I think we'll have colonies in the next couple hundred years at the longest. But the thing is exponential growth. Space travel might get cheaper but the amount of power needed to launch a spacecraft means we won't move people off the planet fast enough that the population actually shrinks.

Why doesn't the US challenge China to a healthcare or human rights race? Something we know will help people now not hopefully help them in the future. If we can't figure out how to take care of each other we don't deserve to colonize other planets.

I agree with a lot of your comments. What I miss about radio is discovering new stuff. That said my tastes lean away from mass market stuff. Not that I hate all of it but the current Lady Gaga song or whatever being played once an hour means 1) I listen to crap I don't like and 2) I don't really discover new music that I want to listen to anyways.

So I rely on friends and concert festivals to find new bands. Because my stuff isn't played on the radio often by the time I discover a band they've put out 6 albums and I have a lot of material to enjoy before moving on to the next new thing I find.

Social aspect: going in all ways. Everyone has headphones on listening to their own playlists while they text with their own friends. casual acquiescences don't really share anything anymore.

Exactly.

No those might have had actual technical limitations length of a record/phonograph for example.

Another possibility: maybe song length for pop songs is self-limiting. People hate to hear songs they don't like. If they have 10min of a song they like and then 10min of a song they don't they'll change the dial. But if you keep them short they'll rid them out like a lot of people do with commercials.

and who has more money than God?

I think I had that channel in my hotel room in Germany.

Well I'd say now a days it is probably more due to advertisement. Keeping the song around 3min gives you enough time to play 3 "songs" do a weather update and the plug boner pills again.

Also probably due to the genre but one of my favorite bands, Opeth, has an average song length of probably 9min. They have a whole bunch of songs 12+ min long. I've never heard them on radio but did hear an a snippet from one of their softer songs in a CSI episode I think it was. I don't listen to the radio because generally it doesn't play the type of music I like. Sure with online I could search around for a station somewhere that plays it but being online I can just listen to the things I like in the first place.

I think radio is an outdated medium at least for music. For discussions and such it can be okay, but then again that can also be replaced by podcasts.

Plus it is a good place to dump your "photos" that you don't really care too much about if they were to be lost and you had to "take" them again.

You mean you've never repaired a fileserver while drunk?

Can't you both be right? price changes tend to happen in chunks throughout the supply chain. Your aluminum is $2/kg from the supplier and then one day they tell you it is now $2.25. You suck it up for a while but then when they raise it again to $2.35 you finally say now we need to charge the customer more. That is why everything in Walmart can be *.97, you don't see a whole bunch of 1.36 products etc. prices move (stupid new keyboard is defective p apparently doesn't work with the shift key, nice) because they retailer has a pricing model, whether it be a standard ending on the end of prices, or "brackets" they place different categories of goods into etc.

I agree though: taxes on profits not total revenue does help a lot though. Same thing with the personal tax rate. When people say you can raise the top bracket it is just silly. 1) If you were making $300k and they changed the tax rate would you chose to stop at say $200k so you wouldn't hit the new high bracket or would you "settle" for making $275k this year? people tend to get used to making a certain amount and plan their spending accordingly. Which means they are still highly incentivized to earn (before tax) at least as much as before the tax rate hike. 2) A lot of high earners aren't making their money by salary: they are "choosing" to make X amount of money every year regardless of the tax rate. How much they keep and how much the tax man gets doesn't really affect them much. The investments, creative works whatever are already done. New investments needing bank loans might be another issue but that is what equity is for. If equity does get spread out because they can't get favorable loans, it will likely go at favorable multiples, which means the same revenue gets split more ways, less people in the top bracket and we get a more balances wealth distribution with fewer and fewer people hitting the "unfair" high bracket.

Also how often do you upgrade the software. If it is only once every 6mth-year or whatever is the cost of the setup going to pay for itself? If you run wires where are they going to go? If not how are you getting a wifi card into all these devices (are they configurable enough to do it, etc? What is the current process is this guy working after hours or doing one at a time at a gas station that is still operating? They might not like it so much if you close all the pumps at once for 20min vs only one at a time for 3 hrs.

I don't know if I'd blame the manufacturer. They couldn't exactly run ethernet under ground at a gas station very easily. Could have used wifi I suppose but flaky/some people are freaked out using phones around gas stations (might cause a spark, kaboom) so knowing they have a built in "cell phone" would make those nutjobs more paranoid than they are already. How often is this software updated? It might just be that, sorry to say, the posters time is of neglible value vs the cost of deploying and maintaining a network: remember networks have issues too. They probably don't trust a random guy they hire to do the upgrades to have the skills to figure out their software + any networking issues that pop up. Not sure wasn't clear if the poster is a true "IT" guy or an installer monkey. Installer monkeys are cheap you just have to keep the systems they play with very simple. Anyways, not clear what the business decision on the deployment was, might have made sense at the time.

+1 to notification crap. You can disable it but I'm amazed at the software that thinks it needs to startup an updater on boot just in case a new version is available. In my case at work: java, adobe, graphics driver etc. You can disable most of it but I agree it is stupid. My graphics card is particularly spammy( "you might not be planning on using it, but just in case, we really really need to let you know we have a driver that will give you a 5% improvement on Dirt 4"). Once a week or more it gives me an update notification.

Nivida: I like to stay up to date but I'm sorry I really don't care about your point-point release as in 187.02.03. Apps IMO should only check for updates when they are actually used (hard to get around the graphics driver I guess) and even then I think it should be limited to once a month or something.

Well they get away with it I think because they can stop supporting older hardware should they hit a limit vs the Windows ecosystem where you have people buying everything from $200-10k workstations/laptops.

They haven't stopped supporting systems for a long time though, my home desktop is a 2009 iMac and I was able to install Yosemite on it no problem. Didn't find that much difference performance wise from Lion, I guess slow is slow :). New system (Dell XPS 15 maxed out) comes on Tuesday so back to a reasonable system at home again for while. Non-SSD is so hard to tolerate once you get used to it.