I can usually tell who wrote the code in the office by whether or not they put a space after their ifs: if(i == 0) vs if (i == 0); where they put their brackets, whether or not they replace their tabs with spaces, how they deal with bools: if (!var) vs if (var == false) and several other telling signs. There are so many combinations of variations no two programmers in the office (about 12 of us) have the same style.

Can you do the same after indent -kr?..

Use something like Nikola or Pelican with [favourite python template system here] to hit the sweet spot between hand-coding/frameworking and CMS. You can adjust any part of the look, feel and templating easily and you can enable customers to have a very easy/cheap way to get the site up, running and maintainable.

The trouble is, these systems provide very few themes and customers want nice and bright looking themes, they want ease of gallery management, etc. I set up CMSMS or Drupal with "pretty urls" feature, running on hidden site protected with .htaccess password. User changes everything on "hidden" site, clicks "publish" and my simple cgi script runs httrack and downloads HTML-only version of the site into its DocumentRoot. Thus they have both security of plain HTML site and features of full-blown CMS.

I had to switch from CMSMS to Drupal lately because it has much more and better themes than CMSMS.

Of couse, this does not work for dynamic content like comments and such, but it's possible to steer users towards Disqus and keep your own site HTML-only.

Hell, it seemed to require a new law...

May be, but that's not the point. Remember, we were talking about *technology* advances and not about politics? Today we have technical ability to "teleport" more than 50% of population instead of communting. No matter what economics and politics dictate today, this option does exist (and slowly eats real presence jobs).

And that's a lot compared with 19th and early 20th century...

Lastly, real Russians will not post on Slashdot.

I do, sometimes.

Why? Because there is no biological reason for a human to live for 120 years. Most women becomes infertile when they are around 40 old. So anything beyond 60 is really unnecessary in a biological sense - then you have had all the children you should have and helped them grown up.

You ignore the fact that people live in families. Thus grandchildren have much better survivial chances when grandmother provides care for them and teaches them while still young and much healthier mother gives more births and performs heavy house work. If older women had their own kids then they would not love grandkids as much as they do. That's why humans developed menopause.

l propagation speed in copper wire is 0.70c, same as it has been since Edison had his "A-Ha!" moment.

Yes, but at that time they had no IP packets, no video transmission, nothing. It's like saying that everything was invented by Carnot in 1824 and nothing has changed ever since.

I think GP was talking about physical commuting, not telepresence.

Well, if it looks like a job, brings real money like a real job and I'm able to do it remotely on other side of the Earth then hell, what's the difference between physical presence and telecommuting?

crop yields don't increase with more information at hand

Nonsense. Crops yield more when agricultural information is applied. Crops yield much, much more when genetics information is applied...

Travel times aren't reduced since several decades, and where they are indeed reduced, it's far away from what happened in the 19th and early 20th century.

Travel time is close to 200 ms as packets travel around the world from me to US. Thus, my travel time to US is close to the speed of light in many cases (not all, but many), that's a lot faster then what became available in early 20th century (and much, much more comfortable).

From a productivity point of view, the information revolution is a disappointment. Jobs get slashed, but there is no increase in the creation of actual wealth or value.

Uh-oh. There are about 3.6 million of programmers in US, almost all nonexistant 30 years ago. These jobs were certainly slashed during infromation revolution... ooops.

40 cars are not equal to one bus, because not everyone are going from single point A to single point B. 40 cars go from points A1,A2..A40 to points B1,B2..B40, but those unfortunate bus riders have to use several buses and wait for each bus to reach their Bs and get back to their As. And if you have to serve people at least 80% good as cars you much more than one bus. And of couse nobody does that and that's why public transportation sucks. Just an example: Moscow, Russia. Heavy public transportation, a lot of buses, trolleybuses and a huge subway system, often advertised as "transportation solution". Yet I had to buy a car 14 years ago, because commuting from my parent's home to work took about 15 minutes in car and an hour and a half on public transportation -- a bus to subway, subway, change line, subway, bus. A lot of time wasted in hot weather or freezing snow, waiting, waiting, waiting...

considering the amount of time it takes to board/de-board a plane

Just blow up one of high-speed train and suddenly we'll see the same checks and delays as in airports. Fast train network is not an answer to the problem of long security checks, TSA will happily expand to "protect" trains, sooner or later.

A lot of people don't want to see this. You can see the assumption everywhere here: those displaced workers will just find another job! Well no, at some point they won't. Automation is well on its way to eliminate certain types of jobs entirely and not all of those people will be able to find new jobs elsewhere. Even if they were to educate themselves, they'd come into a job pool which is already too small for the number of applicants, so at best they'd cause wages to go down and conditions to worsen (since corporations can pick and choose). That's assuming they can, which, especially in the US, usually involves thousands and thousands of dollars on something with no guarantee of a return on investment.

Well, this happened in the past, when people moved away from agriculture and they did not have enough jobs in manufacturing at that time. But that was inevitable part of growing into modern technology age. Automation is going to free the workforce for another purpose like internal combustion engine and agricultural science created workforce that propelled industrial revolution. Today only 3% of population is employed in agriculture and sun did not fall from sky because of that.

The latter is the real problem. A system where anyone can join anonymously and can have as many identities as they want will be overrun by spammers and jerks. Facebook has some pushback in that area, which helps. Facebook also started by getting people from big-name schools, so they didn't start with a loser-heavy population.

Avoiding spam is difficult, but possible. If default model is pulling data from people you trust then you can revoke trust if somebody turns to be a spammer.

Otherwise, the network is overrun with fake accounts.

If nobody trusts these fake accounts and nobody fetches their data then it makes zero sense to generate them.

But such system must be as easy in use as Facebook and that is the main Problem.

Basically, a post-industrial society will either unconditionally pay its citizens their upkeep with no strings attached, be a more or less horrible dystopia where that upkeep comes with submitting to arbitrary rules like taking drug tests or doing pointless busywork, or collapse in a violent uprising. And I think we all know which one Americans will never, ever, under any circumstances allow their neighbours, even if that means denying it to themselves.

Yes, and horse corpses and horseshit are going to fill all streets and we will drown in that horseshit. Linear extrapolation, huh?

Some years ago most of the population spent its time working in the field. Now agriculture employs about 3% of population. So, do these 97% of other guys starve or what? Did they loose agricultural jobs at some point in 19 and 20 century? Yes, they did. But they found another things to do and capitalism did not die. Now automation is doing the same to manufacturing that gasoline engine and agricultural science did to agriculture. So what? We'll need human jobs anyway until develop AI (and that's not going to happen in any foreseeable future). People will find another values that can't be produced by robots.

Stenography relies heavily on a highly-trained stenographer to do the recording, and on a similarly highly-trained individual to turn the record into recognizable English. Trying to use that for writing code, where you don't have the redundancy and patterns of English, is a bit like trying to use Swype to transcribe telephone numbers. Wrong tool for the task, period.

I wonder why parent was modded as +4 insightful? There is no need for "similarly highly-trained individual to turn the record into recognizable English" because transcription software (commercial like digitalCat or opensource like Plover) converts keystrokes into the text. On the fly.

Nobody is going to code at 220 wpm. But what about writing decent documentation? I wish I was able to write documentation, comments in code and emails much faster then I do.

Might as well use Chrome at this point, it's virtually indistinguishable.

Chrome STILL does not have vertical tabs. Unfortunately Google killed that feature a few years ago for some unknown reasons :( Otherwise I'd switch to Chrome immediately...

Side mirrors are useful nor only as mirrors, but they give optical illusion of car being wider than it is. If I have to drive close to the car with mirror I aim to avoid snagging the mirror, but if there are no mirrors, the error margin is much smaller.