Another year, another round of "OMG the PC is dying!" surveys.

We get the hint, market analysts. We've been expecting this for a long time. The sky is not falling. The PC is not dying. The computer market is doing exactly what we'd expect a functioning market to do under the current conditions.

Many in the tech community have been concerned for a while- quite a long while- that privacy as we used to know it is a rapidly disappearing concept. Year after year, they've been dismissed as alarmists, radicals, and so forth.

It is now becoming increasingly obvious that those "alarmists" were right. Whenever we interact with anything involving a networked computer, we leave a digital trail that can and will be mined for someone else's financial benefit.

There is a strong case to be made, from an environmental perspective, in favour of owning multiple cars.

Wait, what?

Conventional wisdom is that the environmentally friendly thing to do is to not have a car, or if you depend on cars, to have as few as possible. In many cases (indeed, in any case where you can get by without a car), the conventional wisdom is right.

It turns out, though, that if two conditions are true- (1) you depend on cars and have no public transit options, and (2) you need a large vehicle often enough that renting a van on occasion doesn't make sense- the environmentally preferable option may be to own more vehicles, not fewer. Sharing the largest of these vehicles (something that's very difficult under current insurance rules, but could be encouraged with insurance reforms) would make the benefits easier to achieve.