NYT is spouting every headline they can imagine to shift votes toward Trump, and not just lately. Their entire editorial focus is to cast confusion on Democrats’ prospects. They should be recognized as firmly partisan and no longer serving a journalistic purpose. Unfortunate, but that’s the times in which we live.

The statistic of low Firefox use is based on accessing US government websites. Could it be that there is significantly LESS government site access by the population of users that prefer Firefox? As a corollary I recently read that game companies observed significantly HIGHER bug reporting from Linux users on Steam, not because there were more Linux-related bugs, but simply because that set of users were more likely to initiate bug reports. Of course Firefox is not Linux and Steam is not the world, but a statistic from a relatively narrow segment of the internet should not be assumed representative of the whole.

Declining birth rate is not a problem that requires fixing, it is a mercifully wise collective decision by intelligent creatures who’ve become educated and aware enough of their place in the biosphere to recognize the destructive effects of their own overpopulation. The idea that declining birth rate is decidedly NOT economic - lower birth rate does not arise among the poor and uneducated in the world.

There is no problem in today’s world that would be mitigated by increasing birth rate. I live in a region where there is a burgeoning elderly population and sometimes people say - we need more young people in this economy! But that does not mean that having more babies here is any help: by the time they are adults, the wave of excess elderly people will be gone. Economic crises are far more immediate than generational solutions - if a region lacks workers, economic forces are more effective to relocate workers than biologically growing new ones. Of course, governments often fail to anticipate needs and adjust migration policies in a timely way, or housing policies, or other such issues that create barriers contrary to the economic forces.

These are some good points. The more traditional engineering disciplines have a depth of methods and practices that developed over time, and software engineering is - what? only maybe 50 years old or so? I have not worked with software engineers, but with all other sorts, so I know if there is engineering going on in software development there will be certain methods in place: preliminary designs that senior teams evaluate and compare, interdisciplinary review so the features of design that “work” for one objective also do not detract from others, and quality control - nobody works alone - every calculation and every sentence and every communication is documented, reviewed by someone else, and recorded permanently.

I can imagine that some software engineering efforts must bring some of these tools to bear, sometimes - but the refrain in software development has long been “we don’t have time or funds to do it that way - things are moving too fast, or it is too competitive.” Which maybe all that is true, and maybe it can all be fun and games since nobody can get hurt. So if game developers want to call themselves engineers regardless of whether they follow, or even know about standards of their industry (let alone any others’), no harm, no foul, right?

An old friend of mine wrote the autopilot software for commercial passenger jets - though he retired about 25 years ago. He was undoubtedly engaged in a project that nowadays would be dubbed software engineering. The aerospace company included him in the team with a whole slew of different engineers of all sorts and they did all the sort of engineerish things. But I don’t have the impression that much software goes through that kind of scrutiny - even software that demonstrably deeply affects lives and society. In a way this is like criticizing the engineering of an AR-15; what were the engineers thinking to develop something that would kill people?! But it seems like with software, the development has effects that are a complete shock even to the developers: facebook algorithms weren’t devised to promote teen suicide, it was just an unforeseen side effect for a while.

I think it is time for software engineering to be taken seriously. And there is professional licensing. The problem is that corporations are dubbing their staff as software engineers a lot of times, when there is no licensed engineer in the building and there are no engineering systems in place. It is fine for me to say that I engineered the rickety shelves in my garage, because I’m an engineer and therefore it must be so, but that is some sensationally bad logic. They could collapse at any moment - I’m a chemical engineer.

Thank you for this correction. I will make a note that professional engineering has nothing to do with engineering - I don’t know how I have been so confused for so long!

I think engineers have been held liable for the soundness and fitness-for-purpose of what they “engineered” since ancient Rome - though they have certainly been called upon to engineer a greater variety of things in the past couple of centuries. And I think if someone proposes to engineer software, I am all for that! We could do with a great deal more of it in fact. And let’s dispense with this perpetual disclaimer of warranty for merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose, and such terms. If an engineer designs it and it does not work, the engineer is generally held to be negligent and liable . . . except if they are a software engineer, of course.

this seems to reflect the simultaneous co-opting of the titles “architect” (one who designs physical edifices such as buildings) and “engineer” (one who applies math and science principles to problems of infrastructure and industrial production). We all understand what is meant by design, but that does not mean a software design must be devised by an “engineer” or an “architect” anymore than an interior design (though there are also some self-styled “design architects” roaming about). So is it possible to say what is different about software development and software engineering without saying the engineer is an architect? Is it that software developers do not design anything (which in its simplest terms is ‘artful arrangement’)? That seems arbitrary - though I agree that there can also be a fine line sometimes between, say, architecture and structural engineering.

How often in the software industry is the title “engineer” a sop to give applicants a flashy title; and how often is there actual engineering involved? When I worked as an engineer some years ago, it seemed inconceivable that software development would become actual engineering because how could the engineering standards of care and professional liability ever be imposed? Today, virtually all software is either privately licensed or open source - there is no such thing as public software infrastructure under the development supervision of a professional software engineer (as far as I know). So I guess Mozilla can call their software developers anything they like, but it seems to be an ongoing cheapening of the engineering title - like why not call this position Chief of Software Surgery? Lead Software Counselor?

You don’t have to use Google at all. They are pretty ubiquitous, so you have to make a little effort - search with another tool (I find duckduckgo to be quite satisfactory). Although Youtube has the lion’s share of the video, there are other places to go. It is the same with all Google products.

maybe you are a little short on RAM? OS and apps keep growing, but installed RAM does not grow with them. :(

It can be a hard road to stubbornly refuse to follow the path of least resistance. But it is vital that as many as possible forge alternative paths or the path of least resistance (Chrome) can become the ONLY path.

It is entirely logical to nationalize package deliver! We should have an organization that follows regular routes all across America and delivers whatever packages, etc. people need! We could call it something like UPS; maybe USPS?!

I get about as many deliveries by parcel post as by UPS. Nothing can stop the US Mail

The problem of democracy has always been the short attention span of the electorate. People make emotional decisions; “throw the bums out” - which of course it is sometimes right to be frustrated and take a new direction - but sometimes cooler heads must be allowed to prevail. We democratically chose to have that non-democratic institution, no different than various other government institutions that we put in authority over our day-to-day activities (police, and a whole range of other government “services”, even the IRS!).

You would think “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” -DJT Jan 2016 would have pretty much filtered the US population into two camps long ago. The “swing” population that is reflected in every poll since then is a gaggle of . . . I don’t know . . . forgetful? inattentive? I am trying not to be invective, no matter what.

Monsanto of the Sea?! This article fear-mongers vague “unintended consequences” as an ethical shortcoming of what they admit seems like a pretty solid concept for sequestering carbon - while never once mentioning the major unintended consequences of NOT trying to sequester carbon.

Capturing carbon in biomass is always a somewhat risky proposition by itself, because biomass can decompose and re-release the carbon. But even if the permanence is low right now, developing the skill of seaweed farming or any other carbon removal technology is a win - we can figure out how to increase permanence later as we scale up. No technology is fully developed at inception.

wha? I use Firefox and I haven’t seen or heard of Pocket in years.

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