Pee at an angle to the wall.

Steve Jobs: "You're holding your wanker wrong".

Subsidizing the cost of nascent "green" technology is needed to prod the industry to produce and learn how to make a better green mouse-trap through experience and R&D.

It's paying off now as electric cars are getting competitive. Gasoline engines have been the dominant car technology for a century, and thus have had a lot of R&D behind them. Thanks to subsidies to induce sales and R&D, electric cars have evolved to be competitive with gasoline.

Private companies rarely look more than 5 to 10 years ahead. It's why they have to be prodded via subsidies, etc. Finance theory on ROI teaches one to generally focus on the short-term. Whether this is entirely rational or not makes an interesting debate, but it's the ruling view of the current business world.

By the way, I consider "soft" socialism to be incentive-based. "Hard" socialism would be outright banning products. I'm generally against outright banning for products, such as incandescent bulbs and sugar-loaded Big Gulps. Tax them heavily as a disincentive, but don't ban them.

Not really. They often have to use it with actual data to relate to what it's doing with it. The data flow matters.

Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of pork

So Comcast isn't incompetent after all, just bribed up the wazoo.

It's not practical any more than everyone learning to be lawyers or plumbers or electricians. Get experience and master your art rather than try to be a jack of all trades. Newbie programmers usually do poor work for a while (or are slow), just like newbie plumbers.

How about over ISIS

mongodb? Use something that's been tried and true for at least 10 years. Go with MySql or PostGresql and screw the noSql toys until they mature and have decent docs.

Let pioneers take the arrows, the rest of us stay in proverbial Boston, which has infrastructure and seasoned specialists, and get shit done. And we have nice lawns to kick fanboys off of.

The problem with most software isn't that it can't be modelling and rely on basic physical principles, it's that many projects fail to take specs and testing seriously

Most requesters (users) don't really know what they want UNTIL they actually see something concrete, and then realize it didn't fit what they had in mind. We don't need engineering, we need mind-readers. If users had enough time to sit and be thoroughly interviewed about needs and preferences, they wouldn't need automation to begin with.

And further, how to make software maintainable in the longer run is highly disputed largely because it depends on "wetware" and unknowns, such as developer perception of code, and unknowable future domain changes.

It's more akin to writing technical documentation than to building a bridge: how do you write documentation that's clear to the audience, but flexible enough that it doesn't have to be largely reworked for every change.

There is no magic modularity formula: domain issues inherently intertwine (or can intertwine in the future even if not at original launch.) You can't hide intertwining, you have to find a way to manage it well.

Software development seems to be riddled with arrogant know nothings who think they can cut corners or reinvent the wheel...

That's a problem with human nature, not just devs. We are not Vulcans. Humans are impatient, egotistical, fixate on the wrong factors, and often just plain random; and most don't know it or care.

I know some well-educated people who are complete idiots outside of their narrow specialty. I'm probably an idiot also in ways I don't even realize (please don't educate me in replies). My head-model of the world is perfectly logical and consistent to me, but it's probably highly lossy against the real world.

Gee, it's almost as if we are merely upright apes who happen to be able to talk and write. (I would have said "hairless", but I'm hairier than the orangutans I see in the zoo.) They fling poo, we fling nukes.

Why not The Register? Sarcasm is their biz such that they may be able to tolerate being trashed by nerds....and enjoy shooting back.

You just can't see the quality because it's in ultraviolet light. Feeble humans.

or worse, a Trump speech

We could've just engraved a URL onto the side of each Voyager.

A pop-up ad could offend them enough to annihilate us

"Number 9, Number 9, Number 9, Number 9, Number 9, Number 9,..."