Because it's totally off topic, this has nothing to do with what bitcoin is. If you get busted for drugs, the police will cease anything of value including cash, real estate, possessions, if you buy gear for your WoW character or land in Second Life with drug money that has resale value they can in theory cease that one too. The point is that bitcoins have been hyped up as anonymous money to buy drugs so lots of dealers should have bitcoins which makes it surprising that they haven't found any to cease before. Nothing here happened to his bitcoins that wouldn't have happened to anything else he owns.
In the sense that you have a long way to go to retirement, yes. I'd worked what, six years back then? With 38 more to go until public pension kicks in here. On the other hand, you'd already be on the "old boys" team in snowboarding. It's all about context.
The thing is regular bookstores have massive overhead, and old publishers where using that to keep thing artificially inflated. Why does an ebook cost more than a regular book?
The biggest cost to running a traditional bookstore is the rent of the property, you need lots of floor space in a good location. Long before Amazon got big in ebooks they were undercutting the business a lot just by shipping dead tree books directly from the warehouse. If I wanted to try reinventing the bookstore I'd have customers browse on terminals, pick a book and a robot will fetch it for you on the spot. That way you could pack many thousands of books in a very small space and have a much wider selection. I'm not sure how quickly you could make it happen but I'm thinking 10-30 seconds is realistic from you push the button until you have the book in hand, it won't be as quick as reading through back covers from a shelf but if we assume you can do that part on the terminal and only fetch those you're somewhat interested in that sounds reasonable.
I have the same sympathy as the (thread!) parent. I feel in some ways we live in an age where traditional societal pressures about who one "should" be as an adult are deteriorating, and I'm personally glad for it.
Yes, but in this age of self-realization many people feel they're not accomplished enough, many of us chose to or are forced to be cogs in the machinery rather than chasing our dreams. It's not cool to be a burger flipper at McD and I don't think the social pressure is any easier than before, in the eyes of our peers it's fairly easy to fail at life and if you take that at face value you'd be pretty depressed. Choosing to avoid things to ignore how badly you suck at them is common, for example not exercising since that'd reveal just how poorly your shape is. In that sense I can in certain ways understand people who choose to recluse from life rather than deal with it, if you don't try nobody will see how badly you fail.
But this only deals with one specific instance, if you have a poster with a history of tinfoil hat posts say "Sure, I totally believe NSA has only my best interests at heart" then that has a lot higher probability of being irony than a poster that is fully in the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" corner. Given all the defective sarcasm and irony detectors out there, the bar of out-detecting a human is pretty damn low.
Colonizing Mars to protect against interstellar war would be like having your safe house on your patio. As for colonizing other planets we haven't got the technology for that any more than you could go to the moon with a horse carriage, just adding more horses won't help. It would be interesting to get started but I except a Mars colony to be dependent on Earth for centuries.
Also, you may not be looking at a big enough map to determine the threats against Europe. Europe's anti-missile defense is provided by the US
And any nation insane enough to initiate a ICBM attack on Europe would soon feel the full wrath of the European retaliation. You know that thing called mutual destruction which kept the world at relative peace during the cold war era.
Full wrath of what? The whole of EU has a few hundred nukes and no known ICBMs, Russia has many thousands of nukes and delivery capability. Many European nations - like my own - have heavily cut troop levels, training and starved them of all heavy equipment after the Cold War ended, we have a few special forces for places like Afghanistan but in major ground combat we'd fall faster than the Maginot line did to the Blitz. Everybody in Europe leans on everybody else and if not that they lean on the US, but if push comes to shove I think we'll find it's like the Lehman Brothers, everybody is leaning on thin air. The main real strong point is that we're rather massive, it'd take a ridiculously big army to occupy 500 million people's countries, but per capita Europe is weak.
That's the nice theory, but in practice it's more like a prisoner's dilemma because they usually have more prospective employees lined up than you have prospective employers. They offer you a low-ball wage, either you take it and is employed and underpaid or some other guy takes it while you're still unemployed. If you'd all refuse they'd offer more, but as long as one of you is more desperate than the rest they continue their race to the bottom and they know in every pool there's someone who has hit that "Screw it, I need a job and I need it now" limit and will sign up. To a lesser degree everyone else who wants out of their old job too. Even if you think you're an above average negotiator for your profession - which you probably aren't - they've dragged the baseline down so low they can pretend to be generous.
Collective bargaining as you say won't be a perfect fit for the individual, but you're making the unsaid and wholly unsupported assumption that what's negotiable is a fixed pool which you get either way. "Give me X, or I walk out that door" is more often than not met with "Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out" while "Give us X, or we all walk out that door" is met with "Whoa whoa whoa let's not be hasty here, let's discuss this". If you get more power and can negotiate a bigger piece of the cake that way, then a slice of that can still be bigger than what you managed to negotiate on your own. They're just very good at making you think you did a great deal, that's what everybody's supposed to think. I think many would change opinion if they saw the salary pay-outs.
I'm not sure that I can really think of good examples of this happening - at least not on a global scale.
Well, for better or for worse the world has gotten smaller in many ways including this one. For example, all of Intel's CPUs that power most PCs in the world are made in 11 plants, 7 locations, 5 countries and if there's a WW3 I predict the countries involved would be "all of the above". Floodings in Thailand sent the whole world's HDD market skyrocketing. Assuming most of this is reduced to piles of rubble, key personnel lost, the whole supply chain of tools and purified silicon gone and there's post-war shortages on everything. None of this is anything you can make in your back yard, how long would you keep the computers running without replacements coming, 5 years? 10 years? 30 years is the estimated shelf life of a backup tape. Even if people in remote areas make it through by living a few decades with 1950s level of technology societies by then everything not put to paper will be gone.
These things are ridiculously asymptotic, what's the price of food now down at the grocery store when there is plenty? In the grand scheme of things very, very low. What happens if there's a famine and there's not enough food to go around? There's really no price high enough to starve. So I'm thinking yeah, today it might seem silly since processing power and storage space is plentiful but if shit really hits the fan? What's a working HDD worth to you if you're down to the last copy of something really important? What if there's none to be had no matter the price? It's harder to fail that hard with books, they're easy to print and there's a zillion printing presses around the world. Not so with high-end electronics.
A little and only specialty chips that don't compete with anything Intel has, also of course for profit but equally much to deny the "real" foundries customers and profit. So when Intel is looking to push into smart phones/tablets/hybrids I'd be very surprised if they at the same time built CPUs for smart phones/tablets/hybrids for Apple at any price, really. If I was Microsoft and I was thinking long term I'd rather give a helluva good deal on x86 chips for the next iDevice instead.
Wildly exaggerated, you say? Who would do such a thing?!
People. Remember y2k, when society would collapse overnight as all our fancy technology would be hit harder than a world-wide EMP burst? What we don't understand is blown hilariously out of proportion. And certain people seem to have an irrational belief in impending doom no matter how unlikely, I guess they're some kind of evolutionary emergency insurance policy. Personally I'm not afraid of people throwing bits and bytes at each other I'm afraid of those bits and bytes controlling far more traditional means of war.
For what, making their tablet interfaces similar to their desktop interfaces? I don't see this being anything similar to how they evicted other browsers, media players, zip software, cd burners, basic video editors, antivirus software and whatnot, sure they can make them similar but your desktop doesn't come with a "free" Windows tablet which you might as well use since you have it. You can't move a single Surface tablet without people going out and buying one. With that logic you'd quickly go overboard, then the Xbox had an antitrust advantage because they used DirectX's dominance in the PC market to gain a foothold in the console market. And Apple, boy did they use their iPods to sell their iPhones to sell their iPads, it's antitrust all around. No, this idea sucks but it's well within the borders of legal stupidity IMO.
Great. With your vision, doctors (or anyone else who needs to be pageable 24/7, like a sysadmin) can never go to a movie.
I'm pretty sure doctors have been going to the cinema every decade from they invented movies up until they they invented pagers, how about you have time on call (where you can't get smashing drunk, go hiking in the mountains or if this is done, go to the cinema) and real time off like in a civilized work relationship. That you in a real emergency might try calling anyway is fine, but nobody should ever really be on 24x7 call, even if you're the CEO you should have some kind of second in command that could step in if you for any reason is indisposed. If things would go that wrong without you the business is a disaster waiting to happen when you really can't be reached.
OTOH, I'm not sure how many Deists are around anymore.
I think they mostly became atheists, that the universe existed entirely without some form of divine creator was too radical for the time. But in practice it means exactly the same, if there's no god or an absent god there's no point in churches, priests or prayers, no heaven or hell, either way there's simply no point in religion. For all practical intents and purposes a deist lives life exactly like an atheist, probably even more than an agnostic who might hedge their bets and not offend god because it might be true. And really here we're heading into foggy territory anyway, Big Bang violates pretty much every law of nature as we know it. God? Nature? Big question mark? Doesn't really matter, if there's no god here and now it's just for the history books.
Consider, if we are at all successful at automating away work, at some point we can only realize that leisure if work hours are reduced for the same pay rather than just having fewer people working the same or longer hours. The last time there was a significant reduction in the average work day that didn't involve starvation ages it took the threat of a communist revolution to accomplish it.
But also because we want more money to do more things. I've thought about the idea of asking for a 80% position - four day week - because I'd do fine on 80% of my current salary but I'd have a three day weekend every weekend. In the end I don't because it seems strange to me not to have a "full" job for no other reason that I don't feel like working that much and because there's always stuff you can spend extra money on. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just being silly and I'd be happier just cutting back and "cashing out" in time instead, but on some level I think doing productive work is healthy and 40 hours a week is hardly that much.
Re:Storage Non-Problem - Sequences Compresses to M
on
The DNA Data Deluge
·
· Score: 1
Each genetic sequence is ~3GB but since sequences between individuals are very similar it is possible to compress them by only recording the differences from a reference sequences making each genome ~20 MB. This means you could store a sequences for everybody in the world in ~132 PB or 0.05% or total worldwide data storage (295 exabytes)
For a single delta to a reference, but there's probably lots of redundancy in the deltas. If you have a tree/set of variations (Base human + "typical" Asian + "typical" Japanese + "typical" Okinawa + encoding the diff) you can probably bring the world estimate down by a few orders of magnitude, depending on how much is systematic and how much is unique to the individual.
In any case you are looking at the situation backwards. Companies only automate for two reasons. The first is if there is a task that cannot be done manually - either requiring precision or due to the job being dangerous. The second and relevant one here is if labor costs are high.
The third reason is if the automation costs are declining, companies won't mind replacing a low wage job if a robot still undercuts it by half. And the labor market can't really adjust because humans have a living wage floor while robots don't. If rising labor costs were the prime driver we'd see more companies leaving China for poorer countries by now.
Have you actually read the Old Testament? Utter repetitive dreck and the main character is a bloodthirsty sociopathic asshole who'll kill people for burning the wrong incense.
It's the world's oldest good cop/bad cop story, first we're terrible sinners that must be banished and entire cities nuked from orbit and then comes our savior who loves us and will forgive everything if we just love him back. The whole old testament is a guilt-trip in order to set us up to need redemption, then it comes like water to a man dying of thirst.
Still, if we ever manage to get our act together well enough to actually build something like a generation ship, 22 light years away is pretty close, relatively speaking.
Voyager has been underway for 36 years and is less than 0.002 light years from earth so it's 10,000+ generations away unless we can go much, much faster. And the concept of generation ships is exactly the opposite, they're massive constructions big enough to sustain a civilization that move very slowly between stars. If we send "humans" I expect it'll be frozen embryos or electronic DNA sequences to be reconstructed on site on a massive rocket ship that'll still take hundreds of years. A light year sounds so short until you realize that if you've traveled 7.5 times around the world you've gone one light second. Only 31,556,925 more to go in order to make a light year.
Yes, it should also be noted that we've put no humans on the moon but NASA, ESA, Japan, India, China have all had missions to the moon since and Russia is also planning new missions after they stopped the Luna program in 1976. Mostly what we lack is a compelling reason to send people, it's been done and even repeated a few times so it's a bit like after the first 10 people had been on Mount Everest there's not really much to be proven that we could climb it again. I'd say go straight for Mars, break some new ground not just revisit the old ones.
Whatever, if they were complaining about things like what the Wii was to the XB360 and PS3 that'd be one thing but when you get quotes like
Sadly, it's also presently an ungainly mess of a consumer product that requires more work than it's worth to get the most out of it.
The controller sounds nice on paper, but it's sadly close to being outright junk. The touchpad is the worst touchpad I've ever used.
That is real hardware and software usability issues, not just lack of eye candy. It's an entertainment device, if it's more annoying and frustrating than entertaining it'll be a $99 paperweight.
Yeah, but 11 years ago getting from NY to London in less than 4 hours was an everyday thing (if pricier than other flights). Now it's unheard of.
Yes but it was sort of like the pony express shutting down their rush service because the telegraph arrived, maybe that sucks if you wanted to send a package but for the 95% that wanted to send a letter the telegraph was faster and better. Not every aspect of every old service is going to be preserved by the new ones, there will always be some regressions in the overall picture. Even though we're making incremental improvements I doubt we'll see any revolutionary changes in things like jet propulsion, internal combustion, gas turbines and whatnot - it's just minor tweaks to squeeze more efficiency out of it.
The overwhelming number of changes I expect is for things to get smaller, smarter and for more and more things to go electronically rather than physically and applying brute force. Maybe you get another 5 mph on the interstate but the main difference is an AI that drives itself. My dream of "real technological development" would be things like having nanobots to destroy bacteria, viruses, toxins, cancer cells, cure genetic diseases and prevent aging on the cell level. In the future maybe we all have personal assistants like only the rich have today, only they're robotic. It couldn't be done today because to have servants somebody would have to be the servants, but we could all have a robot the way we all have cell phones.
I'm not going to bash the system we have today, I can go down to the grocery store and buy a finished meal, pop it in the microwave and put the dishes in the dishwasher but it certainly could be taken to the next level where I just tell a robot I'd like spaghetti bolognese today and it'd shop, cook like a professional chef, serve and clear the tables when I'm done. Having a washing machine and a dryer is also rather relaxed, but again being able to throw dirty clothes in the bin and have them sorted, washed, dried, ironed if applicable and put back in the closest by themselves would be even better. Roombas and electronic lawn mowers are just a shadow of what robot housekeepers and gardeners could be. In short, even if I don't see flying cars on the horizon I see plenty things that could make life in 2013 seem rather primitive compared to 100 years from now.
A probe would probably be meant for observation, not communication since it's so much easier to just boost the signal if there's someone answering at the other end. I think we'd already know if there was a probe in orbit, if it's in transit or just doing a fly-by it'd be a silent black speck of dust we'd have no chance of detecting.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's totally off topic, this has nothing to do with what bitcoin is. If you get busted for drugs, the police will cease anything of value including cash, real estate, possessions, if you buy gear for your WoW character or land in Second Life with drug money that has resale value they can in theory cease that one too. The point is that bitcoins have been hyped up as anonymous money to buy drugs so lots of dealers should have bitcoins which makes it surprising that they haven't found any to cease before. Nothing here happened to his bitcoins that wouldn't have happened to anything else he owns.
In the sense that you have a long way to go to retirement, yes. I'd worked what, six years back then? With 38 more to go until public pension kicks in here. On the other hand, you'd already be on the "old boys" team in snowboarding. It's all about context.
The thing is regular bookstores have massive overhead, and old publishers where using that to keep thing artificially inflated. Why does an ebook cost more than a regular book?
The biggest cost to running a traditional bookstore is the rent of the property, you need lots of floor space in a good location. Long before Amazon got big in ebooks they were undercutting the business a lot just by shipping dead tree books directly from the warehouse. If I wanted to try reinventing the bookstore I'd have customers browse on terminals, pick a book and a robot will fetch it for you on the spot. That way you could pack many thousands of books in a very small space and have a much wider selection. I'm not sure how quickly you could make it happen but I'm thinking 10-30 seconds is realistic from you push the button until you have the book in hand, it won't be as quick as reading through back covers from a shelf but if we assume you can do that part on the terminal and only fetch those you're somewhat interested in that sounds reasonable.
I have the same sympathy as the (thread!) parent. I feel in some ways we live in an age where traditional societal pressures about who one "should" be as an adult are deteriorating, and I'm personally glad for it.
Yes, but in this age of self-realization many people feel they're not accomplished enough, many of us chose to or are forced to be cogs in the machinery rather than chasing our dreams. It's not cool to be a burger flipper at McD and I don't think the social pressure is any easier than before, in the eyes of our peers it's fairly easy to fail at life and if you take that at face value you'd be pretty depressed. Choosing to avoid things to ignore how badly you suck at them is common, for example not exercising since that'd reveal just how poorly your shape is. In that sense I can in certain ways understand people who choose to recluse from life rather than deal with it, if you don't try nobody will see how badly you fail.
But this only deals with one specific instance, if you have a poster with a history of tinfoil hat posts say "Sure, I totally believe NSA has only my best interests at heart" then that has a lot higher probability of being irony than a poster that is fully in the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" corner. Given all the defective sarcasm and irony detectors out there, the bar of out-detecting a human is pretty damn low.
is slim and none. It'd hardly be the first time the Parliament has voted for the right thing but the EC has said "well, we won't do that".
Colonizing Mars to protect against interstellar war would be like having your safe house on your patio. As for colonizing other planets we haven't got the technology for that any more than you could go to the moon with a horse carriage, just adding more horses won't help. It would be interesting to get started but I except a Mars colony to be dependent on Earth for centuries.
Also, you may not be looking at a big enough map to determine the threats against Europe. Europe's anti-missile defense is provided by the US
And any nation insane enough to initiate a ICBM attack on Europe would soon feel the full wrath of the European retaliation. You know that thing called mutual destruction which kept the world at relative peace during the cold war era.
Full wrath of what? The whole of EU has a few hundred nukes and no known ICBMs, Russia has many thousands of nukes and delivery capability. Many European nations - like my own - have heavily cut troop levels, training and starved them of all heavy equipment after the Cold War ended, we have a few special forces for places like Afghanistan but in major ground combat we'd fall faster than the Maginot line did to the Blitz. Everybody in Europe leans on everybody else and if not that they lean on the US, but if push comes to shove I think we'll find it's like the Lehman Brothers, everybody is leaning on thin air. The main real strong point is that we're rather massive, it'd take a ridiculously big army to occupy 500 million people's countries, but per capita Europe is weak.
That's the nice theory, but in practice it's more like a prisoner's dilemma because they usually have more prospective employees lined up than you have prospective employers. They offer you a low-ball wage, either you take it and is employed and underpaid or some other guy takes it while you're still unemployed. If you'd all refuse they'd offer more, but as long as one of you is more desperate than the rest they continue their race to the bottom and they know in every pool there's someone who has hit that "Screw it, I need a job and I need it now" limit and will sign up. To a lesser degree everyone else who wants out of their old job too. Even if you think you're an above average negotiator for your profession - which you probably aren't - they've dragged the baseline down so low they can pretend to be generous.
Collective bargaining as you say won't be a perfect fit for the individual, but you're making the unsaid and wholly unsupported assumption that what's negotiable is a fixed pool which you get either way. "Give me X, or I walk out that door" is more often than not met with "Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out" while "Give us X, or we all walk out that door" is met with "Whoa whoa whoa let's not be hasty here, let's discuss this". If you get more power and can negotiate a bigger piece of the cake that way, then a slice of that can still be bigger than what you managed to negotiate on your own. They're just very good at making you think you did a great deal, that's what everybody's supposed to think. I think many would change opinion if they saw the salary pay-outs.
I'm not sure that I can really think of good examples of this happening - at least not on a global scale.
Well, for better or for worse the world has gotten smaller in many ways including this one. For example, all of Intel's CPUs that power most PCs in the world are made in 11 plants, 7 locations, 5 countries and if there's a WW3 I predict the countries involved would be "all of the above". Floodings in Thailand sent the whole world's HDD market skyrocketing. Assuming most of this is reduced to piles of rubble, key personnel lost, the whole supply chain of tools and purified silicon gone and there's post-war shortages on everything. None of this is anything you can make in your back yard, how long would you keep the computers running without replacements coming, 5 years? 10 years? 30 years is the estimated shelf life of a backup tape. Even if people in remote areas make it through by living a few decades with 1950s level of technology societies by then everything not put to paper will be gone.
These things are ridiculously asymptotic, what's the price of food now down at the grocery store when there is plenty? In the grand scheme of things very, very low. What happens if there's a famine and there's not enough food to go around? There's really no price high enough to starve. So I'm thinking yeah, today it might seem silly since processing power and storage space is plentiful but if shit really hits the fan? What's a working HDD worth to you if you're down to the last copy of something really important? What if there's none to be had no matter the price? It's harder to fail that hard with books, they're easy to print and there's a zillion printing presses around the world. Not so with high-end electronics.
A little and only specialty chips that don't compete with anything Intel has, also of course for profit but equally much to deny the "real" foundries customers and profit. So when Intel is looking to push into smart phones/tablets/hybrids I'd be very surprised if they at the same time built CPUs for smart phones/tablets/hybrids for Apple at any price, really. If I was Microsoft and I was thinking long term I'd rather give a helluva good deal on x86 chips for the next iDevice instead.
Wildly exaggerated, you say? Who would do such a thing?!
People. Remember y2k, when society would collapse overnight as all our fancy technology would be hit harder than a world-wide EMP burst? What we don't understand is blown hilariously out of proportion. And certain people seem to have an irrational belief in impending doom no matter how unlikely, I guess they're some kind of evolutionary emergency insurance policy. Personally I'm not afraid of people throwing bits and bytes at each other I'm afraid of those bits and bytes controlling far more traditional means of war.
For what, making their tablet interfaces similar to their desktop interfaces? I don't see this being anything similar to how they evicted other browsers, media players, zip software, cd burners, basic video editors, antivirus software and whatnot, sure they can make them similar but your desktop doesn't come with a "free" Windows tablet which you might as well use since you have it. You can't move a single Surface tablet without people going out and buying one. With that logic you'd quickly go overboard, then the Xbox had an antitrust advantage because they used DirectX's dominance in the PC market to gain a foothold in the console market. And Apple, boy did they use their iPods to sell their iPhones to sell their iPads, it's antitrust all around. No, this idea sucks but it's well within the borders of legal stupidity IMO.
Then Firefox will be to mobile what Java was to the desktop in the 90s, I don't see anything that could go wrong with that plan.
Great. With your vision, doctors (or anyone else who needs to be pageable 24/7, like a sysadmin) can never go to a movie.
I'm pretty sure doctors have been going to the cinema every decade from they invented movies up until they they invented pagers, how about you have time on call (where you can't get smashing drunk, go hiking in the mountains or if this is done, go to the cinema) and real time off like in a civilized work relationship. That you in a real emergency might try calling anyway is fine, but nobody should ever really be on 24x7 call, even if you're the CEO you should have some kind of second in command that could step in if you for any reason is indisposed. If things would go that wrong without you the business is a disaster waiting to happen when you really can't be reached.
OTOH, I'm not sure how many Deists are around anymore.
I think they mostly became atheists, that the universe existed entirely without some form of divine creator was too radical for the time. But in practice it means exactly the same, if there's no god or an absent god there's no point in churches, priests or prayers, no heaven or hell, either way there's simply no point in religion. For all practical intents and purposes a deist lives life exactly like an atheist, probably even more than an agnostic who might hedge their bets and not offend god because it might be true. And really here we're heading into foggy territory anyway, Big Bang violates pretty much every law of nature as we know it. God? Nature? Big question mark? Doesn't really matter, if there's no god here and now it's just for the history books.
Consider, if we are at all successful at automating away work, at some point we can only realize that leisure if work hours are reduced for the same pay rather than just having fewer people working the same or longer hours. The last time there was a significant reduction in the average work day that didn't involve starvation ages it took the threat of a communist revolution to accomplish it.
But also because we want more money to do more things. I've thought about the idea of asking for a 80% position - four day week - because I'd do fine on 80% of my current salary but I'd have a three day weekend every weekend. In the end I don't because it seems strange to me not to have a "full" job for no other reason that I don't feel like working that much and because there's always stuff you can spend extra money on. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just being silly and I'd be happier just cutting back and "cashing out" in time instead, but on some level I think doing productive work is healthy and 40 hours a week is hardly that much.
Each genetic sequence is ~3GB but since sequences between individuals are very similar it is possible to compress them by only recording the differences from a reference sequences making each genome ~20 MB. This means you could store a sequences for everybody in the world in ~132 PB or 0.05% or total worldwide data storage (295 exabytes)
For a single delta to a reference, but there's probably lots of redundancy in the deltas. If you have a tree/set of variations (Base human + "typical" Asian + "typical" Japanese + "typical" Okinawa + encoding the diff) you can probably bring the world estimate down by a few orders of magnitude, depending on how much is systematic and how much is unique to the individual.
In any case you are looking at the situation backwards. Companies only automate for two reasons. The first is if there is a task that cannot be done manually - either requiring precision or due to the job being dangerous. The second and relevant one here is if labor costs are high.
The third reason is if the automation costs are declining, companies won't mind replacing a low wage job if a robot still undercuts it by half. And the labor market can't really adjust because humans have a living wage floor while robots don't. If rising labor costs were the prime driver we'd see more companies leaving China for poorer countries by now.
Have you actually read the Old Testament? Utter repetitive dreck and the main character is a bloodthirsty sociopathic asshole who'll kill people for burning the wrong incense.
It's the world's oldest good cop/bad cop story, first we're terrible sinners that must be banished and entire cities nuked from orbit and then comes our savior who loves us and will forgive everything if we just love him back. The whole old testament is a guilt-trip in order to set us up to need redemption, then it comes like water to a man dying of thirst.
Still, if we ever manage to get our act together well enough to actually build something like a generation ship, 22 light years away is pretty close, relatively speaking.
Voyager has been underway for 36 years and is less than 0.002 light years from earth so it's 10,000+ generations away unless we can go much, much faster. And the concept of generation ships is exactly the opposite, they're massive constructions big enough to sustain a civilization that move very slowly between stars. If we send "humans" I expect it'll be frozen embryos or electronic DNA sequences to be reconstructed on site on a massive rocket ship that'll still take hundreds of years. A light year sounds so short until you realize that if you've traveled 7.5 times around the world you've gone one light second. Only 31,556,925 more to go in order to make a light year.
Yes, it should also be noted that we've put no humans on the moon but NASA, ESA, Japan, India, China have all had missions to the moon since and Russia is also planning new missions after they stopped the Luna program in 1976. Mostly what we lack is a compelling reason to send people, it's been done and even repeated a few times so it's a bit like after the first 10 people had been on Mount Everest there's not really much to be proven that we could climb it again. I'd say go straight for Mars, break some new ground not just revisit the old ones.
Whatever, if they were complaining about things like what the Wii was to the XB360 and PS3 that'd be one thing but when you get quotes like
Sadly, it's also presently an ungainly mess of a consumer product that requires more work than it's worth to get the most out of it.
The controller sounds nice on paper, but it's sadly close to being outright junk. The touchpad is the worst touchpad I've ever used.
That is real hardware and software usability issues, not just lack of eye candy. It's an entertainment device, if it's more annoying and frustrating than entertaining it'll be a $99 paperweight.
Yeah, but 11 years ago getting from NY to London in less than 4 hours was an everyday thing (if pricier than other flights). Now it's unheard of.
Yes but it was sort of like the pony express shutting down their rush service because the telegraph arrived, maybe that sucks if you wanted to send a package but for the 95% that wanted to send a letter the telegraph was faster and better. Not every aspect of every old service is going to be preserved by the new ones, there will always be some regressions in the overall picture. Even though we're making incremental improvements I doubt we'll see any revolutionary changes in things like jet propulsion, internal combustion, gas turbines and whatnot - it's just minor tweaks to squeeze more efficiency out of it.
The overwhelming number of changes I expect is for things to get smaller, smarter and for more and more things to go electronically rather than physically and applying brute force. Maybe you get another 5 mph on the interstate but the main difference is an AI that drives itself. My dream of "real technological development" would be things like having nanobots to destroy bacteria, viruses, toxins, cancer cells, cure genetic diseases and prevent aging on the cell level. In the future maybe we all have personal assistants like only the rich have today, only they're robotic. It couldn't be done today because to have servants somebody would have to be the servants, but we could all have a robot the way we all have cell phones.
I'm not going to bash the system we have today, I can go down to the grocery store and buy a finished meal, pop it in the microwave and put the dishes in the dishwasher but it certainly could be taken to the next level where I just tell a robot I'd like spaghetti bolognese today and it'd shop, cook like a professional chef, serve and clear the tables when I'm done. Having a washing machine and a dryer is also rather relaxed, but again being able to throw dirty clothes in the bin and have them sorted, washed, dried, ironed if applicable and put back in the closest by themselves would be even better. Roombas and electronic lawn mowers are just a shadow of what robot housekeepers and gardeners could be. In short, even if I don't see flying cars on the horizon I see plenty things that could make life in 2013 seem rather primitive compared to 100 years from now.
A probe would probably be meant for observation, not communication since it's so much easier to just boost the signal if there's someone answering at the other end. I think we'd already know if there was a probe in orbit, if it's in transit or just doing a fly-by it'd be a silent black speck of dust we'd have no chance of detecting.