Clearly, we need a major war which absolutely requires that every soldier be equipped with a personal jetpack.

Often illegal, yes. Firing birdshot into the air is not dangerous. That's why we use shotguns and birdshot to shoot birds. From the air. Birdshot's terminal velocity is low enough that by the time the shot falls to the ground it's not dangerous.

Maybe you call the cops first, then shoot down the UAV. Apparently there's empirical evidence snooper will voluntarily identify himself in to the cops in this case...

Texas is the only state that allows deadly force to be used in defense of property. This is a case where Texas is wrong and the rest of the country is right. I'm all for the right to keep and bear arms, I carry daily and am a certified concealed weapons instructor. But deadly force should only be used to defend people, not stuff.

This.

Further, even after you've unloaded it you should still obey the golden rule of gun safety: never point it at anything you don't want to destroy. If what you're doing requires breaking that rule, first disassemble it so it's no longer a gun. Then, and only then, can you stop worrying about where you're pointing it.

The reason for this is that most people who hurt themselves or others while cleaning their gun *did* unload it first. Or thought they did.

Relatively little of what teens do is going to cause them problems in later life. It's what people do between about 18 and 25 that tends to screw them. Mainly because they're old enough to drink (without having to hide it) but not yet old enough to think (well).

Do you have any evidence to back that claim up?

There are a number of features in Chrome that optionally talk to Google. But you can change them all if you prefer. Do you have any proof that it "phones home" in any hidden way? It should be quite easy to prove; Wireshark is all you need.

FWIW, I know some of the guys who started the Chrome project. Actually, they didn't start Chrome, they started V8. The point was to prove that Javascript engines could be orders of magnitude faster than they were, and to push the rest of the industry to get better, so Google's apps would be able to do more, faster. The rest of Chrome was just to show off V8. Then it became successful, both at pushing Javascript engines to get better, and as a popular browser, and Google started to use it as a test bed for other ideas about how to make the web "platform" better. Security improvements like certificate pinning. Performance (and security) improvements like SPDY and QUIC. UI simplifications like the omnibox (which geeks like to hate, but non-geeks love). Better development tools (though Firebug was and is quite good). And so on.

I don't think "better tracking of users" has ever been a goal, stated or unstated, of the Chrome project. And, seriously, why would it? It's not like the normal web standards don't offer everything that's required for whatever tracking anyone would like to do.

Or programmers who use a bunch of bested if statements because they don't understand XOR, or freak out when they see a ?: statement.

Trial and error, I expect. Look at what other sites do. I realize that this isn't a very good answer. There isn't a good answer, just bad answers that are still better than passwords. Classic OpenID isn't the answer because users don't know how to use it and many RPs don't trust random providers. But as a practical matter providing login with, say, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and AOL will give better than 95% of your users the ability to log on with better security than the password-based model you'd build, and do it just by clicking a couple of buttons.

If you find that your user base tends to have an account with some other provider (no, I can't tell you how to find out who your users are or what they use), then add that.

Clearly you don't understand engineering. Engineering isn't just "model your entire design". Engineering is decomposing your problem into problems that are "spec-able". For example, build your bridge out of steel and bolts. You don't have a model of bolts in your design, you have a spec for bolts that you use in your design that is testable (performance and tolerance) and then you use parts hierarchically in your design. The bolt is designed separately and is made out of some alloy that has specs and is tested (performance and tolerance)...

The problem with most software isn't that it can't be modelling and rely on basic physical principles, it's that many projects fail to take specs and testing seriously, and the specs that exist don't address performance and tolerance (aka, error handling). If software did this, things would be more engineered.

Right now many software artifacts are similar to the prehistoric bridges that cross chasms in jungles in third world countries. They work, people cross them every day, but things were made empirically so nobody knows what might cause them to fail, so it's hard to rely on them.

It's not that bridges that were built 100 years ago were "better", but they were actually built to specs and of course survive to this day (which can't be said for the prehistorical variety). However, improved bridges are continually desired so we use better parts and build even better bridges today because modeling allows us to get tighter specs on the parts that make up bridges and the stresses that we are putting on those parts.

But doing all that requires better engineering discipline not dismissing it as a something that isn't applicable. Engineering is an useful approximation of the physics (an approximation which always gets improved over time), not a practice of physics.