In the greater scheme of things, we've become far more efficient than we used to
And you want to reverse course? How do you think we got there?
No, I don't want to reverse course, nor do I want to believe that any boot up wait time in any future device is a valid argument. My SSD-enhanced computer running a full OS cold boots in about 15 seconds today. I would imagine performance will only get better regardless of start state.
The main reason the CRT used 10 times the power was the standby power required to keep the high-voltage capacitor ready.
And I used to remember when my parents TV would have to warm up before showing a picture. I used to have to wait several minutes for the glow plugs to warm up enough to start my engine. Waiting for hardware is a hell of a lot more efficient today across the board.
Yes, more standby power usage is what we need. That cable box uses almost as much electricity on standby as it does when running.
And your old CRT television set used 10 times the power of your new LED flat-screen. In the greater scheme of things, we've become far more efficient than we used to, even with some minor annoyances.
Besides, given how greedy the cable companies are, we likely won't have to wait long before cable boxes are extinct.
There is only one solution for greed: Complete and total anihilation of every single human being on earth.
Greed is part of our genetic makeup. One cannot be eliminated without eliminating the other.
Worse, greed is actually the fundamental principle behind life itself.
Greed can be mitagated, but it can never be eliminated.
The solution to curb the violence caused by mass murderers is not to lobotomize the entire planet, so no, I don't believe your particular solution is the right one, regardless of how it is embedded into our genetic makeup.
To clarify, when I speak of Greed, I speak of the the control and wealth the 0.001% have amassed, creating a massive imbalance of financial inequality and power. I speak of Greed that can never be satisfied no matter how many lifetimes of wealth billionaires amass, in their quest to become trillionaires. I speak of mind-warping Greed that will ultimately create the Global Welfare state for the unemployable masses once automation and AI work to destroy the concept of human employment.
Yes, I agree, Greed can be mitigated. Alcoholism can be mitigated too, once a person understands and accepts that they have a problem that is causing harm. The issue is those in control don't see themselves as having a problem with Greed, regardless of the impact.
"I think in the next 30 years, people only work four hours a day and maybe four days a week...if people today are able to visit 30 places, in three decades it will be 300 places."
Oh really? People who are 100% disabled or on welfare work less than that, so they must be visiting over 500 places, right? Talk about your bullshit delusions that we would all be world travelers if we just didn't have to work.
"...the rich and poor -- the workers and the bosses -- will be increasingly defined by data and automation unless governments show more willingness to make "hard choices." "The first technology revolution caused World War I," he said, "The second technology revolution caused World War II. This is the third technology revolution."
Given the fact that we had a second World War for the same damn reason, it sure as shit doesn't demonstrate an ability for mankind to make smart choices the next time around.
Greed is ultimately creating this, and has never given a shit about what it creates or destroys.
Greed will ensure 99.99% of humans will be part of the Global Welfare Generation in the future, if we survive World War III.
We use our toaster often, but unplug it when we're not using it. If our toaster was Internet-connected, would we need to wait for it to boot up before we could make some toast? Because if that's the case, I'll do what you do and buy a non-Internet-connected toaster or not connect it to my home network. (If the toaster requires Internet connectivity to make toast, it will be returned ASAP and I'd post a warning online to keep others from buying that model.)
Do you wait to "boot up" your cable box, cell phone, or tablet every time you want to use it, or do you simply wake it up, and it's ready rather instantly?
I get his point - more things will be connected to the internet. But more things will also not be. The internet is a utility now, it's not just new and shiny. Sure, there will be coffee machines that are connected to the internet you can buy, but there will be a ton of people that don't want them and want a normal coffee machine.
His point was centered around the fact that you won't be even offered a choice in the future, thanks to Greed. No manufacturer will simply be satisfied with the one-time profit created from a "dumb" coffee machine. They will want many sources of revenue coming from aggregating their customer usage data and selling and re-selling it over and over again. Along with coffee subscription services, and accessories that report back to the infamous cloud when the carbon filter is dirty and needs to be changed/ordered. It's unending, and won't stop, all because of Greed.
If you don't believe me, look at pets.com and the bubble burst. Seemed at the time that everything would be purchased through a web site.
Pets.com was then. This is now, and things change. There is an insane amount of varied products I now source from Amazon almost exclusively, as do millions of other consumers. That's just one vendor example of how easily consumer behavior can and will change. When Amazon drones reduce delivery wait times from 2 days to 2 hours, I can imagine that behavior will expand even faster.
Sure, Amazon has some pet food sales. But people aren't ever going to stop buying dog food locally.
When it comes to products like food (pet or human), the almighty price tag rules, and online e-tailers don't have anywhere near the business costs that brick and mortar alternatives must maintain, therefore they will reign supreme in price, and ultimately drive consumers away from local sales. The slow but unending death of shopping malls is a prime example of this. I buy my pet food through Amazon now. Why? Because it's cheaper.
Look at other products. How many people still buy music locally? How many bookstore chains have shut down? Local options continue to wane as we cater to the generation of digital consumers who prefer to wait 2 minutes to download an album with minimal effort vs. 2 hours to drive to a store and buy it. Now Amazon will let you try on clothing before you buy it, emulating what people used to have to fight the mall crowds for, and struggle to find their size.
Consumer behavior demanding the minimum price and maximum convenience is driving this. And I highly doubt the 10% of people who don't want this are going to be able to do a damn thing to stop it.
Permanently is a very strong word.
So long as it's cheaper for them to automate the mining, the coal jobs are gone. Remove some human rights and a chunk of pay, and I'm sure automation will be the one looking for a job.
A human requires sleep every 12 - 18 hours. They also require days off for rest, and insurance to be paid to cover for such thing as illness. They generally require pay advances and career progression to keep up with the cost of living increases and fund a retirement plan, as well as a reasonable work/life balance to sustain sanity and do other things like raise a family, or advance their education.
Automation requires none of this shit.
Permanent is a very strong word. It's also a very fucking accurate one.
I remember when a car with 50,000 miles on it was high mileage and 100,000 miles meant it was ready for the junk yard. I remember when bias ply tires lasted 12,000 miles and spark plugs lasted 5,000 miles.
Most things today are a hell of a lot better than back in the alleged good-old-days.
I also remember when troubleshooting cars didn't require custom factory tools, diagnostic crash carts, and software flashing. Back when you could buy individual parts instead of everything coming in a "kit" costing hundreds of dollars. Back when a fender bender didn't create thousands of dollars in damage. Back when a 100,000 mile car could be saved from the junk yard by dropping a new motor into it with a handful of tools over a weekend. Back when a spark plug job was 5 minutes because they were not buried under an intake manifold.
Cars may last longer today, but that sure as hell doesn't mean they're any cheaper in the long run, or getting any easier for the DIY person to maintain.
Due to the "only $19.95 a month!" hardware purchasing gimmicks built into a lot of cell contracts these days, what you meant to say is no one realizes they're already paying for a $479 Android phone...
The carriers don't really push service contracts anymore. Lately, they're actually quite upfront about how much you're financing when you buy a high end phone. People are willing to spend more for the same reasons they'll overspend on anything else they can finance (cars, homes, hot tubs, water treatment systems, timeshares, etc.)
A multi-year financing agreement is essentially a service contract. A turd by any other name...
I can only hope the difference in creative vision went something like this:
"You know what, fuck this sequel/prequel/spinoff bullshit. I've had enough of it. Every damn thing coming out these days is nothing more than a shitty recycle of an older movie that tries to justify itself with a half billion dollars worth of 21st century special effects, or the 17th movie in a drawn-out storyline that should have died long ago. Give me an original storyline with a new concept for once."
Here's your 2023 summer movie lineup to prove a point:
Resident Evil: Gotta Catch 'Em All, Part 2
Fast and Furious: Lunar Drift
Pirates of the Caribbean: Hanna Montana's Revenge
Transformers: Rise of the Transgender
Star Trek: Teen Spock and the Vulcanettes
Sharknado Mayhem 4D: Movie Theater Wetsuit Edition.
Due to the "only $19.95 a month!" hardware purchasing gimmicks built into a lot of cell contracts these days, what you meant to say is no one realizes they're already paying for a $479 Android phone...
(Tin-foil hatter) "There's a global conspiracy to keep the US dollar strong! Billionaires man, the 1% control it all! And they lobby to maintain anonymous cash to fund illegal cartels! Millions laundered every day! I mean, have you ever seen something so artificially inflated before? There's nothing else that can even touch that shit!"
Sure as hell seems like every new feature on Amazon is making a Prime membership rather mandatory instead of merely a nice benefit to cut down on shipping costs.
I shouldn't be surprised. Being forced to subscribe to every service you use to create a per-customer-cost-for-life revenue stream is the definition of capitalism in the 21st century.
...yet another monopolistic mega-corp demonstrates the financial benefits of ripping off customers for years, and is looking for creative ways to re-classify said revenue as a "business expense".
(If this is actually being viewed as an investment, they should fire the idiot trying to sell that idea.)
If you want to use that stuff, go right ahead, but my data stays where I can control it and no one else can access it without a court order.
Did I hear someone say "encryption" ?
Encyption is like a lock on the door of a house.
Sometimes it prevents access, but sometimes it doesn't.
Using additional strong encryption that you trust is one way you can control your data even when in the cloud.
I'm certain you have a lock on your door, but if you're still concerned about security, you probably have a security system to protect your possessions too.
...It is no different that the Auto manufacturers and MPG.. everything touts the maximum unachievable mileage.
Actually, every car I've ever owned I've been able to achieve more than the advertised highway MPG, well before the concept of hypermiling became popular, which I'm fairly certain if I adopted those tactics I could achieve it on a more consistent basis. When compared to ISPs, not even at 3AM could I consistently hit advertised speeds.
So lets make both advertized level with the penalty being the months payment...
FCC needs to simply enforce a law that all ISPs should advertise a minimum speed and apply an SLA with a refund schedule for breaking the SLA. Maximum or "up to" speeds obviously don't mean jack shit anymore, and enforcing a minimum speed would more mirror how business-class services are enforced. Network congestion cannot be predicted, but enforcing a minimum standard would at least set expectations and force providers to maintain infrastructure to contracted levels.
Looking back into the past, at least it wasn't something as totally useless as a cheap rubber wristlet. At least the spinners did something.
Putting Lance Armstrongs indiscretions aside for a moment, the Livestrong foundation sold 80 million wristlets, and was created as a fund-raising item which other organizations have developed similar programs funding charities, so yes they did something far more than just sit on your wrist.
The fidget spinner did nothing. Didn't even garner a validated study that confirmed they offered any medical benefit, regardless of what marketing tried to dubiously claim.
hey become social media addicts striving to be the greatest narcissist in the universe, broadcasting their every move to the entire planet.
You never listened to teenagers talk, have you? They broadcast their every move to everyone in earshot. A new medium for this broadcasting is not new behavior.
A dozen people within earshot was the audience teenagers reached in 1977.
Tens of millions of people on the internet is the audience teenagers now reach in 2017.
The broadcast capability has changed drastically, and behavior has changed as as result. Fake news perpetuated and justified based on clicks alone, pushing integrity off to the side. The teen who wasn't considering suicide before, but now will thanks to the capability to stream it live on internet infamy by broadcasting it live to millions on social media. No, narcissism wasn't invented on the internet. But it was perfected by it.
...The digital computer revolution is coming to an end due to physics and there is no clear path forward. We haven't seen leaps and bounds in digital computer processing power for many years now.
The supercomputer community would happily disagree with you, and advancements in wireless speeds have made it possible for the world to access the ever-growing supercomputing clusters far easier than ever before.
We likely will never see AI...
What we need to understand is we don't need to see true AI in order to create an impact. Even half-assed AI will likely be able to do it, especially in the world of human employment. The human needs to rest after 12-18 hours. Needs to take vacation. Have a work/life balance. Demands pay raises and advancement. The human inherently comes with many flaws that mere automation can prove superior, which isn't even close to AI.
Another good example of half-assed solutions being superior would be in the world of autonomous transportation. If humans behind the wheel kill 30,000 every year, but autonomous solutions "only" kill 10,000 every year due to bugs and hacks, you better believe it's going to be marketed and sold as a drastic improvement.
It's going to be our problem when there is a generation of socially maladjusted children.
Can you cite any actual evidence that phones make kids socially maladjusted?
That may depend on what unfiltered internet access could ultimately cause or create. I find it very odd that society thinks of "the children" when we refuse to allow minors into adult stores or strip clubs by law, but don't think twice about handing a minor a smartphone, which usually comes with the ability to expose them to hardcore porn, violence, or other mind-warping content. Bad parenting isn't always to blame when education often gets trumped by curiosity, especially when children find access is easy. Laws insist on securing guns properly for the same reason. Am I implying that a smartphone with unfettered internet access can be a dangerous tool in the hands of a minor? Yes, I suppose I am.
And when we hear of the high school mass shooter on the news being "such a nice boy", being socially maladjusted may not be the best metric to measure the downsides of certain types of premature access and exposure.
'Those darned teenagers! Spending hour after hour on the phone!
What happens to human interaction when a virtual conversation with a bot is determined to be better than any real one?
What happens to companionship and procreation when machines and virtual realities can pleasure us better than a human alternative, and without the risk of dying prematurely from a world running rampant with STDs?
What happens to human employment and education when automation and AI become good enough to destroy it?
What happens to critical thinking and educating humans when the concept of employment and monetary reward is no longer viable?
As you dismiss these concepts, are you certain this technology is still "waaaay far away", or merely a couple of decades? 20 years ago you were still using a modem to dial
up to the internet. Compare that to what you can do today, from a wireless smartphone.
The next iterations of "advancement" are quite a bit different, and is not something we are readily prepared for, so perhaps you can stop clutching your pearls now. Ancient analogies likely won't apply.
"humans change when they get a cellphone. "They go from being outgoing, energetic, interested in the world and happy, to reclusive. They want to spend all their time in their room. They lose interest in outside activities."
Not sure why in the hell we're being rather ignorant as to the real impact of these devices, as the adult is reduced to emulating ancient cavemen, communicating with emojis scribbled on a (digital) wall in a society that champions reclusive Netflix binge sessions.
And to clarify, kids are interested in a world; it just happens to be a digital one. They become social media addicts striving to be the greatest narcissist in the universe, broadcasting their every move to the entire planet. "Outside activities" are not what is rewarded in this world anymore. How many friends, clicks, and likes you can amass every day is what is rewarded. Parents, if you're wondering where they got this from or how to curb it, remember that kids learn from their environment.
Slashdot Mirror
In the greater scheme of things, we've become far more efficient than we used to
And you want to reverse course? How do you think we got there?
No, I don't want to reverse course, nor do I want to believe that any boot up wait time in any future device is a valid argument. My SSD-enhanced computer running a full OS cold boots in about 15 seconds today. I would imagine performance will only get better regardless of start state.
The main reason the CRT used 10 times the power was the standby power required to keep the high-voltage capacitor ready.
And I used to remember when my parents TV would have to warm up before showing a picture. I used to have to wait several minutes for the glow plugs to warm up enough to start my engine. Waiting for hardware is a hell of a lot more efficient today across the board.
Yes, more standby power usage is what we need. That cable box uses almost as much electricity on standby as it does when running.
And your old CRT television set used 10 times the power of your new LED flat-screen. In the greater scheme of things, we've become far more efficient than we used to, even with some minor annoyances.
Besides, given how greedy the cable companies are, we likely won't have to wait long before cable boxes are extinct.
There is only one solution for greed: Complete and total anihilation of every single human being on earth.
Greed is part of our genetic makeup. One cannot be eliminated without eliminating the other.
Worse, greed is actually the fundamental principle behind life itself.
Greed can be mitagated, but it can never be eliminated.
The solution to curb the violence caused by mass murderers is not to lobotomize the entire planet, so no, I don't believe your particular solution is the right one, regardless of how it is embedded into our genetic makeup.
To clarify, when I speak of Greed, I speak of the the control and wealth the 0.001% have amassed, creating a massive imbalance of financial inequality and power. I speak of Greed that can never be satisfied no matter how many lifetimes of wealth billionaires amass, in their quest to become trillionaires. I speak of mind-warping Greed that will ultimately create the Global Welfare state for the unemployable masses once automation and AI work to destroy the concept of human employment.
Yes, I agree, Greed can be mitigated. Alcoholism can be mitigated too, once a person understands and accepts that they have a problem that is causing harm. The issue is those in control don't see themselves as having a problem with Greed, regardless of the impact.
"I think in the next 30 years, people only work four hours a day and maybe four days a week...if people today are able to visit 30 places, in three decades it will be 300 places."
Oh really? People who are 100% disabled or on welfare work less than that, so they must be visiting over 500 places, right? Talk about your bullshit delusions that we would all be world travelers if we just didn't have to work.
"...the rich and poor -- the workers and the bosses -- will be increasingly defined by data and automation unless governments show more willingness to make "hard choices." "The first technology revolution caused World War I," he said, "The second technology revolution caused World War II. This is the third technology revolution."
Given the fact that we had a second World War for the same damn reason, it sure as shit doesn't demonstrate an ability for mankind to make smart choices the next time around.
Greed is ultimately creating this, and has never given a shit about what it creates or destroys.
Greed will ensure 99.99% of humans will be part of the Global Welfare Generation in the future, if we survive World War III.
We need to Solve for Greed.
We use our toaster often, but unplug it when we're not using it. If our toaster was Internet-connected, would we need to wait for it to boot up before we could make some toast? Because if that's the case, I'll do what you do and buy a non-Internet-connected toaster or not connect it to my home network. (If the toaster requires Internet connectivity to make toast, it will be returned ASAP and I'd post a warning online to keep others from buying that model.)
Do you wait to "boot up" your cable box, cell phone, or tablet every time you want to use it, or do you simply wake it up, and it's ready rather instantly?
I rest my case.
I get his point - more things will be connected to the internet. But more things will also not be. The internet is a utility now, it's not just new and shiny. Sure, there will be coffee machines that are connected to the internet you can buy, but there will be a ton of people that don't want them and want a normal coffee machine.
His point was centered around the fact that you won't be even offered a choice in the future, thanks to Greed. No manufacturer will simply be satisfied with the one-time profit created from a "dumb" coffee machine. They will want many sources of revenue coming from aggregating their customer usage data and selling and re-selling it over and over again. Along with coffee subscription services, and accessories that report back to the infamous cloud when the carbon filter is dirty and needs to be changed/ordered. It's unending, and won't stop, all because of Greed.
If you don't believe me, look at pets.com and the bubble burst. Seemed at the time that everything would be purchased through a web site.
Pets.com was then. This is now, and things change. There is an insane amount of varied products I now source from Amazon almost exclusively, as do millions of other consumers. That's just one vendor example of how easily consumer behavior can and will change. When Amazon drones reduce delivery wait times from 2 days to 2 hours, I can imagine that behavior will expand even faster.
Sure, Amazon has some pet food sales. But people aren't ever going to stop buying dog food locally.
When it comes to products like food (pet or human), the almighty price tag rules, and online e-tailers don't have anywhere near the business costs that brick and mortar alternatives must maintain, therefore they will reign supreme in price, and ultimately drive consumers away from local sales. The slow but unending death of shopping malls is a prime example of this. I buy my pet food through Amazon now. Why? Because it's cheaper.
Look at other products. How many people still buy music locally? How many bookstore chains have shut down? Local options continue to wane as we cater to the generation of digital consumers who prefer to wait 2 minutes to download an album with minimal effort vs. 2 hours to drive to a store and buy it. Now Amazon will let you try on clothing before you buy it, emulating what people used to have to fight the mall crowds for, and struggle to find their size.
Consumer behavior demanding the minimum price and maximum convenience is driving this. And I highly doubt the 10% of people who don't want this are going to be able to do a damn thing to stop it.
Permanently is a very strong word. So long as it's cheaper for them to automate the mining, the coal jobs are gone. Remove some human rights and a chunk of pay, and I'm sure automation will be the one looking for a job.
A human requires sleep every 12 - 18 hours. They also require days off for rest, and insurance to be paid to cover for such thing as illness. They generally require pay advances and career progression to keep up with the cost of living increases and fund a retirement plan, as well as a reasonable work/life balance to sustain sanity and do other things like raise a family, or advance their education.
Automation requires none of this shit.
Permanent is a very strong word. It's also a very fucking accurate one.
Somewhere in Hollywood, at this very second, someone is looking at your list and saying "You know, that one might work".
The amount of recycling in Hollywood tends to validate the consumer quality standard, so there's little doubt half my list will come to fruition.
Shit can in fact still make money.
I remember when a car with 50,000 miles on it was high mileage and 100,000 miles meant it was ready for the junk yard. I remember when bias ply tires lasted 12,000 miles and spark plugs lasted 5,000 miles.
Most things today are a hell of a lot better than back in the alleged good-old-days.
I also remember when troubleshooting cars didn't require custom factory tools, diagnostic crash carts, and software flashing. Back when you could buy individual parts instead of everything coming in a "kit" costing hundreds of dollars. Back when a fender bender didn't create thousands of dollars in damage. Back when a 100,000 mile car could be saved from the junk yard by dropping a new motor into it with a handful of tools over a weekend. Back when a spark plug job was 5 minutes because they were not buried under an intake manifold.
Cars may last longer today, but that sure as hell doesn't mean they're any cheaper in the long run, or getting any easier for the DIY person to maintain.
Due to the "only $19.95 a month!" hardware purchasing gimmicks built into a lot of cell contracts these days, what you meant to say is no one realizes they're already paying for a $479 Android phone...
The carriers don't really push service contracts anymore. Lately, they're actually quite upfront about how much you're financing when you buy a high end phone. People are willing to spend more for the same reasons they'll overspend on anything else they can finance (cars, homes, hot tubs, water treatment systems, timeshares, etc.)
A multi-year financing agreement is essentially a service contract. A turd by any other name...
Spinoff Directors Quit In the Middle of Shooting
I can only hope the difference in creative vision went something like this:
"You know what, fuck this sequel/prequel/spinoff bullshit. I've had enough of it. Every damn thing coming out these days is nothing more than a shitty recycle of an older movie that tries to justify itself with a half billion dollars worth of 21st century special effects, or the 17th movie in a drawn-out storyline that should have died long ago. Give me an original storyline with a new concept for once."
Here's your 2023 summer movie lineup to prove a point:
Resident Evil: Gotta Catch 'Em All, Part 2
Fast and Furious: Lunar Drift
Pirates of the Caribbean: Hanna Montana's Revenge
Transformers: Rise of the Transgender
Star Trek: Teen Spock and the Vulcanettes
Sharknado Mayhem 4D: Movie Theater Wetsuit Edition.
"How *livable* is this phone?" is the only question I want answered from any reviews now-a-days.
Who needs reviews? Experience and Greed tells us they don't build jack shit these days to last like it used to.
Which would be great if we knew how much current this thing is pulling. I'm expecting not a trivial amount, with a 2.45Ghz processor.
How about you have it run Netflix or some games and tell us how long you've got until it craps out?
Cracks me up we still call these things "phones" when it's obvious that's the last damn feature anyone gives a shit about.
No one is going to buy a $479 Android phone.
Due to the "only $19.95 a month!" hardware purchasing gimmicks built into a lot of cell contracts these days, what you meant to say is no one realizes they're already paying for a $479 Android phone...
(Tin-foil hatter) "There's a global conspiracy to keep the US dollar strong! Billionaires man, the 1% control it all! And they lobby to maintain anonymous cash to fund illegal cartels! Millions laundered every day! I mean, have you ever seen something so artificially inflated before? There's nothing else that can even touch that shit!"
(Cryptocurrency) "Hold my beer and watch this."
Prime Video. Prime Pantry. Prime Wardrobe.
Sure as hell seems like every new feature on Amazon is making a Prime membership rather mandatory instead of merely a nice benefit to cut down on shipping costs.
I shouldn't be surprised. Being forced to subscribe to every service you use to create a per-customer-cost-for-life revenue stream is the definition of capitalism in the 21st century.
...yet another monopolistic mega-corp demonstrates the financial benefits of ripping off customers for years, and is looking for creative ways to re-classify said revenue as a "business expense".
(If this is actually being viewed as an investment, they should fire the idiot trying to sell that idea.)
If you want to use that stuff, go right ahead, but my data stays where I can control it and no one else can access it without a court order.
Did I hear someone say "encryption" ?
Encyption is like a lock on the door of a house.
Sometimes it prevents access, but sometimes it doesn't.
Using additional strong encryption that you trust is one way you can control your data even when in the cloud.
I'm certain you have a lock on your door, but if you're still concerned about security, you probably have a security system to protect your possessions too.
...It is no different that the Auto manufacturers and MPG.. everything touts the maximum unachievable mileage.
Actually, every car I've ever owned I've been able to achieve more than the advertised highway MPG, well before the concept of hypermiling became popular, which I'm fairly certain if I adopted those tactics I could achieve it on a more consistent basis. When compared to ISPs, not even at 3AM could I consistently hit advertised speeds.
So lets make both advertized level with the penalty being the months payment ...
FCC needs to simply enforce a law that all ISPs should advertise a minimum speed and apply an SLA with a refund schedule for breaking the SLA. Maximum or "up to" speeds obviously don't mean jack shit anymore, and enforcing a minimum speed would more mirror how business-class services are enforced. Network congestion cannot be predicted, but enforcing a minimum standard would at least set expectations and force providers to maintain infrastructure to contracted levels.
Looking back into the past, at least it wasn't something as totally useless as a cheap rubber wristlet. At least the spinners did something.
Putting Lance Armstrongs indiscretions aside for a moment, the Livestrong foundation sold 80 million wristlets, and was created as a fund-raising item which other organizations have developed similar programs funding charities, so yes they did something far more than just sit on your wrist.
The fidget spinner did nothing. Didn't even garner a validated study that confirmed they offered any medical benefit, regardless of what marketing tried to dubiously claim.
hey become social media addicts striving to be the greatest narcissist in the universe, broadcasting their every move to the entire planet.
You never listened to teenagers talk, have you? They broadcast their every move to everyone in earshot. A new medium for this broadcasting is not new behavior.
A dozen people within earshot was the audience teenagers reached in 1977.
Tens of millions of people on the internet is the audience teenagers now reach in 2017.
The broadcast capability has changed drastically, and behavior has changed as as result. Fake news perpetuated and justified based on clicks alone, pushing integrity off to the side. The teen who wasn't considering suicide before, but now will thanks to the capability to stream it live on internet infamy by broadcasting it live to millions on social media. No, narcissism wasn't invented on the internet. But it was perfected by it.
...The digital computer revolution is coming to an end due to physics and there is no clear path forward. We haven't seen leaps and bounds in digital computer processing power for many years now.
The supercomputer community would happily disagree with you, and advancements in wireless speeds have made it possible for the world to access the ever-growing supercomputing clusters far easier than ever before.
We likely will never see AI...
What we need to understand is we don't need to see true AI in order to create an impact. Even half-assed AI will likely be able to do it, especially in the world of human employment. The human needs to rest after 12-18 hours. Needs to take vacation. Have a work/life balance. Demands pay raises and advancement. The human inherently comes with many flaws that mere automation can prove superior, which isn't even close to AI.
Another good example of half-assed solutions being superior would be in the world of autonomous transportation. If humans behind the wheel kill 30,000 every year, but autonomous solutions "only" kill 10,000 every year due to bugs and hacks, you better believe it's going to be marketed and sold as a drastic improvement.
It's going to be our problem when there is a generation of socially maladjusted children.
Can you cite any actual evidence that phones make kids socially maladjusted?
That may depend on what unfiltered internet access could ultimately cause or create. I find it very odd that society thinks of "the children" when we refuse to allow minors into adult stores or strip clubs by law, but don't think twice about handing a minor a smartphone, which usually comes with the ability to expose them to hardcore porn, violence, or other mind-warping content. Bad parenting isn't always to blame when education often gets trumped by curiosity, especially when children find access is easy. Laws insist on securing guns properly for the same reason. Am I implying that a smartphone with unfettered internet access can be a dangerous tool in the hands of a minor? Yes, I suppose I am.
And when we hear of the high school mass shooter on the news being "such a nice boy", being socially maladjusted may not be the best metric to measure the downsides of certain types of premature access and exposure.
'Those darned teenagers! Spending hour after hour on the phone!
What happens to human interaction when a virtual conversation with a bot is determined to be better than any real one?
What happens to companionship and procreation when machines and virtual realities can pleasure us better than a human alternative, and without the risk of dying prematurely from a world running rampant with STDs?
What happens to human employment and education when automation and AI become good enough to destroy it?
What happens to critical thinking and educating humans when the concept of employment and monetary reward is no longer viable?
As you dismiss these concepts, are you certain this technology is still "waaaay far away", or merely a couple of decades? 20 years ago you were still using a modem to dial
up to the internet. Compare that to what you can do today, from a wireless smartphone.
The next iterations of "advancement" are quite a bit different, and is not something we are readily prepared for, so perhaps you can stop clutching your pearls now. Ancient analogies likely won't apply.
"humans change when they get a cellphone. "They go from being outgoing, energetic, interested in the world and happy, to reclusive. They want to spend all their time in their room. They lose interest in outside activities."
Not sure why in the hell we're being rather ignorant as to the real impact of these devices, as the adult is reduced to emulating ancient cavemen, communicating with emojis scribbled on a (digital) wall in a society that champions reclusive Netflix binge sessions.
And to clarify, kids are interested in a world; it just happens to be a digital one. They become social media addicts striving to be the greatest narcissist in the universe, broadcasting their every move to the entire planet. "Outside activities" are not what is rewarded in this world anymore. How many friends, clicks, and likes you can amass every day is what is rewarded. Parents, if you're wondering where they got this from or how to curb it, remember that kids learn from their environment.