Entertainment media narratives are mostly interesting when they are done for reasons outside of maximizing sales. You certainly can't blame someone for making up plots with just any old nonsense as long as the butts fill up the seats.

I wonder if the writers of penny dreadfuls ever tried to 'improve' the public in some way. There's probably a sociology paper in looking at older pulp fiction or movies made via the old mass-production system to see if they are aimed in different ways than modern ones.

"A lot of public services and utilities have shifted their customer facing operations to the web and the very people who struggle to interact with these services are often the ones who need them the most."

Well, that's the thing isn't it? Personally, I think I'd be happy, and probably better off, with an internet that consisted of email, USENET, and Amazon. (maybe eBay, although I could do without it). Unfortunately, the rest of the world and it's needs and addictions tends to drag you along.

I agree, in principal, but amazon's retail operation succeeds because it works and puts no barriers in front of people who want to buy stuff. One might think this is 'basic internet 101' but the majority of other retail sites prove otherwise?

That's an interesting essay.

It seems to me if desktop general purpose computing becomes a distinctly minority need, then the future of hardware design will bend towards that article's view. Large scale design and manufacturer of hardware platforms will be (mostly) exclusively towards central servers and to specialized devices on the edge. I expect there's an awful lot of legacy desktop design that will disappear.

My view of the state-level (golden) rule for cyberwarefare:

(1) Thou shalt not publish the goods on another country's elite else they shalt do the same to you.

It depends on the use case of course. Low cost with no other constraints is good for utilities, medium cost with smaller size and weight for vehicles, high cost/high capacity/small-light for portable devices.

Since the rest of electric cars is essentially designed, I'm looking forward to someone who really cracks the battery problem. It's a real game changer for a large part of everyday life. No wonder the car companies are thinking twice about building new ICE models, the world could change in a minute.

Question: Is there a graphable Moore's Law at work for batteries?

It seems to me that it would be difficult to separate those valleys from the valleys you see from long term cycles in mass human behavior...under/over population of labor for example (or under/over supply of prey animals and food plants).

Betcha that women tend to be protein deprived in hunter-gatherer groups, at least the ones where they don't get to run a bunch of buffalo off of a cliff. I should look around for a study based on dental remains.

I've always been amused by the concept of egalitarianism in tribal societies. Prison (or high school) should teach you otherwise

Those women were all nursing the children they had with the men, so the men had a strong motivation to keep them well fed.

Besides that, the gathering side of the equation, which the women were in charge with, is generally a lot more reliable on a daily basis than hunting.

> (Two other solutions exist...

Or using a monitor for the 'windshield' and cooking up some way to keep the camera lens clean.

> and cooking up some way to keep the camera lens clean

Put it behind a piece of glass?

And then itty bitty windshield wipers on the glass.

Dammit, it's like they have a different word for everything.

re: Unions

If a software union only existed to deal with the following:

. Pensions . Health insurance

I can see the point.

It could use the Hollywood unions as a model, at least partly. The Screen Actors Guild for example doesn't limit actors' ability to negotiate salaries independently but does allow for freelancers to get health insurance paid through employment in a larger network.

There are other benefits too. Elimating crunch without overtime.

That's an interesting point. I have friends in the movie makin' business and should ask how their unions work in terms of benefits, negotations, etc. The jobs all seems to be split into individual films as independent businesses so to a software contractor there would be a lot of similarities.

And open office plans.

Edit: Also, compile times. Get your C++ devs a goddamn build server or else even I'd join the union.

Here in Sweden, engineers are generally unionized (including software engineers) as Sveriges Ingenjörer (Sweden's Engineers).

The union negotiates minimum benefits, such as working hours, overtime rules, vacation time, pension contributions, and so on. The companies are free to offer more.

They also collect salary statistics (which you can slice by industry, age, experience, area, and a bunch of other stuff), to help you decide whether or not an offer is competitive.