Well, Star Wars *is* a global phenomenon and a staple of US culture loved and adored by millions across the globe. So, now that you draw the comparison to the founding fathers, in our modern times George Lucas has probably been more significant to most people than the founding fathers have.

I know that the Ewoks are controversial among the original, older crowd of Star Wars fans. I watched the movies as a kid and I thought that anything with spaceships and lasers was awesome. However I also thought that the furry buggers actually make sense in the context of the story.

Emperor Palpatine could foresee almost everything, he does claim so a couple of times himself. But the furry little natives of Endor probably seemed so insignificant to him that they didn't even register on his radar. Which ultimately tipped the balance of power to the Rebels and led to his doom.

I disagree. I think pixelated graphics can look better than high-res. Mainly because pixelated art leaves more to the imagination. Your brain fills in the details. Some 2D games that use high-res pictures don't appeal to me because I don't like the art style, like, for example, the faces of the characters. I have never experienced this "issue" with retro-themed 2D games that use more pixelated art.

Seems like that is true. However I strongly suspect that, as with most things in the US. the share of that spending is extremely unbalanced. I'm almost certain a public school in a black neighbourhood will not be even close to the funding of a school in a predominantly white suburb.

Maybe the US of A should put more money into public schools, infrastructure and public service instead of F-22's.

I chose the wording 10x more "effective", because it's not necessarily just 10x "faster", although that is what it usually boils down to in the end.
A poor developer will write code that is buggy, doesn't scale well, with a poor interface and poor extendibility. His code will be more difficult for others to use and work with. It will in the long run be a maintenance nightmare and make the project as a whole worse and thereby affect the work of many other people and require that they also invest more time in their work. (Other developers, quality, IT support, contractors that plug into the system, etc.)

In the end and for all the people involved, a project with 10 average developers might take 10 times longer and cost 10 times as much as if one really good guy just sat down and got the job done.

I've seen this happen. I've seen a one-man team create a framework that is fantastic to work with, has a simple, intuitive API and just plain works, whereas a framework developed by a team of about 20 people that accomplishes essentially the same thing is terrible to work with and buggy.

Most managers don't realize the huge productivity and efficiency gap between skilled and unskilled developers. They think firing one expensive developer in the USA/Europe and outsourcing the job to 10 developers in India* is a net win. Most of the time, it is not.
Many unskilled developers should be considered more of a lability than an asset. You wouldn't want 10 unskilled developers working on the control systems of a 747 either, would you?

If I had my own software company, I would have absolutely no doubts about who to hire. I would hire the best guy(s) I could find for a salary of 100 to 200k instead of getting a couple of decent guys for the same money.

*I'm not saying all developers from India are bad. I'm sure there are also very good Indian developers. But from my personal experience most of them are not very good, in addition to the cultural/communication problems (they will almost never admit mistakes or that they didn't understand something), I found it very hard working with them.

Oh, thank you very much for the -1 Disagree / Denial mod.

Yeah, tricke down is working so well that the income inequality between rich and poor is getting wider and wider each generation.

I disagree with this statement. I enjoy programming and I am very good at it because I enjoy it. Enjoying it means that I am interested, stay up to date and learn new things all the time. It means I do alot of programming in my spare time, which further increases my skills.
Many developers I know do it as a job and forget programming when they leave the office. This makes a huge difference.

But no, programming talent is not distributed along a U curve. However, I firmly believe that an average developer is 10 times more effective than a poor developer. A good developer is 10 times more effective than an average developer, and an excellent developer is 10 times more effective than a good developer.

Maybe not exactly 10 times, but certainly by an order of magnitude.

European here. I follow American politics from afar, and from our trans-continental, somewhat neutral vantage point, I think it's safe to say that republicans or conservatives are, on average, the greater sociopaths by a margin.

Glenn Beck? Rush Limbaugh? Sarah Palin? Donald Trump? Bill O'Reilly? Ann Coulter?

I have yet to find people that sprout such incredible nonsense as the above characters among democrats/liberals.

If you want a challenging civilization experience, C-evo Civilization is pretty good. It's basically a deterministic Civ implementation with unit design and some altered rules.

I mostly agree. But the problem with Skyrim mods compared to DOTA2, CounterStrike, TF, etc, is that Skyrim is a much more complex game and mods are much more intricate and risky as result. With a TF mod you pretty much know what you're getting whereas with a Skyrim mod it's almost impossible to know beforehand if it will work as advertised, or if it will break your game, be incompatible with other mods, corrupt your save file... it's simply a much more experimental and risky way of modding than TF. This is partly also due to the tools not being as good as they could be.
I think a payment system for mods is generally a good idea, but the tools provided by the develper then need to be up to the task to provide a baseline of quality and security. At the moment, the "quality control" is being handled by the modding community with tools like SkyEdit, Wrye Bash, Mod Manager etc, so from this perspective I understand those who feel a little cheated by Bethesda cashing in, as it is the modding community itself that is providing the tools that make it even possible to run multiple mods with a minimum of safety and compatibility.
I think if the payed mods announcement would have been accompanied by an updated CreationKit that handles these issues, it would have been much better received.

Also:

Not yet.

Could also just be construction work on an interstellar highway.

You seem to know what you're talking about. Maybe you can explain the article to me. First it says that the new PCIe SSDs achieve "much higher" speeds and "destroy the competition" and then it says that they don't really load anything faster and average consumers will hardly know a difference?

What?

Not to mention that the killer that gets sentenced for imprisonment may decide to turn himself in, with the hope of seeing liberty at some point in their lives.
Whereas the killer who knows he will be killed by the law has literally nothing left to lose and might keep on killing trying to save himself.