Just need to print the bacon and you'll have a fine meal in no time.

Thank you, yes, what you said. I forgot, the phrase 'big government' means something else in the US and has strong connotations for some people.

This is just yet another big government project gone awry. We get these in the UK all the time. I seriously doubt anyone is talking about the testing of this particular project though. Those involved in testing will just keep doing what they do, good ones doing it properly, bad ones doing it, well badly. The other 99% of the population will just bitch about the site as being generally crap but they won't be saying 'They really should have done more integration and load testing'

Plus of course, not all currencies have just 2 decimals and some have exchange rates which produce huge numbers such as the Yen.

I work in a bank. Our end of day processing runs up numbers in the trillions. Individual currency accounts used for internal processing can easily be in hundreds of billions.

Indeed. I've picked up some PHP to build myself a CMS for a personal website project and C# for another pet project. TBH, my employer tends to work with safe, tried and tested tech for stability so the only way I could get exposed to anything particularly new and 'trendy' is to do it myself and how better to learn something than a project or two at home?

Based on previous examples, what seems to work well for American's to really get it together tech wise is to have a president outline a grand, almost impossible plan then shoot them. Worked for Kennedy/Apollo and Reagan/Star Wars although obviously Ronnie got better.

Anyone agree with me here?

Not really, hobbyist isn't a synonym for bad.

Plus everythng I write is commented to death with notes about how something works, why it was done like that, things to watch for if changing it later etc.

Which is why you give a programming test onsite.

Any number of which I'd probably fail as pulling random function names/jargon out the air isn't my forte. OTOH, I've been coding for 35 years, know where to find the answers to anything I need to know and can crank out pretty much bug free code until the cows come home. As an e.g., last task I was given was to monitor an IBM MQ for SWIFT payments, parse them, pull out the good stuff, validate it and put it in an oracle DB. Wrote it in ProC. Never used ProC (had used C though), Oracle or MQ before yet amazingly it went through testing with only one minor bug and that was a problem with the spec rather than the code. I even threw in diagnostic modes you could select with switches at run time to give verbose logging. Last count I've used 20+ languages from Assembler to 4GLs, across various Unix, DOS, Windows and VMS. As I said though, I'd be amazed if I could answer more than a handful of questions on the spot even though I was (so long ago..) a MCSD or whatever the MS dev training used to be called.

Buses have gps trackers, internal cameras recording all journeys to hard disk, recorders on the vehicle management systems etc. They can replay who got on/off and every press of the brake/accelerator the driver makes. The latter is used for insurance purposes to prove how the driver responded to accidents etc.

You decided to vote for the Tories

To be fair, labour were just as bad - a lot of the survelience law was passed by them. The only real difference between the left/right in the UK is which way they shaft you. they both shaft you though.

Modded down for a joke? Man you guys are up tight.

As an extreme case, the BBC has reported on scrolls from Pompeii and Herculaneum that were 'destroyed' by Vesuvius are now starting to reveal their secrets using some pretty impressive techniques. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25106956

(yes, i am Greek... but don't hate me, i love 'Murica!)

Are you sure you're European?