Because Europe (or at least the major European nations) already had vastly lower murder rates than the US before any gun control laws. Guns don't cause crime, culture does.

Which is supported only by your emotions and not by evidence. Literally close to half of the adults in the US own guns (and we're just talking the non-criminals here) - if guns had anything to do with "a culture of violence", the US would literally be a war zone. Hell, data on those who get concealed carry permits shows that they are the least likely people to commit a violent crime and have a significantly lower rate per capita of committing violent crimes than police officers - yes, that's right, you're several times more likely to be murdered by a police officer than to be murdered by an ordinary American that carries a concealed gun.

Not sure you second statement is true. By opening the patents of his super charging systems, it encourages other parties to put up more stations. This would make Teslas more enticing to prospective buyers. Sometimes, pro-society and pro-profit are not mutally exclusive.

No, they can't because the existing political parties control who gets access to the ballot. Sure, you could try to do a write in campaign, but there's all sorts of legal loopholes to make that incredibly difficult. The existing system will not change that in order to make it easier for you to remove them, they are currently in fact making it harder for you to have any choice between the Republicans and Democrats. That's one issue that Republicans and Democrats are very bi-partisan on - doing everything possible to block anyone else from the ballot. You have a delusion that the existing political parties will vote to end their reign simply because you tell them to. Ron Paul is a great example of this - he was too popular, so the RNC changed the rules for the primary to ensure that their preferred candidate (Romney) won. The Democrats are no better with the incident in 2012 of the members soundly rejecting putting religion as part of the party platform and then the DNC put it in anyways to try and get more religious people to vote for Democrats. Corruption is beyond rampant and you will not eliminate the corruption by playing by the rules instated by the corrupt politicians.

I'm saying that it's almost impossible for an honest person to get elected and that even the better people that get elected are rapidly corrupted by the new-found power. It's not stupid to vote against that single issue because 1) incumbents almost always get re-elected and 2) they can always BS and claim something prevented them from achieving their goals and that they "need more time" or that there were "bad things in the bill" and that they didn't want to cause more harm than good.

They are worthwhile things to study, absolutely. However, they are not worthwhile things to spend $150k+ learning when you won't be able to get a job afterwards. If your family is insanely rich and you know that you'll never need to work a day in your life, then go ahead and major in one of those fields and have no useful skills. For those that need to pay the bills, it's a horrible way to spend a decade of your life and more than enough to buy a home..

Bingo. The worst professors I ever had were tenured and didn't give a damn about the quality of their teaching and any student complaints fell on deaf ears.

Because it's at least trying to do something, even if you know it's a wasted effort.

Problems with that - 1) Those "regular people" will never end up on the ballot due to the way the existing system works. 2) That contract won't hold up in court once they're in power (remember - the government makes the rules and can change them at any time without your consent).

No, it wouldn't end. Politicians LIE in order to get elected. Once they're in power, they don't give a damn about what you think. We've had countless politicians run on things like ending the wars and ending spying, yet do the exact opposite once they're in power.

How the hell is Fast & Furious not a scandal? They willingly supplied weapons to criminal organizations with the sole intention of using it as justification to place restrictions on the rights of Americans. Whether you're pro-Second Amendment or pro-Gun Control is irrelevant - they were willingly arming dangerous people and knew innocent people would die just so that they could push an agenda. No matter what your position is on guns, that's immoral and illegal.

Not really, when the political parties decide who you can vote for. Hell, even primaries they don't really give you any choice. When they control what choices you get, you don't really have a choice. That's not even counting the fact that most of the choices are nearly identical (like Romney and Obama). Thinking that you can change a broken system by using the broken system doesn't work. The American people need to make it loud and clear that they will literally throw the government out if they do not respect our rights and the Constitution. Sadly, the overwhelming majority of Americans lack the spine to do just that and we're stuck in an endless spiral of things getting worse and worse.

Well the land-owning aspect actually has valid reasoning behind it - those who own property have a stake in the outcome, whereas those who have nothing to lose don't care about negative outcomes. See how those who make poor choices today consistently vote for a larger and more oppressive government to absolve them of responsibility for their choices / actions.

It didn't say that people shouldn't do anything, I simply pointed out that voting doesn't accomplish anything - especially since incumbents almost always win. Writing letters and voting does nothing and never has - it takes making the government truly terrified of rebellion to inspire them to make changes...and the American people have lost the will to stand up for themselves.

I do vote and write to representatives - I'm just not foolish enough to think it actually makes a difference.

That's funny that you actually believe that voters get any say in these types of programs. The US government does whatever it wants without repercussions, regardless of which party is in power - and it's been that way for a long time. They only bother with elections to provide the illusion that you're in control in order to keep the populace pacified.

The point is that if a flaw exists, when found, it can be quickly fixed in open source. You can also do your own security audit on open source software if you are really security conscious. With closed source, you have to wait for the vendor to both find and fix it (if they ever do). That said, assuming the vendor is trustworthy and would rather shut down than backdoor their software, heavily auditted close source software could easily be more secure than lightly audited open source software. If the audit levels are the same, open source wins. Part of the problem is that until recently a lot of open source security software/libraries like OpenSSL have not gone though enough auditting and vunerabilities are overlooked.