There's a general and a specific answer to that question:

General: If it is going to happen, it is much better to be the person doing it than the person it is done to, so if it can happen, best assume it will.

Specific: Almost all of Uber's problems spring from the fact that cabs currently need to have drivers.

These points of view do not consider what effects this will have on society in general. Capitalism does not do that.

Of course, there are also people who simply like the technical challenge, but they are generally not financing themselves in this pursuit.

That will be an issue, but I get the impression that many organizations will have to make significant improvements before it becomes a matter of immediate practical concern.

This is not an article about what is possible, it is about what actually happens. I have seen incredible abuses of operator overloading, for example. I have also seen some highly confused Java, but its pedestrian syntax seems to make it a little harder to write cryptic bad code in.

That is an admirably rational argument that I fear won't stand up to politicians' desire to pander to car manufacturers and dealers, oil companies, and that part of the electorate who feel entitled to drive a big vehicle that they have no use case for and can't really afford to run. I hope I am wrong.

They need critical reasoning skills and an understanding of how the world they live in actually works.

Waterfall is a straw man. It only continues to be mentioned because it is an easy target. Claims that X is better than waterfall are a waste of time; they tell us nothing about whether X is actually effective.

Yet the linked-to article says "If Wallace is telling the truth, the FTC aggressively prosecuted a company based on bogus evidence."

The only way I can see the evidence being bogus is if Wallace exploited a position of trust granted to him by the target company, and not even necessarily then. Whatever the truth is, the report is not self-consistent. Apparently, rational analysis and critical thinking are not employed at CNN - but we suspected that, anyway.

I am not aware of any study that shows that arbitrarily complex tasks (a distributed operating system, an AI project such as Watson, an airplane fly-by-wire system...) can be completed solely by a sufficient number of bottom-of-the-barrel programmers. I don't recall any such claim in The Mythical Man-Month, but it has been a while since I read it - perhaps you could cite the chapter that references such a study, so I can look it up in my copy?

There's no point in trying to assign a ratio to it, because the worst developers have zero or negative productivity, on account of the damage that they do to projects by checking in inordinately complicated code that fails mysteriously, or simply by messing up everyone else's schedule by failing to deliver their part. This is not a hypothetical argument; I have several specific people from my personal experience of corporate development in mind (all in the past, fortunately.)

You would have to poll all of them to establish that.

Thank you for your highly informative comment about Goldman Sachs indemnifying its employees for legal fees.

It seems that Goldman Sachs may be hoist by its own petard here, if the intent behind this provision was, at least in part, to enable 'aggressive' behavior by its officers and employees (i.e. to flirt with arguably illegal behavior).

Perhaps this is getting off-topic, but the Greek government hired Goldman Sachs precisely because it wanted to adopt 'sharp practices' in hiding its growing economic crisis.

You are not the only person here to make a case against the conviction on the basis of the meaning of 'stealing', but such arguments don't get anywhere, as the law contains precise definition of what the word is intended to mean in this case (if it actually says 'stealing', which I doubt.) A more pertinent question might be how a matter that should fall under civil / contract law has been turned into a criminal offense.

On the other hand, your characterization of Goldman Sachs' behavior is spot-on.

The good software is not theirs, it is Bitdefender's, and it does not have a zero marginal cost unless they steal it. That would not be unknown, of course, but this company may be too large, and have big enough aspirations, for that not to be an option.

I also tend to agree with those who suspect they are selling to customers who don't like to be reminded that using keygens is risky.

No, the testing organizations here are competent. It is the "let's have the intern do an antivirus review" articles in publications having no particular reputation in security matters that should be treated with suspicion.