Eh, it's past end of service life. Fine for a home or lab use, but, yeah, a 1280 is old. Beautiful hardware, built like a battleship. But at this point, having any of the purple generation of Sun gear in a datacenter is just a disaster recovery situation waiting to happen. So, old, certainly. Useless? Not by a far stretch. Just no longer enterprise-ready.

How about we put bad guys in jail, instead of punishing the millions of gun owners who haven't done anything wrong? A dramatic, double digit drop in murder rates for "Project Exile", vs. "challenges in discerning the effects of the ban"? Richmond, Virginia, had a program in the 1990s. "Project Exile". Short version: Mandatory additional 5 years in jail if you use a gun in a crime, or if you're a felon found possessing a gun or ammunition. Crime went down 40%.
https://house.resource.org/106/org.c-span.153371-1.pdf
From page 2 of this report, "Since the project began, the results have been evident. More than 200 armed criminals were removed from Richmond streets during the first year of Project Exile alone. An entire gang responsible for multiple murders has been dismantled. In 1998, murders were 33 percent below 1997, the lowest number since 1987. In 1999, murders are down yet another 29 percent."

Compare this with the Assault Weapons Ban, which accomplished nothing. Here's the National Institute of Justice's report, describing how it had no effect in reducing crime:
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/jerrylee/research/aw_brief1999.pdf
"A number of factors—including the fact that the banned weapons and magazines were rarely used to commit murders in this country, the limited availability of data on the weapons, other components of the Crime Control Act of 1994, and State and local initiatives implemented at the same time—posed challenges in discerning the effects of the ban."

A century and a half of evidence says otherwise. Unless you intend to include sources that are, you know, ignorant and wrong. Referring to the cartridge as "casing" may be used in as many as several percent of references. All of which are, like you, wrong. Sorry to be blunt but, words have meanings.

Can you name one gun control measure, ever, which has reduced crime? Chicago has 'em all, it's one of the worst places in the country.

I'd rather we go with "Project Exile" as implemented in Richmond, VA, in the 1990s. Mandatory 5 years additional in jail if you use a gun in a crime, mandatory jail if you're a felon in possession of a gun, etc. Punishes the bad people, while not disarming their potential victims. Oh, and crime went down 40% in a year.

They are murdered WITH handguns, not BY them. They are murdered by criminals. Focus on the bad guys, not the hardware. Blaming the hardware, then, by extension, blames the millions of us who are NOT criminals. And you people wonder why gun owners find this offensive.

The cartridge is just the brass part. The round includes the cartridge, the primer, the propellant (powder), and the projectile (bullet). I know this seems like pointless discussion over terminology, but, it's the equivalent of someone pointing at their PC and referring to it as the "CPU".

Exactly. Treat it like being defib or CPR certified. Those who qualify and take the training, should be allowed to protect our children in this way also. And if they can't pass a background check, why the hell are they around our kids? Don't force them to do it, of course, but give them the option. Almost all states have CCW permits with the usual requirements, and those requirements match up pretty well to who we allow to be teachers (I'd hope).

...But how are we going to get the criminals to follow the law that says they should use that kind of gun? Every attempt at legislating the problem away ignores the basic, obvious fact, that criminals don't follow the laws.

See. when an app gives a control panel mechanism that claims to care what percent of a given resource pool it will use, yet, it uses 100% of the resources, it leads to questions such as mine. But thanks never so much for being useless. Let me guess, you want to pretend MacOS Wotever Cat is the problem, when in reality it's some misbehaving app that I tried to help with but which won't play nice. Huh.

Wow, THAT's helpful. Oh wait, what's that other word.

So, I just bought a new 4/8 core I7 Mac. Told Folding@home to use 50% of my cores. It persisted in using 100% of my cores, despite what I told it to do, until I uninstalled it. Is there a distributed project whose client will honor my request to only donate half of my resources? Bonus points for one which lets me say which hours of which days it can run. If none of them can, I'll let ElectricSheep provide the eye candy, I really don't care. But I'd rather help out a cause that behaves as I specify on my hardware. Anyone?

Bridging and overhang are two different things, though. The support materials problem is a big one. Sounds like maybe those patent issues are being worked out, according to someone else's post though...

Yeah, I didn't set the ratio, I just designed our system based on the cost:benefit ratio of working within the rules in the most cost effective way possible. To be honest, I think I'm content with my parents having the 3KW array, and installing just the battery bank and charge controller here. I have a source of free batteries (long story, not relevant, datacenter grade stuff). Given that resource (a ton of batteries per year, give or take), a charge controller and whole-house UPS are very attractive. I just need $3K to get it going. Maybe even a 3 year payback if I run the numbers. Time to bite the bullet and buy the charge controller and wire up my batteries; adding more panels (I've got two 250W's now) can wait. But back to my original point, if I wanted to do this with permits, that $3K cost turns into about $6K. To do it without permits, I have to invest in additional transfer switches and other things to make sure my batteries don't (GASP!) supply green power to my neighbors without the local utility making sure I've got the right cable bend radius on my power feed and all that.

Yet, in out of pocket expenses, payback is still 5 years. If energy costs don't go up. Or 6 if you do your interest trick. Whatever. Everything after 6 years is free money. If you can't see that far ahead, eh, whatever man. If you weren't posting as an AC, I'd take more effort to respond.

Sorry, but the Makerbot and other FDM printers are a dead end. The overhang issue and the fluid dynamics problems limit this specific technology to "bleeding edge", and will never progress past 'cutting edge'. UV hardened resins are where it's at, but predatory patent trolls have locked that up in patent hell for the next few decades. FDM has come a long way in the last 2 years, but, at the end of the day, it's still dropping a noodle onto other noodles, with a very limited choice of materials which have varying qualities of unusability. I say this as someone with a 1st generation Makerbot, who in a year saw 4 generations of newer product, with no real improvement against the fundamental design flaws of FDM. Bigger tables and improved software don't fix the fact that you just plain can't set a melted noodle on top of empty air. FDM is the "aluminized paper dot matrix printer using arcs to produce ozone and dark spots" of this generation's printers. It's a necessary step to get to the real answer, but, 5 years from now nobody will take them seriously, if they even remember them.