1) Just because your predecessor was paid to program doesn't mean he craps daisies and unicorns. I have often gone in with the assumption that the guy before me knew what he was doing. Quite often I find I was wrong.

2) Just because the code is awful doesn't mean it has no value -- No matter how bad it is and how difficult it is to read, if it works at all it has probably got years (maybe even decades) of bug fixes and feature requests. Until you have a handle on it, any little change could cause a catastrophic cascade of side-effects.

3) No, we don't need to rewrite it. See 2. A working program now is worth more than all the pie in the sky you can promise a year from now.

4) It takes 6 months to have a reasonably good grasp of any moderately complex in-house application. It could be a year before you get to the point where someone can describe a problem and you immediately have a good idea of where in the code the problem is occurring and what functions to check.

Maintenance programming is as much about detective work as anything else. The only clues you have about the previous programmer are his source files. Once you've read them for a while you can start to tell what he was thinking, when he was confused, when he was in a hurry. Most of the atrocious in-house applications have changed hands several times and each programmer adds their own layer of crap. You can redesign these applications a chunk at a time until nothing remains of the original code if it's really bad, but it's best to save really ambitious projects until you understand the code better. I heartily encourage the wholesale replacement of "system()" calls with better code immediately, though. In several languages I've run across these calls to remove files, when they could have simply called a language library call (Typically "unlink".) If the original programmer used system("rm...") you can pretty much assume that they were a bad programmer and you're in for a lot of "fun" maintaining their code.

At work I am a big fan of Visual SlickEdit. It builds complete tags of all the functions, variables, classes etc into tags. Allows me to find all callers of a particular function, definitions, references etc. In Linux it will work with gdb to do step through debugging. I believe most of the functionality is available in emacs, with its ctags. Though most developers in our company use Microsoft IDE, I build all my sln files using slickedit and edit using slickedit. It has good integration with version management tools too.

Private Enterprise brought us low bid contracts and high maintenance future costs. Sorry, but privately funded is hilarious [all funding comes from the Central Banks in the end] on the face of it and on the merits of future maintainence. Your Libertarian wet dream can't even manage to pave private roads on large estates without those land owners fishing for tax deductions. Go find a class of 9th graders to rave about the all private mantra of bs. Equilibrium of resources and funds is a balance not only in the Laws of Nature but in our artificial constructs.

Maybe we should have 3 sexes... Man, Woman, and Uman. Him, Her, Hum.

Men have no mental or physical conditions that make them unable to impregnate women.

Women have no mental or physical conditions that make them unable to be impregnated by men.

Umen have mental or physical conditions that make them reproductively unviable.

Gender, as distinct from Sex, can just go the fuck away. How vain do you have to be to think other people are supposed to care about what you've "declared" your gender to be?

Living close to large bodies of water is rather necessary if you want to be a port city. Since sea shipping has been for thousands of years, and still is one of the most important transportation methods, port cities make a lot more sense than building a city in the middle of nowhere.

Flooding problems can be solved with ancient technology called "sea walls". Lots of cities in the world use these, or levies, to prevent storm flooding. The Dutch are masters of this technology, and wouldn't have half their country without it. The fact that the US doesn't invest in sea walls is just a symptom of the extreme short-sightedness and corruption that the US suffers from.

I have to question a few of your points.

"How do we use technology to clean up New York so that it doesn't look like a landfill with people living in it?"

When was the last time you were in NYC, 1985? I can't speak about the Bronx or Queens, but Manhattan these days is a nice place, at least from what I've seen (I live in NJ, not far away, so I get over there occasionally). It's crowded, but so is every dense city in the world. They could stand to clean up some things though; the city is quite old, so a lot of the buildings and such there are old-looking too. They could really stand to knock down some of the crappier ones (I mean the smaller shops, not any skyscrapers or other old but well-maintained buildings) and replace them with newer structures. But that's true of any city. There were plenty of shitty old buildings in Phoenix (in the older sections like downtown) when I lived there, and that's a very new city for the US.

A better question would be "How do we use technology to stop electing clowns like Bloomberg so we don't get blatantly racist and unconstitutional policies like Stop-n-Frisk?"

Also, as a resident of northern NJ, one I'd like to ask is "How do we use technology to develop a better and cheaper transit method to move commuters from NJ to Manhattan, rather than these slow-ass trains that only travel once per hour?"

And another one that really irks me: "How do we use technology to eliminate these ridiculous and costly toll roads and toll bridges?" The bridge from NJ to Staten Island costs $13 now; WTF? Aren't these supposed to be public roads? And WTF is the northeast's obsession with toll roads anyway?

Also, as a NJ resident, "How do we use technology to reduce the insanely-high (highest in the country) property taxes in NJ"? I know this doesn't really concern Bloomberg, but since northern NJ really is part of the NYC metro area, it should; many people here commute to NY every day, and higher housing/tax costs make the area less attractive to workers.

"How do we use technology to ensure police officers are doing their jobs correctly?"

Aren't you thinking of LA here? I haven't heard too many horror stories about SF cops, except that incident where a transit cop shot some guy in the back of the head a couple years ago. LA and SF are very different places.

"How do we use technology to make electric cars affordable?"

Screw electric cars, just build SkyTran. That's a perfect application for modern technology, and the Bay area has just the right level of density for it to work. Last I heard, Mountain View was indeed seriously looking at SkyTran.

There's nothing you can do about asshole people, except to move away, to someplace where people are more like-minded or at least don't care about your differences so they'll leave you alone in public. Generally speaking, this means if you're not a conservative conformist, you need to move to one of the coastal cities, particularly on the west coast. (I do hear that Minneapolis is a pretty good place too, even though it's nowhere near the coast.)

Take Lasik. we've pretty much worked out where Lasik is safe: mostly everywhere which doesn't involve changes in ambient pressure

According to a quick search, Lasik appears to be perfectly safe even with changes in ambient pressure. They did note that extreme mountain climbers with Lasik did experience some myopic distortion, but that's not unsafe, it's just annoying.

Why do surgeons have to decide soon after birth?

Because of social pressures, nothing more. People are intersex-phobic, and can't stand the thought of having a kid who isn't clearly either male or female.

As the Wiki Intersex article says about one expert's opinion, such surgeries really amount to genital mutilation, because they're done without the informed consent of the patient, and aren't correcting a life-threatening condition at al. Worse, 20-50% of these surgeries result in a loss of sexual sensation.

Yes, but I also hear people (mostly women) bitch about strip clubs, even though that's the exact same context as a Chippendale gig.

It lights up. It can be turned on and off and dimmed remotely That's where we were with X10 in the 1980s. It doesn't relay data around for other WiFi devices.

It has over-the-air firmware updates. Your smartphone doesn't really talk to the lamps. It talks to their "cloud server", to which the lamps phone home. What could possibly go wrong?

Is we need to define what we mean when we ask for someone's sex or gender on a form. I think part of the problem is different people identify what it means differently. Some in the transgender community say it is 100% about what you personally choose to identify as. So you could be genetically male, have an XY chromosome set, and biologically male, as in have male genitals and body structure, but identify yourself as female and that's what you should mark down. However other people might disagree. If you went in to the woman's dressing room at a rec center the biological women in there might not be at all comfortable with that since they identify you as male, due to your biology.

So one of the things we need to do is clarify the terms, and perhaps have different terms for identifying someone's genetic structure, biological makeup, and sexual identity.

Like when you are talking to a doctor, the genetic definition matters. Reason is that health issues do NOT affect both genders equally, and it has nothing to do with appearance or identity, it has to do with genetics. So even if you've had a sex change operation and all that, proper identification as genetically male could be relevant to medical providers.

For most people it is more about biology, as in what bits do you have between your legs. We visually identify people as male or female, and most are pretty clearly one or the other. That is one of the reasons it gets asked for lots of forms of ID is to help ensure that the ID is for the person holding it. For that, we might want to use your biological appearance. If you undergo a sex change surgery, then you change that identifier.

In terms of the pronoun you wish people to use to identify your gender, that really is up to you, though you need to understand it can be confusing to people if you appear and sound different than you identify.

So as you say we need to review why the information is collected, and then define terms to say what sort of thing we are talking about. We can't just say "Well let people identify as whatever they want," since reality doesn't work that way. However if you are just collecting it for no real reason, then don't and let people identify how they wish.

You can have nice, efficient, LED bulbs with no WiFi in them. Go to Amazon, Home Depot, pretty much wherever you like. The Philips L-Prize bulb is the one I'd recommend. Very nice spectrum, more efficient than most other LEDs, long life.

Or I suppose you could just whine on Slashdot about a product that isn't on the market yet.

There are various diseases, dysmorphia, accidents and disorders that affect how one perceives one's gender and which affect how other's perceive one's gender.

If we want an accurate Object definition for Class>>Gender it has to be implemented to have a pair of small integers as attributes and presented/interacted with as a pair of Sliders.