A Dyson sphere would have significant environmental effects too, and it's equally likely to be built.

I just have to chime in here. My drop-out paper - back around '91 - was titled "Shovels & Society". It was the final for my Computers and Society class - which I did not think much of. The TA was great, though.

After a few weeks in the class, the TA asked our group how many of us were in this because we enjoy programming. I raised my hand. I was it. I decided I was no longer in the right place.

Anyway, my brief argument was that computer/software advances were a lot like those of the shovel -> bulldozer, etc. Just like every other advance, ever. People would lose jobs like they always had, etc. It was supposed to be 15 pages - but I just wrote 3. I feel bad for my TA - she was so disappointed.

I've been happily programming ever since (and before). I'd learned everything I was gonna for compsci anyway.

But holy crap. AI. The shit I can get done now. I feel like there is no way I could get another programming job - between AI and Agism.

If a company came out with a service that would burn your data into a crystal that you could wear as jewelry, and the crystal was reasonably durable (ideally diamond, or something similar), that would be a useful (or at least novel) way to store valuable data long-term. Assuming there was also a convenient way to read it back when required, of course.

This, however, isn't that. The whole point of git is that it distributes copies of your repository onto every client that clones it, so that the likelihood of everyone accidentally losing all copies at once is minimal.

...and wouldn't it be nice to get something in return for our tax dollars? Other than billion-dollar ballrooms and pointless wars, I mean?

Do they need cover to reject anything? In my projects, I reserve the right to reject anything, for any reason, solely on the grounds that they are my projects, and if someone doesn't like it, they can fork off (their own repository).

Without a hostage there is no ransom!

Which is why OP used "cure cancer!" as a joke.

However, much progress has been made. I am alive right now because of a breakthrough cancer therapy that was FDA approved in 2011. (Well after Nixon!)

This fall I am going to get a therapy that mass-replicates your own immune cells in a lab for re-injection. It's so expensive (and has uncertain benefit) that it's not generally available in the UK or Canada yet. Automation will be a key to making it cost-effective.

It's such a complex area, I think information retrieval and computational science / simulation, or AI if you prefer, will help.

Being rich doesn't make you stupid, but being really rich starts to isolate you in a bubble of luxury and sycophants, and eventually you start to forget what the rest of the world is like, and start making decisions based on the unstated assumption that other people don't matter.

Fun fact: Paris was founded around 225 BC.

... so they've come to Slashdot to recruit volunteers; very resourceful of them. :)

"Direct to Satellite" tech is coming right along and both the satellites on cell towers and the batteries to power them are going to be obsolete fairly soon.

Latency to LEO is not a dealbreaker for backup usage. 25-50 ms for Starlink.

Granted, your issue about bandwidth still stands and seems hard to fix. They form virtual cells on the ground with beamforming, but I don't know how many satellites are in view of a city at the same time to divy it up.

I didn't say PC hardware isn't good enough, I said there's no point buying compromise hardware that's not what you really wanted, because in the long run it's all pretty damn affordable. If an Intel or AMD box is what you prefer, by all means buy one and enjoy!

One thing I want out of my hardware is the ability to run my OS of choice without a lot of hassle, and since my OS of choice is MacOS, that kind of narrows down the field for me.

I imagine it's pretty mediocre, but I don't know and I don't particularly care, because I don't spend much time playing video games anymore. If I was a gamer I'd likely buy a different machine for that.

Are computer purchases not consensual? Nobody is forcing you to buy overpriced RAM if you don't want to, so the rape analogy doesn't work.

I'm an Apple fan; I'm typing this on a 2018 Mac Mini that I spent roughly $2K on -- but it's 2026 and that Mac is still running just great. That works out to an amortized cost of about 68 cents per day -- which is to say, negligible compared to my other expenses.

Trying to save money by buying cheap computer hardware is like trying to save money by buying single-ply toilet paper -- you can do it, sure, but why make your life noticeably worse when the amount of money you'll save is trivial?

I'm going to make a radical suggestion: how about we leave it all in the ground, and continue to enjoy living in a viable biosphere instead?