You are right, of course.

I am aware of the difference between CO2 and CO, and considered toning down my inflammatory (asphyxiatory?) rhetoric.

But in the end (motived by +funny karma whoring) I chose polemic black humor over rational scientific discourse, hoping that no one would call me out for bad science.

But is that fair to other commuters?

Life is not fair, my dears. Do the best you can under the circumstances.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm busy exhaling deadly carbon dioxide into the air you breath.

... sap the performance of your script by following the JQuery ethos of using expensive DOM-query navigators for every operation ...

Performance hit is a problem, agreed.

Also problematic: ease of creating memory leaks.

Corralito (Spanish pronunciation: [koralito]) was the informal name for the economic measures taken in Argentina at the end of 2001 by Minister of Economy Domingo Cavallo in order to stop a bank run, and which were fully in force for one year. The corralito almost completely froze bank accounts and forbade withdrawals from U.S. dollar-denominated accounts. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito]

Instead of getting my programmers from Glasgow, I am sending my current programmers -- broke, penniless, desperate -- to live on the streets of Glasgow for a year.

Those that survive the ordeal will return to my Xanadu-like pleasure palace, where they will serve out their remaining years in matchless luxury.

Talk money: man hours, capital investment, returns.

Will it profit the company?

This is a language problem. Know your audience, use their language

Restrain your Tech nature. Management doesn't care and never will -- just shut up about it.

I like to moderate week-old comments, when I get mod points.

Imagine the poster's surprise: "Hey! I got modded up for a comment I wrote last week!"

Gives me a warm feeling: two parts happiness, one part mischief.

Software developed by non-software companies tends (in my experience) to disappoint on all three counts: quality, price, and speed of delivery.

For starters, non-software companies typically suffer from the All Three fallacy: they want it good, cheap, and fast. No "pick one" principle here: they want it all. Over-optimistic projections then give way to crappy software and extended disappointment.

The core problem, however, is that software companies are better at creating software (forgive me for stating the obvious) because they specialize in creating software, which puts non-software companies (newspapers, banks, whatever) in the second ranks at best.

Related observation: non-software companies have been hot for "Agile" over the past several years; in my experience, every last one of them is not taken seriously, or indeed is treated with rich and deeply-felt contempt, by every last developer at that company. (Personally, I try to let it go, write it off as inevitable industry marketing jargon.)

Agreed, we want:

1) A continuous mapping and quantification of the Military Industrial Complex, complete with relations to people, and businesses up and down the chain.

2) Continuously updated Corporate to Lobbyist to Politician studies, with full exposure.

About your assertion that "These people are only in power because _we_ allow them to be" ... your heart is in the right place, but my head says otherwise. I wouldn't say that the powerful are powerful because we *allowed* them to be -- that overstates how much power *we* really have to prevent the concentration of power.

The powerful either have power to begin with, or they take it. Either way, they won't give it up, and if you try to take it from them, they will fight you. Since they have power -- and I don't -- they will tend to win. Indeed, because I believe they will win, I don't even begin.

For everyone today who says "Bad Guys run the world, let us liberate ourselves from our corrupt overlords", I remind you: we said the same thing in the nineties, and the eighties, and the seventies, and the sixties. And the thirties. And the teens. And the eighteen-nineties. And so on -- the American Revolution, for example.

I'm not saying "Give Up" -- but let's not comfort ourselves with false optimism. If you declare revolutionary intent, do so in pragmatic terms, with specific achievable goals. No idealism: a successful revolution demands hard-headed realists.

What is inconvenient is when people who have nothing to say -- nothing better than sarcasm and "meh", anyway -- insist on saying it anyway.

Example: "But warming is caused by man. Got it."

Tell me something interesting, useful, relevant, meaningful. Then you get my attention and respect, regardless of how similar or different my opinion is from yours.