The 3:2 version was better. As is the 4:3 iPad. I currently have a 16:9 windows tablet and iPhone, and they'd be much more useful as either of those two ratios. I rarely use my iPad anymore because it's so hobbled by the OS as to be utterly inefficient at anything productive, but it kicks the windows tablet's ass when it comes to reading/browsing anything. Jobs had it right, but the son of a bitch died and left a bunch of 12 year old girls running the company.

Huh? They have offline navigation from address to address. All the addresses are available offline, as well.

Borland Pascal wasn't really meaningfully simpler than Modula-2, though. It had modules (units) with separate compilation, and all kinds of low-level primitive, down to inline assembly. At some point (IIRC it was version 5.5? either way, still late 80s) it even became a full-fledged object-oriented language. In terms of what you could do with it, it was definitely comparable with C and C++ compilers available for DOS at the time, and separate compilation helped compile speeds - the short compile time of Pascal, and later Delphi, was truly legendary. They also had what was by far the best DOS IDE, with syntax highlighting, integrated debugger and help system etc. Granted, this was also true for Borland C++, but that was more expensive.

Yeah, on Unix, it never really got off the ground because C was the system language there. On DOS, it was a whole different world.

I think you were on to something with #1. What if it were hollow and came with a small funnel. It'd be a sight more useful in some meetings I've been to if filled with liquor rather than silicon and battery.

I'm amazed at how much people seem to need to watch fullscreen video on their phones. Don't get me wrong; there are times I'm stuck somewhere with just my phone, but unless you're commuting on a train - where do you find yourself for long periods of time where you have nothing better to do than watch tv/movies and only have your phone with you?

(yes, I know: work. ha ha.)

Medical "insurance" is generally not insurance, though. Well, it is, but it's a bastardization - a maintenance plan + insurance, kind of like like whole life (savings account + insurance).

Reassessing your risk, is not cheating you out of past premiums. Premiums (in the theoretical perfectly efficient market) are in the now and based on current risk for the term of the policy. It's that probability thing that people just don't get. Changing risk pools *should* be associated with your actual risk. You begin every year as a new assessment, and you end every year with a sunk cost. It's a die roll, and if it comes up snake eyes, you "win" restitution; if it doesn't you "win" by not having some tragedy befall you. Either way, you place your chips and roll the dice; but at the end of the round you can get up and leave.

The ACA changes the rules because healthcare, 51% of us have determined, should be different. So the range of premiums is compressed, and the healthcare cos must always keep the table open for you if you have chips to play. But for everything else, it's just another table game with the house favored by a few percent and a bankroll large enough to weather a bad run of dice.

1.25-1.5:1 How hard is that? We've got centuries of experience in making page sizes for reading and viewing, and most of them fall into that range. Unless you're Hasselblad, ditch the square. If you're not a television, please don't use 16:9.

#getoffmylawn

But why not? Clearly, if a robot can do hard labor instead of a human, that should be preferable on humanitarian grounds. If it can also do it for cheaper, then, as you rightly note, it should also be preferable on economic grounds. The only argument to the contrary is that people who are pushed out of jobs by robots (and this will clearly keep encroaching, so a laborer can only "retreat" by re-qualifying etc so far) are out of their source of income. But if the sole reason why we give them jobs is to provide them with income, then it's basically just a thinly veiled form of the broken window fallacy.

That was the point that I was trying to make. Automation is inevitably going to drive down the cost of labor so much that selling it to obtain basic income will cease to be a realistic proposition for a significant part (long term, probably the vast majority) of the population. At that point we'll need to come up with some other arrangement.

Note though that the long-term proposition is not "some people supported by the public". It's the reverse - "the public" supported by a few people (those who would still have jobs - like programming the robots). In fact, it's not even clear what "support" would mean, since, if most of society is basically on free welfare, then money is not really a universal medium of exchange anymore... the few people who still work - whom would they get the money for their work for, and what would they spend it on?

Hell, get that proportion high enough, and you'd probably have people competing to get a chance to do "real work" - for free.

Pascal had fucked up string handling, though some dialects partially rectified that.

Also, back in the golden age of DOS (late 80s to early 90s), [Borland] Pascal was in fact the language in which many "real" applications were developed, as well; even games. Delphi was also pretty popular on Windows in late 90s to early 00s.

It doesn't have pointers, but it does have references - which are basically pointers without arithmetic. In fact, in Python, everything in a reference (even primitive types like int are reference types). This is sufficient to explain the core notion of indirection, and data structures built on that notion, like linked lists or binary trees.

You may well be right - that's why I said "in theory". The way the originators of the movement saw it is that they would first need to temporarily establish a socialist system with a strong state that would have to be there for some period of time to 1) advance technology to the point where scarcity is not an issue anymore (they believed it is only possible under socialism), and 2) raise several generations educated and indoctrinated with the outlook that is necessary for such an economic system. The actual amount of time necessary for this was never specified by the theorists, though Marxist-Leninist states often declared goals like "building communism in 10 years" (and then, of course, it would still be 10 years away after 10 years).

Regarding altruism, it is actually a well-established fact that it is a basic instinct in humans. There are many anthropological and ethological studies that demonstrate it, even in very young children. The catch is that it's not universal altruism, but what they call "parochial altruism" - basically, mentally dividing everyone into "us" and "them", and extending altruism only to "us", often at the expense of "them" (which makes sense, since the evolutionary mechanism that causes altruism to appear in the first place necessitates such divisions to maximize gene propagation).

What's so funny (strange, not ha-ha) is that half of the bottom 80% are absolutely convinced that half of the 1% are on their side, and the other half similarly. The 9% are similarly split, but don't care as much because they make good enough coin to keep them in place. The 10% already mistrust everyone else, so they'll beat the shit out of the 80% as long as they can stay fed and above the squalor of the unwashed masses.