*Every* presidential administration, *every* congressman, *every* politician in general has their own best interests in mind. You pretty much have to vote for the one whose interests coincide the most with your own. In my case, that was Obama. Mind you, this pisses me the fuck off, but he was still preferable in my mind to McCain and, yes, Ron Paul (I'm a liberal, not a libertarian).
I remember back during the Bush administration being horrified at all the things he was doing, and wishing I could go back to being pissed off about copyright and media policy the way I was during the Clinton era. It looks like I got my wish.
Even knowing what I know now, if the election were held again, I'd vote for Obama. Not because he's great, but because he's preferable to the other options.
I've seen the ISS during the day, and that was back in 2002 or so. It was pretty close to sunset, and it was awfully bright, Venus-like, even, when it went by overhead. That said, maybe I just saw something else that I *thought* was the ISS. I've seen satellites before, though, and this looked like one, just way brighter.
Let's break this thing down into advantages and disadvantages. If you blur out hospitals on google maps:
+ The terrorists, who have never actually attacked an American hospital, but may or may not do so at some indeterminate point in the future, will have a slightly harder time finding their way around the outside of the hospital. - Hospital patients, who frequently use hospitals for healthcare at all hours of the day and, furthermore, often have to arrive there at a moment's notice due to a medical emergency, will have a slightly harder time finding their way around the outside of the hospital.
Conclusion: Seems to me like there's a good chance that blurring hospitals out will kill more people than not doing so.
Of course, they soon invaded the Philippines (which was at the time US Territory), but according to your logic what they did was simply a "terrorist act".....
Just because an attack justifies a war doesn't mean that it's an invasion. 9/11 justified the war in Afghanistan, much like Pearl Harbor justfied America's entrance into WWII. It is entirely possible to go to war without suspending habeas corpus, as we have done many times in the past. In all of those cases, it was possible that foreign nationals were already inside our borders.
Maybe the government should examine what put us in this situation rather than trying to cram yet another bit of regulation that will just cause further problems.
That's certainly a good thought, but unfortunately you're sticking a lot of other baggage with it. Just because some regulation is bad, it doesn't necessarily follow that all regulation is bad (likewise, just because some deregulation is bad, it doesn't necessarily follow that all deregulation is bad). Regulations that grant a monopoly to one carrier are generally bad (I live in Columbus, and I can get my cable modem service from at least 3 different providers that I can think of right now, as well as several DSL providers. My service has been fast and excellent, and I feel very sorry for all the people out there who are stuck with a single provider like Comcast).
On the other hand, regulations such as net neutrality that see to it that consumers aren't screwed over are a good thing. I'm certain that each and every one of those providers here in Columbus would love to buy out the other two if they could afford it, and if I'm stuck with one provider, you can be damn sure I want regulations in place that say they can't start mucking with my packets.
The world is a complicated place. Just because one extreme is bad doesn't mean that the other extreme is any better. The optimal place is usually somewhere in between.
Should I also join you in the assumption that a rebellion or invasion didn't take place on 2001-09-11?
9/11 was a tragedy, a horrific crime, and a terrorist act. That said, calling it an "invasion" is beyond a stretch. It's interesting the way you phrased this; you're essentially making an implicit association between saying that the September 11th attacks weren't an invasion and trivializing the deaths of 3,000 people. Clever, but I'm not falling for it. This is precisely the sort of thinking that we need to guard against in order to preserve our freedoms.
Nations become dictatorships through a perpetual state of "national emergency" all the time. Terrorism isn't a "new" threat, despite what people may say about it. The threat of terrorism has been around since before recorded history, yet every time a major terrorist attack happens and someone in the government wants to use it as an excuse to increase their power, they claim that it's a New Kind Of Threat.
We're never going to be completely safe from outside threats, no matter what we do. Denying our own freedoms because of that is un-American.
First off, banning someone based on their stated sexual orientation is homophobic, discriminatory, and highly unethical.
Secondly, if they're banning people based on their usage of the words "gay" or "lesbian", then they really ought to be listening to their little bastards on voice chat. If you want to ban all mention of sexual orientation, you ought to have people patrolling voice chat and banning people for use of the word "fag", which is extremely insulting and gets thrown around all the time.
Of course, if they did that, they might lose 80% of their subscribers. That said, for the remaining 20% who are uncomfortable with hate speech, it would be really nice.
I'm a liberal who voted for Obama, and I wasn't fooled either.
Obama is doing better than Bush did (honestly, better to be in the pockets of the copyright cartels than the defense contractors and oil companies), but he's still too conservative and too corporate (which aren't necessarily related) for my taste. And I'll be honest, he's done a lot of things lately that have pissed me off.
A lot of people use these sorts of things as an opportunity to say something to the point of "well, you should have voted for Ron Paul." While I'll buy that Ron Paul is clean in terms of corporate interests, I disagree with him completely on policy. Knowing what I know now, if Ron Paul faced Barack Obama in the presidential election, I would still vote for Obama. That said, if Dennis Kucinich were running, he'd have my vote hands down. He's liberal and not in the pockets of the **AA, and in my opinion he's the guy who would make the best president.
Interesting that you should call me on that, considering that I made absolutely no assumptions about race or genetics in general. What are *your* assumptions, that might have led you to believe I was going down the eugenics path?
A mother who is on already welfare clearly can't afford additional children, and yet if she has a child, the government just ends up shelling out even more money. No one is forcing anyone not to have children; no one is even *asking* anyone not to have children; we're simply making it easier and cheaper to choose not to. If you're poor and living hand-to-mouth, birth control is just another expense, and when you have to choose between condoms (or other, more expensive forms of birth control) versus eating, most people will choose to eat. The thrust of my argument is that it's cheaper in the long run to provide birth control to people who can't afford it than to provide more food to people who can't afford it. Plus, if someone wants to have a baby, they're welcome to do so -- this just gives them a cheap option not to, should they decide against it.
I find the Bell Curve disgusting, and I reject it out of hand. I also find it disgusting that you would twist my words and try to play them off as a "bell curve" argument.
Sometimes. But it's really, really hard to see money for things like Planned Parenthood as "infrastructure". There was waaaaay too much of that kind of crap.
Birth control is actually more important for infrastructure than you may think. Planned Parenthood serves overpopulated inner city areas, where a lot of people are on welfare and other social programs, and are thus costing the government more than they are producing. Set your ideology aside for a moment and consider the fact that a little money now for free birth control and *real* sex education will save us a lot in the future, not to mention improving the quality of life for the people being served by these programs (by preventing the spread of disease -- which again costs us money, preventing unwanted pregnancies, and alleviating overcrowding).
Yes, to regulate a given industry, you want the party who isn't in the pocket of that particular industry. Generally that's the Democrats, as the Republicans are in a lot more pockets, but there are some exceptions, and Hollywood is one.
In addition, there will be an effect where more prominent scientists will get tons of links and favorable peer reviews, in exchange for being "friended" in this network.
Certainly this effect must exist already, and admittedly a bit of it is good (if someone repeatedly submits excellent papers, it stands to reason that their opinions should hold a bit more weight) but this may amplify the effect far past the point of usefulness. Ultimately, science needs to stand on its own merit, and not just the reputation of the person who published it.
It doesn't decrease reliance on IE, it increases reliance on Microsoft, because they're pushing this Windows-only application service through a browser that should be cross-platform.
I don't *want* the ability to run Windows applications over the net, because I don't want to increase the install base of this particular product. There are already several cross-platform ways of distributing applications over the web (Java, Flash, and AJAX, to name a few). We don't need another one, particularly one that locks out non-Microsoft operating systems.
A touch of vulgar honesty for you: I don't give two shits if my policy is "biased". I don't do it out of a sense of fairness; I do it to keep my computer running smoothly, and here in the real world, my strategy works, even if it's not ideologically perfect.
I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft, but my choice is either to run their OS or give up a lot of software that, quite frankly, I enjoy using (mostly games). I use Linux when I can, but unfortunately that's not all the time.
Who's to say this thing isn't a security risk? Microsoft?
Of course, we don't *know* that this software is bad, but my policy with my own machine is that if I don't know what something does, it doesn't run on my computer, which is why my computer still runs smoothly even though I haven't reinstalled Windows for several years.
For those of you who are assuming it's probably safe (and admittedly, you're probably right), there's another good reason to get rid of it. Microsoft changing your browser string to indicate that this piece of software is installed in your browser. The purpose of this, most likely, is to increase the installed base for this software, and use that as an argument to ush whatever new web technology they're pushing. Now that non-IE browsers account for 30% of the total browsers on the internet, Microsoft is losing their stranglehold on web "standards", and they're pulling this crap to get it back.
Don't be a part of it. Remove this plugin, then go into about:config and change your browser string back so it doesn't falsely advertise that you have it installed.
Oh, and as far as Firefox goes... why is the uninstall button grayed out? This feels like a UI issue to me; principals of user-friendliness dictate that I ought to be in control of whether or not I can uninstall an add-on. Even having code in the browser that allows someone to take that freedom away from me is a bad thing. (Of course, is it really Firefox's fault? Is there a technical reason that Firefox *can't* uninstall the plugin?)
To the contrary, one of the most important pieces of Free Software development is feedback. Software developers need to know what their users want if their software is going to be acceptable. These kids are participating in the process as users of the software, and, through their parents, they are providing feedback to the developers, who are using that feedback to make development decisions.
Are they coding? Of course not. They're essentially a focus group.
In this interview, Mark Slater from 2k games said this about the Bioshock release:
"We achieved our goals. We were uncracked for 13 whole days. We were happy with it. But we just got slammed. Everybody hated us for it. It was unbelievable... There is a lot of strain on our content-delivery servers and things like that, where everyone has to download a 10MB executable. I don't think we'll do exactly the same thing again, but we'll do something close. You can't afford to be cracked. As soon as you're gone, you're gone, and your sales drop astronomically if you've got a day-one crack."
Now, before everyone mods me down for ostensibly liking DRM, I can't stand DRM, and would like to see it gone -- however, the article does provide some interesting insights.
And to make it even more insulting, the DRM doesn't actually stop piracy of any kind, so it is all for nothing. The end result is that these companies are saying their interests are more important than the customers.
As much as we would all love for this to be the case, in truth, game sales drop like a rock the day a crack is released.
The question, rather, should be whether DRM is an acceptable solution at all, since it reduces the quality of the experience for paying customers. If pirates are patient enough to wait until the game is cracked they get a superior experience, because they don't have to mess around with putting the DVD in the drive when they want to play the game or worry about having copy protection malware installed on their computers.
So, DRM does increase revenues, but it does so by hurting the people who ought to be getting the best experience -- paying customers. The ideal solution would be to give paying customers a superior experience, but the question is how to do that.
...when they stopped allowing weak content to grow, in favor of just deleting it. The attitude used to be that people shouldn't worry about the rules; that's how articles grew. Nowadays, if you write a big article and don't cite it, the article will usually be deleted, as opposed to someone actually taking the time to cite it.
The fact that he asked for a stay doesn't indicate much of anything, particularly since a lot of the people at the DOJ right now are Bush appointees (you know the type) who really need to be fired ASAP. By all means, we should be making as much noise about this as possible, but it doesn't automatically mean that Obama is pro-wiretapping.
In response to this innovation by Apple, Microsoft will release the Zune Sniper Edition Basic and Zune Sniper Edition Ultimate. Both of these will come equipped with their exclusive ShootsForSure technology, which will prevent you from borrowing ammunition from other snipers.
Interestingly, this is one prediction where he isn't ambitious *enough*. I have one device that's a phone, a PDA, a GPS, a music player, and an internet connection.
Admittedly, some of his predictions are a little silly. Keyboards aren't going away, at least with this generation. The behavior of typing is just too ingrained, and dictating (even when speech recognition software works well) feels awkward. Star Trek: TNG may actually be a really good predictor of the future along these lines (someone mentioned Picard ordering coffee above). Good speech recognition will be nice for issuing short commands or asking short questions, but for doing anything complicated (like navigating a starship) you'll still want a console.
A trillion calculations per second on a home computer, eh?
Take a peek into that SLI-enabled machine under your desk with those two high end graphics cards. What you're seeing there is 1.5 teraflops. Of course, they do very specific kinds of calculations, but the prediction doesn't say the calculations are all taking place on the main CPU. In fact, this prediction was a little conservative; you can pull it off for under a thousand dollars and get half again as much processing power.
Digital books, movies, music? Napster was already out by then. The entertainment industry did its best to stop this from happening and it's only been in the past year or three that it's even been practical (from a legal perspective)
The technologies are available and not particularly difficult to use (again, I can purchase music instantly from my telephone) if not particularly ubiquitous. Physical media will take a long time to go away; not so much because the technology to replace it isn't available, but because people (myself included) *like* having something they can touch. Also, it makes a better gift.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully not the one with the tongue in it. :p
*Every* presidential administration, *every* congressman, *every* politician in general has their own best interests in mind. You pretty much have to vote for the one whose interests coincide the most with your own. In my case, that was Obama. Mind you, this pisses me the fuck off, but he was still preferable in my mind to McCain and, yes, Ron Paul (I'm a liberal, not a libertarian).
I remember back during the Bush administration being horrified at all the things he was doing, and wishing I could go back to being pissed off about copyright and media policy the way I was during the Clinton era. It looks like I got my wish.
Even knowing what I know now, if the election were held again, I'd vote for Obama. Not because he's great, but because he's preferable to the other options.
I've seen the ISS during the day, and that was back in 2002 or so. It was pretty close to sunset, and it was awfully bright, Venus-like, even, when it went by overhead. That said, maybe I just saw something else that I *thought* was the ISS. I've seen satellites before, though, and this looked like one, just way brighter.
Let's break this thing down into advantages and disadvantages. If you blur out hospitals on google maps:
+ The terrorists, who have never actually attacked an American hospital, but may or may not do so at some indeterminate point in the future, will have a slightly harder time finding their way around the outside of the hospital.
- Hospital patients, who frequently use hospitals for healthcare at all hours of the day and, furthermore, often have to arrive there at a moment's notice due to a medical emergency, will have a slightly harder time finding their way around the outside of the hospital.
Conclusion: Seems to me like there's a good chance that blurring hospitals out will kill more people than not doing so.
Of course, they soon invaded the Philippines (which was at the time US Territory), but according to your logic what they did was simply a "terrorist act".....
Just because an attack justifies a war doesn't mean that it's an invasion. 9/11 justified the war in Afghanistan, much like Pearl Harbor justfied America's entrance into WWII. It is entirely possible to go to war without suspending habeas corpus, as we have done many times in the past. In all of those cases, it was possible that foreign nationals were already inside our borders.
Maybe the government should examine what put us in this situation rather than trying to cram yet another bit of regulation that will just cause further problems.
That's certainly a good thought, but unfortunately you're sticking a lot of other baggage with it. Just because some regulation is bad, it doesn't necessarily follow that all regulation is bad (likewise, just because some deregulation is bad, it doesn't necessarily follow that all deregulation is bad). Regulations that grant a monopoly to one carrier are generally bad (I live in Columbus, and I can get my cable modem service from at least 3 different providers that I can think of right now, as well as several DSL providers. My service has been fast and excellent, and I feel very sorry for all the people out there who are stuck with a single provider like Comcast).
On the other hand, regulations such as net neutrality that see to it that consumers aren't screwed over are a good thing. I'm certain that each and every one of those providers here in Columbus would love to buy out the other two if they could afford it, and if I'm stuck with one provider, you can be damn sure I want regulations in place that say they can't start mucking with my packets.
The world is a complicated place. Just because one extreme is bad doesn't mean that the other extreme is any better. The optimal place is usually somewhere in between.
Should I also join you in the assumption that a rebellion or invasion didn't take place on 2001-09-11?
9/11 was a tragedy, a horrific crime, and a terrorist act. That said, calling it an "invasion" is beyond a stretch. It's interesting the way you phrased this; you're essentially making an implicit association between saying that the September 11th attacks weren't an invasion and trivializing the deaths of 3,000 people. Clever, but I'm not falling for it. This is precisely the sort of thinking that we need to guard against in order to preserve our freedoms.
Nations become dictatorships through a perpetual state of "national emergency" all the time. Terrorism isn't a "new" threat, despite what people may say about it. The threat of terrorism has been around since before recorded history, yet every time a major terrorist attack happens and someone in the government wants to use it as an excuse to increase their power, they claim that it's a New Kind Of Threat.
We're never going to be completely safe from outside threats, no matter what we do. Denying our own freedoms because of that is un-American.
First off, banning someone based on their stated sexual orientation is homophobic, discriminatory, and highly unethical.
Secondly, if they're banning people based on their usage of the words "gay" or "lesbian", then they really ought to be listening to their little bastards on voice chat. If you want to ban all mention of sexual orientation, you ought to have people patrolling voice chat and banning people for use of the word "fag", which is extremely insulting and gets thrown around all the time.
Of course, if they did that, they might lose 80% of their subscribers. That said, for the remaining 20% who are uncomfortable with hate speech, it would be really nice.
I'm a liberal who voted for Obama, and I wasn't fooled either.
Obama is doing better than Bush did (honestly, better to be in the pockets of the copyright cartels than the defense contractors and oil companies), but he's still too conservative and too corporate (which aren't necessarily related) for my taste. And I'll be honest, he's done a lot of things lately that have pissed me off.
A lot of people use these sorts of things as an opportunity to say something to the point of "well, you should have voted for Ron Paul." While I'll buy that Ron Paul is clean in terms of corporate interests, I disagree with him completely on policy. Knowing what I know now, if Ron Paul faced Barack Obama in the presidential election, I would still vote for Obama. That said, if Dennis Kucinich were running, he'd have my vote hands down. He's liberal and not in the pockets of the **AA, and in my opinion he's the guy who would make the best president.
Interesting that you should call me on that, considering that I made absolutely no assumptions about race or genetics in general. What are *your* assumptions, that might have led you to believe I was going down the eugenics path?
A mother who is on already welfare clearly can't afford additional children, and yet if she has a child, the government just ends up shelling out even more money. No one is forcing anyone not to have children; no one is even *asking* anyone not to have children; we're simply making it easier and cheaper to choose not to. If you're poor and living hand-to-mouth, birth control is just another expense, and when you have to choose between condoms (or other, more expensive forms of birth control) versus eating, most people will choose to eat. The thrust of my argument is that it's cheaper in the long run to provide birth control to people who can't afford it than to provide more food to people who can't afford it. Plus, if someone wants to have a baby, they're welcome to do so -- this just gives them a cheap option not to, should they decide against it.
I find the Bell Curve disgusting, and I reject it out of hand. I also find it disgusting that you would twist my words and try to play them off as a "bell curve" argument.
Sometimes. But it's really, really hard to see money for things like Planned Parenthood as "infrastructure". There was waaaaay too much of that kind of crap.
Birth control is actually more important for infrastructure than you may think. Planned Parenthood serves overpopulated inner city areas, where a lot of people are on welfare and other social programs, and are thus costing the government more than they are producing. Set your ideology aside for a moment and consider the fact that a little money now for free birth control and *real* sex education will save us a lot in the future, not to mention improving the quality of life for the people being served by these programs (by preventing the spread of disease -- which again costs us money, preventing unwanted pregnancies, and alleviating overcrowding).
Yes, to regulate a given industry, you want the party who isn't in the pocket of that particular industry. Generally that's the Democrats, as the Republicans are in a lot more pockets, but there are some exceptions, and Hollywood is one.
In addition, there will be an effect where more prominent scientists will get tons of links and favorable peer reviews, in exchange for being "friended" in this network.
Certainly this effect must exist already, and admittedly a bit of it is good (if someone repeatedly submits excellent papers, it stands to reason that their opinions should hold a bit more weight) but this may amplify the effect far past the point of usefulness. Ultimately, science needs to stand on its own merit, and not just the reputation of the person who published it.
It doesn't decrease reliance on IE, it increases reliance on Microsoft, because they're pushing this Windows-only application service through a browser that should be cross-platform.
I don't *want* the ability to run Windows applications over the net, because I don't want to increase the install base of this particular product. There are already several cross-platform ways of distributing applications over the web (Java, Flash, and AJAX, to name a few). We don't need another one, particularly one that locks out non-Microsoft operating systems.
Touche.
A touch of vulgar honesty for you: I don't give two shits if my policy is "biased". I don't do it out of a sense of fairness; I do it to keep my computer running smoothly, and here in the real world, my strategy works, even if it's not ideologically perfect.
I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft, but my choice is either to run their OS or give up a lot of software that, quite frankly, I enjoy using (mostly games). I use Linux when I can, but unfortunately that's not all the time.
Interesting... Would it be possible to change Firefox in such a way that it refuses to recognize those plugins that it can't install?
Who's to say this thing isn't a security risk? Microsoft?
Of course, we don't *know* that this software is bad, but my policy with my own machine is that if I don't know what something does, it doesn't run on my computer, which is why my computer still runs smoothly even though I haven't reinstalled Windows for several years.
For those of you who are assuming it's probably safe (and admittedly, you're probably right), there's another good reason to get rid of it. Microsoft changing your browser string to indicate that this piece of software is installed in your browser. The purpose of this, most likely, is to increase the installed base for this software, and use that as an argument to ush whatever new web technology they're pushing. Now that non-IE browsers account for 30% of the total browsers on the internet, Microsoft is losing their stranglehold on web "standards", and they're pulling this crap to get it back.
Don't be a part of it. Remove this plugin, then go into about:config and change your browser string back so it doesn't falsely advertise that you have it installed.
Oh, and as far as Firefox goes... why is the uninstall button grayed out? This feels like a UI issue to me; principals of user-friendliness dictate that I ought to be in control of whether or not I can uninstall an add-on. Even having code in the browser that allows someone to take that freedom away from me is a bad thing. (Of course, is it really Firefox's fault? Is there a technical reason that Firefox *can't* uninstall the plugin?)
To the contrary, one of the most important pieces of Free Software development is feedback. Software developers need to know what their users want if their software is going to be acceptable. These kids are participating in the process as users of the software, and, through their parents, they are providing feedback to the developers, who are using that feedback to make development decisions.
Are they coding? Of course not. They're essentially a focus group.
Okay, here you go:
There was an article that was posted on Slashdot about piracy a while back. The quote I'm citing is on page 8, here:
http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_8.html
In this interview, Mark Slater from 2k games said this about the Bioshock release:
"We achieved our goals. We were uncracked for 13 whole days. We were happy with it. But we just got slammed. Everybody hated us for it. It was unbelievable... There is a lot of strain on our content-delivery servers and things like that, where everyone has to download a 10MB executable. I don't think we'll do exactly the same thing again, but we'll do something close. You can't afford to be cracked. As soon as you're gone, you're gone, and your sales drop astronomically if you've got a day-one crack."
Now, before everyone mods me down for ostensibly liking DRM, I can't stand DRM, and would like to see it gone -- however, the article does provide some interesting insights.
And to make it even more insulting, the DRM doesn't actually stop piracy of any kind, so it is all for nothing. The end result is that these companies are saying their interests are more important than the customers.
As much as we would all love for this to be the case, in truth, game sales drop like a rock the day a crack is released.
The question, rather, should be whether DRM is an acceptable solution at all, since it reduces the quality of the experience for paying customers. If pirates are patient enough to wait until the game is cracked they get a superior experience, because they don't have to mess around with putting the DVD in the drive when they want to play the game or worry about having copy protection malware installed on their computers.
So, DRM does increase revenues, but it does so by hurting the people who ought to be getting the best experience -- paying customers. The ideal solution would be to give paying customers a superior experience, but the question is how to do that.
In their defense, that's exactly what they're planning to do.
...when they stopped allowing weak content to grow, in favor of just deleting it. The attitude used to be that people shouldn't worry about the rules; that's how articles grew. Nowadays, if you write a big article and don't cite it, the article will usually be deleted, as opposed to someone actually taking the time to cite it.
The fact that he asked for a stay doesn't indicate much of anything, particularly since a lot of the people at the DOJ right now are Bush appointees (you know the type) who really need to be fired ASAP. By all means, we should be making as much noise about this as possible, but it doesn't automatically mean that Obama is pro-wiretapping.
In response to this innovation by Apple, Microsoft will release the Zune Sniper Edition Basic and Zune Sniper Edition Ultimate. Both of these will come equipped with their exclusive ShootsForSure technology, which will prevent you from borrowing ammunition from other snipers.
"Body LANs" don't exist in any meaningful form.
Interestingly, this is one prediction where he isn't ambitious *enough*. I have one device that's a phone, a PDA, a GPS, a music player, and an internet connection.
Admittedly, some of his predictions are a little silly. Keyboards aren't going away, at least with this generation. The behavior of typing is just too ingrained, and dictating (even when speech recognition software works well) feels awkward. Star Trek: TNG may actually be a really good predictor of the future along these lines (someone mentioned Picard ordering coffee above). Good speech recognition will be nice for issuing short commands or asking short questions, but for doing anything complicated (like navigating a starship) you'll still want a console.
A trillion calculations per second on a home computer, eh?
Take a peek into that SLI-enabled machine under your desk with those two high end graphics cards. What you're seeing there is 1.5 teraflops. Of course, they do very specific kinds of calculations, but the prediction doesn't say the calculations are all taking place on the main CPU. In fact, this prediction was a little conservative; you can pull it off for under a thousand dollars and get half again as much processing power.
Digital books, movies, music? Napster was already out by then. The entertainment industry did its best to stop this from happening and it's only been in the past year or three that it's even been practical (from a legal perspective)
The technologies are available and not particularly difficult to use (again, I can purchase music instantly from my telephone) if not particularly ubiquitous. Physical media will take a long time to go away; not so much because the technology to replace it isn't available, but because people (myself included) *like* having something they can touch. Also, it makes a better gift.