I read TFA (more specifically the speech transcript) and I don't believe that the Rocky Mountain News would have been much better off even if they did everything right. There aren't any city-specific news web sites out there that are making anything like the kind of money that newspapers made in their heyday. Like the buggy whips, the telegraph industry, and home coal delivery the business is gone and the new industry that is replacing it is too far removed for a transition to be possible.

The glory disappeared when we got what we thought we wanted: compilers that worked, operating systems that don't crash, source level debuggers, enough memory, enough disk, fast networking, source code control that actually works, and the ability to ssh in reliably from home.

I think that the "glory," the absence of which we bemoan in this thread, is best understood as a metaphor for the era when success in IT and its predecessor fields was mainly about being smart. If you were in what was called the data processing business in 1960, intellect was, by and large, what made you successful. That situation persisted until the mid-1980s or so (depending on where you worked), and it gradually became more important to have knowledge than intellect, and the non-technical skills (writing, teamwork, getting along with your boss, dealing with politics) became more important, too. The change was because of the drastic increases in complexity of the systems we worked with, and because the tools were so much more reliable.

In 1980, it was not an unreasonable objective to read every word of every document printed, and every line of source code, for Bell Labs UNIX. Something that could easily be done in a few months. It's not a reasonable goal, anymore, for any of the major desktop releases, and so you have to specialize, and rely on having things just work. And by and large, they do, and even people who don't specialize in technology can use computers and write Excel macros these days. They for the most part do quite well unassisted, and so the panache that came with restoring the boss's spreadsheet from a floppy disk with a bad sector isn't there anymore.

There are still good gigs out there, but they can be hard to find, and you have to make your tradeoffs among technical challenge, funding continuity, salary, management quality, coworker quality, and the extent to which the technology is strategic from a career perspective. And once in a while you still get to work around a compiler bug.

Yes, but you probably don't want to skip the unit test, and having a carefully thought-out design might not be a bad idea.

... or aircraft control and navigation, or banking, or encryption, or much of anything besides consumer products where it's OK to fail once in a while. Different situations require different approaches.

Spolski is smart and I usually like what he writes, but it's important to remember that he spent his formative years at Microsoft.

I'm not planning on taking my Thinkpad X301 with the hardware-encrypted SSD over any borders for exactly this reason.

But if it were more commonplace, they would lose interest. Border patrol operate like cops setting up speed traps. They don't care how many smart people slip through, they care about finding the technique that nets them the largest number of arrests. If it becomes pointless, they'll change it at a policy level.

How long will it be until freedom-loving, consumer-supporting manufacturers start making devices that are resistant to searches like these? With today's technology there's no reason I shouldn't be able to have strong encryption of any nonvolatile storage and a means of locking down the device so that nothing is left in RAM or cache and the key is sequestered or destroyed (presumably pending manual reentry after the checkpoint is cleared). Fine, the law says they can conduct a forensic search, but there's no reason I have to make it easy for them.

Hopefully whatever comes of this will help out groups like IMSLP that are working on books and other media outside the text-centric Google mold. Orphaned copyright, and excessive copyright terms in general, are too large a problem to let an almost "good enough" solution like Google Books carry the day.

Any kind of security system that provides a limited lifetime or constrained redistribution rights for messages is, fundamentally, DRM. Therefore, it's subject to the same kinds of attacks that cause DRM to fail. Ultimately, unless you can build a trusted platform module with remote attestation that is tamper proof, there are gaps. This particular attack is, at a more abstract level, really about producing counterfeit trusted nodes. Without a TPM at each node and some way to authenticate independence through a trust hierarchy, there's no way for this to work.

Blind tests of violins and bows are notoriously difficult to conduct effectively. Much of the problem is that players become accustomed to particular instruments and unconsciously adjust their playing, and indeed their artistry, to the response of a particular instrument. Instruments have off days due to changes in humidity or string wear. The bow has to match the instrument and the performer. Differences among great violins are subtle. Selection of music to be played has a role. Performers, too, are variable, and rarely give three or more great performances of a work in a row.

Nonetheless, this is promising work. A modern violin by the best makers is typically a $25,000 instrument, while professional players in major orchestras are expected to spend several times that for an older instrument. It's like having an extra house payment. If the quality of the modern instruments starts to rival and surpass those of lesser makers in antiquity, it will help young players immensely as well as giving speculators in such instruments a well-deserved comeuppance.

I'm not going to work for people who are either jerks or incompetent, and I'm certainly not going to let people like that work for me.

There actually are pleasant, smart, capable people out there in tech jobs and tech management.

There are tradeoffs involving proliferation risk. If you are willing to accept the presence in a commercial power reactor of fissile materials that could be converted to weapons use, then there's plenty of fuel.

And how is that different from the coal plants that nuclear power replaces?

Analog control loops and things like PDP-8s weren't necessarily a whole lot more reliable than Windows. I don't know what the plant actually had for controls, but if you wanted a digital computer, the PDP-8 was fairly typical of the era. An analog meter with a d'Arsonval movement and optical sensors for the trip points was just tickety-boo in those days. Sometimes even the good ones stick.

In a sick sort of way, Chernobyl had more effective public relations -- the public belief was that the accident wasn't nearly as bad is it indeed was, while at TMI the public belief was that the accident was considerably worse than the facts showed.

A close reading of the accident narrative at TMI doesn't support the idea that the failure was "solved correctly." It shows that despite a grave combination of equipment failures, human factors problems, and bad judgment, the plant was eventually shut down without any leakage of radioactive material into the environment, due to a combination of conservative design and a little luck.

The main technical differences between TMI and Chernobyl were that a) Chernobyl had an intrinsically less safe graphite moderator while TMI had heavy water and b) TMI had better containment.