What I'd really like with modern trends is more emphasis on "private clouds". I want to put my data on my own server on my own network, so it can be accessed from any of my devices around the house and over VPN if I'm out, but with the data always securely under my control and backed up according to my wishes.

This is easy for some formats, including plain files obviously. However, it's surprisingly awkward for stuff like e-mail, where there are plenty of relevant concepts like IMAP and mail stores and smart hosts and web mail systems, but actually setting them up in a useful combination if you're not an experienced sysadmin is quite a challenge.

Sadly, it seems even the best FOSS client software is dying out these days, often because "everyone has Google Whatever". As far as I know there hasn't yet been a lot of movement in the FOSS world towards having easily-deployable private clouds for e-mail, shared documents, and so on, which always surprises me given the implicit freedom, independence, privacy and security.

You might not have much recourse even if it's a commercial service you're using. Ironically, on-line back-up services are among the worst offenders. If you use one, go ahead and check its terms, and see whether any of those lovely restoration options they offer will still be there if they decide to close down on a whim. (Hint: Probably they won't, and all you'll get is maybe 48 or 72 hours to download as much as you can at the same time as every other customer they have is trying to do the same.)

If it matters, back it up on systems you control yourself. If it's private, don't upload it to anything, and encrypt the back-ups. It's really that simple. Then again, so is "make sure you back up your important files", and how many people don't do that because it's mildly inconvenient? Maybe those on-line back-up services aren't quite so bad after all...

I guess this bookends the grumpy programmer's 40 years later....

I remember what I learned after a year; then I remember after about 6 years, I realized what I hadn't actually learned after a year.

What happens if a grue shouts "xyzzy"?

I truly doubt there's a Golden Gate Bridge in it, but there might be a starship....

I suspect that most programmers who don't see the need for software architecture work within the confines of already heavily architected frameworks, platforms, and network stacks.

Thus their comments are akin to saying "I don't think we need an architect to help us rearrange the furniture and paint on the walls".

This plus facetime (and the lunchcart robot) now completely eliminates the need to get any exercise whatsoever during the work day (except finger jumpingjacks and stretches on the keyboard, of course).

Was this invented by a cabal of cardiologists?

Sure, that's why no individual bothers to do it, but if the world at large wanted to demonstrate if there was any merit at all to dowsing, that's the kind of thing they ought to test.

You'd think somewhere there'd be one wealthy investor willing to spend a few tens of thousands to scientifically analyze this.

It took me a while to parse your comment... as the IEEE is an international standards body. Then I realized that you weren't talking about nation states, but half of the party system in the US... and then was lost again figuring out how a standards body pushing a security standard for SAs related to political gerrymandering in the US. Did you mean that the Republican party of the US is intentionally trying to make the Internet less secure, and that an international standards body setting down guidelines for big business to follow when architecting new software designs would somehow annoy them because somehow people would suddenly be required to use such standards to develop software like SSL/LTSP/SSH/etc?

As a start, I'd say: pick 3 spots that feel right, pick 3 spots that feel wrong, and pick 3 spots via some randomization method. Then drill all 9. Repeat over a few thousand plots of land. Compare results.

Electric cars wouldn't use half the country's electricity, passenger vehicles' share of total energy consumption is much smaller than that. But I don't disagree with you that it's bad to waste power. Still, for a potential EV consumer whose turned off from EVs because they're lazy, if the choice is between "waste 20% more electricity" and "keep driving a gasoline car", the wireless EV is still the much better option.

If I'd stated that damage on impact was polynomial, I would have been technically correct, but would have drawn blank stares, even on slashdot. Plus, x^1 is polynomial technically. Squared would have been more accurate, but would have just made the sentence more complicated.

So I'll leave the pedantry up to the responses, and let people understand the implication based on what I originally said.

You act like there's no research papers on this subject. There have been tons, and the conclusions in each case are the same:

1) CO2 emissions would decline even on the US's current grid (which is, I should add, getting cleaner every year, while the amount of emissions associated with oil production keep rising)

2) On a generation basis, every region in the US has enough space capacity for a full switchover of the passenger fleet today, without any new plant construction, except the Pacific Northwest. Most charging is done at night when most power plants lie idle, but the Pacific Northwest is an exception because their heavy use of hydro means time of use isn't important, only net consumption.

3) The only thing that there's not enough of at present is simply local distribution capacity, to peoples' homes.

Of course, that's for a complete, instantaneous switchover, which is of course an impossiblity. Your average car is driven for about two decades before it goes to scrap, only a small fraction rotate out of service every year. And that's assuming that everyone bought EVs as replacement, which if course is an impossiblity because even if everyone was suddenly sold on the concept of EVs it'd take a decade or more to ramp up production to that level. And of course everyone is not suddenly sold on the concept of EVs. You're looking at maybe a 30-40 year transition time period here. If power companies can't keep up with a trend that's stretched out over the scale of several decades, they deserve to fail.

25 kWh per day? What are you, a courier? That's like 100 miles a day on average (including weekends), over 3x the US average.