I think you mean "pole". Election day is over, at least here.

In Soviet Russia, source downloads you! In Korea, only old people download source!

Well, yes. I mixed a couple of time periods in my rant: post-Industrial Revolution and "a hundred years ago". I should have stuck to the latter. The first antibiotic drug to be regularly used in hospitals was in the 1890s, BTW. It was somewhat hit-or-miss, but as I said, we've had refinements since.

Ninety years ago, most of your family may have been large-family farmers, but if they were doing everything manually, they were somewhat behind the times; by 1922, Ford had been shipping tractors for five years, and they were somewhat latecomers to the game, as tractors and other powered farm equipment had been around since the middle of the previous century. And while it's true that very little rural area was electrified, most of the urban environment was. For farm work, a 1917 Fordson 20 hp tractor was not functionally different from a similarly-powered Ford or other brand of tractor today: it pulls or powers implements, whether plows or trailers, threshers or pumps. Electric washing machines were first introduced in 1908, and while they bear only slight resemblance to the front-loading fully automatic machines of today, their function is very similar.

As I said before, much (not all) of what has been developed in the last hundred years has been a refinement of already-introduced platforms. The hundred years prior to that saw an age of such rapid invention that it must have been mind boggling to anyone watching.

That may be so, but his focus is all off. I mean, he's working on a plasma cutter, but he hasn't got centralized waste treatment down. His list of "essential tools for a modern society" includes a 3-D scanner. While it may be very useful for quickly developing models of already-existing artifacts that you need to do a clean-lab reproduction of, it's a long-tail need. Arguably, someone with a set of calipers and a sketchpad should be able to produce a workable set of engineering drawings sufficient to build most things that you could accurately scan with a hand-made 3D scanner. It's folly, like much of what they're pursuing.

Having said all this, I laud the core idea of what they say they'd like to achieve. However, more analysis needs to be put into their plan; more requirements gathering and architecture is needed. For instance, they have their vaunted "power cube". If you read the documentation on their site, they're all excited that future power cubes could have electric motors at their core instead of ICEs, and other power cubes have hydraulic pumps in them. What they fail to realize is that they have two different types of object here: one that generates mechanical energy from some sort of fuel (lumping electricity in with "fuel", which I realize is a stretch here on Slashdot; please keep reading), the other that translates that mechanical energy into a different format. If they had fuel-to-energy cubes (gas or diesel or methane or whatever converted to rotating mechanical), then energy-to-energy cubes (rotating mechanical to one of linear mechanical, hydraulic, or electric), and finally a rotating mechanical-to-electric generator, these objects could be combined in a variety of assemblies to produce what they need.

And it's really not clear to me what they consider "modern society" that they're trying to reproduce. To me, any sort of development since about the Industrial Revolution has been essentially a refinement of capability, including machine-based calculation (thank you Mr. Babbage). Sure, if you want to build computers using silicon instead of tubes, that's much better. But our society and level of comfort could be no worse, and arguably better, if technology never got significantly better than we had a hundred years ago. How many of the trappings of modern society do we really need, and how many just make us more comfortable? How many things did we have a hundred years ago that we could re-implement with the benefit of hindsight and have a much better life than we have today?

Reducing the number of people on the planet, thereby reducing the number of jobs required, is one solution.

Can't decide whether or not I'm being sarcastic.

Hmmph... the "/sarcasm" tag didn't take...

If one of these things get built, American jobs are at risk! Stop them now! ... sort of...

Sadly? Really? Those things were getting difficult to maintain when I was in (happily crewing H models) in the late eighties. My friends at Little Rock, who were stuck with E models, cussed them regularly.

IIRC, the skyhook was featured in "The Green Berets" (1968). I've definitely seen it in some Vietnam War flick. At any rate, when I was in the USAF, as a loadmaster on C-130s, I remember reading about a procedure and rig for the extraction. Definitely a corner case, though, like JATO bottles.

It's mostly the same in the US, though I don't observe so much wanton destruction in recent years. I think the attention span of the U.S. youth has declined significantly in the last several decades or so. The Ex-Lax thing was an urban legend in my youth; I never knew anyone it happened to, but knew several people who said they knew people that were struck. You know how it goes.

Slashdot doesn't really publicize (or at least didn't in the past) how large their user base is, but you can get a feel for the daily readership by watching the numbers of people that vote in the polls (in my estimate, a significant fraction of the daily readers; I usually vote). So only Slashdot can subtract one number from the other and arrive at a number of people that, through ignorance or sheer lack of desire, don't vote.

For the US elections, maybe we should ask counties to publish lists of people who are registered to vote but don't choose to exercise their right to do so. Entitle the list "Conscientious Objectors" or "Enemies of Democracy", whichever you choose.