Thanks for the insults.. very informative.

Perhaps this XKCD will be of help: http://xkcd.com/1053/

For those clueless like me, PAC stands for Politicial Action Committee

I can forgive the headline and summary for not defining the acronym, but when the article itself also doesn't say, it's getting ridiculous.

Way to miss the point. According to Wikipedia, in 2012, 73% of Americans self-identified as "Christians".

Applying strong labels like "irrational" and "unintelligent" to that large of group of people is "irrational" and "unintelligent".

You're dealing with Stanch Atheists. Don't expect them to be rational or intelligent. They've gone tribal, circled the wagons, and are now locked into anti-religious flame wars and are unable to learn better.

Isn't painting with broad stokes fun! There's surely no actual rational, intelligent creatures in these enormous labels!

A studio enforcing their copyright against personal-use downloads might be a somewhat crappy and ill-advised practice, but it's not "trolling". To me if you were going to call something "copyright trolling" it would be more like using copyright letters to silence people, aka SLAPP, not using copyright the way it was intended, to prevent people other than the owner from making copies of the entire media as a substitute to buying it from the media holder.

I'm seeing far more liberals (on the internet, generally pretty wealthy) that are pro-guns, so not that hard for me to picture. But I will grant you the average conservative probably wouldn't get it.

Ignoring the general stupidity of many TSA practices, and that this is an artificial market created by government inefficiency, what's so fundamentally wrong with paying more to get through faster?

If your money is worth more than your time, you'll wait, if your time is worth more than your money, you'll pay. That's a fundamental decision every time you say something like "I'll pay someone to change my oil because I don't want to spend 20 minutes and get dirty doing it myself", or "I'll eat out so I don't have to cook". Time/money/value decisions are something you make dozens of every day.

I was once at an airport, I think it was LAS... people were all piled up in a clusterfuck right after of the entrance to TSA where they check IDs, even though there was about a mile of Disneyland spiral queue that was not being used. A helpful TSA agent started to open up the spiral queue, and was actually rebuked by a superior because "that's not the way they do things", and everyone that went in the queue had to rejoin the mosh pit of people.

And then they closed two of the four open screening lanes because "it wasn't busy enough to justify having that many open". We had to literally jog across the airport to catch our flight after being stuck in that mess for 50+ minutes.

I'm not sure it would take new technology to fix the TSA, just some people running the show that don't have their head up their ass.

Someone who knows PHP and Javascript really well is not a common thing. If you do go the web route, focus on the JS more than the server side, since that's where things are actually happening these days. Learn how to write JS that doesn't leak DOM nodes or memory (for god's sake, please). Half the JS libraries out there leak like a sieve.

Learning to write good PHP code would be a huge benefit, since it seems to be a rare skill, and as you point out, the language gives you plenty of rope to hang yourself with.

I take issue with the idea that a CS degree at most schools would give you the foundation to be a good programmer.

There's far too much emphasis on math, and far too little emphasis on what really matters in software. I will never ask one of my employees to solve a partial differential equation. But I will ask them to write maintainable code (even simple shit like don't copy and paste big blocks of code seems to not be taught at all) and to consider usability and UI at every step.

If Slashdot were created today, I wonder if it would be some kind of homogenized youtube channel or twitter account.

The barriers of entry have come down, but inevitably, so has the quality of content. The white noise isn't a conspiracy, it's a consequence of commoditization of publishing. It just turns out that most people don't have anything worthwhile to say.

It is interesting how much your "well off liberal" rhetoric overlaps with "fox-type conservative". You are both afraid of some dark skinned boogyman. Except, your plan is appeasement, while the conservative plan is self-defense.

Its also the same reason the radical Muslims can convince angry young men to blow themselves up.

I don't think the world needs any more activists.

Judging by your user number and the likely age that makes you, I suspect you are projecting your own experience here.

I believe I've passed the age of consciousness and righteous rage,
I've found that just surviving was a noble fight
I once believed in causes too, had my pointless point of view
Life went on no matter who was wrong or right