Except that IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc all have extensive documentation with examples. It's basically open source that sucks in this regard.

Sun always had fantastic documentation as well (try to find an old SunSolve CD). And you needed it, because it was Solaris, but if you followed it to the T, stuff worked. Unless it was buggy, but that wasn't the writers' problem.

But the barriers to contributing are high. You may not only need to learn about the application, but you need to learn any number of arcane editing and versioning tools, and then convince someone in authority to accept and include your changes.

I will appreciate the natural aversion to this idea, but we need *another project* to mediate the needs and products of open source documentation.

There are some translation websites that have been fabulously successful by making it extremely easy for volunteers to contribute translations to projects. There's nothing (that I know of) that makes it easy to match up the existing bad documentation, the user needs for new documentation, and the tools needed to easily integrate new documentation. There are some good documentation production tools - that doesn't need solving again - but the process needs some automation.

Wikis are better than nothing, but the structure is not guided and volunteers will always need guidance to succeed (and obviously wikis haven't solved the problem). The Arch Wiki is really great, but that's sadly an aberration, not typical. Nearly every Sourceforge wiki is useless, for instance. Arch has earned itself a kick-ass community and I bet a small number of volunteers were instrumental in "erecting the cathedral".

Most people blog on their own sites due to the obstacles involved with contributing good documentation. Fundamentally, it's a coordination problem, and that's something tools are good at solving.

only because the Adobe software was subject to a buffer overflow encoded in the Ruffles halftone.

Many people call themselves Christian but would not want a Christian Rock reception. You can target fans of some of the CR bands, evangelical preachers, etc. Start as narrow as possible and expand until you get some bites. A custom campaign url is probably useful for your tracking.

... that my friends have recommended and posted about. Once in a while I post about an effective product or amazing deal.

There's a simple algorithm for achieving such results: produce an impressive product.

For everything else, there's a CPM (no, not the z/80 kind) ad program. Word of advice: make the ad as incipid and vapid as possible, to save on non-converting clicks.

No kidding - Free having access to spectrum would be horrendously bad for the incumbent corporations' profits. We can't have that now, and, my, what coincidental timing! Thank goodness we have the FCC looking out for the "public interest".

There are some that are skype compatible. You can then encourage the families to buy a video phone or if they are tech savy they could skype as well.

That's what I did, and Skype/Microsoft grew tired of the old protocol version and it stopped working after about two years. They either killed their embedded edition or the vendor (Grandstream) didn't want to license it to update old phones. Same thing happened to me with proprietary D-Link devices before that - I figured going Skype would avoid the problem, but silly me.

I guess they still work as SIP devices, but as videoconferencing devices for older folks to use, they failed in less than two years. Not exactly zero maintenance.

WebRTC might actually be the best bet, but it's early in the cycle to make a great guess. Proprietary stuff will certainly become obsolete.

The first question that comes to my mind is how much would it cost to just fix the damn pipes?

Make sure you're not assuming that the $4.4B that somebody is going to get is a bug, not a feature. Some people will get extremely rich from this expenditure and that's a powerful motivator.

What's the big deal with a few dead cabbies when the City has millions of dollars of medallion sales at stake?

DoL puts a human life at about $8M in value. A medallion commonly costs a quarter million. So, 8*4 = 32. Do one in 32 cabbies die? No, so "society" comes out ahead (while netting the City a nice kitty).

You gotta learn to think like a psychopath!

Is that discount chain a media related product? Because if it's not then it meets their criteria.

It might, but that's still silly. If they were based in Germany and came up with "K-Mart" as their name, Americans would mock it. Let's work with people as they actually exist.

Xtreme Broadband Media Center or whatever would have kept the momentum.

They're not preying on gullible kids, they're taking advantage of stupid and irresponsible parents

Or parents who think that they can just let the kids do what they want now, to shut them up, and dispute the charges later with the credit card company. That way they don't "have to be the bad guy" with their kids either, by saying "no".

It's really screwed up, and I've seen it most in broken families.

My kids both have Android devices, and once in a while they'll get a gift card for a holiday, but by and large they just find stuff to do that's free. Do they have to earn their way up in games? Yep, just like we did as kids (here I'm willfully ignoring turning my paper route money into quarters at the arcade).

Nah, Plus Photos needs an insane frenetic unusable landing page like Hangouts and then only ten percent of the features of Picasa, so they can go ahead and kill Picasa and then kill Plus Photos in two years when nobody uses it.

or a car that is stopped completely (doesn't see it at all)

Ouch. This is rare, but I've seen it.

I'd be afraid if I was on a 50-mile stretch without having to think about speed my mind would wander, and I wouldn't notice this stopped car.

I'm the guy who never uses cruise control unless it's flat and empty for as far as the eye can see, though, so maybe I'm atypical.

Therefore, Congress will pass a law making itself exempt from CIA/NSA spying and the rest of the country be damned.

It's already illegal - you think the CIA is going to care about another law to ignore?

he'd have been fired on the spot for lying to his superiors for months and trying to cover up his own incompetence.

The boss can lie to his underlings all he wants. You seem to be going by book-learning on which is which here and ignoring the data.