... why are mission critical devices connected to the internet

Because being connected to the internet saves a *lot* of money. Instead of having to have an entire emergency team on site at all hours, you can get away with a minimal team at nights/weekends, and workers who can, in an emergency, connect from home.

It takes a very capable manager who can persuade the higher ups that its necessary to continue spending a few millions dollars in wage costs every year to avoid what (at least until very recently) seemed to be a very illusionary threat. Besides, surely with a few precautions like multi-factor authentication, there's no possible way that anyone could break in :-).

Note, it's even harder if you're bidding for contracts. Try telling prospective clients that the reason your prices are double are because you refuse to enter the Internet age... Especially when those you are bidding against are assuring the customer that they're taking all the necessary precautions.

It's a sad fact of life that it's rarely worthwhile to spend a lot of money to protect against rare disasters if your competitors aren't doing the same. (Note, normal disaster planning adds a few percent to cost - we're talking about making yourself bullet proof, which may double or triple your costs.) The odds are fairly high that with much higher costs, you'll be bankrupt before the disaster hits, and moreover, if all your competitors are being hit by the same disaster, the general sentiment becomes "no-one could have predicted it" and everyone keeps their jobs anyway.

I did the essence of this with much less code.

Not "the essence" - *an* essence. A mere shadow of this error handler.

You and I might be content with "recycle" and a sad little notification in an error log somewhere, but not this error handler.

When it detected the CPU was failing, it would comb the register for life signs, route around the dying CPU, say last rites, mournfully bury it, and continue on its mission (as well as sending an email to accounting to order a new CPU). If the disk drive had been hit by lightning, it moved fast enough that it would outpace the bolt traveling down the electrical cord, rewire the junction box to send it current into the ground, power up the secondary backup drive, and send a work order to building maintenance to repair the malfunctioning lightening rod on the building's roof.

The database being converted to EBCDIC? Hah! The error handler converted it to Armenian, just to show it could, before converting it Aramaic, then English, then Unicode, and then sending an email to project manager to let him know he could remove the Unicode phase in our legacy database update project.

The error handler's philosophy was clear and built for an earlier age that even then, realized that man would in time become a lesser, diminished being, incapable of understanding the intricacies of exactly how the error should be recovered. As such, it did not depend upon the fallible hands of men to repair an unexpected error condition. It simply handled them *all*.

Alas, even the programmer, in his wisdom, could not foresee the changes that would one day occur, and for those of us who held but a hundredth of the knowledge that he had accumulated in his years of service, we could no more alter his code than a gorilla could rebuild a finely tuned Swiss watch.

And so his code was lost to the knowledge of men (except the revision control system).

I'm sorry. All you have there is good, maintainable, effective program.

What we had, and then threw away, was art made code.

I have not ever seen that done

I have. The coder handled every possible exception intelligently, handled the possible exceptions in the exception handlers, handled the possible exceptions in the exception exception handlers, etc. It was phenomenal. His code could practically handle a CPU burning out at the same time as the primary disk had been hit by lightening while the database had been accidentally converted into EBCDIC.

Unfortunately, it was also completely unmaintainable. No human being, outside of the original programmer, could possibly grok all the conditions, sub-conditions, and contingencies. The code was also 3000 lines of error handling for about 25 lines of normal execution.

It was my privilege to gaze upon the world's most complete error handling before I fulfilled my responsibility of burning it to the ground.

My apologies, I missed your point. I thought you were asserting that you can't classify something as a mental disease unless you can describe the physical mechanism behind it. I was pointing out that we can't describe the physical mechanisms of many physical diseases either.

> My only point is that some mental disorders we don't understand well may well turn out to have physical causes.

Being a materialist, I believe that all mental behavior (both beneficial and adverse) has physical causes. However, I think we're a long way from getting a handle on the mechanisms (I'm not looking for the singularity this century...)

So your fear of losing what you have is making you afraid of what you could possibly gain?

Who is you?

My son's characteristics are classified as Asperger's, but really, I'd just call it personality. If one could recode someone's personality, would they still be, well..., them?

The question of identity is always tricky (Would you volunteer for a Star Trek transporter? Is the person who's reassembled really you?), and the alteration of characteristics by which we define ourselves is always going to be a very personal decision.

I've often wondered about what would happen if we could cure some forms of mental retardation. For significant jumps in neural ability, wouldn't we have really essentially killed of the old person and replaced them with a new one? Every thing that defined the original subject in his or her own mind would likely change. All are tough questions with no obvious answers.

Sure, after you describe the physical mechanism behind every physical disease.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, anyone?

> but the cost of crime* is invariably far higher than the cost of policing.

Homeland Security

'It's evolving literally to be a single platform,'

It's a floor wax and a dessert topping!

I'd argue that while software patents are a net loss, the rest of the patent system has been quite successful for the US, doing more or less what it's intended to do. Certainly, it's worked a lot better at fostering innovation than in countries with very weak patent enforcement mechanisms like China.

I should point out that innovation is *not* universally a good thing - not all innovations work in the end. For example, much of the financial crisis was caused by innovation in finance that failed in the long term. (Although it should be noted that America dominates finance because of that innovation.)

As for copyright issues, that's not really a matter of innovation and thus not particularly relevant here. It's little wonder that America, being dominant in entertainment production is the keenest to protect its product. You'll notice that in Europe, each region is protecting their particular culinary specialties, etc. It is to be expected that every nation protects what they can (and America has the ability to push that protection elsewhere (other countries attempt to do this as well, but with notably less success)).

As for out-sourcing, this is a global phenomena. It's unsurprising that it causes a lot of dislocation and misery (and incidentally raises a billion Chinese out of poverty, but never mind them), as almost all major economic re-alignments do. However, it should be noted that in the absence of out-sourcing, manufacturing was likely to take a huge hit (albeit not as big as did occur) as mechanization took hold and required fewer people. Companies that didn't use lots of robots, etc. were already being forced to slash wages or increase prices. Either way, just as farm mechanization wiped out millions upon millions of jobs, the same thing was and is happening to manufacturing. And, yes, it's a real challenge to figure out how people who are not information workers by inclination are going to earn a middle-class living. But this is not new - heck, I wrote a high school paper on exactly this subject in the 70's.

Since I am not an American, nor live in America, I'm actually rather grateful for America's military budget. Let's just say I'm familiar with the concept of Finlandization, and the US is one of the only examples I can think of small countries adjacent to a powerful country where Finlandization didn't occur on any scale worthy of the term. (Call me cynical, but the natural state of political affairs is for the larger, more powerful countries to absolutely dictate policy to the smaller ones. The US pushes, not dictates, policy, and often doesn't get its way. I certainly didn't see the USSR have the same problems with countries in its sphere of influence, and I fully expect that once China dominates its region will enforce rather more cooperation. The USA's willingness to let weak countries like my own dictate their own affairs and allow an independent foreign policy is a historical aberration, and one I am rather grateful for.

I'm sorry, but I have to call into question your claim that America isn't innovative any more.

While the rest of the world is *gradually* catching up, which dilutes the appearance of American innovation, there's still a huge amount of research done in America. More to the point, if you start looking deeply into almost any industry, you'll find that it's massively changed over the last 10-20 years, and mostly a result of American innovations.

Farming, manufacturing, chemistry, medical advances, business processes, transportation, finance, electronics (again phones, tablets, internet, etc.) have all made huge recent strides in innovation thanks to American advances. The only real change is that instead of having a virtual monopoly on such advances, American advances are now beginning to share the stage with other countries.

Don't confuse other countries advances with American decline. We should be celebrating, not sorrowing.

Well, given the vast majority of Android phones on the market aren't the latest version and aren't ever going to be upgraded, and the fact that Android is doing very nicely, I would say you're greatly exaggerating the importance of being up-to-date. I think you'd be far more accurate using "very few people" to refer to the number of people who know or care about staying up-to-date.

And truthfully, the Apple owners only care about staying up to date because it happens automatically and it gets lots of publicity.

Well, given the arrests, if I get another call, I'll be seriously attempted to answer something like..

Scammer: I'm calling from Microsoft and ....

Me: Wait a moment, its all over Google News in the last hour. They're raiding 23 workplaces all over India for you guys... Oh, right. Google India is probably blocking it until they're finished the raids... Wait... There, I've got it up here on my screen. OH MY GOD!

They've updated. The police have found bodies! OH MY GOD. Lots of bodies. Why? Why? Oh Jesus. [Reading] Police suspect the criminals decided to eliminate all witnesses who could testify against them. Oh My God. Jesus. 48 men and 6 women in 3 locations? Dear God, what sort of psychos are you working for? Look it up. Look it up on American Google, if you can get through.

Oh God. I'm so sorry. Oh God. This is crazy! They used machetes in one location! I'm so sorry. You don't deserve this. Nobody deserves this. I'm so sorry.

Click.

Actually, I don't think I'd have the guts to pull that off. But oh boy, am I tempted.

Interestingly enough, when I smelled scam a year ago and asked for particulars (company name and address) I was given them! The company was a pronounced like Symantec but spelled differently. I Googled them after hanging up and found about 40 want ads from them looking for tech support people in India... Even the scammers use the internet to recruit.

I've received about 30 of these calls over the last year. The last time (yesterday) I lambasted the salesman for working for fraudsters, I was told "Well, don't blame me when your computer breaks down". *sigh*

What I want to know is how or why their credit card privileges weren't terminated a year ago.

Which is why the phrase "he stole my idea" and "he stole my sale" don't exist in the English language. Oh wait...

Now, if you think about it, I *am* wrong. In each case, there *was* deprivation.

And if you think *really* think about it, you'll understand there's deprivation in the case of piracy - the deprivation of the right to commercially exploit one's work.

Such a right may not be worth a huge amount for each customer, but a theft of pennies adds up when thousands or millions are engaged in the practice.

Just be a bit careful that you aren't showing anything that a previous customer might consider confidential.

Nothing can freak out a customer like a demonstration that you will reveal their confidential information at the drop of a hat.

(Saw this happen when a company competing for a contract blithely showed pre-publication work they were doing for a direct competitor. When called on it, they said that of course, the work for *us* would be held in complete confidentiality...)