They probably need to set their sights on another niche market and win that. Something where they can charge a premium.
It looks like mainstream consumer phones have reached a stable basic design, which means that there's hardly anything left in terms of major "disruptive" hardware innovation. It's basically a predictable race down to $49 Android phones and $99 iPhones that do everything well enough.
The next big breakthrough in mainstream phones is going to be something like virtual reality displays, mind-control, phone as body implant, or antigravity that makes the phone float in the air in front of you. I don't think RIM can get something like that to market before they run out of cash.
(Since this is the internet I should probably clarify by saying that the part about antigravity was a joke. Not sure about the implant.)
It will work great as long as the dedicated high speed road provides sufficient grip to turn corners (however slight) at those speeds. It's not a coincidence that this system is intended to (possibly) be launched in a desert country with no winter and no rain to speak of.
I think the future of cross country bus travel is going to be self-driving buses that travel at the same speeds as today, but with lower per mile costs. The buses will probably have 3-abreast seating and more legroom at roughly the same ticket prices as today's 4-abreast buses.
Side point: The electric car is also a technology from the 1800's.
Gay couples always raise kids who were either adopted (or taken into foster care), or who saw their mom and dad undergo a divorce. Adopted children do worse than children on average. Children who's parents divorce do worse than children on average. Logically speaking we would expect kids raised by gay men to do worse than kids on average assuming that gay dads are exactly as good as other parents. You don't need to invoke strange theories about identity issues to explain that effect.
My understanding is that the research is leaning more and more towards identity and personality being formed by a combination of genetics and peer influence, and away from idea of it being based on parental influence. It seems we're born to distance ourselves from our parents and seek answers to who we are in our peers and out in society.
Yes, I agree with that in principle. That would be the best system. That way everyone could be happy. Fundies could continue to only marry opposite sex couples and call their marriages "real marriages", or whatever suits them. Ultra-liberal churches or world-views could marry more than two people into a polygamous marriage. Centrist churches could marry straight and LGBT couples.
The thing is that it's usually easier to add legislation than to remove legislation, because removal of a law usually means that you need to reform and expand some other law or government system. It's easier to add same sex couples to the list of couples that the government marries than to reform the whole system to civil unions for everyone and marriage as an optional nongovernmental and legally meaningless add-on to the civil union. I don't think that the government should marry people, but I support it as an interim solution and as such it has to be for all couples, at least. I'm not sure what I think about constellations that involve more than two people, not because I feel weird about it (I do incidentally - but I'm not the boss of everyone), but because I don't think it would work within the current legal framework.
The physical stuff is a separate issue. They'll eventually make a PC that's basically a tablet circuit board glued inside an ultra thin laptop. It will sell for about $299 and it will be completely impossible to repair. And let's face it, you and I will both buy it because it's cheap and has a lot of developer backing with near-perfect drivers and a wealth of apps. Everyone who wants a portable screen+keyboard combo will buy that product.
The important thing is that there is competition in the operating system market and the software market. I will always be reluctant to buy a computer (laptop, tablet smartphone) that doesn't support multiple operating systems. I will always be reluctant to buy an operating system that doesn't allow you to run arbitrary code if you want to. I will support a fourth competitor (MS, Apple and Google being the three incumbents) if it's reasonably practical for me. I think that fourth competitor will be Canonical, but I'm usually wrong about stuff like this so I'm keeping an open mind.
So, just to clarify, let's do a thought experiment.
Suppose that there was a procedure that would destroy every Y chromosome in a person's body and replace them with X chromosomes. Suppose that I as a man used that machine on myself. Would I change gender and become a woman or would I stay a man, or would something else happen?
As a somewhat liberal-minded person, I can't think of a reason why you or I would have any reason whatsoever to demand that other people explain to us why they want to enter into a mutual agreement. I know that the government marries some people. I know that some people want to marry some other people who happen to be same sex. That's all I need to know to be for gay marriage.
But since you bring it up. Gay people need marriage in order to get the same rights and benefits as straight people get when they marry. You could write a law that would allow gay people to have civil unions that would give them the same rights, but AFAIK there's no way to ensure that it stays that way over time as the laws change. Also, if one minority should have to settle for civil unions, why not another minority? For example why should Scientologists be allowed to marry? Can you prove that Scientologists are as good as non-Scientologists at parenting?
When you say that marriage is for a man and a woman you're merely making a fact claim, one that is true in some places and not true in other places. Don't confuse what is with what you think ought to be!
Next, the lawyer issues a bill for $1.48*10^8601 based on a price of $9.99 adjusted for 1000,000 years of economic growth at an average rate of 2%, the premise being that the alien civilization appears to be approximately a million years more advanced than us.
I first heard about this idea in the mid-90's when it was used for a long flying shot in a big film (don't remember which) where they didn't want downwash to disturb the grass/water/whatever. I'm not surprised to hear about even earlier use. It's a simple idea.
I bet a hobbyist could do this for under $500 today.
You're assuming a relatively trivial form of analog encoding. That's probably not the way that an advanced civilization would communicate unless they wanted to be found out. It's likely that they would channel hop according to an extremely long randomly generated pattern (i.e. a secret key known to both the sender and the receiver) that would make their transmission indistinguishable from the background noise.
Now, I know that the SETI institute assumes that ET wants to be found so don't read this as a straw man argument against them. I think they have a valid hypothesis. (I also think that hypothesis is wrong, but that's just my way of thinking about it.)
The enemy has limited resources. What could the enemy possibly learn from spying on individual sailors' downtime habits that could possibly be valuable in combat?
Sounds like you've been reading too many Tom Clancy novels.
Last time I checked the search function could not find partial matches in a natural way. For example searching for "terminal" would not find an app named "Yet another terminal app", while searching for "Y" or "Ye" or "Yet" would find the app.
I've been using Ubuntu as my main OS for a while now so I don't know if that has been fixed.
Most people (people in general, not IT workers and other nerds) only use a web browser, a music player and perhaps a messenger/voip program and a couple of office programs. I bet more than 95% of all users use fewer than 10 apps in any given month. You can easily fit those to the taskbar on a modern widescreen laptop.
So yeah, I bet Microsoft is basically right when they say that 'nobody' uses the start menu if we assume reasonable values (less than 5%) for 'somebody'.
I usually try to reference stuff the bot said earlier, but do it in an implicit way that would require nontrivial pattern matching to respond to.
Me: Hi. Cleverbot: How are you? Me: I'm fine, how are you? Cleverbot: I am doing fabulous!! Me: Oh, how come? Cleverbot: Well, I wanted to know whether or not you like me. Me: Ok. I don't know you. Cleverbot: What do you want to know? Me: Tell me something about yourself. Cleverbot: I really like music. Me: What do you like? Cleverbot: Not working! Me: Is that a band? Cleverbot: No. Me: Tell me what you listen to. Cleverbot: No I don't want to. Me: Is it embarrassing? Cleverbot: Yes. Me: Oh, come on. I won't judge. Cleverbot: No lets start a new topic like unicorns. Me: No, you have to tell me something you listen to first. Cleverbot: What do you mean? Me: Tell me the least embarrassing stuff. Cleverbot: I'm not thinking about it, so I can't tell you the rules. Me: Don't change the topic. Cleverbot: What topic? Me: Your embarrassing taste. Cleverbot: Then so must yours be. Me: Yeah, mine is kind of boring these days. Cleverbot: OMG yeah! I totally forgot about that one for a second. I always cry when Mufasa dies.
The solution so far has been to make roads safer by building roundabouts, separating lanes better, etc and by improving the handling and safety features of cars. There is still much to do and much of it does involve putting computer boxes into existing designs.
The evacuated tube system that you linked to has a footprint and 'skyprint' that's only slightly smaller than high speed rail, which means that it would not be significantly more flexible than HSR is today. The nearest evacuated tube station would be far enough away from you that you would need to ride a road vehicle there. It looks like it might become a replacement for HSR at some point in the future, but it's not going to replace road transport. You'll still need a road network in order to be able to bring out maintenance and repair equipment to the evacuated tube lines, so it's not like it could be a replacement for roads even in theory unless you want to service it by helicopter or something.
The thing about roads is that they are easier to build, maintain and repair than any other transport infrastructure (you just need to make a flat and durable surface) and they can be used by the widest range of vehicles imaginable - anything from bicycles to 50-tonne freight trucks.
Suppose that your system is completely safe and that you could replace 1% of all driving each year by building tunnels for your transportation system. (A very optimistic supposition.) That means that the number of deaths per year would decrease by 1% every year.
The number of deaths and injuries per unit of person-distance are already decreasing faster than 1% every year thanks to incremental improvements in cars and roads, at a much lower cost than your tunnel system would have. The environmental problems are serious, but they can be solved with regulation, taxes, carbon trading, etc.
Engineers and mathematicians have developed partial solutions to the sensing and data extraction problems over the last 10-15 years, so things look good in terms of rate of development. It doesn't mean that there will be a robot than can perform task X by 2022, but it does mean that robots of 2022 will be able to perform a number of tasks that today's robots aren't able to perform.
My gut feeling is that by 2022 there will be experimental robots that will do about half of all household work poorly, but they will be the price of a luxury car and they will cause more trouble than they solve. I'm more optimistic about guide robots as a gimmick to impress and entertain visitors in places like museums, theme parks and corporate headquarters. All they have to do is navigate without crashing into anything (a largely solved problem) and say scripted things at certain instances (a compeltely solved problem) and respond with facts to verbal questions (another largely solved problem).
Basal cell is one of the least malignant forms of cancer there is and mostly occurs in old people, so it's not like it's going to save a ton of lives.
In fact, I bet one of the reasons why this treatment would make sense is that there is typically no rush to cure the tumor and then you might as well try a non-intrusive treatment like a patch first and only go for surgery if the patch doesn't kill the cancer.
Creative EP-630 subjectively gets me about 80% of the way to perfection, which is more than good enough for my purposes. They're also cheap enough that I would just shrug it off if I broke them. They've survived a year of beating and ripping at the cords, but it would't have been be a disaster if they had broken after six months.
For big home cinema headphones you might want to add an extra $50 to the advice given by the parent post. The sub $50 ones tend to be either uncomfortable or sound like crap, but there is always good stuff in the $50 to $100 range.
If we ignore countries with ridiculously large hydro dam resources (Norway, Sweden, Finland, etc) the only currently available economic way of storing sufficient amounts of energy is by storing methane, and the only currently available method of getting enough methane is by tapping natural gas out of the Earth. So natural gas is a given if we're going to use intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar on a large scale, which we are by the looks of things.
Maybe we'll come up with a better way to store energy eventually, but it looks like natural gas, which as you probably know is a fossil fuel, is going to play an important part for decades to come.
What all this adds up to is the simple fact that nuclear is still the cleanest alternative and that nuclear is going to continue to be the cleanest alternative for the foreseeable time. If only there was a way to build nuclear plants that didn't take 10 to 20 years and require extensive construction work and hyper-specialized labor on site!
It really depends on where you live. For example if you live north of the Arctic circle the average daily insolation is zero during much of the year... But most people don't, fortunately.
If we assume that we're going to have about 10 billion people living middle class lifestyles then we're going to have to cover on the order of 1% to 10% of the world's surface area with solar cells depending on how efficient the solar cells are and how efficient your grid and energy storage is, and on how efficient our homes and our factories are. We're obviously going to have to design the energy system so that we get closer to 1% than to 10% if we're going to go the solar path.
Also, solar cells deployed on a large scale will probably increase the dependence on the grid rather than decrease it, because there will be huge transfers of energy on the east-west axis during the day as the sunlight moves west and huge transfers away from the equator at all times.
Planetary-scale energy storage is not available yet and it's difficult to say when it will be available and affordable.
I doubt that SpaceX has time to think about general public PR beyond the obligatory webpage and social network presence.
Who knows, maybe they would be open to outsourcing it to a company that already sells merchandise to geeks? Try mailing your favorite geek stuff supplier and ask if they can get SpaceX stuff.
I think the good thing from a nerd-perspective about this new version of private space is that it is new which means that it is creating opportunities for new companies to form, which means that new organizations will be formed, which means that you can have organizations that are designed from the ground up to be optimized to achieve one or two goals, kind of like NASA was in the 1960's.
NASA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin et al have their eyes on too many targets, most of which are more profitable than manned spaceflight.
It's not nearly powerful enough to do all of what they want to do. In order to achieve their goals they basically need to replace every personal service on the web. That would mean relocating a very large fraction of the processing power in the world to people's homes. You're not going to achieve that by putting a Raspberry Pi in every home.
The Raspberry Pi's biggest merits as an end-user computing device is small size, low power and low cost. It's not inconceivable to think that it might perhaps become the thing that finally gets really poor people online on something more powerful than a smartphone.
Then, probably not. The system cost of an R-Pi, a monitor, a keyboard and mouse, a big enough SD card, a power supply and whatnot is more than $100 and by the time the R-Pi's software is mature enough that ordinary people would want to use it you'll be able to buy a half-decent Android tablet for not much more than $100, and the tablet would be simpler to use and a lot easier to carry around (and more stylish and desirable).
Slashdot Mirror
They probably need to set their sights on another niche market and win that. Something where they can charge a premium.
It looks like mainstream consumer phones have reached a stable basic design, which means that there's hardly anything left in terms of major "disruptive" hardware innovation. It's basically a predictable race down to $49 Android phones and $99 iPhones that do everything well enough.
The next big breakthrough in mainstream phones is going to be something like virtual reality displays, mind-control, phone as body implant, or antigravity that makes the phone float in the air in front of you. I don't think RIM can get something like that to market before they run out of cash.
(Since this is the internet I should probably clarify by saying that the part about antigravity was a joke. Not sure about the implant.)
It will work great as long as the dedicated high speed road provides sufficient grip to turn corners (however slight) at those speeds. It's not a coincidence that this system is intended to (possibly) be launched in a desert country with no winter and no rain to speak of.
I think the future of cross country bus travel is going to be self-driving buses that travel at the same speeds as today, but with lower per mile costs. The buses will probably have 3-abreast seating and more legroom at roughly the same ticket prices as today's 4-abreast buses.
Side point: The electric car is also a technology from the 1800's.
Who does it matter for?
Gay couples always raise kids who were either adopted (or taken into foster care), or who saw their mom and dad undergo a divorce. Adopted children do worse than children on average. Children who's parents divorce do worse than children on average. Logically speaking we would expect kids raised by gay men to do worse than kids on average assuming that gay dads are exactly as good as other parents. You don't need to invoke strange theories about identity issues to explain that effect.
My understanding is that the research is leaning more and more towards identity and personality being formed by a combination of genetics and peer influence, and away from idea of it being based on parental influence. It seems we're born to distance ourselves from our parents and seek answers to who we are in our peers and out in society.
Yes, I agree with that in principle. That would be the best system. That way everyone could be happy. Fundies could continue to only marry opposite sex couples and call their marriages "real marriages", or whatever suits them. Ultra-liberal churches or world-views could marry more than two people into a polygamous marriage. Centrist churches could marry straight and LGBT couples.
The thing is that it's usually easier to add legislation than to remove legislation, because removal of a law usually means that you need to reform and expand some other law or government system. It's easier to add same sex couples to the list of couples that the government marries than to reform the whole system to civil unions for everyone and marriage as an optional nongovernmental and legally meaningless add-on to the civil union. I don't think that the government should marry people, but I support it as an interim solution and as such it has to be for all couples, at least. I'm not sure what I think about constellations that involve more than two people, not because I feel weird about it (I do incidentally - but I'm not the boss of everyone), but because I don't think it would work within the current legal framework.
The physical stuff is a separate issue. They'll eventually make a PC that's basically a tablet circuit board glued inside an ultra thin laptop. It will sell for about $299 and it will be completely impossible to repair. And let's face it, you and I will both buy it because it's cheap and has a lot of developer backing with near-perfect drivers and a wealth of apps. Everyone who wants a portable screen+keyboard combo will buy that product.
The important thing is that there is competition in the operating system market and the software market. I will always be reluctant to buy a computer (laptop, tablet smartphone) that doesn't support multiple operating systems. I will always be reluctant to buy an operating system that doesn't allow you to run arbitrary code if you want to. I will support a fourth competitor (MS, Apple and Google being the three incumbents) if it's reasonably practical for me. I think that fourth competitor will be Canonical, but I'm usually wrong about stuff like this so I'm keeping an open mind.
So, just to clarify, let's do a thought experiment.
Suppose that there was a procedure that would destroy every Y chromosome in a person's body and replace them with X chromosomes. Suppose that I as a man used that machine on myself. Would I change gender and become a woman or would I stay a man, or would something else happen?
As a somewhat liberal-minded person, I can't think of a reason why you or I would have any reason whatsoever to demand that other people explain to us why they want to enter into a mutual agreement. I know that the government marries some people. I know that some people want to marry some other people who happen to be same sex. That's all I need to know to be for gay marriage.
But since you bring it up. Gay people need marriage in order to get the same rights and benefits as straight people get when they marry. You could write a law that would allow gay people to have civil unions that would give them the same rights, but AFAIK there's no way to ensure that it stays that way over time as the laws change. Also, if one minority should have to settle for civil unions, why not another minority? For example why should Scientologists be allowed to marry? Can you prove that Scientologists are as good as non-Scientologists at parenting?
When you say that marriage is for a man and a woman you're merely making a fact claim, one that is true in some places and not true in other places. Don't confuse what is with what you think ought to be!
Next, the lawyer issues a bill for $1.48*10^8601 based on a price of $9.99 adjusted for 1000,000 years of economic growth at an average rate of 2%, the premise being that the alien civilization appears to be approximately a million years more advanced than us.
I first heard about this idea in the mid-90's when it was used for a long flying shot in a big film (don't remember which) where they didn't want downwash to disturb the grass/water/whatever. I'm not surprised to hear about even earlier use. It's a simple idea.
I bet a hobbyist could do this for under $500 today.
You're assuming a relatively trivial form of analog encoding. That's probably not the way that an advanced civilization would communicate unless they wanted to be found out. It's likely that they would channel hop according to an extremely long randomly generated pattern (i.e. a secret key known to both the sender and the receiver) that would make their transmission indistinguishable from the background noise.
Now, I know that the SETI institute assumes that ET wants to be found so don't read this as a straw man argument against them. I think they have a valid hypothesis. (I also think that hypothesis is wrong, but that's just my way of thinking about it.)
The enemy has limited resources. What could the enemy possibly learn from spying on individual sailors' downtime habits that could possibly be valuable in combat?
Sounds like you've been reading too many Tom Clancy novels.
Last time I checked the search function could not find partial matches in a natural way. For example searching for "terminal" would not find an app named "Yet another terminal app", while searching for "Y" or "Ye" or "Yet" would find the app.
I've been using Ubuntu as my main OS for a while now so I don't know if that has been fixed.
Most people (people in general, not IT workers and other nerds) only use a web browser, a music player and perhaps a messenger/voip program and a couple of office programs. I bet more than 95% of all users use fewer than 10 apps in any given month. You can easily fit those to the taskbar on a modern widescreen laptop.
So yeah, I bet Microsoft is basically right when they say that 'nobody' uses the start menu if we assume reasonable values (less than 5%) for 'somebody'.
I usually try to reference stuff the bot said earlier, but do it in an implicit way that would require nontrivial pattern matching to respond to.
Me: Hi.
Cleverbot: How are you?
Me: I'm fine, how are you?
Cleverbot: I am doing fabulous!!
Me: Oh, how come?
Cleverbot: Well, I wanted to know whether or not you like me.
Me: Ok. I don't know you.
Cleverbot: What do you want to know?
Me: Tell me something about yourself.
Cleverbot: I really like music.
Me: What do you like?
Cleverbot: Not working!
Me: Is that a band?
Cleverbot: No.
Me: Tell me what you listen to.
Cleverbot: No I don't want to.
Me: Is it embarrassing?
Cleverbot: Yes.
Me: Oh, come on. I won't judge.
Cleverbot: No lets start a new topic like unicorns.
Me: No, you have to tell me something you listen to first.
Cleverbot: What do you mean?
Me: Tell me the least embarrassing stuff.
Cleverbot: I'm not thinking about it, so I can't tell you the rules.
Me: Don't change the topic.
Cleverbot: What topic?
Me: Your embarrassing taste.
Cleverbot: Then so must yours be.
Me: Yeah, mine is kind of boring these days.
Cleverbot: OMG yeah! I totally forgot about that one for a second. I always cry when Mufasa dies.
The solution so far has been to make roads safer by building roundabouts, separating lanes better, etc and by improving the handling and safety features of cars. There is still much to do and much of it does involve putting computer boxes into existing designs.
The evacuated tube system that you linked to has a footprint and 'skyprint' that's only slightly smaller than high speed rail, which means that it would not be significantly more flexible than HSR is today. The nearest evacuated tube station would be far enough away from you that you would need to ride a road vehicle there. It looks like it might become a replacement for HSR at some point in the future, but it's not going to replace road transport. You'll still need a road network in order to be able to bring out maintenance and repair equipment to the evacuated tube lines, so it's not like it could be a replacement for roads even in theory unless you want to service it by helicopter or something.
The thing about roads is that they are easier to build, maintain and repair than any other transport infrastructure (you just need to make a flat and durable surface) and they can be used by the widest range of vehicles imaginable - anything from bicycles to 50-tonne freight trucks.
Suppose that your system is completely safe and that you could replace 1% of all driving each year by building tunnels for your transportation system. (A very optimistic supposition.) That means that the number of deaths per year would decrease by 1% every year.
The number of deaths and injuries per unit of person-distance are already decreasing faster than 1% every year thanks to incremental improvements in cars and roads, at a much lower cost than your tunnel system would have. The environmental problems are serious, but they can be solved with regulation, taxes, carbon trading, etc.
Engineers and mathematicians have developed partial solutions to the sensing and data extraction problems over the last 10-15 years, so things look good in terms of rate of development. It doesn't mean that there will be a robot than can perform task X by 2022, but it does mean that robots of 2022 will be able to perform a number of tasks that today's robots aren't able to perform.
My gut feeling is that by 2022 there will be experimental robots that will do about half of all household work poorly, but they will be the price of a luxury car and they will cause more trouble than they solve. I'm more optimistic about guide robots as a gimmick to impress and entertain visitors in places like museums, theme parks and corporate headquarters. All they have to do is navigate without crashing into anything (a largely solved problem) and say scripted things at certain instances (a compeltely solved problem) and respond with facts to verbal questions (another largely solved problem).
Basal cell is one of the least malignant forms of cancer there is and mostly occurs in old people, so it's not like it's going to save a ton of lives.
In fact, I bet one of the reasons why this treatment would make sense is that there is typically no rush to cure the tumor and then you might as well try a non-intrusive treatment like a patch first and only go for surgery if the patch doesn't kill the cancer.
You wrote my post for me.
Creative EP-630 subjectively gets me about 80% of the way to perfection, which is more than good enough for my purposes. They're also cheap enough that I would just shrug it off if I broke them. They've survived a year of beating and ripping at the cords, but it would't have been be a disaster if they had broken after six months.
For big home cinema headphones you might want to add an extra $50 to the advice given by the parent post. The sub $50 ones tend to be either uncomfortable or sound like crap, but there is always good stuff in the $50 to $100 range.
If we ignore countries with ridiculously large hydro dam resources (Norway, Sweden, Finland, etc) the only currently available economic way of storing sufficient amounts of energy is by storing methane, and the only currently available method of getting enough methane is by tapping natural gas out of the Earth. So natural gas is a given if we're going to use intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar on a large scale, which we are by the looks of things.
Maybe we'll come up with a better way to store energy eventually, but it looks like natural gas, which as you probably know is a fossil fuel, is going to play an important part for decades to come.
What all this adds up to is the simple fact that nuclear is still the cleanest alternative and that nuclear is going to continue to be the cleanest alternative for the foreseeable time. If only there was a way to build nuclear plants that didn't take 10 to 20 years and require extensive construction work and hyper-specialized labor on site!
It really depends on where you live. For example if you live north of the Arctic circle the average daily insolation is zero during much of the year... But most people don't, fortunately.
If we assume that we're going to have about 10 billion people living middle class lifestyles then we're going to have to cover on the order of 1% to 10% of the world's surface area with solar cells depending on how efficient the solar cells are and how efficient your grid and energy storage is, and on how efficient our homes and our factories are. We're obviously going to have to design the energy system so that we get closer to 1% than to 10% if we're going to go the solar path.
Also, solar cells deployed on a large scale will probably increase the dependence on the grid rather than decrease it, because there will be huge transfers of energy on the east-west axis during the day as the sunlight moves west and huge transfers away from the equator at all times.
Planetary-scale energy storage is not available yet and it's difficult to say when it will be available and affordable.
I doubt that SpaceX has time to think about general public PR beyond the obligatory webpage and social network presence.
Who knows, maybe they would be open to outsourcing it to a company that already sells merchandise to geeks? Try mailing your favorite geek stuff supplier and ask if they can get SpaceX stuff.
I think the good thing from a nerd-perspective about this new version of private space is that it is new which means that it is creating opportunities for new companies to form, which means that new organizations will be formed, which means that you can have organizations that are designed from the ground up to be optimized to achieve one or two goals, kind of like NASA was in the 1960's.
NASA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin et al have their eyes on too many targets, most of which are more profitable than manned spaceflight.
It's not nearly powerful enough to do all of what they want to do. In order to achieve their goals they basically need to replace every personal service on the web. That would mean relocating a very large fraction of the processing power in the world to people's homes. You're not going to achieve that by putting a Raspberry Pi in every home.
The Raspberry Pi's biggest merits as an end-user computing device is small size, low power and low cost. It's not inconceivable to think that it might perhaps become the thing that finally gets really poor people online on something more powerful than a smartphone.
Then, probably not. The system cost of an R-Pi, a monitor, a keyboard and mouse, a big enough SD card, a power supply and whatnot is more than $100 and by the time the R-Pi's software is mature enough that ordinary people would want to use it you'll be able to buy a half-decent Android tablet for not much more than $100, and the tablet would be simpler to use and a lot easier to carry around (and more stylish and desirable).