I genuinely appreciate your earnestness in wanting to reform the system, and I think more people should have strong feelings and ideas about how to "fix" things as you do. Unfortunately, a lot of things that seem like they have easy answers don't, and that's why they're hard. The devil is in the details, and the law of unintended consequences makes itself felt very keenly here. To wit:

For better or worse, people elect judges because they want their views to reflect that of the community where they live. Maybe a liberal area wants judges that are more lenient in sentencing, or vice versa. Do you really want your Bay Area case where some wing nut has sued Google for not basing the Android clock on days since Biblical Creation to be decided by an imported judge from Alabama who may actually think they're right?

Plea bargaining has its abuses, but more than anything else it is a very practical thing. A full jury trial for any serious (felony) offense is extremely expensive and time consuming, and plea bargaining is a way to reduce the burden on courts and juries by exacting some form of a minimum toll on the guilty without going for the maximum.

What? Who decides this? Right now, through separation of powers, the courts rule on the constitutionality of laws. Under your idea - does John Boehner get to automatically impeach President Obama because he thinks executive orders on immigration are "unconstitutional?" Who gets to boot Republicans automatically for bringing DOMA to the House floor? What if I just think you're a dick and your law is unconstitutional and you should be gone?

Sorry, friend. I agree with your statement, but probably in exactly the opposite meaning you intend. Why even mention "a well regulated militia" if that is not the justification for the 2nd Amendment? And if you're not in a state-sponsored militia, why do you have this right again? This is just an example of where well intentioned people can wildly disagree on the meaning of legal/constitutional language and there is no shortcut to divining meaning.

So just to make this clear - I arrest you for drunk driving. But I search your trunk later and find you have a kidnapped person in there, and I can't charge you for it? Or, more likely, I arrest you for stealing a car. While the prosecutors are interviewing witnesses for the case, they talk to a chop shop operator who testifies you stole and sold 25 other cars to him. Why on earth should you not be charged with that?

You're right, nobody likes lobbyists. But they do actually have a purpose. Let's say that a congressperson from Maine is going to have to vote on a bill to grant or revoke a complicated set of tribal fishing rights on Federal land in California. Is this congress critter going to have constituents who are informed about this issue, or will they have time to learn about the issue on their own? No. Instead, lobbyists - on both sides of the issue - have their opportunity to brief lawmakers and try to sway their vote. Certainly not a perfect system, but you really do want to have professional advocates on both sides of an issue. Imagine if the EFF couldn't talk to congresspeople, and they had to rely on what some dumb-ass "IT guy" in their home district had to say on the issue, having spent all of 10 minutes researching it on Ask Jeeves. You get the idea.

What? What if I like champagne, cinnamon or wagyu beef? What if the cost of diamond engagement rings goes up 10x because the US doesn't produce a meaningful amount of diamonds? What is the point of suddenly creating the need for millions of minimum-wage jobs - the sh*t end of the economic value chain, which is the vast majority of what has been outsourced - that Americans can't and don't want to fill?

Anyway, my point is that I admire people with a strong desire and thoughts about how to turn things around in this country. It's just much harder to fix things than it looks, which is why making things better will require people to do the hardest thing of all - converting their zeal to electoral action, and then overcoming partisanship to make compromises and work together.

WHAAAAAAA?

You might wish to let these ex-Toyota workers know. Or these ones. Or the 4,000 ex-Motorola-turned-Google employees Google laid off because they were - wait for it - exiting a line of business they didn't think they wanted to be in anymore.

Good companies get out of bad businesses all the time. Usually they fire the people who worked in that business. It sucks but it's true, and to think that good companies never exit lines of business or lay people off is insane.

Since when has "ownership" ever equated to "I can do anything I want with it?"

• I have a car but I am not legally free to disable the seatbelt or airbags. Does that mean I don't own my car?
• I have a house. I signed a contract when I purchased it saying I would abide by the rules of a "Home Owner's Association" which regulates what colors I can paint it, and how I can decorate it. Does that mean I don't own my house?
• I have a book but am not legally allowed to xerox all the pages of it and sell or give those copies away to other people. Does that mean that I don't own the book?

In no modern society has "ownership" ever had anything to do with "has no restrictions on the usage of." If you want to debate whether users have adequate freedom to do what they want with their electronics, that is absolutely an arguable topic! But please don't say it has anything to do with "ownership."

That's not deranged. It just depends on what you want to happen with your stock.

Take for example Company A, which grows a predictable amount each year (or stays predictably flat, whatever). Investors take this amount of growth/profit into account, make some rudimentary financial calculations, and say "a share of Company A should be worth $X." If Company A's performance continues to be predictable, then that stock price is not going to change. Nothing inherently wrong with that, especially if the company pays a nice dividend to the owners of its shares, so they make money even if the share price is flat.

But that's not what most investors want - they want to buy a share for $X dollars and eventually have it be worth $X+Y dollars so they can sell that share at some point and make money on it. (This is what you want when you buy a stock, right?) Companies themselves want this for reasons like incentivizing employees - if you're handing our stock options (not stock grants) to employees but the price you can cash them in at is the same price you bought them at, they are effectively worthless. Additionally, an increase in your stock price = greater market capitalization = it's easier for your company to borrow money at a low interest rate.

But if your company doesn't grow profits above the rate that it has done so in the past (either by introducing new products, getting better returns out of old ones or driving down your costs) there is no reason for your stock price to increase. So, basically, yeah - investors big and small all want your company to show that it is increasing its profits (or in the case of a company like Amazon that loses money in the short term, marketshare) or whatever other measure continually so that there is a reason for its shares to be valued higher. If I believe that Company B has a bright future and will grow above expectations, then its valuation of $X today is too low and I should buy it because it will be worth $X+Y later.

This all may be frustrating to people at companies that feel Wall Street is hounding them to perpetually improve results, but it's at least logically consistent, and certainly not "deranged."

I very strongly disagree with this statement. Adolescents should learn how to interact with adults, sure - but far more important to their social development is interacting with non-adults.

How do you deal with your first crush, your first boy/girl friend? How do you deal with your first bully? Who is your best friend, or your worst enemy? What's your first group of friends? All these need to be peers, and there is no substitute for having these experiences (for better or worse) younger rather than older. So many things about adolescence are the greatest thing ever in your life, and so many things about adolescence break your heart in a way you never thought possible. But experiencing these things at the same age that your peers do - in a way that you can only experience by being immersed with your peers - is the only way to be on an equal footing emotionally, socially and romantically with everyone else you will be dealing with in your young adult life.

I have no doubt that homeschooling can provide a better academic experience. I absolutely do not believe that it can provide the tremendous opportunity to do stupid things, make an ass of yourself in front of everyone, have your heart broken, be an asshole, and find yourself - for better or worse - that swimming in the great pool of co-educational age-equivalent fellow idiots called attending public school can. College is where I learned how to be a useful adult, but public high school was where I learned what not to do, which was in its own way just as important.

Also, I was a horny teenage boy and there were horny teenage girls there. Absurdly painful, awkward and embarrassing - but worth it all in the long run. And the best way I can think of for becoming a (more or less) well adjusted adult.

Your mileage, of course, may vary.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Mac OS X is largely derived from NeXTStep, which was built on top of 4.4BSD UNIX variants (mostly NetBSD with a lot of FreeBSD userland). Stock Android uses a Linux kernel, but the Android app SDK is completely different from a desktop Linux distort, just as the iOS SDK offers zero overlap with a BSD UNIX desktop experience.

Both Android and iOS have their roots in UNIX-derived operating systems (though neither are "classic" SVR4-based systems). But although they are both derived from POSIX and "UNIX-alike" systems, they share (essentially) no code and no development tree. Additionally, I personally would argue that from a OMG UNIX has conquered the world perspective that Android == Linux as little as Mac OS X == NetBSD since all the parts that people care about are derivative or proprietary.

If you're ready to get your UNIX nerd on, check out this UNIX family tree.

That's correct, it was never intended to be. The Universal Service Fund that you pay for each month with your phone bill in the US was created specifically to ensure that all Americans had some form of narrowband voice communications. It was designed as a tax on "the many" to ensure that "the few" who lived in remote or unpopulated areas would not be left out because it was simply economically infeasible to run a phone line 15 miles outside of town to serve a farmhouse with three people in it.

Most of that money goes to the major telcos to support broad rural areas, but a disproportionate amount of the spending goes to small ultra-rural telcos with tiny populations where telephone service would simply not exist were it not massively subsidized. It's a "cost plus" subsidy that nobody is going to get rich off of, but does provide prop up many of the smaller telcos in the US that otherwise wouldn't survive. Regardless of how you feel about this, just remember that USF was never supposed to do anything for broadband.

How does your math work?

• Cost to produce the first copy of an A-list videogame: $60 million
• Cost to distribute the second copy digitally: $.03

How do you see those two converging?

Nobody was going to nominate Timothy Zahn for the Nobel Prize in literature, you're right. But by and large his books (not just the Thrawn trilogy) made for entertaining stories that kept you turning pages and enjoying the experience. Even the Thrawn books had some lame plot elements (I personally believe that anytime you introduce clones into a novel or comic book you should go to Writer Jail for a mandatory 3 year sentence). But they were always fun to turn off your brain for a while and read. The same thing goes for most of the "Rogue Squadron" books.

Sadly, the rest of the Expanded Universe varied wildly from interesting and fun (Luke and his son's Force User Road Trip in "Fate of the Jedi") to dull (many of the earlier EU books) to depressing (most of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion which was just a way to induce PTSD in the next generation of Jedi) to full-on WTF (the Jedi council holding press conferences in "Fate of the Jedi" or the string of '90s book after book about zOMG somebody cloned the Emperor [again] or is rebuilding the Death Star [again].) There were some real gems in the EU but you have to pick through a lot of crap to get to them, and even then you won't get the full impact of some of the plot/character arc elements if you didn't wade through all the dreck that came before. So your time is probably best served avoiding all but a few of the most highly-reviewed ones.

a.k.a. "NEWS FLASH: Pasty Mountain Dew-Swilling Nerds Praise Film Where Handsome Badass Pretends To Do Their Job While Things Blow Up."

Hell, if they made a movie called "The Product Manager" and it was Chris Pine seducing inexplicably hot KPI project manager analysts, engaging in high-speed car chases with developers throwing ninja stars and screaming "put this in your requirements document!" and muttering catchphrases like "Oh, it will ship all right. But you can download it in HELL!" while he walks away from explosions, I'd say "yeah, that is exactly like my job."

The quote you cite comes from a paraphrase of former baseball manager Leo Durocher, and is intended to be understood in a sports context. Sports is a zero-sum game: somebody wins and somebody loses, and there are no points for character. The rest of life is not necessarily like that.

While "nice guys finish last" is often extrapolated (dubiously) to areas like dating, or is sometimes put in the mouth of realpolitik advocates like Niccolo Machiavelli or Henry Kissinger, it was never meant to be a general descriptor of how to get along in life. Some bosses - like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, or pre-mellowing Bill Gates were legendary assholes and still got great results out of their employees. There are other people who manage their employees with a gentler hand and play to their strengths, and get good results too. Your mileage may vary as to which is the best approach, but I certainly know which environment I would thrive in and which one would make me quit the first day.

Sometimes even if all you care about is the end result you may find that the end result would have been better if you had viewed the road getting there as being full of unique persons and not interchangeable tools. If you just aren't good at dealing with people, then fine, don't try to make yourself that type of leader/manager. But just remember that - to fight adage with adage - "you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar."

Umm, no, that's exactly the opposite of how it would work. The (hypothetical) Knitting Channel has a more or less fixed niche size of audience, and a more or less fixed set of costs to operate. TKC is de facto subsidized today by people paying for a more popular sibling network like The (hypothetical) Crocheting Channel.

If TKC weren't being subsidized by TCC, it would not get more subscribers by increasing its price - seriously, if you weren't going to pay $3/month for The Knitting Channel are you going to do it all the sudden because it's $1/month? What it would do without a subsidy is to raise its rates, hoping to meet its operating costs.

In this hypothetical version of today's model, people who like crocheting but not knitting are getting screwed by, in effect, paying for what they don't want. But the smaller group of people who like knitting are getting a channel that, without the subsidy, would probably cost 3x or 4x the subscription fee to survive. So in an unbundled world, expect the nichier things to get far more expensive or just go away. Broadly popular stuff (like TBS, USA, ESPN, whatever) would go down since it was no longer subsidizing the less popular stuff. In theory, anyway.

Not in my experience (for whatever that's worth). I was part of a HOA with the first home I ever bought, which was part of a very middle-class neighborhood of townhouses. The development was a mix of older middle class families and younger first-time home buyers or - increasingly - immigrants who were taking advantage of the mid-2000s real estate situation to buy homes. I received a number of asinine warnings from the HOA about stuff like "you need to repaint your gutters within 30 days or zOMG CONTRACTUAL HELL WILL RAIN DOWN," which was enough to make me hate HOAs forever. But the real ire of the HOA was reserved for the immigrant families.

And, at the risk of being very politically incorrect, what the HOAs were doing there was fighting behavior that had a potential impact on property values for the whole development. Townhouses with 5-8 cars parked outside around the clock, indicating huge over-occupancy; men hanging out all over the steps and front yard all day; loud parties late into the night, etc. Why? Potential racism aside, it was because the people in the neighborhood were not so well off that a decline in property values due to their neighbors' actions wouldn't have a big impact on them. Years later, when I moved into a much nicer/richer neighborhood, there was no HOA to be found - nor would the proudly wealthy and independent residents have stood for anyone telling them what to do with their property.

I am not condoning targeting any group for HOA persecution, and again I was very put off by my experience with a HOA. But I am saying that HOAs are not generally needed in neighborhoods that are so rich that anyone who would degrade the property value couldn't move in there anyway. HOAs will tend to be most prevalent in those areas which are "kinda white" and/or "kinda rich" where there is some worry that people who could move in there might disrupt the community or lower property values. In truly rich/white places, there is simply no need for that.