There is no law barring employment for felons â" on the contrary, the state goes out of its way to encourage employers to hire them, to reduce recidivism.

...but they do a rather bad job of it, as a great many of your larger employers have a zero-tolerance policy.

To be born and raised in the USA â" the country, to which millions of people dream of migrating (legally and otherwise) â" and waste your youthful years on crime?

The advice the OP is asking for applies to other folks as well. One of my friends has a felony record for running web hosting for a brothel a friend of his owned, and otherwise offering services and support to a business which was to the best of his knowledge strictly offering services between consenting adults... and not turning her in when he changed his mind about being willing to continue to provide that support. That folks who don't follow a libertarian philosophy could see that as a lapse of ethics is certainly granted -- but a lapse that should mean that 4/5ths of employment prospects are permanently off the table? That's harsh.

That said -- he's working today, for an employer well aware of the entirety of his background (including his meticulous attention to detail and corner cases in software design and development). So, yes -- fewer options, but some do still exist.

Stars that are too big have lifetimes of only several million years, not billions. The Earth itself was still pretty messed up when it was only a million years old.

The whole reason that a red dwarf is so dangerous to live around is its low gravity. It can hurl flares from its surface that ascend far out into space and reach its tight little "habitable zone", and its planets will occasionally orbit through a flare and get zapped. The flares are channeled and accelerated by electromagnetic turbulence that originates from deep inside the star. Even after the surface temperature of its photosphere finally declines, the star will continue to flare until it shrinks down to a white dwarf (which has no habitable zone at all, since its starlight is extreme ultraviolet radiation that can easily blast water molecules apart). Since M-class stars typically have expected lifetimes of trillions of years, you'd have to wait a long time to see it happen.

From my perspective, it tends to be the people who say they support "family values" that actually support legal and social measures that keep families small.

Look at who it is defending zoning laws enforcing "single-family household" status as excluding larger chosen (non-blood-related) families, and compare to who it is embracing legal and social norms that allow maximum flexibility in assembling a strong, self-supporting structure from such components as available. Look at who is trying to restrict legal marriage and adoption and who is trying to extend it. Look at the group voting for judges that view large aggregated families-of-choice as evidence of perversion -- from which children should be protected -- and the group voting for judges who view a large, stable support network built from people who love and care for each other as precisely that. I'm all for "family values", in by that one means values that support large and strong families... but if I say "family values" in public to a random stranger, what's going to come to their mind is not the same as what I'm actually referring to.

I say this as someone who is overwhelmingly happy to have participated in the upbringing of children -- two of whom are now legal adults -- in whose genes I have no role, but to whose memes and ethics I am gratified to have contributed. I'm glad to have contributed to the financial stability of their household; I'm glad to have been another person there to help with homework and listen to their stories and serve as a role model and help keep things running. The people who say they support "family values" but who would have broken apart that family? I cannot, at such short notice, find words for the damage I see being done -- or attempted -- in the name of "family values".

*sigh*.

And yes, I know that you're acknowledging much of the above, and that a great deal of my rant (perhaps all of it) doesn't apply to you. Please forgive that. I don't believe your assertion that anyone (for a statistically significant value of same) views state programs as an adequate replacement for having a genuine support structure... but would suggest that, perhaps, there are those who would like those who don't have a support structure to have somewhere to turn.

I've known too many people whose blood families weren't a healthy place for them -- physical abuse and the like. Several of those people were welcomed into a family of choice that gave them the support that they needed -- but not everyone can be that lucky, and establishing social policy in a way that only helps those who are already fortunate... well, there's a lot of that done already, and a lot of people it leaves behind.

Finding road edge boundaries in snow, at least, is actually a place where existing self-driving car systems do better than humans already. Keep in mind that they're not limited to the visual end of the EM spectrum.

For the rest, I'll defer to empirical studies on effectiveness under varying conditions. It's easy to think of corner cases -- but the real question, corner cases or no, is whether the average amount of liability incurred per hour of driving is greater or less than a human at the wheel.

I guess, if you like the state or insurance companies telling you when and where you may travel.

The power of the state is one thing. On the other hand, doing harm to others without means to provide recompense is legitimately immoral even under reasonable Libertarian frameworks.

Motor vehicle insurance allows the externalities which would otherwise be created by individuals defaulting rather than being able to pay off debts they incurred to be priced by the market -- quite transparently, given as the profit margins are known and available to customers as well as shareholders. If you can't pay for the harm you're doing to others by an action, even as aggregated and normalized by the insurance industry, can you truly morally justify that act?

Air is 5 ppm helium and 15 ppm neon. Neon lifts balloons too, but we don't use it because it's too expensive to recover from the air, and recovering helium is even more inefficient.

NOTHING is a concern over geological time periods! The Sun will eventually swallow the Earth- but nobody seems to care too much. Helium depletion on Earth will be a blip on a geological time scale, but during that blip helium will be just a memory to several thousand generations.

Helium is for sissies anyway. I don't care if Donald Trump commutes to work in a blimp refilled with freshly scented helium-3 every morning. MY airship has a pedal-powered generator to pump current through a electrolysis chamber. Hydrogen works so much better than helium anyway... it really gets you high.

How isn't it verifiable? The whole thing that made this extra, extra evil was that they were deanonymizing their clients for everyone to see. Run a web server? Access it from your phone, see if your subscriber ID is still there in a header.

Thinking that farmers from Ghana will not be able to make a rational decision between buying industrial seed every year or saving whatever strain they have already from year to year is a not so subtle form of racism.

Or maybe what is or isn't rational varies based on local conditions. Capital availability is a concern. Distribution infrastructure (and differences in cost based on same) is a concern.

Ghana is one of the best-governed countries in its region, but even so, there's still an infrastructure gap -- a decade ago (which is as recent as I had knowledge) you had daily rolling blackouts even in the capitol as a matter of course; electrical generation capacity wasn't growing with demand.

Accusing those who disagree with you of assuming anything other than rational behavior in light of full knowledge of local conditions strikes me as starkly unreasonable.

Sorry kids, Library use is copying. Copying is not a bad thing, you save a lot of time by doing it.

Shared libraries or static libraries?

Static library use involves copying at the link phase. Shared library use doesn't. Depending on your license, the distinction can be legally significant.

And, well, that's the thing. Those of us who are professionals think about liability... which is why we can actually find a large company willing to buy our startups without doing an absolute freakout (or requesting a huge discount for cost of reimplementations) analyzing the codebase during due diligence.

Would Verizon really get in trouble for a DMCA violation? I think the the users with compromised emails have more to fear from the DMCA.

I don't think Obama needs to worry about the veto hurting the Democrats in 2016. His veto count so far is 2, a lower count than any president since James Garfield in 1881. (In comparison GWB vetoed 12 bills, Clinton 39, GHWB 29, Reagan 39.) This is mostly a consequence of the filibuster used to cut off the flow of legislation that reaches him- which effectively raised the required vote count from 50 to 60 during his term. But now, more stuff is now going to percolate through Congress and reach his desk, including some unpopular, corrupt shit that will scare the public. Before, he simply hadn't been given many bills to veto; now he's going to be tested. Even if he only vetoes one bill in the next Congress, that's going to be enough to elicit nuclear head explosions on Fox, so he might as well add a few dozen without having to worry about any additional meaningful repercussions. Hopefully he won't cave as usual.

Just four fucking million public comments sent by American citizens to the FCC- but they're not corrupt politicians, so screw 'em.

"However, I do like other people paying for things I can use. You know, good roads, schools, a health service, mass transportation and so on."

Well, uhh, yeah. The whole point is that that kind of thing is so expensive that no one person can pay for it alone.

Is this supposed to be controversial?