Yes they would if A) they were totally educated on the issue. B) those non-incandescent lights didn't cost an arm and a leg just to buy one or two. C) people's experiences with the first generation of those bulbs were positive (ie. no warming up for a minute before the light got up to proper lumens)

This is the same issue today with Americans and Diesel engines vs. traditional gasoline engines.

I don't know where and why this keeps coming up, but at the end of the day, the death of the PC won't happen for a while, for many reasons:

1) Creation vs. Consumption
        I hear this bullshit a lot as the main driver for the death of the PC. This is a particularly specious argument. The whole creation vs. consumption aspect comes from creating content. While I can type on a tablet or other device, it is not as good (no matter the method) as a keyboard. I can type this entire post in 20 minutes on a keyboard but would take hours (and having fun with spell check, etc.) on some tablet device.

2) Ownership of content
        This a huge one. With a desktop I can own what I own, and it is mine. With any always connected, remotely managed device I never can control what they manage. Cloud apps just scare the hell out of me as you don't own anything. You buy a song on ITunes, it is yours until Apple says it is not. You buy a movie from Amazon, it is your until the movie studio sues Amazon and they get a take down notice. This is why if I buy something, it is a physical device. You can not take my Blu-Ray copy of Skyfall without a warrant and coming to my house.

3) Ownership of information
        The next thing is who owns your data. Have you read many of the EULA for software? Try turbo tax. You would think that your data is yours. Nope. Well I can control how the software works and how it calls home for information my data is stored locally. It never sends that information out. Now use the online (cloud) app from them, they store your information for you. Let me see my tax information is probably one of three things I never want anyone to see (for identity thief protection). This is stored somewhere where you trust them to keep it safe. This is why a desktop (or laptop) is best for this as it is stored local and you have control.

4) Form Factor
        Yes at the end of the day, you can consume any form of media on any form factor. I can watch netflix on my tablet or my phone, but is that the most enjoyable experience? Hell no, it is just the most convenient. If I am going to watch a netflix show I would rather watch it in all its glory on my 52" TV with dolby digital sound system. However when I am sitting at an airport, yes I have to watch it on my portable devices since pulling a 52" TV through an airport w/ associated 7.1 system would just be unfeasible.

5) Gaming
        While some stupid little game like candy crush or angry birds work on those form factors, you cannot tell me that a high FPS FPS (heh .. frame per second, first person shooter) will never work on your dinky 4.3" Iphone screen. Yeah games can be made for those form factors, but at the end of the day, are those the games which are going to be what you want to spend 60 dollars on and want to spend hours playing on a larger screen. Nope, that is a console or a desktop.

Simple, it costs the bank money to do these transactions. The issue is that the banks used to just eat the costs and pay less on the back end in terms of interest to the banks customers. However, what has happened (same with the airline industry) is that people notice that banking is a comodity. Whoever provides the best XYZ combination wins my business. I don't care if it is BOA, Key, Fifth Third, etc. Whoever provides the best serivces, rates, and fees package wins my business. As such, people are not loyal to one certain bank, and can easily change banks. So banks have to compete with the best "services" and people are in general stupid. If they get a 0.5% better interest rate over at this bank .. then hell lets open up an account over there. However the hidden fees and what not wipe out that 0.5% quickly and you really got screwed on that deal. As I said, same thing for the airline industry. Seats for $199, but extra fees for e-ticket passes, peanuts, drinks, and luggage that puts the cost of the ticket at $259. They are creating a competitive market pricing strategy through asterisks, offuscation, and disclaimers.

The simple answer to all of this is choice, and the consequences of choice. I consider myself one of the "best and brightest" and why don't I go out and do what author is describing? Simple, myself subscribed to the philosophy that I needed to make a decent living (aka, I made a choice to live comfortably). I then chose to have a child with a woman who eventually split with me. I chose to get full custody of my son. Based on those choices, I was then told by society (a judge) that I had to live in central Indiana, and not in Washington, if I was to have my son live with me. Now Tell me how I can sit here with all those choices, and tell me how my life is going to work out.

I cannot work on the coasts, I cannot travel, I have to be home every night at 5-6pm, I want to live comfortably, I have to work in central Indiana. Tell me what a highly intelligent person is to do if they want to "change the world" or "help the underprivileged". Straw men such as the original author stated only work when things can work out for the person doing the work's favor.

Lets go with another example. Smart person wants to do a company which helps people. Great. They need money. They go out and they have to get into bed with VC or some angel will give them money for costs. This is great until said money giver now wants a return or worse yet, profit. So they have to find a way to make money. Giving things away does not make money (as poor, disadvantaged don't have a lot of excess cash to pay for things). So that means, companies who have altruistic intentions, must create a marketable application/device/item/widget and then sell that, make money, pay back the original shareholders, pay expenses/taxes, invest in R/D, and then finally with what ever is left, give money away for the original altruistic intentions were to begin with.

I cannot stamp my feet in the street and say "I want millions of dollars to create a company to help poor people, with no chance of paying back the original investors." The only way I can see that is if you hit the lottery.

Yes and no. While in the entire star fleet example you state the entitlement ethic, I wonder about other worlds that dont have people who want to work for the betterment of mankind. Not all people are naturally curious, nor do people naturally want to spend their entire life to help/entertain/etc. other people. The issue becomes no matter what kind of society you live in you will have some sort of trade. Do you think all those bottles of Romulan Ale that those star fleet officers came because someone could walk down to a store and get them without paying for them? No they had to offer services to get them. As such, you will naturally have the "haves" and "have nots". No matter what society you create in your mind, you will have people who will not contribute due to the one immutable law of humanity, people will do the least amount they can to get the most they can get by with.

Everyone is asking "what is a successful adult" and that is valid as that was not presented in the case study. However I am also wondering what is determined as "successful" in terms of schooling? Are you talking arbitrarily the grades someone made? Are you talking scores on standardized tests?

All I can say is that people who do well in school at a young age tend to do well as an adult. That is what the study states. However I would also add that it is not necessarily all inclusive as many people don't do well in school (at a young age) but succeed in life as well as academically.

The real reason it won't be liked by the content providers (dish, direct tv, cox, comcast, etc), and the channel providers (espn, tnt, discovery, etc.) are all tied to how they currently have their systems. The content providers won't like it much as they have to upgrade their network. They have this aging dinosaur of legacy cable in the ground, and have oil can type filters on their channels. This will require every TV to have a digital box on it to work. Yes they can amortize the cost by charging you $10 a month (or more), but that is not what the customers really want. They want to pay as least amount they can. Imagine a house that has 4 TVs (as many do), and now you are paying $20 a month for service (what is going to be required, just so you can be billed), and $40 just to watch shows on your 4 TVs. That is $60 a month before you pay for the content ... Now you are going to pay for each channel you want. Lets say you are a professional sports enthusiast, and want your channels. You need ESPN, TNT, TBS, NFL, MLBtv, plus the locals just to watch all the games and playoffs. That is probably $20 a month right there (according to cost (before markup) that is paid to each channel by the content providers). We have not even gotten into the costs that are there to watch "shows".

Channel providers have tied their contracts to "cost per seat" style licensing. This means if a content provider has 1.2 million subscribers, they have to pay 1.2 million times the going rate monthly to the channel provider to "carry" that channel, regardless of number of people who actually subscribe to that channel. They love this model as if they can get a critical mass of people (look at AMC and when it was not carried on a cable network, and they almost had a revolt when "walking dead" came back on), they can force more money from the content providers. This is exactly what they want, and don't want to have to deal with real world market forces. In fact, many channels would go away for good if people had to pay to get them. Look at things like FX, which does not have original programming (to my knowledge, it might now, I don't have cable, and use appropriate channel for my point), but only shows re-runs. Who is going to pay for that? Not many people. But since they are now bundled, and at little cost to the content provider, they ride on the coat tails of another company. If they had to compete directly, they would be ruined in months, and disappear.

This is what they have to address with this bill, should it be good for Americans. They need to provide a way for the content providers to have a service, and they pay for as you go, and pay for the services you use, and not screw the customers for the costs of the upgrades that have so long been needed to their decaying systems. Secondly the channel providers need to realize that they have to fight for time and eye balls now. They have to provide content and actually have decent programming. I don't know how they are going to pull this one off, as these two markets are already established, and the massive changes needed will not be in the final bill passed and we will get some bastardization which wont help anyone (like the health care bill).

This is because of the fuel system typically have vapor let off and your fuel is literally turning to vapor and leaving the car. The measurements at the fuel injector is always right (if the car has proper parts) but you loose MPG based on the fuel staying in the gas tank and floating into the world before it actually gets injected into the motor.

You assume they are standard. Many lights around this area are timed, and work great, except at rush hour as they are "tripped" by side streets all the time. Yes, timed should be timed, and that would be great, but around here timing them is impossible with a wad of traffic every day.

Sr. management have a limited amount of time to devote to this and they want to be trained in the system and will allow them to do their day to day tasks better. Take one of them aside (after asking for a volunteer, or who ever the project sponsor is) and run them through your training, exercises, reports, etc. and validate it is what they want. Based on their feedback, you can deploy that training (with tweaks from feedback) to the rest of management. You don't want to spend your time telling them superfluous information, just the facts as they want to know what it will do, what buttons to click, and what it will do for them. If they want more info, say you can be reached for info about this or any other IT questions.

If you are following standard security protocols. Most people are up in arms about this in the work place, but if you are following standard protocols at a work place, then it would not matter. An OS is always installed in a non-production network, with a different root password (typically the development network root password as it is distinct from production). Then the new OS is patched, configured with check lists, connected to LDAP servers (or what ever connections you need). The last three steps are to change the static IP to the new production network, Change root password to production root, and shut down the server. Then it is re-patched on the production network and when it comes up, it is secure, and only the admins know the root password.

You disable all but base corporate access to systems. You have the person who is leaving begin the knowledge transfer (or if you are a decent company, you were doing it already) and have all the information put on team shares, etc. So the person still does not have access to any mission critical systems, only has email and basic network share access, and then they can do nothing but damage their PC (which will be ghosted anyways) and maybe some file share or email servers. None are mission critical (yes, email is not mission critical, however much management think it is).

That is if the person is on good terms, and you want them to help you through the transition. Many companies just walk them to the door the second the two weeks is given and pay them for that two weeks immediately. No reason to risk anything.

I don't know where to begin in response to this, so lets take this by point/paragraph.

1) An IT degree is not "worthless" because it teaches you certain technologies. You lean about specific technologies, and yes they change. However learning how a technology works (not just learning how to click a button and wow it works) is the true knowledge you are learning. I learned LDAP and Netware in college, and those technologies are fundamental to how I can look at all authorization technologies today, even though people rarely deploy true virgin implementations of those technologies today. The same can be said about modem technology. I learned how a modem worked and today, very few people still use modems. However knowing frequency multiplexing, understanding bandwidth, encoding methodologies, etc. I can know how most any telecom signal works.

2) IT degrees are not standardized. Yes, and nor should they. Universities are a bevy of politics, greed, money changing hands, etc. Curriculum are determined by committees made up from companies which are giving money to the universities to make sure they get the kinds of employees they want. Any company that wants a person can spend 30 minutes and determine if the person has the skills they want. This is called an interview.

3) IT has focused on certs. While yes, this is true, it again tells you if a person has a certain knowledge in certain areas. A company that implements certs can determine the level of knowledge required to pass them and this is no big deal either. Industry knows which are the crap certs and which are the good ones. Again, an interview can determine really quick if a person knows their stuff.

I think you are looking about this the whole way. There are IT workers, and there are IT professionals. An IT worker is an individual who only has the skills to do one specific type of task, and cannot branch out into other areas or line of work. An example of this is a desktop admin (Not all, don't flame me, just read the specifics as I state them) at a large company. If the person has only just joined, and all the know how to do is load a boot CD and ghost images, then guess what, they are an IT worker. They might expand further into creating images and doing other things on that team, but they are still an IT worker. Until they understand full system integration, app design, architecture, etc. then they know how to one specific task (or set of tasks).

A true IT professional is an individual who can work on almost any given technology, knows and has experience with most of the underlying technologies, and can quickly come up to speed with anything that is given to them. These people are rare, and people like this rarely are desired in the traditional hiring process and most the time work as consultants. Why is this? Simple, companies want IT workers. Give them a task, they do only that task. People who can see the bigger picture are not needed often, and when they are, cheaper to hire a consultant for the few weeks they are needed.

I am proud to say I am an IT professional. I have two masters degrees and several certifications after my name. I make a great living, and will be retired by the time I am 45. I can tell you that being an IT professional has not harmed me one bit. I would like to know how this has harmed me? The only way I can see it harming you to be an IT professional is if you want to do the same IT job for the rest of your life, at the same company. Not me, I want to use the knowledge, skills, and god given inquisitiveness I have to learn.

Password Management is not the same as access management. In terms of password management, yes, you can standardize all systems to authenticate and authorize from a central system (LDAP, AD, RADIUS, RSA Tokens, etc.) The issue becomes when a person leaves, turn it off and all their access goes away. The issue is for proprietary systems that use things like digital certs, or that do not play well with centralized auth systems (ie. lazy programming in my book for enterprise apps).

As for the other piece, access management, this has to do with the knowledge (and proof) that a person was given access to (and what level of permissions) as well as who approved, and who implemented the account creation/deletion. There are systems which costs millions of dollars to manage access and the subsequent audit requirements around it.

While I agree with several of your points, I think it is not a "We Hate Success" problem, but more of a "We hate what success has done to you!" problem. Yes many people are quick on and off the bandwagon, and those people were not to be considered true fans to begin with. Yes Ubuntu has done a lot, by giving us a standard platform, and originally giving us a good repository, and a good start for many forks (Mint, etc.) which can be created.

The main issue was, their decision to push Unity. In the Linux community, if something comes as a drastic change, you fork the development and someone can pick up the abandoned fork (the GNOME 2.X developed interface) within their community. Ubuntu did not do that. They gave us a universally panned GUI, designed for cell phones and tablets, to be used on servers and desktops. Worse yet, they gave us no option but to make this major switch with them if we wanted the latest patches, etc. Bad move.

So my point is that they grew so successful, they forgot their roots, and decided to make changes, regardless of what they were "supposed" to do based on the community they were in. The OS communities version of "Too Big to Fail." The Linux User Community got them where they were, and they abandoned them by making this one time, decision. This has caused the hatred for Ubuntu, not that they are successful.