> So... who gives a shit?

Clearly some butthurt slashbots do. Otherwise they wouldn't be objecting to the idea so fiercely.

If you don't have to sign your name to it and take personal responsibility for it when it breaks, you simply aren't a professional engineer. You're just a wannabe trying to pretend you're more respectable than you really are.

Software is Max Max territory compared to any real engineering discipline.

The food? Anything you can buy from someone else, I can probably do better. That's the flip side of not living in some closet in an overhyped urban center.

The "lawn" also comes with fresh fruits,vegetables and herbs.

You don't sound like someone that's ever had to live in a place where drive by shootings are problem. Clearly you are not because you don't acknowledge the problem of violent crime in general. You clearly have no clue what else people in poor violent neighborhoods have to deal with.

It's not just the guns.

You think you can be smug because "there are no guns" but the guns really have nothing to do with it.

The real reason you can be smug is that you don't live in some festering ghetto. Your silver spoon protects you from harm. Repressive gun laws really have squat to do with it.

> Mandatory validation of sexual preference

Nope. Not forced "validation", just "forced" tolerance. That is a manifestation of our founding ideals regarding religion. We are simply not a Sharia Law nation. Even our devout founding fathers knew the dangers of mixing church and state.

Religious wars and repression weren't such a distant memory for them.

If you can't handle all of this, I suggest moving to Iran where you will find like minded people.

It's not small minded. It actually makes a remarkable amount of sense. Foreign nationals that like to lecture anyone else are like the GOP crowd that thought they could mold Iraq into a western style democracy while ignoring the fact that the Iraqis are a distinct people with their own history and characteristics.

Bleeding heart liberals and Eurotrash that think that they can just impose foreign ideas on the US are just like that.

Take a good long look in the mirror. The face that should be looking back at you should be George Bush the younger because you are EXACTLY like him and a moron for the same reasons.

Even in Europe neighboring countries have wildly divergent cultures and trying to impose the same regime on all of them is problematic. So trying to impose a European style nanny state in the US might run into problems.

The US is pretty much made up of all the people that rejected the European way of doing things at one time or another. That's still very much reflected in our politics. A US solution needs to be something blindly transplanted from somewhere else and imposed upon us Bush+Iraq style.

Plus there's the obvious scaling issue. The US is just bigger.

Is there a successful beaurocracy of any kind that covers the entire EU?

> Up here in Canada guns are severely restricted. As a result, it's unlikely in the extreme that you'll ever have one pointed at you.

It's not the guns. It's the people. If you aren't comfortable walking in their 'hood at night then it doesn't matter if they are armed or not. They can kill you just as easily by beating you to death.

Do you regularly flaunt your whiteness in the wrong neighborhood?

If you're really too frightened to try then you're just blithering idiot and hypocrite ignoring the real issues here.

I don't care if my neighbors are armed or not because I don't live in some shithole. I don't feel the need to meddle in their business or take away their stuff or anything else that's ultimately anti-social. I don't need to be afraid of the guy next door.

It's a commonly held American myth that living in a "real city" magically eliminates the daily commute. It does not. It just makes the commute different. It will likely be just as long and might even be even more miserable.

Being jam packed into some subway or bus isn't a real improvement. This is even with giving mass transit the best possible advantages in the comparison (good European systems versus nightmarish American ones).

Security is fine if you are no one of interest. It doesn't matter if it's physical security or computer security. Once you are important enough for anyone to be interested in, most security measures are completely meaningless. This is just the harsh reality.

For most of us, security measures just dissuade the opportunitistic idiot trying for an easy score with no particular interest in you as an individual.

Once you've managed to attract unwanted attention, you will have to engage more serious security measures (in general).

It is most certainly bullshit if your cavalier attitude towards my resources causes my application to grind to a halt because you are too greedy and there simply isn't enough to go around.

Engineers study the sciences, and math. Why should it be any different for computing professionals? They should be exposed to the same kinds of "fundementals" you would associate with other "serious STEM" programs.

You never know. He might have and those are just pay stubs. It all could just be a colossal misunderstanding on this part.

A fictional character can be as much of a dufus as the rest of us.

...or better yet. People that like to whine about documentation actually contribute to that documentation once they have gone to the trouble to sort themselves out.

You determine your own level of involvement with project mayhem.

Government paying for birth control? I thought that was about corporations being "forced" to pay for birth control. Although that was all about corporations being "forced" to allow the employees to spend the money in question.

The government paying for birth control in general is not such a bad idea. The poor ones might actually use it and breed less poverty.

You would think that Republicans would be all about shrinking the welfare rolls and doing pretty much anything to do it, even kicking fundies to the curb in the process.

> what a person that builds a car?

Cars are much more complex than computers. The PC form factor has always been designed like a big Lego set. If you can put together a toy or follow a recipe, then you can "build" a PC.

Just putting cars and computers in the same post here shows such disrespect for mechanics that you might as well go to your nearest garage and start pissing on everyone.

> if you're required to resort to a daily PPA

All this represents is the latest product available. It's like going to a hardware vendor's site for the latest version of their driver. Except the Ubuntu version is actually MUCH MUCH easier.

You're whining about having to install something, as if this is a great tragedy on any commercial platform.

Total double standard. Extreme hypocrisy.