Phones encrypt the data by default, your password or pin is also needed to authorise the connection with a computer.

However, many people do insecure things like storing passwords etc in Notes applications, or having simple PINs that are easy to guess, don’t update their devices, or even turning off security features (if they can) because they won’t take a small amount of time to understand them.

Don’t mean this rudely, struggling to find a way that doesn’t sound condescending because I know things can be different in different regions. Didn’t realise that still happened.

In my experience all of this has been done wirelessly for several years.

The risk of malware means you aren’t allowed to plug in sticks. For business use you share a document or wirelessly connect to a display.

In fact our local library didn’t USB sticks eight years ago when I was researching our family tree.

An interesting point not touched upon is that the types of people using USB sticks has changed. Because the use of technology filters down from tech savvy, to general population, to people late to the scene or can’t change.

We are in that last stage now. They are buying by price and so easier to take advantage of.

But the UI hasn’t been finalised yet?

I’m uncertain about this. It doesn’t seem much different than things like Inoreader and seems to lack as comprehensive a search.

Remember fuel cells? One tiny drop would power your phone for a week.

I think the problem with every survey I’ve seen is that it does something like

<20 20-30 30-45 45+

Its strength was in running the same operation on large sets of data rather than general purpose computing. So specialist hardware would need to be developed for real time input and a graphical display (which would need to be able to draw the screen from the data the Cray produced. )

I think a better comparison would be a modern GPU.

A Cray 1 could do approx 160,000,000 floating point operations per second. A modern GPU can do 1,600,000,000,000 per second.

That makes no sense. It’s been repeatedly tried and failed for very obvious reasons.

Technically it’s very very hard unless you spend so much it’s uneconomic and takes too long to develop.

Secondly, its investors who were scammed. Yes they could have done better due diligence but they were still scammed.

I’ve also noticed that Bard has become “unfriendly”, if I didn’t know any better it’s got fed up with stupid humans.

This is so true, when you go there now it’s full of “reply guys”, gatekeepers and trolls. There’s little to no sense of community and the money grabbing is even more upfront and obvious.

It depends what country you are in. In the UK a retailer must accept electronic items for recycling (or provide you with the details of a free recycling service) The local council will have a recycling service (in most areas small appliances can be left out with your recycling bin). For items which might have a value there are companies that will buy them from you for a small amount and then recycle.

Please do not take them to a charity shop without checking beforehand as many cannot afford the testing needed before they can resell.

Why in these videos is it always someone so out of it they can only say the same thing over and over. Pointless waste of time

Good question, I was thinking about this the other day. The reason being that development of several fediverse apps has seemingly stalled because the previously active developers have life issues. (I’m not moaning about it, just a straightforward account)

It seems to me that FOSS developers wouldn’t want their projects to be popular. Because that comes with pressure to constantly improve or expand and it takes up more time. So they start a Patreon or similar but that adds more pressure.

When projects are community developed then I see disagreements and personality clashes which increases stress for lead developers.

It literally says that it’s due to ageism!

It was you that brought up using computers. You didn’t say anything about learning or progressing.

As for certain age, I think your answer actually supports my piint that it’s down to individual experience rather than age. Consider a manual worker who doesn’t trust technology and will only have a basic dumb phone. They are technology averse but might be in their 20s.

Computerisation of the workplace started in the 70s (I was there) and by the mid 80s was commonplace. Even shops were installing computerised systems then, even if it was a standalone register with a number of preset department numbers. A conservative estimate is that the majority of people working and living from 1990 onwards would have experience of computers whether at work, in shops, at the bank, in the car or public transport or at home. Let’s be generous and say they retired in 2000 at age 60 (will be higher in most countries) after ten years of familiarity then they’d be over 80 now.

And yet we have people much younger than that who are technology averse and unable or willing to learn. Why is that? Because age is not the deciding factor but people’s own lives experience.

Have a look at the UN Global Report on ageism and how it affects younger people as well as older people. The flip side of stereotyping older people is that you automatically stereotype younger people as being easily able to do the thing you think older people can’t do.

You’re right that the UN is not always consistent but note that the Secretary General is not talking exclusivity but that more support is needed and that they are referring to new technologies rather than email which has been around for over 50 years. I sent my first email in 1981 when addresses were resolved in the opposite way to nowadays.

Excellent point

You are perpetuating stereotypes. They have been using computers for at least 30 years as they’ve had the email address that long.

What do you think this certain age is ? What evidence do you have to counter the UN campaign and the actual research? I’m happy to consider alternative viewpoints. Is this something that just seems logical to you?

This is another example of ageism. The key characteristic here is not that they are older but they use an ISP provided email address. They could be 24 with an ISPaccount they’ve used for ten years.

It’s also an example of media stereotyping older people as somehow being affected more, implying they can’t/won’t switch, are somehow not savvy enough with technology to cope and to be less capable.

Look at it this way. If you’ve had an email address for 30 years. How many times did they move house or change car or change phone number. Did they cope with that? Of course they did. And it’s more disruptive when you move physically

The UN is campaigning to stop older people being stigmatised as set in their ways, unable to cop and technologically disadvantaged. Not only does it penalise older people but distracts from the real issue. The issue here isn’t their age but the lack of portability of email addresses which are used as a means of identity.