What's hated is the waste of everyone's time on a bad job of exchanging information and ideas. Powerpoint is merely a tool often abused to that end, and made into either the scapegoat for why a presentation was bad or excuse for why it was good, or both at once.

And those are merely neutral and boring meetings. If you think that's the worst, you haven't been in a really nasty meeting. Meetings often have hidden agendas. Most of the time those agendas stay hidden, but sometimes they come out, and then chaos can ensue. Meetings are the premier place where office politics moves into a gallop, and truly ugly meetings have people getting trampled. An insecure boss takes over the meeting to browbeat and bully people, try to make them look dumb so he or she can feel less insecure. Or there's the arrogant boss who won't let anyone else get a word in, and insists on lecturing to everyone as if they're particularly slow and stupid children who don't get it. Or there's the rival groups trying to cut the others' throats. I've been in all those kinds of meetings. I have seen people unfairly sidelined and put on a fast track to the pink slip, because of how a meeting went. The boss decides that a person isn't competent, but can't just up and fire the presenter on the spot, doesn't have enough authority to do that. And also, the boss is often wrong, made a hasty judgment. He's all unhappy that the presenter's plan didn't give a seemingly credible path to the invention of perpetual motion in 6 months time. Meanwhile, the bullshit artist fools the boss again, often with pretty Powerpoint slides, and gets praise. The b. s. artist can't do the job either, and knows it, he's only trying to delay his own inevitable termination as long as possible, and if that means someone else takes the fall that time, so be it.

Compared to that, Powerpoint's contribution is trivial.

I am for having a camera on the train engineer. But the engineers' union stance is a bit more nuanced than just privacy concerns. I don't think they give a damn whether the engineer picks his nose. Their concern is more to do with how people react under stressful situations when snap decisions are required. Knowing that your every move is being recorded and will be intensely scrutinized after the fact can alter those decisions.

The best recent example is probably the Fukushima nuclear plant. The manager had it within his power to dump seawater into the reactor early on, and avert what would eventually become only the second INES level 7 emergency in history. But dumping in seawater would've destroyed the billion dollar reactor - an act which was sure to invite intense scrutiny into his decision from company and regulatory officials. He was so afraid of making a bad decision, that he ended up making no decision. He instead chose to believe the signs that the reactor fuel rods were not melting down, thus requiring him not to make that fateful decision. Until it was obvious they had melted, and it was too late for the seawater option.

I often what would've happened if he had decided to dump in seawater in time. It's doubtful he would've been hailed as a hero as we know in hindslight. There would have been no melted fuel rods, no radiation released. Instead the spectre of a catastrophe would've only been a probability-based best guess. Contrast that with the certainty that he'd destroyed a billion dollar reactor. In all likelihood he would he have been disciplined or fired by TEPCO for making a "rash" decision which cost the company a billion dollars.

> If the network infra-structure allows for POS to connect to the Internet at large

If it can't reach "the Internet at large", then it has to use modems and modem based access for credit card and debit card transactions. This is relatively slow, fragile, and expensive per transaction. Such devices are almost completely gone. Sadly, Windows XP is still commonly used on point-of-sale terminals. A typical vendor, like the one below, has _no_ Windows * based systems and supports only Windows XP and Windows 7.

                http://www.barcodesinc.com/p/

> This is what happens when you have employees who think they have a god given right to surf the internet

Or when you have an employer mandate to check employee email about store policies, schedules, delivery dates, and inventory, verifying store hours for other branches, verifying alternative vendor prices for price matching, checking the weather for a customer buying exterior paint, looking up a product review or product specifications with a customer, or any of a dozen other uses. It is _embarrassing_ for a modern vendor to be unable to work with a customer checking the same information that the customer can obtain at home on their home computer, or to be unable to print out the specifications for a product that the vendor sells.

Such terminals have become quite common and are much more necessary now that customers expect one store to be able to verify inventory or reserve an item before proceeding to another physical store. If they cannot do this, they will lose the sale to an online vendor.

This especially includes video monitoring. The UK has a television tax, called the "television license fee". It's still a tax, and it's used to help fund the BBC and other government sponsored media. This tax is being skipped more and more with modern computers downloading video directly, and the DRM on British television is being evaded more and more and the broadcasts being retransmitted live, around the world. The problems of collecting the tax are compunded by home entertainment systems no longer being CRT based and easily detected by the scanning vans.

        http://www.theguardian.com/not...

There's some speculation here regarding the difference. True it's speculation so worth what you paid for it, but it is at least reasonably informed speculation. Seems it may well be about accomodating his desire to move back to the UK, or at least spend more time there.

> I agree on this point. But since the proposal is for a generic design to deal with any incoming impactor, be it comet, asteroid, or even generation ship, then a design that can handle any impactor without modification is needed. There won't be time to design a modification if it is actually needed.

And this is where I would say _what!!???_ at lest if we were in person. "Any incoming impactor" includes objects of such potentially high kinetic energy, and of such unlikeliness, that we cannot even include it in any practical discussion. That includes, for example, intrastellar planetary bodies, "rogue planets". And that is where such a discussion would need need to assess, right from the start, trade-offs of likelihood of combinations of mass, velocity, and lead time to deal with it.

This was played out in the Rosetta Comet mission, which did _not_ succeed in embedding anchors in the cometary surface. Expecting a single design to handle both intra-solar-system objects, such as those from the Astroid Belt and of much smaller relative velocity to the Earth, and a cometary body that could be expected to be far, far colder and of a much larger relative velocity.

So right there, in the necessary requirements, are two profoundly distinct missions that might require two very distinct designs. Let's not limit such a discussion from the start in a single idea or technology that _must_ handle both.

An A.I. expert may know a lot about A.I., but you need a broader perspective to judge the impact of A.I. on humanity. A bit of economics, sociology, psychology... and in that light, I'd value the opinion of certain Science-Fiction writers higher than that of any of those 3 as they've already done some considerable philosophizing about the subject.

So we already stopped singling out winners for scholastic performance (or performance at sports, or whatever), with this "everyone's a winner" crap. And now we can't even give kids points for effort?!

Competition (meaning a race between two or more people, although this also applies to the economic meaning of the word) is healthy and good, and it is a powerful way to push people to excel. And recognizing effort helps disadvantaged children, they get bonus points for persevering where the advantaged kids "got everything handed to them on a silver platter" without having to try very hard, as one critic in that article puts it.

It's hard work, and the pay tends to be far below the amount of work expected. Pre-school is exhausting, and grade school and high school often demand as many hours of support work, meetings, after-hours activities, and lesson preparation as hours of actual classroom teaching Many of those teachers also hung on through several deep recessions, and have reached retirement age or worked well past retirement age. And many "district" educational boards are encouraging senior teachers to retire early, so that younger, teachers with no seniority and lower hourly wages can fill those roles. Older teachers often disagree with the latest fads, and have the experience and knowledge to resist fads: middle management often finds those older teachers to be a dangerous "note of discord", and work politically to eliminate them quietly.

Please note that most of those issues occur in senior engineering roles. In IT, the sudden egress of senior tends to be much faster, and more concentrated to single companies.

I'm Dutch, by the way... But the stuff that works against us often works equally against the Brits. And I am not talking about Europe making rules about the size of flowerpots, such things should be seen in the same light as setting up an EU patent office, and is in the interest of people in the business of making and selling flowerpots (and other stuff). No, the EU isn't all bad, that's why I called it a benign dictatorship. That's the problem: the EU is turning into something that is not "for the people" but for itself, i.e. the people running it. Most persons in power in the EU are appointed rather than elected, and there is very little (if any) direct democratic oversight. It's not about the EU being too big or imposing too much red tape, but about it becoming a goal unto itself instead of a means to an end, and being controlled by a cabal of bureaucrats rather than by the people.

There are enough examples of bad EU policies to be had, in monetary policy alone. Greece being dragged into the euro, for example. Experts warned against exactly the sort of things now going on. France and Germany repeatedly getting (i.e. giving each other) a pass on not meeting budgetary requirements during good times, then cracking down hard on smaller countries with similar issues during bad times. When we joined the euro, we got short-changed by about 10%, as pointed out by experts and later even by the minister of finance in charge at the time. Joining the euro was not a bad plan, but think about what it means if a minister of finance is willing to push through such a measure under such conditions. Our national governments, who are supposed to look out for our interests, are largely so blinded by their rosy vision of a united Europe that they are willing to make insane (and often unnecessary) sacrifices to make it happen.

There is a saying that goes "share your wealth with us or we will share our poverty with you". The whole point of the EU is that the stronger members bring up the poorer members so that they don't dissolve into financial chaos which tends to have other inconvenient outputs.

That's actually the problem with the EU. Poverty doesn't go away just because you reduce trade barriers. If it did, NAFTA would've turned Mexico into a shining beacon of democracy. You need political and legal reform to disperse the conditions that are causing the poverty.

The EU does take some steps towards this - e.g. harmonizing product standards. But for the most part the EU countries are insisting on political independence. That's like trying to hitch up a bunch of horses of different athletic ability to a single wagon under the premise that the faster horses will bring the slower horses up to speed. What really ends up happening is the slower horses end up getting dragged along, and the faster horses end up having to work harder (e.g. Germany and Greece). You need to condition the horses until they're of similar fitness (i.e. political reform until they're of similar economic strength) before you think about hitching them all to the same wagon.

The U.S. tried what is basically the EU approach in the 1700s when it first won independence from Britain. Mostly because of the bad aftertaste of the overreaching British Monarchy, each state wanted to govern itself as if they were separate countries. That lasted about a decade before it became obvious it wasn't working, and a stronger central government was needed if there was to be a union.

All? Well, if you have any tips on how to accomplish that, I'm all ears. One of my country's parties sees the same issues but they want to try and fix things from within (i.e. working within the existing European political framework). Personally I fear it may be too late for that: the positions that reformers can be elected for are all but powerless, and the people currently running the show will ensure that real reformers will never be appointed to a position of influence. It's close to a dictatorship, even if it's a relatively benign and multiheaded one.

Please actually look at the older generation, and revisit your own. Many younger people have _no idea_ how the technology works, much like their older peers. They have considerable hands-on familiarity with newer tools and no older habits to unlearn, but wait that same 10 years and they will be in a similar situation. I'm old enough to remember when 'C' and 'BASIC' were new and exciting. And it's a delight with my older colleagues and peers to learn new tools, and a personal delight to walk the young programmers through the same problems we had decades ago, problems they didn't realize the new tools would also have or which they ignored in testing.

Many of us who are labelled "europhobic" are actually in favour of a Union, even a strong one. The problem we see in the EU is that it has become a bureaucratic, intransparent, undemocratic monster with a far too wide mandate. And if you look at the people building the EU, that is no accident. Considering what this EU might turn into, I think it would be better to not have it at all.

What the EU lacks first and foremost is a proper constitution: a simple document that describes what the EU does and doesn't do, who does what, how, and under what conditions, and what the rights are it grants to its citizens and national governments. Since we don't have one, the EU can grow in any direction and in any way its architects desire. And that direction might not be what's best for Europe or its citizens, but for those running the show in Brussels. As Juncker once said: "When it becomes serious, you have to lie". And that is sort of what they did with the thing that is called the European constitution. It's a huge document and you have to be a legal expert to make any sense of it. And that too is by design: when several countries voted against the "constitution", they took out one part (making "An die Freude" the European anthem) and rewrote the rest in impenetrable legalese.

There are many good reasons for having *a* union. And there are many more for not having *this* one.