I dont know about his area but here they are supplied by natural gas

Which, one assumes, also relies on pumps.

I doubt natural gas gets from point a to point b by magic.

They've been saying fusion is just a "few years away" for decades now.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Fusion could make all sorts of things possible, but it doesn't mean we're near making it happen.

Why did the perfectly spherical chicken cross the road?

To get to the black hole (or neutron star).

Seriously, can we get a can analogy (yeah, I know, imagine a perfectly spherical car, bastards! ;-)

And, then contrast that to how much controls were on the people who oversaw it, how well they communicated/knew the requirements, how often they changed them, and how much political infighting they did.

I've been on several projects trying to replace legacy systems. And, as often as not, the client is fighting among themselves, the definitions are either never nailed down or are constantly shifting, and the people involved have no actual experience in managing large scale IT projects.

I'm more likely to think this is a management issue than an issue with who was doing the work.

Ask anybody who has been involved in such a project.

I was on one project that had 11 PMs (no, I'm not kidding), all with their own agenda, and no two of them could ever agree on anything.

It was a truly terrible experience. The people in charge of the existing technology didn't want change and actively sabotaged stuff. The various stakeholders were all trying to carve out their own little fiefdom, the users weren't consulted until late into the project, and the specs might as well have been written in smoke.

The people trying to actually build it were constantly being told "no, don't do that, do this" only to have someone else say "why the hell are you doing this when we told you to do that?". Heck, I've left a meeting one day where everybody said "OK, we agree to do this", only to have a directive come down a day later which said "we can't possibly do that".

Combine that with vastly complex legacy systems nobody really fully understands, because it's been hacked, extended, patched, and a zillion other things for a few decades and you end up with a complete mess.

As I've said elsewhere in this thread, my money is on a failure of the owners of the project to actually take ownership and responsibility, instead of endlessly changing their mind and finding other people to blame. Documenting all of the bullshit becomes a full time job, because you need to CYA for when things go wrong later.

Some problems simply can't be fixed with good technical staff. Because the technical staff is just there to be yelled at and be scapegoats for management incompetence.

And, now they'll say it was all the fault of the contractor.

In reality, I suspect it's government infighting, poorly defined (and constantly changing) specs, and congress-critters trying to get a piece of the pie for their own districts.

They always blame the contractor but usually it's being managed by incompetent people without enough accountability and controls.

In fairness, I've seen a lot of legacy migrations fail, because it's often damned near impossible to understand the existing system well enough to write a replacement for it, and then you end up breaking everything which has been integrated with it for years.

I've been on a few large legacy replacement projects which fell squarely on their nose as the project progressed, largely because the system is vastly more complex than the initial analysis, and people make it impossible at every turn.

Oh, well then, why didn't they just say so?

I knew chicken was the universal standin for what things taste like, I had no idea it was also used for what things look like. :-P

Indeed, to all intents and purposes, it would look like a large neutron star.

WTF does a large neutron star look like then?

If we start getting regular turn-over of elected officials then the back-room deals, the special interest groups, the lobbying all become less effective as they're starting from 0 every election cycle

Not really, the former elected people just become the new lobbyists. Or the former lobbyists become the new political appointees.

And the cycle continues.

If the signal wasn't scrambled, all those naked blue-colored girls I saw on a TV as a teenager may actually be naked blue-colored girls... from SPACE!

I'll be in my bunk. ;-)

In order to compensate you for our insecure products and indifference to your privacy ... we're giving you more of our crappy, insecure products?

Wow, did Sony write this settlement themselves?

What a joke.

Of course they get measured. In the long term if they deliver too many screwed up projects, their superiors stop giving them projects.

Sadly, in my experience, they blame it on their team, and get promoted.

Bad managers are surprisingly good at making it look like someone else's fault.

So, it's legal for Americans to spy on the Dutch? Who knew!

If it's legal for the US to spy on Dutch citizens, then isn't it also legal for the Dutch citizens to spy on and hack into Americans?

Because, clearly, if it's legal for the US to do the same to external entities, the reverse must be true, right?

"No crime happened here, within our jurisdiction," they'd say.

Which would seem to invalidate pretty much any extradition treaty, wouldn't it?

If you can commit what would be a crime in another country, and there's no law against it, you can't be extradited.

Clearly, nobody could be extradited from the US to the Netherlands for this, so why should anybody ever be extradited to the US for anything? If the stuff America does is outside of everyone else's law, then obviously, anything you do from outside the US to the US is clearly legal, right?

Oh, wait, this only gets applied to governments when they skirt around their own laws, not to the rest of us.

Such bullshit.

It's not dead, it's pining for the fjords.