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MickeyFinn posted:This is dumb. When Hertz first discovered EM waves he said it was a curiosity that wouldn't amount to much. Now, you would have to pick up a 130 year-old book to figure out how you'd live your life without them. It is true that you aren't going to have a Higgs factory heating your lunch any time soon. But the advances that go in to building giant discovery science accelerators are legion and end in everything from semiconductor processing to cancer treatment. Yeah, I guess if you want to argue that physicists aren't focusing on "small lab" science that might be held in the hands of the masses, and instead are working on "esoteric" science you can show how little you know about how modern science works. Also, things like quantum computing are studied in "small labs". Transistors and solid state physics are too. I mean, to name examples the poster concerned with cooler cell phones might be familiar with. silence_kit posted:I think in the late 19th century/early 20th century we had a great explosion of advances in the what I'll call 'the physical science of real life' and those advances eventually worked themselves into real technologies which affected how people lived their lives. The origin of mass, a feckless quest for inapplicable knowledge. A quest totally divorced from discoveries like an electromagnetic description of light and not at all relevant to "real life". Boot and Rally fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Oct 30, 2016 |
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Oct 30, 2016 16:27
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mobby_6kl posted:Same thing with video chat - people have been dreaming about it for a century but now it's here, for free, and nobody gives a poo poo. I skyped with my grandfather while I was at Cape Point in South Africa and it was neat but didn't blow anyone's mind any more. We've had phones, cell phone and webcams for decades now so now the seamless combination is, while impressive, hardly revolutionary. There has never in history been an invention that was not a combination of technologies we already had. Nor has there ever before been a time before now where saying something has existed for "a decade" makes it anything but extremely new. It's only now that something being 2 or 3 years old and already it's old. Because the pace of technology has risen so dramatically.
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Oct 30, 2016 16:36
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MickeyFinn posted:This is dumb. When Hertz first discovered EM waves he said it was a curiosity that wouldn't amount to much. Now, you would have to pick up a 130 year-old book to figure out how you'd live your life without them. Hertz was able to generate and detect radio with like brass spheres and bits of wire, at room temperature, and at atmospheric pressure. In other words, he discovered physics in which could exist in 'real life' conditions. He didn't need a billion dollar instrument to detect like a one-part-in-a-billion effect in a vacuum that every other field of science would never care about. Hertz's science experiment is totally the opposite of finding the Higgs Boson. Physicists used to explain why the current hot technological inventions of the time, which were not understood by their inventors, work the way they do, and proposed better technologies. Now they engage in navel-gazing. MickeyFinn posted:A lot of the "everyday" inventions got there because someone was willing to pay to invent them, like the klystron (at Stanford) and semiconductor transistors (at Bell Labs). Nowadays, the guys working at Stanford can still sorta get that money (in a fiercely more competitive environment) and the guys who would be at Bell Labs are making fart apps or routines for targeting ads on Facebook. Advancement has slowed down primarily because no one can justify it on their quarterly sheets anymore. I totally disagree. I think you have it backwards. Companies stopped pouring money into physical science research because they discovered that there wasn't that much there that they could use. The idea that if only we dumped more money into physical science research, we would in proportion have more great technological advances is a totally wrong one. Posters in this thread have no problem with accepting that kind of argument when it is applied to start-up companies and to goofy Google moon-shot projects--why do they do a 180 and totally reverse their opinion when it gets applied to science research? silence_kit fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Oct 30, 2016 |
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Oct 30, 2016 17:02
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Boot and Rally posted:Also, things like quantum computing are studied in "small labs". Transistors and solid state physics are too. I mean, to name examples the poster concerned with cooler cell phones might be familiar with. Yes, condensed matter physics research is a more socially responsible type of research. I still wouldn't make the argument 'okay guys, if we fund condensed matter research at a level 10x higher than it is currently, it will eventually, down the line, bear 10x the technological fruit' Boot and Rally posted:The origin of mass, a feckless quest for inapplicable knowledge. A quest totally divorced from discoveries like an electromagnetic description of light and not at all relevant to "real life". The Higgs Boson does not matter outside of the insular world of high energy physics. The biologist, engineer, chemist, and even condensed matter physicist, now that they have the Higgs Boson, don't know what to do with it and have zero use for it. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Oct 30, 2016 |
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Oct 30, 2016 17:21
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silence_kit posted:Yes, condensed matter physics research is a more socially responsible type of research. It took just shy of two decades for Schroedinger to come out with speculation as to how quantum mechanics might apply to genetics, and just shy of one to actually nail down how DNA is set up. Before that it wasn't very clear that quantum mechanics, atomic physics, etc, were relevant to the life sciences. Before GPS came out, who would have thought that General Relativity, first proposed 40 years before, had any practical use for anyone? On the other hand, plenty of science people spent a lot of time, effort, and money on led nowhere (most of the research into the ether, for example) Your problem is that you've got a Whiggish frame of mind, being in 2016, looking back already knowing the answer for specific discoveries or directions of research, while we do not have that kind of information about research moving forward. Meanwhile, startups are not at all comparable, because they promise specific results. The joke on the venture capitalists is not that they're making long-term investments with uncertain outcomes, but that they expect they personally are going to make bank with them and are throwing inordinate amounts of money at the problem even after what they are investing in, supposedly profit-motivated companies, have shown no indication that they are going anywhere.
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Oct 30, 2016 17:31
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I'm talking about the ~32 million accounts whose passwords got hacked. oh that scandal, the one where people picked lovely passwords? Compared to Yahoo, Google, etc it's barely a blip. and re:Snapchat. Thats 100% investor story time. Take a look at the numbers:  Thats revenue in 2015. Now, they claim for 2016 they'll be at close to 350 million and a billion, with a B, by the end of 2017. Does that sound familiar? It should cause its basically the same pitch Twitter and Tumblr made in their pictch decks. quote:Though there had been murmurs that the acquisition wasnt going well, Yahoos quarterly earnings report on Feb. 2 provided a truckload of new fodder for naysayers. In a call with analysts, CEO Marissa Mayer said Yahoo was writing down the value of Tumblr by $230 million. Tumblr also fell short of its goal of $100 million in revenues in 2015. This is with 550 million users on Tumblr compared to SnapChat:  Of course this is from 2015, today the numbers are closer to 150 which means that growth curve is flattening out. This just happens to be 10 million more than Twitter has in active users. Yet somehow we're to believe that SnapChat will be doing a billion in advertising in a year? However, Twitter says they made 2.7B in ad revenue in 2016. So somehow SnapChat, with more users and less ad revenue is doing better than twitter. It boggles the mind. The funny thing is, all the websites with that SnapChat forecast (350 in 2016, 1B in 2017) are all quoting an internal investor pitch deck put together by SnapChat themselves (or, more likely people on the board who were series A-E funding rounds). So it's basically all a house of cards hoping that advertisers come through in 2017. Optimus_Rhyme fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Oct 30, 2016 |
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Oct 30, 2016 17:39
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Also, my favorite site never fails to deliver: https://www.cbinsights.com/research-downround-tracker quote:Shares of Group on plunged more than 22 percent Thursday after the company said in its earnings press release it would buy rival LivingSocial.
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Oct 30, 2016 17:48
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Dr. AA Hazredstein posted:It took just shy of two decades for Schroedinger to come out with speculation as to how quantum mechanics might apply to genetics, and just shy of one to actually nail down how DNA is set up. Before that it wasn't very clear that quantum mechanics, atomic physics, etc, were relevant to the life sciences. When QM did come out it actually immediately solved other problems that other scientists cared about. This is the complete opposite of the Higgs Boson. Your point about technological applications being hard to predict is well taken, and I never completely argued against that. However, you can use that argument to basically to fund any esoteric study of anything to arbitrarily high levels. It isn't a very strong argument. You can justify funding high energy physics research for purely academic and intellectual reasons, like how we justify funding for people to study the arts. That's fine. But the technological argument for esoteric physics research is specious. Dr. AA Hazredstein posted:Before GPS came out, who would have thought that General Relativity, first proposed 40 years before, had any practical use for anyone? The crown jewel technological application of General Relativity is that it allows you to understand why there needs to be something like a one part in a million correction in GPS systems, and this weak effect is actually partially cancelled out by special relativity. Personally, I would be a little embarrassed that that is the biggest application of GR. They may have even been able to figure out the correction empirically without GR. Dr. AA Hazredstein posted:On the other hand, plenty of science people spent a lot of time, effort, and money on led nowhere (most of the research into the ether, for example) Well the reason why it went nowhere was because it turned out to be wrong, not because it was irrelevant. I'm not saying that the Higgs Boson is wrong. I'm saying that it is irrelevant. Dr. AA Hazredstein posted:Meanwhile, startups are not at all comparable, because they promise specific results. The joke on the venture capitalists is not that they're making long-term investments with uncertain outcomes, but that they expect they personally are going to make bank with them and are throwing inordinate amounts of money at the problem even after what they are investing in, supposedly profit-motivated companies, have shown no indication that they are going anywhere. They know they are making investments with uncertain outcomes and that it is gambling with money, which is why it is hilarious to me when posters in this thread keep wondering aloud about why venture capitalists keep funding companies which are not immediately profitable on day one. Yes there is a lot of stupidity in start-up companies and their investors and they fund a lot of bad and sociologically dangerous ideas. But I could use your argument 'it's hard to predict whether a company's technology or business will be successful, therefore we are obligated to fund everything which has the slightest chance of making it' in defense of the current attitudes in venture capital. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Oct 30, 2016 |
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Oct 30, 2016 17:55
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silence_kit posted:[Faraday] was able to generate and detect [magnetic fields] with like [iron filings on a piece of paper]. In other words, he discovered physics in which could exist in 'real life' conditions. He didn't need [brass spheres and bits of wire] to detect like a one-part-in-a-billion effect in [an aether] that every other field of science would never care about. [Faraday]'s science experiment is totally the opposite of finding [electromagnetic waves]. Edit: And while we are at it, explaining the operation of existing hot technological inventions of the kind you are describing (in air, with simple "every day objects" that were not every day at the time) is considered development work by every funding source I know of and is nearly impossible to get funded. MickeyFinn fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Oct 30, 2016 |
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Oct 30, 2016 18:21
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silence_kit posted:Hertz was able to generate and detect radio with like brass spheres and bits of wire, at room temperature, and at atmospheric pressure. In other words, he discovered physics in which could exist in 'real life' conditions. He didn't need a billion dollar instrument to detect like a one-part-in-a-billion effect in a vacuum that every other field of science would never care about. Hertz's science experiment is totally the opposite of finding the Higgs Boson. Your argument seems to be that science that follows invention is motivated, while the other way around it is an effort in navel gazing. I guess I can start with three questions/comments: 1) support the claim that biologist (or whoever) had been currently looking for an explanation of something that was later explained by physics, and that this was a consistent effect until some point of your choosing. 2) What technology is currently looking for a physical principle that isn't currently studied. If none, do we wait for the invention before studying physics? 3) Most importantly, defend the idea that invention must precede science and that it is in fact science that is out of low hanging fruit and not invention. I think your romantisicing the early revolutions in physics to try and gotcha people in this thread for inconsistency, which I think is your schtick.
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Oct 30, 2016 18:25
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Boot and Rally posted:1) support the claim that biologist (or whoever) had been currently looking for an explanation of something that was later explained by physics, and that this was a consistent effect until some point of your choosing. IIRC, the various theories of thermodynamics were heavily motivated by the invention of the steam engine, and were developed to help engineer them. That's incredibly practical. In the early days of radio, there were a lot of inventors and tinkerers who were dicking around and didn't know what the hell that they were doing, and a lot of physical science was done to explain and understand why their inventions worked the way they did. This is incredibly practical. Boot and Rally posted:2) What technology is currently looking for a physical principle that isn't currently studied. If none, do we wait for the invention before studying physics?. I'm not trying to say that invention, then science is the only order in which to create technology. Of course that's not true. I'm just pointing out differences between physics research from the 19th century and early 20th century and current physics research. It used to be more applied and so it used to actually matter to society more. Boot and Rally posted:I think your romantisicing the early revolutions in physics to try and gotcha people in this thread for inconsistency, which I think is your schtick. I am not romanticizing them. I am just pointing out whenever you guys bring these examples up to compare them to searching for the Higgs Boson that they are not as alike as you say they are. I am not anti-physics research--I just think the economic and technological justifications that people throw out in defense of study into esoteric physics are weak. Study of the subjects can be justified for purely intellectual reasons. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Oct 30, 2016 |
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Oct 30, 2016 18:53
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Groupon is interesting because I've heard they have massive technical debt from their hyper-growth phase. This is probably going to be a big problem for unicorns as they age. There are unicorns doing legit technical poo poo, it's just that the news media has trouble understanding what, say, Github and Docker do so you don't hear about them.
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Oct 30, 2016 19:33
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silence_kit posted:I am not romanticizing them. I am just pointing out whenever you guys bring these examples up to compare them to searching for the Higgs Boson that they are not as alike as you say they are. This is because you don't understand the the entire history of science is people saying what you are saying and being wrong every single time. Nor do you understand how discovery science drives technology. For example, the accelerator-based discovery science that you bemoan as navel gazing also produced the synchrotron light source which is now a fundamental tool in science from condensed matter to chemistry and biology. Scientists working at synchrotrons for the last 2-3 decades have pushed the frontier to where free-electron lasers are needed for probe beam power level and pulse length needs and we are now on the cusp of being able to literally film chemical reactions. And you are betting that turns up nothing of value for society. quote:I am not anti-physics research--I just think the economic and technological justifications that people throw out in defense of study into esoteric physics are weak. Study of the subjects can be justified for purely intellectual reasons. Again, you think these things because you are ignorant of scientific history.
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Oct 30, 2016 19:36
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Uber, in explaining their recent loss in the gig economy tribunal case, lied to their current employees about the scope of the decision and who it affected and they're getting hammered by the GMB for it quote:“As you may be aware, earlier this year a small number of London partner-drivers brought a claim to challenge their self-employed status with Uber. Although we have today heard that this challenge has been successful at this first stage, it’s very important to note that today’s decision only affects two individuals and Uber will be appealing it. 
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Oct 30, 2016 19:59
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Gail Wynand posted:There are unicorns doing legit technical poo poo, it's just that the news media has trouble understanding what, say, Github and Docker do so you don't hear about them. What would you say is Github's major technical innovation?
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Oct 30, 2016 20:03
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silence_kit posted:I am not anti-physics research--I just think the economic and technological justifications that people throw out in defense of study into esoteric physics are weak. Study of the subjects can be justified for purely intellectual reasons. That you describe any study of physics as "esoteric" is a pretty clear sign that you are dismissive of whatever you don't think is useful. Quantum mechanics and theoretical physics are incredibly complex and not something that can easily be dumbed down into 10 second sound bites or promoted as a new way to make smartphone apps. It's about exploring and testing the fundamental laws of reality at the highest level and no one knows what future tech could possibly come from it but there's almost certainly a net societal positive.
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Oct 30, 2016 20:08
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silence_kit posted:I totally disagree. I think you have it backwards. Companies stopped pouring money into physical science research because they discovered that there wasn't that much there that they could use. The idea that if only we dumped more money into physical science research, we would in proportion have more great technological advances is a totally wrong one. Posters in this thread have no problem with accepting that kind of argument when it is applied to start-up companies and to goofy Google moon-shot projects--why do they do a 180 and totally reverse their opinion when it gets applied to science research? High energy physics is not the only natural science, there are super applicable questions in plenty of fields that could be answered and would benefit greatly from more research funding. Science funding is not the same as some multi billion dollar startup promising uber for hover boards.
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Oct 30, 2016 20:14
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Subjunctive posted:What would you say is Github's major technical innovation? Actually admitting that sexual harassment happened and forcing the CEO to resign after it.
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Oct 30, 2016 20:15
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karthun posted:Actually admitting that sexual harassment happened and forcing the CEO to resign after it. Laudable, but not what came to mind when reading the phrase "legit technical poo poo" I have to say.
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Oct 30, 2016 20:15
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Subjunctive posted:What would you say is Github's major technical innovation? Add Atlassian in while we're at it, p sure they are a unicorn. Github's CLI app is great though. If you use Github regularly, it's a pro install.
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Oct 30, 2016 20:22
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Gail Wynand posted:I was interpreting technical broadly, getting most of the open source community onto their platform counts as a technical achievement IMO - anyway my point was the nontechnical press isn't going to get it and they are delivering something with genuine technical value add. Yeah, Atlassian is like 5B or something. Github is only seen as technical because it manipulates source code. It's like flickr for JS files, the innovation was product and not tech.
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Oct 30, 2016 20:28
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No one cares what you recall. Your whole argument is based on the motivation for research. Specifically, that in the 19th century you claim it was motivated by existing technology. You are specifically trying to draw a difference in research that is motivated by existing technology and purely scientifically motivated research to call thread denizens hypocrites for supporting green field science but not moon-shot start-ups/tech companies: silence_kit posted:I totally disagree. I think you have it backwards. Companies stopped pouring money into physical science research because they discovered that there wasn't that much there that they could use. The idea that if only we dumped more money into physical science research, we would in proportion have more great technological advances is a totally wrong one. Posters in this thread have no problem with accepting that kind of argument when it is applied to start-up companies and to goofy Google moon-shot projects--why do they do a 180 and totally reverse their opinion when it gets applied to science research? You fail to take into account the motivations of those "dumping money", the way in which that money is dumped and the outcomes of dumped money. You then cherry pick "more money will be more invention" to try and draw preposterous parallels. To be direct (and I am sure someone will try to pick to death and reduce the entire discussion to): the search for the origin of mass and the development of apps that allow me to rent out vacant rooms are not the same just because they both have money "dumped" into them.
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Oct 30, 2016 20:35
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MickeyFinn posted:A lot of the "everyday" inventions got there because someone was willing to pay to invent them, like the klystron (at Stanford) and semiconductor transistors (at Bell Labs). Nowadays, the guys working at Stanford can still sorta get that money (in a fiercely more competitive environment) and the guys who would be at Bell Labs are making fart apps or routines for targeting ads on Facebook. Advancement has slowed down primarily because no one can justify it on their quarterly sheets anymore. Which is why we political wonks like to scream for government funding of basic research and for things like NASA. Tons of advances have come out of that which private industry have later run into enormous commercial success.
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Oct 30, 2016 20:47
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silence_kit posted:Hertz was able to generate and detect radio with like brass spheres and bits of wire, at room temperature, and at atmospheric pressure. In other words, he discovered physics in which could exist in 'real life' conditions. He didn't need a billion dollar instrument to detect like a one-part-in-a-billion effect in a vacuum that every other field of science would never care about. Hertz's science experiment is totally the opposite of finding the Higgs Boson. In 1961, Crick and Watson created a model that drew on billions of dollars of research using the most cutting edge radiographic, microbiological and microscopic technology of the time. They proved a theory about a chemical compound with no practical application called deoxyribonuceic acid. In 2004, a couple scientists discovered they could create one-atom thick layers of graphite with scotch tape, while playing around during one of their "friday fun" sessions. They won a nobel prize in 2010 for the discovery. Great stuff, but uselessly expensive to produce. Until last year, when someone created a method to reproduce it for 1/1000 the cost. We don't know what applications will come out of isolating the Higgs. Neither did Hertz know what applications would come from radio waves. Your argument is so inane and shows such a misunderstanding of the application and power of scientific inquiry that I have to wonder if you're trolling.
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Oct 30, 2016 21:00
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:In 2004, a couple scientists discovered they could create one-atom thick layers of graphite with scotch tape, while playing around during one of their "friday fun" sessions. They won a nobel prize in 2010 for the discovery. Great stuff, but uselessly expensive to produce. Until last year, when someone created a method to reproduce it for 1/1000 the cost. What is this one? I'm not immediately familiar, but I might have just filed it mentally with a lot of other discoveries.
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Oct 30, 2016 21:02
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silence_kit posted:Hertz was able to generate and detect radio with like brass spheres and bits of wire, at room temperature, and at atmospheric pressure. In other words, he discovered physics in which could exist in 'real life' conditions. He didn't need a billion dollar instrument to detect like a one-part-in-a-billion effect in a vacuum that every other field of science would never care about. Hertz's science experiment is totally the opposite of finding the Higgs Boson. You're a poo poo talking knownothing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwmxSjydPEE
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Oct 30, 2016 21:04
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Prism posted:What is this one? I'm not immediately familiar, but I might have just filed it mentally with a lot of other discoveries. You mean the discovery of graphene or the furnace that reduces the cost? Discovery of graphene by playing with scotch tape and pencils: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/s...at-8539743.html Guy who invented the graphene furnace: http://delta.tudelft.nl/article/making-graphene-affordable/29377 my favorite thing about the invention of graphene is that one of the first things they did with it, being Russians, was use it for passive vodka distillation. Dr. Fishopolis fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Oct 30, 2016 |
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Oct 30, 2016 21:10
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:You mean the discovery of graphene or the furnace that reduces the cost? The furnace; I knew of graphene. Thanks!
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Oct 30, 2016 21:11
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The problem is that we've picked all the low hanging fruit of technology. But now new innovations are becoming harder and harder. Compare 2006 to 2016; they might as well be the same year, tech-wise. Now compare 1996 to 2006, the changes were slightly more. Now compare 1986 to 1996, which saw even bigger changes. Progress is slowing down. I bet 2026 will be pretty much exactly like now, at least as far as technology is concerned. Medical progress has definitely stopped.
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Oct 30, 2016 21:22
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:Guy who invented the graphene furnace: http://delta.tudelft.nl/article/making-graphene-affordable/29377 A billion dollars to build an oven? Why this just proves my point that modern science is hanging its hat on trivialities that someone would have eventually figured out, in some other way, for free and maybe even faster. 
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Oct 30, 2016 21:25
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Blue Star posted:Compare 2006 to 2016; they might as well be the same year, tech-wise. If we're talking home electronics, sure. Incremental innovation almost all across the board. As for everything else, do you actually leave your home now and then? 
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Oct 30, 2016 21:50
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Blue Star posted:The problem is that we've picked all the low hanging fruit of technology. But now new innovations are becoming harder and harder. In 2006 smartphones basically didn't exist. If you don't think the smartphone has changed the world in way that is comparable to the spread of the PC and the Internet, then I don't know what to tell you.
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Oct 30, 2016 22:34
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Blue Star posted:The problem is that we've picked all the low hanging fruit of technology. But now new innovations are becoming harder and harder. silence_kit posted:... This has come up at least twice now and it is just not true. What exactly is "low hanging" about the thousands of years of metallurgy that had to be developed before a steam engine could even be conceived of? How much practice and craft had to be learned to mass produce cars and end the tidal wave of horse poo poo that was drowning New York City and London at the time? If anything, the level of technology that we have attained today makes advances even easier than they were 200 years ago. What I think you guys are looking for is maybe "layman's science" where some person who is not a scientist by trade expands on their daily work to produce something novel that ends up being very useful. This happened 200 years ago because the set of skills for making (for example) boilers was considered different than the set of skills for being a physicist. The reason laymen have trouble competing in modern day science is because scientists learned from the mistake of letting progress come on the blind luck of brute force searches for invention and took over the space with the scientific process. This does not mean, however, that the fruit that was picked previously hung any lower than the fruit we picked today. By the way, both boilermakers and physicists studied for years, decades even, to excel at their respective crafts and in that sense even using the word layman sounds farcical to me, but I can't think of a better term for the kind of science method the "low hanging fruit" concept requires. Liquid Communism posted:Which is why we political wonks like to scream for government funding of basic research and for things like NASA. Tons of advances have come out of that which private industry have later run into enormous commercial success. One of my biggest pet peeves about science funding is "what have you done for me lately?" I mean science means that life spans have doubled, disease no longer kills a large fraction of our children, I sit in side a 72-degree office everyday and touch a fantastically powerful device that likely replaced dozens of workers, I can just sit in a metal cylinder and be on the other side of the planet in 24 hours, or talk to the people over there by video in an instant but by golly, if you don't personally, in the time period I determine, produce something that profoundly changes my existence, then I don't know how you justify your paycheck.
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Oct 30, 2016 22:53
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Counter point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKDr7YwRR7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWreyC2l-dw Best phone of 2006:  Latptop Battery Life from 2006: quote:Hey guys, here's my current situation: I bought a MacBook Pro in the craze to get one like everyone else; my first laptop. After having it for a few months I realized the short (2.5hrs) battery life is driving me crazy, I feel like I'm being cheated out of the purchase since dragging my charger around behind me and getting 2-2.5hrs of life out of this thing before it dies is hardly "mobile" in my eyes. (Even though my other mobile friends say that kind of battery life is normal) And here's an electric car from 2006: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsVwhd8mojA Best Movie Streaming Service in 2006: Oh there weren't any.
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Oct 30, 2016 22:55
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So in one last desperate attempt to get this trainwreck of a thread back on track here's a decent writeup of the current market: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-20/the-tech-bubble-didn-t-burst-this-year-just-wait quote:Earlier this year, One Kings Lane, the online home goods retailer once worth almost $1 billion, sold itself to Bed Bath & Beyond, one of the companies it was supposed to displace, for just $12 million. Jawbone, the maker of sleek wearable fitness hardware once seen as a threat to Apple’s, has seen its value fall 50 percent. Since 2015, researcher CB Insights has counted 80 “down rounds,” instances of a startup accepting a reduced valuation to raise more venture funding. “There was this fog hanging over Silicon Valley in 2001,” says Botha, referring to the last big tech bust. “And there’s a fog hanging over it now. There’s no underlying wave of growth.” 
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Oct 30, 2016 23:03
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Blue Star posted:Compare 2006 to 2016; they might as well be the same year, tech-wise. Now compare 1996 to 2006, the changes were slightly more. Now compare 1986 to 1996, which saw even bigger changes. Progress is slowing down. I bet 2026 will be pretty much exactly like now, at least as far as technology is concerned. Medical progress has definitely stopped. I have a strong feeling you were born in 1996 in this story.
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Oct 30, 2016 23:14
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Blue Star posted:The problem is that we've picked all the low hanging fruit of technology. But now new innovations are becoming harder and harder.
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Oct 30, 2016 23:32
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cheese posted:Holy poo poo, you sound like one of the guys in the 1890's saying "Well, we have mastered the train and the telegraph is perfect, we really have no where to go from here!". I don't even really know what to say - smartphones and mobile technology have revolutionized so many facets of our lives in that SPECIFIC 2006 to 2016 time period. Thank you for your vague hand waving and generalizations. To expand on this, people really underrate the significance of smartphones in terms of everyone having a camera with them all the time. Widespread awareness of police misconduct has really been a direct result of technology, and it's perhaps the most dramatic example of technology driving social change in America since oral contraception.
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Oct 30, 2016 23:42
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I think another issue is that computers are becoming the omni tool of society and a lot of massive technological breakthroughs are easy to overlook because they "do the same thing" because they just are another part towards the perfect computer. Like if someone figured out a way to burst the vault of heaven and inscribe script immutably into the soul of god himself or whatever we'd pretty much just use that to make new hard drives and have windows boot faster. The actual underlying technology of computers has changed so much so rapidly but it's easy to boil away all the quantum mechanics and massive engineering breakthroughs it took to get from one standard to another and just say "yeah, but it's still a hard disk/CPU/modem".
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Oct 30, 2016 23:54
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| # ? Jun 1, 2024 22:06 |
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Blue Star posted:The problem is that we've picked all the low hanging fruit of technology. But now new innovations are becoming harder and harder. This is pretty funny, it's like singularity logic but run backwards in time instead of forwards.
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Oct 31, 2016 00:31
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