This is, of course, completely anecdotal but a number of years ago I had a room-mate from mainland China who was a doctoral student in a STEM field at a major nationally ranked university in the area. One time, he described his undergrad university back in China where, supposedly, they had a significant department focused around automation. He said that the students used to, jokingly, call it the "Department of De-Automation" because what they would do is take western automation technology and intentionally dumb it down so that it didn't end up eliminating too many jobs...

Yea, I find it a little funny (in a sad, depressing, sort of way). We have a short memory as a country/culture. Most people today don't realize that these are the exact same arguments slave owners used to use to justify the continuance of slavery (and, almost certainly, then used to justify the sharecropping system after slavery was ended). Instead of "I can't find American's to do the job", they used to argue "I won't be able to find a white person to do the job". It's all complete bullshit.

The simple fact is, if you're not paying someone enough to live off of and/or you are putting them in a work environment that will literally destroy their body over their career then you are just vermin living off the misery of others. A great example of this was, a while back, when Steven Colbert spoke about illegal immigration in front of a congressional committee. It was posted to YouTube because it was a rare opportunity to hear him speak out of character but what really got my attention was the gentleman who spoke immediately after him. The guy in question was an illegal immigrant rights/labor activist who was there to protest the horrible working conditions (extreme temperatures without adequate water; poor medical services in case of emergencies such as heat stroke or heat related heart attacks; too many hours of work to be healthy; etc.). You know, all those things that make these into jobs "American's don't want/won't do"... It's not that the illegal immigrants want to do them (in those conditions and at that pay) any more than the Americans do, it just that in the case of the illegal immigrants, the farm owners can prey on their higher level of desperation.

As someone else here pointed out, Guam is even closer to NK than the Aleutians (and, probably, much easier to get to).

It's not about alternatives. You're not entitled to alternative ways to put other children at risk by exposing them to your un-vaccinated spawn. Frankly, you shouldn't even be entitled to bring them out in public as long as they're a threat to other children or anyone else who couldn't get vaccinated for some other reason outside of their control. Willful ignorance should come this a heavy cost.

...and Martin would have been killed my old age before he ever finished the final novel.

It's quite possible that he means they have artificially slowed down the graphics rendering to provide more cycles to the AI.

Remember, this was the first dot com boom. It could, just as easily, have been a case of too many company humvees purchased...

We've had that here in the US for decades. We call it street parking.

Actually, as the proper name they chose for their company it's only one word.

I think you're comparing apples to oranges. For every example like the ones you gave, there seem to be just as many like jetpacks and the flying car that have just never happened long, long after everyone assumed they should.

The way I see it, the difference is all about how clearly dangerous experimentation in a certain field happens to be to human lives and how much infrastructure needs to be built out to make a given iteration of the tech useful. Computer and telecommunications tend to evolve extremely quickly because they are widely assumed to be harmless to humans and because they don't usually need lots of infrastructure build-out. You'll note that in the few places where infrastructure build-out IS required (broadband and wide-area wireless communications) the time between iterations seems almost glacial in comparison to the rest of the industry.

While the kind of implant tech described in the article doesn't require lots of physical infrastructure build-out, it does involve lots and lots of human medical testing. To make matters even worse, the kind of medical testing (surgical experimentation on the brain) is the most complex and risky in the entire field of medicine. In such a field, by it's very nature, moving a single iteration of tech from prototype to commercial product can take a decade or more at it's best.

The claim they're trying to make (right, wrong, or otherwise) is that the sub-systems used in the development of this system have already been proven to be so uneconomical that developing a new system, using more modern technology, would produce a more cost-effective system in the end. Furthermore, (and ironically, considering the claim you're making in your last sentence) they are inferring that the only reason these existing sub-systems are being championed is that they represent products already being produced in the congressional districts of US politicians and, thus, the people pushing for them only really care about the jobs and don't care about the actual costs involved.

Again, I'm not suggesting that they are factual correct in their argument. I'm just trying to clarify their position as I see it.

From what I took away from the WUWT article, it seems that the crux of their "argument" is that there's a possible chance you might have enough consecutive days of "just enough" wind and/or "not enough" wind that your back-up energy storage system will be empty when you have an additional day(s) of "not enough" wind (thus leading to black-outs or brown outs). Of course, what they seem to be ignoring, even if the original writers of the paper didn't take this into account and didn't include enough over-capacity in the turbine system to make this almost impossible, is that the energy industry has had proven solutions to this problem for a very long time. As it is, it's very common for power plants to have a set of back-up natural gas generators to provide power in down times. They're relatively cheap up-front; drop in;in; still relatively cheap to operate (if not as cheap in the long-haul); and they should last almost forever if they're well maintained and only run in emergencies.

The same way, if I remember correctly, that he was "sure" that the Citizen's United ruling wouldn't lead to a massive increase in private/corporate money influencing the US election system...

Uhm, they already do. Here in Chicago, we call it the south side.