A suborbital mission would do the trick. Maybe Copenhagen Suborbitals could earn money that way in the future?

I'd say simply by going for the horse's mouth, as in reading Strostrup's C++ Programming Language book, will get you there 90% of the way.

I don't think "steep learning curve" means what you think it means. If it's steep, it's easy to learn. Did you really meant that heavy-duty-enterprisey Java is easy to learn?

What are you talking about? This applies neither to C++ nor to Java. Heck, there is in fact no way of checking for either directly, whether in C++ or in Java. You can hack around it in C++ by adding code to the destructor that will mark the object as "freed" in some global dictionary, but what's the point of doing that I wouldn't know. If you need such code, you're doing it wrong.

In Java it's even simpler: if you can access the object, it's there, or you've hit a garbage collector bug or a bit flip in your hardware. There's basically no way of freeing an object. You can reset the reference, but that's it. It's same as in modern C++: if you use std::weak_ptr, you may get a nullptr and you must check for it. If you use a std::shared_ptr and it's non-nullptr, the object is there, and it won't magically become nullptr unless you reset it.

I'm pretty damn sure for another $50M you could license a tech transfer from Amazon and have your own fucking AWS, in your own datacenter.

Employing one of the three top consulting houses was probably what sunk it. They are big bureaucracies that mirror the government, really. Just think what those consulting houses do: they help clients who are clueless enough not to be able to do the work themselves. If the client can't do the work, you think they'll know enough to gauge consultant's performance? Nope.

LOL, you have no idea what it takes to scale something like facebook. Compared to it, healthcare.gov could run on one high-end server for all I care.

It's really, really simple, in a way. The rules and their interactions form a basis of a more complex set of behaviors that emerge when you start executing them.

It's like with ants: a single ant is pretty dumb. But put them together, and you've got beautiful emergent behavior. In case of bureaucracy, you've got a bunch of "intelligent", "well meaning" simple rules. Put them together, and the emergent behavior is a pile of crap. It's like why IP internetworking won over X.25.

Both the behavior of ants and the behavior of the bureaucracies "defies reason". We're quite literally at the edge of human understanding. All that we know is that the less rules, the better it will be. Yes, so some excesses will slip through, but oh well. Right now it's all a big well meaning excess. The way government contracts are done is really just as if you paid the workers 10%, and the rest got paid to crack whores.

Yeah, I can't get over the fact that many Blu-Ray discs have fucking progress bars before the menu shows up. It's like YouTube, just local.

Can't you just buy a chain saw, a climbing harness, some rope and slowly but methodically take them down? It really isn't that hard. Been there, done that.

Yeah. I have a Sony TV and a Sony Blu-Ray player - both less than 2 years old. The crypto negotiation takes about a second, with blank screen and audible pops. On most Blu-Ray discs it happens at least twice before you get to playing the movie. With DVDs it sometimes takes place 4 times. I swear that an old CRT TV and a VCR were faster to cold-boot to a visible, playing movie, with inclusion of loading the tape, than the current generation of HD gear. It says something when a system that could, theoretically, be up and playing in 5 seconds from power-up is almost a factor of magnitude away from what the hardware allows it to do. It really takes the cake when such a system is about as "fast" as an electromechanical variant. Yeah, VCRs are nowhere near the quality of even DVDs, but still.

I'm analyzing plenty of other code, thank you, slashdot's is very, very low on my list. It might have even fallen off the list :)

Maybe they just don't fucking read books. It may be that simple :(

The stories are nothing but conversation starters. They are usually so badly edited so as to be useless for anything more than that anyway. It takes a truly amazing amount of presbyopia on the part of Dice to presume anything else. Nobody cares much about your lousy stories, slashdot.

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but who the fuck has the time to analyze the source code of a news site they simply read? Sure, if you're in web design of one sort or another you'd want to learn from the others by reverse-engineering, but that's not what any significant fraction of users is doing. I'm pretty sure slashdot could randomly insert links to bank accounts, with passwords, into the html comments, and it'd be missed for a long time.