Filling up landfills with carbon is a very inefficient way to deal with CO2 in the atmosphere. Landfill space, near urban areas (where the trash is generated), is at a premium. There is more than one pollution issue going on at a time. Filling up landfills with paper will scarcely make a dent in the CO2 in the atmosphere.
Don't worry, you can just clean all that up using one of those free plastic bags you get at the grocery store.
Ooops, they banned those in CA as well....
Which worked really, really well! With the success of that law, nine other states are currently planning on copying.
As right-wingers love to lecture, nothing is "free", those "free" bags cost money, and since retail is a highly competitive, low margin business, those "free" bags had gotten so cr_ppy as to be almost worthless - requiring multiple bagging to hold anything of any weight, if they would even then.
Now, if you need a bag, and don't want to pay $2 for one of those nice sewn waterproof fabric bags at the checkout counter that are indefinitely reusable, you can buy a disposable plastic bag for a dime. And that bag is so nice, being large and sturdy, that it can be reused indefinitely. Throwing away piles of flimsy one-use bags is a thing of the past.
I would object strenuously if someone proposed going back. It is much better without those "free" bags.
Also, many neurons have nothing to do with "thinking".
...
That is not happening, because the real bottleneck is our knowledge of how intelligence works.
I generally agree with the thrust of your comment, but your last sentence refutes your first one. We really don't know how intelligence works, or even have a good definition of what it is, still, so your confidence that neurons that maintain homeostasis have nothing to do thinking is misplaced. In fact there is very strong evidence that these background task neurons are also very important in thinking - like in maintaining consciousness. Disruptions in those low level background neurons do not usually interfere with just the autonomic functions but leave consciousness alone, instead consciousness bites the dust first.
Of course the answer is zero, because the brain has neurons. But we can have some numbers for comparison. A Graphcore GC2 IPU has 23 billion transistors. In comparison, a brain has:
100 billion neurons.
10 trillion synapses.
300 billion dendrites.
Which of those need to be emulated?
A transistor does not do as much as a neuron, and we don't know all the things a neuron does. There is some evidence that the inside of a neuron does some kinds of calculations.
There is a lot more than "some" evidence of that. The behavior of a single neuron is quite complex, much more like a CPU than a transistor. We haven't worked out the processing of even a single neuron. There is very good evidence that even individual synapses perform some sort of computation - their response is a function of a number of local chemical factors, i.e. it is a weighted computation, and is not simple like a transistor.
Neural systems (except for the simplest peripheral reflexes perhaps) are statistical computing systems at every level, and there are many levels (you list three, but there are likely more that are not as obvious or easily enumerated. The equivalent of a "neural" component in a AI neural net is more like a synapse than a neuron.
The thing about parallel processing is that not everything CAN be neatly decomposed into stateless parallel processes.
However we have really, really good evidence that real, strong AI absolutely CAN be decomposed into stateless parallel processes sufficiently well to allow it to perform in real time at the highest level of competence, with hardware that only has a maximum switching rate of only 1000 HZ, and has a mean firing rate of only 6 HZ. You probably have one of these pieces of evidence about two feet from your keyboard.
Gates's focus on new, un-proven, and frankly more complex fission reactor designs is hopelessly misguided. A much better idea was the Gen III+ approach of standardized units that are improved lower cost versions of proven PWR technology, like the Westinghouse AP1000.
And no, it is not "opposition to nuclear power" holding it back in the U.S.
The primary problem is and has been the high capital cost of the plants. Without regulation guaranteeing sufficient stable returns over a long time to recover the investment it is a difficult pitch, and even then the long pay-back time makes it less desirable than natural gas plants if that is an available option. How to make capitalists and investors want to sink their money into these plants in large enough numbers to be helpful?
And this problem has led to the second - so few plants built that the industry to do it has become moribund, thin and the supply chain brittle.Westinghouse, the developer and backer of the AP1000 plant went bankrupt two years ago.
The U.S. has had a stream-lined licensing process for a few decades now, and since 2008 seven new units were licensed - all of the AP1000 design. Investors/utilities have dropped out of five of these, and the projects are dead. None of these projects were killed by "opposition", it was due to the projects going over budget and becoming uneconomical, and Westinghouse going bankrupt, not problems an untried new technology is likely to fix.
Only the two Vogtle units are still being built and have gone massively over budget. How far over budget? The original estimate for the two units was $4.4 billion and is now expected to be $25 billion. In large part this is has been due to difficulties in getting the major parts manufactured, and errors in construction, requiring rework, and delaying the schedule. And this is due to the brittleness of the industry supporting it at this point.
An AP1000 is running in China right now (started up in June of this year) and three more are under construction, but these units have also been delayed by years due to supply problems
The nations that have either a) built a mostly nuclear electricity grid (France); b) are actively building many nuclear power plants (China); or c) have a well-proven track record for building plants on-time and budget (South Korea) have one key thing in common. All of the companies doing this are majority government owned. That is to say, they are socialist enterprises.
The capitalistic model of the U.S. for nuclear power has failed. It has not maintained economies of scale, has been shown robustness to overcome "teething" problems, and is unable to "take a bath" on early units to perfect the supply system and overcome the learning curve.
It you want to see nuclear power making a come back in the U.S. the only option, on the evidence, would be creating a government run corporation to build them. If you don't support that, then you don't support nuclear power. And complaining about NIMBYism, or environmentalists, as if they were stopping nuclear power is simply beating a convenient whipping boy. Makes you feel good inside to bash people you don't like, but accomplishes nothing.
What? Transformers are made almost entirely out of heavy metals.
No.... Transformers are made mostly of Copper and Iron.
Heavy Metals refers specifically to certain metals such as Antimony, Lead, Mercury, Lithium, Manganese, Cobalt, Nickel, Organotin, Cadmium, Arsenic, Chromium, and Thallium -- metallic chemical elements that have relatively high density, are toxic or poisonous at low concentrations, and which may have a tendency to bioaccumulate in some form.
The term "toxic metals" would be a much more accurate term since "heaviness" really has nothing to do with it. Lithium, which is on your list is the lightest of all metals. Beryllium, is next lightest, and is one of the most toxic. Tungsten and bismuth, both quite heavy, are not especially toxic.
PS - Sweden is capitalist. Note that they have a stock market...
Venezuela does too, it is called the Caracas Stock Exchange. So Venezuela is just as capitalist as Sweden, and I guess the U.S.
So why are righties always claiming that Venezuela is socialist through-and-through and proof that socialism always fails?
Because they define all successful economies as "totally capitalist, man!" and all failed economies as "proof of the universal failure of socialism everywhere". In other words it is plain dishonesty. All economies in the world of any size are mixed economies, with some level of regulation for the capitalist component (and the socialist component as well, for that matter).
Venezuela's economy tanked because its government was taken over by corrupt incompetent authoritarians whose only interest is self-aggrandizement.
You seem to be under the impression that Bill Clinton invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. I would say you are in no shape to critique anyone's views about history.
If you read the summary, no need to even go to TFA, you will see that Google deleted a personal map created by an individual on a service that exists for exactly that purpose - MyMaps.
If someone created a MyMap showing an ethnic region where there are many Latinos which extended into the U.S. and labelled it "LatinoLand" of something, why would the U.S. care, and why would it have any standing to demand that the personal map be deleted?
This is treating a personal map, showing a real ethnic group's real distribution, as if it were, say, child pornography -- something inherently criminal and illegal in all contexts.
And what should the Kurds call the region where Kurds actually live? "Place where the Kurd's live"? Seems reasonable, wouldn't you think? That is exactly what "Kurdistan" literally means.
Why yes, Curiosity has a bunch of fancy stuff onboard.
And it still drives at an amazing 0.08 mph. I think even turtles go faster than that. A human walking is 3.1 mph. So we've got an almost 40X improvement before we even add a rover.
Zipping across the terrain does not collect any scientific data about the terrain. If NASA needed to build a fast rover, they could have done it. It would have weighted more, and been a more expensive mission, but a couple of orders of magnitude less than sending any humans. But they wanted to minutely examine the terrain they landed on, since it had never been examined before. Every square meter of it was mars incognito. The fact that the mission moves slowly and cautiously has virtually nothing to do with the fact that a dude isn't sitting in a seat driving it.
I would contend that a single astronaut on Mars can do far more science than even 1000 robots.
You sure you don't want to make it a million, or maybe a billion? I mean, while you are just making up numbers, go nuts!
...the robots have to be operated with extreme paranoia - which is the enemy of research and discovery
Yeah, caution and careful, thoughtful examination and data collection has always been the enemy of research and discovery. It is as if you have never bothered to read up on how the robot landers are actually operated, and what they actually do.
there are things that no amount of robots can accomplish, compared to a single human who can arrange an impromptu test or experiment
You mean like spot an interesting rock, decide to cut into it, and examine it with a microscope? That sort of impromptu test or experiment? Opportunity does that. The people operating it have a stereo camera that has an angular resolution which is three times better than the human eye, and can filter the light in many different ways to extract information from it that a human eye cannot.
The astounding productivity of that guy in a space suit is just taken for granted, as if just having him standard there she is generating vast amounts of scientific data.
You however would have been a fearless intrepid explorer, one of the first on the boat to settle that new colony, that they will be calling "Jamestown"! Not for you any lily-livered quibbling! Such a man!
Of course the mortality rate of the settlers on that ship was 80% in the first year. What do you suppose your odds would have been? Would you have been a corpse, or one of the few lucky, lucky cannibals?
And this orders of magnitude easier than going to Mars. All it required where conventional commercial sailing vessels, and ordinary supplies. Indians were able live next to Jamestown that winter just fine.
We have memories that we don't know how they work, perhaps they will be a good fit for quantum computing where we only probably know what they are going to do.
This is 170 gigapascals. That is 1.7 million atmospheres! The most powerful high explosives known only produce pressures up to about 300,000 atmospheres. This can only done in a diamond anvil which have working sizes one the order of 100 microns (barely visible speck, without magnification).
No, this is not thinkable. There is no conceivable way anything practical can done with this line of research, unless it ultimately reveals knowledge that allows to design some other material that can do the same trick without 6 times the detonation pressure of HMX.
In a 1992 paper "The Deep Hot Biosphere" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,[56] Gold first suggested that microbial life is widespread in the porosity of the crust of the Earth, down to depths of several kilometers,
Now fuck off.
According to your own words then, this has not been "known for decades".
Someone hypothesizing that something sort of like this might be true does not make that thing "known". Only collecting actual evidence can do that. And that is what this study is publishing, a whole lot of, yes, new research. We have been making remarkable advances in scientific tools and this changes the data we can collect. No, this is not stuff "we knew long ago". These observations we could only make recently.
I'm old enough to remember when we used to make fun of "European socialism", but now that those countries are kicking our asses
They are not "kicking our asses". The only European countries ahead of America on either median income or per capita GPD are Norway, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.
Norway has a small population and plenty of off-shore oil. Luxembourg and Switzerland have tax shelters and international banking.
It should be well known at this point that the higher per median capita income of the U.S. is largely due to a few things.
The most important is the Americans work longer hours than any other advanced economy. This is largely not voluntary, try taking extra time off from your job and see how that goes for you, career-wise.
The other is that the U.S. has an extremely unequal distribution in income, approaching third world kleptocracy levels. Thus a good chunk of that "median income" is in the hands of very high income people.
And finally the EU spends 9.5% of its GDP on health care. The U.S. spends 17.9%, with no better results (in many cases worse). So about 8.4% of the "higher" median income is being sucked down a black hole of corporate inefficiency.
When you take all of these things together it turns out that average American's standard of living is below that of much of the EU, have shorter lifespans, poorer educational outcomes, and less chance of moving up socially and economically.
Many of us have learned not to adopt new Google services, period. They have taught us patiently over and over by rolling out Cool New Stuff and then deciding that it wasn't monetizing adequately (if they ever tried to do so, often they didn't) and pulled the plug, with little or no notice oftentimes.
Was it free? Not really, I am paying for it like other people do through Google's highly profitable ad business, and through my employer indirectly who uses their web business offerings and even GC. They just can't imagine that it makes sense to keep running services at modest cost as loss leaders to keep people happy with their ecosystem, and ready to adopt new offerings.
If Google offers anything new now I ignore it, since they are going to take it away anyway in a few years. They convinced me, finally, and I believe them.
I actually took a crack at developing such a beast back in the day. But it was both too early and too late. APL for microcomputers came along too late to be available, and by the time it did, there was no room for such a product except as free software for the nerd market segment.
And by the way, the ribbons still really, really suck.
Yes. Yes they do.
I cannot comment on the current state of Multiplan, err, Excel (yes, I remember when Microsoft rebranded Multiplan) since I abandoned when the ribbon was pushed on us and have only ever used LibreOffice since (unless I am doing Pandas in a notebook).
Slashdot Mirror
Filling up landfills with carbon is a very inefficient way to deal with CO2 in the atmosphere. Landfill space, near urban areas (where the trash is generated), is at a premium. There is more than one pollution issue going on at a time. Filling up landfills with paper will scarcely make a dent in the CO2 in the atmosphere.
Don't worry, you can just clean all that up using one of those free plastic bags you get at the grocery store.
Ooops, they banned those in CA as well....
Which worked really, really well! With the success of that law, nine other states are currently planning on copying.
As right-wingers love to lecture, nothing is "free", those "free" bags cost money, and since retail is a highly competitive, low margin business, those "free" bags had gotten so cr_ppy as to be almost worthless - requiring multiple bagging to hold anything of any weight, if they would even then.
Now, if you need a bag, and don't want to pay $2 for one of those nice sewn waterproof fabric bags at the checkout counter that are indefinitely reusable, you can buy a disposable plastic bag for a dime. And that bag is so nice, being large and sturdy, that it can be reused indefinitely. Throwing away piles of flimsy one-use bags is a thing of the past.
I would object strenuously if someone proposed going back. It is much better without those "free" bags.
Also, many neurons have nothing to do with "thinking".
...
That is not happening, because the real bottleneck is our knowledge of how intelligence works.
I generally agree with the thrust of your comment, but your last sentence refutes your first one. We really don't know how intelligence works, or even have a good definition of what it is, still, so your confidence that neurons that maintain homeostasis have nothing to do thinking is misplaced. In fact there is very strong evidence that these background task neurons are also very important in thinking - like in maintaining consciousness. Disruptions in those low level background neurons do not usually interfere with just the autonomic functions but leave consciousness alone, instead consciousness bites the dust first.
How many transistors in the human brain?
Of course the answer is zero, because the brain has neurons. But we can have some numbers for comparison. A Graphcore GC2 IPU has 23 billion transistors. In comparison, a brain has: 100 billion neurons. 10 trillion synapses. 300 billion dendrites. Which of those need to be emulated? A transistor does not do as much as a neuron, and we don't know all the things a neuron does. There is some evidence that the inside of a neuron does some kinds of calculations.
There is a lot more than "some" evidence of that. The behavior of a single neuron is quite complex, much more like a CPU than a transistor. We haven't worked out the processing of even a single neuron. There is very good evidence that even individual synapses perform some sort of computation - their response is a function of a number of local chemical factors, i.e. it is a weighted computation, and is not simple like a transistor.
Neural systems (except for the simplest peripheral reflexes perhaps) are statistical computing systems at every level, and there are many levels (you list three, but there are likely more that are not as obvious or easily enumerated. The equivalent of a "neural" component in a AI neural net is more like a synapse than a neuron.
The thing about parallel processing is that not everything CAN be neatly decomposed into stateless parallel processes.
However we have really, really good evidence that real, strong AI absolutely CAN be decomposed into stateless parallel processes sufficiently well to allow it to perform in real time at the highest level of competence, with hardware that only has a maximum switching rate of only 1000 HZ, and has a mean firing rate of only 6 HZ. You probably have one of these pieces of evidence about two feet from your keyboard.
But courage so much courage!
Gates's focus on new, un-proven, and frankly more complex fission reactor designs is hopelessly misguided. A much better idea was the Gen III+ approach of standardized units that are improved lower cost versions of proven PWR technology, like the Westinghouse AP1000.
And no, it is not "opposition to nuclear power" holding it back in the U.S.
The primary problem is and has been the high capital cost of the plants. Without regulation guaranteeing sufficient stable returns over a long time to recover the investment it is a difficult pitch, and even then the long pay-back time makes it less desirable than natural gas plants if that is an available option. How to make capitalists and investors want to sink their money into these plants in large enough numbers to be helpful?
And this problem has led to the second - so few plants built that the industry to do it has become moribund, thin and the supply chain brittle.Westinghouse, the developer and backer of the AP1000 plant went bankrupt two years ago.
The U.S. has had a stream-lined licensing process for a few decades now, and since 2008 seven new units were licensed - all of the AP1000 design. Investors/utilities have dropped out of five of these, and the projects are dead. None of these projects were killed by "opposition", it was due to the projects going over budget and becoming uneconomical, and Westinghouse going bankrupt, not problems an untried new technology is likely to fix.
Only the two Vogtle units are still being built and have gone massively over budget. How far over budget? The original estimate for the two units was $4.4 billion and is now expected to be $25 billion. In large part this is has been due to difficulties in getting the major parts manufactured, and errors in construction, requiring rework, and delaying the schedule. And this is due to the brittleness of the industry supporting it at this point.
An AP1000 is running in China right now (started up in June of this year) and three more are under construction, but these units have also been delayed by years due to supply problems
The nations that have either a) built a mostly nuclear electricity grid (France); b) are actively building many nuclear power plants (China); or c) have a well-proven track record for building plants on-time and budget (South Korea) have one key thing in common. All of the companies doing this are majority government owned. That is to say, they are socialist enterprises.
The capitalistic model of the U.S. for nuclear power has failed. It has not maintained economies of scale, has been shown robustness to overcome "teething" problems, and is unable to "take a bath" on early units to perfect the supply system and overcome the learning curve.
It you want to see nuclear power making a come back in the U.S. the only option, on the evidence, would be creating a government run corporation to build them. If you don't support that, then you don't support nuclear power. And complaining about NIMBYism, or environmentalists, as if they were stopping nuclear power is simply beating a convenient whipping boy. Makes you feel good inside to bash people you don't like, but accomplishes nothing.
What? Transformers are made almost entirely out of heavy metals.
No.... Transformers are made mostly of Copper and Iron.
Heavy Metals refers specifically to certain metals such as Antimony, Lead, Mercury, Lithium, Manganese, Cobalt, Nickel, Organotin, Cadmium, Arsenic, Chromium, and Thallium -- metallic chemical elements that have relatively high density, are toxic or poisonous at low concentrations, and which may have a tendency to bioaccumulate in some form.
The term "toxic metals" would be a much more accurate term since "heaviness" really has nothing to do with it. Lithium, which is on your list is the lightest of all metals. Beryllium, is next lightest, and is one of the most toxic. Tungsten and bismuth, both quite heavy, are not especially toxic.
PS - Sweden is capitalist. Note that they have a stock market...
Venezuela does too, it is called the Caracas Stock Exchange. So Venezuela is just as capitalist as Sweden, and I guess the U.S.
So why are righties always claiming that Venezuela is socialist through-and-through and proof that socialism always fails?
Because they define all successful economies as "totally capitalist, man!" and all failed economies as "proof of the universal failure of socialism everywhere". In other words it is plain dishonesty. All economies in the world of any size are mixed economies, with some level of regulation for the capitalist component (and the socialist component as well, for that matter).
Venezuela's economy tanked because its government was taken over by corrupt incompetent authoritarians whose only interest is self-aggrandizement.
But don't worry, that can't happen here.
You seem to be under the impression that Bill Clinton invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. I would say you are in no shape to critique anyone's views about history.
If you read the summary, no need to even go to TFA, you will see that Google deleted a personal map created by an individual on a service that exists for exactly that purpose - MyMaps.
If someone created a MyMap showing an ethnic region where there are many Latinos which extended into the U.S. and labelled it "LatinoLand" of something, why would the U.S. care, and why would it have any standing to demand that the personal map be deleted?
This is treating a personal map, showing a real ethnic group's real distribution, as if it were, say, child pornography -- something inherently criminal and illegal in all contexts.
And what should the Kurds call the region where Kurds actually live? "Place where the Kurd's live"? Seems reasonable, wouldn't you think? That is exactly what "Kurdistan" literally means.
It would more accurate to say the absence of any breathable air is a killer.
Why yes, Curiosity has a bunch of fancy stuff onboard.
And it still drives at an amazing 0.08 mph. I think even turtles go faster than that. A human walking is 3.1 mph. So we've got an almost 40X improvement before we even add a rover.
Zipping across the terrain does not collect any scientific data about the terrain. If NASA needed to build a fast rover, they could have done it. It would have weighted more, and been a more expensive mission, but a couple of orders of magnitude less than sending any humans. But they wanted to minutely examine the terrain they landed on, since it had never been examined before. Every square meter of it was mars incognito. The fact that the mission moves slowly and cautiously has virtually nothing to do with the fact that a dude isn't sitting in a seat driving it.
I would contend that a single astronaut on Mars can do far more science than even 1000 robots.
You sure you don't want to make it a million, or maybe a billion? I mean, while you are just making up numbers, go nuts!
...the robots have to be operated with extreme paranoia - which is the enemy of research and discovery
Yeah, caution and careful, thoughtful examination and data collection has always been the enemy of research and discovery. It is as if you have never bothered to read up on how the robot landers are actually operated, and what they actually do.
there are things that no amount of robots can accomplish, compared to a single human who can arrange an impromptu test or experiment
You mean like spot an interesting rock, decide to cut into it, and examine it with a microscope? That sort of impromptu test or experiment? Opportunity does that. The people operating it have a stereo camera that has an angular resolution which is three times better than the human eye, and can filter the light in many different ways to extract information from it that a human eye cannot.
The astounding productivity of that guy in a space suit is just taken for granted, as if just having him standard there she is generating vast amounts of scientific data.
You however would have been a fearless intrepid explorer, one of the first on the boat to settle that new colony, that they will be calling "Jamestown"! Not for you any lily-livered quibbling! Such a man!
Of course the mortality rate of the settlers on that ship was 80% in the first year. What do you suppose your odds would have been? Would you have been a corpse, or one of the few lucky, lucky cannibals?
And this orders of magnitude easier than going to Mars. All it required where conventional commercial sailing vessels, and ordinary supplies. Indians were able live next to Jamestown that winter just fine.
Did a "wall of text" hurt you when you were young?
Yes. Yes it did.
We have memories that we don't know how they work, perhaps they will be a good fit for quantum computing where we only probably know what they are going to do.
I'm pretty sure Oracle's are the worst.
Normal people want to give me all of their money, and let me control their enterprise to boot.
This is 170 gigapascals. That is 1.7 million atmospheres! The most powerful high explosives known only produce pressures up to about 300,000 atmospheres. This can only done in a diamond anvil which have working sizes one the order of 100 microns (barely visible speck, without magnification).
No, this is not thinkable. There is no conceivable way anything practical can done with this line of research, unless it ultimately reveals knowledge that allows to design some other material that can do the same trick without 6 times the detonation pressure of HMX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold#Origins_of_petroleum
In a 1992 paper "The Deep Hot Biosphere" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,[56] Gold first suggested that microbial life is widespread in the porosity of the crust of the Earth, down to depths of several kilometers,
Now fuck off.
According to your own words then, this has not been "known for decades".
Someone hypothesizing that something sort of like this might be true does not make that thing "known". Only collecting actual evidence can do that. And that is what this study is publishing, a whole lot of, yes, new research. We have been making remarkable advances in scientific tools and this changes the data we can collect. No, this is not stuff "we knew long ago". These observations we could only make recently.
I'm old enough to remember when we used to make fun of "European socialism", but now that those countries are kicking our asses
They are not "kicking our asses". The only European countries ahead of America on either median income or per capita GPD are Norway, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.
Norway has a small population and plenty of off-shore oil. Luxembourg and Switzerland have tax shelters and international banking.
It should be well known at this point that the higher per median capita income of the U.S. is largely due to a few things.
The most important is the Americans work longer hours than any other advanced economy. This is largely not voluntary, try taking extra time off from your job and see how that goes for you, career-wise.
The other is that the U.S. has an extremely unequal distribution in income, approaching third world kleptocracy levels. Thus a good chunk of that "median income" is in the hands of very high income people.
And finally the EU spends 9.5% of its GDP on health care. The U.S. spends 17.9%, with no better results (in many cases worse). So about 8.4% of the "higher" median income is being sucked down a black hole of corporate inefficiency.
When you take all of these things together it turns out that average American's standard of living is below that of much of the EU, have shorter lifespans, poorer educational outcomes, and less chance of moving up socially and economically.
Many of us have learned not to adopt new Google services, period. They have taught us patiently over and over by rolling out Cool New Stuff and then deciding that it wasn't monetizing adequately (if they ever tried to do so, often they didn't) and pulled the plug, with little or no notice oftentimes.
Was it free? Not really, I am paying for it like other people do through Google's highly profitable ad business, and through my employer indirectly who uses their web business offerings and even GC. They just can't imagine that it makes sense to keep running services at modest cost as loss leaders to keep people happy with their ecosystem, and ready to adopt new offerings.
If Google offers anything new now I ignore it, since they are going to take it away anyway in a few years. They convinced me, finally, and I believe them.
I actually took a crack at developing such a beast back in the day. But it was both too early and too late. APL for microcomputers came along too late to be available, and by the time it did, there was no room for such a product except as free software for the nerd market segment.
And by the way, the ribbons still really, really suck.
Yes. Yes they do.
I cannot comment on the current state of Multiplan, err, Excel (yes, I remember when Microsoft rebranded Multiplan) since I abandoned when the ribbon was pushed on us and have only ever used LibreOffice since (unless I am doing Pandas in a notebook).