I think you undersell how people lived in the 1950s.
I live in a house built in 1954 and it was originally about 1800 finished square feet with 3 bedrooms. Switching counter tops to Formica was probably an upgrade over previous choices which probably had been wood or linoleum. I don't think automatic dishwashers were that widespread until the 1960s or later.
But I think they would have had a washing machine, possibly a dryer, almost certainly a TV and a couple of radios.
I think in many ways the lifestyle of a 1955 family probably felt extremely futuristic to them -- for a lot of them, I bet they had first hand experience with houses without central heating, wood cooking stoves, using an outhouse, no automatic hot water heater.
The other high tech stuff nobody had, either, so they weren't exactly missing it.
I wonder if they should work with pharma and come up with some new and improved hypnotics for a Mars journey. It might makes sense to have long-haul astronauts "zoned out" for several hours per day. They could keep a patch or some kind of autoinjector connected with a drug to counter-act it in case of emergency.
Their minidisc stuff wasn't bad in the late 1990s. It had some DRM limits if you recorded digitally, but I don't remember it being a pain and it was way better than cassette for general reliability and analog recording.
I think they managed to screw this up when MP3 came along, bringing in more DRM and limitations while trying to stay relevant.
Clearly humans, possessing more developed language and sophisticated intellectual capabilities, have been able to develop more sophisticated social organizations than other primates.
But it doesn't stop them from displaying regressive behavior that shows pretty clearly while we've branched off into a new species we still carry a lot of primal instincts from our ancestors.
I always thought the elite schools attracted people not for their education but for the benefits of their social connections to a lot of rich and well-connected people.
What would Facebook be if Zuckerberg had instead gone to Purdue or Texas A&M instead of Harvard? How much of his success is due to the fact that he had access to a lot of rich and influential people?
It's not really meant as a joke. For a lot of managers, at its core, managing is about being in charge, and being in charge is about dominance.
And it ultimately looks like innate primate behavior. They're achieved status in the troop and they need to dominate the other members or they fear they will lose their dominance.
I think the cable companies started ramping prices to consumers first, then the networks caught on and began demanding more carriage fees, figuring that they weren't going to let the cable company profit while they didn't.
Then the production companies and sports leagues caught on, and figured they weren't going to let the networks get fat and profitable, and THEY demanded more money, part of which the networks tried to make up with more advertising.
And now we're in this spiral where they've gotten used to just regular increases, and as soon as any one of them demands an increase they all demand an increase.
The net result is that the pricing to consumers is out of whack and it's so filled with commercials the value proposition is wiped out.
You're fighting the cultural expectations of management and power, and likely at the root, primate dominance.
Your boss assumes that being boss requires some level of physical control of you, and that means controlling your locality to reinforce his perception of dominance and control over you.
It goes a long way towards explaining why incompetent employees who show up and don't evidence much insubordination are tolerated so well.
This article perfectly encapsulates the extent to which globalists are scared and their complete lack of denial on the inequalities globalism has created:
Much of this year's Davos meetings have been globalist hand-wringing over the surge in populism and the rejection of globalism, and the majority of Davos speakers are rejecting any notion of increases in labor negotiating or doing anything substantive about reducing economic inequality.
The article author does a pretty good job in questioning why the Davos globalists are unwilling to do anything that directly addresses the issues that have substantially led to an increase in anti-globalist sentiment.
I think you can create all kinds of narratives about why Hillary lost, and Hillary's personality/image had a lot to do with it, but I think a lot of it had to do with the attitude that Hillary was a big corporation globalist at the end of the day.
Selective omission. It creates a false impression that the only replacement power is renewables without mentioning additional nuclear capacity that presumably will also make up for the loss of this coal power.
If I say "My family has decided to cancel spending on a new SUV as part of a focus on increasing use of bicycles and public transit and wean ourselves off of cars" it sounds like we're really going green.
However, the reality is we're not just cancelling the new SUV, we're also adding another compact car, so the statement should read "My family has decided not to buy a new SUV, but instead bike and ride the bus more, and buy a second compact car to increase our transit options" we look a lot less green.
The first statement omits our use of the first compact car and the fact that we are increasing our compact car usage for transportation, creating the false impression that bikes and transit will be completely filling the transportation the SUV would have provided.
The second statement is much more accurate, as it shows while we want to bike and ride transit more, we're also expanding our use of compact cars for transportation.
I've seen a lot of accusations that Manning's imprisonment was "like" torture, but I can't find anything that demonstrates actual torture -- beatings, electrocutions, waterboarding, that sort of thing.
Commuting the sentence to what amounts effectively to release from prison is pretty much a soft pardon. It doesn't get you the civil rights restoration that a pardon gets, and that's largely a sop to those who claim Manning was a traitor.
But really, how is serving only 7 years of a 35 year prison sentence not some kind of refutation of the government's case against Manning, especially when it results in getting out of jail?
It would be more of a statement that the government didn't approve to commute the sentence to 10 or 12 years, forcing Manning to remain imprisoned for another few years but not the rest off the sentence.
I don't really have an opinion on whether Manning should or shouldn't be in prison. The government gets up to shady shit and punishes those who tattle on it severely. If you're taking a job in the government, especially in the military and decide to tell its tales, you should expect to suffer its punishments.
It my impression that most criminals aren't nearly clever enough.
Maybe small-time criminals like home burglars or armed robbery people aren't clever enough, but someone capable of delivering a working e-commerce site? I'm assuming there that all the cleverness required to pull it off is built-in.
My question is -- they caught THIS guy, but how many have done the same thing and not gotten caught? There's possibly millions of e-commerce sites out there written by people with nobody looking over their shoulder and not enough resources for someone to check for something like this.
Surely this isn't the only person to give in to a moral hazard like this.
I don't know for sure, but I thought they had a method for fingerprinting songs that made it (relatively) simple for them find copyrighted audio in video audio tracks.
Since each porn star has a different voice, coupled with background music or sounds, it's they'd have to fingerprint the audio from every porn movie.
Plus I always thought that porn was detected more or less by people flagging the videos as porn if they weren't detected by more obvious screening methods (ie, keywords or something in the titles).
I found a series of German TV documentaries from the late 1960s/early 1970s on YouTube about the "german youth" that had pretty explicit sex and nudity, more explicit than I had ever found in YouTube. They had been posted for years with thousands of views and I was kind of surprised they had kicked around that long.
I guess I would assume that private, unshared content on YouTube would be subjected to all the usual automated scanning plus a higher than normal level of human review since it seems like an ideal way to swap prohibited content on Google's dime.
I've also wondered if it would be possible to use video content as a means of storing data while having it survive re-encoding. Tivo used to buy time on a cable network at night and broadcast a kind of flash block pattern that was decoded into data.
I'd be curious to know what the propeller-heads who study long-term valuation think of Comcast NBCUniversal.
I'm not one of those people, but I have this idea that of that combo-package, NBC has the best long-term business model, Universal second and Comcast third.
Comcast's primary value *now* is its local monopolies on broadband and cable television, and the cable part isn't an actual monopoly if you take DirectTV and Dish into account as viable competitors for most households. But long-term, doesn't the whole viability of the cable television model look shaky? Netflix, HBO Now, Prime Instant, the whole streaming thing looks like its undermining their cable business.
That leaves broadband, but who knows what that will look like in 5-10 years. 5G with high enough caps and/or more fiber rollouts could undermine that business, too.
Universal is mostly a production studio, and their future is probably decent as a content production business -- maybe not big growth, but at least competitive if managed right.
NBC still has a giant network of affiliates who actually broadcast their signal in addition to a fair amount of content that still draws eyeballs, which makes it seem to have some durability.
So at the end of the day, Verizon, with its giant cell phone network and terrestrial network seems to have much more asset value and long-term value.
My question is that as AI is developed from machine learning or whatever it's antecedents are, at what point will we decide that we have AI?
It seems like the goal line for what we're will to accept is AI keeps getting moved forward, mostly driven by a science fiction version of AI, like HAL9000, Westworld robots or some other kind of self-aware machine consciousness.
I think the big error Facebook made early on was making it too easy to post links and to share other such posts. This diluted the content from "stupid shit my friends say and do" to "clickbait social media shares" with no original content from friends.
I see people on Facebook who seem to do nothing other than re-share web links and meme photos, with zero original content added. And there's a lot of it, which is why you end up speed-scrolling your news feed, because its all clickbait and a lot of it politics, too.
I also think that politics and the ease of re-sharing has been a REALLY toxic combination for Facebook. The amount of ZOMG Trump and strident political messaging makes the content even worse.
I was flat on my back sick for 3 days and was surprised how easy it was to blow past everything in my news feed when I finally checked it out again, I thought for sure there would be enough unique self-generated content to kill some time, but it was, again, just a lot of low quality noise.
The idea of Facebook as a long-form video source platform just seems ridiculous. It's not on any STBs and even if it was, the newsfeed doesn't make for a video selection user interface. Even Netflix struggles a little with content catalog presentation.
I work as an IT contractor, and I have about 400 gigs of miscellaneous software archives that I drag around with me. About a third of it is legacy crap that I almost never need but when it does come up, it's usually critical to solving some problem.
I split the archive between a current branch and a legacy branch and keep legacy as just a symlink to a directory on a 256 GB card that stays in my Dell laptop and fortunately fits completely flush.
I agree that the speeds to SD are kind of erratic and not nearly as good or predictable in response to even a decent USB3 stick, but for what I'm using it for its more or less ideal.
A modular bottom panel is a pretty good idea. I suppose ideally the entire case would be designed around the bottom panel being swappable for a thicker one which included supplemental battery power and extra ports.
If they had a docking port on the bottom, this could almost be something a third party could deliver.
Am I the only one who finds that a SD card slot that holds an SD card is a great way to hold extra data? I keep a 256 GB one with low-use archive data in my SD card slot, symlinked into the main file system.
Frankly I wish they could put 2 or 4 of these slots into a laptop. I would use one for portable data I expected to move to other computers, one as a generic storage enhancer, and one other for my automatic image backup.
The latter I would really like, I can keep at least 5 restore points in 512GB for my system's 66% full 1 TB boot disk if I run the backup cycle daily. Create an incremental at every boot and then auto-dismount to protect it from malware or accidental overwrite.
My summary of this whole Macbook Pro issue (and I don't even own one) is that one side is arguing that "nobody" uses the missing features (SD card slots, USB ports, etc), basically arguing that because the *average* user doesn't use them, it's a waste to add them.
The other side seems comprised of the actual power users who have use cases for them and think that a product should be offered that addresses something other than the average user.
At the end of the day, the whole thing seems to boil down to millimeters and ounces of weight.
I think the larger problem is people are just sick of everything having telemetry in it, even if it's generally benign and possibly even beneficial.
My main beef with Windows 10 is how willing Microsoft is to re-install sample app store apps after I've already "uninstalled" them (which I don't even think actually uninstalls them but just kind of removes them from my profile). There's a perniciousness to push their marketing angle in my user profile configuration that kind of bugs me.
This is for your betters to move between their gated community, private clubs and corporate headquarters, and for essential security personnel to help ensure your safety and political hygiene.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you undersell how people lived in the 1950s.
I live in a house built in 1954 and it was originally about 1800 finished square feet with 3 bedrooms. Switching counter tops to Formica was probably an upgrade over previous choices which probably had been wood or linoleum. I don't think automatic dishwashers were that widespread until the 1960s or later.
But I think they would have had a washing machine, possibly a dryer, almost certainly a TV and a couple of radios.
I think in many ways the lifestyle of a 1955 family probably felt extremely futuristic to them -- for a lot of them, I bet they had first hand experience with houses without central heating, wood cooking stoves, using an outhouse, no automatic hot water heater.
The other high tech stuff nobody had, either, so they weren't exactly missing it.
I wonder if they should work with pharma and come up with some new and improved hypnotics for a Mars journey. It might makes sense to have long-haul astronauts "zoned out" for several hours per day. They could keep a patch or some kind of autoinjector connected with a drug to counter-act it in case of emergency.
Their minidisc stuff wasn't bad in the late 1990s. It had some DRM limits if you recorded digitally, but I don't remember it being a pain and it was way better than cassette for general reliability and analog recording.
I think they managed to screw this up when MP3 came along, bringing in more DRM and limitations while trying to stay relevant.
They went back in time and managed to divert Helios 685, but it didn't eliminate time travel or the fucked up future.
Clearly humans, possessing more developed language and sophisticated intellectual capabilities, have been able to develop more sophisticated social organizations than other primates.
But it doesn't stop them from displaying regressive behavior that shows pretty clearly while we've branched off into a new species we still carry a lot of primal instincts from our ancestors.
I always thought the elite schools attracted people not for their education but for the benefits of their social connections to a lot of rich and well-connected people.
What would Facebook be if Zuckerberg had instead gone to Purdue or Texas A&M instead of Harvard? How much of his success is due to the fact that he had access to a lot of rich and influential people?
Would agree with your crime fighting methods.
I can't say that I don't like it in theory, but in practice it seems to have some side effects.
It's not really meant as a joke. For a lot of managers, at its core, managing is about being in charge, and being in charge is about dominance.
And it ultimately looks like innate primate behavior. They're achieved status in the troop and they need to dominate the other members or they fear they will lose their dominance.
I think the cable companies started ramping prices to consumers first, then the networks caught on and began demanding more carriage fees, figuring that they weren't going to let the cable company profit while they didn't.
Then the production companies and sports leagues caught on, and figured they weren't going to let the networks get fat and profitable, and THEY demanded more money, part of which the networks tried to make up with more advertising.
And now we're in this spiral where they've gotten used to just regular increases, and as soon as any one of them demands an increase they all demand an increase.
The net result is that the pricing to consumers is out of whack and it's so filled with commercials the value proposition is wiped out.
You're fighting the cultural expectations of management and power, and likely at the root, primate dominance.
Your boss assumes that being boss requires some level of physical control of you, and that means controlling your locality to reinforce his perception of dominance and control over you.
It goes a long way towards explaining why incompetent employees who show up and don't evidence much insubordination are tolerated so well.
This article perfectly encapsulates the extent to which globalists are scared and their complete lack of denial on the inequalities globalism has created:
Davos Elite Fret About Inequality Over Vintage Wine and Canapes
Much of this year's Davos meetings have been globalist hand-wringing over the surge in populism and the rejection of globalism, and the majority of Davos speakers are rejecting any notion of increases in labor negotiating or doing anything substantive about reducing economic inequality.
The article author does a pretty good job in questioning why the Davos globalists are unwilling to do anything that directly addresses the issues that have substantially led to an increase in anti-globalist sentiment.
I think you can create all kinds of narratives about why Hillary lost, and Hillary's personality/image had a lot to do with it, but I think a lot of it had to do with the attitude that Hillary was a big corporation globalist at the end of the day.
Selective omission. It creates a false impression that the only replacement power is renewables without mentioning additional nuclear capacity that presumably will also make up for the loss of this coal power.
If I say "My family has decided to cancel spending on a new SUV as part of a focus on increasing use of bicycles and public transit and wean ourselves off of cars" it sounds like we're really going green.
However, the reality is we're not just cancelling the new SUV, we're also adding another compact car, so the statement should read "My family has decided not to buy a new SUV, but instead bike and ride the bus more, and buy a second compact car to increase our transit options" we look a lot less green.
The first statement omits our use of the first compact car and the fact that we are increasing our compact car usage for transportation, creating the false impression that bikes and transit will be completely filling the transportation the SUV would have provided.
The second statement is much more accurate, as it shows while we want to bike and ride transit more, we're also expanding our use of compact cars for transportation.
I've seen a lot of accusations that Manning's imprisonment was "like" torture, but I can't find anything that demonstrates actual torture -- beatings, electrocutions, waterboarding, that sort of thing.
Commuting the sentence to what amounts effectively to release from prison is pretty much a soft pardon. It doesn't get you the civil rights restoration that a pardon gets, and that's largely a sop to those who claim Manning was a traitor.
But really, how is serving only 7 years of a 35 year prison sentence not some kind of refutation of the government's case against Manning, especially when it results in getting out of jail?
It would be more of a statement that the government didn't approve to commute the sentence to 10 or 12 years, forcing Manning to remain imprisoned for another few years but not the rest off the sentence.
I don't really have an opinion on whether Manning should or shouldn't be in prison. The government gets up to shady shit and punishes those who tattle on it severely. If you're taking a job in the government, especially in the military and decide to tell its tales, you should expect to suffer its punishments.
It my impression that most criminals aren't nearly clever enough.
Maybe small-time criminals like home burglars or armed robbery people aren't clever enough, but someone capable of delivering a working e-commerce site? I'm assuming there that all the cleverness required to pull it off is built-in.
My question is -- they caught THIS guy, but how many have done the same thing and not gotten caught? There's possibly millions of e-commerce sites out there written by people with nobody looking over their shoulder and not enough resources for someone to check for something like this.
Surely this isn't the only person to give in to a moral hazard like this.
I don't know for sure, but I thought they had a method for fingerprinting songs that made it (relatively) simple for them find copyrighted audio in video audio tracks.
Since each porn star has a different voice, coupled with background music or sounds, it's they'd have to fingerprint the audio from every porn movie.
Plus I always thought that porn was detected more or less by people flagging the videos as porn if they weren't detected by more obvious screening methods (ie, keywords or something in the titles).
I found a series of German TV documentaries from the late 1960s/early 1970s on YouTube about the "german youth" that had pretty explicit sex and nudity, more explicit than I had ever found in YouTube. They had been posted for years with thousands of views and I was kind of surprised they had kicked around that long.
I guess I would assume that private, unshared content on YouTube would be subjected to all the usual automated scanning plus a higher than normal level of human review since it seems like an ideal way to swap prohibited content on Google's dime.
I've also wondered if it would be possible to use video content as a means of storing data while having it survive re-encoding. Tivo used to buy time on a cable network at night and broadcast a kind of flash block pattern that was decoded into data.
I'd be curious to know what the propeller-heads who study long-term valuation think of Comcast NBCUniversal.
I'm not one of those people, but I have this idea that of that combo-package, NBC has the best long-term business model, Universal second and Comcast third.
Comcast's primary value *now* is its local monopolies on broadband and cable television, and the cable part isn't an actual monopoly if you take DirectTV and Dish into account as viable competitors for most households. But long-term, doesn't the whole viability of the cable television model look shaky? Netflix, HBO Now, Prime Instant, the whole streaming thing looks like its undermining their cable business.
That leaves broadband, but who knows what that will look like in 5-10 years. 5G with high enough caps and/or more fiber rollouts could undermine that business, too.
Universal is mostly a production studio, and their future is probably decent as a content production business -- maybe not big growth, but at least competitive if managed right.
NBC still has a giant network of affiliates who actually broadcast their signal in addition to a fair amount of content that still draws eyeballs, which makes it seem to have some durability.
So at the end of the day, Verizon, with its giant cell phone network and terrestrial network seems to have much more asset value and long-term value.
My guess is that they have automated the ability to find audio content, but automation of sexual content is harder or less effective.
My question is that as AI is developed from machine learning or whatever it's antecedents are, at what point will we decide that we have AI?
It seems like the goal line for what we're will to accept is AI keeps getting moved forward, mostly driven by a science fiction version of AI, like HAL9000, Westworld robots or some other kind of self-aware machine consciousness.
I think the big error Facebook made early on was making it too easy to post links and to share other such posts. This diluted the content from "stupid shit my friends say and do" to "clickbait social media shares" with no original content from friends.
I see people on Facebook who seem to do nothing other than re-share web links and meme photos, with zero original content added. And there's a lot of it, which is why you end up speed-scrolling your news feed, because its all clickbait and a lot of it politics, too.
I also think that politics and the ease of re-sharing has been a REALLY toxic combination for Facebook. The amount of ZOMG Trump and strident political messaging makes the content even worse.
I was flat on my back sick for 3 days and was surprised how easy it was to blow past everything in my news feed when I finally checked it out again, I thought for sure there would be enough unique self-generated content to kill some time, but it was, again, just a lot of low quality noise.
The idea of Facebook as a long-form video source platform just seems ridiculous. It's not on any STBs and even if it was, the newsfeed doesn't make for a video selection user interface. Even Netflix struggles a little with content catalog presentation.
I work as an IT contractor, and I have about 400 gigs of miscellaneous software archives that I drag around with me. About a third of it is legacy crap that I almost never need but when it does come up, it's usually critical to solving some problem.
I split the archive between a current branch and a legacy branch and keep legacy as just a symlink to a directory on a 256 GB card that stays in my Dell laptop and fortunately fits completely flush.
I agree that the speeds to SD are kind of erratic and not nearly as good or predictable in response to even a decent USB3 stick, but for what I'm using it for its more or less ideal.
A modular bottom panel is a pretty good idea. I suppose ideally the entire case would be designed around the bottom panel being swappable for a thicker one which included supplemental battery power and extra ports.
If they had a docking port on the bottom, this could almost be something a third party could deliver.
Am I the only one who finds that a SD card slot that holds an SD card is a great way to hold extra data? I keep a 256 GB one with low-use archive data in my SD card slot, symlinked into the main file system.
Frankly I wish they could put 2 or 4 of these slots into a laptop. I would use one for portable data I expected to move to other computers, one as a generic storage enhancer, and one other for my automatic image backup.
The latter I would really like, I can keep at least 5 restore points in 512GB for my system's 66% full 1 TB boot disk if I run the backup cycle daily. Create an incremental at every boot and then auto-dismount to protect it from malware or accidental overwrite.
My summary of this whole Macbook Pro issue (and I don't even own one) is that one side is arguing that "nobody" uses the missing features (SD card slots, USB ports, etc), basically arguing that because the *average* user doesn't use them, it's a waste to add them.
The other side seems comprised of the actual power users who have use cases for them and think that a product should be offered that addresses something other than the average user.
At the end of the day, the whole thing seems to boil down to millimeters and ounces of weight.
I think the larger problem is people are just sick of everything having telemetry in it, even if it's generally benign and possibly even beneficial.
My main beef with Windows 10 is how willing Microsoft is to re-install sample app store apps after I've already "uninstalled" them (which I don't even think actually uninstalls them but just kind of removes them from my profile). There's a perniciousness to push their marketing angle in my user profile configuration that kind of bugs me.
This isn't for you, citizen.
This is for your betters to move between their gated community, private clubs and corporate headquarters, and for essential security personnel to help ensure your safety and political hygiene.
Now move along, citizen.