You'll never convince hoplophobes with logic. Their opinions are an emotional reaction derived primarily from fear of themselves.

I used to suffer from a benign form of this condition when I was in college. I had never tried to control my temper and saw no reason to. I viewed firearms as extending the range and destructive force of my temper. I assumed that everyone else was like me. They are not.

Both conditions were cured for me when I inherited my father's police service pistol and after educating myself on its safe and effective use, began shooting it. That led me to the conclusion that I had a lot more to learn about myself and about other people.

Now I carry daily, and only worry about the damage of ignorant and fearful politicians. I also try to take as many people as I can shooting. After some instruction in safe handling and proper technique, and about $20 worth of ammo, something changes and they begin to reassess their views.

Most completely change their views. Some never come around completely but understand more than they did. For the rest there's organized political action.

I can not see why anyone would want one for themselves.

Worse, It's a .22. I presume .22LR and not some more capable .22 like 5.7x24. The article didn't say, but called it a plinker.

I can barely understand my wife wanting a .380 auto (Ruger LCP) instead of a 9mm. But at least she'll carry it, and it's better than pepper spray or harsh language.

This sounds like a novelty to me.

Wait, the battery is rechargeable? If this is an ADVERTISEMENT in a paper magazine, why would you want to recharge it beyond the novelty? What good is this...

Because if they didn't include a rechargeable battery then you would complain that "The damned thing doesn't even have a rechargeable battery! What good is this..."

...ballistically speaking. Depending on the angle, a shot taken might have traveled past the intended target and missed if it were for real.

Good point, but it would be fairly easy to account for this, as well as windage in software. The computer knows where the target is relative to you (give or take a bit) and can easily calculate where your bullet would have hit based on the load data.

That said, bullet drop isn't an issue until the zero point anyway.

You could also load rubber bullets and simulate any round that you wanted.

I added a tankless electric hot water heater a few years ago (I love it, and have saved $$$$)
However this required the addition of a 220V-125A feeder breaker to a sub-panel with four 220V-30A breakers. Each of these is feeding a 7KW heater element on the water heater.

The heater is microprocessor controlled so that it uses only as much current as it needs. This lets my 28KW water heater run the shower and dishwasher at the same time endlessly with no outward sign.

The sad thing is, I only have 50A running to my server racks.

I recently looked into a (cybersquatted) domain for a client. The squatter wanted $3000.00. We said, "Take a hike." Over the next few weeks I received unsolicited offers, each one for less money. Eventually the price went below 1K, then to make-an-offer.

I was determined that my client not give these scumbags any money, so I advised against making any offers, and finally told the scumbag, "No, seriously, take hike!"

My client went with an alternative that turned out to be a better choice because he was able to trademark it. The one he originally wanted was pretty generic and was already being used in commerce in several states by several companies.

The ability to trademark is one of the reasons that so many companies have begun using made-up words in their names. Doing so also takes cybersquatters out of the picture.

Fuck I lost my line of thought.

Screw it.

Here. Have another Oreo.

That /is/ evolution.

Not necessarily, and in this case, I think not at all. Sexual reproduction is one example of picking up new traits from other compatible organisms. The offspring have a partial copy of one parent's DNA. They acquire new traits from the other parent. This does not result in a new species, but rather unique individuals all of the same species. This is not automatically evolution because those traits being passed around are possessed by many other individuals of the species. They are not new, but they are not possessed by ALL members of the species.

With flu viruses, you have the case of an organism acquiring new traits through asexual reproduction. The resultant offspring are still flu viruses. The pool of possible traits that they can acquire is limited by the species that they inhabit.

Crossing the species barrier, say mammal to avian, might open up the possibility of evolution in the organism by making new genetic material available.

We know that new species arise since we have have observed evidence of this, but I suspect that whatever the process, it is not the theory of evolution proposed by Darwin. I suspect that it is a much faster and more discrete (in the denotative sense) process. It may also have an environmental component. e.g. it only happens when sufficient pressure is put on the population. This would have new species arising in a single or several generations rather than over millennia as proposed by Darwin.

My use of the term mutation was vague. I was referring to spontaneous random mutations in the parent that are passed on the offspring. I was making the point that this is not some kind of totally new organism. It's a flu virus that has different genetic traits and geometry than its predecessor. It has picked up some virulent traits, changing it into a more harmful variant.

Flu viruses change every year, primarily in Southeast Asia where pigs, ducks, and people live in very close quarters. This may be a form of mutation, but it has not resulted in a new species. I think that puts it in the camp of slight variant, and not of evolved species.

how do you know?

I don't. I'm relying on the fact that no one has put out a press release saying that there's been a mutation. I'm also relying on my understanding that gene swapping, and not mutations, is responsible for the new virus variants that we routinely see every year.

I could be wrong about both since I'm practicing arm chair biology. So far that does not look like the case, however. If someone would like to offer convincing evidence that I'm deluded, I will be more than happy to entertain other conclusions.

Well, yes, we know this. It's known as a "gene".

I didn't word that well. Thanks for making me aware of it.

I suppose what I was trying to say was that the idea of gene transfer between species while well known, and used to great effect industrially and scientifically, does not seem to have made an impact on the evolutionary biology community. It's as if it never occurred to them that what we see as evolution is nothing more than trait swapping and conditional expression. Whereas mutations appear to be universally bad.

This is not evolution. At least not the Darwinian sense.

In the connotative sense of the word, the organisms have "evolved" i.e. changed. They have not, however, evolved in the way Darwin envisioned. They have not mutated in any way. They have done what what efficient, adaptable, resilient life forms always do. Which is to pick up new traits from other compatible organisms, or to express new traits from existing DNA in response to environmental changes.

This happens all the time even in higher order life forms. Good examples may be found in the Galapagos islands ironically, where, depending on environmental conditions the offspring of one species will express a completely different phenotype than their parents. It appears that the DNA for multiple phenotypes is present in the gene pool, but the particular expression is dependent on environmental conditions.

It is unfortunate that evolutionary biologists have become so fundamentalist in their adherence to Darwin's theory that they appear to miss vital clues that suggest a much more interesting and likely hypothesis. Which is that traits seem to come in "packages." If this is true, then the really intriguing question is; Where did the traits themselves come from? The idea that one organism can acquire traits from another's DNA implies a certain level of modularity in all DNA. If that's not the 800 pound gorilla of biology, then it should be.

No, for the same reason you do not have a right to keep and bear nuclear devices or chemical and/or biological weapons.

But I do have a right to those things. I simply choose to reserve that right in order to gain the benefits of living in an industrialized nation with a very high standard of living who will, for a small annual tax, defend me from others who own those same items. That, and the fact that I couldn't hope to afford, or to effectively deploy any of those items making them useless to me.

On a serious note, we call fallacious statements such as yours red herring arguments. The chances of an individual ever owning a nuke are so small as to be nearly zero. This makes your use of it in your particular argument a red herring. On the other hand, if you would have said that I don't have a right to own a machine gun, then you would have made an incorrect, but otherwise logically valid statement. I know dozens of people who own machine guns. It used to be more common than it is now, but it's gotten very expensive since the late '80s.

He can spoof ips yet he can't install software to detect unwanted outbound traffic?

You have to know of a threat to defend against it.

Non-intuitive threats are common and can be deadly. I would imagine that many of the people reading the article summary (who reads the articles?) would have made the same mistake.

It's a classic hacker move, and a common mental error. We think of spyware for tracking individuals, but not an individual. Oops!

I think that Pfizer took it all. I keep hearing people say that's where they get theirs.