People sending you annoying emails with this method is not really an issue as anyone that knows your email can (and does) find easy ways to annoy you (spam, phishing, chain letters etc.). I do agree however that the user experience is a deal breaker. I'd rather enter a password than open a client and wait for an email to arrive just so I can log in.
looking at all those people, thinking how each is busy with their day, their plans, their hopes - then realizing all of them had already lived their lives and died, including the odd child also in the video... Nothing deep to say - this can be said about every old media showing people - just for some reason, perhaps the portrayed routine, this made me reflect on that fact
I've thought about that watching old movies from even as late as the '30s - that every single person I'm watching (scenes with 10s if not hundreds of people) are long dead.
Every time I watch old films or start pondering mortality I then think of life longevity augmentation which is probably going to happen in the next 40-50 years (if not sooner) and then wonder if a. I'll live that long, and b. what a shame it is all those people are dead.
Then I start thinking of all the differences we'll have when longevity comes about, such as being able to travel intergalactic distances, declining birth rates, and placing a higher price on the human life. It's an interesting thought exercise.
What about Youtube? Never in history could people so easily share their lives with the whole planet and it being archived very well (and searchable). Think about the impact it (already) has on the future, when people somewhere hundred years from now can look back at so much of human history in full color and sound etc. We as humans are currently recording so much for future generations. Half of it may be crap, but on the other side there's also a lot of good stuff.
And if you refuse to accept that the optimal solution is impossible to implement, you will forever try to build a perpetuum mobile rather than go with the second-best solution.
Absolutely - fair point and taken. The optimal solution for time & date is probably way beyond SUT: One could discuss months (12, why so), weeks (7, wtf?), days per month (28-31), ... I believe there are many ways to improve our current life. SUT is a humble and very practical proposal, as soon as you accept that standing up is at a different time in Japan than in Berlin.
Give it a try in thinking, you may enjoy the light feeling in your stomach afterwards.
Well, yes, but unfortunately, time is inherently non-metric. As long as we mainly operate on this planet, we have two basic units of time: the day and the year.
Now unfortunately, the latter is roughly 365.24 days, so whatever unit X you choose such that 1 day = 10^n X, one year will be 3.65 10^{n+2} X. Again, there are two choices (as outlined before for the case 86400s = 1d): Either divide the year into some arbitrary months (365 has the ugly property of being 5 × 73) or have stupid stuff at the end (apparently some cultures have 12 months of 30 days each and five special ones). So is it possible to implement a much better way of counting time? Certainly, yes. Is SUT such a way? Probably. Is it worth it? I don’t think so.
(And, again: The matter of timezones is orthogonal to the matter of how you divide a day, you can easily abolish timezones and still use 246060 – you can even do so slowly by using UTC as an implicit timezone with your social circle.)
((As hinted at above, this whole matter will get even more ugly when there are humans on the Mars and Earth – clearly a second (basic SI unit) should be the same length on both planets, but what about hours? Days? Years?))
I never really understood the appeal - I don't see that gives anything beyond what a simple tree control based UI can deliver. Perhaps it's a matter of taste.
This is a legitimate question due to speed comparisons I've seen between PHP and Python/Ruby.
Also, it seems like the obligatory "if you replicated their special and custom 'platform' in C and it exceeded Ruby or Python's performance by miles what would their reasoning for continuing to use Ruby or Python be?" People like the language, deal with it...
