Being good at general scientific reasoning requires a firm understanding of scientific philosophy. This is not a subject many people encounter directly unless they're on a scientific track at a university. Very few, if any, will pick it up just from engaging in scientific activity.

Anyone can learn to program, just like anyone can learn to build a house or drive a car or bake a cake. But not everyone can learn to do these things well. The lower an industry's barrier-to-entry, the more crap people one will find working in it. Just look at the software business.

... I'm speaking of Microsoft

API-documentation comments can be a good thing. General commenting within the code itself, not so much. If one's codebase requires such comments to understand it, they've got problems.

Your entire post reeks of bad management. Anyone who initiates a project without basic boundaries is a moron. Anyone who cannot decompose tasks is unqualified to lead. Anyone who allows things to go off on tangents should be fired. It's that simple.

Happens in my company all the time, but it requires competent management and lots of discipline. The software design has to support such changes, as does the work environment. If you've got a jumble of spaghetti and a boss who just wants it done, you've got management problems. No system is going to be very effective.

Agreed 100%. If you can't stop what you're doing and fix a bug in a few minutes, you've got management issues. The only exception to this that I've encountered are the rare situations where I'm using a system and nowhere near my development environment. In those cases I use whatever communication tool seems appropriate: email to myself, voicemail to myself, note scribbled on paper, etc.

This concept works in team projects as well. If you need a tracker, you have bigger problems than software defects.

This is exactly it. Everything I ever saw from Apple on this subject said their products were immune to the large volume of PC viruses out there, which is completely and totally true. They probably changed their tune in order to avoid a waste-of-time lawsuit from people who can't read.

I think you've spent too many of those 42-years indoors.

Our society indeed has a problem with accepting half-assed work. In my experience, employees and managers alike just want to be able to say something is done regardless of whether or not it really is. Few seem to show concern for doing a good job, and those who do are ridiculed for it.

Macs don't come with Blu-Ray drives, and some of the newer models don't have optical drives at all. Apple may be trying to kill off removable media. They've done it before. Remember the shock of the first iMac? "How can any computer function without a floppy drive?!!" Yet today floppy drives are nowhere to be seen. Apple has shown a willingness to declare certain technologies as dead or dying long before the rest of the industry. Given what they're trying to do with iCloud, it wouldn't surprise me if optical drives continued to disappear from their product line.

This is getting old and tired. Not everyone finds "walled gardens" to be a problem. If you do, you're free to use something else.

Apple's patching of the vulnerability only means they acknowledge its existence and feel it's worth correcting. Nobody is disputing that. It's not even the first vulnerability for Macs nor the first to be patched. It is, however, the first to my knowledge to have such a widespread infection. THAT is what I would like to see corroborated.

As with any other claimed discovery, I'd like to see independent corroboration. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, just that I personally haven't seen it. Everything I've read credits Dr.Web as the source. Has nobody else confirmed their findings?

I guess I'm not understanding how using a "controlled" platform hinders me.