This is why you should treat employees as criminals from their first day on the job. Then there's no difference when the last day comes.
Right? :-)

> I think i know why she isnt a computer programmer

She's a psychologist. That's pretty close to a computer programmer. Psychologists do their work on a biological computer and without the aid of a debugger and without the programmer's greatest tool: the reboot. But in both cases, it is trying to work out where the logical inconsistencies are and apply code patches to get the system to respond correctly to input.

If the cost is supposed to be "some portion of what you have to spend each day", the story mentions net income and the discussion threads talk about net worth, and the downsides of both. What if we simply said, "Show your bank statement, credit card and estimated cash transactions for the last 60 days and we base your fine off of the *expenditures* you have made." Thoughts?

The surgeons in the article imply that they themselves do not consider it successful unless the psychology angle is also a success.

Be fair. Sony and Comcast have both blamed their customers and dallied around in court for quite a while before doing anything, or avoided doing anything in some cases. Lenovo reacted within a day. Lenovo may have taken a fall, but there are circles to Hell, and they aren't in the same class as Sony and Comcast.

> The second major challenge of the software revolution is the concentration of power in small groups.

I have sometimes mused about feasible ways to make this work. In other words, just accept that tech IS going to concentrate power in small groups and just ensure that the small group is people we actually want to have that power. Republics are supposed to do that by giving the elected officials the ultimate authority -- by definition, a small group with lots of power -- but that hasn't worked so well by some measures when tech gets involved.

I don't have any good answers here, but I figure that along with brainstorming ways to prevent the consolidation of power, we might also brainstorm ways to be happy with the results of the consolidation.

Pretty much any country in the world would have treated Turing the same in that era. Most of the world still would. The Brits have no special shame in that category, and they have been doing their level best to set things right. Many other countries still have yet to catch up, not just legally, but culturally.

See: history of scientology, L. Ron Hubbard

Without a license statement, I have to assume that your copyright still applies. It is similar to a chain of evidence for legal proceedings -- I have to document that any image I use in my work didn't just come from some place that claimed it was a public domain image but actually can be traced back to the original author and confirmed as public domain. It's a real bitch some days, which is why the Internet is often not helpful at all for image searches and why people still end up paying large sums of money for image libraries that are vetted as "cleared for commercial reuse".

True, but some ice is right at the tipping point. And some trees only bear fruit at some particular tipping point. As the average temperature moves up, more and more species and systems find themselves outside of their personal equilibrium point. So you'll see a chunk of ice melt somewhere. And some trees die off somewhere. And some fish fail to spawn somewhere. And we are talking about a GLOBAL effect, which means a few of those events happen everywhere. At some rate of failure, the system heals itself. At a higher level, we have mass extinctions and it takes thousands of years for species to come back together. We appear to be pushing fast [geologically] toward that higher level. Look at the problems already being created in California and Texas by the ongoing drought. In March, Texas is expected to break the 1950s record of the "drought of record." We are losing whole towns. If this is a consequence of climate change and not just weather cycles, we have a real long term systemic problem. And the science is suggesting that it is climate and not weather that is causing the droughts.

Unfortunately, because of the network effect, it is actually quite important that you fight for your choice. Let's say you like PHP but no one else does... you will quickly find that tools for writing PHP dry up/don't get updated for new OSes. If you like Windows Phone, you're going to need to "sell" your preference to all your friends or eventually you'll have to switch to Android or iOS because if the Windows Phone platform doesn't get enough mindshare, it goes away.

Mindshare matters, and your company can get screwed easily by picking the wrong one and by not defending the one it does pick.