You can't trust anything you're currently buying with a computer onboard and external communication abilities not to spy on you. My current car can't spy on me - it's more than a decade old and doesn't have much of anything tech-wise in it. My limited home automation is also fairly old, and has restricted network access. Now, if I bought a Tesla, or went with Nest toys, yeah, I can't trust those.
I agree with how ridiculous things have gotten, and unfortunately it seems the only real solution is old tech, and forgoing the new stuff.
THe problem is whoever has enough money can buy their way hence have a voting right.
Well no, that's not the problem, not in the least. W3C, in their foundational documents and mission statements, does not run on votes. It runs on consensus. That is, you talk it out as long as it takes until you arrive at a place that everyone around the table is comfortable with.
The problem is that they decided that adopting a DRM standard was critically important, so much so that they didn't need to work towards consensus on the idea. And it's not like they could work towards consensus on it anyway, as a minority was absolutely, fundamentally opposed to it, while the corps absolutely insisted on it. Like someone noted above, you can't sit a 70s hippy down with a member of ISIS and ask them to come to consensus on how to organize a society. If the WC3 had kept its soul, the proposal would have died in committee because there was no consensus on it. Instead it was adopted.
Why was this so critical to adopt? If we knew the answer to your last question, we'd have that answer.
But you're not considering security through obscurity. And while we all know that's a bad idea, there is still significant overhead when it comes to knowing enough about my personal details to break into my banking website. In no particular order:
What bank do I use? What is my login to that bank? What phone number do I use? Do I have 2fa using text turned on?
An attacker needs to know all of that in order to leverage this sort of attack. Even getting into my email requires the phone number when accessing it from an unknown device, which would be the fastest way to find my phone number. Malware that gets access to my email would be able to turn it up, but running Linux plus NoScript, I think I'm pretty safe.
Outside of compromising my email account, I'm not sure how someone would piece together enough of this information. I don't tend to post my cell number anywhere, and I don't tend to go to the physical bank very often. My login for my banking website is not a logical first.last or anything like that, so it's not really guessable. And by the time they guessed the password to my stolen phone I'd have disabled it anyway.
Outside of a targeted spear phishing attack, how do you anticipate that an attacker would get all this info?
I think you got one of your 5 scenarios correct. What you and everyone else seems to miss is that the pressure differential is about the same as the International Space Station, not a submarine. At 50 feet down, water pressure is already 2x the pressure differential between near vacuum and 1 ATM. Water is heavy, but air is not. The ISS sees all of ~15PSI, while you'd be in the mid 30s PSI at 50 feet underwater.
Most of the hyperloop designs are air bearings, and not maglev. It's not a complete vacuum, which makes the pressure difference between the outside air at 1ATM and the inside less, and the thin air inside is what's used to keep the train off the bottom of the tunnel. The pressures involved are nothing like a bullet in a gun or even any liquid that we pump through pipes.
The lack of maglev immediately knocks off your bottom three scenarios. That leaves gradual vacuum failure, where the drag will slowly bring the craft to a halt, and may allow it to reach more pressurized parts of the tube, or its destination. And then rapid vacuum failure, which will quickly slow the craft to a halt.
I'm not sure where you get collision and rapid dissection of the capsule with rapid vacuum failure, because you're just going from closer to 0 ATM of pressure to 1 ATM of pressure, which is sub 1PSI on the craft to 15 PSI. That's plenty survivable for an aerodynamic structure. Even if the air is moving at the speed of sound, and the craft is moving at about the same, the absolute maximum total relative difference would be 1,400 mph for a brief amount of time. Most likely it will be far, far less than this, because you just can't lose the vacuum in a large amount of the tube all at once. There will be turbulent flows from the breach out both directions, and the craft will feel those and likely start slowing well before it gets into a zone with a full 1ATM of pressure.
Far more problematic than any of your scenarios would be debris (including broken tube) in the way of the craft. That would be the disaster scenario that you imagine. It's pretty unlikely, and neither planes nor trains are immune from this anyway.
No matter what you think about my above comment, I hope you can appreciate the vast quantity of mods I've gotten on it. At the present time:
Insightful: 8 Troll: 3 Flamebait: 2 Overrated: 2 Funny: 1 And 1 Insightful removed due to posting after modding. I've never had anything get this number of mods, so I'm going to call this insightful, trolling flamebait a success, and put it on my resume.
Are you a marketing exec for Amazon? Because every single thing about this sounds like the most contrived bullshit to justify sticking a spying device in every room in your house.
If you're in the garage covered in grease, fucking focus on what you're doing and stop dicking with the radio. For the better part of a century there was a radio turned to a radio station and it made noises while people were covered in grease. That hasn't changed. If what's on the radio is more important than the reason you're covered in grease, go wash your hands, and sit down and listen to the radio.
Three. The answer is three. It's not really hard to remember. And why the hell would you need to know that anyway? If you don't have the correct measuring tools, buy them. If you're modifying the recipe, do that ahead of time, not while you're fucking cooking already. That's a recipe for disaster.
Holy shit. A cone of sound? You need directional speakers when you're working on the car? WTF?
And in your bedroom. You can't turn off the lights before bed? You can't decide if you want the fan on or off? It's too hard to haul your ass out of bed for 4 seconds to adjust either?
I'm sorry, but as the GP said, I can't see how anyone can use these flimsy justifications to make themselves comfortable with placing listening devices in all the rooms of their house. You're actually telling me that when you're having sex or a wank in bed, you're fine with Amazon listening to that because it turns out the light for you and turns off the fan when you get cold?
It's truly amazing what a couple of good pans, some fresh ingredients, and a little know-how and technique can get you for very little money. My wife and I go out to eat when we're feeling lazy, and to satisfy a craving or two of hers that we can't easily make at home. We don't go out for cheaper food, and rarely go out for better food. Learning to cook makes going out to eat hard, because it stings a bit to pay a lot of money for something you could have done better. It doesn't matter how good a chef is, when the kitchen gets slammed, it gets slammed. Hard to do a great job on 20 dishes all at once.
For the most part, at the current time, you are correct, and that makes me pretty sad. A long time ago there was a time when trolling was a real art, and some really deep and amazing things were created. Great works of trolling were undertaken which took hours or even days to construct. Glaringly obvious "trolling" like what is so common today wasn't common, and instead really, really subtle and thoughtful trolls were more of the norm.
Only now we have lost that art, lost the storied tradition of someone trolling and 3/4 of the people not getting that they are trolling. That makes me sad, and I weep for all that we have lost.
I'm not worried about battery life - what I need are headphones that work during the infrequent times I need them.
I use headphones probably once every two months. For that sort of use, I've got a decent pair of noise-canceling earbuds stowed away in my bag at all times. When I need them, out they come, they get used, and then back into the bag for another month or two.
That sort of use isn't really conducive for wireless headphones, as there's a very good chance that they will have limited to no battery remaining after a few months of storage. And no, I'm not inclined to add an extra chore of trying to remember to recharge them every couple of weeks to ensure they have a charge when I need them. And if they're sitting in the charger, they're not in my bag when I need them.
I don't want one more thing that I have to manage and keep track of in my life. The added complexity does not make anything better for me.
How far up your ass is your head? The fucking title notes that Google threatened removing ad revenue if they didn't remove a post. Google did not force them to delete a post, not in the least!
They could easily have said, "No Google, go fuck yourself, we have principles." But they didn't. They chose Google advertisement money over everything else. Same is going on here. There is no reason any script writer or casting agent can't just ignore Google. But the lure of Google money and exposure is such that none do. Why? It's business.
And what sort of communist are you that you think you can tell Google how to spend their money? Privately owned company can spend its money any way it wants to. If you don't like what Google is doing, avoid them and the companies they do business with. Sure, it's inconvenient, and potentially costly, but you have principles, right?
According to a Google-funded study...Google's Computer Science in Media team conducted "CS interventions" with "like-minded people" to create "Google influenced storytelling......In addition to our continuing interactions, we engaged in extensive PR and marketing support including social media outreach, events and press....Based on our research, one of the reasons girls and underrepresented minorities are not pursuing computer science is because of the negative perception of computer scientists and the relevance of the field beyond coding
If CS interventions with like-minded people, extensive PR and marketing, and research aren't totalitarian, I don't know what is. That's some scary shit right there, and it's ruining our country.
Some were fitted with chemical timers, so they would go off later. This was for two reasons, from what I understand. First, these bombs were so big that 6,000' was the minimum altitude for bomb-drops, as the shockwave would damage the plane below that. Second, it was an area-denial method, as they either had to send in technicians to defuse them hopefully in time, or simply wait until they exploded before going in and picking up the pieces. Given the number of bombs and the potential for many to embed themselves underground, defusing them just wasn't feasible most of the time. In the fog of war, nobody was keeping track of where they fell either.
The chemical timers didn't always work, for a number of reasons, including failing to initiate, being broken upon impact, and more interestingly, the bombs coming to rest nose-up. The chemical timers worked on gravity, and if the bomb didn't impact and remain vertical, sometimes the reaction needed to set if off just couldn't happen.
God, that sounds awful. Why would you work anywhere near those places?
One place I worked was a nice 8-5 sort of place, where the management encouraged the developers to take a walk or two every day down to the nearby park to stretch their legs and eyes. 2/3 were married with kids, all were well compensated, and the only thing preventing promotion was a flat company structure with only a head of the department and a CEO above them.
If your "extensive personal experience" is all shit companies, I don't know what to say other than "move". There are so much better places out there.
It's the opposite, actually. They didn't have it reinforced to them day in and day out that only someone who didn't look like them was fit to do something. What they could aspire to was more of a blank canvas, because there wasn't an established trope of only X can do Y. Movies tend to create and perpetuate these tropes. For people who don't look like a 20-something awkward white kid in a hoodie or a lumbering neckbeard with cheeto fingers and a stained t-shirt, the computer-whiz position doesn't seem to include people like them.
And secondly, I'll point out that you didn't list too many women. Why? It probably had something to do with the fact that the role of professor/lecturer and genius was filled by men, and women were not allowed to enter that space or aspire to it for most of history. That's part of what google seems to be trying to address here - show that it is indeed possible, at least in fantasy, for people to fill roles that historically have been actually closed to them, or more recently, have had the appearance of being closed, even if they are now are open.
The whole purpose of this is NOT to be consistent with reality, and NOT show things as they really are. The goal is to create an illusionist Utopia la-la land....
And why is that a bad thing, when we're specifically talking about films here, and not documentaries? Films are already not reality, unless you currently have problems with giant robots stomping through your town.
Not only is there no harm in showing a happier version of reality in film, it might actually do some good, as we know that films can be influential. I'm really confused by why you are so angry about this. Every film should be a documentary on your gritty white suburban life?
The problem is you are saying that we could get something from nothing. But that cannot possibly happen.
May I point you to quantum fluctuations? Out of nothing quantum fluctuations consolidate energy, that creates two opposing particles which then recombine and release that energy. Back to nothing.
The problem with clinging to god is that you're clinging to the imagination of bronze aged peasants. Back here in reality things are really, really interesting, in ways those peasants could never fathom.
You know enough theology and philosophy to know about the Cosmological Argument, which means you probably also know about the God of the Gaps fallacy. Throwing around "you can't get something from nothing" as an argument puts you on the wrong side of that fallacy. Just like the earth being the center of the universe, the creation story in Genesis, Noah's flood, evolution, and a whole host of other places where god existed until science closed that gap. At what point do you give up, and admit that you've got no god, and rejoin reality?
I think politics have had less influence on science than our funding model has, to be honest. And the arguments now stem directly from it.
Part of the reason that scientists can't accept fault is that funding is tied to research publications. Undermine your research, and you're less likely to get funding. Publish or perish really is how science works, and an additional complicating factor is that null results don't make for interesting reading, nor do retractions, and thus they don't get published very often. If you undermine your research you'd better have an even better paper explaining why, to make up for the publication you just ruined. Destroy someone else's work? That's fine. Because you then have a better chance competing for their funding.
It's wise to believe in something that's not demonstrably true? To wrap the one, very short life you have in a cloak of lies, which both terrify you and give you hope?
No, that's not wise. That would be called a mental illness if we didn't have a cultural history spanning millennia of doing that behind us. There are tons of things that humans have done culturally that are neither wise nor good for them, but which have persisted due to cultural inertia. (See lutefisk, e.g.) It is for this very reason that north of 90% of people who are religious believe what their family believes and why religions cluster geographically.
Even if just about all religions didn't have a long, storied history of being truly awful to various groups of people, often their own members, I'd still have a serious objection to people basing their lives on lies and mythology. The resources that are wasted on these lies and this mythology are staggering. Religion is great at keeping the poor poor, and using their meager wealth to prop up an inefficient enterprise which uses fear of the unknown to keep them donating.
If you need a fairy-tale to give you hope and entertain you, go to the library. It won't cost 10% of your income, and the stories are better. If you need counseling, go find a certified expert who actually specializes in the help you need, not someone who may have no training and is preaching to the masses. If you need a social group, throw a block party and get to know your neighbors. Find a hobby. Play a sport. Go to the bar.
Do you know what's wise? Spending the time and money you would have spent on lies and mythology on real things, with real, tangible benefits, instead of on religion which sells the cure to the poison it administers.
I concur with the other two posters here. Have you not used a credit card in the last few years, or are you just tied to an incompetent bank?
The last time there was fraud on my card, my credit union called and emailed me because it looked dodgy. I called back, confirmed that I didn't buy $35 of McDonalds in another country that morning, they canceled that charge and refunded the money. They requested I get a new card, so I walked over at lunchtime to the nearest branch where they shredded the current card and handed me a replacement one. The only real hassle was typing the new number into the few places that have my card saved on the internet.
With the new chip cards, fraud is vastly reduced, and now if a merchant accepts a payment from a card without the chip, they are required to eat the fraud cost.
The tech jobs in the US (especially those that end up getting surveyed like this) are concentrated in a few big cities on the coasts, where the costs of living are 2x-3x the rest of the country. Thus the salaries are 2x-3x the rest of the country. Also keep in mind that with minimal social programs, we need to pay for a lot more things, many of them provided by for-profit companies which charge a lot more. And those for-profit companies hire people and pay them lots of money.
I like how you spend a half page shitting on the concept of a Hyperloop without actually knowing what you're talking about. To start, do you realize that hyperloop is not maglev? You not getting that right really makes it hard to listen to your other complaints, because you've obviously got a hard-on for beating strawmen you've named hyperloop.
The reason there aren't larger vacuum chambers isn't because vacuum chambers are tricky or don't scale well, it's just because generally there's no need for large vacuum chambers.
It occurs to me that we could get SpinalTap on this. They could then have an amp with warm tones that goes up to 10^11.
I mostly agree, save for one possibility: We've concentrated wealth so much, that it now only takes a small handful of greed-traitors to flip the switch. If Gates, Buffet, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Musk decided that they were going to team up to change the tax structure and institute UBI, I think they could do it. They have pockets so immensely deep that they could completely own the airways, drive the conversation, lobby all the legislators, and fund all the candidates to make that happen. FFS, they could almost fund the first year of UBI themselves.
Outside of that remote chance, I do agree. Almost all of our current problems could be solved if we could redistribute stupid-rich money back into the economy. We've got more than enough resources, goods, and money to give everyone in the US food to eat and a roof over their head. The fact that people go without is largely because a small percent of greedy assholes have way, way more than they know what to even do with.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't trust anything you're currently buying with a computer onboard and external communication abilities not to spy on you. My current car can't spy on me - it's more than a decade old and doesn't have much of anything tech-wise in it. My limited home automation is also fairly old, and has restricted network access. Now, if I bought a Tesla, or went with Nest toys, yeah, I can't trust those.
I agree with how ridiculous things have gotten, and unfortunately it seems the only real solution is old tech, and forgoing the new stuff.
THe problem is whoever has enough money can buy their way hence have a voting right.
Well no, that's not the problem, not in the least. W3C, in their foundational documents and mission statements, does not run on votes. It runs on consensus. That is, you talk it out as long as it takes until you arrive at a place that everyone around the table is comfortable with.
The problem is that they decided that adopting a DRM standard was critically important, so much so that they didn't need to work towards consensus on the idea. And it's not like they could work towards consensus on it anyway, as a minority was absolutely, fundamentally opposed to it, while the corps absolutely insisted on it. Like someone noted above, you can't sit a 70s hippy down with a member of ISIS and ask them to come to consensus on how to organize a society. If the WC3 had kept its soul, the proposal would have died in committee because there was no consensus on it. Instead it was adopted.
Why was this so critical to adopt? If we knew the answer to your last question, we'd have that answer.
But you're not considering security through obscurity. And while we all know that's a bad idea, there is still significant overhead when it comes to knowing enough about my personal details to break into my banking website. In no particular order:
What bank do I use?
What is my login to that bank?
What phone number do I use?
Do I have 2fa using text turned on?
An attacker needs to know all of that in order to leverage this sort of attack. Even getting into my email requires the phone number when accessing it from an unknown device, which would be the fastest way to find my phone number. Malware that gets access to my email would be able to turn it up, but running Linux plus NoScript, I think I'm pretty safe.
Outside of compromising my email account, I'm not sure how someone would piece together enough of this information. I don't tend to post my cell number anywhere, and I don't tend to go to the physical bank very often. My login for my banking website is not a logical first.last or anything like that, so it's not really guessable. And by the time they guessed the password to my stolen phone I'd have disabled it anyway.
Outside of a targeted spear phishing attack, how do you anticipate that an attacker would get all this info?
I think you got one of your 5 scenarios correct. What you and everyone else seems to miss is that the pressure differential is about the same as the International Space Station, not a submarine. At 50 feet down, water pressure is already 2x the pressure differential between near vacuum and 1 ATM. Water is heavy, but air is not. The ISS sees all of ~15PSI, while you'd be in the mid 30s PSI at 50 feet underwater.
Most of the hyperloop designs are air bearings, and not maglev. It's not a complete vacuum, which makes the pressure difference between the outside air at 1ATM and the inside less, and the thin air inside is what's used to keep the train off the bottom of the tunnel. The pressures involved are nothing like a bullet in a gun or even any liquid that we pump through pipes.
The lack of maglev immediately knocks off your bottom three scenarios. That leaves gradual vacuum failure, where the drag will slowly bring the craft to a halt, and may allow it to reach more pressurized parts of the tube, or its destination. And then rapid vacuum failure, which will quickly slow the craft to a halt.
I'm not sure where you get collision and rapid dissection of the capsule with rapid vacuum failure, because you're just going from closer to 0 ATM of pressure to 1 ATM of pressure, which is sub 1PSI on the craft to 15 PSI. That's plenty survivable for an aerodynamic structure. Even if the air is moving at the speed of sound, and the craft is moving at about the same, the absolute maximum total relative difference would be 1,400 mph for a brief amount of time. Most likely it will be far, far less than this, because you just can't lose the vacuum in a large amount of the tube all at once. There will be turbulent flows from the breach out both directions, and the craft will feel those and likely start slowing well before it gets into a zone with a full 1ATM of pressure.
Far more problematic than any of your scenarios would be debris (including broken tube) in the way of the craft. That would be the disaster scenario that you imagine. It's pretty unlikely, and neither planes nor trains are immune from this anyway.
/var/log/sexytime gets cross-referenced with your network traffic? That's a level of sexually successful neckbeard that I didn't know existed.
No matter what you think about my above comment, I hope you can appreciate the vast quantity of mods I've gotten on it. At the present time:
Insightful: 8
Troll: 3
Flamebait: 2
Overrated: 2
Funny: 1
And 1 Insightful removed due to posting after modding. I've never had anything get this number of mods, so I'm going to call this insightful, trolling flamebait a success, and put it on my resume.
Are you a marketing exec for Amazon? Because every single thing about this sounds like the most contrived bullshit to justify sticking a spying device in every room in your house.
If you're in the garage covered in grease, fucking focus on what you're doing and stop dicking with the radio. For the better part of a century there was a radio turned to a radio station and it made noises while people were covered in grease. That hasn't changed. If what's on the radio is more important than the reason you're covered in grease, go wash your hands, and sit down and listen to the radio.
Three. The answer is three. It's not really hard to remember. And why the hell would you need to know that anyway? If you don't have the correct measuring tools, buy them. If you're modifying the recipe, do that ahead of time, not while you're fucking cooking already. That's a recipe for disaster.
Holy shit. A cone of sound? You need directional speakers when you're working on the car? WTF?
And in your bedroom. You can't turn off the lights before bed? You can't decide if you want the fan on or off? It's too hard to haul your ass out of bed for 4 seconds to adjust either?
I'm sorry, but as the GP said, I can't see how anyone can use these flimsy justifications to make themselves comfortable with placing listening devices in all the rooms of their house. You're actually telling me that when you're having sex or a wank in bed, you're fine with Amazon listening to that because it turns out the light for you and turns off the fan when you get cold?
Idiot.
It's truly amazing what a couple of good pans, some fresh ingredients, and a little know-how and technique can get you for very little money. My wife and I go out to eat when we're feeling lazy, and to satisfy a craving or two of hers that we can't easily make at home. We don't go out for cheaper food, and rarely go out for better food. Learning to cook makes going out to eat hard, because it stings a bit to pay a lot of money for something you could have done better. It doesn't matter how good a chef is, when the kitchen gets slammed, it gets slammed. Hard to do a great job on 20 dishes all at once.
For the most part, at the current time, you are correct, and that makes me pretty sad. A long time ago there was a time when trolling was a real art, and some really deep and amazing things were created. Great works of trolling were undertaken which took hours or even days to construct. Glaringly obvious "trolling" like what is so common today wasn't common, and instead really, really subtle and thoughtful trolls were more of the norm.
Only now we have lost that art, lost the storied tradition of someone trolling and 3/4 of the people not getting that they are trolling. That makes me sad, and I weep for all that we have lost.
I'm not worried about battery life - what I need are headphones that work during the infrequent times I need them.
I use headphones probably once every two months. For that sort of use, I've got a decent pair of noise-canceling earbuds stowed away in my bag at all times. When I need them, out they come, they get used, and then back into the bag for another month or two.
That sort of use isn't really conducive for wireless headphones, as there's a very good chance that they will have limited to no battery remaining after a few months of storage. And no, I'm not inclined to add an extra chore of trying to remember to recharge them every couple of weeks to ensure they have a charge when I need them. And if they're sitting in the charger, they're not in my bag when I need them.
I don't want one more thing that I have to manage and keep track of in my life. The added complexity does not make anything better for me.
How far up your ass is your head? The fucking title notes that Google threatened removing ad revenue if they didn't remove a post. Google did not force them to delete a post, not in the least!
They could easily have said, "No Google, go fuck yourself, we have principles." But they didn't. They chose Google advertisement money over everything else. Same is going on here. There is no reason any script writer or casting agent can't just ignore Google. But the lure of Google money and exposure is such that none do. Why? It's business.
And what sort of communist are you that you think you can tell Google how to spend their money? Privately owned company can spend its money any way it wants to. If you don't like what Google is doing, avoid them and the companies they do business with. Sure, it's inconvenient, and potentially costly, but you have principles, right?
According to a Google-funded study...Google's Computer Science in Media team conducted "CS interventions" with "like-minded people" to create "Google influenced storytelling......In addition to our continuing interactions, we engaged in extensive PR and marketing support including social media outreach, events and press....Based on our research, one of the reasons girls and underrepresented minorities are not pursuing computer science is because of the negative perception of computer scientists and the relevance of the field beyond coding
If CS interventions with like-minded people, extensive PR and marketing, and research aren't totalitarian, I don't know what is. That's some scary shit right there, and it's ruining our country.
They did work! These are just the ~10% that didn't. I think you might not fully grasp the horrors of the world wars.....
Some were fitted with chemical timers, so they would go off later. This was for two reasons, from what I understand. First, these bombs were so big that 6,000' was the minimum altitude for bomb-drops, as the shockwave would damage the plane below that. Second, it was an area-denial method, as they either had to send in technicians to defuse them hopefully in time, or simply wait until they exploded before going in and picking up the pieces. Given the number of bombs and the potential for many to embed themselves underground, defusing them just wasn't feasible most of the time. In the fog of war, nobody was keeping track of where they fell either.
The chemical timers didn't always work, for a number of reasons, including failing to initiate, being broken upon impact, and more interestingly, the bombs coming to rest nose-up. The chemical timers worked on gravity, and if the bomb didn't impact and remain vertical, sometimes the reaction needed to set if off just couldn't happen.
God, that sounds awful. Why would you work anywhere near those places?
One place I worked was a nice 8-5 sort of place, where the management encouraged the developers to take a walk or two every day down to the nearby park to stretch their legs and eyes. 2/3 were married with kids, all were well compensated, and the only thing preventing promotion was a flat company structure with only a head of the department and a CEO above them.
If your "extensive personal experience" is all shit companies, I don't know what to say other than "move". There are so much better places out there.
It's the opposite, actually. They didn't have it reinforced to them day in and day out that only someone who didn't look like them was fit to do something. What they could aspire to was more of a blank canvas, because there wasn't an established trope of only X can do Y. Movies tend to create and perpetuate these tropes. For people who don't look like a 20-something awkward white kid in a hoodie or a lumbering neckbeard with cheeto fingers and a stained t-shirt, the computer-whiz position doesn't seem to include people like them.
And secondly, I'll point out that you didn't list too many women. Why? It probably had something to do with the fact that the role of professor/lecturer and genius was filled by men, and women were not allowed to enter that space or aspire to it for most of history. That's part of what google seems to be trying to address here - show that it is indeed possible, at least in fantasy, for people to fill roles that historically have been actually closed to them, or more recently, have had the appearance of being closed, even if they are now are open.
The whole purpose of this is NOT to be consistent with reality, and NOT show things as they really are. The goal is to create an illusionist Utopia la-la land....
And why is that a bad thing, when we're specifically talking about films here, and not documentaries? Films are already not reality, unless you currently have problems with giant robots stomping through your town.
Not only is there no harm in showing a happier version of reality in film, it might actually do some good, as we know that films can be influential. I'm really confused by why you are so angry about this. Every film should be a documentary on your gritty white suburban life?
The problem is you are saying that we could get something from nothing. But that cannot possibly happen.
May I point you to quantum fluctuations? Out of nothing quantum fluctuations consolidate energy, that creates two opposing particles which then recombine and release that energy. Back to nothing.
The problem with clinging to god is that you're clinging to the imagination of bronze aged peasants. Back here in reality things are really, really interesting, in ways those peasants could never fathom.
You know enough theology and philosophy to know about the Cosmological Argument, which means you probably also know about the God of the Gaps fallacy. Throwing around "you can't get something from nothing" as an argument puts you on the wrong side of that fallacy. Just like the earth being the center of the universe, the creation story in Genesis, Noah's flood, evolution, and a whole host of other places where god existed until science closed that gap. At what point do you give up, and admit that you've got no god, and rejoin reality?
I think politics have had less influence on science than our funding model has, to be honest. And the arguments now stem directly from it.
Part of the reason that scientists can't accept fault is that funding is tied to research publications. Undermine your research, and you're less likely to get funding. Publish or perish really is how science works, and an additional complicating factor is that null results don't make for interesting reading, nor do retractions, and thus they don't get published very often. If you undermine your research you'd better have an even better paper explaining why, to make up for the publication you just ruined. Destroy someone else's work? That's fine. Because you then have a better chance competing for their funding.
It's wise to believe in something that's not demonstrably true? To wrap the one, very short life you have in a cloak of lies, which both terrify you and give you hope?
No, that's not wise. That would be called a mental illness if we didn't have a cultural history spanning millennia of doing that behind us. There are tons of things that humans have done culturally that are neither wise nor good for them, but which have persisted due to cultural inertia. (See lutefisk, e.g.) It is for this very reason that north of 90% of people who are religious believe what their family believes and why religions cluster geographically.
Even if just about all religions didn't have a long, storied history of being truly awful to various groups of people, often their own members, I'd still have a serious objection to people basing their lives on lies and mythology. The resources that are wasted on these lies and this mythology are staggering. Religion is great at keeping the poor poor, and using their meager wealth to prop up an inefficient enterprise which uses fear of the unknown to keep them donating.
If you need a fairy-tale to give you hope and entertain you, go to the library. It won't cost 10% of your income, and the stories are better. If you need counseling, go find a certified expert who actually specializes in the help you need, not someone who may have no training and is preaching to the masses. If you need a social group, throw a block party and get to know your neighbors. Find a hobby. Play a sport. Go to the bar.
Do you know what's wise? Spending the time and money you would have spent on lies and mythology on real things, with real, tangible benefits, instead of on religion which sells the cure to the poison it administers.
I concur with the other two posters here. Have you not used a credit card in the last few years, or are you just tied to an incompetent bank?
The last time there was fraud on my card, my credit union called and emailed me because it looked dodgy. I called back, confirmed that I didn't buy $35 of McDonalds in another country that morning, they canceled that charge and refunded the money. They requested I get a new card, so I walked over at lunchtime to the nearest branch where they shredded the current card and handed me a replacement one. The only real hassle was typing the new number into the few places that have my card saved on the internet.
With the new chip cards, fraud is vastly reduced, and now if a merchant accepts a payment from a card without the chip, they are required to eat the fraud cost.
The tech jobs in the US (especially those that end up getting surveyed like this) are concentrated in a few big cities on the coasts, where the costs of living are 2x-3x the rest of the country. Thus the salaries are 2x-3x the rest of the country. Also keep in mind that with minimal social programs, we need to pay for a lot more things, many of them provided by for-profit companies which charge a lot more. And those for-profit companies hire people and pay them lots of money.
I like how you spend a half page shitting on the concept of a Hyperloop without actually knowing what you're talking about. To start, do you realize that hyperloop is not maglev? You not getting that right really makes it hard to listen to your other complaints, because you've obviously got a hard-on for beating strawmen you've named hyperloop.
The reason there aren't larger vacuum chambers isn't because vacuum chambers are tricky or don't scale well, it's just because generally there's no need for large vacuum chambers.
It occurs to me that we could get SpinalTap on this. They could then have an amp with warm tones that goes up to 10^11.
I mostly agree, save for one possibility: We've concentrated wealth so much, that it now only takes a small handful of greed-traitors to flip the switch. If Gates, Buffet, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Musk decided that they were going to team up to change the tax structure and institute UBI, I think they could do it. They have pockets so immensely deep that they could completely own the airways, drive the conversation, lobby all the legislators, and fund all the candidates to make that happen. FFS, they could almost fund the first year of UBI themselves.
Outside of that remote chance, I do agree. Almost all of our current problems could be solved if we could redistribute stupid-rich money back into the economy. We've got more than enough resources, goods, and money to give everyone in the US food to eat and a roof over their head. The fact that people go without is largely because a small percent of greedy assholes have way, way more than they know what to even do with.