Yup, this sure is a NYT article. Hand wringing by an economically and technically illiterate journalist, asking a question which any 6 year old could answer.

The patriot act. Homeland Security. Secret laws. Secret panels. When you passed this shit, did you all honestly think it would never come back to bite you in the ass?

Well, look behind you.

I'm looking at you, Kathleen Sebelius. The healthcare.gov fiasco is just one obvious symptom. The world depends utterly on science and technology, but is being guided by people who I will describe politely as "technically challenged."

We've seen the results recently, and they're not pretty. I think our democracy itself is going to have to go through a thorough upgrade to remain viable. IQ tests for politicians? No, it's not egalitarian. It's not the American way. It may, however, allow the country to survive in something like its present form over the next century.

Unless it happens to flash into this time period. All the passengers are there now, running from polar bears, avoiding smoke monsters - that sort of thing.

This just shows that replacing Ballmer doesn't solve the fundamental cultural problems at Microsoft. This is classic M$ behavior, as in "We're going to tell you what to do and why you should do it, even it works against your self interest and costs you a lot of time and money."

They did it by not providing an automated migration from VB6 to VB.net
They did it by not providing and automated migration from Winforms to ASP or WPF.
They're doing it now by not providing and automated migration from Silverlight to WPF.
They did it by not providing a useful transition from the Windows 7 interface to Windows 8.
They did it by replacing VBScript and Jscript with Powershell instead of providing VBScript.net or Jscript.net while maintaining backward compatibility with old code, or providing and automatic migration.

Seeing a pattern here? Microsoft's answer is always the same one: "Fuck you, learn a brand new language (or OS), recode, and No, we don't care how much it costs you or your clients or if it puts you out of business."

I'm pretty sure that if something like the Zorin distro was a little better, a more MS-like, and ran most MS software under Wine out of the box, that most people would install it and never look back.

I'm not sure what anyone can do for you.

"...- there's a difference between good people and qualified people. As a working programmer, when I complain about finding qualified managers, I mean people that can show, in an interview, that they have a basic comprehension of the technologies being used by the people they are attempting to manage."

No. There's no "shortage." There's a shortage of STEM workers who will work for slave wages like all the MBA's and foreign CEOs would like.

Engineers. We're so.... uppity.

"About the same" is my choice.

We're not *anywhere* near either. We are still laughably dependent on hydrocarbon energy and lack the political will to build enough sustainable nuclear (fission or fusion) to sustain our current industrial society much beyond this century. Without that power, other hard limits like phosphate depletion for agriculture will eventually constrain our ability to feed 7 billion people worldwide.

It's not hopeless. There's a natural, normal population bottleneck coming, as it does for all species as they run themseles out of natural resources. The survivors in the 2150s should start living fairly comfortably as the Earth starts cooling down.

I suggest reading a book in protest. Voltaire anyone?

First Guy: Look, I made this incredible communication device!
Other Guys: Wow. Cool! Can we use it?
First Guy: Sure!
Other Guys: OK, but we own it now, OK?
First Guy: Uh......

Our society now runs on technology that requires extremely intelligent people to design, build and maintain it.

The politicians who want to regulate or even use this technology are elected by the lowest common denominator of Americans. Moreover, most of those politicians are scientifically illiterate and therefore, incompetent to do so (e.g. Sebellius and the healthcare.gov site) .

It's nice to think that in a democracy, anyone can get elected to office without regard to IQ or education. How's that been working out lately?

I mean, certainly no politician or local police "authority" would ever silence an entire area just to stop the public from filming the latest police atrocity. Heavens, no.

And the tech community says, "Ouchie" and runs back to their offices. I've been lecturing developers on this for years, and gotten little but hostility back. When you tell them "The fucking computer DOES NOT MATTER" they just look at you blankly.

The computer. It's a toaster, OK? It should turn on immediately. Do what the fuck I tell it to do and stay out of my face. It's not even a servant. It's *less* than a servant. It deserves no regard whatsoever.

More to the point, the toaster should not ask me a bunch of questions, steal my input focus, wait for it's little processes to complete in the foreground before moving on, take minutes to start, or stop, refresh my screen randomly, puke out unhelpful pointless error messages that require my attention, and so on. Aside from all of this being a sign of lazy, careless design and programming, all of this will drive consumers to devices that *don't* do this, or do it less. This is one reason among many why Android is taking over the world, while Windows is dying a well deserved death from it's ossified, well preserved stupidity.