That just means Google is now operating in exactly the same manner that Microsoft used to be when they had dominance over consumer device operating systems. Google now has dominance in the mobile market with Android, and is using that to shove Chrome down people's throats. Personally, the first thing I do with any new phone is download Firefox, just like I did (and still do) with new computers. As the statistics show, though, the vast majority of people don't bother to do that so whatever is the default is what they use. The right and fair thing to do would be to stop them from abusing their monopoly power by offering a choice of browsers at time of install, and not favor their own browser in any way. That would have been the thing to force MS to do as well back when they were being sued for abuse of monopoly power after taking down Netscape with the same tactic. Unfortunately, it didn't happen then and it isn't happening now either. So, Google will continue to dominate the market unless and until some other highly disruptive technology comes along to unseat the current smartphone market and gives another player a chance to enter and eventually dominate the market in a similar fashion.

I grew up down the street from her house. Went to the first Chuck E Cheese's across the street often.

Civilization didn't collapse due to her house. It wasn't even the first revision of her house (IIRC got leveled in the great SF earthquake) There's a lot of people that look at the Victorian adornments of her house as a sign we had civilization. Compared to the Soviet Bloc style housing we have going in today that has surrounded it, the Winchester house now looks out of place.

All kind of sad really. Town and Country was a beautiful shopping center. The trailer park next door provided low income housing, and the Styufy dome theatres looked straight out of a moonbase. Nothing is allowed to have exposed wood beams or rounded edges anymore.

Today I was looking at an AI Asian woman on Facebook. She had a whole page setup of her in various outfits, and I am not kidding I was having a difficult time discerning if she was real or fake. It wasn't until I went to her profile and saw all the videos was I able to tell the difference. Even here, I'm using a "She" pronoun, when it should be an "IT" pronoun, because it is not human.

No joke though, the realism and attractiveness was just.. off the scale. I'm not one of those guys into Waifu anime, hug body pillows, etc. I'm married, got kids, I'm older and I've been in tech a long time. I removed myself from my emotions for a minute to examine what was happening, and I closed the page.

If AI visually can do this to me, a guy with a 138 IQ that has been on this site forever, can usually discern if these things are real or fake, imagine what happens when these things are talking to people of lower IQ, coupled with realtime voice chat and response, programmed to understand your likes and interactions on facebook, to get you the perfect group of attractive friends, that treat you like the center of the universe.

Or worse yet, overlayed on the actual people you interact with on a daily basis. Like "Mudd's Women" from Star Trek TOS or Pike in "The Cage" Slapping on some Meta Quest glasses so everyone you meet and interact with is attractive... for only $99.99 a month.

Zuck isn't stupid, the population is. People will be throwing money at this if he gets it right.

If after 93, you couldn't see where the world was headed, you weren't paying attention.

I was 20 in 93, my first ISP was PSI-Net and prior to that it was Fidonet strung together by BBS's. People were already sharing news articles via Fidonet mirrors of NNTP servers. Granted, there was no URL share button, and they were retyping stuff word for word, but they did it. By 93 however people were starting to take scans and images as well.

Fast forward to 1995, when a lot of my friends were graduating SJSU. A few of my closest friends got degrees in print. It was interesting watching and comparing our career trajectories. When I was a young man, my family and their families were so proud of them. "Oh so and so does LAYOUT for the Mercury NEWS!" "So and so does PHOTOGRAPHY for Wave Magazine!" When attention turned to me it was, "MIS? What is that?" While I struggled at first to get my footing in MIS, they were hired right away by local newspapers or magazines, but slowly their careers petered out, and mine is still raging.

I now work for one of the largest IT departments in the world, making great money. A few of them stopped trying to find jobs in journalism, one went to work for the local equivalent of a Kinkos.

Ironically their parents carry computers in their pockets.

If you're young, like I was, and you don't want to become obsolete, don't look at jobs and say, "Oh I like the idea of this, that is what I want to do!" No.. Look at what is being used as building blocks in the world. You want to work with the building blocks, not what comes after the construction. Right now? It looks like AI is huge. GPU design is HUGE. Quantum is going to be the next building block after. Get into quantum.

Your absolutely right. Population is around 132k. Comes out to about $7,620.21 per person. The only thing I think they could do here would be some science fiction, like drill down to the earths mantel and allow lava to flow and create new land mass, while the heat energy creates freshwater. Considering the crust is about 10 miles thick, ya, science fiction.

Kiribati has money from years of selling off phosphate mining rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Kind of a neat story out that way. Nauru is probably the most famous of these, but there's dozens of islands in the area that acted as rest stops of migratory birds, and as a result deposited millions of tons of bird shit and seeds on what was essentially volcanic rock, atolls, and uplifted reefs. Seeds do what seeds do and these grew into ecologies that covered up the bird shit.

In the late 1800's early 1900's chemistry wasn't what it is today, and bird shit phosphate was used in everything from field fertilizers to gunpowder. Nauru and Kiribati were sitting on white gold, ships were constantly in and out of the area hauling away millions of tons of white phosphate powder.

If you don't replace what you've taken out, you leave a void for seawater to get in through.

What did Kiribati and Nauru do with their billions? Pissed it away. The government gave a huge portion of the money to the residents, who did things like import Mercedes Benz's. Why would you import a car on an atoll with one road? Or in Nauru's case, an Island barely 2 miles across?

Eventually the rest of the world got better at synthesizing phosphate on a large scale and no longer needed to dig up the bird shit.

Real interesting history around that time and Guano though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Ahh found the 2b2t player.

I've been a /.'er since the beginning. This isn't even my original UID. I think that one was like 50k or so.

This site started off as somewhat libertarian anarchy. The old adage of, "We just move packets, any inspection of content is irrelevant" Granted, there is some content that is truly horrible, reprehensible, with IRL victims, but at the time of 1mbps internet connections it was deemed, "Too much overhead" for deep packet inspection.

Yet here we are close to 30 years later. 3 letter agencies routinely install their servers in ISP's to do just that. Speaking of ISP's, what ever happened to the 1000's we used to have? Seems like the choices either died out or were bought up. Internet is no longer an ala-cart option of free thought and speech, but rather the bourgeoisie hidden microphone installed on every computer, every phone, designed to listen to your every thought and whim. Even as I type this now, I have no doubt that somebody, somewhere, who is not /. is logging it as a part of the overall profile of t0qer, so they can sell that info to a marketeer.

We used to keep our thoughts and politics private. I never remember my parents, or my parents friends, or my friends parents talking about politics as much as we do now. It just seems like this thirst has been created in the collective consciousness that we have to share. Why? So a bunch of people we never met, or cared about prior to this, our facebook "friends" or our instagram "followers" can shower us with clicking a graphic of a thumb pointed up? The pavlovian response generated I guess in some ways can trace its roots back to here. It's to late for Karma, but if I had *just* commented when this article was hot, I'd be refreshing this comment to see if it got up or down votes.

I hope we can break free from this as a society.

It's almost like you're a bot that didn't read my comment.

You said:
>Gas was cheap

I said: personal autonomous electric air travel

You said:
> Furthermore you have to figure in the cost of your labor in operating the vehicle

And I said: Cars too will also see improvements in AI and self-driving.

Like I said, the future will be personal AI driven autonomous electric vehicles. Have you seen how cheap Chinese EV's are?

and I'll probably be downvoted for saying it but;

We've always romanticized train travel. It's like the movie Titanic, but nobody is going to drown, no ship is going to sink. People from different walks and stations of life are forced together for an extended period of time and next thing you know Leo is painting naked chicks in the baggage car.

Yet there's a reason we left it behind... At least in the US. Gas was cheap, cheaper than the cost of buying a family of 4 train passage. You didn't have to share a cabin with strangers. There was some disadvantages, like having to stop to rest and use the restroom, but the door to door travel of a car and being in your own self contained transport outweighed them. In the 40's and 50's trains were still painfully slow. HSR was still in its testing phase.

Jet travel, while like a train (having to share a cabin) didn't have the social experience a train did due to the noise, and short travel time. You don't really get a chance to know people, you put on your headphones and close your eyes until you're at your destination.

Trains have leapfrogged both cars and air travel in terms of speed and environmental friendliness, but they can leapfrog trains right back. Air travels has a security issue which causes most of the delay. This will be mitigated through... wait for it... personal autonomous electric air travel. Like cars, for the sky. Cars too will also see improvements in AI and self-driving. We will likely see a day in the next 20 years where cars will zip along at 100+ mph in dedicated self driving lanes.

If Slashdot had the ability to paste images, that meme would be going up now.

Hmm my slash UID is in the 200k range, yours is in the almost 5 million. I'm gonna guess you're young.

See I'm moving because I can. I've built up a resume over 30 years that any company will look at and say, "We need this guy" but more importantly, these companies ask, "What can we offer this guy to stay with us?" Since Covid, WFH has been a very good bargaining chip.

You're welcome to stay here in a hamster cage, eating my sloppy seconds. I'll be selling my paid off house and moving to the beach where the temperature will always be stable. Hope you like the sound of strangers stomping their feet all night long. Hope you like homeless, crime, piss, shit on the streets. You'll get everything you ever wished for in a "big city." Meanwhile the guys in Atherton, Brisbane, Los Altos, Palo Alto will be relatively immune. A glass of tap water will cost you $1. For the wealthy, they'll sleep on a mattress of $100 bills. They'll complain, "Oh look at the cost of water, we can't even water our lawns, maybe Seven Spirals should only take a shower a month to conserve." You're a "poor" to these people.

You underestimate the direction this is all going in. Enjoy having them force you to sacrifice so they can maintain their lifestyle. They need me more than I need them, but you need them more than they need you. Good luck with that bro.