Some flails are like that, yes. Spiked-ball flails also existed, some with multiple balls. Also, some of the bar-and-handle flails didn't have a chain at all - they either had a cord, or the two pieces were joined by a ring on the end of each one, with the two rings linked.

Out of those given, I chose the halberd, but my favorite is the English Black Bill. Here's a picture: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~bathonia/_private/EnglishBill.jpg

Like a halberd, it has a thrusting point, a large cutting blade, and a back spike. The point and blade form a V, though, which can be used to push heavily-armored opponents back, and used in some circumstances to trap an opponent's weapon momentarily, pushing it down and then lifting and thrusting. Terry Brown's "English Martial Arts" covers its use.

It should be noted that both halberds and bills were used with much shorter poles than many of the other pole weapons - often only six feet long. This makes them much more suited to use as individual weapons, since you can actually do close-in fighting with them by choking up and using them more like a staff.

So... you really want a situation where, if you go on vacation in another state, and happen to refer to your spouse as your spouse, you could be arrested for that, because that state doesn't recognize your marriage as being legal? Because that's what you're arguing for, when you say that each state should be allowed to say who can and can't be married.

I can, however, point out that W. Bush and his father went a long way toward creating the security situation they were running the country under. Sure, the Republicans can argue that paying for the military is like making your house payment... but personally, I would argue that our current military setup is more akin to investing in a security system, panic room, and armed guards when you're living in a low-crime neighborhood. Not to mention providing those for some of your neighbors, and going around threatening people you don't like on weekends.

You might want to follow the cite I gave on to the article it cites. Here's the link for you: http://www.businessinsider.com/government-spending-2011-7

There, the breakdown is by quarter, and going by that, they have Bush taking the spending rate from $1.9 trillion to $3.2 trillion, while Obama takes it from $3.2 trillion to $3.8 trillion, and then it starts to go back down. That's a $1.3 trillion increase for Bush, but a $0.6 trillion increase for Obama.

Note too that while Obama inherited deficit spending, Bush started off with a surplus.

Actually, it seems I misremembered my source; what Bush grew by more than twice as much as Obama has isn't the deficit, but rather, federal spending. The problem is that while Republicans like to talk about reducing government spending, they don't really seem to do it... but they still like to lower taxes.

And by the way, Democrats do propose reducing federal spending - namely, military spending, which is currently more than half of the discretionary federal budget. The US not only spends more on its military than every other country in the world - it spends more than the next seven top spenders combined.

Lastly, note that the biggest drop in federal spending since the US began the current debt happened under a Democrat - Bill Clinton.

You might want to read that article again. I didn't say that Reagan passed a ban. As the article you linked states, Reagan supported both the 1993 'Brady Bill' (aiming to create a national background check and mandatory waiting period) and the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban. Indeed, the article you linked calls that a "180-degree turnaround" from his earlier stance on gun control.

Misremembered the citation - Bush grew federal spending by more than twice what Obama has, not the deficit. My apologies. Here's the citation: http://www.businessinsider.com/whos-responsible-for-budget-deficit-2012-8

... except for that whole part about promising a large increase in military spending, which is already more than half of the US government's discretionary (i.e., not required by law) spending. And he was also wanting to lower tax rates while supposedly closing loopholes, for what he claimed would be a net near-zero change to tax revenues.

As for the banning guns part, it's funny how the Republicans thought those gun bans were just fine when it was Reagan who proposed them.

Of course, Bush grew the federal deficit by more than twice what Obama has... and if you look back at records of the increase/decrease in the federal deficit each year since the current federal debt began, you'll find that almost every year that the deficit has been decreased, a Democrat was President.

Umm... neither storage nor hard drive bandwidth have anything to do with whether an OS uses virtual memory or not. Also, all modern OSes provide priority levels - now, whether people writing software for those OSes actually use the provided priority levels is another thing, but all modern OSes do have a way to inform them that the process playing media is more important than the file copy operation, which is more important than the background virus scan and defrag.

And, as others have pointed out, so long as there are possibilities of errors and resource competition, you can't provide solid time guarantees. If a hard disk sector is going bad and the disk controller winds up having to read it half a dozen times before it gets a correct read, that's going to slow things down, no matter what your OS does. If your network provider suddenly gets a huge burst of traffic while you're downloading a file, that's going to slow down the download, no matter what your OS does.

Not necessarily - as someone else pointed out earlier, for some things, it's possible that a long-running process may have portions that are themselves long, but also may encounter problems and need to be rolled back and retried. Then you're stuck between showing zero progress for a long time while running the portion that can be rolled back, showing a reversal of progress should the rollback actually wind up having to happen, or extending the progress bar in some way to show that there's now more to do. Alternatively, there may be operations that rarely need to be done as part of a process - rarely enough that including them in the normal estimate of how much needs to be done doesn't make sense.

(To take that back to your analogy - if you get partway to work and realize you forgot something you need, then you're not going to drive the same distance that day. A progress meter of your drive would then either have to stop until you return to the point you'd gotten to when you had to turn around, show backwards progress as you go back home, or add additional distance that needs to be driven. For the second alternative, an analogy would be encountering a detour, traffic accident, or other blockage that causes you to take a different, longer route that day.)

Of course, what you really need there is some explanatory text, so the user knows what the heck is actually happening... which is why I personally like progress bars that have a way to "open them up" to get more information about what's going on.

There's a difference between 'bogus' and 'an estimate that's subject to change'. Personally, though, if I were the designer of that dialog, rather than estimating time to completion based on ( amount remaining / current speed ), I'd do it based on ( amount remaining / average speed so far ). As you get farther along, that reduces how much a short slowdown (or speedup) will change the estimate. At the same time, with the graph being shown, the user can see if the speed drops to zero and stays there for a considerable time, so even if that happens at 99% completion, they can set their own criteria for "how long am I going to wait with zero progress before I decide this thing's frozen and kill it".

To me, that last bit is the big thing that's missing from most progress dialogs right now. I want to be able to tell if progress has stopped, and for how long it's been stopped. If you just show percentage completed and time, I as a user can't tell whether progress has slowed down to a crawl, or whether no progress at all is being made. Further, without the historical information provided by the graph, If I want to tell whether, say, the bar moves at all in the space of five minutes, I often have to resort to tricks like taking a Post-It and putting it on the screen where the bar ends right now, then using that later to tell whether the bar has moved. (A percentage count helps with this, but generally, the percentage count seems to be rounded to the nearest 1%, while the bar has more than 100 divisions and seems to be using them. Thus, a single pixel of movement might be only 0.3% progress, which might not show up in the percentage count, if it's not showing that same degree of accuracy.)

Both statements are true, so just simplify to:

Yes it is. And to be fair, it's a lot more accurate than Nostradamus.

... and your ISP was free, I take it? You paid for your email as part of paying for Internet access. You still do, with most Internet providers - it's just that a lot of people don't bother using their ISP-provided email any more. The only people who had free email were those using Freenets, or who had someone else paying the bill for them.