I recently pulled the census data and it's pretty much useless since any information you could use to look at results by city or region have been stripped out in the version available to the general public. Sucks.

You described a situation where you have people who understand the customer identifying requirements and planning. Makes a lot of sense since an outsider would take many years to understand customer needs. I think the real part is the second part of your statement "ex-military are extremely unlikely to buck the system and stand up to uniformed types" - the problem has nothing to do with uniform, prior service are LESS likely to be impressed with that, what you really have is the age-old problem of not wanting to say no to the customer.

I'm both a PMP certified and a ScrumMaster and it's really annoying when advocates of one system attack the other out of misunderstanding. Agile isn't "anti-management and anti-process" and PMP isn't uber rigid. PMP did evolve from a construction mindset but should be tailored for other areas like software dev. The real problem is people turning process into a religion. There aren't hard-and-fast laws. They are guidelines Use what makes sense and tailor the rest to work for you. You want repeat-ability in your work process for many of the same reasons you want repeat-ability in your code.

I was making the arguments that others make to dislike the languages, not my personal feelings. There's no such thing as a perfect language. The arguments against Ruby (as I understand them, I haven't used the language all that much) is that it's very slow and the community is full of asshats.

To be fair, Minecraft is a (surprisingly) quality program that is written in Java. It's also a total memory pig and is much slower than other 3D games, though also to be fair, it's a quite complex 3D environment (infinitely changeable), so it's hard to compare to games with more static worlds. But it does show that it's at least possible to write a good game in Java. It does occasionally freeze up, however, probably doing garbage collection to my son's infinite annoyance. :)

Now, a fair comparison is comparing the Java version of the Scratch environment to the Flash version, and the Flash version is about 5-10x the speed.

Java can nearly as fast as C for very small pieces of code where the runtime can do straightforward JIT compilation, that is true. If you define that as "where Java is used", then your claim is true. However, for code of any size or complexity, Java slows down tremendously. Why do you think Java is "slow on the desktop"? It's because desktop apps are applications of size and aren't trivial pieces of glue code.

Or, to put it another way, if Java isn't inherently slow and is "as fast as C" as you claim, why would there be an exception around desktop apps or "graphics in general"?

Oops, you are correct. My apologies to the original poster. But then, C# is Microsoft, so I think it's fair to say that you can find programmers out there that say it's stupid and awful. :) [I actually haven't used the language to a significant enough extent to have an opinion]

I notice that most (not you, obviously) of the PHP defenders are posting as A/C. :)

There is no doubt that PHP has some deep flaws, but they give you an escape from a lot of the flaws. It's possible to have a reasonable codebase written in PHP if you have good experience in the language.

The main reason I like PHP is that it's ubiquitous. I learned a long time ago that it SUCKS to work in an unpopular environment, even if it has some sort of theoretical advantage. It's hard to find information, libraries are nonexistent or buggy, programmers are hard to find or expensive, etc, etc.

As I see it, there are only four viable language if you want to stay mainstream: Java, C++, C# and PHP. If you want to avoid Microsoft, you're down to three. If you hate Java's verbosity, slowness and pain, as I do, you're down to two. And if you want quick productivity and rapid development for entrepreneurial reasons, that eliminates C++ and also eliminates Java again, and that leaves one to rule them all: PHP.

I don't particularly like PHP. But it does have a lot of modern language features, and it's really easy to get code written and out. And it's reliable, if you put in the work to establish a framework (E_STRICT, turn on exceptions, etc).

I would love to see a better mainstream language emerge, but PHP just plain wins out for certain purposes. If I was working for a large organization with plenty of time and money, I'd probably pick C++ or Java. But for a small, hungry organization, it's hard to beat PHP, which was forged by necessity. And I wish I could beat it, because it does have some pretty big flaws.

Very few serious programmers will say that they are stupid or awful.

Huh? Have you just fallen off the turnip truck?

C: Unsafe at any speed. Un-bound-checked array, null pointers, etc, etc. Many people HATE C because it's unsafe, though they grudgingly admit that it's sometimes a necessary evil for system programming.

C++: Overly complex, insane learning curve, no garbage collection. There are no shortage of people who hate C++.

And Java is possibly your most absurd point. Overly verbose to the extreme, slow, insane memory requirements, slow, crazy libraries, and slow (please don't bother to claim that isn't slow).

Don't know why you're putting the scare-italics on bacteria. I probably should have said microorganisms to be as general as possible, but are you thinking bacteria requires oxygen? Anaerobic bacteria evolved on Earth, so I would think it could possibly evolve on Mars (assuming there isn't trapped oxygen in the soil, for whatever reason).

Of course our sterilization wasn't perfect, but at least we did it, and there wasn't an easy way for them to grow and spread into the environmental soil. That's a far cry from putting dirty humans there along with hydroponics with literally quadrillions of bacteria actively growing, not to mention the living space located within the ground and tapping the native water supplies.

Like I said in another post, I highly doubt there is native life there. But doubt is not the same as proven, and the fact is that contamination from a colony is a real possibility. The point isn't really about the factual question of life or no life, the question is whether there are sufficient scientists who believe it's likely enough to be an issue, and then it becomes a political issue.

For what it's worth, I agree with you. I highly doubt there is life on Mars, but our opinion doesn't matter to the big picture that there are a lot of people who believe there might be. And really, we're just guessing. The point is that once we have contamination, it might kill off something that was there.

I've always been of the opinion that once a private Mars mission gets close to becoming reality, scientists and the government will go in league to shut it down because of environmental contamination. The question of whether there is life on Mars is still open, and once you have a group setting up a settlement, the planet is potentially contaminated forever with Earth bacteria, which might even kill off native bacteria, if any.

My question is, are you concerned with the contamination question and do you think you might be prevented from going if scientists get the right politicians to listen? You sort-of have a FAQ question about this ("Will the mission be harmful to Mars' environment?"), but you don't really answer it.