At my kids' K through 8 school, they had 1 hour a week of Spanish class just so the school could say they taught a second language. I'd just as soon they didn't have it. Not because I don't think a second language is valuable, but because I don't think one hour a week accomplishes much. Middle school kids had no recess. I think they'd be better off using that hour and lengthening the school day a bit to get some recess in there.

Further, the kids spend much less time on music, art, and gym than when I was a kid. Personally, given all the time that was devoted to practicing cursive, I'd say there are more important things that kids can be doing with their study time. It's not that I don't think it has any value, but to me it's less valuable than things that are already lacking.

I have no idea how many models of cars of trucks are available in my area but I imagine it's quite a few.

Just a wild guess, but I'd say anywhere from 40 to 80% of them would be unsuitable for our family due to cost and features, yet they still exist and many are very popular. What I'm saying is that the fact that an e-Golf wouldn't work well for everyone doesn't mean it couldn't work very well for a large number of people.

My family might be a good example. We live in a city and are are fairly close to everything that we need to get to on a regular basis. In fact, I ride my bike to work most days (about 6 miles each way). We have one small fuel efficient car that's getting up there in age and one mid-sized SUV we use when hauling more stuff, more people, or when the roads are bad.

We don't put a lot of miles on either vehicle but the small car is driven less than 8,000 miles a year, - under 22 miles per day on average. We very rarely drive it over 90 miles a day and could easily avoid it.

So essentially ENIAC is lost.

What's left is only a quarter of the original machine that's been turned into some light show. The other 3/4 of the panels are owned by other people or are gone entirely. While I'm not saying it wasn't worth doing or that it wasn't hard work, it's not what I would call "refurbished".

It's like digging up a skeleton and having someone rig up a motion detector to play recorded phrases and move the jaw as people walk by it.

Unfortunately there seems to be a period of time where things are just old and past their usefulness, - their historical significance takes more time for people to appreciate. I understand that a true restoration would be hugely impractical, but it would be cool.

When it came to the iPhone, Apple wanted control over the safety, and to a limited extent, the quality of the 3rd party software available. That protects the consumer and Apple. Concentrating all the 3rd party software in one place also made it quickly appear that there was an abundance of it. Further, it's an additional revenue stream for Apple.

One idea that's starting to take hold here is the notion of community solar. An individual homeowner may not have the ideal site for a solar installation, but maybe there is a place in the neighborhood that does. So a community solar project gets funding from many individuals that share the energy and the expense.

You said you own the roof space. Do you own the whole dwelling? Can you insulate the walls, attic, and air seal bypasses? Can you run a heat pump? It still requires electricity but not that much. If you can purchase petrol when it's available and run a generator (or photovoltaics) when it's not, that might be the ticket. Of course the more more energy efficient your home and appliances are, the easier it will be to function off the grid, - even if it's just sporadically.

Do you really need to run your own server or can you have it hosted somewhere else?

"You've had 100 years and still no flying cars? Lame."

I said nothing about socialism, - good or bad but I could spend quite a bit of time on both. My point is simply that capitalism has its downsides which you can either choose to try and mitigate or not.

Employers hire unskilled people all the time and pay them accordingly. Education and experience are vehicles for becoming more skilled. Increasingly educational institutions expect students to have Internet access.

There are lots of different types of people on welfare for various reasons. When you're poor, transportation and child care can be barriers to employment. But even if some people on welfare are just plain lazy, I'd like it if their kids still had an opportunity to be contributing members of society, rather than just continuing the cycle. Wouldn't you?

Alternative means of communication were used but were both slower and more expensive. And as I mentioned, more and more teachers want to use materials that are only available on-line.

I said nothing about eradicating capitalism, but like any economic system, it has its downsides which can't be just waved away.

At my son's current high school (and even to a certain extent my daughter's grade school), having Internet access at home is an expectation.

At my son's grade school, it was a different story. They had a substantial number of kids whose families were below the poverty line and for whom Internet access could not be assumed. I was on the leadership council and the lack of Internet access for many families caused a lot of difficulties for the school both in terms of the educational materials that could be provided and in terms of communicating with parents.

It is my opinion that poverty is partially systemic. Our economic system depends on there being a pool of available workers (unemployed and underemployed). So as long as there is capitalism and a functioning free market, there will always be poor people. That being the case, we have a responsibility to make sure the basic needs of everyone are met. Increasingly in order to succeed in school and in life, Internet access isn't really a luxury.

How much time have you spent scraping ice off of a windshield where it's gone from above freezing and raining when you parked your car to well below freezing overnight and sometimes even well below 0 F? How many times have you had to dig a car out of a snowbank? If you've had to do it over the course of a few winters you'll know that it's often not so easily mitigated.

I think people either don't know or often forget what a hostile environment winter can be in the the Northern part of our country. How densely packed are the sensors going to be in the road to tell reliably where there is ice, whether the ice is smooth or rough, whether there is snow and how deep it is and whether it is packed or fresh? How long are these sensors going to last when the roads I drive on end up filled with potholes each spring?

I'm sure it would all work great in a laboratory setting when every other car, plus all the roads and traffic control devices can talk. I'm not so convinced that it will work when things are in some state of disrepair as they often are in the real world.

The Newton is not noteworthy for being a pda, it's noteworthy for being a flop. Most notably the handwriting recognition. It was impressive technology at the time, but would often make glaring mistakes rendering it not so great in real world use.

Yes, but how badly does it degrade? Will it just stop if there is too much ice or snow on its sensors to "see" adequately. Will it just sit at a green light not knowing whether it's safe to proceed? Can it determine what the road conditions 10 to 30 yards ahead are and react accordingly?

It depends on whether you're doing it for a hobby or designing something you can build multiple copies of. It also depends on how important precise timing is. You may need a RTOS which Android isn't. Raspbian isn't either but there are ports of Real-Time OSes for RPi.

It sounds like the OP is looking for a long term solution to help the project move forward and attract new developers. A few of old timers might be willing to hang around and fix a few bugs or deal with security issues but that's just a slower death. And yeah, if these guys are currently getting paid by the company to maintain the software, they might not have any interest in doing so once they retire. Even if they are willing to maintain it, at any point on any open source project, there is nothing stoping anyone from deciding they're done. That's why you need new developers.

I personally have never worked on a single project that I was passionate enough about to want to make it a life long endeavor. Eventually I want to move on to something different. And I'm sure I'll reach a point in my life (or death) where I simply won't be able to do it anymore even if I wanted to.

And from maybe a more philosophical standpoint, one of the things I see as attractive about retirement is no longer having the burden of having to maintain anything. ;)