Do you know any complex software that succeeded in avoiding documentation by having significantly improved usability?
No. I have worked with software that has tried.... there is nothing more annoying.
I would even go so far as to define "complex" in the user's context as meaning "requires documentation to use". Users don't care how convoluted your code is, it's complex to them if they need a manual.
I'm concerned about your description of the problem, though. One thousand pages of documentation for four different target audiences and 250 programs. That's one page per program per type of user, on average.
That's interesting because I see people on a daily basis fumbling with the debit/credit machines at checkouts.
If you stopped standing near the line trying to shoulder surf their PINs you wouldn't see so many.
Even with basic things like swiping their cards.
That's poor design of the hardware, not the software. When you have to figure out where the magstripe is on the card and then where the reader is so you get the right orientation, you're bound to get it wrong. The ATMs I use that have a simple slot to push the card into, I never get wrong. Card comes out of wallet with me holding the end that goes into the machine last. Very simple.
But there are, indeed, intuitive GUI programs. They're the ones you never think about. The ones that you remember are the stupid ones. For example, any GUI where you click on a TEXT LABEL to a menu or dropdown to do something. A label should label what the button is, not be the button itself. One program I use requires me to click on a red label to fix whatever the red thing is.
An example of one of the most egregious GUI offenders is... Windows Media Center. If you want to scroll left or right on something (like the program guide so you can see what is on later today) you have to roll over JUST the right spot on the screen and a magical left or right arrow (less than or greater than characters) will appear. Same with up and down. And if you are looking through the list of recorded programs, if you dare keep the cursor over one program too long the entire list will shift to the left so that item is the leftmost. Even if it started as the rightmost. That means you can put your cursor over a program in anticipation of viewing it, pause to read the description to make sure it is the right one, and just before you click on it it will run away and you'll be clicking on the wrong thing.
If you think Morse sent over a Ham radio connection is equivalent to a telegram, then you're missing the point. It's only equivalent if someone prints it off at the far end and couriers it to the recipient.
There is a national traffic system through the ARRL that takes written messages, sends them (sometimes via CW), transcribes them at the far end, and delivers them. Maybe not courier, but at least by phone and usually with a followup delivery.
There are people who think this is the bee's knees and devote a large part of their life to doing it.
I wish you did not need to file a tax return in the US either unless you had an income source other than your primary employer.
Without tax returns, the income tax system could not be used as a tool for social engineering. Or you'd have to tell your employer a lot more about yourself than most people would want them knowing. For example, "dear employer, I just installed a new high efficiency heat pump in my house, please adjust my tax withholding accordingly."
I guess maybe doing it through the employer would be just as much, if not more, of a hassle than a once-a-year tax return.
Because it's not fake as in "printed at home to look like a passport"
Straw man. Nobody said it was. It's "fake" as in "not a real passport". "Not real passports" are created by "not the State Department", just like "not a real Chevy" is produced by "not Chevrolet". Nothing in "fake passport" means "printed on your printer at home."
It's fake as in "not actually for the person it claims to be".
That's not "fake", that's "false" or "fraudulent." If the state department issues it using the standard process, it isn't a fake. The information on it is fraudulent. If Boeing ships a 737 off the assembly line that contains counterfeit parts from a shady vendor, it's not a fake 737, it's a real 737 with fraudulent parts.
"Fake" is the wrong word of course, which is probably why the article doesn't use that word but uses "fraud".
I just quoted the article from the BBC for the previous response.
"Street performer Neil Stammer travelled to Nepal eight years ago using a fake passport under the name Kevin Hodges." The guy making fake passports doesn't send the photo off to the US Government; that kinda defeats the purpose of getting a fake passport.
So not being a complete moron the guy didn't get a passport in his own name. But instead got one in someone else's name - using his own photo since it helps to look like the photo when actually using the passport.
So not being a complete moron, the guy didn't send a passport application off to the state department using his own picture, he found a forger who could make a fake passport without the government being involved at all. It is a half-moron who sends his picture off to the feds to let them know he's planning on traveling out of the country to flee prosecution.
So maybe it wasn't a fake passport like the article says it was. Fine. But stop telling me that the article doesn't say it was a fake because it does.
Street performer Neil Stammer travelled to Nepal eight years ago using a fake passport under the name Kevin Hodges.
Yes, because at the time the scanning was done the FBI in fact did not have the photo. After the State department found the match against the publicly available wanted criminal information
It doesn't matter WHO had the picture. State department, FBI, whatever. Since the passport was fake, and clearly said so in the article as well as the summary, the state department wouldn't have the picture. You do not send your picture to the state department when you get a fake passport, you give it to the guy who makes the fakes. And he doesn't give it to the government.
How did they (whoever) get his picture to scan against his wanted photo?
and thus is perfectly reasonable for the FBI to obtain from the State Department after that.
I didn't ask if it was reasonable for the FBI to get the picture, I asked HOW they got it. And for that, you have no answer.
If you could be bothered to read the article, you would know that they didn't. The State Department had the passport photos.
And had you read my question, you'd have noticed that who had the photos was pretty much irrelevant, the important question was HOW DID THEY GET IT? The passport was fake. You don't send your photo to the state department to get a fake passport, you give it to the guy making the fake passports. He doesn't send them to the state department, either.
The FBI before this point did NOT have the passport photo, and at this point they got it from the State Department.
So now you say the FBI did have the photo because the state department gave it to them, after telling me they didn't have it. I don't really care who had it, the question was how anyone had it.
College bookstores have already become "fan gear" outlets instead of "book" stores due to online retailers. At least at our local university, which used to have a really good trade book section, and now has nothing other than texts, with a limited number of those. Amazon won this battle a long time ago, the bookstores just haven't quite figured out they are dead yet. Except when they change to become licensed sales outlets for branded fan items.
I am an unlimited 4g lte customer of t-mobile. And when I asked what unlimited meant, the seller told me exactly what it meant. unlimited up to 2GB per month (which is a lot, I never reached it), then throttled down to a slower speed which still allows you to check emails and navigate.
I looked at their plans yesterday and it was pretty clear they were selling "unlimited data" and the plans had a number of Gb that were 4g, after which you dropped back to slower speeds. It's pretty unreasonable to try to claim that "unlimited" should mean "completely unlimited" because there is always a limit: 30 days times the data rate per day.
The reason I was looking is because T-Mobile chose this last weekend to DROP their aliases service for the email to SMS gateway. That means if you were using joe.user@tmomail.net to get email pushed to your phone via SMS, your address just STOPPED WORKING. Without notice. Without warning. And without any bounces to tell the sender of the problem.
Possession of knowledge, such as a decryption key of encyphered text embedded in the passport that says "yes, it's really me" will be good enough for most purposes but it's not as good as a unique biometric identifier.
Knowledge of a decryption key would be useless to prevent passport fraud. I could loan my passport to someone and tell him the key -- then he's me. He would have a lot harder time developing my same facial features to defeat a picture, especially if "he" is a "she" trying to impersonate me. The IMF could do perfect impersonations, but for normal folk not so much. "The password is..." could be used by anyone.
And you want to steal someone's identity? "Tell my your passport key or I'll kill you..." then kill them to stop them from reporting the passport stolen. It probably wouldn't even take that much, since most people would probably put their passport key on a post-it inside the back cover so they don't forget, just like they post their passwords within eyeshot of the computer.
Pictures are simple and easy to use, requiring no huge database or complicated equipment, unlike the DNA scanner you'd need for a DNA hash. Does the person standing in front of you look like the picture? Yes, ok. No, investigate. Even the border agents in Nepal can do that much.
Forgive the troll feeding, if that's the case. Snowden was convicted of what?
The same thing this guy who is being extradited from Nepal was. Nothing yet. He jumped bail, which can only happen prior to trial.
What I'm wondering about in this story, if the passport was FAKE, how did the FBI have a copy of the passport PHOTO that wasn't sent to the department of state to scan against the mug shot they did have? Was the passport REAL but under an assumed name, or was it really fake and not issued by the state department and they got the picture by magic?
E-readers and public libraries aren't mutually exclusive.
That's the reason why this current comparison is silly. Let's instead compare the similar functions and similar sources. That would be ebooks and all retailers, not just Amazon.
The one misleading statement the summary contains is that "libraries can have a greater selection". Technically, true. They CAN. But do they?
I've found that my public library's selection of ebooks is VERY much smaller than I can find in online retailers. I can find lots of fluff reading at the library, which is stuff that the common public wants. For more technical or limited demand things the online retailers are much more likely to have copies. And one of the "limited demand" criteria for my public library happens to be politically based.
Fortunately, the university library also does ebooks, and their technical selection is excellent.
The major advantage to the public/uni libraries is that access to the ebooks is free. Selection is less, and I don't believe it will ever become equivalent because it would simply cost too much to cater to everyone.
he hasn't actually leaked anything. he gave all the docs he stole to greenwald
"I didn't actually steal that Cadillac, I just took it from the owner's driveway and drove it to the chop shop and they stole it." Sorry, but "gave all the docs" to someone who isn't supposed to have them is leaking.
What makes you think the NSA thinks they are the only ones working on this?
What makes you think the NSA is working on this? The words of someone who is trying to revive his fifteen minutes of fame? Here, from the summary:
Snowden suggests MonsterMind could one day be designed to return fire
"Could be". And I "could" decide to go out to my car "one day" and start running grandmothers down in the city park, but that doesn't mean I have done so or am even thinking about doing it.
Other than a car analogy, which I didn't realize I had made until I thought that this would be a good place to make a car analogy, here's this one: Slashdot readers COULD one day actually read the summary for what it says and react accordingly instead of leaping across huge chasms to horrific conclusions.
Given the option, I'd replace any high volume alert paging system with a twitter feed at the first opportunity.
I cannot see how forcing people to have a continuously running twitter app connected to an internet data stream to receive a large number of sponsored tweets mixed in with a few alerts is better than a communications channel that is part of the basic phone protocol handled by a native app and containing only the alerts.
Unless you're an advertiser on twitter who is paying for those sponsored tweets and you want more people to see them.
I stopped using twitter when my stream started filling up with tweets from people I could not block and did not know who were paying twitter for access to my eyeballs. I could not imagine having to check my pager on a regular basis because the pager company started sending sponsored pages telling me what things I should buy, so I don't know why you'd use twitter as a replacement for that kind of system.
Let people opt out of it (maybe force people under 25 to opt out of it),
I'm fascinated by a system you claim is "opt out" that people are forced to "opt out" of.
The problem with letting anyone opt out of it is that you've still got to pay off the promises. That's the problem with Ponzi schemes. You have to keep money coming in from new participants to pay off the promises made to previous players. As soon as you force people to "opt out" the entire system will collapse and those who have the most to lose will lose it all.
So no, you don't get to let people opt out unless you want to make me whole for my previous contributions that will now be worthless. I ain't accepting no Yugo when I've paid my entire life and been promised a Lambo.
I see it as being almost the same as people with ridiculously high pension benefits. The people should get the benefits they were promised when they were hired.. but you can cut down/remove pension benefits for new hires.
It is the same, and we've already seen what happens when corporations do not fund their pension plans and those plans become orphans (through buyout or bankruptcy.) Let people keep their money and they will, and that will orphan the social security system because it will be unfunded. You want to make payouts to those who have paid in, that will take another source of money, like massive, confiscatory income tax increases.
No, you are only coerced to choose among multiple private vendors. That's mostly different.
The only way it is different is that you used the words "multiple private vendors" and he used the word "corporations". Do you not understand that the "multiple private vendors" are all "corporations?"
And you can still skip buying, but you will have a skipper's fee.
What you call "a skipper's fee" many would call "coercion", especially when the IRS is the organization that would collect it.
What really irritates me is that the monster has gotten to the point where it just can't go away because such a large percentage of our population has gotten so damn lazy that they now plan on relying on Social Security for their income during retirement.
It is not "lazy" for people who could not opt out of a system that ate away at their income, which they were subject to their entire working lives, to expect the promises to be kept.
Would you be happy if you were told that mandatory deductions from your pay (and an equal amount the employer could have paid to you were it not for his mandatory contribution to the same place) were going to cover a layaway plan for a nice new Lamborghini when you retired, and then be told when you actually do retire that there is no Lamborghini and you're a lazy ass for not having bought your own car -- with the income you had left over after paying into the layaway program?
You want to disband social security? Fine. Give me back every penny I paid into the system that you think I shouldn't get anything back out of and we'll call it even. I'll be nice and only expect 2% interest on my money.
He is in Russia specifically because the US revoked his passport.
No, he IS in Russia because the Russians won't issue him a passport so he can leave. That would be an easy solution to his problem. Why you don't see this and assign blame for this not happening to the correct party is a mystery.
Could Russia do something to 'unstick' the situation? Sure, but that's entirely a different.
No, that's exactly the point. You're talking about the short term, past-tense problem of him being stuck in an airport because the US revoked the passport of someone they considered to be a traitor who was fleeing prosecution. The current situation could be easily "solved" by Russia issuing him a passport, the failure of which to happen is not the fault of the US in any way.
If they had no genetic makeup, they'd have no learning ability.
No, you don't watch infomercials, do you? If they have no genetic makeup, someone will either grind up some rocks and sell them "Essential Minerals", or put a cantelope in a blender and sell them that to keep their skin young looking.
The free market loves a vacuum since that is a source of suckers who will buy anything. As soon as you tell someone they have "no genetic makeup", someone will invent it and send them a free bottle after they sign up for auto-refill and auto-pay.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know any complex software that succeeded in avoiding documentation by having significantly improved usability?
No. I have worked with software that has tried.... there is nothing more annoying.
I would even go so far as to define "complex" in the user's context as meaning "requires documentation to use". Users don't care how convoluted your code is, it's complex to them if they need a manual.
I'm concerned about your description of the problem, though. One thousand pages of documentation for four different target audiences and 250 programs. That's one page per program per type of user, on average.
That's interesting because I see people on a daily basis fumbling with the debit/credit machines at checkouts.
If you stopped standing near the line trying to shoulder surf their PINs you wouldn't see so many.
Even with basic things like swiping their cards.
That's poor design of the hardware, not the software. When you have to figure out where the magstripe is on the card and then where the reader is so you get the right orientation, you're bound to get it wrong. The ATMs I use that have a simple slot to push the card into, I never get wrong. Card comes out of wallet with me holding the end that goes into the machine last. Very simple.
But there are, indeed, intuitive GUI programs. They're the ones you never think about. The ones that you remember are the stupid ones. For example, any GUI where you click on a TEXT LABEL to a menu or dropdown to do something. A label should label what the button is, not be the button itself. One program I use requires me to click on a red label to fix whatever the red thing is.
An example of one of the most egregious GUI offenders is ... Windows Media Center. If you want to scroll left or right on something (like the program guide so you can see what is on later today) you have to roll over JUST the right spot on the screen and a magical left or right arrow (less than or greater than characters) will appear. Same with up and down. And if you are looking through the list of recorded programs, if you dare keep the cursor over one program too long the entire list will shift to the left so that item is the leftmost. Even if it started as the rightmost. That means you can put your cursor over a program in anticipation of viewing it, pause to read the description to make sure it is the right one, and just before you click on it it will run away and you'll be clicking on the wrong thing.
If you think Morse sent over a Ham radio connection is equivalent to a telegram, then you're missing the point. It's only equivalent if someone prints it off at the far end and couriers it to the recipient.
There is a national traffic system through the ARRL that takes written messages, sends them (sometimes via CW), transcribes them at the far end, and delivers them. Maybe not courier, but at least by phone and usually with a followup delivery.
There are people who think this is the bee's knees and devote a large part of their life to doing it.
I wish you did not need to file a tax return in the US either unless you had an income source other than your primary employer.
Without tax returns, the income tax system could not be used as a tool for social engineering. Or you'd have to tell your employer a lot more about yourself than most people would want them knowing. For example, "dear employer, I just installed a new high efficiency heat pump in my house, please adjust my tax withholding accordingly."
I guess maybe doing it through the employer would be just as much, if not more, of a hassle than a once-a-year tax return.
Because it's not fake as in "printed at home to look like a passport"
Straw man. Nobody said it was. It's "fake" as in "not a real passport". "Not real passports" are created by "not the State Department", just like "not a real Chevy" is produced by "not Chevrolet". Nothing in "fake passport" means "printed on your printer at home."
It's fake as in "not actually for the person it claims to be".
That's not "fake", that's "false" or "fraudulent." If the state department issues it using the standard process, it isn't a fake. The information on it is fraudulent. If Boeing ships a 737 off the assembly line that contains counterfeit parts from a shady vendor, it's not a fake 737, it's a real 737 with fraudulent parts.
"Fake" is the wrong word of course, which is probably why the article doesn't use that word but uses "fraud".
I just quoted the article from the BBC for the previous response. "Street performer Neil Stammer travelled to Nepal eight years ago using a fake passport under the name Kevin Hodges." The guy making fake passports doesn't send the photo off to the US Government; that kinda defeats the purpose of getting a fake passport.
So not being a complete moron the guy didn't get a passport in his own name. But instead got one in someone else's name - using his own photo since it helps to look like the photo when actually using the passport.
So not being a complete moron, the guy didn't send a passport application off to the state department using his own picture, he found a forger who could make a fake passport without the government being involved at all. It is a half-moron who sends his picture off to the feds to let them know he's planning on traveling out of the country to flee prosecution.
So maybe it wasn't a fake passport like the article says it was. Fine. But stop telling me that the article doesn't say it was a fake because it does.
The word fake is not in the article.
Third paragraph, third sentence of the article:
Yes, because at the time the scanning was done the FBI in fact did not have the photo. After the State department found the match against the publicly available wanted criminal information
It doesn't matter WHO had the picture. State department, FBI, whatever. Since the passport was fake, and clearly said so in the article as well as the summary, the state department wouldn't have the picture. You do not send your picture to the state department when you get a fake passport, you give it to the guy who makes the fakes. And he doesn't give it to the government.
How did they (whoever) get his picture to scan against his wanted photo?
and thus is perfectly reasonable for the FBI to obtain from the State Department after that.
I didn't ask if it was reasonable for the FBI to get the picture, I asked HOW they got it. And for that, you have no answer.
If you could be bothered to read the article, you would know that they didn't. The State Department had the passport photos.
And had you read my question, you'd have noticed that who had the photos was pretty much irrelevant, the important question was HOW DID THEY GET IT? The passport was fake. You don't send your photo to the state department to get a fake passport, you give it to the guy making the fake passports. He doesn't send them to the state department, either.
The FBI before this point did NOT have the passport photo, and at this point they got it from the State Department.
So now you say the FBI did have the photo because the state department gave it to them, after telling me they didn't have it. I don't really care who had it, the question was how anyone had it.
Unless they're going to buy the books back, student bookstores aren't going anywhere.
Around here the buyback is done by folks who set tents up on the streetcorners, not the bookstore.
College bookstores have already become "fan gear" outlets instead of "book" stores due to online retailers. At least at our local university, which used to have a really good trade book section, and now has nothing other than texts, with a limited number of those. Amazon won this battle a long time ago, the bookstores just haven't quite figured out they are dead yet. Except when they change to become licensed sales outlets for branded fan items.
I am an unlimited 4g lte customer of t-mobile. And when I asked what unlimited meant, the seller told me exactly what it meant. unlimited up to 2GB per month (which is a lot, I never reached it), then throttled down to a slower speed which still allows you to check emails and navigate.
I looked at their plans yesterday and it was pretty clear they were selling "unlimited data" and the plans had a number of Gb that were 4g, after which you dropped back to slower speeds. It's pretty unreasonable to try to claim that "unlimited" should mean "completely unlimited" because there is always a limit: 30 days times the data rate per day.
The reason I was looking is because T-Mobile chose this last weekend to DROP their aliases service for the email to SMS gateway. That means if you were using joe.user@tmomail.net to get email pushed to your phone via SMS, your address just STOPPED WORKING. Without notice. Without warning. And without any bounces to tell the sender of the problem.
At least this change is being announced.
Possession of knowledge, such as a decryption key of encyphered text embedded in the passport that says "yes, it's really me" will be good enough for most purposes but it's not as good as a unique biometric identifier.
Knowledge of a decryption key would be useless to prevent passport fraud. I could loan my passport to someone and tell him the key -- then he's me. He would have a lot harder time developing my same facial features to defeat a picture, especially if "he" is a "she" trying to impersonate me. The IMF could do perfect impersonations, but for normal folk not so much. "The password is..." could be used by anyone.
And you want to steal someone's identity? "Tell my your passport key or I'll kill you..." then kill them to stop them from reporting the passport stolen. It probably wouldn't even take that much, since most people would probably put their passport key on a post-it inside the back cover so they don't forget, just like they post their passwords within eyeshot of the computer.
Pictures are simple and easy to use, requiring no huge database or complicated equipment, unlike the DNA scanner you'd need for a DNA hash. Does the person standing in front of you look like the picture? Yes, ok. No, investigate. Even the border agents in Nepal can do that much.
Forgive the troll feeding, if that's the case. Snowden was convicted of what?
The same thing this guy who is being extradited from Nepal was. Nothing yet. He jumped bail, which can only happen prior to trial.
What I'm wondering about in this story, if the passport was FAKE, how did the FBI have a copy of the passport PHOTO that wasn't sent to the department of state to scan against the mug shot they did have? Was the passport REAL but under an assumed name, or was it really fake and not issued by the state department and they got the picture by magic?
Public/uni libraries, even prior to ebooks had less selection that what was commercially available.
They do, however, have more older things available, so the proper word for the paper stuff would be "different", not specifically "less".
E-readers and public libraries aren't mutually exclusive.
That's the reason why this current comparison is silly. Let's instead compare the similar functions and similar sources. That would be ebooks and all retailers, not just Amazon.
The one misleading statement the summary contains is that "libraries can have a greater selection". Technically, true. They CAN. But do they?
I've found that my public library's selection of ebooks is VERY much smaller than I can find in online retailers. I can find lots of fluff reading at the library, which is stuff that the common public wants. For more technical or limited demand things the online retailers are much more likely to have copies. And one of the "limited demand" criteria for my public library happens to be politically based.
Fortunately, the university library also does ebooks, and their technical selection is excellent.
The major advantage to the public/uni libraries is that access to the ebooks is free. Selection is less, and I don't believe it will ever become equivalent because it would simply cost too much to cater to everyone.
Are you insane? We haven't even figured out if Google is evil or not.
That's easy to figure out. All it took was ten seconds for a Google search to find the answer. They aren't evil.
he hasn't actually leaked anything. he gave all the docs he stole to greenwald
"I didn't actually steal that Cadillac, I just took it from the owner's driveway and drove it to the chop shop and they stole it." Sorry, but "gave all the docs" to someone who isn't supposed to have them is leaking.
What makes you think the NSA thinks they are the only ones working on this?
What makes you think the NSA is working on this? The words of someone who is trying to revive his fifteen minutes of fame? Here, from the summary:
"Could be". And I "could" decide to go out to my car "one day" and start running grandmothers down in the city park, but that doesn't mean I have done so or am even thinking about doing it.
Other than a car analogy, which I didn't realize I had made until I thought that this would be a good place to make a car analogy, here's this one: Slashdot readers COULD one day actually read the summary for what it says and react accordingly instead of leaping across huge chasms to horrific conclusions.
Given the option, I'd replace any high volume alert paging system with a twitter feed at the first opportunity.
I cannot see how forcing people to have a continuously running twitter app connected to an internet data stream to receive a large number of sponsored tweets mixed in with a few alerts is better than a communications channel that is part of the basic phone protocol handled by a native app and containing only the alerts.
Unless you're an advertiser on twitter who is paying for those sponsored tweets and you want more people to see them.
I stopped using twitter when my stream started filling up with tweets from people I could not block and did not know who were paying twitter for access to my eyeballs. I could not imagine having to check my pager on a regular basis because the pager company started sending sponsored pages telling me what things I should buy, so I don't know why you'd use twitter as a replacement for that kind of system.
Let people opt out of it (maybe force people under 25 to opt out of it),
I'm fascinated by a system you claim is "opt out" that people are forced to "opt out" of.
The problem with letting anyone opt out of it is that you've still got to pay off the promises. That's the problem with Ponzi schemes. You have to keep money coming in from new participants to pay off the promises made to previous players. As soon as you force people to "opt out" the entire system will collapse and those who have the most to lose will lose it all.
So no, you don't get to let people opt out unless you want to make me whole for my previous contributions that will now be worthless. I ain't accepting no Yugo when I've paid my entire life and been promised a Lambo.
I see it as being almost the same as people with ridiculously high pension benefits. The people should get the benefits they were promised when they were hired.. but you can cut down/remove pension benefits for new hires.
It is the same, and we've already seen what happens when corporations do not fund their pension plans and those plans become orphans (through buyout or bankruptcy.) Let people keep their money and they will, and that will orphan the social security system because it will be unfunded. You want to make payouts to those who have paid in, that will take another source of money, like massive, confiscatory income tax increases.
"New"s stuff includes social media portals. Wow, I don't even know what that is, but it sounds web-ish.
I think that means that modern programming is done via crowd-sourcing, kickstarter, and mechanical turk.
I seem to recall having these modern things called "libraries" when I was programming in small C on CP/M.
No, you are only coerced to choose among multiple private vendors. That's mostly different.
The only way it is different is that you used the words "multiple private vendors" and he used the word "corporations". Do you not understand that the "multiple private vendors" are all "corporations?"
And you can still skip buying, but you will have a skipper's fee.
What you call "a skipper's fee" many would call "coercion", especially when the IRS is the organization that would collect it.
What really irritates me is that the monster has gotten to the point where it just can't go away because such a large percentage of our population has gotten so damn lazy that they now plan on relying on Social Security for their income during retirement.
It is not "lazy" for people who could not opt out of a system that ate away at their income, which they were subject to their entire working lives, to expect the promises to be kept.
Would you be happy if you were told that mandatory deductions from your pay (and an equal amount the employer could have paid to you were it not for his mandatory contribution to the same place) were going to cover a layaway plan for a nice new Lamborghini when you retired, and then be told when you actually do retire that there is no Lamborghini and you're a lazy ass for not having bought your own car -- with the income you had left over after paying into the layaway program?
You want to disband social security? Fine. Give me back every penny I paid into the system that you think I shouldn't get anything back out of and we'll call it even. I'll be nice and only expect 2% interest on my money.
He is in Russia specifically because the US revoked his passport.
No, he IS in Russia because the Russians won't issue him a passport so he can leave. That would be an easy solution to his problem. Why you don't see this and assign blame for this not happening to the correct party is a mystery.
Could Russia do something to 'unstick' the situation? Sure, but that's entirely a different.
No, that's exactly the point. You're talking about the short term, past-tense problem of him being stuck in an airport because the US revoked the passport of someone they considered to be a traitor who was fleeing prosecution. The current situation could be easily "solved" by Russia issuing him a passport, the failure of which to happen is not the fault of the US in any way.
and oh, btw, if you dont pay your mortgage, the bank gets the guys with guns to come kick you out.
So don't take out a mortgage. Where can you say the same thing about taxes?
If they had no genetic makeup, they'd have no learning ability.
No, you don't watch infomercials, do you? If they have no genetic makeup, someone will either grind up some rocks and sell them "Essential Minerals", or put a cantelope in a blender and sell them that to keep their skin young looking.
The free market loves a vacuum since that is a source of suckers who will buy anything. As soon as you tell someone they have "no genetic makeup", someone will invent it and send them a free bottle after they sign up for auto-refill and auto-pay.