Drupal and Joomla do email and calendaring? Out of the box?

I don't recall Lotus Notes pre-IBM having calendaring.

Lotus Notes may well be the worst piece of software ever to exist

Lotus Notes was awesome before IBM bought it, and before the web seemingly made it obsolete. But replacements for Notes are only just recently appearing, such as Drupal and Joomla. That's right, what was called "groupware" back in the 90's is called CMS now. And Notes was decades ahead in terms of CMS back in the 90's. But then IBM bought it and its original vision was lost.

If the Copyright Act of 1790 were still in force, the first version of Lotus Notes 1-2-3 Millennium Edition from 1998 would have become public domain last year.

Some offices don't even bother with Ethernet cabling anymore; they just use WiFi. This was unheard of 15 years ago, when Slashdot users were no doubt grousing about their homebuilder's oversight for not incorporating Ethernet into their homes during construction.

I predict 15 years from now, the constant need to be tethered to A/C will be obviated, either through wireless recharging, through improved device charge capacity, or through increased energy efficiency.

SPOILERS

The spacing of the films -- every few years -- is supposed to be the opportunity for epic character and situational changes, for tragedy and redemption. Star Trek II-IV was an epic trilogy. Star Trek VI was kind of epic, due to the tie-ins to TNG and DS9. Star Trek VIII was epic. Star Trek 2009 was obviously epic.

The rest are just episodes -- everything gets resolved in a single movie with the universe completely unchanged. Star Trek VII was not epic even though Kirk died -- he didn't really die in a tragic way critical to the plot; he was just unceremoniously killed off. Plus it was a bad movie all the way around.

Thus, I liken Into The Darkness to Nemesis and Insurrection. It's just an episode.

I feel Abrams and the script writers were just rushed due to all the delays, and didn't have time to allow their collective creativity to be fully manifested.

Oh, it was a good movie. But it was an episode, not an epic.

No matter the number of digits in your bank account, in the end you're still human.

No matter how many digits King Louis XIV had in his bank account, he was still limited by the speed of horses for transportation and communication.

"Immortality" will probably happen within this century or millennium.

But then, we're ultimately limited by available matter/energy in the universe.

This is the first time optical observations have shown evidence of alien jet stream winds at work.

Jupiter is no longer consider "alien"? I take this as evidence that people have already secretly colonized Jupiter.

Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union

Synopsis from Google Books, emphasis added:

By the 1980s the Soviet Union had matched the United States in military might and far surpassed it in the production of steel, timber, concrete, and oil. But the electronic whirlwind that was transforming the global economy had been locked out by communist leaders. Heirs to an old Russian tradition of censorship, they had banned photocopiers, prohibited accurate maps, and controlled word-for-word even the scripts of stand-up comedians. In this compellingly readable firsthand account, filled with memorable characters, revealing vignettes, and striking statistics, Scott Shane tells the story of Mikhail Gorbachev's attempt to "renew socialism" by easing information controls. As newspapers, television, books, films, and videotapes flooded the country with information about the Stalinist past, the communist present, and life in the rest of the world, the Soviet system was driven to ruin. Shane's unique perspective also places one of the century's momentous events in larger context: the universal struggle of governments to keep information from the people, and the irresistible power of technology over history.

As I write whenever the topic of smartphone muggings come up:

In the 70's, people were held up for their watch and cash (remember cash?). Different decade, different stuff.

Qwest was the only telco to refuse warrantless wiretaps during the Bush era.

Actually, 1997, during the Clinton administration.

If you're doing stuff that upsets customers, you need to change your business model to sell ($) to customers what it is they really want.

Microsoft should switch to annual subscription fees for Windows, and keep patching and supporting Windows versions indefinitely.

It's time to retire the 1980 business model of software. Viruses didn't exist in 1980.

The most important thing to do at this stage is to set expectations:

1. What ERM will streamline (including headcount that could possibly be eliminated)

2. The investment required: the customization needed to match the current business process (or even more complex: taking the opportunity to streamline the business process at the same time). The investment is not just $, but also time for requirements gathering, UI mockups, etc.

3. Most importantly, the problems that can be expected: downtime (and whether there is any fallback plan to paper?), and kludges due to failure to capture all requirements (e.g. putting critical information in the "Notes" field).

In short, management needs to know ERM implementation lifecycle, not nuts and bolts.

horsepower-deprived 1970s

Um, no. Cars were unmitigated leaded-fuel-guzzling muscle cars (or land yachts, depending on your preference) until the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It would take 20 years of technology before horsepower was restored while keeping MPG high. And as you can see from that linked graph, the 1973's war effects on horsepower were not realized until model year 1977. And since not everyone rushed out to buy new cars at the same time in 1977, that means the vast majority of cars on the road throughout the entire decade of the 1970's were "high" (1990's level) horsepower.

It's those early 1980's cars that were underpowered -- follow-on effects of gas rationing and Nixon price controls.

Everyone has a theory, so here's mine.

The question is whether one has demonstrated the ability to make paradigm shifts: unstructured to structured, structured to OOP, 3GL to SQL, imperative to functional or dataflow. A gray-hair stuck maintaining COBOL or FORTRAN for the past 40 years has not demonstrated an ability to make a paradigm shift. In contrast, a gray-hair who has demonstrated past paradigm shifts should be presumed to retain the capacity for further paradigm shifts, until proven otherwise -- and furthermore should have a "seen it before" trove of experience to bring to the table.