Apocalypse now
It seems to me that since humans have been communicating with each other there has been end times stories. I think perhaps it makes sense, from the beginning of our lives we are taught to accept that all things end. The seasons begin and end, people in our lives come and go. What is peculiar is that no matter which era we belong to there is a prevailiant belief that the ending is preprogrammed for a date in the near future. Some people beliefs are scary. Some otherwise quite sensible people revel in the idea of doom. There is something romantic to the notion of fire and brimstone I suppose, but I don't have this handle on it. These are asides however; the interesting thing I wish to bring up is actually none of these things.

The interesting thing I want to talk about is that god no longer plays a prominent role in the western world's notion of the end. A christian world's ending 400 years ago would have involved seven seals, four horsemen and a antichrist in a predetermined dance. As another aside I never understood why satan, a generally ascribed to be smart, cunning though completely evil fellow would go along with the apocalypse, it seems satan does not benefit at all, being locked up for eternity. You might think that satan would just read of his eventual demise in revelations and choose other plans. (maybe 5 horsemen?) Either way, we now have a belief that we will sucumb to our fate not by the hands of god but by the powers in our own. Isn't that neat? Now it isn't god and satan casting spells on scorched earth using us as pawns, but us just being silly. 400 years ago god, 40 years ago nuclear weapons, and 4 years ago global warming. Not to discount any of these theories directly, they can all individually or together come true, but the oenus is shifting from the ordained to the fallible to the mundane. It has also become a little less epic.

I also want to point out that having a god or not appears to not play a role in deciding how safe you think you are. I have read in places that having a god is a nice security blanket, I have heard other stalk about how scary having a must be god. I say it is probably neither, or perhaps a choose your own adventure.

The Legacy of  Standards
I heard while listening to a lecture on MIT OCW about the American space shuttleMIT OCW of a link tying Rome's technology to the design of the shuttle.  The story goes like this: the Romans built their chariots  in a way such that two horses could ride along side each other, allowing chariots to be ridden on them. When the Roman empire conquered England,  it brought the system of roads which was to be used by the English after Rome fell.  The roads used by the Romans had ruts in them , formed by where the wheels rolled across the ground. after the Romans left, the people continued to build their wagons to meet the specifications of the Romans, because if they were of a different width, the previously formed ruts would destroy the spokes on the wheels of the wagons.  This width between the wheels of  a wagon was carried forward when the English started putting railways though out the country.  The American railway was modelled on the English railway later.  The link to the space shuttle comes from the solid rocket boosters on the shuttle, they were designed to fit on standard rail.  Thus 2 horses asses helped design the space shuttle.

Of course, this isn't the only thing designed in this way.  We probably owe our base-10 counting system to our 10 fingers. A couple countries in the world still measure distance  with feet, the qwerty keyboard layout was designed to minimize jamming on early typewriters. It has been alleged that the size of the original CD was determined by Norio Orga's insistence that the CD should be able to hold Beethoven's 9th symphony, and at 16 bits and with the red lasers used, this corresponded directly to the diameter of the medium  and thus size of the CD's progenitors we have today.  

One thing that is apparent from this is the need to design with the future in  mind. When standards are created, they have a need to work today and be flexible enough to be useful in the future.

A current problem many people have today is related to how data is packaged on our computers. Each program has it's own file formats.  Many document formats are purposely created to be unreadable to other programs.  Some people only find this out when trying to allow others to see what they have made, finding it unreadable on another computer.  This is a backwards step in the usability of our devices.  It wastes the time of the user, and tries to enforce the place of that particular companies software in the market, by making other users purchase the software in order to read files.  

We need government made standards by which all software must subscribe to.

The software industry is not the only industry that uses these tactics, however the decisions made designing data structures are completely based on how well the said company wants their format to interact with competitors products.

Ignoring the annoyance consumers felt when technologies do not interact as expected, the real issue is retaining support for legacy data structures. As we become increasingly a digital society and retaining support for older file formats is problematic. Unix file systems have avoided the problem of readability by simply mandating that data be stored in text files, however for more complex data, text files are not as useful.