Actually, when people say googling, they really do mean "look it up using Google."

Actually, no, they don't. They mean "look it up with whatever search engine you usually use". As in, google it with Bing".

If gun ownership were more tightly controlled, those 14000-19000 nonfatal injuries and the hundreds of fatal injuries from accidental shootings would be reduced by at least an order of magnitude - lives would be saved.

The number of firearms accidents is statistical noise. Anyone making a great hue and cry about them is clearly not actually concerned with gun accidents, but is trying to use them to veil a prohibitionist agenda.

If gun ownership were more tightly controlled, the 60,000 to 2,500,000 annual incidents of firearms self-defense (yes, huge error bars) would be reduced -- more people would be murdered, raped, and robbed from. Lives would be lost.

Also, of course, enforcing a prohibition law ipso facto means locking people in cages for acts that do not credibly threaten the rights of others. Liberty would be lost.

Here in the civilised world...murder rates and prison populations are proportionally tiny compared to the USA.

Folks in Mexico, Philippines, and Brazil might take exception to being called "uncivilized".

Yes, we have more violence than other wealthy nations. We also have more of a problem with an unaddressed legacy of slavery and segregation, ongoing racism, ongoing economic injustice, and lack of access to useful mental health care than those nations do. Those factors have far more to do with our violence problem than access to firearms does.

According to CDC's WISQARS, there are about 14,000-19,000 nonfatal injuries stemming from accidental shootings per year in the U.S.

And according to that same source, for 2012, there were 8,974,762 non-fatal accidental injuries from falls. Floors are dangerous. 2,145,927 from cutting or piercing objects, 972,923 from poisoning, 423,138 from fire, 357,629 from dog bites...

Heck, there were 58,363 from "nature/environment", which includes "exposure to adverse natural and environmental conditions (such as severe heat, severe cold, lightning, sunstroke, large storms, and natural disasters) as well as lack of food or water." Nature will hurt you with more probability than guns will.

But yours is a common mistake people make when talking about guns, because they just don't know (or care) about the actual numbers.

Pot. Kettle. Black. Numbers are meaningless without context for comparison. By any rational comparison with other things that can hurt you, firearms accidents are rare.

Why is it that if you copy something it's called a fake, but if you also destroy the original it's called restoration?

Interestingly, that's how transporters might eventually work:

Scan you, transmit scan data, reassemble you at the other end based on the data, confirm checksum, then destroy original.

Evolutionary selection pressures never stop.

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any long-term evolutionary advantage for a species. Horseshoe crabs have been rocking along on tiny brains for about three orders of magnitude longer than Homo sapiens has been around.

"Also some of the science and tech courses are very demanding but the teachers don't simplify it leading to many whooshing sounds for the student throughout the courses. Such courses could benefit from a simplified overview of the course material."

How many employers would like to hire people that can't understand the actual content and need "simplified overview" to get a grade? If you really don't grasp it to the point where you can actually apply the math for new, novel problems, then you don't actually know it, do you?

MOOCs have a serious credibility problem already. The very last thing they need is to dumb things down. If it becomes common knowledge that, say, an engineering MOOC graduate can't even handle a system of differential equations in an intelligent manner, or don't understand the implication of Green's function, then the credits will become truly worthless.

So basically what you're saying is humans are flawed, so we need some flawed humans to make rules for the rest of the flawed humans?

Yes, because some humans are way more flawed than others.

Here in Vancouver, flawed humans are flying drones around jets landing at our airport. Less flawed humans are making rules around that, which is OK by me.

"...it's illegal for these ride-sharing services to charge passengers an individual fare..."

If you're charging for access to X (for any given X), you're not sharing, you're selling (or leasing). And you don't get to be exempt from consumer protection regulations just because you're doing your selling on the web.

Who watches TV these days.

Most nights when people are watching TV I'm out walking the dog. Judging by the number of TVs I see glowing in everyone's living rooms as I walk by, I'd say a lot of people are still watching TV these days.

You know, the amazing thing is they feel they have a right to be angry.

You're using a western mindset.

He's some impoverished guy in India desperate to make a few rupees from someone who, in his eyes, is very wealthy.

The 'wealthy' person has wasted his time, so he's angry. His 'boss' will probably yell at him for being unsuccessful, so he's angry.

It's not cut-and-dry like you might think.

...but some European countries (France is another one) have all these stupid little "we're special...and we don't understand the internet" rules...

Sounds like these nations understand the internet quite well. They understand that it's not magic and does not relieve companies of their responsibilities to operate in an accountable manner. "But...we do it the internet!" is not a legal escape clause, as companies like Uber are finally being taught.

It does depend on the size of the field as well, though, as well as the funding. I can well imagine astronomy having major problems; everybody has heard of astronomy, and lots of people dream of being astronomers.

A friend of mine is working in paleogeology. As you might imagine there's not a huge amount of money in the field. On the other hand, few people have heard of it either, and there aren't that many people dreaming of working there. There's no movies starring daring paleogeogists with hat and bullwhip in hand ducking poison arrows and swinging across pits of snakes in order to determine the local sea bed temperature during the cambrian. The end result is that funding is pretty stable and dependable. People that are qualified and willing find funding. I bet there's a fair amount of other obscure fields in a similar situation.

You could write an open source application in C++ rather than the much less mainstream R language and you'd have lots of people ready skilled to maintain it.

You may be right in general. But R is not a general-purpose language. It's a programmable tool for statistical computing; you'd have to spend a lot of time to reimplement a set of high-quality statistical libraries to do the same. Doing that correctly is very non-trivial and not quick. Very similar to saying you can replace Matlab with your own C++ code.