Light aircraft don't use fly-by-wire, why do cars need it?

Because you can keep incompetent people from getting a pilot license, but you can't keep them from getting a driver's license, at least not without grinding the whole society to a standstill. So letting a computer handle as much of the driving as possible makes everyone safer.

As a gamedev: Stop leasing games, you fool.

There is no way the U.S. federal government should be (in the long term) involved in health insurance.

The federal government was intended from the start to have wide authority over commerce.

Health insurance is commerce. Unless you require insurers to each operate only in a single state, it's interstate commerce.

Hmm I seem to have messed up a few >s and <s... That's my fault, 0: For not giving a fuck -- It's futile to try deconverting a zealot; and 1: it's 2013 and we're still escaping HTML manually?

Truly, the whole computing world is shit strung together with bubble gum and twine. I mean, really... No isolation for code and data pointers or sacrificing a register for offset / segmentation and not giving us a new offset register so we could ACTUALLY do the heap code pointer protections.

How fucking dumb can everyone be? The language and systems programmers don't interact with the hardware makers and vise versa. What the actual fuck. I'd love just ONE MORE hardware execution permission ring level, so that SANDBOXES could actually work... Nope, not on ARM, or AMD... Just 2 levels -- Hardware designed for a monolithic kernel. It's fucking disgusting.

I mean... I get that mature software doesn't necessarily deliver awe-inspiring features all the time, but

But we're talking about Firefox. It's not mature by any stretch of imagination.

why is it news?

Hype. The whole purpose of ditching major.minor.build versioning was to get the hype of a major release for every single new build. Well, that and it makes it less convenient to maintain old branches in bugfix state, thus forcing everyone to buy into every new feature and feature removal unless they want to be pwned. The developers have a vision and you will share it, dammit!

You know, I've had very little good to say about Snowden, considering him little more than some kid who punked the NSA, then mooned us on his way out the door.

/blockquote>

Who's us? The NSA? The people who'd rather keep their heads in bushes and pretend their governments are not their enemies? The people who benefit from all that illegal digital stalking?

Or are you simply an authoritarian who gets angry at the thought of the rule of law?

A rare breed worth risking your neck to hunt?

What you said;

What I heard:
"Everybody does not need to be taught math, or driving, or history."

In the US, you have a hard time getting by if you don't learn to drive unless you live in specific cities with good public transportation. If you don't know how to code, you really don't know how to operate a computer. Full stop. It's true. BASIC is fucking simple, I've taught groups of 10 year olds, and alternately many other scripting languages -- Today I teach JavaScript to 8 year olds at the civic center. So much of what they do is in a browser now, not knowing how to manipulate that system is a terrible disadvantage. Folks complain all the damn time about bullshit they could write a ten line script to do for themselves if they actually knew how to use a damn computer.

It's just like not learning to drive in an environment where that's pretty much a requirement to function. Driving is life threatening and requires constant vigilance -- Coding is MUCH easier; No, really. It is. Think about it. It's about the same level as algebra. Bonus, if you teach a kid to code, they can apply mathematics to real life. Who in their right mind would teach Mathematics to kids and NOT give them the tiny bit of knowledge required to immediately apply those skills to the real / online world they live in? It's fucking ludicrous, and you are a moron.

I'm unconvinced as to the wading in water bit. It might explain somewhat better breath control than other apes (but so can benefits of refined communication), or perhaps heads full of oily hair. It's true aquatic species lose body hair when they or their ancestors were exposed to direct contact with water (hippos, whales, elephants, manatee, rhinos) or in dirt (naked mole rats) for majorities of their lives (at least to breeding age), but losing hair could also be a sexual selection increased neoteny in mates (youth is correlated with fertility, and makes the appearance of pubic hair at breeding age more visible).

As for standing upright, well, what about buoyancy and floating on your back instead? Standing erect in water wouldn't be necessary if they adapted to become blusterous tubs of lard that can have several hundreds of pounds of fat-weight without choking out their hearts by concentrating the fat outside of their core cavities, unlike most other mammals. However, plump hairless beasts could be the result of selective breeding for use as food by a superior alien race...

Now that I think of it standing upright would achieve a higher vantage to increase the area you can survey.... FOR SNAKES!

Here, I'll just copy/paste myself, WRT threat narrative:

Now, that's ACTUAL terrorist attacks vs automobiles and junk food I'm talking about. You can imagine the threat from the leaks is ridiculously minuscule in comparison. As a scientist, when confronted with extraordinary claims, especially about threats, my immediate response is to shout: PROVE IT!

Now, I'm not from the UK, however, I suspect midges aren't feared as eye-pecking vultures over there. Free yourself from the threat narrative. Godwin be damned, bowing to such notions is how you wind up slaughtering Jews, Internment Camping Japanese, Victims of population control in Vietnam, and with Stasi-style police forces.

Use fear to win political goals? Fuck right off, Terrorist!

If one vendor is selling "Atlas Shrugged" for $1 (plus $4) shipping, and the other vendor is selling it for $2 including shipping, which one is cheaper?

Well, since dollar isn't backed by gold and is therefore worthless to the target audience, they're the same price: 5*0 = 2*0 = 0 ;).

Nazism is short for National Socialism. They aren't *like* socialists, they *are* socialists.

Or so they claimed, anyway. Do you also trust the rest of Nazi propaganda, or did you pick this particular item because it happened to make for a nice propaganda piece for you?

Anyway, you answered the summary's question by demonstration: USA can't get anything done right because Americans treat politics like a weird role-playing game where you are the hero and anyone who doesn't agree with you is a nazi communist zombie terrorist. Why would you expect fighting against figments of your own imagination to solve any actual problems, rather than making them worse?

Well, also don't forget that the businessman or doctor that get elected is also in that hated 1%, so half the people don't care what experience or knowledge they can bring to the table.

Doctors and other people who's income comes primarily from their own work aren't in the 1%, that's purely the domain of businessmen. And they don't usually stop being businessmen when they become politicians, which leads to conflicts of interest when talking about economics, which in turn causes problems with trustworthiness.