You should write it instead of cut and paste?

There is fair use, and there is lifting the work of another person. If this were an academic paper, I would be far more lenient. but this is a book written to sell a lot of books. The purpose is to make money here, and not letting publishers get a free ride is precisely why there are copyright laws.

Then you run into the predictions of the Technocracy movement, where the price system collapses and most people have no job and zero income. Without job there are no consumers, without consumers there are no jobs. It's inevitable as the amount of work an individual can do increases with technology.

...we all give up.

Even if we have to invest exponentially more resources into shrinking transistors, the industry is very likely to continue to invest. They will give up when the R&D costs are high enough that there is no longer any profit. But marketing has really pushed people to upgrade to new devices that they don't need, if marketing continues to do their job then we'll see Moore's Law working for quite some time to come.

If there was an apocalypse, I assume there would be fewer people alive than there are now.

There is plenty of places to grow things if we all live like homesteaders on 2 or 3 acres of land. Takes about an acre per person to feed someone on today's diet. Less if you're a bit smarter about what you do. A bit more needed if you want to not die if you have a bad season.

Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley is 1290 sq mi. That's 825600 acres, if every man, woman and child had 5 acres to raise crops and livestock that would support 165,120 people, or about 41280 small families. (I don't think anyone would want to farm more than about 15 acres alone anyways, not without a tractor)

So that means a thriving suburban community of 1,894,605 today would be reduced to no more than 165,120. So an apocalypse where only 1 in 11 people survives is sustainable. Any more and conflict is likely as people fight for resources to avoid starving, that would most likely result in far more deaths and bring the population far below what is needed.

I used silicon valley as an example, as I am familiar with the area and I felt that it has a pretty representative population density. For people on the east coast, places like Long Island would have to be abandoned entirely for a large population to survive. It could support some people, but I doubt anyone could come to an agreement on who could stay and who would have to move further inland. My rough guess is people would have to spread out as far as all of Pennsylvania to handle that 9% of survivors from NY and NJ. That kind of population pressure is likely to create a ripple of conflict in many regions.

blacktop roads exist because we didn't know what to do with all that sludge from the refineries.

if money and labor was no object we would make roads out of roman concrete, and would probably pave far fewer roads than we have.

That blacktop is crap anyways, it falls apart in northern climates after a few seasons and patches are less stable than the original leading to a cycle of deterioration. (drive in Michigan to see what the post-apocalyptic highway system will look like)

If your smartwatch has a feature that makes it beep when it's too far from your phone, you will never forget it again and you can resume wearing a watch.

Yes, but if a burglar comes in, the safe is probably the first thing he'll get...

Agreed. I use an alternative to all this: all my data is backed up on a small eeePC in my attic and send sent to a friend of mine through SSH. I have 1TB of data storage at his place, and I offer in return 1TB of data storage in my place for him to do the same.

Sensitive stuff is encrypted so I don't care if he can see all my files. The bulk of it is pictures/personal movies in terms of size. encfs works wonders for low sensitive data, the rest can go through TrueCrypt/keepass2 encryption or even PGP.

And it costs me zero (minus the 1TB I have reserved for him).

So ? Buy a bigger house if you don't have enough room.

I wonder if chewing bubble gum would also impact a below average student's exam scores. Seems like minimize the distractions from sex, alcohol, and cannabis would tend to help most below average students.

Also, if you can only smoke in these Dutch coffee shops, and spend all your time there instead of in your apartment or dorm, then less studying might explain away some of the exam scores.

But despite the above concerned, I think most of us all assumed that there is some cognitive impact while someone is using cannabis. The debate has always been if this is temporary or is the impact long term. I tend to find a lot of holes in research that shows the negative impact to be long term. I have a hunch that there could be some neutral impact that is long term (changes but not detrimental), but that has been rather tough to measure.

(researching comfortably from my armchair)

Google didn't, Apple did. Not one iPhone ever sold has ever been touched by a carrier before getting into the hands of the final user, where the vast majority of Android devices get crapped by carriers before they get sold.

Apple said: Carriers are crap, let's protect all of our phones (and thus users) from them.
Google said: Carriers are crap, we're going to provide users that care with phones that are untouched by them.

As always, Apple forced their views on everyone while Google offered a choice. I think Apple was right on this one.

So you don't recognize YouTube brings any value to you? Shouldn't they be able to decide how to monetize it? After all, it's their website.

As for the spamming part, I don't see as spamming if you actually willfully go there al by yourself.

There is another catch to it: I will not pay a fee to all websites I visit in order to avoid ads. Not even talking about the money spent, there is just no practical way for me to micro-pay for every site I go to... Even though I think it would be a nice way to avoid ads while still giving something to the sites I visit. After all, they provide value..

In other words: it doesn't scale until there is a way to expand the model to the internet. As such, I will still have AdBlock installed for all the other sites I visit. So even if I don't pay for YouTube, I won't see any ads anyways, making the YouTube subscription of little value.

Reference needed. There is no country on earth where police, fire, health and education systems costs 30% of the GDP. Governments want that to do all sort of stuff most members of the population don't want. This is why people try to evade taxes. Because they're spent 90% on bullshit. If my country was asking for 3% of the GDP and that was it, nobody in their right mind would try to evade taxes because they would be fair: (almost) insignificant for the people and providing quality services.

Unfortunately, this is almost not true in every country. All governments are huge ballooned administration that forever wants to gobble more money to do more bullshit, most of the time orders of magnitudes less efficiently than private companies could.

Being able to vote what gets lit next would solve a lot of debate in my circle.