Don't forget the normal voter who just doesn't want to have more taxes. Even if it means that they will pay more for Internet service.

Americans in general, have a distrust of the government. And prefer to have more personal power even if that means they are putting themselves in a disadvantage. But that way it is their mistake in their lives not someone elses.

Are you implying that my Open Source Grammar and Spell checker is faulty?

Most companies don't.
If it gets to a point where your program is changing its programming language for its code, chances are the entire workflow process will be evaluated, and will be coded from the start up. If there isn't a change in workflow, then there isn't a good need to change how the program is written, and they will just code the legacy system, in the style of the time.

However your Old COBOL or Fortran system is being migrated to a newer platform, the new workflow means a lot of these cool tricks back then may be so simplified down to a built in language class, so that module that took weeks to perfect may be just as easy as x.dothis()

Or if you do go back in time, your grandfather will kill you first, so he can tell those tales at nauseum on how he fought off a mad man at nauseum, which enrages you so much that you just want to go back in time and kill him.
   

Many high end equipment does have fairly large capacitors to allow enough power off time to do a clean power off.
I remember back in the 1990's some PC Centric folks were looking in a Sun Workstation they were surprised about all the large capacitors that were on the motherboard. In short it gives the system enough time finish its final calculation before the power goes out.

In terms of brain implants, we are at the Peg-Leg level of sophistication. We can offer them a solution that will help with some problems, but it isn't a case where we can solve all the problems.

So something that detects that a seizure will happen then does a pulse to stop it. Will help stop the seizure, but not cure all the problems, as well it may bring in some side effects, because the brain so so complicated.

However for some reason we have been polarized to a point that we really can't judge tradeoffs any more. We want a 100% cure. We want our food to be 100% healthy and fill us up, and meet the taste we are craving, we want technology to Run Fast, Use little power, and be tiny. We want our contractors to be Cheap, Fast and Good.

The fact that we live in this imperfect world, seems to have a lot of people paralyzed to the idea of progress where progress will sometimes means there will be a tradeoff.

Perhaps not as well. If people are following the coding standards for the organization then the code for the most part looks far more similar.

When I am working with a development team, I will tend to adjust my unique style to better match what everyone else is doing. Even if it means doing coding methods that I will normally disagree with.

If the code tends to use a bunch of Goto's instead of Procedures or classes. I will use those GOTO not for my benefit, but for people who will maintain my code later on, so they won't have to change their mindset and debugging strategies to see what the program is doing to do future corrections.

I will go full Object Oriented if the group of people that I am working with do their coding full OO.

My personal style would be more procedural, than OO. Not due to lack of knowledge or not realizing OO advantages and disadvantages. But if I am to code on my own, I code in the way that My Mind handles the requirements, and how I feel would be easier for me to change and fix my code in the future.

I think this method is best for ID based on personal code, vs group corporate code, where a lot of your particular style is hidden.

In terms of a server OS, Linux has good security. The lock screen on X11 in order to keep other out of your logged in session, workstation/desktop usage. It isn't ideal.

the NT Alt-Ctrl-Del is a Workstation thing. Its security is low level to prevent applications from accessing it.

Ethics and Morals are based on the cultural norms.

Taking a bribe is consider corruption in our culture. In another it may be considered payment for expedited services. In America we Tip our servers, the size of our tips are based on what we figure was the quality of the service. This motivates the server to try to exceed expectation. The only difference between this and a bribe is payment after service is performed and not before.

There are the obvious fads. But there are plenty of times where a Fad can endure vs just go away, sometimes it could just be something disruptive that changes its path.

We had the rails fad. Ruby on Rails got rather popular in the early 10's then it just kinda faded away. Technically it was fine, however mobile apps development took over which made Web Applications development seem less popular, so the existing Web Apps were just maintained with PHP, JSP or ASP.NET. The need to try to make an ultra rich interface for web applications somewhat paused, when they realize they just need to focus on the PC, and no longer put effort in Mobile HTML with the new input methods.

OS/2 Vs. Windows 95. There was a lot of buzz around OS/2 Warp replacing Windows 3.1... However IBM really bombed its marketing while Microsoft did a stellar job.

During our careers I am sure the best of us, had jumped onto the wrong fad, or made a bad choice. Then the next time you didn't change your criteria and you made a good choice.

However the real question should be. As the parent pointed out What does it do, and will it actually benefit me/my organization.

There is nothing simple about ethics with international business.
Things that ethically right in one culture can be a huge issue in an other.
Many European countries have laws about Hate speech.
The US has against with Pedophilia.
In some countries bribes are just part of doing business. In others it is quite illegal.
Countries will tax you for things that other countries would consider as overstepping bounds.
Some countries lets things go by without legal controls that others find monstrous.

If you are going to be doing international business, you need to be sensitive to your own ideals, as well as the ideals of your new customer base.
Our American Ideals of nearly full freedom of speech, vs. Turkey ideals of limited speech. Are clashing. So if Zuckerberg just said no. They will not operate in Turkey, and the users will be loss of a medium to spread the areas of free speech that they do enjoy. If Zuckerberg agrees then Facebook stays operational, and while taking heat from the culture who doesn't like to see any speech censored, is allowing the culture to have better tools to share the free speech that they are entitled too.

Especially now that most of the data is transmitted digitally. This was a necessary evil before digital distribution, because an analog signal took up a full bandwidth having too much will cause interference. With the data being distributed digitally a lot of competition can go across the same pipeline without affecting the other. TCP/IP is kinda neat that way.

You're assuming that the task of crossing the Atlantic in the 17th Century is a feat comparable to a more advanced civilisation travelling dozens of lightyears in space. We are a more advanced civilisation - and not only are we still doing pretty badly at human space exploration, we're staring to form pretty successful scientific theories that show the task will be very, very difficult - and could be impossible. You're basing your argument on the (non-falsifiable) notion that an advanced civilisation will develop technology indistinguishable from magic - in an age where science is capable of asking quite a few awkward questions about magic w.r.t. little things like causality and the laws of thermodynamics...

At that time, travelling to America may have not been a picnic, but was still "only" a matter of months. Ships were readily available (the Mayflower was just a garden variety merchant ship). Coming back was unlikely (for the majority of the passengers) but not impossible. Trade with the old world was still feasible (much of the exploration of the new world at the time had a view to bringing resources back to Europe) and the climate on the East coast of America may have proven to be a bit nippy, but you could breathe the air, drink the water, eat native plants and animals and be reasonably confident that your seeds would go.

So, the question is, would the pilgrims still have left Europe for America if it meant a shipbuilding programme that made Apollo look like a science fair project, then spending the rest of their life on a ship, never seeing land, in the hope that their great-grandchildren would finally arrive in America - and then face the task of another generation or two on the ship terraforming the land before they could start ploughing and planting?

Especially given that, if you could buy a ship that could survive for many lifetimes in the middle of the Atlantic without support, wouldn't it be a hell of a lot easier just to build a big raft and park it sufficiently far offshore that the people you were running from wouldn't bother you?

Then, seriously, what do you think the chances are of a bunch of religious fundamentalists crewing a generation ship without overpopulating, schisming, squandering resources, killing each other and regressing to savagery (the 56th law of Science Fiction)? Yet in a society without the tendency for people to persecute each other in an argument over the colour of the sky fairy's wings, their motivation for embarking on the journey wouldn't have existed...

IT security is about tradeoffs.
The idea of 100% security while possible, it impractical.
Your argument about Blackphone is the fact they are not supportive of the OSS mind set, So you judging the quality of the technology based on what type of license it has.

Ok a flaw was found, and they put in a fix for it, what else do you expect from them?

Nah - I think the "skeuomorphism considered harmful" movement comes from form-over-function graphic design numpties who were tired of actual content, meaning or useful visual cues for functionality polluting their minimalist design and stealing valuable screen area that could be used for whitespace, irrelevant generic images of shiny happy people or corporate identity guff. It was showing up on websites etc. (Slashdot's Bucking Feta was fairly late to the party) long before Apple went flat. Google have been going down the same route for some time, too.

Apple didn't help by coming up with some appallingly bad skeuomorphic UIs shortly before they went flat: someone had completely forgotten that the point of making something look like, say, a physical book is to suggest to the user that it works like a physical book (e.g. with data arranged in pages). Apps like Contacts and Calendars looked like books, or flip-over calendars, but didn't work remotely like such things, leaving the user with a load of totally misleading visual cues. (Subsequently copying them from iOS to OSX, where the mouse-based interface made them work even less like the physical object didn't help, either). Now, the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater, and we're left with "mystery meat" UIs with nothing to distinguish the controls from the content.