That's all circumstantial, until or unless he walks into the diner with a bomb.
I'm not willing to sacrifice the privacy of the whole country over a movie plot threat.
Stated another way...
Your relationship with your ISP: You are the customer.
Your relationship with Facebook: You are the product.
It's easy to come up with BAD examples, that's the default for movies. What's your vote for the BEST portrayal?
The computer stuff wasn't particularly great in this movie, but I thought this move captured the technology development process very nicely:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085271/
I wholeheartedly agree. If we can't get rid of zero-tolerance or "THE RULES", perhaps the "bright guys" at the top could try to codify common sense. Something like:
Here are "THE RULES" 1-N...
Rule N+1 is: You must make a good faith attempt to understand the context of and apply common sense to each individual situation. If you do not, these rules hold you to be just as accountable (or more at fault?) as if you had completely disregarded them.
Then perhaps they could write in to the official HR description of all administrative jobs: #1 required job qualification: Common Sense.
...might work. Uh, never mind...
-N.
This essay from Bruce Schneier goes directly to this issue:
http://www.schneier.com/essay-208.html
Government has a lot of power over you. Whereas you as an individual have very little power over the government. To balance things out, large/powerful entities should be transparent. Smaller entities and individuals get to have secrets (privacy).
it's also not fairly easy to use, however it's probably the same interface you've used since you were a kid. That makes it familiar, not easy.
I would argue that familiar is very important. I don't want to re-learn something a new way if the current way is working for me. Even if your new way is marginally better. It's not because "I don't like to learn new things". I just don't happen to want to spend my time learning the same new things you care about.
Incidentally, I have the same basic gripe with Vista and Server 2008. Many things were changed arbitrarily or for only minor benefit.
I completely agree that one way or another, the car needs to be stopped.
But it is not *crazy* to be thinking about the car behind you either. Newer cars with high-tech braking systems have much better braking ability then the average 10-year-old Honda on the road. On a few occasions, I've had to make a quick stop and then, after realizing I was definitely *not* going to hit the car in front of me, let up a bit to try and give the guy behind me as much room as possible.
Whether he's tailgating me or not, his fault or not, he's a dumbass, whatever... all things being equal, I'd rather not get rear-ended.
So I think it would be cool if the software for any sort of automatic braking system take that into account and stop you "just enough" to not hit the guy in front of you.
An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.