In the spirit of "command-line tools I use all the time":

sed - search and replace within files
git - redistributable file system that tracks changes, often used for version control of text files
ssh - secure command-line connection to another machine
scp - secure copy between machines
diff - compare differences between files

Silly me, I thought the reason for NSA's existence was to make it HARDER for the bad guys to attack our infrastructure, not easier. Shows how little I know about how Washington "works" for us.

Hey, this is an easy one. Just move 9/10ths of those people out of the cities and force them to live in rural counties. Problem solved! No more "inequality"

Something must be done
This is something,
Therefore it must be done.

The reason why some poor people vote conservative is because they are still independent-minded. They believe that to be beholden to another is to be in their debt, which puts one in a lower social position. To be self-sufficient is to be proud and free.

However, there aren't actually that many poor people who vote conservative. Large cities attract poor people precisely because of more liberal government programs, and large cities are overwhelmingly liberal. Look at http://www.politico.com/2013-election/results/map/#/Governor/2013/VA as an example. Liberals live in big cities. Conservatives live in the country.

No, there are code samples. Here's my fav: https://bitbucket.org/FeministSoftwareFoundation/c-plus-equality/src/mistress/fizzbuzz.Xe

Faith does not have anything to do with logic or philosophic arguments.

Yet another example of how empiricism misses the forest for the trees. Faith has everything to do with logic and philosophic arguments; those are the reasons why one believes what one believes. Faith is simply a conclusion one reaches about things which are beyond empirical proof. Because you can't see them and put them into a test tube and observe them, it doesn't mean they don't exist.

"You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding. "

OK, you're a "winner" in the health care insurance lottery, congratulations. But realize that the rest of us are the "losers" who are paying not just the cost of our health insurance, but part of yours, too.

Still they are doing it in the right order. Get people to commit to a plan before the dead line

I think you've missed the point about having a 25% error rate. That means 25% of the people who used the exchange will have thought they selected a plan, but in reality, they didn't. They may think they have insurance, but don't.

So, the correct order would be to do the backend first, which makes sure that people actually get insurance, then fix the pretty front end. Fixing the pretty front end first actually makes things worse because it increases the number of people who will be hurt by the errors.

Going "off-exchange" doesn't mean not having health insurance, it means not using the exchange to buy health insurance. You can buy health insurance direct from insurance companies, but subsidies are only available via the exchange. Thus, if you don't need a subsidy, you don't need to risk using the exchange.

By this point, I think people generally understand that Healthcare.gov is to be avoided if at all possible. This system of systems is a monster (reportedly 500 million lines of code at 60-70% completion), and it's probably too big to test -- testing might take longer than it took to write, i.e., the QA death spiral.

The only reason to use the exchange is to get a subsidy. If you are a normal taxpayer who won't qualify for one, go off-exchange.

Or, join a religious health care pool, which are medical cost-sharing plans that are exempt from the law.

Not everything in the cloud is open or free. Amazon Web Services are proprietary and metered, for example, and lots of people still use them. Why is that?

I think it's because AWS decided to support two of the four freedoms, and those are the important ones. Basically, give people tools, and let them build what they want with them, without having to ask anyone for permission.

HR not understanding tech is like business executives not understand tech, and the answer is the same: you hire someone to sit in the middle as an adapter and translate. It sounds like you were, in fact, being the "business analyst" guy for HR, but you were translating into the wrong language. You were translating from high-detail tech -> low-detail tech, instead of high-detail tech -> HR speak. If you could have filled in all the HR metadata yourself, you no doubt would have chosen the correct ones. The signature of the problem is HR asking "is C++ hardware?". That tells you they're doing a second translation step.

Only stupid executives think this way. Smart executives -- Jeff Bezos comes quickly to mind -- listen to engineers. Especially ones who suggest your company commoditize all the web service components you need, and then rent them to the world.

And the reason why the government changes it's mind so often is because the leadership changes. In the case of Obamacare, apparently the leadership was reported spread across multiple agencies to lower the attack profile from Republicans, so it was already behind the eight-ball.

When did he NOT have the time to pay attention to the most important legislative agenda of his entire Presidency? Personally, I think historians will be writing books about the answer to that question for decades to come. Here's the problem: either it really is his key agenda item, or it isn't. If it is, then why did he let it go live on October 1st? If you say, "someone else made that decision", then it can't be his key agenda item, can it? Who concedes decision-making power of the most important item on one's list?

It's more than a conundrum, it's a full-blown mystery.