Although, in hindsight - you've already authenticated the server, so you are going to treat it as a trusted party anyway...
There's trust, and then there's TRUST. Doing something like this automatically is like doing automatic updates
Maybe it will happen, but by then everyone reading this today will be 61+.
Adoption is going to be slow. The current perl is like XP with one important difference - it's still being distributed.
The average person doesn't respond to appeals to logic. Otherwise we'd be walking, bicycling, and taking public transit instead, just from an economic point of view. And people would have a lot less garbage to haul out on garbage day because they'd recycle. And we'd be admitting that we went over the tipping point in the 70s. And nobody should have more than 1 or 2 children. And many more would be telecommuting. And the Tea Party wouldn't exist. And Sarah Palin wouldn't be on anyone's radar.
Unfortunately, we don't live in that alternate reality.
Last I read, they are targeting a price point of $20k for those robots. Considering they could probably replace 2 workers each, the payback time would be less than a year.
How many people would buy the "Kate" model just so they can say "Kate, make me a sammich"?
Football especially, where all those players are regularly inflicting chronic brain damage on themselves with every head-first impact, in addition to the occasional broken bones and other traumatic injuries that take them off the field
So I guess those stories of going to a football game and seeing a hockey match break out are true
Where is Blinky the 3-eyed fish when you need him?
Just because we've gotten lucky so far (if you discount TMI and Chernobyl and Fukushima) doesn't mean we shouldn't do better. The better the standards, the more acceptable it becomes. This is the political reality of nuclear power, and you can scream FUD all you won't it won't change that reality.
On a side note, I never believed the NAFTA hype. I read the actual Free Trade agreement and it stunk. I brought a copy of it to Ottawa and spent a week trying to explain why it was bad. I couldn't find a single politician who had read it, but they were all so certain that it was a good thing. Ignorance really is bliss, I guess, even when it's willful ignorance.
Absolutely not. The one thing we don't need is yet more bureaucrats and politicians.
Just bring back tariffs on imports from countries that compete unfairly by not having decent regulation. See my reply here. It worked before. It can work again. But you're right - looking at the stats since NAFTA, it was never raveled in the first place. And of course, it's kind of ironic that the country with the least open economy (China) is going to pass the US soon.
Of course, various studies have shown that in trade between countries with highly restrictive import rules and high tariffs and countries with limited import rules and tariffs, it is the latter which fair better economically
The studies are kind of flawed (to say the least) when looked at through the lens of reality. Look at the US. NAFTA was signed in 1994, so that's a good place to start, Since then, major parts of the economy hollowed out, and China is poised to pass the US as the #1 world economy. China, of course, has more trade restrictions. So imposing trade restrictions seems to have worked quite well for them.
In 1994, the United States' national debt was $4.692 trillion. It's expected to be $18.713 trillion this year. In 1994, the US trade deficit was $151 billion. Last year, it was $661 billion. So in 20 years, the deficit has ballooned by almost 4x the total amount for the previous 200 years.
Worse is that in 1994, US imports only exceeded that year's exports by 30%. Today, it's 50%. It's quite simply getting worse no matter how you look at it. And then we can also point to the decline of the middle class, not because they've benefited, but because they've joined the ranks of the poor.
So, how's that free trade working for you again?
A lot of the stuff you buy today is simply not repairable by tinkering around. To repair my toaster, I had to drill the rivets out of the bottom and replace them with screws, then figure out what was wrong. Repairing my microwave by taking it apart got me a couple more years out of it, but last year it would have cost more just for the part than the whole thing had originally cost, so I got a new one for half the price I paid for the old one. I've got a 15-year-old desktop computer taking up space that I will get around to tossing, same as I've tossed other computers over the last 25 years. At some point they're just not worth fixing. Not when I can buy a new laptop with 4x the (much faster) ram and 4 cores just for the cost of the ram and equivalent hard drive (and I'd still be stuck with a single core 32 bit cpu).
There's a cost-benefit curve associated with electronics that is different from most everything else because of the rapid pace of improvements and lowering costs. Just like I stopped fixing people's vcrs (remember those things) when they were going for $25 new.
About the only thing that hasn't been obsoleted is fixing bicycles. It seems that nobody else knows how to fix a flat - or if they do, they do it wrong and wonder why their "fix" only lasted a few hours.
All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin
