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...

Having worked in finance, I can assure you that pretty much everyone* has access to investment vehicles with a larger return than 2%. The problem is that those investments are significantly more risky than a bank, and losing the investment is unlikely to be catastrophic to someone with a large supply of other diversified assets, but it could be catastrophic to someone with only a weekly paycheck to fall back on.

The solution to that problem is to properly diversify your investments for safety. An investment adviser can help with that, but they'll charge a fee for their work, and many people feel (accurately or not) they can't afford that service. There are books and other resources to assist someone in wisely choosing their own investments, but that requires ambition, effort, and the admission that one is not naturally a financial expert. That last part seems to be the most difficult to come by.

* American, not already in excessive debt, with a stable income... some disclaimers apply, but the vast majority of the American population qualifies, not just those who fall under the "rich" label.

That is silly. A falling bullet has a much lower speed than one that was just shot. I've been hit by shotgun pellets at the end of their range, it was like having gravel slung at you.

A returning bullet CAN hit someone, and possibly injure them if everything is lined up right, or there is a very low angle of fire, but they have a small fraction of the energy they had in the first km after being fired.

"I should have known when the instructions told me to give him £50 out of my wallet, too."

Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

SpaceX is a young, hip company eager to show that it does things the public likes, including the OSS-loving public of nerds. They're different from existing spaceflight options, and they want the public support to help make those differences look like good things, especially if their business ever falls on the mercy of Congress.

ULA is a partnership of old companies who really don't care what the public thinks of them because they're operating under the status quo. They already have the political clout to be sure that any changes won't be disastrous to their business model, so drumming up public support is a waste of money.

I'd expect that an audit would find comparable uses of OSS, from Linux servers and BSD embedded devices to innumerable copies of PuTTY scattered across workstations.

From my own time working on government contracts, I have a similar experience, but a substantially different perspective.

Often, the most valuable people on the team are the ones who know what to do. Every process is the result of bureaucrats getting their say, so having a manager who knows what the bureaucrats want is a good way to know what to expect. It may be just knowing that eventually you'll need this report, or as intimate as knowing that reviewer will want that level of detail, but knowing the expectations from the other side of the phone call makes every part of the project run more smoothly.

Yes, this is reflected in the buying process as well. If they have a rapport with the contractors, the buyers know that they'll get what they want the first time, rather than waste their own time and money going through several rounds of revisions.

They appear to have fixed the problem by taking the entire application offline. Brill[i]ant!

But why should I expect my private business to incurr costs to make some future militarization easier?

Well, no, I don't. That's why I asked. It sounds like the answer to my question is yes?

The government web site doesn't work with any operating system. It doesn't work with any version of the #1 most popular desktop operating system, Windows. It doesn't work with IE, Spartan, Chrome, or Firefox. The government web site plain refuses to work. And by the way, it's a web form a friggin form tag. Many eight-year-olds can build that and make it work.

You equate that with the private company's HARDWARE which works just fine with the predominant operating system, and also works just fine with some versions of minor operating systems. It just has an issue on one version of an OS that few people use. I use OS X, so it might bug me, but that's quite different from "doesn't work at all, under any OS.

Right. Don't buy them. They specifically moved the Golf back to Wolfsberg. Be careful, though, because I think they moved it back to Mexico more recently. You can get e.g. a "VAG VIN Decoder" app for Android, or just memorize which place in the VIN to look at and a handful of plant codes. Then you'll know precisely where the vehicle was produced.

If that's all the variable is used for, won't the compiler optimize it out of existence anyway? Or is that too fancy yet?

Welcome to the party, it began several years ago.

Please tell me you already feel this way about Gawker.

Not because you were the most qualified applicant? That means the company you work for hired you not because they should have, but because they were strong-armed into it. In fact, they should not have had to have hired you, they should have been able to hire the best-qualified applicant.