The test Google is doing is not looking for a "mobile version" of a site, it's looking for whether the site renders well on mobile. They're looking for basic things - are the fonts big enough to read, are the links clickable, etc. The BBC site (at least BBC News) passes their tests fine. They have a tool you can use to test for compliance.

It certainly varies by location. In most of mainland Europe cabs are fine and comfortable but extremely expensive. I will say they can be a little pushy in the larger cities (Paris, AMS in particular in my experience). London cabbies are great as long as you can find one, mini cabs (which you're often forced into on a Friday night) are basically taking your life in your hands. I live in NYC and the difference with Uber is night and day from either the yellow cabs (uncomfortable, dirty, badly driven) or the black cars (sketchy, expensive, unmetered). If nothing else having the car coming to me instead of having to guess which corner to stand on to try and flag someone down is worth the cost of admission.

You need multiple copies. Stick a BD is the safe, another at a local bank and upload to an offsite backup company like crashplan or even plain S3. All of these have failure modes, but the likelihood of them all failing at the same time is miniscule.

A degree (in literally anything) has benefits. A degree in a CS field has more benefits, regardless of when it was obtained.

I consider myself "self taught" - in that I taught myself to program when I was 6 and was already being paid to code by the time I was 16. That was over 20 years ago so I have a fair amount of experience under my belt too. But I still consider my formal education an essential part of the engineer I am today, and make use of it every single day.

Hiring is a tricky business. I have one document and maybe a couple of hours of conversation to figure out how good you are, how well you'd fit in my organization, how much you have lied about your skills, how much you'd benefit from & enjoy the role (strangely enough I don't want to hire someone who'd be miserable) and a bunch of other stuff. An appropriate degree from a decent school tells me a lot about you, along with your past work experience. The lack of a degree isn't a dealbreaker but you better be damn impressive everywhere else.

I'm going to presume someone with 5 or 6 years experience knows a handful of scripting languages, knows what version control is, can do basic database stuff, can use a bug tracker, etc.

You'd be amazed.

I just loaded yahoo mail on a clean browser and it took just under 2 seconds. Not ideal, but perfectly usable (and about the same as gmail).

That's just the default license. You are free to negotiate something different if you prefer.

Kickstarter should only ever be used for new projects. Established businesses, artists, engineers, etc should not be allowed to sully the waters for people or projects that could legitimately use it

So what you're saying is one of the world's most successful smart watch manufacturers, with a healthy cash flow and established production and retail channels shouldn't be using kickstarter to launch their third generation device?

Of course you don't need tomcat to write a web service in Java. I don't even remember the last time I used tomcat - typically I spin up a simple JVM process with an in-process http server (I like simplehttp, there are plenty of others) and take it from there. The nice thing about that approach is your process isn't tied to http as a protocol - want something else? Just add another in-process server for JMS or whatever. Where I work we front plain jvm processes with haproxy (apache is a dog, and even nginx is overkill for simple proxying) and can get hit rates up to 100k/s per node depending on the workload.

The whole container model (e.g. tomcat, weblogic, etc) is heavy and while it does confer some benefits, if performance is a concern you shouldn't even consider it. In my previous enterprise life a hit rate of 5/s was considered high so honestly I could have used anything :)

The nice thing about using the jvm for this kind of thing is it's stable, tested and well understood. Not something I can say about the latest branch of a fork of something originally built for a browser.

I frequently hear this comment about how desolate the US is compared to Europe (whether it's discussing broadband, cell service, electric vehicles, etc). I've lived in both significantly - and the difference really isn't that great. Yes there are great areas with few people in the middle of the US - but get anywhere near a coast or major city and it's plenty populated. And guess what? That's where most people live and therefore where most people drive. No one is proposing electric vehicles as the only choice (yet), but for a majority of the population they are or soon will be a viable choice - vehicle cost aside.

Meh. I wouldn't hire you because you come across as an arrogant prick who thinks he knows better than everyone else. That's a team dynamic issue, which is every bit as important as what you can or can't do technically.

That aside, your general point is sound - what matters is the person not what certifications they have. However, as others have mentioned there is a value to a (good) formal CS education, at least for the work I do. Self taught people tend to learn the minimum needed to solve the problem they face. There's a whole bucket of academic stuff (logic, complexity, stats) that don't often fall into that category but which are really useful as background knowledge. Someone teaching themselves python or ruby is unlikely to spend much time learning about CPU cache design, but that can be surprisingly useful when it comes to optimizing stuff. Just examples, there are always exceptions :)

Since most reviews are prohibited from coming out before the game

Review embargoes are, in general, a good thing. I know you don't believe me :) If the outlet doesn't get the final version of a game until a few days before launch they don't have time to play the thing and write a decent review if they're competing with every other outlet to get that all important first post. Having an embargo takes that first past the post advantage away and lets the outlets actually spend the time they need to do the job properly.
That said, a game which puts it's embargo actually past the release date (as opposed to the day before or something) is likely doing so because they know the reviews are not going to be great and they don't want to scare away preorders. But that in itself is useful information for the savvy consumer :)

and one assume most of these websites are getting paid for favorable reviews

You might assume that, I think you're crazy. If it were true we'd see a lot less major sites closing down - Joystiq could have saved their jobs by just adjusting some review scores. Stop listening to the GG morons and take off the tin foil hat.

What you describe has always been the case, I'd guess even more so in the film days when the rate of change of bodies in particular was much slower. I think the theory is that as established photographers slow down their purchasing, new ones come up and are buying kit. I know I bought less last year than previously, but I still probably spent $1000 or so. The concern is whether people are being put off making the switch to SLR from phones or whatever.

I honestly don't see that - I see so many people spending money on a Canon or Nikon low end DSLR and running around using the kit lens thinking it'll magically improve their shots. They're not spending thousands but $700 or whatever isn't nothing.

My guess (and I haven't seen the numbers) is that we're in a situation similar to gaming. The bar has been raised so high that R&D is WAY more expensive than it used to be, and the market is struggling to support it. So it's not that sales are down or the audience is diminishing, it's that the cost of doing business is so much higher sales have to be that much higher again.

Or they store a salted hash attached to the user record and put an unsalted hash in a global "used passwords" set - which isn't tied to any account and so wouldn't be very useful to an attacker. Not saying that's what they do, but it could be.

You know it's interesting. I used to work in finance. We, like you it seems, had a very locked down production environment with huge amounts of testing - pushing builds through multiple stages, reviews and signoffs. Once every month or so we'd shut everything down for a few hours in the middle of the night and roll the world forward. Stability was everything. Downtime was OK if scheduled, a disaster if not.

Now I work at a web company. We push to prod multiple times per day. There's a process, there are reviews and approvals, but it all happens much more quickly and at a more granular level. Change is constant but small, as opposed to infrequent but total. What's more we're a 24/7 operation so no downtime (as visible to the user) is acceptable. We simply can't schedule a few hours to do our rollout - everything has to happen live.

You know what I've noticed? We're no less reliable, overall, than the bank was. Yes we have issues, but they tend to be noticed, and fixed, much much faster. When you change everything all at once you run the risk of not being able to figure out what broke when inevitably something does. Rollback is painful because you have so many interdependent changes - in the end you have to pull the whole release to avoid one small issue in a single module. When you roll frequently the scale of change is small so isolating the bug is trivial, and rolling it back the same. Now of course there are huge differences in risk when you're handling people's money vs their cat photos, but I think the view that people working on an agile schedule don't care about stability, and that the only way to achieve stability is through reducing the frequency of change, is demonstrably wrong.