The point of failure is usually the stud that holds the bolt. In typical US, wood-frame construction, this is a 2x4, with the bolt centered, leaving really just about 3 cm of pine wood holding the door closed. "Kick the door down" is also a euphemism for any form of forced entry, most likely a 40 (one man)-100 (two man) pound battering ram.

Why not talk to them via bullhorn or phone without even approaching the house? It's going to take at least 15 minutes to assemble and deploy a SWAT team - don't you think any killing the guy has started will be done by then?

If you start with negotiation, you have at least some chance to let the adrenalin run out, get people thinking rationally about consequences, let the first pangs of guilt emerge. If you start with shocking and overwhelming force, you pretty much guarantee someone's going to get hurt. Police are supposed to be trained to deescalate situations. They may carry tools required to respond to an escalation, but they're supposed to be distinguishable from a lynch mob by their ability to remain calm and bring about peaceful resolutions. Failure of this training results in shooting of unarmed crazy people.

Depends on your environment. In my area, the crawl space is often used for all mechanicals - HVAC, water heater, electrical service, even the whole-house vacuum. It makes running new lines really easy, with no tearing open of walls, not unlike an upside-down dropped ceiling. A central store of media files that can be distributed through the house is much more attractive than separate HTPCs for every room. One relatively beefy HTPC, capable of transcoding multiple media files for playback on low-power, fanless frontends is likewise very attractive. Especially if "crawl space" means a 3-4' high space between the slab and the floor of a house on a hill.

The only thing I'd recommend to OP is rack mounting on posts hanging from the floor joists - ie, suspend the system as far above the floor as possible. Water heaters and HVAC are designed to resist a little water/flooding - computers aren't. Dust is likely still to be a problem, but you can wrap the whole thing in a bag filter to cut that down.

This is particularly true for spoken English vs written English. In spoken English, intonation and body language contribute to communication, eg bad vs bad. You're expected to fill in missing/garbled words from context. Written English is an attempt to encode all of that information.

So, sure, sloppy spelling, poor grammar, and homophone substitution may be understandable to your close friends. That makes it more of a code language or private language, and there's plenty of times where we like to share private, insider conversations. If you actually want to communicate with everyone, you have to use the parent language - step back from the Southern drawl or the Scots brogue and speak Common.

But a basic black, $10 timex was boring. Swatch made cheap ($20), crap watches that came in different colors. With 'funky' designs. People paid for swatches twice what they were worth because they had an off-center stripe on the face. And then someone realized that you could wear two, three, or even four swatches on one arm!

When the swatch guy gets up and tells you that iWatch has the potential to crush swiss watchmaking, he's talking about fashion, not function.

Agreed. I think a lot of the sour-grapes group look at "Excellent understating of HADOOP ecosystem" and read "founding developer of HADOOP," or interpret "Excellent Knowledge of Linux" as "Kernel developer." They're looking for a "big data" person and saying they're a Java shop with HADOOP/NoSQL infrastructure. Those people are out there. If you're not one of them, then this job may not be for you. 4 years experience means they're targeting people probably 25-30 years old. If you have vastly more experience than that, then this job may not be for you.

For pay rate, $30/hr is, to most of the country, a pretty good wage, especially early in the career. Other "good paying" jobs: construction, $15-25; Auto plant, starting at $16; teacher, start $18, median $35.

At most 85,000 H1b visas are issued each year. 7000 per month, nation-wide, compared with 2.8 million people employed in "Information Technology." I think you overestimate the impact of H1b on your personal employability.

The point of TFA is that people have dumb camera placement. They take the one camera they get free with the security system and put it in the bedroom, or otherwise inside. They mount the camera on the roof, pointed down at the front door, offering a nice view of an intruder's baseball cap. And honestly, the electric meter on most of the homes I've seen is mounted discretely behind the shrubbery, so it doesn't spoil the view of the house, and reasonably accessible to human meter-readers (they only stopped being a thing a decade or two ago in most areas). Then again, few of the homes I've seen have multiple ring-walls that seem to be common in AK.

Considering that, for a long time, the boundaries established by language and location prevented human interbreeding, those seem like pretty reasonable indicators of genetic drift. That is, the same population trends that allow languages to drift also allow genetic drift. Maybe we'll see that disappear, now that it's so easy to travel, but it's really only been 30 years or so. Skin tone, hair color, and facial structure are just the most obvious external indicators of genetic variation.

The one legitimately valuable business arrangement that I can see being blocked by net neutrality is where I buy the lowest possible tier of service from my ISP, because email doesn't require much bandwidth, but then buy premium delivery from Netflix, where Netflix pays my ISP to deliver data faster than my service tier.

What beautiful irony. The proponents of small government and deregulation, running to a government agency complaining that a private company won't run ads calling for government regulators to block a business transaction.

Those laws don't exist in general. The primary thing preventing Time Warner from running cable to my house is the fact that Comcast already has a wire there. Comcast has already spent the millions of dollars required to wire my neighborhood, and the tens of millions required to wire my town. Whatever price Time Warner can offer, Comcast can beat, because they've already sunk costs. Time Warner can, optimistically, hope to get 50% of cable subscribers, meaning at most half the revenue that Comcast projected to pay off their capital. There is no way for a new cable company to compete effectively with one that's already laid out the major capital expenses. The only reason DSL is competitive is it doesn't require laying new copper to every home.

Likewise, there's no way multiple electric or gas companies could compete with an incumbent who had already wired/plumbed a neighborhood. When cities deregulate gas/electric service, they do so by transferring the wires to one company, and forcing that company to sell transit to all comers at regulated rates. If you want to see competition among ISPs, nationalize the coax, copper and fiber, and let the ISPs rent bandwidth to subscribers' homes and manage their access.

That's fine. You're exactly the audience this piece of legislation targets. I mean, really, who would make a rational argument against using good, reproducible, published science to support their policy.

This legislation is social engineering that depends on the distinction between theory and practice. In theory, it's great to use data to support your policies, to have good science backing your regulations, and to know the exact effects you're trying to block or induce. In practice, those data do not exist. There's 150+ chemicals at my job site, and the MSDSs for half of them report "Data not available." This legislation is intended to delay for as long as possible any regulatory action.

Example, pentachlorophenol, one of the most common preservatives for telephone poles and RR ties over the past 30 years, still lacks any human carcinogenicty studies. It looks like penta is metabolized in vivo to a much more carcinogenic compound, and I imagine that another 10 years or so will produce pretty convincing data. Meanwhile, the EPA has been allowed to regulate penta as a probable carcinogen since the early 80s. This includes banning the sale to private individuals (it used to be a popular fungicide for people to spray around their basements). Penta is one of the better studied molecules because of its popularity and explicitly toxic function, and after 60 years, one can still argue that there is no reproducible scientific data demonstrating its role in cancer.

First, there is no reason to believe that list is exhaustive. According to the page itself, it is "a partial list of the chemical constituents in additives that are used or have been used in fracturing operations." It was only released in 2011 in response to a congressional investigation, having been held secret for 60 years. Nor does it help you know whether fracking fluid is mostly toluene or mostly liquid nitrogen (personally, my guess is that there is very little, if any, liquid nitrogen in fracking fluids, but it's on the list)

Second, from a random sampling of MSDS:

• 2,2-Dibromomalonamide: No human toxicity studies have been carried out with this product. Not evaluated by IARC.
• Poly(diallyldimethylammonium chloride): Not evaluated by IARC. No carcinogenicity information is available
• Carboxymethyl hydroxypropyl guar: Carcinogenic effects: Not available; Mutagenic effects: Not available; Developmental toxicity: Not available

So, under the proposed legislation, even if you know what the chemicals are, you have to wait for someone to get interested enough in them to perform ecological, carcinogenic, and mutagenic studies with those specific chemicals and publishes the results. Until someone proves that a compound is carcinogenic, it would be regulated like it is not carcinogenic.

Perhaps you are willing to have your dinner grown next to a factory that can hold its chemical waste secret for 60 years, and then be unable to regulate that waste for another few years or decades, waiting for someone to bother to measure their health effects. Maybe you believe that no company would knowingly or accidentally release chemicals without clear confidence in their non-toxicity (even if they can't release that data to the public). Maybe you trust those companies, more than the politicized EPA, to balance their profits against potential harm to humans and environment.