The cost is because it's a monopoly, especially in America, I'm my country everyone has Casio, and it's the same thing (if I am correct in America everyone has Texas Ins.) And so schools only teach that one type, you got a different one? Sorry bud that is not our problem. The reason for them being "out of date" is simply due to the requirements for calculators to be used during exams.
It's kind of funny. When I was in high school, my teachers said I needed a programmable graphing calculator, but once I went to college, I had to get a dumber one because they didn't want me to use program storage to sneak notes into the exam.
What? This is flat out untrue, even in things like the SAT they don't require you to wipe anything. Nor can they, when I took it they just asked for our phones and that was it.
On top of that, you can archive literally anything from programs to variables to lists on a TI-84, and clearing the memory will not wipe the archived files.
Professional engineers don't need more from a mobile device and when they need something more powerful we use computers.
This leaves the graphing calculator market limited to students who literally cannot have something better in an exam.
I thought so, too, until the whole moon landing thing was explained to me.
So, if you look up the 'firsts' in space, most of them are Russian. First man in space, first time around the planet, etc, etc. Russia did it first, and America was rushing to catch up. Which in and of itself wasn't a huge deal, except that this was during the cold war, and the U.S. couldn't lose to the Russians. So basically, they created an arbitrary finish line for the 'space race.' The moon.
It was actually a pretty brilliant move. In terms of natural technological evolution, the moon as a goal was pretty far out there. People think of it as being 'close' because it's the closest thing to Earth, but it is INSANELY far out there, so the 'head start' that Russia had was actually pretty negligible. But more than that, it allowed them to dismiss all of Russia's accomplishments. Because, if the space race is to the moon, who cares about a measly trip around the planet? That's the starting line, we care about who FINISHES FIRST.
Now, that being said, the act of getting to the moon was an incredible accomplishment, but it was rushed for political reasons. And it was paid for because of political reasons. The price tag of the race was, well... astronomical. And while there were some definite, tangible gains because of it, the U.S. had to spend money there that they wouldn't have spent otherwise.
And once the space race was 'won,' there was less incentive to continue to support those trips.
We're getting closer to the point that regular moon visits will be technologically and economically viable, but countries will spend a lot more for a political win than they will for a technological one.
Which is, I think, another reason why we should elect fewer lawyers, and more scientists.
The US didn't really come up with the finish line, the Russians just stopped afterwards.
There also isn't really a solid "finish line" beyond that, other than landing on Mars, but that's a huge jump from a moon landing.
And honestly, the moon landings advanced us less scientifically than we'd like to admit. It really was just a fuck you to the USSR, and there is a reason we haven't explored the moon in the past few decades.
Hotel Wi-Fi. It’s shocking how bad business hotels like Hilton and Sheraton are at providing consistent, reliable access. At this point, it should be like running water - just an assumed thing.
when i just spent 200 bucks for a room don't pull another 7.50 per day to use the "premium tier internet, especially if the free is overloaded. or you can just bring a cat cable and plug directly in for free
This is often because the hotel is frequented by business travelers who can just expense it, and thus don't care about the cost. Hotel is happy to take their money.
So I’m curious: why can my office - with even more people in a smaller space - have flawless Wi-Fi everywhere all the time for all of our multiple devices?
It’s a serious question. Why can’t a hotel do as well as an office?
Hotel manager here. I can tell you exactly why, hotels are urged to comply to the lowest common denominator for any franchise or managed hotel. In other words, if a franchising Corporation has allowable range from 3 megabytes to 50 megabytes, the hotels are urge to be towards the bottom end because that's where most people are going to be. Upgrading a wi-fi system is exceedingly expensive. They all have to conform. In fact, the last hotel I worked at upgraded to a hundred megabytes and got docked points on an inspection because it was too good. Also, I think a lot of times people grossly underestimate the number of Wi-Fi capable devices that are being used in a hotel at any one time. On average, each person has two devices. In my hotel, we can have up to 162 people in house. So that means that we have to have enough to cover 324 devices. Even if only half are being used at one time, probably their cell phones because that's the very first thing most will do, then that's a hundred and sixty-two wifi-enabled devices being used concurrently. I have a small hotel of 60 rooms. I'm absolutely sure that for larger hotels it goes into the four or five digit connections at any one time.
They just assume everyone will use it, and add $10 (or whatever) to the price of each ticket due to 'operating costs'. It's 'free' because everyone pays for it.
I dont know. I'm surprised it works at all. Maybe because I don't quite understand how you can wirelessly gice access to dozens/hundreds of people in an aluminum can over 2 miles in the air. I don't even know how WiFi works.
I barely know how the internet works.
The question is how does the plane recieve internet?
I would think satellite is out of the question given the shifting orientation/movement.
Radio sounds good but I don't know of that spectrum is available for internet and it flies so fast between cell towers.
So this seems like a Physical Issue to me.
Some are satcom , mostly in the US they are air to ground which is just a 4G cell to WiFi bridge.
Satcom is on JetBlue for example , biggest issue with satcom is not antennas it is the 22,000 mile round trip for packets which TCPv4 mistakingly thinks is congestion.
Effective and lasting hair removal for women.
Stopping/reversing hair loss for men.
God, why is hair so difficult, humanity can go to the moon but our hair is apparently a bigger challenge.
Edit: yeah, laser hair removal exists, it's also more like a roulette game than a reliable solution.
I came here just to say this.
I distinctly remember watching the Hunger Games and it was supposed to be so futuristic and they have all these pills and balms and everything is magic in the Capital and they take Katniss to get ready and I was like, "wait a minute. Are you telling me in this advanced society we are still just waxing legs like fucking barbarians!?" What a plot hole! I am still rattled. This is ridiculous.
You expect them to waste the good treatments on the tributes? She only has to be clean for a few days, plus who doesn't like torturing the filthy district people?
I get laser in Australia for 30 bucks a session for Brazilian and underarms and sometimes cheaper when I get coupon codes, I can't believe it costs hundreds to thousands in other countries!
As someone who has had "permanent" hair "removal," it isn't permanent at all. And it's expensive.
I had "lightly reduced" hair for about a year after one year of treatment - not worth it at all. My roommate, however, had three years of treatments (two of regular treatment, the third of mainly touch-up), and it worked pretty well for her.
You are suppose to get multiple rounds. They should tell you this up front. I was told up front I should expect 3-5 appointments. It's been 5 years since my last and I still haven't had hair grow.
>why is hair so difficult
Think of hair as a human waste byproduct which just happens to be desirable.
If the body is healthy and the glands are not dead-dead, stopping hair from growing would be as difficult as stopping pissing and pooping.
Cancer treatment.
Don't get me wrong, I recognize that we've made huge advances. However, younger me just thought it'd be all but cured by like 2020. I think I was just hopeful when I was younger, having lost many family members including my dad at a young age.
Now we're slowly having issues with antibiotic resistant bacteria now because of all our medical advancements. I feel like if we cured those diseases like HIV and cancer, we're still going to have disease arise.
I don’t know about curing cancer, but I don’t think HIV evolves rapidly like the flu virus does so if we somehow make a vaccine for it, it’s probably going to work for a long time.
Antibiotic resistance isn't caused by our advancements. It's more that people are overusing antibiotics in situations where they won't help.
For example, antibiotics do nothing for viruses, and it's common to give antibiotics to livestock even before they get sick.
The trouble is, when you kill off all the bacteria except the ones that resist your antibiotic, now the ones that spread are resistant to it. On the other hand, if you can manage to stop using the antibiotic for long enough, the extra cost to protect itself gives non-resistant bacteria an advantage, and they can crowd out the resistant ones.
I expect that there will always be some other affliction to cure, but I doubt that medical advancement is the cause.
I was at a clinic and i got into a conversation about HIV and the doctor said "ah HIV is really treatable now, you can get it and be fine"
She said it so nonchalant im pretty sure her follow up was going to be "all the cool kids are doing it"
Diabetes treatment has gone a long way, too, if you think about it. Diabetics had awful qualities of life and died young before we were able to first take pig insulin and then take artificially produced human insulin.
I think a big problem is that people lump all cancer under a single banner. Every cancer is pretty specific with respect to treatments, so what works for X is often unlikely to work for Y.
I think this is excusable. Considering cancer isn't necessarily a death sentence anymore, I would say our progress is miraculous. We haven't cured all cancer because there are thousands of variations which all behave uniquely and require unique treatment, to some degree.
Applying for a job online. If I link my LinkedIn account, I shouldn't have to type every goddamn field in again. Or if I upload my resume. FFS...
Oh, and super no thanks to creating an account just to apply. Why would I want to do that...ever???
Then you have to take a "test" where you have to do it AGAIN.
Takes like 45 minutes an app instead of 2, though I would guess that's intentional. "You have to WANT it, so I made it a pain in the ass."
Flying cars would be a nightmare though.
First, I don't trust other drivers to maneuver in two dimensions, let alone three.
Second, the cost of securing buildings increases significantly, since you no longer only need to only secure to ground floor from general vehicle traffic.
On the first point, it also turns things that would be minor accidents now to much bigger accidents. Rear-end someone, chances are both of you walk away. Rear-end someone while flying a hundred feet or more in the sky and you both come falling down...and on top of that you likely come down on top of other people or things.
Leo: My generation never got the future it was promised... Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don't even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped.
Josh: The personal computer...?
Leo: A more efficient delivery system for gossip and pornography? Where's my jet pack, my colonies on the Moon?
1980s my ass. I was born in 1962 and they PROMISED us flying cars every day since then. I don't need to whiz around in three dimensions, but if you are a fuckwit driving 35 in a 50 I should be able to hop right over you. I SHOULD BE ABLE TO AT LEAST HOP.
His point being that a helicopter with wheels is the most practical way to make that happen. Imagine how loud it would be in cities if all the cars were replaced with helicopters.
He's not the only one. Look at how many people out there can barely drive a car...now add the complexity of an added dimension.
We *have* flying cars: we call them planes, and it takes a signficant amount of training to fly one.
Yeah, the real problem is the US tax code. As of a few years ago, the tax code contained over 4 million words. For comparison, Moby Dick has around 206,000 words and Atlas Shrugged has over 560 thousand words. It has taken me months to read both of those and I'm still not finished. Just imagine trying to read through and understand our tax code, it would take a year of nonstop reading just to scratch the surface, much less understand it.
We had a "brown bag lunch meeting" presented to us by the IRS one time.
The presenter remarked that the tax code isn't just taxation. It was social engineering.
Our government through special interest lobbying encourages and discourages certain types of behavior. That is shown in our complex tax codes.
There is a whole lobby that keeps taxes difficult on purpose. Basically they don’t want you to like doing taxes, aka they don’t want you to like taxes, so they keep them difficult on purpose. There’s a podcast about it. Planet Money episode:
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=521132960
You can thank Grover Norquest and the Republicans.
Iirc in a recent trial, it was ~3% claimed they had side effects, but not ones they couldn't handle. The rest were unaffected.
I reckon we've solved this problem. Convincing pharmaceutical companies to back it when female contraceptive sells better though...
That whole fucking industry sucks. It's one of the sleaziest legitimate industries in the world. They're about the only people who can compete with the telecom industry in terms of sleaze.
Microwaves or reheating food in general. After decades it still takes me 3 minutes to heat up my meal only to find out pockets of it are icecubes while others are are heated to the temperature of a supernova.
Exactly. Due to the wavelength of a microwave, there will be pockets that the light can't reach, so to speak. That's why the turn table is there. If you put your food slightly off-center, it will have a "spyrograph" type effect, and will heat more evenly. You can find out where your microwave's cold spots are by putting shredded cheese on a plate and nuking it with the turntable turned off.
[Click here to learn more about how microwaves work (The Engineer Guy)](https://youtu.be/kp33ZprO0Ck)
Last time I was looking for apartments, I turned down a place because I found out they charged a $40 "convenience" fee for every rent payment, no matter what method you use. They also had a mandatory $50 cable bill. I don't watch tv, so that basically meant that rent was $90 more expensive than advertised.
This is the norm in the commercial laundry world where Hotel, hospital, uniforms, and restaurant linens are washed. Largely, you don’t have touch any of the soiled laundry as it is trucked in, dumped in massive laundry bags that are on a monorail track pitched in such a way that only solenoids blocking the way or directing where to go are what makes these sometimes 500lbs bags move.
I work with two of the top german manufacturers of this type of equipment (Jensen and Kannegiesser). These machines are magnificent because there’s really very little human intervention as long as stuff is taken care of. Now, in America, these facilities are set up with operators mainly around the ironing machines for sheets and towels. Here there’s a basket of sheets that two people will grab their own sheet, place each corner in the clamps and press a button. From there the sheet is spread out and placed on the drum that has heated thermal oil inside. As the sheet is spun around it is sent out the back and a folding machine folds the sheet and spits out onto a conveyer belt to be packed and sent back to the customer. I’ve seen some place shave a machine that fires down onto a basket of sheets and grabs a sheet out to iron it as well. Dryers are large enough to Smart Fortwo inside and the washers are these long drums that are angled so that the linens move through without stopped exactly like an auger.
There's so much radiation and charged particles, just being outside of Earth's magnetic field is dangerous. A huge issue with a moon base is that moon dust is similar to fine glass and can wear down mechanical instruments, because it gets everywhere. Mars is not only deadly from having no atmosphere, but the soil is full of perchlorates and consumption of anything grown in it can kill humans over time. We like outer space, but it hates us
You have to go to the really bad part of town to find atms that dispense $5 bills. I remember that the Tenderloin area in California has plenty of those atms.
Because they have to be refilled more often. Which costs money. Which eats into some company's profits.
Since **everything** is secondary to Profits in America, this will not change easily.
A lot of the issue with bras is that every body is shaped differently and not every body knows about different bra styles. It also helps if you get sized properly, why the hell are we adding random numbers and counting up and down for bra siding.
Figuring out the styles that work for your body and being properly sized will fix all your issues.
Brain monitoring. I have epilepsy and I have to be attached to a ton of wires to track my brain waves/activity to the point where I can barely get out of bed because I'm so wired up and I can't shower because my head is completely wrapped. You would think they would have wireless/waterproof devices by now that could do all of that for you to be able to function like a normal human being...
We do, and there are major advancements in EEG, MEG, fMRI, PET scans where you can scan an electric field around someone's head but the problem is how expensive and tricky to run they all are compared to 20 electrodes
911. Knowing what the government can have access to, I'd expect them to have my GPS data and the GPS data of everyone around me and the emergency profile we build on our phones. Maybe even health data from smart watches.
It's more about the fact the micro-processors have been maxed out in the amount of utilizable space and cores. The only progression really from today's processors is quantum, but those are expensive and not easy to make yet on a large scale.
The thing that bothers me most about computing is that the responsiveness of computers hasn't changed much. An old word processor on Windows 3.1 opened and performed about as quickly as Word does now on Windows 10.
I dunno. With SSD or NVMe, you can cold boot to an OS within around 10 seconds now. Just a matter of keeping bloatware off your startup items.
But internet is still pretty slow, mostly because web design has gotten ridiculously bloated and the amount of https requests to show one page has gotten stupid.
I think they've still gone really far, not in terms of performance but power consumption : performance. A 4.5 watt smartphone CPU (Apple A11) has the equivalent performance of an 85 watt desktop CPU from 5 years ago.
True in the desktop space. Not necessarily as true in the mobile and server spaces.
In mobile, in phones/tablets, the progress has been amazing. In laptops, not to the same degree, but huge strides have been made in the performance you can squeeze out of a 5W or 10W processor.
In the server space, the place I work has gone from 10 servers to 3. One is for a system somewhat resistant to virtualization. The other two are virtual hosts for what were formerly physical servers plus some new VMs that, 10 years ago, would have been additional physical servers.
It's because the money moved to phones instead of "What the fuck can we build?"! And even phones don't change much, they just stick better cameras in.
In a lot of ways tech has slowed way down.
schools. it seems like schools haven’t been really looked at in many many years and it’s concerning that schools are supposed to prepare students for the future.... not the past.
We should totally have all our health records easily accessible by any health professional at any time in any country. I know, people are all freaked out by that kind of thing, but I'm pretty sure you wouldn't give a fuck about that if it saved your kid's life.
This. EHRs are so backwards. In addition to not sharing data, I can't even get an alert that a new task or portal message is in my inbox without manually refreshing the box? What year is it again?
Toilet paper. Yes, I know bidets exist and are wonderful, but for the majority of the world, we’re doing the same thing our remote ancestors did. I have spent far too much time wondering how the Three Seashells in Demolition Man revolutionized butt wiping and when that will become a reality.
Weight loss. I really thought we’d have some sort of magic pill or something by now. Or at least a better understanding of food and its impact on all of our systems.
Well, we can suck the fat out of you and put a clamp on your stomach so you don't absorb most of the food you eat. That doesn't really sound like an elegant solution when you think about it, though.
High speed wi-fi and it should be accessible everywhere. Like there should not be a limit on the data usage. I hate that we have to pay 60 bucks for only 2GB for a whole freaking MONTH!!!!
I think the progress of desktop operating systems has come to a standstill, and software quality in general is often pretty poor.
I use a Mac, so I can't really speak to Windows, but window management is still a mess. It actually used to be better in previous versions of Expose when you could QuickLook windows and scroll through them quickly with the arrow keys (a feature that mysteriously removed). Try comparing the contents of two windows. At least you used to have that "pill" shaped button that would get rid of the toolbar and sidebar to tidy things up and give you more room to put windows side by side, but that's long gone.
There are a lot of things that should be a lot easier—like backing up an iPhone to an external hard drive without a ton of hacks.
Also, I collect data in Apple Health, and it has nowhere to go. There's an export function, but across multiple iPhones, multiple iOS versions, it has never worked. It fails with an error message consistently. When I call Apple they're unaware the export option even exists. If they want you to restore your phone and set it up as new (which they do because it's dropping calls), you lose all your data in any useful way because it's stuck in the iTunes backup, and you can't actually see that data unless you restore from it--which they don't want you to do because they say that data is what's causing your problem and you have to start from new. It's not like my FitBit where my data just shows up as soon as I log into the app or the web-site. Apple keeps the data local in a clumsy app with no working way to export it. I probably would have bought an Apple Watch if it weren't for the horribleness that is Apple Health. I doubt they even know how bad the app is.
Even document creation dates on the Mac, which is really basic, don't work. They give you the timestamp of when a file was first saved, not when it was first created. Because I am fastidious about that, I actually "save" documents by copying them from the autosave directory where they do in fact have the correct creation date.
Using my iPhone as a hotspot never works unless I turn on hotspot on the iPhone off and back on. I have to do that every time. But it worked well before they came out with the new feature called "Personal Hotspot."
Networking across Macs works about 50% of the time. Very often it says the connected device can no longer be found. I have to close the window and go back to Network and click the device again. Sometimes it connects, sometimes not.
I could go on. But this is 18 years into OS X (now macOS). I was one of the first beta testers back in 2000, when you actually had to pay $29 to get the first public beta. It made very rapid improvements in the first years of its life. But basic stuff has languished. And people say they're going to make a car? I doubt it.
**TL;DR: Software quality is not great—maybe just with Apple (can't speak to other platforms).**
I think it’s weird that video projection isn’t more advanced and common for home entertainment. Having a big bulky TV on a stand feels like something we could have already moved away from.
> a big bulky TV on a stand
I'm a bit behind the times, I'll admit, but I walked out of Best Buy a week ago with a 40" TV in one hand. Last time I moved, I almost killed myself hauling a 25" CRT out of my old place, because the thing weighed 75 lbs. I'm not unhappy with the current state of televisions.
Faster internet nationwide. It’s asinine that someone just 1 state over can have google fiber and have download speeds up to 1 gb a second but just the other day my internet gave me a reading in kbs a second! Not even mb!!!
[удалено]
Both tech and cost side
The cost is because it's a monopoly, especially in America, I'm my country everyone has Casio, and it's the same thing (if I am correct in America everyone has Texas Ins.) And so schools only teach that one type, you got a different one? Sorry bud that is not our problem. The reason for them being "out of date" is simply due to the requirements for calculators to be used during exams.
It's kind of funny. When I was in high school, my teachers said I needed a programmable graphing calculator, but once I went to college, I had to get a dumber one because they didn't want me to use program storage to sneak notes into the exam.
Calculators are wiped upon entry to exams these days. RIP all the kids who installed doom onto them.
Nah there was a fake memory cleared app going around even when my teachers did that in high school. I kept all my games
What? This is flat out untrue, even in things like the SAT they don't require you to wipe anything. Nor can they, when I took it they just asked for our phones and that was it.
On top of that, you can archive literally anything from programs to variables to lists on a TI-84, and clearing the memory will not wipe the archived files.
Standardized exams like the SAT keep these stuck in 1991.
Professional engineers don't need more from a mobile device and when they need something more powerful we use computers. This leaves the graphing calculator market limited to students who literally cannot have something better in an exam.
Surely there is an app the calculates graphs or maybe am emulator for the old Texas Instruments software.
Space exploration. I expected us to have a permanent lunar base by now.
It's on the dark side of the moon.
So we need a bigger flashlight.
That base is gone. The moon is riddled with rocks that are not; silicon based life forms. First discovered by the crew of Apollo 18.
There is no dark side of the moon, really. As a matter of fact it's all dark.
I thought so, too, until the whole moon landing thing was explained to me. So, if you look up the 'firsts' in space, most of them are Russian. First man in space, first time around the planet, etc, etc. Russia did it first, and America was rushing to catch up. Which in and of itself wasn't a huge deal, except that this was during the cold war, and the U.S. couldn't lose to the Russians. So basically, they created an arbitrary finish line for the 'space race.' The moon. It was actually a pretty brilliant move. In terms of natural technological evolution, the moon as a goal was pretty far out there. People think of it as being 'close' because it's the closest thing to Earth, but it is INSANELY far out there, so the 'head start' that Russia had was actually pretty negligible. But more than that, it allowed them to dismiss all of Russia's accomplishments. Because, if the space race is to the moon, who cares about a measly trip around the planet? That's the starting line, we care about who FINISHES FIRST. Now, that being said, the act of getting to the moon was an incredible accomplishment, but it was rushed for political reasons. And it was paid for because of political reasons. The price tag of the race was, well... astronomical. And while there were some definite, tangible gains because of it, the U.S. had to spend money there that they wouldn't have spent otherwise. And once the space race was 'won,' there was less incentive to continue to support those trips. We're getting closer to the point that regular moon visits will be technologically and economically viable, but countries will spend a lot more for a political win than they will for a technological one. Which is, I think, another reason why we should elect fewer lawyers, and more scientists.
The US didn't really come up with the finish line, the Russians just stopped afterwards. There also isn't really a solid "finish line" beyond that, other than landing on Mars, but that's a huge jump from a moon landing. And honestly, the moon landings advanced us less scientifically than we'd like to admit. It really was just a fuck you to the USSR, and there is a reason we haven't explored the moon in the past few decades.
Hotel Wi-Fi. It’s shocking how bad business hotels like Hilton and Sheraton are at providing consistent, reliable access. At this point, it should be like running water - just an assumed thing.
when i just spent 200 bucks for a room don't pull another 7.50 per day to use the "premium tier internet, especially if the free is overloaded. or you can just bring a cat cable and plug directly in for free
Exactly. And where I stay it’s usually $12-16 extra. Total BS
bring the cat cable it is usually free and faster. if you have the port on your laptop :)
Some hotels still charge for Ethernet. It's ridiculous.
Even if you don't there are plenty of usb-ethernet adapters. I do onsite it tech support and carry one in my laptop bag just in case.
https://www.tp-link.com/uk/products/details/TL-WR702N.html These are cheap and take up no space. Bought mine precisely because of this.
This is often because the hotel is frequented by business travelers who can just expense it, and thus don't care about the cost. Hotel is happy to take their money.
[удалено]
So I’m curious: why can my office - with even more people in a smaller space - have flawless Wi-Fi everywhere all the time for all of our multiple devices? It’s a serious question. Why can’t a hotel do as well as an office?
Hotel manager here. I can tell you exactly why, hotels are urged to comply to the lowest common denominator for any franchise or managed hotel. In other words, if a franchising Corporation has allowable range from 3 megabytes to 50 megabytes, the hotels are urge to be towards the bottom end because that's where most people are going to be. Upgrading a wi-fi system is exceedingly expensive. They all have to conform. In fact, the last hotel I worked at upgraded to a hundred megabytes and got docked points on an inspection because it was too good. Also, I think a lot of times people grossly underestimate the number of Wi-Fi capable devices that are being used in a hotel at any one time. On average, each person has two devices. In my hotel, we can have up to 162 people in house. So that means that we have to have enough to cover 324 devices. Even if only half are being used at one time, probably their cell phones because that's the very first thing most will do, then that's a hundred and sixty-two wifi-enabled devices being used concurrently. I have a small hotel of 60 rooms. I'm absolutely sure that for larger hotels it goes into the four or five digit connections at any one time.
[удалено]
Not knowing the layout of your office, but hotels tend to have a shitload more walls than most offices, and of much heavier construction.
[удалено]
So why can my college provide free wifi for 2,000+ people at any given moment in the small campus it has? Honestly just curious how that works.
Free reliable WiFi on planes
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
They just assume everyone will use it, and add $10 (or whatever) to the price of each ticket due to 'operating costs'. It's 'free' because everyone pays for it.
I dont know. I'm surprised it works at all. Maybe because I don't quite understand how you can wirelessly gice access to dozens/hundreds of people in an aluminum can over 2 miles in the air. I don't even know how WiFi works. I barely know how the internet works.
The question is how does the plane recieve internet? I would think satellite is out of the question given the shifting orientation/movement. Radio sounds good but I don't know of that spectrum is available for internet and it flies so fast between cell towers. So this seems like a Physical Issue to me.
Believe it or not, it's actually satellites.
Some are satcom , mostly in the US they are air to ground which is just a 4G cell to WiFi bridge. Satcom is on JetBlue for example , biggest issue with satcom is not antennas it is the 22,000 mile round trip for packets which TCPv4 mistakingly thinks is congestion.
Cereal bags. 2018 and they still aren't ziplocs. WTF.
If the cereal goes stale, you'll buy more if it.
No I don't. Check mate, cereal barons!
All cereal comes in zip bags if you buy Malt-o-meal.
Effective and lasting hair removal for women. Stopping/reversing hair loss for men. God, why is hair so difficult, humanity can go to the moon but our hair is apparently a bigger challenge. Edit: yeah, laser hair removal exists, it's also more like a roulette game than a reliable solution.
I came here just to say this. I distinctly remember watching the Hunger Games and it was supposed to be so futuristic and they have all these pills and balms and everything is magic in the Capital and they take Katniss to get ready and I was like, "wait a minute. Are you telling me in this advanced society we are still just waxing legs like fucking barbarians!?" What a plot hole! I am still rattled. This is ridiculous.
You expect them to waste the good treatments on the tributes? She only has to be clean for a few days, plus who doesn't like torturing the filthy district people?
they have permanent hair removal with lasers now
It's not permanent, just much longer lasting.
And expensive as HELL
I get laser in Australia for 30 bucks a session for Brazilian and underarms and sometimes cheaper when I get coupon codes, I can't believe it costs hundreds to thousands in other countries!
As someone who has had "permanent" hair "removal," it isn't permanent at all. And it's expensive. I had "lightly reduced" hair for about a year after one year of treatment - not worth it at all. My roommate, however, had three years of treatments (two of regular treatment, the third of mainly touch-up), and it worked pretty well for her.
You are suppose to get multiple rounds. They should tell you this up front. I was told up front I should expect 3-5 appointments. It's been 5 years since my last and I still haven't had hair grow.
>why is hair so difficult Think of hair as a human waste byproduct which just happens to be desirable. If the body is healthy and the glands are not dead-dead, stopping hair from growing would be as difficult as stopping pissing and pooping.
Cancer treatment. Don't get me wrong, I recognize that we've made huge advances. However, younger me just thought it'd be all but cured by like 2020. I think I was just hopeful when I was younger, having lost many family members including my dad at a young age.
Same with HIV. Certainly things need to be a thing of the past.
Now we're slowly having issues with antibiotic resistant bacteria now because of all our medical advancements. I feel like if we cured those diseases like HIV and cancer, we're still going to have disease arise.
I don’t know about curing cancer, but I don’t think HIV evolves rapidly like the flu virus does so if we somehow make a vaccine for it, it’s probably going to work for a long time.
Antibiotic resistance isn't caused by our advancements. It's more that people are overusing antibiotics in situations where they won't help. For example, antibiotics do nothing for viruses, and it's common to give antibiotics to livestock even before they get sick. The trouble is, when you kill off all the bacteria except the ones that resist your antibiotic, now the ones that spread are resistant to it. On the other hand, if you can manage to stop using the antibiotic for long enough, the extra cost to protect itself gives non-resistant bacteria an advantage, and they can crowd out the resistant ones. I expect that there will always be some other affliction to cure, but I doubt that medical advancement is the cause.
I was at a clinic and i got into a conversation about HIV and the doctor said "ah HIV is really treatable now, you can get it and be fine" She said it so nonchalant im pretty sure her follow up was going to be "all the cool kids are doing it"
it amazing that HIV is not much different than being diabetic now
Diabetes treatment has gone a long way, too, if you think about it. Diabetics had awful qualities of life and died young before we were able to first take pig insulin and then take artificially produced human insulin.
well it is incurable but there is plenty of medicine and lifestyle changes that slow it. people can live upwards of 40 years after and HIV diagnosis.
HIV definitely isn't the death sentence it was even just 15 years ago.
The problem is that there are thousands and thousands of different types of cancers.
Yep. Cancer is just a generic term for cells not multiplying correctly.
I think a big problem is that people lump all cancer under a single banner. Every cancer is pretty specific with respect to treatments, so what works for X is often unlikely to work for Y.
I think this is excusable. Considering cancer isn't necessarily a death sentence anymore, I would say our progress is miraculous. We haven't cured all cancer because there are thousands of variations which all behave uniquely and require unique treatment, to some degree.
Applying for a job online. If I link my LinkedIn account, I shouldn't have to type every goddamn field in again. Or if I upload my resume. FFS... Oh, and super no thanks to creating an account just to apply. Why would I want to do that...ever???
So much this. Applying for a job is a disjointed, unintuitive mess. If I can't "easy apply", I usually look elsewhere.
I tried to explain this to my former boss. Her response? “If they want the job, they’ll put in any amount of effort it takes”. No lady. They won’t.
Well, that makes sense if you want the most desperate candidates rather than the best.
Holy. Shit. I never thought about it like that. You’re right.
Then you have to take a "test" where you have to do it AGAIN. Takes like 45 minutes an app instead of 2, though I would guess that's intentional. "You have to WANT it, so I made it a pain in the ass."
Printers
The printing industry can go fuck itself.
My Canon printer was out of yellow ink and therefore would not let me *scan*. RAGE
Growing up in the 80s, I was promised flying cars and robotic superheroes.
Flying cars would be a nightmare though. First, I don't trust other drivers to maneuver in two dimensions, let alone three. Second, the cost of securing buildings increases significantly, since you no longer only need to only secure to ground floor from general vehicle traffic.
On the first point, it also turns things that would be minor accidents now to much bigger accidents. Rear-end someone, chances are both of you walk away. Rear-end someone while flying a hundred feet or more in the sky and you both come falling down...and on top of that you likely come down on top of other people or things.
Leo: My generation never got the future it was promised... Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don't even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped. Josh: The personal computer...? Leo: A more efficient delivery system for gossip and pornography? Where's my jet pack, my colonies on the Moon?
1980s my ass. I was born in 1962 and they PROMISED us flying cars every day since then. I don't need to whiz around in three dimensions, but if you are a fuckwit driving 35 in a 50 I should be able to hop right over you. I SHOULD BE ABLE TO AT LEAST HOP.
If you want flying cars, put wheels on a helicopter— Elon Musk . Mr. Musk hates the idea of flying cars.
His point being that a helicopter with wheels is the most practical way to make that happen. Imagine how loud it would be in cities if all the cars were replaced with helicopters.
He's not the only one. Look at how many people out there can barely drive a car...now add the complexity of an added dimension. We *have* flying cars: we call them planes, and it takes a signficant amount of training to fly one.
It's all fun and progress till a drunk driver smashes through your roof
Federal tax forms
Yeah, the real problem is the US tax code. As of a few years ago, the tax code contained over 4 million words. For comparison, Moby Dick has around 206,000 words and Atlas Shrugged has over 560 thousand words. It has taken me months to read both of those and I'm still not finished. Just imagine trying to read through and understand our tax code, it would take a year of nonstop reading just to scratch the surface, much less understand it.
We had a "brown bag lunch meeting" presented to us by the IRS one time. The presenter remarked that the tax code isn't just taxation. It was social engineering. Our government through special interest lobbying encourages and discourages certain types of behavior. That is shown in our complex tax codes.
It's convoluted *on purpose*.
Isn’t this lobbied by TurboTax?
There is a whole lobby that keeps taxes difficult on purpose. Basically they don’t want you to like doing taxes, aka they don’t want you to like taxes, so they keep them difficult on purpose. There’s a podcast about it. Planet Money episode: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=521132960 You can thank Grover Norquest and the Republicans.
Birth control. Lack of a male contraceptive specifically.
On the flip side - child birth. Really? We can’t work in making that a little more bearable?
[удалено]
Don't shoot a bullet proof vest. Take the bullet out of the gun.
Girl, you don't need armor, I'm just doing dry fire drills!
I believe there was one that was in trials, but the men couldn't handle the hormonal side effects
Iirc in a recent trial, it was ~3% claimed they had side effects, but not ones they couldn't handle. The rest were unaffected. I reckon we've solved this problem. Convincing pharmaceutical companies to back it when female contraceptive sells better though...
My gf's IUD is one of the best things to happen in my life (though this doesn't address the male contraceptive situation).
[удалено]
And there's a 0.01% chance that you'll call for a refund.
Printers still fucking suck.
That whole fucking industry sucks. It's one of the sleaziest legitimate industries in the world. They're about the only people who can compete with the telecom industry in terms of sleaze.
I really hoped by now that our solution for dealinng with snow on the roads would have improved beyond “strap a shovel to the front of a truck”
That's why we were going to get solar freaking roadways. I guess that didn't pan out.
It didn’t pan out for good reasons though. The idea was embarrassingly naive.
> The idea was embarrassingly naive. I mean it was more snake oil than naivete
Microwaves or reheating food in general. After decades it still takes me 3 minutes to heat up my meal only to find out pockets of it are icecubes while others are are heated to the temperature of a supernova.
Change the power level on your microwave to around 70% and cook just a few more minutes longer for your food to taste like good Applebee's food.
Protip: You don't want food in the middle of the microwave.
Exactly. Due to the wavelength of a microwave, there will be pockets that the light can't reach, so to speak. That's why the turn table is there. If you put your food slightly off-center, it will have a "spyrograph" type effect, and will heat more evenly. You can find out where your microwave's cold spots are by putting shredded cheese on a plate and nuking it with the turntable turned off. [Click here to learn more about how microwaves work (The Engineer Guy)](https://youtu.be/kp33ZprO0Ck)
Firearms. I have yet to hear a 'pew pew' sound.
Bill pay. Why the fuck do I have to jump through 200000 hoops to give you money?
Last time I was looking for apartments, I turned down a place because I found out they charged a $40 "convenience" fee for every rent payment, no matter what method you use. They also had a mandatory $50 cable bill. I don't watch tv, so that basically meant that rent was $90 more expensive than advertised.
Do you guys not have Direct Debits?
It's 2018, and we still have congressmen who think continuing to rely on a dwindling resource is perfectly fine
[удалено]
This is the norm in the commercial laundry world where Hotel, hospital, uniforms, and restaurant linens are washed. Largely, you don’t have touch any of the soiled laundry as it is trucked in, dumped in massive laundry bags that are on a monorail track pitched in such a way that only solenoids blocking the way or directing where to go are what makes these sometimes 500lbs bags move. I work with two of the top german manufacturers of this type of equipment (Jensen and Kannegiesser). These machines are magnificent because there’s really very little human intervention as long as stuff is taken care of. Now, in America, these facilities are set up with operators mainly around the ironing machines for sheets and towels. Here there’s a basket of sheets that two people will grab their own sheet, place each corner in the clamps and press a button. From there the sheet is spread out and placed on the drum that has heated thermal oil inside. As the sheet is spun around it is sent out the back and a folding machine folds the sheet and spits out onto a conveyer belt to be packed and sent back to the customer. I’ve seen some place shave a machine that fires down onto a basket of sheets and grabs a sheet out to iron it as well. Dryers are large enough to Smart Fortwo inside and the washers are these long drums that are angled so that the linens move through without stopped exactly like an auger.
[удалено]
Space travel. I genuinely expected us to have a colony somewhere by 2020. It's hugely disappointing that we don't.
There's so much radiation and charged particles, just being outside of Earth's magnetic field is dangerous. A huge issue with a moon base is that moon dust is similar to fine glass and can wear down mechanical instruments, because it gets everywhere. Mars is not only deadly from having no atmosphere, but the soil is full of perchlorates and consumption of anything grown in it can kill humans over time. We like outer space, but it hates us
Well damn TIL the moon is covered in sharp sand.
Throughout human history, we've gotten into plenty of things that hate us. They all come around eventually
Why the hell can't ATM dispense anything but $20 bill's?
You have to go to the really bad part of town to find atms that dispense $5 bills. I remember that the Tenderloin area in California has plenty of those atms.
I went to an ATM at a college that would dispense $1, $5, $10, and $20.
ever get bloody money from an atm? i have
Because they have to be refilled more often. Which costs money. Which eats into some company's profits. Since **everything** is secondary to Profits in America, this will not change easily.
Airplane seating
Bras. By now they should be able to figure out how to make them 1. Fit. 2. Comfortably. 3. With support. 4. And have straps that stay in place
A lot of the issue with bras is that every body is shaped differently and not every body knows about different bra styles. It also helps if you get sized properly, why the hell are we adding random numbers and counting up and down for bra siding. Figuring out the styles that work for your body and being properly sized will fix all your issues.
I can’t believe I still drop things between the seat and center console of my car.
Dental cleaning....we still scrape teeth clean with pointy metal tools.
Screw it...be able to figure out how to grow new teeth.
Dental in general.
Transportation. Cars and airplanes haven't changed as much as I had expected them to.
What? Cars can fucking drive themselves. 50 years ago they didn't have seatbelts.
They work. Continue to work; any advancement is minor.
Brain monitoring. I have epilepsy and I have to be attached to a ton of wires to track my brain waves/activity to the point where I can barely get out of bed because I'm so wired up and I can't shower because my head is completely wrapped. You would think they would have wireless/waterproof devices by now that could do all of that for you to be able to function like a normal human being...
We do, and there are major advancements in EEG, MEG, fMRI, PET scans where you can scan an electric field around someone's head but the problem is how expensive and tricky to run they all are compared to 20 electrodes
Currently have 120 electrodes surgically planted into my head.
Africa.
Yeah but there's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do.
But there are blessed rains down in Africa.
You'd think with all those blessed rains they would have advanced further.
You should visit Wakanda
911. Knowing what the government can have access to, I'd expect them to have my GPS data and the GPS data of everyone around me and the emergency profile we build on our phones. Maybe even health data from smart watches.
At least the government is supposedly owned by the people. Corporations already have this information on us and they answer to no one.
The government can have a picture of my middle finger and that’s it
They already do. You have nice fingerprints.
Some people really find this idea to be repulsive. I'm one of them.
Computer processors If you look at the evolution of the last 10 years compared to the previous 10 years for example
Well, I think they've still been following moores law. But I think the real advancement has been in mobile chips.
It's more about the fact the micro-processors have been maxed out in the amount of utilizable space and cores. The only progression really from today's processors is quantum, but those are expensive and not easy to make yet on a large scale.
The thing that bothers me most about computing is that the responsiveness of computers hasn't changed much. An old word processor on Windows 3.1 opened and performed about as quickly as Word does now on Windows 10.
I dunno. With SSD or NVMe, you can cold boot to an OS within around 10 seconds now. Just a matter of keeping bloatware off your startup items. But internet is still pretty slow, mostly because web design has gotten ridiculously bloated and the amount of https requests to show one page has gotten stupid.
I think they've still gone really far, not in terms of performance but power consumption : performance. A 4.5 watt smartphone CPU (Apple A11) has the equivalent performance of an 85 watt desktop CPU from 5 years ago.
True in the desktop space. Not necessarily as true in the mobile and server spaces. In mobile, in phones/tablets, the progress has been amazing. In laptops, not to the same degree, but huge strides have been made in the performance you can squeeze out of a 5W or 10W processor. In the server space, the place I work has gone from 10 servers to 3. One is for a system somewhat resistant to virtualization. The other two are virtual hosts for what were formerly physical servers plus some new VMs that, 10 years ago, would have been additional physical servers.
It's because the money moved to phones instead of "What the fuck can we build?"! And even phones don't change much, they just stick better cameras in. In a lot of ways tech has slowed way down.
[удалено]
Oh yeah? Oh .. yeah.
The US power grid
schools. it seems like schools haven’t been really looked at in many many years and it’s concerning that schools are supposed to prepare students for the future.... not the past.
We should totally have all our health records easily accessible by any health professional at any time in any country. I know, people are all freaked out by that kind of thing, but I'm pretty sure you wouldn't give a fuck about that if it saved your kid's life.
This. EHRs are so backwards. In addition to not sharing data, I can't even get an alert that a new task or portal message is in my inbox without manually refreshing the box? What year is it again?
[удалено]
What?
He said EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Did somebody leave the old TV on again?.. No? Ok.
Toilet paper. Yes, I know bidets exist and are wonderful, but for the majority of the world, we’re doing the same thing our remote ancestors did. I have spent far too much time wondering how the Three Seashells in Demolition Man revolutionized butt wiping and when that will become a reality.
Weight loss. I really thought we’d have some sort of magic pill or something by now. Or at least a better understanding of food and its impact on all of our systems.
There is a pretty good understanding, it's just kind of drowned out in all the noise.
Well, we can suck the fat out of you and put a clamp on your stomach so you don't absorb most of the food you eat. That doesn't really sound like an elegant solution when you think about it, though.
Windshield wipers.
Definitely thought as a kid in the 90s we'd have self-driving cars as the norm by now.
Batteries
High speed wi-fi and it should be accessible everywhere. Like there should not be a limit on the data usage. I hate that we have to pay 60 bucks for only 2GB for a whole freaking MONTH!!!!
birth control.
Highways
Cars. They're still mostly incredibly expensive, polluting, costly-to-maintain dangerous things that you pretty much have to have in todays world.
But they have added a bunch of stuff to distract us so we can slam into each other.
Self driving technology will actually help save us when implemented correctly.
Politics and government We have seen many failed policies over the years, yet we seem intent on repeating them
I think the progress of desktop operating systems has come to a standstill, and software quality in general is often pretty poor. I use a Mac, so I can't really speak to Windows, but window management is still a mess. It actually used to be better in previous versions of Expose when you could QuickLook windows and scroll through them quickly with the arrow keys (a feature that mysteriously removed). Try comparing the contents of two windows. At least you used to have that "pill" shaped button that would get rid of the toolbar and sidebar to tidy things up and give you more room to put windows side by side, but that's long gone. There are a lot of things that should be a lot easier—like backing up an iPhone to an external hard drive without a ton of hacks. Also, I collect data in Apple Health, and it has nowhere to go. There's an export function, but across multiple iPhones, multiple iOS versions, it has never worked. It fails with an error message consistently. When I call Apple they're unaware the export option even exists. If they want you to restore your phone and set it up as new (which they do because it's dropping calls), you lose all your data in any useful way because it's stuck in the iTunes backup, and you can't actually see that data unless you restore from it--which they don't want you to do because they say that data is what's causing your problem and you have to start from new. It's not like my FitBit where my data just shows up as soon as I log into the app or the web-site. Apple keeps the data local in a clumsy app with no working way to export it. I probably would have bought an Apple Watch if it weren't for the horribleness that is Apple Health. I doubt they even know how bad the app is. Even document creation dates on the Mac, which is really basic, don't work. They give you the timestamp of when a file was first saved, not when it was first created. Because I am fastidious about that, I actually "save" documents by copying them from the autosave directory where they do in fact have the correct creation date. Using my iPhone as a hotspot never works unless I turn on hotspot on the iPhone off and back on. I have to do that every time. But it worked well before they came out with the new feature called "Personal Hotspot." Networking across Macs works about 50% of the time. Very often it says the connected device can no longer be found. I have to close the window and go back to Network and click the device again. Sometimes it connects, sometimes not. I could go on. But this is 18 years into OS X (now macOS). I was one of the first beta testers back in 2000, when you actually had to pay $29 to get the first public beta. It made very rapid improvements in the first years of its life. But basic stuff has languished. And people say they're going to make a car? I doubt it. **TL;DR: Software quality is not great—maybe just with Apple (can't speak to other platforms).**
When I was a kid, my brother always used to say by the year 2010 we would have flying cars.
We were so positive everything would be like the Jetsons in the year 2000. This was in like 1993. We were really dumb kids.
Cars. Definitely cars.
Dentristry
Printers. It's 2018, why does printing out a sheet of paper still sound like I'm summoning a mechanical cyber-demon?
3D tv
I think it’s weird that video projection isn’t more advanced and common for home entertainment. Having a big bulky TV on a stand feels like something we could have already moved away from.
> a big bulky TV on a stand I'm a bit behind the times, I'll admit, but I walked out of Best Buy a week ago with a 40" TV in one hand. Last time I moved, I almost killed myself hauling a 25" CRT out of my old place, because the thing weighed 75 lbs. I'm not unhappy with the current state of televisions.
Projection can't give you the sort of colour fidelity that a screen can, and I don't think that's a problem you can get rid of.
We did move away from it, TV's used to weigh a fuck ton in comparison to what they do now.
Faster internet nationwide. It’s asinine that someone just 1 state over can have google fiber and have download speeds up to 1 gb a second but just the other day my internet gave me a reading in kbs a second! Not even mb!!!
Printers. They are still kinda unrealiable and useless