So you don't think Forest Service land management (or the lack thereof) has anything to do with it? Because the timeframe for increasingly bad fires matches up really nicely with changes in approach to doing so...

Riiiight. So this has absolutely nothing at all to do with progressively worse nonmanagement of national forests over the past 30 years, opting instead to wait for a really big fire to clear burn areas?

Nice dogmatic and unfounded supposition, warmers.

The absurdity of the premise behind "a gun that can't get turned on its owner" is almost beyond the pale.

Why?

Because guns don't generally get turned on their owners. It isn't a common occurrence, not here in the US, or anywhere else. If it was, we'd see a lot more "man shot in home by intruder with own gun" than we do.

It's an urban legend, up there with other silliness told by high schoolers to get their dates to snuggle close.

There is one and only one pragmatic use for limiting who can use a firearm: restriction of effective force into the hands of the "right people". The right people will always be those who have power, and want to keep you from it. Consider that for a moment before embracing so-called 'smart guns': the people pushing these want to restrict firearms to only the military and police.

That's worked out so well for people throughout history already, hasn't it?

What continues to blow my mind is, despite the breaches of civil liberties and outright offenses Obama and his administration have perpetrated against American citizens - and then lied about - we still have people who voted him defending him and saying he's doing a good job.

From a liberal point of view, Obama has been a worse President than Bush, by a long shot: if you look at "what has he accomplished", "what has he lied about" and so on.

And this doesn't even get into the NSA spying and things like that, which he's obviously quite fond of.

Unless, of course, we're trying to imitate a truly socialist state, like Soviet Russia. Then he's been excellent.

Neither.

The "nothing compares to the bandwidth of a minivan full of tapes" maxim applies here. Specifically, it applies to the length of time it takes for a cargo ship to transgress the Pacific.

Rail can move a large number of people faster than a plane can.
Rail can also move a relatively small volume of cargo faster than ships can.

They want to be able to get R&D and "latest greatest" products and similar over here ASAP so that they don't lose out to fledgeling US industry which is popping up to deal with the length of time it takes to get foreign made products.

They may also want to have a more direct venue to get large numbers of Chinese people here to "colonize". They do own a large percentage of the US, at this point.

China's economic model can probably be called summarized as calling them pragmatic opportunists (lack of foresight for their empty cities and ecological destruction aside). They leverage the benefits of other peoples' shortsightedness (such as with the exchange rate, and consumerism) to benefit domestically.

However, locally sourced labor and goods most certainly can compete with shipping by sea.

That's exactly what's happening: a lot of goods are being returned to US manufacture right now. Companies are starting with their emerging products and building the R&D and facilities to do it here, instead of offshoring the 'expensive' production part to China. For instance, go and try to find a new household appliance - you'll be hard pressed to find a GE or Whirlpool appliance which isn't "Made in the USA" now. We're seeing this happen with small bin electronics and inexpensive tools, too. Why?

Competition. They've been able to slash their product costs markedly by doing so. We're not talking just the cost of shipping, we're also talking about product defects and overall quality, turnaround on even minor R&D revisions, and so on.

If China can turn the current "time to market" of a product revision from about 2-3 months (after all is said and done) down to a month to a month and a half (at least for select customers and/or producers), the cost of rail over sea shipping would be marginal to the big picture of retaining American income.

What do you mean, "were" awesome? NOD32 is still the best game in town. Not sure what you mean by "didn't play those MBA games"...

ESET is by far the best I've had the opportunity to use.

Yeah, it's actually worth paying for: it's unobtrusive where it needs to be and I've not seen anything sneak by. The big things that break other AV doesn't hurt ESET. I make it a pre-requirement for anyone who wants my help on their Windows, and so far... no "I've got a virus" type requests. :)

"we know electrical trumps mechanical more often than not"

We do? In what sense? A mechanical switch is simply a mechanically activated contact plate/circuit. That's as simple as it gets, really. Sure, you've got mechanical wear and tear, but mechanical items have progressive wear, often - their failure mode is not immediate unless it is a catastrophic failure.

Mechanical/electrical switches for ignition have one/two failure modes: your car won't start, or your car will stop. The second is drastically less likely than the first, and applies to almost every motorized vehicle, ever. It hasn't exactly been a major concern.

A simple mechanism is inherently less likely to fail than a complex one performing the same task. Good systems people know this: cyclomatic complexity is bad.

From what I'm understanding, 'switchgate' is merely the failure of the electronics associated with the mechanical switch, and circumvented safety measures.

This sounds a lot like the many lines of bullshit we've been fed by various government and corporate bodies, in the past. They're pushing this shit through regardless, using something they fucked up for an excuse to fix it with something nobody wants. (My recollection is that the 'complaints' have largely revolved around the $200+ chipped keys automotive makers have been using, after all... We don't hate the keys, we hate electronic meddling -unubtrusively- with our mechanical devices (ie cars).)

Basically, automakers just want more control of your vehicle, and the revenue stream which results from fixing it.

(Side note: Remember when they said electronics would reduce the cost and maintenance on vehicles, in the late 1980s/early 1990s? That was true, in so far as the cheap stuff that broke was often replaced. But they're replacing everything with electronics now, and so many of the things that should not be 'electronic' (ie just need a simple electrical signal to work), are.

The idea that the primary mastermind behind 3D gaming and 3D accelerated instructions, not to mention one of the most recognized names in all of computing, would have stolen ideas from a "who's that?" company is just absurd.

And what if I have an HDMI projector hooked to my phone?

ITIL certified? Seriously?

Understanding process control is one thing, but ITIL is stupid governmental nonsense and requires markedly more than 20 people in a shop to properly implement.

Meaningful process determination can be determined through effective interviewing and early monitoring/guidance alone.

Trust is earned.

You've basically got three kinds of sysadmins, in my experience (though obviously there's a spectrum).

1) The jerkoffs who don't do their job and squander company time. They don't fix things, they don't improve things - insofar as it's not visible to management. These are the kinds who put in backdoors and may put in needless obfuscation to maintain their relevance.
2) The fuckups. These are the ones who needlessly make a mess of things by not following basic best practices. They're better suited for desktop support roles or development. They may be good, damn good, but they're not systematic enough to be good admins, and overlook crucial things (like, "oh, I'll just leave this point-to-point tunnel up without encryption and get back to it later").
3) Everyone else. Doesn't matter how good they are and how fast they are at doing it, but they follow a couple basic rules: be thorough, be diligent, and always try to improve.

You'd know pretty soon which kind of administrator you've got. Start with a short term contract. Give them a limited scope of responsibility - a zone, like a set of specific systems or a project, such as something like upgrades and/or documentation. Maybe give them a problem to solve. Give them something that's intentionally expansive but of limited impact for them to work on and see how well they do.

If they do well and don't surprise you with something atrocious (oh, I don't know: can't convert MB to GB would be a hard stop for me - I've seen it), let them stay on.

But they really do need to see how the shop runs and be your PFY for a bit, first. There are very few people who can jump into someone else's baby and drive it like a pro, it's going to take a long time for even good sysadmins to catch on (my replacement is still catching up after I left 3 years ago, and I was only there for a year, thrown into more or less the same environment he was: his approach has been to slash and burn whereas mine was more granular due to less levity in outages).

I believe you'd find that slashdotters have more telecommuting than most any other demographic in the country, if not world.

I work from home exclusively - and home can be any number of places, including the beach (though I'd find that a bit distracting) or in a tent up in the woods (assuming decent data connection).

There's something to being able to fairly spontaneously travel and not save up for months to do so (above and beyond normal expenses).