Although most TVs in stores are very badly set up, it's almost universal now that they have a "shop mode" that makes the colours more vivid and the picture brighter. This would simply seem to be an extension of that practice.
Wait... why do these cards have a "good mode" and a "shitty mode" in the first place, and why is the shitty one called "gaming mode"?
Because there are a lot of gullible people out there who will pay more for something - anything - that has "gaming.... " pre-pended to its description. It makes them feel special, that they are a cut above all the non-gaming people. Even in instances where the difference is illusory, irrelevant or insignificant.
If they are willing to pay a "stupid" tax, why shouldn't they be allowed to?
With a self-driving car, there are many things that can go wrong and cause an accident apart from the driver.
Insufficient maintenance being one.
So I reckon that either accidents will involve a great deal of argument between the little guy (who bought the SDC) and the big guy (manufacturer) with the big guy making all sorts of accusations and demanding proof that every last servicing requirement had been carried out by an approved service agent. Or the car will remain the property of the manufacturer (or fleet owner) and it will be leased to the notional user. Thus removing the car's passenger from liability. But leaving them with a large monthly bill for ensuring the vehicle is kept mechanically perfect.
multiple mail or social media accounts side-by-side without having to use multiple browsers
I like having (to use) multiple bowsers for this. It means I can have a different desktop icon for each one. Want to do "general purpose" surfing? use the default. Want to log in to FB? Use a firefox that has a different database, history, cookie location and remembered passwords - not quite a sandbox, but good enough.
And so it goes on. It is quite easy and sounds more straightforward than that stuff about containers.
That sounds a little presumptuous: that Facebook will still be around in 5 years.
It's been going for over 10 years now - so it#s well into ( the internet version of ) middle age. To look forward to 2021 and try to predict what people will want, how they will act, or what technology will be mainstream is a formula for disaster,
I would suggest that if FB is 100% in 5 years, then in 6 years every FB app will be an AI that people use in order to extract the useful information from all that waffle and wasted bandwidth. it takes megabytes of video to say what a few dozen bytes of text say - and worse: you have to play through a video, linearly. One thing the world seems to be doing is to move away from linear "broadcast" formats.
If I buy something, I can post a review that is favourable, critical or I can post nothing. I can do this under my own name, someone else's name or an "internet" name.
Even if I am forced to use one, single, verified, form of identification (no matter whether this is as an EU citizen or not), there is STILL nothing that guarantees what I write in my review is truthful, accurate, competent, unbiased or consistent.
We would still get situations where suppliers offer "samples" to reviewers in return for them writing glowing reports of crappy products. We would still get situations where someone, who bought a faulty product years ago, continues a vendetta against a brand for their own bitter and twisted reasons and we would still get situations where people give products a 1-star rating simply because it was delivered late.
It also won't do anything to stop the negativity bias: that people are more likely to write a review if they have something to complain about, than if what they bought is just OK.
For instance, only paying someone to go to school won't benefit a new single mother who needs to spend some time at home.
Which raises another question: if people won't have jobs with them all being automated, what will be the point in having an education? Obv, some, in the next generation, will want to fulfill their "potential" (whatever that means). But the second generation will have grown up with mass ignorance and illiteracy so won't know what all the fuss was about.
And then, what do we base out future governments on? - If we even need them, any more?
In a future in which robots decimate the jobs but not necessarily the wealth of nations...states should be able to afford to pay all their citizens a basic income
Nations, i.e. governments only get their "wealth" from 2 sources: taxation or selling government bonds.
Any nation that doesn't want to get into hyper-inflation would never fund a day-to-day cost by borrowing, so this UBI would have to be paid for from the tax take.
However, the amount of tax: income, corporate, sales, that a government extracts from its citizens depends to a very large extent on them earning salaries and then spending their pay on the non-essential items that attract sales taxes. Also, corporation taxes are levied on the profits that companies make, generally from selling their goods and services. Once you have a population that chooses not to work, not to produce stuff and doesn't have the discretionary income from UBI to buy "luxuries", your corporate tax income takes a dive, too.
I doubt that a 1-year study is long enough to draw any meaningful conclusions. Certainly it wouldn't attract a representative enough group of subjects to be able to say how an entire country's populace would react. I'm just glad that this experiment is being tried somewhere else. Personally, I think that the money would be better used to ensure everyone had a job - that way they'd also feel like they had some worth to society, rather than just accepting handouts.
OK, you seem to think that I was literally listing jobs that people don't want to do. What you should have understood i that those are merely illustrative, not exhaustive.
The basic point that I obviously didn't manage to get across, was that there are plenty of people on the IQ spectrum for whom these sorts of employment provide an income, a sense of worth, a feeling of respectability - that they are earning a living. Rather than sitting around on welfare payments. I don't know if you managed to read as far as the final sentence about cost, but this is what puts those people out of jobs - removes their self-esteem, not intelligence: artificial or otherwise.
machines that are capable and more capable than human intelligence
Most of what the human race needs in order to progress is a lack of greed, diligence, honesty, compliance with the laws, less ill-founded beliefs and a willingness to reign in the "entitlement" attitude.
You don't need super intelligent machines (or people) to pick up litter, assemble cars, staff call centres, deliver stuff, report the news, teach children or grow crops. At the risk of falling into the the world will only need half a dozen computers trap, the opportunities for any thing or person with super-intelligence seem rather limited.So although many of these jobs can be automated - driverless cars being the NEXT BIG THING, they don't need to be intelligent to function. They just need to be safe, able to deal with people, reliable and cheap. It seems to me that it's the cheapness that will push up unemployment, not artificial intelligence.
Fine until it comes to a road (or another of these "buses") that intersects its route.
I guess it could be made to work if you were designing and building an entirely new city from scratch, but I doubt if this concept could be backed into an existing city, especially one with narrow, winding, streets.
If the printing press isn't a gadget, then the laser printer certainly is. Maybe the listed bubblejet printer counts, too.
However the whole list falls apart on the semantics of "gadget". Time seem to have warped the definition to mean small (-ish) pop-culture commercial product. Thus limiting the scope to stuff produced within the past 50 years, with very, very few exceptions (box brownie camera and wind-up record player).
I would suggest that in its time, the lever counted as a gadget, as does the medical syringe, adding machine, clock / watch, slide rule, vacuum cleaner and electric torch. Maybe even a bicycle, too. You could probably have an entire article on the top 50 kitchen "gadgets" - most of which have been more influential than a lot of the media-orientated ones in this list.
But as others have alluded, Time has to pander to both its advertisers and its audience. So it will inevitably be hugely biased in favour of an amercian, middle-aged consumer.
The maths says that a 0.1% risk of annihilation is a 99.9% "risk" of survival. So to get to 1,000 years in the future needs 1000 consecutive years of non-annihilation, i.e. 0.999 raised to the 1000th power. That comes to about 36% chance. While not a certainty, it's a lot better than zero.
when extrapolated to century-scale it comes to a 9.5 percent chance of human extinction within the next hundred years.
This assumes that every year will be the same as the year before, with some random chance of the disasters happening. But the world and progress doesn't work like that.
Things change
So the factors that give rise to a 0.1% chance today will be subtley different next year, and the next and in 50 years time will have altered drastically. Just like the risk factors today are much different from those of 1966, when climate disasters weren't even a consideration. We are all probably worrying about the wrong things.
Looking at the Classics of Science Fiction list (is the clue in the name?) there is nothing in the top 100 that's less than 30 years old.
The Worlds without End appears to have been Slashdotted - update: contains about a dozen from the last 3 decades
and the Premios y Listas list names 22 titles from the 1950's and only 23 from the past 30 years
Has the genre run out of ideas, do people prefer the simple, "space opera" style of times past or is modern science just too abstract and mind-boggling to base entertaining stories on?
Whichever answer it is, the future of the future does not look very promising.
These devices have not redefined the way we phone, nor have they blown us away with unprecedented speeds, or wowed us with extraordinary battery life
And yet people are happy to buy these devices and seem to be content with the level of performance they offer. It's important to remember that the "phone" is merely a platform. On its own, it's nothing - useless. When the apps come along that need more powerful phones, the manufacturers will develop them.
But for the time being, unless you're addicted to better, faster, bigger / smaller - just for the sake of having something a tiny bit better to brag about - then making phones faster or more capacious seems pointless.
I had the impression that planes had a layer of laminar flow around the fuselage. So something like a 10gram plastic bag wouldn't actually make contact with the bodywork. Would you even expect a lightweight drone to get through that layer?
I can see that a heavy drone (one with enough battery power to lift it to 1700 ft might do, but if so, you'd definitely see a mark on the side.
but if 10% of the people go create incredible new products and services and new wealth
And what happens when that "90%" includes all the teachers, law enforcement, hospital workers and fire crews? Basically the people who do the shitty, but necessary, jobs that keep societies running?
It's fine for the aspirational people to assume that everyone is like them - but they aren't. Most people do the least-worst job that allows them to keep a roof, feed their kids and keep the lights on. Remove the need for them to work to do that and the food stops coming, the lights go out and the roof doesn't get repaired. If you will rely on those with some sort of moral imperative to earn, or those for whom work is a joy rather than an inconvenient necessity, then your society won't last a month.
Would you do a dangerous, unpleasant, stressful or demeaning job if you didn't need to? I don't see those sectors having many volunteer workers.
Senior admin to millenial newbie: "What ever you do, don't run the delete_all_evidence.sh script on the production systems. We only use that when the Feds raid us. It completely scrubs the boxes".
newbie: "Oh.... yeah. So it does. Where do I click undelete"
it's extremely unlikely you can greatly improve your reading speed without missing out on a lot of meaning."
So many articles today are padded, just to make the word-count.
When reading these, it is frequently annoying to have to wade through paragraphs of irrelevant material, searching for the few lines of new information, or the single insight. For texts like this, skimming, speed-reading, or going sraight to the conclusions makes a lot of sense and saves a great deal of time.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen american TV. There isn't 4.5 hours of watchable stuff in a day.
we'd probably still be using computers with VGA and serial ports
I've just had a look on the computer I bought last year. Check and ..... check.
Although most TVs in stores are very badly set up, it's almost universal now that they have a "shop mode" that makes the colours more vivid and the picture brighter. This would simply seem to be an extension of that practice.
Wait... why do these cards have a "good mode" and a "shitty mode" in the first place, and why is the shitty one called "gaming mode"?
Because there are a lot of gullible people out there who will pay more for something - anything - that has "gaming .... " pre-pended to its description. It makes them feel special, that they are a cut above all the non-gaming people. Even in instances where the difference is illusory, irrelevant or insignificant.
If they are willing to pay a "stupid" tax, why shouldn't they be allowed to?
Insufficient maintenance being one.
So I reckon that either accidents will involve a great deal of argument between the little guy (who bought the SDC) and the big guy (manufacturer) with the big guy making all sorts of accusations and demanding proof that every last servicing requirement had been carried out by an approved service agent. Or the car will remain the property of the manufacturer (or fleet owner) and it will be leased to the notional user. Thus removing the car's passenger from liability. But leaving them with a large monthly bill for ensuring the vehicle is kept mechanically perfect.
multiple mail or social media accounts side-by-side without having to use multiple browsers
I like having (to use) multiple bowsers for this. It means I can have a different desktop icon for each one. Want to do "general purpose" surfing? use the default. Want to log in to FB? Use a firefox that has a different database, history, cookie location and remembered passwords - not quite a sandbox, but good enough.
And so it goes on. It is quite easy and sounds more straightforward than that stuff about containers.
It's been going for over 10 years now - so it#s well into ( the internet version of ) middle age. To look forward to 2021 and try to predict what people will want, how they will act, or what technology will be mainstream is a formula for disaster,
I would suggest that if FB is 100% in 5 years, then in 6 years every FB app will be an AI that people use in order to extract the useful information from all that waffle and wasted bandwidth. it takes megabytes of video to say what a few dozen bytes of text say - and worse: you have to play through a video, linearly. One thing the world seems to be doing is to move away from linear "broadcast" formats.
Even if I am forced to use one, single, verified, form of identification (no matter whether this is as an EU citizen or not), there is STILL nothing that guarantees what I write in my review is truthful, accurate, competent, unbiased or consistent.
We would still get situations where suppliers offer "samples" to reviewers in return for them writing glowing reports of crappy products. We would still get situations where someone, who bought a faulty product years ago, continues a vendetta against a brand for their own bitter and twisted reasons and we would still get situations where people give products a 1-star rating simply because it was delivered late.
It also won't do anything to stop the negativity bias: that people are more likely to write a review if they have something to complain about, than if what they bought is just OK.
For instance, only paying someone to go to school won't benefit a new single mother who needs to spend some time at home.
Which raises another question: if people won't have jobs with them all being automated, what will be the point in having an education? Obv, some, in the next generation, will want to fulfill their "potential" (whatever that means). But the second generation will have grown up with mass ignorance and illiteracy so won't know what all the fuss was about.
And then, what do we base out future governments on? - If we even need them, any more?
In a future in which robots decimate the jobs but not necessarily the wealth of nations...states should be able to afford to pay all their citizens a basic income
Nations, i.e. governments only get their "wealth" from 2 sources: taxation or selling government bonds.
Any nation that doesn't want to get into hyper-inflation would never fund a day-to-day cost by borrowing, so this UBI would have to be paid for from the tax take.
However, the amount of tax: income, corporate, sales, that a government extracts from its citizens depends to a very large extent on them earning salaries and then spending their pay on the non-essential items that attract sales taxes. Also, corporation taxes are levied on the profits that companies make, generally from selling their goods and services. Once you have a population that chooses not to work, not to produce stuff and doesn't have the discretionary income from UBI to buy "luxuries", your corporate tax income takes a dive, too.
I doubt that a 1-year study is long enough to draw any meaningful conclusions. Certainly it wouldn't attract a representative enough group of subjects to be able to say how an entire country's populace would react. I'm just glad that this experiment is being tried somewhere else. Personally, I think that the money would be better used to ensure everyone had a job - that way they'd also feel like they had some worth to society, rather than just accepting handouts.
The basic point that I obviously didn't manage to get across, was that there are plenty of people on the IQ spectrum for whom these sorts of employment provide an income, a sense of worth, a feeling of respectability - that they are earning a living. Rather than sitting around on welfare payments. I don't know if you managed to read as far as the final sentence about cost, but this is what puts those people out of jobs - removes their self-esteem, not intelligence: artificial or otherwise.
machines that are capable and more capable than human intelligence
Most of what the human race needs in order to progress is a lack of greed, diligence, honesty, compliance with the laws, less ill-founded beliefs and a willingness to reign in the "entitlement" attitude.
You don't need super intelligent machines (or people) to pick up litter, assemble cars, staff call centres, deliver stuff, report the news, teach children or grow crops. At the risk of falling into the the world will only need half a dozen computers trap, the opportunities for any thing or person with super-intelligence seem rather limited.So although many of these jobs can be automated - driverless cars being the NEXT BIG THING, they don't need to be intelligent to function. They just need to be safe, able to deal with people, reliable and cheap. It seems to me that it's the cheapness that will push up unemployment, not artificial intelligence.
I guess it could be made to work if you were designing and building an entirely new city from scratch, but I doubt if this concept could be backed into an existing city, especially one with narrow, winding, streets.
should ensure they're clearly visible in the night sky, even in the polluted skyline of a metropolis like Tokyo.
Unless it's cloudy.
WhatsApp isn't very popular in the United States and European countries
Yes, it's very widely used i Spain. Almost everyone with a smartphone has it installed.
I have also noticed that in London, on the tube, maybe half the people using their smartphone are "Whatsapp"-ing.
how did they fasten the cameras to a rocket traveling at 3,796 mph?
They didn't. They used a bit of foresight and attached the camera before the launch,when it was stationary.
If the printing press isn't a gadget, then the laser printer certainly is. Maybe the listed bubblejet printer counts, too.
However the whole list falls apart on the semantics of "gadget". Time seem to have warped the definition to mean small (-ish) pop-culture commercial product. Thus limiting the scope to stuff produced within the past 50 years, with very, very few exceptions (box brownie camera and wind-up record player).
I would suggest that in its time, the lever counted as a gadget, as does the medical syringe, adding machine, clock / watch, slide rule, vacuum cleaner and electric torch. Maybe even a bicycle, too. You could probably have an entire article on the top 50 kitchen "gadgets" - most of which have been more influential than a lot of the media-orientated ones in this list.
But as others have alluded, Time has to pander to both its advertisers and its audience. So it will inevitably be hugely biased in favour of an amercian, middle-aged consumer.
The maths says that a 0.1% risk of annihilation is a 99.9% "risk" of survival. So to get to 1,000 years in the future needs 1000 consecutive years of non-annihilation, i.e. 0.999 raised to the 1000th power. That comes to about 36% chance. While not a certainty, it's a lot better than zero.
when extrapolated to century-scale it comes to a 9.5 percent chance of human extinction within the next hundred years.
This assumes that every year will be the same as the year before, with some random chance of the disasters happening. But the world and progress doesn't work like that.
Things change
So the factors that give rise to a 0.1% chance today will be subtley different next year, and the next and in 50 years time will have altered drastically. Just like the risk factors today are much different from those of 1966, when climate disasters weren't even a consideration. We are all probably worrying about the wrong things.
The Worlds without End appears to have been Slashdotted - update: contains about a dozen from the last 3 decades
and the Premios y Listas list names 22 titles from the 1950's and only 23 from the past 30 years
Has the genre run out of ideas, do people prefer the simple, "space opera" style of times past or is modern science just too abstract and mind-boggling to base entertaining stories on?
Whichever answer it is, the future of the future does not look very promising.
These devices have not redefined the way we phone, nor have they blown us away with unprecedented speeds, or wowed us with extraordinary battery life
And yet people are happy to buy these devices and seem to be content with the level of performance they offer. It's important to remember that the "phone" is merely a platform. On its own, it's nothing - useless. When the apps come along that need more powerful phones, the manufacturers will develop them.
But for the time being, unless you're addicted to better, faster, bigger / smaller - just for the sake of having something a tiny bit better to brag about - then making phones faster or more capacious seems pointless.
I had the impression that planes had a layer of laminar flow around the fuselage. So something like a 10gram plastic bag wouldn't actually make contact with the bodywork. Would you even expect a lightweight drone to get through that layer?
I can see that a heavy drone (one with enough battery power to lift it to 1700 ft might do, but if so, you'd definitely see a mark on the side.
but if 10% of the people go create incredible new products and services and new wealth
And what happens when that "90%" includes all the teachers, law enforcement, hospital workers and fire crews? Basically the people who do the shitty, but necessary, jobs that keep societies running?
It's fine for the aspirational people to assume that everyone is like them - but they aren't. Most people do the least-worst job that allows them to keep a roof, feed their kids and keep the lights on. Remove the need for them to work to do that and the food stops coming, the lights go out and the roof doesn't get repaired. If you will rely on those with some sort of moral imperative to earn, or those for whom work is a joy rather than an inconvenient necessity, then your society won't last a month.
Would you do a dangerous, unpleasant, stressful or demeaning job if you didn't need to? I don't see those sectors having many volunteer workers.
Senior admin to millenial newbie: "What ever you do, don't run the delete_all_evidence.sh script on the production systems. We only use that when the Feds raid us. It completely scrubs the boxes".
newbie: "Oh .... yeah. So it does. Where do I click undelete"
it's extremely unlikely you can greatly improve your reading speed without missing out on a lot of meaning."
So many articles today are padded, just to make the word-count.
When reading these, it is frequently annoying to have to wade through paragraphs of irrelevant material, searching for the few lines of new information, or the single insight. For texts like this, skimming, speed-reading, or going sraight to the conclusions makes a lot of sense and saves a great deal of time.