Maybe for four-wheeled vehicles, but I dread encountering such a surface on my motorcycle when there's rain about.

Who covers leap years? (24/7 is sufficient.)

I already can't grok why anyone wants a "smart" phone that freezes and crashes all the time, acts like the NSA in your pocket, has no usable keys or keyboard, a screen that's like reading the internet through a straw, and generally has nothing but irritating "features." I certainly do not want a digital watch with no buttons.

Except those were rack upon rack of glowing hot vacuum tubes all connected by point-to-point wiring with cabinets of core and drum memory alongside. Very much individual components, with the vacuum tubes having to be replaced at least one a day. These were then replaced with racks of transistor logic, and then IC logic, all on little replaceable cards. All designed for easy maintenance and in the hope that customers would upgrade their systems.

Big Data wants to be Multivac, Google wants to be R. Daneel Olivaw, and now Hari Seldon has sufficient data to begin his work. Yet, as in Foundation and Earth, is a benevolent dictatorship by remote overlords truly the answer, or is there still something missing that could doom us all...?

Why bother spending time with "friends" In Real Life when they are only going to spend the whole time ignoring you, poking their thumbs at some greasy little cracked piece of glass? When did the world become this shallow?

I read that as discarding stuff for Windows 98, 2000, and other ancient platforms that have fallen almost entirely from use, and certainly outside the pool of what's tested: A good thing.

Sure, all those so-called "telephones" running on 99-cent "apps" are plentiful, like cockroaches, but if you're running one the million- or billion-dollar companies that let those awkward thumbpaint-smudge-laden gadgets actually do anything, you're talking mainframes one way or another (call them a "cloud" if you must).

Wonderful, the unusable interface of 'evince' (Print is hidden under a sun icon or a gear, or something -- with no known way to open the menu from the keyboard) now comes to gedit. Now editing a file becomes impossible too! Please, folks, follow CUA , the Common User Access protocols, with named menus we can access with Alt+keystroke or F10. Arrrrrgh! Stupid! Make it stop! Give us back our File, Edit, View menus and all the rest!

The routine for directory listing is called CATALOG (shades of Apple DOS, and Heath's HDOS); for deleting, the routine is ERASE (shades of CP/M).

Early, abandoned steps toward UNIX: MS-DOS 2.2 supported the SWITCHAR variable in config.sys; if set to anything but "/", the directory separator would be slash -- just like Xenix and UNIX; if set to "-" you would type "DIR -W C:/foo/bar" for a wide listing of what generally would be called C:\FOO\BAR

Furthermore, if you're trying to solve a complex problem with complex tools, you probably need to go back and think about how to reduce or compartmentalize that complexity. That's the UNIX philosophy: building blocks. There's no reason you can't use Perl (possibly with Moose or Mojolicious if you need them) for a modern project. No reason you can't use PHP or C++ or whatever you know, with the addition of a few new libraries. Leverage what you know, don't replace it.

What happens to all the people who live and work in mining towns? Murder the coal mines and what have you done to all the families and small businesses that, directly and indirectly, depend on them? This is a headline straight out of Atlas Shrugged... has the whole world gone bonkers?

If IBM punch cards were used, 1 GB equals approximately 47 cubic yards (assuming 80 bytes per 187x86x0.18mm per card) and about 70,000 lbs (at 2.42 g per card), so one standard railroad boxcar (limited by both cubic capacity and weight) could hold about 3 GB. 20 TB would need over 6000 boxcars of punch cards; at 60 feet per boxcar, that's a freight train about 70 miles long.

Hasn't chalk been banned by the TSA as a suspicious white powder?

It would be worth a ticket to see PETA protest leather at the annual motorcycle festival.