Yes, you are astroturfing for the 'clean coal' lobby. All of the complaints you cite as being wrong with nuclear power generation are also true of coal power generation. That's why other people were commenting that coal is still a net-lose to nuclear even with an every-20-years problem like TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima.

you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." -Andrew Lewis (metafilter:blue_beetle) It's in my quote file for a reason.

Because:

1. 1. You're using their network resources, and it's distinctly possible that they know something you don't, or the system may need some care/maintenance when you're not around,

   2. They're likely responsible for security auditing, etc. And unless this is a very unusual environment, they've already been trained/contracted about non disclosure (HIPAA in your case). It's a lot easier for them to do the job of proving that your box isn't a security risk if they can get inside of it, and providing there's need to know, it's an appropriate and justifed risk to get substantial benefit.

   But:

   3. Choose your trusted party carefully - different organizations have different trust and authority models for their IT departments. Most tend to concentrate administrative logins with particular people with ability and need to know on particular types of systems, so a Windows admin wouldn't have rights on *NIX boxes, an infrastructure admin wouldn't have rights on anything but routers and switches, etc. Depending on the size of the organization this might be one person or three different departments. In any case, verify that the person/group you're granting login rights is knowledgeable in general terms about your system. People who don't know anything about the box seldom have need to log in.

   4. Review your logs. A good idea in any event, but it keeps folks honest if you casually ask them why they logged into your box at 03:15 on Saturday. And if they didn't, you've just identified a possible data breach.

I see they've discovered platooning...again. Looks like the difference this time is that the lead vehicle is not autonomous. It's not a new idea - there was lots of research and hoopla over increased traffic density, increased safety, and reduced fuel consumption and emissions back in the late 90s. Simply put, a speeding car is very slow compared to speed-of-light communication between vehicles and cell towers, and the rules of physics are pleasantly consistent - it's an easy system to model, and not especially hard to implement - the trailing vehicle driving computer does not need to be aware of the whole road, just its position in the lane and its relation to other vehicles nearby.

The variant I remember used rare earth magnets buried in the center of the lane to give the cars an idea of where they should be on the roadway, and sensors and inter-vehicle communications were used so that each car knew where the others in its platoon were. There was an assumption that something like a cellular communication network and traffic management computer would tell entire platoons what a safe speed for this block of road was. Because the auto drive system had reaction times in the very low millisecond range, it was quite practical and safe to space cars a meter apart at 130 km/h, which offered big fuel economy benefits. Remove the cellular block command and control system and you have what the Europeans are proposing.

http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/bishopahs.htm
http://www.williamson-labs.com/ivhs.htm
http://pubs.its.ucdavis.edu/publication_detail.php?id=859

This is yet another thing that evaporated after 9/11 so that the US could afford to create the TSA and replace a dictator in Iraq with a power vacuum...

His name is Pond. James Pond.

http://www.detnews.com/article/20100927/BIZ04/9270360/1013/NYT--U.S.-seeking-to-expand-wiretaps-on-the-internet

...for the transgressions of the rest.

Machines with pirated software usually have malware as well, which means you now have a corporate data security problem. We've found with our Shanghai branch that the only solution has been to make sure nobody on site has admin rights. If they want software, we install it for them. Blast your standard OS and application build onto them and then lock the machines down.