Somehow I doubt that the point is for somebody to go out and buy an XBox when they need an HDMI switch. The idea is that if you've got an XBox and a shortage of ports, you don't have to go out and buy an extra switch.

They'll simply stop trying to correct UTC to match the rotation angle of the earth. "Correcting" UTC that way is mostly helpful to astronomers, and for everyone else has no benefit and some significant drawbacks.

Well, let's see:

Their kids are 5 and 2. Their parents are doing this for a single year. Somehow, I think that between the ages of 3 and 18 they'll be able to pick up the skills they need.

Even should they decide to do this permanently, there's no reason to think that the parents are going to ban their children from using computers. They will attend school, and socialize with their friends. Hard as it may be for someone on Slashdot to believe, being connected to the internet all the time is not universal. Not even in the United States. There are many, many households that have no or limited access to computers at home.

Finally, there are certain groups that forego technology for various reasons; sometimes religious, sometimes otherwise. It turns out that children from these cultures do just fine. They have lots of opportunities open to them, and if they choose they can learn skills that they might have missed out on at a later point. This is nothing unique to technology -- there are lots of skills that can be invaluable in today's society that most people don't have.

No. It's not abuse. It's a parenting choice, and I'll bet that their children are going to be better off than the kids whose parents think that giving them a cell phone and a television is all they need to do. The fact that the parents are making this decision tells me that they are actually involved in the lives of their children, which is far more important than any gadget.

So it was a reasonable defense of FEMA until the very first sentence?

This is an absolute trivialization of the negative effects of actual child abuse. You think that it's a bad method of parenting -- fine. But trying to equate it to abuse is laughable.

There are plenty of scientifically-documented health reasons to require knowledge of ingredients. Allergies, for instance; also nutrition is related to ingredients and has an obvious impact on health. This doesn't apply for GMO foods.

You are free to choose foods whose manufacturers advertise their non-GMO nature. Manufacturers already know that they can sell things to people like you by advertising it, and so they do. I don't have a problem with the information being available. I have a problem with government mandates and regulations when they aren't necessary.

I've got a newsflash for you: in any group of people, there are people with differences of opinion. Members of any political party will have some areas of disagreement.

The fact that people who subscribe to (or think they subscribe to) libertarian political philosophy don't always agree with each other doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with that philosophy.

The number of people in those "tails" don't really matter, because there aren't enough of them to appreciably affect the average.

Why should it be mandated? It's not the government's business, unless there is an actual, scientifically-documented health risk involved. If you don't like genetically-modified food, it's your responsibility to choose products to avoid it. Plenty of manufacturers of food are helping you to do so by doing their own labeling.

This comes down to consumer preferences, and as such is not an appropriate target for government regulation. The default position should be to reject government regulation unless you can show that such regulation is actually beneficial to society.

If intelligence follows a normal distribution (and the results of most intelligence tests, at least, tend to support that conclusion), then half of the population will be less intelligent than the mean.

I guess that's true, but I am trying (and failing) to come up with any valid reason why someone who does not know their candidate's name could possibly be considered qualified to cast a vote.

Well, I can't speak for the original poster, but in my book anyone who can't even figure out the name of which candidate they intend to vote for doesn't deserve to have their vote counted.

This is the main reason why I support removing party affiliation from all ballots. If someone can't be bothered to learn the name of the person that they're voting for, then they shouldn't be voting. Increasing voter turnout is only a worthwhile goal if the voters actually have some idea of what they're doing.

We already get enough pointless 300-post threads with everyone arguing about how they apparently know exactly what happened that day every time there's an article related to the Martin shooting. Nobody's going to change their mind on the subject at this point. No need to try to turn unrelated threads into the same argument.

That would make sense if the ACLU claimed a position in support of the Second Amendment, but had a policy of not taking cases related to it. In reality, though, they have an official position that opposes the Second Amendment.

They're certainly entitled to take that position, but it does mean that they don't live up to their mission to "defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States."

This seems to depend an awful lot on the local post office. In my area, sending packages via USPS is very good -- much more reliable and timely than UPS, and on par with FedEx, though much cheaper. On the other hand, I know people in other places where USPS is so bad that it's completely pointless to use it -- packages and letters are "lost" or destroyed more often than not.

The result is that if I have something being shipped to me, then I have the sender use USPS. If I'm shipping something myself, though, then unless I know that USPS is reliable for the receiver, I'll use another service.