The best test of whether you understand something is whether you can explain it to someone else. If you can't write good documentation, then you probably don't really understand your code, which means that you're not a programmer you're a code monkey (and not a very good one, at that).

WYSIWYG is a terrible way of writing, but it's a great way of editing. The problem is that most modern tools conflate the two. When I write, I prefer to use vim and minimise the distractions - I see the words, I focus on the words and the markup describing their meaning, and I worry about the typesetting later. For articles, actually I don't worry about the formatting at all, my publisher sorts all of that out and so there's no reason for me to bother. I don't care what it looks like - that's not my job as a writer - I care that it's coherent and fluid prose. For books, I use LaTeX, and then I typically have a few rounds of iterations at the end of each chapter when I do the tweak-recompile-check cycle. I structure my environment such that I can build each chapter independently, which speeds up the build times, but it's still painful getting the style tweaks in correctly. I'd be much happier if I could get LaTeX to do a first formatting pass and then use a visual WYSIWYG editor to tweak everything and have those changes preserved the next time I do a formatting run from the source text.

You can fix it, but I agree that it usually puts it in the worst possible place. The problem is that TeX uses an elegant dynamic programming model to determine where to break lines in a paragraph, but uses a greedy algorithm to do page layout. Why? Because the PDP-10 didn't have enough RAM for the dynamic programming tables that would be required to do elegant page layout on a typical document. On a modern computer, even if it takes 2-3MB for the tables, you most likely have a single image in the document that is bigger than that (in early TeX, images had to be added afterwards in a separate compositing phase after you sent the typeset document to the printer, because computers weren't powerful enough to handle nontrivial images).

I tried implementing the TeX linebreaking algorithm for page layout in some naive (unoptimised) Objective-C a few years ago and ran it on a 900-page book that I'd written. Even then, it took under a second to run on the laptop I had at the time. There's no reason not to do it now.

The flamebait mods are obviously from people who use the other editor.

I like rST, but Markdown seemed to get wider support so I gradually switched to using it instead because they're sufficiently similar that it's annoying using both and lots of things didn't support rST. They're both roughly equal for the sorts of things I use them for: blog posts, articles, doc comments in code. There's no way I'd write a scientific paper or a book in either though: LaTeX is still the king there.

And if you ever talk to a British soldier, you'll find that they're even higher up the list of complaints than the food...

You're right about the first part, but wrong about the second part.

H.R.132 : ObamaCare Repeal Act
H.R.1005 : Defund Obamacare Act
H.R.2087 : Protecting Taxpayer Dollars and Identity under Obamacare Act
H.R.2125 : No IRS Implementation of Obamacare Act
H.R.2443 : Safeguarding Children Harmed by Obamacare's Onerous Levies Act
H.R.2682 : Defund Obamacare Act of 2013
H.R.3067 : No Obamacare Subsidies for Members of Congress Act of 2013
S.177 : ObamaCare Repeal Act
S.1292 : Defund Obamacare Act of 2013
S.1497 : No Exemption for Washington from Obamacare Act

Unfortunately not, but if you find one, let me know!

I should mention, in case it wasn't clear, that my comment about Planned Parenthood was an example I made up, not something mentioned in the study I linked to.

According to this report (PDF), there are three distinct groups within the Republican party: the Tea Party, evangelicals (the Religious Right), and moderates. There are stark differences between the three groups, but another poster mentioned "the power of cognitive dissonance" - no matter which of the three Republican subgroups you belong to, you're going to have a natural tendency to WANT to agree with the other two, because you're a Republican. For example, Evangelicals think the government shouldn't fund Planned Parenthood because abortion is murder, and the Tea Party thinks the government shouldn't fund Planned Parenthood because it's wasteful government spending, but Evangelicals are going to adopt "smaller government" as part of their argument and Tea Partiers will adopt the moral case as part of their argument.

Quite a few of them are working on upstreaming JunOS changes to FreeBSD.

Every flight that I have booked in the last few years, has involved booking the seats at the time of reserving the tickets. The only ones that didn't recline were in the back row and were clearly marked as such, and in some cases were cheaper.

An upgrade to Economy Plus (which has more leg room) typically costs about an extra 10%, and is often automatic for regular flyers. If you can't afford an extra $10/hour for comfort, then perhaps that comfort isn't as important to you as you're claiming...

There are currently a million people who have Top Secret or above security clearance. That means, one million people who may be sharing secrets with a foreign power if they are bribed or blackmailed into doing so. Do you really trust the vetting to have managed to find a million incorruptible people in the USA?

The cost is embodied in the regulation, but the regulation is (in most cases) really just codifying the cost. You can't bring a drug to market until you've first done trials that it doesn't have any serious negative effects (or, at least, that you know what they are and can disclose them), and then until you've demonstrated that it actually works. This is expensive to do, because it involves doing controlled scientific experiments on groups of human subjects.

The fact that it's expensive means that it's not possible to explore all of them and so profit-motivated companies pick the ones that will give the most return on financial investment, which may or may not be the same ones that will save the most lives, or cause the greatest overall improvements in the standard of living.