Most of the answers to your questions are "it depends" I don't understand what you mean by a "software shop" - is this a consulting company, a company that produces a large scale product, a company that produces a small product, an online service or what?

Your ratio of junior to senior developers depends on the kind of product you're producing. If you have an application that has a big, overarching architecture and then lots of relatively simple modules for specific cases, you want many junior developers to pound out those simple modules (e.g. different types of data entry screens).

Coding standards and standardization are always good. For a small shop you're best off looking around for one that you like and adopting it rather than trying to make your own from scratch because it is not a revenue producer and you can burn endless hours in meetings arguing about spacing, comment style, etc. Make an executive decision and move forward.

Tools and languages, again, it depends. Use the right tool for the job.

Since you don't know any of these things or how to make the tradeoffs, what you need is to hire a director of engineering who does because if you try to hire some developers and apply the vast depth of wisdom that you've acquired from this thread on Slashdot you're probably going to fail miserably.

And there's nothing in North America except trees and savages. What a short-sighted view you have.

There's a lot of value in having humans along. Currently, launch costs are so high that the costs of bringing along the life support for humans is prohibitive, but if it got cheaper many things would work better.

Consider Philae - if it had landed a few meters in another direction it would still be working. If it had been a manned expedition, that wouldn't have been an issue.

Or look at the Mars rovers. Great stuff, but there's little ability to improvise. Think up a different experiment you want done? Well, it'll have to wait for the next rover because that one can't do it.

That's such bullshit. We didn't understand the atom until a little over a century ago. Quantum mechanics even later. Just because it's been thousands of years and we haven't figured something out doesn't mean that it's unknowable.

The difference being that you could have coded it from scratch - and you don't learn how to do that just by copy/pasting code.

Because nobody is making that many batteries yet and they're quite expensive? The whole Tesla "gigafactory" is so they can produce 500,000 cars per year. That's a drop in the bucket for supplying homes with batteries.

Yeah, Angela Merkel was upset the NSA was spying on her (and she's actually a legitimate target as a head of state and has her own security forces who are supposed to be securing her communications) but wants to return the favor to the rest of the world. They're all the same.

There's one barrier in front of space exploration - high launch costs. Everything else is surmountable or ignorable.

We've been sending people to Antarctica for a while. Many of the early explorers died. Tourists have died in Antarctica. Some space explorers will die because of shoddy equipment. We may even send people places with equipment known to be substandard. I wouldn't go but there seem to be plenty who would.

Nope - I haven't given up on my US citizenship yet.

And personal tax is a myth for the same reason because I just ask for a higher salary to offset my tax burden. By that logic you can't tax ANYTHING because the cost will get shifted somewhere else.

What makes you think that companies don't want and lobby for this complex tax code that is full of loopholes they can explot?

Don't like it? Move.

What Amazon is doing here is eating their cake and keeping it too. They get the advantage of using the infrastructure and then skip out on paying the taxes that fund the infrastructure. If they don't want to pay for it, don't use it.

Well, considering that you're NOT paying taxes in a tax haven, tax "heaven" seems reasonable.

Actually, it doesn't matter how long you reside outside of the US they still want their bite.

Well, as a normal US citizen (I'm an ex-pat so I have to deal with this crap) the US wants to tax you on your worldwide income. The only legal way to avoid that is to give up your US citizenship. Currently, I think the US is the only country that tries to tax you on your worldwide income so pretty much if you shift your citizenship to any other country you can then go reside in whatever low tax locale you can and only pay the local taxes. The US has come up with an "exit tax" though, so if you have a substantial amount of assets and want to give up your US citizenship they want you to pay for the privilege of leaving.