Go to bed when you're tired, earlier if you have a big day ahead. It's not hard.
Read up on "second sleep", previous generations knew about and thought it quite normal to wake up in the night, go and do some things, then go back to bed. Read storybooks and you'll see veiled references to it everywhere, people don't just go to bed and then wake up in the morning. Never heard of "midnight snacks"? Same phenomenon.
Same for food. Hungry? Eat. Three square meals a day is a Victorian invention. It's a biological nonsense. And yet people have trained themselves to it.
Listen to your body, not some random number thrown at you (how many pieces of fruit/veg a day? EVERY COUNTRY CHOOSES A DIFFERENT NUMBER. From 2 up to 8 in some cases.)
"Electric lights, television and computer screens, longer commutes, the blurring of the line between work and personal time, and a host of other aspects of modern life have contributed to sleep deprivation"
All of which, with the possible slight exception of commutes which may be out of their control, are about GROWN ADULTS who aren't able to take themselves to bed on time.
Literally, people, I'm the most gadgety person in the whole of gadgetdom. And I switch them off, turn out the light, and go to sleep no problem at all, after using them for between 8-16 hours a day, every day, for my entire adult life.
If you're not going to bed because you're up doing stuff, stop it and go to bed.
"and 20,000 silent iPhone readers rolling their eyes"
Which, by unit sales, means there'll be 200,000 silent Android readers rolling their eyes at them.
Sorry, but Apple is really nothing special, has never had a "first", doesn't understand that "design" doesn't mean pretty like "designer" does, and sells less than their competitors.
They're only business-positive advantage is that they make SO MUCH profit on every device that they are hugely rich. Which, I'm sorry, is not a criteria I desire in a manufacturer. Sure, they need to be profitable, so they can bring out the next model and sustain their support. But when you're the one paying for it so it sits in an offshore account and never gets used, I don't get it.
From the websites I see statistics for, iPhone users don't figure heavily at all. And the more tech-y the site, the less Apple-y the devices used to access it.
My smartphone has a native-running C compiler on it.
If I wanted to, I could replace it with a free, open-source version of the same OS that it's already running.
If my phone does something over Wifi, I guarantee you that I can know about it. Over 4G etc. is another matter, but to be honest, if you're running an OS you can audit pretty much you could just switch that off, use it only for GSM and isolate anything talking in or out.
Repair components are easy to come by.
My phone is just a mass-market Android smartphone, nothing special.
Fact is, not enough people care, as proven by the existence and hyping of a company that doesn't let you do the above in preference. But even then, Android outsells iOS by about 10:1, but people never believe / research that statistic until you tell them that.
Outside of that, say if you have a complete distrust of anything Android related even if it's not controlled by Google, what choice do you have? Zero. Therefore you take the device you can buy today in a shop and use it appropriately, rather than sit in your cave in the woods complaining about this "new-fangled fire thing, it's just an Orwellian conspiracy".
The tools exist. People don't care. Even when it's obvious, stated, admitted, brought up, demonstrated, people don't care. They just want to play Angry Birds and make calls. If it actually mattered to them - for anything other than lip-service when you mention it - they'd not buy those kinds of devices. Fact is, it doesn't matter to them. Even the celebrity phone-hacks, stolen photos, etc. nobody actually CARES about or people would be up in arms thinking "What if that was my daughter".
You're onto a loser if you think people just need a certain incident to make them realise what's happening. Just look at the news any day of the week.
Their biggest expense is probably the bottle, and then moving it to somewhere they can sell it.
This isn't news.
Nor is it news that stupid people will pay again for something that already comes out of their bathroom taps or falls from the sky for free all the time.
Dasani (Coke-owned?) were bottling River Thames water and selling it to Londoners. Everyone bought it UNTIL it made the news. They hadn't even noticed or cared up until then.
Bottled water has its place, sure, but paying for a bottle of water if you live in a huge house with hot and cold running water is like buying a can of air.
If true, all such matter would have the same change / trajectory to it.
It means they come in on a completely unexpected angle, the people studying them aren't stupid.
Comparatively speaking the gravity of the galaxy is either pathetic, or so strong you end up caught in it's whirlpool. There's basically nothing that could ever do what you suggest, no matter how heavy or non-existent the particle (not that the mass of a particle, or absence of mass, has much to do with how much gravity affects it - gravity is curvature of space-time).
If you can't, then you have no faith in your own products.
To be honest, Linux Foundation was always just some-off, not-affecting-me group anyway. I never quite get what they do, or where the money comes from or goes to.
But you can't say "Linux does/doesn't work on the desktop" until you've done it yourself.
P.S. Yes, I've done it. Exclusively. For 8+ years. While managing Windows networks for a living. It's perfectly viable, and in many ways better.
Nowadays, though, I virtualise everything so it barely matters what the core-OS is and can work in Linux or Windows depending on what I'm doing.
For sure, if I was working for something called the Linux Foundation, myself and EVERYONE under me would be using Linux. Unless I literally had used it and had deemed it inadequate myself, in which case there's be bigger problems than what my people were using to get their work done.
My virtual-speed-penis is obviously not as big as yours.
However, 10 seconds with a HUGE list of active and open projects in it is barely even noticeable, especially if that's the "uncached, hasn't run once yet this session, from nothing" speed on Windows.
On Linux (even a VM with identical projects and versions), it's half that at least, from cold.
Neither are "oh my gosh" slow. The times for anything like SQL Server Manager, or Visual Studio are no better.
I think that only applies if you have to watch the latest things NOW.
I have regularly taken breaks from the stuff on TV, video games, etc.
Wait a year, then everything you "discover" new to yourself is available cheaply, on cheap devices, broadcast for free, you avoid all the stuff that turns to shit (or know when it turns to shit), and you don't have to be left on cliffhangers constantly, we can just pop the next series on.
I think trying to keep up with "all the new stuff" is what sells games consoles, launch-price games, pre-orders, TV subscriptions, etc.
To be honest, if you name a series, I probably didn't watch it until its run was almost finished (or at the very least 4-5 seasons in). But when I did watch, I could watch at my leisure, for a pittance (and own-outright immediately if I wanted to), legally, at my own pace (none of these "new episode next week" stuff), and make sure what I'm watching was actually worthwhile.
The only thing that "hurts" is the transition to that state, that first year you're behind. For me, that was a year where I was living on the edge of my income so such things were a luxury anyway. After that? I play catchup, don't really notice, spend MUCH less on all forms of entertainment, and get a lot more for what I do spend.
Seriously, take a year out. Cord-cutting is a perfect way to start that. Then when you start back, you won't consume a year's entertainment anyway, you'll cherry-pick the good stuff, and you can never quite catch up unless you desperately want to. But likely you won't because your catch-up will be more than enough.
Stop using fucking names, addresses and "secret" (pfft) numbers to authorise credit.
Do some fucking ID, 2-factor-authentication, etc. rather than just "You say that you're Fred Bloggs at 1 Privet Drive? Sure, have a loan".
Literally credit authorisation without explicit notification of such (why is there not a "credit account" where I authorise with a password any credit request?) is just fucking stupid and always has been.
If someone else who knows some obviously public data (I mean, fuck, Equifax have it for a start so anyone who works there could claim to be me, let alone EVERY COMPANY you've ever used to ask for credit or been required to give the same information too) is able to just authorise credit for you, that's the problem.
Past that, it's a much simpler privacy issue - nobody should know what loans I have except me and the loan holder.
Equifax operate in the UK where they hold a similar position to one or two other major credit reference agencies and it's pretty much even chances whether a credit check made by a company uses Equifax or the other major ones. But they all share data and if you ask for a loan from a company that uses one, and then ask for a loan from a company that uses another (e.g. comparing providers), then your data is on both for at least four years.
Likely they have data, out of a population of 70m, on at least 35m of those. Probably more.
The reason they say the bottom bit is because that's what EU law requires, so they are trying to say that their normal processes are to only store in EU (I have to get such guarantees from companies before I can store data with them, e.g. Google, Office 365, etc.).
They obviously fucked up, however, by letting 400k of those records out of the EU, which is instantly illegal. You can't process, or release data for processing, outside of the EU without explicit agreements to do so (not just with consumers). I have to explain this regularly to people who want to use services hosted in the Bahamas and India. Literally, we're not allowed to, and if we did and anything was ever released - it's OUR fault for allowing it to happen.
I stopped caring about the specs on my personal devices (including PCs) years ago. Maybe even a decade.
Screen res / megapixels? Don't really care, I watch SD movies with the screen inches from my face, and I only see MPEG artifacts, not resolution deficiencies.
RAM? Don't really care unless things start dropping out of RAM (if that's visible as crashes / particular slowness only, really).
Cores? Can't say I sit and count them. I know multicore performs better than single-core generally as it's not trying to schedule everything at the same time but beyond that I don't see differences between a 6-core and 12-core unless I'm doing a mass-compile with the full make -j12 options, etc.
Processor speed? To be honest, it's stagnated anyway, and my work machine (running an IT department) is... hold on, because I literally never know... E7500 @ 3GHz. This machine is YEARS old (the chip is 2009).
I get "lumbered" with it because all the new stuff goes out to users because a) IT can manage their machines themselves, b) IT understand when they are hitting limits and can compensate or move the work elsewhere, c) IT should use the lowest denominator so that they have the worst user experience, because then you know EVERY other user has a better experience (it makes you optimise the system and immediately quells the "but you have a super machine, so of course it works for you" stuff). 1.5-2GHz machines are perfectly acceptable, still, however, especially on a mobile device. I do nothing that that chip is required for.
Storage, ports, those I notice. But specs? I couldn't even tell you what my current machines have got. When I buy machines, I set a minimum that can run our software comfortably, but even the basic models ALWAYS exceed our specifications.
Generally speaking, antidepressants don't make you happy. They provide almost a removal or suppression of feeling (so you don't feel depressed but you don't feel happy to the same extent - or you find it HARDER to feel those things).
If you're taking antidepressants then I don't think that the death-risk is particularly significant (sure TWICE THE RISK sounds scary but it's a small percentage anyway). I think the only study to do is: Depressed people NOT on them vs. Depressed people ON them. Which, generally speaking, works out as an improvement in quality of life overall.
Comparing them to non-depressed people is like saying "People who didn't need heart surgery twice as likely to die when we cut them open than people who do". It's not medically all that useful as you just try not to do that anyway.
In Europe, it's at least 2 years, by law, guaranteed. Apple got sued for selling "an extra year" after the first year when actually bog-standard consumer law says you get two on anything. If you get two on washing machines and PCs, pianos and watches, diving equipment or generators, what makes them think you shouldn't get 2 on a phone, especially one sold on a multi-year contract (are you suggesting if it stops working through no fault of my own I need to carry on paying for it still, and buy another phone? Really?)
They don't have to offer a refurbished phone, agreed. They don't have to because it's a cop-out. They are in court arguing that their STATUTORY CONSUMER RIGHT isn't to replace the entire phone for free. They may well be legally required to replace every one ever proven faulty (not broken by the user) within several years. By comparison a $150 offer on a refurb is just a kick in the teeth.
But I don't see them arguing in a European court that it shouldn't be 2 years. Do they make different phones for different continents? I doubt it somehow. And, to be honest, in a waterproof, sealed device that's subject to daily life, if it can't survive two years they really need to go back to their design books and start again (hint: design means more than "looks").
In 15 years, I've never damaged a smartphone, and they've taken tumbles down marble staircases and fallen out of lofts and all sorts. Not one of them was Apple, though. In work, everyone with Apple smashes their screen in the first year no matter what case it's kept in, and it usually takes a chunk of circuitry with it unless it's just a crack.
And reliability? Hehehe. That's funny. Ever worked anywhere where they use them en-masse? iPhone screens particularly are the shittiest things I've ever seen on a modern device in terms of surviving just ordinary usage. Everything from internal boards fucking the screen display up (lines down the screen, etc.), touchscreens dying, to just plain shattering of the glass at the slightest hint of a knock. Not shared with their equivalent devices in anywhere near the same prevalence, whether tablet or phone.
The right direction being "Oracle washing their hands of it and having nothing more to do with it as they can't monetise it", so yes. This is definitely going in the right direction.
At least they didn't just kill it off and bury it, like some of the other things they took over.
Oracle's touch is like a death-knell to everything from Solaris to OpenOffice.
You'd need a 20-processor board to match a small conventional mini-heater which would barely heat one room in the winter.
Though the heat should be used, I'm not sure that using it for direct home heating is really worthwhile. Sure, a datacenter pushing out hundreds of thousands of watts of generated heat is probably able to help heat the swimming-pool in a leisure complex next door (to mutual benefit), I'm not sure it really stands up as a solution once distance of any kind is involved.
I could fill the basement of a tower block with rack servers, but it probably wouldn't be enough to heat even the first few floors or so of residential apartments. And for most of the year, and in fact most of the time it's running even in winter, it would be venting that stuff to the outside air or dialling back the power rather than have the systems overheat.
Not a single software counsellor is medically-authorised in my country (or continent, to my knowledge).
Apart from literally administrative work (e.g. online interfaces to file suits, legal database and calculators), not a single part of the legal process is replaced by software.
Design work? Out of my area, but I'd be very surprised to see that anywhere other than concept.
Supervisory? Not really. Broad area, though. Is watching employees on cam and giving them boxes that beep if they don't pack fast enough supervisory? At best it's incredibly primitive and nothing new.
Doctor's diagnosis? Go tell IBM Watson that, that's hit a loss for 21 consecutive periods and managed to add almost nothing to medical diagnosis whatsoever. And, again, it isn't qualified, isn't able to do anything that the most basic of doctors can do.
I think you're confusing sci-fi and press-releases with real life.
Automation is rife if you want to pluck examples, but they are all in the "unskilled" jobs. Telling machines. Warehousing packing. Postal management (but not collection or delivery). And so on. Hell, I'll give you a skilled example: Not one person in industry now designs silicon chips by hand any more.
All the things you state are 100% human at the moment, or literally unauthorised and not very useful toys. They are the equivalent of people setting a Google search to work on finding a cure for their disease.
No software counsellor will do anything more than spout inanities at the moment. AI isn't there. No software lawyer will do anything more than be an expert system running through procedure at the moment. AI isn't there. No design software will do... well... anything at the moment. AI isn't there. No medical software will do anything in the way of diagnosis without the same trained human being as has always been required in the loop. AI isn't there.
I see two different kinds of workers, and two different kinds of jobs.
There are jobs that exist because they need to be done, and they require almost no skill beyond some initial training. They are low-paid, boring, have high churn (but that doesn't matter because training is simple) and the people in them are easily replaceable.
Almost every other kind of job is the opposite - better paid, require skill beyond just "training", are not boring, have less churn and the people in them are much more difficult to replace (with other humans or with robots).
Like my teacher at school always told me. Work hard, so you can get skills, so you have a job to go to and a career path. If you are - for a career - doing something that anyone could do if you sat with them and told them everything in the space of a few weeks, then you're in the former.
My job is one of the latter - I couldn't explain my job in that time, and merely explaining it would not allow them to adapt and change and perform it indefinitely. Only to someone who's done my job already, really. I don't claim to be a genius, but it's a skilled job. It's nothing like the degree I took, it's nothing like I wanted, but it's a skill I have and continue to evolve that other people can't just walk up and steal.
Now, not everyone will able to get such a job. Not everyone has a skill that few others possess. For those people - I'm sorry, but you aren't going to have a long-term career that isn't as boring as hell. You're going to have to chop-and-change or get outsourced or superseded or made obsolete on a regular basis.
Even if you have a skill-based job, some day that skill will be less relevant (whether it's blacksmithing or programming). The determining factor, though, is the ability to learn. If you have the ability to learn, it doesn't MATTER that your job disappears - you retrain, go and do something else entirely different. Whether you're highly-skilled or a fries-packer, you need to be able to learn and continue to learn.
The "job for life" died generations ago. There won't be a "world without jobs", only a "world without menial jobs". Possibly.
The insulation against that is an ability to learn, and always having a skill that isn't common. Like my teachers used to go on about all the time.
In time, I'm sure my job will be obsoleted. But it won't really matter because the knowledge it brings can be applied elsewhere, and I can learn fast. I'm nearly 40, I'm not that concerned about a future career path yet. And by the time I get to that point, a menial job will be all I can get anyway
The problem is people who get jobs because "they need money" but where their entire working life is spent doing the same things, things that are easily replaceable. It's not even about "going to school", it's about having some kind of interest, skill, talent or effort.
The kind of jobs where you're sitting in a warehouse stacking boxes are ALWAYS going to have their days numbered. You can go to another warehouse and stack different boxes, but the risk of redundancy is always there.
P.S. Don't think me an elitest arsehole, my degree isn't that great, unrelated to my job, my job is pretty ordinary, and yes I have worked stacking shelves in hardware stores, etc. The point is that it was never seen as a "career job", but as a chore to earn money. Often I did it alongside my career job.
But if have no unique selling point, you're just a standard commodity.
A world without jobs is just a fantasy at the moment, we can't even feed everyone in a first-world country, let alone worldwide, the resources that produce robots and electrical power are not infinite. Even if you get to the point where food is free, heating is free, etc. then the options left for those jobless are boredom and anarchy (hey, I get fed, clothed and looked after whatever I do, so what's the consequence?)
But things like lawyers, counsellors, doctors, designers, supervisors, etc. are always going to be around and
Same way the "GNU/Linux" stuff was always dead in the water too.
Rather than fight against it fruitlessly, just accept it and move on. PC is an architecture and even "Macs" are really just "PCs" now (as is XBox and so on). But that distinction doesn't hold anywhere outside an IT office.
Rather than try to revive antiquated terms (which people killed off when they stopped saying "IBM-compatible), just use the full product name itself if you want to distinguish. A Windows PC or a Linux PC.
But "PC" will mean Windows PC until a certain large company stops making that OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Better:
Go to bed when you're tired, earlier if you have a big day ahead. It's not hard.
Read up on "second sleep", previous generations knew about and thought it quite normal to wake up in the night, go and do some things, then go back to bed. Read storybooks and you'll see veiled references to it everywhere, people don't just go to bed and then wake up in the morning. Never heard of "midnight snacks"? Same phenomenon.
Same for food. Hungry? Eat. Three square meals a day is a Victorian invention. It's a biological nonsense. And yet people have trained themselves to it.
Listen to your body, not some random number thrown at you (how many pieces of fruit/veg a day? EVERY COUNTRY CHOOSES A DIFFERENT NUMBER. From 2 up to 8 in some cases.)
"Electric lights, television and computer screens, longer commutes, the blurring of the line between work and personal time, and a host of other aspects of modern life have contributed to sleep deprivation"
All of which, with the possible slight exception of commutes which may be out of their control, are about GROWN ADULTS who aren't able to take themselves to bed on time.
Literally, people, I'm the most gadgety person in the whole of gadgetdom. And I switch them off, turn out the light, and go to sleep no problem at all, after using them for between 8-16 hours a day, every day, for my entire adult life.
If you're not going to bed because you're up doing stuff, stop it and go to bed.
"and 20,000 silent iPhone readers rolling their eyes"
Which, by unit sales, means there'll be 200,000 silent Android readers rolling their eyes at them.
Sorry, but Apple is really nothing special, has never had a "first", doesn't understand that "design" doesn't mean pretty like "designer" does, and sells less than their competitors.
They're only business-positive advantage is that they make SO MUCH profit on every device that they are hugely rich. Which, I'm sorry, is not a criteria I desire in a manufacturer. Sure, they need to be profitable, so they can bring out the next model and sustain their support. But when you're the one paying for it so it sits in an offshore account and never gets used, I don't get it.
From the websites I see statistics for, iPhone users don't figure heavily at all. And the more tech-y the site, the less Apple-y the devices used to access it.
My smartphone has a native-running C compiler on it.
If I wanted to, I could replace it with a free, open-source version of the same OS that it's already running.
If my phone does something over Wifi, I guarantee you that I can know about it. Over 4G etc. is another matter, but to be honest, if you're running an OS you can audit pretty much you could just switch that off, use it only for GSM and isolate anything talking in or out.
Repair components are easy to come by.
My phone is just a mass-market Android smartphone, nothing special.
Fact is, not enough people care, as proven by the existence and hyping of a company that doesn't let you do the above in preference. But even then, Android outsells iOS by about 10:1, but people never believe / research that statistic until you tell them that.
Outside of that, say if you have a complete distrust of anything Android related even if it's not controlled by Google, what choice do you have? Zero. Therefore you take the device you can buy today in a shop and use it appropriately, rather than sit in your cave in the woods complaining about this "new-fangled fire thing, it's just an Orwellian conspiracy".
The tools exist. People don't care. Even when it's obvious, stated, admitted, brought up, demonstrated, people don't care. They just want to play Angry Birds and make calls. If it actually mattered to them - for anything other than lip-service when you mention it - they'd not buy those kinds of devices. Fact is, it doesn't matter to them. Even the celebrity phone-hacks, stolen photos, etc. nobody actually CARES about or people would be up in arms thinking "What if that was my daughter".
You're onto a loser if you think people just need a certain incident to make them realise what's happening. Just look at the news any day of the week.
That's nitrogen, or the crisps would be bad before you got to them.
THEY'RE BOTTLING WATER.
Their biggest expense is probably the bottle, and then moving it to somewhere they can sell it.
This isn't news.
Nor is it news that stupid people will pay again for something that already comes out of their bathroom taps or falls from the sky for free all the time.
Dasani (Coke-owned?) were bottling River Thames water and selling it to Londoners. Everyone bought it UNTIL it made the news. They hadn't even noticed or cared up until then.
Bottled water has its place, sure, but paying for a bottle of water if you live in a huge house with hot and cold running water is like buying a can of air.
If true, all such matter would have the same change / trajectory to it.
It means they come in on a completely unexpected angle, the people studying them aren't stupid.
Comparatively speaking the gravity of the galaxy is either pathetic, or so strong you end up caught in it's whirlpool. There's basically nothing that could ever do what you suggest, no matter how heavy or non-existent the particle (not that the mass of a particle, or absence of mass, has much to do with how much gravity affects it - gravity is curvature of space-time).
That's okay. As per previous stories on Slashdot, Apple has argued in court that their devices are only built to last a year anyway.
They have literally said that, in a court of law.
Yet people still buy them.
Yay, we got rid of proprietary plugins!
Now let's put proprietary plugins into the standard!
I stand by my assertion.
What do they do?
It seems a load of company-focused rhetoric, I can't dig through to what they actually DO. Specifically what do they do FOR Linux?
A few bits of project-hosting is all that pops out, and I'm sure there are any number of places that do the same.
Eat your own dog food.
If you can't, then you have no faith in your own products.
To be honest, Linux Foundation was always just some-off, not-affecting-me group anyway. I never quite get what they do, or where the money comes from or goes to.
But you can't say "Linux does/doesn't work on the desktop" until you've done it yourself.
P.S. Yes, I've done it. Exclusively. For 8+ years. While managing Windows networks for a living. It's perfectly viable, and in many ways better.
Nowadays, though, I virtualise everything so it barely matters what the core-OS is and can work in Linux or Windows depending on what I'm doing.
For sure, if I was working for something called the Linux Foundation, myself and EVERYONE under me would be using Linux. Unless I literally had used it and had deemed it inadequate myself, in which case there's be bigger problems than what my people were using to get their work done.
My virtual-speed-penis is obviously not as big as yours.
However, 10 seconds with a HUGE list of active and open projects in it is barely even noticeable, especially if that's the "uncached, hasn't run once yet this session, from nothing" speed on Windows.
On Linux (even a VM with identical projects and versions), it's half that at least, from cold.
Neither are "oh my gosh" slow. The times for anything like SQL Server Manager, or Visual Studio are no better.
Start... Run... Programming... Eclipse... Eclipse
(Yes, I use classic shell and old-fashioned start menus categorised and in alphabetical order).
1...
2...
3...
4...
5... (Splashscreen)
6...
7... (loading huge default-open project)
8...
9...
Loaded.
That's from a REALLY cold filesystem cache for it, I doubt it was in there at all.
Libreoffice comes up in 4, admittedly.
But Steam takes longer, as does a game called Factorio (to get to the MENU!) as does anything complex.
I wouldn't call it "long". And if it worried me, I'd just leave it in the background - I already never log off because... what's the point?
And that's on Windows. On Linux, it's so much faster.
I think that only applies if you have to watch the latest things NOW.
I have regularly taken breaks from the stuff on TV, video games, etc.
Wait a year, then everything you "discover" new to yourself is available cheaply, on cheap devices, broadcast for free, you avoid all the stuff that turns to shit (or know when it turns to shit), and you don't have to be left on cliffhangers constantly, we can just pop the next series on.
I think trying to keep up with "all the new stuff" is what sells games consoles, launch-price games, pre-orders, TV subscriptions, etc.
To be honest, if you name a series, I probably didn't watch it until its run was almost finished (or at the very least 4-5 seasons in). But when I did watch, I could watch at my leisure, for a pittance (and own-outright immediately if I wanted to), legally, at my own pace (none of these "new episode next week" stuff), and make sure what I'm watching was actually worthwhile.
The only thing that "hurts" is the transition to that state, that first year you're behind. For me, that was a year where I was living on the edge of my income so such things were a luxury anyway. After that? I play catchup, don't really notice, spend MUCH less on all forms of entertainment, and get a lot more for what I do spend.
Seriously, take a year out. Cord-cutting is a perfect way to start that. Then when you start back, you won't consume a year's entertainment anyway, you'll cherry-pick the good stuff, and you can never quite catch up unless you desperately want to. But likely you won't because your catch-up will be more than enough.
Or:
Stop using fucking names, addresses and "secret" (pfft) numbers to authorise credit.
Do some fucking ID, 2-factor-authentication, etc. rather than just "You say that you're Fred Bloggs at 1 Privet Drive? Sure, have a loan".
Literally credit authorisation without explicit notification of such (why is there not a "credit account" where I authorise with a password any credit request?) is just fucking stupid and always has been.
If someone else who knows some obviously public data (I mean, fuck, Equifax have it for a start so anyone who works there could claim to be me, let alone EVERY COMPANY you've ever used to ask for credit or been required to give the same information too) is able to just authorise credit for you, that's the problem.
Past that, it's a much simpler privacy issue - nobody should know what loans I have except me and the loan holder.
Equifax operate in the UK where they hold a similar position to one or two other major credit reference agencies and it's pretty much even chances whether a credit check made by a company uses Equifax or the other major ones. But they all share data and if you ask for a loan from a company that uses one, and then ask for a loan from a company that uses another (e.g. comparing providers), then your data is on both for at least four years.
Likely they have data, out of a population of 70m, on at least 35m of those. Probably more.
The reason they say the bottom bit is because that's what EU law requires, so they are trying to say that their normal processes are to only store in EU (I have to get such guarantees from companies before I can store data with them, e.g. Google, Office 365, etc.).
They obviously fucked up, however, by letting 400k of those records out of the EU, which is instantly illegal. You can't process, or release data for processing, outside of the EU without explicit agreements to do so (not just with consumers). I have to explain this regularly to people who want to use services hosted in the Bahamas and India. Literally, we're not allowed to, and if we did and anything was ever released - it's OUR fault for allowing it to happen.
I stopped caring about the specs on my personal devices (including PCs) years ago. Maybe even a decade.
Screen res / megapixels? Don't really care, I watch SD movies with the screen inches from my face, and I only see MPEG artifacts, not resolution deficiencies.
RAM? Don't really care unless things start dropping out of RAM (if that's visible as crashes / particular slowness only, really).
Cores? Can't say I sit and count them. I know multicore performs better than single-core generally as it's not trying to schedule everything at the same time but beyond that I don't see differences between a 6-core and 12-core unless I'm doing a mass-compile with the full make -j12 options, etc.
Processor speed? To be honest, it's stagnated anyway, and my work machine (running an IT department) is... hold on, because I literally never know... E7500 @ 3GHz. This machine is YEARS old (the chip is 2009).
I get "lumbered" with it because all the new stuff goes out to users because a) IT can manage their machines themselves, b) IT understand when they are hitting limits and can compensate or move the work elsewhere, c) IT should use the lowest denominator so that they have the worst user experience, because then you know EVERY other user has a better experience (it makes you optimise the system and immediately quells the "but you have a super machine, so of course it works for you" stuff). 1.5-2GHz machines are perfectly acceptable, still, however, especially on a mobile device. I do nothing that that chip is required for.
Storage, ports, those I notice. But specs? I couldn't even tell you what my current machines have got. When I buy machines, I set a minimum that can run our software comfortably, but even the basic models ALWAYS exceed our specifications.
Generally speaking, antidepressants don't make you happy. They provide almost a removal or suppression of feeling (so you don't feel depressed but you don't feel happy to the same extent - or you find it HARDER to feel those things).
If you're taking antidepressants then I don't think that the death-risk is particularly significant (sure TWICE THE RISK sounds scary but it's a small percentage anyway). I think the only study to do is: Depressed people NOT on them vs. Depressed people ON them. Which, generally speaking, works out as an improvement in quality of life overall.
Comparing them to non-depressed people is like saying "People who didn't need heart surgery twice as likely to die when we cut them open than people who do". It's not medically all that useful as you just try not to do that anyway.
In Europe, it's at least 2 years, by law, guaranteed. Apple got sued for selling "an extra year" after the first year when actually bog-standard consumer law says you get two on anything. If you get two on washing machines and PCs, pianos and watches, diving equipment or generators, what makes them think you shouldn't get 2 on a phone, especially one sold on a multi-year contract (are you suggesting if it stops working through no fault of my own I need to carry on paying for it still, and buy another phone? Really?)
They don't have to offer a refurbished phone, agreed. They don't have to because it's a cop-out. They are in court arguing that their STATUTORY CONSUMER RIGHT isn't to replace the entire phone for free. They may well be legally required to replace every one ever proven faulty (not broken by the user) within several years. By comparison a $150 offer on a refurb is just a kick in the teeth.
But I don't see them arguing in a European court that it shouldn't be 2 years. Do they make different phones for different continents? I doubt it somehow. And, to be honest, in a waterproof, sealed device that's subject to daily life, if it can't survive two years they really need to go back to their design books and start again (hint: design means more than "looks").
In 15 years, I've never damaged a smartphone, and they've taken tumbles down marble staircases and fallen out of lofts and all sorts. Not one of them was Apple, though. In work, everyone with Apple smashes their screen in the first year no matter what case it's kept in, and it usually takes a chunk of circuitry with it unless it's just a crack.
And reliability? Hehehe. That's funny. Ever worked anywhere where they use them en-masse? iPhone screens particularly are the shittiest things I've ever seen on a modern device in terms of surviving just ordinary usage. Everything from internal boards fucking the screen display up (lines down the screen, etc.), touchscreens dying, to just plain shattering of the glass at the slightest hint of a knock. Not shared with their equivalent devices in anywhere near the same prevalence, whether tablet or phone.
The right direction being "Oracle washing their hands of it and having nothing more to do with it as they can't monetise it", so yes. This is definitely going in the right direction.
At least they didn't just kill it off and bury it, like some of the other things they took over.
Oracle's touch is like a death-knell to everything from Solaris to OpenOffice.
Call it 100W per processor.
You'd need a 20-processor board to match a small conventional mini-heater which would barely heat one room in the winter.
Though the heat should be used, I'm not sure that using it for direct home heating is really worthwhile. Sure, a datacenter pushing out hundreds of thousands of watts of generated heat is probably able to help heat the swimming-pool in a leisure complex next door (to mutual benefit), I'm not sure it really stands up as a solution once distance of any kind is involved.
I could fill the basement of a tower block with rack servers, but it probably wouldn't be enough to heat even the first few floors or so of residential apartments. And for most of the year, and in fact most of the time it's running even in winter, it would be venting that stuff to the outside air or dialling back the power rather than have the systems overheat.
And Apple score 0 models out of a tiny handful, by the same metric.
What's your point?
Not a single software counsellor is medically-authorised in my country (or continent, to my knowledge).
Apart from literally administrative work (e.g. online interfaces to file suits, legal database and calculators), not a single part of the legal process is replaced by software.
Design work? Out of my area, but I'd be very surprised to see that anywhere other than concept.
Supervisory? Not really. Broad area, though. Is watching employees on cam and giving them boxes that beep if they don't pack fast enough supervisory? At best it's incredibly primitive and nothing new.
Doctor's diagnosis? Go tell IBM Watson that, that's hit a loss for 21 consecutive periods and managed to add almost nothing to medical diagnosis whatsoever. And, again, it isn't qualified, isn't able to do anything that the most basic of doctors can do.
I think you're confusing sci-fi and press-releases with real life.
Automation is rife if you want to pluck examples, but they are all in the "unskilled" jobs. Telling machines. Warehousing packing. Postal management (but not collection or delivery). And so on. Hell, I'll give you a skilled example: Not one person in industry now designs silicon chips by hand any more.
All the things you state are 100% human at the moment, or literally unauthorised and not very useful toys. They are the equivalent of people setting a Google search to work on finding a cure for their disease.
No software counsellor will do anything more than spout inanities at the moment. AI isn't there.
No software lawyer will do anything more than be an expert system running through procedure at the moment. AI isn't there.
No design software will do... well... anything at the moment. AI isn't there.
No medical software will do anything in the way of diagnosis without the same trained human being as has always been required in the loop. AI isn't there.
I see two different kinds of workers, and two different kinds of jobs.
There are jobs that exist because they need to be done, and they require almost no skill beyond some initial training. They are low-paid, boring, have high churn (but that doesn't matter because training is simple) and the people in them are easily replaceable.
Almost every other kind of job is the opposite - better paid, require skill beyond just "training", are not boring, have less churn and the people in them are much more difficult to replace (with other humans or with robots).
Like my teacher at school always told me. Work hard, so you can get skills, so you have a job to go to and a career path. If you are - for a career - doing something that anyone could do if you sat with them and told them everything in the space of a few weeks, then you're in the former.
My job is one of the latter - I couldn't explain my job in that time, and merely explaining it would not allow them to adapt and change and perform it indefinitely. Only to someone who's done my job already, really. I don't claim to be a genius, but it's a skilled job. It's nothing like the degree I took, it's nothing like I wanted, but it's a skill I have and continue to evolve that other people can't just walk up and steal.
Now, not everyone will able to get such a job. Not everyone has a skill that few others possess. For those people - I'm sorry, but you aren't going to have a long-term career that isn't as boring as hell. You're going to have to chop-and-change or get outsourced or superseded or made obsolete on a regular basis.
Even if you have a skill-based job, some day that skill will be less relevant (whether it's blacksmithing or programming). The determining factor, though, is the ability to learn. If you have the ability to learn, it doesn't MATTER that your job disappears - you retrain, go and do something else entirely different. Whether you're highly-skilled or a fries-packer, you need to be able to learn and continue to learn.
The "job for life" died generations ago. There won't be a "world without jobs", only a "world without menial jobs". Possibly.
The insulation against that is an ability to learn, and always having a skill that isn't common. Like my teachers used to go on about all the time.
In time, I'm sure my job will be obsoleted. But it won't really matter because the knowledge it brings can be applied elsewhere, and I can learn fast. I'm nearly 40, I'm not that concerned about a future career path yet. And by the time I get to that point, a menial job will be all I can get anyway
The problem is people who get jobs because "they need money" but where their entire working life is spent doing the same things, things that are easily replaceable. It's not even about "going to school", it's about having some kind of interest, skill, talent or effort.
The kind of jobs where you're sitting in a warehouse stacking boxes are ALWAYS going to have their days numbered. You can go to another warehouse and stack different boxes, but the risk of redundancy is always there.
P.S. Don't think me an elitest arsehole, my degree isn't that great, unrelated to my job, my job is pretty ordinary, and yes I have worked stacking shelves in hardware stores, etc. The point is that it was never seen as a "career job", but as a chore to earn money. Often I did it alongside my career job.
But if have no unique selling point, you're just a standard commodity.
A world without jobs is just a fantasy at the moment, we can't even feed everyone in a first-world country, let alone worldwide, the resources that produce robots and electrical power are not infinite. Even if you get to the point where food is free, heating is free, etc. then the options left for those jobless are boredom and anarchy (hey, I get fed, clothed and looked after whatever I do, so what's the consequence?)
But things like lawyers, counsellors, doctors, designers, supervisors, etc. are always going to be around and
You lost that battle in the 90's.
Same way the "GNU/Linux" stuff was always dead in the water too.
Rather than fight against it fruitlessly, just accept it and move on. PC is an architecture and even "Macs" are really just "PCs" now (as is XBox and so on). But that distinction doesn't hold anywhere outside an IT office.
Rather than try to revive antiquated terms (which people killed off when they stopped saying "IBM-compatible), just use the full product name itself if you want to distinguish. A Windows PC or a Linux PC.
But "PC" will mean Windows PC until a certain large company stops making that OS.