In another news about Kenya's explosion, authorities confirmed that since it is oil there will be no need to evacuate anybody in a 30 km radius like with nuclear. Also, you won't have to worry about increased cancer deaths for the next 20-30 years.

Marx described the mechanical forces driving human social evolution. Production relations are the infrastructure, they create a social superstructure. Each society evolves through a thesis-antithesis-synthesis process very similar to the ying-yang concept of Asia. So, capitalist society creates its own replacement: the industrial revolution that created capitalism has created the information revolution. Old ways of creating wealth are gradually being obsoleted. New ways are taking over. What the future society will look like? No one knows, but it will grow from the current advanced capitalist countries. A surprisingly insightful analysis can be found at Cracked: http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s..html

God makes them, then they find each other...

Smartphones will get to be so powerful everybody will carry all their work environment in one of them. Your employer will provide something like a dock with monitor, keyboard, mouse, lan connection, etc which youÂll connect to through a special standardized connector in your phone. All public places will provide such docks.

In the future smartphones will be portable and powerful computers. Everybody will carry a copy of their work environment in them. People will come to work and connect their smartphones through a special connector to an external monitor, keyboard, mouse, lan connection, etc. All their files and programs will be on their phones and backed up on the internet. And those phones will use some variant of Linux, some super-Android-like OS.

The program that decides under the current reshoring initiative if a factory stays in CHina or returns to the USA is an Excel app: http://www.reshoringmfg.com/Reports/TCO%20ESTIMATOR%20VERSION%204.xls

The problem is not the advancement of technology, the problem is the social structure, the production relationships. Our current capitalistic system is not fit for the information revolution. It was fit for the industrial revolution. Capitalism will start blocking real productivity, as best explained here: http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s._p2.html/ As the classics speculated, the new socialist society will emerge from the advanced capitalistic societies.

Why should you get to live in the country, pay super low taxes, and have someone else in the city pay super high taxes to subsidize YOUR high speed?

Why indeed? If you can't setup manufacturing faclities in the countryside just move them to China!

For a moment I thought I was in reddit. I'm looking for any connection in this article to a technical subject, any, well, I guess I'm losing my sense of humor.

The Human Being is a predator animal, that is, everything either can be eaten or can eat you, and our brain is organized to help this behaviour. That is why Buddhism has such a dismal opinion of human thought and searches instead for a direct, non-thinking way to truth.

In other countries we have this image of the American as a highly eficient robot that lives and dies alone. It sure is a gross stereotype but reading all these comments I realize it perfectly applies to a big sector of your population.

..have you ever read "Ficciones" and "El Aleph" from Jorge Luis Borges? Yes, the writer that everybody says has not received the Nobel because of his political opinions.

Great post. Also, Harvard was more about preparing the ruling class, and they do need the rigours of classical studies plus the brain cell exercise provided by math.

Thank God tunnel-visioned Slashdot people is not deciding this issue...where have you seen whole regions being evacuated because a gas plant failed?

It's called "Tunnel vision", which seems to abound in Slashdot. How dare somebody to criticize technology?