4.0 - great
2k - great

I could argue on both sides about 3.5 and 3.51

First OEM cars DONT BLIND PEOPLE. It's the dipshits that own hondas and pickup trucks that do aftermarket HID retrofits from ebay that blind people. REal stuff doesnt do that.

Consider for a moment a road that's not perfectly straight and flat. Those OEM HID lights that are so bright and so focused on the road ahead of the car as if it were on a freeway with no slope or turn are now going to be pointing in other places. I regularly drive on back roads of New York to and from work, and there's a few places where I can tell the fancy cars because of the lights that are way too bright until I get on the same level or a straight section.

Yes, after market HID installs are a problem, but they're easy to pick out. OEM HID have different problems, and denying it underscores your tight focus on a limited terrain.

Dear patriot,
Well, I did it again.
Every gun grabber called my office yesterday screaming and crying because I posted this to our website.
Yes, I find liberal tears to be the best gun cleaner.
Now that's funny.
But you know what would really have gun grabbers dabbing their eyes with their petticoats?
If I were to run this campaign for U.S. Senate.
So let's give them something to cry about.
Today is the last day to accept donations for this period, so I need you to act NOW...

is 42.

Let's walk through building a similarly speced Hackintosh and set aside the build quality and all-in-one arguments for the moment.

(Massively cribbed from TonyMacx86.

Let's get as 3.2 GHz i5 for $200 (Core i5-4570).

We need a motherboard to plug it into. A Gigabyte for $142 will get us WiFi and some nice features (GA-Z87N).

8 gigs of RAM for $85 seems reasonable and compares to the target too. (CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9)

A Bitfenix Prodigy is a nice case for $90. Here, you may be able to go cheaper, but you can certainly go more expensive. (BFC-PRO-300-WWXKW-RP)

A Corsair 500W power supply for $55 is pretty reasonable.

Although I'd prefer an SSD, we're comparing to a system with a 7200 RPM spinner. A Seagate Barracuda for $79 seems appropriate. (ST31000524AS)

I'm having trouble matching the GeForce 755M with my Wikipedia-Fu. A modest video card with twice the memory sets us back $100 (ASUS GT640). Hopefully the performance is similar, but I'm open to suggestions.

The barebones system is $751.

You can get a 27" IPS display from Monoprice, which Anandtech said badly needed calibration to be taken seriously (http://www.anandtech.com/show/7240/monoprice-zerog-slim-27-ips-monitor-review) for $390.

You can get a decent keyboard for $50, and a decent mouse for $50 (here, you can beat both by downgrading, but I use a trackball that's closer to $100).

The reference system excludes an optical drive, so we won't needlessly add one to compare, but includes an SDXC slot, whatever that is. Assembling all those spare parts above gets me to $1241, and excludes software (which is famously "free" now, but really is only free with the purchase of a licensed computer), but I can save $460 over the reference system.

I cheaped out on the screen, but for another $100, I could get a Dell that's got decent factor calibration. I don't have speakers -- $50 may be a good budget for what's in the iMac, I don't have a camera, but a Logitec C920 for $75 seems equivalent. Adding those back in gets me closer to $235 under the reference system.

My hand-built system isn't an all-in-one, which is a value to some. My hand-built system may not be as quiet, which is worth a premium too (I used higher-power desktop components instead of the laptop equivalents in the iMac), and I may use more electricity, increasing the TCO by as much as $0.05-$0.10 per day (wild guess) which adds up over a few years. All of this, the OS, iLife and iWork licenses plus the support of being able to walk into an Apple store is where the $235 goes toward. My iMac is 5.5 years old. I've replaced the hard drive 4 times (one died out of warranty, the replacement was slower than hell but free, replaced that with a faster spinner, replaced that with an SSD), and the number of Torx screws necessary to get to them is significant, but does not make it unserviceable. The memory in my wife's (same age) died at 5 years old, and that was a $40 replacement that took 5 minutes.

It is unfair to say that this is a $12 burger selling for $100 (when I go to the local restaraunt, I pay $9-$10 for a burger, and it comes with fries... Are you overpaying for your hamburger?).

"as we know it" is an important caveat, since nuclear war, even if we blew every weapon up, wouldn't destroy human civilization. We could decimate a few major cities, but there'd be plenty of people and technology left.

We exploded over 500 devices in the atmosphere in the 50s and 60s, some of them far more powerful than those currently in the stockpile (which are typically 100-300kt these days). Nuclear winter was a hoax perpetuated by Sagan, a man I respect, but a man who seemed to have an irrational fear of nuclear things, which corrupted his integrity on those matters.

I don't think the TSA turned the trend around, it was the actions of the 9/11 hijackers themselves, who turned the standard advice of "comply with hijackers and wait it out" into "fuck that, swarm the fuckers and stand on their throat until they die".

None of them were actual grenades. The blog post says some were smoke grenades or flash bangs, which don't even look at all like the explody kind. Still wouldn't be fun to have a smoke grenade go off on a plane, but it's not a very credible hijacking threat.

And besides, I doubt even the threat of a grenade would get a hijacker far these days. 9/11 made planes pretty difficult to hijack on a mere threat.

I don't believe that's the case, at least not at many airports. I've read an article that says that air taxi service is getting popular because it does avoid TSA.

Branzburg v. Hayes which lead to one of the big supreme court rulings on this matter (striking down protections for press) was under Burger's court and was hardly a conservative bunch (the same court that gave us Roe v Wade).

The world isn't black and white, and those who would oppress you aren't limited to one side of the aisle.

One big point you miss is that to do otherwise basically assumes that silence=guilt. If you refuse to talk to the police, right now that's a protected right. If people didn't have 5th amendment protections, it would be a crime to refuse to be interviewed by the police about some crime you were suspected in, guilty or not. In the real world, people incriminate themselves all the time. It's the police's job to try to trick them into doing so. Confessions are the goal of police interviews with suspects. Giving police the power to threaten jail for merely not talking would pretty much allow them to jail anyone they wanted.

Historically, the 5th amendment is about something much larger and more sinister, the practice of using torture to extract forced confessions. This isn't necessarily some outlandish thing, it happens in more subtle ways every day. When the cops keep a junkie too stupid to lawyer up in an interview room for 12 hours, eventually they will say anything to get out of there, once the withdrawal really hits.

Regarding your other scenario, extending 5th amendment protections to third parties, there have been some limited cases of that, married couples for example. The idea behind there being a different standard for third parties is that a third party testimony is a lot more suspect than a confession from the suspect. The motivation to torture a confession out of a third party about some crime they weren't involved in is pretty low.

There would be no need to pirate it if everyone knew that it would be on TV. How many knew that this was the case?

Not everyone has the same motivations as you. "Pirates" often have setups similar to TiVo's "season pass" feature. You type in the name and all the episodes are downloaded automatically, and with higher accuracy than PVRs (ever had a favorite show preempted by a politician or sports program you weren't interested in?). They end up in a uniform location with all the other shows the user is interested in, and with a common interface-- be it XBMC or just VLC.

Fixing one TV show doesn't fix the entire problem. Personally, I was terrified to download anything ... until suddenly there was no legal way to get my TV show of choice. I was in the US, couldn't get cable, my satellite provider wouldn't (or couldn't) provide the local networks -- a problem long since rectified -- and despite my satellite and affiliate's insistence, I was unable to receive that station with any antenna. Once I realized how easy it was, I realized that it was easier and more accurate to download than it was to DVR shows. That spread to even shows I received over the antenna and satellite because of the convenience and accuracy.

I look forward to when the entertainment industry realizes they're not catering to my type and there are a lot of us out there.

Actually the whole gauss gun idea makes no sense.

I think it makes lots of sense. It's pretty clearly functional and simple, and it runs off the definition of a linear motor. In fact, there are some places that will assume "projectile" when you specify "linear motor" instead of slower speed ideas (like a MagLev).

Take an electric motor attach a say 100mm diameter spinning frame put you bullet on one side with a counter balance on the other side spin it up to 2000 revolutions per minute and you achieve 628m/s when you release the bullet.

Did you build one of those yourself to satisfy your own curiosity? If not, then I don't think you have any business stating that a coil gun makes no sense. When someone explores your idea and discovers a 10cm flywheel that's counterbalanced until the moment of release, what kinds of problems are they likely to encounter at the moment of release? 2000 rpms sounds pretty reasonable in terms of my car engine, but I might get nervous about that close to my face. How noisy is a 2000 rpm flywheel that is centripetally loaded? How much energy is involved in that strategy? How long is the initial spin-up?

Personally, I think the coil gun ideas are far more simple to understand and instead of mitigating drawbacks at every step, he's shooting aluminum cans and glass jars and a laptop he apparently has a great deal of animosity toward.

Lego Mindstorms isn't a cheap way to go, and it's even worse if you don't already have lots of Lego lying around.

Head to Radio Shack and take a look at their Arduino kits. It's not any cheaper, but it's the popular way to start these days. That will familiarize you with some stuff that's available these days. Once you're familiar with the terminology of what interests you, head to the Internet and see what they have to offer.