= = = That said, the United States Postal Service isn't really in financial trouble.
Their problem mostly has to do with a bad law that forces them to devote enormous amounts of cash to prefund pension plans [wikipedia.org] = = =

Excellent point.

sPh

Something like 99.7% of USPS mail is autosorted. There are three (IIRC on the number) centers were a few dozen human-type people view (remotely, from the regional sorting center) the 0.3% that doesn't autosort. Again IIRC those people are able to sort 99% of the remaining, usually within 10 seconds. The rest go to the dead mail office.

The pictures people have in their minds of USPS "inefficiency" are the way things were done in the 1950s; the USPS started automating in a big way in the 60s and funded a lot of research in machine vision and OCR in the 60s and 70s.

sPh

...because all resources collection occurs outside the well.

Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there unfortunately.

sPh

= = = = build a space elevator and... = = = =

Soon as that 1000x-stronger-than-spider-silk cable material is invented, the electrical charge problems are solved, and the people living under the fall path of a broken cable accept the risk we are good to go. Just a few minor engineering obstacles to be sure.

sPh

There is no doubt that in a situation of species-threatening emergency that mankind has, today, the technology to construct a quite large object in earth orbit and give it enough engine power to move through the solar system (Orion drive or whatever). The problem is that we do not have the technology to get stuff out of the Earth's gravity well with anything greater than 0.1% efficiency, and in the process of building that Enterprise-sized object we would destroy the Earth's atmosphere and ecosystem. So until a 10,000x better surface-to-orbit launch technology comes along this ain't gonna happen.

sPh

- - - - you need to think about this from the standpoint of you being the boss, [...] When it comes to the people who are leading a division or organization, this becomes even more important. What kind of shady deals would these people be willing to make, what kind of precarious situations would they be willing to put the company in? - - - -

A boss whose company is being acquired is often given a bribe ("retention bonus") to lie to his employees about what he knows and what is going to happen for a long period of time (6-12 months is not uncommon). This is particularly common for director-level bosses and those who lead divisions or organizations. Not sure how that fits into your theory.

sPh

= = = Indeed. I'm beginning to suspect these claims of widespread fraud have more to do with some pretty bizarre metrics on the part of those making the claim. It makes great headlines, but I think there's something rather fishy about it. = = =

Lot of pushback on the so-called "fraud epidemic" on the academic science blogs. The emerging concensus is that the campaign is part of a softening-up process for anti-climate science actions.

sPh

I don't disagree with you, but the economic pressures are relentless. As late as the mid-1990s a manufacturer could count on there being an ecosystem and trained programmers available for the various high-security, high-reliability architectures on the market (or at least people willing to take jobs being trained as programmers, designers, etc for such systems). By 2000 those ecosystems and finally the architectures themselves had vanished under the avalanche of Wintel systems (bought a new PDP-11 lately? Or even a Tandem Nonstop?). And the cost differential in favor of Wintel went from 1/3x to 1/1000x. It is extremely hard to convince a product development board that your product needs 1000x more funding than the team building what is fundamentally very similar consumer- or commercial-grade system.

And the demand from customers drives things too. Right now every operating manager I work with wants to be able to monitor his plant from home on his iPhone. Customers are putting enormous pressure on their vendors to replace expensive proprietary (but secure) wireless interfaces with much cheaper iPhones. Security gets paid lip service in the spec but doesn't control the decision.

sPh

= = = Which is why you need to heed warnings about deadlines well in advance - these SCADA issues wouldn't have been a problem if planning had started two years ago rather than now.

It can take five to ten years (or in some cases I have seen, 20 years) to replace an embedded SCADA system.

Which is a good argument for not using Windows(tm) in any form for industrial control, but that argument was apparently lost in the late 1990s.

sPh

= = = Funny how the word egotistical is thrown around by both "sides" here (even though there shouldn't be sides; Apple dropped the ball with an exploit in Java that was patched by Sun months ago, but because Apple owns their own version of Java, porting it from Oracle, they didn't get to it in a timely manner). = = =

Sun has been a division of Oracle for ~2 years now.

sPh