1. Simplify the design until you've distilled it down to a zen state of ease and grace
2. Make the thing physicality as artistically beautiful and pleasing as possible, add a degree of fun and whimsy
3. Make a media event of new products or new versions of existing products
4. Lock the market in, control every atom of what it does and who you have to go to, to make it work
5. Charge twice as much for the same hardware as anyone else
6. Use a consistent interface across your universe, make the learning curve as close to a flat line as is humanly possible.
7. Target artists, movers and shakers and aesthetes of all types first, causing a culture to develop around your stuff
Oh yeah, I want my doctor to diagnose my problem looking at a cat scan on an Iphone... is that my liver of smudge? Because you best believe he isn't gonna use a PC to manage his charts. Moving a Doctor to a paperless digital environment means using a device that replaces a clipboard and that is plugged into his patient database, billing system, Rx management system, medical database, personal and office communication systems. A phone would suck for that, and a computer ties him down to a single place (a doctor is always moving.) Now multiply that times lawyers, shipping clerks, inventory control specialist, warehouse managers, production control professions and a thousand other jobs, then multiply that again times the fact it does all the cool things a person want to do in their personal lives... I'm sorry, watching a movie on a phone is a willful attempt at going blind. The pad is here to stay, get over it.
That's exactly the point. A touchscreen, digital appliance with exceptional versatility isf a huge boon to most people, and completely indispensable to specific people. The key features are a high quality graphics in a convenient screen size (i.e. book sized, clipboard sized, large enough to show an entire picture or video screen without blinding people with eye strain), good audio, wi-fi and/or cell capabilities, convenient memory size and a super easy user interface allowing people to begin using it in seconds and expanding it with specifically useful applications in minutes. This is not going away. It is not designed to replace a PC, it is designed to make the a proper move in the right direction for the ultimate digital appliance (and phones are simply too small for most people.)
As core proliferate, and power growth, these tablets will get good speech recognition, removing the need for a keyboard. They'll get better at interacting with human beings (think if about a display with a human face with micro expressions and speech with emotional content and inflection to convey subtle information about system environments and application status.) Flexible electronic films and displays will allow then to be rolled up into an even smaller/lighter form factor (think of a roughly 7 inch cylindrical form factor.)
These devices will subsume dozens of common day to day tasks including communication, personal information storage, credit and debit cards, online banking, car security, childrens' education, personal health information, and on and on. Basically, a bunch of tasks and services can be concentrated into a simple appliance that allows most people to handle those things they normally need to handle. There will also be hosts of applications for more specialized use. Doctors charts, construction forms, warehouse inventory, assembly line process tracking, lab management, library access, remote training or student tutoring. The possibilities are literally endless and user specific. A PC is the wrong device to try to implement for these purposes, the keyboard actually get's in the way for mos of these uses, while a small, light device like a tablet is perfect. People have been screaming for this, and what made the market so slow before was computer manufacturers who were trying to put too much hardware and on a tablet without providing a sane and simple interface to access a lot of resources easily and quickly (an area Apple has raised to a fine art.) Apple chose the right balance, and now everyone else is trying catch up. That is neither right or wrong.... its like the weather....it just is.
The tablet may well go away, but it is the first step in a line of ubiquitous personal digital devices that will ultimately provide with all the computing power we need to do our daily lives. Keyboards won't go away, but they be only one of many ways to communicate with these devices.
Oh you mean as opposed to the impact of the algorithms in the IBM mainframes that had already influenced a generation of American lives? Or perhaps as opposed to the algorithms in the Enigma Box which had a significant hand in ending global Fascism during WWII? Then again maybe you meant the algorithmic process the Curies used to purify radium, ultimately changing physics forever and creating completely new branches of physics, chemistry, biology and medicine? Perhaps you're talking about the 8048 as opposed to the algorithmic processes of Ford, Edison, of the algorithms used in the looms that literally started the industrial revolution? Hell why not take it all the way back to the Spartans with their mechanical precision and strict attention to science and ordered process which made possible the defeat of the Persians at Thermopylae and the birthplace of Democracy to exist at all in the first place.
Ever see how a flint arrow head or axe is made? The process is entirely algorithmic, well defined and repetitive. Its one of the defining moments of humanity making it possible for early human beings to eat meat and grow our big fat brains, making it possible for us to design ever more elaborate algorithms. We've been stringing together process and symbolic representation for millions of year, and the universe has been doing it with elementary particles for billions of years. The 8048 was simply a blip on a trend line that started 13.8 billion years ago. With the advent of serious synthetic brains, I would be surprised if some degree of sentience isn't the next world shaking development in computers and algorithms, and I'm just as certain that it will come with all the apocalyptic terror the media can muster.
The problem is that this is an ants eye view of a city... of course it doesn't make sense. The most powerful algorithms include chaos, and occasionally cause it. Because the universe is a chaotic place. You think you have control of your body and you have a uniform sense that you and your body are integral. Speak to a stroke victim or someone suffering from cerebral palsy. Billions of nerve ending channel signals to your spine which concentrate and filter signal letting the important ones by and stopping the ones that don't matter. Ever notice you had cut you weren't even aware of and only after seeing the blood did you feel it? Your brain filters a literal flood of information first through nerve filters but then through a series of cognitive filters, emotional state, cultural belief, on and on to arrive at a consistent world view. Why should it alarm you that as our technology grows ever more complex, that it finds new way to abstract its lower levels, and that we would find ourselves at the end of greater and greater filtering and aggregation. That's how all complex systems function. We just now have the technology to create systems of sufficient complexity that these natural laws would begin to express themselves in our day to day lives in a conscious way. There's nothing to be afraid of, we just need to begin to notice that what we experience as individuality is an illusion and that we are part of a super-organism. As such we need to begin to look at the care and healthy development of that super-organism and its relationship to eternity. This part of the growing up of our species.
I'm sorry but algorithms already control our lives and always have. The algorithmic nature of the information and process of our universe that guide the function of DNA, evolution, the dissipative structures of clouds and galaxies all have aspects that can elegantly be seen as algorithms. As quantum mechanics and information science find themselves coming to a junction where the entire universe can be looked at as a remarkably complex computer, the ordered processes (particularly the processes we don't understand or perceive), can be expressed as algorithms and dealing with them as such gives us new insight and ability to understand and manipulate that universe. Even in the purely human world of human creations, there is guiding structure and process in virtually everything. From laws to lug nuts, algorithms allow to decompose process find inherent opportunities for enhanced efficiency and greater elegance. Why would anyone be afraid of that?
It would have been too late, my friends patented a noise canceling headset for use in small planes the year before. But nice try:-) You may notice that all the cool noise cancelling stuff has really exploded over the last 10 years since the patent has expired.
I see so their patent covers not only the 2001 pad computer but the alien monolith as well... I mean its just a super advance iPad from Jupiter... right?
Clearly you have not read about this topic. Flying cars like non flying cars would have to be simple enough for a teenager to learn how to operate. It would have to be part of a distributed network that wrested control from the would be pilot in congested air space, stacking it like a packet in a network designed to ensure that the car got to its pre-specified destination without delay or collision. A city of flying cars would be beyond the capacity of human management or human piloting. Future cars on the ground will utilize similar technology, and jams and collisions will be a thing of the past.
This won't be an issue for early adopters, because there will be few others in the air (relatively speaking) to interfere with the full pleasure of going wherever you want (with the obvious exception of controlled/restricted air space.) I think the first car adopters must have loved getting away to wild places in their horseless carriages, until everyone had one and we all spent out time in jams waiting for traffic to move. It will take time and billions of dollars to build the necessary infrastructure for such a system. The real question is whether or not America has the steam left to take on a venture of national magnitude. We've spent the last 3 decades letting our nations infrastructure crumble, highways, bridges, railroads, and air traffic control systems are all on the verge of collapse, it seems unlikely that we'll suddenly get the gumption to build a national flying car network. At least not until we get the rest of our stuff together.
Actually nowadays, you don't even need that much space. I saw a STOL plane that had a stall speed of 26 MPH, and could take off in still air in just under 85 feet. He could literally take off inside the length of a 747. The TV segment showed him flying around the Central Coast of California, and in a moderate head wind he could virtually land the plane vertically. He floated over the coast doing lazy 8s (super lazy 8s), then brought it down and flew at about 15 feet over hills and meadows. At 26 MPH, its pretty hard to have a fatal accident. A cow looked up at him with a very puzzled look as it chewed grass. The cool part is that it also had the top cruising speed for an over wing craft at the time, so this plane could get you there slow or fast.
In fact if you live a decent distance from air traffic, and have a couple hundred feet of take off and landing space, and need to drive to town every day, this plane would make a fine commuter vehicle.
I think when most people think about flying cars they want something that will support VTOL or at least STOL. They want the car to be autonomous, with manual override and redundant safety feature like the Moller big safety parachute. They want to get there way fast, be able to fly at any reasonable altitude, and they want it to get decent fuel economy. The only way to prevent stupid people from crashing the vehicle is to give it a better brain than the passenger (a mouse brain should do... really.) Then tie all vehicles in congested fly ways to server controlled flight networks that manage traffic like any other network. Only now your the packet:-)
PCs evolved in the wild wild west of arpanet, open source, even Microsoft had to deal with the explosion of possibilities, endless sources of hardware, software and content.
Telephones evolved for a century in the authoritarian straight jacket of Ma Bell, and phone companies are used to controlling every aspect of your digital resource, charging you for everything, forcing you to take what they want to give you. BUSINESS GET"S HARD JUST THINKING ABOUT THIS. The death of the PC will not be because of application integration, but because American Business hates having to dance to the tune of its customer, and will do everything humanly possible to force a migration to a platform that gives them complete control. That what makes the pad computer perfect. Its a PC that the provider can control like a cell phone.
Consider what you're loosing, and demand your freedom at every turn. Your Cell Phone should be free as a PC, not the other way around.
Actually, I'm surprisingly close to your mind here I would however tweak things just a wee bit... try to follow:-)
Since 80% to 90% of the zygotes created for invitro fertilization are simply disposed of, there is a wonderful source for embryonic stem cells that will never, ever become a human being under any circumstance. No moral dilemma here. Moreover, if you want to take the fear of profit out of the equation, make it voluntary (like an organ donor card) for the parents of the zygote to donate the cells to help others in need (this is exactly like saying, yes my son/daughter is brain dead, you may save lives with his or her organs.) Again, no moral dilemma. With the ability to split the first few division up into individual seed cells, you now have the ability to serve hundreds or thousands of people from a single zygote. There will never be a shortage of stem cells. No need to touch abortions, ever, period... take it off the table.
Agreed, make a baby, support the critter, its not just a good idea, its the law... enforce the heck out of it. Moreover, make such a public stink about being a Dad who won't do his duty that the shear weight of being a pariah makes him do the right thing.
I agree, abortions are an abomination. An equally or even greater abomination, is bringing a crack addicted premature fetus (of non-white) parents into the world, who will never know love, never be adopted, at best get passed around in child welfare system that is woefully inadequate to the need, and ultimately grow up into a drug addicted, angry, violent sociopath who either ends up committing suicide by cop or spending the rest of a short and violent life in our prison system. For starter I would make dead certain every child in the public school system knew and could get contraceptives and basic health care. There are high schools out where 50% of the girls get pregnant before graduating. THAT IS GROTESQUE. Teach kids to abstain, they haven't the physical, mental or emotional maturity to deal with parenthood, but knowing that they're going to have sex anyway, teach them to avoid pregnancy and STD with proper contraception. Also provide counseling, if the child has a relationship with its parents that isn't adversarial or abusive, bring the parents into the conversation, and by all means take the stigma off this conversation. Sex is a fundamental human design, stop making it the focus of shame and embarrassment, and also using it sell products or titillate teenagers into buying banal crap.
We can now save babies under a pound. The technology has gotten pretty good. The energy would be better spent preventing the causes for preemies and sick mothers. Proper education, nutrition, drug rehabilitation, prenatal care and counseling to ensure young mothers to be are creating a great future for their children whether they keep them or not.
Rape is a violent crime. One in three girls in college gets date raped. Date rape drugging is out of control. Our entire economy is based on sexualizing everything and whipping young men into a semi-permanent sexual frenzy. Case in point a televised spring beak bash in Huntington Beach, CA broke into a sexual riot when girls dancing in tiny bathing suits were suddenly attacked by drunken frat boys, stripped naked, assaulted and in some cases raped. The ensuing riot caused millions in damages, and not only traumatized the girls, but ruined the lives of a number of young men who simply got sucked into the mob and were later identified as perpetrators. If you really mean to deal with rape to its logical extreme, you're going to need to define rape, and does that include bands of young men who engage in games where they get girls drunk, slip them ruffies, coerce, bully or bludgeon girls into having sex as some sick game, all the while their Father beaming that's my boy the stud. There are some pretty ugly social dynamics that should be getting addressed in our schools, and its high time parents became part of the solution and not part of the problem.
The best indicator we have of success is education. You will either provide decent education (note, this isn't warehousing, baby sitting, crowd management, or child processing, but education) or you will pay for a significant percentage of your population being incarcerated, and your economy being in shambles.
Time and time again, the very same children failing in public school environments, have excelled when placed in legitimate institutions committed to providing a safe, comprehensive, committed environments for children to learn. The failure is not in the children, it is in the public schools. The list of failures is nearly endless. Providing so little funding that schools resort to having fast food on their campuses leading to unhealthy diets high in sugar and fat, leading to poor physical and therefore mental performance (exacerbating attention disorders and chronic sleepiness in classes.) Insufficient funds for meaningful PE, art instruction, music instruction, computer science instruction and extracurricular activities make students less interested in their course work and curricula, provides them with insufficient opportunities to develop healthy social behavior, and in poorer communities where both parents work to feed their families, leaves children vulnerable to gangs and negative influences (those drugs mentioned above.)
Children are naturally curious and want to know. It takes an environment of trying to force kids into being the little automatons that governments and businesses so desperately want in their workforces and electorates to kill off the desire to learn. The state isn't interested in intellectually developed, informed and empowered civilians. Such people are a nightmare for Government. They have opinions and know how to voice them, they see trends and make informed conclusions and demand that their representatives tow the line. Government hates that. Much better to create an ignorant, superstitious public who get's their truth out of the little black corporate box in their living rooms and does what Fox news tells them to.
I agree there is a small percentage of special needs children, children acting out because they are being raised by monsters, children with medical conditions which make it hard or impossible for them to function normally in a class room. These children for the most part need special education to succeed, but significant information now available says that they indeed can lead productive, happy, contributing lives giving to society rather than simply taking. Until we're willing to spend as much on our children (as a society) as we do on pets, none of this should be a surprise. Over the last 3 years we secretly gave 1.2 trillion dollars to banks (half of them in other countries.) We've lined the pockets of wealthy and greedy men, and continue to do so. Our representatives refuse to tax the wealthy, while Rupert Murdoch stood up in public and said "FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S HOLY, TAX ME ALREADY!!!" Our schools just look like the rest of the train wreck, that's all.
Texas does lead the way in stupid however. Their government has been hijacked by the profoundly ignorant, and they're demonstrating what the decent into a police state looks like. Don't deal with the underlying causes long enough, keep addressing the symptoms, keep using magical thinking as your foundation for making decisions, all the while hoping the messiah will magic all your problems away, and you get Texas. The real problem is that a very large number of poorly educated people in this country think Texas is the model for the nation, and it scares me to bottom of my soul.
As technology and human social evolution alter the trajectory of human society, new, unpredictable and interesting results will disrupt the obvious path of our development. Research suggests that an end to poverty and global access to modern education would in fact preclude the many problems facing the world today. The end of poverty and the access to modern education would impact population growth, the availability of health care and the prevention of pandemics and ending the likelihood of war, tribal conflict and outbreaks of violence based purely on social inequality.
Education is the single most important means by which people everywhere may break free of the bonds of poverty. In so doing, drastically altering what is possible for the entire human race. Democratizing the third world and bringing them truly into the 21rst century as full partners in designing a global future. Making comprehensive education available freely to all people is tantamount to ending slavery on a global scale. The tools of knowledge are quickly becoming available to people everywhere, the information itself will make the realization of an enlightened humanity, a dream within our grasp.
Neil Stephenson's "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer Study Guide" may soon be coming to a pad computer near you, wherever you may live. We surely live in the most interesting time in human history... dancing on a razors edge between disaster and the complete liberation of the human spirit. I for one am betting on a future of blazing brilliance and blinding light!
I think orthodoxies of any religion are unhealthy, inherently broken and that includes Communism, Capitalism, and any number of other socioeconomic/political belief systems. The inherent problem with orthodoxies is that the belief, the ideology becomes more important, than the goal the belief system serves. In the end the system cannibalizes its purpose in the name of the belief.
An operational belief system tests its own validity all along its process, and adjusts its beliefs and opinions as the nature of the universe unfolds and unconceals physical reality. It then continues to refine itself as it goes, always validating itself with rigorous observation and critically honest self appraisal.
Isms have failed in the past because they became obsessed with the beauty and greatness of humanity without taking equal consideration into the nature of Man's ignorance, bigotry, foolishness and lowest impulses. The brilliance of our founding fathers was the idea of checks and balances. Create a environment that illicit's greatness, and provides sufficient freedom to create, while ensuring that no person or group could ever do too much damage, because they could never acquire too much power. This is genius. This it the first thing men without conscience or consideration, given wholly to an Ism, had to destroy to bring our country down. Sadly today, our checks and balances have been all but obliterated and these men have almost completely succeeded in destroy what makes this nation great in the name of their Ism. We are literally all the poorer for it.
Any vague illusion to a two party system is for the most part simply coincidental. We have perhaps several dozen real champions on either side of the aisle, and then a mob of retired lawyers who pretty much sold their collective souls to the highest bidder to get to the positions they now hold. Republicrats aren't Republicrats because of their political view, because they don't vote according to their political views.
The Dems who were supposedly for all the thing the parent post suggests, voted for the invasion of Iraq (etc.), gave hundreds of billions to the banks, instituted laws which allowed torture, the effective repeal of habeaus corpus, no trial detention, no warrant wire-taps and the virtual gutting of the entire bill of rights. The titular head of the Democratic party, our President (the man who was going to bring us real change), has proven to be the blandest of moderates and only seems radically liberal when compared to the mouth breathing tea-baggers. The only missing from this pitiful circus that I can see, is a statesman or an IQ higher than the temperature of tepid bath water (in Centigrade.)
The Republican party is simply deranged, deluded, and demented. Clearly winning hands down the Wackadoodle trifecta! The Dems are 98% testicle free, and have less collective spine than a sea slug in vat of battery acid, giving up at the merest whisper of a filibusterer... sweet jebus help us!!! It occurs to me that both sides are just doing this little song and dance number to cover up the fact that all the actors have already been paid, and are just reading their scripts so the American People can continue enjoying that long running soap opera "Days of our C-Span".
A wise man, a very long time ago, said "If you want the truth, follow the money." The rest is just slight of hand and misdirection. Pointing a finger at either party is like thinking their something magical about either the hat or the rabbit. Stop looking at the props, and start paying attention to the elderly gentleman behind the curtain. Now figure out who the real humbug is.
Sorry but this is incredibly naive. In ten years China will be the worlds largest economy and as hard as they are trying to grow IT professionals they will terribly short and American engineers who saw the curve early and capitalized on it will do very well indeed. Absolutely, learn Mandarin, it will serve you well the rest of this century.
Advances in swarm technology, adaptive intelligent systems, self optimizing technologies with move most engineers to position of working on IT metastructures at least on level removed from the data stream, probably more. With any luck human interfaces will improve dramatically. Security will become critically important as that threat to security will only grow, especially as poor practices today will result is massive failures in the not too distant future and business and government will knee-jerk respond by setting outrageously high security standards.
This suggest that jobs will move but the need for engineers will remain the same of grow (possibly grow a great deal.) That will continue until we develop human level AI and implement that intelligence into the networks and security systems themselves. Of course, once Human Level intelligence becomes commonly available, most of the jobs that human being do will be relegated to machines. The real issue then, becomes, unless we figure a way for common people to benefit from the ultimate migration to a robotic workforce the vast majority of people everywhere in every walk of life will suffer and the only ones who profit will be those vanishing few who are milking the planet dry today.
The Chinese will mess with the price of Rare Earths (which are not really all that rare) and the US will almost certainly begin using its own from a major find in California. All the while Austrailia, Japan, Africa and South America look at seriously developing their resources. The real lock China has on Rare Earths is its processing (pretty much the only game in town right now.) Here's a chance for the U.S. to get back into industrial jobs (god forbid) and produce a lasting job base for a new global economic boom in the rare earth arena. The Chinese advantage is short term, and if they squeeze too hard, the world will simply take their business away. Nobody likes a chiseler.
By the way rare earths are used all over the place and for a dizzying array of things. There are about 400 lbs of them in a late model Prius. They are used in virtually all green tech (high performance generators in modern wind mills are pretty much sluggs of rare earths.) Colorful plasma and LED displays use them (that cool display on your smart phone is probably chock full of rare earths.) Florescent lighting that is any color but off green uses rare earth mixed in with the coating. Rare earths are used in glass making, advanced textiles, plastics with special properties (OLEDs), and anything that uses an enhanced magnetic field from an earbud to an mag-lev train. Even the "Euro" contains a trace of Europium as an elemental pun. Modern society runs on rare earths.
Now if we can teach them to sniff out stupid and criminally inclined, we can run all our politician through and subsequently assign them tasks according to their level of reliability. With this technology we could have put George Bush Jr. in charge of the White House garden, and Dick Cheney in charge of the White House laundry (no you don't need Haliburton to get clean white sheets!)
This is just silly. Its taken us 30 years to even consider going back to the moon. We finally have technology that will maybe have us visiting the moon in what maybe 10 years? It takes us maybe 4 days to get there using modern tech and methods. That's a quarter of a million miles away. The moon isn't even 2 light seconds away. The sun is almost 400 times further than the moon, about 8.5 light minutes. The closest other star to earth is Proxima Centauri, about 4.2 light years away or a whopping 98,000,000 times further than the moon. Grasp that number. Roll it around. How do you plan to span that gulf in a sane time frame? That's the closest star to earth, the immediately interesting stars are 10 to 100 times further than Proxima Centauri. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, and contains maybe 200,000,000,000 stars. It may also contain thousand or millions of civilizations some perhaps millions of years old. If you consider that humanity is a class 0 civilization (class 0 means our primary source of power is derived from fossil chemicals) with maybe 400 years worth of serious civilization under its belt, looking at that intelligences that may exist in this galaxy alone, we would hardly rate as microbes to many of them.
If we showed any sign of getting past our own Oort Cloud, without having first grown up past waring factions, and tribal disputes, and if faster than light is even possible, then these being would only have to let us know that we've been quarantined until our culture reached a level of maturity needed to interact with more advanced beings. I'm sure they'll have dealt with all kinds of irritable baby societies, know precisely how to ensure we don't hurt ourselves or others, while we gain some stability and self control.
Being sentient and advanced, they would simply treat us a wayward children until we straightened up. If we posed any real threat, all they would need to do is quietly help us destroy ourselves by perhaps taking over the government(s) of the worlds leading super power(s) and have them drive the planet into environmental catastrophe, economic collapse, religious war and/or political chaos. Hmmmmmmm maybe they're already here?
Actually, I would leave subsidies for small Mom and Pop farms, especially if those farms are managing genetic diversity by growing heirloom crops, because we are in terrible danger of loosing the genetic diversity necessary to sustain our crops into the future. That said, cutting back on corporate welfare, and ending agro-scams (people sitting at home collecting millions to NOT grow something), is a great idea, by all means proceed.
Once you finish that, then stop paying other companies billions in corporate welfare during years of record profits, foreign aid (save real aid to disaster victims... a drop in the bucket of that budget), military spending and social security/medicare to folks whose income exceeds $200,000 per year or who have personal assets in excess of say $5,000,000. Then do a top to bottom search for redundancy, duplication, corruption, mishandled funds, and bottomless money sinks, and eliminate them with extreme prejudice. Move some of that military spending into diplomacy where the dollars get a 1000x bang for the buck. Then finally create a pit-bull fixer department in the GAO to clean up the budget disaster that is our government. This would include no-bid contracts and any other sneaky dealings perpetrated by past Vice Presidents (with plenty of jail time for discovered transgressions and loud public trials just to let others know that the cookie jar now has a bear trap inside.)
You could probably cut 30% off the budget (not including entitlements), and save trillions over the next 10 years without touching a single vital service. In fact, a bit of that money should go straight back into vital services and to the states. We need to dramatically expand education in this country if we want to have a snowballs chance in hell of competing in this century.
Anyway it expensive to actually make something with artistic integrity, and a use real writers and stuff. Its just better to put a fresh coat of paint on something Stan Lee did in the 60s, and hope CGI will hide the fact that the plot is simplistic and the acting nonexistent.
Check out indie films, movies for adults (no I don't mean making the beast with two heads) with a plot you can't guess in the first 5 minutes, dialogue that actually makes sense and sounds like something real people might say and often set in places and circumstances that are emotionally or mentally engaging. Popular movies have degenerated into formulaic dreck. All we seem to get from Hollywood anymore are comic book superheroes, the slapstick antics of Rob Schneider or Chris Tucker, or another Shrek sequel. At least its interesting to note that Hollywood is sucking exactly like the rest of the country and for exactly the same reasons. The lawyers and banker are now running everything, and when the only motive in life is making a buck, you get the same stinking mess everywhere you look.
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Apples formula is mind numbingly simple;
1. Simplify the design until you've distilled it down to a zen state of ease and grace
2. Make the thing physicality as artistically beautiful and pleasing as possible, add a degree of fun and whimsy
3. Make a media event of new products or new versions of existing products
4. Lock the market in, control every atom of what it does and who you have to go to, to make it work
5. Charge twice as much for the same hardware as anyone else
6. Use a consistent interface across your universe, make the learning curve as close to a flat line as is humanly possible.
7. Target artists, movers and shakers and aesthetes of all types first, causing a culture to develop around your stuff
Wash and repeat!
Oh yeah, I want my doctor to diagnose my problem looking at a cat scan on an Iphone... is that my liver of smudge? Because you best believe he isn't gonna use a PC to manage his charts. Moving a Doctor to a paperless digital environment means using a device that replaces a clipboard and that is plugged into his patient database, billing system, Rx management system, medical database, personal and office communication systems. A phone would suck for that, and a computer ties him down to a single place (a doctor is always moving.) Now multiply that times lawyers, shipping clerks, inventory control specialist, warehouse managers, production control professions and a thousand other jobs, then multiply that again times the fact it does all the cool things a person want to do in their personal lives... I'm sorry, watching a movie on a phone is a willful attempt at going blind. The pad is here to stay, get over it.
That's exactly the point. A touchscreen, digital appliance with exceptional versatility isf a huge boon to most people, and completely indispensable to specific people. The key features are a high quality graphics in a convenient screen size (i.e. book sized, clipboard sized, large enough to show an entire picture or video screen without blinding people with eye strain), good audio, wi-fi and/or cell capabilities, convenient memory size and a super easy user interface allowing people to begin using it in seconds and expanding it with specifically useful applications in minutes. This is not going away. It is not designed to replace a PC, it is designed to make the a proper move in the right direction for the ultimate digital appliance (and phones are simply too small for most people.)
As core proliferate, and power growth, these tablets will get good speech recognition, removing the need for a keyboard. They'll get better at interacting with human beings (think if about a display with a human face with micro expressions and speech with emotional content and inflection to convey subtle information about system environments and application status.) Flexible electronic films and displays will allow then to be rolled up into an even smaller/lighter form factor (think of a roughly 7 inch cylindrical form factor.)
These devices will subsume dozens of common day to day tasks including communication, personal information storage, credit and debit cards, online banking, car security, childrens' education, personal health information, and on and on. Basically, a bunch of tasks and services can be concentrated into a simple appliance that allows most people to handle those things they normally need to handle. There will also be hosts of applications for more specialized use. Doctors charts, construction forms, warehouse inventory, assembly line process tracking, lab management, library access, remote training or student tutoring. The possibilities are literally endless and user specific. A PC is the wrong device to try to implement for these purposes, the keyboard actually get's in the way for mos of these uses, while a small, light device like a tablet is perfect. People have been screaming for this, and what made the market so slow before was computer manufacturers who were trying to put too much hardware and on a tablet without providing a sane and simple interface to access a lot of resources easily and quickly (an area Apple has raised to a fine art.) Apple chose the right balance, and now everyone else is trying catch up. That is neither right or wrong.... its like the weather....it just is.
The tablet may well go away, but it is the first step in a line of ubiquitous personal digital devices that will ultimately provide with all the computing power we need to do our daily lives. Keyboards won't go away, but they be only one of many ways to communicate with these devices.
Oh you mean as opposed to the impact of the algorithms in the IBM mainframes that had already influenced a generation of American lives? Or perhaps as opposed to the algorithms in the Enigma Box which had a significant hand in ending global Fascism during WWII? Then again maybe you meant the algorithmic process the Curies used to purify radium, ultimately changing physics forever and creating completely new branches of physics, chemistry, biology and medicine? Perhaps you're talking about the 8048 as opposed to the algorithmic processes of Ford, Edison, of the algorithms used in the looms that literally started the industrial revolution? Hell why not take it all the way back to the Spartans with their mechanical precision and strict attention to science and ordered process which made possible the defeat of the Persians at Thermopylae and the birthplace of Democracy to exist at all in the first place.
Ever see how a flint arrow head or axe is made? The process is entirely algorithmic, well defined and repetitive. Its one of the defining moments of humanity making it possible for early human beings to eat meat and grow our big fat brains, making it possible for us to design ever more elaborate algorithms. We've been stringing together process and symbolic representation for millions of year, and the universe has been doing it with elementary particles for billions of years. The 8048 was simply a blip on a trend line that started 13.8 billion years ago. With the advent of serious synthetic brains, I would be surprised if some degree of sentience isn't the next world shaking development in computers and algorithms, and I'm just as certain that it will come with all the apocalyptic terror the media can muster.
The problem is that this is an ants eye view of a city... of course it doesn't make sense. The most powerful algorithms include chaos, and occasionally cause it. Because the universe is a chaotic place. You think you have control of your body and you have a uniform sense that you and your body are integral. Speak to a stroke victim or someone suffering from cerebral palsy. Billions of nerve ending channel signals to your spine which concentrate and filter signal letting the important ones by and stopping the ones that don't matter. Ever notice you had cut you weren't even aware of and only after seeing the blood did you feel it? Your brain filters a literal flood of information first through nerve filters but then through a series of cognitive filters, emotional state, cultural belief, on and on to arrive at a consistent world view. Why should it alarm you that as our technology grows ever more complex, that it finds new way to abstract its lower levels, and that we would find ourselves at the end of greater and greater filtering and aggregation. That's how all complex systems function. We just now have the technology to create systems of sufficient complexity that these natural laws would begin to express themselves in our day to day lives in a conscious way. There's nothing to be afraid of, we just need to begin to notice that what we experience as individuality is an illusion and that we are part of a super-organism. As such we need to begin to look at the care and healthy development of that super-organism and its relationship to eternity. This part of the growing up of our species.
I'm sorry but algorithms already control our lives and always have. The algorithmic nature of the information and process of our universe that guide the function of DNA, evolution, the dissipative structures of clouds and galaxies all have aspects that can elegantly be seen as algorithms. As quantum mechanics and information science find themselves coming to a junction where the entire universe can be looked at as a remarkably complex computer, the ordered processes (particularly the processes we don't understand or perceive), can be expressed as algorithms and dealing with them as such gives us new insight and ability to understand and manipulate that universe. Even in the purely human world of human creations, there is guiding structure and process in virtually everything. From laws to lug nuts, algorithms allow to decompose process find inherent opportunities for enhanced efficiency and greater elegance. Why would anyone be afraid of that?
It would have been too late, my friends patented a noise canceling headset for use in small planes the year before. But nice try :-) You may notice that all the cool noise cancelling stuff has really exploded over the last 10 years since the patent has expired.
Indeed, we'd all have to start breeding with household appliances to avoid being owned by Apple!
SamsungAndroidGoogle... less a question of equality and more a question of whose inside whom???
I see so their patent covers not only the 2001 pad computer but the alien monolith as well... I mean its just a super advance iPad from Jupiter... right?
Clearly you have not read about this topic. Flying cars like non flying cars would have to be simple enough for a teenager to learn how to operate. It would have to be part of a distributed network that wrested control from the would be pilot in congested air space, stacking it like a packet in a network designed to ensure that the car got to its pre-specified destination without delay or collision. A city of flying cars would be beyond the capacity of human management or human piloting. Future cars on the ground will utilize similar technology, and jams and collisions will be a thing of the past.
This won't be an issue for early adopters, because there will be few others in the air (relatively speaking) to interfere with the full pleasure of going wherever you want (with the obvious exception of controlled/restricted air space.) I think the first car adopters must have loved getting away to wild places in their horseless carriages, until everyone had one and we all spent out time in jams waiting for traffic to move. It will take time and billions of dollars to build the necessary infrastructure for such a system. The real question is whether or not America has the steam left to take on a venture of national magnitude. We've spent the last 3 decades letting our nations infrastructure crumble, highways, bridges, railroads, and air traffic control systems are all on the verge of collapse, it seems unlikely that we'll suddenly get the gumption to build a national flying car network. At least not until we get the rest of our stuff together.
Actually nowadays, you don't even need that much space. I saw a STOL plane that had a stall speed of 26 MPH, and could take off in still air in just under 85 feet. He could literally take off inside the length of a 747. The TV segment showed him flying around the Central Coast of California, and in a moderate head wind he could virtually land the plane vertically. He floated over the coast doing lazy 8s (super lazy 8s), then brought it down and flew at about 15 feet over hills and meadows. At 26 MPH, its pretty hard to have a fatal accident. A cow looked up at him with a very puzzled look as it chewed grass. The cool part is that it also had the top cruising speed for an over wing craft at the time, so this plane could get you there slow or fast.
In fact if you live a decent distance from air traffic, and have a couple hundred feet of take off and landing space, and need to drive to town every day, this plane would make a fine commuter vehicle.
I think when most people think about flying cars they want something that will support VTOL or at least STOL. They want the car to be autonomous, with manual override and redundant safety feature like the Moller big safety parachute. They want to get there way fast, be able to fly at any reasonable altitude, and they want it to get decent fuel economy. The only way to prevent stupid people from crashing the vehicle is to give it a better brain than the passenger (a mouse brain should do... really.) Then tie all vehicles in congested fly ways to server controlled flight networks that manage traffic like any other network. Only now your the packet :-)
PCs evolved in the wild wild west of arpanet, open source, even Microsoft had to deal with the explosion of possibilities, endless sources of hardware, software and content.
Telephones evolved for a century in the authoritarian straight jacket of Ma Bell, and phone companies are used to controlling every aspect of your digital resource, charging you for everything, forcing you to take what they want to give you. BUSINESS GET"S HARD JUST THINKING ABOUT THIS. The death of the PC will not be because of application integration, but because American Business hates having to dance to the tune of its customer, and will do everything humanly possible to force a migration to a platform that gives them complete control. That what makes the pad computer perfect. Its a PC that the provider can control like a cell phone.
Consider what you're loosing, and demand your freedom at every turn. Your Cell Phone should be free as a PC, not the other way around.
Actually, I'm surprisingly close to your mind here I would however tweak things just a wee bit... try to follow :-)
Since 80% to 90% of the zygotes created for invitro fertilization are simply disposed of, there is a wonderful source for embryonic stem cells that will never, ever become a human being under any circumstance. No moral dilemma here. Moreover, if you want to take the fear of profit out of the equation, make it voluntary (like an organ donor card) for the parents of the zygote to donate the cells to help others in need (this is exactly like saying, yes my son/daughter is brain dead, you may save lives with his or her organs.) Again, no moral dilemma. With the ability to split the first few division up into individual seed cells, you now have the ability to serve hundreds or thousands of people from a single zygote. There will never be a shortage of stem cells. No need to touch abortions, ever, period... take it off the table.
Agreed, make a baby, support the critter, its not just a good idea, its the law... enforce the heck out of it. Moreover, make such a public stink about being a Dad who won't do his duty that the shear weight of being a pariah makes him do the right thing.
I agree, abortions are an abomination. An equally or even greater abomination, is bringing a crack addicted premature fetus (of non-white) parents into the world, who will never know love, never be adopted, at best get passed around in child welfare system that is woefully inadequate to the need, and ultimately grow up into a drug addicted, angry, violent sociopath who either ends up committing suicide by cop or spending the rest of a short and violent life in our prison system. For starter I would make dead certain every child in the public school system knew and could get contraceptives and basic health care. There are high schools out where 50% of the girls get pregnant before graduating. THAT IS GROTESQUE. Teach kids to abstain, they haven't the physical, mental or emotional maturity to deal with parenthood, but knowing that they're going to have sex anyway, teach them to avoid pregnancy and STD with proper contraception. Also provide counseling, if the child has a relationship with its parents that isn't adversarial or abusive, bring the parents into the conversation, and by all means take the stigma off this conversation. Sex is a fundamental human design, stop making it the focus of shame and embarrassment, and also using it sell products or titillate teenagers into buying banal crap.
We can now save babies under a pound. The technology has gotten pretty good. The energy would be better spent preventing the causes for preemies and sick mothers. Proper education, nutrition, drug rehabilitation, prenatal care and counseling to ensure young mothers to be are creating a great future for their children whether they keep them or not.
Rape is a violent crime. One in three girls in college gets date raped. Date rape drugging is out of control. Our entire economy is based on sexualizing everything and whipping young men into a semi-permanent sexual frenzy. Case in point a televised spring beak bash in Huntington Beach, CA broke into a sexual riot when girls dancing in tiny bathing suits were suddenly attacked by drunken frat boys, stripped naked, assaulted and in some cases raped. The ensuing riot caused millions in damages, and not only traumatized the girls, but ruined the lives of a number of young men who simply got sucked into the mob and were later identified as perpetrators. If you really mean to deal with rape to its logical extreme, you're going to need to define rape, and does that include bands of young men who engage in games where they get girls drunk, slip them ruffies, coerce, bully or bludgeon girls into having sex as some sick game, all the while their Father beaming that's my boy the stud. There are some pretty ugly social dynamics that should be getting addressed in our schools, and its high time parents became part of the solution and not part of the problem.
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The best indicator we have of success is education. You will either provide decent education (note, this isn't warehousing, baby sitting, crowd management, or child processing, but education) or you will pay for a significant percentage of your population being incarcerated, and your economy being in shambles.
Time and time again, the very same children failing in public school environments, have excelled when placed in legitimate institutions committed to providing a safe, comprehensive, committed environments for children to learn. The failure is not in the children, it is in the public schools. The list of failures is nearly endless. Providing so little funding that schools resort to having fast food on their campuses leading to unhealthy diets high in sugar and fat, leading to poor physical and therefore mental performance (exacerbating attention disorders and chronic sleepiness in classes.) Insufficient funds for meaningful PE, art instruction, music instruction, computer science instruction and extracurricular activities make students less interested in their course work and curricula, provides them with insufficient opportunities to develop healthy social behavior, and in poorer communities where both parents work to feed their families, leaves children vulnerable to gangs and negative influences (those drugs mentioned above.)
Children are naturally curious and want to know. It takes an environment of trying to force kids into being the little automatons that governments and businesses so desperately want in their workforces and electorates to kill off the desire to learn. The state isn't interested in intellectually developed, informed and empowered civilians. Such people are a nightmare for Government. They have opinions and know how to voice them, they see trends and make informed conclusions and demand that their representatives tow the line. Government hates that. Much better to create an ignorant, superstitious public who get's their truth out of the little black corporate box in their living rooms and does what Fox news tells them to.
I agree there is a small percentage of special needs children, children acting out because they are being raised by monsters, children with medical conditions which make it hard or impossible for them to function normally in a class room. These children for the most part need special education to succeed, but significant information now available says that they indeed can lead productive, happy, contributing lives giving to society rather than simply taking. Until we're willing to spend as much on our children (as a society) as we do on pets, none of this should be a surprise. Over the last 3 years we secretly gave 1.2 trillion dollars to banks (half of them in other countries.) We've lined the pockets of wealthy and greedy men, and continue to do so. Our representatives refuse to tax the wealthy, while Rupert Murdoch stood up in public and said "FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S HOLY, TAX ME ALREADY!!!" Our schools just look like the rest of the train wreck, that's all.
Texas does lead the way in stupid however. Their government has been hijacked by the profoundly ignorant, and they're demonstrating what the decent into a police state looks like. Don't deal with the underlying causes long enough, keep addressing the symptoms, keep using magical thinking as your foundation for making decisions, all the while hoping the messiah will magic all your problems away, and you get Texas. The real problem is that a very large number of poorly educated people in this country think Texas is the model for the nation, and it scares me to bottom of my soul.
As technology and human social evolution alter the trajectory of human society, new, unpredictable and interesting results will disrupt the obvious path of our development. Research suggests that an end to poverty and global access to modern education would in fact preclude the many problems facing the world today. The end of poverty and the access to modern education would impact population growth, the availability of health care and the prevention of pandemics and ending the likelihood of war, tribal conflict and outbreaks of violence based purely on social inequality.
Education is the single most important means by which people everywhere may break free of the bonds of poverty. In so doing, drastically altering what is possible for the entire human race. Democratizing the third world and bringing them truly into the 21rst century as full partners in designing a global future. Making comprehensive education available freely to all people is tantamount to ending slavery on a global scale. The tools of knowledge are quickly becoming available to people everywhere, the information itself will make the realization of an enlightened humanity, a dream within our grasp.
Neil Stephenson's "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer Study Guide" may soon be coming to a pad computer near you, wherever you may live. We surely live in the most interesting time in human history... dancing on a razors edge between disaster and the complete liberation of the human spirit. I for one am betting on a future of blazing brilliance and blinding light!
I think orthodoxies of any religion are unhealthy, inherently broken and that includes Communism, Capitalism, and any number of other socioeconomic/political belief systems. The inherent problem with orthodoxies is that the belief, the ideology becomes more important, than the goal the belief system serves. In the end the system cannibalizes its purpose in the name of the belief.
An operational belief system tests its own validity all along its process, and adjusts its beliefs and opinions as the nature of the universe unfolds and unconceals physical reality. It then continues to refine itself as it goes, always validating itself with rigorous observation and critically honest self appraisal.
Isms have failed in the past because they became obsessed with the beauty and greatness of humanity without taking equal consideration into the nature of Man's ignorance, bigotry, foolishness and lowest impulses. The brilliance of our founding fathers was the idea of checks and balances. Create a environment that illicit's greatness, and provides sufficient freedom to create, while ensuring that no person or group could ever do too much damage, because they could never acquire too much power. This is genius. This it the first thing men without conscience or consideration, given wholly to an Ism, had to destroy to bring our country down. Sadly today, our checks and balances have been all but obliterated and these men have almost completely succeeded in destroy what makes this nation great in the name of their Ism. We are literally all the poorer for it.
Any vague illusion to a two party system is for the most part simply coincidental. We have perhaps several dozen real champions on either side of the aisle, and then a mob of retired lawyers who pretty much sold their collective souls to the highest bidder to get to the positions they now hold. Republicrats aren't Republicrats because of their political view, because they don't vote according to their political views.
The Dems who were supposedly for all the thing the parent post suggests, voted for the invasion of Iraq (etc.), gave hundreds of billions to the banks, instituted laws which allowed torture, the effective repeal of habeaus corpus, no trial detention, no warrant wire-taps and the virtual gutting of the entire bill of rights. The titular head of the Democratic party, our President (the man who was going to bring us real change), has proven to be the blandest of moderates and only seems radically liberal when compared to the mouth breathing tea-baggers. The only missing from this pitiful circus that I can see, is a statesman or an IQ higher than the temperature of tepid bath water (in Centigrade.)
The Republican party is simply deranged, deluded, and demented. Clearly winning hands down the Wackadoodle trifecta! The Dems are 98% testicle free, and have less collective spine than a sea slug in vat of battery acid, giving up at the merest whisper of a filibusterer... sweet jebus help us!!! It occurs to me that both sides are just doing this little song and dance number to cover up the fact that all the actors have already been paid, and are just reading their scripts so the American People can continue enjoying that long running soap opera "Days of our C-Span".
A wise man, a very long time ago, said "If you want the truth, follow the money." The rest is just slight of hand and misdirection. Pointing a finger at either party is like thinking their something magical about either the hat or the rabbit. Stop looking at the props, and start paying attention to the elderly gentleman behind the curtain. Now figure out who the real humbug is.
Might I suggest you follow up your fecal feast with Orbit Gum, its the cure for potty mouth!
Sorry but this is incredibly naive. In ten years China will be the worlds largest economy and as hard as they are trying to grow IT professionals they will terribly short and American engineers who saw the curve early and capitalized on it will do very well indeed. Absolutely, learn Mandarin, it will serve you well the rest of this century.
Advances in swarm technology, adaptive intelligent systems, self optimizing technologies with move most engineers to position of working on IT metastructures at least on level removed from the data stream, probably more. With any luck human interfaces will improve dramatically. Security will become critically important as that threat to security will only grow, especially as poor practices today will result is massive failures in the not too distant future and business and government will knee-jerk respond by setting outrageously high security standards.
This suggest that jobs will move but the need for engineers will remain the same of grow (possibly grow a great deal.) That will continue until we develop human level AI and implement that intelligence into the networks and security systems themselves. Of course, once Human Level intelligence becomes commonly available, most of the jobs that human being do will be relegated to machines. The real issue then, becomes, unless we figure a way for common people to benefit from the ultimate migration to a robotic workforce the vast majority of people everywhere in every walk of life will suffer and the only ones who profit will be those vanishing few who are milking the planet dry today.
The Chinese will mess with the price of Rare Earths (which are not really all that rare) and the US will almost certainly begin using its own from a major find in California. All the while Austrailia, Japan, Africa and South America look at seriously developing their resources. The real lock China has on Rare Earths is its processing (pretty much the only game in town right now.) Here's a chance for the U.S. to get back into industrial jobs (god forbid) and produce a lasting job base for a new global economic boom in the rare earth arena. The Chinese advantage is short term, and if they squeeze too hard, the world will simply take their business away. Nobody likes a chiseler.
By the way rare earths are used all over the place and for a dizzying array of things. There are about 400 lbs of them in a late model Prius. They are used in virtually all green tech (high performance generators in modern wind mills are pretty much sluggs of rare earths.) Colorful plasma and LED displays use them (that cool display on your smart phone is probably chock full of rare earths.) Florescent lighting that is any color but off green uses rare earth mixed in with the coating. Rare earths are used in glass making, advanced textiles, plastics with special properties (OLEDs), and anything that uses an enhanced magnetic field from an earbud to an mag-lev train. Even the "Euro" contains a trace of Europium as an elemental pun. Modern society runs on rare earths.
Now if we can teach them to sniff out stupid and criminally inclined, we can run all our politician through and subsequently assign them tasks according to their level of reliability. With this technology we could have put George Bush Jr. in charge of the White House garden, and Dick Cheney in charge of the White House laundry (no you don't need Haliburton to get clean white sheets!)
This is just silly. Its taken us 30 years to even consider going back to the moon. We finally have technology that will maybe have us visiting the moon in what maybe 10 years? It takes us maybe 4 days to get there using modern tech and methods. That's a quarter of a million miles away. The moon isn't even 2 light seconds away. The sun is almost 400 times further than the moon, about 8.5 light minutes. The closest other star to earth is Proxima Centauri, about 4.2 light years away or a whopping 98,000,000 times further than the moon. Grasp that number. Roll it around. How do you plan to span that gulf in a sane time frame? That's the closest star to earth, the immediately interesting stars are 10 to 100 times further than Proxima Centauri. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, and contains maybe 200,000,000,000 stars. It may also contain thousand or millions of civilizations some perhaps millions of years old. If you consider that humanity is a class 0 civilization (class 0 means our primary source of power is derived from fossil chemicals) with maybe 400 years worth of serious civilization under its belt, looking at that intelligences that may exist in this galaxy alone, we would hardly rate as microbes to many of them.
If we showed any sign of getting past our own Oort Cloud, without having first grown up past waring factions, and tribal disputes, and if faster than light is even possible, then these being would only have to let us know that we've been quarantined until our culture reached a level of maturity needed to interact with more advanced beings. I'm sure they'll have dealt with all kinds of irritable baby societies, know precisely how to ensure we don't hurt ourselves or others, while we gain some stability and self control.
Being sentient and advanced, they would simply treat us a wayward children until we straightened up. If we posed any real threat, all they would need to do is quietly help us destroy ourselves by perhaps taking over the government(s) of the worlds leading super power(s) and have them drive the planet into environmental catastrophe, economic collapse, religious war and/or political chaos. Hmmmmmmm maybe they're already here?
Actually, I would leave subsidies for small Mom and Pop farms, especially if those farms are managing genetic diversity by growing heirloom crops, because we are in terrible danger of loosing the genetic diversity necessary to sustain our crops into the future. That said, cutting back on corporate welfare, and ending agro-scams (people sitting at home collecting millions to NOT grow something), is a great idea, by all means proceed.
Once you finish that, then stop paying other companies billions in corporate welfare during years of record profits, foreign aid (save real aid to disaster victims... a drop in the bucket of that budget), military spending and social security/medicare to folks whose income exceeds $200,000 per year or who have personal assets in excess of say $5,000,000. Then do a top to bottom search for redundancy, duplication, corruption, mishandled funds, and bottomless money sinks, and eliminate them with extreme prejudice. Move some of that military spending into diplomacy where the dollars get a 1000x bang for the buck. Then finally create a pit-bull fixer department in the GAO to clean up the budget disaster that is our government. This would include no-bid contracts and any other sneaky dealings perpetrated by past Vice Presidents (with plenty of jail time for discovered transgressions and loud public trials just to let others know that the cookie jar now has a bear trap inside.)
You could probably cut 30% off the budget (not including entitlements), and save trillions over the next 10 years without touching a single vital service. In fact, a bit of that money should go straight back into vital services and to the states. We need to dramatically expand education in this country if we want to have a snowballs chance in hell of competing in this century.
Anyway it expensive to actually make something with artistic integrity, and a use real writers and stuff. Its just better to put a fresh coat of paint on something Stan Lee did in the 60s, and hope CGI will hide the fact that the plot is simplistic and the acting nonexistent.
Check out indie films, movies for adults (no I don't mean making the beast with two heads) with a plot you can't guess in the first 5 minutes, dialogue that actually makes sense and sounds like something real people might say and often set in places and circumstances that are emotionally or mentally engaging. Popular movies have degenerated into formulaic dreck. All we seem to get from Hollywood anymore are comic book superheroes, the slapstick antics of Rob Schneider or Chris Tucker, or another Shrek sequel. At least its interesting to note that Hollywood is sucking exactly like the rest of the country and for exactly the same reasons. The lawyers and banker are now running everything, and when the only motive in life is making a buck, you get the same stinking mess everywhere you look.