As an organisation accredited to be following PCI-DSS, we would be crucified if the PCI auditor found us holding the PAN (the long number on the front of your credit card, PAN = primary account number) in plain text. Surely the airlines/booking agents should not be passing the PAN to anyone else if they are following PCI-DSS (which is mandatory if you want to accept card payments)?
You might not be terrible at math. I thought I was terrible at math (I'm also a software developer). I also thought I was only good at discrete mathematics (which was a course I took during my university degree, heavily related to programming and CS). Furthermore I thought I was terrible at learning human languages, after having had 7 years of compulsory French at school and not being able to form a coherent sentence in French.
It turned out I was wrong on two counts:
A while back I started learning Spanish. The way I was being taught now was in a fun and easy way. I was also self motivated. In six months after starting, I could actually use some of it and knew more Spanish than I did French from 7 years of French lessons. 14 months after starting I was giving a technical talk in Spain (with an admittedly terrible accent and many grammar errors). Later today I'm off to Spain to help organise RetroEuskal with a bunch of Spanish friends. I started learning Spanish in my mid-30s, not as a kid. I learned it far faster than I would have as a child.
More recently I realised I needed better mathematics skills to be able to do more complex things in my electronics hobby, so I took an algebra course on Coursera. At school I had pretty much flat out failed algebra. In fact I was put into the lower maths set with all the thick kids (where you could only score a C at most in the GCSE, the exam we take at age 16) because both myself and my teachers were convinced that I was bad at the subject. But doing algebra in a course that was interactive, fun and gave instant results - I passed that with a distinction. I then did a pre-calculus course, and passed that with a distinction. I then did Jim Fowler's (Ohio State University) calculus 1 course on Coursera and passed that with a distinction too.
So it turns out that I was wrong about myself. In reality I was not bad at maths nor human languages. Now I admit I will probably never be a mathematician or linguist, but I can now do two things I never thought I ever would be able to. The reason I never succeeded at these things at school was because they were taught in a very boring and overly complex manner, and I was also pathologically lazy and didn't pay enough attention. The reason I succeeded now is due to having more motivation to do it and being exposed to teaching methods that inspire, and that aren't just hours of boredom.
Furthermore, while I don't usually use calculus or algebra in my day job, I have found that learning these things has improved the way I approach a problem.
None of the stuff he lists is particularly time expensive.
Cooking? It's fun anyway, and there's no need to cook a five star gourmet meal every meal. Most days just simple, good tasting food - 5 or 10 minutes prep and cooking time.
Car? Even an old car doesn't need that much time spent on it. I've just finished with my nearly 20 year old Audi, I spent about an hour or two PER YEAR on maintenance.
Not buying shit? This actually gives you MORE time not less since you're not driving to and from a shop and browsing for stuff you probably don't actually need.
I'm probably wrong - but a quick back of the envelope calculation would suggest the Shannon limit for a 6MHz channel with SNR of 28 would only be of the order of 20Mbit/sec
You must be unusual. I cycled an hour to work today (and it's not flat, it's hilly where I live, and today is unusually warm). I'm not even in particularly great shape at the moment so I'm having to work harder than usual on the bike. It's over 80 degrees in our definitely NOT climate controlled office, and I did not sweat for hours afterwards.
You miss out one innovation - Talgo rolling stock. The company by that name in the Basque country (Spain) developed a lightweight, low CofG articulated train that could efficiently run at high speeds (Talgo is an anacronym - Tren Articulado Ligero Goicoechea Oriol - Lightweight Articulated Train by Golcechea Oriol). The current Talgo designed high speed units run up to 320km/h (just over 190 mph) and have an entirely passive tilting mechanism. The wheelsets are connected via the roof of each vehicle so the car will naturally lean into a corner without requiring the complex electronic controls that dogged the British APT experiment (incidentally the APT technology ended up being sold to the Italians who now use it in the Pendolino trains)
I'd say it's debatable that it was a train - it looks like just a light loco (nothing was coupled to it). You need at least two coupled vehicles to go from light loco to train.
The thing is the jet train - now I appreciate the effort and it is pretty cool - wasn't a train at all, it was just a light locomotive. The Mallard record was done with a train. It wasn't just a light loco, there were other vehicles coupled to the Mallard when it did the 125mph run.
The whole problem is UX designers exist. I don't want a user experience. If a user interface is giving me an experience, it's getting in the way of what I want to do. User interfaces should melt into the background and explicitly NOT give me an experience. I should barely notice the user interface.
We need to get rid of UX designers and replace them with competent UI designers instead.
Search is more efficient when you know what you're looking for. The big deal about the start menu is that it is discoverable (and it's discoverable without being jarring, or having a "user experience").
Not any more. I use my laptop for gaming (I plug it in when I get home). It gets 4 hours battery life when away from the charger, and is too thin to have an optical drive. You've not needed to buy a monstrous Alienware do game for a long time now. Sure there might be one or two games that will not run well enough, but fortunately they aren't the games I'm interested in.
This. I've noted that most people care more about their hair looking nice than frugal energy use. Some people who live within comfortable cycling distance of their job for example are all excited about the energy they can save when the next innovation that's only 20 years away in solar panel technology makes roof solar panels cheaper. However, they can save the same amount of energy today by riding into work twice a week on average - but they say "it'll mess up my hair" or some such excuse.
So really the only solution will be technology because people don't even want to make minor lifestyle changes.
The other thing is from an individual point of view you can live off the grid in a tent but it won't make any difference. Even if your whole country starts living in a tent off the grid it won't make a big change. So why live in extreme discomfort when it won't make any difference, anyway? Instead we need to accept that people will not modify their habits and do something like perhaps cut military spending a smidgeon and direct it into a Manhattan-project style push for better technology for generating power and for using it more efficiently.
There are still some things to solve for the cashless society.
1. Electronic transactions are still far too expensive. Every shop I go into to get (say) my lunch have a minimum amount you have to spend before you can use your debit card (or you have to pay a surcharge). My lunch always falls below this value so I must use cash. Things like vending machines too. Until it's cheap enough to use something like a debit card to buy an item costing 60p, then you'll still need cash. 2. Security. Debit/credit cards are too insecure, and the burden of making them secure is on the merchant in the form of PCI-DSS. It means if you're a small business taking debit/credit might not be an option. The burger van in the car park for instance, it's still impractical for him to take electronic transactions due to the equipment requirements and PCI-DSS. 3. Very hard to settle private debts. For instance if I hire a builder for a small job, he now has to give me all his bank details if I'm to do an electronic transfer. It's about 100 times easier to give him cash.
It wasn't a sensible comment for anyone who could see the writing on the wall. If you weren't in academentia, you could see that it wouldn't be long before personal computers would have more than one process active at a time.
The parent wasn't quite right, in reality software flies your airplane 100% of your journey right now.
Modern Boeing and Airbus designs are pure fly by wire. 100% of the time you fly it though software. The engines are FADEC (full authority digital engine controls).
Autoland has been a thing since the early 70s. The first aircraft to have it, the Hawker Siddeley Trident 3 (an aircraft similar to the Boeing 727 in layout - three engines at the back of the aircraft and T-tailed) was flying autolandings in pretty much zero visibility decades ago.
Since all modern large airliners are fly by wire, you're screwed anyway.
Airliners have multiple redundant power buses. Each engine has a generator, and there is also an APU (auxilliary power unit) which has a generator. If all three fail (for example, because the plane ran out of fuel, it's happened, or flies through a flock of Canada geese and loses all engines and for some reason the APU won't start) there is a ram air turbine that sticks out into the airflow and powers a generator. There is also a mandated amount of reserve battery power. Talking of losing all engine power, the Airbus A320 that went in the Hudson has purely electronic controls, and remained controllable after a double engine failure.
They glide much better than a brick. I think a typical airliner has something like a 16:1 glide ratio so from a cruise heigh of 11km could glide 176km (over 100 miles).
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Well, my current employer is happy for me to use work time to do Coursera courses related to my job.
As an organisation accredited to be following PCI-DSS, we would be crucified if the PCI auditor found us holding the PAN (the long number on the front of your credit card, PAN = primary account number) in plain text. Surely the airlines/booking agents should not be passing the PAN to anyone else if they are following PCI-DSS (which is mandatory if you want to accept card payments)?
You might not be terrible at math. I thought I was terrible at math (I'm also a software developer). I also thought I was only good at discrete mathematics (which was a course I took during my university degree, heavily related to programming and CS). Furthermore I thought I was terrible at learning human languages, after having had 7 years of compulsory French at school and not being able to form a coherent sentence in French.
It turned out I was wrong on two counts:
A while back I started learning Spanish. The way I was being taught now was in a fun and easy way. I was also self motivated. In six months after starting, I could actually use some of it and knew more Spanish than I did French from 7 years of French lessons. 14 months after starting I was giving a technical talk in Spain (with an admittedly terrible accent and many grammar errors). Later today I'm off to Spain to help organise RetroEuskal with a bunch of Spanish friends. I started learning Spanish in my mid-30s, not as a kid. I learned it far faster than I would have as a child.
More recently I realised I needed better mathematics skills to be able to do more complex things in my electronics hobby, so I took an algebra course on Coursera. At school I had pretty much flat out failed algebra. In fact I was put into the lower maths set with all the thick kids (where you could only score a C at most in the GCSE, the exam we take at age 16) because both myself and my teachers were convinced that I was bad at the subject. But doing algebra in a course that was interactive, fun and gave instant results - I passed that with a distinction. I then did a pre-calculus course, and passed that with a distinction. I then did Jim Fowler's (Ohio State University) calculus 1 course on Coursera and passed that with a distinction too.
So it turns out that I was wrong about myself. In reality I was not bad at maths nor human languages. Now I admit I will probably never be a mathematician or linguist, but I can now do two things I never thought I ever would be able to. The reason I never succeeded at these things at school was because they were taught in a very boring and overly complex manner, and I was also pathologically lazy and didn't pay enough attention. The reason I succeeded now is due to having more motivation to do it and being exposed to teaching methods that inspire, and that aren't just hours of boredom.
Furthermore, while I don't usually use calculus or algebra in my day job, I have found that learning these things has improved the way I approach a problem.
It's easy to say this when it won't be your grandmother who is freezing to death this winter because the Russians turned off the gas.
But they are Nokia employees, the majority of which are in Finland. They don't have H-1B visas in Finland.
None of the stuff he lists is particularly time expensive.
Cooking? It's fun anyway, and there's no need to cook a five star gourmet meal every meal. Most days just simple, good tasting food - 5 or 10 minutes prep and cooking time.
Car? Even an old car doesn't need that much time spent on it. I've just finished with my nearly 20 year old Audi, I spent about an hour or two PER YEAR on maintenance.
Not buying shit? This actually gives you MORE time not less since you're not driving to and from a shop and browsing for stuff you probably don't actually need.
I'm probably wrong - but a quick back of the envelope calculation would suggest the Shannon limit for a 6MHz channel with SNR of 28 would only be of the order of 20Mbit/sec
OS X is still discoverable. It has the functionally equivalent Applications folder in the finder.
It's probably still safer than the risks of not having enough exercise.
You must be unusual. I cycled an hour to work today (and it's not flat, it's hilly where I live, and today is unusually warm). I'm not even in particularly great shape at the moment so I'm having to work harder than usual on the bike. It's over 80 degrees in our definitely NOT climate controlled office, and I did not sweat for hours afterwards.
You miss out one innovation - Talgo rolling stock. The company by that name in the Basque country (Spain) developed a lightweight, low CofG articulated train that could efficiently run at high speeds (Talgo is an anacronym - Tren Articulado Ligero Goicoechea Oriol - Lightweight Articulated Train by Golcechea Oriol). The current Talgo designed high speed units run up to 320km/h (just over 190 mph) and have an entirely passive tilting mechanism. The wheelsets are connected via the roof of each vehicle so the car will naturally lean into a corner without requiring the complex electronic controls that dogged the British APT experiment (incidentally the APT technology ended up being sold to the Italians who now use it in the Pendolino trains)
I'd say it's debatable that it was a train - it looks like just a light loco (nothing was coupled to it). You need at least two coupled vehicles to go from light loco to train.
The thing is the jet train - now I appreciate the effort and it is pretty cool - wasn't a train at all, it was just a light locomotive. The Mallard record was done with a train. It wasn't just a light loco, there were other vehicles coupled to the Mallard when it did the 125mph run.
The whole problem is UX designers exist. I don't want a user experience. If a user interface is giving me an experience, it's getting in the way of what I want to do. User interfaces should melt into the background and explicitly NOT give me an experience. I should barely notice the user interface.
We need to get rid of UX designers and replace them with competent UI designers instead.
How do they get 40Mbps in a 6MHz channel? That sounds like it would be above the Shannon limit unless the SNR is ridiculously good.
Search is more efficient when you know what you're looking for. The big deal about the start menu is that it is discoverable (and it's discoverable without being jarring, or having a "user experience").
Not any more. I use my laptop for gaming (I plug it in when I get home). It gets 4 hours battery life when away from the charger, and is too thin to have an optical drive. You've not needed to buy a monstrous Alienware do game for a long time now. Sure there might be one or two games that will not run well enough, but fortunately they aren't the games I'm interested in.
This. I've noted that most people care more about their hair looking nice than frugal energy use. Some people who live within comfortable cycling distance of their job for example are all excited about the energy they can save when the next innovation that's only 20 years away in solar panel technology makes roof solar panels cheaper. However, they can save the same amount of energy today by riding into work twice a week on average - but they say "it'll mess up my hair" or some such excuse.
So really the only solution will be technology because people don't even want to make minor lifestyle changes.
The other thing is from an individual point of view you can live off the grid in a tent but it won't make any difference. Even if your whole country starts living in a tent off the grid it won't make a big change. So why live in extreme discomfort when it won't make any difference, anyway? Instead we need to accept that people will not modify their habits and do something like perhaps cut military spending a smidgeon and direct it into a Manhattan-project style push for better technology for generating power and for using it more efficiently.
There are still some things to solve for the cashless society.
1. Electronic transactions are still far too expensive. Every shop I go into to get (say) my lunch have a minimum amount you have to spend before you can use your debit card (or you have to pay a surcharge). My lunch always falls below this value so I must use cash. Things like vending machines too. Until it's cheap enough to use something like a debit card to buy an item costing 60p, then you'll still need cash.
2. Security. Debit/credit cards are too insecure, and the burden of making them secure is on the merchant in the form of PCI-DSS. It means if you're a small business taking debit/credit might not be an option. The burger van in the car park for instance, it's still impractical for him to take electronic transactions due to the equipment requirements and PCI-DSS.
3. Very hard to settle private debts. For instance if I hire a builder for a small job, he now has to give me all his bank details if I'm to do an electronic transfer. It's about 100 times easier to give him cash.
It wasn't a sensible comment for anyone who could see the writing on the wall. If you weren't in academentia, you could see that it wouldn't be long before personal computers would have more than one process active at a time.
No need for a second display. Just ssh -X develsystem and have everything display on the Solaris machine.
The parent wasn't quite right, in reality software flies your airplane 100% of your journey right now.
Modern Boeing and Airbus designs are pure fly by wire. 100% of the time you fly it though software. The engines are FADEC (full authority digital engine controls).
Autoland has been a thing since the early 70s. The first aircraft to have it, the Hawker Siddeley Trident 3 (an aircraft similar to the Boeing 727 in layout - three engines at the back of the aircraft and T-tailed) was flying autolandings in pretty much zero visibility decades ago.
Since all modern large airliners are fly by wire, you're screwed anyway.
Airliners have multiple redundant power buses. Each engine has a generator, and there is also an APU (auxilliary power unit) which has a generator. If all three fail (for example, because the plane ran out of fuel, it's happened, or flies through a flock of Canada geese and loses all engines and for some reason the APU won't start) there is a ram air turbine that sticks out into the airflow and powers a generator. There is also a mandated amount of reserve battery power. Talking of losing all engine power, the Airbus A320 that went in the Hudson has purely electronic controls, and remained controllable after a double engine failure.
They glide much better than a brick. I think a typical airliner has something like a 16:1 glide ratio so from a cruise heigh of 11km could glide 176km (over 100 miles).