There is a political agenda behind this,

Obviously. Specifically, airlines don't want their $$$ planes to turn into flaming scrap, and passengers don't want to die. What's less certain is your agenda.

This is called "living in a free society", and you do it every day you encounter strangers on the road,

So do you support letting people drive on the runway in the name of freedom? Or on the left lane? Or park their car in the middle of the highway?

Or do you simply think quadcopters should be exempt from regulation for some reason?

A system of tight regulation & oversight, including fines for violations, is the best way to deal with it.

But if you let the market take care of it, you'll surely boost sales for bottled water, Fallout 3 style!

Think about the fallout if Deutsche Bank hired a database administrator with prior convictions for banking fraud, only to see that employee steal 100 million from the bank.

"Deutsche Bank welcomes a new member to its board of directors. Natural talent was found amongst company IT staff."

Fail? High recividism rate succeeds perfectly in reinforcing the idea that world has good people and bad people. This, in turn, helps justify the use of violence against the bad. And, certainly entirely coincidentally, the USA has invested very heavily into the capacity to use such violence.

What's a few ruined lives next to an empire?

Aside from the fact that it's fundamentally incompatible with democracy, wasn't a huge part of the American revolution the idea that there should be no taxation without representation?

Yes, but as usual, as soon as the rebels won and became the new bosses they started behaving like bosses.

And a full 3D model of the ship would have been measured in terabytes....

This seems pretty unlikely, because how would you manufacture it? Remember, every edge described by the model actually has to be physically molded by some tool or another. That means, in practice, mass-produced parts, so wouldn't the model simply reference them?

It's not entrapment. Having a securtiy clearence like that his first responsibility upon being contacted by someone seeking that information and claiming to be from a foreign government would have been to report it to the proper authorities. He was a willing participant in the crime.

Entrapment doesn't mean someone pushed money into your hands against your will. It means the crime was instigated by the authorities. So this most certainly is entrapment. The only things security clearance might even in principle affect are whether it was morally okay or legally actionable.

The engineer is the guy who builds trains.

Really? Then what do you call the guy who designs them?

In what space, sir, in what space? She's two feet above the ground. Frankly, if he really loved her, he'd let her hit the pavement. It would be a more merciful death.

She's two feet above the ground in the last panel. We don't actually know how far up she was when superman caught her.

Besides, this is Superman we're talking about. What's stopping him from simply smashing through the ground to gain more room to maneuver? Also, the comics strongly suggest supe's flying ability is actually a kind of telekinesis, which also augments his other abilities (thus explaining why his clothes don't ignite on re-entry, and why he can lift huge objects by grapping a small bit without them crumbling), so force would be applied equivalently to every part of Luis's body to a total of zero relative acceleration between various parts.

Or if all else fails, spin real fast to go past and try again.

Something about by the people, of the people and for the people. Unfortunately, the people do not truly participate, so that chain never truly starts anymore. As long as people are more focused on who their favorite right/left wing nut job is and less on what does the country need, there is no end to any of this. Just more nut jobs.

They do not install a special substation to handle my solar power, in fact they do nothing at all.

They keep spinning reserve ready to go in case a cloud covers the Sun.

No, no let's assume that they can (i.e. men can fly). Lois Lane is falling, accelerating at an initial rate of 32ft per second, per second. Superman swoops down to save her by reaching out two arms of steel. Ms. Lane, who is now traveling at approximately 120 miles per hour, hits them, and is immediately sliced into three equal pieces.

Unless, of course, Superman matches speeds before grapping Lois and then decelerates gently. Even a meter or so of deceleration turns this into basically a head-on crash with Superman's hands distributing loads roughly the same way as a seat belt would.

Oh. My. God. No, they aren't. Don't make excuses for these people. Substances necessary for biological function are not poison.SRE

Oxygen is. Vitamin D is. Water is.

So let's give up more of our liberty because some of us are irresponsible.

No. Let's decide whether liberty to sell poisonous food is worth having an obesity epidemic. If you think it is, fine; but don't blame the victims.

The people are too stupid to feed themselves, amirite?

No. Are you sure you're actually replying to me, rather than some personal demons?

I'm not sure how to build a resurgent culture of self-responsibility and sporting physical play in western civilization, except to encourage a few fellow geek friends here and there and maybe a thoughtful slashdotter or two.

Fat and sugar are addictive, borderline poisonous substances. On the other hand, willpower, time and energy are all limited resources. So while you'll probably always find some people who'll have enough of a surplus to stay fit throughout their lives even when constantly surronded by temptations and having to spend on both work and personal life, the same as you'll find the odd fellow who'll quit heroin cold turkey without being forced to, no amount of culture-building will significantly affect obesity rates as long as the cause remains on the shelves of every convenience store.

But then again, comparing fat and sugar to heroin is hardly fair. After all, you can quit heroin but you can't quit food, so cold turkey is not an option. Instead, you have to carefully manage the intake for the rest of your life. Which, to put it bluntly, is a sufficient burden that it's probably more rational to settle for being fat. And that means obesity will remain a major problem until excessive fat and sugar are removed from food by legislation.