westbywest

The "Soliton Wave" from TNG was very far down on the list of things I would have expected to see in real life.

Although the end of the Weimar Republic was essentially an electoral choice, significant chunks of the electorate by then had been skewed, divided, disenfranchised, or even displaced it wouldn't be accurate to call the elections fully representative. And yes, similar efforts are underway in the US too.

An underlying motivation to this new power-mongering in school district politics is that education is typically the 2nd largest budget item in most US states. The "troublemakers" despite their theatrics also as a category tend to overwhelmingly support schemes that divert education funds to private entities, e.g. vouchers, tax-credit scholarships.

The increasingly toxic politics (arguably by design) emerging around school board elections is very recent addition to disincentives. I live in a Midwest city where suburban school districts that previously wooed young professionals away from urban core now frequently feature nasty culture war fights, book banning, etc. It's notable for impacting generally wealthier households that could bear the expense of relocating to suburban municipalities with higher cost of living/taxes to access better schools.

60GHz wifi products are pretty common now. With the notable quirk of having difficulty passing through paper.

Probably the flexibility of that router having 3 MiniPCIe slots for the wireless card(s), from the standpoint of ease in firmware development. The cheaper routers with embedded radio chipsets range from very good to crappy support for open source firmware. But, few people are going to be interested in a 350$US product, when equivalent is available for a fraction of that.

MSCoE here. FPGAs have limited applicability due to their high cost per unit and relatively low clock speeds. They were all the rage ~15 years ago during my grad study, but then flattened out. Although, it does look like they're bouncing back, likely due to newfound popularity for mining, and cheaper/better product lines coming out. Cheap, embedded stuff based on MIPS, ARM, even mobile processors like NVidia Tegra, will probably enjoy an order of magnitude broader market footprint, however.

I diverged from a very similar career path due to layoffs spurred by my employer being acquired, the remaining HW design team told to promptly relocate to Bay Area, whereupon they were gradually weaned out by extremely large work loads. Those to made it were then told to promptly relocate to SE Asia. The layoff, in hindsight, seemed the most appealing option.

At a prior job last decade involving FCBGA packaging design for the company's ASIC, and I witnessed exactly this to debug ESD problems, etc. That is, prototype dice failing test would be ground down until a black spot was found. Very expensive design cycles, so lots of incentive to extensively model such issues before fab.