You make a good point - sometimes the 'stupid' programing decisions of management are actually smart business decisions. They prefer messy code that makes money to pristine code that doesn't, and that's just business. The money it makes keeps us employed. The fact that we coders are immersed in the details makes us more concerned about them than about the big picture - which is fine, but we need to be overruled at times.

I'm glad that you've got a boss who understands the tradeoffs.

unless you happened to select a religion that believes in reincarnation

So by believing in reincarnation, you make it real?

Consider Ruby. 'The Well-Grounded Rubyist' is an excellent (new) book that I'm currently working my way through. Very good teaching of a fun language.

Also, this happens too often:

Manager: We need to add Feature Y.
Coder: But that builds on Feature X, which is still buggy.
Manager: I don't care. The customer wants it.
---
(A month later)
Coder: Can we take some time to fix the bugs in Feature X and Y?
Manager: No, we have to make Feature Z, which builds on X and Y. We can fix them later.
Coder: If we'd known you wanted Feature Z, we would have done X and Y completely differently.
Manager: Hmmm. Well, it needs to work by next Tuesday.
Coder: (very quiet expletive)

If you use a piece of FOSS software that lacks a feature you need, hire one of the project's developers to add that feature and contribute it back to the project.

This is great because:

1) You get the feature you need for a low, one-time cost
2) If it's added back to the main project, it simplifies your future installations
3) You help the project to continue development, which again benefits your organization in the future
4) This use of taxpayer money goes to create something that all citizens can use. Public dollars for public benefit.

More importantly, how do you know if they're honest even if they provide data? They could have faked the raw data. Independent (i.e. different data/code) reproduction is the only way.

Your overall point is good, but publication of the raw data would still be useful. It's much easier to tweak an algorithm to bias it than it is to tweak thousands of data points individually, without leaving any trace of manipulation (for example, maybe (I'm not sure) these numbers could be expected to follow Benford's Law). My guess is that much of the data collection is automated, too, so if we were really paranoid, we could say that the data collection stations must publish their measurements in real time to the public internet. It would be REALLY hard to tweak them, then.

I realize this is probably overkill. I'm just saying that more transparency CAN be useful. Whether its usefulness outweighs to cost of providing it is debatable.

Free exchange of information isn't a problem between honest scientists. To some random political asshole who will merely use it as ammunition? Not really.

How do we know who the honest scientists are unless their data and source code is available for public analysis?

How about "I'd like some evidence you're going to do something useful with the data before I bother preparing it for you"?

How about "if you're funded by public tax dollars, whatever data you produce is public property and it's part of your job to release it publicly?"

It's worth pointing out that at one point CRU were getting over 50 FOI requests per week from climate skeptics. Maybe it's more now. That is a crazy additional workload for the CRU scientists who are paid to do actual research and not fill out FOI replies.

Solution:

• Make a public web site
• Post your new data there continuously
• Answer every FOI request with a one-line, stock email with the URL

Am I missing something?

The word "unlimited" just has to come out of all advertising everywhere. There is no such thing as unlimited supply of anything so it is, on its face, false advertising.

While it's true that nobody can give you truly unlimited access due to finite bandwidth, I think that a company could still advertise unlimited access honestly. To me, it would mean "we are capable of giving you bandwidth X, and we guarantee that you can use that much bandwidth, around the clock, 365 days a year if you like. We won't stop you."

In other words, the fact that the network has inherent limits is not a problem, as long as they're made clear up front. The problem is when they say "unlimited" and actually plan to cut you off at some point. That should be considered false advertising. If the cap is 5 GB, call it a "5 GB data plan."

Uberdork: "Now if only we could get them to ship Windows with a choice to use bash."

a DOCUMENT READER shouldn't be interpreting javascript.

Seriously. Web pages are interactive. Documents are meant to be read and maybe filled out. The only reason we need PDF is for stuff that needs to look the same on every screen and print out the way it looks. We don't need Javascript in them.