1) Resist urge to kill coworkers
2) Wait for slow-ass software on slow-ass hardware connected by slow-ass networks to slow-ass databases

I heard that vaccines cause Mass Psychogenic Illnesses in children - pass it on!

"Should"? Does that mean anything more than "the guy writing the sentence wishes that PCs included only free software"?

Personally, I think the majority of Ferrari's "should" be given away for free. I think I'll talk to the DOT about enforcing my personal preferences on other people.

It's far worse than that - I heard that many schools require students to read copyrighted books, thereby forcing them to be exposed to text which they cannot re-use in mashups or whatever. Oh the humanity!

Apparently it considers quantum effects, too - at high speeds I was able to tunnel through the fence, but then I didn't have enough room get to back up to speed to tunnel out!

OK, let me be clearer: it's not just the job they've been assigned, it's the job I want them to be doing, and which I pay them to do. (OK, we can quibble about whether we're getting our money's worth or not, but that's a separate argument)

I don't think it's at all bad to try to find out what's actually going on in another country. Are you seriously suggesting that any country should just take every other country's gov't (friendly or hostile) at face value? I hope not: they'd be fools to do it, and seriously neglecting their responsibilities. I don't know about other countries, but the US gov't (and more particularly the people within in) is explicitly given the duty of protecting citizens from enemies. The first step is to find out who your enemies actually are, and asking them is kind of pointless - you have to snoop around and try to find out what's actually going on.

Of course the chinese try to steal our secrets and technologies. I hope they don't succeed very often, but I don't blame them for trying.

I'm not surprised when ANY gov't (US or anyone else) tries to play up stuff like this - I'm surprised when they succeed.

Wow, a corrupt government... what to do?... I know, let's give them even more power over us! Surely the thieving bastards that run the government will turn into saints if we just give them enough power!

I really don't understand all the outrage about spying. OF COURSE the CIA is spying on Russia - it's their fucking job to spy on Russia! And of course Russia is spying on us - it's their job, too. Once in a while somebody gets caught - but so what? You shrug your shoulders, say "OK, you won this round", and then you get right back to business. It doesn't mean either side is being "bad guys"; we shouldn't be surprised or upset when we catch one of theirs, and we shouldn't feel embarrassed when they catch one of ours (OK, maybe we should be embarrassed about being so inept we were caught, but not embarrassed about what we were caught doing).

News flash: the CIA spies on Russia and occasionally gets caught! In other news, water remains wet and rocks remain hard.

But it's by far the most common - read details on any group of exploits (service pack "X" of your favorite platform, for example) and you'll see that the vast majority come down to executing user input.

For overall coding, you're right - it's all in the eye of the beholder. For secure coding, one simple rule (which is unfortunately much harder to follow than it should be) will avoid 99% of the problems:

DON'T EXECUTE CODE WRITTEN BY YOUR USERS!

What makes it so damn hard is the temptation (if not active encouragement by your platform) to "stringly type" all your data, combined with the temptation (if not active encouragement by your platform) to build up executable code by pasting strings together, all smothered in a rich sauce of inconsistent, confusing, and poorly-documented rules for how to escape what characters where.

That's a nice strawman you've got there - it's such a shame it has to go up in flames!

Of course every channel on TV shouldn't show the same programming, just like every website on the internet shouldn't report the same stories. But if one news report on TV covers a particular story, that doesn't mean it's wrong for a TV news report on a different channel (which might have a different audience) to cover the same story. Same with websites.

"Bullpen" environments (lots of desks in one big noisy room) are the single worst productivity sink I've ever seen. Sure, meetings reduce the time available for useful work, but bullpens make it next to impossible to concentrate, and thus next to impossible to get useful work done, even in the non-meeting time. But boy are they trendy - and just think how much money we're saving by not buying cubes or actual offices!

Oh, and slow PCs and small monitors are huge productivity sinks too.

Wait, are you saying Microsoft would admit that they had made a mistake? I don't think so! They'd be all over what a new paradigm for application development it was, and how this represented a clean break with the crufty old past, and how users were going to love the new synergistic platform for cloud deployment of interoperable applications design to leverage the newest hardware and blah blah blah....

...and then it would be silently dropped in Windows n+1.

You'd get solar energy by going close to the sun, but no "slingshot" - the slingshot trick relies on the fact that the planets are moving in their orbits. In fact the technique slightly reduces the planet's orbital velocity - the energy has to come from somewhere! But because the sun is stationary (with respect to the solar system, of course) there's no advantage to be gained.