Petty harassment is still harassment.

Cops are mostly dumb, I don't expect them to have any grasp of logic. Problem is, the kangaroo kourts are packed full o' smart-but-evil lawyers and officials who know this kind of logic is irrational, but still think it's an a-okay pretext to destroy the lives of commoners.

CO2 is the cause of global warming/climate change.

Want to be careful about criminalizing an action. Governments are all too likely to seize upon that as a revenue opportunity. If the rules are themselves bad or counterproductive, breaking them may be to everyone's benefit, and the only way to get the government to see that a particular change is necessary.

...it can't even give efficient driving directions for light traffic in the suburbs. In the city with real traffic it almost always gives "bad" (worse than you'd get from knowing the streets) directions.

Even at its best, before it closed google.cn and started redirecting people to google.com.hk, Google only had half the number of users as Baidu in China. It never had the dominance we're used to in the USA and most of Europe, and it's not certain that it would have come to dominate in China anyway, considering the stable dominance of other search engines in other large countries. Your statement made it sound like Baidu only caught on once google was out of the picture.

Especially in software engineering, which is notorious for being difficult to estimate, customers are always paranoid that they are getting a bad deal, and often compensate by making excessive demands. They will try to put the screws to you, threatening to take their business elsewhere if you resist their extreme demands. You have to finesse that kind of pressure. Not an outright, flat no, but counterproposals that won't break your company. I've seen more than one business fail because they didn't push back hard enough. Sometimes the customer got what they wanted, at far too low a price and then the vendor folds, and sometimes they didn't because the vendor folded before delivery.

This problem is harder to avoid than it might appear. in one case, the company was screwed by their own employees, that, to be fair, they had put in a bad position. The employees were told that if the company didn't win the contract, they would all be laid off. So what happened? The employees did anything they had to, to win the contract. They lowballed their own company. They severely underestimated the effort and work required, coming up with a plan that called for the job to be finished in just 6 weeks, with another 6 weeks margin of error. Even the customer was doubtful that the work could be done that fast, but the deal was so good, from their point of view, that they accepted. Why management approved it, I'm not sure. Desperation maybe? They blew right past the 3 month mark of course. A deathmarch was nowhere near enough to compensate. After 8 months, they managed to deliver one working part, just enough so that the customer grudgingly decided not to sue them. The customer had little appreciation or sympathy for the vendor's plight. The rest of the work was abandoned. The company lost a lot of money on the deal. One bad deal wasn't fatal, but they made several other bad deals, and those were enough to kill them.

Are you kidding me? IE's interface is utter shit, as bad as Chrome. At least on Firefox you can set it up to a modicum of normalcy, especially with the Classic Theme Restorer add-on.

Nowadays it's not called UI, but UX. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that interfaces are turning into shit.

It's time to stop listening to the dramagreens.

So, just like any of the countless ARM-based Android mini-PCs that are already out there right now. Except this is quite more expensive.

First!

I've thought a bit about this too, but I arrived at the opposite conclusion. I think the single most valuable thing one gets from being a programmer is debugging experience, which is actually quite similar to the scientific method: You start with a mental model of how your program works. You observe symptoms that indicate that that model is wrong - the program isn't behaving according to the model. You form a new model based on the observed behavior, and then modify the program to test the new model. And repeat until you have a model that correctly predicts the future behavior or the program.

I can't think of many better ways to teach yourself that your mental model of the world can be wrong and the importance of testing it. Lacking that insight seems to be one of the defining characteristics of crackpots. That's why I think it's surprising to hear all the anecdotes here of crackpot programmers. Based on the reasoning above I would have expected them to be among the more madness-resistant segments of the population.

Just invent powdered water, that way...oh, wait.

Shhhh...they're Saving The planet!