I have an external 2TB drive I use for backups. (In addition to DropBox for critical files, although I've been reconsidering that particular service lately.) I unplug it when not in use. So in the same system broadly, but not really. It's a consumer system, so no need to go as silly as having a separate BDR box.

I think with a properly set up system, RAID can speed it up considerably. I prefer the multi drive model for consumer systems though - a small SSD OS and application drive, a fat slow platter drive for storage of large media files, and an even fatter and slower drive for backups. 128GB/1TB/2TB is the system I have on my desktop.

I'm an advocate for better gun education. The vast majority of gun injuries in the US are accidents. So-called responsible gun owners forgetting about loaded weapons, not locking them up properly in gun cases, etc. I'm totally okay with elementary school kids learning how to use guns provided all the safety rules are ingrained into them at the same time. We harp about not running with scissors and carrying them point down, but most kids never learn gun basics like ensuring the chamber is empty before fiddling with it.

X-acto knives in 911, and they were banned from airplanes. Along with knitting needles and pretty much any sharp metal object longer than an inch.

Did anyone actually die from that?

We used to have serial killers, who would take out one victim at a time over a series of months. Now we have one lone crazy kid (usually white and male) shooting up 20 people in what really is just a form of domestic terrorism. There are still singular homicides and shootings every day in cities across the country, but we only hear about the mass murderers.

He hasn't officially been a judge in a while so he's allowed to say what he wants.

Upthread someone said that Switzerland requires that everyone keep track of individual rounds of ammunition. I'd be okay with this in the US.

Having grown up on a military base, I'd say yes. Yes it could.

I'd totally fight for my right to openly carry a katana. Actually I think you can openly carry a sheathed sword in most places - just can't take 'em into courtrooms and such.

The problem is that many "grass roots" organizations get their funding from big anonymous donors. Or not so anonymous. AARP and NRA charge membership dues, some of which does go to a lobbying arm, but many of the Tea Party folks don't even know where the money is coming from. My in-laws went on a Tea Party rally to Washington thing. Someone else paid for a charter bus to take them there and they had at least 3-4 catered meals along the way. When I inquired about how they were paying for it, my mother-in-law did not know. They basically had their trip subsidized by an unknown person or group in order to get more bodies into DC for photo optics.

We actually have more success on the local level. Our city government where I live has 4-5 parties represented (there's a Green and a Libertarian in addition to the standard Republican and Dem). That's probably because we eliminated party primaries and everyone is in one big runoff from the start, so we're more likely to vote for a person than a party.

Our city is still pretty dysfunctional, but at least the potholes get filled, which is better than 99% of the rest of the country these days.

We're surrounded by tiny errors in the world. Heck, they're even built into our DNA. The vast majority of tiny little errors do no harm, and we don't notice them. We gloss over them, like a typo in a book. It's just that every once in a while, a tiny little error can occur that snowballs into something much greater. Like cancer. Or a massive, accidental security leak.

More eyeballs usually do make bugs more shallow, but only if the eyes know what to look for.

Well, since the fake returns are filed with forged W2s and such, you would still owe $3,000, but the scammers probably convinced the IRS that they should get a few hundred dollars back at the minimum.

I tried to efile a few years ago and discovered someone had already submitted a tax return under my SSN. So I had to send in all my tax forms and all my proof of identity in paper, along with a statement of fraud or something of the sort. And I had to file paper again the next year since my SSN was blocked from efiling due to the fraud alert.

Finally got the ability to file normally again last year. We don't qualify for the free tax software any more, unfortunately. I think we used the paid version of Turbo Tax.