Why did a mega-corporation fail where a single guy succeeded? It's simple:

• Lack of direction
• Bloated interface
• Too much Evil

When you work in an environment when you maintain code written by others in editors of their choosing the code indents always come out screwey. Whenever I open the next garbled mess of a source code, there is a two stroke command to reformat to the style of my choosing. The next person to open the file will see it exactly as I saved, regardless of editor. The only issue is that version control tools will think that I changed EVERYTHING.

If everyone in your group uses the same editor, say MS Visual Studio, this is probably less of a problem.

Ever heard of walkie-takie?

In case of a real emergency EVERYONE is going to need help. They can either call their parents/sposes/relatives or your heavenly 911 will have to dispatch a unit to EVERYONE. And we already know how well that works.

People think they are smarter than they are always and independently of any other variables.

Ha ha, they already do that at UPS, which is also rated one of the worst companies to work for. I still think there should be a video log in a crashed plane's black box. Maybe encrypt the video in the camera and send it to black box, so that employer cannot accidentally tap in?

...because it "integrates with a pretty scary existing system". Something written from scratch would have much much fewer. I guess it does speak of quality of the code but also depends on the quality of data it has to work with, external interfaces, changing user requirements, etc.

Well, the article is shit, so I will have to go with the sparce details I have so far:

The jury deliberated for 2 days, so there were some serious arguments to deliberate about, and thus this was not a frivolous lawsuit.

Lawsuites like this impose a cost of litigation but in the long run they give us something more important, something other places like Korea or China lack. This advantage is the prime reason the Silicone Valley exists in the Valley as opposed to some shithole where laws are questionable and judges go to the highest bidder.

In this example, the lawsuit tries to establish equal treatment of men and women in the workforce. Women comprise over 50% of population and any country that can tap that talent (and most countries cannot) suddenly has access to 2x the number of capable candidates, a tremendous advantage. Most of these lawsuites are impossible for lack of proof, but if something is so obvious that it is provable in court it would be a waste not to persue.

Now imagine a society where all the respectable and compensated positions are given to communist party member's cousin's son-in-laws. All their talent rots in slums. This is the current situation at some 75% of the world. Good luck starting any successful ventures there.

I understand the CPU and other resource hogs are undesirable, but for simple things there is a trade off between keeping them simple or squeezing every drop of performance out, and for most practical tasks keeping things simple is more important.

Imagine something that takes 0.001 ms on a cheap CPU and is used once a day. Is it worth making it faster for a day of work and a man-week of maintenance increase due to complexity?

Pardon me, but your targets are off target:

Fast

Depends program objectives. Most of my code does not need to be fast, and some even works better if it is slow so it does not pig some resource

efficient

Usually the case, then again, see "Fast"

not bloated

maintenability

not buggy

BS. I just completed a complex project that integrates with pretty scary existing system. It is 95% bugs at this point, yet does not make it bad code. Most bugs will get weeded out over a few weeks, as long as code is easy to read and maintain.

respectful of the user's privacy

N/A

hardened with regard to hacking

yes

not encumbered by dependencies

maintenability

adequately featured

?

well supported

It is if someone pays for it?

well documented for the end user

Users of a very complex iPhone never read a single page of documentation. I prefer things that just work as expected

So IMHO it boils down to maintenability and security.

Let's auction senators directly to the highest bidder instead. Why bother with the elections?

This is not a pissing contest of "which religion is the best". We (as a society) need to look into what caused the massacre and how to prevent similar events in the future. Here's a short list for you:

Norway in 2011:
Try to detect certain mental disorders early and restrict their access to firearms. Tighten control over who has access to firearms.

Paris last Wednesday, Sydney last month, etc.:
Figure out why perfectly sane and capable muslims have frequent urges to execute random civilians. Find and fix the root of the problem.

While #1 is difficult to accomplish, many jurisdictions try their best to restrict access to firearms.

#2 is easy to fix but political pressures tie our hands under "freedom of religion" umbrella. My personal opinion is that we should be keeping zealot followers of Sharia Law in countries where Sharia is the official law of the land, rendering them harmless. I would also like to see the the enablers of the assassins called to justice. I am sure they had lots of help -- moral, financial and operational to carry out this massacre.

Challenge accepted:

You probably noticed that there is a difference in physical appearance between men and women. This is probably because men and women carry out different roles in society. Isn't it right to assume that the differences are not limited to physical appearance but also physiological, mental state, goals and interests? Believe it or not, men and women are different.

Russian TV is a giant propaganda machine. They make Fox News look good. Russia takes 3rd place in the world in journalist murder rate, while the first two places are taken by countries torn by ongoing war. Calling Russian TV "free speech" is a good joke. They will like you in Kremlin.

There was a time interval during which White House was hesitant to label it as terrorism, and that in itself is pretty astonishing. Where they contemplating to go with "Freedom Fighters"? "Firearms Incident"?