"Mass transportation", like its name indicates, transports massive numbers of people. When more people use mass transit, fewer roads need to be built (and then maintained). This can save money overall for the government.
I hear a lot of the pollution from India in the winter is from night watchmen in commercial establishments who burn little wood fires to stay warm. Incredibly polluting relative to the benefits, but apparently they don't have a better option.
India seems to be at the "sweet spot" where they are developed enough to create tons of pollution but aren't developed enough to eliminate it. China is a little further along, they have started taking significant steps to minimize pollution.
I think more accurately: Russia needs oil revenue to balance its budget. If the world stops using oil, Russia stops being a superpower. So they have to fight environmental movements at all costs.
Non-technical end users don't run their own email servers. Email servers/email addresses come in two main varieties:
- Internet services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, MSN - most of which now have encryption - Businesses like your employer and your bank - which mostly don't have encrytion. That should change.
Personally, I would LOVE to get my bank and credit card statements in encrypted emails. As it is right now, I just get an email saying "You have a message". Then I have to fight through an unintuitive web site with its own flaky message system and a username/PW I don't remember in order to find out what the message is. It's a MAJOR unnecessary pain.
Of course that's affordable! If it's to be considered a cost of living in the boondocks, then the prices of your fruit and vegetables will have to rise a tiny bit to pay for it. But the average family farm probably earns $5000/month if not much more, so $125 extra would increase food prices by at most ~2%, and probably much less. Whatever the effect, the market would take care of it quite nicely, with no need for special government subsidies and the corruption that frequently comes with them.
I don't think so. "Other people" will always want things done, but at the cheapest possible cost. If a robot has skills equal to a person, "other people" will probably prefer to hire it over a person, due to being cheaper.
Most human skills boil down to a few basic categories: vision, object manipulation, understanding speech. Computer science is making rapid progress in all these areas. And computer programs are cheap - you write the program once, and billions of people can use it worldwide.
There was massive employment for horses until machines were developed that could do their main skill (pulling/carrying heavy loads) better. Now, only a few horses are employed (for recreation, police, etc). The level of human employment could drop just as drastically.
I'm surprised there isn't a national government somewhere funding open source software.
In the US, the National Endowment for the Arts spends $146 million a year on stuff which most Americans never see or are affected by in any way, and some of which is offensive to large segments of the population ("Piss Christ", nude "performance art, etc.).
Imagine how much quality open source software could be produced with $146 million per year? For comparison, LibreOffice has a budget of under a million euros per year.
Even Slashdot. (which otherwise has a quite sane, usable interface, thanks to user complaints at every attempt to degrade it over the years)
When I get a message in the upper right of the screen, that somebody has modded or replied to my comment - I go to click it, but then an ad loads just above it, shifting the message down so that I accidentally click on the ad instead.
Don't lump all Americans together. I'm American and I'd also love to see this happen. My government has no justification for treating people this badly without any real security benefit.
I understand why you don't like it. I don't understand why you think you should be able to control it. What they do with their property should be their business.
Right now, young people are employable while elderly people are unemployable. In the future, everyone will be unemployable. Shouldn't elderly people be more of a "liability" now?
In Brazil, it's already common for the rich to commute by helicopter. So yes, we have "flying cars" already. And I'm guessing it wouldn't be too hard nowadays to create a navigation system, so massive numbers of helicopters can fly without crashing into each other.
But you know what the problem with helicopters is? They're LOUD. Just one helicopter can be heard easily from kilometers away. If you had tens of thousands of helicopters descending on a business district each morning, the noise would be beyond intolerable. All aircraft - whether relying on rotors, jet engines, or rockets - are extremely loud, and when you burn enough energy to reverse gravity, this loudness is probably unavoidable.
So in short, the masses will never use flying cars.
You know how Olympic athletes like to bite into their medals after receiving them? (because that used to be a way of telling that "gold" was really gold) Well, I hope they're healthy after biting into lead and gallium arsenide...
So we end up with an OS in 2017 that looks more primitive than Win3.0.
This is very to the point.
In fact, I think someone needs to make a list of UI features that were in Windows 3 and Windows 2000/XP/7 (whichever we think is most usable). And for newer interfaces like Windows 10, count what percentage of the UI features still exist. And based on that, calculate an "age" for the new UI, i.e. "$OS has regressed to a 1997 level of interface".
Actually, it's often fruitless. But you don't know ahead of time which of it will become fruitful.
It's like what the apocryphal CEO said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half" - and continued spending all that money on advertising.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, maybe you Mississippi politicians should have chosen to spend their stimulus funds on more useful things.
"Mass transportation", like its name indicates, transports massive numbers of people. When more people use mass transit, fewer roads need to be built (and then maintained). This can save money overall for the government.
I hear a lot of the pollution from India in the winter is from night watchmen in commercial establishments who burn little wood fires to stay warm. Incredibly polluting relative to the benefits, but apparently they don't have a better option.
India seems to be at the "sweet spot" where they are developed enough to create tons of pollution but aren't developed enough to eliminate it. China is a little further along, they have started taking significant steps to minimize pollution.
I think more accurately: Russia needs oil revenue to balance its budget. If the world stops using oil, Russia stops being a superpower. So they have to fight environmental movements at all costs.
Non-technical end users don't run their own email servers. Email servers/email addresses come in two main varieties:
- Internet services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, MSN - most of which now have encryption
- Businesses like your employer and your bank - which mostly don't have encrytion. That should change.
Personally, I would LOVE to get my bank and credit card statements in encrypted emails. As it is right now, I just get an email saying "You have a message". Then I have to fight through an unintuitive web site with its own flaky message system and a username/PW I don't remember in order to find out what the message is. It's a MAJOR unnecessary pain.
Before we let him make any more decisions, must upgrade him to the Pointy Haired Boss 3.11 firmware.
FTFY
It would be hilarious if he didn't have so much damn power now.
Of course that's affordable! If it's to be considered a cost of living in the boondocks, then the prices of your fruit and vegetables will have to rise a tiny bit to pay for it. But the average family farm probably earns $5000/month if not much more, so $125 extra would increase food prices by at most ~2%, and probably much less. Whatever the effect, the market would take care of it quite nicely, with no need for special government subsidies and the corruption that frequently comes with them.
People who live on a farm can buy satellite internet access. It's quite affordable. There's no reason for us to subsidize them.
I don't think so. "Other people" will always want things done, but at the cheapest possible cost. If a robot has skills equal to a person, "other people" will probably prefer to hire it over a person, due to being cheaper.
Most human skills boil down to a few basic categories: vision, object manipulation, understanding speech. Computer science is making rapid progress in all these areas. And computer programs are cheap - you write the program once, and billions of people can use it worldwide.
There was massive employment for horses until machines were developed that could do their main skill (pulling/carrying heavy loads) better. Now, only a few horses are employed (for recreation, police, etc). The level of human employment could drop just as drastically.
I'm surprised there isn't a national government somewhere funding open source software.
In the US, the National Endowment for the Arts spends $146 million a year on stuff which most Americans never see or are affected by in any way, and some of which is offensive to large segments of the population ("Piss Christ", nude "performance art, etc.).
Imagine how much quality open source software could be produced with $146 million per year? For comparison, LibreOffice has a budget of under a million euros per year.
Even Slashdot. (which otherwise has a quite sane, usable interface, thanks to user complaints at every attempt to degrade it over the years)
When I get a message in the upper right of the screen, that somebody has modded or replied to my comment - I go to click it, but then an ad loads just above it, shifting the message down so that I accidentally click on the ad instead.
Don't lump all Americans together. I'm American and I'd also love to see this happen. My government has no justification for treating people this badly without any real security benefit.
I understand why you don't like it. I don't understand why you think you should be able to control it. What they do with their property should be their business.
Right now, young people are employable while elderly people are unemployable. In the future, everyone will be unemployable. Shouldn't elderly people be more of a "liability" now?
In Brazil, it's already common for the rich to commute by helicopter. So yes, we have "flying cars" already. And I'm guessing it wouldn't be too hard nowadays to create a navigation system, so massive numbers of helicopters can fly without crashing into each other.
But you know what the problem with helicopters is? They're LOUD. Just one helicopter can be heard easily from kilometers away. If you had tens of thousands of helicopters descending on a business district each morning, the noise would be beyond intolerable. All aircraft - whether relying on rotors, jet engines, or rockets - are extremely loud, and when you burn enough energy to reverse gravity, this loudness is probably unavoidable.
So in short, the masses will never use flying cars.
A friend of mine with a sprained ankle had to wait 13 hours before receiving any service in an emergency room in Stockholm.
Well, duh. Why on earth did he go to the emergency room for a sprained ankle? The hospital was busy taking care of more urgent injuries at the time.
You can take the nerd out of his mother's basement, but you can't take the basement out of the nerd.
That's the main reason why I'm still using Firefox. But the more Mozilla shits on its users, the harder it gets.
Apparently smokers do have higher medical costs per year than non-smokers (but lower costs over a lifetime because they die sooner). source source
I think the reason for this is that on average smoking causes more damage via heart disease and emphysema than via lung cancer.
You know how Olympic athletes like to bite into their medals after receiving them? (because that used to be a way of telling that "gold" was really gold) Well, I hope they're healthy after biting into lead and gallium arsenide...
It wasn't that long ago, tariffs were just regular policy.
Yeah, during the Great Depression!
Governments, utility providers, MILLITARIES!
A "millitary" doesn't seem very powerful. My country has a megatary, I'm just saying...
So we end up with an OS in 2017 that looks more primitive than Win3.0.
This is very to the point.
In fact, I think someone needs to make a list of UI features that were in Windows 3 and Windows 2000/XP/7 (whichever we think is most usable). And for newer interfaces like Windows 10, count what percentage of the UI features still exist. And based on that, calculate an "age" for the new UI, i.e. "$OS has regressed to a 1997 level of interface".
Actually, it's often fruitless. But you don't know ahead of time which of it will become fruitful.
It's like what the apocryphal CEO said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half" - and continued spending all that money on advertising.