Watch Joerg Sprave on the Slingshot Channel on YouTube. He uses high speed cameras to illustrate sailing a ball bearing through a block of ballistic gelatin. Guess your "high power" catapult wasn't that high power, eh? I know I've shattered a windshield with a ball bearing and a LOW POWER catapult. Head injuries kill, even if they aren't a "through and through".

I like your attitude...

But it will get you f*cked in the wallet, or worse. The only attitude a judge likes is his own, and he WILL have the bailiff smack your peepee with a fricken' night stick, before he lays legal financial slavery on your ass for life. It's not funny to see happen to even your worst enemy. It would be a kindness to shoot them in the head in front of their family.

Win 7 ISN'T working fine, for me or a lot of other people. I'm having hell trying to get Win 7 to see SMB shares on my network, mostly a couple of SANS. Some installs will see it fine, some won't see it even if you sacrifice a baby seal to the dark gods. XP, Vista, and Win 8 can all see them. This is the one thing that Win 8 actually has going for it. Otherwise, it sucks balls, too.

Win 98 was the last version where you could actually find the hidden data MS was collecting on the users (mostly username/passwords, IP addresses, and filenames). XP was the last system where you could actually go in and build a custom minimal graphical OS in ~50 MB of drive space. Now, If MS doesn't bless it, you can't have it.

I don't care for Apple Corp. any better, but they do have nice hardware design. They abuse their acolytes just as badly, though.

My newest self-built system goes from power-on to login in about 25 seconds, and nothing is still loading 5 minutes later.

Odd. This panic seems to have lasted several years now, and isn't showing any signs of abating. I haven't been able to get any ammo for well OVER a year. They might want to consider that this isn't so much a "spike" as a baseline increase in market demand. I'm about to the point that I may just go ahead and start making weapon parts to trade for ammo. Having blacksmith and machinist skills is awesome for untraceable barter transactions.

Don't have to go through the trouble and expense of creating a gun (and ammo) that's invisible to x-ray and metal detectors. Just make a cheap, throw away slingshot with a couple of marbles and you have the equivalent of a silenced zip gun that's invisible to detectors, for all of about $10. If you can stash some ball bearings inside an obvious metallic object (metal pen, etc...) now you've got high density rounds that will do a through-and-through on someones head or torso. The people of Okinawa learned during Japanese occupations that effective weapons don't have to be complex.

I don't know. When I use my tablet with keyboard in class I don't have a mouse, I just touch a screen location and continue on. It actually feels very natural. It takes a little getting used to again to use a mouse with my laptop. I mean, what's more intuitive that pointing at where you want to go?

Now, sometimes I want a mouse for certain tasks, like navigating around in apps or games, but having more options available is always awesome. Even better would be a 3-D touch display with Kinect on a tablet with a spaceball input device. Full 3-D input and output, with touch, doesn't preclude the use of normal 2-D input and output.

Interesting. Considering the system load that stupid WYSIWYG word processor puts on a machine, I don't see how you could even run it on an tablet. Maybe if you took VIM and dressed it up ... The MS Office crew isn't exactly known for keeping their code tight, fast, or their format conversion routines consistent. Their track record indicates a clusterfuck on the way. People really aren't that keen on change, unless it's change for the better (less annoyances).

Their coming to the party late, with a scary-expensive "Ugly Betty", when there's already some hotties running around giving it away for free.

You might check into adding supercaps into the power supply, across the DC output lines.
For a less DY method, you could try this: http://www.beam-tech.com/093001/prd_pgs/internal_ups.htm#
It's an internally mounted, UPS. There are also some PC power supplies that have the UPS built-in, but expect to pay a premium for those.
If your application allows it, you might want to just mount your SSD into a laptop. It already has internal battery power, and there isn't any exotic hardware you have to pay through the nose for.

Try running some benchmark/testing software on your RAM. It sounds like you've some bad memory cells. And please be clipped to the case with an ESD wrist strap if/when you go poking around inside your case. I had a clients machine that would crash instantly if you waved your hand over the memory chips (dinosaur days). The ESD damage just accumulated enough that the system became flaky. I replaced the chips and the problem went away.

Problem with that is that older people can fight back. And WIN!

An additional feather in their cap if their students and faculty actually jump start the project, and bring it up to a usable level and deliver it to the world.
"Here, have a free version of the most used desktop OS in the world, thanks to the ingenuity of Russian programmers." I've been amazed by their programming skills since the '80s, and I thoroughly believe that if any group of people can bring a fat dose of AMAZING to an OS, the Russians are certainly capable of it.

I'm about to hit your "Paranoid" button. Look up "Fusion Center" in wikipedia.

I've worked for a private data warehouse before, doing DB work, so I have a pretty good understanding of what they are doing. It's a huge data warehouse project funded by DHS, with weak (if any) oversight or guidance. There are at least 72 fusion centers in the US collecting and collating data on citizens and non-citizens alike.

For a really nice scare, look for the YouTube video of Jesse Ventura trying to investigate these centers, and the FEMA camps. I don't think his story is totally accurate (it is for public TV after all), but it does give enough information to start looking and researching for yourself. What little I've looked up via Google is pretty damn disturbing.

They already have the IT ability to pull off the data mining for the new laws, no new technology needs to be developed. Relational DBMS are well understood, as is social network analysis (just take a quick look at the tools available for that commercially). Oracle is pretty much the one-stop-shop for building the required data centers, and they build them for anyone that has the money.

I'm afraid I don't share your viewpoint. I know from experience that most criminals are not going to give you any notice that they have a weapon, until it's too late for you to do anything about it. " They represent an elite group of people with the proper training and psychological stability to use firearms for the public good. They are actively monitored for psychological problems, they are trained to distinguish friend from foe, and they are trained to store their service weapons properly." Where the hell did you get that? SOME police fall into that classification, BUT they are a very small minority. The majority of this country is composed of small towns, with small budgets, and small minded people. Quite often that get whatever they can find: Jocks that were bullies in school and aren't smart enough to do anything else, prior military, or ex-military (there is a difference), guys that normally would be part of the problem instead of the solution. I've seen several corrupt police forces. One thought they should hunt down my uncle and help him have an "accident", but being prior military, and having a gun, he's lived into his 80's.

This is a chaotic country, with a culture of chaos. If you don't like the idea of weapons being in the hands of the populace, stay out. It's part of the trade-off for having certain guaranteed rights. Paradise doesn't exist except in a childs' book of fairy tales.

Take a quick look at the Wikipedia pages for gun ownership per capita by country, and list of countries by intentional homicide rate. If your correlation was accurate, that gun ownership equals crime, the US should have the highest crime rate to go with the highest gun ownership. It doesn't. It's running around 4.8 % with the majority of Africa, South America, Asia, and South-East Asia being quite a bit more dangerous. Considering the list a little closer, except for China and Japan, gun ownership rates tend to correlate to SAFER countries. On the face of it, your theory fails.

Yes, I know. "Numbers don't lie, but liars use numbers." So research for yourself, and decide for yourself. Not for me.

You morons. I WAS a weapon. By the end of my training I would have have killed a bus full of nuns and orphans with a spoon, if so ordered. I wouldn't have cared about nationality or skin color or if they were good looking, just if they were the designated target or not. That's the wonder of intense psychological conditioning. Helsinki Syndrome isn't just a made up thing, it's the core of all intense military conditioning programs, and it sinks in even worse if you have Asperger Syndrome. It took me years to readjust to civilian life after separation.from the service. How did they de-militarize me? Gave me a two minute briefing about how I would be charged and tried by a military court if I talked about any classified actions I'd been a part of. Period. They stamped my paperwork, gave me my final paycheck, and said I had 24 hours to get off post.

If there had been any hardware installed in me, they would have removed it or destroyed it, and only left something functioning (at bare minimal levels) if it was life-critical. The hardware may be military, but the biological portion is under contract. A pretty nasty contract, but still a legal binding agreement. If they perform any "elective medical procedures" you can be sure that they'll have the DOD's ass covered, and yours will be flapping in the breeze. And before someone mentions it: Secret medical experiments on troops (and civilians) are a f*cking tradition,for the military. Laws won't change that. You think that breaking a few laws means anything to a corp of cold-blooded killers?

I use this stuff:
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Velcro-50pk-Rip-Tie-Cable-Ties-Black-Gray/16517608

I use it at work, home, in my portable gear, in projects, etc... I used it extensively when I was building a $100K test stand and needed to run bunched of wires and cables before zipping everything down. It's great for building prototypes, and I used quite a few when wiring up my home entertainment system in a "Metro" style rack. It let's me (or my wife) upgrade our gear and our system layout without any fuss. No cutting zip ties, no getting cut on zip ties, no having to go buy more zip ties.