The essential nature of Social Security accounting is such that FICA tax is unrelated to FICA spending. At the moment, much of your FICA tax is spent on general fund items. In the future, much of your income tax will be spent on FICA items.
"Congress invested these surpluses into special series, non-marketable U.S. Treasury securities held by the Social Security Trust Fund. Under the law, the government bonds held by Social Security are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government."
"According to most projections, the Social Security trust fund will begin drawing on its Treasury Notes toward the end of the next decade (around 2018 or 2019), at which time the repayment of these notes will have to be financed from the general fund."
All social security revenue that is not paid out in benefits is replaced with unmarketable treasury securities and spent as part of the general fund. When social security ceases to run a nominal surplus, the money to pay for those securities will come out of the general fund. As you can see, social security is essentially part of the broader budget, and the divide between its budget and the broader budget is strictly imaginary.
As such I think it is appropriate to calculate FICA spending exactly as the author has.
The federal government actually only has about 58-59 cents of revenue for each dollar it spends. It would be slightly more accurate (if extremely inflammatory) to make an applet that generates a receipt for only entitlement spending, as entitlement spending has come within 2% of revenue recently.
Agorism is a political philosophy dedicated to the idea that free markets (and a more free society) can arise out of a trend toward disregarding governments in commercial matters. It comes with all the typical and commonly rejected anarchist ideas like "any state is inherently unjust and arbitrary," but isn't altogether unreasonable.
The author seems to think that financial reform has done anything to harm the ability of big banks to extract dollars from productive humans. It has not. Among other things, it has granted FOIA-immunity to the SEC, so that in addition to failing to regulate the industry, it can now ensure that nobody knows for certain that it fails to regulate the industry.
AAPL is among a lot of stocks that have a long way to fall before their prices can be called reasonable, but it's difficult to know when they will do it.
It is pretty easy to distinguish DRM from net-enabled features. You simply need to ask "Could the feature exist without an internet connection?" You claim that users will conflate the two regardless, but I doubt this.
Imagine an alternate dimension in which StarCraft shipped with LAN support but never supported online play over Battle.net. The StarCraft community would be based on gamer-oriented VPNs, and would likely be about as healthy as it has become in our dimension. If, when StarCraft II was announced, players learned that LAN play would still be supported, but play over Battle.net had been added, I don't think very many people would complain that the product had been deliberately crippled.
In our world, StarCraft supported LAN play and Battle.net play, while StarCraft II does not support any type of multiplayer other than over Battle.net. Battle.net play has resulted in half-second latency for all players and several days of downtime since release. Additionally, it is known that a "Professional" version of StarCraft II exists that supports LAN play - the feature has simply been removed from the retail version.
I think it is pretty clear which of these is a feature and which is not.
Yes. It should be fairly simple to generate a program that generates all strings of length 20 that will be accepted by Wells Fargo's login page. I would consider such a program a compressed version of a string containing my username and password. If you want to generate a shorter output, you might try the De Bruijn sequence.
edit: I should warn you, though, Wells is likely bankrupt, along with FDIC. If you want to plunder my accounts, you should get to work before accounting fraud becomes illegal in this country.