This is a actually good thing -- you get to decide if you want to pay the license fee, instead of having it bundled in. You should be supporting this ala-carte style opt-in feature set, as you get to vote with your wallet against the closed-source DRM of DVDs by not even paying for the underlying tech every time you get an OS (and in particular, even when you get the OS for a computer incapable of even playing DVDs as it has no optical drive as would be the case otherwise).

Yep, it's horrible when a traffic light goes out and police step in to direct traffic until repairs are completed. Tyrants!

Don't be silly... there are plenty of languages where it's difficult to write any program.

No problem: Coal.
Previously: Also coal. Oil.
Future: [insert image of SimCity 2000 Microwave Plant mis-fire here]

IIRC, Fukushima is an old design that was already running beyond its originally estimated life span. Modern reactor designs are set up such that an emergency situation would cause reactor shut down -- they need a constant controlled feed to maintain the reaction, rather than a needing a constant controlled feed to limit the reaction. Shut down the entire control system in some catastrophic fashion and it'll quietly shut itself down. Can the containment be breached? Sure, a significant enough event could do that... Of course, a significant enough event could shatter a major dam and cause destruction all downriver.

I'm a big fan of Solar and Wind power, and I don't see any particular way those are likely to cause any sort of failure-disaster on the scale of anything else (at least until we're beaming it in from space), which is nice... However, I see modern Nuclear Fission reactors being relatively reasonable as a middle-point and as something that can help easily absorb loads when wind or solar have poor generating conditions -- of course, if you aren't running it at full capacity, it becomes rather expensive to maintain just as a back-up generation method, which could be problematic without government funding (or at least regulation for the general power grid architecture to require enough funding get to the back-up systems).

Nuclear is not lethal through walls or miles of distance any more than anything else that can contaminate ground water -- it's the contamination that's a problem, and you see that with any chemical-consuming power plant. A hydro-fracking-related accident could potentially generate an earthquake to level a city (unlikely), or seriously contaminate an aquifer causing the entire region, and possibly all areas down-stream, to be unlivable (quite possible). Or an under-water drilling operation could impact, say, a gulf in the ocean, contaminating all of the fish caught there to the point where people starve. And I already pointed out the coal fire. So yeah, I'm quite willing to say Nuclear isn't necessarily more dangerous than all other sources. Just differently dangerous.

Until private schools are required to accept and retain any student a public school would be required to take on (including those requiring special education or otherwise having additional needs, but allowing for extreme discipline problems to be removed), there's no way to compare them effectively, especially on a per-pupil cost basis. If you only have model students that require a bare minimum of effort to teach, your numbers will always look better. If you have students that require an aide on a regular basis on top of normal class time, and that take teacher attention away from the class to ensure they don't fall behind... you're spending disproportionate funds for some students, so the per-pupil costs go up... and if they don't go up, then you're not spending as much on the model students as the private school is.

Bottom line: If private schools that accepted vouchers were required to take any student from their area... they'd be public schools, and they'd very likely do even worse than public schools do, since with all of their current cherry-picking advantages they still can't really beat the best public schools.

Or reject or expel students that make them look bad.

Having worked QA for lots of different types of programmers, the guys who write 10x the tests to catch every code path may spend more time on the first write of the code... but they spend less time on the project in total. They seemed to find the weird design issues immediately because they had to consider all of those tests and what their implications were, so they did fewer refactors later. They spent a hell of a lot less time on bug fixes (at least from my reports), because their automated tests caught all the basic stuff long before I got a crack at it. While I initially saw it as a mindset (100% unit test code coverage) in a team of Ruby programmers, the Ruby guys infected the C++ team with it, and that team's bug counts and development time dropped significantly (after an initial spike) from implementing those tests. In my opinion, writing those extra tests isn't a waste of time for a long-term project - it's a time-saver on all sides, and assuming the compiler will "catch those problems automatically" is a bad habit some programmers get into, and it usually causes problems down the line.

Here you go!

Well, that may just be because they open-carry instead...

They might also be right, since you are wrong. For example, the vast majority of the population has an above average (mean) number of limbs. You'd need to have a Bell Curve or something similar to get half above and half below the average. I'm inclined to think more examples exist where things don't fall into place nicely, and therefore on average (hah!) it won't be exactly half the population that is below the average.