ok, this is more about what programmers should "do" than what they should "read". But for anyone involved in working as part of a team or dealing with either managers or subordinates (holy crap, I have just described everyone not working completely alone), I strongly recommend going to a few Toastmasters meetings.
No matter what programming language you use, development style, methodology, or approach, programmers today spend more time communicating with other people than they ever have done before.

Toastmasters - both in terms of giving speeches and also performing leadership tasks based on running the meetings, helps to improve communication and leadership skills (dramatically, in most cases).

If you are ok with being the anti-social loner who sits in the corner churning out code, and who thinks of communication with others as "one grunt for no, two for yes", then you need not bother. But for everyone else, it is a great place to go.

Hampshire CC is at least a partially Microsoft environment, as their SAP ERP system is hosted on SQL Server (M$ have a case study from 2012 on the migration from Oracle/Unix), so their IT admins probably already have significant experience with the administration of MS packages.
http://www.microsoft.com/cases...

Based on the wording of their "Hantsweb" site detailing their software standards, the standard desktop OS is Windows 7, with Vista/XP being phased out or supported on a "best effort" basis and other operating systems not allowed to connect to the domain, so with the exception of any Unix admins left who used to look after their old database servers for the SAP environment, they are an exclusively MS shop possibly with some iOS expertise so that they can look after iPhones and iPads. They do not even support non-IE web browsers, having standardised on IE8...
http://www3.hants.gov.uk/itsch...

On that basis, the cost of user training and admin training for non-MS systems plus the added complexity of a platform change within the organisation is going to make the TCO of future MS solutions lower than an open-source alternative, especially if they get a good discount in return for another positive case-study.

The open source options may well be a better technical fit, once the pain of a platform migration is out of the way, though.

No, it stops the "competing" company hiring employees of the other company. The standard employee contract in most companies typically includes a clause that everything the employee does on company time and hardware belongs to the company, and that if/when the employee leaves they acknowledge that the IP to all work performed or used by the employee stays with the company and cannot be taken, copied or used by the employee once they leave.

Non-competes limit the free flow of employees (resources, if you like) around the marketplace. If a company feels they need to justify a non-compete by citing IP concerns, then they are being disingenuous. Sorry, I mis-typed there... I meant to type "they are lying through their ass".

I think the thing that has most people worried about the Facebook purchase of Oculus is the difference in emphasis between the two companies - Oculus are/were looking to bring a reasonably-priced viable VR display to the market. Facebook are a social media powerhouse which makes revenue by monetizing it's users' details for advertising purposes. There is very little obvious synergy there, meaning it is not clear which direction the Facebook-piloted Oculus ship is going to go, but very few business lay down this kind of money and just let things carry on as they are, so there will almost certainly be some form of redirection.

If Oculus had been bought by a VR competitor, the direction would be largely unchanged; if the purchaser was an OS company - Microsoft, for example, the approach would probably be one of monitor-replacement for the Xbox and also for the Windows OS, other buyers with their own agendas, and so on. If the purchaser was Google, the synergies are again less apparent and the deal would probably be greeted with some skepticism laced with hope/expectation for what improvements might come when paired with Google's resources, but the question is - what is Facebook doing at the moment that makes a VR display the last piece of the puzzle for a killer app? VR Social Media? (Would not really work if the interaction is real-time, as all you will see are loads of people with Oculus headsets on. Not very social...)

Journalists (as the world's professional content creators) versus Bloggers (the world's amateur - sometimes very much so - content creators) are similar in the same way that the guy hacking together application code in his bedroom in his spare time is the same as the salaried analyst programmer employed full time to do that.

They both produce content, and the amateur may produce content which would be considered of an acceptable standard by the professional. But the average amateur produces content which is of a much lower standard than the average professional (no, I have no specific citation to prove that, other than my own experience of working with both types on projects).

Granted, the vast majority of CEOs and lobbyists are good at what they do, but their jobs do not involve finding an engineer. The lobbyists do not need engineers, and the CEOs have minions who can find engineers for them. I suspect that the typical CEO thinks that an engineer is a cross between Dilbert, middle management, and a random faceless guy with a pocket full of pens and bad personal hygeine plus the social skills of Sheldon Cooper - "if all those factors are not present, the person is not an engineer, and I am right because I am the CEO".
I would, however, be interested to see how strong the correlation is between people who say that there is a shortage of scientists and engineers, and the groups who are advocating for broader H1B visa use, because I suspect that what the CEOs and lobbyists really mean is not "there is a shortage of trained engineers and scientists", but "there is a shortage of qualified individuals who are willing to work the hours we demand for the wages we are willing to pay".

The coder/designer would be an Analyst/Programmer. However, the title "Engineer" is both a very specific one (referring to someone who maintains and operates an engine), and also a very generic one (a catch-all title for people trained and *hopefully* skilled in the design/construction of various types of machines or structures - Mechanical Engineer, Civil Engineer, Electrical Engineer, and so on).
I would suggest that a programmer or analyst/programmer is a specific class of engineer.

Paying to skip the whole boring leveling process is going to be a wet dream for a lot of impatient wannabes. But from my experience with MMOs based on leveling skills, you pretty much need to go through the leveling process to get to know the class, limitations, effective playstyles, rotations, and so on. Starting at max level is going to mean that you know nothing about the character class, so you will be a waste of a group/raid slot.
Cue lfg messages where the caller asks for members who have not bought their max level character...

10 years ago, I was on "gardening leave" for 6 months from a job, and once that leave finished, I got a very generous severance package. So for about 9 months in 2004, I was able to do whatever the hell I wanted with my time. Aside from a couple of "walkabout" vacations across Europe and the US, I had no trouble at all spending 12 hours a day playing games. Fun times... grinding toons in my favourite MMO at the time, usually depopulating Nym's Stronghold on Lok looking for a decent set of vibromotors... fun times.

My first instinct was to think that the competitive nature of e-sports would be more likely to attract men than women, as men are "naturally" more competitive when playing games, while women (in my experience) tend to play games either to socialize or relax. It is a very broad brush to paint the two sexes with, but as we are basically looking at a sub-section of men (those who are interested in playing or watching e-sports) versus an entire gender (women, specifically why are there not more of them playing/watching e-sports) any comparisons are going to be a bit disingenuous.
However, I suspect that a large percentage of people who chose not to declare their gender in the survey are doing so out of a sense of privacy, rather than a desire to hide the "fact" that they are women... unless they are also attending the venue where the survey is taken while wearing androgynous clothing designed to mask their gender, and expect to be pounced on like an antelope surrounded by a pack of hungry lions if there is even a hint of femininity (disturbingly, that is probably not far from the truth in some cases).

Educational use is one of the fundamental uses of the Fair Use doctrine, as long as there is no commercial gain derived directly from the application of Fair Use.
Quoting from 17 U.S.C 107:

So... this use is valid on the grounds that it is criticism (in both of the main definitions of the word), comment, and teaching, if the person applying the Fair Use doctrine is not claiming any direct commercial benefit from the use of said copyrighted information. Unless, of course, the original authors can show that the original work is of a specific nature that would itself invalidate Fair Use; the re-user had included all or the vast majority of the original piece directly in his response; or the re-use substantially affected the commercial value of the original work (probably requires a before/after study of revenue generated from the work to be presented in justification for the copyright claim, not something that can be submitted with a DCMA request).

In this case, both sides will probably feel justified in labeling the other's position as "propaganda", with their own as "education", although it shows the AIDS-deniers' viewpoint and world view as being very narrow, because "any view other than something that completely aligns with mine is incorrect, and worse propaganda, so must be expunged from view so that my Universal Truth can be seen in all its glory"...

If you are having problems getting past this one (idiotic) App reviewer, then unless you have already gone through a successful app review process with another reviewer whom you can use for a second opinion or have an escalation point to request an appeal, then you have only two choices that I can see - give up on the idea, or rewrite the app without using jQuery (either by self-coding all of those elements, or taking the bits of jQuery that you need and packaging those separately.

Let's say that I buy a brand new HP product, and then inside of 1 month I notice a bug in the firmware. It doesn't stop the system working, because that server is not hosting anything on its secondary RAID array other than a set of backup disks that I can put on a different controller (i.e. it causes a problem, but I have an easy and 100% effective workaround). However, I report the bug to HP. On that server, I download all available firmware updates and apply them as they are released.
3 years later, that system is out of warranty but I now need to start using that secondary disk array, and HP has now released a firmware patch to fix the bug that I reported when first using the system.
In this case, the "different controller" happened to be a RAID card that had been purchased for a different project which was on-off-on-off- and then finally back on, so we had to purchase another RAID card, which was a smaller expense than swapping out the entire HP server for one with different firmware (the other option we had).

At the time we had this issue, we could just download the patch from HP for our now out-of-warranty system. Under this new policy, we could not have done so.

If companies fix their firmware issues in a timely fashion, my problem does not arise. As it is, I can see a huge demand on Torrent sites for HP firmware updates coming up, or contract network professionals trying to build up firmware libraries through companies that do maintain their HP service agreements.

As you have said that the person who worked on the project before is well liked and respected within the company, while you are the new guy with no good will or social capital built up in the organisation, the last thing you should be doing is forming any kind of criticism of the code or the person who wrote it.
However, if the project is truly "Broken", then the person who worked on it before will not be the untouchable God type. He may be the asshole programmer from Hell who purposefully wrote code that could not be maintained by anyone else, in which case you are his patsy and you are probably on a losing bet, because he is just waiting in the wings to swoop in, pull an all-nighter bashing away at the keyboard to rescue the company from the incompetence of the new guy, all for a measly 50% pay rise... I have seen it happen to a few contractors and it is not pretty.

The "obvious" solution, of course, is to quit and find another gig. However, the next place (or the one after that) will probably have a similar scenario, so the best approach would be to start learning to tackle the problem on this project.

That means that step 1 is to look at where YOU went wrong. By that, I mean that either your initial code analysis was incomplete (you did not check out the code before taking the assignment, or maybe you had no opportunity to check it out), or you started coding before understanding the existing structure (or lack of). Yes, you are under pressure to add value, contribute, justify your existence, and so on... but that will be doubly true next month. If you cannot make the argument in the first week/month that you need to review the existing code before making changes and adding features, then you are not going to be able to make that argument at any point. It takes a particular kind of coder to write updates to existing code without first understanding what the existing stuff does, and that type is rare, especially when dealing with an un-maintainable bird's nest of code.

If the code is already documented, verify that the documentation is accurate. If it is not already documented, then document it. The code may need to be re-factored before you can make any meaningful contribution, but right at the beginning of the project is the only possible window you will have for that kind of analysis.

If your response at this point is "I do not have time to document the code", then my advice would be to leave with your sanity and most of your reputation intact. You have already seen that coding hot, without any insight into what you are working with, causes unexpected and unexplained problems.

Maybe not... but spending by Munis is also not responsible for the vast majority of US public debt. As of 2012 (the latest year-end I can find data for without logging into Bloomberg and compiling the data):
US local government debt as a percentage of GDP was around 7-8%.
US state government debt as a percentage of GDP was around 19-20%.
US federal government debt as a percentage of GDP was a touch over 120%.

So, by far the biggest contributor to US public debt is the US Federal Government, and by far the biggest single-ticket item of its expenditure is military spending ($700 Billion per year in direct contract awards), with massive spending on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most thorough study that I can find public reference to is by Brown University, which puts the cost of troop deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan and logistical support in Pakistan, plus domestic spending on debt interest to service that cost, at something over $6 Trillion so far, and that is only since 2003.
The study itself does not seem to be publicly available on the interwebs - Crawford, Neta and Catherine Lutz. "Economic and Budgetary Costs of the Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan to the United States: A Summary". Costs of War. Brown University.
But you can check out the Wikipedia article to get the basics: Financial cost of the Iraq War

Seeing as the current US Federal Debt burden is somewhere between $17 and $17.5 Trillion, the "non-War" debt burden is still a not-inconsiderable $11 Trillion, but the annual Military Gravy Train in the US dwarfs the rest of the debt components.