What I want is (say) a 1920x1440 monitor (4:3 ratio). If I want to "mask" a 16:9 monitor to do that, I'll need it to be 2560x1440. One example of such a monitor is the Dell U2711, which is nearly $900!

Dammit, accidentally posted this as AC just now. Reposting as myself.

Honestly I'm fine with the idea that someday my phone will be my main computer, and that I'll "dock" it to a keyboard and monitor at home. (As long as everything is constantly backed up to some cloud storage somewhere so when eventually I drop my phone or a jackass friend pushes me in a lake, I don't lose the past few days of work!)

But one thing I do wonder about is what this will do to the price of "real" workstation class equipment. Already, 4:3 monitors (which are much better for engineering work, spreadsheets, etc. -- think MATLAB, COMSOL Multiphysics, AutoCAD, SolidWorks, CST Microwave Studio...) are far more expensive than to 16:9 panels (which have the economies of scale from being the aspect ratio of broadcast TV). Even Dell's fantastic U2410 and U3011 LCD panels are 16:10, not 4:3.

So yeah. I'm fine with the day that most people's only computers will be a phone and a tablet, with a docking station for a mouse/keyboard/monitor. But for those of us that need more horsepower than a mobile processor can provide, it's not going to be good. Hopefully there'll still be enough gamers to subsidize the high-power graphics card and desktop processors so that technical people can afford them!

The problem is that such reforms will probably (in order from most to least important): (a) break EU rules, (b) break some treaties that Finland has signed with other non-EU countries on required length of copyright, (c) piss off the U.S..

Other than that, I fully support you, and I hope that something exactly like what you suggest goes ahead!

While the commercial uses of these UAVs are cool (hunting feral pigs tearing up your crops using an IR camera on a drone and then radioing the location to your brother with a shotgun! That would be something that only a few militaries in the world could do a decade ago...) the real impact is going to be on the complete loss of privacy for just being anywhere outside in public.

I've long thought that the ease by which something can be obtained really does matter. I mean, things like divorce records have always been "public", but for most of history, that meant going to the city offices and having some surly clerk find the records for you in a basement filing cabinet. Which meant that strictly speaking, they were public, but in practice most people would never go to that trouble. With online records, finding out juicy details about your neighbour's divorce can be as easy as clicking a link. So the change in ease of obtaining records really does change the meaning of "public", even if it doesn't change the definition in a strictly legal sense.

It's the same thing with being outside. The advent of huge networks of computerized cameras on the street, on business fronts, and now perhaps on ubiquitous flying unmanned vehicles... it means that while you had no expectation of privacy in public before, in practice it meant that you could generally go places without anybody knowing about it, as long as you didn't just happen to run into somebody that knows you. Before long, an unblinking computer eye will see you everywhere. The idea of going somewhere without anybody knowing about it will be a thing of the past.

Now, is this, overall, a good thing? That I'm not sure about. Good and bad sides to it, I guess. (I'll be very interested to see its impact on strip clubs and massage parlours, though! Especially if divorce lawyers can subpoena the records.)

Insurance companies typically force the insured company to be proactive, i.e. start thinking about cyber-security (or fire safety, or employee driver training, etc.) *before* something catastrophic happens. Like think of how your home fire insurance rates are lower if you install an automatic sprinkler system... same idea here with cyber-security. I have no doubt that the big insurance companies will be looking closely at companies' security policies before writing them a $200-million policy.

Or double the cost of construction and twenty years of operation for ITER, the tokamak that will demonstrate magnetic fusion energy for the first time. If it doesn't get cancelled because of government budget shortages, that is...

Nano-steampunk means gluing non-functional pico-watch parts to it.

Sure, a tablet or mobile phone is useless for those of us that actually do non-trivial things with the computer (video editing, Photoshop, finite element analysis, coding, even heavy MS Excel work), but for that cousin you have that only uses it for uploading photos to Facebook and emailing?

I can almost see such a person getting by fine with a modern smartphone (one of the more powerful dual-core ones), with an MHL output allowing it to be hooked up to a monitor when at home, and a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Heavy storage is done in the cloud; you pay for data through your mobile provider (or if this isn't enough, get a home cable connection and WiFi). Polaris Office is fine for the one word-processing task such a person does per week (making birthday invitations or Please Don't Steal Food From The Fridge signs).

We're only a few years away from this being a common use case, I think.

Why not, I don't know, just run the "don't stress out the human" program from the beginning? Why wait until they're already pissed off?

Hyperspectral imaging (viewing electromagnetic radiation across a much wider wavelength/frequency range than the human eye can see) is one of these things that just boggles the mind with the possibilities. For a system to be able to simultaneously "see" in far IR or even terahertz or microwaves, all the way up to X- and gamma-rays.... Well, it's like Predator. But doing cool things like monitoring the health of rainforests or quickly identifying explosives.

What about people who aren't capable of doing these high-level, un-automatable jobs? Half the population has an IQ below 100. Easy to forget that when your real-world milieu consists of other highly educated, intelligent people and your online reading leans toward sites like Slashdot.

This article/rant is very much worth reading: http://www.fredoneverything.net/Commentators.shtml

I completely disagree. People have a very deep need for meaningful work. A world in which we all work meaningless jobs selling each other coffee (assuming we haven't automated the barista!), even the necessities of life are cheap, would not be a very happy place. Sadly I think the reality of the 12-hour work week would be more "drugs and mindless entertainment" than "leisurely creation of art and science".

Are you at MIT and is your benefactor David Koch? Because in that case, we have some researchers up at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center that do simulation work that could definitely use access to a bigger cluster. As long as you can compile FORTRAN on it, the TRANSP runs and GYRO simulations that we do are already run on a (smaller) cluster. This falls under "energy research" and is way cool to boot.

I'm not joking, if you are at MIT, please get in touch with Martin Greenwald (contact info on the PSFC staff page).