I am happy that some people can work sharing a table with a bunch of other people. But I never could -- when working as a software architect I needed to keep the door closed to maintain the quiet I needed to focus. But thats me. In reading this, I am curious about two things -- one, does anyone correlate the workspace and degree of voluntary isolation with their productivity? And two, are the executive offices shrinking by the same amount? Guess everyone should be grateful that they are not yet chained to their keyboards and phones for their work period.

I wonder. How can we tell the difference between a well-intentioned but stupid response from the government (ignoring for a moment Chertoff's financial interests in promoting airport scanners) to a real threat from a manufactured threat by those same governments to impose a police state? I was shocked that Homeland Insecurity feels justified to randomly stop anybody within a 100 miles of the US-Canada border and demand to see their papers. Seems we have crossed the line from protecting the country from a vague, external treat to imposing controls on the citizens. Reminds me of the line about the tradeoff between freedom and security -- am not sure we are really any safer but it is clear that we are substantially less free. Just because I may be paranoid does not mean that 'they' are not after me...

UPS is on the top of my shitlist for willfully damaging packages and lying to the customer and shipper and assessing steep and imaginary fees to up their revenue. But DHL is pretty good at that as well. I had to ship a camera part back to its manufacturer in China for service. The paperwork was correct but DHL would not release the package without a $100 'duty' which they insisted could be refunded from the government -- but the government says it was the shipper. Yeah, right. So DHL gets it for general larceny -- but UPS for scope. I have received books that had been left in water so long the pages were disintegrating, a robot lawnmower that was dropped or slammed so the internal fibreglass parts were shattered (including the circuitboards) and countless packages that vanished because UPS didn't feel like going to my area -- so left them at the depot marked 'held at depot at recipients request'. Oh, they were found eventually by repeated calls to UPS and badgering them to do a trace -- then a 1 hour drive to their closest 'depot' between the hours of 4pm and 7pm M-Fri.. From the number of companies that use them as the exclusive carrier, I guess their salesforce is pretty pursuasive, sure ain't based on their quality or reliability.

Y'all have missed the point of terrorism. It is not to create death and destruction (there are enough home grown people who do that...) but the fear that it might happen. Their object is to disrupt the West and provoke responses that divert resources from more constructive uses. The TSA and the Department of Hopeless Insecurity have been spectacular in achieving these goals. The idea that someday I might want to go shopping and have to endure strip searches and document checks to do so is so profoundly antithetical to my view of what America can and should be. But here we are. In effect we are more fascist in the degree of control we want to exercise over our fellow citizens than the real fascists ever were. We have successfully implemented the nightmare world of 1984 to be 'safe' and I am sure the 'terrorists' are LOL.

The dismantling of regulations, unions and exporting jobs is all part of the re-feudalisation of North America. The vision is of a small, vastly wealthy ruling elite that sits on top of a large, impoverished population. Oh, it will be prettier than the Middle Ages, possibly with air conditioning. But the actions by our (for now) elected representatives will continue to be in the interest of corporate tyrannies and even less in the interest of everyone else. Power corrupts...

Unfortunately, I tend to agree -- I have made a couple of runs at a Linux desktop and have bailed because the software just wasn't there. None of the major applications I use exist in Linux versions -- that is a clue right there. The open source versions are too different and require too much fiddling to configure and maintain. And it is an awfully short step from setting options in a GUI to doing web searches for files and options scattered all over the machine -- and very fragmented support info that is version and distribution-specific. That is not to say that it cannot be done or that if my needs were different I could be satisfied with what is available -- I know people who are quite satisfied with what they can do with their Linux laptops out of the box. But it just doesn't work for me. Oh, 30 years ago when I was writing DBMS internal code, compilers and the like -- lots of assembler, C and scripting, I might see things differently. But there we are -- I just don't have the time or inclination to do that level of fiddling anymore and am appalled that the need to do it as a general rule still exists. Too many times have I set something up, had it work perfectly, then did a reboot and nothing worked due to special install rules -- then ugly digging to get it working again. So I stick with Windoze -- at least it works most of the time and helps me do what I need.

Back when nuclear reactors were falling out of fashion I ran into a study that showed a huge percentage of the cost of a nuclear plant in the US was the legal fees for all the government submissions and approvals. The number that sticks in my head was 90% but I hope this was wrong. I suspect what ever it was it is probably worse now due to the lingering induced paranoia about anything 'nuclear'. And the approval process for any project going through the entrails of government is probably vast. Remembering the Manhatten project, Hoover Dam and the Transcontinental Railway as examples of huge projects that were at the edge of capability (and affordability) and yet were done in a period of a few years. And yet building a nuclear plant takes decades... I think we have just lost our will to survive.

Yeah, I can relate to this. I eventually dumped Facebook because of the flood of inane posts and the dumping I got from news vendors when I 'liked' them. Oh, I read and enjoy the info from SciAM, the Globe&Mail and so forth. But finding my Facebook page becoming an unreadable dumping ground was too much. In the end I shut down my Facebook page because it was nothing but clutter. 'Liking' anybody was just an invite for a nonstop dump of everything they were flogging -- better off to stick with email. At least THAT could be controlled.

The problem with the commerce or nothing view is that someone has to expend the risk capital to make the initial discoveries that justify the subsequent commerce. Looking back at history this has pretty much been governments. Sure, private companies built all the stuff. But NASA drove the projects and the taxpayer paid for it. And the technology spinoffs that came as a result of trying to solve the hard problems have enriched us all.

I suspect that is the lifetime of the physical media after it has been moved to landfill. There has been a huge amount of work over the last 20+ years to suggest that the information recorded on this media may not be readable for anything close to this term. Interestingly, the last time I was doing a media useful life survey I could not find a lot of the detailed stuff that used to be out there. I am suspicious that the manufacturers are trying to obscure this key detail. For my own stuff I am keeping digital stuff on spinning magnetic media -- easy to make multiple copies. But I keep the physical media for anything spooled to digital (despite complaints from my significant other) in case I have to redo the dump and cleanup. I have a bunch of Ektachromes that were taken back during WW2 that are as bright and clear as the day they were fished out of the soup. And a bunch of CD-R archives of my early digital pictures that have already coastered. I guess that like clay tablets, what survives of today will be governed as much by chance as intent.

I can only read this with horror -- yet another lossy image format to burden everyone. When I setup a media management system the number of different formats I need to accommodate already makes my head hurt. We are all dancing around the black hole that says the ultimate lossy compression can be achieved by writing to the null device. I guess that is the problem of software -- since it is intangible one can claim better by making it different (and incompatible). One sees few cars on the road with five wheels -- that standardized pretty quick and a long time ago. And I guess everyone likes keeping it art rather than science. Means 'engineer' is just a courtesy.

And I think this is a Bombardier production, a Canadian company with high speed train installs almost everywhere except in Canada. Here we are still ripping out track and degrading passenger service even more by routing it over old freight lines and making passenger trains wait on sidings so the freight can go through. And the fare for regular service across a distance of roughly 200km is $95 one way -- takes 2.5 hours vs 2 in the car or $50 on the bus. Passenger service to a whole raft of cities was discontinued and the passenger trains routed by an old freight route that makes a wide swath away from population centers. So passenger train travel is still declining here -- but we read about what the rest of the world is doing and have severe envy.

Am afraid that I would have to agree with you. Whatever their reasons for the various decisions being made they are being bloody quiet about them. We cannot tell what the real driver is, perhaps to push as much public money into private hands as possible or some suite of crackpot theories. But no recognizably rational arguments seem to be made and the results appear to be destroying institutions and raising costs. He did make a comment some years back that we would not recognize Canada when he was finished. That seems to be happening -- unfortunately I don't think it was most people thought they were voting for.

Human factors are critical for effective staff performance. One other low tech item to not forget is to have plenty of whiteboards available. The high tech variety with automagic copy is very cool but your basic panel and markers will do it. Everything breaks -- especially in the control center. It is helpful to have some place to keep track of things when the power goes out or an ill-timed lighting strike fries everything. And this bunker is above the 100 year flood line, yes?