Me too. Typing was the most useful thing I learned in high school.

My son is in 4th grade, and they are learning to type in school. They dumped cursive to free up time in the schedule. I haven't used cursive handwriting since I learned to type, so it may be time to toss it on the ash heap of history.

But of course, you are different, right? Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/610.

You might want to actually read the first amendment. It does not say that states cannot establish and favor a particular church. It only says that congress cannot do so. At the time the states ratified the constitution, this clause meant what it said. Many states had official state sponsored churches. The last was disestablished in 1833 by Massachusetts. The Supreme Court did not apply the first amendment to the states until 1925.

XKCD ridicules the notion that dumb people reproduce more than smart people, and claims that it is "wrong". But is it? I cannot find any reference for birth-rate-by-IQ, but here is a reference for birth-rate-by-income that shows that women in households with income below $10K have nearly twice the birthrate of women in households with income above $75K. Income is not IQ, but they are highly correlated.

It isn't clear if the birthrate-by-income is corrected for age, so it could be skewed because the poor women are younger, while more of the rich women are past childbearing age.

The point of debate is usually not to persuade your opponent, but to persuade the audience.

They pay plenty of taxes, including payroll taxes, sales taxes, and taxes on dividends and capital gains paid by their shareholders. They only avoid income tax. But corporate income tax comes out of the pockets of some combination of their employees, customers, and shareholders. If you think employees should pay more, then raise payroll taxes. If you think customers should pay more, then raise sales taxes. If you think shareholders should pay more then raise taxes on dividends and capital gains. Any of those would make far more sense than continuing a poorly designed corporate income tax is easily avoided, collects little revenue, and pushes jobs and investment out of America.

So? The pools are a pretty good long term solution, if by "long term" you mean at least the next century or so, until future generations figure out a better place to store it, or more likely, an economic use for the "waste".

No it didn't. If you didn't pay in, you didn't benefit. Anyone already retired with SS was adopted didn't get squat.

Bitcoin may or may not be a good investment, but it certainly is not a Ponzi Scheme.

The article lists the biggest Ponzi Scheme in history as Social Security. Social Security may or may not be good public policy, but it is not a Ponzi Scheme either.

Most bitcoins are mined where electricity is cheap, like Iceland and the US Pacific Northwest, that use hydropower. Water flowing through a turbine really isn't causing much environmental damage. Compared to the environmental damage of gold mining, this is much better.

They do not degrade enough to matter during the normal lifetime of a drive, regardless of the write frequency or patterns. The bearings may wear out, but the iron oxide will not.

Before you make such a judgement, you might want to actually read the patent. Slashdot summaries almost always completely misrepresent what is actually covered in the claims section of the patent.

You are wrong. Nicotine patches have helped millions of people quit smoking. These diet pills have also been shown, in controlled studies, to help many people achieve long term weight loss. Yes, people need to change their habits. But what you are missing, is that the drugs can help them do that. By achieving some weight loss, it can start them on the cycle of positive reinforcement.

I see a big difference: with an automated car, the car will know that it needs maintenance. If it is a safely issue, it can limit its speed, or refuse to drive until the problem is fixed. Otherwise, it can automatically drive itself to a maintenance center while you are at work or sleeping.

You are obviously not an embedded system engineer with mission critical design experience. The proper way to design a system like this is to have multiple processes running on at least two separate CPUs. The most powerful CPU computes the car's speed and path, and another process running on a separate CPU performs sanity checks on the results. If something is clearly wrong (like steering into oncoming traffic), then the backup program applies the brakes and pulls off the road. Bits can be flipped by cosmic rays, or whatever, and a system like this is designed to deal with that. This is standard critical system engineering. Then you put it on the test track, and throw all the crap you can at it: turn off sensors at random, put corrupt data on the bus, flip bits in memory, etc. Keep hammering it and fixing the problems until it can handle any failure as safely as possible.