The toughest punishment would seem to require the most accurate judgment and as we know lots of prisoners come out free from a death row after DNA evidence was verified. The same evidence that FBI labors apparently fucked up so much that one would think the error was systemic and not sporadic as one would hope. Taken this into account one would be forgiven to think that for crimes of lesser weight the procedures used were more relaxed.
This all is only for failures in the system that are failures also with current law. The whole deal or rot forever system is broken too. Not too mention that US systems are rather brutal - comparing to other countries considered civilized - less apparent violence in all other Western countries. DEA and all he corruption that is associated with it adds to the whole misery as are mandatory minimum sentences. You can look at specific failure points but how about looking at statistics and showing why US has to incarcerate and execute so many?
Tough on crime sells well. US citizens dislike liberals. Every criminal freed from prison that fails to stay straight is a reason to go for maximum. There is a lot of nonsense in US justice and penitentiary systems (as well as in law and law enforcement) and some people supporting this nonsense profit from it while having enough funds and not feel not enough restraint to use the wealth to support own position when law is created/revised. Who can blame them - it is American way....

In my previous project we had to save costs so much that we never had an updated document/service showing current booking/usage of our development, test and target servers. The result was that we had to negotiate use of some chains, work in shifts etc while some chains were idling. I have not lasted till the end so I do not know how successful the project was. I guess it was very successful - after they switched off all the machines they had more power than they budgeted i.e. managed to get to profit without customers!
At least on paper...

This is probably wrong - assuming a solution you propose is used (which does not have to be the case) you would still want to run some sort of watchdog signalling to be sure failover machine is up and ready. This means effectively you would still have some communication.

well I had an encounter once with a product that had a feature developers called poor man's redundancy/failover - a doubled system that was neither really redundant nor was it able to failover. Switching off the other machine would indeed save some costs.

In my career in big corp I started with arguments as in your short sketch and augmented my approach with escalations to technical authority. This worked till bookkeepers forced us to optimize on use of technical authority which back then was company wide with spocs etc. I was forced to use abuse in form of forcing the enemy to publicly admit failure. This stopped working few years later as we moved to modern leaderless way of working so there was nobody to front the show of shame and blame - people just do not listen and revert to lies if things go as bad as I shown or worse. I shortly tried "you fucked it, AGAIN" sort of approach, it worked by catching management attention - I resort to it only in emergency now because of troubles that it involved with meetings where I had to explain my outburst with HR etc. Instead now I have developed two pings approach: report failure followed by a bit more extensive explanations just in case the other side had brains and was willing to discuss (it still happens although not very often). If this ended in failure I document the discussion and move on. It is bitter joy but still a joy to see them failing exactly the way I predicted. It is bitter because they then say they could not prevent it even if somebody told them etc. Cost my corp few mills already I would think but who gives a ff - if they were short of money they would try to arrange projects in efficient way instead of firing good managers and engineers and moving it all to Zamunda. And so it goes. Only few years left to pension why should I bother?

there are limits to everything. Calling somebody a pedophile stops any discourse. There is no argument you can bring against this. If you have legitimate problems of this nature with the guy go to public prosecutor and clarify the issue. There are also organizations that can help judge if such claim is valid and in pursuing prosecution. Just throwing such abuse in public is wrong.

I think you are wrong about it who is going to do this. We know that H1Bs can do it cheaply and maybe there can be savings on return trip?

This article has nothing to do with different units systems but with the standard carry-on bag size. Besides that you are right - it is a mental masturbation most of the time to discuss different units. Sometimes you learn something. Sometimes you just enjoy the ride - why cannot you just enjoy the ride? It is Friday after all.

'my pound is better than your pound (I can cheat better this way too)' being a main argument of not adopting common units till french revolution came and forced everybody to use common scientifically but still arbitrarily chosen units. It was the widely adopted because of benefits it offered, at least everywhere where French army went trough. Everybody else adopted it, I guess at the point where they standardized units to use on national level. I guess US was too big manufacturer of things to ever comply and UK did not like the French and continental things in general (thus forcing 'Made in Germany' to show where bad quality was). At the end you convert as much as we in Europe do. Sometimes we do not and expensive satellites fall from the skies. Some would fall anyway because somebody forgot to test things properly etc.

In metric Europe we still use inches for pipes and some such. Life, it seems, is never easy.

It is not extraordinary legal process - the interview in foreign land or by video link is part of European, European Arrest Warrant which wanted him extradited to Sweden on charges of lesser rape and coercion is also part of European law. The coercion charges expire this year due to statute of limitations leaving more serious but possibly more difficult to prove 'lesser rape' charge. So I guess UK authorities may be cutting costs of course but cutting the charge because it expired is maybe also an issue. In any case it is a correct decision - why wait if one can interview the guy and indict him instead of waiting. Not sure if that changes anything but at least it looks like public prosecutor is doing something.

That is odd. Over 20y in development and QA and I have not seen a language that has not been abused by morons to the point one had to agree with you. Sometimes there is a significant amount of skill required to show that one cannot code (C++ is known for that). Sometimes it is easy - java is like that.
At the same time I have seen amazingly well written code in all of the languages I have worked with.
Even this annoying indentation can be argued to be a good thing especially because there is whole bunch of idiots out there that think that putting a code into readable structures is evil and against nature.

Stripping things to the absolute core has some advantages. Yet because shells are different and the one you consider basic, is not always available (due to corporate policy or some other force of nature), this makes this absolute minimum a set of absolute minimums. If so you can just say - chose the tool available and best fitting your approach to the problem
Besides simplification is good but you should not simplify beyond certain point. I'd say python belongs to the set of common tools as are grep, awk, sed, all shells and other tools. I am divided myself on whether that is good or bad but I accept it as it is.

Ask their friends at CIA to send the drones?

Different or not but Elonis' conviction has been reversed on 1st of June 2015 by SCOTUS. That would mean throwing even very vivid threats at a person is nothing under law as long as there is no intent to threaten. Not sure I agree with this but I am not a lawyer and do not live in US so why should I care. Still the current interpretation of the law seems to have changed. Maybe if threatened person were a judge this would be different.