1 What are the threats? 2 Why do you care? 3 Expose as little as possible 'publicly' with as few people even knowing you have diamonds in your safe. 4 Have 'CCTV' so you can detect intrusions (and possibly a honeytrap) 5 Assume anyone with $$$ to spend technically will first spend $ on more basic intelligence. 6 [This list goes on and on]

If you edit a text file you know what you've done. For a sysadmin that's quite important. With a GUI 'things happen'. Are your changes in one file or a dozen? When will the next be backed-up. If you restore some of them and not the others then what? I really like tools I can point a mouse at to flip a switch rather than having to trawl through acres of 'documentation' and then test hoping I've got the case-sensitive flags right and the actual version matches the docs or is compatible with foo, but for sysadmin work you need to learn tricky text files that are the links in the chain you lead your tiger by.

Six times improvement in six years I could accept.

Psychologically we all hate to deal with an issue imposed on us but utility companies are supposed to be rational. A fix today won't cost more than a fix next month or next year but it will stop HUGH amounts of losses.

Feedback in necessary to tailor efforts into communication. Suppose you woke up in the jungle surrounded by monkeys (or whatever intelligent creature rocks your boat.) If they don't react to Ug? BOO! Gosh-pilliwinks! or anything else you have no way to evolve a language. 'Doctors' could do better with a dice or oueja board.

There is a trade-off between getting each step right first time by absolute concentration eg. coding, and wasting time exploring the solution-space at the speed of an ant. A lot of programming involves juggling eggs and a mind trained not to drop stitches is required. On the other-hand you can't cross a ditch with lots of tiny steps no mater how small you make them - you need to jump. SOME way of letting 'what the heck' out of the bottle can be a very useful mind tool for minds that are trained to analyse and check everything. Chemical means is one, requirement not to be a 'total nerd' in public another. You could try serious habit-forming methods but cider is more fun -- is there something wrong with that?

If I walk up to you in the street and ask you how old you are and are you married then you're going to be uptight. (You might decline of course but this is EMOTIVE territory.) Yet people blandly fill in forms with this and lots more connected information without worrying. Let's make it more creepy! 1001 CCTV cameras can see how short skirts are at any place today. So it'll be OK for me to approach women and take my tape measure out will it? The guy in the story is quite rightly pointing out that we have grown to accept Big Brother surveillance.

The WHOLE POINT of science fiction is to get us to think about how decisions in the past and we make TODAY affect the future.

How about for an example? A TV-top camera watching for who watches what adverts being used to detect atheists who 'ignore' religious blatterings? (I hope) this is SF but either it is bound to be abused occasionally or massively. "The next educational program on Afgan [UAE, Dubai,...] TV is not for women."

Put the super computer deep in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Cooling problem (impossible to deal with on the Moon) solved.

Access? Not easy but a couple of orders of magnitude better than the moon.

Interference? Not much. More like blockage through general clag in the atmosphere.

Dishes? Float them. Float a dozen which will randomly point in various directions as the swell tilts them. But who cares -- You've got a supercomputer to deal with trivia like that.

In two words BS.

You know the result: This.

So you're a democracy with freedom of speech etc. etc. so where are your mass-media communicators that shrivel this ball of idiocy into a cinder? You may have a few obstreperous icons but that's not the same thing as a must-watch 'spitting image' on every week to lampoon the whole lot of them.

If you have a group of people unused to thinking then you can draw pretty lines and boxes together in a friendly sort of way. It is a social thing like ten people going to the kitchen to cook a meal.

If you are an experienced thinker then you probably need time (in ways you have got used to eg On waking-up or hiking or "Shut up! I've just had an idea!") to note your thoughts and see where they lead. You're quite likely to have ways of grouping and ordering notes on [bits of] paper which just happen. The only software you need is a pencil and scrap paper.

If you are one of the 90% of people who don't use analysis and imagination then you need prompts and buckets. Prompts to ask say 'what are the sub-tasks' and buckets to keep similar things together. MM don't have prompts and the buckets are very generic. For a particular task such people need particular headings to put 'first answers' into.

If you wish to create an on-line reference then fine. OTOH understanding is about context and appropriate use. A function reference tells how to use it not why. A discussion of say various ways of doing something may introduce all sorts of concepts and easily mention useful functions or sections of the manual to look at in more detail but it is about why and doesn't need to be on a screen - in fact I would say it is better to have the why and overview documentation in a form suitable for picking up and putting down when the reader is in the mood for a bit of learning and not trying to look at the instructions while driving.

(1) You have job security. (2) You have delivered what is needed so far Now what happens... Your organisation could carry on as-is. It has worked in the past but you might get eaten by a rogue killer whale. Oho! A /real/ risk of you going AWOL for (100 genuine reasons). So how do you suggest this is is handled? In-line comments? Development Wiki? etc. IMHO I would try to list the things that could go wrong... ...Then put them into categories such that responsibility for a certain category can be handed to whoever. Two days later ask whoever is supposed to be 'in charge of foo' how they intend dealing with a certain detail. (This is Health and Saefty... Gone mad) if you ask people happily fumbling about their own business.ask to see the legal details.

The national, local and various agencies of the UK government could be charged say 1p (or 5p etc) per view. That would bring in many £000. It should be easy to see the domain of ...gov.uk in the logs and send a bill each week. (Obviously it doesn't address the original issue but it does send a message that wealthy organisations should support a socially useful resource instead of just leaching.)

The objective may be to make sure you don't unwittingly fork.