Keyboards are for entering text. But even now programming is almost all entering symbols and references. Text is a lot of work entering lots of characters when a single symbol is produced. Typing allows all kinds of mistakes. And possibly most important, typing doesn't match the practice of mainly reusing code - you're always writing things from scratch, even to refer to existing code.
20 years from now, if you're still programming, you'll be flowcharting and speaking. Probably using a haptic-feedback stylus on an interactive surface, though any stick or finger will work in any 3D space or 2D surface for most operations. You'll notice that the theramin never replaced keyboards, guitar or even drums, though it's had nearly a century to do so. There will always be better accuracy and therefore faster communication when augmented by hands touching something that touches back, since the human side of the HCI isn't changing HW and only tweaking SW.
20 years from now, you might still have a keyboard. Commercial telecom innovation and obsolescence never follows the fastest development path, but rather tracks the fastest speed of amortizing R&D costs, determined by incumbent technology vendors keeping innovation at bay long enough, so the actual time to get there is going to take unpredictably longer than what's necessary. But the change is defined by the mass of computing interaction already happening on mobile phones. They have keyboards mostly because of texting and the truly archaic phone numbers that are already being replaced by software directories and directly messaging contact info around. Within 5 years phone numbers will be digits only for old people, and keying text messages will start to be reliably replaced by speech to text (spoken over the network to the STT server). Then keyboards will be used with phones about as much as people now use pens/paper with computers: an exception, though not infrequent. But about a human generation later, about 15 years more, the keyboards won't be used.
Programmers will move faster than most people, because we have choices and many of us are expected to innovate, despite what vendors sell us. So by the time 20 or so years comes around, young programmers will use whatever input hardware most effortlessly and transparently supports a hand moving an implement in a space that feeds back to the hand and eye, whether 2D or 3D movement. Which will likely be a stick on a flat surface, with the stick deforming to feed back to the hand and images projected either on a surface or directly to the eye (or perhaps brain, but probably not so soon). Convenience and cost for the billions of users will probably mean most people just touch surfaces or gesture in the air for selecting options, while workers use "pens" that don't feed back unless they're working on the machine's state, not the state of more abstract work. People who must communicate more precisely or verbosely with the machine will use pens that feed back, and perhaps surfaces and objects that deform to interact with the pens, because the human wetware has the most expressive and receptive interface in that manner.
Or maybe someone cleverer (or better informed, closer to the events) will think of some other mode by which to exploit the performance of hand-eye-mind coordination with some other technology. But the stick/pad has worked for thousands of years, even before we could make the pen actually like a "magic wand" that can feed back to the hand, and the pad actually physically feed back to the stick. Which is why I think the momentum is towards "smart pen/pad".
But you're not going to be typing code in 2030 any more than you today design algorithms as calculus equations you type in on a "TTY". Or why we haven't gone to cursive stylus/pad, even though Microsoft tried to hobble us with that "digital ink" starting over a decade and a half ago. Nobody wants to form individual lines into characters to communicate anymore, except as an archaic art form. Soon enough we won't want to push charact
If banks spent less time throwing out stupid shortcuts to financial success based on brand names that front for little or nothing in useful product, but more time funding development of useful products, we'd have more useful products - and the banks would have more money.
But they don't know anything anymore except gaming the economy. Brand name mergers are the laziest way to do so. It's all sizzle and no steak, but they get their share of the money explosion from their banker peers on the sizzle.
Shirky's no "Net Pioneer", he's a hack burped up by the "Silicon Alley" ripoffs central to what caused the.com Bubble to collapse.
Woz isn't a "Net Pioneer", either. By the time Apple was on anything like the Internet, Woz had already spent several years since his last worthwhile pioneering effort at Apple, and hasn't done anything technologically interesting since then.
None of those people really can claim any demonstration that they know what they're talking about today.
It competes with Windows. It replaced Windows for me, and for everyone in my family who wants computer "advice" from me. Whenever Linux does something really bad it's Windows I consider shifting to - then reconsider when I try Windows again. It's the only alternative to Windows in any business I've ever worked with or for (and that's a lot, all serious businesses, usually Fortune 500 or their ilk).
I agree that Linux should "go its own way". Linux has the zeitgeist, the momentum, the developers, the real world diversity of problems it must be used to solve. Meeting that demand makes Linux the more viable OS, while Windows is stuck doing what Windows has done for 20 years. Linux is actually adapting to the real growth sector, mobile and embedded, in ways Windows never could, like the Android variant. Mobile/embedded is not subject yet to the anticompetitive advantages that have kept the desktop captive to Windows, because actual performance and reliability is still necessary. So by going its own way, and by mutating (eg. Android) while remaining essentially Linux, Linux will leave Windows behind. Because the people who define the new world take it there, and don't take Windows.
That is competition. That it's not how Windows has competed to the top doesn't mean it's not competition. Since Windows' way was so anticompetitive, it means it's finally a competition again.
Desktops are stuck in a "desktop" paradigm, and so are going to be whatever they are now until they totally disappear sometime decades from now: Windows for most everyone, Macs for some specialties particularly in audiovisual production, and Linux for the very few in either the narrowest range of specialties or the narrowest band of all: those who use the best tool for the job at hand, regardless of what everyone else is using.
But the desktop is disappearing. "Mobile" computing is computing you don't have to notice computing. Especially as input leaves behind keyboards, as all displays are networked and shareable, the GUI will detach from the hardware, to be put anywhere the users want it to be, including merged together. More and more people will do what they do helped by "computers", but they won't be Windows. They'll be Android, or some other Linux variant. Because Windows is like a desktop, and most work is better done without a desktop.
It won't be Linux, either. Linux will have a place in the majority of servers, and there'll be a lot of them. But the "Internet of Things" needs something smaller than Windows, smaller than Linux. It's why even the Mac ditched the old MacOS and is now closely related to Linux, in that it's mostly a (mostly) open Unix variant.
Android is closing in on a majority of smartphones. Around the time it's the majority, all phones that do more than just talk will be smartphones. It's the software and uses of smartphones, and their closely related tablets, that will be what most humans use "computers" for most of the time. Everyone in a developed economy will have their mobile device that's their key to accessing all the people, things and info in their world. Windows will be stuck on desktops, where the first small segment of humans started using them. The rest of the world, most of it, will be using the descendants of Android in ways that Windows can never approximate.
As cited in another response to your post, it's about 3 billion chickens to make 75 million gallons of oil, at about 40 chickens per gallon. But that fat doesn't come from whole new chickens - it comes from fat from chickens already slaughtered. The fat is either a waste product currently "discarded" in landfills or holding tanks, or else possibly used in other applications not as valuable as the fuel oil product. My understanding is that the chicken industry, despite finding all kinds of uses for every part of the chickens slaughtered to make the meat that determines the number and size of chickens slaughtered, still creates lots of waste in "renderings" like fat and other grisly parts. Likewise, to produce 75 million gallons of oil we have demand for consuming we currently do a lot of drilling and refining that consumes other resources, including generating lots of pollution when it's burned.
Recycling chicken waste for fuel oil can be a net improvement on our previous operations in each of those industries. If indeed the chicken oil production actually delivers more energy in the oil than is consumed to make it, or if the consumption of the waste is more valuable than any possible net energy cost to make it.
The real world is about actual alternatives, not single actions in a vacuum. Until I hear of some significant new downside, recycling chicken waste into fuel oil sounds like a good move. Better than dumping the waste while drilling for oil.
You have presented a false dilemma. The reason you don't worry about regular criminals is because the government protects you from them enough that you don't have to worry. That doesn't mean you don't have to worry about the government committing crimes. These are not exclusive categories in some Sim City world. They are descriptions of groups of people and their behavior, which has substantial overlap and fuzzy boundaries.
Terrorists do affect Americans, including people not in their direct line of fire. The World Trade Center in NYC really was destroyed in 2001, as was the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 along with several other targets in the US - not to mention many more foreign targets of US assets and foreign assets. The actual terrorism is the political use of those attacks as credible threats. So while the US government has practiced more terrorism on Americans using the credible threat presented by bombings, that doesn't mean non-government terrorists don't exist.
Americans did do "something" to see this coming and to stop it. The entire government system is based on distrust of government, limiting its powers. Americans spend lots of time and effort interfering with government's power and activity in political use of fear to control us. What Americans have failed to do is to stop electing people who cooperate in betraying the people, rather than oppose each other with power to catch each other betraying the people. Americans have taken the bribes of unsustainable credit and unlimited entertainment instead of protecting ourselves from government corruption. Failing to impeach Nixon for Watergate (and more) or Reagan/Bush for Iran/Contra (and more), allowing the House to impeach Clinton for practically nothing without replacing those House and Senate representatives who voted to remove him, reelecting Bush/Cheney and their congressmembers who voted to start and continue the Iraq War (and more)... that is where Americans have failed.
And meanwhile actual terrorists, both foreign and domestic, continue to create and use credible threats of violence to produce political action to their benefit that all damages the American people. Just because the government practices its own terrorism on us doesn't mean it's got the monopoly.
US authorities have all the technology, laws and budgets they need to "spy" on foreign spammers. All it takes to start spying is an email address, especially if it's published in a web page. US authorities also have lots of leverage in prosecuting foreign nationals, including crime treaties, international law, and the usual diplomatic carrots and sticks.
But the authorities don't use them. Instead they want more. It's obvious that they want more power to spy on people in the US, not really foreign criminals.
If the "Justice" departments really wanted to battle "bad guys" in high tech crime, they would be targeting the highest crime rate domains with the biggest losses already. That is phishing and spam/virus networks that already take over $BILLIONS in IT personal property, using it to rob its owners and amass it into bot networks to attack others. Those crimes are committed largely by a relatively small group of crime gangs, largely concentrated in Asia (including Russia) which are also connected to large non-virtual crime in smuggling dangerous drugs, stealing property, counterfeiting brands, slavery, weapons trading (including WMD components), kidnapping, blackmail. The phishing/spam/botnet networks are probably the least bad of their crimes, and the greatest exposure to the public where they could be caught, with most of their traffic passing through the US even if the endpoints are all foreign. They're the obvious place for US law enforcement. Existing law allows US law enforcement to spy on them and catch them, while only small technology innovations might be necessary to do so - even without the PATRIOT Acts and other violations of the US Constitution.
What is required is that US law enforcement actually want to catch "bad guys". Then they'd have the means and opportunity to do everything they say they want.
But evidently they lack the motive. Their motive is to gain ever more power to spy on everyone, regardless of evidence or crimes. They've already been spying on telephone and email comms of every American they can fit on a hard drive, for years. What they want now is just bigger budgets for hard drives, for more secret police, and more laws that violate the Constitution and our rights so they can do so with impunity.
We don't generate nearly as much wealth as we send to foreign countries like India.
The US government owes over $13T; businesses and consumers each owe almost that amount. We haven't generated $40T of new wealth to compensate for those losses.
What you're calling "wealth" is mostly inflated financial instruments. We buy stuff from the rest of the world because we can borrow the money to buy it. So far.
None of the banks actually write software themselves - certainly not any retail consumer bank. All of their software, especially something like a consumer mobile app, is written by an independent software firm, usually for hire but possibly an exclusive license of a premade app. As far as I can tell, every banking app is tied exclusively to a single bank that allows it access, which is how banks do business. I know - I've had bank customers for software of all kinds for going on 20 years, including lots of Internet software from the very beginning.
Whether a bank gives bad software "to rip us off" is a question that depends on an undefinable meaning of "to" in that proposition. What usually happens is that everything banks do is managed by too many layers of people who don't know anything about banking, let alone software - just how to keep their jobs as management middlemen. So things always go wrong. Secure banking software requires every link in the chain to work right, but the bank will not perform competently enough for that, and several links will have problems. The banks fix things only when fixing it makes or saves them money more than most other operations, and when someone can be a hero (ie. get a bonus) for fixing it, without making too many enemies of those who are thereby demonstrated to be to blame. If their loss insurance premiums don't rise because of the insecurity it presents to their customers, no one will take responsibility, and no one will spend budget to fix it. If it's a really big loser, blame will be spread as widely as possible, with no one stepping up to fix it because they'll take the lead on the blame, especially when it takes too long to fix and then has new problems. Meanwhile, it's smaller fish to fry than the $billions they make on lots of other software/business projects.
The banks are the most pampered, risk denying businesses possible. The conflict of interest is built in. What's necessary is open standards for online banking, but of course that is a nonstarter because all banks are afraid of losing their proprietary investments (however delusional) and the slightest possibility that it's easy for a customer to switch banks. But that is the only way for this to work. It's been over a decade since banks started offering banking apps for PDAs (Palm Pilot 1999 was first), and they still suck, and nothing fundamental has changed.
Any trade deficit is bad, though it takes a while for the deficits to add to a total debt that has effects beyond the interest's cost of capital. We are now at that point, since we are at the limits of not just our debt, or of our credit, but of our ability to change our credit - there isn't enough money elsewhere to lend to us.
The 4% of GDP is sustainable for a long time, but it's a net loss, and eventually those losses added up are too big to sustain. That's where we have finally arrived, after decades of talking about "this can't go on forever".
It is true that we have to cut spending. Consumers have to stop spending borrowed money on useless products that are soon replaced with more useless products. Producers have to stop wasting energy and material, and labor time that's office-political instead of productive, and overall produce less dead-end products that doesn't help anyone make a living, like fame and media products. And of course our government has to stop spending over a $TRILLION a year on military/intel that doesn't make anything except riches from crony contractors, and increase US costs around the world while corrupting our political and economic systems at home.
40% of the US GDP growth during Bush/Cheney was purely financial products, not capital or labor growth. Financial assets lost 40% of their market value in 2008-9, but have regained a lot of their market value in 2010 - mostly as the public funneled $TRILLIONS into financial businesses. That decade has been worse than lost. We have to stop that kind of "tampering" and replace it with actual management of the US economy. When we do that we get more real wealth across the board: higher wages, higher employment, more and better capital.
Not all of us. Only those of us competing with low skilled labor. At least for a while. Eventually the bankers will have Indian banker competition. Though already the bankers and the others in the top percent or two richest "Americans" are global, and are more in partnership with their "Indian" counterparts than in competition.
In any case, owning a bank is always the best way to "fit" the environment.
The US trade deficit with India is already over $7B this year through August; heading to top $10B this year. That will be among the highest annual deficits, though Bush/Cheney got deficits as high as $12B+. August 2009 saw the only monthly trade surplus with India in well over 20 years, $34 million; the rest of the months total to something like a quarter $TRILLION more spent on India than India spent on the US. It's obvious that the parallel growth in the US and India leaves the US with less money from our jobs and more money in India for its jobs.
Of course, the corporate profits on all those jobs are not counted in trade stats. The real competition isn't between US labor vs Indian labor. It's between labor in either country, and the corporate owners who run the system, keeping the profits among themselves and their banker partners.
I've written lots of software for banks, for a good chunk of money.
While the regulators need changing to truly protect us from banks, we just took a big step backwards this week by putting Republicans back in charge of that legislation. They are busy deregulating again, though the most they'll probably get is monkeywrenching the new regulations. The reason the legislators can't be trusted is because Americans are stupid, and vote for corrupt legislators, even when that's obviously what they're getting.
Which is why I'd like better tools to protect us from banks. That is the reality. I can tell from your comment that you're not really qualified to give advice on the reality of financial institutions.
Forget that: how long have you been reading the news? How could you think that banks are either trustworthy or reliable? If it weren't for the public (FDIC, FSLIC, Federal Reserve, Treasury) bailing them out every 10 years, they'd have lost more money than ever existed. It doesn't get more untrustworthy than that.
I wouldn't trust those banking apps to not rip me off or expose me, since they're made by the banks. The banks are untrustworthy.
What we need is a standard for consumer banking transactions with any bank server. Then a single client could connect to multiple banks, or to a single one even when it changes its style and services. I would install the banking client app that I trusted and preferred. One view of all my finances, including my IRA, insurance, mortgage, savings, checking, stock market, even perhaps debts owed to/from individual people. In fact I'd like such a client to keep a database of all my financial transactions, including all bills. I'd like it to keep records of every "automatic withdrawal". I'd like it to use my phone to alert me to deposits and withdrawals if I wish, including "OK/Cancel" per transaction. I'd like it to lock each payment with a one time password it generates and sends, instead of using my credit card number in the clear all the time.
Some desktop apps, like Quicken, already do some things like this. But it's time that all my finances are handled by an app I trust that doesn't come from the server that has an interest conflict with me in reporting transactions, that is simple enough without lots of "financial planning" baggage necessarily coming with it. This has been true for email and websites for decades, as well as every other successful kind of info transaction over networks for even longer. It's long past time to leave the consumer side of the banking to businesses actually in the business of serving consumers. Banks are not in that business, haven't been in a long time, and show less and less real interest or reliability in returning to it.
Those viruses are different, and not the ones I'm talking about. Excluding them still leaves many, many viruses that Windows is vulnerable to.
Though Windows could implement a better UI for ensuring that installing new apps in the system, the main vector for user-mediated virus attacks, is a lot harder. Funding an independent whitelist and blacklist would be good: ISVs could pay to be audited for registration in the whitelist, while MS could collect virus reports from the field to populate a blacklist. But at the very least opening a document for an already installed app should have a different UI from installing a new app, to give users pause.
Ultimately business insurance should protect users, with crypto signatures of insurance corps required for indemnified SW installation, and prohibition of any installation not indemnified unless the user accepts liability.
In the meantime, increasing deployment of Web apps should mean users install apps locally less frequently. Of course that increases the risk of personal data being exploited and distributed without authorization, but at least that's per dataset, instead of all data on one's PC being at risk every time.
When I buy Windows, it should include virus protection that works - and continues working for at least a couple years without my paying any additional costs. Viruses exploit software defects produced by Microsoft. They are Microsoft's fault. Microsoft should bear the cost of protecting me from them. It's obvious that MS will not ship products that are inherently safe from viruses due to bad programming. So MS must ship an OS that includes an effective virus protection system to protect it as an extra layer. The "new virus" subscription might have to cost extra after a couple of years, as that's about how often MS introduces a new OS. But it should still cost a small amount, like $10-20 per year. MS can make a huge profit from that kind of rate. Of course, that's if the MS virus protection SW is good quality, and if MS doesn't make basic OS SW that's such bad quality that its virus protection SW is overwhelmed.
I don't have to pay extra for seat belts when I buy a new car, unless I want belts that perform better to accommodate some unusually bad driving I do. OS security should be the same.
don't assume that paying $10 gets you out of viewing ads like it does on Netflix — and there's no way to skip them.
Can't I receive Hulu video to my own player app, and then fast forward past the commercials using my own app's controls? If there's some kind of "mandatory advertising" lockout in the video data, isn't there a player that ignores it? Or at least a player that can play the video format which is open source, which I can change myself to execute the way I want - fast forward whenever I want it?
I hope it's the last option. Then I'd like to see the hamfisted content providers charge for mandatory ads that can be skipped in open source players, and a database collected by users of what timeframes to skip. If they're going to abuse their power, I want to see it thrown back in their faces, or rather right at their moneybelts where it really hurts.
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Keyboards are for entering text. But even now programming is almost all entering symbols and references. Text is a lot of work entering lots of characters when a single symbol is produced. Typing allows all kinds of mistakes. And possibly most important, typing doesn't match the practice of mainly reusing code - you're always writing things from scratch, even to refer to existing code.
20 years from now, if you're still programming, you'll be flowcharting and speaking. Probably using a haptic-feedback stylus on an interactive surface, though any stick or finger will work in any 3D space or 2D surface for most operations. You'll notice that the theramin never replaced keyboards, guitar or even drums, though it's had nearly a century to do so. There will always be better accuracy and therefore faster communication when augmented by hands touching something that touches back, since the human side of the HCI isn't changing HW and only tweaking SW.
20 years from now, you might still have a keyboard. Commercial telecom innovation and obsolescence never follows the fastest development path, but rather tracks the fastest speed of amortizing R&D costs, determined by incumbent technology vendors keeping innovation at bay long enough, so the actual time to get there is going to take unpredictably longer than what's necessary. But the change is defined by the mass of computing interaction already happening on mobile phones. They have keyboards mostly because of texting and the truly archaic phone numbers that are already being replaced by software directories and directly messaging contact info around. Within 5 years phone numbers will be digits only for old people, and keying text messages will start to be reliably replaced by speech to text (spoken over the network to the STT server). Then keyboards will be used with phones about as much as people now use pens/paper with computers: an exception, though not infrequent. But about a human generation later, about 15 years more, the keyboards won't be used.
Programmers will move faster than most people, because we have choices and many of us are expected to innovate, despite what vendors sell us. So by the time 20 or so years comes around, young programmers will use whatever input hardware most effortlessly and transparently supports a hand moving an implement in a space that feeds back to the hand and eye, whether 2D or 3D movement. Which will likely be a stick on a flat surface, with the stick deforming to feed back to the hand and images projected either on a surface or directly to the eye (or perhaps brain, but probably not so soon). Convenience and cost for the billions of users will probably mean most people just touch surfaces or gesture in the air for selecting options, while workers use "pens" that don't feed back unless they're working on the machine's state, not the state of more abstract work. People who must communicate more precisely or verbosely with the machine will use pens that feed back, and perhaps surfaces and objects that deform to interact with the pens, because the human wetware has the most expressive and receptive interface in that manner.
Or maybe someone cleverer (or better informed, closer to the events) will think of some other mode by which to exploit the performance of hand-eye-mind coordination with some other technology. But the stick/pad has worked for thousands of years, even before we could make the pen actually like a "magic wand" that can feed back to the hand, and the pad actually physically feed back to the stick. Which is why I think the momentum is towards "smart pen/pad".
But you're not going to be typing code in 2030 any more than you today design algorithms as calculus equations you type in on a "TTY". Or why we haven't gone to cursive stylus/pad, even though Microsoft tried to hobble us with that "digital ink" starting over a decade and a half ago. Nobody wants to form individual lines into characters to communicate anymore, except as an archaic art form. Soon enough we won't want to push charact
20 years from now, if you're still programming, you'll be flowcharting and speaking.
If banks spent less time throwing out stupid shortcuts to financial success based on brand names that front for little or nothing in useful product, but more time funding development of useful products, we'd have more useful products - and the banks would have more money.
But they don't know anything anymore except gaming the economy. Brand name mergers are the laziest way to do so. It's all sizzle and no steak, but they get their share of the money explosion from their banker peers on the sizzle.
Shirky's no "Net Pioneer", he's a hack burped up by the "Silicon Alley" ripoffs central to what caused the .com Bubble to collapse.
Woz isn't a "Net Pioneer", either. By the time Apple was on anything like the Internet, Woz had already spent several years since his last worthwhile pioneering effort at Apple, and hasn't done anything technologically interesting since then.
None of those people really can claim any demonstration that they know what they're talking about today.
It competes with Windows. It replaced Windows for me, and for everyone in my family who wants computer "advice" from me. Whenever Linux does something really bad it's Windows I consider shifting to - then reconsider when I try Windows again. It's the only alternative to Windows in any business I've ever worked with or for (and that's a lot, all serious businesses, usually Fortune 500 or their ilk).
I agree that Linux should "go its own way". Linux has the zeitgeist, the momentum, the developers, the real world diversity of problems it must be used to solve. Meeting that demand makes Linux the more viable OS, while Windows is stuck doing what Windows has done for 20 years. Linux is actually adapting to the real growth sector, mobile and embedded, in ways Windows never could, like the Android variant. Mobile/embedded is not subject yet to the anticompetitive advantages that have kept the desktop captive to Windows, because actual performance and reliability is still necessary. So by going its own way, and by mutating (eg. Android) while remaining essentially Linux, Linux will leave Windows behind. Because the people who define the new world take it there, and don't take Windows.
That is competition. That it's not how Windows has competed to the top doesn't mean it's not competition. Since Windows' way was so anticompetitive, it means it's finally a competition again.
Desktops are stuck in a "desktop" paradigm, and so are going to be whatever they are now until they totally disappear sometime decades from now: Windows for most everyone, Macs for some specialties particularly in audiovisual production, and Linux for the very few in either the narrowest range of specialties or the narrowest band of all: those who use the best tool for the job at hand, regardless of what everyone else is using.
But the desktop is disappearing. "Mobile" computing is computing you don't have to notice computing. Especially as input leaves behind keyboards, as all displays are networked and shareable, the GUI will detach from the hardware, to be put anywhere the users want it to be, including merged together. More and more people will do what they do helped by "computers", but they won't be Windows. They'll be Android, or some other Linux variant. Because Windows is like a desktop, and most work is better done without a desktop.
It won't be Linux, either. Linux will have a place in the majority of servers, and there'll be a lot of them. But the "Internet of Things" needs something smaller than Windows, smaller than Linux. It's why even the Mac ditched the old MacOS and is now closely related to Linux, in that it's mostly a (mostly) open Unix variant.
Android is closing in on a majority of smartphones. Around the time it's the majority, all phones that do more than just talk will be smartphones. It's the software and uses of smartphones, and their closely related tablets, that will be what most humans use "computers" for most of the time. Everyone in a developed economy will have their mobile device that's their key to accessing all the people, things and info in their world. Windows will be stuck on desktops, where the first small segment of humans started using them. The rest of the world, most of it, will be using the descendants of Android in ways that Windows can never approximate.
As cited in another response to your post, it's about 3 billion chickens to make 75 million gallons of oil, at about 40 chickens per gallon. But that fat doesn't come from whole new chickens - it comes from fat from chickens already slaughtered. The fat is either a waste product currently "discarded" in landfills or holding tanks, or else possibly used in other applications not as valuable as the fuel oil product. My understanding is that the chicken industry, despite finding all kinds of uses for every part of the chickens slaughtered to make the meat that determines the number and size of chickens slaughtered, still creates lots of waste in "renderings" like fat and other grisly parts. Likewise, to produce 75 million gallons of oil we have demand for consuming we currently do a lot of drilling and refining that consumes other resources, including generating lots of pollution when it's burned.
Recycling chicken waste for fuel oil can be a net improvement on our previous operations in each of those industries. If indeed the chicken oil production actually delivers more energy in the oil than is consumed to make it, or if the consumption of the waste is more valuable than any possible net energy cost to make it.
The real world is about actual alternatives, not single actions in a vacuum. Until I hear of some significant new downside, recycling chicken waste into fuel oil sounds like a good move. Better than dumping the waste while drilling for oil.
You have presented a false dilemma. The reason you don't worry about regular criminals is because the government protects you from them enough that you don't have to worry. That doesn't mean you don't have to worry about the government committing crimes. These are not exclusive categories in some Sim City world. They are descriptions of groups of people and their behavior, which has substantial overlap and fuzzy boundaries.
Terrorists do affect Americans, including people not in their direct line of fire. The World Trade Center in NYC really was destroyed in 2001, as was the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 along with several other targets in the US - not to mention many more foreign targets of US assets and foreign assets. The actual terrorism is the political use of those attacks as credible threats. So while the US government has practiced more terrorism on Americans using the credible threat presented by bombings, that doesn't mean non-government terrorists don't exist.
Americans did do "something" to see this coming and to stop it. The entire government system is based on distrust of government, limiting its powers. Americans spend lots of time and effort interfering with government's power and activity in political use of fear to control us. What Americans have failed to do is to stop electing people who cooperate in betraying the people, rather than oppose each other with power to catch each other betraying the people. Americans have taken the bribes of unsustainable credit and unlimited entertainment instead of protecting ourselves from government corruption. Failing to impeach Nixon for Watergate (and more) or Reagan/Bush for Iran/Contra (and more), allowing the House to impeach Clinton for practically nothing without replacing those House and Senate representatives who voted to remove him, reelecting Bush/Cheney and their congressmembers who voted to start and continue the Iraq War (and more)... that is where Americans have failed.
And meanwhile actual terrorists, both foreign and domestic, continue to create and use credible threats of violence to produce political action to their benefit that all damages the American people. Just because the government practices its own terrorism on us doesn't mean it's got the monopoly.
US authorities have all the technology, laws and budgets they need to "spy" on foreign spammers. All it takes to start spying is an email address, especially if it's published in a web page. US authorities also have lots of leverage in prosecuting foreign nationals, including crime treaties, international law, and the usual diplomatic carrots and sticks.
But the authorities don't use them. Instead they want more. It's obvious that they want more power to spy on people in the US, not really foreign criminals.
If the "Justice" departments really wanted to battle "bad guys" in high tech crime, they would be targeting the highest crime rate domains with the biggest losses already. That is phishing and spam/virus networks that already take over $BILLIONS in IT personal property, using it to rob its owners and amass it into bot networks to attack others. Those crimes are committed largely by a relatively small group of crime gangs, largely concentrated in Asia (including Russia) which are also connected to large non-virtual crime in smuggling dangerous drugs, stealing property, counterfeiting brands, slavery, weapons trading (including WMD components), kidnapping, blackmail. The phishing/spam/botnet networks are probably the least bad of their crimes, and the greatest exposure to the public where they could be caught, with most of their traffic passing through the US even if the endpoints are all foreign. They're the obvious place for US law enforcement. Existing law allows US law enforcement to spy on them and catch them, while only small technology innovations might be necessary to do so - even without the PATRIOT Acts and other violations of the US Constitution.
What is required is that US law enforcement actually want to catch "bad guys". Then they'd have the means and opportunity to do everything they say they want.
But evidently they lack the motive. Their motive is to gain ever more power to spy on everyone, regardless of evidence or crimes. They've already been spying on telephone and email comms of every American they can fit on a hard drive, for years. What they want now is just bigger budgets for hard drives, for more secret police, and more laws that violate the Constitution and our rights so they can do so with impunity.
These secret police are the "bad guys".
We don't generate nearly as much wealth as we send to foreign countries like India.
The US government owes over $13T; businesses and consumers each owe almost that amount. We haven't generated $40T of new wealth to compensate for those losses.
What you're calling "wealth" is mostly inflated financial instruments. We buy stuff from the rest of the world because we can borrow the money to buy it. So far.
None of the banks actually write software themselves - certainly not any retail consumer bank. All of their software, especially something like a consumer mobile app, is written by an independent software firm, usually for hire but possibly an exclusive license of a premade app. As far as I can tell, every banking app is tied exclusively to a single bank that allows it access, which is how banks do business. I know - I've had bank customers for software of all kinds for going on 20 years, including lots of Internet software from the very beginning.
Whether a bank gives bad software "to rip us off" is a question that depends on an undefinable meaning of "to" in that proposition. What usually happens is that everything banks do is managed by too many layers of people who don't know anything about banking, let alone software - just how to keep their jobs as management middlemen. So things always go wrong. Secure banking software requires every link in the chain to work right, but the bank will not perform competently enough for that, and several links will have problems. The banks fix things only when fixing it makes or saves them money more than most other operations, and when someone can be a hero (ie. get a bonus) for fixing it, without making too many enemies of those who are thereby demonstrated to be to blame. If their loss insurance premiums don't rise because of the insecurity it presents to their customers, no one will take responsibility, and no one will spend budget to fix it. If it's a really big loser, blame will be spread as widely as possible, with no one stepping up to fix it because they'll take the lead on the blame, especially when it takes too long to fix and then has new problems. Meanwhile, it's smaller fish to fry than the $billions they make on lots of other software/business projects.
The banks are the most pampered, risk denying businesses possible. The conflict of interest is built in. What's necessary is open standards for online banking, but of course that is a nonstarter because all banks are afraid of losing their proprietary investments (however delusional) and the slightest possibility that it's easy for a customer to switch banks. But that is the only way for this to work. It's been over a decade since banks started offering banking apps for PDAs (Palm Pilot 1999 was first), and they still suck, and nothing fundamental has changed.
Any trade deficit is bad, though it takes a while for the deficits to add to a total debt that has effects beyond the interest's cost of capital. We are now at that point, since we are at the limits of not just our debt, or of our credit, but of our ability to change our credit - there isn't enough money elsewhere to lend to us.
The 4% of GDP is sustainable for a long time, but it's a net loss, and eventually those losses added up are too big to sustain. That's where we have finally arrived, after decades of talking about "this can't go on forever".
It is true that we have to cut spending. Consumers have to stop spending borrowed money on useless products that are soon replaced with more useless products. Producers have to stop wasting energy and material, and labor time that's office-political instead of productive, and overall produce less dead-end products that doesn't help anyone make a living, like fame and media products. And of course our government has to stop spending over a $TRILLION a year on military/intel that doesn't make anything except riches from crony contractors, and increase US costs around the world while corrupting our political and economic systems at home.
40% of the US GDP growth during Bush/Cheney was purely financial products, not capital or labor growth. Financial assets lost 40% of their market value in 2008-9, but have regained a lot of their market value in 2010 - mostly as the public funneled $TRILLIONS into financial businesses. That decade has been worse than lost. We have to stop that kind of "tampering" and replace it with actual management of the US economy. When we do that we get more real wealth across the board: higher wages, higher employment, more and better capital.
Not all of us. Only those of us competing with low skilled labor. At least for a while. Eventually the bankers will have Indian banker competition. Though already the bankers and the others in the top percent or two richest "Americans" are global, and are more in partnership with their "Indian" counterparts than in competition.
In any case, owning a bank is always the best way to "fit" the environment.
The US trade deficit with India is already over $7B this year through August; heading to top $10B this year. That will be among the highest annual deficits, though Bush/Cheney got deficits as high as $12B+. August 2009 saw the only monthly trade surplus with India in well over 20 years, $34 million; the rest of the months total to something like a quarter $TRILLION more spent on India than India spent on the US. It's obvious that the parallel growth in the US and India leaves the US with less money from our jobs and more money in India for its jobs.
Of course, the corporate profits on all those jobs are not counted in trade stats. The real competition isn't between US labor vs Indian labor. It's between labor in either country, and the corporate owners who run the system, keeping the profits among themselves and their banker partners.
Republican Trollmod proves my point about how stupid they are.
Because by carefully tracking my money, I stop them when they rip me off. That's why I'd like a simple, comprehensive tool to do so.
I've written lots of software for banks, for a good chunk of money.
While the regulators need changing to truly protect us from banks, we just took a big step backwards this week by putting Republicans back in charge of that legislation. They are busy deregulating again, though the most they'll probably get is monkeywrenching the new regulations. The reason the legislators can't be trusted is because Americans are stupid, and vote for corrupt legislators, even when that's obviously what they're getting.
Which is why I'd like better tools to protect us from banks. That is the reality. I can tell from your comment that you're not really qualified to give advice on the reality of financial institutions.
I'm a rich guy who's too busy to develop that app, but smart enough to know there's demand for it.
Free clue for you, Anonymous greasemonkey Coward.
How long have you been banking?
Forget that: how long have you been reading the news? How could you think that banks are either trustworthy or reliable? If it weren't for the public (FDIC, FSLIC, Federal Reserve, Treasury) bailing them out every 10 years, they'd have lost more money than ever existed. It doesn't get more untrustworthy than that.
I wouldn't trust those banking apps to not rip me off or expose me, since they're made by the banks. The banks are untrustworthy.
What we need is a standard for consumer banking transactions with any bank server. Then a single client could connect to multiple banks, or to a single one even when it changes its style and services. I would install the banking client app that I trusted and preferred. One view of all my finances, including my IRA, insurance, mortgage, savings, checking, stock market, even perhaps debts owed to/from individual people. In fact I'd like such a client to keep a database of all my financial transactions, including all bills. I'd like it to keep records of every "automatic withdrawal". I'd like it to use my phone to alert me to deposits and withdrawals if I wish, including "OK/Cancel" per transaction. I'd like it to lock each payment with a one time password it generates and sends, instead of using my credit card number in the clear all the time.
Some desktop apps, like Quicken, already do some things like this. But it's time that all my finances are handled by an app I trust that doesn't come from the server that has an interest conflict with me in reporting transactions, that is simple enough without lots of "financial planning" baggage necessarily coming with it. This has been true for email and websites for decades, as well as every other successful kind of info transaction over networks for even longer. It's long past time to leave the consumer side of the banking to businesses actually in the business of serving consumers. Banks are not in that business, haven't been in a long time, and show less and less real interest or reliability in returning to it.
Those viruses are different, and not the ones I'm talking about. Excluding them still leaves many, many viruses that Windows is vulnerable to.
Though Windows could implement a better UI for ensuring that installing new apps in the system, the main vector for user-mediated virus attacks, is a lot harder. Funding an independent whitelist and blacklist would be good: ISVs could pay to be audited for registration in the whitelist, while MS could collect virus reports from the field to populate a blacklist. But at the very least opening a document for an already installed app should have a different UI from installing a new app, to give users pause.
Ultimately business insurance should protect users, with crypto signatures of insurance corps required for indemnified SW installation, and prohibition of any installation not indemnified unless the user accepts liability.
In the meantime, increasing deployment of Web apps should mean users install apps locally less frequently. Of course that increases the risk of personal data being exploited and distributed without authorization, but at least that's per dataset, instead of all data on one's PC being at risk every time.
Microsoft should be responsible for helping - and forcing, and charging - Adobe and other ISVs for keeping the MS virus protection up to date.
"Better" isn't good enough when it's not good enough. Proof is the fact that PCs are full of viruses, even when their users don't do anything wrong.
When I buy Windows, it should include virus protection that works - and continues working for at least a couple years without my paying any additional costs. Viruses exploit software defects produced by Microsoft. They are Microsoft's fault. Microsoft should bear the cost of protecting me from them. It's obvious that MS will not ship products that are inherently safe from viruses due to bad programming. So MS must ship an OS that includes an effective virus protection system to protect it as an extra layer. The "new virus" subscription might have to cost extra after a couple of years, as that's about how often MS introduces a new OS. But it should still cost a small amount, like $10-20 per year. MS can make a huge profit from that kind of rate. Of course, that's if the MS virus protection SW is good quality, and if MS doesn't make basic OS SW that's such bad quality that its virus protection SW is overwhelmed.
I don't have to pay extra for seat belts when I buy a new car, unless I want belts that perform better to accommodate some unusually bad driving I do. OS security should be the same.
Can't I receive Hulu video to my own player app, and then fast forward past the commercials using my own app's controls? If there's some kind of "mandatory advertising" lockout in the video data, isn't there a player that ignores it? Or at least a player that can play the video format which is open source, which I can change myself to execute the way I want - fast forward whenever I want it?
I hope it's the last option. Then I'd like to see the hamfisted content providers charge for mandatory ads that can be skipped in open source players, and a database collected by users of what timeframes to skip. If they're going to abuse their power, I want to see it thrown back in their faces, or rather right at their moneybelts where it really hurts.