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Comment Re:When doing anything involving the ocean (Score 4, Interesting) 198

The original screws were probably bronze, not brass. Bronze has no appreciable zinc while brass contains a lot of zinc. Immersed in sea water, brass will dezincify and corrode.

Most marine raw water systems use bronze fittings for this reason.

Stainless isn't suitable for below the waterline applications because the chromium can't form a protective oxidization layer due to the lack of oxygen exposure.

Your boat would have sunk with brass or stainless screws.

Comment It doesn't seem to make sense (Score 3, Informative) 494

I don't really understand the political or economic motivations of Scottish independence.

The political side would make more sense if Scotland was greatly different than UK culturally and had a significant short-term history of English subjugation. The Scots really aren't an ethnic or racial grouping, except at some micro level and don't seem to have a serious complaint regarding discrimination on language or religious grounds.

The economics make less sense -- Scotland has been economically integrated with the larger UK for a long time. Had Scotland split off in 1850, it would have been at a time when economies were smaller and much more locally self sufficient and it would have had time to develop into something that The economy seems much more regional now and it will be a hard transition to a more standalone economy.

Comment Water/retardant "bombing"? (Score 1) 112

Could they encapsulate the retardant or water into some kind of non-flammable shell that would break open on impact? Sort of like giant water balloons or paintballs.

If so, they could repurpose some of the parked B-52s into "water bombers". It's not clear to my quickie referencing if this would be a net improvement in payload but it might be an improvement in payload delivery flexibility if you could choose to unload a partial load or make multiple passes. It looks like the DC10 has to dump the entire payload at once.

I would guess that loadout might be easier with a bulk tank than with bombs, but I think some models of the B52 could be loaded with "clips" of several bombs at once.

Comment Re:Great one more fail (Score 1) 600

The US Constitution was an open declaration of treason against the Crown

Nonsense. The Revolution had been over for years when the Constitution was ratified.

I think you mean the Declaration of Independence, which didn't have any amendments, much less a second one. Now that was a suicide pact ("Live Free or Die!"). The Constitution on the other hand, was the result of many of those same authors figuring out how to create a government and maintain an orderly society. It was also a counter-revolutionary document, to rein in some of the more extremist notions of democracy and fairness that were going around at the time. It was also designed to preserve slavery, which is a discussion for a different day. And the Second Amendment, very specifically, was designed as a tool to maintain slavery. It had nothing to do with a personal right to own and carry It had nothing to do with making sure tyrants could be overthrown. It was meant to preserve the Southern slave patrols because they were worried that some abolitionist might become President and prevent slave patrols from forming their nasty little posses. The Second Amendment is an artifact of slavery and of a very ugly period in our history. It's something we should be ashamed of. I say this as someone who has owned a gun over 4 decades.

Comment Re:Make the server version look like a server. (Score 5, Interesting) 545

Ctrl-C in any alert type box copies the content to the clipboard. Well, it copies much more than that, which is weird, but it does copy the important bits. Can't find an example right now, but the format is hideous. You've got to paste it in a text editor first, but it's better than nothing.

My personal most hated feature of windows is that god awful "Choose a Folder" dialog that gives you a shitty, small tree list that you can't resize to stumble through your file system with. It's one of the absolute worst dialogs in computing history, and we've been stuck using it since at least Windows 95. The worst part is that it's possible to use the regular Open dialog for directories, but lazy ass devs use the simplest (for them) method of calling that fucking mess of shit.

Comment Re:Great one more fail (Score 1) 600

You will find that all of those quotes except that of George Mason are fraudulent.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/w...

The actual Thomas Jefferson quote is, “No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms [within his own lands or tenements]“

The George Washington quote isn't found anywhere but on Second Amendment activist sites. It doesn't appear anywhere in Washington's papers. The first quote, which you attribute to Alexander Hamilton, is usually attributed to Samuel Adams. The only problem is, Adams never said it either.

That's the thing about this Second Amendment "movement", which as I said, started in the 1980s. They lie. They make stuff up. Maybe they don't realize that people can check these things, or maybe they don't care. As I said above, it tells you everything you need to know about the intellectual honesty of the pro-gun movement.

Comment Re:Car Dealers should ask why they're being bypass (Score 1) 155

Though assuming you were Musk and were putting some stores out there for people to look around... how would you structure it?

Keep his idea of the slick showroom, but leave out the Apple geniuses.

Put all the data online and populate the store with the equivalent of well-trained booth-babes from both genders. Have a kiosk for payment. Low overhead. Have a couple of cars for test driving.

By the way, I finally drove a Tesla a little bit. They're really nice. The chair of my wife's department at the University bought one and he had us out to the house for a BBQ a few weeks ago. Let me cruise around his tony suburb for a little bit. I love driving a car without engine noise.

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