What I would like to see is some form of opt-in "jamming". For example, when I go to a movie theatre, I might sometimes forget to turn off my cell phone. But if there is a device in the theatre that tells your cell phone: you are now in a theatre, then I can tell my cell phone to go to vibrate mode whenever I am in that zone. I.e. the theatre tells you where you are, and it is your responsibility to act on that information accordingly. I should then be able to change my outgoing message, so I'm still available: "Hi you have reached the phone of Joe. I am currently in a movie theatre, and will look like a fool if I answer the phone now, but in case of a real emergency, please press 1, and my phone will ring. Otherwise, please leave a voice mail or text message." I think something like this would greatly help the problem, because currently the caller has no idea that he might be putting the callee in a socially unacceptable position at the time that the call is being placed.
...It is also true that each generation of integrated circuits requires exponentially more computation to create.
Not to mention that chip foundries are also exponential in the cost to construct them. I once did a simple calculation on the cost of chip foundries, and I found that if the chip manufacturing business continues the way it currently does, then around the year 2050, a chip factory in the USA will be more expensive than the US GDP.
In any case, if I understand those folks at Intel correctly, exponential progress will halt around 2020. So there might very well be a singularity, but not the one that was hoped for, namely: There was lots of progress before then, but not so much after the singularity.
Before you start arguing this way or that way, you first have to decide what you are arguing about. I think that most people on the forum will argue about what the law should be, not what it already is, and if that is the case, then saying that it is wrong just because UK law says so is a little bit like putting the cart before the horse. For myself, I haven't decided whether fining someone who uses an open network is a good or bad idea, but I wouldn't mind knowing some of the reasons why the UK chose to do this.
This reminds me when I Beta tested for MS on various products of theirs. Some times you could see that there were issues with their software that was ok at the code level, but was more at the design level. If you ever reported those bugs, lazy/overworked/whatever developers would just close your bug report with the reason "this is by design". I think that because of this, a lot of potentially serious issues were just swept underneath the carpet. So it is not surprising to me that the "defective by design" finger gets pointed to them, and if they continue down their current path, I suspect that this will happen more frequently per capita.
I hope that they will be able to recover some of the agility they had 5-10 years ago, but right now, to me personally, Microsoft has become just another big company that has become too big and bloated to be able to effectively listen to the concerns of their users.
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What I would like to see is some form of opt-in "jamming". For example, when I go to a movie theatre, I might sometimes forget to turn off my cell phone. But if there is a device in the theatre that tells your cell phone: you are now in a theatre, then I can tell my cell phone to go to vibrate mode whenever I am in that zone. I.e. the theatre tells you where you are, and it is your responsibility to act on that information accordingly. I should then be able to change my outgoing message, so I'm still available: "Hi you have reached the phone of Joe. I am currently in a movie theatre, and will look like a fool if I answer the phone now, but in case of a real emergency, please press 1, and my phone will ring. Otherwise, please leave a voice mail or text message." I think something like this would greatly help the problem, because currently the caller has no idea that he might be putting the callee in a socially unacceptable position at the time that the call is being placed.
I assume by "4 - ???", you mean that the s*t hits the fan, because a few false positives got through?
...It is also true that each generation of integrated circuits requires exponentially more computation to create.
Not to mention that chip foundries are also exponential in the cost to construct them. I once did a simple calculation on the cost of chip foundries, and I found that if the chip manufacturing business continues the way it currently does, then around the year 2050, a chip factory in the USA will be more expensive than the US GDP.
In any case, if I understand those folks at Intel correctly, exponential progress will halt around 2020. So there might very well be a singularity, but not the one that was hoped for, namely: There was lots of progress before then, but not so much after the singularity.
Before you start arguing this way or that way, you first have to decide what you are arguing about. I think that most people on the forum will argue about what the law should be, not what it already is, and if that is the case, then saying that it is wrong just because UK law says so is a little bit like putting the cart before the horse. For myself, I haven't decided whether fining someone who uses an open network is a good or bad idea, but I wouldn't mind knowing some of the reasons why the UK chose to do this.
I hope that they will be able to recover some of the agility they had 5-10 years ago, but right now, to me personally, Microsoft has become just another big company that has become too big and bloated to be able to effectively listen to the concerns of their users.