Large numbers of homeless people are symbolic of a failure somewhere - shantytowns may be a symptom of trying to deal with it instead of hiding that there is a problem by moving people along.

You don't have money to do much for the homeless and neither do I. However we both pay taxes to people with the resources to deal with the problem in bulk.

Considering nearly all of what Americans call Christianity has purged "the good samaritan" from what they teach and instead taken a "if you have money it proves you deserve the love of Jesus" approach then what empathy was there for the poor in the first place?
Also people just cannot see themselves falling into that position so they blame the victims. The attitudes to and of the Katrina refugees pointed that out very well - we had "pious" people like Barbara Bush saying that people who were homeless before Katrina should not be helped and we had people that suddenly found themselves becoming the "worthless homeless person" they never imagined they would be and having to rely on charity, even if it was only for a short time.
Another way to look at it is at this time any homeless person in the USA has a more positive financial balance sheet than Donald Trump. He defaulted on a couple of vast fortunes in debt and comes nowhere near matching them since, but his connections allow him to be respected instead of despised like the homeless people that also ran out of money.

People hate to see the government spending money on new technology which is why so many places have software and hardware that would have been retired in a commercial environment a decade earlier.

Oh yeah, if anybody is pro nuclear must be either misguided or a paid propagandist

I didn't say anything about nuclear one way or another which is why I'm calling your distraction and accusations childish.

but I would call myself a scientist

Oh FFS. Act your age.

New code is not perfect on creation and developers need to be prepared to swing the axe, scrap stuff that doesn't work and start off different approaches.
However in production it's better to make very gentle changes to a unstable house of cards even if it is utter shit held together by chewing gum and string.
To work in both you need to be able to switch between mindsets because they are really very different jobs. Someone working in both is not ideal. Even if you are very good at both there is a strong temptation to make radical changes, make incremental changes an place them in production and thus limit options in development or to develop something new that incorporates the flaws of something in production. An ideal is good communication between people in both roles.
"Switching hats" can result in too many compromises and being either too conservative or too radical for the project. If you are stuck in that situation external input from testers or somewhere is vital as a sanity check.

I'm not speaking of the US but instead providing an example from anther country of a child "held accountable for crimes that precede their birth". In Australia, due to odd wording of a law, babies born to refugees are classified as "maritime arrivals" and denied citizenship. If their parents are not refugees that "Anchor Baby" situation applies. I'm not going to argue if it's right/wrong or doesn't matter, I'm just using it as an example.

Honestly, I'm not paid to post here

I never suggested that. However in hindsight you are acting as if you were so I can understand now why you decided you needed to point out that you are recycling silly propaganda for free.
You have stated that you are no longer a child. I suggest acting accordingly and lay off the stupid lies or you will get people taking you to task for such stupid lies.

Is that some sort of petty insult suggesting I'm not a "real" citizen? I am an Australian and envious of the US Constitution that the NSA is spitting on. They have betrayed your country and Snowden caught them at it. They have betrayed my country by circulating information about an Australian intelligence operation on the Indonesian President very widely (in a powerpoint presentation FFS) and Snowden got hold of it.

Since the NSA is such a shambles with outside subcontracting, civilians in roles that should be military and various horse judges running things due to social connections, you can be certain that Putin could have got hold of everything Snowden had and more many years ago. With a cast of thousands and people employed due to connections you can be certain that someone in that shambles had a night at Vegas and got a job offer. They have shown from lies to congress that patriotism is not going to stop them doing that, so it's not going to stop them from selling out either.

On interesting bit of the recent anti-Snowden propaganda is a rant similar to yours in the Murdoch press from Laim Fox - the former UK defence secretary who had to resign after a string of very serious security breaches in negotiations with Israel's Mossad and Sri Lankan military intelligence. I suppose at least he knows a bit about the subject matter. The online version is behind a paywall, but it's amusing that he uses the "treason" word for material far less sensitive than the material he gave unauthorised people access to.

Let's throw that back at you - so you support King before Country (and Constitution). My mistake, I thought you were an American and not an English Loyalist.

My feeling is that a lot of older computer users suffer from ergonomic injuries as a result of repetitive stress. Eventually this won't be a problem for us as we move computers into the mind-space but for now when we have to physically interact with computers it's one of those injuries that can really lower the quality of life, let alone the scoreboard.

enter the real world

An air-conditioned office? Funny how that's what is mostly what people shouting "real world" mean.
If you want to challenge the experience of others then provide your own "metrics" or anecdotes from your own experience.

Considering that part of that was things like industrial espionage of an Indonesian Clove Cigarette manufacturer for the benefit of commercial clients in the USA where presumably kickbacks would be given to someone in US intelligence who gave the job to the Australians - fuck yes. We should not be risking intelligence assets on that shit just so that someone in Washington gets paid a bribe. Since another was Australia's Telstra handing communications data to the NSA and giving full access to some intercontinental cables - fuck yes.
Snowden betrayed a bunch of people going far beyond what their jobs should have allowed TO HIS COUNTRY. He told his country what is going on. He did your country and mine a service. The only losers are the people who went too far and tried an East German Stasi approach to intelligence instead of the targetted approach the USA had used in the past.

Exposing the rot in your country so that it can be cured is different to betraying your country. The bullshit along the lines of "because he told the Washington Post it's the same as telling the KGB" is just damage control by some people who will probably lose their jobs and could even be facing jail time.

What a disgusting little weasel you are. When your made up "facts" failed to impress you've made an empty appeal to authority about a completely different topic. Please use that education and life experience instead of acting like a teenage school debate club member.

It's BECAUSE of open source we even learned about Heartbleed. If it was closed source the hole would still exist hidden in the shadows.

Same here. I tried TurboTax one year and it didn't save me any money, didn't really save me any time, and had annoying DRM. You have to research what you can deduct on your own anyway in advance anyway so you can preserve documentation throughout the year, and that is the time consuming part. So paying money just to have software fill out and submit the form doesn't seem worth it for me.