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Smartphones to die out within five years?

MLSS said:
We have to have it really. I live in southeastern Ohio. Nothing but hills and National Forrester. Our cell service isn't reliable enough to go without it.
If you need to call out (especially if it's an emergency), most folks outside of town need a landline.
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Problem with landlines, especially out of town, it means wires strung from lots of wooden poles. Very expensive and definitely prone to failure, especially in bad weather. I know this, because I was a lineman for BT for 10 years, on emergency call out, repairing wires, often brought down in bad weather.

To me now, the idea of stringing miles and miles of wire from wooden poles seems somehow quaint.

The alternative is to build cell towers on the hills. And that's what they been doing in Inner Mongolia, where you can be a very long way from getting a landline installed, and no mains electricity either. The situation is here, the govt. is paying cell tower build-out in places like Inner Mongolia, well China Mobile, China Telecom, et-al. are state owned anyway. But if you want a landline installed in the middle of nowhere, you got to pay for that yourself, i.e. pay for the wooden poles, miles of wire and labour.
 
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dan330 said:
home landlines??? do people still have those?

I have not had one in years..
my parents have not had one in years..
my friends do not have one in years..
the office I work don't have one in years..

landlines are a waste of money... and public telephones.. are dieing and disappearing.
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Payphones seem to have all but disappeared from the street, definitely. However our school campus has them though, and not likely to change for the moment, school rules, students are not allowed to have mobile phones.
 
Landlines are great in an emergency, but we were paying close to $600 a year for our landline and most of the calls we got were from telemarketers (even though we're on the no-call list). We decided that's an annual road trip and got rid of it... and we don't miss it at all. Even our home security system is cellular-based.
 
The_Chief said:
Landlines are great in an emergency, but we were paying close to $600 a year for our landline and most of the calls we got were from telemarketers (even though we're on the no-call list). We decided that's an annual road trip and got rid of it... and we don't miss it at all. Even our home security system is cellular-based.
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We pay around 200 dollars a year for ours.
No long distance. The only people who have our home number are our jobs and the schools and a few friends.
 
I run two home based businesses that are both tied to a long standing and published landline. :(
It has no long distance access and the expense is deductible so the cost is minimal. If not for the business link, it would have been tossed years ago. It's never used for private use. If not for the spam and a few new business contacts a year, it sits idle with an answering machine in tow.
 
I found something AI can't do yet:


The self-driving car, that cutting-edge creation that’s supposed to lead to a world without accidents, is achieving the exact opposite right now: The vehicles have racked up a crash rate double that of those with human drivers.

The glitch?

They obey the law all the time, as in, without exception. This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well. As the accidents have piled up -- all minor scrape-ups for now -- the arguments among programmers at places like Google Inc. and Carnegie Mellon University are heating up: Should they teach the cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?​
 
Someone is going to die as a result of an accident involving one of these vehicles and then all hell will break loose.
 
mikedt said:
Problem with landlines, especially out of town, it means wires strung from lots of wooden poles. Very expensive and definitely prone to failure, especially in bad weather. I know this, because I was a lineman for BT for 10 years, on emergency call out, repairing wires, often brought down in bad weather.

To me now, the idea of stringing miles and miles of wire from wooden poles seems somehow quaint.

The alternative is to build cell towers on the hills. And that's what they been doing in Inner Mongolia, where you can be a very long way from getting a landline installed, and no mains electricity either. The situation is here, the govt. is paying cell tower build-out in places like Inner Mongolia, well China Mobile, China Telecom, et-al. are state owned anyway. But if you want a landline installed in the middle of nowhere, you got to pay for that yourself, i.e. pay for the wooden poles, miles of wire and labour.
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Google is working on a solution for off-the-beaten-track locations... and poorer countries/locations...


http://www.google.com/loon/
 
jefboyardee said:
I found something AI can't do yet:


The self-driving car, that cutting-edge creation that’s supposed to lead to a world without accidents, is achieving the exact opposite right now: The vehicles have racked up a crash rate double that of those with human drivers.

The glitch?

They obey the law all the time, as in, without exception. This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well. As the accidents have piled up -- all minor scrape-ups for now -- the arguments among programmers at places like Google Inc. and Carnegie Mellon University are heating up: Should they teach the cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?​
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here is anther article...
http://time.com/3854528/google-self-driving-cars-accidents/
that is 11 accidents in 6 years.. with 1.7 millions miles.
and the accidents are from Humans hitting these cars from behind!

as I remember it... they are currently restricted to regular streets.. no highways.. and limited in 30mph.
so.. they are going slow.. to be safe. other cars are hitting them.

I don't understand your link.. here is a quote
"Accident rates are twice as high as for regular vehicles
  • Most mishaps are fender benders caused by inattentive drivers"

"Turns out, though, their accident rates are twice as high as for regular cars, according to a study by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Driverless vehicles have never been at fault, the study found: They’re usually hit from behind in slow-speed crashes by inattentive or aggressive humans unaccustomed to machine motorists that always follow the rules and proceed with caution."

not sure how they came up with "accident rates are twice as high"

that is not a true AI... it can only do .. what is strictly programmed to do. step by step.. and reactions to each stimuli.
anything outside it's box.. and it will not know what to do.
 
dan330 said:
like I said...
the google cars are not allowed on freeways... yet
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I worded that sideways. I just meant they drive like old biddies on the freeway, not that they were actually on the freeway, let alone actually being old biddies.
 
Humans 2.0: How the robot revolution is going to change how we see, feel, and talk

That gelatinous mass you feel coming to life inside you found its way into your body 24 hours earlier, when you swallowed a pill that looked unremarkable, save for its bulk.

But now this package of edible electronics will allow the doctor to feel inside your body without making a single incision, effectively taking the tips of the doctor's fingers and transplant them onto the exterior of the robotic pill.

---

The bot isn't static but remote-controlled. Using a live feed from the bot's video camera, the clinician can guide the tiny craft through the patient's gut, pressing up against areas of interest. As a way of moving the robot, Winstone is drawing on biology for inspiration and examining how worms propel themselves forward by flexing the muscles along the length of their body, something called peristaltic motion.​
 
Digital hippies...

Techno-skeptics, or whatever you want to call them — “humanists” may be the best term — sense that human needs are getting lost in the tech frenzy, that the priorities have been turned upside down. They sense that there’s too much focus on making sure that new innovations will be good for the machines.​
 
jefboyardee said:
Digital hippies...

Techno-skeptics, or whatever you want to call them — “humanists” may be the best term — sense that human needs are getting lost in the tech frenzy, that the priorities have been turned upside down. They sense that there’s too much focus on making sure that new innovations will be good for the machines.​
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That's the rub. It's far easier to predict what people will do if they have to stay lumped in a group and not be seen as individuals.
It used to be called "stereotyping". Once you start lumping people into groups, you expect them all to behave in a certain way.
If they don't, they are ignored, reviled, passed over. The other phenomena is "Helicopter" parents. Make sure your kid doesn't get lost in the crowd to its disadvantage.

I've been fighting demographics for years. I like my tech, but I will use it my way.
 
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