What a load of bullshit. The government isn't supposed to fear us, you twit, and to be brutally honest, it's that attitude that has gotten us into such the mess we're in today. After all, how far a leap is it from "government is supposed to fear us" to "if only someone would bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City or an Olympic venue in Atlanta, that would show 'em"?

The government is supposed to provide for the common defense and general welfare of the country. When some dictator stages a military coup d'état against his government, how well is that government able to provide for the common defense and general welfare? It's impossible for a government that fears its citizenry to fulfill that mandate. It's also utterly moronic to espouse rule by physical intimidation, which is exactly what you're supporting when you propagate this idiotic notion that people should have guns to keep government in check.

A little anecdote I like to relate to "government is supposed to fear us" twits:

On April 12, 2009, three Navy SEALs shot and killed three Somali pirates holding Captain Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama hostage. They had parachuted in two days before, and were set up on the fantail of the U.S.S. Bainbridge, a destroyer dispatched to handle the situation. The pirates were on a lifeboat being towed over 75 feet behind the Bainbridge. The SEALs had been manning their sniper rifles for over 24 hours straight, and both boats were bobbing up and down. Three simultaneous shots were taken, and there were three direct hits in the heads of each of the pirates. Captain Phillips was successfully rescued without injury.

I bring this up for a couple of reasons. First, because Navy SEALs are badass, and you do not want to mess with them. But mostly because you need to understand that if the government wants you dead, you are going to be dead. You will be a red splatter on the wall before you even have the chance to get your military-grade weaponry.

Several times since the Revolutionary War, nutcases have tried to rise up in armed resistance to the U.S. government. The largest such rebellion took place between 1861 and 1865. You would have thought that that would have settled the matter once and for all, but no, even almost 150 years later, we still have people romanticizing revolutions trying to convince others that overthrowing the U.S. government via armed conflict is a good idea, or that the U.S. government is even remotely concerned about the possibility; thus we end up with incidents like Ruby Ridge and Waco. So let me break it down to you really simple-like: 1) Armed revolt against the U.S. government by U.S. citizens will never work, and 2) if you try, you will be quickly dispatched with no matter how many guns you own.

And personally, I'm glad. Unlike apparently you, I realize that we need government to maintain our society. If someone burns down my house or murders someone in my family, I don't want the government to be afraid to arrest and prosecute the guy who did it because he has a lot of guns, that's the height of idiocy. If you want a haven where there is little to no government interference, you should move to Somalia. There's practically no government there past the "might makes right" rules imposed by local warlords. If you have a lot of guns, you have a lot of power. If someone commits some perceived injustice against you, there's nothing stopping you from using your resources to carry out justice in whatever way you want. As an added bonus, you wouldn't have to pay taxes. Of course, you do have to worry about your warlord neighbors getting jealous of your stuff and, if they have more guns and mercenaries than you do, coming over and taking it. But hey, at least you can go down in a blaze of glory knowing that you and your family are dying without the benefit of government helping you with your personal protection or interfering with your ability to acquire lots of guns and that the only limit you have on what kind you can buy is how much money you have.

Plus, all of this "government is supposed to fear us" talk has me wondering, who exactly do you consider to be "us"? You sure as hell aren't speaking for me. You are presumably aware that over 90% of people support universal background checks? A good majority of them support stricter gun laws? Hell, even the headline of this submission is "Majority of Americans Would Ban 3D-Printing Guns at Home". So by "us", I can only assume that you don't mean a majority of the American people. Instead, you're referring to the minority; depending on exactly which issue you're referring to, a minority that varies from tiny to at best somewhat small. Funny how people like you think that government should only protect your interests, not the common defense or the general welfare of the country.

I hate to burst your little bubble, but it doesn't work that way. Mr. Random Anonymous Coward doesn't get to dictate to the rest of us through a campaign of fear and intimidation what the agenda of our government is. If you don't like it, then try to elect different people to set a different agenda. But the second you take action to instill fear in other people for their physical safety to advance your political agenda or to coerce the government into doing your bidding, that doesn't make you a patriot, it makes you a terrorist. Furthermore, you have exactly zero room to try to frame our government as a tyranny, because what you're espousing is a tyranny--just one that caters to your whims instead of someone else's.

People like you boggle my mind. I wish that for one year, you would live in a place where there is a real totalitarian government, somewhere like North Korea. Then for a year, live in a place where there is no government, like Somalia. Only then, I'm convinced, will you ever realize the tripe that you're spewing is completely impractical and immoral. Only then will you realize that the best government is a happy medium, one in which neither the government fears us nor we fear the government, but we work together as a team to ensure our common defense and promote our general welfare, one in which the citizens realize that they're not always going to get what they want, one in which people realize that no freedoms come completely without limit and that is not a slippery slope into communism/socialism/whatever evil buzzword you pretend it is.

But in the meantime, I highly suggest you grow the hell up and stop being such an insufferable tool, and to stop getting your political thoughts off of bumper stickers and from right-wing talk radio hosts.

Hopefully it was obvious that I was referring to the common lay definition of the word, things like ghosts, ESP, clairvoyance, divination, etc.

If you watched the video, he specifically addressed this. He says that he's not claiming that supernatural events don't occur. His prize is up for grabs to someone who can prove that they do.

"I don't know" is, in fact a perfectly good answer, but it's not a valid explanation. It's certainly not proof of the contrary. More often than not, it is a cop-out to use "I don't know" as an excuse to not believe what evidence there is or do further research into the matter. This is where religion gets into trouble a lot. I've seen it a lot in the form of statements like, "Scientists don't know such-and-such, therefore God did it."

If you have what seemed to be supernatural occurrences happening in a house you lived in, the scientifically "correct" course of action isn't to simply chalk it up to ghosts and be done with it, it is to try to come up with plausible explanations for what was happening and testing them. Even if you settle on the ghosts answer, you need some way to prove that that's what it is. Who knows? Maybe you could have won Randi's prize.

And I'm not being facetious when I say that. A lot of advancements in science have happened when people didn't just accept seemingly supernatural phenomena at face value, but investigated it. Sometimes you even get really lucky and the actual explanation is more fantastical than any supernatural explanation.

It shouldn't be, but statistically speaking, you're wrong. Don't confuse stereotyping individuals (which may or may not be a factually correct assessment of someone, depending on the individual) with aggregate data collection (which can be proven to be statistically valid). Most people who actively associate themselves with gay rights are gay. That is in no way saying that no straight person does so, or that most straight people aren't for gay rights (which has become the case in only the last decade). It's only saying that those people marching in gay rights parades? They are predominantly gay. If you pull someone out of the parade, they might or might not be gay. But if you want to advertise, for example, a heterosexual dating service, you'd probably be better off targeting a different event demographically.

Don't worry, we can bring that stuff back, too!

People used to ask why desktops would need multiple processors. Most software now takes advantage of multithreading capability, and trying to use a single core process is downright painful.

It may not need to multitask many phone calls at once, but it most certainly may need to multitask a whole bunch of apps at once, especially on a phone that can do things like instantly translate written or spoken text, record and composite two video sources at once and audio in real time, receive notifications such as texts, keep track of calendars, locations, temperatures (?), heart rates (!), etc. while you go about whatever it is you're doing, running a pretty sophisticated operating system with a pretty sophisticated user interface, and oh yeah, take and process telephone calls. And don't forget that it might have to do some of these tasks twice, given that the phone can be configured to be running an entirely separate virtual OS for your work stuff.

Never ask why any electronics device would need more resources, whether it's CPU cores, memory, storage capacity, network bandwidth, or anything else. It's a sure recipe for looking back in five years and say, "Wow, I sure was dumb back then. I never dreamed that devices today would be able to [insert amazing capability due directly to advancement in hardware specifications]!"

With all due respect, this is one of the dumbest things I've ever read on Slashdot. It really doesn't take a lot of thinking to realize how nonsensical what you've stated is. Yes, some poor and middle-class people have investments, but I can't imagine anyone who doesn't know that the rich have disproportionately much more in investments than any poor or middle class person does. In fact, most of the poor don't have any investments at all, or so little as to be negligible, more than offset by debts they carry, and a lot of the working lower-middle class don't either. Sales taxes (or VATs or consumption taxes or whatever snake oil term you want to use for it now) disproportionately hit the poor and middle class, the people who don't have the luxury of choosing whether to spend or save their money because they're living paycheck-to-paycheck. Your warped logic seems to be that because the poor and middle class would have to pay a little bit extra on investments if the capital gains tax is raised, let's instead endorse a plan in which they'd get the shit smacked out of them with, depending on who you ask, an extra 20%-40% in taxes at the time of purchase. Oh, and the rich, who pay the lions share of capital gains taxes, might have to pay a minuscule bit more on their foie gras, but if you're listening to who I think you're listening to, they'll get a huge windfall in paying little or no taxes on money made by their money sitting in a bank or corporation's slush fund!

I hope you're not seriously advocating the so-called "Fair Tax," because the people who cooked that up have one goal and one goal only in mind: To shift the nation's already skewed tax burden even more onto the poor and middle class. It is to get people who currently pay little to no taxes due to their low incomes to pay even more in a national sales tax. Yes, I've read up on the so-called "Fair Tax". Yes, I've heard all of the arguments for it. Yes, I know about the proposed refund to people in poverty. I've looked at the numbers, evaluated their arguments, and come to the conclusion that they are goddamned liars with a slick marketing campaign trying to twist the concept of "fairness" into getting people to lobby against their own economic self-interest.

What really needs to happen is that they need to do away with the capital gains tax and tax all income as income, period, end of story. If you make $50,000 from wages and $5,000 from capital gains, then you'll pay a marginal income tax rate of 25% on that $5,000. If, on the other hand, you make $5,000 from wages and $50,000 from capital gains, you'll pay a marginal income tax rate of 25% on the last $5,000 of that $50,000. No matter how you slice it or dice it, you pay the same taxes.

I was really hoping that he would call himself Pope Awesome. A little marketing never hurt. If I were Pope, I'd have to go with either taking the name Mobile, or possibly Oree.

Funny, but it does make me wonder. While I'm not gay, I do tend to like statuses and pages that have to do with gay rights, and several of my friends on Facebook are gay, yet I still see ads all the time for single ladies in my area. It makes me wonder: 1) Has Facebook accurately pegged me as straight (or bisexual) even though I haven't given it any direct indication of what I am, 2) has Facebook not made the connection and/or advertisers don't care, just spamming their ads to all males, or 3) is Facebook using some other algorithm that happens to be accurate for me, but generally less accurate for the population as a whole? Personally, I think #2 is correct.

I'd like to see a page about me that says, "Here's the information you've provided, and here's the information we're inferring from what we know about you." I suppose they'd never do that because it might very well creep people out too much, but then, it might get people whose inferences are wrong to directly supply the information to them.

Maybe, but if you're a nude man and see someone attractive, it could be a bit embarrassing. You just can't hide that. And if you spend much time in an airport, you'll know that there are some VERY attractive people who go through there. While I'm not so low on self-control that I'd rape someone, sometimes just thinking about that girl I saw in the theater last night is enough that I'm glad I wear pants everywhere I go about my daily business.

True story: A few years ago I got sick as a dog, running fever, having chills, and relevantly to this story, I had a nasty case of laryngitis. I wasn't just hoarse, I just plain couldn't talk. I called my insurance company to get some information I needed to go to the doctor, and I had one of those damn voice menus. "Please say your social security number!"...

I tried entering it in using touch tones, but it wouldn't work. The damn thing insisted that I say my social security number, and it wouldn't let me talk to anyone until I did. And I tried, too. Oh lord, I did try. I could get enough weird sounds out that a human could probably understand what I was saying, but my voice was breaking up so badly that the IVR couldn't decipher it.

I ended up going to the doctor anyway, and they had someone from the receptionist desk help me out with the insurance stuff because according to that insurance company, if you can't talk, you don't get help.

To this day, I think that any company worth its salt should give you the option of dropping to a human operator to help you. There are just too many things that can go wrong with an IVR, and too many problems that are simply unsolvable via automated response systems.

I'd go even further, and say that most of even the best documentation doesn't provide use cases and best practices. Picking on MSDN as an example, there are some really good articles out there about various topics, but there aren't a lot of articles on addressing a specific question or need. If you need to know how to use, for example, a treeview control, MSDN is probably the best place to go. But it doesn't answer the question, should I be using a treeview control to begin with, or are there other solutions that might be better? Or, I'm having a specific problem with a treeview control, such as getting it to work right in a multithreaded application. How do I fix this? For those kinds of issues, you don't particularly need documentation, you need a community that is ready and willing to help you.

Having said that, one problem with StackOverflow is that it's not maintained that well. I've frequently found answers there that were just plain wrong, and answers that might have been applicable in 2005 when the software I'm working with was six versions behind what I'm using now. It would be nice if they had some sort of cleanup mechanism to maintain a bit of freshness to the answers and encourage people to re-answer questions when underlying technologies or software changes.