Robotic surgery doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. It isn't an autonomous robot doing the procedure. It is a doctor doing the procedure using robotic technology to enhance and assist. It improves capabilities for minimally invasive surgery and remote surgery but it is not what you are describing.
Well, you are mostly right, but having a robot involved, even if it is minimally autonomous, means a complex tool is being used, introducing some consistency to the part of the job it does. A bit like the difference between using an automatic plant to build a car versus doing it manually like it is still done with italian sports cars. But this is only the beginning. I have seen reports of the next wave of medical robots becoming more autonomous, like sensing the type of tissue and refusing to go into the wrong type.
Common misconception. Automation does not "shed jobs", it simply pushes the jobs elsewhere. We automated farming and that freed the labor force to work in manufacturing and services and we all have benefited greatly from that shift. Manufacturing is now being increasingly automated for many things freeing labor for more valuable tasks. A lot of work is not value added. A lot of my work is as an accountant. Theoretically I could keep the books by hand like they did before computers with large staff but that adds no economic value to what we do, just cost. Better to use Quickbooks and automate and apply that labor more productively elsewhere. The purpose of jobs is not to provide a paycheck. The purpose of jobs is to do economically useful work. If a machine can do the work more economically that labor needs to be applied elsewhere.
This one uses examples from the industrial revolution that are not applicable anymore because the rate of automation is far faster (and accelerating), meaning that the economy doesn't have enough time to rellocate workers to other basic tasks before they are automated as well. In fact, the way things are going, non educated people will have a hard time competing with machines in any basic job. By the time we get around to change society, we'll have so much unemployment that it will be very difficult to manage. This time is the singularity. It is not just better tools that are removing jobs, it is artificial intelligence, of the non strong variety (for now). What is left for the workers to compete?
Doctors don't need to be protected from automation any more than anyone else. If anything they welcome the productivity improvements automation can provide, particularly on the administrative side of things. But it's pretty hard to automate a checkup or removing an appendix. We give them a lot of training because those skills are not presently replaceable with any technology we possess. Perhaps that will change someday but it won't be anytime soon.
If ten years doesn't sound like anytime soon to you, then you are right. The speed things are going, it will start about that time. Please google references to IBM Whatson. It is not a robot, and it is only labeled as an assistant to diagnostic, but it already is capable of being on top of all of the literature about cancer, and make suggestions based on that. This is something very few doctors can do, or have the time and interest of doing. In any case, I agree doctors don't need special protection. That is my point. But it is also true that they will use their collective power to try to stop technology if they see it as threating their position, so it is quite likely they will lobby for regulations using scare tactics.
From the article: "In fact, 'robotic surgery has been linked to many serious injuries and severe complications, including death.'"
Same thing goes for surgeons, but a robot has two qualities that your run of the mill surgeon doesn't: It is consistent in its results (you can end up in the hands of a drunken surgeon, someone who just lost a familiar, or it just happens to have a bad day), and it is cheaper (in the long run).
If a generation of robots have some problem or make some mistakes, next generation will improve on it, for all of the units. For a doctor, each one is different and have its own particular weaknesses, most of them having to do with emotional stuff, and they are already information overloaded, so no much room for improvement.
Also, rich people will be able to select what doctor treats them, but for the rest of the population that is not possible. The malpractice results of this are usually played down, but we all have heard about medical mistakes from friends and family.
And if you go out of the US, in poor countries "bad" but affordable care from robots is superior to "good" but inaccessible medicine from doctors.
Automation is coming to all other aspects of life, shedding jobs at its wake. I don't see why doctors need to be protected from that, as long as automation brings some benefits to society.
I am not really sure this is about Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. I think this is about the run up to the singularity. There are many riches and power to be gained by the first country or entity able to reverse engineer the human brain. Now it looks feasible and nobody wants to be out of it.
If it were about health, they would invest the same amount of resources into a cure for circulatory diseases.
I agree, it is too expensive, and not enough payback.
The only reason to send a human to Mars would be if he is going to stay there and found a colony. Anything else can be achieved in a way that is better and cheaper by robots. And we already know we can send (and recover alive) people to space, so no need to do it again unless it is for good reason.
The more ways we attack a given problem, the more chances of success. We have different communities working on different approaches to AI: Statistic, symbolic and biologically inspired. All three have produced interesting results already, meaning they have solved some practical problems.
Also, most human brains can show "intelligent behavior" in certain ways that our latest algorithms can't, e.g. navigating an arbitrary kitchen and finding a beer in the fridge:-)
Well, right now there is an economic war where the middle class all around the world is being obliterated. The likely end result will be a few very powerful and very wealthy entities/individuals owning most of the resources and technology, and competing between them in ways that we won't understand except when they use us.
They have been able to run around democracy and democratic institutions already. Unemployment is growing all around the word, as is social inequalities, the financial / industrial elites openly call the shots now. Manipulating people is extremely easy with the current mass media and people short attention spans.
The natural equilibrium state for this is just one entity calling the shots, the new superpower, and our only hope is that it is benign. The previous superpowers (USA, the British empire before that, the Spanish empire before them) didn't have the means to control all that is important, but with a globalized, homogeneous world and the current understanding of social science and politics and with the current technological means, it will be possible.
The only way around this would be to colonize the moon, or Mars, or somewhere that would allow for a situation where a new power center could have a chance of grow and survive, due to the physical distance.
Why should they eat a humble pie? Were they spared when they did this? They were taken to court, lost and forced to comply. Why should they allow their competitors a free pass if they are not allowed a free pass?
They were taken to court, lost, and slapped in the hand.
They are also the creators of the term "Freetard" used to reference anyone questioning the current "Intellectual Property" regime.
This gives you an idea of how they drifted. They used to be "bitting the hand that feeds IT", but no more. They used to get information from IT contacts inside companies. Now they are becoming standard journalist that are too dependent on the goodwill of PR departments.
This may have unintended consequences for MS. They are giving a high profile to the fact that their youtube app isn't up to snuff, compared to IOS or Android. Not very smart unless they are really sure they can get some action going in the antitrust front.
If I were looking for a phone and I would come across this information, this would be another negative. If you add this to all of the other shortcomings of Windows phone, I would avoid it.
Which sounds great until you recognize that corporations and financial institutions don't pay taxes. People pay taxes. So any taxes you levy on said corps or banks will just be passed along to customers in the form of higher prices and/or service fees. I find it remarkable that most people don't realize this, but I guess it's just too easy to beat the "rich corps are EEEVVVIILLLL!" drum.
The reality is you should tax *spending*, not *income*. If you spend less, you pay less in taxes. If you spend more, you pay more in taxes. It neatly gets around the idea that you can hide income because, unless you want to live in a shack off the grid in the middle of nowhere, you're *going* to spend money sooner or later. A 23% National Retail Sales Tax would and could replace our byzantine, impenetrable, lopsided income tax code with a system that is both workable and revenue neutral.
If you only tax spending, hoarders will get rich. They will invest their savings and at some point they will own everything. We should tax production means as well. That means taxing corporations. I am not against taxing spending, but you can't stop taxing corporations.
In fact, my point is that we should stop taxing labor. If a Robot produces some good, the corporation owning the robot pays corporation tax and sales tax. If a person produces the same good, the corporation pays corporation tax, sales tax, social security tax and the person pays income tax. That situation is easy to change. You remove income tax from labor rents and social security. Removing taxes is better than throwing subventions around. Instead of getting money to go through the government with all of the inefficiencies and associated waste, you leave money in the hands of workers. You incentive work.
Then you need to raise taxes in the other areas. What is left? corporation earnings, financial transactions and sales .
Most people will never make it to higher education. It is never mentioned but the educational system works by setting up a threshold on people, not on knowledge. The 20% (or whatever) with the best mathematical skills get to be engineers or scientists. Exams are designed to filter that 20%.
In the US, people with some college is 56.86% of the population, as per wikipedia. The rest of the people are doing jobs that are being automated now or will be automated during the next decade. For example, drivers (self driving cars), factory people (robots), call center (the web and call center speech recognition), and many more. At some point robots will be flipping burgers, it is not that difficult.
We don't have time to educate all this people and create paid jobs for them before the next wave of technology comes around in another ten years. When it comes, it will take away even more jobs.
So we have two choices. We own the robots collectively as a society, or a few rich people owns them. The way things are going, it seems to be the former. This could bring a dystopia if we don't find a way out.
So here is my proposal.
Right now governments get most of their money from labor taxes, but soon this money will dry out. We should stop taxing human labor completely. We are penalizing it. Instead we should tax corporate earnings and financial transactions. That is where all the tax money need to come from. That would keep worthy humans productive even if their marginal value compared to robots is small.
We need to come to terms with the fact that a big and growing proportion of people will not be employed. They should not be considered guilty. In any case they should be considered owners of the automated workforce the same as the rest of people is. So they should be given a cut of the taxes so they can live meaningful lives.
Yea I want a larger testing samples and longer time frame for my brain implants.
I do not want to have to upgrade my implant every 20 years let alone 5
There is a problem with this. You don't want to wait 20 years if the technology is available now and you really need it (as in quadriplegic). So you will have to settle with two or three years in animal tests and with tissue samples showing no measurable damage to the brain tissue.
Worst of cases, if you are quadriplegic and using this technology, probably the independence gained with it would be worth one operation every five years.
The French government obviously has it backwards. Instead of making new law and all that shit, they should get google to stop dodging taxes with the double dutch. There is plenty of money that can be had that way. Then they can share it with newspapers or whatever.
I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents.
Quite to the contrary, LibreOffice deals better with long documents than the proprietary alternative, and also it never corrupts complex documents like the proprietary alternative.
The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite files. Complexity which is fairly common, given the proprietary suite deficiencies in structuring documents.
From your comment and his comment I suspect that his test involved getting huge documents from different MS office versions and loading them. Then deciding that OO can't handle big documents in general. This is a very skewed test. For people moving completely to OO that's a non issue.
You could introduce a "bug" into a processor that given a specific input (e.g. some GUID) will jump to a memory location and execute it. I guess that would be pretty difficult to find unless it is actually exploited.
Obviously, the US has been doing exactly that. There are documented cases of back doors introduced into US software and hardware. It could bite them back with other countries using exactly the same argument against them.
I do not fault the US for defending their interests. It is clear that China will use all opportunities available to them, exactly as US did. But they are going to face the same issues that countries like Iran face now. They can use foreign technology that is better than domestic products, or they can try to stop it from entering the country. The fact is that US is quickly becoming irrelevant in hardware manufacturing, so it is a difficult call.
What seems clear is that this won't be good for the economy since it will be interpreted as tariffs by the other side.
I have thought a lot about this lately. In a very short time during this decade, we will see most of this factory work automated (e.g. Foxconn), then we will see road transportation automated (e.g. google cars) and farm work automated. I don't think there is time for the economy to generate jobs for the growing unemployed part of the population. We are told that western jobs are moving to the east, but this is only a part of the story. Globally, jobs are being lost (Unemployment has risen globally to 210 million, or 30 million jobs lost since 2007 according to the IMF).
But this is only the current round of automation. If the singularity is near, and I believe it is, probably around 2035 as per Kurszweil's extrapolations of current trends, by the 2020's the value of human work will tend quickly to zero.
So it is clear to me that:
1) We should stop taxation of work, asap. Instead we need to tax corporate profits. Google, Microsoft and most of the big corporations pay close to zero taxes. That is unacceptable. For two companies with the same income, the one employing most people pays the more taxes. Also, people is taxed on their job income at a higher rate than its investment profits.
2) Society needs to come to terms with the fact that most people will not be able to work. World citizens need to have their basic needs covered. Then if they manage to work, they can have extra income. Most people I know would work just to be occupied in something useful.
Right now, the world is going the wrong direction. Income inequality is at its highest for the last decades all around the world. Economic output is going down and middle class standard of life is going down. What happened in Spain and Greece will soon happen in France, US and other western countries. The sooner the elites realize that they need consumers, the sooner we can change the system so we produce what people needs to survive and we can all move to the next level.
The alternative is for the elites (and this means 1% of the population, so most of us smartass IT people won't be there) to transcend and the rest of the world to be left in the dust fighting to survive miserable lives. I may be too optimistic, but I don't think that is what the elites want.
Slashdot Mirror
I did.
Robotic surgery doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. It isn't an autonomous robot doing the procedure. It is a doctor doing the procedure using robotic technology to enhance and assist. It improves capabilities for minimally invasive surgery and remote surgery but it is not what you are describing.
Well, you are mostly right, but having a robot involved, even if it is minimally autonomous, means a complex tool is being used, introducing some consistency to the part of the job it does. A bit like the difference between using an automatic plant to build a car versus doing it manually like it is still done with italian sports cars.
But this is only the beginning. I have seen reports of the next wave of medical robots becoming more autonomous, like sensing the type of tissue and refusing to go into the wrong type.
Common misconception. Automation does not "shed jobs", it simply pushes the jobs elsewhere. We automated farming and that freed the labor force to work in manufacturing and services and we all have benefited greatly from that shift. Manufacturing is now being increasingly automated for many things freeing labor for more valuable tasks. A lot of work is not value added. A lot of my work is as an accountant. Theoretically I could keep the books by hand like they did before computers with large staff but that adds no economic value to what we do, just cost. Better to use Quickbooks and automate and apply that labor more productively elsewhere. The purpose of jobs is not to provide a paycheck. The purpose of jobs is to do economically useful work. If a machine can do the work more economically that labor needs to be applied elsewhere.
This one uses examples from the industrial revolution that are not applicable anymore because the rate of automation is far faster (and accelerating), meaning that the economy doesn't have enough time to rellocate workers to other basic tasks before they are automated as well. In fact, the way things are going, non educated people will have a hard time competing with machines in any basic job. By the time we get around to change society, we'll have so much unemployment that it will be very difficult to manage. This time is the singularity. It is not just better tools that are removing jobs, it is artificial intelligence, of the non strong variety (for now). What is left for the workers to compete?
Doctors don't need to be protected from automation any more than anyone else. If anything they welcome the productivity improvements automation can provide, particularly on the administrative side of things. But it's pretty hard to automate a checkup or removing an appendix. We give them a lot of training because those skills are not presently replaceable with any technology we possess. Perhaps that will change someday but it won't be anytime soon.
If ten years doesn't sound like anytime soon to you, then you are right. The speed things are going, it will start about that time. Please google references to IBM Whatson. It is not a robot, and it is only labeled as an assistant to diagnostic, but it already is capable of being on top of all of the literature about cancer, and make suggestions based on that. This is something very few doctors can do, or have the time and interest of doing. In any case, I agree doctors don't need special protection. That is my point. But it is also true that they will use their collective power to try to stop technology if they see it as threating their position, so it is quite likely they will lobby for regulations using scare tactics.
From the article: "In fact, 'robotic surgery has been linked to many serious injuries and severe complications, including death.'"
Same thing goes for surgeons, but a robot has two qualities that your run of the mill surgeon doesn't: It is consistent in its results (you can end up in the hands of a drunken surgeon, someone who just lost a familiar, or it just happens to have a bad day), and it is cheaper (in the long run).
If a generation of robots have some problem or make some mistakes, next generation will improve on it, for all of the units. For a doctor, each one is different and have its own particular weaknesses, most of them having to do with emotional stuff, and they are already information overloaded, so no much room for improvement.
Also, rich people will be able to select what doctor treats them, but for the rest of the population that is not possible. The malpractice results of this are usually played down, but we all have heard about medical mistakes from friends and family.
And if you go out of the US, in poor countries "bad" but affordable care from robots is superior to "good" but inaccessible medicine from doctors.
Automation is coming to all other aspects of life, shedding jobs at its wake. I don't see why doctors need to be protected from that, as long as automation brings some benefits to society.
I am not really sure this is about Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. I think this is about the run up to the singularity. There are many riches and power to be gained by the first country or entity able to reverse engineer the human brain. Now it looks feasible and nobody wants to be out of it.
If it were about health, they would invest the same amount of resources into a cure for circulatory diseases.
I agree, it is too expensive, and not enough payback.
The only reason to send a human to Mars would be if he is going to stay there and found a colony. Anything else can be achieved in a way that is better and cheaper by robots. And we already know we can send (and recover alive) people to space, so no need to do it again unless it is for good reason.
Why study a human brain?
The more ways we attack a given problem, the more chances of success. We have different communities working on different approaches to AI: Statistic, symbolic and biologically inspired. All three have produced interesting results already, meaning they have solved some practical problems.
Also, most human brains can show "intelligent behavior" in certain ways that our latest algorithms can't, e.g. navigating an arbitrary kitchen and finding a beer in the fridge :-)
Well, right now there is an economic war where the middle class all around the world is being obliterated. The likely end result will be a few very powerful and very wealthy entities/individuals owning most of the resources and technology, and competing between them in ways that we won't understand except when they use us.
They have been able to run around democracy and democratic institutions already. Unemployment is growing all around the word, as is social inequalities, the financial / industrial elites openly call the shots now. Manipulating people is extremely easy with the current mass media and people short attention spans.
The natural equilibrium state for this is just one entity calling the shots, the new superpower, and our only hope is that it is benign. The previous superpowers (USA, the British empire before that, the Spanish empire before them) didn't have the means to control all that is important, but with a globalized, homogeneous world and the current understanding of social science and politics and with the current technological means, it will be possible.
The only way around this would be to colonize the moon, or Mars, or somewhere that would allow for a situation where a new power center could have a chance of grow and survive, due to the physical distance.
What do you think will come first, immortality through repair technology like SENS, or immortality through mind uploading?
Why should they eat a humble pie? Were they spared when they did this? They were taken to court, lost and forced to comply. Why should they allow their competitors a free pass if they are not allowed a free pass?
They were taken to court, lost, and slapped in the hand.
There, fixed it for you.
They are also the creators of the term "Freetard" used to reference anyone questioning the current "Intellectual Property" regime.
This gives you an idea of how they drifted. They used to be "bitting the hand that feeds IT", but no more. They used to get information from IT contacts inside companies. Now they are becoming standard journalist that are too dependent on the goodwill of PR departments.
This may have unintended consequences for MS. They are giving a high profile to the fact that their youtube app isn't up to snuff, compared to IOS or Android. Not very smart unless they are really sure they can get some action going in the antitrust front.
If I were looking for a phone and I would come across this information, this would be another negative. If you add this to all of the other shortcomings of Windows phone, I would avoid it.
Which sounds great until you recognize that corporations and financial institutions don't pay taxes. People pay taxes. So any taxes you levy on said corps or banks will just be passed along to customers in the form of higher prices and/or service fees. I find it remarkable that most people don't realize this, but I guess it's just too easy to beat the "rich corps are EEEVVVIILLLL!" drum.
The reality is you should tax *spending*, not *income*. If you spend less, you pay less in taxes. If you spend more, you pay more in taxes. It neatly gets around the idea that you can hide income because, unless you want to live in a shack off the grid in the middle of nowhere, you're *going* to spend money sooner or later. A 23% National Retail Sales Tax would and could replace our byzantine, impenetrable, lopsided income tax code with a system that is both workable and revenue neutral.
If you only tax spending, hoarders will get rich. They will invest their savings and at some point they will own everything. We should tax production means as well. That means taxing corporations. I am not against taxing spending, but you can't stop taxing corporations.
In fact, my point is that we should stop taxing labor. If a Robot produces some good, the corporation owning the robot pays corporation tax and sales tax. If a person produces the same good, the corporation pays corporation tax, sales tax, social security tax and the person pays income tax. That situation is easy to change. You remove income tax from labor rents and social security. Removing taxes is better than throwing subventions around. Instead of getting money to go through the government with all of the inefficiencies and associated waste, you leave money in the hands of workers. You incentive work.
Then you need to raise taxes in the other areas. What is left? corporation earnings, financial transactions and sales .
Most people will never make it to higher education. It is never mentioned but the educational system works by setting up a threshold on people, not on knowledge. The 20% (or whatever) with the best mathematical skills get to be engineers or scientists. Exams are designed to filter that 20%.
In the US, people with some college is 56.86% of the population, as per wikipedia. The rest of the people are doing jobs that are being automated now or will be automated during the next decade. For example, drivers (self driving cars), factory people (robots), call center (the web and call center speech recognition), and many more. At some point robots will be flipping burgers, it is not that difficult.
We don't have time to educate all this people and create paid jobs for them before the next wave of technology comes around in another ten years. When it comes, it will take away even more jobs.
So we have two choices. We own the robots collectively as a society, or a few rich people owns them. The way things are going, it seems to be the former. This could bring a dystopia if we don't find a way out.
So here is my proposal.
Right now governments get most of their money from labor taxes, but soon this money will dry out. We should stop taxing human labor completely. We are penalizing it. Instead we should tax corporate earnings and financial transactions. That is where all the tax money need to come from. That would keep worthy humans productive even if their marginal value compared to robots is small.
We need to come to terms with the fact that a big and growing proportion of people will not be employed. They should not be considered guilty. In any case they should be considered owners of the automated workforce the same as the rest of people is. So they should be given a cut of the taxes so they can live meaningful lives.
Is it finally ready for prime time? any one with experiences/horror stories?
two monkeys over 4 years.
Yea I want a larger testing samples and longer time frame for my brain implants.
I do not want to have to upgrade my implant every 20 years let alone 5
There is a problem with this. You don't want to wait 20 years if the technology is available now and you really need it (as in quadriplegic). So you will have to settle with two or three years in animal tests and with tissue samples showing no measurable damage to the brain tissue.
Worst of cases, if you are quadriplegic and using this technology, probably the independence gained with it would be worth one operation every five years.
The French government obviously has it backwards. Instead of making new law and all that shit, they should get google to stop dodging taxes with the double dutch.
There is plenty of money that can be had that way. Then they can share it with newspapers or whatever.
I remember at least three incidents where I was instructed to evaluate Open Office, Libre Office or other F/OSS word processing or layout packages. In each instance, the F/OSS products fell short in fundamental ways, and were a total disaster for larger documents.
Quite to the contrary, LibreOffice deals better with long documents than the proprietary alternative, and also it never
corrupts complex documents like the proprietary alternative.
The only fundamental way where LibreOffice falls short is when dealing with unnecessary complexity in the proprietary suite
files. Complexity which is fairly common, given the proprietary suite deficiencies in structuring documents.
From your comment and his comment I suspect that his test involved getting huge documents from different MS office versions and loading them. Then deciding that OO can't handle big documents in general. This is a very skewed test. For people moving completely to OO that's a non issue.
I hoped it is clear I was kidding.
Yes, and China is leading the way in this area too, exporting civilization to the west for thousands of years.
You could introduce a "bug" into a processor that given a specific input (e.g. some GUID) will jump to a memory location and execute it. I guess that would be pretty difficult to find unless it is actually exploited.
They are opening a can of worms.
Obviously, the US has been doing exactly that. There are documented cases of back doors introduced into US software and hardware. It could bite them back with other countries using exactly the same argument against them.
I do not fault the US for defending their interests. It is clear that China will use all opportunities available to them, exactly as US did. But they are going to face the same issues that countries like Iran face now. They can use foreign technology that is better than domestic products, or they can try to stop it from entering the country. The fact is that US is quickly becoming irrelevant in hardware manufacturing, so it is a difficult call.
What seems clear is that this won't be good for the economy since it will be interpreted as tariffs by the other side.
I have thought a lot about this lately. In a very short time during this decade, we will see most of this factory work automated (e.g. Foxconn), then we will see road transportation automated (e.g. google cars) and farm work automated. I don't think there is time for the economy to generate jobs for the growing unemployed part of the population. We are told that western jobs are moving to the east, but this is only a part of the story. Globally, jobs are being lost (Unemployment has risen globally to 210 million, or 30 million jobs lost since 2007 according to the IMF).
But this is only the current round of automation. If the singularity is near, and I believe it is, probably around 2035 as per Kurszweil's extrapolations of current trends, by the 2020's the value of human work will tend quickly to zero.
So it is clear to me that:
1) We should stop taxation of work, asap. Instead we need to tax corporate profits. Google, Microsoft and most of the big corporations pay close to zero taxes. That is unacceptable. For two companies with the same income, the one employing most people pays the more taxes. Also, people is taxed on their job income at a higher rate than its investment profits.
2) Society needs to come to terms with the fact that most people will not be able to work. World citizens need to have their basic needs covered. Then if they manage to work, they can have extra income. Most people I know would work just to be occupied in something useful.
Right now, the world is going the wrong direction. Income inequality is at its highest for the last decades all around the world. Economic output is going down and middle class standard of life is going down. What happened in Spain and Greece will soon happen in France, US and other western countries. The sooner the elites realize that they need consumers, the sooner we can change the system so we produce what people needs to survive and we can all move to the next level.
The alternative is for the elites (and this means 1% of the population, so most of us smartass IT people won't be there) to transcend and the rest of the world to be left in the dust fighting to survive miserable lives. I may be too optimistic, but I don't think that is what the elites want.
The most active area seems to be btrfs. What is the general opinion, is it ready for general usage?
Any one with feedback from production setups?
Insurance is not gambling, it is bookkeeping.
If you consider that the banks and investment firms dictate to a great extent the government's macro policy, you get the right picture.