Working on large projects where you experience the consequences of bad judgment calls made years earlier, and trying to figure out how things could have gone better.
Probably the nastiest way to learn, but still the best.
"Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?"
So what they are saying is rather that "power attracts the already corrupt" you just don't get to see their true colors until they are in power.
Your stereotypical abusive politician is typically someone who has been a nasty piece of work since childhood, they were just powerless to act on it until some suckers voted them into office.
This is bullshit, he admits he realised that in addition to installing AdBlock, users had to deliberately get EasyList, then he goes on to conveniently assume that said users (who had to make 2 very deliberate decisions to get there) didn't really want the full effect of EasyList, basically because it doesn't suit his business model. It was never a misunderstanding, and it didn't escalate unreasonably, NoScript was abusive from the outset, they were just subtle about it.
I would ask "What are we looking for?"
A correct answer requires great insight and pretty much compels the candidate to continue and explain how they fit the description.
Sing the first few words of your opening sentence. It really grabs attention, and usually shuts everyone up in confusion. While it is not overtly offensive, you will piss-off the usual alphas by grabbing focus from them, so expect some backlash.
Actually a canny data-center operator might be able to offer a limited free service to something like a hospital, allowing them to argue that a wholesale shutdown might threaten lives. Done just right, the hospital gets a free service and the data-center gets protection.
The 10 cents to the dollar allows you to absorb some fraud. You also check the applicants records, and for those cases where there is too much uncertainty offer payment only after a successful lawsuit (you my want to pay out 25 cents to the dollar in these cases to reflect the reduced risk).
Even high-profile complaints will only ever result in case by case resolutions.
Now if someone was able to start a business where they bought the rights to seized google checkout accounts at say 10 cents to the dollar and (now representing sufficient monetary sums to make action worthwhile) launched serious legal campaigns to retrieve the funds, then google would revise their policies.
If I were owed money by google in this way, I'd happily give 90% to a third party, just to see google get nailed (particularly if it helped force a policy change so that no more 'little guys' were victimised).
To hire sufficient good TAs, schools would have to pay much more than they do, as they are competing with a lucrative commercial industry. However academic hierarchies won't tolerate paying elevated salaries to people with lesser paper qualifications just because they are talented. So every year you get the people who want a bit of cash on the side, but aren't yet good enough to do part-time contracting.
We use Adobe Flex, and at times have the Flex app write to a HTML page in the browser (for the vastly better markup). The .swf format makes things a bit more secure, although you can decompile Flex apps. For the most part we are targeting the flash engine for performance and functionality.
I favour ubuntu on servers mainly because it's what I use on my desktop, and it's handy to be able to write & test scripts on your desktop and deploy to the servers only once everything works.
The sensible way to build more complex web apps these days is to have a (invisible) client side model, and have the controller communicate with the server as is required (typically to fetch data, sometimes to poll). The server becomes more of a router and data repository, with less intelligence. It is sometimes easier to think of the server as a secondary, dumb user with a huge amount of data on tap. And the more intelligence you can push out to the client side the better the system will scale.
Common Lisp's main advantage over Scheme is that it has been used commercially for years, and has thus accumulated a large number of libraries. Scheme was created as a more consistent and concise Lisp, and is better suited to experimentation.
I like Vim, so I use Netbeans with the jVi plugin when I need an IDE.
I would use Eclipse because of its more extensive language support, but there are no decent plugins that offer vi style navigation AND code-completion.