Read a book. A bunch of books, really. For me, first a C++ book in HS. Then many more in college. You see, if you need to master a language, you research the top 2 or 3 books for said language, then read them all cover to cover, spend several thousand hours coding in that language, and then you'll start to be proficient. Copy/Paste programmers are a lower breed in my view. When I conduct interviews and ask any sort of question about bit manipulation, it's staggering to see how few "Senior/Principal" engineers can't recall how many bits are in a byte, or how much space their data structure will consume. Perhaps these are tradesmen, however? Does the pipe fitter understand hydrodynamics, or how exactly his lathe cuts threads into a pipe? No, he just knows how to measure, cut, and install pipes. There is a use for those who grok and those who just build, but I hate seeing the moniker "Senior Software Engineer" applied to people who have just copied and pasted code for a few years, as they don't understand the 'why' of the system at lower levels.

Sure, Boeing knows the plane will actually fly before it's first test flight, but there is a reason that first test flight (i.e. Dreamliner) only has the minimum possible crew, they're all wearing bright orange rescue suits, and they don't dare retract the gear. There are a ton of parts, and they all need testing. For example, the brand new 747-800 had to get software fixes for wing flutter http://www.seattletimes.com/bu.... This is something designers and software testing had missed. So yes, A & B still do flight testing, with test pilots for a reason.

Just don't fault these companies for being "stupid" as is so often the case. The CEO's were not reckless as you mentioned. Take Kodak, a company I've read a lot on the failure of, given that I lived in Rochester. Kodak didn't "miss out" on digital photography. They actually invented a lot of the firsts in the industry. The company's board made the very clear decision that they had a massive cash cow in the film production/developing business. To chase digital would be to cannibalize their own cash cow chasing a risky new technology in a race to the bottom. They made the best decision for shareholders within the decade time horizon. Also realize that had Blockbuster bought Netflix in ~2004/5, we'd not have great online streaming services today. As Tim Wu expounds in The Master Switch, it is always in the interest of the incumbent to subvert new technologies that threaten the stability of the industry.

But all sorts of legislation exists imposing stiff penalties for auto theft. These don't exist for phone theft.

So stolen phones will be sold on ebay to countries without our regulations.

Head East young man!

Fool. Water going downhill means you must dump the volume of a super tanker's worth of fresh water into the ocean each lift. You've got to have that much flow in the body of water you're using to keep that up. Reuse uses pumps to circulate that fresh water back uphill. Remember that the Panama Canal requires a large damn to supply this water because it uses gravity fed locks. This fresh water source however is the limiting factor on how many ships can transit the canal over a period of time.

Optional will be tomorrow's mandatory. That has been the typical beta test to roll out of Gmail updates so far.

Never under estimate the stupid user. "Why, who would ever do that?" is a bad omen. Consider the delete repo UI for GitHub. You've got type in the conf and the repo name. That's case of making a destructive process suitably difficult.

Perhaps you've never heard of an EMP then. You'll knock out satellites and ground electronics for many hundreds of miles. People notice those.

RTFM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman "Minuteman-III introduced in the post-boost stage (“bus”) an additional liquid-fuel propulsion system rocket engine (PSRE) that is used to slightly adjust the trajectory."

IANAL, but I'm married to an employment attorney. People with kids are not a protected class, so no. Race, religion, gender and sexual orientation are protected classes. If someone does not like unmarried dbags, there is no legal protection.

FWIW: Ford cared a great deal about his employees. He didn't just want them to work 40 hours a week. He wanted them to have balanced lives, nice homes and happy families. Had incentivized the whole bit of it too and even sent inspectors to make sure it was working in peoples' homes. He was not just a slave driver. Frankly, he was fairly in line with TFA.

Precisely. I went from working heroic hours to 9-5 once we really were Agile. Most of those long hours in the past could be traced back to poor planning and management acquiescing to last minute customer requirement changes. Once you accept that you were doing Waterfall wrong and want to fix it, life can be much better.

Ever heard of Coconut Grove?