Because the more people who are under "oaths of silence" that have your records, the less like "silence" it becomes.

And yes, if you can assume that your government workers are only acting in the interests of their job, and never overreach, and never act politically, you might well be justified in allowing them access, secure in the knowledge that they are only using their authority to protect the public.

Unfortunately, as we have just seen with the IRS, they are quite capable of being political and biased at some level and having it spill over enough that they use their official capacity to cause issues. And despite my usual wariness towards expanding government power, I have to admit surprise that something this blatant has happened. I think direct comparisons to Watergate would probably be overblown, but when they say 'Nixonian', it rings at least a little true. All that there is really missing for that to be spot-on is the "amoral genius" in the central position.

The fact is, no matter how good your civil servants are *now*, they don't have to remain that way into the future. That's why limiting their power is always the right thing to do, even if it impairs efficiency a little. Authority, once given to a government, is rarely returned short of revolution, even if the need for that authority has evaporated. And it *will* be used, no matter what party is in office at the time, and no matter how much they campaigned on promising to not to do the same things.

I suggest avoiding the Produce aisle.

Google analysis:

You sir, are a sharp dressed man. Cueing music now.

Would you care to buy some new khakis? [Y/n]

It does, however, mean that you are absolutely starving.

Anyone got any Cheetos?

Thing is, people are not thinking of flying cars as cars with wings on them when they talk about "flying cars". They're thinking of the Jetsons. Yeah, you can extend some wings on a car, turn on the aircraft engine, run down some stretch of road/runway and fly that way, but that's not what people think the future is all about. That's just a weird plane... thing. To have a true "flying car of the future" you have to be able to lift off in something that looks like it shouldn't be able to fly or hover in midair, but does anyway, due to SCIENCE!

Actually I lumped that into #2, and then proceeded to only touch on the waste end of it. Which I noticed after I clicked Submit.

For the mining... well that's honestly not going to be much worse than the mining processes for many things we use today that are not uranium. Rare earth elements? Nasty, evil crap comes out of those processes. We need a solution for that, for sure, but we're going to need a solution for similar systems whether we use nuclear or any other source.

Dirty bomb possibility? It's a terror weapon, and should be taken seriously as such, but the real effect of a dirty bomb is a relatively simply decontamination process. Remember, some people once set off *two* atomic bombs in major Japanese cities in 1945, and even after that, those cities are still occupied today. One dirty bomb is going to really scare some people, and probably cause some expense, but there's things you could make a bomb out of that are much nastier than that. There are some days I wonder if we focus on the dirty bomb scenario so that we don't give the terrorists ideas for something truly hideous (and easier to fabricate).

Now, now. Ray may be extremely optimistic, but some of that stuff he comes up with is like reading a really retro science fiction anthology.

Retro, as in, we'd have flying cars and be regularly talking to aliens by 1985, and will have ascended into super-powerful energy beings by the year 2000.

The Singularity is an interesting concept, even if it's about as likely as me being proposed to by every lingerie model on Earth, on the same day.

I hope you're not comparing Perl to PowerShell.

Perl is not at all difficult to understand if you're trying to do something with it, it's the part where *someone else* is trying to figure out what you did which is the problem.

There are only two real outstanding issues with nuclear power engineering: making it fail-safe and handling of material/waste.

These are not small issues by any stretch of the imagination, but they shouldn't be impossible to solve. If you can make and demonstrate a reactor that fails safely when there is a problem of sufficient degree, then that is solved. Drop a tsunami on it and it just turns off, or at least, doesn't explode.

As for storage of nuclear waste material. Bury it where there isn't a groundwater source. You might complain about dumping radioactive waste into the ground, but where do you think the uranium came from to begin with? It's not like the planet isn't filled with radioactive isotopes naturally. Dump it in a mineshaft, seal it progressively and put up some signs. If the signs don't last the millennia to the point where our descendants are tunneling into that area again, one would presume that those miners would have similar means of checking for radioactivity that we have today. If not, one storage area is the least of their worries if they are digging around without safety measures.

I agree that if something is not broken, you don't need to fix it. Using terminals and lynx and other stuff is completely valid, although using a text browser is starting to have more and more limited applications once you start seeing more and more functionality where Javascript manipulates a bunch of icons to get functionality. I'd almost say that for anything you can still use lynx for reliably, you should probably just use curl or wget for.

On the other hand, whether he likes to use older stuff or not, it is in his best interests to at least understand how some of the new-fangled stuff operates. Someday, people will stop supporting what he is using, and he'll need to know what the alternatives are and be able to use them.

I remember being just fine with Microsoft Word 5.1a on my toaster Mac, and liking it much better than a lot of what Word turned into with later versions. Presumably, if I still had my toaster Mac and a printer, I could still use it today. The problem is that, eventually, the toaster Mac breaks, or they finally add a feature that 5.1a doesn't have, which you absolutely MUST have, and it's all over. You better hope that when that day comes around, you figure out how the dreaded "ribbon" works.

Also, while a lot of this stuff is a fad, sometimes, the new stuff you can't think of a use for actually has a use that you just hadn't thought of. I wouldn't have bought my tablet unless there were things I could do with it usefully, and I've found even more useful things to do with it now that I have it.

Don't get the new toys just to have new toys, but don't scorn new things just because they are new either. That's one way to find yourself in trouble and your skills suddenly obsolete.

Well, for those who remember actually making out notecards for school work, there was a sense that a "card" actually represented a different way of presenting data that was more concise, and the understanding that space was at a premium. You also were able to manipulate them a lot more easily than pages of paper, as they were both smaller and made of more rigid stock, so the understanding was that ordering would not always be sequentially in a fixed page order.

Whether that is what people are thinking of today when they talk about "cards", I don't know. It did make sense as a metaphor back in the days of HyperCard, though.

I agree that I could probably source a contractor faster than an employee, but I don't understand why being a contractor means he or she learns faster than anyone else would. There is also the fact that contractors tend to be of an uneven quality themselves, sometimes. If there was some sort of firm that maintained people on staff that had my exact needs available, that might be different, but that sort of specialization is expensive, even when it actually exists.

I used to be a contractor myself, and I'd like to think I did a good job of it, but I worked with many who were not. And good or not, I had the same spin-up period as anyone else. There would always be some tool they used which I had not, or they used tools I use all the time, but differently. For instance, believe it or not, I have never seen a business use JIRA in quite the same way or to the same extent, even working in three jobs in a row that have used it. That was mostly all process involved.

Business knowledge is king when it comes to a lot of things. Unless a new person already knows our deployment tools, our business model, and has some experience with the packages we use, they will effectively work at the level of someone who is not as good for a period of time, even after they start being productive. So in that case, I might as well keep the poor performer for the interim unless they suck that much, because at least I don't need to detail an existing employee to train them on the business stuff.

Which goes sort of back to my point on layoffs. Although they are horrible, that is usually when management takes the chance to fire people who are not all that good. Part of that reason is that the planning of the layoff usually gives you some ramp to figure out how to deal without that person. Unfortunately, being a layoff, you don't usually get someone to replace that person.

That is not to say that you suck if you got laid off. Very few people in this business rate being fired, many of the people who get laid off get the shaft based on some "fair" metric like critical domain knowledge, performance reviews, or seniority. Of course, since the layoff tends to include target numbers, there is the "unfair" situation where you simply cost too much. I used to wonder why companies didn't just reduce salaries, but the sad truth is that the preference is to fire rather than reduce salaries because reduction in salary creates an employee who has a good reason to look for another job while they continue with you. That means you have unplanned vacancies at the wrong time and produce potentially shoddier work.

This isn't 19th Century Texas. In fact, Texas isn't 19th Century Texas, even. There's a reason for that.

And don't tell me that dirty politicians got run out on a rail everywhere back then either. They were rampant. Sure, if you happened to piss off the wrong mob in the wrong place, the FBI or State Police wasn't there to pull you out of the mess (because they didn't exist then), but there were very powerful "machine" bosses who were celebrated for their ability to give out patronage to those who would see things their way. You'd never touch them, because they had constituencies who could protect them.

This isn't the Old West. Physical threats to a representative today are a pipe dream and not even a really good one.

And consumers want the cheapest prices available for products.

So, riddle me this: how do you pay your workers a lot of money, but offer a cheap product?

You are right, but they are attempting to close that little loophole. The courts are starting to look very unfavorably towards companies that try to liquidate, and then start a new business with all the same customers and the employees they want, but without any of the debt or the other obligations.