We are still disposing of them, yes, there's always crates full of them at the dump (in Vermont). There's no used market for them though. I see people trying to sell them, but I never see anybody buy them. Their value is in the negative numbers; IE you typically have to pay to get rid of them. Even the thrift stores sell LCDs now. Only a fool would pay money for a CRT in this market.

Pretty much constantly. Entropy is a bitch and the sea generates a lof of it.

I don't even know where to begin. The ocean is a harsh environment and ships work hard and maintenance and upkeep is a constant chore day in and day out both in port and while underway. The engineering crew is basically the travelling maintenance department. If the ship doesn't carry a crew, it will have to come out of service for maintenance and repairs, which means not only is it not making money, it's tying up an expensive berth in port. If it does break down while underway, how is anybody going to get to it? It could take days.

Honestly, not much, except perhaps demand better software. Better processes, better languages. I'm just hypothesizing here but it might not have happened if they had e.g. followed better development standards like the MISRA C standard, or don't use C at all, use Ada or something. Better QA processes might have caught it before it went into production, e.g. using a dynamic stack profiling tool, input fuzzing, whatever. Fundamentally a system like this should have an independant hardware watchdog timer to at least try and make it fail-safe in the event of a CPU crash. Finally any motor vehicle ought to have a manual cutoff switch wired into the fuel pump or ignition circuit so that when the CPU shits it's bits you can still turn the damn thing off before you crash crash.

They're talking about something the size of a boulder according to TFA. Earth gets hit by objects this size all the time.

The diameter of the biggest impactor to hit Earth on any given day is likely to be about 40 centimeters, in a given year about 4 meters, and in a given century about 20 meters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoroid#Frequency_of_large_meteoroid_collisions_with_Earth

"There are other elements involved, but if size were the only factor, we'd be looking for an asteroid smaller than about 40 feet (12 meters) across," said Paul Chodas, a senior scientist in the Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Not really. Couldn't robots do this at a fraction of the cost and risk?

I've worked as an engineer in a partnership with a project management guy and I've found it to be highly effective.

This has sadly been my experience as well, in medium to large commercial orgs. I remember once I was given the choice, and shown a chart, with two career tracks, management and engineering. The management track went through through the usual layer cake. The engineering chart went Engineer -> CTO. Of course there can only be one CTO, and he wasn't going anywhere, so basically it was their way of preventing engineers from ever getting promotions. But they did offer me management track. I'm not sure if I should have been flattered or offended.

At least he didn't get fired.

There's a bottle in front of you right now, judging from your last sentence.

I have met exactly one excellent engineering manager. Of course he was a licensed professional civil and HVAC engineer, and he didn't know anything about software engineering, but it turned out that didn't matter, because he was awesome at project management, documentation, using the right amount of process, and he really "got" engineers and engineering in general, and trusted us on the technical stuff. Then he got unceremoniously shitcanned by a blowhard asshat VP who didn't want to hear what he was saying, who himself proceeded to jump ship a year later. *sigh*.

Of course if you're OT exempt salaried then you get to work as many hours as your boss says, or quit, or be fired. But market rules still apply in the big picture.

1. Most software projects are reasearch and development; buiding something new that's never been built before; hence there's a lot of risk. It's not like a wall that people have been building the same kind of wall for thousands of years. Risk costs money. The only question is who's going to pay for it. Hint: the boss, unless you're stupid, or you have some sort of equity you want to protect.
2. If you're an employee, the boss has two choices; pay you to fix it, or fire you. Construction and programming are the same in this regard. Maybe he can take it out of your salary, I dunno, might depend on emplyment terms or state law. But typically he cannot compel you to work for free; that's called slavery.
3. If you're on contract, you're only obligated to fix your mistakes to the extent that the warranty clause demands it. No warranty clause no fixie. The boss may be able to terminate the contract or just not contract with you again, his choice. Your choice if you want his buisness bad enough to fix it for free. Again, construction and programming are the same in this regard. If you do have a warranty clause you will typically bake your own cost of fixing your own bugs into your bid and or hourly rate so it's still not really free for the Boss, your bugs still cost him money.

Not as annoying as when your Bangkok cabbie rear ends somebody and makes you get out and walk the last five blocks to your destination (ask me how I know).

It's not a dupe, it's new information, as in the whole fucking powerpoint deck.