Depends. Who owns the C API?

Oh dear. This could be a problem for anyone who uses a C compiler. Who owns the original C APIs anyways? Dennis Ritchie maybe?

I wonder who owns the SQL APIs? Oracle may have a problem here...

Dunno; I used to have some really weak passwords on sites which I don't care about. Never as bad as "123456" but almost. I wish more sites used something like OpenID so I could centralize my authentication (and get 2-factor) and not have forgotten authentication info at dozens of sites on the web.

Now I use a password manager so I can use distinct non-trivial passwords on all sites. It's a reasonable workaround, but a federated authentication system would be better I think.

A few years ago, someone in my neighborhood (~4 miles away from a fairly large city) was arrested because they were shooting from their house at someone in their backyard (maybe someone taking a shortcut through their backyard? I don't remember the details but it was not a home invasion.)

A year later, my cat came home with a pellet in her liver. Despite expensive surgery, she died a painful two weeks later.

When you say "nobody is forcing one on you", I'm not sure how that's supposed to work.

They do. They're called "antilock brakes". They exist because many people don't know how to pump brakes, and if you slam on your brakes at speed then you lose all steering control, so the antilock brakes help save you from your own incompetence. They sometimes make the problem worse (stopping distance on dry pavement is sometimes longer), but on average they save a lot more lives than they endanger.

And when they started appearing in cars, most of those who thought they were competent drivers complained. Just like this.

The home invaders were unarmed, but they would have killed him anyways? Look, I know that criminals are not generally competent, but that's quite a pretzel of logic there.

Plus we have heavy regulation of automobiles and their safety features, so that road deaths are going down while miles driven continue to rise. Gun deaths are mostly consistent with number of people who own guns (both have been slowly dropping for a few decades).

They're gun nuts. Masculine insecurity is 90% of gun ownership. Why else would you want to wear your strap-on in public?

And you cannot stop selling guns to idiots, because the NRA opposes any background checks for any reason.

What is hilarious is that most of these "gun enthusiasts" were probably livid when the addresses of gun owners (from public records) were publicly posted in New England a few years ago.

I'm not anti-gun, but I'm anti-idiot. Limit handguns, mandate background checks and periodic training, and punish people who kill when they fear a deadly bag of skittles. Then you can own your very own phallic security blanket and I can be a bit more confident that you won't kill someone I care about because they wear a hoodie and have the wrong color skin.

Those companies don't want to replace drivers. Drivers buy cars, and if you can't "imagine yourself behind the wheel of this car" then it's harder to sell someone an overpriced hunk of metal just because it is styled a bit differently. Those companies just want to assist drivers (help them park or stay in in their lane), so their videos will be much less impressive.

Only google seems to want to replace drivers completely.

It's a desert. The government likely owns it because nobody else wants it. If they gave it away, people still wouldn't take it because they don't want to pay taxes on it.

What Bundy did, using someone's property without permission... where I grew up, that's called "tresspass" or "theft" or somesuch. If he wanted to protest, he could have not used the public land and put up signs saying so, or called his congresscritters, or did any of the other things that protesters do. Maybe even used it for one year without paying as a protest. But using it for 10 years without paying means "dishonest cheapskate who wants to abuse the tragedy of the commons", not "protestor".

Such religious ferver, attacking something I did not say and do not believe, while ignoring what I did say. You truly believe the Holy Gospel of the NRA, that all those who do not worship the NRA wish to destroy every last gun.

Again: the NRA is a religion and does not represent the desires of the majority of its adherents. It perpetuates itself by convincing gullible people that if they do not support the NRA then evil forces will throw them into Hell (a gunless society). You believe this in the absence of all evidence and against all evidence (blind faith).

So your theory is that unlike every other religious organization, the NRA does what its members want rather than the members doing what the NRA wants. Nice theory. Every religious zealot believes that their religion is different; every non-zealot sees that they are largely identical.

Though the gun manufacturers are part of it, a much larger part is that the NRA only exists as long as they can whip people up into a frenzy to donate money. So even though gun control laws have been completely gutted in the USA, the NRA has to keep on whipping up the masses or else the organization will fade away. See also: Greenpeace.

The first rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club.

You're right. For example, laws against polluting only stop those who are not polluting. But so what? Do you think the laws against polluting should be repealed? Do you think that when the laws were passed that polluting did not decrease?

Are you claiming that gun control laws are useless if one person ignores them? Australia passed laws in 1996 to greatly limit firearms. The number of firearms and the number of violent deaths in Australia both suffered major declines in the years since then.

Somalia isn't actually used as an example of a place with no government. Somalia is used as an example of what would actually happen if you get rid of a central government the way that many libertarians want. Somalia is used by many (including me) to mock those idiots who actually want "anarchy". Sure, in the US we'd likely end up with some form of corporate oligarchy disaster rather than a Somalia-type disaster if the Ayn Rand worshipers ever get what they want (and if the Rand-worshiping politicians ever did what they claim to want rather than what they actually do).

But yes, Cody is an idiot.

So you think that the spam was initiated by Google and not by one of the many sites you went to to learn about this plastic?