"C# has historically been years ahead of Java"

Given that Java is older than C# by more than a decade I have problems accepting your assertion that C# has historically been years ahead of Java at nothing.

"Until now"

Exactly. The grand parent is the kind of guy that falling off a skyscrapper would say "well, it's been 100 floors by now and nothing wrong has happened. You are an alarmist".

But maybe there's kind of a pyrrhic hope: there already are a lot of jobs that could be automated in, say, China which are not automated simply because the work force payed peanuts and living in the verge of slavery is still cheaper. Current automation even in first world countries will slow its motion once they have destroyed enough employment that people accepts working for peanuts in almost slavery conditions too.

"His predecessors neglected their responsibility and allowed a mess to be made. GP came in, found the mess, cleaned it up, and provided a useful alternative"

Back to square one. From his own words, first he did was "...make sure that no computer had any file sharing or any other services running on it", which is what I blamed him for.

First you do is understand the situation, not closing useful services. Once you understand the situation you go and close unsecure services *once* you are in the position to offer valid alternatives at the same time, not before.

"Folks who look at productivity as not having to log in"

I'll take this as an example. In my not so short experience, people usually have no problem to log in; people do have a problem having to log in half a dozen times to different systems within the same company, when they already provided their credentials to their computers at the begining of their work day. And they do have a problem with having to change every 30 days their passwords in crazy ways on those half a dozen different systems.

To follow on the example, provide them with proper single sign-on, let them change their password no more frecuently than every three months, with a policy of allowing them a last log in to change their password instead of blocking them out and having to rise a ticket to IT and educate them into passphrases instead of passwords and the "problem" will vanish all of a sudden.

"set up a dropbox, or really want to use thumbdrives"

And then you research a bit on why they are doing that and then you discover that they need to go through seven hops to reach the fileserver instead of the fileserver path to be the default to save in for their office apps, and then the performance of the fileserver is awful and their quota forces them to expend half a day cleaning their data every fortnight and then they still need to share files with customers or providers and since the company IT doesn't provide solutions for their use cases but the "this is verbotten" standard policy, they find their workarounds which are, of course, awfully insecure but still the best they knew to make their ends to meet.

"Having a few people hate you might be an indicator that you are doing your job."

Never is. Most you can say is that sometimes *despite of your qualified efforts*, you can't find a solution for them to work comfortably and efficiently.

"I'd fire your ass in a heartbeat."

Probably yes.

And probably you'd be in the majority.

That explains why IT is on average the miserable nightmare that it is.

On the other hand, I'm the kind of guy that first looks to understand why the users do what they do and then I go to provide secure alternatives that, in many cases, just go transparent to said end users. They just still do their stuff in the easiest way for them and I produce for them an environment where the easiest way happens to be the secure enough one.

"They were sharing their drives because they knew no better"

No, they were sharing their drives because they knew no better *and* they still find cases when sharing files is useful for their work.

"Providing a central server..."

Blah, blah, blah... you still didn't address the main point: *Why* users shared their local drives instead of using the central server (or ask for administrative privileges on their computers, or you find they are using something like dropbox, etc.). I've more than 20 years in this industry and every single time I've seen an environment like that has been because of incompetent IT.

"The state of corporate IT can be shocking. When I took over the IT at the UK branch of an international technology company I couldn't believe what I saw. Regular office staff had file sharing switched on individual PCs, Software developers had systems operated as root or administrator. People routinely downloaded whatever they wanted and installed it on their computers.
The first thing I did was make sure that no computer had any file sharing or any other services running on it"

You were doing it wrong, then, and probably the company employees hate you.

The first thing you should have done is understanding why computers/lans were configured that way. I can't count the times I've seen security just going all the place closing this and that without providing working alternatives to the function the user was achieving that way, just to put productivity to a halting grind.

People don't go out of their way to share their hard disks or to install this or that simply because they have nothing better to do but because they need to do something and do it that way because they don't know anything better.

Corporate security is more about providing secure ways to do what it's needed to be done (as defined by the end user, not the top brass) and less about tying users' hands but very short numbers of "IT security people" seem to understand that.

"The problem with unlimited mechanical replication is the same problem that happens with biological chemical replication. Errors. "

You are right and wrong at the same time.

You are wrong: mechanical replication can be bound to QA, which is something that bears no meaning when talking about real spontaneous life forms. Of course you cannot copy a stream of bits (or a physical machine for that matter) with 100% security of 0 flaws, but it's trivial to check the stream (or the physical machine) and discard it if you find any flaw.

You are right: The problem with unlimited mechanical replication is the same problem that happens with biological chemical replication. Raw material.

As of now, all of our machines require a lot of exotic elements not so easy to find over there. Even "standard" life tissues require some exotic elements you are not going to easily find and extract over there. The problem to replicate machines at a scale will be the avalibility of, say, iron, titanium, arsenium, gallium, gold, platinum... and how much of them can you put your hands on.

"if you built such a thing and it could only do something like 25% of the speed of light, it would only take them 300,000 years to overrun the entire galaxy."

Yeah. Now try redoing the math with something that just makes 0'001% the speed of light and then, in order to replicate, they require readily access to some elements in the high part of the the periodic table.

"ET must likely does not use radio waves, they are too primitive."

21th century civilization most likely does not use wheels, they are too primitive.

See? not an argument. When something perfectly fits its role, "too primitive" means nothing.

And then, even if it's too primitive, it's probably only too easy for an advanced civilization to produce radio noise, moreso if they are not worried since the radio noise won't mask their own superadvance comms tools.

"Give us another 100 years..."

No way.

I already gave you 100 years and I'm still waiting for my flying cars and my underwater cities. You wasted your credit.

"Finally, we can discover whether increased crime causes ice cream sales to rise...or if it's the other way around."

Nonsense... increased ice cream sales comes from global warming which, in turn, reduces pirates as everybody know, therefore reducing crime, not the other way around.

"You are correct, it is possible to have a causal relationship that does not result in a correlation."

Too long to explain. An easier way: there can be causation without correlation. This is called deterministic chaos (the butterfly inducing a hurricane in the other side of the world, remember?).

Oh, yes! And you don't micromanage.

"The middle class seems to do okay for example."

You are kidding, aren't you? Middle class is going the way of the dodo at a fair pace, thank you very much.