I'm guessing that the "attack plan" originated in one of the NSA's back rooms, and Snowden could supply a lot of detail about it, and about other red herrings and contingency plans the NSA boys have developed just in case some activity started to slide sideways into broad daylight, and they needed to do some damage control.
The NSA has been competent enough at what it does to have amassed all this information on everybody over the years. That strongly suggests that it is competent enough to have prepared contingency plans to use if any of their activities started to go bad. The only question is how extensive those contingency plans might be. Do their contingencies include threats of blackmail of elected officials or top level civil servants? If they would never go that far, then how far would they go to protect their agency, their mission, and-- incidentally-- their asses?
The NSA needs to be shut down. Its core mission and values cannot be reconciled with the values expressed in the USA Constitution.
Light water reactors were "fail safe by design" when they were introduced in the 1950s and 1960s. And actually their safety record is far better than that of any other industry.
But that ain't good enough when the results of those rare failures are so devastating.
So basically "fail safe by design" is not anywhere good enough when it comes to nuclear power facilities. The damn things need to be fail safe in practice-- and not only do we not know how to do that, nobody knows how to learn how to do that. For one thing, humans are a critical part of the operation of any of these things, and we do not have a clue about how to design a reliable human being, let alone how to construct one.
Case in point: pebble bed reactors look good on paper, but rubbing those balls against each other is going to create dust, and no one knows how that dust is going to behave during long term exposure to 1500 degree temperatures. Our materials science doesn't cover that. Nor can it, not with any kind of reliability. At a guess, if any of that dust came in contact with air before it cooled to less than ten times ambient temperature, it would explode like gun powder. And that's just the safety cladding. Underneath that candy coated shell is a pyrolitic material whose behavior in moist air is quite similar to anti-tank and bunker-busting ordinance.
So how can anyone develop a safe design when it involves an environment so alien that we cannot reproduce it? Or even develop sensors that could say what it is doing if we could somehow mimic it? Talk about black boxes. "Fail safe by design" has no meaning in these conditions.
The other point parent post makes is that the USA nuclear industry is chock full of corruption. I expect that is true, simply because projects with huge budgets attract those who are more interested in taking a piece of the pie than in doing a good, or even adequate, job.
In many technologies there is a big step between completing an adequate design phase and constructing an implementation that works, fulfills the minimum specifications, and meets safety regulations. In the nuclear industry, this step is too far; there is nothing solid on the other side of the chasm to put one's foot upon.
As yet, there are no reactors that can burn used fuel. The entire future of the industry is nothing but an engineer's wet dream, conceived in CAD, based on wonderful assumptions of materials behavior over the long term under conditions that have never existed.
The reactors the parent post speaks of are, in the most literal sense, science fiction. They will most certainly work if every detail of the science behind them is an adequate reflection of reality-- but too many of those pesky details are, paradoxically, both absolutely critical, and purely speculative.
Current day nuclear engineers should focus on the problems that the industry has already created: Fuckyoushima, Chernobyl, the mess at Hanford, the hundreds of casks of spent fuel in temporary storage, the incredibly greater number of spent rods sitting in cooling ponds for want of any better place to put them. Any future nuclear engineers would do far better in switching now to a sustainable career.
STEM programs are partly to blame. But there is another part.
Playing with a technology that will eventually create massive deadly catastrophes just isn't much fun. Anyone who takes a serious look at the industry will realize that even if the French and Chinese manage to build effective recycling and millennial storage facilities, that won't make a dent in the amount of nuclear waste we have already generated. There is basically no money going toward developing the clean-up part of the cycle, so the most that anyone in today's nuclear industry can hope for is that they will be comfortably dead in their coffins long before their great grandchildren are trying to eke out some kind of miserable life in the radiotoxic environment that we are going to leave to them.
Anyone with any brights at all would realize that for a satisfying career, they are better off becoming experts in biochar, composting facilities, or even energy efficient, low emission cremation furnaces. Those are where tomorrow's glory will be found! In ways to make better use of dead things than in making more things dead!
Successful in the not-so-humble opinion of author of parent post. Others may use a different yardstick to measure success.
Gnome and KDE have very different, and basically contradictory, approaches to desktop management. You could probably combine the two: you could probably take the design for the biggest cement mixer truck ever and combine it with the design for the fastest Ferrari ever. But you would end up with shite.
The same goes for other places where there appears to be competition between FOSS products. As soon as you look deeper than the surface, you find that the products differ in very significant ways to meet the needs of very different uses.
Apache is a good counter-example. There is basically only one way to be the Best Web Server Ever, so Apache has no significant FOSS competitors. Persons who see a way to make a server better contribute to the Apache project.
I may be feeding a troll here. I usually do not respond to ACs unless they have gotten some mod points.
Pooling people to do one thing well is not good? You'd rather have those dozen non working programs, which you can switch between?
The AC is incorrect in assuming that everyone agrees on how the goodness of a program should be judged. The number of current ways of judging a given program's goodness is about the same as the number of current users of that program. That there are successful alternatives in some application areas reflects the different needs of different groups of users.
The AC is rather arrogant in assuming that everyone agrees that his way of measuring quality is the only way.
I have been using FOSS from app to OS in all my work (writing, illustrating, some web site administration) for more than a decade, typically working on the computer 7+ hours / day, 7 days per week (when you combine favorite hobbies with work, you end up looking like a workaholic when you're just having fun). So I know a little bit about long term use of FOSS products.
Part of delivering [ s/a working/is/ ] figuring out where the specs are flawed, and changing them so that the delivered system works for the users. otherwise it only works for the contracting officers and the lawyers who handle the ensuing lawsuits.
Exactly. The contracting officers and the Oracle lawyers managing the contract knew of the problem, for Oracle does not put inexperienced persons in these positions. I think there would also have been red flags raised in the bookkeeping of this contract, so I think a Chief Accountant would also have known of the problem. There would have to have been a conspiracy among several corporate officials for Oracle to have continued to work on what it knew would be a failure.
And if Oracle was open and above board, it would have walked away from the contract very early, as soon as it was evident that the spec was incomplete and could not be implemented. That's what any reputable small business owner would do when faced with a similar problem. As soon as you realize you can't do the job, you quit. And start your legal guy on maximizing the smaller amount that is fairly due to you for the work that has been completed. There would be clauses in the contract to cover that.
Oracle is at fault. Or rather, persons in power at Oracle are at fault.
You are implying that Oracle was not capable of recognizing that the spec was "bad and incomplete"? Then Oracle was misrepresenting itself as competent to do the job. And with Oracle's resources, that means the company was doing this in a deliberate and purposeful way; it was committing an act of fraud.
This could not have been done by one or two individuals at Oracle. A fraudulent act of this scale, perpetrated over months and involving expertise in technical, legal, and accounting fields could only be done by a conspiracy involving corporate officers, corporate lawyers, and chief accountants. Oregon's Attorney General should investigate the conspiracy to defraud the State, and should probably bring some of Oracle's high level personnel up on criminal RICO charges.
That will not mitigate the damages done to Oregon, but then there is nothing that could repair that damage. It would take some bad actors out of circulation and possibly send an important message to other corporate officials that just because they are not in the 99%, they are not immune to criminal prosecution when they drive their corporations into fraudulent activities.
The "publishes articles without checking facts" puzzled me for a minute. Until I realized it goes hand in hand with deliberately feeding news commentators false data so that they would publicly destroy their own credibility.
Gee, I think we may have seen some of that recently.
My greater fear is that the NSA might already possess, or be working toward, the ability to inject false records into a target's credit history. Create a situation where credit cards are revoked, assets are impounded, the target loses his house, his car, and any ability to ever use credit again. What better way to shut a dissident up than to so mess with his personal finances that he has to spend every waking moment trying to get it all straightened out.
When will snooping on private data end, and manipulation of that data begin?
Yes, the USA is a republic, but this was not set up to protect minority rights. It was set up because of limitations of the technology of the day. When it could easily take a month for correspondence to make the round trip from a distant state to the District of Columbia and back, a representative government was as close to the ideal New Hampshire Town Hall meeting as they could get.
The Bill of Rights was the first codified effort to protect minorities from getting trampled by the majority-as-tyrant. In the USA there has been a long, active history of refining and extending those protections, but this has almost always been through improving interpretations of the words in the Bill of Rights. It is far from a perfect system, but then it has to be done in a natural language, rather than, for instance, algebra, geometry, or perl.:-)
It does amuse me that so-called higher educated professionals just as liable to open mouth and insert foot on Facebook as the immature uneducated brats
Some persons are educated beyond the level of their intelligence. In the USA, that seems to be increasingly common in the last decade or so.
Parent post assumes that the Republican party will continue into the future. However it is failing, has been failing ever since Reagan stitched together an unlikely coalition of evangelicals and corporations. Whether the Tea Party nonsense is its demise (Sarah really plays the part of the Angel Of Death quite well, doesn't she), or it staggers on for another five years, it just is not going to recover.
This has happened before. In the history of the USA the GOP will be the sixth or seventh national political party to lose its clout and crumble away. Hopefully a workable alliance of smaller parties will be able to fill the need for an articulate conservative point of view in Washington. Maybe the Libertarians and some of the eco groups can find ways to agree to disagree on some things while moving together on other things.
Back to the point. There are a lot of Democrats who had to hold their noses to vote for this limitation on filibustering. The rules will likely be changed as soon as the threat of the Tea Party shutting down parts of the government goes away. So in two to six years, is my guess.
As a sort of apologetic defense of America, please recognize that the first person to try something new never gets it right. Good on Europe and other countries for doing it better than the USA did. It would be disappointing indeed if those who came along afterward did not avoid some of the problems we have made for ourselves.
Someone also once said that no government has to be good, it just has to be good enough not to fail. That's the situation here in America. Until it breaks so badly that a lot of people get hurt, the USA is unlikely to make the kinds of sweeping changes to its Constitution that seem to be needed.
Please realize that this end of filibustering only applies to the Senate confirmation process. Where the Senate votes on whether a proposed appointee is fit to hold the appointed office. Filibustering on policies and legislation is NOT affected.
The Tea Partiers brought this situation on by their attempts to cripple the Federal government until they got their way. That is tyranny by a minority. As a group, the Tea Party is walking closer to the line that defines treason and impeachable actions than any other political faction in living memory. They do not seek the compromises that make a democratic republic work; they push a "my way or the highway" agenda which risks everyone's safety and pushes the cost of government higher and higher.
Harry Reid just got rid of the filibuster in the Senate. It was one of the few protections against the tyranny of the majority. Maybe his next step will just be a winner-take-all type setup in the Senate where the minority party is abolished completely. Once this is done, he can just declare Obama King. Sadly, most on the left would cheer for this.
Yes, this was a bad step, however the alternative was, for the immediate future, much worse.
Please realize that the filibuster rules are unchanged for matters legislation. They have only been removed in confirmation hearings, where the Senate says yes or no to someone the President wants appointed to fill a vacancy. Most commonly a vacant judge position. The change means that appointments cannot be held in limbo for months and years; there will be a timely "yes" or "no" decision. That will enable the Federal government to run at closer to its best possible efficiency. Instead of staggering for lack of judges, etc.
This Senate rule can be reversed using the same process that put it in place. If there is ever any value in allowing procedural delays in a Senate confirmation process, then this rule will be reversed fairly soon.
Democracy of itself is the tyranny of the majority. In the USA, the Bill of Rights provides some protection against this tyrant, by putting some limits on democratic processes. The USA is far from a pure democracy (thank the Powers That Be).
One of the options TFA talks about is a system where CEOs become monarchs with stockholders becoming nobles or gentry. If I understood correctly, the author says that this is one proposed neoreactionary system of governance. However it fits the definition of fascism, and would certainly fail for the same reason fascist regimes always fail: they are too susceptible to internal corruption, when policy makers put selfish concerns ahead of societal concerns. "Yes, I have decided that we need to build a flood control dam, and my company will supply the concrete for the job. It's true that we have never had a flooding problem but it is good social policy to be prepared."
Pure monarchies have serious problems when an incompetent gains the throne. And they have troubles with filling a vacancy at the top without a lot bloodshed.
Churchill once said that democracy was the worst form of government... except for all the others. That's as true now as it was in the last century.
It is a solved problem if and only if you limit database operations to today. Then you can use today's best software and practices.
But this is too big a system to be taken through the revisions that are needed every 7 to 10 years to keep a DBMS up to date. For one thing, once it is in full operation it cannot be taken off line for a weekend upgrade. That adds a lot of headaches as you can count on always having to support simultaneous database operations by two or more different versions of software: the pre-upgrade version and the post-upgrade version. You also have to assure that records last updated 50 or more years ago can still be accessed, even though fields may have been added, dropped, or merged in the meantime.
I am surprised that any corporation took this on. Winning this contract was a poison pill, and that would have been obvious to anyone with a memory of what the Veterans Administration went through when they began implementing ViSTA and the Computerized Patient Record System in the last years of the last century. And ViSTA was a simple overlay on a proven database engine, not this kind of build from scratch project.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing that the "attack plan" originated in one of the NSA's back rooms, and Snowden could supply a lot of detail about it, and about other red herrings and contingency plans the NSA boys have developed just in case some activity started to slide sideways into broad daylight, and they needed to do some damage control.
The NSA has been competent enough at what it does to have amassed all this information on everybody over the years. That strongly suggests that it is competent enough to have prepared contingency plans to use if any of their activities started to go bad. The only question is how extensive those contingency plans might be. Do their contingencies include threats of blackmail of elected officials or top level civil servants? If they would never go that far, then how far would they go to protect their agency, their mission, and-- incidentally-- their asses?
The NSA needs to be shut down. Its core mission and values cannot be reconciled with the values expressed in the USA Constitution.
It's simulations all the way down.
She called them "turtles", but that's just a semantic convenience.
Light water reactors were "fail safe by design" when they were introduced in the 1950s and 1960s. And actually their safety record is far better than that of any other industry.
But that ain't good enough when the results of those rare failures are so devastating.
So basically "fail safe by design" is not anywhere good enough when it comes to nuclear power facilities. The damn things need to be fail safe in practice-- and not only do we not know how to do that, nobody knows how to learn how to do that. For one thing, humans are a critical part of the operation of any of these things, and we do not have a clue about how to design a reliable human being, let alone how to construct one.
Case in point: pebble bed reactors look good on paper, but rubbing those balls against each other is going to create dust, and no one knows how that dust is going to behave during long term exposure to 1500 degree temperatures. Our materials science doesn't cover that. Nor can it, not with any kind of reliability. At a guess, if any of that dust came in contact with air before it cooled to less than ten times ambient temperature, it would explode like gun powder. And that's just the safety cladding. Underneath that candy coated shell is a pyrolitic material whose behavior in moist air is quite similar to anti-tank and bunker-busting ordinance.
So how can anyone develop a safe design when it involves an environment so alien that we cannot reproduce it? Or even develop sensors that could say what it is doing if we could somehow mimic it? Talk about black boxes. "Fail safe by design" has no meaning in these conditions.
The other point parent post makes is that the USA nuclear industry is chock full of corruption. I expect that is true, simply because projects with huge budgets attract those who are more interested in taking a piece of the pie than in doing a good, or even adequate, job.
Sigh... said it before, but....
Big sigh... Heard it before.
In many technologies there is a big step between completing an adequate design phase and constructing an implementation that works, fulfills the minimum specifications, and meets safety regulations. In the nuclear industry, this step is too far; there is nothing solid on the other side of the chasm to put one's foot upon.
As yet, there are no reactors that can burn used fuel. The entire future of the industry is nothing but an engineer's wet dream, conceived in CAD, based on wonderful assumptions of materials behavior over the long term under conditions that have never existed.
The reactors the parent post speaks of are, in the most literal sense, science fiction. They will most certainly work if every detail of the science behind them is an adequate reflection of reality-- but too many of those pesky details are, paradoxically, both absolutely critical, and purely speculative.
Current day nuclear engineers should focus on the problems that the industry has already created: Fuckyoushima, Chernobyl, the mess at Hanford, the hundreds of casks of spent fuel in temporary storage, the incredibly greater number of spent rods sitting in cooling ponds for want of any better place to put them. Any future nuclear engineers would do far better in switching now to a sustainable career.
STEM programs are partly to blame. But there is another part.
Playing with a technology that will eventually create massive deadly catastrophes just isn't much fun. Anyone who takes a serious look at the industry will realize that even if the French and Chinese manage to build effective recycling and millennial storage facilities, that won't make a dent in the amount of nuclear waste we have already generated. There is basically no money going toward developing the clean-up part of the cycle, so the most that anyone in today's nuclear industry can hope for is that they will be comfortably dead in their coffins long before their great grandchildren are trying to eke out some kind of miserable life in the radiotoxic environment that we are going to leave to them.
Anyone with any brights at all would realize that for a satisfying career, they are better off becoming experts in biochar, composting facilities, or even energy efficient, low emission cremation furnaces. Those are where tomorrow's glory will be found! In ways to make better use of dead things than in making more things dead!
I have definitely been feeding a troll.
So sorry.
Successful in the not-so-humble opinion of author of parent post. Others may use a different yardstick to measure success.
Gnome and KDE have very different, and basically contradictory, approaches to desktop management. You could probably combine the two: you could probably take the design for the biggest cement mixer truck ever and combine it with the design for the fastest Ferrari ever. But you would end up with shite.
The same goes for other places where there appears to be competition between FOSS products. As soon as you look deeper than the surface, you find that the products differ in very significant ways to meet the needs of very different uses.
Apache is a good counter-example. There is basically only one way to be the Best Web Server Ever, so Apache has no significant FOSS competitors. Persons who see a way to make a server better contribute to the Apache project.
I may be feeding a troll here. I usually do not respond to ACs unless they have gotten some mod points.
Pooling people to do one thing well is not good? You'd rather have those dozen non working programs, which you can switch between?
The AC is incorrect in assuming that everyone agrees on how the goodness of a program should be judged. The number of current ways of judging a given program's goodness is about the same as the number of current users of that program. That there are successful alternatives in some application areas reflects the different needs of different groups of users.
The AC is rather arrogant in assuming that everyone agrees that his way of measuring quality is the only way.
I have been using FOSS from app to OS in all my work (writing, illustrating, some web site administration) for more than a decade, typically working on the computer 7+ hours / day, 7 days per week (when you combine favorite hobbies with work, you end up looking like a workaholic when you're just having fun). So I know a little bit about long term use of FOSS products.
Part of delivering [ s/a working/is/ ] figuring out where the specs are flawed, and changing them so that the delivered system works for the users. otherwise it only works for the contracting officers and the lawyers who handle the ensuing lawsuits.
Exactly. The contracting officers and the Oracle lawyers managing the contract knew of the problem, for Oracle does not put inexperienced persons in these positions. I think there would also have been red flags raised in the bookkeeping of this contract, so I think a Chief Accountant would also have known of the problem. There would have to have been a conspiracy among several corporate officials for Oracle to have continued to work on what it knew would be a failure.
And if Oracle was open and above board, it would have walked away from the contract very early, as soon as it was evident that the spec was incomplete and could not be implemented. That's what any reputable small business owner would do when faced with a similar problem. As soon as you realize you can't do the job, you quit. And start your legal guy on maximizing the smaller amount that is fairly due to you for the work that has been completed. There would be clauses in the contract to cover that.
Oracle is at fault. Or rather, persons in power at Oracle are at fault.
You are implying that Oracle was not capable of recognizing that the spec was "bad and incomplete"? Then Oracle was misrepresenting itself as competent to do the job. And with Oracle's resources, that means the company was doing this in a deliberate and purposeful way; it was committing an act of fraud.
This could not have been done by one or two individuals at Oracle. A fraudulent act of this scale, perpetrated over months and involving expertise in technical, legal, and accounting fields could only be done by a conspiracy involving corporate officers, corporate lawyers, and chief accountants. Oregon's Attorney General should investigate the conspiracy to defraud the State, and should probably bring some of Oracle's high level personnel up on criminal RICO charges.
That will not mitigate the damages done to Oregon, but then there is nothing that could repair that damage. It would take some bad actors out of circulation and possibly send an important message to other corporate officials that just because they are not in the 99%, they are not immune to criminal prosecution when they drive their corporations into fraudulent activities.
Rocket brain surgeons.
As in the disparaging remark: "this isn't rocket surgery, you know. Hell, it ain't even sociology." (Best used before anthropologists.)
The "publishes articles without checking facts" puzzled me for a minute. Until I realized it goes hand in hand with deliberately feeding news commentators false data so that they would publicly destroy their own credibility.
Gee, I think we may have seen some of that recently.
The lower calorie and healthier practice is to slather on olive oil. The "extra virgin" kind, of course.
My greater fear is that the NSA might already possess, or be working toward, the ability to inject false records into a target's credit history. Create a situation where credit cards are revoked, assets are impounded, the target loses his house, his car, and any ability to ever use credit again. What better way to shut a dissident up than to so mess with his personal finances that he has to spend every waking moment trying to get it all straightened out.
When will snooping on private data end, and manipulation of that data begin?
Faced with the eloquence of parent post, I find that there is nothing I can possibly say to argue this any further.
Thank you for so clearly demonstrating my point.
Yes, the USA is a republic, but this was not set up to protect minority rights. It was set up because of limitations of the technology of the day. When it could easily take a month for correspondence to make the round trip from a distant state to the District of Columbia and back, a representative government was as close to the ideal New Hampshire Town Hall meeting as they could get.
The Bill of Rights was the first codified effort to protect minorities from getting trampled by the majority-as-tyrant. In the USA there has been a long, active history of refining and extending those protections, but this has almost always been through improving interpretations of the words in the Bill of Rights. It is far from a perfect system, but then it has to be done in a natural language, rather than, for instance, algebra, geometry, or perl. :-)
It does amuse me that so-called higher educated professionals just as liable to open mouth and insert foot on Facebook as the immature uneducated brats
Some persons are educated beyond the level of their intelligence. In the USA, that seems to be increasingly common in the last decade or so.
Parent post assumes that the Republican party will continue into the future. However it is failing, has been failing ever since Reagan stitched together an unlikely coalition of evangelicals and corporations. Whether the Tea Party nonsense is its demise (Sarah really plays the part of the Angel Of Death quite well, doesn't she), or it staggers on for another five years, it just is not going to recover.
This has happened before. In the history of the USA the GOP will be the sixth or seventh national political party to lose its clout and crumble away. Hopefully a workable alliance of smaller parties will be able to fill the need for an articulate conservative point of view in Washington. Maybe the Libertarians and some of the eco groups can find ways to agree to disagree on some things while moving together on other things.
Back to the point. There are a lot of Democrats who had to hold their noses to vote for this limitation on filibustering. The rules will likely be changed as soon as the threat of the Tea Party shutting down parts of the government goes away. So in two to six years, is my guess.
As a sort of apologetic defense of America, please recognize that the first person to try something new never gets it right. Good on Europe and other countries for doing it better than the USA did. It would be disappointing indeed if those who came along afterward did not avoid some of the problems we have made for ourselves.
Someone also once said that no government has to be good, it just has to be good enough not to fail. That's the situation here in America. Until it breaks so badly that a lot of people get hurt, the USA is unlikely to make the kinds of sweeping changes to its Constitution that seem to be needed.
Please realize that this end of filibustering only applies to the Senate confirmation process. Where the Senate votes on whether a proposed appointee is fit to hold the appointed office. Filibustering on policies and legislation is NOT affected.
The Tea Partiers brought this situation on by their attempts to cripple the Federal government until they got their way. That is tyranny by a minority. As a group, the Tea Party is walking closer to the line that defines treason and impeachable actions than any other political faction in living memory. They do not seek the compromises that make a democratic republic work; they push a "my way or the highway" agenda which risks everyone's safety and pushes the cost of government higher and higher.
Harry Reid just got rid of the filibuster in the Senate. It was one of the few protections against the tyranny of the majority. Maybe his next step will just be a winner-take-all type setup in the Senate where the minority party is abolished completely. Once this is done, he can just declare Obama King. Sadly, most on the left would cheer for this.
Yes, this was a bad step, however the alternative was, for the immediate future, much worse.
Please realize that the filibuster rules are unchanged for matters legislation. They have only been removed in confirmation hearings, where the Senate says yes or no to someone the President wants appointed to fill a vacancy. Most commonly a vacant judge position. The change means that appointments cannot be held in limbo for months and years; there will be a timely "yes" or "no" decision. That will enable the Federal government to run at closer to its best possible efficiency. Instead of staggering for lack of judges, etc.
This Senate rule can be reversed using the same process that put it in place. If there is ever any value in allowing procedural delays in a Senate confirmation process, then this rule will be reversed fairly soon.
Democracy of itself is the tyranny of the majority. In the USA, the Bill of Rights provides some protection against this tyrant, by putting some limits on democratic processes. The USA is far from a pure democracy (thank the Powers That Be).
One of the options TFA talks about is a system where CEOs become monarchs with stockholders becoming nobles or gentry. If I understood correctly, the author says that this is one proposed neoreactionary system of governance. However it fits the definition of fascism, and would certainly fail for the same reason fascist regimes always fail: they are too susceptible to internal corruption, when policy makers put selfish concerns ahead of societal concerns. "Yes, I have decided that we need to build a flood control dam, and my company will supply the concrete for the job. It's true that we have never had a flooding problem but it is good social policy to be prepared."
Pure monarchies have serious problems when an incompetent gains the throne. And they have troubles with filling a vacancy at the top without a lot bloodshed.
Churchill once said that democracy was the worst form of government... except for all the others. That's as true now as it was in the last century.
It is a solved problem if and only if you limit database operations to today. Then you can use today's best software and practices.
But this is too big a system to be taken through the revisions that are needed every 7 to 10 years to keep a DBMS up to date. For one thing, once it is in full operation it cannot be taken off line for a weekend upgrade. That adds a lot of headaches as you can count on always having to support simultaneous database operations by two or more different versions of software: the pre-upgrade version and the post-upgrade version. You also have to assure that records last updated 50 or more years ago can still be accessed, even though fields may have been added, dropped, or merged in the meantime.
I am surprised that any corporation took this on. Winning this contract was a poison pill, and that would have been obvious to anyone with a memory of what the Veterans Administration went through when they began implementing ViSTA and the Computerized Patient Record System in the last years of the last century. And ViSTA was a simple overlay on a proven database engine, not this kind of build from scratch project.