Separation of powers happened because the founding fathers understood that no single concentrated power could be trusted. Universal surveillance of all government officials would simply be an extension of this principal.

The founding fathers would approve filming government at ALL levels, from congress to notary. Multiple cameras (in the case of cops, dash-cam and chest-cam), streaming to web, with read-only access and multiple, physically separated backups.

There is no *technical* reason this can't be done, and frankly, it's a good idea. Think how much crap congress and K-Street wouldn't have gotten away with, had this been in place.

A militarized police is so handy! You can:

1) Get around that annoying "Posse comitatus" thing.

2) You can use them to fight the national guard, should they become unccoperative.

3) You can field them for both local OR national coups against EITHER the Feds or the State authorities (Texas, you wanted to secede? Your chance is coming...).

4) You can ramp up civil forfeiture (i.e. Theft by law enforcement) and take a cut!

They slice! They dice! You can even Julliane freedom fries! Militarized by military surplus cops. Whoo Hoo!

The decision is driven by economics. Don't want to go into huge debt? Need to live at home? Don't want to pay for a quaint archaic infrastructure of unnecessary buildings and offices for professors and administration? You'll go to digi-school!

It may only be half as good, but if it's 1/10th the cost, this is where students will go. Excellent students will excel anywhere, of course. This structure favors autodidacts.

Once again, Microsoft discovers what's obvious anyone else who's been in the business for 25 years or so.

You have to have manual and automated GUI testers. Unit testing is nifty, but that's like testing just the spark plug, or maybe the spark plug and the ignition timing. Not a bad idea, but listen. If you knew about a new car, but knew that nobody had ever actually *driven* the car, much less taken it out on the road on a regular basis, would you buy that car?

For that matter, would you fly in a plane tested that way?

Developers testing their little piece of code isn't ever going to cut it. Neither is unit testing. Thinking it will is just managerial fantasy, or an idea that lets you fire a bunch of testers so the books look better and some manager or bean counter. can get a one time bonus.

Turn off fox news. They'll go away.

Well....not today...

Lucky you! I'm sure this will terribly valuable in 20 years time, much like my ability to do code typesetting on a Compugraphic Quadex 5000 using Forth.

Worry about the folks who flew here from Africa who didn't know they were infected, and are even now having hamburgers at the airport.

New languages. New frameworks. New IDEs. New magic procedures...

Some of it is good, surely. Who programs without classes these days? But every time I see someone come up with a magic new net language, framework, etc., I sort of cringe. I mean, do we really need another one? Do we need all the ones we have (I'm lookin' at you, Ruby...).

The elephant in the room here that Microsoft, et. al. seems happy to ignore is that it takes time to learn AND recode this stuff. Time is money. If you're a teen or a student, you have time to mess with the next Ruby, or Dart, or GO, or BrainFuck or...

As a kid, you have no money invested, and plenty of time. There's no risk.

Fast forward 25 years. You still code for a living. You have a house, a wife, kid(s), car(s). You and your spouse are paying for all of this. Suddenly, genius boy at Microsoft invents Powershell! and convinces a few PHBs to roll it out. Suddenly, all your clients want Powershell! Quite frankly, you haven't got the time or interest in learning Powershell!. You wanted .net features added to VBScript and/or Jscript. You wanted backwards compatibility with existing VBscript and Jscript code. You wanted something that added value, not something that subtracted value by forcing you to go back to the drawing board and recode perfectly functional tools to satisfy a corporate IT security requirement from the corporate PHB that says, "Use Powershell!" for which you may, or not be paid, depending on how well your contract was written.

Disclaimer: I like Powershell, but it was the wrong decision.

The problem, quite simply, is this: Change!=Improvement. Change!=Better. Sometimes you get lucky. At other times, not so much.

Can someone explain to me again why this couldn't be modified, scaled up and used as a micro thrust system for satellites and such? And why is a microwave resonant chamber "better?"

There's a shortage of technically competent people who will work for Wal-Mart wages. That I'll grant. As long as technology continues to advance, however, you've got to pay to play. Upper management, of course, will deny this forever, and will never learn from past outsourcing mistakes.

As I recall, the protagonist in "The Shadow of The Torturer" wears a costume and cape made of a perfect black material so that all you see when he walks towards you is an irregular shifting black shape of perfect darkness.

With an axe, and eyes.

It was a good book. The rest of the series? Eh.

If they're corporations, they can be sued out of existence. Let the fun begin!

Interesting. The next question, of course, is "Can you scale it up to replace 160 exajoules of energy currently provided by 30 billion barrels a year of oil ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), or will it remain forever a niche player?"

Because in a world of capitalist systems, that's all that matters. At the moment, I buy 25 miles of transportation for about $3.45 cents.

I'm pretty sure that ammonia doesn't have anything like the energy density of gasoline, and that it costs more per unit of energy. Feel free to show me how wrong I am.

TL;DR: Another horseshit, "we're saved! There's never going to be an energy problem again!" article.