I'm a vet: Gun Line, '72. Even though I was never in close combat, I'll bet that I have a much better understanding of just what war is than anybody who never served. Believe me, nothing in those video games can possibly match the experience of being in a war zone, especially if you're close enough to the fighting to see and/or hear the action. (Actually getting shot at, of course, is different; nobody ever shot at me, personally, but I did see 6" shells hitting the water behind our ship, and there's nothing in any game that comes near to that because you know that it isn't real.)

I don't think Military service is even the best way (although I do think it a good one).

What branch did you serve in? I was in the Navy back in '72, serving on the Gun Line.

Our soldiers always go somewhere else to fight.

Speaking as a 'Nam vet, that sounds real good to me! The best place to fight a war is always on somebody else's territory.

I think a lot of us in the US (and not just kids) could use that kind of experience.

If you really think that, there's an easy way to get that experience: enlist, serve, spend some time doing something for your country instead of whining about what it should be doing for you.

The non-computer game I like best right now is Oh Hell, especially at a penny a point. I've been playing it for decades at a club I belong to and according to the records kept by one of the players I'm "lifetime positive" because I've won more overall than I've lost. Most players consider it a cheap form of entertainment but I'm one of the few who considers it a minor source of income.

Make it easy for your users to report real problems to your developers.

Many years ago, I did tech support for a small startup that used a proprietary database (btrieve, I think) as part of its back end. The developer who wrote that part would have the program show the user the exact error message returned if the database had a problem. Alas, not only didn't the messages make any sense to the users, they didn't make sense to me, either, and I wasn't given any access to the documentation, meaning that unless the developer came down from his ivory tower, they were useless. Not only that, he refused to modify his code so that we had an idea which file was causing the error. This is just one of the reasons that the company folded.

... you're going to have a lot of folks in the army who don't have an education much past that...

I don't know what the requirements are for enlistment now, but I do know that back when I was in the Navy ('Nam era) it was pretty much a given that everybody in the Navy had at least graduated from High School. Of course, back then, the Navy had the highest mental standards (and the Marines the lowest, although they did have the highest physical standard) and I don't know what the Army required. Now that there's no draft, I wouldn't be surprised to find that all branches required either a High School Diploma or GED. You might want to revise your image of soldiers as ignorant, functionally-illiterate thugs.

... there are something like 17 different representations of strings depending on which engineer/department wrote the code!

That can't possibly be a good thing. What's worse is, there's no reason to think that any of the code checks to see which type of string it's been passed instead of just assuming that it's been sent the One True String.

Either way, you need to be savvier than your average Windows user.

That's not exactly setting the bar very high, is it?

Batman no; Spiderman maybe. I can remember at least once he was out in LA introducing himself as "your friendly coast-to-coast Spiderman."

About three years ago. All went well and my vision is much improved.

Aphakia is the absence of a lens, either congenital or through surgery (e.g. cataract sugery).

I have had cataract surgery in both eyes, but I don't have aphakia. In both cases, I had artificial lenses put in that completely corrected my astigmatism and changed me from being severely nearsighted to slightly farsighted. (I need reading glasses for closeup work because my minimum focus is about two feet.) My ophthalmologist was slightly disappointed because I didn't quite end up with perfect vision. I know a number of other people who've had cataracts removed and all of them now have artificial lenses.

I can now claim to be at least partly bionic because I have ocular implants and adjustable augmented hearing.

I too am certain that I'm not color blind. If I were, I wouldn't have been able to serve in Uncle Sam's Navy.

He's quite right, as you can see here.

...why does GNU's documentation still only document the differences?

I'm only guessing here, but it seems reasonable that much of that was written back in the early days when most people using Linux had migrated from one or another form of Unix and all the users needed was a list of differences. Then, of course, other people copied that form of "documentation" under the impression that this was what was expected of them.