Like many so called gun "safety" legislation attempts, this legislation has nothing to do with gun safety and everything to do with gun control. This type of legislation will severally harm gun makers financially (potentially putting them out of business). Furthermore, new smart guns technology could easily double the cost of any firearm, making it hard for law abiding individuals to own and purchase firearms. Failure points are a given, and it won't be long before follow up legislation will mandate back doors for law enforcement built in to the firearm "safety" mechanisms. The backdoors will almost for sure be easily exploitable and buggy. This legislation is bad from start to end, but luckily/hopefully people aren't stupid enough to buy the hype, and it will fail like all the attempts before it.

With the recent IRS debacle and large corporations like Apple and Facebook avoiding billions in taxes, it should be obvious to everyone that taxes are not about fairness. They are a weapon to be wielded by government to attack opposition and to grant favors to business cronies who elect them and donate to them. If ever there was an argument for a simple tax system, like a flat tax, this is it.

Actually I'm a hard core Libertarian with strong Conservative leanings. I don't agree that the government can or should attempt to grant "rights". I believe they only take them away. But as you pointed out, it is completely off topic.

As for the whole driving is a right/privilege, I can't win either way. If I didn't make the disclaimer, there would be a dozen posts of people claiming that driving isn't a right. Driving is not a enumerated right in the constitution. Transportation is covered. Driving a car isn't. As one AC pointed out there are a lot of court cases to back up that it should be a "right". I believe that the government ought to get the hell out of transportation completely, but then you'd have private roads and private tolls which has its own system of problems. While they maintain the roads, they get to make the rules that govern travel on them, to some extent. That is a whole debate in itself.

We'd prevent many accidents and most of the fatal ones if we forced everyone to drive no faster than 15 miles an hour.

The obvious problem is that it is impractical, likely to severely impact average individuals, and frankly a pretty lousy tradeoff of "freedom" versus safety. I use freedom in quotes, because yes, "driving is a privilege not a right". On a side note, those who make the idiotic argument that the internet should be a "right" because it is almost impossible to live without it are on far more untenable ground than claiming that driving ought to be a "right".

Likewise, with drinking, there are similar practical, freedom versus safety, and impact arguments. I personally fall on the, "the government doesn't give a crap about safety and wants to scam citizens for millions of dollars each year" side of the issue.

Right now a hacker can cause billions in damages, and pull potentially millions of dollars in ill-gotten loot, and maybe see 15 years in prison. That is way too soft in my opinion.

On the issue of Swartz, I don't know why the guy is some sort of cause-celeb just because he off-ed himself. He broke the law, plain and simple.

In cases where individuals get unauthorized access, and aren't doing anything with it (not Swartz who was planning to distribute), I think there could be room for more lenient sentencing, especially on first offenses.

I've tried many different schemes in the past, but this is by far the best and easiest that I've come up with: Roku + Plex + Plex media server. Then Samba shares for everything else.

WxMaxima is may go to choice for intense mathematical stuff.

Precisely. There is an utter lack of explanation for this extra CO2. Humans don't produce that much CO2 relative to nature each year, but somehow this article has leaped to the conclusion that this extra CO2 is all from anthropogenic sources. If this counts for "science" these days, we ought to all throw in the towel.

I think you missed the point of the OP. That was precisely what he was saying.

This is a government backed monopoly (in my opinion, the only true use of the word "monopoly"). It needs to be shut down. The same way utility providers currently get to exercise monopolies, enforced by government. Tesla ought to succeed or fail on their own merit (and I think they will fail, but they deserve the chance).

Maybe we could add a GPS tracker that way we could track the weapons and know exactly where and how they are used...I know! We need a good name for this operation...hmm...missiles go fast, so maybe we could call it "Operation Fast and Furious!"...oh wait...

Libertarianism would "prepare Americans" by not coddling people when they are stupid. The vast majority of the idiots would either climb out of the mire, or die.

I would wholehearted support this concept. People shouldn't get "second chances" on my dime.

This could be a fantastic thing for the Opensource Community.

Providing the OpenOffice (OO) and the LibreOffice(LO) developers can get past the bad blood of the past, they could merge their to projects back together and focus their efforts.

Corn prices go up because of ethanol subsidies which drive an otherwise failed alternative energy source. Ethanol makes no economic sense, unless you happen to be a corn farmer and in bed with big government.

So in a "perfect socialist (substitute communism or whatever other "planned economy" belief you hold)" all the dogs in your cage would starve because there isn't enough food for any of them when it gets equally portioned out? This assumes that capitalism has anything to do with crony capitalism which it doesn't (other than a similarity of name). It also assumes that capitalism is a zero-sum game, which it isn't and never has been. Putting aside all of these gross generalizations. Lets take your analogy at face value. You allege that it would be better for every dog to starve to death equally instead of half of the dogs to survive. How is that any more moral, or right, than the best and brightest dogs surviving while the slower and dumber dogs perish. I thought we believed in evolution and survival of the fittest, or doesn't that count in the social-economic world?

There are different types of rockstar coders. One type will get shit done under ridiculous deadlines. The other will write great code quickly and meet sane deadlines. Most of the time you want the later. Sometimes, you need to bring in your pinch hitter (the first group) and get stuff done. Most of the really bad spaghetti code can be mitigated by having good requirements and not wasting your rockstars on stupid, simple projects, and of course, strong helpful management.

I think rockstars get a bad wrap precisely because they are called in to fix things when projects are getting over deadline for the exact reason that the requirements suck. You really can't hold them accountable for spaghetti code or not exact solutions when the project requirements were the reason they had to step into the mess in the first place.