Dude, I'm stealing that. That's one of the best retorts I've read in a long, long time. Kudos.

...based on a Congressional requirement to fund their pension *75 YEARS* into the future. They are being forced to fund a pension fund for people that won't even be born for years to come, solely to make it look like they are in trouble to people who don't bother to look at *why* they appear to have a problem funding the pension.

I have to assume this is a rhetorical question, based on my past experiences with situations such as this. "Down the road" is a mythical place to many people, whereas the "savings" by firing expensive people and replacing them with inexperienced dipshits occurs in real time.

Actually, when you look at the corruption scandals where politicians are being indicted for various idiocies, it's amazing how *little* it takes to bribe them. Some of these dimwits are taking a huge fall for bribes amounting to no more than $100-200k over several years.

Mitt, is that you?

I actually sent them a message pointing that out. I'm guessing the folks in Norway simply made a mistake, but it'll be interesting to see if anyone follows up and fixes it.

FUD? Sure, there are *more* eyes in open source than closed source: that's not the point. Are there *enough* eyes to prevent potentially catastrophic bugs from being exploited? I'd submit that we're seeing that there isn't. I'm not suggesting that closed source is superior, but let's not confuse some sort of moral superiority being attributed to open source as being equivalent to automatic technical superiority. In most cases, I'd agree that open source has technical superiority, but it's not automatic.

The phrase might be true, but we're seeing the effects of insufficient eyes. In reality, how many sets of eyes are actually reviewing these libraries at a source code level? I rather strongly suspect that in most cases they are simply used under the assumption that "well, everyone uses it, it must be okay".

You're close. It should read "If the government has to decide what to fund and what not to fund, they are going to get their ideas and decisions entirely from the people who bought them with campaign contributions and bribes, and will never vote to fund anything they are told by their owners not to."

How is it not plausible? Lots of people go back to school, and if he's smart with his money he could afford to take the time to become a dentist. It's not like medical school has a defined cutoff age for admissions. Yeah, he's on the older end of the scale, but so what?

Yes, because God forbid the people at the games actually, you know, watch the games instead of surfing the web, tweeting inane opinions or Facebooking their opinions of the refs. And "tragedy"? Really? If the officials at these stadia have emergency plans for disasters that depend on all the fans having cell phone access, they ought to be flogged. We've had major sporting events for a *whole* lot longer than we've had cell phones.

Disclaimer: I've worked in wireless since the early days of cellular, and I was a field tech at Cellular One in Seattle back when turning up the 20th tower in the Seattle MSA was a big deal for us. So I understand that what you are saying is correct technically, but I'm far from convinced that this is a burning issue that the FCC needs to address. I'm still further from convinced that this isn't simply more kowtowing to the wireless carriers to allow them Yet Another Revenue Stream for which they do nothing.

And I have a repeater at my house. I'm in a semi-rural area, and the signal strength at my house flat-out sucks. My little signal repeater puts out at most 1W, and my nearest neighbor is about 200 yards away. I don't think I'm likely to cause significant interference to anyone, but it improves the usability of my cell phone dramatically.

Wish I had mod points. My favorite line from that movie:

"Did you know he measures his sanity with a stopwatch?"
"What do you measure yours with, a dipstick?"

Well, technically all semi-automatics are *capable* of fully automatic operation (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) with appropriate mods. Hell, I've even seen old plans in a Guns and Ammo magazine of somebody's idea in the late 1800's to make a lever-action rifle into either a semi-auto or automatic rifle. Looked unwieldy as hell, but still.

Having said that, I didn't realize that M-14's were initially designed to be selective fire between semi-auto and full auto. You learn something new every day. :-)

I'm pretty sure he meant M-14. The M-14 is a semi-automatic .30 caliber rifle, not fully automatic by default except for specialized models. I shot one regularly when I was in the Navy.

I've always thought the M-14 with a synthetic stock was a fine weapon. They're accurate, rugged and have considerably more power that any 5.56mm round. You could use an M-14 as a tent peg and then run over it with a truck and it would still work.