Since lots of businessmen are macho, domineering types

Who usually make decisions based on "gut feelings" and aren't used to people calling them on it because they're making such decisions on things that can't be weighed and measured very well. They don't know what to make of people who make decisions on things that have some absolutism involved, and frequently will not make "gut decisions" when the data is missing and they are asked to.

The message that indicates that MS hasn't learned anything and IE is worth ignoring is that they're trying to get DEVELOPERS to give the browser another look. That whole "design for me, lock out the competition" mentality that sensible people ignore. If IE11 is that good, people should willingly use it, not be coerced...

But would you have realized it as a child?

Yup. Back in the day I had a fist fight or two, and learned young that even if you win the fight you still get hurt. It really doesn't take being exposed to horror to figure out what happens when you let people go all out with the most destructive forces at our disposal.

Kids are way smarter than you think. Even my 6 yo sees an explosion on TV and tells me "But dad, this is fiction, but they really made that explosion right? Couldn't someone get hurt?".

Why would this cure anyone of FPS BS? What correlation is there between FPS and real war? Who plays an FPS because they wanted to go to war, but didn't like travel?

I don't mind shooting up some virtual people, I want to be as far away from real war as I possibly can be. You can like, die there. And I hear that's not the worst possible outcome by far. Down here in Texas the number of people with missing limbs and purple heart license plates is staggering, especially considering what wars we're in aren't really that large scale.

Kids are going to grow up and say "Yeah, Dad is kind of a stick in the mud. We wanted to CoD:BLOps on a new XBox, and he took us to the West Bank and showed us decapitated people. We just went over to friend's houses to play games after that."

We squeeze it out with inflation.

Additionally, it's still not clear why we can't continue to deal with trolls as we always have and just ignore them. Why is it that contrasting views, even if intentionally ignorant, dim, hateful or hostile annoy people so much? If your posts can't survive the human waste that might respond to you, then perhaps they should not be posted.

"I see you're in Florida, hide the body in plain sight and say you stood your ground."

Education has (with a few notable exceptions) reduced ignorance, and better educated people have been shown to be more forward thinking and progressive. Education is usually paid for by property tax. Property tax is paid for by working people with jobs.

So you've argued effectively for the case of locating a factory in a place with unemployed and ignorant people, to most effectively alter the country to your political specification.

Ignoring the droves of marketing, finance, accounting, HR, operations, customer support and sales a company like Apple would require, all of which require degreed and (theoretically) non-degreed workers in fields that are not quite the white/asian sausage fest that engineering is.

Usually engineering is the smallest part of any company. While I do not agree with the cause of diversity for diversity's sake, nor hiring lesser qualified individuals based on their genitalia or ethnic background, nor hiding behind diversity when attempting to "globalize" a workforce with the intent of reducing wages, it is possible that they can diversify using the existing labor pool without requiring engineering "unobtanium".

I'm pretty sure he ultimately retired.

I can only imagine he's trying to decide if this guy was overlooked for Mensa or something.

There is no reason that we should all be striving towards having the same skillset, though.

There are reasons. They should not necessarily be, but there are reasons. We value certain skills and certain job types far more than others. I have always been good at software, but I elect not to do that and do something else. I can see where that job market is going, and what is going to happen to opportunities as I age, and what is going to happen to wages as people pile on. I have instead chosen to invest my time in something that for me, at least, was more challenging to learn, but which seems a little more immune to the tragedy occurring there.

It would have been EASY, it would have bypassed my disadvantages, to simply do what I'm good at. It would also be my eventual undoing. There's nothing wrong with forcing something, everything good requires heavy investment. I agree with your statement solely to the extent that if something is both hard AND unrewarding that there's no compelling reason to journey on.

Perhaps she's good at something else but doesn't like doing it, or perhaps it won't lead to a lucrative career? If she's slower at learning math, it's obvious she will need to spend more time at it to get the same proficiency as her sibling.

Being human is about overcoming the disadvantages nature has imposed on you, not embracing them.

Dogs are actually a feline attempt at genetic engineering that went awry. Created intentionally with a sort of built in Stockholm syndrome, they seem to have developed an overly strong empathy with their captives instead. Their intentionally capped intelligence which was to be useful for the more mundane task of physical security, and possibly to serve as a pack animal, also backfired: they chased anything that moved quickly, including their creators.

The project was quickly abandoned, unfortunately the prisoners and their obsession with all things related to mating have bred the abortions beyond all reason. The best that can be said for the beasts, perhaps, is that they provide distraction and amusement.

That's what they want you to think. The truth is that there is now an entire army of CIA spy cats.

You must not be a cat owner. The real truth, the truth they don't want anyone to know, is that the CIA, NSA, FBI, KGB, IRS, and especially the DMV, are entirely run by cats. That acoustic cat was actually a senior agent, trusted with testing a next gen prototype. He was not "run over by a car", he was assassinated by an enemy agent. That thing cats do in the middle of the night, where they charge around the house as if an axe murderer were on a spree? That is spy versus spy warfare, your cat saved your life. There's a war going on, a war most of us never see, and it rages under your bed, on your kitchen counters, even on top of your refrigerator.

The NSA isn't so much monitoring your email to see what dirty emails you send each other, they're looking for coded messages from field agents as they "walk across the keyboard". They no longer need acoustic agents, the agents are simply embedded everywhere, and they are always watching. It sounds as if this Snowden person has altered the communications flow, necessitating another field trial of a more "cat in the middle" interception plan. War kitteh is a hero.