So, in effect you're denying that there is such a thing as society, as comprised of the bulk wishes and desires of the country that you live in, and consequently the use of taxation as a redistributative economic measure? That's a morally/politically consistent position, even though I thoroughly disagree with it.

Unfortunately, the office network is also definitely full of managers, and prizing a bit more convenience at the cost of "a little" more risk is a classic thing that managers order. They are also usually able to find people who will carry out the orders.

But you have to let the users on anyway. If you manage to completely secure systems so that it is completely impossible for any data to leak, you'll have excluded everyone who has legitimate reasons to have access, and you'll have cost the company a lot of money in the process. You'll be seen as the weak point in the whole process and will get replaced with someone less expensive and more compliant with what the business needs.

So... you're saying that anyone using git for a serious C project is an idiot? Hmm...

The really big problem Microsoft has (and numerous other large US companies that run cloud services with datacenters in the EU, such as Amazon and IBM) is that if they give in with this, there will be lots of EU customers who will leave as soon as possible, and nothing that they'll be able to say or do will stop it short of relocating the company HQ and ownership structure entirely outside the US so the US government and courts really won't have jurisdiction (but will instead have to work through international treaties). This will be caused by the perception in the EU of overreach by the US, and the EU's generally fairly aggressive data protection laws.

At the very least, giving in on this will cost MS a huge amount of money to put right, and there'd be a real danger of an EU competitor being able to grow large enough to lock them out while they're sorting it all out (other US corporations would be in the same position).

When you're dealing with an automatic, it depends on what the car manufacturer thought was a good idea for their brand image; there's no benefit at all to either side (but you need to pick one). With a manual shift, you want the signal lever on the opposite side so that you are able to signal while changing gear.

The windscreen wiper control appears to migrate from side to side with no technical considerations at all, and headlight controls are even more variable...

But if that caused a severe performance penalty, that wouldn't be a step forward. The success metric was to get the product shipping fast so that it could be sold over the Christmas period, not to make something that would be wonderfully maintainable for all time.

Sucks to be them if that matters to them. If they'd wanted good internet, they'd have not gone out in the boonies, but would have picked some nice small town that has just enough population to support good networking without the trouble of larger places. Instead, they trade that for lots more space; it's a valid option, even if not one that I'd ever pick.

But if it's that old, it's probably also massively underdocumented (if at all) and so if something unexpected happens, your ass is still hanging out the window. Producing the documentation of what was actually done is at least as valuable a part of a replacement project as the change to the new system, as it should allow someone to start looking at which parts are required, which parts are emulating interfaces (from both sides, usually) that could be de-layered for improved performance and capabilities with no down-side, and which parts are just dumb holdovers from a few systems ago that nobody needs any more at all.

Just because something is painful doesn't mean you can get away without doing it.

Those who hope for a reduction of government meddling in their affairs will see it as a sign of true hope: the sky didn't fall in, despite the fact that the politicians couldn't agree on the most basic thing of all. Throwing them all out of office and only then starting work on the replacement would in fact be just fine...

Maybe, but the effects are less severe because state lines are enormously more difficult to change for short-term political advantage. State-level gerrymandering requires sustained visible policies that affect migration and/or birth rates over decades.

It's not too hard.

It's the long-lived toxic nucleotides that are the real problem. Keeping something safe for 50 years isn't too hard (particularly if everything is vitrified and kept as small pellets so you can use passive cooling) but keeping it safe for 5000 years is a massive headache. So how should we deal with them? Bombard with more neutrons. Like that, they transmute into something hotter which will decay away much more rapidly.

What's the likelihood of that happening, versus the likelihood of something happening to an above-ground cable? Note that you should be thinking about putting the cable well down so that you're unlikely to hit it by accident, just like with water and sewage infrastructure (though even more like gas, if you're in an area with it piped in). Heat dissipation isn't a big deal with domestic supply; you use reasonably thick cabling and aren't really carrying that much current in the first place in normal service.

I think there's probably less of a problem with voltage drop in electric power circuits built to European standards (and even more so with the massively over-specified UK standards) as the higher voltages mean there's less current in the wire and so less of an impact due to the resistance of the wire itself. That eliminates a lot of the local problems (e.g., due to having kitchen appliances) or reduces them to the level where the switch-mode power supply can usually compensate easily.

I don't know whether the quality of the power delivered by the utility is better. It is for me, but I'm not that far from a major hospital and a major Grid node (and the wires between are underground). I don't pretend that that extends to anyone else other than my immediate neighbours.

Would you accept "inherently impossible to predict any significant length of time ahead"? It's all very well to pick on the reason for the unpredictability (be it quantum uncertainty or extreme sensitivity to initial conditions because of non-linearity) but at a functional level, the outcome is similar: some stuff just can't be predicted in detail long term, and will continue to be like this whatever we do.