Must resist "living Darwin" comment. Aww screw it!

Well naturally. Once the owner burns the store down deterring shoplifting, nothing left to steal == no crime.

Well, OK, so when should I expect that I can build a brochure site for a hotel that uses HTML5 videos and have one video format and one set of custom controls to work with? Because the world has moved on and Flash is no longer a viable option for this kind of work despite offering those advantages for many years, thanks to much the same browser developers who can't get their act together and actually provide a better replacement. They can't even manage to make the default "this is a video" overlay look the same, or even put it in roughly the same place so you can design placeholder graphics accordingly.

If your company's video site actually is YouTube then this kind of problem probably doesn't affect you all that much. However, for normal web sites that are just trying to take advantage of multimedia as part of the presentation, HTML5 audio and video are a bad joke, and the punchline is that all the much better technologies that used to be viable alternatives have been deliberately killed off anyway.

But this brings us back to the original question from my first post in this thread: why? What objective advantage do you or your employer/client gain by insisting on such compliance?

I do sympathise with your position, in that it should be an advantage to follow standards, and browser compatibility now and in the future should be practically guaranteed by doing so. The world would be a better place if this were the reality. But it isn't, and so pragmatically, I'd rather build web sites and apps that work than sites and apps that dogmatically tick the right boxes even though it requires more effort and offers no demonstrable benefit.

Yes, I was, and I respectfully disagree. Browsers today do a lot more, but frequently the support for newer features is so specific to each browser and in some cases so unstable that it is completely useless for real world projects, it requires silly amounts of boilerplate and prefixing (= will break at some future point you can't predict, so also useless for production sites that won't have ongoing maintenance), or at best it requires implementing something in multiple independent ways.

An example of useful standardisation would have been all browsers using the same default stylesheet. Imagine how much developer time could have been saved and how many glitches could have been avoided over the years if we had never needed things like CSS resets or Normalize.

But the point is that these non-standard-compliant implementation techniques don't break anything in practice, because every browser is tolerant of them and will always remain so because far too much would break otherwise. The only downside to not following those standards is that someone can complain you're not following their preferred standards. And someone always will, but unless it really does matter (for example, because it excludes customers and damages your bottom line, or it actually does undermine some sort of accessibility aid) you can just ignore them.

You mean it will reduce the value of everyone's debt.

Poor people can't even open a bank account anymore.

There may exist a theoretical construct that is necessary and isn't itself criminal but I am not convinced that we have an actual example of such at this time.

Bank fraud is not a desirable thing but at the end of the day it's just crooks stealing from crooks currently.

Because if it's not protected, the person won't go to confession and the opportunity to talk him out of it is lost.

For the same reason, if the state will not honor the sanctity of confession (or other pastoral relationships) it puts itself in a position of banning religious practices. It just doesn't look much like freedom of religion if they keep hauling clergy off to jail when they behave as their religion insists that they must.

Note that mandatory reporting for doctors is not without controversy and is not frequently enforced. There are also laws that go the other way. For example, some states have laws providing amnesty from various drug and underage drinking laws if it is discovered in relation to calling 911 for a medical emergency.

I'm pointing out that a sufficiently large number of ops will be using the non-trapping versions that it probably makes more sense for the compiler to add a check of the flags in the cases where it would be helpful.

Genuine questions: Who do you think that would help, and why?

This kind of validation can be useful if you need to follow a standard for something to work. If browsers all followed proper de jure standards then this would offer a useful benefit for compatibility, particularly forward compatibility with future browsers.

Unfortunately, most of the major browsers today do not do this at all consistently. Even some of the people writing the standards have basically given up. (HTML5 "living standard"? Seriously? If it changes arbitrarily then it's not a standard.)

The de facto standards that actually matter are how real browsers behave, which dictate whether your page looks right in the browsers your visitors are using today. Nothing else you do today is guaranteed to work tomorrow without regular attention anyway, which is foolish regression from the situation a few years ago for which we can thank Google and Mozilla, but it's the reality all the same.

In my entire career doing Web work -- which is measured in decades -- I'm not sure I have ever seen an example where a project was objectively better off because it routinely enforced having valid mark-up and stylesheets. I have, however, seen plenty of cases where someone has deliberately deviated from W3C standards for a specific, useful reason.

For example, Google have been known to omit mark-up that they were sure wasn't necessary in any browser in order to save a few bytes. Multiply those bytes by a bazillion visitors to their site every day and that's a lot of traffic saved overall. Another common case is trendy MVC frameworks like Angular, which often use non-standard attributes on HTML elements for their own purposes. They could use standard "data-*" attributes, but once you've got a few of those sitting on many elements in your mark-up, it's just noise and excess weight, so they use their own prefix for namespacing instead. And yet, I don't see anyone claiming that either Google's search engine or Angular as a JS framework have failed as a result of these heinous crimes...

Python dodges the question by using long when necessary. A Python long is what C would call a bignum.

Overflow isn't always wrong. Two's complement arithmetic DEPENDS on ignoring an overflow AND underflow to 'just work', for example.

Too bad it's not generally checked for. That's where the tool comes in.

The irony is that the same logic applied to the job by the worker basically means -- I'm free to do whatever I want at this job, and if it doesn't work out of them they can fire me.

For the company, the logic means they can be abusive, discriminatory, dishonest and exploitive.

So for the worker then, I guess they can be lazy, dishonest, unproductive, etc. It's the worker's role to exploit the company for the maximum gain they can get. Maximum shirk, minimum work.

What's funny is, I would bet that author if presented with her own logic from a worker perspective would probably immediately launch into a diatribe about the worker's moral obligation to work hard, be a good employee, etc, yet she refuses to see any moral obligation by the employer to the employee.

"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

Sounds almost like a corollary to Clark's third law.