Go directly to jail.

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.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Textbook broken window fallacy.

How would a site tell 100 deafblind testers behind the same NAT from a bot?

Since when? The US Department of Veterans' Affairs was among the first to adopt an electronic health record system. In the late 1970s, it began to develop the MUMPS-powered VistA system now used by nearly half of all U.S. hospitals with electronic health records. And VistA is free software.

Flickr is 1TB free, with no resizing necessary, AFAIK.

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.

Click the word "Slashdot" at the top left of each page to go to the home page, and your replies should be just below your username in a box at the top of the right column.

I get a "Load More Comments" button at the bottom.

I can think of roughly 1.25 billion people who don't find "Indian" racist.

For this purpose, would you consider "rape" to include sexual contact between an 18-year-old and a 17-year-old when the 17-year-old has presented fake ID? Or are you in the "save it for marriage to avoid accidental molestation convictions" camp?

Modern pseudo-slavery differs from slavery in the first half of the nineteenth century in one important way: the child of two wage slaves is not a slave to either of his parents' employers.

Members of some religious groups handle this by not saying the Pledge at all. They pledge allegiance only to god, or they say a parody pledge referencing a pyrotechnic accident in 1984:

I pledge allegiance to the flag,
Michael Jackson makes me gag.
Pepsi-Cola burned him up,
Now he's selling 7 UP.

In theory, people also have the choice to live single instead of starting a family in the first place.

Non-compete agreements used for their non-disclosure properties are used to prevent accidental disclosure.

"Five Eyes" doesn't have to be in the article. "New Zealand" alone is enough. All major industrialized anglophone countries are in on this.