Not knowing the difference between two similar looking words isn't that uncommon. Average people don't have to pay attention to astronomy or astrology on a daily basis, and stuff is going to get forgotten.

It doesn't mean anything except that people got the meaning of the word confused with another word. That happens pretty much everywhere on the planet, and says nothing about Americans.

Contractors also cost a lot more, doubly so when you factor in that you have to keep paying them well past the end of the contract to fix all the screwups.

The government needs enough people that it isn't going to need to increase or decreasing staffing by large amounts regularly, and if it does it can fill those gaps with contractor developers.

Hiring contracting companies to do things is just a recipe for failure.

The years of lying it takes to get that many people to vote for you is pretty hard work.

Make donations to some key people in Congress, and bid on a government contract. Defense ones are the best, you can totally fail at that for years and they'll just throw more money at it.

People who aren't into computer security know his name, which means he can get in to talk to Congress. When you're dealing with politicians, being famous certainly helps you.

The commercial company that built this website was let go from their contract, and without that contract there will likely be firings.

But yes, feel free to tell us about all the firings from the major corporate breaches that happened in the last year. Because if you think this doesn't happen all the time, you're living in a fantasy world.

Congress is currently among the most incompetent and ineffective governining bodies on the planet. It's filled with people in safe seats (no particular effort required to win) and corporate shills who are open about it. The place needs a total purging, but that would require voters to do something other than vote for the same party every single time.

And if you expect anything out of voters these days, good luck with that.

I'm pretty sure that "it shouldn't work and should be easily hackable" were not in the spec. This is just another example of the quality of work you get when governments contract out to private companies.

CGI botched up the long gun registry in Canada in the same way many years ago.

Great answer. If you can show up with fifteen homes willing to sign up, they are a lot more inclined to take you seriously.

I'm pretty sure drugs and hiring Russian botnet operators are already Bitcoin's killer apps.

Making their desktop/laptop users hate Metro is not advancing their phone/tablet cause. It's the opposite. Nobody who has a bad experience with Metro on their PC is going to go looking for it in another environment.

They needed to make using Metro painless on PC for that strategy to work, and they failed in spectacular fashion. It's time to give PC users what they want and make Metro a secondary thing in that environment, because it simply works badly on PC and forcing it hurts their other product lines.

Its amazing how nobody at Microsoft seemed to realize that if they forced Metro on people and people didn't like it, that would harm their phone/tablet sales rather than help them.

If I hate it on my desktop PC (where it sucks), why would I want it on a tablet?

Is there a good PC version of any of these? It seems odd that they're phone-only, messaging on the computer is still very much a thing.

Beat me to it. That one was just hilarious.