technology

7 years ago, my computer had a 1GB hard disk. It was sweet.

Now, I have the entire eastern united states stored in my GPS, down to street level detail, in a 1GB memory card the size of my pinky nail.

How times have changed.

9 thoughts on “technology”

  1. yeah well…
    my computer has a 3 GB harddrive. neener neener ;op

    and my closet has a 40 GB drive. (but I can't access it. heh)

      1. Actually, I was thinking a bit more along the lines of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001/2010 than Futurerama. Futurerama is funny because we don't live in that universe, if we actually did, I think it might be rather sad.

      2. My comment may have also been a subtle criticism of our national priorities. If we had sunk the equivalent amount of money into NASA that we have into the Iraq war, we'd have a base on Mars right now. Instead, NASA starves as the Defense Department wastes billions on technologies and policies that have already proven not to work.

        Granted, in the DoD's defense, they don't call the shots, the President does.

        1. If we put the money into public schools that we have into Iraq, we might have up to date textbooks in schools to teach with.

          1. Public education is a much more complicated issue than national scientific research objectives. The physical sciences have the advantage of not bumping up against social problems, which tend to be intractable in practice.

          2. I would argue that education quality has a larger, more immediate and lasting effect than individual research projects. Unless we get lucky and that's the $84 billion that cures cancer. Throwing money at the school problem won't fix it, but it will help.

          3. I really don't want to rehash the whole education debate here at this time. Note that my argument did not mention lasting effects in the least. You really need to talk to my friend about his experiences working as a tutor for No Child Left Behind.

            Technological problems, like space exploration, respond very well to larger budgets, since the people working on them have a good idea of how to solve the problem. The interlocking social problems that are affecting our society are harder to solve, primarily because there are major differences of opinion regarding what the solution is and how it should be implemented. Dropping large amounts of money into a system that isn't working could also lead to wasting that money with no appreciable gain. This is what had happened in New Orleans public schools (just to give an example) for decades prior to Katrina.

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