Creative != using the latest buzzword-compliant language/framework.

The older workers just realize that switching to a new framework will usually end up wasting time that could be spent actually coming up with some interesting ideas for novel features that customers might actually care about. The productivity gains of new environments are marginal if you spend most of your time learning how to use it effectively. You're not going to hit your 10,000 hours to master a skill (per Gladwell's suggestion) if you switch to a new one every 5 years. Or at the very least, you're not going to have chance to do very much with that knowledge once you've obtained it.

While this is technically true, the effect is small for any realistic sample size and population size, as it proportional to the square root of the fraction of the population who are not included in the sample, so you might as well assume the population you are sampling is infinite (which is how these surveys tend to work out their error margins). While this may make for a sizeable difference between the reliability, say, of a 10%-of-population and a 20%-of-population sample, here we're talking about some numbers that are very close to zero.

For 1,000 people in 300,000,000, sampling population size correction factor of sqrt(299,999/300,000) results in a decrease of error of 0.0002% from those calculated based on infinite population.
For 1,000 people in 16,000,000, the decrease in error is instead based on a factor of sqrt(15,999/16,000), so is 0.004%, meaning that a random survey of 1,000 people in the USA is about 0.0038% less reliable than a similar survey of 1,000 people in a much smaller country.

Yes, but the government of the UK is continuous with the previous government of England & Wales, and the government of England before that.

As I understand it, although obviously the office-holders were changed, the Normans basically retained the old Anglo-saxon system of government, because they felt it was better than their own. Therefore, as far as I see it, this only differs from what happens in a republic when the governing party loses the election by the means of chosing who gets the power, which seems irrelevant from the point of view of determining whether the country is the same country or not. If the Normans had come in and imposed their own system of government, making England part of a Norman empire, I'd agree with you, but that's not what they did.

Except for the fact that your government (two chambers + head of state) changes completely at this time, whereas only one of our legislative chambers does, and our head of state has the position for life. We have much greater continuity than you do.

Except the list makes them a single country. It almost seems the choice has been made explicitly to keep the numbers as low as possible.

(Personally, I prefer the "sovereign entity" definition, so would include both UK and Austro-Hungarian Empire as countries, but a project like this really ought to apply some degree of consistency, so should have either both or neither.)

AIUI, at least part of the APK signature verification only happens when you first install the APK. If you modify the file on the data partition (for which you would require root access), you can actually change the code and android does not notice that it no longer has a valid signature. I have done this, years ago, on a Froyo install for a phone that was running on a very slow processor, in order to remove certain delays (e.g. animation of screen on/off, which was taking too long). Nothing ever noticed that the apks had been modified.

Have you looked at the performance of the latest Cortex-A15 chips? Stuff like the Exynos 5 wipes the floor with workstation class processors from only a handful of years ago and at a fraction of the price. The Exynos 5 Dual, clocked at 1.7GHz, performs within a factor of 3 of a core i3-330m (2.1GHz) on many benchmarks, and approaches half its speed on some. Which means it's probably not an awful lot different to my current desktop machine, a first generation core 2 quad. And the quad-core version used in the Galaxy S4 should be even better, as long as you hardwire it to always run on the A15s rather than scaling back to the energy-efficient A9 cores.

Yeah, but then Android had the tools to handle it (proper layout managers) while iOS developers had to make do with automatic resizing of controls and not much else.

Really? I removed just such a link from a client's web site only a couple of months ago when their shared hosting provider was compromised. And having searched to find what the scripts that were added actually did, I found quite a few reports from other people who had had similar problems. It seems to still happen quite a bit.

How do you know which aspects of its behaviour are intentional and which are bugs? What if you miss a test for a corner case that isn't apparent from the documentation and/or source code?

Mandatory fields in addresses are a truly insidious form of evil. They screw everything up, because not all addresses have the same structure. I've seen address forms that have mandatory house number/name and street name fields (sure, I can fill those in for my parents' address, but you'll get them the wrong way round when you print them out and the delivery might never arrive). Here in the UK, one thing that really annoys me is mandatory county fields, which you see sometimes. Yes, we have counties, but they have officially not been part of our addresses for 15 years now. So why are you insisting I make my address incorrect so I can fill in your form? (For reference, I've lived in one of those locations where my actual county is different to the county my post town's delivery office is in, so putting the county I actually live in in my address was even more incorrect than not including a county at all. I don't think this situation is at all uncommon.)

In the original context, interviewing a candidate for a job, it would be highly unlikely the person in front of you is the owner.

Yes, but they would not be obliged to release those improvements (GPL requires release of source only when you distribute to a third party, and most business management software is never distributed to a third party), so it is unlikely that will help.

Most business software would only be useful to somebody in exactly the same line of business, so it is unlikely other users are people you would end up interacting with.

No, but there is a cost (preparing the code, probably adding missing documentation, and certainly a little management and IT staff time organising the actual release) and if there's no benefit, why do it?

The mechanism you describe wouldn't work against inline javascript, so I must conclude that this is not how NoScript actually works.

Depends. A lot of sites seem to get built these days that assume the user has a way to trigger onmouseover events. This isn't necessarily true.