How does the government expect people to live without a job? And do I need to dig up citations for employers turning down candidates who don't have a mobile phone because they can't return calls for a second interview, or turning down candidates who don't have a Facebook account because they don't have a Facebook account?

Trying to explain my points a bit more explicitly:

Some might claim that people with home Internet are more likely to have a cell phone.

One of the possibilities was that ubuntuforums.org might either A. adopt similar auth to Facebook or B. just rely on Facebook login.

Facebook is relying on the telephone number as a unique key to identify real people. Anybody can generate trillions of e-mail addresses by registering a domain and using catch-all forwarding. It's supposed to be cost-prohibitive to register a phone number just to create a single Facebook account.

The government requires people to find a job in order to live outside prison. If all employers in the field for which one is trained require a mobile phone, then the government requires a mobile phone.

I thought the products whose names start with iP were the return of the Newton, and the new gaming functionality that ships in iOS 7 was the return of the Pippin. So you might want to revise your analogy.

Why bring in aptitude? I thought that from the command line, apt-get did the same thing.

How much does OpenSSH + the basic LAMP stack add to the base install?

I thought Facebook was already premium. In order to skip the friend request CAPTCHA, post videos, add a page, or even to log in to your account after a while, you have to verify your account, which requires having a unique mobile phone number. A house phone won't work if you share this phone with another Facebook user in your household, and a lot of house phone carriers can't receive texts anyway.

Some people don't have Internet. In any case, you already need your own phone number to sign up for Facebook unless you still have access to a university e-mail address.

I agree with you that something reversible like encryption is not the best primitive to protect a shared secret when users are logging in to a server, such as the case in the article. But when the server is itself logging in to another server, it still needs to store a shared secret reversibly. For example, this secret might be an API key used by the payment processor to charge a credit card or a transaction ID used by the payment processor to refund a charge.

This shopping cart uses OpenID and Google sign-in, but OpenID sign-in doesn't work for Yahoo! because Yahoo!'s OpenID provider uses redirects for the verification step and PHP cURL doesn't follow redirects if an open_basedir is set.

For the attacker before the mail even gets to the intended user.

For those people who have the discretionary income to fly to key signing parties.

For people who already pay hundreds of dollars a month for cell phone service. A lot of households still share a POTS house phone among members because it's cheaper than a cell phone with unlimited minutes per person.

I was under the impression that the Windows binaries of VLC automatically install that code separately.

True, bipartisan support is hard to find since the rise of the Tea Party, but it takes only 67 senators and two-thirds of the House to override President Obama's veto. Anything passed through a voice vote, such as the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, can be assumed to have at least 80 percent assent and should easily pass once it goes back for a roll-call.

"I am shark food" is more attractive to females who prefer "I want a mate who has proven that he can outrun sharks". It's signaling, just like what a peahen looks for.

The replacement is native code.

I'm certain that experienced developers of mouse-driven games for Windows on PCs can still obtain Xbox One devkits through an accredited disc game publisher. Of course this requires you to conceive, implement, ship, and market a game in a mouse-driven genre to demonstrate your competence. And you'll need certain professional social networking skills, which don't come easily to people with some disabilities that correlate with programming skill, to negotiate with a publisher. But as another Slashdot user has repeated to me over the years: "them's the breaks."