One of my buddies is buying a Leaf.

The problem is this: once you test drive an electric car, you're done with shitty ICE forever. Nothing has better torque, better acceleration... and that's what the gold ol' 'murkin cahs are sold as, muscle.

Put them up against something electric, and these so-called "Muscle cars" are just saggy old curlbros trying to get big arms to draw attention away from their massive beer bellies.

Wouldn't you like to know, apk?

I suspect we've all encountered managers that don't grasp the difference between "managing" and "intimidation". But after your first job out of college, you will discover that you have better things to do with your life than burn the candle at both ends for a crappy job.

More importantly, the "death-march" style of project management doesn't produce good results. What you describe can't become the norm, simply because any company that uses it will find itself internally paralyzed, completely unable to adapt to a changing market. When individual projects stretch on for longer than the company's strategic plan, the threat of firings doesn't really mean much because none of you will still work there in five years.

Find a new job today and save your sanity.

How is blinding someone with a laser worse than killing or maiming them with a bullet?

This world holds a lot of horrors worse than death for our tribe of domesticated monkeys. Personally, I would rather die than go blind... But of course, given that we as a society regularly allow the infirm to live past birth, holding such a belief has become gauche to an extreme. Handbasket, please.

That said, this has nothing to do with issues of morality and mercy, and everything to do with military logistics. A dead enemy merely means one less fighter for the other side. A crippled one still means one less fighter, but also means risking still-tactically-useful men getting him out of combat, then wasting precious medical resources providing immediate treatment, and then (in most civilized countries) supporting him for the rest of his life.

This was true for me when the modem they gave to me failed to bootstrap. I was charged for the guy to come out, debug the problem, and then swap the modem because it was defective from the factory.

But my only other internet option is AT&T and that's it.

So basically a duonopoly in a city with millions of people.

We need the city to lay the lines and then allow the cable companies to compete for customers on those lines like we do for our electric lines.

Was that 99.99% test done on a fire arm that has been used much?

If you check out the pics in TFA, you'll see that not only didn't they test fire this the hundreds of thousands of times it would take to come up with that claim of accuracy - This "proof of concept" wouldn't ever work in a real gun.

Apparently, this genius 17YO knows so little about the functioning of an actual gun that he simply filled the receiver with electronics (because nothing important goes in all that empty space) and produced what amounts a gun-shaped fingerprint reader. Because, y'know, who needs all those silly little things like springs or hammers or firing pins or magazines to also fit inside a working gun?

Guns must not be simply reliable. They must be infallible. They must work instantly, every time. Otherwise, any gun is useless. See how fucking idiotic that sounds?

It doesn't sound idiotic at all. Yes, the real world means that you will have some measurable failures-to-fire. Also IN THE REAL WORLD, quality ammo in a well-maintained gun simply doesn't fail. You'll see less than one FTF in a thousand, and that one will only happen after a long day at the range with the gun completely fouled. And even then, a tap-rack-bang will usually clear it (as opposed to a dead battery, which would mean a dead you when you have two seconds before a home invader gets from the door to you).

So yes, guns MUST be as close to infallible as possible. We have to accept the constraints of the real world, but adding a functionally unnecessary point of failure amounts to nothing short of suicidal.

What I will say is I don't understand why folks are against the development of these sorts of things. As long as it's not government mandated as the only way to get a usable tool then let it compete in the market.

Why? Because at least one state HAS already mandated it - New Jersey passed that one in 2002, and only the lack of any viable commercial tech has blocked the enforcement of such mandates. And worse, Eric Holder (yes, that Eric Holder) publicly stated that he considers NJ's law a model for future NATIONAL policy.

I don't think even the most paranoid gun-nuts have a serious moral objection to safer guns. Until such tech exists as to allow "smart" guns to have four properties, however, I will cling to my dumb ol' guns to my last breath:
1) No batteries.
2) Lower false NEGATIVE rate ("99.99%" from TFA makes a great soundbite but means fuck-all without qualifiers) than a dumb gun's normal failure-to-fire rate (which with quality ammo and a well-maintained gun comes to pretty damned near zero).
3) No slower than existing draw-rack-point-click. I would even say, if fingerprint-based, the sensor MUST go on the trigger itself and detect a thin stripe of index fingertop.
4) No remote disabling, PERIOD. If the police can do it, so can home invaders.


/ OT: Why the hell doesn't bolding work on Beta? And Dice really wonders why we hate it?

But you have to compare it to what they would otehr wise be doing.

If you pay them $50 an hour but this sucks out of their water cooler time, then no loss.
If you pay them $50 an hour but this sucks out of "figuring out where the hell the command I always use went on the new ribbon system" then no loss.

Seriously, Ribbons cost me well over 10 hours of time figuring out how to do what I'd always done.

A customer is someone who receives a service from a company, even if the (monetary) price for that service is zero.

No. Don't mistake "users" for "customers". They do not mean the same thing, and you conflate the two at great risk to your productivity, your profitability, and your sanity.

The fact that random people can read my blog in no way makes them "customers". The fact that Google makes money on their websites while I make nothing and use mine as a soapbox has no relevance - I ignore email from German users too (mostly because I can't read them). Come and get me, polizei!

It would've gone on long enough for something to happen.

For what to happen, exactly?

"We the People" count as fucking sheep, more concerned with Kardashians than the Constitution. What exactly do you think more awareness of the problem would have gotten us?

The general public now knows about the NSA's spying programs, just like they learned about Bush (senior)'s CIA running the global drug trade to arm the Taliban 30 years ago, just like they learned about J. Edgar's FBI's CoIntelPro 30 years before that, just like they put Joe Kennedy in charge of the SEC 30 years before that. And yet... Do you see Keith Alexander's head on a pike in a conspicuous public place? Do you see the entire agency disbanded for breach of public trust, and everyone who ever worked there rendered unemployable due to the taint on their resumes?

No. No, you don't. Because we deserve the government we have. We exist as a nation run by bread and circuses, and we like it.


/ Dear $Deity - You can send that asteroid any time now... Perhaps the intelligent dragonfly empire 100 million years from now will do better than the domesticated apes did.

The judges in these kind of cases are appointed by the executive, the same branch of government they are supposed to keep in check.

Remember, kids - Nothing says "legitimate democratic government" like extortionate secret courts!

Un-fucking believable. Well, no, entirely too believable. On the bright side, federal judges get appointed for life, so we have a very straightforward recall procedure.


/ 28 USC section 375, of course - What did you think I meant?

Bwah bow chicky bow bow, bwah bow chicky bow bow!

(alternatively, "Hey baby, I'm excited! Let's share some electrons and get covalent!")

If you *really* want to talk silly tho... the front page of Yahoo is about 200k (plus images).
98,000 characters were space characters! Why on earth are we transmitting spaces for html source code? Isn't there some way to suppress them?

100mb in a half hour is 100mb/1800s is 1mb per 1.8s is under 1m/s.

I've played multiple videos, played minecraft and done over 12 hours of browsing, streamed music and I've hit 471MB in 27 hours since I rebooted which is a lot lower than 100m/1800s.

Unless you are downloading distros or movies/tv shows or expect sub second response for every page you visit, you don't "need" that kind of speed.

I agree it's NICE to have.

Heck, this entire page is only 40k.