If you aren't paying quarterlies then why are you even getting a refund? Adjust your W-4 withholding so that you don't pay them more than you have to in the first place. If you are paying quarterlies then try to improve your income estimates so that you don't give Uncle Sam an interest free loan of your money. I understand that it can be difficult for self employed people with highly variable incomes, but most Americans don't fall into that group and should know their yearly tax liability to within a fifty dollars or so at the beginning of the tax year.

It's not a matter of attitude. Attitude is irrelevant in this case. The employees of the IRS and government officials working there could theoretically be punished or prosecuted for failing to perform their lawful tax collection duties. It's a matter of law, not attitude.

The United States is one of the few (only?) countries that makes no distinction between income earned at home or income earned abroad for purposes of taxation. If you're a US citizen then all your income is taxable, subject to the US tax codes, regardless of where you earned it or where you lived. That is why you never hear about US "tax exiles" because the only way to end your US tax liability is to renounce your US citizenship which can only be done at a US embassy on foreign soil and only upon presentation of proof of alternative citizenship.

Compared to what? Updating the firmware on millions of production routers and servers because a critical flaw made it into production? Paying out claims against the company that resulted from security breaches associated with the bug? Going back, after the code has already been designed, written and deployed to fix a bug that would have been tens of thousands of times cheaper to fix had it been caught instead by unit tests well before release? Testing has a cost, yes, but gambling that your code will get by without it can wind up costing you more than you'd ever imagined was possible. How would you feel about driving a car with software written according to that philosophy or banking software that get's it mostly right but every once in a while zeros out your balance for some strange reasons?

You refuse to accept types that you cannot identify at runtime or you use a type safe language. Accepting void pointers or the like is just asking for trouble.

Then you test for that. You wrote the code for a specific reason and purpose, right? Well, then you ought to be able to prove that with tests. Knowing what tests you need and how to write them is itself a skill and a worthwhile one at that.

Sounds like a good test to me. The length of the payload was an input in this case and it should have been asserted against the true length of the buffer in a test.

That is yet another reason why we separate concerns in our code, so that we can plug in mocks and stubs as needed to simulate inputs into or outputs from a module of code. This enables unit testing, but it also leads to better organized and more clearly written code that accurately and concisely expresses the intent of the module. The existence of unit tests is a necessary, although not a sufficient, condition for good code.

In hindsight yes but this code was reviewed (supposedly) and this was missed. Code review alone is not enough, you must prove it with tests.

Incorrect. They suspended enforcement while they review the matter. However, if the IRS finds, as a matter of law, that they're obligated to collect these debts, per the meaning of the statute, then they must attempt to collect them unless the law is changed or the courts rule otherwise. I've often heard from those on the left, "Oh, don't worry they're not going to enforce that" or "they're only going to use that against the right people", but here is the perfect example of why the law isn't always the best instrument to use in pursuit of social policy goals. There can be no mercy under the law. It binds all, whether they be high or low, equally. Anything less and the law fails to defend our individual rights and freedoms against the mob or the corrupt rule of the strong over the weak.

No production code without unit tests. Every possible type or class of input must be tested. All assumptions must be tested. All outputs must be verified for each possible combination of inputs. All failure modes must be exercised. No excuses, just do it.

It depends upon what sort of fuel you're trying to produce. Methane can definitely be burned as a fuel, on your stove for example, but it's not a good aviation fuel. The idea here is to skip methane and go straight to ethane or propane which can be up-converted to even longer chain hydrocarbons via more heat and pressure, eventually yielding jet fuel. Artificial hydrocarbon fuels themselves are nothing new. The basic processes have been known since the early part of the 20th century, but because it's way cheaper to simply refine naturally occurring petroleum pumped out of the ground, nobody does synthetic hydrocarbons unless they have to. For example, Germany produced synthetic aviation gasoline from coal during WWII as supplies of oil were gradually cut off and South Africa produced diesel fuel from coal during the sanctions of the Apartheid era.

There's no doubt that manufacturing fuel on board is desirable from a logistics standpoint. The question is cost, not just monetary but energy. As you're no doubt aware, hydrocarbon fuels are incredibly energy dense which means that an equal amount (and probably more) energy most go into their creation from scratch using the most basic raw materials, H2, CO2 and CO. The question is how much space is available onboard for production scale versions of these reactors and how much steam and electric power will the reactor have to supply to make this work. I don't know, but I would guess lots. This fuel production sounds like an energy hungry process. How much power and steam can be spared from other onboard needs to power fuel production? Would this stress the reactors, possibly reducing service life or requiring more frequent nuclear refuels? There are trade-offs here, it's not a slam dunk.

California?

I was under the impression that electrolysis isn't a fast process but the article does mention some kind of patented "electrolytic cation exchange module", perhaps combined with some kind of "bicarbonate" reactant? In any case, it seems clear that they've found a way to substantially speed up H2 and CO2 production from seawater. From there it's not much of a stretch to produce CO and then hydrocarbon fuels, jet fuels in this case, via the well understood Fischer-Tropsch process or similar.

You do realize that what they're producing here is artificial jet fuel, right? It's not "biofuel" because it isn't produced by bacteria or algae or other direct biological process. No, what they're talking about here is essentially the water gas shift reaction whereby dissolved CO2 in the seawater is combined with water vapor (aka steam) and carbon monoxide (produced via this "bicarbonate" reactant?) to yield carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and hydrogen which more heat and pressure (steam) in the presence of an iron catalyst converts these products into short chain hydrocarbons (alkenes), probably ethanes (CH3) and propanes (CH4), and from there longer chain hydrocarbons with more heat and pressure until the desired blend is cooked up, jet fuels of CH9 to CH16. However, these processes don't really transition us away from fossil fuels or at least not into something besides a hydrocarbon fuel, whether produced artificially as in this case or refined from naturally occurring crude oil that we've pumped out of the ground.

It's unlikely that this would obviate completely the need for external supplies of fuel. At best it would probably only marginally decrease the depletion rate of on board stocks allowing for a somewhat longer cruise before a resupply is needed. There are probably other downsides to using this system too. For example, there are parts, maintenance and possibly extra wear and tear on the reactor which now not only has to propel the ship but also power an energy intensive conversion process from seawater to jet fuel. Indeed, the initiation energy for some of those chemical reactions is quite high which probably explains why somebody isn't already doing this on a large scale for profit here on land.

They have a name for that. I believe it's called hyperinflation and it's definitely not a good thing.