Three federal government programs that do/should provide a Web interface to authenticated users:

• Student loans
• Income taxes
• Social security

These are off the top of my head. I'm not trying very hard.

If you mean envelope-based budgeting (a revolving balance for each budget category that must never go below zero), I use GNUCash for this. Unlike Quicken, etc., expense categories are first-class accounts, which means they can have budget funds deposited into them, and you can always see your current running balance.

GNUCash also has some Quicken-like budgeting features, but I don't pay any attention to that.

The benefit of accounting software is that it allows you to predict what you will spend based on real data (aggregated over months or years) rather than conjecture. Accounting software I've used has made it easier to make sure my data is accurate (by reconciling periodically) and to ask queries (to help predict future spending). The more accurately you can predict your future balance, the less money you will waste, either via lost opportunity if you invest too little, or via fees and interest if you invest too much.

Depends on the job, but I don't see why a lot of people in the Slashdot demographic couldn't spend those extra minutes on work. That's 120 minutes less time you have to be in the office.

I don't understand the objection. Everybody complains about how ISPs aren't being upfront about their usage caps. So now they're being upfront. At the same time, they're choosing to raise their rates and make the rates tiered according to usage. There's nothing fundamentally unfair about that -- if anything, tiered pricing is more fair than flat pricing. And I'm no fan of rising prices, but if they can survive in the market while raising their prices, then good for them. It weakens their competitive position. In my experience, different ISPs are always trying to outdo each other on pricing; I'm quite willing to just let supply and demand do its thing.

Oops. Broken link.

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596006099/

O'Reilly would never put a picture of a cat on a book about "cat". It's way too obvious. (Well, nevermind.)

Not really. If the "end" keyword in languages I use were replaced with "fin", it wouldn't bother me much. It's the unbounded set of APIs and accompanying documentation that really causes trouble.

Also note that universal programming languages need not be English-based. There's another lingua franca for programmers: mathematical notation. The Fortress people would argue, in fact, that this is a far better way to express programs, having far more history behind it, and being more natural, concise, and universally-understood.

I've actually had a problem here. The java.lang.Future interface in the Java API has a (British) "isCancelled()" method; I had written some related interfaces using an (American) "isCanceled()" method. I had to use both names and duplicate code to implement both interfaces.

A couple of people have said this, so I'm curious: what did your $100 a month do for you that you couldn't do for free, over-the-air (but that you can now do with Hulu)? Just DVR functionality?

According to Jammer's Reviews, which I have found pretty reliable (the reviewer shares your distaste for Voyager), looks like the average score for episodes he wrote is 2.7 out of 4 stars. 6 of his episodes are rated especially badly (2 stars or less) and 6 are rated especially well (3.5 or more stars). Definitely a mixed bag, including the terrible "Course: Oblivion," "Sprit Folk," and "Fury." On the other hand, he is responsible for some of Voyager's best: "Living Witness," "Drone," and "Barge of the Dead."

In fact, if you look at How to Design Program's introduction (the server seems to be down right now; here an archive page), you'll see that it was written with this sort of a class in mind. Even if you use a different language, and even if you disagree with its philosophy, you should at least be familiar with it as an important work in this area.

A relevant excerpt from the link:

The state that you belong to means much more than random "happenstance." Roads, education, welfare, etc. -- all the boring stuff that government spends most of its time managing -- are all tied to the state. Those are the interests that you have in common with everyone else in your state, and that, I believe, usually overshadow or at least equal your interests associated with other groups. Where states are not bound by common interest in important areas, they can evolve by splitting/realigning (West Virginia did this; California sometimes talks about it).

Whether these regional interests really outweigh interests associated with other arbitrary groups is open for debate. I think they're at least on a similar level -- in any case, like I said, preventing abuse is hard enough when voting is based on residency; doing anything more would probably be unenforceable. And I think it's essential that some measure of broad appeal, beyond strict popularity, be used in the formula that determines which candidate is best.

The discussion of rural states was just an example. I'm not suggesting that "rural" people deserve special treatment. I'm saying that small states, despite their small size and regardless of their demographics, deserve to have their interests as entities represented.

Yes. People who live in the same region tend to share the same interests. (Hence, governments are organized geographically.) A candidate who only appeals to urban voters in a few regions does not very well represent the interests of the country as a whole. Similarly, a candidate who appeals to a variety of regions but can't get a majority of voters (because he rejects urban interests) doesn't represent the country as a whole, either. An ideal candidate should be strong in *both* dimensions: regionally and popularly. Hence, a formula was derived that gave weight to both dimensions (although the popular dimension carries much more weight -- 436 vs. 102).

In mentioning other groups with common interests (races, religions, etc.), you're suggesting that there ought to be other dimensions that carry some weight in the formula. In principal, I think that sounds fine. A president should appeal to a variety of races, etc. But I think regional interests tend to be more significant than interests associated with membership in these other groups, and it would clearly be a lot harder to prevent abuse of a system based on the ill-defined concept of identification with a certain race, etc.

Give me a break. You don't think California, Texas, and New York have any influence on presidential elections? It's a *prerequesite* that, say, any Democratic presidential candidate can win California and New York. If that weren't the case, they'd never get off the ground. And if an opposing-party candidate has a chance to take one of those big states, it's *huge*.