> Is everyone just supposed to be as smart as us programmers?
No. Luckily programming isn't the only task in the world that needs doing, and we have a lovely thing called "comparative advantage" that helps solve all the information problems that result from such grand diversity of relative-capabilities. I suggest you look it up.
We even have people who are even smarter than programmers, or are at least smarter in different ways than programmers. Managers and scientists, for instance.
> Is it peoples' own fault if they're stupid?
It is either their own that they continue to be ignorant, or their parents' that they and their parents are stupid yet still they were conceived and born.
> Do they deserve no sympathy?
None whatsoever. They're - at best - just random people. Why should they?
> or humanity?
How can someone "deserve" humanity? It is an intrinsic physical attribute of a particular object - "X is a human being instead of e.g. a toaster-oven" - and since this is the real world, I do dare to presume that the only extant people who have jobs are indeed humans.
In other words: thusfar, saying that a person "deserves humanity" is just as meaningless as saying that a cleaver "deserves cutleriness".
That said, if my knowledge of someone consists only of "it is a human", I cannot conclude much of anything!
("He invented mongrel2" or "he is carrying a knife in his hand and is standing ten feet in front of me", are examples of knowledge-base items which do yield nontrivial conclusions in isolation.)
> I feel bad for people like you who lack empathy to such a degree. Just literally disconnected from such a large portion of humanity.
What in the nonextant Nine Hells is there to profit from "connecting" with the whole world's troubles? I feel bad for people who submit to their empathy and thereby let other people drag them down.
The US college population is still big enough that that tiny fraction is still a lot of people; and almost certainly enough for a viable market niche.
In that case I think they should not be prohibited from leveraging their unique motivation and study-skills, in the manner described by the grandparent comment.
Apologies; I appear to have made my point in an overly indirect manner. Luckily your response here allows me to clarify myself concisely:
Have you ever considered that that sort of ethical reasoning might in fact be pointing out a classic problem with society as we know it? (Insofar as, the legitimacy of today's centralized authorities rests upon social-contract theory, which as you have clearly shown, is baseless.)
tl;dw: the presence of air, solves the propellant-related issues (i.e. this is an electroaerodynamic drive, not a reaction-thruster), allowing this engine to provide, novelly, several whole Newtons of thrust; but scaling it to a practical size increases the thrust requirements by (overall) a high-degree polynomial, and will therefore likely require further scientific effort.
Because, for most of these problems ... from the point-of-view of anyone with enough resources to solve them, they are non-problems and/or not severe enough for the solution to be worth the cost. While that remains true, there will never be any rational reason to solve them.
IIRC, it is intended to replace both Android and Chrome OS. And as shown by the Android Open Source Project, they don't need to close-source it to engage in worrisome behavior.
Well that is socialism. (As is our conflation of insurance and charity.) Being a form of price control, it also happens to not work very well.
EDIT: and if anyone can explain why forcing doctors and hospitals to provide their services at a loss, is not socialism, then feel free to reply; as that will be assuredly more enlightening than a simple downvote.
Information-security can be oversimplified as one big "holy grail" problem unto itself - and when someone presents some software and proclaims it is "the" solution to that problem, but in fact has presented only a partial solution, then we call it "security theatre" and denounce it with extreme prejudice.
I believe the comment you replied to, may be making an analogous argument here about distributed systems.
Go pile-drive that idea through your thick skull.
(Doing so, just might fix whatever major malfunction you are so clearly suffering.)