That assumes the entire cost scales equally, but I suspect the major cost is the development of the technology and the building of the train itself, the track and associated infrastructure is probably a lot less. I expect adding further track/destinations/etc, such as a line from Nagoya to Osaka, would be a lot less expensive.
Something like this would be amazing to have in the Northeast Corridor - heck, we're spending $117 billion just to increase the speed there to 350km/h. At 500km/h it would take an hour to get to New York, which would be just as fast as flying, without the insanity and the hassle.
For one, it's an investment in technology. Being a leader in high-tech stuff has lots of advantages, such as selling to other countries that want to build the same thing. It makes a lot more sense than, say, the money that the USA wasted in the Middle Eastern wars over the past decade or so.
Japan tends to be more sane about this sort of thing. Heck, they had someone nerve-gas their subway, but it's still the same as before. Here in the USA we'd have politicians demanding mandatory strip-searches on anyone trying to use mass transit faster than you can say TSA.
Money isn't speech. It's a fallacy to think that it is.
Money is a surrogate for production and economic value associated with that production. It is used to represent that value, in lieu of bartering the goods themselves directly. It is not speech, nor is the spending of it on something 'speech.' Buying an ad is not 'speech' any more than buying a megaphone so you can shout over the rest of the people around you is 'speech.'
And that's the problem. Money isn't used to express someone's opinion, it's used to drown out the opinions of others. We need to stop enshrining protections for that in law.
White-collar jobs are largely getting the treatment that unskilled labor got in the industrial revolution. Machines make their jobs more efficient, meaning that one person can do the same work it used to take more people to do. This makes them much more efficient, and thus it isn't bad in the medium to long term, once you get past the initial churn.
Unskilled/low-skill labor though is facing a much worse deal though. Their jobs are being replaced entirely by machines who will do it without needing an operator. They're left trying to compete for an increasingly smaller pool of jobs, or trying to train/educate into a white-collar field, where there's already lots of competition - people with experience and skills. Good luck with that. And we're not even to the worst of it yet - just wait until delivery and long haul truck drivers are replaced by self-driving vehicles. All those people (approximately 1% of the US population) will be out of work, just in that field alone.
It's also that we're eliminating low-skill jobs entirely, not just replacing them with a job operating a machine that does their old job better. Even if there are high skill/education jobs available, not everyone is going to be able to retrain for that.
That depends on how we divide up the productivity of the robots. It's probably going to require a rather radical rethinking of how our economy and society is structured, in part, because we'll have radically changed the very nature of economic production. It will be generated largely by robots, independent of human labor. At that point, I would propose several things:
-End taxes on regular income. Replace them with taxes on robot production. (How you'd formulate this isn't what matters, the point is that you tax the stuff that's actually producing). -You then pay everyone a guaranteed basic income, enough for living expenses, and maybe a little basic entertainment, using that money. -Eliminate minimum wage laws, and let the market set the price for human labor (Skilled or not) beyond that, as there's no need for people to survive on that income, it's entirely discretionary income now. (You can also eliminate other welfare/unemployment/social security/etc because it's no longer necessary)
This serves several purposes. For one, it means that people will be able buy the stuff that the robots make. The capitalist economy will continue to function, because the price/demand/etc signals are still there. There's still incentive to save, invest, to work, and to get rich - and at the same time, nobody gets left completely out in the cold to starve.
It'd be great... at least, until the day comesthat the robots decide they're not satisfied with it anymore.
Equating what happened in the industrial revolution to what's happening now is a fallacy, and here's why.
In the past, machines did not replace "manual" labor, they traded a manual laborer for an unskilled or low skilled laborer who operated the machine. That laborer was then much more efficient, and could do work that multiple people had done, which caused some churn... but the net result was not "out of work laborer," it was "more efficient worker who needs a little bit of training on how to operate the machine." For instance, the automobile did not eliminate transportation workers, it merely made them need to learn to drive a truck rather than a team of horses. One truck driver could move a lot more stuff, faster, than a horse drawn cart, nevermind one guy lugging stuff on his back.
Fast forward to today. We're not talking about making these workers more productive by putting in machines that help them do the job - the machine does the job, without need for control or direct supervision even. To use the truck example, a self-driving truck doesn't need a driver at all. It maybe needs one guy at the control hub that's watching the fleet - but that's not a new job, that guy is probably already there coordinating the human-driven ones. Worse, the robot driver can do the job BETTER than a human can, because it doesn't need sleep, doesn't need to stop to grab a burger, doesn't get sick, doesn't need a vacation, etc.
Education isn't a solution either. There simply won't be enough low-skill jobs available to easily retrain for, and not everyone is going to be able to do advanced stuff. Sure, maybe some truck drivers are going to be able to learn to program, but what about the rest of them?
The solution is that standard terrestrial cable TV should get replaced by channels and services over the internet. You're starting to see this now, not just in Netflix, but with HBO Go, and others that are likely to follow. There's no quality advantage anymore, nor any particular reason to prefer using the old broadcast model to on demand streaming - no reason for the customer, that is.
Draconian/dystopian controls are completely unnecessary. Population explosion projections fall prey to the xkcd rule on extrapolation - they don't properly account for the impact that modern technology/medicine/family planning options have.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say our problem isn't going to be having too many babies, it's going to be having enough of them.
Several advanced nations have already fallen well below replacement level (i.e., roughly 2 births per female). The USA is even one of those nations at 1.88 births per woman as of 2012. Some places are even worse, like South Korea at 1.3, a rate at which if it continues, the South Korean population would be gone by 2700 or so (though of course, see previous statement on extrapolation). It's true for pretty much every sufficiently advanced nation. The USA and many of these countries have started replacing their population via immigration (which is why the US population is still growing despite the slowing birth rate), but that's only going to work for so long...
Because it's spreading. In 1970, Mexico's birth rate was 6.72 per female. In 2012, it had fallen to 2.22. What about India? 5.49 in 1970, 2.50 in 2012. Yes, it's still pretty high in some of the most undeveloped nations, but that will change, not because governments enforce it, but because on the whole people want it.
Everyone who was technically astute and aware, on sites such as this, raised concerns of this very nature. While I don't have the reference at the tip of my finger, I feel that I can state with some certainty that this very possibility was raised, by explaining how applying the DMCA to cars would prevent you from modifying, repairing, or otherwise working on your car, or even taking it to a third party mechanic. (After all, since when has Slashdot been able to resist a car analogy?)
No, the people that "didn't realize this" are the politicians and proponents of the DMCA and other horrible laws like it, and the others who bought the line of BS being fed to them by those proponents - the people who dismissed such objections as the being "outlandish," "preposterous," or similarly unrealistic. We tried to tell them, and they ignored us.
And how much do you think it costs us right now to keep someone on death row while all the various appeals processes are carried out? I've read sources that cite the figure for executing someone is actually higher. Now, obviously those may be partisan figures, and the cost is certainly going to vary from case to case, but it's certainly arguable at present.
Now, I suppose you could propose curtailing appeals and hurrying on to the imposition of the death sentence - but are we really comfortable with that given all the instances where the Justice system has clearly failed, and sometimes spectacularly? It doesn't seem like a week goes by before we hear of another story of some egregious action on the part of law enforcement. This past week was the news that the FBI had been presenting hair sample analysis overstated the evidence in 95% of the trials that had been reviewed, which included 32 death penalty cases.
I wonder what implications this has for alien worlds that somehow ended up vaguely earthlike, with lots of liquid water, yet never developed life despite being generally hospitable. Offhand I think it's certainly possible that such worlds exist, but this would seem to indicate that they'd more likely be predominantly oceanic, with only small continents or isolated archipelagos for land mass.
While it's certainly possible to use Steam and never, ever spend any money in theory, in practice I don't think the sort of person who buys a retail game that's Steam activated but never buys anything on Steam, ever, is generally going to be the sort of person who finds themselves limited by these restrictions.
What I suspect is much more common is that the retail game introduces them to Steam, and along the way they start purchasing games, probably in the various Steam Sales.
This is all about understanding the profiles of different users, and setting it up so that you don't impact 99.n+% of legitimate users, but significantly impact bots/scams/etc.
The Government, and the Military as a whole, has several problems when it comes to hiring and retaining talented network/IT/etc security people. Much of that is endemic to it being the government and military, as others have noted, and I won't belabor those (valid) points.
What this seems to be largely about though is restructuring their internal codes. Pretty much every job in the military or government, civilian or otherwise, has a particular job code and career field, from park ranger to law enforcement to, yes, Special Forces (which is 18 series for the Army). When they talk about "Cyber Branch 17" that's what they mean, it's the designation for that series of military occupational specialties (MOS), just like 11 is infantry, 12 is combat engineer, etc.
Now, on the civilian side, one of the problems the government in general has had is that they don't/didn't have a career field for "Cyber." Everyone that I met was being shoehorned in either as an Intelligence billet or as a general IT billet, neither of which apply quite correctly, as IT Security has focuses and training that would not apply to the majority of the jobs previously classified as those fields, at least in the sense that the Government does. Someone might have 10+ years of experience as either, but know absolutely nothing about advanced IT security.
It should also be pointed out that at the time they were conducting the Able/Baker tests, they didn't realize just how nasty the effects of nuclear weapons against warships is. The military scheduled three tests as part of Operation Crossroads - Able, Baker, and Charlie, held at Bikini Atoll. It was considered important to know how effective nukes would be against ships, and what sort of defenses could be employed, how long they could survive, etc. Various animals were used in place of crew members at different points around the ships, with radiation measuring devices.
Able was an air burst, and for the most part the ships survived, partly because it missed its target, the Battleship Nevada, though it was judged based on the data that the Nevada would have been a floating coffin from the radiation. So the ships got hosed down and the second test, Baker, was conducted, with a nuke detonated some 90 feet below the water, which not only sunk multiple ships, but sprayed the radioactive byproducts pretty much everywhere, and it got into everything on all the ships, to the point that they had to cancel the third test because it was judged impossible to clean them up at that point.
So in short, they intended to clean up the surviving ships and recycle them, but the nature of the test served to make that impossible.
The question becomes how maneuverable one is, versus the other, as well as the question of speed.
In fact, let's we have a rocket powered drone, that has its own guidance systems, and an explosive charge, that is trying to hit the jet, or come reasonably close to it and explode that charge, in order to destroy the jet....and now let me point out that these "Drones" have been in regular use by armies worldwide for over fifty years. They're called guided Surface to Air Missiles.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what took Thompson down was not online harrassment, twitter trolling, or IRL threats of violence/rape/etc - it was clear-headed dissection of his poor arguments and the legal sanctions against his own atrocious behavior. In short, he was given enough rope to show himself up as the idiotic demagogue he is/was. Twitter trolling, sending pizzas to his house, and other Anon-style pranks may have made people feel better, but they probably had no positive impact in the court of public opinion. At the very least, that sort of behavior wasn't going to convince anyone that didn't already hate him.
On the other hand, what about Anita Sarkeesian? Can we really say she's been responded to in any sort of rational way? No, what the public sees is a bunch of juvenile attempts to shout down a critic. We're not even talking about how inappropriate rape or death threats are, we're talking about how counterproductive it is to let the conversation change over to that, rather than pointing out how she's wrong, her criticisms are overblown and uninformed, etc. Hell, I would never have even heard of her if it wasn't for the threats and harassment, because THAT'S the story the media keyed in on.
That's why her accusations stuck, not because anyone was evaluating them on any merits, but because a bunch of trolls turned it into a conversation about her being attacked, which caused people to take her side. I'm sure it helped that she was in the role of "feminist critic under attack" rather than "overly litigious lawyer" and thus much more sympathetic in nature, but the ultimate point is that the Gamergate trolls' behavior isn't just objectionable on its own merits, it's also proved rather counterproductive.
Nevermind many of the various "voyages of discovery" that European nations conducted from the 1400s onward that went into uncharted territory, spending long times at sea, with the only outside contact being potentially hostile.
Really though, isolation is only a real problem when you get down to small numbers. One person by themselves will go insane, but a large enough group isn't exactly unusual or unnatural. How many people do you really deal with in an average day, after all? The only real question is what comprises a healthy number. I'd say if we get somewhere in the 6-7+ range, it's really not going to be an inherent issue psychologically (personality issues and such may vary, of course, based on which people we're talking about).
I disagree. The internet of 25 years ago, and the internet of today, are very different things. Even the internet of 10 years ago is noticeably different than today, partly because I can take it with me in the palm of my hand, in ways that weren't possible then (or were limited to the ridiculously wealthy) - and that's not solely a function of computing power increases. It's improvements in a lot of things, from battery storage capacity and size to spectrum use to the establishment of robust wireless data networks and so on.
Furthermore, the advance of technology isn't about "major breakthroughs" so much as it is about iterative improvement in all things. For instance, guns were invented a long time ago, but the difference between guns in 1500 and guns of 1750 is pretty big. Even the difference between guns in 1900 and 1950 was noticeable, nevermind 1950 and 1975, or 1975 and today. The same sort of thing can be seen in all sorts of fields and technologies - the rate of improvement has been increasing, regardless of whether it comes in the form of things that you notice, or things you don't, from cars to jets to medicine and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
That assumes the entire cost scales equally, but I suspect the major cost is the development of the technology and the building of the train itself, the track and associated infrastructure is probably a lot less. I expect adding further track/destinations/etc, such as a line from Nagoya to Osaka, would be a lot less expensive.
Something like this would be amazing to have in the Northeast Corridor - heck, we're spending $117 billion just to increase the speed there to 350km/h. At 500km/h it would take an hour to get to New York, which would be just as fast as flying, without the insanity and the hassle.
For one, it's an investment in technology. Being a leader in high-tech stuff has lots of advantages, such as selling to other countries that want to build the same thing. It makes a lot more sense than, say, the money that the USA wasted in the Middle Eastern wars over the past decade or so.
Japan tends to be more sane about this sort of thing. Heck, they had someone nerve-gas their subway, but it's still the same as before. Here in the USA we'd have politicians demanding mandatory strip-searches on anyone trying to use mass transit faster than you can say TSA.
Money isn't speech. It's a fallacy to think that it is.
Money is a surrogate for production and economic value associated with that production. It is used to represent that value, in lieu of bartering the goods themselves directly. It is not speech, nor is the spending of it on something 'speech.' Buying an ad is not 'speech' any more than buying a megaphone so you can shout over the rest of the people around you is 'speech.'
And that's the problem. Money isn't used to express someone's opinion, it's used to drown out the opinions of others. We need to stop enshrining protections for that in law.
White-collar jobs are largely getting the treatment that unskilled labor got in the industrial revolution. Machines make their jobs more efficient, meaning that one person can do the same work it used to take more people to do. This makes them much more efficient, and thus it isn't bad in the medium to long term, once you get past the initial churn.
Unskilled/low-skill labor though is facing a much worse deal though. Their jobs are being replaced entirely by machines who will do it without needing an operator. They're left trying to compete for an increasingly smaller pool of jobs, or trying to train/educate into a white-collar field, where there's already lots of competition - people with experience and skills. Good luck with that. And we're not even to the worst of it yet - just wait until delivery and long haul truck drivers are replaced by self-driving vehicles. All those people (approximately 1% of the US population) will be out of work, just in that field alone.
It's also that we're eliminating low-skill jobs entirely, not just replacing them with a job operating a machine that does their old job better. Even if there are high skill/education jobs available, not everyone is going to be able to retrain for that.
That depends on how we divide up the productivity of the robots. It's probably going to require a rather radical rethinking of how our economy and society is structured, in part, because we'll have radically changed the very nature of economic production. It will be generated largely by robots, independent of human labor. At that point, I would propose several things:
-End taxes on regular income. Replace them with taxes on robot production. (How you'd formulate this isn't what matters, the point is that you tax the stuff that's actually producing).
-You then pay everyone a guaranteed basic income, enough for living expenses, and maybe a little basic entertainment, using that money.
-Eliminate minimum wage laws, and let the market set the price for human labor (Skilled or not) beyond that, as there's no need for people to survive on that income, it's entirely discretionary income now. (You can also eliminate other welfare/unemployment/social security/etc because it's no longer necessary)
This serves several purposes. For one, it means that people will be able buy the stuff that the robots make. The capitalist economy will continue to function, because the price/demand/etc signals are still there. There's still incentive to save, invest, to work, and to get rich - and at the same time, nobody gets left completely out in the cold to starve.
It'd be great... at least, until the day comesthat the robots decide they're not satisfied with it anymore.
Equating what happened in the industrial revolution to what's happening now is a fallacy, and here's why.
In the past, machines did not replace "manual" labor, they traded a manual laborer for an unskilled or low skilled laborer who operated the machine. That laborer was then much more efficient, and could do work that multiple people had done, which caused some churn... but the net result was not "out of work laborer," it was "more efficient worker who needs a little bit of training on how to operate the machine." For instance, the automobile did not eliminate transportation workers, it merely made them need to learn to drive a truck rather than a team of horses. One truck driver could move a lot more stuff, faster, than a horse drawn cart, nevermind one guy lugging stuff on his back.
Fast forward to today. We're not talking about making these workers more productive by putting in machines that help them do the job - the machine does the job, without need for control or direct supervision even. To use the truck example, a self-driving truck doesn't need a driver at all. It maybe needs one guy at the control hub that's watching the fleet - but that's not a new job, that guy is probably already there coordinating the human-driven ones. Worse, the robot driver can do the job BETTER than a human can, because it doesn't need sleep, doesn't need to stop to grab a burger, doesn't get sick, doesn't need a vacation, etc.
Education isn't a solution either. There simply won't be enough low-skill jobs available to easily retrain for, and not everyone is going to be able to do advanced stuff. Sure, maybe some truck drivers are going to be able to learn to program, but what about the rest of them?
The solution is that standard terrestrial cable TV should get replaced by channels and services over the internet. You're starting to see this now, not just in Netflix, but with HBO Go, and others that are likely to follow. There's no quality advantage anymore, nor any particular reason to prefer using the old broadcast model to on demand streaming - no reason for the customer, that is.
Draconian/dystopian controls are completely unnecessary. Population explosion projections fall prey to the xkcd rule on extrapolation - they don't properly account for the impact that modern technology/medicine/family planning options have.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say our problem isn't going to be having too many babies, it's going to be having enough of them.
Several advanced nations have already fallen well below replacement level (i.e., roughly 2 births per female). The USA is even one of those nations at 1.88 births per woman as of 2012. Some places are even worse, like South Korea at 1.3, a rate at which if it continues, the South Korean population would be gone by 2700 or so (though of course, see previous statement on extrapolation). It's true for pretty much every sufficiently advanced nation. The USA and many of these countries have started replacing their population via immigration (which is why the US population is still growing despite the slowing birth rate), but that's only going to work for so long...
Because it's spreading. In 1970, Mexico's birth rate was 6.72 per female. In 2012, it had fallen to 2.22. What about India? 5.49 in 1970, 2.50 in 2012. Yes, it's still pretty high in some of the most undeveloped nations, but that will change, not because governments enforce it, but because on the whole people want it.
The circle is now complete. Once, I was the analogy, now I am the master.
Everyone who was technically astute and aware, on sites such as this, raised concerns of this very nature. While I don't have the reference at the tip of my finger, I feel that I can state with some certainty that this very possibility was raised, by explaining how applying the DMCA to cars would prevent you from modifying, repairing, or otherwise working on your car, or even taking it to a third party mechanic. (After all, since when has Slashdot been able to resist a car analogy?)
No, the people that "didn't realize this" are the politicians and proponents of the DMCA and other horrible laws like it, and the others who bought the line of BS being fed to them by those proponents - the people who dismissed such objections as the being "outlandish," "preposterous," or similarly unrealistic. We tried to tell them, and they ignored us.
Guess that's just how bad Bay Area housing prices have gotten. :)
And how much do you think it costs us right now to keep someone on death row while all the various appeals processes are carried out? I've read sources that cite the figure for executing someone is actually higher. Now, obviously those may be partisan figures, and the cost is certainly going to vary from case to case, but it's certainly arguable at present.
Now, I suppose you could propose curtailing appeals and hurrying on to the imposition of the death sentence - but are we really comfortable with that given all the instances where the Justice system has clearly failed, and sometimes spectacularly? It doesn't seem like a week goes by before we hear of another story of some egregious action on the part of law enforcement. This past week was the news that the FBI had been presenting hair sample analysis overstated the evidence in 95% of the trials that had been reviewed, which included 32 death penalty cases.
I wonder what implications this has for alien worlds that somehow ended up vaguely earthlike, with lots of liquid water, yet never developed life despite being generally hospitable. Offhand I think it's certainly possible that such worlds exist, but this would seem to indicate that they'd more likely be predominantly oceanic, with only small continents or isolated archipelagos for land mass.
While it's certainly possible to use Steam and never, ever spend any money in theory, in practice I don't think the sort of person who buys a retail game that's Steam activated but never buys anything on Steam, ever, is generally going to be the sort of person who finds themselves limited by these restrictions.
What I suspect is much more common is that the retail game introduces them to Steam, and along the way they start purchasing games, probably in the various Steam Sales.
This is all about understanding the profiles of different users, and setting it up so that you don't impact 99.n+% of legitimate users, but significantly impact bots/scams/etc.
We'd probably get something even worse, like Slashdot Origin.
The Government, and the Military as a whole, has several problems when it comes to hiring and retaining talented network/IT/etc security people. Much of that is endemic to it being the government and military, as others have noted, and I won't belabor those (valid) points.
What this seems to be largely about though is restructuring their internal codes. Pretty much every job in the military or government, civilian or otherwise, has a particular job code and career field, from park ranger to law enforcement to, yes, Special Forces (which is 18 series for the Army). When they talk about "Cyber Branch 17" that's what they mean, it's the designation for that series of military occupational specialties (MOS), just like 11 is infantry, 12 is combat engineer, etc.
Now, on the civilian side, one of the problems the government in general has had is that they don't/didn't have a career field for "Cyber." Everyone that I met was being shoehorned in either as an Intelligence billet or as a general IT billet, neither of which apply quite correctly, as IT Security has focuses and training that would not apply to the majority of the jobs previously classified as those fields, at least in the sense that the Government does. Someone might have 10+ years of experience as either, but know absolutely nothing about advanced IT security.
It should also be pointed out that at the time they were conducting the Able/Baker tests, they didn't realize just how nasty the effects of nuclear weapons against warships is. The military scheduled three tests as part of Operation Crossroads - Able, Baker, and Charlie, held at Bikini Atoll. It was considered important to know how effective nukes would be against ships, and what sort of defenses could be employed, how long they could survive, etc. Various animals were used in place of crew members at different points around the ships, with radiation measuring devices.
Able was an air burst, and for the most part the ships survived, partly because it missed its target, the Battleship Nevada, though it was judged based on the data that the Nevada would have been a floating coffin from the radiation. So the ships got hosed down and the second test, Baker, was conducted, with a nuke detonated some 90 feet below the water, which not only sunk multiple ships, but sprayed the radioactive byproducts pretty much everywhere, and it got into everything on all the ships, to the point that they had to cancel the third test because it was judged impossible to clean them up at that point.
So in short, they intended to clean up the surviving ships and recycle them, but the nature of the test served to make that impossible.
If the climate isn't ideal for growing almonds, maybe we should grow them somewhere else? Nah, that's a crazy thought.
The question becomes how maneuverable one is, versus the other, as well as the question of speed.
...and now let me point out that these "Drones" have been in regular use by armies worldwide for over fifty years. They're called guided Surface to Air Missiles.
In fact, let's we have a rocket powered drone, that has its own guidance systems, and an explosive charge, that is trying to hit the jet, or come reasonably close to it and explode that charge, in order to destroy the jet.
That's just what a Rules Nazi would say.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what took Thompson down was not online harrassment, twitter trolling, or IRL threats of violence/rape/etc - it was clear-headed dissection of his poor arguments and the legal sanctions against his own atrocious behavior. In short, he was given enough rope to show himself up as the idiotic demagogue he is/was. Twitter trolling, sending pizzas to his house, and other Anon-style pranks may have made people feel better, but they probably had no positive impact in the court of public opinion. At the very least, that sort of behavior wasn't going to convince anyone that didn't already hate him.
On the other hand, what about Anita Sarkeesian? Can we really say she's been responded to in any sort of rational way? No, what the public sees is a bunch of juvenile attempts to shout down a critic. We're not even talking about how inappropriate rape or death threats are, we're talking about how counterproductive it is to let the conversation change over to that, rather than pointing out how she's wrong, her criticisms are overblown and uninformed, etc. Hell, I would never have even heard of her if it wasn't for the threats and harassment, because THAT'S the story the media keyed in on.
That's why her accusations stuck, not because anyone was evaluating them on any merits, but because a bunch of trolls turned it into a conversation about her being attacked, which caused people to take her side. I'm sure it helped that she was in the role of "feminist critic under attack" rather than "overly litigious lawyer" and thus much more sympathetic in nature, but the ultimate point is that the Gamergate trolls' behavior isn't just objectionable on its own merits, it's also proved rather counterproductive.
Nevermind many of the various "voyages of discovery" that European nations conducted from the 1400s onward that went into uncharted territory, spending long times at sea, with the only outside contact being potentially hostile.
Really though, isolation is only a real problem when you get down to small numbers. One person by themselves will go insane, but a large enough group isn't exactly unusual or unnatural. How many people do you really deal with in an average day, after all? The only real question is what comprises a healthy number. I'd say if we get somewhere in the 6-7+ range, it's really not going to be an inherent issue psychologically (personality issues and such may vary, of course, based on which people we're talking about).
I disagree. The internet of 25 years ago, and the internet of today, are very different things. Even the internet of 10 years ago is noticeably different than today, partly because I can take it with me in the palm of my hand, in ways that weren't possible then (or were limited to the ridiculously wealthy) - and that's not solely a function of computing power increases. It's improvements in a lot of things, from battery storage capacity and size to spectrum use to the establishment of robust wireless data networks and so on.
Furthermore, the advance of technology isn't about "major breakthroughs" so much as it is about iterative improvement in all things. For instance, guns were invented a long time ago, but the difference between guns in 1500 and guns of 1750 is pretty big. Even the difference between guns in 1900 and 1950 was noticeable, nevermind 1950 and 1975, or 1975 and today. The same sort of thing can be seen in all sorts of fields and technologies - the rate of improvement has been increasing, regardless of whether it comes in the form of things that you notice, or things you don't, from cars to jets to medicine and so on.