Actually, it's not SMD components in particular. The failure mode for many MOSFETs and other semiconductor devices tends to be a short. They only tend to fail open if there was enough energy at hand to blow the short clear.
Yeah. And I learned this the hard way with the Perl module JSON::XS. It successfully encodes a Perl NaN, but its decoder will choke on that JSON. (Reported it to the maintainer who insists that is consistent with the documentation and wouldn't fix it)
Because, with the popularity of Linux, people have forgotten how varied unix-like OSes once were. I'm sure the grandparent poster will mention things like how it stores configuration differently, etc, but that's only not-unix-like to someone who hadn't used a handful of different commercial Unices back in the 1990s.
I think one of the key flaws with a lot of bullpen setups is this: They're too big, and they include hallway area where people from unrelated teams walk through having irrelevant conversations all day. A much better solution would be maybe a ~500 sq ft (~50 m^2) big shared office with a window, populated with people that work on the same project.
A few years ago, I once met someone who worked on imaging devices for satellites for a military contractor, which was about all he would say about the specific work he did. He indicated that the building they did their work in had _no_ internet access. Generally, if they wanted to refer to things on the internet, they had to go to some internet-connected computers in another building, print out whatever they wanted and bring it back to the building they worked in.
Perhaps it's unrealistic to expect security without tradeoffs of convenience.