It's not so much science or even pseudo-science as it is pseudo-statistics. A lot of the recommendations on diet come from studies with very shaky statistics.

Just as easy to put a bug in simple code while you are blissed out on something else.

There are lots of firms who buy used equipment. Get a quote from them. Sell the surplus equipment and buy something you do need.

"The company is famous for its huge teams that don't work together well, and excessive middle management." Can you guess which one causes the other?

The last place I worked at had redundancy both within the data center and across data centers. That is they could survive the loss of a data center. If the service you are supplying is so critical you should have redundancy. This will give you a little more leeway on when maintenance is done.

Spreading the work across so many states insures continued political support, even when the Pentagon no longer wants to keep buying the F-35 but decides it needs a new plane. They won't be able to stop producing the old one.

You have left some important information off. Is the meeting being held at the customer site or your facility? Is there a need for people to join remotely? These days not everyone is in the same room during a meeting. I really think that something like Lotus LiveMeeting might work best. Remember a key point; the decision makers in such efforts are frequently technically illiterate. Keep the presentation as simple as you possibly can and don't forget printouts of the presentation that people can mark up by hand.

Ken Thompson on trusting trust. http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ke...

We all hate legacy code and want to work with something brand new but Perl is actually a very useful language. Don't forget to add performance to your list of desired attributes. Here is a performance comparison between several popular languages http://raid6.com.au/~onlyjob/p... . At least for the tests they were conducting; Perl was very quick.

In all fairness to "software engineers", this discipline is so new it is a joke to call it engineering. Civil engineering is centuries old with more than a few huge heaps of rubble created when they pushed outside of their bounds of knowledge at the time. Lots of exploding steam engines and crashed airplanes before best practices were codified in those disciplines. Real engineers have to pass a professional exam. You could try the same thing for software engineers but the exam would be meaningless almost before anybody could take it. That tells you the discipline is too new to called engineering however comforting the title may be. Give it another 50-100 years until it settles down. Right now, programming is more of a craft than an engineering discipline.

Another side benefit is becoming less dependent on natural gas (from Russia). Imagine if a significant amount of our energy came from a source that Putin controlled.

Same here. The great thing about Perl is not all the things you can do with it, but all the things you don't have to do because there is CPAN module that already does what you want. IMHO, the most important characteristic of a language is its' usefulness and Perl is very useful indeed.

Most programmers and people in IT in general are classified as exempt. Given the level of monitoring and control; the idea that IT people are exempt is a joke. Shift the classification to non-exempt and start paying overtime.

Basic schooling (up to high school) should be about preparing kids for life; not jamming in some jobs training gratis for business. Instead of statistics, how about financial literacy? So that later on the kids won't be stunned when they find out what a $100,000 college loan really means. And maybe they can keep their parents away from the pay day loan vendors. Instead of computer science, how about critical thinking? The next time they hear some bloviating politician they will be able to see the arguments for the hogwash they are. If a kid graduates high school with good reading skills (and with that the ability to teach themselves anything they want to learn), good math skills (enough for financial literacy), a good grasp of history (at least of their own country) and the ability to think critically and analyze arguments, the schools can pat themselves on the back for a job well done.