I believe more in nurture than nature. Human plasticity is an amazing thing. So long as some of those smart, intelligent people who are not actually reproducing are teachers (and lo, my husband is an education professor) then critical thinking can be taught to the next generation, regardless of who provided the genetic material.

We also have plenty of options for increasing yields and nutrition from existing crops, although a lot of the anti-GMO panic is putting a damper on that research. (Even when such research doesn't actually involve direct gene tinkering...)

Famine is already a problem in many places around the world, unfortunately.

I view humans as humans, regardless of country or ethnicity. Too many first world countries also put an enormous strain on the environment, with our love of conflict minerals and cheap imported goods.

Meh, not so much. Many of my same-aged friends are having kids (or had them and they're ranging from a few months to 10 years old in one particular teen pregnancy case). I went through my smug "child-free" stint a long time ago, and now I just appreciate the hard work they are putting into raising their families and am grateful I only have cats to deal with at the same time.

My husband and I decided (long before we got married) we didn't want kids. We have three nieces and a nephew between us. That's plenty of kidlet time when we need it, and it gives their parents a break. (Turns out I'd have difficulty getting pregnant anyway so I'm glad we already decided on our route before I got my hopes up only to have them dashed.)

People may consider it selfish of us, but I'm not sure I want to bring any more human beings into this already over crowded world.

Actually, that's the case for some electives at the university I attended. PE classes were pure pass/fail, usually based on attendance.

There absolutely is. Otherwise software documentation would not be in such a sorry state at most organizations.

We're here. We're just invisible.

I have an external 2TB drive I use for backups. (In addition to DropBox for critical files, although I've been reconsidering that particular service lately.) I unplug it when not in use. So in the same system broadly, but not really. It's a consumer system, so no need to go as silly as having a separate BDR box.

I think with a properly set up system, RAID can speed it up considerably. I prefer the multi drive model for consumer systems though - a small SSD OS and application drive, a fat slow platter drive for storage of large media files, and an even fatter and slower drive for backups. 128GB/1TB/2TB is the system I have on my desktop.

I'm an advocate for better gun education. The vast majority of gun injuries in the US are accidents. So-called responsible gun owners forgetting about loaded weapons, not locking them up properly in gun cases, etc. I'm totally okay with elementary school kids learning how to use guns provided all the safety rules are ingrained into them at the same time. We harp about not running with scissors and carrying them point down, but most kids never learn gun basics like ensuring the chamber is empty before fiddling with it.

X-acto knives in 911, and they were banned from airplanes. Along with knitting needles and pretty much any sharp metal object longer than an inch.

Did anyone actually die from that?

We used to have serial killers, who would take out one victim at a time over a series of months. Now we have one lone crazy kid (usually white and male) shooting up 20 people in what really is just a form of domestic terrorism. There are still singular homicides and shootings every day in cities across the country, but we only hear about the mass murderers.

He hasn't officially been a judge in a while so he's allowed to say what he wants.