It's a perfectly cromulent approach in that it offers solutions to the perceived problems.

"Nails are hard to use because I keep breaking bricks on them" is an obviously silly thing to say when hammers are cheap and available.

Likewise, "Teslas are hard to use because they take forever to recharge, and only go a few hundred miles" is also a silly thing to say when other tools are readily available, especially since most people don't drive more than a couple of hundred miles round-trip on a regular basis and normally come home every night.

It's a matter of using the right tool for the job. I don't need to drive a car every day that can do anything, and most other people don't either.

I'm not going to explain why it's better to use a hammer, or the proper application of a wrench. Their relative merits are implicit.

Smart engineering thinking. These are the details that make for verisimilitude.

Sad. A future that could never, ever be. Remember when the situation of Kubrick's 2001 seemed not only plausible, but likely?

Was that an ironic comment? It's SO hard to tell these days. ;-)

Hey! Look! We're all meta!

That's a fact.

Nobody dealin' with that winter, for rent.

Meh.

I drive quite a lot, at least compared to most people I know around here. I drive an old, small, fun, reasonably efficient gas-burner. Lately, I've been doing about 700 miles a week, and I'm home every night.

A Tesla would be awesome for this, if my current car weren't already so paid-for and weren't relatively cheap to maintain.

Every now and then (once or twice a year on rough average), I do drive more than 450 miles at a stretch. Filling up in minutes instead of hours is admittedly very handy.

But for a long trip, I can just rent something more appropriate. No big deal.

I made a conscious decision a long time ago that I didn't need to own a truck because I can always have Big, Heavy Things delivered, or just rent something more appropriate. ("Renting something more appropriate" usually means renting a truck by the hour from Lowes/Home Depot, but has also included U-Haul box trucks of various sizes. Either is economical and easy compared to owning, driving, insuring, maintaining...etc...a truck of my own.)

If I were in car-buying mode I could very easily decide that I don't need a gas tank, and that a Tesla would be a perfect fit.

If the Tesla is cheap to drive (it seems to be), and fun and comfortable (no stated complaints there that I've ever read), than yeah: A range of a few hundred miles would be perfect for the vast majority of my driving.

Sure, I'll occasionally need something else: But that's what rental agencies (and friends!) are for. ("Hey, you want to use my Tesla this week while I take your Honda to Florida for a week?")

So...*shrug*

Using the back of a different envelope, let's hypothesise some mutation to ebola that gives it a 70% mortality rate (the mean of the mortality rates you cite), and a flu-like transmission profile. Then in around 5 years of cycling through the population, we'll be down to about 2.1 billion people left on the planet. That's around the population in the late 1920s to late 1930s.

Add on your 69 years for 3 generations and we'll be back to a population situation of 1933 + 69 = 2002. In short, we'd be back to the approximate population position of today.

I see that you cite American flu rates, suggesting that you may be American. Given that, likely you live there and rarely leave (average American)? Of the last 3 years I've spent about 8-9 months (I'd have to check my pay slips) living in various countries of Africa and on my last rotation out of there an aircraft fault put us down into Abidjan airport, which borders the most recent ebola outbreak. My next rotation into Africa will see me in Gabon, in the thick of the "ebola belt". Ebola isn't a theoretical issue for me, and I'm paying close attention to the vaccine work, and would consider participating in clinical trials of one.

It's perfect! Unsinkable? Unthinkable!
No Homer will ever be allowed, and all the regulators will be objective and unbowed!

Yes, I remember the Psion Organiser. I never had one myself, but a guy at work dropped his into one of the chemical storage pits (filled with an oil/ water/ salt mix), and since we were 2 weeks from getting back to shore, he asked me if I could try and bring it back to life. All I did was clean it - very carefully, inside and out, water, alcohol, water, alcohol - and then dry it very, very carefully. But it worked when I put it back together, which allowed him to back it up. And it carried on working until the next hitch on the vessel, which astonished everyone.

That stuck in my memory for 8 years later when I was looking for something better then a Nokia Communicator, and which I'd be able to take to work. I wasn't disappointed by the hardware Psion were selling then.

Sure, it was running a great OS for the time but that OS did not have the kind of app ecosystem that the iPad does.

And it didn't need it.

Writing documents - covered on the stock ROM (and you could get converters to go to Word and or Write formats too).

Spreadsheets - I could make the stock ROM's spreadsheet do the calculations for steering oil wells. Other people I knew ran their stock portfolios on their Psions. Converters available.

Drawing ... well, you could do it. The 4-shade grey screen was a limit there, but it was good enough for my purposes. Converters available.

Database - again, good enough for my purposes. I knew a mud man who did his stock control on one, so I guess that was good enough for him.

Presentations ... I think they didn't see making presentations as being a use case.

There were a LOT of other apps out there - I remember buying several, such as astronomical tools - but you could take the machine out of it's box on Xmas day and be up and running for any regular office tasks.

I used a Compaq desktop system which included a touch screen in 1989. It worked - and since I was new to computers then (I didn't actually have one at home at the time, and at work we used industrial rackmounts with teleprinter terminals and HP 9800 series systems for report writing.) The technology for touchscreens is decades old. IIRC those touch screens added about $1500 to the cost of the system, which wasn't a particular problem. If MS had agreed to include the drivers for them in Windows 3.0, then we'd probably have had the touchscreen revolution in 1991.

We hooked those systems up to the old Motorola analogue mobile phones - we could get 2400 BPS data links from 70 miles offshore. Since the antennae for a formal radio system would have cost 10s of thousands of dollars for installation, and be repeated each time we needed to hire a vessel, then the price of the touchscreen didn't seem too unreasonable. We saved hundreds of thousands over the years that system was working!

Ahhh, memories. Xenix! X! Multiple overlapping windows! All so new then.

... Interesting.

And with an $800 BoM, you'd have been up against a £400 Psion 5 (retail cost), which included all applications necessary (was a web browser considered necessary at the time? I honestly can't remember. I know I did do some web browsing on it, because it would connect well to my Sony mobile or Nokia Communicator ; but I honestly can't remember if the web browser was built in or one I chose)., a large installed base of users with their own applications from the 3- and 5- series and an established dealer network.

Oh, hang on - you priced things in dollars. American? Then no Psion dealer network. Maybe you'd have survived.

Technologies that had to mature before the tablet computers became practical:
Wifi networking.

Useful, I'll agree. Not "necessary". I ran cables throughout the old house in the mid-1990s, and was getting a stable 100MBPS connection from any computer from about 1996 until we left in 2012. If I had a guest and I wanted to provide them with WiFi, I'd turn on the laptops WiFi card and the last time I did it, they could get half the connection speed that I had through the cable. I was considering running 1000-base, but would probably have left it until the previous cable was 20 years old before replacing it.

Capacitive Touchscreens -- Most early designs used a stylus, which sucks, and had poor resolution to boot

I used a touch screen with a stylus. You might think that they suck, but I'm perfectly happy with them. My Psion used one (and I never lost one!) and my last - or last-but-one - phone also had a stylus (which I also didn't lose, until I lost the phone itself). You might think that they suck, but that's a subjective opinion, not an objective fact.

Low power but still acceptably fast processors -- A huge sticking point, lots of early tablets had extremely poor battery life on top of being slow

Yeah ... in 2000 I objected so badly to replacing the AA cells (rechargeable or primary) EVERY DAMNED MONTH. It was such a pain in the arse having to go to any shop in the world and buy two batteries EVERY DAMNED MONTH. It's so much better having to carry a charger (and the panoply of adaptors for the 5 different sockets that I meet most months) with me and having to recharge the device several times a day.

A touch enabled OS -- WinCE is terrible to use with a finger, and really pretty bad with a stylus. Symbian was never great. PalmOS was too narrowly focused on Palm pilots

When I discovered Symbian, I never felt the need to try a WinCE machine or a Palm machine. I just got on with using the applications and barely noticed the OS. Which is how it should be.

Battery capacity -- Battery technology has come a long way inetwork speed n the past 15 years. Early attempts would use NiCad batteries, which just aren't good enough, especially with the relatively high energy consumption figures from the old chips

See above comments about the horrors of a monthly battery change (Either NiCads, NiMHs or primaries).

The technology to make effective "tablet" devices was available in the late 1990s - Psion did it. To this day, it's a mystery to the community of "Psioneers" why they stopped manufacturing them, or why they didn't sell the hardware division as a going concern when they restructured to become a software-only company. If they'd continued ... well, the world is full of "if onlys".

Because it, well, works. The older tech worked poorly when it worked at all and suffered a much higher rate of failure.

Crap resistive touchscreens were crap because they were crap. Good resistive touchscreens were good because they were good, not crap.

See up-thread for comments about the Psion 5 family. I forget who made the touchscreen - I know that the display was a Hitachi part, but I can't remember if you could get the touchscreen separately. That was a good part - and probably one of the highest cost items on the BoM to build the device. But it was also one of the major features of the device, and essential to it's success.

Capacitive touchscreens are more accurate to use with a bare finger than resistive ones, which call for a stylus

[SHRUG]

When you want accuracy from fingertips, you use an implement. Be that a dissecting needle and forceps (I spend several hours each working day at the microscope - it shows), or a stylus, or a keyboard. Fingertips weren't designed for precision work. They evolved to their current form while we were still making tools by banging rocks together. By the time we started to make needles and fabrics, our ancestors were already "anatomically modern humans".

I used Psion 5s and 5mxs for about 10 years until supplies dried up - during the period that this device was designed. Applications and an excellent (for a pocket device) keyboard made the Psion ; the stylus wasn't a problem.

The US president is a Spokesmodel.

The last vestiges of Presidential authority as actual executive were blown out of JFK's skull, 50 years ago. The real rulers have allowed the cosmetic changes of politics, without substantial challenge to policy or imperative.

That's why you can argue successfully to let fags into the imperial legions, but not if such legions should be withdrawn from the globe and disbanded.

False conservatism, false progressive/liberalism. Everybody in the US takes a hot shower and drives to the mall, on the burnt bodies and broken future of a million dead babies - hidden in Congo and Yemen and Indonesia and...