For those of the same ideology, you'll hear stuff about blaming "the government", "the bureaucracy" / agency in question, or the individual announcing the policy - Holder in the case.

Yes, but Obama as the head of the executive branch is Holder's boss, and picked the guy out for the job. This is why it's a cop-out to avoid blaming Obama for his henchmen's actions, just like it was a cop-out to avoid blaming Bush for the actions of Ashcroft and friends.

But since you mention it, I have seen homes with big, thick bars over the windows that the fireman's ax wouldn't be able to cut through. It would take the jaws-of-life to pry them off.

I haven't seen those many times, but you're right, there are houses like that. Good luck breaking through those easily.

Still, even with a 1" throw, I can install a metal door and a metal frame bolted to my metal stud walls, all legally. No way they are just kicking that door down.

Actually, it's still easy to break down that door. The Achilles' Heel you're missing is the hinges. But first, are your metal stud walls the typical commercial steel studs? Those things are paper thin and easily bent; they're only meant for holding up drywall, not for any great strength. What's important is what the door framing is made of. Commercial-grade doors have heavy steel frames, and those would indeed be hard to bust through (regardless of what your wall is made of). However, again, the weak point is the hinges. You can get door-breaching rounds for a shotgun and shoot out the hinges with them. Or you can break down the door with a battering ram, by concentrating on the hinges side rather than the deadbolt side. The deadbolt is a thick, 1" long piece of steel, usually going into an anchor plate or pocket held in with some very long screws. The hinges, OTOH, are usually held in with some very short screws.

>Also, just to be precise, I believe the 1" limit depends on the jurisdiction - my state limits deadbolts to 1" but your mileage may vary.

I don't think I've seen any longer. It's very unlikely a big lock company like Kwikset or Schlage would bother making different-length deadbolts for sale in different states; it's much easier just to manufacture to the lowest common denominator. It's just like cars; once California makes something a mandate, all the automakers just adopt that for all cars sold nationwide.

for example deadbolts are legally limited to 1" in throw length so that they can be broken by emergency personnel if necessary, say when a fire occurs.

Wow, that seems like a ridiculous law. No one really needs to break through the front door of a house. If it's a true emergency, you can always break a window. I haven't seen a house yet that didn't have easily-broken windows. A fireman's axe should have no problem breaking through a window and quickly removing any dangerous shards.

Sorry to play devil's advocate, but cancer cells are just as much a part of your body as any of your other cells. However, if the rest of your body doesn't utilize its immune system cells to seek out and kill these cancer cells (which I guarantee you probably have a few of in your body somewhere as I write this), then you'll grow a malignant tumor and without serious foreign intervention (medical treatment) you'll die.

-- enacted Nixon's health care plan with the liberal parts stripped out.

What's really funny is how all the tofu-eating liberals will defend Obamacare to the death even though it's a right-wing corporatist scheme.

Obama is a case study in how to take the troublesome younger leftist activist types in society and turn them into ardent defenders of crony capitalism.

Also, SCREW YOU Obama Administation, for your big fat 'Fuck You' to the American public and their civil rights and constitutional rights.

Also, SCREW YOU to the liberal morons who voted for Obama, insisting that he'd be completely different from Bush, and then have come out in droves to defend Obama's policies which mirror Bush's.

the problem really comes down to this: NOBODY trusts the US gov'ment to actually hang on to that crap. It's just too easy to exploit.

Sure they do. The liberals would happily trust Obama and Holder with their encryption keys. And the Republicans would happily trust the Bush administration with their keys. The two groups just don't just the opposite administration.

I mean really, where do you see liberals bitching and demonstrating against Obama and his policies? They were happy to do so back in the Bush days, but now that their savior is doing it, they're just fine with this stuff.

I've seen news reports that call simple street vandalism and muggings "domestic terrorism".

To be fair, is it really inaccurate to call them that (at least the muggings, not the vandalism)? Were the mugging victims not scared for their lives? Just about any violent crime could be called "terrorism".

The whole "safety, safety, safety" bit has gotten so ridiculous and I am endlessly surprised by the fact that a majority of people haven't cried "bullshit" on it.

If Obama were a Republican, you would be hearing a much bigger outcry (esp. in tech circles) about this bullshit. However, since he's a Democrat and he's the "savior", the liberals refuse to criticize him and will just back everything he does, even when it's exactly the same as what Bush did, or worse.

And provides a real-world slap in the face.

I had to explain to a school once that we were still deploying Office 2003 to students who came into the school system in 2004.

That seemed to wake them up a bit, when they realised that the reason the kids found the IT stuff strange was that they weren't even BORN when it first came out, and was nothing like they were using at home.

When they ask what the difference is between 2003 and 2013, you can say - with a straight face - the same as the difference between the 80's and the 90's. When they realise their lesson plans and teaching are 10 YEARS out of date, it kind of shakes them up a bit.

Fuck that, even.

Just give me a damn option. Who cares what silly nonsense the latest fad is to launch programs (and, sorry, Windows 8 Tiles = Windows 95 Active Desktop in all but name)? Just give me the option - if it's really THAT good, I'll switch to it. If not, I've lost nothing.

And the development time is literally in the "freeware utility" range so don't give me shit about how long it takes MS to manage two shell paradigms.

I've deployed Windows 8 - but wouldn't do it without Classic Shell and specifically its GPO settings. When I constantly ask myself WHY that's not part of Windows any more, it makes me question what I'm expecting from Windows in the future.

P.S. Microsoft - make it a fucking single setting in GPO to push Desktop Backgrounds, Logon Screens, Lock Screens, Colour Themes etc. to clients (and put AD pictures into Windows 8 User Icons on logon). While you're there, make it a free feature to put a corporate signature in Exchange without poncing about with transport rules and copying files down to clients. 20 years and we still don't have the SIMPLEST of things done right.

More directly, any sort of winning on a "bet" you make has to come from somewhere. Some guy loses out, or some stock exchange gives you money that it's inevitably getting from someone else as they lose.

Gambling, or trading, overall, is not a zero-sum game. Your earnings have come from someone else's loss - PLUS commission. The guys earning commission are raking it in with little or no loss. But the guys the other end - they are the ones "giving" you that money, one way or another. Maybe via third-parties, maybe from their own companies, maybe from their own mistakes, maybe just in allowing the stock exchange to balance out and be profitable to operate while you're winning on the other, but the money has come from somewhere. It didn't magic out of thin air.

Vegas and lotteries are the same. Yeah, you might win a million. The million came from some other MORE THAN ONE MILLION poor saps each spending one (of whatever currency) trying to win the million. And nothing is guaranteed. If you have a brain you stop once you've won big. To keep going is not only a sign of greed, but a sign of some stupidity. Before long, the tide will turn and if you're stupid you'll spend whatever you have left hoping that the next hand will fall your way.

So you only ever hear of people winning big - and then never hearing of them again, or winning big and then stopping playing. The "I pissed away millions" story just makes people think you're a stupid fucker, so it's not that those stories don't exist or aren't heard, it's that nobody has any sympathy for *that* guy.

Similarly for all those celebs who were earning millions and then have to declare themselves bankrupt. It's news both ends. But if you're wanting to make it big, you won't care about the second story because "you're not that stupid".

> This didn't protect against such scams either however, as people did things like manually redrawing bridges on chips to disabled cores and so on.

That's because they were doing things outside the chip packaging, such as putting SMD components (jumper resistors for instance) on the top of the package. It's not hard so solder simple SMD components with a soldering iron, though it is a little harder than reflashing some firmware.

If they make the modifications on the chip die, before packaging, that's going to prevent almost anyone from re-enabling features that were disabled at the factory. Cutting a chip open, making modifications at the microscopic level, then putting it back together so it isn't obvious that it's been tampered with, is not an easy task, or something that a guy in his garage can do.

It seems the real use for SQLite (besides teaching) is for cases where you simply don't have multiple processes accessing the same database, or if they do occasionally, performance isn't a big concern. One big example I can think of is storing configuration variables for applications. That's not something you want to have a full-blown database like PostgreSQL running for, but it can be handy to use SQLite so you have more power than you'd get with flat files.