It's not a fantasy. I had someone try to break into my house once. I have a friend who hid in a broom closet with a her mother and they armed themselves with a broom for a weapon because there was a rapist outside the window watching them while doing nasty things to himself and on another occasion I have a friend who was home alone when two thieves broke into the house and confronted her.

Mind you I live in a rural mountain community and not a crime ridden suburb with bars on the windows.

It. Is. Not. A. Fantasy.

Well when you try regulating a class of weapon out of existence then another class will takes its place.
Regulate machine guns? Semi-automatics take the place.
Regulate semi-automatics? Revolvers and bolt guns take its place.
Regulate those? People will be killing each other with percussion and bladed instruments again.

This escalating regulation has gotten so bad overseas that in England just having a pocket knife makes you an instant terrorist in the eyes of the government. In fact there is a group over there calling for the complete ban of knives with pointed tips because of "knife crime."

Semi-automatics do their job very well, perhaps better than machine guns, in combat and the amount of them in circulation I think makes it convenient for criminal organizations to just not bother with fully automatic weapons which is why I think you only see full autos in very small percentage of crime and usually only in the heaviest of cartels. If you ban semi-automatics somehow I doubt criminals would be satisfied with weapons from the turn of the century as opposed to when full autos were practically banned a semi-automatic would do the job just as well.

Ultimately I think regulating something that is supposed to be protected into oblivion is just cough medicine; it makes you feel good but all it does is treat the symptom and not the underlying cause. Violence will continue and with the amount of money in illegal weaponry I suspect they would just continue to flow, like drugs, into the country to be sold out of a trunk in L.A. meanwhile the citizenry would be defenseless against a relatively heavily armed criminal element.

Actually what happened is that in 1986 Congress closed the machine gun registry with the Hughes Amendment to the Firearm Owners Protection Act.

It was supposed to be a poison pill to defeat FOPA but the NRA supported the bill anyway (FOPA was full of good stuff otherwise) and said they'd challenge the Hughes Amendment later on constitutional grounds since assault rifles and submachine guns can be considered militia weaponry and therefore protected by the 2nd Amendment as the Supreme Court has come to understand it, however that never happened and to this day Congress continues to infringe the 2nd Amendment by keeping the registry closed, no one has been able to get the Hughes Amendment before the Supreme Court and no senator would be caught dead introducing a bill to re-open the machine gun registry.

Most gun owners I've talked to though would rather see a bigger focus on the repeal of portions of the National Firearm Act though like deregulating; short-barrel rifles, shotguns, handgun grips and evil safety devices like suppressors.

Even more gun owners would like the BATFE to have more transparency and Congressional oversight because of their arbitrary and non-nonsensical decisions and fortunately Operation Fast'n'Furious exposed their tom foolery to the general public but I doubt anything will come of it.

This.
Those who continue to preach about the unfaulting hand of the free market will tell you to shop and take your money elsewhere but in my experience most providers refuse to quote you a price and even if they can't give you a price without knowing is wrong they'll refuse to give a price on a basic exam. To make matters worse your insurance company will only have a few doctors in network limiting your choice on where to take your money.

I find that most doctors will refuse to give you a price because they'll charge different people different prices for the same service depending on their insurance company and how much they can get away with billing the insurance company who in turn dumps the entire bill on you.
One example is that a friend of mine and I have the same doctor but my friend doesn't have insurance so the doctor charges him $60 for an office visit but I have insurance so he charges me $180 and my insurance company will only cover a small percentage of it so I have to pay the difference plus the co-pay.

If it worked like my health insurance company they'd deny the claim by saying the gas station was not in-network, i'd have to mail-order my fuel instead of getting it at a local gas station and that having an empty fuel tank is a pre-existing condition.

For me garbage collection is more annoying than its worth.
Any programmer worth his salt is going to make sure his objects are properly cleaned up anyway regardless of garbage collection, but unfortunately most "programmers" these days don't seem to be worth their salt and consequently high-level languages have to compensate for bad programming practices.

Unless things have changed I never paid Qt any attention because it is dually licensed and therefore not truly free software and its ownership keeps changing between commercial companies.
Last I checked Qt is "free" for open source projects but requires an expensive commercial license for anything else.

wxWidgets on the other hand is licensed under much more liberal terms and not owned by a commercial enterprise looking to make a buck or subject developers to strange licensing schemes.

Desktop memory is cheap but ECC server memory can be very expensive

I had a similar experience with theological articles I kept attempting to keep NPOV (Neutral Point-of-View) in regard to the way some denominations interpret certain scripture in their doctrine but my edits kept getting reverted and modified by some Southern Baptist and Quaker church members (Their usernames clearly identified them as such) who insisted their point of view was the end-all and be-all and that other major points of views didn't deserve to be even mentioned in an encyclopedia.

I remember informing Wikipedia's administrative staff of the problem but I don't think anything ever came of it.

Long story short I've tried to contribute to Wikipedia on a number of occasions but self-proclaimed editors and people insistent on pressing their philosophy and ideas on others make it very difficult to be a contributor.

What really bothered me was that I wanted to be part of the beta (I seem to participate in lots of beta stuff) but unfortunately to be considered you had to play a game for 10 minutes with a controller or something like that to get the Steam badge that would throw you in the candidate pool.

Unfortunately I did not have a controller that I could get to work with my PC and I couldn't get the PS3 controller I had on hand to communicate with my PC.

So I'm kinda bummed out about that.

There is no shortage of stupid when it comes to big companies due to bureaucracy and those being in management being disconnected from their customers and employees.

I used to work for a small software company of no more then maybe 120 people tops.
It was great; the benefits were great, the people were great and the work was not only great but deeply rewarding and even us low level developers got to have input on the product and even on occasion make design decisions.
Even the top management worked with us on such menial lowly tasks as coding and testing.

Then we got acquired...

The new company is multinational, employs people well into the thousands, and the new management seems to be obsessed with reports and numbers all the way up the chain to the CEO so consequently development has slowed down to a snail's pace.
My job no longer feels rewarding and I feel like an exhausted code monkey and the management continues to add more official procedures we must do to accomplish anything and they've even gone so far as to change the way we track changes in the source control system by eliminating bug items and stuffing everything into these gigantic user stories so the numbers look better for management.
As a result keeping track of everything is really difficult and non-uniform; every developer and tester writes something in a slightly different format inside text fields instead of keeping everything linked and individually documented as their own items like we did before.
To make matters worse they'll eventually retire our product and force our customer base to move over to their main flagship product so those of us at the bottom of the corporate food chain feel really discouraged and pessimistic about the future.

We were a market leader before and the reason was because we had everything down to a science and could adapt really quick to customer needs and input but now all that is gone.

It's a job and I'll do whatever they tell me to but still its not fun to work anymore and the management feels disconnected from those who they manage.

I have a younger friend who raves on about the Chromebook and how its superior to a PC (Along with the usual lines like "No viruses") but what he doesn't understand is that Chromebook is a glorified web browser masquerading as an operating system.
These machines are built for content consumption rather then creation, sure you might be able to type up an essay or ruin your pictures with filters through some kind of crappy $5 photo manipulation app, but for serious content creation the desktop is far from dead.

In many cases, in the real professional world, the tablet or phone is just a thin client if not a mere tool for something larger controlled, developed and otherwise managed by the desktop workstation.
I feel the newer generation fails to understand just how significant the desktop workstation environment is.

O'Connor v. Donaldson was a landmark case in 1975 where the Supreme Court ruled that commitment to a mental institution is the same as imprisonment in a criminal penitentiary therefore the state has a burden of proof to prove to a Judge that the subject is a harm to society or himself and that there is no alternative, and consequently anyone subjected to being committed is entitled to legal representation.

Even if you're voluntarily committed you should be able to leave at any time but if they force you to stay then you are being unlawfully imprisoned unless they have gone through the whole process I just mentioned, and you are entitled to an attorney even if it's just a public defender.

IANAL but I have done research on the subject and IMHO this is one of the best rulings SCOTUS has ever made.
Obviously none of this is relevant to your situation if you were confined before 1975 but it would be handy to keep in mind should it happen again.

As someone who has been harassed for photography I make a personal note of places that post signs prohibiting photography and remain aware of my surroundings should I engage in photography. There seems to be this strange unspoken paranoia in society about cameras and law enforcement usually has the worst attitude about it let alone private persons.

The uphill challenges that photographers face in regard to people's attitudes and misinformed ideas about the law reminds me of the same challenges and misinformed ideas and attitudes that those who carry of firearms (or other defensive tools such as tazers) often have to face.

Unfortunately photographers don't have as much case law and legislative code to defend themselves with unlike those who lawfully carry firearms but this site is a great place to start on the subject and of course the EFF usually has some good material in relation to this subject.

Anyone else remember the good old days when NewEgg did three day shipping as a standard? Now they only offer relatively slow 5-7 day shipping and expensive 2 day shipping.