I see it less from a personal-self perspective than as a factor in the overall evolution of the society. A significant enough majority of ignorance, illiteracy (tech or otherwise), innumeracy, etc. can by itself dominate mainstream culture in ways that at the very least throw sand in the gears, and the kind of culture that grows out of that always has the potential to at least be suspicious of people who have unsanctioned knowledge, and possibly much worse. I don't see an ignorant society as something I can differentiate myself from as an outlier, I consider it a sleeping monster that might someday wake up and line people like me up against the wall. It's happened before and I don't think for a moment that it can't happen again.

.. did we not learn our lesson from Rise of the Planet of the Apes?

One might argue that learning to code on C64's, Apple II's, TRS-80's, and other 8-bit machines taught plenty of its own lessons about how to code efficiently, both in terms of optimizing performance (bitwise logic, integer math, lookup tables, etc. vs floating point, trig, and other high-cost operations on processors that didn't even have built in multiply operations, let alone hardware floating point) and cramming code into limited space (when 64k was a lot of RAM because it was all the CPU could address). In the old-school BASIC interpreters one soon learned tricks like putting the subroutines in first, with the most performance-critical ones right at the beginning where the seek times were shorter because the interpreter stepped in from the beginning when seeking any given line reference. The performance limitations of the 8-bit machines were formidable challenges in terms of coding well. I don't knock them, and if anything, I consider myself a better programmer for having experienced coding within those constraints and I wish later generations could have had that experience, especially seeing some of the code that's come out in recent years. The only thing I can think of today that's comparable is Arduino.

It's possible latter-day BASIC doesn't need such techniques to squeeze extra performance out of it, but if it's interpreted, somehow I doubt it..

When I was exposed to it, it had none of those things. But I did bail out of it rather early .. about the time Pascal and C first became available. It's probably evolved somewhat in the past 30 years, so perhaps you're right about its current incarnation. I haven't found myself in need of anything it offered over other languages, so what I remember goes back a ways. Which happens with people who've been doing this for that long.

How much fun would it possibly be if it weren't possible to save programs?

And if you could save programs, then the interpreter would have access to filesystem I/O. Which, I'd bet, is unacceptably "powerful"..

It does rather enable bad habits. It's possible to do reasonably good programming in it, but it involves knowing things one doesn't find out just by playing around with the language itself. (And it doesn't have a stack, or variable scoping, or any number of other handy things. And even C does for() better..)

Possible, I'd say. Not holding my breath, but this is at least benign.

Yes you will. Authentication that relies on a single factor has been proven time and time again to be inadequate. The most viable authentication methods have almost always relied on at least two factors, the rule of thumb being "something you have and something you know" .. the latter being a password, or a PIN, or some other piece of information you memorize. Until we can all do public-key encryption in our heads, passwords or other memory-based authentication factors will be necessary. Even if they take a form like "crimson, eleven, delight, petrichor".

Only a complete extrovert would find this idea anything other than absolutely horrifying. (Granted, extrovert-chauvinism is endemic to this culture, so it's not surprising this would be seen by major decision-makers as a good thing.) I cannot imagine any future where I would trust any real-world government run by any of the kinds of people who've been running things until now with any knowledge of what's going on in my mind. The moment they think they know what's going on in our heads with any degree of reliability, people start getting preemptively locked up by "precrime" units for crimes the state thinks they were about to commit, either in a genuine (if misguided) effort to protect "the public", or as a pretext for locking up people who disagree with them .. most likely the latter, in my experience. (And I'm not even going to open up the can of worms of whether they really do know what people are thinking. Being convinced they know and being wrong is even worse than actually knowing.)

Probably. The continuing value of being "connected" just for its own sake remains to be seen.

I'm almost as disturbed by this as by (3) above. There's a real danger in the cognitive merger of advertising and human interaction that, again, I'm not sure is getting nearly as much critical attention as it deserves because the type of people who promote advertising tend to be extreme extroverts who don't have much of a grasp of the self/other boundary. However, for those of us who value our own internal identities and prefer to draw a clear distinction between interacting with actual human beings on an individual level and the (increasingly intrusive) encroachment of advertising on those interactions, or for me at least if I'm the only one, spam will always be spam, because unsolicited messages designed to persuade the recipient to buy a certain product or have a certain positive emotional reaction to a certain brand will be intrusive whether they're personalized or not. And I for one don't want them personalized and indistinguishable from my interactions with family and friends. I want there to be a clear distinction between the two -- I want advertising to be honest about the fact that it's trying to sell me something.

One of my biggest concerns with blurring that particular boundary is that advertising sells candidates for public office, as well, and it uses the same end-runs around our conscious cognitive processes to make its pitch, which is one reason I'm not confident that more than a few people in this country really vote with any effectiveness for their own interests. The Tea Party exists largely because of that kind of advertising -- it's probably the best example I've ever seen of people being persuaded to vote directly against their own interests by messages that appeal to their baser emotional needs. Do I want that kind of advertising to be so pervasive that it becomes just like chatting with my friends? That, to me, is a nightmare scenario, and I don't want any part of it. If that's where the world is headed, don't say you weren't warned.

I'd be OK with having to stop to send texts. It's possible to set the phone up so incoming texts just pop alerts, so I don't have to touch it, and if the message requires more brain effort to parse than I can safely devote to it, again, I can pull over.

But navigation in dense urban areas whose traffic situations may evolve rapidly during the day is considerably more difficult (and requires considerably more concentration on route planning than I feel is safe when I'm driving) without real-time traffic data on a map app. I need a moving-map display with at least near-real-time traffic density info, because if I know a slowdown or a complete backup is ahead before I hit it, I can re-route to avoid it and not get stuck in traffic to begin with. (And possibly avoid a rear-end-collision situation that's put me in danger more than once when traffic abruptly stops.) Sorry, NTSB, but navigation is an entirely different class of interaction with electronic devices than texting or email. It's part of the job of driving. I'll dock the phone if I have to, but I need real-time navigation info anytime I'm not driving on highways between cities.

Exactly. There is such a thing as legal file sharing, and artists just starting out and trying to get their work in front of people, or those less interested in profit (and there are such artists), can and often do use P2P to get exposure and build an audience. Which the major labels don't like, because they used to be the only game in town .. they've been making money off of past generations of new talent and they're not happy at all with the idea of this generation and future ones bypassing their contract racket .. so of course they lump it all in with "piracy", and legal sharing of CC and public-domain work is "piracy" only in the sense that they didn't get their cut for "producing" it themselves.

As soon as their citizen's ( :p ) wake up and start following up on how well they're doing their job ..

CW is also a system that works with very little equipment, and often very little power, on the transmitting end. If you have enough of a receiver to pick up the person you're talking to, *transmitting* is often little more than some batteries, a transistor oscillator (of which all the parts but the transistor can be improvised in the field if you know what you're doing), a tuner, and a random wire antenna. If you're trying to get health and safety reports out of a disaster area, the ability to bodge together a basic QRP transmitter can mean the difference between news getting out and news not getting out when all the infrastructure is so thoroughly trashed it'll be months before it's all back online.

(I know of one county whose sheriff's department radio system was totally dependent on the base station for the radios in the cars to work. When an F5 tornado came through and demolished the building with the base station in it, they had to put a ham with a 2 meter HT in the front seat of every department vehicle. No, the cell towers didn't fare much better. 2 meter FM worked just fine.)

And Texas. (Although that one was a NASA photogrammetry calibration target, I think..)

Indeed. Doing it all server side just seems like cheating, somehow ..

.. can you ask Siri "where to hide a body" before a backend notification gets emailed to a detective at your local PD?

Which raises a very important and much lower-tech question: why would cartels be deterred by technical obstacles keeping them from identifying the real bloggers? Grab some random techy-looking guy off the street and kill him, and pin a note to him claiming he's a blogger with a warning to others not to report on cartel activities, and who'll know the difference locally? (And even if the actual bloggers are so thoroughly anonymized as to be undetectable .. that's got to make anyone on the street nervous about whether or not they're really anonymous..)

Because there's more to real life than tech ..

'“The thing that troubles me about it is [in] the preprint, [t]hey had originally had a supplemental figure at the end that showed the original results for the individual quasars they measured,” Orzel said. He explained that in that figure, the Keck telescope in the Northern Hemisphere seemed to predominantly measure the variation of alpha in one direction while Chile’s VLT in the Southern Hemisphere measured it in going the other way. “It looks a lot like what they’re seeing is coming from a difference between the two telescopes.”'

Very much want to see independent confirmation of this result, if instrumentation error hasn't been controlled for ..