.NET is slowly beeing weeded out of the enterprise though and that's a trend I don't want to see diminished by devs picking up .NET because it's now "open source". It's OK to hate .NET, open source or not.

Lol, are you serious about that? That's not true at all! I work at a fortune 500 company and it's the exact opposite: it's Java that everyone is trying to weed out. There are several reasons for this, but they include these three things: Java's performance is slower than .Net, Java's IDEs are not as good as .Net's (Visual Studio is probably the best IDE ever built), and most importantly, the constant daily updates of Java to fix security flaws are driving everyone crazy and causing support nightmares. When haven't you recently turned on your computer only to have Java say an update is ready to install, and then pop up it's really slow installer to do it (that tries to install Ask.com as your homepage to boot)?

And one other thing about Java and another reason enterprises are trying to weed it out... the various Java application servers sprawling all over the place are seriously annoying and make supporting Java well a massive undertaking of training and manpower. In my organization, we have purchased Java applications from vendors that are based on all of these: Oracle Weblogic, IBM Websphere, Apache Tomcat, Redhat JBoss, and Apache Geronimo, and we have to figure out how to admin and support them all. And worse, none of these are as good as .Net/IIS, which is what we've chosen for all custom development that we do in house.

Plus, there are other things about .Net that make it better than many alternatives. For one thing, it's not a language, it's a runtime. There are all variety of languages you can use, which means you can use .Net whether your programmers come from a C syntax background or a Visual Basic type of background. And when it comes to web technologies, MVC and other .Net contributions are excellent: much better than the Java equivalents. And IIS is a fantastic web servers these days. True, it got off to a rocky, buggy start and trailed Apache for years, up through the IIS 6 days, but with IIS 7 and above it's actually much better than Apache, both in ease of administration and more importantly, in performance (why is Apache still spawning processes for every request that comes in... don't they realize the overhead of that??). A lot of the performance reasons that are behind people switching from Apache to Nginx are also capabilities that IIS has.

So I really don't understand where this bashing of .Net comes from, but I'm guessing a lot of it is from open source fanboys that love to hate Microsoft and have never taken time to use the recent (last 3-5 years) iterations of it's products. I totally get that a lot of people up to now have certainly preferred open source because it is free, but with .Net going that way a lot of you should try it. Having used Java and .Net both, I'd never in a million years pick Java over .Net. And I'd never pick PHP over .Net either, because that technology is pretty much the equivalent of what Microsoft's classic ASP was a decade ago, and .Net is far ahead of it now.

Look, CO2 is like a blanket on the bed. Making it thicker makes you warmer. You wish to deny this?

Partially, yes, for three reasons:

1. Your body is a heat source. Cover it with a blanket and you get warmer because the heat energy is trapped and cannot easily escape, and you body is constantly adding additional heat energy. By contrast, the Earth is not a heat source in that same way. Any heat it has is generated by an external body: the sun. It's like a rock sitting next to a fireplace with a blanket over it. Take away the fire, and rock is ice cold regardless of the blanket. Same with the Earth. This makes the CO2/blanket analogy very flawed, because the climate can be totally independent of the thickness of the blanket, and get much colder or much warmer based almost entirely on the current energy output of the sun.
2. Secondly, CO2 is a tiny trace gas in our atmosphere. This is not Venus where it makes up the majority of the atmosphere. Our atmosphere is 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, and everything else is a trace gas. People like to claim there has been a dramatic rise in CO2, but zoom the scale of your graph out, and you see that the "big jump" is considerably less than a fart in a windstorm. Right now CO2 makes up 0.04% of our atmosphere. 100,000 years ago it is estimated that it was 0.03%. So even assuming humans are 100 percent responsible for the 0.01% increase, it is extremely tiny. In your blanket analogy, you claim that making the blanket thicker makes you warmer. I would dispute that and say that it does not make you warmer if the blanket is negligibly thin. If a human is covered by a blanket that is 0.03% the width of an average thread, and you "thicken" it to 0.04% the width of an average thread, I submit to you that that is so negligible that you do not, in fact, find yourself feeling warmer from the thickening of the blanket. We really do need to keep our perspective on CO2 percentage and not commit fallacies based on graphs of CO2 concentration that are far too zoomed in to show context.
3. Thirdly, we do not understand all the interacting, chaotic systems on our planet at all. We see clearly that CO2 percentage and temperature have both varied considerably over the course of the planet's history, but frankly, we really don't know why. Why should there be a difference between 100,000 years ago and 50,000 years ago? We certainly know humans didn't have anything to do with that. And because we can't say what the causes are, we can't say definitively that thickening the so called blanket leads to warming. Historically, we know that CO2 increased only to find that in later eras it decreased. This would suggest the planet has some kind of feedback/absorbtion systems that can at times remove CO2 and thin the blanket. We also know temperature can increase or decrease by large amounts naturally with no involvement from humans, and that temperature does not always move in sync with CO2 concentrations historically. In short, we don't understand the relationships between the CO2, temperature, and the systems on this planet, so even though a CO2 increase may lead to a temperature increase in an isolated system, we don't know that CO2 increase leads to predictably higher temperatures (or even permanently higher CO2 levels) in the highly complex planetary system of Earth.

4. So yes, I wholeheartedly dispute your blanket analogy on the grounds that is a flawed analogy, and that we don't know enough about our planet to make any intelligent predictions or models at this time. Indeed, every model we have, when fed historical temperature data, says we should be at much higher temperatures than we are now. Most assume some kind of blanket model, but since none match our measured results, we can conclude that a simple blanket model does not match the complex reality of the systems on Earth.

No, foo. It's called basic common sense -- keeping confidential medical records, SSNs, and personnel files in paper format only, and not allowing them to be scanned or placed in a system connected to the general business intranet, or "the cloud".

That really seems like unnecessary effort. Why go all the way back to paper when you could set up computer systems in a back room on an isolated network, which is not connected to any other network (especially the Internet)? Then it's air gapped pretty nearly as effectively as paper, and you could get all the advantages of computerization without having to deal with the pain of paper only records. And if you are really worried about physical security, like thumb drives walking off, just put good physical security around the room with multiple locks on the door, with the keys to each lock spread among multiple people so no one can be in there alone copying data.

To me, that seems like a lot more effort than most companies would be willing to go to. Certainly it's a lot more painful because employees can't go in and update their personal records on their own remotely (things like W4s, address changes, etc). But it's a far better option than going all the way back to paper.

This is just the sort of bug to get people to adopt Linux on the desktop, since it will be more similar to what they expect from Windows.

Not me! I refuse to use software as immature as version 3 of Linux. Mac is on OS version 10, Windows is about to release version 10, and by golly, I'm not wasting a second of my time on Linux until it catches up!

You obviously are a bit hazy on what ethical means. To me it is ethical to kill a retarded person under certain circumstances. To sum things up, morals are the values instilled by society, ethics however are the values you aspire to. Personally for me it is highly ethical to lie as much as I am being lied to, especially to the people who are lying to me. Of course always considering the risk and benefit ratio. You might find that is highly immoral but I think you guessed it by now I am a very ethical person albeit not a very moral one.

You are neither ethical nor moral, nor are you correct on your definitions. No one believes ethics are "the values you aspire to, completely uncoupled from morality". If you aspire to have the worst moral values possible, that's not considered ethical. Only aspiring to high moral values is considered ethical.

Aspiring to kill retarded people is not ethical, not moral, and your posturing fools no one. Frankly, you must work at an IT shop full of the lowest talent possible, because you'd never for a second get away with lying where I work. I had someone try that on an interview once: I'd ask him questions, and rather than saying "I don't know" he'd very calmly and matter of factly tell me wrong answers as though he knew them. Problem for him was, I knew the actual answers and new he was lying... we have real IT people doing tech interviews, not HR. My immediate comment in the HR meeting afterwords was that he's a liar and he should never be on our team, and he never was. You'd never be allowed in the door.

Since it sounds like you aren't really technical anymore and don't have a desire to be technical, then I wouldn't recommend any of the technical certifications (RHCE, etc). Those are going to get you job offers for things you don't want to do. You should probably look for something more along the lines of Project Management Professional (PMP) certification, or something of that ilk. That will really help you manage projects and it probably looks good on a resume. Just my 2 cents.

There's now an entire generation of IS/IT managers, directors, and CIOs who not only prefer Microsoft technology but have an active dislike of anything related to Unix(tm)

I don't know how much the "actively dislike Unix" part is true, but yes, there are a lot of IT people that prefer Windows. And there are very good reasons for that. Microsoft makes some exceptionally good products in a number of areas. Here are some examples:

• Visual Studio, probably the best IDE known to exist. I've used it and competitors like Eclipse, and it is MUCH BETTER than Eclipse. This alone makes a lot of devs prefer Microsoft. And as of the announcement last week, is now going Open Source.
• .Net and ASP .Net, which are better than PHP (which is like classic ASP) and WAY better than Java, which needs a security patch daily and performs like a turtle. And as of the announcement last week, .Net and ASP .Net are going fully open source and multi-platform.
• Powershell, which for management is really, really good. It's gotten to the point now where it is better than competitors like Bash. Objects in the pipeline, rather than just text, is just so much better than any other shell.
• SQL Server, which is finally reaching performance/feature parity with Oracle, but has better management tools and is generally preferred by a lot of devs.
• IIS, which in it's latest incarnation has better performance than Apache, is easier to manage and is easier to get security isolation of websites out of (I do web hosting for a living, and I can easily stack 350 sites onto IIS and have them all be completely isolated in different processes with different security accounts as well, and it's REALLY easy.
• Windows Server, which admittedly is a tossup but depending on what you want may cause IT people to prefer it. It admittedly doesn't run on as much variety of hardware as Linux or scale up to supercomputers like Linux, but really is a very competent OS that is simple to manage and has probably the largest ecosystem of software written for it.

In summary, I don't get the bashing of Windows or all the "My Linux is teh best!" kind of comments. Linux has it's strong points as an OS, but Microsoft does too, and they have some fantastic products out there that can handily beat some open source equivalents. Depending on your workload, it can be very appropriate to prefer Microsoft products. (Of course, I'll be the first to say Microsoft has it's terrible products too... Network Load Balancer anyone? Linux based load balancers like F5 beat the pants off that thing.)

The OP said this:

500kph is moving towards the average speed of an airliner. Add the convenience of no boarding issues, and city-centre to city-centre travel, and the case for trains as mass-transport begins to look stronger.

Airliners routinely cruise at 550 mph, which is nearly 900 kph. So I guess trains are moving towards the speed of an airliner in a strictly technical sense, but in reality, even this one, which is not representative of the norm, is still only just passing 50%, so not even close yet.

The OP also said this:

The Japanese Shinkansen is now running over 7 times times as fast as the average U.S. express passenger train.

It should be noted that there are almost no US express passenger trains anywhere in the country, except within a few large east cost cities. In the rest of the country, there are none city to city or coast to coast, except for one, maybe two Amtrak routes that appear to exist only for nostalgia reasons, not for routine travel.

Add the convenience of no boarding issues, and city-centre to city-centre travel, and the case for trains as mass-transport begins to look stronger.

Nope, not really. It only looks stronger if your cities are very densely populated AND very close together. Neither of those are true of the average US city. If I'm going from the city center of Minneapolis to the city center of Atlanta, that's 1815 km, and I'm not going to sit around for a whole day on a train getting there. And since the majority of the US population lives on the East and West coasts, what about going from the city center of New York to Los Angeles, a common route? That is about 4,500 km. So yeah, rail travel in the US continues to be a pipe dream that makes no sense. I don't understand why people are so hot on bringing the premier travel method of the 19th century back into the 21st century in the US, when we now have airliners for city to city travel and cars and buses for intra-city travel, both of which make far more sense and are far faster than rail. Rail in the US continues to be an expensive, money losing boondoggle almost everywhere.

The problem with North American rail travel has never been a technology barrier, it's always been about having any interest in doing better.

Or more precisely, the problem with North America is that it's a country where most people would never even benefit from having high speed rail.

The root cause of the lack of interest is that our nation's population is so spread out, you can't get rail to move you to your destination faster than a car, no matter how fast the train runs. It's not like densely populated areas of Europe or Japan where a million people all want to go from the same point A to the same point B. Americans are so spread out that you have many tiny groups wanting to go from many thousands of different point As to different point Bs. You'd have to make hundreds of thousands of train lines, traveled by only a handful of people, and even then you'd have to switch lines so many times as you travel the sprawling cities and suburbs that you'd never beat the car anyway.

That's why most large American cities have bus lines instead of subways as well. Americans built their cities out, not up, and you can cheaply throw tons of small capacity buses on the roads going all kinds of different directions to move people about. It's really the only kind of transit other than a car that makes any sense in American cities like Houston, Minneapolis, Kansas City, etc. And even then, your car is going to easily beat the bus unless it's during rush hour when the bus drives in a dedicated lane. But at least the bus can go anywhere in any direction, so they still will easily beat rail in almost all scenarios, with the exception of a few densely populated East Coast cities like New York. They also do much more to relieve congestion, since more people can get where they want to go via bus than train, and are therefore more likely to take it.

I was excited till I saw the units of measurement. 500 mph, WOOOHOO! 500 kph, not so cool.

That's a bizarre attitude. Christians are peaceful, Muslims are not. Christians will debate origin theory with you. Muslims will behead or stone you for even discussing it. When children go missing, Christians search and put up wanted posters. Muslims like Boko Haram are the ones who did the kidnapping. Christians run next to you in the Boston Marathon. Muslims blow the people next to you up. Jesus went without protest to an execution on the cross. Mohammed raided caravans, kidnapped the woman, raised and army and conquered and killed everyone who disagreed with him.

Clearly not every Muslim is totally violent, but there are tens of millions in the Middle East who support these things and are trying to bring every back under 6th century Sharia law. You are completely irrational if you are more scared of Christians than that.

There is no place for PSEUDOCIENCE in universities. Not for Homeopathy, not for creationism, not for astrology. They can be discussed as curiosities or historical analysis (like when you analyse Greek mythology), but can not be presented as scientifically proven facts. If you want to promote irrational beliefs, the place is in the church, not in the university.

Then prepare to say goodbye to the following:

• Sociology
• Philosophy
• African American Studies
• Political Science
• Keynesian Economics
• The list could go on and on...

Point being, there's a lot of so called psuedo-science going on at universities already. Don't be a bigot about religions; if you are going to demand only things that can be experimented on in a test tube be taught, then a whole lot of other stuff should be leading the way out the door.

Sorry, but nobody wants your miniature space shuttle, Sierra Nevada. Probably should have thought a little harder before copying one of the most expensive and unreliable space systems used in recent times. Heat-shield > Everything. Now SpaceX/Boeing have to bite the bullet and stop work? Something very wrong with this way of doing things.

Actually, the Dream Chaser is 900 million cheaper than Boeing's system, with equal or more features, and Sierra Nevada also argues compellingly that their delivery track record is at least as good as Boeings (anyone remember Boeing's Dreamliner delays)? Since the selection was supposed to be based on three factors: price, suitability and track record, with price weighted as heavily as the other two metrics combined, it seems very odd that Boeing was selected. Both competitors are far, far cheaper, so unless Boeing is massively better on the other metrics (and again, there isn't much evidence of that), it doesn't look fair that they were awarded the contract.

Personally, I hope they reverse the decision, because I think it will save the taxpayer a lot of money over Boeing, and it would be nice to have a refined version of the landable spaceplane that can improve on the shuttle. I still don't think the shuttle was a totally bad idea (ie - an idea that can never work)... it just needed improvements. Capsules aren't the only way to go, despite what people in some circles say.

Weather modeling and forecasts are very good, boasting >95% accuracy over the first 3-4 days, with accuracy decreasing the further ahead you go.

Not a chance. Bring some data before I will believe that accuracy rate. I don't even believe 95% is accurate for forecasting on the day of, let alone 3-4 days out, since our forecasts here in Minnesota have predicted sunny skies in the morning when I go to work, and we later get storms that drop four inches of rain. And I'm not using the "main on TV", but forecasts that are based on NOAA, which does have actual meteorologists working there. So again, bring data... I think your accuracy ratings are hugely inflated, especially for 3-4 days out.

What? Your weather forecasts are wrong every day? And in every conceivable way (Temperature, Cloud cover, Humidity, Rainfall, Windspeed, etc.)?

No one claimed they are wrong every day, just that they aren't nearly 80% as the grandparent claimed. They seem to be wrong about 50% of the time (at least) here in Minnesota too. We are talking major, predicted sunny skies and got one of the worst storms of the summer with four inches of rain kind of wrong. And when I say wrong 50% of the time, I'm talking about major wrong. I'm not talking about "predicted 83 degrees but it ended up being 85" kind of wrong (in which case the models would approach 100% wrong). They are wrong in some more major way, such as predicted temp off five degrees or more, wind off by several mph, heavy rains when sun was predicted, snowfall either doesn't arrive or has way more inches than predicted, etc. I know that's anecdotal to you, but I'd have to see some very good data to concede that they are correct 80% of the time. My observations make me believe it's probably otherwise (although maybe other parts of the nation are more accurate and bring the average up).