I have mixed feelings about that. I know I did a lot of tinkering on my PC when I was in high school, and that led me to a CS degree. On the other hand, my career as a software developer has been focused on big data and distributed computing. I hardly do any development locally anymore. There are still ways that we could build tech skills in a world without desktops, but it would require investment and deliberate effort. I think we were fortunate that the factors at play when we were growing up pushed us to build those tech skills ourselves.

"Even as you read this, you are wishing that you could jam a gun in my face and make me back down." That's a whole new level of projection, right there.

That Gizmodo article is the worst thing I've ever read a Gawker site, and that's saying something.

But no mention of how many studies were retracted, the percentage of retracted vs. non-retracted studies, what journals the studies in question appeared in, or that the studies in question were retracted reflects the strength of peer review. "We can't even believe scientists anymore!" Really? Fuck Gawker, and fuck you for linking that.

What gun control laws?

"Gun deaths", 2/3 of which were suicides. Conflating suicide and homicide is misleading given that they're significantly different problems.

Except that licensing wouldn't have prevented Newtown either, for the same reason that a background check wouldn't have worked (i.e. the person who used the guns to commit crime was not the person who owned them). That's not to say that background checks aren't a good idea, just that they aren't going to stop Newtown like scenarios unless you also check everyone in the applicant's family and friends. The only proposal I've heard post-Newtown that tries to address that particular issue is the one about making gun owners liable if their guns are stolen and used in crimes and/or mandating insurance against this possibility. But in practice that just seems like an attempt to get a gun ban in through the back door, by making the cost of ownership prohibitive.

Replace "the left" with "Democrats" and yes.

No one says that, you are being intellectually dishonest.

You and I came to the same conclusion "Fox tries to pretend its (sic) unbiased", but we clearly have radically different opinions whether that's a good thing. If a TV channel is going to be producing a heavily biased package, I'd prefer that it acknowledges that the content is opinion. Airing talking points as news devalues the work of actual news organizations by casting doubt over all of journalism.

You're comparing apples and oranges. The sport is motorsport, and Nascar is one of the top levels of the sport. Autocross, karting, or track days are more analogous to the "finding a ball and running around" scenario. Not everyone can participate in Nascar, but not everyone can participate in the NFL either.

Fucked up my mod. Apparently I'm bad at dropdowns.

By that argument it's equally ironic that the paper, which is championing its first amendment rights, is trying to demonize people for exercising their second amendment rights. Different people have different priorities, that's not irony.

Irony would mean that it was contrary to the expected result. A paper that engaged in anti-gun activism using armed guards to defend itself is ironic. A paper doing something that could upset a bunch of people and some of them getting angry and making threats isn't ironic, just sad.

As promising as the one sentence description in the summary sounds, keep in mind that its being directed by Dominic Robilliard, the man behind The Force Unleashed 2. TFU2, you might remember, was a mediocre action game with a story that was ridiculous even by the standards of the Star Wars franchise, which already has more than its fair share of bad writing. It was rightly critically panned, and as far as I know sales weren't that hot either.

If the guy behind a game that Joystiq called "glorified fan fiction" about a character named "Starkiller" is capable of producing a "grounded and gritty fiction", I'll be quite surprised.

The same republicans who've repeatedly and explicitly stated that their number one goal is to make Obama a one term president? Yeah, I wonder why it's been hard to get them to meet in the middle.