AT&T will be raising the rates every 6 months until it hits $100/mo like most other "not really unlimited plans"
This may really be their plan. The would upset a lot of customers if they jumped the price to $100/month or just kicked everyone off but by doing a gradual increase, people will gradually move to other plans and aren't going to freak out about $5/month jumps. A slow "boil a frog" strategy to not upset too many people and have a backlash.
Good luck in finding a real unlimited data plan elsewhere. New real unlimited data plans do not exist as far as I know.
I have an unlimited sprint hotspot. I use it as my only internet. It's not super fast where I live but it's the only thing that really works in the somewhat rural area I live in. I get about 1-2 meg down and 2-4 meg up (yes, faster upload for some strange reason). I only use about 50GB/month but I haven't noticed any slow downs at the end of the month so if there is a throttle, it either doesn't affect me in my area or it's above 50GB.
. to me it is obvious that the first Consumer Reports test was correct.
I would somewhat agree but if Apple was able to fix the bug so that the original configuration they used with the cache off also significantly improved then it isn't a problem with the test as much as a problem with the bug that Consumer Report accidentally found. I'm actually kindof surprised that Apple never tested with the cache off as this would seem like a common thing to test.
but this stated reason, that CR had disabled the browser cache, is kind of unsettling. It kind of turns it into a hit piece and should definitely stain CR's credibility a bit. Incompetence, malice - both show similar symptoms.
I don't think disabling the cache shows incompetence. I could argue that is a reasonable thing to do during a stress test. It wasn't the disabling the cache though that directly caused the problem. It was that disabling the cache exposed an actual bug that depleted the battery life. Consumer Reports goes out of their way to make sure they are neutral. They even go so far as send secret shoppers to purchase the items so they don't get optimized products. I'm surprised they even worked with Apple but it sounds like they were able to identify an actual problem with the device even if that problem only shows up for some users.
Cell phone providers really need to stop selling unlimited plans.
Pretty much all of them have but most of them also grandfather in old customers some of which have unlimited plans from back when the average bandwidth used was a lot lower than it is today. I'm actually surprised that they all have such generous grandfathering provisions when to my knowledge they are under no obligation to honor a contract that expired 10 years ago. Very few other industries do this. It's normal in other industries to get occasional rate hikes. For instance, unless there are specific laws prohibiting it, it's pretty common for places to raise your rent or your car insurance rates every few years.
Training a sniper with shells 75% of the weight the would normally have is pointless.
I could see the appeal for biodegradable bullets and if they worked just as effectively even using them in combat but I find the idea that they be required to host live plants rather strange and limiting. It would make much more sense to pursue biodegradable bullets optimized for biodegradability and effectiveness than adding a third optimization of needing to host a plant. The more things you optimize for the less you're going to be able to optimize each criteria.
Usefulness: Debatable. Uniqueness and recognizability: 100%.
Someone is asking for trouble.
Especially because one of the primary usefulness of a 3 screen laptop is portability and the portability is severely limited if you can't be seen in public with it therefore negating most of the usefulness of it. If it was a laptop that was already being sold then you could maybe get away with it but not something where only a handful even exist.
Just to make a website that was consistent in look...
That's the whole problem. Html was never supposed to have a consistent look across devices then we tacked on pixel perfect precision, javascript, css and everyone did it slightly different. Oh, and we also decided to allow best guess rendering so install of giving a syntax error, a page still tries to render so broken, sloppy, incorrect pages with missing tags, etc... still render on some browsers and not others. Now it's a horrible mess. Just look at jquery. It's an amazing feat of what can be hacked together but you shouldn't have to do thousands of hacks just to get something to render correctly. Html/css/javascript should be scrapped and we need something with strict syntax checking that works uniformly across all browsers. You could even do it in the existing browsers. Just like at one time we had gopher:// and we have ftp:// there is no reason we can't have http2:// and have browsers slowly start adding it but it needs to have strict rules not the lazy rules that we currently have.
To my knowledge there will be zero effort made to recycle them other than as electronic trash, when you could have just put them in a container and shipped them to... anywhere but here, really and sold them cheap or given them to a third world country.
"Giving" your toxic waste to third world countries is neither charitable nor an environmentally friendly alternative to dumping them in your own landfills. WTF is someone living in the third world going to do with an obsolete DAB radio? They don't have DAB stations to listen to, and if they ever get them, they are far more likely to be the same HE-AACv2 DAB+ signals that have triggered you into throwing your radio away than the original MPEG-1 layer 2 based DAB that the radio can receive.
I think he was referring to the FM radios as usable radios not trash. The problem is that even in some place like the USA where we still use FM radios, factory radios are worthless. Every car comes with one and most all of them outlive their cars so you can get one for basically free at any junkyard. Even if you shipped 1M of them to the USA, unless you either start installing used radio in new cars or selling new cars without radios, there will be no market for them.
Strange, posted fine for me without the silly hyphen.
I have no idea. I looked and didn't see anything that looked like it would trigger the filters, added a few hyphens and the comment and it then posted fine.
They are just starting with someone, almost every consumer grade supplier have security holes in their products and they just leave support for your device about a year after you bought it.
This is exactly what I'm worried about. Having "guest/guest" hardcoded is ridiculous but I'm not sure I like the idea of the government deciding what is and is not secure enough. Will it get to the point where only giant companies can release products or accept credit cards because no one else is capable of getting their products certified as secure?
We should replace the patent prohibition with mandatory royalties to the patent holder. That way the inventor gets paid and the technology gets used.
Although I like this idea, how do you decide the royalty amount? Is it 10% of the cost of the final product? 50% of the cost? 10% of the profit? What if the patent is only a small part of the product? What if the patent is practically the entire product? I don't think you can set a single royalty amount that works across the board. The only real option would be for either have the two companies decide or the courts to somehow decide on a case by case basis which is pretty close to what we already have now. The only difference would be that a company would have to allow you to use their patent for a reasonable price which I agree would be an improvement.
Which by the way, every safety patent that was not implemented could be fertile new work for patent trolls
Actually if they started doing this it might help eliminate patent tr-olls. Patent trolls have traditionally been the ones holding the patents. Getting competing tr-olls on the other side trying to find unused patents would make it harder to stockpile thousands of unused patents. This might make patents more of a use it or lose it situation which would probably be a good thing overall for innovation. If you had to actually implement and sell your patented idea in order to hold on to the patent this would make patent stockpiling by patent trolls much harder. Right now what we have is companies patenting every crazy idea that they come up with even when they have no plans to implement it just so they can collect royalties or flaunt their patent war chest. This makes it hard for small people without war chests to do anything without infringing on something. This is the exact opposite of what the patent system was designed to do.
** "Filter error: Lameness filter encountered" -- Apparently I'm not suppose to talk about tr-olls on slashdot even when the article is about them.
The thing that makes the difference in any technology race is human capital. You need large numbers of people, and you have to make good use of them. Hundreds of millions of uneducated peasants or unskilled laborers adds nothing to a country's technological might.
If we want to remain a world leader in technology and science, we need to maintain and support the army of brains it will take to make that happen.
You don't need a huge number of rocket scientists to win a technology race. Even at our peak, only a small percentage of our population was involved in the space race. What you need to win a technology race is a decent number of highy intelligent people and a large amount of excess capital. Russia was able to compete in the space race because they had a small number of smart people and a large enough population they could steal from to raise the needed capital. It doesn't matter whether those people are farmers or engineers, the thing that is needed is a large population to draw capital from. It helps if that population is relatively rich though as then you are not taxing your population to starvation but it doesn't really matter what the majority of the population's occupation is. All advances in human technology and society and even individual families are pretty much tied to the ability to produce more than is immediately consumed so that they have extra materials to spend on art, entertainment, technology and experimentation. If you are constantly worrying about where the next meal is coming from then you aren't going to be spending your precious resources on something that may pan out 10 years down the road.
The justification for leniency makes no sense to me. If a criminal is driven by impulse and lack of emotional control, shouldn't he (and it is usually a "he") get a longer sentence, since he is a greater danger to other people?
It depends on what length of sentence we are talking about. If a person is going to grow up and no longer have impulse control issues then then you don't need to give them a longer sentence just a long enough sentence to have them age out of that behavior if that's possible.
the government is curious if free money inspires you to make more money or try and figure out how to live on $585US/month...
If they really want to find out, they need to make it longer than 2 years. Most people aren't going to restructure their life for something that is only 2 years. Make it lifetime and then watch those individuals. They could even do it without spending any real money. Many places have lotteries already in place that have million dollar plus payouts. Take a look at these people. Many pay out over 20 years and/or lump sum. A slight restructuring would make it even better. Make the payout 10k for life or 20k for life. My guess is that there are enough lotteries that someone has already done this. 10k for life would only be around a 250k jackpot so that's small as lotteries go. See what people do when they have a guaranteed income for life. That would make a good approximation of UBI.
Oh, and make sure that the person can't sell or borrow against their future earnings or your UBI goes up in flames as now people have sold off their future earnings before they received them and are back in the same boat.
Basically what you do is modify (increase) the tax so in most cases, people get net more or less what they do now. That way the numbers come out more or less the same as they are now but in practice on the low end people do get extra money. Most people won't see much of a change.
The problem with this approach is now 10k dollars per person now passes thru a middle man before coming back to you. There is a huge incentive for the middle man (or men) to steal, borrow, modify, add strings, etc... as it passes by. That's over 3 trillion dollars for the USA and now literally everyone is dependent on the government because for most people over 25% of their income now comes from the government.
This is what needs to happen with IoT and this is why things like NEST or other management systems are going to prevail.
With a proper hub, only the hub needs to be connected to the internet and secure. Everything else just talks to the hub so really the hub is the only thing that can be compromised remotely. This is a better system but it really needs an agreed upon standard because otherwise if the hub becomes discontinued and stops working then all the devices stop working. If there was a simple standard where multiple companies were all creating hubs and devices then you could easily swap one hub for another and mix/match IoT devices in your home.
"let me have something stronger!" and then fall on your face after a few more, unless they are monitoring the blood alcohol content of each customer this is just a retarded exercise in AI, and a dangerous one...not trying to sound like a killjoy I love getting smashed, but this shouldn't be a replacement for a sober bartender
I'm not sure where you are located but I've never seen a bartender or waitress refuse to serve a paying customer and even if they did, many times the person doing the ordering is grabbing something for a friend, ordering for the entire group, etc... Granted I live in a college town but most actual bars I've been to are so packed with sloshed people with barely room to move around that trying to figure out who is still sober and who might have had one too many would be near impossible. It's not like the movies where there are 6 people with 8 barstools. It's more like 300 people with 8 barstools.
Better yet, their competing companies can just offer unlimited data plans. That's the direction we're headed anyway.
We aren't talking about their carrier competitors. It's their video streaming competitors that they are hurting. Netflix has no way of zero rating their service because they don't own a network of their own. Verizon/ATT bundling their service with their plan is no different than Microsoft giving IE away free with windows. Giving IE away from with windows didn't hurt the Mac, it hurt Netscape.
I would love to have federated social networking the way e-mail works now! Think of how much better the UI (Timeline, home page, whatever...) would be when moving did not mean losing your friends!
This was sort of what Google Wave was supposed to be. The execution was so bad (so incredibly messy) that it will never be tried again.
Google Wave was still owned/controlled by Google. What we need is an open standard like smtp or openid but for social networking.
I won't take a WAG at the numbers, but terraforming the Sahara has got to be massively cheaper than terraforming Mars - For quite a few reasons. For the price of settlements on Mars, we could probably start populating sea beds.
I completely agree. Terraforming the Sahara or even Antarctica would be several orders of magnitude cheaper than terraforming Mars. The only advantage that Mars has over Antarctica is that there is easier access to raw native building materials (aka rocks) and less competition for those resources.
Maybe we should start thinking about ways to mitigate this kind of thing. If putting all your eggs in one basket and watching it isn't working then maybe it's better to start thinking about ways to break it up. If instead of having companes like google, yahoo, and facebook with billions of users, we had hundreds of companies each with a million users apiece then the profit potential is greatly reduced. It still takes the same amount of work to hack into the system but if you only get 1M accounts then your profit is only $300 instead of $300,000.
unless human-friendly planets are startlingly common, that's not sustainable.
Even if human friendly planets are common, if they have life on them then that life is likely already filling all the ecological niches. It would likely take years to evaluate a planet to make sure it doesn't have pathogens that can kill us and even if it doesn't, what if there is intelligent life? It's bad enough that we are destroying earth, now we are talking about hostile takeover of hundreds of planets. Terraforming would likely take hundreds of years and that's if you are able to find suitable planets without life that mother nature hasn't found yet. Honestly the most practical solution would likely be a ringworld type system where we stay in our current solar system and mine the resources here and create biodomes on the moon, venus, etc... In theory, this is possible. We could then put solar panels in space, biodomes in space, etc... The problem with this is this is currently extremely expensive. We increase the cost of the average dwelling several orders of magnitude. A 50k apartment turns into a 5M apartment in space. In the short term we would be better off building houses and farmland in the Sahara. There is a reason that we don't do this right now though and that is because it is too expensive but still cheaper than building out the moon. The only practical way to keep expanding is to continue to extract more and more energy and resources per person so we can expand into these more resource intensive areas which means that not only is the number of people expanding but also the resources required per person is also expanding. This is a bad combination.
If you could keep someone healthy to 150 and then just took them out in the streets and shot them that would be preferable to what we have now...
Try convincing that to the 150 year old guy. "OK, Charlie. We're just gonna tie you to a stake and put a bullet through your head. A small one, just to open it up a little bit. Maybe put some fire ants in there. Alright?"
I wasn't saying that was a good solution. I was just saying I would prefer it to what we have now. Besides, it doesn't really matter. If you eliminate aging, the average life expectancy would jump from about 80 years to about 250 years even if everyone had the same probability of dying each year as a 25 year old does. So just because a person doesn't age doesn't mean they are going to live forever unless we also greatly decrease the odds of dying from random accidents.
Slashdot Mirror
AT&T will be raising the rates every 6 months until it hits $100/mo like most other "not really unlimited plans"
This may really be their plan. The would upset a lot of customers if they jumped the price to $100/month or just kicked everyone off but by doing a gradual increase, people will gradually move to other plans and aren't going to freak out about $5/month jumps. A slow "boil a frog" strategy to not upset too many people and have a backlash.
Good luck in finding a real unlimited data plan elsewhere. New real unlimited data plans do not exist as far as I know.
I have an unlimited sprint hotspot. I use it as my only internet. It's not super fast where I live but it's the only thing that really works in the somewhat rural area I live in. I get about 1-2 meg down and 2-4 meg up (yes, faster upload for some strange reason). I only use about 50GB/month but I haven't noticed any slow downs at the end of the month so if there is a throttle, it either doesn't affect me in my area or it's above 50GB.
. to me it is obvious that the first Consumer Reports test was correct.
I would somewhat agree but if Apple was able to fix the bug so that the original configuration they used with the cache off also significantly improved then it isn't a problem with the test as much as a problem with the bug that Consumer Report accidentally found. I'm actually kindof surprised that Apple never tested with the cache off as this would seem like a common thing to test.
but this stated reason, that CR had disabled the browser cache, is kind of unsettling. It kind of turns it into a hit piece and should definitely stain CR's credibility a bit. Incompetence, malice - both show similar symptoms.
I don't think disabling the cache shows incompetence. I could argue that is a reasonable thing to do during a stress test. It wasn't the disabling the cache though that directly caused the problem. It was that disabling the cache exposed an actual bug that depleted the battery life. Consumer Reports goes out of their way to make sure they are neutral. They even go so far as send secret shoppers to purchase the items so they don't get optimized products. I'm surprised they even worked with Apple but it sounds like they were able to identify an actual problem with the device even if that problem only shows up for some users.
Cell phone providers really need to stop selling unlimited plans.
Pretty much all of them have but most of them also grandfather in old customers some of which have unlimited plans from back when the average bandwidth used was a lot lower than it is today. I'm actually surprised that they all have such generous grandfathering provisions when to my knowledge they are under no obligation to honor a contract that expired 10 years ago. Very few other industries do this. It's normal in other industries to get occasional rate hikes. For instance, unless there are specific laws prohibiting it, it's pretty common for places to raise your rent or your car insurance rates every few years.
Training a sniper with shells 75% of the weight the would normally have is pointless.
I could see the appeal for biodegradable bullets and if they worked just as effectively even using them in combat but I find the idea that they be required to host live plants rather strange and limiting. It would make much more sense to pursue biodegradable bullets optimized for biodegradability and effectiveness than adding a third optimization of needing to host a plant. The more things you optimize for the less you're going to be able to optimize each criteria.
Usefulness: Debatable.
Uniqueness and recognizability: 100%.
Someone is asking for trouble.
Especially because one of the primary usefulness of a 3 screen laptop is portability and the portability is severely limited if you can't be seen in public with it therefore negating most of the usefulness of it. If it was a laptop that was already being sold then you could maybe get away with it but not something where only a handful even exist.
Just to make a website that was consistent in look...
That's the whole problem. Html was never supposed to have a consistent look across devices then we tacked on pixel perfect precision, javascript, css and everyone did it slightly different. Oh, and we also decided to allow best guess rendering so install of giving a syntax error, a page still tries to render so broken, sloppy, incorrect pages with missing tags, etc... still render on some browsers and not others. Now it's a horrible mess. Just look at jquery. It's an amazing feat of what can be hacked together but you shouldn't have to do thousands of hacks just to get something to render correctly. Html/css/javascript should be scrapped and we need something with strict syntax checking that works uniformly across all browsers. You could even do it in the existing browsers. Just like at one time we had gopher:// and we have ftp:// there is no reason we can't have http2:// and have browsers slowly start adding it but it needs to have strict rules not the lazy rules that we currently have.
To my knowledge there will be zero effort made to recycle them other than as electronic trash, when you could have just put them in a container and shipped them to... anywhere but here, really and sold them cheap or given them to a third world country.
"Giving" your toxic waste to third world countries is neither charitable nor an environmentally friendly alternative to dumping them in your own landfills. WTF is someone living in the third world going to do with an obsolete DAB radio? They don't have DAB stations to listen to, and if they ever get them, they are far more likely to be the same HE-AACv2 DAB+ signals that have triggered you into throwing your radio away than the original MPEG-1 layer 2 based DAB that the radio can receive.
I think he was referring to the FM radios as usable radios not trash. The problem is that even in some place like the USA where we still use FM radios, factory radios are worthless. Every car comes with one and most all of them outlive their cars so you can get one for basically free at any junkyard. Even if you shipped 1M of them to the USA, unless you either start installing used radio in new cars or selling new cars without radios, there will be no market for them.
Strange, posted fine for me without the silly hyphen.
I have no idea. I looked and didn't see anything that looked like it would trigger the filters, added a few hyphens and the comment and it then posted fine.
They are just starting with someone, almost every consumer grade supplier have security holes in their products and they just leave support for your device about a year after you bought it.
This is exactly what I'm worried about. Having "guest/guest" hardcoded is ridiculous but I'm not sure I like the idea of the government deciding what is and is not secure enough. Will it get to the point where only giant companies can release products or accept credit cards because no one else is capable of getting their products certified as secure?
We should replace the patent prohibition with mandatory royalties to the patent holder. That way the inventor gets paid and the technology gets used.
Although I like this idea, how do you decide the royalty amount? Is it 10% of the cost of the final product? 50% of the cost? 10% of the profit? What if the patent is only a small part of the product? What if the patent is practically the entire product? I don't think you can set a single royalty amount that works across the board. The only real option would be for either have the two companies decide or the courts to somehow decide on a case by case basis which is pretty close to what we already have now. The only difference would be that a company would have to allow you to use their patent for a reasonable price which I agree would be an improvement.
Which by the way, every safety patent that was not implemented could be fertile new work for patent trolls
Actually if they started doing this it might help eliminate patent tr-olls. Patent trolls have traditionally been the ones holding the patents. Getting competing tr-olls on the other side trying to find unused patents would make it harder to stockpile thousands of unused patents. This might make patents more of a use it or lose it situation which would probably be a good thing overall for innovation. If you had to actually implement and sell your patented idea in order to hold on to the patent this would make patent stockpiling by patent trolls much harder. Right now what we have is companies patenting every crazy idea that they come up with even when they have no plans to implement it just so they can collect royalties or flaunt their patent war chest. This makes it hard for small people without war chests to do anything without infringing on something. This is the exact opposite of what the patent system was designed to do.
** "Filter error: Lameness filter encountered" -- Apparently I'm not suppose to talk about tr-olls on slashdot even when the article is about them.
The thing that makes the difference in any technology race is human capital. You need large numbers of people, and you have to make good use of them. Hundreds of millions of uneducated peasants or unskilled laborers adds nothing to a country's technological might.
If we want to remain a world leader in technology and science, we need to maintain and support the army of brains it will take to make that happen.
You don't need a huge number of rocket scientists to win a technology race. Even at our peak, only a small percentage of our population was involved in the space race. What you need to win a technology race is a decent number of highy intelligent people and a large amount of excess capital. Russia was able to compete in the space race because they had a small number of smart people and a large enough population they could steal from to raise the needed capital. It doesn't matter whether those people are farmers or engineers, the thing that is needed is a large population to draw capital from. It helps if that population is relatively rich though as then you are not taxing your population to starvation but it doesn't really matter what the majority of the population's occupation is. All advances in human technology and society and even individual families are pretty much tied to the ability to produce more than is immediately consumed so that they have extra materials to spend on art, entertainment, technology and experimentation. If you are constantly worrying about where the next meal is coming from then you aren't going to be spending your precious resources on something that may pan out 10 years down the road.
The justification for leniency makes no sense to me. If a criminal is driven by impulse and lack of emotional control, shouldn't he (and it is usually a "he") get a longer sentence, since he is a greater danger to other people?
It depends on what length of sentence we are talking about. If a person is going to grow up and no longer have impulse control issues then then you don't need to give them a longer sentence just a long enough sentence to have them age out of that behavior if that's possible.
the government is curious if free money inspires you to make more money or try and figure out how to live on $585US/month...
If they really want to find out, they need to make it longer than 2 years. Most people aren't going to restructure their life for something that is only 2 years. Make it lifetime and then watch those individuals. They could even do it without spending any real money. Many places have lotteries already in place that have million dollar plus payouts. Take a look at these people. Many pay out over 20 years and/or lump sum. A slight restructuring would make it even better. Make the payout 10k for life or 20k for life. My guess is that there are enough lotteries that someone has already done this. 10k for life would only be around a 250k jackpot so that's small as lotteries go. See what people do when they have a guaranteed income for life. That would make a good approximation of UBI.
Oh, and make sure that the person can't sell or borrow against their future earnings or your UBI goes up in flames as now people have sold off their future earnings before they received them and are back in the same boat.
Basically what you do is modify (increase) the tax so in most cases, people get net more or less what they do now. That way the numbers come out more or less the same as they are now but in practice on the low end people do get extra money. Most people won't see much of a change.
The problem with this approach is now 10k dollars per person now passes thru a middle man before coming back to you. There is a huge incentive for the middle man (or men) to steal, borrow, modify, add strings, etc... as it passes by. That's over 3 trillion dollars for the USA and now literally everyone is dependent on the government because for most people over 25% of their income now comes from the government.
This is what needs to happen with IoT and this is why things like NEST or other management systems are going to prevail.
With a proper hub, only the hub needs to be connected to the internet and secure. Everything else just talks to the hub so really the hub is the only thing that can be compromised remotely. This is a better system but it really needs an agreed upon standard because otherwise if the hub becomes discontinued and stops working then all the devices stop working. If there was a simple standard where multiple companies were all creating hubs and devices then you could easily swap one hub for another and mix/match IoT devices in your home.
"let me have something stronger!" and then fall on your face after a few more, unless they are monitoring the blood alcohol content of each customer this is just a retarded exercise in AI, and a dangerous one...not trying to sound like a killjoy I love getting smashed, but this shouldn't be a replacement for a sober bartender
I'm not sure where you are located but I've never seen a bartender or waitress refuse to serve a paying customer and even if they did, many times the person doing the ordering is grabbing something for a friend, ordering for the entire group, etc... Granted I live in a college town but most actual bars I've been to are so packed with sloshed people with barely room to move around that trying to figure out who is still sober and who might have had one too many would be near impossible. It's not like the movies where there are 6 people with 8 barstools. It's more like 300 people with 8 barstools.
Better yet, their competing companies can just offer unlimited data plans. That's the direction we're headed anyway.
We aren't talking about their carrier competitors. It's their video streaming competitors that they are hurting. Netflix has no way of zero rating their service because they don't own a network of their own. Verizon/ATT bundling their service with their plan is no different than Microsoft giving IE away free with windows. Giving IE away from with windows didn't hurt the Mac, it hurt Netscape.
I would love to have federated social networking the way e-mail works now! Think of how much better the UI (Timeline, home page, whatever...) would be when moving did not mean losing your friends!
This was sort of what Google Wave was supposed to be. The execution was so bad (so incredibly messy) that it will never be tried again.
Google Wave was still owned/controlled by Google. What we need is an open standard like smtp or openid but for social networking.
I won't take a WAG at the numbers, but terraforming the Sahara has got to be massively cheaper than terraforming Mars - For quite a few reasons. For the price of settlements on Mars, we could probably start populating sea beds.
I completely agree. Terraforming the Sahara or even Antarctica would be several orders of magnitude cheaper than terraforming Mars. The only advantage that Mars has over Antarctica is that there is easier access to raw native building materials (aka rocks) and less competition for those resources.
Maybe we should start thinking about ways to mitigate this kind of thing. If putting all your eggs in one basket and watching it isn't working
then maybe it's better to start thinking about ways to break it up. If instead of having companes like google, yahoo, and facebook with
billions of users, we had hundreds of companies each with a million users apiece then the profit potential is greatly reduced. It still takes
the same amount of work to hack into the system but if you only get 1M accounts then your profit is only $300 instead of $300,000.
unless human-friendly planets are startlingly common, that's not sustainable.
Even if human friendly planets are common, if they have life on them then that life is likely already filling all the ecological niches. It would likely take years to evaluate a planet to make sure it doesn't have pathogens that can kill us and even if it doesn't, what if there is intelligent life? It's bad enough that we are destroying earth, now we are talking about hostile takeover of hundreds of planets. Terraforming would likely take hundreds of years and that's if you are able to find suitable planets without life that mother nature hasn't found yet. Honestly the most practical solution would likely be a ringworld type system where we stay in our current solar system and mine the resources here and create biodomes on the moon, venus, etc... In theory, this is possible. We could then put solar panels in space, biodomes in space, etc... The problem with this is this is currently extremely expensive. We increase the cost of the average dwelling several orders of magnitude. A 50k apartment turns into a 5M apartment in space. In the short term we would be better off building houses and farmland in the Sahara. There is a reason that we don't do this right now though and that is because it is too expensive but still cheaper than building out the moon. The only practical way to keep expanding is to continue to extract more and more energy and resources per person so we can expand into these more resource intensive areas which means that not only is the number of people expanding but also the resources required per person is also expanding. This is a bad combination.
If you could keep someone healthy to 150 and then just took them out in the streets and shot them that would be preferable to what we have now...
Try convincing that to the 150 year old guy. "OK, Charlie. We're just gonna tie you to a stake and put a bullet through your head. A small one, just to open it up a little bit. Maybe put some fire ants in there. Alright?"
I wasn't saying that was a good solution. I was just saying I would prefer it to what we have now. Besides, it doesn't really matter. If you eliminate aging, the average life expectancy would jump from about 80 years to about 250 years even if everyone had the same probability of dying each year as a 25 year old does. So just because a person doesn't age doesn't mean they are going to live forever unless we also greatly decrease the odds of dying from random accidents.