A few other jobs that were lost to technology:

The knocker-up was a person whose responsibility was to go out to people's houses and wake them up so they could get to work on time. Alarm clocks eliminated the need for them.

Acoustic locators were people who listened to acoustic mirrors to detect incoming aircraft before radar was invented.

And sure, we can talk about buggy whips. The point is, quite a few jobs and entire industries no longer exist as a result of automation. We can start throwing our shoes at the machines like during the industrial revolution, or we can enjoy the benefits they bring us, accept the growing pains, and adapt to the new world. Personally I don't want to have to pay some guy to come knock at my window every morning so I can go to work. I hope I live long enough to talk to the younguns about all the ridiculous jobs that used to exist when I was their age.

People weren't really clamoring for creep. They were complaining about the lack of a hill hold feature, and we got creep instead. When I drive a stick, I can use the clutch to hold the car as I switch from brakes to accelerator. On the Tesla I'm going to run into the idiot who stopped an inch from my bumper behind me at the stop light as the car rolls backwards on the hill, if I don't have creep on.

Oh, please. It shouldn't really be possible for someone to be that idealistic.

The once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be rid of all nuclear weapons everywhere was gone the moment physicists realized that maybe such a thing would be possible. From that point forward, somebody was going to figure out how to make one and invest the money, because it's too good of an advantage to have. After the cold war ended, if everyone had agreed to get rid of all their nuclear weapons, the game would be to either figure out how to hide a few without the other side knowing, or how to build new ones in secret. It's simply not feasible to prevent this from happening, the policing power isn't there. it's the equivalent to software piracy in the torrent age. You can make it illegal all you want, you can have several people who either agree with the law or want to avoid punishment, but you really can't ensure that NOBODY will do it. Because you can't monitor everything and everyone all the time.

Another thing to consider is that nuclear weapons have probably brought more peace and stability than they've done damage. MAD actually works, and if it weren't for nuclear weapons being invented the cold war wouldn't have been just a bunch of proxy wars everywhere. It would have turned into World War III in the middle of Europe. The existence of nukes made the cost far too high, which actually promotes peace. The last time nukes were used where in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when there was no threat of retaliation. Get over it, it will never be used again, and the only reason it will never be used again is because multiple people still have them, so it's not just a question of who can rebuild their arsenal quicker.

The knowledge that there's a difference between a government and a people. That even if your government is about to be dissolved, and your territory taken by a foreign enemy, the people living there will largely survive...unless you do a dumbass thing like an attack which won't actually win the war for you, but will cause retaliation which will kill those people who would have survived the invasion otherwise. Those people include your family and friends.

You don't use a nuclear weapon if you're not assured that you'll destroy their retaliation capabilities. It doesn't make any sense, it doesn't win you anything. It doesn't even win you the satisfaction of making them suffer, because you're going to be responsible for the suffering of your own people in that mix.

Is your point of view that there should be no such thing as classified information, and that every single thing the government does and knows should be public domain and easily accessible to everyone?

If so I disagree with you, but find your position internally consistent and wouldn't argue with it. It's just a matter of opinion, and I don't share yours as I find that secrets are sometimes necessary and unavoidable. If, however, you see the benefit in the government keeping some secrets, then you must expect people who are in position to have access to these secrets to exercise a high level of caution and discreteness when they find it necessary to overrule the system in place that decides what is classified and what is public. When necessary to stop illegal behavior, you disclose what it is absolutely necessary and not a single thing more.

Managing employees is hard. If you just crack the whip and make them do nothing but focus non-stop on the task at hand, they're going to be much less productive and waste much more of your money than if you actually invest a bit of money on keeping morale high and put out the small fires in human interaction that happens when not everyone in your team is socially compatible.

The NSA would be no different in this than a private company. You take a tremendously successful company like Google, and they're spending money on play rooms and free food for their employees. If that makes them more productive by causing some of them to not have a problem staying in the office longer to work on a problem and others to get a burst of creativity that you only get when you quit thinking about the problem for a bit and free your mind, then that investment is worth every penny. If that advice column is helping your team deal with problems they encounter in an effective way and thus making them able to work together more effectively, it's far from "frivolous crap."

If, on the other hand, it was a leak about the NSA giving every project manager a free Ferrari, you'd have a point.

Is there any reason this should have been leaked? Yeah, we can poke fun at the irony of NSA co-workers concerned about their office gossip being spied upon and how they consider that an intrusion of their privacy. Does it constitute information a whistleblower should disseminate? The point isn't that this is damaging to national security, it's an advice column, but it was happening inside their intranet and not cleared for public scrutiny.

My problem with Snowden isn't that he leaked info about NSA unconstitutional activities. If you see your employers doing something blatenly illegal, it's your duty to do something about. My problem is that his leaks are completely indiscrimate. He didn't just deliver the documents that contained information on what he considered were illegal activities by the NSA. He took everything he could get his hands on and turned it in to journalists. I don't know how he could possibly justify that.

So you're saying there's something new now that wasn't possible before?

Well, compare it to the other electric cars, and I don't mean golf carts or the ones that were being built in the 19th century. Compare the Model S to its contemporaries, who can and do use the same battery technology that makes electric cars feasible now. The Model S has a much larger range. The Model S accelerates faster. The Model S doesn't make the annoying high pitched sound the Prius does, and is relatively silent. The Model S looks better. The Model S isn't trying to get its range by being smaller and lighter, and is a nice spacious car. Tesla is making it such that you can drive everywhere it not by compromising and making it a hybrid, but by building an infrastructure of chargers and battery swapping stations.

What's exciting about the Model S isn't that it's an electric car. You're right, there's nothing interesting about that. What's exciting about the Model S is that it's a no compromise electric car. It's not just a great electric car, it's just a great car, period. You can't say that about any other electric car. If they weren't electric, you'd steer clear from them because a short-range, small and heavy vehicle is a horrible idea. But if the Model S was an internal combustion vehicle, people would still want to buy it, at that same price point. It wouldn't be making press, but it would still be a great car.

In terms of competition, verizon buying time-warner is a much bigger deal than the blocked attempt of at&t buying t-mobile. This purchase can't possibly be allowed to proceed.

Please. People still argue over whether men has been to the moon, or whether NASA faked it. The proof is there, but humans are irrational and simply don't accept evidence that goes against what they would like to belief.

I'm fully willing to accept there are things which are untestable. Evolution isn't one of them. The age of the Earth isn't one of them. The age of the universe isn't one of them.

If you want to argue straight out creationism as a literal interpretation of Genesis? Well, every single prediction you can make from that model is directly refuted by every piece of evidence we can dig up. It's exactly equivalent to arguing that the moon landings never happened, it's just stupid.

Do you have a source? Every google article that I hit while searching "HID vs. LED" says that although HID is a bit more efficient (not blow-away efficient) than LEDs at light-generation, there are a ton of losses in the lamp, related to light being reflected back, and absorbed by lenses and protective covering. Comparing actual lumens output from the lamp, instead of generated lumens at the source, LED seems to come out the winner, by a lot.

It's possible I only hit biased sites. This one website listed warmup of 5-10 minutes for HID, but I assume they've solved that problem if they're using them as headlights. I wasn't able to find an HID-favorable source, though.

Correct, and that's true whether the theory is proven or not. The point he was making is that theories don't become laws. They're separate concepts. That evolution happens is a fact, and an observable fact. The details of which mutations happened when, where exactly an extinct species lies in terms of being an ancestor to a current species of part of a failed branch closely related to the said ancestor, the role of epigenetics, these things can be revised. As scientists discover more evidence, they refine those details.

The analogous part you're looking for here would be the law of natural selection. That's a directly observable thing, which is that new species come about as a result of mutation and environmental selection of existing species. Just like the law of gravity, nobody is every going to say gravity doesn't exist, or that evolution through natural selection doesn't exist. The details of how those things happen get refined, but the main thrust of it will never go away any more than Newton's Laws went away with the Theory of Relativity (hey look. Theories superseding laws??? Madness!!)

Buddy, we can reliably quantify so many things about it, it's not even funny. We can build a family tree of species using the same DNA evidence and methods that can be used to build your family tree. We can date fossils at 60 million years old and we can even quantify that uncertainty at about plus or minus a million years. We can quantify the rate of mutations happening in a population. We can examine similarities, and we can tell when certain genes appeared or disappeared. For example, did you know most mammals can make their own vitamin C through absorption of sunlight, as well as vitamin D like we can? Actually, we have that vitamin C creation gene as well. So how come we get scurvy if we don't get vitamin C through our diet? Turns out our vitamin C-making gene is defective, as a result of a mutation. The same defect exists in other primates like chimps. So we can examine the DNA of related species, figure out which ones have the defect and which don't, and you know the mutation first occurred in a species that was the common ancestors to all of those that have the defect, but not all the way back to a common ancestor that encompasses species which do not have a defect, and maintain a working gene.

In a way, there is a lot of confidence in creationism. It's provably wrong, we have 100% confidence in that. It can't be refined into something that works, the fundamental idea is incorrect. In the example I gave above regarding figuring out when a mutation occurred, I could have used an example of an additional feature, instead of the removal of a feature (same method. Compare species that have and don't have the feature, feature must have developed after common ancestor to both groups). I chose that one, because it completely disproves not only creationism, but also intelligent design. A lot of creationists like to say, "of course we have so many similarities in DNA. They were all created by the same creator, who re-used the same genes." But given the vitamin C problem, that creator just happened to make a mistake copying that common gene around to his favored species that is supposed to rule the earth. And before you can say, "maybe he didn't want us to be able to have that feature, because he wanted to force us to eat vitamin C containing fruits," you'll have to explain why he made the same mistake with the non-planet-ruling primates.

Although I agree the Cracked explanation is perfectly plausible and very likely, Occam's Razor says no such thing. It's a pet peeve of mine when people state it that it that way. Occam's Razor makes no claims at all on likelihood of correctness.

What Occam's Razor does say is that when choosing between hypotheses which all give the exact same predictions, you should pick the one that involves less variables. Not because it's more likely to be true than the others (it's not, there's no requirement on nature to make things simple), but because there's no point in doing extra work to achieve the same result. The moment there's any difference at all between the predictions, Occam's Razor can no longer be invoked. At that point, you've got to eliminate theories by attempting to falsify their predictions. For example, if one theory says the incident was the result of an avalanche and another says it wasn't, you should now look for characteristic signs of an avalanche at the site. The evidence should rule out or support an avalanche theory, but "an avalanche is the simpler explanation" isn't evidence for anything.

When you do invoke Occam's Razor is when the hypotheses make no testable difference. For example, you and I examine a black box that allows us to input a number via a keyboard, and watch a screen for an output. We type in 1 and get 3. We type in 24 and get 26. We type in 127 and get 129. Now you develop a hypothesis: "The black box outputs the input plus two." I develop a differnet hypothesis: "the black box first adds 5 to the input, then it subtracts 3." The predictive power of both hypotheses are exactly equal, and you can't devise a test to figure out what the exact computation happening inside the black box is. So, Occam's Razor says we should pick your hypothesis in order to make predictions, because adding the extra work is unecessary. However, it could very well be that my hypothesis is the one that is right...it just doesn't matter.