Make it easy for your users to report real problems to your developers.

Many years ago, I did tech support for a small startup that used a proprietary database (btrieve, I think) as part of its back end. The developer who wrote that part would have the program show the user the exact error message returned if the database had a problem. Alas, not only didn't the messages make any sense to the users, they didn't make sense to me, either, and I wasn't given any access to the documentation, meaning that unless the developer came down from his ivory tower, they were useless. Not only that, he refused to modify his code so that we had an idea which file was causing the error. This is just one of the reasons that the company folded.

... you're going to have a lot of folks in the army who don't have an education much past that...

I don't know what the requirements are for enlistment now, but I do know that back when I was in the Navy ('Nam era) it was pretty much a given that everybody in the Navy had at least graduated from High School. Of course, back then, the Navy had the highest mental standards (and the Marines the lowest, although they did have the highest physical standard) and I don't know what the Army required. Now that there's no draft, I wouldn't be surprised to find that all branches required either a High School Diploma or GED. You might want to revise your image of soldiers as ignorant, functionally-illiterate thugs.

... there are something like 17 different representations of strings depending on which engineer/department wrote the code!

That can't possibly be a good thing. What's worse is, there's no reason to think that any of the code checks to see which type of string it's been passed instead of just assuming that it's been sent the One True String.

Either way, you need to be savvier than your average Windows user.

That's not exactly setting the bar very high, is it?

Batman no; Spiderman maybe. I can remember at least once he was out in LA introducing himself as "your friendly coast-to-coast Spiderman."

About three years ago. All went well and my vision is much improved.

Aphakia is the absence of a lens, either congenital or through surgery (e.g. cataract sugery).

I have had cataract surgery in both eyes, but I don't have aphakia. In both cases, I had artificial lenses put in that completely corrected my astigmatism and changed me from being severely nearsighted to slightly farsighted. (I need reading glasses for closeup work because my minimum focus is about two feet.) My ophthalmologist was slightly disappointed because I didn't quite end up with perfect vision. I know a number of other people who've had cataracts removed and all of them now have artificial lenses.

I can now claim to be at least partly bionic because I have ocular implants and adjustable augmented hearing.

I too am certain that I'm not color blind. If I were, I wouldn't have been able to serve in Uncle Sam's Navy.

He's quite right, as you can see here.

...why does GNU's documentation still only document the differences?

I'm only guessing here, but it seems reasonable that much of that was written back in the early days when most people using Linux had migrated from one or another form of Unix and all the users needed was a list of differences. Then, of course, other people copied that form of "documentation" under the impression that this was what was expected of them.

Linux has won. Most Linux users have never used a traditional Unix, and most never will.

You say that as though you think it's a bad thing. Think of it as evolution in action.

Huge dinosaurs disappeared, for the same reason huge battleships did.

Wrong. Battleships were so big because they needed to be to carry what was then the most effective weapon available: high-caliber, long-range gunnery. By the end of WWII they had been rendered obsolete by the development of effective naval aviation, carried on aircraft carriers that are even bigger than battleships were.

How? Even if the border patrol blocked the entrances on the US side, the owners could always provide a door on the Canadian side and there's no real way to stop people from going into Canada and using them. And, as the tavern was a Canadian business, American LEOs wouldn't have had any jurisdiction as long as the sales were made on the Canadian side of the building.

I've had to clean up my desktop after an upgrade didn't finish properly and I only had a CLI to work with. Knowing how to use at least one non-GUI text editor and having that editor installed already was a life saver because without it I couldn't have gotten the network up again and without that, I couldn't have installed an editor. Remote admin is one good reason to know how to work without a GUI, but it's not the only one.

I've been using nano, or as I like to call it, "Mork's editor," for a number of years when I've needed (or wanted) to do text editing in a CLI environment under Linux and I've never had a bit of trouble with it, even with line endings. You just have to remember that in some places, such as /etc/fstab, you need to make sure there's a /n at the end of every line, including the last one. Of course, my bashrc includes alias nano='nano -w -m' which may well explain why I've had such good luck with it.