How many ways have COMPUTERS changed our lives?

[underpants]

Man could you imagine if back in elelmentary school you could cut and paste 100 times instead of having to write "I will not flick boogers on Marvin anymore" on the chalkboard.

You no longer have to fear someone you know seeing you porn shopping. Likewise there is the off chance of seeing someone you know nude. Bonus!

E-mails tell us exactly how much spare time people have on their hands and the proportion of whackjobs there are running around loose.
EXAMPLE


Microsoft word has elevated the amount of cursing done in offices by people who f**king forgot that the GD thing was set on motherf**king Manual Paper Feed :grr:


So how has it changed your life in ways other than these profound writings.

[XNASA]

1. I can make 100X more mistakes...............

...than I used to in less than 1/100th of the time it used to take.

[underpants]

7. I konw waht you maen

See Champion_Jack's post below, hilarious.

[Champion Jack]

2. This is one of my favorite quotes

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human
history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila." -- Mitch
Ratcliffe, Technology Review, April 1992










.

[Cha]

3. My typing skill has improved a 1000 fold since I got my computer

last year!

I no longer watch tv news but I know more of what goes on the World.

And most importantly.. I am part of a Grassroots effort to kick bush out of his squatting position in 2005 ..:kick:

[regularguy]

4. I now have a way to make a living

that doesn't include washing dishes. For that, I love 'em. In most other ways I hate the vile little boxes.

[underpants]

8. vile little boxes.

Very funny.

[SoFlaJets]

5. As a musician alone.......

it has literally helped me in so many ways like chords,lyrics and just yesterday it taught me how to play "Blackbird"a song I've wanted to learn for 30 years.My wife put me to a site that finally showed me HOW easy it could be.Then there is the little download sites that have saved me THOUSANDS of dollars on songs where I would go buy a tape or CD for 1 song I can now (shhh) just press a few keys and save myself all the drive-time to the mall and into a couples of stores and all the hassle and frustration...Thank you AL GORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!I'm kidding c'mon

[Snow]

6. Heh! Well, my field of employment/fun wouldn't being doing much

because we'd be working so slowly. I'm an epidemiologist, which means I diagnose and try to treat illnesses in populations rather than individuals. This means statistical analysis, big time. Our commonest tools are simple linear models - ordinary least-squares regression, logistic regression, generalized estimating equations. And when we're really feeling wild and radical, we'll do bootstrap/resampling techniques and maybe some monte carlo sims. Well, there are biostatistics professors around old enough to remember when that sort of thing was done by roomsful of ladies (that's what he called them; don't shoot me; and that's probably what their status was back then anyway) *ahem* roomsful of ladies who spent their 8 hours per day inverting mathematical matrices so some poor slob of a biostatistician could run a simple regression. Preferably without more than one or two covariates. Now we just plug that into the machine and chug away, answer comes out in more than 10 seconds and we're getting really impatient. In practical terms, this means we've made tons of progress in understanding causes of diseases in populations. Now if we'd get off some of our stupider mindsets (eg, breast cancer is hormonal, not virus-caused) we'd do even better.

[underpants]

9. Okay I understood about half of that

And I am going to wash my hands.

[Snow]

28. *chuckle* That's okay, underpants.

I think i understand you about half the time, too.....trust me, it's very useful stuff, and next to impossible without compys. Even in the late 70's - early 80's, when I was enjoying myself in grad school (no sarcasm; it was a very pleasant time) we had to do our statistics by feeding stacks of punched cards to a roaring beast, which after a period of time would puke out reams of paper telling us we had a period missing. Still, it was an improvement over the previous era.

[ProfessorGAC]

10. Not At All

On my planet, computers have been implanted into our brains for millenia. So, i haven't noticed any difference in my life. Now for the rest of your primitive species, you would have to tell me.
The Professor

[ProfessorGAC]

11. OK, Now Seriously

Since i do protracted multidimensional analysis, and teach others how to do it, i would have gone insane by now if i had to do every design, every iteration, and every calculation by hand. Oh Your God, what a nightmare that would be.

Also, as a keyboardist, almost all modern keyboards over the last 20 years are nothing more than a computer with piano keys. The sonic pallette is so much extended, and the cost has not been prohibitive for a long time. (Think Synclavier in 1979 at $120k. Then the Mirage in 1984 at $1900! 5 Years passes, cost drop to 1/60th!)

And, of course, there'd be no DU without computers.
The Professor

[OKNancy]

12. and online banking

is a wonderful thing. I have a business and I write lots of checks. My bank offers it for free.

[Pltcl_jnky]

13. I'm a government speechwriter/pr spindoctor

I thank my lucky stars everyday for the internet and computers. Of course when they are down I cuss up a storm because if they are down or slow we can do nothing...

[newyawker99]

25. Congrats Pltcl_jnky!! 400 posts

:toast:

[RebelOne]

14. The Internet

Don't how I ever lived without it.

[Don_G]

15. A Beer Can Sass You Now

Coors ran an Ad campaign a few years back; you popped the tab on a Coors Light and a chip in the beer can would tell if you won or not.

Somehow, I don't think that was what IBM and the high tech industries had in mind when they developed computer technology.

[underpants]

16. I doubt this was bandied about in the IBM boardroom either

http://www.gayspiderman.com/

Spiderman will make you gay!

[Friar]

17. 3,427 ways, approximately

:silly:

[ikojo]

18. I no longer have to go to the library

to read out of town newspapers..

I can listen to radio stations from all over the world...

I LOVE the Internet!

:bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce:

[meow2u3]

19. Two words: Democratic Underground

How do you think we're communicating with one another now? If it weren't for computers, there never would have been a DU!

[Interrobang]

20. If I had to do my job without a computer...

...it would probably involve something like sitting in a warehouse full of floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets, in front of an IBM Selectric (which I would bring to work myself rather than work on an inferior typewriter!), hammering out cover pages for the bloody documents all day, probably with four layers of carbons underneath. I'd come home covered in carbon black and correction white. On the other hand, I wouldn't have "mouse cramp." ;-)

Also, without the Internet, I'd spend a fortune on periodicals, and all my free time in the library (and since they moved it from its old building, it 5uX0rZ!).

We'd also (collectively) not have to deal with proliferating/splitting area codes and exchanges, because without computers, there would be a lot fewer fax machines and "second lines" into people's houses. We'd also still be using electromagnetic (not electronic) switching in the phone system, which would mean that our more rural members would still be unable to have touch-tone dialling. We'd also have more payphones than we do now, because cell phones wouldn't exist.

There would be more sweatshop garment jobs, mostly for cutters, because all those computer-controlled industrial fabric cutting machines wouldn't exist.

Cars wouldn't have computers in them, which might be a net bonus, because your car wouldn't be able to nag you "The door...is ajar...the door...is ajar," and so on; and those annoying musical microchip greeting cards wouldn't exist, either.

That's just a few of the ways things would be different.

[Skittles]

21. I HAVE TO READ F****ING TONS OF SH** EVERY DAY

I average 150 e-mails a day from 17 states. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

[underpants]

22. I'm glad you like my posts so much

Always love to get "positive" feedback.

:bounce:

[Skittles]

23. lol

:*

[americanstranger]

24. I can record a studio-quality CD, right here at home.

A little over 10 years ago, I recorded a CD for Wanrner Brothers. When the bill was tallied up, my band spent almost a quarter million of Warner's money.

Now, I can walk into my basement, plug in my guitar and get largely the same results - for the cost of strings and the electricity to run the equipment.

http://www.blah3.com/dot/den-of-thieves3.mp3

Not to mention the fact that I've made a living for nearly 7 years now designing and building web sites. Beats the crap out of painting cars...

God bless my computer.

-as

[Awsi Dooger]

26. Receding hairline compliments of PGA Tour.com Live Scoring

I bet golf matchups, quite seriously. For a decade it was rather tame: pick up the sports page the following morning, find the golf scores, and view from the bottom to top, hoping to see the bad guys first. My brown bangs survived nicely.

Then this Al Gore thing came along, and now I'm beholding every sickening stumble on every hole of every player I embrace for a given week. Especially thrilling are the final holes on Friday, when my guy is comfortably inside the cut line with two holes to go then finishes 5 and 6 on the two easiest holes on the course. You wonder why it's taking 15 minutes to post the score then a 6 pops up. My neighbors are treated to an oral evaluation that they laugh about when I see them next while chucking out the garbage, including my losing tickets on Fred Funk.

Sundays, of course, are a debate between TV torture or my trusty Macintosh and PGA Tour.com Live Scoring. Sometimes Jim Nantz will pop in with a humorous aside about my latest quadruple bogey before the internet catches up. Most appreciated.

At least the internet was not available to me about 12 years ago, when my biggest matchup bet of the year had Steve Jones ahead by 18 shots with 6 holes to play. "Even I could klutz in from there," I remember thinking.

Minutes later they cut to 13, and I'll never forget the description from boob expert Ben Wright: "Tragedy has just befallen poor Steve Jones. He has been disqualified for having two balls in play simultaneously." The details: genius Jones sprays one left on a 220 yard par 3 with a weird setup, no gallery behind the green to the left due to the dense foliage. Sure it's out of bounds, eventual US Open champ Jones tees another ball up in disgust and sticks it within 5 feet. Then a marshall magically locates his first ball, safely in bounds by 3 inches. Jones had not held up his second ball as a provisional, so he was DQued along with my cash.

[arwalden]

27. I Comparison-Shop Online Instead Of Driving All Over The Place...

... and sometimes I'll actually buy it online if that's the best deal.