Totalitarian states (e.g. USSR, East Germany, North Korea) are extremely effective at dealing with small crime. Growing in a small town in East Germany we didn't have a key for our house small door. There were literally zero people to use or sell illegal drugs.
Yeap. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The Singapore elite already has enormous, ever increasing power. Everything is done to destroy all opposition. You must be very naive to think that once a small group achieves a complete control over a country, they will use it for everybody's good.
For 99.999% of the US population the totalitarian monitoring won't have any direct consequences in the near future. The real problem IMHO is that it makes impossible to create any kind of opposition to the current political-financial-media elite. Any potential leader of such opposition will be thoroughly studied and profiled. Nothing found to black mail him with? Well he likes to eat at a certain italian restaurant and he likes blonde women. Throw some narcotic in his food, have a 17yo girl seduce him and that guy belongs for life ...
Democracy, liberty, privacy need at least a few percent of the population to invest a substantial amount of effort. If those few percent are missing the totalitarian state is unavoidable.
You can't do anything. The complete system is corrupted to the bone. If you are a successful company someday somebody with very deep pockets or a huge bank credit will show and buy you up. A few days later the encryption will start to disappear (e.g. Skype). If you don't sell your competitor will get the money and drive you out of business by the sheer force of money - pay higher salaries and get better ppl, better locations, more ads, etc.
Maximum damage to the environment in case of a disaster for a 1MW reactor with a lot of waste fuel stored on the site is rendering the Northern Hemisphere (where almost all such reactors are) inhabitable.
Really? Tell that to the tens of thousand of USSR 18-20 yo soldiers, that were called biorobots during the cleanup. 100% of them either died or ended with very serious cases of cancer and kids with malformation. IMHO one has to be literally mad to advocate for nuclear power.
A friend of mine is running an ASP.NET MVC/Mono/MongoDB ecommerce site on micro with around a quarter million of annual sales. The site is very very fast.
Really? The developers I know in London earn 500 to 650 pounds per day, which after corporate tax and say 3 weeks of vacation is still at least $140K per year.
Yeah, I've worked with quite a few ppl like this. Usually they are very smart, read programming books, blogs HN, etc. and interview very well. The problem seems to be motivation, as the author pointed they face a problem and don't have the will power to keep throwing possible solutions at it. Or the motivation to write those 500 lines of CRUD and simple business logic.