You'll be happy to find out that SNAP (aka "food stamps") is already one of the best run programs our government has ever set up in terms of efficency and lack of fraud. It is a model for effective solutions to social problems. That fraud is rampant among SNAP receipients is simply a myth--and one that has been deliberatly crafted over generations to achieve certain political goals.

There will come a time when people who are guilty of nothing more than being born of mere average intelligence will not have any "meaningful" contributions to make to the scaffolding of society. We're already there for a lot of people. What do you propose we do about them? They're going to get their means of survival one way or another. I'd rather it be a peaceful and orderly process instead of violent anarchy. They may not have the technical skills to be computer programmers or engineers, nor the artistic talent to be great painters or composers, but guns, clubs, and jars of gasoline are technologies they'll readily understand and immediately grasp the utility of in their struggle to exist. Denied the opportunity to participate in the future economy by their unexceptional intelligence, they will not simply lay down and resign themselves to starving to death.

My favorite simpleton is the one who uses MS Word as their file manager.

I actually have infinite patience for anyone willing to learn the correct way to do something. When someone just wants me to make their horribly inefficient, kludgy, jerry-rigged, workflow continue to work across OS/software versions, I become very annoyed.

It was around at the right time to capture a large percentage of normies just getting online for the first time. These people don't like change. They don't really "like" computers in general. To them they're just tools; very frustrating and obtuse tools. Changing e-mail addresses is far more trouble than it is worth--we can barely get these people to give up Windows XP.

No, not really. There isn't a viable left-wing party in the USA. The Democrats are moderately pro-business center-right and the Republicans are extremely anti-regulation, anti-tax, pro-business far right. There's more divergence on a few (mostly irrelevant) social issues, which is why people think there's a bigger difference than there really is.

I'll have the bravery--which Americans used to pride themselves on--to state that I'd rather there be another attack than live with the current NSA abuses. I'd rather die with my liberty than live without it. And it's a false choice anyway, like you said. This won't make us safer, it won't prevent another attack. We're not trading away liberty for safety. We are giving away liberty, getting no extra safety, and becoming a police state. It's lose-lose-lose. There's no trade off. There's no balance. It's the ever tightening ratchet of fascism.

There are trivial workarounds for both platforms.

Please explain how a legitimate business, which has to answer to the court of public opinion, not to mention the real courts, would be able to monetize blackmail (an illegal activity).

It's even more laughable than that. You can simply take a screenshot and it'll be saved permanently. In iOS, press the home button and the lock button at the same time. I'm sure it's easy with Android, too.

There's precedent for the FLOSS community not giving a fuck about software patents. They're not enforceable globally and the internet is still mostly borderless, at least in the "free" world. How many open source media players are out there that technically violate the patents on MP3, Windows and Apple codecs, et al? There's no trouble distributing those.

The number of people who think along those lines, and who are reasonably informed, morally competent, and not shilling for the NSA, is precisely zero. If you are against Snowden and what he did, you are defective in one of the aforementioned ways.

YOUR feminism doesn't sound like mainstream feminism. YOUR feminism doesn't sound like feminism at all. It sounds like you're an egalitarian who mistakenly wandered into the feminist camp and picked up their lingo. Here's a tip you'll be thankful, get rid of that label. Stop calling yourself a feminist, because when you really examine what they stand for, you'll find that's not what you want to be.

Do you know what you call a mainstream feminist in 2013? An egalitarian. Those who choose to differentiate themselves by adopting the feminist monicker are either true believers of female-supremacy or ignorant of the core beliefs to which they're hitching their wagon. If you consider yourself a feminist, you're importing a great deal of positions and ideas which you might not be proud of when exposed to the light of day.

There's an undercurrent of hatred for men in most feminist theory. The current strain lusts after the idealized future when men will be exterminated; made exiguous through biological and genetic science as the human race becomes a species entirely composed of females.

If you want to get away from that implication of hatred, you have to drop the label of "feminist". There's no other choice. If you choose to use the feminist label, you're choosing to stand and be counted with those people who want all male babies to be castrated.

Feminist thought doesn't need to be caricatured to be ridiculed. It's ridiculous enough all on its own. These are the "all heterosexual sex is rape" crowd. These are the people who believe, and this is mainstream feminist doctrine, that women are unable to commit rape; and that the accusation of rape (by a woman against a man, only) constitutes proof of the crime.

We already have a perfectly good word and social movement promoting real equality. It's called egalitarianism. Feminism excludes half the population from concern right in the statement of its name. Feminism is not the solution to my problems as a man, and I will not stand to have it said otherwise. I refuse to be talked to in that tone of voice.

You really, really, really, don't want a "free" market anyway. A "free" market leads to Somalia. What you want is a fair market, and a fair market requires government intervention to stop one company from becoming so dominant that they can dictate all the terms. This naturally happens from time to time and requires government to force the company to break up so the market can be "reset" and healthy competition restored.

It's also possible for the mechanism of government intervention to be captured and used for the opposite of its intended purpose. That's what's happening here with AT&T. But this is not inevitable or uncorrectable, and it is not a knock-down argument against ever using government intervention to make the market fair. It can work effectively and provide better outcomes, it has worked in the past, it will work in the future.