GreyEyedGhost

Ah, sorry, I didn't realize that the Nazis sent all their prisoners to one camp. I guess those weren't concentration camps, either.

Why is it not?

I have a Win11 ThinkPad for work, so I get MS ads, Lenovo ads, and 2 or 3 versions each of Teams and Outlook. We use SharePoint, so when I open a file from there via the web interface, I don't want to deal with that BS for printing. Depending if it's Word or Excel, the button/link for opening in the desktop app will be located differently (or maybe it's based on editing permissions), but it never fails to throw a dialog saying it couldn't open the file in desktop mode and asking if i want to cancel or try again...just before the desktop app opens.

Some of these things don't happen every day, but they all happen every week, and anyone who doesn't see a problem with that hasn't used a half-decent OS (and I'm willing to include early-release Win10 in that group, telemetry and Cortana notwithstanding).

Why on earth would she have any interest in helping the company retain knowledge when the country that company is in has treated her so poorly? Move on and it's their loss.

"if we bank online, how come we can't vote?"

There are two competing goals: traceability and anonymity. Banking has strong traceability and no anonymity. Having both is much harder than having one but not the other. Traceability is maintained until you put the ballot in the box, and the security of those boxes are maintained by multiple people. Banks also have traceability, by themselves and you, in part by removing anonymity - you can verify activity in your account. Anonymity is vital to maintain the integrity of the vote - if you can't prove who you voted for, your vote can't be easily sold or coerced out of you.

"imagine how many more people would vote if you could just open your phone and do it"

Sure, good point, simplicity would be nice, but part of the process is verifying who is voting and thay they aren't being coerced. Do you have any proposals for doing that remotely? I can't think of any.

"why can't we vote on proposals like we do on Reddit? with their discussions"

We can have discussions about votes like we are, right now. It would be nice if more people did, and more policies could be easily read by laymen so we could do this without intermediaries such as news sites. And how to turn that into direct democracy, where everyone gets a vote, anonymously and verified? See above.

I hope things trend this way in the future, but there are fundamental problems to solve before it can be safely done.

There are 4 main bottlenecks in computers, and they generally take turns being the most relevant. CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage. Bus speed can also be a bottleneck, but that is generally factored in and we know how to make faster buses for the most part, using parallelization if nothing else.

Right now, for home computer use, GPU is the biggest factor. Good thing, too, because CPUs are plateauing, and will probably require a fundamental change in architecture or programming techniques to get past it.

I wouldn't say inevitable, but there seems to be a whole aspect of capitalism where doing that which is not done is the norm. So all those baby steps inevitably lead to a degree of rapaciousness that is hard to envision 20 or 40 years ago.

Well, that got a laugh out of me.

"How did we get here from there?" One step at a time.

Not all consequences are immediate.

And have an easily accessed setting to turn it all off if you don't want it. I'd even be okay with a physical switch. The short answere is, your appliance should do what you and only you want it to do, and you should be able to enforce that.

Or growing eyeballs in your teeth.

...where were your balls when that happened?