They've tried before, maybe they'll try again?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Too late, this business picked up in a big way not long after the Great Recession hit. Wired had an interesting article and photo gallery on "luxury doomsday shelters" but I can't find it now.

Same here. This is the second time I've heard of NZ being used as the real-life Elysium, and the first time I thought it was a joke. NZ is going to be among the first of the first-world countries to revolt, they're not an economic powerhouse. 1%ers would land on their airstrips to find their compounds looted and burned, and walk right into an ambush ready to Gadhafi them, if they don't find an IED in the runway first.

Freedom Ship was actually a clever idea. Basically a floating Elysium station. If they're really clever they could even get protection on our dime in the form of a few battleships.

The iPhone was far from the first smartphone. It was the first dumbed-down smartphone-like toy. You could argue that it was the beginning of the end for real handheld computing rather than the shitty cable-TV-like experience that exists today.

The first smartphone was the Handspring Visorphone.

The big problem with building a cluster out of anything but bleeding-edge processors is that the flops-per-watt is going to suck so much compared to a new cluster, that you might not save any money over buying that new cluster.

This is excellent. Tapping all the world's communications is cheap and easy (especially when any person or company can be strong-armed), bugging individuals is expensive and difficult. They'll have to restrict this activity to those who they strongly suspect, rather than spying on the communications of all known sentient beings in the universe and then seeing what sticks. Less widespread privacy invasion, more effective surveillance instead of growing the haystack. Sounds like a win/win to me.

Futurists tend to be right about technology but far too optimistic about the economy, causing their technically accurate predictions to fall flat on their faces.

Likewise, IoT is simply too expensive to take off any time soon. These devices need to be in the single-digit prices to make sense to the average joe, and they're currently in the triple-digits.

But you have to pretend it is, or you'll expose the fact that capitalism is just a nasty framework for rationalized victim-blaming.

Reminds me of how NAMBLA used to try to slip into gay pride parades.

Hahaha, we're really living in the future now! I guess you have a Macbook Air?

It doesn't match the spec, it has less processing power and an older video adapter, and the screen resolution is lower and the hard drive is smaller. But the size is the same, the RAM capacity is the same, the wifi adapter is the same, the optical drive is the same, and for everyday computing the greater processing power, better video card, larger storage and higher screen resolution wouldn't help much - that's why I don't value these advantages too much in a laptop. A computer from 2009 will still perform most non-gaming duties very nearly as well as one from 2015.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

If it was a gaming PC these things would help, but the Librem would have many drawbacks as a gaming PC (not even counting the fact that it's a laptop).

No there's a hefty fuckin' fee,
And if you don't throw in your two grand stack who will?
Oooh, two grand stack,
Freedom costs a two grand stack.

Yeah I'd buy one if I was rich, but the basic spec is $1900, and it's just slightly better than my current laptop which I bought for $500 in 2009.

If Purism can produce a modern N900-like phone later for 3 digits (vs. ~$2k for a Neo900), I'd be all over that.

So when do you think pedophiles came into being and made modern society too dangerous for children? It seems to have been some time in the '80s from what I've gathered, I'm trying to narrow down their origin.

That's what I always say. I guess the difference is that the rich also have something to fear if they become slaves to a machine.