Coward.

Heh, trollin'. I think I meant that I pre-date the ubiquitous versions. Or the mass-market versions of those things. "in the lab" doesn't count. Quite frankly, I don't think it counts until it has a price -- and that price needs to be accessible to that market's intended use.

I'm becoming more and more disappointed with my techie breathren for things like this. No part of life is anywhere near as safe, or secure, as the current internet already is.

And yet, we trust all of it, every day, with things far more precious than our communication and finances.

We even trust these things despite countless and routine and frequent demonstrations of catastrophic failures.

We have political systems that squander money on a global level. And yet, we still elect leaders through campaigns of obvious horse-shit. Alex ran for student-body president 20 years ago on the basis of getting rid of homework.

We also have roads. We have highways where anyone from across the planet can show up, 'accidentally' drop sand and ball bearings and tire spikes and chunks of metal.

There is NOTHING that stops my car from flying off the highway at 140kph and falling 2'000 feet off the mountain.

But good news! There is something stopping my car from slamming into an on-coming car -- at an impart speed of 280 kph, by the way -- there's a two-inch strip of yellow paint; sometimes two.

And, as discussed earlier, every single day there're another many traffic collisions. And every single day, multiple people die in those collisions. It's so continuous, that the city actually pays for tow-trucks to sit at the edge of the highway in order to clear away accidents that much faster.

So, my e-mails to my grandmother, and to my clients, my banking transactions and my phone bills, while all important, pale in comparison to the vitality of the many other things in my life.

Oh yeah, and my front door, to my house, where I keep virtually all of my stuff, every one of my posessions, and many of my loved-ones -- some not able to protect themselves from a flood, let alone an intruder -- is protected by a very-easy-to-pick lock. Which wouldn't benefit from sophistimication because next to the door, is a big glass window.

Oh yeah, and the alarm wouldn't cause police to show for about 10 minutes anyway. Oh yeah, and the house is mostly wood.

Oh yeah, and my beautiful grass lawn, can be totally destroyed by anyone casually dropping a handful of dandilion seeds.

Nothing we do is secured for trust. That's what the word trust actually means, by the way -- if things were proven secure, you wouldn't be trusting them.

The internet is good enough as-is. Try focusing on the roads please. How about we trust hospitals to not screw up during surgery. How about we work on having enough water next year, or food during droughts, or maybe we could work on not killing people with military super-powers.

These techies are stuck in the wrong rut. They (we) were supposed to be using technology -- like the internet -- as tools to solve real-life problems. This article discusses uses tools to solve problems with other tools. That doesn't help anything.

Scratch that. Improving the security of tools does do one very significant thing. It's called one-upmanship, and it creates better criminals.

Solve the global food problem. Not because people far away from me are starving -- I'm not responsible for them, I've got my own problems. Solve the global food problem so that I don't need to have my yummy cooking show show me a gorgeous sizzling steak, and then break to commercial to see starving children in africa, who've been starving for fifty years now. It does nothing more than to put me off my dinner, and ruin the cooking show..

I also have a friend who upgrades everything all the time. "the new phone's amazing" either means that the "old phone sucks" -- which makes no sense since the old phone was "amazing" when it was new too -- or that the new marketing is amazing -- which makes sense because the old marketing was also amazing.

There are countly amazing things that can be added to anything. Some new features are just really impressive. But being impressive doesn't mean that it improves my life at all.

A frisbee that can be thrown over a half-mile is really cool (and called an aerobe, by the way, and I love them) but I don't have a park that large, nor would I enjoy playing catch with a friend that far away.

Similarly, most new OS features might be neat, but they don't actually change my life at all. Perhaps the best example I can give is with regard to office/productivity suites.

Between word, excel, wordperfect, lotus 123, and-if-you-thought-wordperfect-was-dating-myself wordstar, I've been writing essays and poems and business documents for close to thirty years. Before the computer "clipboard", before 3d text-art, before pivot tables, before ribbon bars, before toolbars, before menu bars, before arrow-keys, even before the mouse. In the end, the business documents that I produce today, to earn a living, aren't any more sophistimicated than the ones that I producted 25 years ago, early in my career. Believe it or not, youngin's, business invoices and quotes and proposals existing before XML. So none of these new features actually provide any additional benefit to my life. They only change the way I create the very same invoice -- whether for dot-matrix, inkjet, laser, PDF, or e-mail.

How many new OS features actually add to my life? The answer is: none. So I upgrade my OS when I upgrade my computer. When is that? When my computer is too old to play the almost-latest games -- because games are entertainment, and entertainment is my sole purpose in life.

The OS is very definitely secondary.

All that said, there have been OS upgrades that have improved my life. Win 95 let me switch between games and work faster, which meant that I could play more games. Vista let me have more pixels so I could work more at a time and keep the tv playing in the corner at the same time. Win 7 added nothing. Win 8 added nothing. Win 10 would let me work cross-device better, if my work were capable of being done anywhere but a desk, but it ain't.

Simple PAC file to make windows update think there's nothing to find. With a little work, you can block individual files too.

you've cut your costs 50%. So you'll be working 50% less. So you're commuting less.

You shouldn't need modern science to tell you that working all day every day, especially in your older years, is bad for you. Standing, sitting, laying, bending, reading, writing, seeing, listening, . . .it all doesn't matter. If you're concentrating on anything -- mentally or physically -- to the exclusion of all else, it'll be bad for you.

But you really ought to be thankful that you'll die sooner, since you're just working your life away.

Instead of trying to work in a healthier manner, you might want to try working less. Move thirty minutes farther from down-town, drop your cost-of-living by 50%, and start enjoying the kinds of hobbies that are effectively free.

I run a company, a tech company, and I actually insist that most passwords be easily sent to clients in plain text.

I'm not talking about credit card information, obviously, nor control of any nuclear facilities. We're usually talking about invoices, business-administrative panels, business reports, and even financial reports. And, believe it or not, even e-mail passwords.

It's certainly not more secure. Especially those last two.

But I drive very fast on highways with other cars driving very fast, and the only thing separating us from 50-car pile-ups and massive death is a yellow line of paint.

In all of these cases, no one dies, and no one directly loses large sums of money.

But it's more than just convenience alone. It's business. Business often comes down to service. And when a client forgets their password, nothing beats just telling them. Yes, telephone's a little bit better, but not always the better business solution.

In the end, you know something, it's up to the person paying the bills. If my client doesn't care about the security risk, then I'm not the one to force them onto the long road.

The front door to my house has a lock that is easily picked -- which doesn't matter because right next to the door. . . is a window. I don't want bars on my windows either.

So let's you and I try to come to a consensus here and now as to the next effort to be undertaken in this regard.

I think you've pointed us in the best direction with that current HUD article. It is this: what's with all of the focus on visual information?

A human being is way more than floating eyes; in fact, the eyes are the most cognitively expensive feature. Overlosading it is easy to do, even by accident.

The thing is, a human pilot doesn't need to see most of the gauges. Most of them show numerical information with far greater resolution than is usually necessary. For example, altitude to the foot is not necessary outside of landing scenarios. Being able to see through the plane is completely useless when nothing is there.

But I see a human being sitting in a chair. Not walking, not running, not smelling, not tasting, not feeling a temperature, not being hugged, not being caressed by a loved one. There are so many human faculties -- most of which are wired directly into the human spine, and one wired directly into the human brain -- going almost completely unused. Why not tap into those?

A pilot could easily know where the bandit is by a simulated caress (or vibration) on the relevant part of the body -- upper back, lower back, left shoulder, right shoulder, et cetera. Visual HUD information can be the detail upon request. Here's a thought, how about a gentle pull of the neck towards the bandit. Easily felt, easily overcome.

I've got one of those non-fan heat dishes for my grandmother. It's basically an IR heat-ray. Altitude could certainly be conveyed by the localized temperature in the cockpit, or in the helmet. A ten degree range would be easily understood, and a twenty degree change even more so. Colder at high altitude makes sense.

There are myriad tactile sensory inputs to be used, including a gently squeezing of the upper arm as a fuel gauge. The really amazing thing about any such system is how the brain adjusts memory as a result - with different memory banks for high vs low altitude because of temperature sensation -- something a numerical altimiter can never provide.

In any event, to summarize, I see a few dozen inputs into the human brain, and I see only the visual cortex being used.

Interesting. But my point surrounds situational awareness without invasive technology. I doubt any crop-dusting biplane pilot has any trouble with situational awareness -- it's all wide open. It's the enclosed jet, and the crazy number of jet systems that remove the mind from the situation. That's what I'm saying needs to be addressed -- technologically.

So, it's been thousands and thousands and thousands of years since the last asteroid strike of any consequence, and there's currently zero no reason to believe that another one is coming any time soon.

And we have diseases, and earthquakes, and deserts, and insufficient water, and insufficient food, and terrible economies, and wars, and we work way too much. But let's start spending money and time on risks we know nothing about.

I'm in full support of spending money and time to research the risks, but not to solve the unknown problem. Let me know when you know what the problem is. For all you know, asteroids are intentionally and maliciously guided by aliens. Let me know when you find out.

Like so many other "tools" these days, this one attempts to provide advantages via some form of automation -- be it in terms of the structural aircraft, or the features within it. Every time anyone ever focuses on such a goal, they reduce the required expertise of the user -- in this case the pilot -- substantially.

Everyone always thinks that's a good thing -- if it can be operated with less learning, then it can be operated by more users. They always forget that every advantage is a sacrifice of some other advantage. If it can be operated with less expertise, then there is less expertise that can be learned.

The end result is almost always the same. A rookie pilot can operate better, sooner, and an expert pilot can do less.

That's fine with self-assemble furniture. It sucks with military applications like this one. I'm always for tools that empower the operator into a god. Imagine a fighter jet, requires many many more hours of learning to master, but that allows the expert pilot to do so much more.

In my head, that's a very lean aircraft, bordering on ultralight. It's also an aircraft with guns that point backwards -- one day someone will explain to me why we love dog fighting so much that we insist on being unable to kill the enemy right behind us. I digress.

I'm confident that an expert pilot doesn't want a fancy helmet HUD at all. He just wants to be able to see -- gauges, backwards, what's going on. And I'm certain that an expert pilot knows most of what's going on without his eyes -- I'm sure his left buttock gives him more information than any HUD ever could.

maybe yours, but not mine. spec it properly, and it won't.

I did answer the question. In my plentiful experience, it's not windows, it's the compenent combination. That was the question, and that is the answer. Learn to read, then learn to think.

Care to introduce yourself? If not to me, then to the other AC here? If you're going to support her, you should say hi.