One small disadvantage: When I was a kid, I remember a HUGE stack of National Geographic magazines that stat around my grandparents' house. Many of them dated back to IIRC the 1940's and 50's, and some older still... I could sit around as a kid in the 1970's and leaf through them, no problem.

Would we be able to, 30-40 years hence, be able to even open some of these digital mags without paying (again) for the privilege of doing so? What if the website dies off? What if archive.org didn't, well, archive it?

Paper may be inefficient at many things, but even magazine publishers that died off a long-assed time ago likely still have one or two copies of their editions floating around somewhere (even if it's sitting in a flea market or antique store...)

This, right here.

Back then, anything starting with http:/// was good for news, yahoo (for search), early discussion forums, downloading something, or pr0n.... and not much else. Banking hadn't come around yet, and flash games were barely in their infancy (heh - I can only imagine what it would take to run Flash on that thing.)

Video, really? Animated GIFS often had better resolution and didn't take half a day to download. Speaking of download speeds, remember that DSL was just being rolled out - at a blazing 256k if you were lucky. Most folks still had 56k dial-up, and mobile speeds made 24k dial-up look good.

Apps? Really? Nobody except maybe Palm had any kind of mobile app ecosystem, and getting those apps procured and installed would involve a process that most non-geek users would likely describe as rather painful (we're talking colonoscopy-with-a-chainsaw levels of painful). I remember watching executive types blow hundreds of bucks just for one or two productivity apps.

Also folks, remember that battery life was 100% pure unadulterated shit (even on laptops - oh hell, especially on laptops). You were forced to balance between usability and battery life. Palm did it by staying monochrome and using a resolution that most folks would completely hate today. Not until around the time that the iPod Nano came out (with an incredibly tiny OS footprint and obsessive power efficiency) did you start seeing improvements.

I remember using an old Compaq iPAQ PDA... but with Familiar Linux on it instead of WinCE.

One thing I noticed, no matter the OS, was that you occasionally had to re-calibrate the stupid screen so that it was accurate enough to use... and it was a fairly widespread thing (I think only Palm had their engineering together enough to not constantly require that.)

I guess what I'm getting at is that not only was the capacitive screen a necessity, but so were drivers sufficiently tight enough to insure at least a modicum of accuracy.

Actually, I don't miss the stylus much. On a Wacom pad it was perfect, because its stylus detected subtleties that mimicked a pen, pencil, paintbrush... things like that. But, on a tablet or phone (or PDA if anyone remembers what one of those were), it just becomes something that actually slows down texting, gets lost easily, and is nothing more than a glorified stick.

WinCE and WindowsMobile needed a stylus becuase, well, Microsoft sucked mud when it came to UI design on such a small footprint - they figured you could just recycle the same UI framework and elements that the desktop had... and thus you UI actions the user had to make that only a stylus could accomplish.

Now if someone comes up with a stylus that is, say, bluetooth enabled and can detect pressure and such like the Wacom styluses did, then I could see where it would have some applications... but honestly, not much with regard to the UI itself, but within applications. Otherwise, even with large-ish hands like mine, I have no problems exhibiting a sufficient modicum of hand-eye coordination and just doing without a stylus.

Dude, seriously? I thought GP was reaching for hyperbole - you've not only reached for it, but have taken a double-handful. I'll explain:

Most of these folks participate fully in the democratic process (such as it is), and spend more time politicking and posturing than in doing anything that could be called combat training. the "thugs" in Eastern Ukraine are most likely Speznaz plants, and Nigeria is chock-a-block with wannabe warlords.

Never have I seen a more apt typo - funny thing is, I saw a commercial last night for one of those PC repair/registry/whatever apps that practically shouted about how "Microsoft is using fear to make you buy Windows 8" (as opposed to your beloved XP box, natch.)

It all ties back to why Intel is now (should say, now more than ever) casting about, looking for new markets for their chips... PCs ain't selling, server lifecycles are getting longer (VMWare pretty much helped stretch that out), and there's not much outside of those two which would encourage PC sales.

(I wonder if Intel will ever stop navel-gazing at tablets and fire up their now-dead Digital Home Group again; they had a fairly decent idea with the chip-in-a-TV thing. Fun group of guys to work with as well...)

They've been peaceful the whole time, and did nothing more than provide a presence and protest. The only difference between them and Occupy $location is the presence of firearms - none of which were brandished by the protesters, let alone used in a threatening manner.

Honest question: Are you terrified because they don't share your ideology, or what?

The Dust Bowl was caused by a trifecta of over-farming, monoculture (wheat), and a massive drought - not grazing. It was also caused by activities performed primarily on private land, so the comparison is invalid on two fronts. Methinks you're reaching too much for hyperbole to support an otherwise somewhat valid point. Also, why does the federal government have to supply this management, instead of by the state whose borders encompass the land in question?

Really? Because if the government wanted the tax money bad enough (which IIRC the rancher paid to the state of Nevada instead), they could have simply put a lien against the rancher's property and taken it quietly, instead of forming a wall of heavily-armed paramilitary intimidation.

It doesn't help that the senior senator from Nevada (Harry Reid) is egging things on and swaggering the whole time about how the feds will crush anyone that gets in the way.

I think the problem is in mis-defining the role. A DevOps can write code at a junior level, but you don't want one doing anything more than simple modifications and/or workarounds. He can also do most of the infrastructure bits of IT at an experienced level, but you should always have him in close communication with the senior security admin, the senior network admin, the senior storage admin... this is so that he doesn't wind up going all cowboy on the infrastructure just to recover from an outage, or worse, do it just to meet an artificial marketing-induced deadline.

What sibling said... I've seen companies that refuse to have a DevOps position, but yet hire "System Engineers" that basically do the same damned thing.

The biggest danger I've seen is in trying to silo such a position. I actually prefer having the freedom to whip up port channels on my own switchgear and having my own vlans/IPs to play with. I need free reign over an independent and complete environment for QA and dev use (so I don't have to put in a change request and then wait a week just to, say, add one IP addy to a NetApp SAN's NFS export ACL on some dark and early Sunday morning.)

I've done this job in a siloed company environment before, and quite frankly it sucks. You sometimes spend literal weeks waiting for one stupid VM that you could have cloned off yourself in less than 10 minutes, and configured in less than five more. I remember waiting almost a month while two different IT departments argued over how they would route a simple outbound rule over multiple firewalls whose path crossed the realms of their two departments... meanwhile having the devs wait alongside with me until the parties in question got done measuring their penises and found a solution (it took a pissed-off client, and a subsequently scared VP to threaten some jobs, which finally got them to STFU and work something out).

Devs and QA alike need someone who can quickly cut through the bullshit and red-tape, understand what it is they do (and more importantly, what they need and why they need it), and as someone aptly stated, "make shit work."

This, right here. I inherited the DevOps job title, even though it is exactly what I've been doing for years now. I can go in, find a problem, test a simple fix, turn QA loose on that fix, and even with change management, I can have it implemented far faster than the devs, who might fit it into their next sprint if you're lucky. They naturally get informed and fit a more elegant solution in for the next release (and sometimes they leave my fix checked-in just as it is).

Meanwhile, while yeah in a start-up company the developer(s) had to play sysadmin too, all-too-often they don't really know much beyond the basics, and so you really don't want one, say, tweaking HugePages in sysctl.conf, or planning SAN or VM Farm expansion for the next web project, or lots of other things. Similarly, I refuse to dig any deeper in code beyond the simply Python tweak or the obvious fix/workaround, since I only know enough to be dangerous when it comes to all of the dependency chains, not to mention all of the subtle gotchas in all of the codebases I work with (why? Because while a given developer may only need to dork around with (or even just only a part of) one codebase, I have to wrangle multiple projects - time demands that I prioritize what I know about them all).

It bears a lot of responsibility - you have to know what the frig you're doing, because downtime==money, and stakeholders will have none of it. On the flip-side, you're given a lot of leeway when it comes to what you're allowed to do in order to keep the uptime flowing. For instance, I get priority, where I can call up a network admin, security admin, or whoever I need to put through a change as soon as safely possible. I can order-up (within reason) whatever CapEx I need to build up for the next release, project, or what-have-you. Of course, you have to justify what you do, and if you do something stupid it's your nuts on the chopping block, but overall it balances out.

IMHO (and little else), I've seen a lot of sysadmins able to step up to the DevOps plate, but very few developers that would be willing, let alone capable (most that I know prefer to write code, and not get their hands dirty with the business of playing server-monkey or wire-monkey.)

Honest question - would doing this induce a population crash? If so, then the results could cause more harm than good (or would the recovery cycle be too fast to have an impact?)

...and slavery, and lack of medical care, the lack of a civilized global society...

Sure, you can go out into the woods and live 'off the grid', as it were, but you do so while being completely protected from invasion, wars, raids, and etc - about the only thing you have to worry about is the occasional criminal or two. You can also do so knowing that if you get an infection or suchlike, modern medical help help is not really that far away. Finally, you do it with a huge advantage in knowledge that the 200-years-gone man never had, or could have even if he wanted it.

It's a far cry from the life of a typical family trying to settle, say, Western Kentucky in 1814, where dying young (if you were lucky enough to make it to adulthood in the first place) was pretty damned common. ...they did get to see more stars at night, though.

So, before we make that pronouncement stand as incontrovertible fact, two things are needed...

1) where can we find a completely accurate (or even reasonably accurate) climate model? Even pro-AGW climatologists would shy away from claiming that they have one. Point is, the science is not "settled", unless everyone is agreeing on the mere fact that climate does change over time (which, seriously, no one credibly argues against).

2) what is the rate of change, and is is accurate enough to take action against? If we overestimate, then our best efforts may well over-correct, and we touch off a new ice age. If we underestimate, then there is little-to-no remediation. As it is, there's still too much slop factor, and the degree of confidence isn't high enough across the spectrum of scientists.

This is disingenuous due to the fact that you left out *why* life is better now than it was 200 years ago. Was it primarily due to politics, culture, technology, medical/scientific knowledge... what? Most of what I just listed has bugger-all to do with the climate. In fact, if memory serves we were going through a mini-ice-age around 200 years ago, which makes your advocacy of dragging down global temperatures from today's averages just a touch ironic, no? ;)

Investigate all you like, but do it with two caveats:

1) climate does change, and trying to keep everything just like it is in the 1980s (or whenever) may do more damage than just letting it cycle naturally.

2) before your investigations turn into actions, you'd damned well better know for certain what you are doing - making mistakes on a global level will have global consequences, and will last for a very long, long time.

That's a bit of a problem with slow-changing things like climate... a high amount of effort is required for even a short-term budge, and when you found out you gave it too much gas, it's too late to stop it, even if you let your foot off the accelerator.

Think of it like trying to drive a supertanker or uber-sized cruise ship down a very narrow channel... it takes a very experienced person to steer and accelerate the things safely through tight quarters (and they don't really come with brakes per se).

Carrying the analogy back to the climate, no one is sufficiently experienced enough to know how to apply steering and acceleration (or braking) properly and/or efficiently. Hell, analogy-wise, we don't even fully know what the currents we're sailing through are doing.