Don't you just love those Dr. Strangelove references.

I didn't use to, but I've stopped worrying and learned to love them.

I do now that I've learned to stop worrying.

As we old cable types know, this has been coming for some time. Just as hardline phones have not gone away rapidly (the ability to have both parties talking at the same time is still a convenience for some people, that cell phones can't emulate yet), cable tv has a convenience factor that some people simply like.

And with that cable-cord-cutter attrition rate of 1%, that seems to me to be about the death rate of the human population in countries with cable tv (if we live to be an average of ninety, then 1.1% are dying each year), perhaps cord-cutting is somewhat of a generational thing?

How long did it take for landlines to go away? i got rid of mine 16 years ago. Several years ago i cut cable but i gave in a few years ago and reconnected because people wanted to watch sports.

It's been a slow burn with landlines, just like with cable. There was a bit of a growth in landlines in the late 90s and early 2000s when internet usage with dial-up modems was a growing product, and before cable modems and wireless data really took off. after that, though, second-line usage rolled off appreciably as some people converted to cell-phone only, and cord-cutters (phone version) started to eat away at the cable companies' and phone companies' client base.

There are still a lot of landlines in homes and businesses to this day, though. Ma Bell's distant grandchildren still have their core products throwing off a lot of cash (at least for now), but they've definitely noticed the roll-off in their subscriber base.

I call to your attention a series of three blogs written by someone who had the opportunity to interview Elon Musk himself before the writing.

I, for one, think that big thoughts, big visions, and big ability to implement them can't help but change the direction of humanity.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-m...

Interesting take on the internet as Feudalism, and everyone having to align with a king or a prince to protect him from other unknowable threats.

There is a blog which discusses how much of the internet is more like a digital bazaar - everyone shouting and no one listening to most of it (camels, get your camels here, dates, I have dates, and so on).

I trust I can include the link here, and as I am very new to Hacker News, I trust I am not overstepping some boundary by doing so. http://www.bfstransdata.com/digital-bazaar/

Maybe the internet is a little of all things - bazaar, wild west, feudalism, democracy, socialism, and so on.

It seems in the article there is a discussion that uses two different definitions for Moore's Law - number of transistors per "space" (and by proxy, size of each transistor) and overall computing power per "space."

When Mr. Moore put his law out there 50+ years ago, perhaps the concept of number/size of transistors was effectively a proxy for computing power, or perhaps even more true, no one saw a difference, or cared to see a difference between the two. Since Mr. Moore is still around, I would love to have his feedback about this- I guess, like Woody Allen's character pulling in Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall.

Enough of the aside, though: since 1965, much has been learned on the hardware and software sides, industries have grown and shrunk, and we are now able to have debates that - at least somewhat - bifurcate the issue of size/density of hardware from the issue of the somewhat more intangible computing power.

Moore was talking explicit about transistors, not computing power.

Agreed that he said that in his 1965 paper; research indicates he was asked what would happen in the semiconductor industry (which I see as "the hardware side." He was Director of R&D at Fairchild at the time). Per several areas I have read, it was after Mr. Moore reviewed his thoughts in 1975 that David House made reference to an 18-month doubling of performance of circuits. This leads to my question about proxy regarding what the thoughts were (or weren't) 10+ years earlier. Was there any awareness, in 1965, of a difference between transistor count and operating performance, or did this awareness come about later on as industries matured? I tend to think that without any history to define a difference, they would have been viewed as one and the same in 1965. I theorize that at that time Mr. Moore - as a young, 35-36 year old, Director of semiconductor R&D and quite intelligent, undoubtedly - focused on the question as solely about circuits, and not necessarily taking a wider view in his article about overall performance (however performance would have been defined at the time, if it was considered as anything different from transistor size/count/density) when he was asked to write an article about future projections in the semiconductor industry.