Hey Anonymous Coward, you're gonna have to do better than that...

What facets of my Surface Pro makes it a fake computer?

You know what I love even more than than Win 8.1 on my Surface Pro 1? The side glances of envy from MacBook Air fanboys as they watch me use the touchscreen.

Downvote away haters, my karma can take it.

I have a liberal arts degree (Political Science) and I work in tech as a product manager - Writing requirements docs, training, travelling, evangelizing as the voice of the customer. I also have more job security than my coder-peers as my job hasn't been outsourced, unlike many of theirs.

However, I've always dabbled in computers and software, going back to my TRS-80 Model 1 in 1980.

The biggest challenge is that while Tech CEOs talk the talk of wanting 'critical thinking skills' it doesn't translate down to the line managers doing the hiring. All they know is STEM, so that's what they fall back on.

"It's not enough getting a free ride off of developers building great software, we want to shove our roadmap down their throats and get them to work harder for us â" without having to pay for it, of course."

Looks more like "We want to figure out how best to coordinate and share that portion of the work that the people whom we pay to develop software for us, do on free software." (Though they're not using that dangerous word "free", of course.)

"Free" or "open source" doesn't mean no one is getting paid to develop it.

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".

I agree, and it's sad. All I'm reading is uninformed juvenile snark based off some middle-NSA manager's "vision" that is, frankly, technically impossible. And probably was dropped a long time ago - not that this doesn't sell newspapers, of course.

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.