I'm not disagreeing with you in principle. However, the reality is, there are tens (hundreds?) of millions of Americans and billions of people worldwide with no real skills whatsoever. None. They're capable of nothing but jobs without a skill requirement. These people rightfully want to sleep, eat, buy stuff, and get healthcare just like everyone else. And yet, they either lack the circumstance, the ability, the willpower, or the mental acuity to grow beyond a job that requires no skills. I am not judging how they came to be in this situation, only remarking that this is their reality.

This is a fact. These people need to be able to survive their whole lives. They need to earn enough not to be a burden on the rest of us. How can this be accomplished? If we aren't willing to give them higher wages, and we're not willing to pay for them to get training to do something more meaningful, then this situation will never change.

They picked the worst company on earth, gave them $300M and thought they were going to get something for it. This has been covered for months by NPR -- nobody has signed up because the site has not been online yet, at all.

See here and here.

Anecdotally, a company I worked for in 2001 hired Oracle consulting to implement their own ERP system for us, and we ended up getting our money back because they could not even make their own software work.

I've hired dozens of developers over the years. I can teach a developer a language, or a development philosophy, or a set of APIs. There are only two things I cannot teach, and therefore should look for in new hires: 1) Communication skills 2) Work Ethic If a person has these two skills, I can teach them anything else they need to be a quality developer. People will tell you to over-communicate. It's good advice.

That's exactly the problem in the US. We're a nation divided. If you look at the last 3 elections, we're divided nearly 50/50 on our political views. Half of Americans seem to want social justice, equality, privacy, and caring for the poor, and the other half want religion in schools, small government, privatization of all government roles, and a huge military. The two sides are so far apart that no compromise is possible.

A friend explained it like this. Two people go out to dinner. One says, "I feel like eating Italian tonight." The other says, "I want to eat Anthrax and broken glass." Now, compromise so both are happy.

1. I've got a degree in computer engineering. I have designed and built CPUs and motherboards. I don't repair my own computers. It's not worth my time.
2. Aesthetics are important. Anyone who hasn't realized this is living in the past. There's a reason that Apple is the most valuable company in the world. The real genius in Apple's products isn't the performance and never has been; it's the fusion of design, style, and functionality.
3. Need OS X for some reason? How about because it's the best OS on the market for nearly everyone? Linux is a great dev OS, but my mother could never use it. Windows is an adequate OS, and had gotten better with Windows 7, but it's still far, far more obtuse than OS X, and it's less powerful for a power user with a UNIX background too.
4. A Mac is not a $100 burger. It's the $10 burger that's clearly better than the cheaper Big Mac. Both will fill you up, but there's no question in my mind which one I want to eat. You get what you pay for.

The ONLY way anyone is blowing Android out of the water is if they provide a better product and give it away for free. Android isn't where it is because it's superior; it's there because manufacturers can use it for free.

http://www.pixelmator.com/ An amazing piece of software, and only $15! Seriously, if you have a Mac and you don't get this you are doing yourself a disservice.

All police are asshats. You pretty much have to be a sociopath to take such a horrible job.

I have a Chromecast, as well as a Roku and an Apple TV. The Chromecast's video quality is terrible by comparison, pausing and stuttering, buffering and rendering video quality from the 1990s. Hopefully one of these updates will make it actually do what it's designed for. Right now it's a $35 device that serves no purpose.

PGP/GPG with an 16k key? Yeah, crack that NSA. Until quantum computers come out, PGP/GPG are solid choices. Just keep making the key bigger.

That is an absurd position. There's no issue with lossless compression, and it's beneficial to the customer, because it allows you to scan and copy much larger documents without memory issues. The reason that this is a problem is that it's lossy compression algorithm that clearly is flawed.

I don't have any data under my personal control that I care if the government intercepts. My email is boring as hell. The most interesting thing in my email is when Blizzard locks my Battle.net account because I tried to log in from work and they think my IP changed. My Dropbox is full of junk I want to transfer between computers and nightly binaries that I want to share with our Ukrainian QA team. Really exciting stuff. Hack away, people, hack away. I care not. The pieces of data that I wouldn't want stolen (SSN, bank accounts) aren't in my personal control anyway.

As to the quote about operating systems mad in China... what OS is that exactly? Neither Apple nor Microsoft develop their OS's in China. If any OS has Chinese developers, it's Linux. Red herring.

People who don't think java7 is ready are smoking crack. It's been production ready for a long time.. Works on Linux, works on OSX, works on Windows. I have used it on 20M transaction/day apps and had it run for months with no issues.. Java gets a bad name because of the browser plugin. Let's EOL that for all versions of java. I like java on the server. I like it for writing Android apps. I do NOT like it in the browser, and neither does anyone else with any interest in security.

Every problem that a slashdot reader has is a first world problem. Unless you're dying from or transmitting a disease, starving to death, cannot find clean water, have too many children because you don't about contraception, or are growing up uneducated, your problems are most likely all first world problems.

How can this comment not get modded up? I actually laughed.