If you make it easy for criminals to know exactly who owns guns, you are setting up a situation where those who wish to steal guns can know which houses to watch (to make damn sure the occupants aren't home) and go gun shopping... brilliant!

Or, criminals who want to avoid getting shot may be emboldened if going into a house where they know the owners aren't as likely to fight back.

Either way, I think the objections are less about "oh noes, neighbors will shun me" and more about not laying your cards all out on the table.

This is yet another case of certain people using a given tragedy to push their agenda.

The folks who already have an anti-gaming viewpoint are always going to use a given media event like this to push for bans on / studies on video games.

Last time I checked, it wasn't a troubled teenager taking out their peers, it was a legal adult slaughtering defenseless children. You can study the effects of violent video games on children all you want, but it's not going to address a situation like this. Maybe someone might have legitimately wondered about the connection between the Columbine shooters and video games, but I believe the studies that came out then pretty much said that "batshite f-tards will be batshite f-tards with or without video games" (I may be paraphrasing a little)

Ok, so I don't know either, but just really??? sick bastard ADULT shoots children and someone's proposing studies of video games effects on kids? Yeah, yeah, this guy was a kid once, but honestly - it's pretty obvious that this is yet another "We gotta do SUMTHIN'" knee-jerk response that politicians feel the need to whip out so they can seem like they're taking action... without actually threatening the interests of their donors.

For the record, it's my opinion that anti-gun folks are pretty much doing the same thing - they're going to take every opportunity to push gun laws regardless of the actual situation - they do it because it's how you move an agenda forward - throw it up against the wall enough and something will stick sooner or later.

None of these are mutually exclusive, and all (even LA Rush Hour Traffic) are worthy of exploration/deeper understanding.

They all have very different funding requirements and domains of expertise, so I feel fortunate that we live in a world where to some extent, they're all possible to explore to greater depths.

Ok, Ok, I want a personal molemobile too!

I liken it to learning a dance... you start out clumsy, but through practice and repetition, you work out the kinks and finally you get through it correctly the first time. From there, you keep re-doing it, getting more and more nuanced until you get to where it has transitioned from "oh crap I hope I don't mess up" to a very zen, fluid expression of art.

except it's got epic lewtz.

I have an iPhone 4s and I'm happily NOT "upgraded" to the new iOS. I heard about the maps kerfuffle and said "you know, the phone works well enough as it is, and I DO occasionally use the Google Maps app and I don't like where Apple's going with this one"

So, until my phone refuses to work, I'll just keep on my current version of iOS.

If Apple gets too much more douchy, I may well decide to go with a competing product next time around.

So-Called Rare Earths aren't all that rare - It's just that it's been so much cheaper for them to produce with near slave labor that all the US-based rare earths production shut down... it's only been since China got uppity about it that some in the US have realized that Rare Earths production capability is of strategic value - I'm guessing our industry will be subsidized to some degree to ensure that it gets back on its feet so that we're not beholden to China.

my Oblig. "My Answer Not Present"...

Drains the crap out of my phone's battery.

I've made the mistake of using Siri the other day and must not have exited properly - the phone got really hot and used up its entire battery... this is not the firs time that's happened.

Maybe the "derp" is mine, but it made this the first option thought of.

I agree...

I'd like to see decently tactile steering-wheel mounted buttons with up/down/left/right, ok, and cancel/back
(sort of like my beloved MX-950 universal remote control) so I can keep my eyes off the controls, and ... well, perfectly, a HUD on the windscreen, but if not that, then a decenly readable screen which is close enough that I'm never ever fully removing my view from the road, and with a UI designed to show just what's needed at a glance and not get too complicated. I think modern mapping GPS a-la Garmin Nuvi / TomTom units are a good example here)

I think it's a mistake to get too close to even iOS ... iOS id admittedly a lot more streamlined than say a PC desktop, but it's still a bit too busy and detailed to really make a great car interface. It's one of those trade-offs - you want simple and intuitive and minimalist for the driver.

Most folks I know get to know their car's controls well enough to activate them mostly by feel... touchscreen interfaces are really not going to allow for this unless they come up with a way to make them haptic.

I love my MINI, but I have to say that the iPod/Sirius interface is incredibly clumsy and doesn't make for easy use while driving.... Yes, one shouldn't be fiddling with stuff instead of paying attention to the road, but there's always a trade off between "the right thing" and "what people do" (admit it, no matter if you should or not, everyone tends to reach over to change the radio station/volume or adjust the heating/cooling while driving - since folks are GOING TO do stuff like that, making the interfaces as intuitive as possible and getting their focus BACK to the road as quickly as possible should be key concerns. /rant

Good thing we used Allen-Bradley controllers in our production lines at my previous job then. ;)

I'm with you on the China thing: In order to implement a bunch of data collection, I had to bridge the air gap we had between our production lines and our internal network... with a certain 5 letter brand name of routers which doubtless were produced in a Chinese factory.

On the plus side, the routers were not actually publicly exposed, so unless their backdoor "phoned home" and could work its way around the VLANs I set up, I think my former employer's production lines are relatively safe.

(We made stuff used in the manufacture of solar panels... nothing to do with Nuclear energy or weapons and the like)

I think the issue at hand is that hidden costs (long-term pollution effects long after the gas companies have made their money and have left) end up being subsidized by all of us... look at the whole superfund thing, and other cases of industrial revolution era manufacturing and mining practices where they were able to come in, extract the resources and walk away from the mess.

IF they'd have had to pay the cleanup costs, they might have been a bit more careful, but instead the public ends up having to pay for it and the original polluters got a free ride on that part.

Now, I understand that part of it was a case environmental awareness simply not being the norm back then. The oceans were thought of as this endless drain you could just dump crap (literally) into and there was enough land that they would just leave it be. Hell, they used to walk away from mines without sealing off the pits - now, there are contractors/companies out there going around sealing off the old mine entrances to keep people and wildlife from falling in the old shafts and killing themselves.

OOps, I digress. The point is that if you can privatize the profits and socialize the risks (which is what I accuse a lot of the energy companies of doing), you essentially get to profit at the expense of the future generation who will have pay the cost (That you avoided) to clean up your mess.

Yes, but big corporations have effectively bought themselves personhood... and since these new citizens have oh so much money to throw around, they get whatever government they paid for and we, the little folk, get screwed.

Yeah, but how long before they get to where they start doing what they do in the mobile market: start trying to lock you in to long-term contracts in order to stop you from switching.

I'm sure that's coming

I have a Buffalo TeraStation that I use just for a NAS to store backups on, but I did notice it has quite a few powerful features that made me think, "hey, I ~could~ use this along with a decent router to pretty much meet the needs of a SOHO"

I certainly think you ~could~ go this route, but honestly, I don't think you should. Here's why: those NAS units are pretty chill and the good ones have some kind of self-healing/recovery option ... like my TeraStation's Raid5. I've had a drive fail and it was a fairly painless but also quite LONG process to repair. Drive died, bought replacement, slammed it in... the work was simple, but it was nearly 24 hours before it was all green and fully up to speed.

Had that been my main server, I wouldn't have been too happy with that long of an outage.

However, in my situation, the NAS was just a backup, my WIn2008 server was on-line and fully available and working the whole time.

If this were an actual office, I'd have had a second win2008 server as a secondary domain controller and would have the important data set up on a DFS and that would handle file sharing. The NAS would be used as backup.

How many days could your office reasonably go with your main shared drives off-line for repair/reconstruction - even if you eventually got all your data back, it seems like lost time in a law office would be a BAD THING.

No offer anyone would ever realistically make could get me to leave a job I love for a job I'd hate...

However, that's not to say I wouldn't at least hear them out.

Unrealistic offers... well, that's when I get all suspicious and stuff.

I've been very fortunate on two separate occasions to find jobs I truly loved and looked forward to going to every single day... That first one ended with me resigning when the company got gobbled up by big, heartless corporate entities. My current gig is the other.

(We have Bacon Day! ... what's not to love about Bacon Day?)

I own a MINI with a keyless entry system ... MINI is made by BMW these days, so I was a bit concerned.

My first vision was "Yikes - someone either grabs my signal out of the air or else they have some 'rainbow box' that tries a bunch of freqs/combos really fast so they can essentially walk up to my car, get in, and go."

Turns out they have to break your window and connect to your OBD port... This sucks, but to my mind, it's not a whole lot of difference between that and breaking the window then hot-wiring the car. ... If they could just walk up and get in and drive away as if they had the valid key, I'd be a lot more concerned. ... checks insurance policy ... at least I've got theft insurance.