Article jumped the shark for me with the following gem:<p>"... she uses a 2013 Dell laptop: new by government standards, but clunky enough compared with the cutting-edge devices of her former life that her young son asked what it was."<p>I'm sorry, but while other forms of technology are rapidly replacing laptops, they are still the dominant mobile productivity workhorses (unless you count things like tweeting and facebook as productivity tasks). This quote implies that laptops are so out-of-date that the child of a well-off tech worker wouldn't know what they are, akin to VHS players and cassette tapes. Ridiculous.<p>Also, by whose standard <i>isn't</i> a ~1-2 year old laptop new?
"I wish they had people in there for this last two years that could make the trains run on time, not somebody who has big ideas"<p>We need both. The conundrum is that improvements are done through constant iteration and ideation. Government implementation is plagued by fear of fiat and fear of failure. The implementers need to be protected by the big idea people from the skeptics.
Floppy disks actually provide a rather pleasant form factor. It's large enough to feel meaningful, wide enough to not get lost between other objects, flat enough to be included in a binder with printed material. The only downsides are transfer speed, data capacity, and lifespan.
What's wrong with floppy disks?<p>For certain kinds of highly sensitive information transport, a floppy disk is probably a better idea than a flash drive.<p>I suppose you could use CDs, but floppy disks seem easier to destroy.
I find it funny how we're mostly nitpicking over something the author probably didn't spend more than 3 seconds about and are missing what most of the article's even about, including the usually inflammatory women-in-tech initiatives she's trying to jump start in the region.<p>I don't think it's such a big deal for someone in her position to have such a laptop mostly because she's not exactly going to fix the default constant of failure in government IT and software by coding. She'll probably have a docking station and she can probably afford a decent monitor from there.<p>Best of luck, but I really hate to see people thrown to the wolves like this politically by being the first in a position with such little political backing to support them. I'll say that she's done her job admirably well when my mother in law knows about her position and staunchly opposes it (she'd vote for a cat if it was Republican and Reagan was on a Democrat ballot, I think she literally said that).
This strikes me as a use case where something like the USB-Armory might be really well suited. It was recently shown at 31.CCC:<p><a href="https://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/Fahrplan/events/6541.html" rel="nofollow">https://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/Fahrplan/events/6541.htm...</a>
Meh, it jumped the shark for me in the first two paragraphs.<p>"We would never say that about reading.”<p>Now this is just a hunch, but I'm guessing most highly educated people have used their reading skills on a regular basis since school as compared to, say, what they learned in Calc III.
Interesting that the US now has a Digital Service similar to the "(UK) Government Data Service" <a href="https://gds.blog.gov.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://gds.blog.gov.uk/</a><p>Those folks have done some <i>incredible work</i> over the last few years with no sign of letting up.