You must be mistaken. Accidents only happen to other people. And accidents only happen to idiots.

TFA isn't about American politics. Neither was my comment.

That's not really a problem since according to TFA they can be opened in seconds. Your 3-year old can even retrieve it for you!

In what world can owning a car be compared to owning a gun? Quick reminder: one is designed to go from one place to another, the other is designed to kill other people.

Best way to be gun safe is to have no gun in the first place.

Ironically, independent is apparently spelled that way because the English couldn't (or wouldn't) spell the French "indépendant" correctly. To get back to the point, communicating means conveying meaning to another. If you do not play by the grammatical rules, you lessen the probability of your meaning getting across, because they are a standard that all parties implicitely decide to use. English has comparatively few grammatical rules, but I can assure you that errors in French can easily alter and degrade understanding. Also, if you put the strain of trying to understand you on others, you are just wasting their time because you did not want to spare yours. Others recognize it and a less liable to repeat the effort.

You seem to imply that the meaning of a message is independant of the message itself. That's clearly not true. A small grammatical error can dramatically alter the overall meaning of a sentence. How far do you rely on the recipient to put himself in your shoes to try to infer what you meant?

Grammar used to be something that you learned in school. Using correct grammar means that you can express your thoughts clearly, which means that you can think clearly. You can use tools to catch typing mistakes, but if you need them to correct grammar, the problem lies with you.

For private conversations, maybe. At work, though, bad grammar always makes you look like an idiot. How would you like to hire someone who can't even spell correctly on their resume?

You're forgetting the part where using improper grammar makes you look like an idiot.

This happened to me once. At first I thought it was a hard drive problem, it took me a while to figure it out. I lost many pictures in the process, and had rsync'd corrupted files over my backup. To me the problem now is: how to make sure what I'm backing up is not corrupted and that my previous backup, about to be overwritten, is not cleaner than my source?

The quote in the summary is funny. Nietzsche wrote something much more interesting and thorough about cause and effect and what it means for science in 1882. That's right, Wired's newfound worry about science today has already been dealt with 130 YEARS AGO.
http://books.google.fr/books?id=Vf8KETLiKXMC&pg=PA113&lpg=PA113&dq=nietzsche+gay+science+cause+effect&source=bl&ots=7pQG91yPvP&sig=JFwAumRAPzIqqwwMDk2XPbpqqIE&hl=fr&sa=X&ei=X0spT-fROYje8QODzZ2kAw&ved=0CFoQ6AEwAw

so you don't have the knowledge to appreciate a dslr, yet you're willing to buy a similarly expensive mirrorless camera with multiple lenses?

If you buy a cheap 50mm for your camera, it'll work from entry level to pro body. I only use Canon since I got the 350d, but since then I steadily upgraded my gear, lenses and bodies. I never was at a point where a lens was not compatible with my camera. At one point of course you can choose to sell a lens to get a better one, but that doesn't mean all of your gear has become useless. So I don't get where you think this is a fallacy -- it actually is one of the strongest selling points for DSLRs, image quality aside.

Smugmug, and also a spare external hard drive for monthly backups. That should be enough.