Sounds pretty paranoid, I thought all of those guns in the US were supposed to be making you safer than Australia.

The best way to survive a bad situation, guns or no, is to avoid it in the first place.

Has the ACLU ever actively worked against gun ownership, though? They interpret the 2nd as applying to government-controlled military, not individual rights, but I don't know that they've tried enforce gun control. Here's a case where they defended a gun-rights supporter, though because of the violation of his civil liberties and not because of his firearms.

It's also a matter of domain rather than interest; where the ACLU doesn't take cases that could violate the 2nd, the NRA steps in. Why should the ACLU spend its resources on a battle the NRA can fight?

Similarly, I haven't heard much about the NRA working to protect free speech or the right to proper legal representation outside of fire-arm-related cases...

This one isn't too hard; the best way to "fix" this is stop using Verizon and supporting their horrible company. I had them for a few years and always had excellent cell service, but everything else sucked balls. I switched to T-Mobile's pay-as-you-go plan and have saved a ton of money without supporting the cellular devil.

(I realize that there are contracts etc., but seriously, if you can you should drop them like a hot potato.)

What if they're going to pull an Apple and move to *nix as the Windows kernel, offering their standard GUI on top of it? Since Android is based off of Linux, this would give them a stepping stone for maintaining the "one GUI, every device" paradigm they're trying to push when they transition.

I know, I know, this seems implausible, but I can't see them adopting Android outright as their phone OS (even if they change the GUI) because of the amount of control that Google has over it. Sure, Cyanogen can claim they'll "take Android from Google", but good luck.

Or, maybe it's the reverse: Take Android from Google, then change up Android and make Google play Microsoft's rules.

I'm hoping that advertising dies as a primary revenue stream purely so that sites like Buzzfeed can die. Not just Buzzfeed, but there are entire networks of websites that do two things:
1) Repost someone else's original content
2) Display one at a time along with three ads
Sets of these kinds of sites use the same network and just have different domain names in order to get around any blocking. They seem to target StumbleUpon, which is where I primarily run into them, hence the need for different domains since StumbleUpon lets you block results from an entire domain.

Stuff like Patreon and Kickstarter are showing alternatives to advertising, standard subscription models, and random donations, and this will only pick up as the fight against ads increases.

Hell, I've noticed less ads on Hulu (free version); previously I could expect two+ minutes of ads per break, but recently there have been 2, 1, and in rare cases no ad break at the marked spot even on videos I would expect to be popular. This is without running any kind of ad blocking (the computer I watch it on is a dumb media player), so something has changed in that regard.

The twitter-friendly response is, "Just because I have nothing to hide, it doesn't mean I'm happy with a webcam on my toilet."

The thought that always comes to me is "I have nothing to fear, so I have nothing to hide. If I have nothing to hide, why do you need to look?"

Why not something that rotates? Have it pointed down when not in use, but it rotates forward if you want. Not only does this make it easy to see if someone could be filming, it also allows someone to have it record in a different direction than they're looking while still freeing up hands, projecting the image onto a corner of the glasses. Imagine someone riding a bike having this pointed backwards so they can see if something is coming up without using awkward mirrors or having to look over their shoulder.

If there's a motor small enough, it could rotate automatically into the downward position when not actively being used.

Although, on average, men and women are about the same, men have a higher variance.

You're the third +5 I've seen in this thread with that assertion. Can someone link a study or group of studies that supports this?

I'm not saying you're wrong, but seeing it so often with no source makes me wonder if it's become "common wisdom".

I received several full ride offers to college. But it was because I worked my ass off. I was only modestly talented.

The quip "The world needs ditch diggers" can easily be extended to "The world needs moderately talented ditch diggers". No one stands on their own shoulders, and even the best of those math whiz's will need someone who can understand most of what they say and can check their math, or do some more mediocre work of their own that helps out the "smarter" person.

To put it in a car analogy, it doesn't matter how great your engine is if there aren't wheels to go along with it.

To put it in a programming analogy, the lead developer/architect will always need someone to implement dwim().

Even if you can't be great[1], you can still be good, and most times that's good enough.

[1] I question that assumption; introspection is an incredibly useful quality that a lot of people, even seemingly-smart people, lack. You appear to do a lot of it, so you can probably go further than you can imagine right now.

Everybody says "Think of the children"
Nobody says "Think of the children's future"...

Yes, anything that puts science to a face and makes it approachable, normal and something to be admired or respected is always a good thing.

Cast your wishes carefully.

Any person who can be pointed to as someone both scientific and popular can be useful for the general population, but also creates an easy target. We've had stories on Slashdot before about companies/people trying to get as much personal e-mail as possible about scientists, not because they believe they can find evidence of forgery on the part of the scientist, but trolling for any kind of negative character trait they can parade into the press. Does he curse a lot? Like hiring prostitutes? Is a closet homosexual? Doesn't hold the door open for women? Once an accusation sticks (even a false one), then they only have to use a broad brush to paint those traits on all like-minded scientists; sadly, our population will eat. It. Up.

I guarantee you there are more than a few people who have the personal goal of digging up heavy dirt on Neil deGrasse Tyson. If they could find evidence of financial fraud, a torrid love affair, or (jackpot!) pedophilia it would spread across our 24/7 news networks like wild fire.

If we had a number of scientists highly-respected by the public, such tactics wouldn't be as useful, but right now in the general public there are only a half-dozen or so. If someone polled random folks on the street you would likely get few more answers than Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye

that we shouldn't question the science that is proven.

Where does he say this? I would not be surprised if he said something against deniers--climate-change for instance--but these kind of people aren't asking questions.

Imagine two people have a debate about what kind of fruit something nebulous is. Person A goes "It's round and has a warm color, so some type of citrus, and based on the size I'd say it's an orange." Person B goes "NO IT'S NOT" Person A asks B "Why do you think it's not an orange?" Person B responds "IT'S NOT AN ORANGE."

This is what many politicians and non-scientists due when presented with a scientifically-driven theory (scientific sense, not layman) that conflicts with one of their motivations (power, profit, etc.) These are "deniers". There are some, few of whom get any time on news channels, that are presented with the idea and go "Okay, but your original conclusions say that X would happen, but instead we are experiencing Y, something similar-but-different. How do you explain the difference?" These are people who ask questions, and those who ask a lot of questions like this are "skeptics". Good skeptics are useful in science (better if they can do their own science to show new results or invalidate old ones), and I would be quite surprised if NDG was talking about these kind of people.

This is like saying "Why would you pay for [$NICE DINING ESTABLISHMENT] when you can get a hobo to feed you poop for free?" (Or, for those who require car analogies, "Why would you purchase a vehicle when you can jump on the back of a bus for free?")

I suppose if you're the type who likes having a selection of ~40 songs 90% of the time, separated by annoying commercials and whatever the "DJ" spews forth, then radio is fine. Personally, when I want to listen to music, I want to listen to just music. Preferably of a wide variety and stuff I know I'll like, so all my devices that can have music on them do, from my personal collection (bought-and-paid), including my car. Sure, I might miss out on some new music I would enjoy while driving, but I will happily do so over having to deal with the crap surrounding it. I listen to Pandora One while at work or home, which I pay for to also get rid of the commercials, so I'll hear the new music anyway.

I did so in response to FireFox's default being changed to Yahoo!; I knew I didn't want Y!, but I didn't really want to go back to Google for the same reasons as you. DuckDuckGo was one of the other options immediately available (dunno if it came with it or I had installed that as an option years ago) and now I use that for my default.

I miss some stuff about Google search--like the "instant facts" that often told me what I wanted to know, directly on the search results page--but I also find DDG to be competent enough to turn to Google very little.

When I realized the difference after I upgraded, I actually changed my search engine to DuckDuckGo because I wanted to give that a shot rather than defaulting back to Google. So even if people didn't stick with Yahoo, the change may have helped other search providers.