You do know that it did end in a hail of bullets from police, right?

Not sure about that. I spend about 8 hours a day producing content at work, and fewer than 8 hours a day consuming content in my free time.

Exactly. I don't get why people get so worked up about this and think that it only happens to IT people.

My uncle is a retired mechanic, and has fixed problems with my family's cars a few times for free (not including the cost of parts obviously). My mom is a sewing machine operator and often does clothing alterations and repairs for me. My brother who works in a restaurant often brings free food for us to eat.

I'm a programmer, but when they need help setting up a printer or cleaning malware off of their PCs, I'm happy to help. If I didn't, I'd feel like a dick.

In addition to the reasons other people have mentioned (e.g. fuel economy, reliability), one reason that a lot of people prefer manuals is the feeling you get when you floor the accelerator.

An automatic transmission has no way of knowing what gear you're about to need. It has to react to changes in throttle position, whereas the driver of a manual car can anticipate the need to accelerate and change gears beforehand.

For efficiency reasons automatic transmissions usually stay in a high gear, and will then shift down after you've hit the accelerator. It usually takes a second or two for it to shift, and so the result is weak acceleration initially, and then a sudden jolt - it's unpredictable and uncomfortable (and in certain cases, unsafe).

A manual transmission on the other hand provides instant access to a predictable amount of torque. This is useful when you're exiting a corner, or overtaking on a freeway.

It's the main reason why people who like sports cars hate (slushbox) automatics - there are a lot of cases where an automatic is guaranteed to be in the wrong gear, and there's nothing that the driver can do about it.

If you want personal computers and the internet, child porn is inevitably going to be distributed too. Should we stop trying to control that?!

Crime in general is the inevitable result of society. That doesn't mean we should give up trying to minimize it.

I've heard this a lot - this idea that PostgreSQL has better transactional integrity than MySQL, but most applications don't need it, and so they are fine using MySQL instead.

That's a good reason to not rule out MySQL, but it's not a reason to choose MySQL over PostgreSQL. What exactly are the reasons for choosing
MySQL/MariaDB/SkySQL over PostgreSQL? I don't know enough about databases to answer this myself, but every time I read about this question, all I hear is "most people don't need PostgreSQL so therefore they shouldn't use it", without much explanation about why PostgreSQL would be worse in any given situation.

If an armored car had no drawbacks to a normal car, there'd be no reason not to use one for commuting to work. But obviously the drawbacks of armored cars are that they are heavier and use more fuel; what are the drawbacks of using PostgreSQL?

Say what you will about Summly, but Wavii is not just a hodgepodge of existing tech. They spent three years building their own natural language processing technology, and their team probably has a better understanding of machine learning than most of Google's engineers. It's not hard to see why Google would be interested.

OK, I disagree. I'd like to see you name a big non-American tech company that was started by a former H-1B holder.

I'm not talking about tiny littles ones that employ a few people; I'm talking about foreign multinational tech companies. These are the only companies that will ever "compete with American companies" like Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft.

Can't think of any? That's probably because it never happens.

...but less likely to kill pedestrians and cyclists.

A lot of new cars can already drive down a freeway without driver control, with adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist. Congested inner cities provide a lot more situations which are much harder to handle than simply following some the lines and not crashing into the guy in front of you.

If a driverless car was less likely to be involved in an accident, the insurance cost per car would be less what we currently pay. The only difference is that the manufacturers would pay it, instead of the car owners, although this cost would be passed on to the consumer in the end. So this wouldn't be a problem for the automakers.

But in a world where cars can drive themselves, I wonder if there would even be insurance companies anymore. Car makers would have a big enough fleet to self-insure, so they could provide insurance themselves.

It's cool that you're interested in developing to an open standard, but I think it's worth noting that there are two kinds of proprietary platforms.

The first is platforms like Google App Engine or Windows. These platforms lock you in, by forcing you to write your code to a certain API. If you decide you don't want to keep using this platform, it's really hard to move to something else. The bottom layer of the platform forces a lot of implementation details in the upper layers of the system.

Then there are things like EC2 or GCE. EC2 gives you a pretty standard Linux machine (unless you choose another OS) and you run standard Linux applications on it. There isn't much lock-in, and the bottom layer of the stack can more easily be swapped out. There are features of EC2 like auto-scaling that are available to you, but you don't have to modify your application when you move to a different auto-scaling implementation.

It sounds like you're a software guy, and so getting someone else to manager your data center is probably a good idea for your situation. That way, you can focus on the software. You can always move platforms later if you decide Amazon is not doing a good enough job, or if you find a more open platform that is as good.

Big (bigger than a watch - not necessarily something ridiculous like 6.3 inches) screens are useful for things like maps and ebooks.

Also, some people actually buy sports cars because they're fun to drive.

The commuter car-plane was a bad idea in the first place. If anything it would be the sci fi writers - not the mechanical engineers - who failed.

Also, I don't think it'd be hard to build a home that tracks the sun. There are plenty of revolving restaurants all around the world. But like the flying car, it's just more trouble than it's worth for most buildings.

Imagine how awful it would be if someone were to fly over people's houses, take pictures of their backyards and post them on the internet ;)

If you think about the residual value of "the iconic Mercedes S Class", it sounds great, doesn't it? Mercedes is a great brand, and the S Class is their best luxury sedan!

But here's the thing about luxury cars (and this applies even more to higher end luxury cars, like the S Class): no one buys them used. If you're rich enough to buy an S Class, you buy it new. If you can't afford a new one, you probably can't afford the maintenance costs, and so used ones have to be heavily discounted to make up for this.

A Corolla or a Civic on the other hand, is something that the used car market goes after. These cars have strong resale value because they are cheap to run and maintain.

The S Class has one of the worst resale values of any car. Tesla claiming that their Model S will have the same residual value percentage is at best an admission that the resale value will be terrible. I wouldn't call that "standing behind" a product.