There are a few options for a government or other large organization to get something important and difficult done.

1. Assign the task to whatever part of your org chart this falls under. Uncountable billions and years later, you'll have a semi functional disappointment. NASA has proven this several times.

2. Contract it out to a major company, picked in some bidding process. The results are slightly better than (1), but still very bad.

3. Announce a prize of 1% of what you would have spent in (1), and you'll likely have a solution in 1/3 of the time.

This is because with prizes, whoever is best suited to solve the problem, in the whole world, can do so without having to convince your bureaucrats of their ideas, and make a profit doing so.

It's one of the very few effective ways to work around natural bureaucracy inertia.

I didn't know he was getting married!

As a minor side effect, the Sahara desert will be expanded to cover half the world.

Why? That's an easy question to answer: because we're human.

But... That's true for all countries.

You couldn't ask for help??

Team work is to me the most important part of agile.

In a real agile project, you would at the very least have been working in a pair and figuring this out together with your partner.

If being a good programmer is so easy, why are they so expensive to hire?

Well, I can appreciate your good intentions, but I think that energy would be far better directed toward solutions that can actually work.

I'm not making any value judgement about Rational Ignorance. I'm just saying that it does exist. Whether you like it or not, reality is real.

Going from wishing that something doesn't exist to basing policy on assuming that it in fact doesn't exist is madness.

A more fitting murder parallel would be to abolish punishments for it, since murder should not exist.

People are uninformed about issues and candidates, because that is the smart thing to do. The fundamental problem is that the cost in time and effort of me learning is spent by me, while the benefit is shared equally be the whole electorate. So with a million voters I only get one millionth of the benefit of my labor. Few people want to work hard under those conditions.

This is a well researched phenomenon known as "Rational ignorance". Google it to learn more.

Like any vision dependent on a fundamental change in human nature, your system empirically does not, and can not work. What we need is a system where people can affect their own lives. In those areas people are usually quite well informed and make as good decisions as they're capable of.

Here's an idea. It might even be a good one:

Imagine an encryption system with 2 (or more) passwords for an encrypted file, each "decrypting" different things. So when someone demands the password, you give them one that produces data that won't get you in trouble. I can see a few practical problems, but they seem solvable.

A simpler version of the same idea is an emergency ATM pin code, to prevent "ATM muggings". When entered, the bank would pretend you only had small amount on the account, and/or alert police/security.

"IBM's been kind of weird on the whole topic because on the one hand they do everything they can to try and screw Sun over, I mean they didn't name Eclipse casually"

Never crossed my mind but once pointed out it's obvious that an Eclipse is what can defeat the Sun!

Email is much less reliable than FB messages. You can never be sure your email won't disappear in some spam filter.

That is one of the main reasons I use FB!

Think about it.

Why would a martian microbe be specialized in feeding off Earth mammals? How would evolution end up there?

Invader Zim is back!

Quote from the article "The principle of operation of an atomic clock is not based on nuclear physics, but rather on the microwave signal that electrons in atoms emit when they change energy levels."