Why investigate and attempt to solve a potential problem that your engineers have brought to you attention? There could be some risk involved (to your career). Better to do nothing and write a report later on saying there was nothing you could do.

It's about learning from mistakes, not making them worse.

If NASA was capable of learning from their mistakes, they wouldn't have been flying space shuttles in the first place.

Fortunately Cowards don't become astronauts.

Unfortunately, they do become administrators. . .

It means you're a bad developer because you're using .net to make webpages. You should always use the right tool for the job.

This is one thing that bothers me. If the natural order is for a period of glaciation to begin in the near future, surely global warming will benefit mankind. So why are we acting like we need to cool the place down? All the geologic evidence points to a risk for run-away cooling, if temperatures get a just few degrees lower than they are today. None of it points to a serious long-term threat of run-away global warming. And if the present ice-age were to end, it seems like the world would more hospitable to humans than ever. Sure over the next couple thousand years some cities would have to move to make way for rising water, but most buildings aren't occupied over that kind of time-frame anyway.

Most of their arguments for a potential global catastrophy hinge one a hypothetical "tipping point" beyond which the climate will no longer be in stable equilibrium and will spiral out of control. I haven't seen a plausible mechanism for this, but based on what we know about the climate, such tipping points probably do exist. On the other hand, we know this kind of thing has happened in the past without human intervention. The causes cited are always much larger than anything humanity has been capable of (huge meteor impacts, super volcanoes, things like that). Also, it seems that only run away global cooling has been the real problem in that past, and we understand how that can happen: ice sheets reflect a lot of light and result in the earth taking on less and less heat from the sun. If there's too much ice, the sheets will get bigger and bigger every year.

Frankly, it's hard to consider a website to be a legitimates source of information about programming when they botch their redesign this badly. I know that a lot of websites out there have a similar look and feel, and also work very poorly, but a good developer should be able to see those shortcomings and know to avoid them. If you're not competent enough to pull of the redesign, why not simply stick with the older version? What it looks like is some brainless suit from the parent company who doesn't understand the website or it's users tried it out and decided he wanted a more modern look. You can't make a good product when the person who has the final say is an idiot who doesn't know what he is doing.

Discovery can involve any material which might be relevant to a particular case with substantial restrictions to protect the identity of government informants and to prevent intimidation of witnesses. The prosecution is not the authority in determining which information may or may not be relevant. They must comply with any request for information the defense makes which the court agrees may lead to information relevant to the case. Any lawyer worth anything will ask for, and be entitled to, all the information the police gathered during their investigation. Of course, this also goes the other way in that the defense is required to comply with any requests made by the prosecution.

With regard to illegal wiretaps, if a defendant's civil rights were violated during the course of an investigation, that would certainly be relevant to the case. That is why they build a parallel case using legitimate means to present to the prosecutor.

I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but the curvature of the earth would definitely prevent a laser beam from an aircraft in Kentucky from hitting a building in South Carolina, to say nothing of Oregon.

That would make it practically impossible to defend yourself against any charges brought against you by a government agency. They would have all this information that they gathered by whatever means are at their disposal, and you'd only have the evidence they presented to be used you and whatever else you are legally able to obtain (within your financial means). There is no way that scenario fits the definition of due process, the government would be practically guaranteed to win every time. According to you, they could have evidence that exonerates you and simply choose not to present it and it would all be totally legal.

You are not correct, during the discovery process the prosecution is required to turn over all the evidence they gathered. Not just whatever they saw fit to present.

Shouldn't your local charger be in your garage?

Listen, the home owner can own the pipe going to his house and a share of the pipes in his neighborhood. There is absolutely no need for the water company to own the pipes or the power company to own the power lines, or the phone company to own the data infrastructure. The developer can put them in and charge for maintenance and access. In fact, letting the supplier own them is very stupid because, as you've said, it's a conflict of interest of epic proportions, and all the regulation in the universe could never make up for it. Also your connection costs are way off base and do not reflect reality. If you believe running 100 feet of 3/8" HDPE costs $5,000, I've got a bridge to sell you.

Also looking at the cost of 12" vs 8" pipe is nutty, because most of your costs are labor to dig a trench and bury the pipe.

Either way, is actually very expensive.

Compared to a cheeseburger maybe, but not compared to a house! Connecting a house to a line in the road with buried cable or pipes would cost around $500. That's nothing compared to a monthly cable bill of $50 or a monthly electric bill of $100. Of course, this is all beside the point because as I pointed out the electricity provider does not even need to own the power lines.

If I threaten to quit a company with a thousand employees, they're faced with losing 0.1% of productivity

That's assuming there is no worker specialization. In reality losing some employees will have a much larger impact. For example, if you lose a key engineer it can cause an entire project to fail. On the other hand, some employees actually bring down productivity and losing them will increase the companies income.

You are wrong about the core cause of this imbalance. The real problem is that most people need to work for a large corporation or they will literally starve to death. If people could work for themselves and get by, the individual and the corporation would be on roughly equal footing, since either of them could afford to walk away.

areas where competition is impractical, such as water/electricity to the house

Why does everyone believe this? First of all, running power cables and water lines isn't particularly expensive. Secondly, people could own the lines going to their house, and simply pay for the power or water separately to allow for multiple providers. The idea that this couldn't be a competitive market is simply a myth peddled by proponents of big government and government sponsored monopolies.