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On July 10 2015 00:19 zatic wrote:
fruity: None of what you are saying addresses my point. I already said I consider the internet an incredible technological achievement, I mean you would be insane not to think so. However, it simply pales in comparison to the insane progress from before 1970 on virtually every front of human life.
Also, 2015-50 years gives you 1965, not 1950. And we had communication satellites in 1965.
All your future talk is maybes and super vague. The benefits of current progress just haven't arrived yet? Well then, why not, and when will it happen? This doesn't explain the stagnation of the past 40 years. And you are wrong, we know very well that CERN will not give us interstellar travel. We also know quite well the powers and limitations of the "AI" we can create.
No idea what you are getting at with your talk about evolution.
The democratization of information will be the single largest leap in human history. It will be an instrumental part of almost every innovation as long as it exists. The internet is almost as huge as the wheel.
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On July 10 2015 01:10 zatic wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2015 00:30 [UoN]Sentinel wrote:On July 09 2015 21:22 zatic wrote:On July 08 2015 05:01 fruity. wrote:Look at how we have progressed since 1900. The leaps forward in science and technology, from Einstein's work on the atom to visiting every planet in this solar system. All this in such a short time. What would someone from the 1700's make of an Apache attack helicopter? And then saw the sheer destruction these war machines can bring? + Show Spoiler +An incredible speed of technological advancement is happening, and we're increasingly reaching out into space, and developing the technologies for long distance space travel, to highlight one point; A team of physicists from the UK, Portugal and Sweden led by Ruth Bamford of the Rutherford lab has shown that it should be possible to shield spacecraft using artificial magnetosphere's. MOOREAD THIS Google can spend BILLIONS of $'s on a WHIM and they are heavily investing in technology, as is a whole slew of American government agencies like the NSA, to their European counterparts. This is desired.As we learn more about how our own brains work, this knowledge will in time be applied to quantum computing and Artifical Intelligence. I say a fully concious AI who has a sense of self, understanding that it lives in a different world to us.. Will happen at some point in the future, and when it does the sheer speed of thinking he she or it could achieve with a quantum computer, will be a turning point for humanity, good or bad. Science fiction becomes science fact, it's just a matter of time. This is one of my favorite subjects because I am still convinced of the opposite: That progress has slowed down, and is not nearly as rapid as it used to be during the days when say the helicopter was invented, to bring up your example. As an exercise, travel back in time 50 years, and compare the world to our present. Obviously there will be differences in technology, but to me the vast majority is in computerization. The rest will look more or less familiar. People have cars, televisions, airplanes (in fast, the SAME airplanes) and you could probably extend that list. They won't have facebook and iPhones, sure. But compared to say human flight, those "inventions" seem really miniscule to me. In some areas you can't help but notice that technology has actually regressed. 40 years ago you could fly from Paris to NYC in 2 hours. In 2015 you are back at the travel speed of the 1960s. In 1965 humanity was on its way to the moon and to operational space stations. Compared to those days we have given up on space exploration. 1965 was the height of nuclear research, a path that has pretty much stagnated since. Now, take a person from 1965, and let them travel back 50 years. The world they are taken to is VASTLY different. This is a world where a flu epidemic would kill millions. Where human flight was JUST invented, and commercial flying still far off. Where the majority of city traffic was horse drawn. Where people often enough didn't have central plumbing, central heating, refrigeration. Where transatlantic travel took not hours, but weeks. Where the fastest means of telecommunication was the telegraph. Where moving pictures existed, but were a carnival attraction rather than an every day normality. Compared to the progress we saw from the beginning of the 19th century to say the moon landing, everything that happened since then is sad stagnation. It is no wonder that the visions of the future from say the 1950s and 1960s imagined fantastic worlds straight out of science fiction by 2000, considering the amazing pace of progress they had experienced in their lifetime. To steal from someone who argues along the same lines, "we were promised flying cars, and what we got was 140 characters". The Concorde burned up way too much fuel, it was loud (and hence only used on transatlantic flights), had all sorts of environmental issues (such as harming the ozone layer) and relied on government support to make up for the cost of building and maintaining a drastically reduced number, only becoming profitable later on. It might have been a technological achievement but a very shortsighted one. It's like saying I could save half the time on my work commute by installing a bulldozer blade in front of my car and flooring the gas. It's great, but I just destroyed half a highway. In 2015 we have operational space stations, new countries are planning manned missions to the moon with unmanned ones already underway by the EU, Russia, China, India and Japan, and the UAE is trying to send an orbiter to Mars. If you were in any of those countries in 1965, except for Russia, you weren't going anywhere. NASA is getting ready for Moon Program 2: Electric Boogaloo with the Orion program making its first test launch last year. Now for the first time, you and I can go to space as well, assuming you and I have either a really trusting bank or a few hundred thousand dollars. But that was completely unattainable 50 years ago, where it was strictly government work with only the best of the best of the best from the US and USSR who were going to be going to space. We have anything but given up on space exploration. Nuclear... we're in a lull. Blame Chernobyl, Fukushima and the Simpsons. But we do have all sorts of other alternative-energy developments. Maglev trains in China, Japan and Korea. The Tesla, which I'll get to in a bit. But anyways, these are all the pinnacle of our technology, but let's go back to your example of the regular world, then and now. A person from 1965 would definitely see the differences, just as they would see the differences in 1915. Diseases from their time like the measles are almost nonexistent. We can conduct surgeries with lasers. We can bomb people with robot planes and plan their route with military satellites. We have cars that make so little noise it has to be included artificially, and ones that you can plug in are commonplace and spreading. I actually saw one of the Tesla supercharging stations (the fast ones, not the regular ones that take hours to charge your car), in rural New Hampshire. Farms everywhere, not exactly first-rate when it comes to tech, but feel free pass through, grab a bite to eat, and when you get back to your car it's nearly topped off. About a decade from now (actually 5 years, but let's plan for the worst), we won't even need to drive the cars around anymore. As for what the Internet has given us, it's far more than just knowing who was the 43rd President of Mexico. The same magic rectangle that does that can also summon me a random person off the street who will take me to my destination, during which time I can have a nice chat about the technological developments of the day with people who don't live on the same continent as me and might see differently. The speed of my rectangle and others' are all averaged together so if I, or someone else wanted to, could check traffic on any given road in real time. And I think it's not just the knowledge but the speed at which we get it and the near-infinite potential it affords us that we're able to glean all this information, everything we've had, and decide it's not enough. Also, a funny side note on TV's: If you really wanted to blow a 1965 person's mind, you show them a house with a 72-inch TV in the bathroom, turn on the TV and show that the number of available channels has gone from ~3 to >1000, and then say that it's actually the low end of modern entertainment (compared to near-infinite number of streams, TV shows, movies, games, whatnot available on a PC with an internet connection). I don't know if they'd consider it magic, but it would definitely be awe inspiring. The reason why the Concorde failed (or why we stopped exploring space, or why we are still flying planes from the 70s, or why we are still driving the same cars, but with bluetooth) are irrelevant. I am describing simply THAT all that happened, and that those are signs of technological slow down. All the counter examples you brought are from the future, and I like I said earlier, I mostly share a (mildly) positive view of technological progress in the future thanks to companies like Space X and Tesla, renewable energies, and actually applicable uses of AI like self driving cars. If all those come to fruit, that we are finally back on real progress. But we still leave behind us decades of slowdown.
Alright, I think the position I'd rather stand behind is - we're slowing down technologically, or we've slowed down and will speed back up again at some point in the future, but for the "right" reasons (as opposed to not caring or hitting a technological wall). Most of it is environmental concerns (fuel wasn't a big factor until the 70s), and with the Cold War over we don't have a need to establish cosmic supremacy, stockpile nuclear weapons, or develop new jets as fast as we did during the 50s and 60s.
This is basically the Windows 7 era of technology. Evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
And we're not driving the same cars. We didn't have anything close to a car that you could plug in in the 70s. Or one that takes all the energy you'd otherwise waste when you hit the brake and convert it back to usable energy for when you accelerate again.
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On July 10 2015 02:37 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2015 00:19 zatic wrote:
fruity: None of what you are saying addresses my point. I already said I consider the internet an incredible technological achievement, I mean you would be insane not to think so. However, it simply pales in comparison to the insane progress from before 1970 on virtually every front of human life.
Also, 2015-50 years gives you 1965, not 1950. And we had communication satellites in 1965.
All your future talk is maybes and super vague. The benefits of current progress just haven't arrived yet? Well then, why not, and when will it happen? This doesn't explain the stagnation of the past 40 years. And you are wrong, we know very well that CERN will not give us interstellar travel. We also know quite well the powers and limitations of the "AI" we can create.
No idea what you are getting at with your talk about evolution. The democratization of information will be the single largest leap in human history. It will be an instrumental part of almost every innovation as long as it exists. The internet is almost as huge as the wheel.
Information cannot be democratized, whatever that means.
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On July 10 2015 05:43 farvacola wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2015 02:37 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 10 2015 00:19 zatic wrote:
fruity: None of what you are saying addresses my point. I already said I consider the internet an incredible technological achievement, I mean you would be insane not to think so. However, it simply pales in comparison to the insane progress from before 1970 on virtually every front of human life.
Also, 2015-50 years gives you 1965, not 1950. And we had communication satellites in 1965.
All your future talk is maybes and super vague. The benefits of current progress just haven't arrived yet? Well then, why not, and when will it happen? This doesn't explain the stagnation of the past 40 years. And you are wrong, we know very well that CERN will not give us interstellar travel. We also know quite well the powers and limitations of the "AI" we can create.
No idea what you are getting at with your talk about evolution. The democratization of information will be the single largest leap in human history. It will be an instrumental part of almost every innovation as long as it exists. The internet is almost as huge as the wheel. Information cannot be democratized, whatever that means.
I think it's pretty safe to assume what he meant by "democratization of information" was "democratization of access to information".
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On July 10 2015 05:52 OtherWorld wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2015 05:43 farvacola wrote:On July 10 2015 02:37 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 10 2015 00:19 zatic wrote:
fruity: None of what you are saying addresses my point. I already said I consider the internet an incredible technological achievement, I mean you would be insane not to think so. However, it simply pales in comparison to the insane progress from before 1970 on virtually every front of human life.
Also, 2015-50 years gives you 1965, not 1950. And we had communication satellites in 1965.
All your future talk is maybes and super vague. The benefits of current progress just haven't arrived yet? Well then, why not, and when will it happen? This doesn't explain the stagnation of the past 40 years. And you are wrong, we know very well that CERN will not give us interstellar travel. We also know quite well the powers and limitations of the "AI" we can create.
No idea what you are getting at with your talk about evolution. The democratization of information will be the single largest leap in human history. It will be an instrumental part of almost every innovation as long as it exists. The internet is almost as huge as the wheel. Information cannot be democratized, whatever that means. I think it's pretty safe to assume what he meant by "democratization of information" was "democratization of access to information".
Doesn't that mean that the majority gets to decide how much the minority is allowed to learn? So whoever has the most resources gets to decide how much the people beneath them gets access to technologies?
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On July 10 2015 05:52 OtherWorld wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2015 05:43 farvacola wrote:On July 10 2015 02:37 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 10 2015 00:19 zatic wrote:
fruity: None of what you are saying addresses my point. I already said I consider the internet an incredible technological achievement, I mean you would be insane not to think so. However, it simply pales in comparison to the insane progress from before 1970 on virtually every front of human life.
Also, 2015-50 years gives you 1965, not 1950. And we had communication satellites in 1965.
All your future talk is maybes and super vague. The benefits of current progress just haven't arrived yet? Well then, why not, and when will it happen? This doesn't explain the stagnation of the past 40 years. And you are wrong, we know very well that CERN will not give us interstellar travel. We also know quite well the powers and limitations of the "AI" we can create.
No idea what you are getting at with your talk about evolution. The democratization of information will be the single largest leap in human history. It will be an instrumental part of almost every innovation as long as it exists. The internet is almost as huge as the wheel. Information cannot be democratized, whatever that means. I think it's pretty safe to assume what he meant by "democratization of information" was "democratization of access to information".
Yes this. Meaning that information flowing more freely than ever in human history is and will be the core of all the great innovations so long as it exists.
Musk and practically all the other potential leaders of innovation (tech, political, or otherwise) are wholly dependent on the internet.
democratizeSource verb de·moc·ra·tize \di-ˈmä-krə-ˌtīz\ : to make (a country or organization) more democratic : to make (something) available to all people : to make it possible for all people to understand (something)
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Ok so you're saying a bunch of overly dramatic things that all require huge amounts of unpacking that I know I don't want you to try and do, so yeah, the internet is important, I agree.
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On July 10 2015 06:06 farvacola wrote:
Ok so you're saying a bunch of overly dramatic things that all require huge amounts of unpacking that I know I don't want you to try and do, so yeah, the internet is important, I agree.
It's how they will describe the internet when we're gone. Dramatic sure, overly, not so much.
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On July 10 2015 05:58 TMagpie wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2015 05:52 OtherWorld wrote:On July 10 2015 05:43 farvacola wrote:On July 10 2015 02:37 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 10 2015 00:19 zatic wrote:
fruity: None of what you are saying addresses my point. I already said I consider the internet an incredible technological achievement, I mean you would be insane not to think so. However, it simply pales in comparison to the insane progress from before 1970 on virtually every front of human life.
Also, 2015-50 years gives you 1965, not 1950. And we had communication satellites in 1965.
All your future talk is maybes and super vague. The benefits of current progress just haven't arrived yet? Well then, why not, and when will it happen? This doesn't explain the stagnation of the past 40 years. And you are wrong, we know very well that CERN will not give us interstellar travel. We also know quite well the powers and limitations of the "AI" we can create.
No idea what you are getting at with your talk about evolution. The democratization of information will be the single largest leap in human history. It will be an instrumental part of almost every innovation as long as it exists. The internet is almost as huge as the wheel. Information cannot be democratized, whatever that means. I think it's pretty safe to assume what he meant by "democratization of information" was "democratization of access to information". Doesn't that mean that the majority gets to decide how much the minority is allowed to learn? So whoever has the most resources gets to decide how much the people beneath them gets access to technologies?
I don't think I completely understand your question. To me the democratization of access to information means that :
-It is easier to access to information in time (live reporting of events through Internet as opposed to the time it takes to write a "proper" journalistic piece and publish it + immediate access to a big chunk of the recorded knowledge we accumulated since a fair bit of time - wikipedia says hi)
-It is easier to access to information in "space" (if there's, I dunno, a military incident at the US-Canada border and you want to know how medias of both countries are presenting it, you can easily do it without having to leave your seat + you can easily access to more local knowledge that would otherwise necessitates that you travel - non-English wikipedias say hi)
Thus I don't see how this could lead to the majority deciding how much the minority is allowed to learn. For example, let's imagine that in a sudden XIXth century-like outburst of germanophobia, the French government holds a referendum asking "Should all ressources allowing to learn German in France be destroyed?" and the referendum's result is a Yes at 71%. Thus the minority of people who wanted to be able to learn German are fucked, since all books on the subjects are burned, and all sites used to learn German are deleted if located in France, or blacklisted by the ISPs if not. Well, where's the issue? As the blacklisting of TPB by the UK government taught us, as of today, a government cannot reliably forbid people from accessing to a website. Thus here, Internet precisely allows the minority to circumvent the majority's decision.
@GreenHorizons : Internet is great, but I've yet to see an actual technological inventions - like aircraft, cars, lasers, nuclear things, phones, radio, drugs, etc - that has been created after the Internet and that wouldn't have been possible at all without it.
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I see the misunderstanding.
To me, information is not (nor should be) a democratic process. People don't (as a group) decide what is or isn't permissible. To me, information is a chaotic and wild concept. Everyone has access to it and every can freely add/corrupt it at their leisure. For example--the internet is the bastion of both a more open society as well as specifically closed societies. The internet allows racists to be fully formed, organized, and hidden from public view to pass on their teachings as they please as much as it allows passionless liberals to feel powerful because they changed their profile picture. It pushes advancements in both goo and bad things in equal measure.
It is also the easiest to shut down as needed as it takes a lot of infrastructure to keep it afloat. A few well placed bombs will cut off entire sections of the internet depending which data centers are struck. It's so easy for it to be manipulated and controlled specifically because there are no rules. I can go online right now and so long as I don't go to websites I disagree with--I can feel like the whole world agrees with my viewpoints.
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On July 09 2015 22:25 zatic wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2015 22:06 Cascade wrote:On July 09 2015 21:22 zatic wrote:On July 08 2015 05:01 fruity. wrote:Look at how we have progressed since 1900. The leaps forward in science and technology, from Einstein's work on the atom to visiting every planet in this solar system. All this in such a short time. What would someone from the 1700's make of an Apache attack helicopter? And then saw the sheer destruction these war machines can bring? + Show Spoiler +An incredible speed of technological advancement is happening, and we're increasingly reaching out into space, and developing the technologies for long distance space travel, to highlight one point; A team of physicists from the UK, Portugal and Sweden led by Ruth Bamford of the Rutherford lab has shown that it should be possible to shield spacecraft using artificial magnetosphere's. MOOREAD THIS Google can spend BILLIONS of $'s on a WHIM and they are heavily investing in technology, as is a whole slew of American government agencies like the NSA, to their European counterparts. This is desired.As we learn more about how our own brains work, this knowledge will in time be applied to quantum computing and Artifical Intelligence. I say a fully concious AI who has a sense of self, understanding that it lives in a different world to us.. Will happen at some point in the future, and when it does the sheer speed of thinking he she or it could achieve with a quantum computer, will be a turning point for humanity, good or bad. Science fiction becomes science fact, it's just a matter of time. This is one of my favorite subjects because I am still convinced of the opposite: That progress has slowed down, and is not nearly as rapid as it used to be during the days when say the helicopter was invented, to bring up your example. As an exercise, travel back in time 50 years, and compare the world to our present. Obviously there will be differences in technology, but to me the vast majority is in computerization. The rest will look more or less familiar. People have cars, televisions, airplanes (in fast, the SAME airplanes) and you could probably extend that list. They won't have facebook and iPhones, sure. But compared to say human flight, those "inventions" seem really miniscule to me. In some areas you can't help but notice that technology has actually regressed. 40 years ago you could fly from Paris to NYC in 2 hours. In 2015 you are back at the travel speed of the 1960s. In 1965 humanity was on its way to the moon and to operational space stations. Compared to those days we have given up on space exploration. 1965 was the height of nuclear research, a path that has pretty much stagnated since. Now, take a person from 1965, and let them travel back 50 years. The world they are taken to is VASTLY different. This is a world where a flu epidemic would kill millions. Where human flight was JUST invented, and commercial flying still far off. Where the majority of city traffic was horse drawn. Where people often enough didn't have central plumbing, central heating, refrigeration. Where transatlantic travel took not hours, but weeks. Where the fastest means of telecommunication was the telegraph. Where moving pictures existed, but were a carnival attraction rather than an every day normality. Compared to the progress we saw from the beginning of the 19th century to say the moon landing, everything that happened since then is sad stagnation. It is no wonder that the visions of the future from say the 1950s and 1960s imagined fantastic worlds straight out of science fiction by 2000, considering the amazing pace of progress they had experienced in their lifetime. To steal from someone who argues along the same lines, "we were promised flying cars, and what we got was 140 characters". Imho, internet is 100x bigger than commercial airlines. Yeah, being able to travel to the other side of the planet in a day (compared to weeks of train travel for example) is really cool, but very few actually do that anyway. But having essentially all collected information of the human race at your fingertips in a couple of seconds, that is huge. There is no competition between the the two as I see it, and I'd easily take the internet over everything that happened between 1960 and 1910. I don't think we fully realise how limited we were before internet. Then the fact that we tend to use this access to all collected information of the human race to look at kittens videos, that's a different point.  Of course it is hard to argue that the impact of the internet has not been huge - and I am not trying. I am arguing that progress since 1970 has been primarily in bits and bytes, while progress in the "real" world has mostly stagnated. And I believe that humanity needs to find a way to channel the progress in the digital world back to the physical to make the world a better place tomorrow. Some of this is already happening, which is why I am somewhat optimistic about the future. However, I can't get around the real world stagnation that has gripped us, and is still holding on, which is why I contest the idea that we are living beyond what people imagined say 50 years ago - far, far from it. "I'd easily take the internet over everything that happened between 1960 and 1910" - this however seems ridiculous, and I think you would reconsider once you start choking to death on Diphtheria. Although that comparison isn't really useful to begin with. What would "all the knowledge of the world" really give you in 1910, when most of the knowledge that makes the internet amazing has yet to be brought to the world?
I'll reply to this as representative of the replies to my somewhat provocative statement.
In terms of quality of life for me right now, I'll agree that everything between 1910 and 1960 probably did more than the internet alone. However, in terms of the state of humanity in general, I think that instantaneous sharing of information between everyone on the world easily beats the advance in medical and transportation in those fifty years. Not least because instantaneous worldwide information sharing allows medical and transport science to advance much faster as everyone got immediate access to the cutting edge research. (This is why I hate the concept of IP in science and RnD with a passion, but that is a sidetrack.)
Regarding your point that technology is going backwards, I don't think it makes much sense. It's not like the technology to go to the moon or build supersonic commercial airplanes is forgotten. We just choose not to build them (as much), as we've come to realise that it isn't really worth it. Between 1910 and 1960 they found it a good idea to launch nuclear bombs on inhabited cities, which hasn't happened between 1960 and 2010, because we choose not to. I find that a sign of maturity that we have come to realise that some technologies, such as sending people to the moon, commercial supersonics, nukes, simply isn't worth the price in many cases. I agree that we are hitting a transportation technology plateau though. We have tech to move people around the earth pretty well, and I don't think we will see much more impact on everyday life until we routinely can move people between planets. Even if we bring back supersonics, going to the other side of the earth in 6 hours instead of 22 isn't that huge of a difference in the big picture imo. Well, apart from giving access to cars and airplanes to everyone, including third world.
I can agree that the impact of transport technology maybe hasn't changes the everyday life of people as much between 1960 and 2010 as it probably was changed from 1910. Although I don't know exactly how common it was to own a car in1960, and how cheap commercial airlines were at that point. Today, I think at least 80% of people in western world can afford a car and occasional intercontinental flights without straining their budget too much. I don't really know, but I'd guess that that figure was a lot lower in 1960, at which point you could argue that the larger change in everyday quality of life actually happened after 1960. I'm just making up numbers here, and they may not be accurate, but I think you get the idea.
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On July 10 2015 09:25 Cascade wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2015 22:25 zatic wrote:On July 09 2015 22:06 Cascade wrote:On July 09 2015 21:22 zatic wrote:On July 08 2015 05:01 fruity. wrote:Look at how we have progressed since 1900. The leaps forward in science and technology, from Einstein's work on the atom to visiting every planet in this solar system. All this in such a short time. What would someone from the 1700's make of an Apache attack helicopter? And then saw the sheer destruction these war machines can bring? + Show Spoiler +An incredible speed of technological advancement is happening, and we're increasingly reaching out into space, and developing the technologies for long distance space travel, to highlight one point; A team of physicists from the UK, Portugal and Sweden led by Ruth Bamford of the Rutherford lab has shown that it should be possible to shield spacecraft using artificial magnetosphere's. MOOREAD THIS Google can spend BILLIONS of $'s on a WHIM and they are heavily investing in technology, as is a whole slew of American government agencies like the NSA, to their European counterparts. This is desired.As we learn more about how our own brains work, this knowledge will in time be applied to quantum computing and Artifical Intelligence. I say a fully concious AI who has a sense of self, understanding that it lives in a different world to us.. Will happen at some point in the future, and when it does the sheer speed of thinking he she or it could achieve with a quantum computer, will be a turning point for humanity, good or bad. Science fiction becomes science fact, it's just a matter of time. This is one of my favorite subjects because I am still convinced of the opposite: That progress has slowed down, and is not nearly as rapid as it used to be during the days when say the helicopter was invented, to bring up your example. As an exercise, travel back in time 50 years, and compare the world to our present. Obviously there will be differences in technology, but to me the vast majority is in computerization. The rest will look more or less familiar. People have cars, televisions, airplanes (in fast, the SAME airplanes) and you could probably extend that list. They won't have facebook and iPhones, sure. But compared to say human flight, those "inventions" seem really miniscule to me. In some areas you can't help but notice that technology has actually regressed. 40 years ago you could fly from Paris to NYC in 2 hours. In 2015 you are back at the travel speed of the 1960s. In 1965 humanity was on its way to the moon and to operational space stations. Compared to those days we have given up on space exploration. 1965 was the height of nuclear research, a path that has pretty much stagnated since. Now, take a person from 1965, and let them travel back 50 years. The world they are taken to is VASTLY different. This is a world where a flu epidemic would kill millions. Where human flight was JUST invented, and commercial flying still far off. Where the majority of city traffic was horse drawn. Where people often enough didn't have central plumbing, central heating, refrigeration. Where transatlantic travel took not hours, but weeks. Where the fastest means of telecommunication was the telegraph. Where moving pictures existed, but were a carnival attraction rather than an every day normality. Compared to the progress we saw from the beginning of the 19th century to say the moon landing, everything that happened since then is sad stagnation. It is no wonder that the visions of the future from say the 1950s and 1960s imagined fantastic worlds straight out of science fiction by 2000, considering the amazing pace of progress they had experienced in their lifetime. To steal from someone who argues along the same lines, "we were promised flying cars, and what we got was 140 characters". Imho, internet is 100x bigger than commercial airlines. Yeah, being able to travel to the other side of the planet in a day (compared to weeks of train travel for example) is really cool, but very few actually do that anyway. But having essentially all collected information of the human race at your fingertips in a couple of seconds, that is huge. There is no competition between the the two as I see it, and I'd easily take the internet over everything that happened between 1960 and 1910. I don't think we fully realise how limited we were before internet. Then the fact that we tend to use this access to all collected information of the human race to look at kittens videos, that's a different point. Of course it is hard to argue that the impact of the internet has not been huge - and I am not trying. I am arguing that progress since 1970 has been primarily in bits and bytes, while progress in the "real" world has mostly stagnated. And I believe that humanity needs to find a way to channel the progress in the digital world back to the physical to make the world a better place tomorrow. Some of this is already happening, which is why I am somewhat optimistic about the future. However, I can't get around the real world stagnation that has gripped us, and is still holding on, which is why I contest the idea that we are living beyond what people imagined say 50 years ago - far, far from it. "I'd easily take the internet over everything that happened between 1960 and 1910" - this however seems ridiculous, and I think you would reconsider once you start choking to death on Diphtheria. Although that comparison isn't really useful to begin with. What would "all the knowledge of the world" really give you in 1910, when most of the knowledge that makes the internet amazing has yet to be brought to the world? I'll reply to this as representative of the replies to my somewhat provocative statement. In terms of quality of life for me right now, I'll agree that everything between 1910 and 1960 probably did more than the internet alone. However, in terms of the state of humanity in general, I think that instantaneous sharing of information between everyone on the world easily beats the advance in medical and transportation in those fifty years. Not least because instantaneous worldwide information sharing allows medical and transport science to advance much faster as everyone got immediate access to the cutting edge research. (This is why I hate the concept of IP in science and RnD with a passion, but that is a sidetrack.) Regarding your point that technology is going backwards, I don't think it makes much sense. It's not like the technology to go to the moon or build supersonic commercial airplanes is forgotten. We just choose not to build them (as much), as we've come to realise that it isn't really worth it. Between 1910 and 1960 they found it a good idea to launch nuclear bombs on inhabited cities, which hasn't happened between 1960 and 2010, because we choose not to. I find that a sign of maturity that we have come to realise that some technologies, such as sending people to the moon, commercial supersonics, nukes, simply isn't worth the price in many cases. I agree that we are hitting a transportation technology plateau though. We have tech to move people around the earth pretty well, and I don't think we will see much more impact on everyday life until we routinely can move people between planets. Even if we bring back supersonics, going to the other side of the earth in 6 hours instead of 22 isn't that huge of a difference in the big picture imo. Well, apart from giving access to cars and airplanes to everyone, including third world. I can agree that the impact of transport technology maybe hasn't changes the everyday life of people as much between 1960 and 2010 as it probably was changed from 1910. Although I don't know exactly how common it was to own a car in1960, and how cheap commercial airlines were at that point. Today, I think at least 80% of people in western world can afford a car and occasional intercontinental flights without straining their budget too much. I don't really know, but I'd guess that that figure was a lot lower in 1960, at which point you could argue that the larger change in everyday quality of life actually happened after 1960. I'm just making up numbers here, and they may not be accurate, but I think you get the idea.
Some relevant stats for your claim.
80+% of americans have internet access: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.P2
About 1.6million people travel per day (Average of total number of passengers over total days) http://www.transtats.bts.gov/
So about .5% of americans fly each day while 80+% of them have online access each day.
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Side note on the previous conversation: Induction stoves (and the new induction chargers, fuck you LG for taking it out of your US phones) are fucking magic. I turn one on and it's cold no matter how long I wait but then I put a pot of macaroni on top and holy shit it's done in 3 minutes. Like I know how induction works but it's still crazy how I have one object and another object and nothing happens until I touch the two together and boom, a service is complete.
Anyways, has Carlos Mencia done anything recently? I miss him and his brand of comedy, but I think that South Park episode destroyed his reputation.
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Allright, not 100% if this belongs here but it's fucking killing me that I can't find the answer.
Doug Stanhope at one point did a bit on coming out of the closet as a straight guy:
"That’s why I like to come out of the closet as just a normal dude. A guy on a plane go ‘Yeah, I remember when stewardesses used to be hot. Now they are all fat.' And you go 'Yeah, I’m right with you buddy, thank Christ I’m queer cause they’re fat as shit.’ Because maybe somewhere around you, when you just drop a normal 'I’m gay’ in a conversation, an adolescent kid who has just come into terms with the fact that he’s gay - and he’s fucking terrified, not only of just being gay. Maybe he thinks he has to jump out of the cake and ride a fucking float assless-chaps-escapades-gay - and he hears you saying just like a normal dude 'I’m gay’ and he goes 'oh, I can do that’."
Which show was that from? I can't find it for the life of me ^^
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On July 13 2015 01:54 [UoN]Sentinel wrote:
Side note on the previous conversation: Induction stoves (and the new induction chargers, fuck you LG for taking it out of your US phones) are fucking magic. I turn one on and it's cold no matter how long I wait but then I put a pot of macaroni on top and holy shit it's done in 3 minutes. Like I know how induction works but it's still crazy how I have one object and another object and nothing happens until I touch the two together and boom, a service is complete.
Anyways, has Carlos Mencia done anything recently? I miss him and his brand of comedy, but I think that South Park episode destroyed his reputation.
Carlos Mencia was a classless joke thief and a fake Mexican. He destroyed his own reputation. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
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Mencia is indeed fuckin terrible.
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Let me see if i get this straight. You need an ID to drink in the US, but you don't need it to vote?
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On July 13 2015 02:30 TMG26 wrote:
Let me see if i get this straight. You need an ID to drink in the US, but you don't need it to vote?
Turns out there's a whole lot more people under 21 trying to drink than people trying to fraudulently vote. Though the laws for ID wouldn't be a problem if they didn't attempt to restrict voting access at the same time, and they made the ID's easily accessible.
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On July 13 2015 02:37 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 13 2015 02:30 TMG26 wrote:
Let me see if i get this straight. You need an ID to drink in the US, but you don't need it to vote? Turns out there's a whole lot more people under 21 trying to drink than people trying to fraudulently vote. Though the laws for ID wouldn't be a problem if they didn't attempt to restrict voting access at the same time, and they made the ID's easily accessible.
Very few disagree with the abstract notion that voter fraud is bad. But it's not a particularly prominent problem in the US, and ID laws wouldn't do much.
What's worse is that in their current implementation, voter ID requirements often make it especially difficult for many groups to vote, such as disabled individuals or the elderly, who may not be able to pass vision tests
to get a license or be sufficiently mobile to travel around town to get an ID, transgendered individuals who struggle to get their government identity to match their social persona, or those in poverty, who often have to pay significant fees to acquire an id (such as a license fee, fees to acquire documents, fees to get a photograph, etc.) These fees also have a racial component, because of the socioeconomic structuring of the US today. After the end of slavery, many in the South used poll taxes and exemption clauses as part of a wider campaign to disenfranchise Black Americans.
Interestingly, not all ID programs have these issues. Hawaii allows people to sign an affidavit if they cannot produce a photo ID. But as long as the majority of laws do, a chilling effect exists, and many who would be disenfranchised by harsh laws effectively silence themselves.
These laws are being fought nationwide (they exist in about 30 states, and only started cropping up post 2006), but often remain on the books because the groups they disenfranchise tend to vote Democratic, creating a powerful incentive for conservative lawmakers to protect their electoral status.
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I have 10 folders with various files. Is there a fast way to put all the files in one general folder, without having to cut-paste the files inside each one?
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EPT![[image loading]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Apache_helicopter_in_flight.jpg)
