Seriously not impressed by the generalization that interns are the ones responsible for "making the web a terrible place." So as soon as that same developer takes a position as a full-timer they're magically imbued with all the best practices and knowledge required to run a great website?
Also, you just admitted that your own place of work serves large images. Let's not throw blame around that we're not willing to take ourselves.
I agree that Firefox's certificate warning page is much better designed. I'm not blaming 'dumb' users for anything, I was providing supporting evidence of the fact that when browsers make warnings easy to bypass, users will simply click right through them.
To corroborate your point, one of the Chromium developers spoke about this sort of problem, but in the context of invalid SSL certificates and the associated warning that Chrome displays. A ridiculous percentage of users ignored the warning that the site they were visiting wasn't verified and simply clicked 'Visit this site anyway.' Most users don't understand that there are potentially serious costs to ignoring security warnings.
To be honest, this seems like a set of 'nice company policies,' rather than core values. A lot of these could be summarized with a single value that they are idealizing. This list looks like a good way to implement those core values.
Edit: Here are the core values of Google, Apple, Facebook, Zynga, Salesforce, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Netflix, HP, Zappos, Twitter, LinkedIn, SAS, and Cisco.
Saying that different defaults should be documented prominently is like saying that because every piece of software is different, you should be required to read the documentation before you use it...
They're not even trying to hide the fact that they're patent trolls:
"We are located in East Texas, and we are developing innovative technologies and products. We have a team who is responsible for some of the web’s most popular software and applications, and we own some really amazing patents."
Besides the points about not sharing products I haven't bought/tested/tried/etc., your page is not visually appealing. It's hard to take anyone claiming to 'design' shirts seriously when their launch page is poorly designed.
Things you could improve:
* Use a nicer font.
* Use horizontal space more effectively.
* Even if the shirts were great, tweeting about 'HappyNerdShirts' is just asking my friends to flame me.
I'll be honest, I've read a very small number of books on software development throughout the years. I've learned all my stuff on the way, from mistakes I've made, associated documentation, and from reading the code that's powering production systems from the engineers before me. In the end? I'm doing pretty well. I'm sure that anyone else in a similar situation would agree.
Reading these books isn't going to make you a rockstar/ninja/allstar programmer. Keep doing what you're doing, learn from the mistakes you make; the lessons you learn from them are going to last a lifetime. The lessons you learn from these books might make you a better programmer, but almost all of it will be gone in a week.
You should! Make sure you pick up the 6th book by Eoin Colfer (of Artemis Fowl fame), 'And Another Thing...' who's actually done a marvelous of picking up the series where it left off after Douglas Adams' extremely unfortunate passing.