There are still some things to solve for the cashless society.

1. Electronic transactions are still far too expensive. Every shop I go into to get (say) my lunch have a minimum amount you have to spend before you can use your debit card (or you have to pay a surcharge). My lunch always falls below this value so I must use cash. Things like vending machines too. Until it's cheap enough to use something like a debit card to buy an item costing 60p, then you'll still need cash.
2. Security. Debit/credit cards are too insecure, and the burden of making them secure is on the merchant in the form of PCI-DSS. It means if you're a small business taking debit/credit might not be an option. The burger van in the car park for instance, it's still impractical for him to take electronic transactions due to the equipment requirements and PCI-DSS.
3. Very hard to settle private debts. For instance if I hire a builder for a small job, he now has to give me all his bank details if I'm to do an electronic transfer. It's about 100 times easier to give him cash.

If you were an engineer in charge of destroying data printed on paper, and you decided on shred then burn then stir the ashes in water, how many times would you repeat the cycle in order to be sure the data was destroyed? Hint: if your recommendation is greater than one (in order to be pretty sure), check your job title, because you're probably Dilbert's pointy-haired boss.

Drives today work almost nothing like the drives of 20 years ago. They don't paint bit-bit-bit in a stripe, they encode a set of bits in every pulse of the write head. Alter it a tiny fraction, and it becomes a completely different set of bits, one that error correction won't be able to overcome.

Old disks were recoverable because the mechanisms weren't precise, and the data was written with big chunky magnets to assure it was readable. All that slop has been engineered out on order to achieve today's remarkable areal densities. One overwrite is all it takes - as long as you're overwriting it all.

This.

What is the value of a used device? Compare that to the risk of the data on that device going to a malevolent third party.

I've had people saying "oh, look at all these hard drives, you should totally sell them on ebay and I bet you could get $10 apiece for them!" Adding up the time I would waste running DBAN or sdelete or whatever, and keeping track of which ones have been wiped, and double checking to make sure everything is really gone, it's not worth the time.

A big hammer and a punch, driven deeply through the thin aluminum cover and down the platter area, takes about a second and leaves nothing anybody would bother trying to recover. You can quickly look at a drive and say "yes, this drive has been taken care of", or "hey, there's no jagged hole here, this drive isn't destroyed." The aluminum cover contains the shards if the platters are glass. I don't care who handles them after destruction. There's no worries about toxic smoke. And if you have to inventory them before shipping them to a recycler, the serial numbers are still readable.

Smashing a phone wouldn't destroy the data on the chips, so a fire is a somewhat safer option.

Weasels that know corporate double speak are ruining everything though. You know we don't mourn the T-rex. We talk about the dinosaurs as being really big and dumb.

They were all psychopaths!! Lizard brains.

When the cockroaches are mulling over what our existences might have been like, they will all say that the weasels died out because of our stupidity and overconfidence. They'll say we were monsters, too. Big and dumb. Lizard brains.

The "scanner" portion of these devices is typically an embedded system that drives a hardware sensor, and speaks USB out the back side. You could probably open one up, solder a cable to the right points on the scanner board, and you'd have exactly the simple and transparent scanner you requested.

But because the business wants a truckload (no pun intended) of functionality out of these scanners, they need it to have more capabilities. First, it needs to be on the network, or it won't give them any benefit. Next, it needs to be multi-tasking so it can display alerts, etc. Its primary task may be to inventory the stuff coming off a truck, its other tasks may include assigning work items to line employees, displaying alerts on the supervisors' screens, punching the timeclock for breaks, and possibly even employee email. To a lot of businesses, a browser based interface lets them run whatever kind of functions they want, without the expense of continually pushing a bunch of apps out to a bunch of random machines. So taking all that together, embedded XP is one (bloated) way of meeting all that.

So while the scanner itself is simple, it's the rest of the hardware in the device that was infested with XP and other malware.

[Citation needed]

Don't forget the RF shielded optical fiber interconnects, for true fidelity at high frequencies, and a mellow bass.

It wasn't a sensible comment for anyone who could see the writing on the wall. If you weren't in academentia, you could see that it wouldn't be long before personal computers would have more than one process active at a time.

No need for a second display. Just ssh -X develsystem and have everything display on the Solaris machine.

What I think a lot of the utopian visions miss, as well as a lot of the posters here, is that the problems with programming are not problems with the tools, but with the code that these amateurs produce. Writing clean, clear, correct, modular, maintainable, tested, and reusable code is still a skill that takes time to learn.

Generally, most people understand following a sequence of steps to achieve a goal. They can follow a recipe's steps to bake a cake. Some can even write down the steps they took to accomplish a task, which is the beginning of automating it; but recording and playing back steps is certainly not all there is to programming. Almost anyone who can write steps down can then learn enough of a language to string together a dozen or even a hundred individual steps to then achieve a goal: StepA(foo); bar = StepB(foo); StepC(foo,bar); ... another 97 steps here...; return(). The problem is that because writing down all those steps is possible, people who manage to do it once think they're programming. But all they're really doing is scripting.

Once someone tries to add logic to their scripts, the resultant code is generally buggy, slow, difficult to maintain, impossible to test, and probably should not be put into production, let alone reused. What a professional software developer does is recognizes the difference. He or she uses his or her experience, skills, and knowledge to organize those instructions into small groups of functionality, and wraps them into readable, testable, reusable, methods. He or she recognizes dependencies in the code, follows design principles to ensure they are properly organized, groups related methods into classes or modules, knows when to follow design patterns and when to break from them, groups related areas of modules into architectural layers, and wraps the layers with clean, testable, usable interfaces. He or she knows how to secure the code against various types of attack or misuse, and to properly protect the data it's been entrusted with. He or she understands validation, authorization, authentication, roles, sanitization, whitelisting, and blacklisting. And he or she understands the many forms of testing needed, including unit testing, system testing, integration testing, fuzz testing, pen testing, performance testing, as well as tools to evaluate the code, such as static code analysis and metrics.

On the other end of the developer's life are the inputs to the processes: requirements, stories, use cases, usability, scalability, performance. They know that following certain development methodologies can make a great deal of difference to the software's quality. And then there are the realities of all the non software development issues: equipment, firewall rules, IDPs, networking, vendor contracts, software licensing, hosting, distribution, installation, support, bug tracking, and even sales.

Tools can help with all of these steps, but as you pointed out, having a word processor does not make one a poet.

Unobtrusive to me means that the technology does only what I want it to but we all know that technology today serves its master, which is NOT the end user. This is an invasion.

Let's apply this towards eventually getting Matrix-styled learning models. Eventually we could implant memories of how to perform any skill. We could enable permanent muscle-memory learning instantaneously. Not only learning karate but being able to apply the lessons with strength and precision. Never having to work out to be in shape. Understanding advanced physics without ever taking a course at a university or even having any partial interest in the subject. That's a step towards singularity.

To what extent are we able to compute safety related human dynamics issues and what is slowing us down in this particular programming area?

Can we ever come up with a safety system for a workplace that would be able to overcome employee buy-in issues early on, especially if the typical large corporation is in a constant tug of war with profit and employee needs?

You see whenever we introduce changes in policy in the workplace, employees assume they are going to be required to do MORE but they are not getting more money for the work so this tends at times to cause resistance from employees to safety policies. Management doesn't often understand the issues at hand so they tend to make contradictory safety policies as well, saying that things need to be addressed in a timely fashion.

But in the aftermath of this complexity, companies are often just faking safety in order to appear to be safe when in fact they are running at a significant moral hazard to everyone (their staff, the general public and anyone else for that matter).

This particular problem is of great interest to me and I find that whenever there is an imbalance between management and employee needs there is a systemic problem that is solvable but yet only once all the variables are on the table. The problem with human safety is that most of the variables are unknown.

The general equation for solving safety related issues is:

For every task an employee is required to do or will reasonably be presented with, the employee must be trained to perform the task safely within prescribed safety policy. This idea is fundamentally at odds with bravado in the workplace, hero complexes, profit margins and it goes directly against human psychopathy that is prevalent in modern corporate culture.

What's the best approach to stabilizing a safety model?

Really? Because I don't seem to remember the purges that took place when Reagan took office, or Bush, or Clinton, or Obama. I don't remember when they arrested the political dissenters from the opposition parties, hauled them out of Washington and trucked them up to camps in North Dakota where the majority froze to death, or shot them in the basement of the Lubyanka after pronouncing them guilty in a secret "trial". Perhaps that all took place when the Ministry for Information took razor blades and cut out the encyclopedia pages for Jimmy Carter, and extended the entry for the Bering Sea to compensate, because we can't really trust our history books.

Go read Mitrokhin's books. Read the KGB's own history, stolen from their own archives. Compare it to what the USA claimed actually happened, and to what the USA claimed was Soviet propaganda. Mitrokhin's papers serve as independent corroboration that essentially everything the USA said about the Soviet Union's "active measures" was true.

Wow, such hate and bile. The country Mitrokhin "betrayed" no longer existed. He turned over documents from the Soviet Union, not from "Russia". Yes, there is a distinction.

You completely failed to read what was written, which was a comparison of Mitrokhin to Snowden.

Apparently, that's what the fuck I don't get.