It's a little more complex than that. I believe it's more like this:

Little Johnny Verizon opens a sandwich delivery service. He offers "Guaranteed sandwiches in 10 minutes". This isn't a problem for him, as there are only 5 people ordering sandwiches and he can easily get them all delivered in 10 minutes.

Net d'Flix opens a new sandwich shop. It's really really popular. People start asking Little Johnny to deliever sandwiches from d'Flix. Little Johnny (being a little bit greedy) signs up a bunch of new customers. Unfortunately, d'Flix sandwiches take more time to make, and little Johnny can't guarantee his 10 minute delivery time anymore. At the same time, Little Johnny's brother (Fios Verizon) opened his own sandwich shop. Little Johnny gets a kickback from Fios for every sandwich he delivers, so he REALLY wants people to buy from Fios. Unfortunately, Fios' sandwiches are terrible and can only be ordered in "combo packages" where if you really like pickles, you have to order mustard and lettuce as well.

Little Johnny then has a great idea "I'll just tell d'Flix that I won't deliver their sandwiches in 10 minutes unless they pay more money to hire another delivery guy, plus a little extra for my inconvenience". People will whine about their sandwiches not being fresh, and d'Flix will have to pay up.

Now this entire time, Little Johnny hasn't been meeting his "10 minute delivery guarantee", but he doesn't really care as he's the only sandwich delivery person in town, and people really like their sandwiches.

I agree, but I also think there needs to be a balance between KISS and other principles (e.g. DRY). I've come across developers who use KISS as an excuse to be lazy.

I recently came across some code from a colleague where it was hundreds of lines filling in object properties from data in a spreadsheet. Each property being filled in was coded as a separate line, calling a one of five different routines based on the data type to be parsed.

I asked "why didn't you just add a configuration (or just an array) that lists the fields to be parsed, then use reflection to fill in the properties" (performance was not an issue). His response was it violated KISS as reflection is "complicated".

Yes reflection isn't as simple as direct property access, and yes adding a config parser/loop is a bit more code, but at least:
- The code is readable (reading 10 pages of code in a single routine makes my eyes bleed)
- Its easier to modify (we had a change where we needed all decimal values to be parsed differently. Suddenly 50 lines of code need to change rather than 1)
- It's immediately obvious where the exception cases are (we had a bug due to a typo where 1 of the fields was being parsed incorrectly in certain edge cases. This filtered down to some calculations later on and was quite the pain to find the culprit).

As in most programming tasks, balance is key.

This is how good science is supposed to work,

Huh? Colonizing Mars is not science. It's engineering.

Now, peer review is also a good idea in engineering, but so are things like detailed design specifications, planning, prototyping, feasibility studies, etc.

These are areas in which Mars One is severely lacking.

I'd love to see you make that same post 10 days from now when the number of confirmed cases in the US skyrockets.

'
Given it took 10 months to reach the 7000 or so cases in Africa, why would you think the cases in the US is going to skyrocket?

Ebola is scary because it is deadly, not because it is particularly communicable.

No...that's a personnel issue.

For future reference:
If it runs on electricity, it's technical.
If it runs on meat, it's personnel.

By the way I think your summary of the story (you are the submitter) is weak.

Yes, but at least it is better edited than most of the submissions we see on Slashdot. It makes more sense, too.

Do you have a link? I'm assuming these must be overall consumption.

I'll agree China, India, US are the overall top 3.

When you put Canada of all places in that list, my alarm bells went off. It's ridiculous to think that a country of 30 million people uses more energy than Japan or Russia.

I would also be a little surprised to find that India is now consuming more energy than Russia, but that at least is believable.

I suspect the top 5 now is still the same:
China, USA, Russia, India, Japan (probably in that order, possibly switch Russia and India)

You're poor? Well you should have worked harder. You're sick? Well you should be working harder on getting better. Got paralyzed in a horrible accident? Work harder in growing those nerve cells back. Stop being a lazy whiner, assuming that you're a special little snowflake.

Actually, not at all.
You're poor? Society should have educated you better and provided better social support to you and your family. We do a piss-poor job right now providing for the lowest income bracket in western society, which IMO feeds directly back into the high incarceration rates, drug issues, and a host of other issues.

You're sick / paralyzed? Go to the hospital. What sort of backwards barbaric country doesn't have socialized medicine in this day and age? (Note: I do not currently live in the USA)

Have you ever considered that part of the reason why the professional world is so inane and stupid is that we teach our kids to respect and suffer through inane stupidity?

No, the real world is inane and stupid sometimes because people are different. What some people consider inane and stupid, others consider valuable and intelligent. Do you really think your high-school teachers were some sort of horrific monsters who enjoyed inflicting boring repetitious tasks on students for no reason? I don't. As far as I can tell, most people honestly believe they are trying to do the right thing.

I have no doubt that our society would benefit from fostering children's strengths rather than punishing any bit of non-conformity.

I agree. But (a) As I mentioned, in high school these are not children, these are young adults. They should be reaching the point where they can use their own strengths towards whatever task is put in front of them. I have seen little to no evidence of high schools attempting to "punish any bit of non-conformity".

I won't hire someone who's going to be a prima donna and refuse to do necessary work, but I will hire someone who comes to me and says, "Look, I know you asked me to do this project, but this is inane and stupid. I've written up a report detailing exactly why it's inane and stupid.

I would expect someone to first come talk to me about why a project was inane and stupid before they wasted time on a report, but I am always open to feedback. The thing is, if I don't agree that the work is inane and stupid then I expect my employees to capable of doing the work, regardless of whether they agree with it or not. IMO, many "prima donnas" today only want the really intriguing projects that look interesting and they can pad their resume's with (i.e. RDD - Resume Driven Development).

Sometimes (valuable) tasks are unfortunately fairly boring to work on though.

Debian, all of the Debian-derived distros, OpenSuse and Arch have adopted systemd, and those who oppose systemd can't just create a distro of such maturity and respect overnight. Sure, Slackware and the *BSDs are left, but losing Debian too was a hard blow, and it's understandable that systemd opponents are feeling a sense of desperation.

Not being a massive Linux geek (use it, but don't develop for it), I don't understand the pushback against Poettering over systemd's adoption.

Let me get this straight:
- He wrote an init system that some people didn't like
- Poettering didn't agree with their objections, continued development
- Distribution maintainers liked it enough to replace init with systemd
- People bully/threaten the developer of systemd?!?!

It would seem a discussion with the distro maintainers over the technical merits/deficiencies of systemd would be more in order. I've found the few open source projects I've followed more closely (NHibernate, automapper, PetaPoco) to be reasonably polite. Is Linux very different? Is it just the size/complexity that makes people jerks?

Individual people can be reasoned with. Unfortunately, groups of people are stupid

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it"

  - Agent K (Men In Black)

Small changes by those who use the most (China, India, US, Canada in that order) would do most of that.

Where the heck did you get that list?

If you are talking per-capita, China and India don't belong. If you are talking overall, Canada doesn't belong.

Ok, I'll stop being lazy and look it up:

Top 5 per-capita energy consumers:
Iceland
Qatar
Trinidad and Tobago
Kuwait
Luxembourg

Top 5 overall energy consumers:
United States
China
Russia
Japan
India

And would it not be much more fair to look at per-capita numbers? i.e. stop harping on China/India, start worrying about Europe / NA

One of them being, frankly, that high school really can be inane, stupid, and soul-crushing. I don't blame kids who check out and lose interest.

I do blame young adults who check out and lose interest (this idea that a 16-18 year old is a "kid" is a peculiar 20th century notion).

Guess what, work can also be inane and stupid. If someone is unable to suck it up and do some pretty straightforward (and yes, sometimes seemingly pointless) work for 3 years, then the probably won't succeed in a typical business environment, and maybe the should not be considered for college enrollment.

I can't imagine what these special snowflakes who think high-school is "soul-crushing" would do if they had to face real hardship.

TL;DR:
Nobody cares if you failed because you are incapable or if you failed because you felt the work was inane and stupid. I'll hire the guy who is less capable but actually does the work over the prima donna who feels the work assigned him is beneath his precious skill set.

It's time for national units to finally be put out to pasture. Both US units and UK units.

You are welcome to try to change all the street signs in the UK using miles, and all the speed limits using miles per hour, and I'll predict you'll have utter chaos because the percentage of drivers who can figure out that 80km/h = 50mph is quite low, and the percentage of drivers who can do that calculation in their head without taking their hands off the steering wheel and their eyes off the road is tiny.

We managed the changeover in Canada just fine.

But then again, we're like a younger, hipper, better looking version of the UK anyways....

Google doesn't have a monopoly on smartphone OS's. Microsoft does have a monopoly on desktop PC OS's

Correct, but you don't need calculus.

c+dc = 2*pi*(r+dr)

substitute 2*pi*r for c & expand
2*pi*r + dc = 2*pi*r + 2*pi*dr

simplify
dc/dr = 2*pi

assuming dr>0. i.e. we are not dealing with a poodle singularity.
Which by remarkable coincidence have recently been shown mathematically to not exist