In the interests of furthering accuracy and geographic knowledge - several points.
1 Taiwan is the Republic of China and claims to be government of the whole of China. The Republic of Taiwan is just wrong - and reflects the US two China policy. It is as big a faux pas as calling the People's Republic of China, the Republic of Mainland China (or worse Communist China)
2 Only 26 countries recognize the ROC. It used to be the other way until the 70's when most countries did pursue a 2-China policy due to US influence. Google Taiwan recognition and you will see why this is the case and how it came about
Don't even want to go near Kashmir but Microsoft should have at the very least just made it a disputed region under control of India and I think people would have been satisfied (since that is in fact the reality of the situation...)
Ironically, the "fix" to the problem shows the source of the problem. Microsoft wants to do as little work as possible and rather than globalizing its software it wants to repackage the American form.
To be even more pedantic - 4C is when water is most dense at 1 atm pressure. This is probably different at the much higher pressures at the bottom of Lake Ontario...
I believe that this methodology was originally directed towards MD treatment. However, from the emphasis in the SA article to "wow - way cool technology and Olympic mutants " rather than this is a serious treatment for MD- it obviously hasn't worked as well as hoped - which of course doesn't mean that it can't be developed eventually into an effective therapy.
I remember listening to a talk many years ago by Louis Kunkel, who cloned and isolated the dystrophin gene back in the days when cloning was difficult. Even more impressive was that he accomplished the feat with a very small lab beating out much larger competitors by sheer cleverness and of course a little bit of luck. Anyway, when asked about this type of gene therapy, he basically thought that the development of drugs to stimulate production of dystrophin or some substitute would be a more realistic way to go. If you google his home page you will find some clever approaches that they are quietly working on for MD - including gene therapies.
IANAL but I believe that it is the same in Canada - at least that's what I was always told - truth is not a defence - the question is whether the statement was made with malicious intent.
The only conclusion that can be drawn from this "study" is that counting citations is a terrible measure of the relative merits of a paper. It may be OK for comparing average to good papers but obviously fails for evaluating the absolute best discoveries. One simple reason is that because more papers are published today you will get more citations of recent articles - esp since the older ones are established as "fact" and often not cited. If he had done something like normalized for the number of papers being published at the time weighted for how often the offspring were cited, it might have worked a bit better
This type of analysis, while useful for bureaucrats who need simple, if inaccurate metrics, is still dubious. The most cited papers often turn out to be methods papers e.g. how to run gels rather than those with the most import.
I don't think you have an idea of the scope of the protein folding problem. We *do* use machine learning techniques - quite extensively actually but the algorithm space is much broader than you can imagine and takes a long time to explore - hence the human. A supercomputer would be only of minor help at this exploratory stage in the game since only a few approaches are memory bound at least for proto-typing.
I also think that you are a bit confused about biologists - it's not like we just took a Java course. This is computational biology and all of us are computer scientists as well as biologists and the demands of the problem put us at the cutting edge of both fields. The code is not as clean or optimized as it could be but that's because they are prototypes. We want to test as many approaches as possible as quickly as possible. If it works then we can clean up the code at our leisure. GROMACS is an example of a more mature technology which has been optimized. This is the nature of scientific programming...
It is sort of silly to compare what Google or the Bank of America needs and do to what scientists do though there is some overlap. In science there is a need for both FLOPS and throughput
For example we use a Linux cluster for protein simulations to try to figure out how proteins fold (or as you would say - test out our ideas about how proteins fold...). We are very aware of the bandwidth and memory limitations. That's why the software is written so that it fits into memory and so that there is as little IO betwen nodes as possible and thus things pretty much scale linearly with the number of processors. None of the work would be feasible without the CPU horsepower.
Another example is the particle physics lab that my brother used to work in also which used a cluster to process their events. An old mainframe then handled and stored the huge amount of data fed to it by the workstations (this was a few years ago). There they needed both the computational power to evaluate the data and the throughput to store it
In both cases, I suspect that in a business environment, buying a supercomputer would have been referable to noodling with the algorithms. I'm sure some consultant would have been hired to deem it necessary. And indeed we could use the extra IO but it's just not worth the cost - I'd rather use the limited resources we have on more processors and work around the IO limitations.
BTW, the last calculator I used had LEDs though I do like to work out equations on paper still...
Yes pressure would help to speed things up but really urea is too small for easy dialysis. I don't know how dialysis machines do it but if it were simple, you would figure that you wouldn't need an expensive machine to do it. As other people have said, your best bet is probably to react it with something to either precipitate it or bind it to something larger.
The real problem and danger with this entire approach are holes in the membrane. These membranes tend to be rather fragile especially until they get wet. And marines *will* add pressure...
Urea is very small molecule only a bit bigger than water. Even if you did have a membrane that could filter it out - it would take a very long time for enough water to diffuse across into the food.
I worked many moons ago in a lab that measured uranium loads in miners. The detectors were very sensitive - I was told by an older technician that they could even see the spikes in the background radiation after the Chinese atmospheric A-bomb tests in the 60's. However, the amount of radiation in the miners lungs was so small that readings were taken in a lead lined 8 inch steel chamber to screen out environmental radiation. We also had to account for the of the normal background radiation given off by humans, so we calibrated to unexposed subjects of about the same weight and build (lots of K40 in muscles). It still took us about an hour to get a decent signal.
However, if I remember correctly, the reason we were doing this was to ensure that the uranium burdens didn't get too high as there was a correlation between high burdens and lung cancer. Probably not due to the radiation - it seems unlikely with that low an amount but possibly through chemical or physical toxicity (like with asbestos...). Just saying that there *might* be some basis for some of the DU complaints...
I think it's a cold war thing. Either because of supply or politics, they never really switched over to transistors and instead kept developing vaccuum tubes which were used in their MIGs. Looks like that expertise has migrated to consumer products.
Genetics is neither quick nor easy even if you know what you are doing and have lots of time and resources. There is essentially no hope of anything with a complicated set of changes surviving let alone do what you want it to do. That's why modifications are basically one gene at time - mostly one mutation at a time.
The hacker analogy is having a billion lines of disassembled code which you barely understand. Random changes are just going to cause the program to crash. Geneticists basically only know the NOP command (ah those were the days using MACSBUG...). If you know where the branch point for a key subroutine was you might be able to shut it down or have it run another subroutine but that is still very difficult to do without crashing everything. Changing it to do something completely different is very very difficult since you really have no idea what the code does. Add to that the fact that you need a lab and weeks or months to introduce your changes and you can appreciate how far-fetched these fears of amateur bio-hackers are.
First of all IANAE (Iamnotanengineer) but a former audiophile that used to do quite a bit of signal processing while in grad school.
I see what you are saying about introduction of artifacts going from a 48 kHz digital copy to a 44 khz digital copy and then compressing. What some posters don't seem to get is that processing digital is not the same as working with analog - you get essentially digitization artifacts of digitization artifacts if you are not careful.
However, I have a problem with your test about cutting off frequencies above 16kHz. Seems to me that this would be very hard to do without affecting the other frequencies in the waveform. Again this is because we are dealing with digital copies and thus can only adjust the signal by a single bit at single time point. So we have to worry about introducing more quantization noise. Furthermore the distortion would only be in a subset of higher (not important) and lower frequencies and not across the entire spectrum. This might be the the variance that you hear when you do this especially in quiet passages.
From what I remember, vinyl has a practical limitation of somewhere around 16kHz especially as you get near the end of the record where the grooves are more tightly spaced. However, vinyl still sounds better A/B (to my ears) at least compared to early CD's made from analog masters probably because of the lack of digitization artifacts. (Also, the early sound engineers probably didn't know what they were doing yet and there might not have been much signal above 16K in the masters anyway since the orignal engineers knew it was going to be for vinyl so there was not much benefit for digital to start with but that is another issue..)
Oh to get back on topic, I was listening to a friend's high end system and we both noticed the distortion in the digital MP3 streams that we got from his cable radio stations. Don't know what the bitrate was but I wouldn't want to buy it either...
The 1st world is the west, the 2nd the (former) communist bloc (of which Macedonia was part of when it was part of Yugoslavia) and the 3rd, the poor countries of the world.
I don't know enough about Macedonia to know whether there is a lot of fraud coming from there, however, I have very little faith in these commercial rating agencies. There is little incentive for them to do much research - it is much easier to just lump a small country on the list than to lower their profits by spending time and resources. From the posts I've seen here - few of their Western clients are going to question it, especially since very little business is lost. The only people that could be hurt are the ones in Macedonia that have little influence and noone is going to listen to...
Sort of like those loser credit bureaus that insist on using social security numbers as keys because it is easy and the banks don't care and it is hard for individuals to sue them. A frustrating situation indeed...
Not to say that oxidation wouldn't be a problem too but when their concerns about protein stability are probably more about whether it can maintain the proper active shape or fold and whether it can avoid being chewed up by the many organisms and proteases out there.
I don't think you would need anything as sophisticated as encryption to defeat this. I assume that encryption would be banned anyway if it worked (sounds a bit familiar...)
A low tech solution is just to use code phrases - SMS people seem to use enough of those already. Won't fool a human but it'll get past the automatic filters. A funny example was the use of the number 9 on restaurant signs which sounds like "dog" in Cantonese to advertise that delicacy while avoiding the wrath of the British. Since people in China already know that their e-mail and chat rooms are monitored I assume that they are already doing things like this.
The government could of course, adjust their filters from time to time as they learn of these things but my guess is that the clueless party official who suggested this is happy that it has been implemented and that it looks like they are in control and doing something. Whether it works or not is not really that important.
A bit colonial isn't it to automatically assume that the Indian president needs an emissary from the US to tell him about open source?
Do you really think that Kalam has never thought about open source? After all he is not the president of the US - he actually has proven that he can think independently as a scientist. If you knew academic scientists you would know that they understand the value of open-source better than anyone.
A much more likely scenario is that Dr. Kalam wanted to meet with someone to discuss some technical details and get some feedback and maybe some publicity for his ideas of implementing open source. As there were noodles before Marco Polo went to Cathay and there was open source before Stallman went India...
Seriously, I feel a bit sorry for the folks there. The interesting science that they do is not really interesting enough to warrant the billions invested unless they can come up with military applications or appeal to the Trekker in the public. Hence have the nanobe "discovery" while shilling for money to send men to Mars or school teachers on missions to generate excitement for the space shuttle. Meanwhile, planetary probe missions get cancelled.
Maybe it is time to retire this relic of the cold war or just admit that it is primarily for military purposes and re-allocate the funds for science elsewhere. Give the money to someone who understands O-rings and knows what units to use..
The scariest words that ever emanated from a 8 bit box as the SS guard rushes into the room guns blazing...
Because the joystick was broken on the Apple ][ (owned by the most popular man in residence) my friend and I played using two paddles - one to control the gun and the other to move the prisoner which made it that much scarier as we tried to sneak up behind the guard to shoot him in the back - or worse - throw a grenade and not hit a wall and blow everyone smithereens
Wolfenstein (and The Prisoner) was a unique game than transcended graphics and sound - wait a second - I'm starting to sound like an oldtimer...
In the last ten years chess programs have gotten to the point where routinely kick my butt. Never big on checkers and Othello but I do know that Go and poker programs still play worse than my baby sister. However, I think the poster is wrong about bridge being the next game conquered by computers - it's been a few years but the programs I saw were very weak
Scrabble on the other hand is world class. You used to be able to beat the computer's vocabulary using strategy but not anymore.
Backgammon is nearly there too. One shareware backgammon game - whose name I can't remember, now bundled with Hoyle's games, claimed to play world caliber and was very very good - much better than the other programs out there. However, it could be beat with the proper doubling strategy (after playing it a 1000 times you get to know your opponent...)
I played Bridge Baron a few years ago. It was the only decent program out there at the time. By decent, I mean playing like a human might at a casual bridge night.
Don't worry about it being too good - it isn't by any stretch of the imagination (or wasn't then) but it was the only one that was worth bothering with..
So the manager who took credit for inventing DVD's was stupid enough to get screwed by his fellow sharks...
What about the poor shmoes who actually got the vershugginer thing to work who had to deal with this guy and probably got outsourced or lost their jobs due to the Time/Warner/AOL stock scam - I mean bubble...?
We have all become so innundated with the career path mythos that we forget that the reason that most people work is to pay the bills. Given the choice, most people would much rather sit on the beach than answer phones.
If machines are able to decrease the amount of mundane work that we need to do to generate wealth is a good thing in general. True, in our present system, the people who are displaced by the machines lose financially. But the solution is not to cut off the head of the goose laying the golden eggs but to develop a new model to distribute the wealth more equitably so that we can all spend as much time as we want in front of our PS-2's...
Slashdot Mirror
In the interests of furthering accuracy and geographic knowledge - several points.
1 Taiwan is the Republic of China and claims to be government of the whole of China. The Republic of Taiwan is just wrong - and reflects the US two China policy. It is as big a faux pas as calling the People's Republic of China, the Republic of Mainland China (or worse Communist China)
2 Only 26 countries recognize the ROC. It used to be the other way until the 70's when most countries did pursue a 2-China policy due to US influence. Google Taiwan recognition and you will see why this is the case and how it came about
Don't even want to go near Kashmir but Microsoft should have at the very least just made it a disputed region under control of India and I think people would have been satisfied (since that is in fact the reality of the situation...)
Ironically, the "fix" to the problem shows the source of the problem. Microsoft wants to do as little work as possible and rather than globalizing its software it wants to repackage the American form.
To be even more pedantic - 4C is when water is most dense at 1 atm pressure. This is probably different at the much higher pressures at the bottom of Lake Ontario...
I believe that this methodology was originally directed towards MD treatment. However, from the emphasis in the SA article to "wow - way cool technology and Olympic mutants " rather than this is a serious treatment for MD- it obviously hasn't worked as well as hoped - which of course doesn't mean that it can't be developed eventually into an effective therapy.
I remember listening to a talk many years ago by Louis Kunkel, who cloned and isolated the dystrophin gene back in the days when cloning was difficult. Even more impressive was that he accomplished the feat with a very small lab beating out much larger competitors by sheer cleverness and of course a little bit of luck. Anyway, when asked about this type of gene therapy, he basically thought that the development of drugs to stimulate production of dystrophin or some substitute would be a more realistic way to go. If you google his home page you will find some clever approaches that they are quietly working on for MD - including gene therapies.
IANAL but I believe that it is the same in Canada - at least that's what I was always told - truth is not a defence - the question is whether the statement was made with malicious intent.
The only conclusion that can be drawn from this "study" is that counting citations is a terrible measure of the relative merits of a paper. It may be OK for comparing average to good papers but obviously fails for evaluating the absolute best discoveries. One simple reason is that because more papers are published today you will get more citations of recent articles - esp since the older ones are established as "fact" and often not cited. If he had done something like normalized for the number of papers being published at the time weighted for how often the offspring were cited, it might have worked a bit better
This type of analysis, while useful for bureaucrats who need simple, if inaccurate metrics, is still dubious. The most cited papers often turn out to be methods papers e.g. how to run gels rather than those with the most import.
I don't think you have an idea of the scope of the protein folding problem. We *do* use machine learning techniques - quite extensively actually but the algorithm space is much broader than you can imagine and takes a long time to explore - hence the human. A supercomputer would be only of minor help at this exploratory stage in the game since only a few approaches are memory bound at least for proto-typing.
I also think that you are a bit confused about biologists - it's not like we just took a Java course. This is computational biology and all of us are computer scientists as well as biologists and the demands of the problem put us at the cutting edge of both fields. The code is not as clean or optimized as it could be but that's because they are prototypes. We want to test as many approaches as possible as quickly as possible. If it works then we can clean up the code at our leisure. GROMACS is an example of a more mature technology which has been optimized. This is the nature of scientific programming...
It is sort of silly to compare what Google or the Bank of America needs and do to what scientists do though there is some overlap. In science there is a need for both FLOPS and throughput
For example we use a Linux cluster for protein simulations to try to figure out how proteins fold (or as you would say - test out our ideas about how proteins fold...). We are very aware of the bandwidth and memory limitations. That's why the software is written so that it fits into memory and so that there is as little IO betwen nodes as possible and thus things pretty much scale linearly with the number of processors. None of the work would be feasible without the CPU horsepower.
Another example is the particle physics lab that my brother used to work in also which used a cluster to process their events. An old mainframe then handled and stored the huge amount of data fed to it by the workstations (this was a few years ago). There they needed both the computational power to evaluate the data and the throughput to store it
In both cases, I suspect that in a business environment, buying a supercomputer would have been referable to noodling with the algorithms. I'm sure some consultant would have been hired to deem it necessary. And indeed we could use the extra IO but it's just not worth the cost - I'd rather use the limited resources we have on more processors and work around the IO limitations.
BTW, the last calculator I used had LEDs though I do like to work out equations on paper still...
Yes pressure would help to speed things up but really urea is too small for easy dialysis. I don't know how dialysis machines do it but if it were simple, you would figure that you wouldn't need an expensive machine to do it. As other people have said, your best bet is probably to react it with something to either precipitate it or bind it to something larger.
The real problem and danger with this entire approach are holes in the membrane. These membranes tend to be rather fragile especially until they get wet. And marines *will* add pressure...
Urea is very small molecule only a bit bigger than water. Even if you did have a membrane that could filter it out - it would take a very long time for enough water to diffuse across into the food.
All good scientists at any stage deride ideas that believe are wrong. It's only when they become highly ranked that people start to listen...
I worked many moons ago in a lab that measured uranium loads in miners. The detectors were very sensitive - I was told by an older technician that they could even see the spikes in the background radiation after the Chinese atmospheric A-bomb tests in the 60's. However, the amount of radiation in the miners lungs was so small that readings were taken in a lead lined 8 inch steel chamber to screen out environmental radiation. We also had to account for the of the normal background radiation given off by humans, so we calibrated to unexposed subjects of about the same weight and build (lots of K40 in muscles). It still took us about an hour to get a decent signal.
However, if I remember correctly, the reason we were doing this was to ensure that the uranium burdens didn't get too high as there was a correlation between high burdens and lung cancer. Probably not due to the radiation - it seems unlikely with that low an amount but possibly through chemical or physical toxicity (like with asbestos...). Just saying that there *might* be some basis for some of the DU complaints...
I think it's a cold war thing. Either because of supply or politics, they never really switched over to transistors and instead kept developing vaccuum tubes which were used in their MIGs. Looks like that expertise has migrated to consumer products.
Genetics is neither quick nor easy even if you know what you are doing and have lots of time and resources. There is essentially no hope of anything with a complicated set of changes surviving let alone do what you want it to do. That's why modifications are basically one gene at time - mostly one mutation at a time.
The hacker analogy is having a billion lines of disassembled code which you barely understand. Random changes are just going to cause the program to crash. Geneticists basically only know the NOP command (ah those were the days using MACSBUG...). If you know where the branch point for a key subroutine was you might be able to shut it down or have it run another subroutine but that is still very difficult to do without crashing everything. Changing it to do something completely different is very very difficult since you really have no idea what the code does. Add to that the fact that you need a lab and weeks or months to introduce your changes and you can appreciate how far-fetched these fears of amateur bio-hackers are.
First of all IANAE (Iamnotanengineer) but a former audiophile that used to do quite a bit of signal processing while in grad school.
I see what you are saying about introduction of artifacts going from a 48 kHz digital copy to a 44 khz digital copy and then compressing. What some posters don't seem to get is that processing digital is not the same as working with analog - you get essentially digitization artifacts of digitization artifacts if you are not careful.
However, I have a problem with your test about cutting off frequencies above 16kHz. Seems to me that this would be very hard to do without affecting the other frequencies in the waveform. Again this is because we are dealing with digital copies and thus can only adjust the signal by a single bit at single time point. So we have to worry about introducing more quantization noise. Furthermore the distortion would only be in a subset of higher (not important) and lower frequencies and not across the entire spectrum. This might be the the variance that you hear when you do this especially in quiet passages.
From what I remember, vinyl has a practical limitation of somewhere around 16kHz especially as you get near the end of the record where the grooves are more tightly spaced. However, vinyl still sounds better A/B (to my ears) at least compared to early CD's made from analog masters probably because of the lack of digitization artifacts. (Also, the early sound engineers probably didn't know what they were doing yet and there might not have been much signal above 16K in the masters anyway since the orignal engineers knew it was going to be for vinyl so there was not much benefit for digital to start with but that is another issue..)
Oh to get back on topic, I was listening to a friend's high end system and we both noticed the distortion in the digital MP3 streams that we got from his cable radio stations. Don't know what the bitrate was but I wouldn't want to buy it either...
The 1st world is the west, the 2nd the (former) communist bloc (of which Macedonia was part of when it was part of Yugoslavia) and the 3rd, the poor countries of the world.
I don't know enough about Macedonia to know whether there is a lot of fraud coming from there, however, I have very little faith in these commercial rating agencies. There is little incentive for them to do much research - it is much easier to just lump a small country on the list than to lower their profits by spending time and resources. From the posts I've seen here - few of their Western clients are going to question it, especially since very little business is lost. The only people that could be hurt are the ones in Macedonia that have little influence and noone is going to listen to...
Sort of like those loser credit bureaus that insist on using social security numbers as keys because it is easy and the banks don't care and it is hard for individuals to sue them. A frustrating situation indeed...
Not to say that oxidation wouldn't be a problem too but when their concerns about protein stability are probably more about whether it can maintain the proper active shape or fold and whether it can avoid being chewed up by the many organisms and proteases out there.
I don't think you would need anything as sophisticated as encryption to defeat this. I assume that encryption would be banned anyway if it worked (sounds a bit familiar...)
A low tech solution is just to use code phrases - SMS people seem to use enough of those already. Won't fool a human but it'll get past the automatic filters. A funny example was the use of the number 9 on restaurant signs which sounds like "dog" in Cantonese to advertise that delicacy while avoiding the wrath of the British. Since people in China already know that their e-mail and chat rooms are monitored I assume that they are already doing things like this.
The government could of course, adjust their filters from time to time as they learn of these things but my guess is that the clueless party official who suggested this is happy that it has been implemented and that it looks like they are in control and doing something. Whether it works or not is not really that important.
A bit colonial isn't it to automatically assume that the Indian president needs an emissary from the US to tell him about open source?
Do you really think that Kalam has never thought about open source? After all he is not the president of the US - he actually has proven that he can think independently as a scientist. If you knew academic scientists you would know that they understand the value of open-source better than anyone.
A much more likely scenario is that Dr. Kalam wanted to meet with someone to discuss some technical details and get some feedback and maybe some publicity for his ideas of implementing open source. As there were noodles before Marco Polo went to Cathay and there was open source before Stallman went India...
I think they write too much sci-fi...
Seriously, I feel a bit sorry for the folks there. The interesting science that they do is not really interesting enough to warrant the billions invested unless they can come up with military applications or appeal to the Trekker in the public. Hence have the nanobe "discovery" while shilling for money to send men to Mars or school teachers on missions to generate excitement for the space shuttle. Meanwhile, planetary probe missions get cancelled.
Maybe it is time to retire this relic of the cold war or just admit that it is primarily for military purposes and re-allocate the funds for science elsewhere. Give the money to someone who understands O-rings and knows what units to use..
Achtung Schweinhund!
The scariest words that ever emanated from a 8 bit box as the SS guard rushes into the room guns blazing...
Because the joystick was broken on the Apple ][ (owned by the most popular man in residence) my friend and I played using two paddles - one to control the gun and the other to move the prisoner which made it that much scarier as we tried to sneak up behind the guard to shoot him in the back - or worse - throw a grenade and not hit a wall and blow everyone smithereens
Wolfenstein (and The Prisoner) was a unique game than transcended graphics and sound - wait a second - I'm starting to sound like an oldtimer...
In the last ten years chess programs have gotten to the point where routinely kick my butt. Never big on checkers and Othello but I do know that Go and poker programs still play worse than my baby sister. However, I think the poster is wrong about bridge being the next game conquered by computers - it's been a few years but the programs I saw were very weak
Scrabble on the other hand is world class. You used to be able to beat the computer's vocabulary using strategy but not anymore.
Backgammon is nearly there too. One shareware backgammon game - whose name I can't remember, now bundled with Hoyle's games, claimed to play world caliber and was very very good - much better than the other programs out there. However, it could be beat with the proper doubling strategy (after playing it a 1000 times you get to know your opponent...)
I played Bridge Baron a few years ago. It was the only decent program out there at the time. By decent, I mean playing like a human might at a casual bridge night.
Don't worry about it being too good - it isn't by any stretch of the imagination (or wasn't then) but it was the only one that was worth bothering with..
So the manager who took credit for inventing DVD's was stupid enough to get screwed by his fellow sharks...
What about the poor shmoes who actually got the vershugginer thing to work who had to deal with this guy and probably got outsourced or lost their jobs due to the Time/Warner/AOL stock scam - I mean bubble...?
Wonder if this was pre-negotiated as part of the public making up that Bush and the Europeans are orchestrating?
The timing is awfully coincidental..
We have all become so innundated with the career path mythos that we forget that the reason that most people work is to pay the bills. Given the choice, most people would much rather sit on the beach than answer phones.
If machines are able to decrease the amount of mundane work that we need to do to generate wealth is a good thing in general. True, in our present system, the people who are displaced by the machines lose financially. But the solution is not to cut off the head of the goose laying the golden eggs but to develop a new model to distribute the wealth more equitably so that we can all spend as much time as we want in front of our PS-2's...