[ExI] Thanksgiving

[William Flynn Wallace]

do share please with this tech-oriented group what developments rocked your
world and which ones you anticipate soon.  spike

I was always the student in the class who asked the most questions.  I have
been inhaling books and knowledge (and wish more of it had stuck) since
first grade.  So an easy answer for me:  access to knowledge far outweighs
smartphones, smartTVs, or smart anything else.  The web.  For the future:
much better voice to text or action, so disabled or simply nontech people
can use more of the technology than they can do now.  With no knowledge
whatsoever, we will be able to control phones, TV, computer, house computer
system (not only for rich people in the new future, I hope), our car,
washing machine and a lot more.  This is a fantastic age and an even better
one to come for the mentally retarded, disabled, elderly and so on.

And so much of it is cheap - available to almost everyone - almost (we
should subsidize the very poor:  computers for all - becoming an essential
for all of us.)    bill w

On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 12:05 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
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> *From:* extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> *On Behalf
> Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
> *Subject:* [ExI] Thanksgiving
>
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> Dear chat group:
>
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>
> >…If there were a competition for being thankful, I think I must win it…
> bill w
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> Silver medal at best sir, for surely I am thankfuller than thou.  Life in
> our world today does not suck.  We have enough food, we have homes, things
> are going well for humanity in our fortunate times.
>
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> Since we are generally technology fans here but not followers of any
> particular deity, now is a good time to thank technology for the good
> things that make our lives not suck.  Technology is great: you don’t need
> to pray to it, you don’t need to give it money (well, I suppose that
> depends on how you look at it (I have given plenty for computers over the
> years (but oh they have given back a thousand-fold.)))
>
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> I have looked back over the years and identified what I think are the most
> important developments which were the punctuation in the equilibrium,
> developments which caused a chain reaction in cool stuff.  I don’t include
> stuff before my time, such as the communications tech which developed
> during the war.
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>
> I have these:
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> 1.           Commercially viable computers, which I will kinda
> arbitrarily assign to Apple computer, about 1977.
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> 2.         HTML, which enabled the modern internet as we know it with
> websites and links and all the cool stuff on there, about 1993
>
> 3.         Cell phone technology, which reached inflection point around
> 2000 or so.
>
>
>
> Those are the three biggies in my lifetime, and ja I know they are
> debatable, but since we are in a festival of thanksgiving, do share please
> with this tech-oriented group what developments rocked your world and which
> ones you anticipate soon.
>
>
>
> I am tempted to add Zoom to that list, because I have discovered how that
> one seemingly minor development is the key to open a hundred doors.  Now I
> can pull together meetings with students and do software efforts without
> ever having to suffer their actual presence (ewww, teenagers, take me away
> Calgon (but if I hafta work with them for half an hour on the computer they
> are most tolerable (and highly productive (fine example available on
> request.)))))
>
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> Let’s hear it please.
>
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> spike
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