I remember tape drives costing about the same as a hard disk of a similar capacity and the tapes costing 10-20% the cost of the drive. That made it feasible to stick tape drives in high-end desktop computers so that people who cared about their data had a good backup system.
It sounds like you're remembering QIC tapes. I had one of those too. I think those were an anomaly; high-end computers have always had tape drives (remember the giant reel-to-reel tapes that mainframes had), and they've probably always been expensive. They didn't really have them for early home computers (they had cassette drives, but they weren't for backup, they actually used them for primary storage for people too cheap to get the disk drives), they just popped up for a while for the "prosumer" market and then fizzled. Tapes are still around, but again only at the high end; companies spending large amounts on IT are not going to blink at a $2k tape drive.
It really doesn't make sense to buy tape drives: if you have enough data for tapes to be useful then you're going to be buying big tape robots.
Exactly; companies that are serious about backup can afford this stuff.
You're right, there is a hole in the market there for prosumer and small business needs, but it seems that no one really cares to fill it. Maybe it simply can't be filled economically by anything besides hard drives: the number of people willing to buy these things just isn't enough to push tape drive prices down, whereas everyone needs hard drives, so we get today's situation where using hard drives (whether bare or in a USB-attached enclosure) for backup is the standard. That's exactly how I back up my data.
It is too bad they can't make optical discs with enough capacity to be useful for backup. But there's likely difficulties there in making them accurate enough to work. In a hard drive, the big advantage is that the media and the read/write mechanism are enclosed within the same unit, and free of dust, worry about mechanical alignment issues between different drives, etc.
Which goes to show that Paul the elder is a fucking dunderhead. The chance of peace breaking out in 1908 Europe, oh sorry, the Middle East is about as likely as the Kardashians suddenly deciding not to act like media whores or ISIS to convert wholesale to Asatru.
You may be misunderstanding him. Any idiot knows there isn't going to be peace in the ME anytime soon. What he probably meant was that peace between Iran and the US could "break out", rather than this obvious path towards war which the hawks have been pushing us to lately. Because that's basically what it's coming down to: we are going to have a war with Iran within 4 years, most likely, and it'll be just like Iraq, over some BS justification, with a nation on the other side of the planet which poses absolutely zero threat to the US. It might pose a threat to our fundamentalist Muslim buddies in Saudi Arabia, but please tell me why American troops should sacrifice their lives to support an Wahhabi Islamist regime?
Yes, I forgot to mention that part. NAFTA was a very bad deal for lower-income, lower-skill workers, because it meant moving a lot of their jobs to Mexico. This is the problem with Democratic voters: they buy into the party's free-trade dogma, and then tout the stock market performance as proof that the economy is great for everyone, while ignoring the fact that stock market performance doesn't mean squat to some guy with a high school education who has a low-skilled job.
There is also the issue that our Muslim Allah loving enemies do not consider women as equals as a rule and while we may be ready for a woman the rest of the world probably isn't.
Who cares about them? What about our fundamentalist Muslim Allah-loving friends, such as our staunch ally Saudi Arabia?
You didn't read his whole comment, obviously. He said that he doesn't know of any countries that are free enough to go to, and also stupid enough to let Americans into.
Leaving the country, for an American, really isn't that easy. That's why most people who talk about it never do it. There are quite a few countries with higher standards of living (in western Europe mostly), but they're really not easy to emigrate to from here unless you have some critical skill, and even then they treat you like a guest worker. Even Canada isn't that easy to move to. There are other countries which are probably easy to move to, but they're not anyplace you'd want to live, they're 3rd-world shitholes like El Salvador where 1 in 9 adult males die by murder.
That's never going to happen; our voting system makes it impossible for third parties to get elected, due to the first-past-the-post voting system plus the Electoral College.
What we need to do is hold a new Constitutional Convention of the states, and toss out the Constitution. We need a new Constitution where we basically adopt the government that Germany or France has: a parliamentary republic. Presidential republics are rare, and for good reason: they don't work. There's too much infighting in government between the branches, and nothing gets done. We see this every time there's a federal government shutdown because Congress and the White House are bickering. This never happens in a parliamentary system; at the worst case, parliament gets dissolved, new elections are held, a new PM is selected, and business continues as usual within a few weeks.
And while we're at it, we need to adopt a preferential voting system like the European countries have, so we can have a bunch of different parties, all sharing power in parliament.
Clinton reigned during a big economic boom, which actually largely turned out to be a bubble. It was called the Dot-Com Boom. The Internet became commercialized, and computers became powerful enough and easy enough to use, and the Internet because commonly available enough, that it was a technological and social revolution. This happened to occur while Clinton was in office. It had little to nothing to do with Clinton's actions. (It did have to do with his VP's actions; Gore helped the internet along legislatively, but this was many years before the internet boom of the 90s.)
Clinton even tried to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. His administration pushed the "Clipper Chip" fiasco: he signed laws which banned "strong encryption" (over 40-bit), regulating any such crypto as a "munition" and banning it from being exported. But worse than that, he pushed for a law requiring ALL strong encryption to be done with a special chip called a "Clipper chip", which all computing devices would be required to have built-in, and which the NSA would have the keys for, called "key escrow". That way, the government would be able to snoop on any communications they wanted. This of course didn't go over too well, and lots of companies moved crypto operations out of the US.
The Clintons, and the Democrats in general, are big friends with the NSA and obviously want the government to be able to spy on everyone, all the time. It sucks because the Republicans probably agree with them, only more secretly, but with the Dems it's overt: just look at how "Mr. Transparency" Obama reacted when the NSA spying came to light via Snowden.
Anyway, yes, a lot of jobs were added during the dot-com boom days; a lot of them promptly disappeared when the bubble burst. These events were neither Clinton's nor Bush's fault; they were natural occurrences in an economic bubble. Lots of these jobs were "web developer" positions which paid ridiculous sums for people with little to no skill in programming; it wasn't a big loss when these people lost their cushy jobs after the bubble burst and had to go back to truck driving or whatever; most of them weren't actually producing anything of value anyway.
He's *already* become a generic right-wing kook. He occasionally spouts something sensible, like his recent comments on the War on Drugs, but overall is just another Republican. Even his dad disagreed with him recently; Ron said the Republicans who signed onto something against the peace deal with Iran were "afraid that peace would break out"; Rand was one of the Republican signers, along with the typical wackos like Cruz.
So I'm an "ageist bigot" for telling people who became masters at riding horses that they need to give that up and learn to drive a car instead? Or that people who became masters at making buggy whips that they need to give that up and learn a new profession because no one wants buggy whips any more? Or that people who became masters of texting on a 0-9 keypad featurephone need to give that up since all the new big-screen smartphones don't have keypads any more?
Once the wheel was invented, no one wanted to go back to the tiller and no one even invented some other way to steer a car. There is something optimal in the use of the steering wheel that makes any other refinements and changes useless.
You've gone from a good explanation of why the change happened to a complete assumption. Just because everyone uses the steering wheel doesn't make it superior. There have been other ideas, such as side-sticks. Now, it may very well be that nothing better than steering wheels have been tried (which I would personally agree with), but the fact that steering wheels got enough inertia and nothing's displaced them is not proof of this, it's proof of the power of inertia.
The QWERTY keyboard is further proof of inertia, with a shitty UI when far better ones have been available for ages (including Dvorak and Colemak).
Similarly the first graphic UI's were full of experimentation. Even the first Mac OS's had the menu bar in the window, but was moved out in early beta phase as the idea was that it was easier on the user to simply look always in the same place for the applications' commands, and has remained there ever since. Windows traditionally had the menu bar inside the window, with very little exceptions. However your example shows the same thing I am trying to get across: they DON'T change once they've made a decision.
Exactly my point: inertia is all-powerful. Which is better, menu bar at the top of the screen, or inside the window? Well, we still haven't settled that: for Windows (as well as most of Linux-UI-land), it's inside the window. For MacOS (as well as Linux/Unity I believe), it's at the top of the screen. So after 30 years, we still haven't reached a consensus on this simple thing. And now some people want to toss out the menubar altogether, which we've already done with mobile device UIs. Which one is really the best? (Again, personally, as a KDE user, I actually prefer the menubar inside the application, but I'm under no illusion that my preference is "right", but rather my preference because I'm used to it. However, this doesn't extend to keyboards, where I switched to Dvorak 20 years ago, though I'm able to go back and forth easily.)
at least in Linux land, there is a tendancy to put the menu bar as something permanent on top (at least in Unity), but many desktops still keep the in-window menu bar.
You're twisting this; AFAIK, Unity is the *only* DE which does this; all the others don't. The way you've phrased this, you're implying that most Linux desktop uses use Unity, which is probably far from the truth (though it's pretty hard to tell since no one's done a good survey on which DEs are most popular on Linux, and they only go by the website visitation stats for particular websites).
The mouse is a useless thing in my honest opinion
And see here you are adopting a UI convention totally different than the vast majority of computer users, and even probably most Linux users. Not that you're wrong, but it's certainly not a popular opinion.
In any case, my point stands: if it works for the user, don't change it.
But different users have different preferences. Some people want to stick with the old tried-and-true because they're too lazy to learn something that might really be better. This doesn't make the old UI better, it just partially explains inertia. Other people want to switch to something different because they think it's better. Dvorak/Colemak users like me fall into this camp (at least for this one thing, it doesn't mean we do this for everything). On computers, this isn't really that hard if you use a system like KDE which is highly configurable. Almost every computer now lets you use Dvorak layouts, some DEs have more configurability than others, most let you change colors and such, some let you change fundamental things like single vs. double-click (KDE does this). Cars are different though; you can't just put the accelerator on the dashboard
One particular new UI sucking is not proof that all new UIs suck.
And just because we've done things a certain way for 30 years does not mean that's the best way to do things, it just means it has a lot of inertia.
You probably don't remember this, but back in the early 1900s, there was a lot of resistance to putting steering wheels in cars, because earlier cars had tillers. A lot of people thought they should just stick with tillers, because that's what had been used before and people were used to them. It's a good thing those people were ignored.
Finally, MacOS has been putting the menu bar for the active task at the top of the screen since probably before Windows ever came out. Why don't we just stick with that on all UIs? Or are you simply arguing that whatever UI you prefer is better?
We in western nations pollute less toxic stuff than back then, yes, but this isn't the case over in east Asia, where a lot of our products come from.
Also, planetwide, we pollute a LOT more with global-warming gases than we ever did. So we're burning stuff more cleanly, and we don't have soot all over our cities like late 1800s London, but that isn't helping the overall climate much. Don't forget that our population is a lot larger than it was 100 years ago.
As far as I can recall, tape backup systems have never been a consumer product. At least, I don't recall tape systems ever being marketed that way.
You must be young. Back in the 90s, we had "floppy tapes": QIC systems connected to the floppy connector on the motherboard, and with the correct software let you store 20MB or 40MB per tape (more with compression turned on). These were marketed to small businesses and high-end consumers. One of these tape drives didn't cost any more than a typical hard drive of the day.
But the price for a single tape drive is beyond insane.
That's pretty easy; it's because of the volume it's sold in. All your consumer electronic gear would cost similar amounts if it sold in similar quantities. There's 1-3 orders of magnitude fewer tape drives sold than, say, laptop optical drives, so of course it's going to cost a lot more.
You might not remember this, but all this consumer computing gear used to cost a fortune too. I remember paying around $600-700 for a 14" monitor once, and $350 for an 80MB hard drive; this was around 1990, when a dollar was worth quite a bit more than it is now. Back then, a laptop cost probably a couple thousand dollars or more. These days, you can get a decent laptop for $500-1000, and a nice used laptop for $100-200.
Teenagers and 20-somethings have not been using these things that long; if you switch to a better UI, the youngest people will adopt it fastest and easiest. Just because you're 60 and have been using these paradigms for the last 25 years doesn't mean everyone is happy with them.
Classic keyboard layout optimization places commonly used keys close together to reduce finger motion
This is incorrect. Any decent optimization (on a normal keyboard) places the commonly used keys in the home row, and places them so that you're more likely to alternate hands between each keypress. Less-used keys go on the upper row, and the least-used keys go on the bottom row (which is harder to reach), but the overall goal is to alternate hands.
You're talking about it like it's some future sci-fi technology. It's not; it's already here. Google's self-driving cars have already driven many thousands of miles across the country, error-free, which is a lot better than probably any human driver can hope to achieve ("error-free" includes not committing any traffic infractions like illegal turns, tailgating, etc.).
Basically, you're arguing against something which is already proven.
I'm willing to accept the technological problem; it does seem far-fetched, but there's no guarantee that different civilizations will develop technologies in the same order as we have. Maybe they developed some kind of computer-to-mind technology that we never thought of, but never thought too much about exploring space or dealing with severe climate change until it was too late.
But the idea of putting a bunch of effort into this probe, which then only communicates with a single (to them) alien being and then burns out, just seems poorly thought out; if you want your culture to be remembered, you have to do it in a way that lasts longer than that and communicates to more beings. Of course, this is a planet where they developed such technology but couldn't figure out how to deal with climate change, so maybe they don't think things through too well....
No, I got it, but that episode always bugged me that way. Overall, it was a beautiful episode for sure, but you have to turn off part of your critical-thinking to enjoy it the most because of these bits. I wish they had changed the ending a bit so that the alien probe wasn't a one-shot deal, and so that other people could have the same experience and learn about the culture there. Maybe a line about Federation archeologists being able to repair the probe later?
That is a possibility, but I'd think it's pretty remote. How often do asteroids smash into the Moon these days? Yes, during the early days of the solar system, the Moon got bombarded, as we can see plainly on its surface, but these days most debris in the system seems to be cleared out, probably by Jupiter's gravity, so the airless Moon, free of tectonic activity, is probably a very safe place to put a monument which will stand undisturbed for eons.
Not polluting isn't really feasible as long as humans are alive and have civilization. If we were smarter, we could pollute a lot less, but we're stupid, short-sighted, and greedy in general, so that's not going to happen.
Pay better? Retail and fast food? Is this some kind of bad joke? Even a manager at McDonald's can only expect maybe $35k. Even the most incompetent or inexperienced STEM worker with a BS degree can easily get $50k. Retail and fast food pay poverty-level wages usually.
Finance, maybe, I really don't know much about that field, but it does seem like there's high salaries there. However, I would think those salaries would only go to people with degrees in finance. There are a lot of STEM jobs in finance, mainly programming, but that's still STEM, even though it's in the finance sector.
That was a truly awful way. It was a great episode I guess, as long as you didn't think too hard about the aliens and their probe: it somehow takes over some alien person's mind and makes them live a lifetime as one of them, all within a few minutes? How did they have the technology to figure that out? And then it burns out, so it can't be used on anyone else, so you're only told a single person (who may or may not care--luckily it wasn't the Klingons who found this probe), who now has nothing more than a little flute as evidence of the whole thing or their whole society. Any archeologists are out of luck, since the probe has burned itself out, so all knowledge of their society is dependent on one lucky person telling others orally about his experience in the mind-warp.
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I remember tape drives costing about the same as a hard disk of a similar capacity and the tapes costing 10-20% the cost of the drive. That made it feasible to stick tape drives in high-end desktop computers so that people who cared about their data had a good backup system.
It sounds like you're remembering QIC tapes. I had one of those too. I think those were an anomaly; high-end computers have always had tape drives (remember the giant reel-to-reel tapes that mainframes had), and they've probably always been expensive. They didn't really have them for early home computers (they had cassette drives, but they weren't for backup, they actually used them for primary storage for people too cheap to get the disk drives), they just popped up for a while for the "prosumer" market and then fizzled. Tapes are still around, but again only at the high end; companies spending large amounts on IT are not going to blink at a $2k tape drive.
It really doesn't make sense to buy tape drives: if you have enough data for tapes to be useful then you're going to be buying big tape robots.
Exactly; companies that are serious about backup can afford this stuff.
You're right, there is a hole in the market there for prosumer and small business needs, but it seems that no one really cares to fill it. Maybe it simply can't be filled economically by anything besides hard drives: the number of people willing to buy these things just isn't enough to push tape drive prices down, whereas everyone needs hard drives, so we get today's situation where using hard drives (whether bare or in a USB-attached enclosure) for backup is the standard. That's exactly how I back up my data.
It is too bad they can't make optical discs with enough capacity to be useful for backup. But there's likely difficulties there in making them accurate enough to work. In a hard drive, the big advantage is that the media and the read/write mechanism are enclosed within the same unit, and free of dust, worry about mechanical alignment issues between different drives, etc.
Which goes to show that Paul the elder is a fucking dunderhead. The chance of peace breaking out in 1908 Europe, oh sorry, the Middle East is about as likely as the Kardashians suddenly deciding not to act like media whores or ISIS to convert wholesale to Asatru.
You may be misunderstanding him. Any idiot knows there isn't going to be peace in the ME anytime soon. What he probably meant was that peace between Iran and the US could "break out", rather than this obvious path towards war which the hawks have been pushing us to lately. Because that's basically what it's coming down to: we are going to have a war with Iran within 4 years, most likely, and it'll be just like Iraq, over some BS justification, with a nation on the other side of the planet which poses absolutely zero threat to the US. It might pose a threat to our fundamentalist Muslim buddies in Saudi Arabia, but please tell me why American troops should sacrifice their lives to support an Wahhabi Islamist regime?
Yes, I forgot to mention that part. NAFTA was a very bad deal for lower-income, lower-skill workers, because it meant moving a lot of their jobs to Mexico. This is the problem with Democratic voters: they buy into the party's free-trade dogma, and then tout the stock market performance as proof that the economy is great for everyone, while ignoring the fact that stock market performance doesn't mean squat to some guy with a high school education who has a low-skilled job.
There is also the issue that our Muslim Allah loving enemies do not consider women as equals as a rule and while we may be ready for a woman the rest of the world probably isn't.
Who cares about them? What about our fundamentalist Muslim Allah-loving friends, such as our staunch ally Saudi Arabia?
You didn't read his whole comment, obviously. He said that he doesn't know of any countries that are free enough to go to, and also stupid enough to let Americans into.
Leaving the country, for an American, really isn't that easy. That's why most people who talk about it never do it. There are quite a few countries with higher standards of living (in western Europe mostly), but they're really not easy to emigrate to from here unless you have some critical skill, and even then they treat you like a guest worker. Even Canada isn't that easy to move to. There are other countries which are probably easy to move to, but they're not anyplace you'd want to live, they're 3rd-world shitholes like El Salvador where 1 in 9 adult males die by murder.
You can't have 200 military bases all over the world without still "meddling". We need to cut that number way down.
That's never going to happen; our voting system makes it impossible for third parties to get elected, due to the first-past-the-post voting system plus the Electoral College.
What we need to do is hold a new Constitutional Convention of the states, and toss out the Constitution. We need a new Constitution where we basically adopt the government that Germany or France has: a parliamentary republic. Presidential republics are rare, and for good reason: they don't work. There's too much infighting in government between the branches, and nothing gets done. We see this every time there's a federal government shutdown because Congress and the White House are bickering. This never happens in a parliamentary system; at the worst case, parliament gets dissolved, new elections are held, a new PM is selected, and business continues as usual within a few weeks.
And while we're at it, we need to adopt a preferential voting system like the European countries have, so we can have a bunch of different parties, all sharing power in parliament.
Clinton reigned during a big economic boom, which actually largely turned out to be a bubble. It was called the Dot-Com Boom. The Internet became commercialized, and computers became powerful enough and easy enough to use, and the Internet because commonly available enough, that it was a technological and social revolution. This happened to occur while Clinton was in office. It had little to nothing to do with Clinton's actions. (It did have to do with his VP's actions; Gore helped the internet along legislatively, but this was many years before the internet boom of the 90s.)
Clinton even tried to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. His administration pushed the "Clipper Chip" fiasco: he signed laws which banned "strong encryption" (over 40-bit), regulating any such crypto as a "munition" and banning it from being exported. But worse than that, he pushed for a law requiring ALL strong encryption to be done with a special chip called a "Clipper chip", which all computing devices would be required to have built-in, and which the NSA would have the keys for, called "key escrow". That way, the government would be able to snoop on any communications they wanted. This of course didn't go over too well, and lots of companies moved crypto operations out of the US.
The Clintons, and the Democrats in general, are big friends with the NSA and obviously want the government to be able to spy on everyone, all the time. It sucks because the Republicans probably agree with them, only more secretly, but with the Dems it's overt: just look at how "Mr. Transparency" Obama reacted when the NSA spying came to light via Snowden.
Anyway, yes, a lot of jobs were added during the dot-com boom days; a lot of them promptly disappeared when the bubble burst. These events were neither Clinton's nor Bush's fault; they were natural occurrences in an economic bubble. Lots of these jobs were "web developer" positions which paid ridiculous sums for people with little to no skill in programming; it wasn't a big loss when these people lost their cushy jobs after the bubble burst and had to go back to truck driving or whatever; most of them weren't actually producing anything of value anyway.
He's *already* become a generic right-wing kook. He occasionally spouts something sensible, like his recent comments on the War on Drugs, but overall is just another Republican. Even his dad disagreed with him recently; Ron said the Republicans who signed onto something against the peace deal with Iran were "afraid that peace would break out"; Rand was one of the Republican signers, along with the typical wackos like Cruz.
Don't forget all the people associated with her who "committed suicide".
So I'm an "ageist bigot" for telling people who became masters at riding horses that they need to give that up and learn to drive a car instead? Or that people who became masters at making buggy whips that they need to give that up and learn a new profession because no one wants buggy whips any more? Or that people who became masters of texting on a 0-9 keypad featurephone need to give that up since all the new big-screen smartphones don't have keypads any more?
Once the wheel was invented, no one wanted to go back to the tiller and no one even invented some other way to steer a car. There is something optimal in the use of the steering wheel that makes any other refinements and changes useless.
You've gone from a good explanation of why the change happened to a complete assumption. Just because everyone uses the steering wheel doesn't make it superior. There have been other ideas, such as side-sticks. Now, it may very well be that nothing better than steering wheels have been tried (which I would personally agree with), but the fact that steering wheels got enough inertia and nothing's displaced them is not proof of this, it's proof of the power of inertia.
The QWERTY keyboard is further proof of inertia, with a shitty UI when far better ones have been available for ages (including Dvorak and Colemak).
Similarly the first graphic UI's were full of experimentation. Even the first Mac OS's had the menu bar in the window, but was moved out in early beta phase as the idea was that it was easier on the user to simply look always in the same place for the applications' commands, and has remained there ever since. Windows traditionally had the menu bar inside the window, with very little exceptions. However your example shows the same thing I am trying to get across: they DON'T change once they've made a decision.
Exactly my point: inertia is all-powerful. Which is better, menu bar at the top of the screen, or inside the window? Well, we still haven't settled that: for Windows (as well as most of Linux-UI-land), it's inside the window. For MacOS (as well as Linux/Unity I believe), it's at the top of the screen. So after 30 years, we still haven't reached a consensus on this simple thing. And now some people want to toss out the menubar altogether, which we've already done with mobile device UIs. Which one is really the best? (Again, personally, as a KDE user, I actually prefer the menubar inside the application, but I'm under no illusion that my preference is "right", but rather my preference because I'm used to it. However, this doesn't extend to keyboards, where I switched to Dvorak 20 years ago, though I'm able to go back and forth easily.)
at least in Linux land, there is a tendancy to put the menu bar as something permanent on top (at least in Unity), but many desktops still keep the in-window menu bar.
You're twisting this; AFAIK, Unity is the *only* DE which does this; all the others don't. The way you've phrased this, you're implying that most Linux desktop uses use Unity, which is probably far from the truth (though it's pretty hard to tell since no one's done a good survey on which DEs are most popular on Linux, and they only go by the website visitation stats for particular websites).
The mouse is a useless thing in my honest opinion
And see here you are adopting a UI convention totally different than the vast majority of computer users, and even probably most Linux users. Not that you're wrong, but it's certainly not a popular opinion.
In any case, my point stands: if it works for the user, don't change it.
But different users have different preferences. Some people want to stick with the old tried-and-true because they're too lazy to learn something that might really be better. This doesn't make the old UI better, it just partially explains inertia. Other people want to switch to something different because they think it's better. Dvorak/Colemak users like me fall into this camp (at least for this one thing, it doesn't mean we do this for everything). On computers, this isn't really that hard if you use a system like KDE which is highly configurable. Almost every computer now lets you use Dvorak layouts, some DEs have more configurability than others, most let you change colors and such, some let you change fundamental things like single vs. double-click (KDE does this). Cars are different though; you can't just put the accelerator on the dashboard
One particular new UI sucking is not proof that all new UIs suck.
And just because we've done things a certain way for 30 years does not mean that's the best way to do things, it just means it has a lot of inertia.
You probably don't remember this, but back in the early 1900s, there was a lot of resistance to putting steering wheels in cars, because earlier cars had tillers. A lot of people thought they should just stick with tillers, because that's what had been used before and people were used to them. It's a good thing those people were ignored.
Finally, MacOS has been putting the menu bar for the active task at the top of the screen since probably before Windows ever came out. Why don't we just stick with that on all UIs? Or are you simply arguing that whatever UI you prefer is better?
We pollute a lot less than the industrial age,
We in western nations pollute less toxic stuff than back then, yes, but this isn't the case over in east Asia, where a lot of our products come from.
Also, planetwide, we pollute a LOT more with global-warming gases than we ever did. So we're burning stuff more cleanly, and we don't have soot all over our cities like late 1800s London, but that isn't helping the overall climate much. Don't forget that our population is a lot larger than it was 100 years ago.
As far as I can recall, tape backup systems have never been a consumer product. At least, I don't recall tape systems ever being marketed that way.
You must be young. Back in the 90s, we had "floppy tapes": QIC systems connected to the floppy connector on the motherboard, and with the correct software let you store 20MB or 40MB per tape (more with compression turned on). These were marketed to small businesses and high-end consumers. One of these tape drives didn't cost any more than a typical hard drive of the day.
Not with a $30 dock it isn't.
But the price for a single tape drive is beyond insane.
That's pretty easy; it's because of the volume it's sold in. All your consumer electronic gear would cost similar amounts if it sold in similar quantities. There's 1-3 orders of magnitude fewer tape drives sold than, say, laptop optical drives, so of course it's going to cost a lot more.
You might not remember this, but all this consumer computing gear used to cost a fortune too. I remember paying around $600-700 for a 14" monitor once, and $350 for an 80MB hard drive; this was around 1990, when a dollar was worth quite a bit more than it is now. Back then, a laptop cost probably a couple thousand dollars or more. These days, you can get a decent laptop for $500-1000, and a nice used laptop for $100-200.
Teenagers and 20-somethings have not been using these things that long; if you switch to a better UI, the youngest people will adopt it fastest and easiest. Just because you're 60 and have been using these paradigms for the last 25 years doesn't mean everyone is happy with them.
Classic keyboard layout optimization places commonly used keys close together to reduce finger motion
This is incorrect. Any decent optimization (on a normal keyboard) places the commonly used keys in the home row, and places them so that you're more likely to alternate hands between each keypress. Less-used keys go on the upper row, and the least-used keys go on the bottom row (which is harder to reach), but the overall goal is to alternate hands.
You're talking about it like it's some future sci-fi technology. It's not; it's already here. Google's self-driving cars have already driven many thousands of miles across the country, error-free, which is a lot better than probably any human driver can hope to achieve ("error-free" includes not committing any traffic infractions like illegal turns, tailgating, etc.).
Basically, you're arguing against something which is already proven.
I'm willing to accept the technological problem; it does seem far-fetched, but there's no guarantee that different civilizations will develop technologies in the same order as we have. Maybe they developed some kind of computer-to-mind technology that we never thought of, but never thought too much about exploring space or dealing with severe climate change until it was too late.
But the idea of putting a bunch of effort into this probe, which then only communicates with a single (to them) alien being and then burns out, just seems poorly thought out; if you want your culture to be remembered, you have to do it in a way that lasts longer than that and communicates to more beings. Of course, this is a planet where they developed such technology but couldn't figure out how to deal with climate change, so maybe they don't think things through too well....
No, I got it, but that episode always bugged me that way. Overall, it was a beautiful episode for sure, but you have to turn off part of your critical-thinking to enjoy it the most because of these bits. I wish they had changed the ending a bit so that the alien probe wasn't a one-shot deal, and so that other people could have the same experience and learn about the culture there. Maybe a line about Federation archeologists being able to repair the probe later?
That is a possibility, but I'd think it's pretty remote. How often do asteroids smash into the Moon these days? Yes, during the early days of the solar system, the Moon got bombarded, as we can see plainly on its surface, but these days most debris in the system seems to be cleared out, probably by Jupiter's gravity, so the airless Moon, free of tectonic activity, is probably a very safe place to put a monument which will stand undisturbed for eons.
Not polluting isn't really feasible as long as humans are alive and have civilization. If we were smarter, we could pollute a lot less, but we're stupid, short-sighted, and greedy in general, so that's not going to happen.
Pay better? Retail and fast food? Is this some kind of bad joke? Even a manager at McDonald's can only expect maybe $35k. Even the most incompetent or inexperienced STEM worker with a BS degree can easily get $50k. Retail and fast food pay poverty-level wages usually.
Finance, maybe, I really don't know much about that field, but it does seem like there's high salaries there. However, I would think those salaries would only go to people with degrees in finance. There are a lot of STEM jobs in finance, mainly programming, but that's still STEM, even though it's in the finance sector.
That was a truly awful way. It was a great episode I guess, as long as you didn't think too hard about the aliens and their probe: it somehow takes over some alien person's mind and makes them live a lifetime as one of them, all within a few minutes? How did they have the technology to figure that out? And then it burns out, so it can't be used on anyone else, so you're only told a single person (who may or may not care--luckily it wasn't the Klingons who found this probe), who now has nothing more than a little flute as evidence of the whole thing or their whole society. Any archeologists are out of luck, since the probe has burned itself out, so all knowledge of their society is dependent on one lucky person telling others orally about his experience in the mind-warp.