Actually, I vote in every election, and have since I turned 18 and could. I vote on the local ballot issues, since they're the only things that directly affect me.

Here, I'll help get you started.

I get my most of my news from Europe, specifically the UK and Germany, and the rest of my news from Japan. Our media in the US is a wasteland that isn't worth reading, and hasn't been for at least the last 20 years.

I read slashdot for the comments, prefer the BSD license over GPL, and prefer OSX and *BSD over Windows and Linux. I avoid computers whenever I can, even though I make a living dealing with them.

I watch Formula 1, love sailing, and follow most of the major sailing races. I don't watch movies, or television other than F1. I prefer J-Pop and EDM over anything that gets played on the radio in the US.

I don't care which, if any, god(s) you worship, but would prefer you keep it to yourself and don't try to change my beliefs (exactly what they are or aren't, you don't need to know).

I don't care about climate change, warming or cooling, man-made or natural, because I don't think humankind as a whole is worth saving. Eventually, we'll kill the human race off anyway. Life will go on in some form, somewhere, even if it's reduced to single-celled organisms and has to evolve all over again.

Also, I absolutely hate career politicians of every stripe, and always have. There's a 99.9% chance I won't vote for any of you assholes who make a career in politics. I don't think I'm all that unique, but I hope that helps you figure out which box I fit in.

That would be my point.

that they reached space.

Sending a balloon to 80,000 ft is not "into space". So far, no one has actually managed to get a weather balloon to exit the atmosphere. Actually doing so would be much, much more impressive than "kids stuck camera, gps logger, and random object in a styrofoam box and brought back pretty pictures".

You know there are large sections of this country where you do not have to register your firearms, right? And large areas where there is no legal obligation to report them lost or stolen, or sold, for that matter.

The whole country doesn't operate like Law & Order's version of New York.

Well, that would certainly put and end to global warming.

For quick hack-it-together devices, I'd rather have a cheap linux computer with some gpio pins that I can access via something like /dev/port0 than an arduino. I'm not sure that this Raspberry Pi is the perfect solution to that, but it's closer to what I want than a arduino is, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to deal with than hacking something together out of an old laptop or mini-itx board.

If I'm going to go back to playing with microcontrollers, I'm going to be working from a bare chip, custom boards, and assembly language, because to me, that was fun.

Arduinos have their place. This thing has its place. There might be some overlap, but there's a lot of situations where you'd pick one over the other. Choice is good, right?

My first thought was "higher", "lower", "lower", "higher", etc.

Really, who cares?