I think you're confusing communism with a surveillance society. Sure, the USSR encouraged a climate of fear, but that was because the regime was poor and having the citizens in a continual state of fear is the cheapest way to control them. The way that the USA and other western democracies used to use to control their citizens was the threat of taking away their wealth and lifestyle. They've now discovered that the same goals can be achieved much cheaper by the use of fear - so they've adopted the tactics of the totalitarian regimes. It's true that dictatorships and poorly run communist states are poor, but it's not a requirement of communism to monitor and terrorise its population - it's just the easiest way to keep them subjugated.

I'm guessing what we have here is a junior programmer who's acting up because he is in the presence of senior staff, who are better paid than him, but don't have his spread of buzzwords. It's a sign of inexperience to assume that you're better, simply because you have been taught all the trendy buzzwords. I doubt that the older guys transgressions are anything really significant - maybe he cocked up a RCS entry once and maybe he doesn't know some of the stuff that the new kid does.

However I would not be at all surprised to learn that Old Guy is more than pulling his weight where it counts: producing reliable stuff that is efficient, well documented, properly tested and on time. What New Kid fails to recognise is that in a short time, some other New Kid will be sniping at HIM for the same reason he's whining on now.

Those (enlightened, safe) parts of the world with gun controls generally have the same sensible controls over ammo, too. So being able to print a gun leaves you with a rather cheesy ornament since you can't get any bullets to fire from the thing. That's probably just as well since places that don't permit people to shoot each other generally have a population that knows nothing about guns: how to maintain them, load them or shoot them. So putting a weapon in the hands of inexperienced people is probably the dumbest thing you can possibly do.

I set their stuff up properly and it just works. What's the problem?

... are STEM graduates who are willing to work for the pittance most companies intend to pay. The shortage is of salaries, not candidates.

Surely it's better to have one person: a person who is intimately familiar with a piece of software, to go about the job of setting it up ONCE, properly, than for thousands of individuals who know bugger all about it to have to go through the learning curve of finding out about it and then each one configuring it in slightly different and sub-optimal ways?

That doesn't mean that each user would be unable to reconfigure an appiication or O/S to suit themselves, but it would result in much more software arriving at the users' in a fit state to just be used - rather than people having to futz arounf for hours or days on forums and support sites.

However, where's the fun in providing proper settings and useful documentation, when an author could be writing the next version or some other completely different piece of code, that thousands of new users could be confounded by in the weeks to come?

My experience is that when things go wrong the LAST person you want to have to deal with is an under-trained, demotivated human who just wants you and your problem to go away. They'll tell you whatever gets you out of their way and woe betide anyone who rocks up to their counter within 5 minutes of going-home time.

Give me a computer every time.

Few of the studies have reproducible results and fewer are able to draw hard, unambiguous, numerical conclusions from their data. So it doesn't make much difference whether american students or penguins were used as test subjects - unless the study was on the motivational effect of raw fish.

Not advisable. With obviously incorrect sales pitches, such as this, there is gold to be extracted.

What you have (apart from a number of happy but evil customers who gave this as a present to someone they didn't like) is a mailing list with the names and addresses of some very gullible people and people with low control over their impulse to buy junk. This is worth far more than SPAM lists as the clientele is proven to buy pointless items, and to fall for the dumbest advertisements.

It may even be that the value of the list far exceeds the development cost of the flawed product and could even be the covert line of business - with the bicycle pedal just being a front for the real business: identifying people with more money than sense.

The basic problem with Ultra-HD is that nobody can see it. You'd have to be sitting so close to the screen to appreciate the difference (from "normal" HD) that your eyes couldn't see the whole screen. Add on to that. that the data stream would be so highly compressed to fit into the available bandwidth that the only difference would be the resolution of the artifacts. What you have is the video equivalent of an audio bandwidth extending into the 100's of kHz. great for any dogs listening, or eagles watching your TV, but utterly pointless for humans, unless their motivation is so immature that they feel the need to have something impractically better than the guy next door's, no matter what the cost - or usefulness.

The industrial revolution is driven by man's ability to harness energy. So far that's all been fossil fuel and has limited what we can do - and how fast we can do it.

That phase of the industrial revolution is still going strong and has nothing to do with electronics, electricity or computers. Those developments are a completely different strand of development, and (themselves) have barely started, either.

The next phase of human-kinds development is when we break out, past the limitations (both of availability and rate of generation) of fossil fuels into a new era where there is MORE energy available to each human. Probably several times more energy.

However, if you really want to talk about computers, then we're still in the pre-condensing boiler stage. We can make computing devices that seem pretty powerful (because we have nothing better to compare them with), but they're not particularly powerful, complex or scalable. Also, it's debatable whether there is anything on the horizon (quantum, possibly - but it seems to be a hellishly complicated way to do things and needs a lot of supporting structure, compared to, say, the human brain) to take us to the next phase.

So, no. We have NOT come to the end of IR3, we're still firmly stuck in the first industrial revolution, probably for another 50 - 100 years until we get our asses into gear and get past fossil fuels. Computing also seems firmly stuck on the bottom rung, with no promising technologies to move up, past the limitations of current semiconductor processors and logic-gate based architectures.

The predictions say nothing about what we'll be using. They only guess at what will be possible. Flying cars are "possible" (we call them helicopters), but they aren't used by everyday people. The IBM predictions are typical ivory tower statements that have no commercial credibility.

Maybe IBM is saving the what will be predictions for itself.

Some large companies have a liason department who's job is to help small contractors to "deal" with the larger organisation. Check if there's any such thing with your problem company.

Second idea is to simply sell the debt to a factoring outfit. You'll only get a percentage of the headline figure, but the loss should be written off for tax purposes (small comfort).

The students pay the fees that keep the staff in jobs. It seems bizarre that they should be the ones who should be tracked.

If anything, the lecturers and academics should be the ones who have to sign in and prove they are doing the work the students are paying them for.

Never forget there are plenty of ways to deliver a nuke - a freight container being a good choice. Even with anti-nuke scanners (a sure sign that the method is credible) it would be easy to overload the warning systems by spreading a little radioactive waste on the outside of several thousand containers. Just over-fly a container ship with a crop sprayer would be enough.

Even if the NKians did want to deliver a nuke by missile, an EMP burst would be just as effective as a ground strike and wold need very little accuracy. Let's not forget that since the NKians have very little electricity generation, a retailatory attack in kind would have very little effect on them.