Great idea, we should all do our part to collect old guns. There's no reason to let guns sit in warehouses or gun stores for longer than the lifespan of a cell phone.

I was looking at some that were on sale yesterday and was thinking I can probably take 3, maybe 4 of them off the streets myself.

The drop&discharge issue that was cited is addressed with the firing pin safety. When I said "improvements", I meant there's more than one way to implement that feature.

In order to get a discharge, the gun must be dropped at a fairly specific angle onto a hard surface while the hammer is down to allow the force of hitting the ground to drive the firing pin forward. CA's safety tests were developed specifically to cause rare, specific failures.

The 1911 is a good whipping boy for arguments like this because the original 1911 can be cited as having a specific problem, even if it's difficult or impossible to go out and buy a 1911 that exhibits the specific issue today.

The state of CA is not a good example of safety evaluation. They require each model of gun to go through an expensive(IIRC, ~$25,000 per) "testing" process. A gun made in 5 different calibers and 5 different colors or finishes requires the manufacturer to pay 25 times the fee to be able to sell in CA. This process has little to do with safety. It's about income for the state and discouraging gun manufacturers from selling in their state.

Do car manufacturers need to have each color of their cars to be "safety tested" before they can be allowed to sell them? If a new color is introduced, is it inherently illegal to sell until it has gone through the testing process?

In fairness to your point, the 1911 design does lack some improvements that have been developed in the last 100 years. During that time, it was a standard sidearm of our military and used by law enforcement agencies. It may not be a perfect design, but it's clearly not inherently unsafe. The hypothetical situation you describe is due to unsafe handling practices.

If that's what aliens came light years to probe, there's gotta be something if immense scientific interest there.

This topic keeps coming up, but there isn't a market for this product. Are the target audience also people who want:

Bicycles for fish
Mouse traps that don't kill mice, but embarrass them into moving next door
Any item advertised via spam

That's just crazy, creating paper spheroids to throw into a cylindrical object? This is the fault of the paper and waste basket manufacturers who should all use a single standard form factor to maximize rubbish density.

Capital punishment is a way for society to collectively say "we will no longer be needing your services."

In this case, the replacement for the previous drugs (which are less available to the US due to their use in the death penalty) turned out not to work as expected. Considering the severity of the crimes committed, there's not many people with empathy for the criminal. However, the state did the right thing by acknowledging the failure of the method and not proceeding with another inmate that was already scheduled.

I've always wondered if heroin overdose would be a good option. For those who don't want to live in prison the rest of their lives, that seems like an option some would take voluntarily.

Why aren't there more asian basketball or football players?

Some jobs need people with specific skill sets. Developing those skills is not encouraged equally among every culture.

Under representation of blacks in the senate may suggest that being a bunch of backstabbing bullshitters while smiling and saying jesus wants them to win may not be something that's important to many blacks. Then again, I don't think any culture has a lot of respect for these parasites, so maybe it's just that political donors are a bunch of racists.

Looks like the court is saying that US companies have to spin off separate companies to exist in markets that require that sensitive data stay within the country/region.

Combine this with actively subverting security of US based products and it sounds like internet based companies need to be run and hosted outside the US.

Apparently our government is entirely staffed by people who completely missed the point of King Solomon's cut the baby in half ruling.

Of course you could still hammer nails with it, but can you plug it in and *type* on it?

I used to know people who would carefully disassemble their old IBM keyboards, run the parts through a dishwasher and reassemble them, fully functional.

These days, I'm not sure if some keyboards could stand up to the compressed air in a can cleaning.

By the time it fails, that's 15 jobs ago for the management. They already got their bonus for short term cost savings and are doing the same thing to bigger and better projects now. There's a reason job hopping is so common in senior management levels.

Where did they get the 1000 responses? Did some management magazine offer free subscriptions to managers who stood over their employees as they filled in their responses to the survey? The data suggests this happened at least 98% of the time.

It's the legal foundation our country is built upon. If there were sufficient agreement that the second amendment is detrimental, it could be eliminated through the amendment process.

Why does everything need a federal law anyway? There are state and local laws that could be used to address the concerns of people in high population density areas, and if there's enough benefit from those, the support for a federal law would bubble up from there.

Do you think people in the Bible Belt and California want to be governed by the same laws? There's no reason that different cultures should not be permitted to have laws appropriate to their communities.

Rainbows are just an illusion created by the different refraction angles of sunlight coming through rain drops. Do you realize how large those pony farts would have to be to create rainbows? That's the kind of science that would win you an ig nobel award.

*I* have alternatives to running XP, but I'm also a Unix admin and programmer. I think it's fair to say the average person doesn't really get much choice once they get locked in to proprietary drivers, hardware, etc. The "don't buy it" argument is like the idea of original sin. By the time you have a choice, it's already been made for you. There are those who can and will rise above, but those people aren't in the bottom 99% of computer users.