Unfortunately, for the scenario I was replying to, a lot of the times when you’re doing support, you can’t see the user’s screen and are limited to verbal communication, so verifying what they typed or the output can lead to just as many problems. Any support scenario where you’re talking the other person through a series of tasks will be very dependent on how familiar each person is with the task you’re supporting. And no one Rs TFM these days, if you even get one.

Just try to verbally describe the difference between a bracket, brace, or parenthesis, or forward slash vs backslash. I’m sure it will be fine. But absolutely, a text-based interface is easier to describe in text.

Oh, I have. Now imagine giving those people a command line.

As someone who read at least 2/3 of the DOS 6 manual when it came out, and have used a variety of Linux flavors as well, a command prompt is the least helpful interface devised. What do you type there? How do you let the computer know when you’re done typing? If the answers seem obvious to you, think about why, and what on the screen would point you that way if you hadn’t had training. People are very visual, in general, and a simple interface such as a mouse that directs focus and has a minimal amount of interaction options is far easier to get started with, especially if the GUI has culturally intuitive icons (save needs updating).

I don’t think the power of the command line, or text interfaces in general, can be overstated, but even the most helpful text interfaces, such as those found in some IDEs, require prior knowledge to be useful. This isn’t going to work for the majority of people.

After having gone through a number of setbacks in my life that challenged my self-identity, I realized that I needed to reassess both what I considered to be what made me “me”, and what made me worthwhile, which is similar but not the same.

You are not your job or your salary, and you are worth more than your salary. Find new target for what makes self-worth for you. It will give you better rewards than cash when you strive for them, and will give you a better perspective about money than if you tie your identity and self-worth to how much you can make.

One of the best things I did was raise my kids ad-free for the first 5 or 6 years of their lives. The first time they saw ads, they were baffled about what they were, then they were baffled why people would put up with them.

Why would you convert to decimal naming conventions when using a binary numbering system? Or do you think numeric values like 42(dec) have inherent names? That’s as silly as thinking that the freezing point of water is 0 degrees or, even worse, 32 degrees.

This is programmer humor.

10…

1…

0. Why are you still here?

I’m not the best guy to ask for sensitive responses, but try to take my blunt and possibly obnoxious response in a positive light.

There are a lot of people saying terrible things on the internet, to the point where only the more aggregious ones stand out. Most things will be ignored or forgotten by most people, whether they were good or bad, but I appreciated this post, and you for putting it out there.

I was trying to make a lewdly suggestive comment about vintage balls leaving them hanging. Apparently it wasn’t done very well, but it did have unintended and appreciated consequences.

And he just leaves them hanging.

I’m referring to the users asking the questions.

There have been plenty of studies that refute this, from various countries. I can only conclude that this belief/wish stems from a variant of the puritanical work ethic where hard work will lead to prosperity, and winning the lottery isn’t hard work so will obviously not lead to prosperity.

I’ve won the lottery. Sure, it was only a few grand and my life didn’t significantly change. Studies on winners of truly large amounts of money, in the millions, tend to have more successful outcomes, with the studies I’ve seen putting between 66% and over 80% retaining their wealth for 5 or 10 years after winning.

Doing something that demonstrably doesn’t work isn’t how you get what you want. If you want an option besides Democrats and Republicans, voting for someone else where those two options have a lock on winning does nothing besides vent some spleen.

I’m not saying doing nothing is the solution, or even voting for the two main parties is the solution, but doing something that has been shown to be completely ineffective is not the solution.

Nor should they. Lossless image manipulation doesn’t remove data. Fortunately, a dumb pedophile was caught due to his lack of security awareness.

Then rail the maid of honor on the wedding cake table. Time’s a wasting!

NASA spent more than that on the Shuttle program alone, and we got 135 launches and a dozen dead astronauts, so that is demonstrably false.

NASA is great, and did a lot of great things. We also got a lot of great technology (and some questionable shoes) because of it. But NASA suffers from the same thing Blue Origin does, bureaucracy and a top-down attitude with respect to developing technology. (They also suffered from a lot of government pork.) It’s a good system for developing new things from scratch with a clear goal, but it rarely works well for taking existing technology and wringing the most effectiveness you can out of it.

Besides all this, the shuttle program suffered from ties to the military, which put in expensive requirements that didn’t help the whole thing, either.

If NASA got out of the rocket launching business and contracted out that part of their mandate to others, they would have a lot more money to spend on other things, such as research, both pure and practical.

A little vague, but fair.

Which tools of government are used to maintain power for capitalists that also are of no use to a communist government?

Yeah, so the state is always a problem, from what I can see in your comments. But there can be other bad actors who aren’t government (we see them in every society) and they need to be dealt with one way or another, preferably in a way that the community approves of, and all of a sudden we have laws and government, which is a more general definition of Statehood.

So what I’m seeing here is that people who seem to think everyone will agree on how things should be done use the name for the group that enforces the rules, good or bad, that other people agree with as an epithet, while studiously ignoring that they will need similar bodies to deal with the bad actors within their society, since the only place where an ideal society exists is in the imagination.

Not that I have a problem with ideals, they can help provide a road map to get to where you want to be, and perhaps a achievable interim goals that are also worth striving for.

Given this paradigm, how would you describe anarchy and communism?

If there was no government, and the capitalist organization hosted their means of violence internally or by hiring thugs like the Pinkertons, would it stop being capitalism?