Yeah, I went there.

Drupal sites I run don't use thousands of modules. But they do use dozens, and I'm nervous as shit because there is really no way for me to evaluate the security of all that module code that's originated in god-knows-where.

What color is the sky on your planet, where corporate management is devoid of power hungry, empire-building narcissists?

Students Matter, the group singing, is a front organization for a guy named David Welsh and his money. These aren't hardscrabble parents just trying to get a better education for their kids, its a Silicon Valley libertarian trying to bust unions for the sake of ideology.

The effects of this are local, not national. Northern states and towns should be able to make these tradeoffs locally. There is no reason for the federal government setting rules or the entire nation

Right, because air pollution never crosses political boundaries.

NPR is the most conservative force in media today. Fox may make Tea Partiers crazy, but NPR makes liberals complacent.

Yeah, that Morning Joe is a screaming leftist.

I love JSON, but XML has the advantage of being something you can validate against a defined schema.

The intestate commerce clause. Netflix is selling a product across state lines and is thus clearly engaged in interstate commerce, and is therefor subject to Congressional regulation.

Also, is there any evidence whatsoever that these "graphical" languages are easier for people to learn?

My kid is 5, and he spends hours writing little programs in Scratch. The click and drag aspect of the graphical language makes it much easier for him. If he had to rely on his nascent typing skills to write code, he'd be stuck in the frustration of Syntax Error Hell, as I was for years when I first started pounding out Basic code on the Apple II.

Owly is a comic targeted at that age group. Wonderful stories about nature and friendship, and no words.

Any decent programmer should be able to write a secure program. Read your input, reject it if it's not what you want.

Writing a secure program is relatively easy. Building a secure system is difficult. This is largely because any system that performs any non-trivial task in this day and age will necessarily entail running large amounts of code written by someone else.

Although I am pretty sure this goes against a Geneva convention

The relevant international treaty would be the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, but that only covers weapons that cause permanent blindness.

we have a generation afraid to take risks

I always see people praising risk takers. And the same people who praise risk-takers treat failure like leprosy.

But the thing about risks is that they involve a high probability of failure due to circumstances beyond the control of the risk-taker. If they don't have that high probability of failure, they aren't really risks, are they?

So, if you take a risk and you are lucky enough to succeed, you are held up as a fine example of the kind of person that everyone should be. If you take a risk and succumb to the probability that you will fail, then its "fuck off, moocher, you're on your own".

Alternative albuterol inhalers cost almost three times as much as the $20 epinephrine inhalers sold by online retailers."

The worst part is that epinephrine you can get any time you want (like, say, in the middle of an asthma attack), but albuterol requires a prescription, which means schlepping to a doctor with all the associated costs and inconveniences.

Albuterol works a lot better, sure, but sometimes - when you need an inhaler and you need it NOW - its nice to know the good old Primatine Mist is available over the counter at the nearest drugstore.