As modern life becomes more complex -- and that's both complex in terms of both computers and social/government structures -- we are swimming in edge cases. Wh

As modern life becomes more complex -- and that's both complex in terms of both computers and social/government structures -- we are swimming in edge cases. When you used to interact with 4 or 5 complex systems every day, it was a rare thing when one was whacked. System designers got things working 90-95% of the time and the rest of it wasn't worth chasing down. But now that we're interacting with hundreds of complex systems each day, we're constantly running into oddball situations where things frustrate us. Worse still is what I call an "edge case tsunami" where multiple oddball situations combine to create a PITA or disaster much worse than any one of them would individually. It's an interesting problem. We can't make everything perfect to a 99.999% accuracy. The economics simply don't work out. To edw519's point, I think the way to go is to toss out the general purpose computer. Have a device for books, a device for music, a device for programming, a device for surfing, and so on. Not only does this decrease the possibility of a cascade, it also allows us to physically separate our technology habits.