Ease of use and good user experience are not always synonymous. In most cases they are, but if you're making it easy to do something that can't be easily undone, someone will do that accidentally and then have the frustration of fixing that. For example, I was recently working on allowing some software to interface with a connected scale. One of the things you can do through that interface is tare the scale, but after implementing that I decided that it was too easy to accidentally hit the tare button instead of the weigh button with the consequence that the person using the software would then have to re-tare the scale and re-weigh to get the correct measurement. So I took the tare button out figuring that people would generally rather do that at the scale itself anyway. I'll probably put it back in at some point, but it will be a little harder to hit that accidentally when I do. Your example is too vague to say who is right in your particular case.

And here's another from 2006: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painstation

Yes and no. The signals and slots mechanism is still there and it's still using moc, but there's a new connection syntax available that's a lot more C++ like, allows C++11 lambdas in place of slots, and offers compile-time checking of connections that previously would just fail at run time. Won't please the purists, but it's a step in the right direction.

The fraud detection heuristics must be very strange. In my case I've never had a problem using a card traveling in foreign countries (and I never tell them I'm going aside from usually having purchased the plane ticket months in advance), no problem buying industrial equipment, but attempting to buy groceries at a place I frequently buy groceries? Yeah, that's suspicious and worth declining the transaction and shutting down the card until I call to have it reactivated. I've never had a true positive detection and wish they'd just give up trying with me and instead let me tell them if something is wrong.

Note that in a lot of cases the caffeine in pain killers come from coffee. Depending on how a coffee is decaffeinated, the caffeine can be removed from the binding agent, sold to pharmaceutical companies, and added to your pain killers. I wouldn't be surprised if that's a common source of caffeine for drinks with caffeine added. Tea, of course, produces its own caffeine as do several other plants.

I'd say keep telling your doctor you don't drink coffee (or take up coffee drinking) but mention the pain killers separately.

What the sales tax pays for probably varies depending on where you are, but one of the things I keep seeing in these sorts of stories are the assumption that it pays for infrastructure used by businesses not paying the tax. Is that really the case? It didn't match with my recollection on the matter so I did a bit of research. Anybody interested in doing similar should be able to find the information in the comprehensive annual financial reports from their state department of revenue.

In Wisconsin, sales tax makes up about 30% of the general purpose revenue for the state (about 18% of total state government revenue). This is used to fund several programs, most notably school aids, shared revenue paid to municipalities, medical assistance programs, the University of Wisconsin system, prisons, property tax credits, community aids, tax relief to individuals, other public assistance, and WI technical college system aids.

Since a big chunk of that is money paid to local governments, I then went to the budget for my city to see where that was going. It's paying for public safety (fire and police department), public works (planning, surveying, mapping, city engineering, emergency management, building inspection, trash removal, snow removal, bridge and street maintenance, weed cutting, street lighting, traffic signs), parks, recreation, and cultural services (several area parks, community centers, a museum, the zoo), and general administration. That public works section is about 16% of the city budget and street maintenance is about 23% of that, or about 3% of the total city budget. Looking at revenue for the city, shared revenue from the state would fall under intergovernmental revenue, making up a portion of 42% of city revenues.

So, while it's certainly possible that some sales tax money ends up funding local roads, the vast majority of that is paid for from a different fund through, for example, fuel taxes. Don't misunderstand me. There's a lot of good stuff that sales tax money goes to, but the suggestion that it's largely going to infrastructure that out of state businesses rely on doesn't seem to be true, at least where I am. YMMV.

I wouldn't hold it up as any kind of example of great code (so there are certainly opportunities to improve it and it is still under active development), but another open source (MIT licensed) literate C++ program you can add to the list is some software I've written for data logging/record keeping in commercial coffee roasting facilities. I've tried to keep the generated source documentation reasonably easy to read and understand and the program is used daily at several coffee firms throughout the world.

http://www.randomfield.com/programs/typica/index.html