That's the trend in technology, from very expensive to dirt cheap. The first box of 5.25" floppy disks I bought were single-sided, single-density and $40 for a box of 10. If my brain hasn't completely failed me, a SSSD disk gave you 130 kilobytes of storage, so the box represented 1.3 megabytes or about $30 per megabyte. The last 1.5 terabyte drive I bought was around $80. 1.5 terabytes is about 1,500,000 megabytes. It would have cost about $45 million to buy that much capacity in floppy disks back in 1979.

Technology... The only thing that keeps getting cheaper while getting better.

I can't wait to build my next machine with an SSD for the boot drive. The way prices keep falling, hard drives will go the same way floppy drives did.

I would say the final answer to your question is moving a laptop while it's running is fine. I just wouldn't drop it. If a laptop drive can stand bouncing around in a pickup driving down dirt roads, I don't think it's going to mind being carried from room to room.

It's not a false dilemma, but historical reality. The whole point of the original post was that nations with high levels of individual liberty are short-lived.

Man... and I was planning a really big End of the World party.

I built a "carputer" some years back that had a 30 GB 2.5" hard drive and a CD burner in it. The carputer sat under the passenger seat in my Titan pickup and suffered all the bouncing and jostling you'd expect dragging a camping trailer around the south. Never had any problems with the machine other than cables coming loose because of the bumps.

The machine under the seat:
http://ngc1514.com/Images/car2.jpg

Yeah, you had to climb into the back seat to put a CD into the CD player....

And the display on the 7" touchscreen:
http://ngc1514.com/Images/car1.jpg

I have carried a running laptop on a floor mount stand in several vehicles for navigation and, again, the bouncing has not affected the hard drives.

iBooks is the most used app on my iPad (don't have a smart phone... if it wasn't for the wife, I'd throw the Tracfone away).

Regardless of the time line... everything evolves and that includes societies and civilizations. Why would you expect the United States to be any different? That's the point Tyler is making. It's not the fault of the nation, but the result of human failings. Tyler was pointing out these same human failings have caused the downfall of many great civilizations (not all, of course, military conquest is also a pretty definitive cause for a society's downfall), why should we expect our own nation, with those same human failings, to survive when others haven't?

First ya gotta fix the people and no one has yet been successful in doing that.

The longest lived civilizations - Egypt and Ancient China, for example - have also been the most rigidly governed, the most tyrannical and the ones that equate the king/pharaoh/ruler as god. Personal freedom wasn't even a concept in those civilizations!

Is that what you want?

Not bogus, but misleading. For example:

It also encompasses those citizens who are among the richest people in the nation. I didn't see any actual numbers about median income comparisons between the counties won by Obama vs. McCain. Would you like to compare the median income of Palm Beach County in Florida to some of the counties that went for McCain in Mississippi?

Exactly. There is no Young Earth theory in any scientific sense.

Of course they make it. They are not making it as part of their own Young Earther science (such as it is), but as an absolutely false claim about evolution. It's a lie told by the Young Earthers used in a sad attempt to discredit evolution.

Do you know who Christine O'Donnell is? She lost the 2010 election in Delaware despite strong Tea Party support. You can watch her ask the question in this Youtube video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68g0MBO_uTM

Egypt lasted 3000 years. Rome existed for more than 2000 years if you count the Eastern Roman Empire. Greece managed to hang on for 600 years before becoming part of Rome. The Harappan civilization in the Indus Valley another 2000 years. England did ok from 1588 and the defeat of the Spanish Armada and they are still viable more than 400 years later...

Snopes rates this as Mostly False. http://www.snopes.com/politics/ballot/athenian.asp

Perhaps naming a few of these "greatest civilizations" that crumbled after 2 centuries might be instructive. I can think of a few city-states that fill the bill, but doubt most of us would consider them among the greatest civilizations and many I doubt people have even heard of.

It's all academic anyway since the world comes to an end in December as the Mayan calendrical long count ends.

(For the science impaired, that's a joke.)

Long term survival is probably less iffy for people like Swan than most of us. BUT... it's the short term survival that becomes questionable as millions of starving people flee the cities and towns to scour the countryside for food.

Yes, most of them will be dead in a month or two, but they will take a lot of those like Swan with them before they go.

How far are you from the closest big town and how will you defend what you have from a starving mob armed to the teeth?

Did you contact Samsung tech support? What does your user manual say? Can you feed the images directly to the TV instead? A model number might be helpful.

My LG Blu-Ray supports up to 4000 x 3000 pixels while the LG TV will handle 15000 x 8000 pixels.

"Could we survive?"

Absolutely not. At least not in the numbers of people presently inhabiting our planet. Malthus was right for the technology that existed when he wrote his An Essay on the Principle of Population in the closing years of the 18th Century.

He was wrong because he didn't foresee the advances in agricultural technology over the next 2 centuries. I think it would have blown his socks off to discover the planet could sustain, sort of, 7 billion hungry mouths.

But take that technology away and billions will starve to death long before the lack of medical technology starts costing lives on a wholesale basis.

Infant mortality in the United States in 1870 was 175 fatalities per 1000 live births. Today that number is down to 5 per 1000 live births.

Nope.. give me the 21st century!