Having fun isn't necessarily stupid. Having fun with flamboyantly dangerous things isn't necessarily stupid. It's endangering unwilling bystanders that's stupid.

Some people like to build and shoot powerful crossbows, or even replicas of medieval siege weapons. These are extremely dangerous and useless things. The dangerous power of a trebuchet to throw an upright piano 150 yards is part of the charm.

But a trebuchet is something that takes certain amount of thought and sacrifice to obtain and use. This flamethrower thing is more like a powerful handgun. There's been a recent fad for ridiculously overpowered handguns, which pack superfluously fatal power into a convenient, affordable form factor. The recent brouhaha over "armor piercing" ammunition was a side effect of a manufacturer selling a cut-down semi-automatic carbine as a "handgun", even though if you look at videos of people using them they're obviously terrible as handguns. This raised the question of whether 5.56 NATO ammunition should be regulated as "handgun ammunition", and in the end I think the decision not to was reasonablee. These aren't cop-killing or military handguns. They're extremely dangerous toys designed to get your rocks off.

There are some who'd say that because these guns are dangerous and impractical they should be banned. But I don't agree. "Impractical" isn't the same as "useless" because getting your rocks off is a legitimate use for a thing. I think people should be able to enjoy their ridiculous firearms as long as they do it at some kind of appropriate range. I also think there's a real danger though from stupid people who will go plinking in the woods with the things like they were BB guns.

That's really the only problem I have with this flamethrower, whether it's gold, chrome, or gunmetal gray. Any idiot can buy one, but it'd take someone reasonably intelligent and determined to find a place where it can be used safely. I'm not against people buying them, but I am for coming down hard on people who use them where they're a danger or public nuisance.

Well, in the end you have to ask "did he get away with it?". Or, given that he turned himself in later, "did he have some purpose in escaping that he fulfilled?"

Intelligence is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. It includes things like thinking through unintended consequences before acting that quite clever people are sometimes bad at.

...but they get our shit to space.

What, no clever comeback to the actual facts, Fox Newser?

Damned near every terrorist attack in the US has been end-times or anti-government christian cultists of one sort or another. Or racist cults. Or anti-tax cults. And we don't have anyone assigned to keep track of them. I blame Obama for caving in to the Republicans on this one. Doctor killers, Dominionists, Sovereign Citizens, this-land-is-ours loonies pointing guns at sherriffs from high ground WHILE ON LIVE ON CAMERA, and nothing happens and no one gets arrested, because everyone is afraid of them and their supporters. We don't even report on them.

But if a guy with a beard does it, on the news forever. Hell, the HS guys claiming someone was GOING TO join ISIS because reasons is national news for days. Every damned day it seems.

Reposted because downvoted by Fox News enthusiasts. And, I was right again, Cudahy.

Those warehouse workers work for employment contractors, not for Amazon. Our employment law is so destroyed that Amazon, indeed, any corporation, can treat you both as an employee of theirs and an employee of someone else. They aren't even pretending anymore - they do what they like.

I'm pretty sure that this does not happen in Vanuatu.

By reducing the value of the Ruble 66%, the Ruble value of the Russian economy increased 66%. 50% of which went to pay for his Sochii boondogle, harem of gymnasts, assassinations of journalists and advocates of justice, etc.

Amen, Brother.

Every major government does it. It's still evil, and only by educating the public about the foreign agents subverting public discourse can we avoid the consequences of a malign deception. Education without which democracy fails.

I've thought about this a lot; obviously it's inevitable that police will start using quadcopters more and more (they already do) and probably it's a matter of time (I'd say about 5-10 years) before small autonomous drones start supporting police work, for example tracking suspects.

At the same time, drones will become cheaper and cheaper and I'm afraid many of us nerds won't be able to resist letting them out, looking around, racing eachother through the mall, spying on the girl next door, those kind of things. And you know what? They're pretty much anonymous; nobody's going to trace the drone that crashed into your backyard (or into a police drone) back to you if you do it well.

And then there will be terrorists; it's going to be a matter of time before a plain old stupid terrorist attack is carried out using a drone. But that will be only the beginning; while they may sound like SciFi fantasy, assasination drone-swarms will very soon be almost trivial to create. You WILL see video footage of people being attacked by hordes of drones in the not too distant future...

And that will be the end of privacy as we know it. Once we've had enough of annoying nerds and their drones, terrorists and their drones and criminals and their killer swarms, we will start doing something about it. And that something is not going to be pretty; in order to be able to trace a drone back to a person, continuous surveillance is inevitable. Unauthorized drones will probably be shot automatically.

And if we're really unlucky, all this will result in drone parts without DRM-support becoming illegal to own...

This is not going to be fun at all.... :|

It's only those damn Russians are doing this, all other countries are saint.

Yeah, because that makes it all OK then.

Your comment is designed to distract from the issue at hand, shut down intelligent conversation on the topic, and imply the wrongdoer is just fine because, by implication, "everybody else does it, too" (no evidence to said implication provided, certainly not proven, and probably not true), all without contributing a single creative or new thought to the discussion at all.

Nice job, (Russian?) troll.

So can unarmed passengers. And unarmed passengers have swarmed hijackers and taken them down. The hijackers' weapons (knives) are useless if dozens of people jump them. The doors didn't save the planes, the people did. And recall, the one plane on 9-11 that didn't kill people on the ground was the one the passengers fought back on. If they'd done it earlier, they may have lived. Dunno. But sitting still doesn't help at all. And armed passengers would shoot holes in the fuselage and other passengers, and in the melee the plane may crash. Use your hands. Can't blow out the pressure with your hands.

Numbers win against guns, if people know they will die if they don't fight. Best thing to stop a gun-toting idiot menacing a crowd? Crowd jumps him.Works every time. You personally can't, but three dozen of you can. Go for the guns first, grab those lovingly polished killing machines by the barrels and push them up/down and out of line, grab the hands, then his arms, and then pinch his corneas really hard and rip them out. He'll have second thoughts after that. Then kill him at your leisure. Or you can get really a good communal grip and rip his arms off. Or snap his neck. So many ways to make him stop dreaming of killing with his penis enhancing boom stick. Think communist Batman. Batman has the strength of one supremely trained indvidual, but you all have the strength of three dozen fat people who are REALLY scared and TOTALLY pissed.