Still incapable or unwilling to argue ideas which are actually on topic? Very well, my point stands and yours' refuted. Good day!

Would you accept a "small class" of speech being prevented by the government? Say, political rallies for Democrats? If not, then why would you accept other rights being arbitrarily infringed by the government? Particularly rights whose existence is based on keeping governmental power and abuse in check.

I'm going to assume this was written in lieu of a cogent counter-argument to the ideas I wrote in my post. I'll take that to mean you have no real argument. If you'd care to have a real discussion, I'm game. If you're unable or unwilling to do so, just say so up front.

First you state (and I agree) that regulation is very different from prohibition, but then you imply that people shouldn't be allowed to have their own AK47 (a prohibition). The government should not be allowed to decide what tools for defense one can use. Arguments over which gun is a better tool garner as much attention as arguments over which caliber is best. Those are matters of opinion and as per Justice Jackson in WV State Board of Education v Barnette (1943) "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."

You're mischaracterizing the argument here, though I can't tell if it's intentionally or not. The argument about governmental overthrow is simple: the original purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that if the government that our founding fathers were creating ever became as tyrannical as the government they were fighting to overthrow, that the patriots of the time would have the tools available to do exactly what they were in the process of doing. As citizens of the nation they created with their actions, we have both a right to be prepared for that possible eventuality and a civic responsibility to be prepared for it. Is it that preparation which itself can help stave off tyranny for a government that understands the fact that it truly does govern by the consent of the people (not just on paper, but in reality). In other words, a government that knows it can be replaced at any time will not (at least outwardly) attempt to enact oppressive measures against its own people.

This is merely an extension of the ancient concept si vis pacem, para bellum.

All other arguments about hunting, sporting, and self defense against criminals are perfectly valid and should not be dismissed. The right to self defense is a basic human right. To deny common, non-violent people the right to have and carry tools for self defense is to effectively deny the right of self defense itself. I'm in favor of respecting human rights as much as I am in favor of respecting constitutional rights. I should hope everyone would be.

The typical compromise (see what I did there?) when a customer or Federal Government auditor wants to run scans of any sort on your private network is to agree on tools (to be provided by the auditing group if you don't already have them) running an agreed configuration/profile/whatever against an agreed limited scope target list (typically a VLAN or set of VLANs unless that entire network is devoted to just that one customer, which is sometimes the case, though less so these days with public/private/hybrid clouds being all the rage). When it comes to web application and database testing, you'll typically agree on a non-production target list that's a mirror of the production system (with appropriate verification of the two being a mirror outside the automated testing) so as to avoid impacting the production systems. When it comes time to run the tests, over-the-admins'-shoulder monitoring ensures the proper tools with the proper configurations hitting the proper targets is being done and that the output is being handed over unaltered.

Seen this done in plenty of places and 99% of the time, the auditing group is fine with it because at the end of the day, it's getting them exactly what they want; just in a slightly more red-tape riddled way. Meanwhile, the group being audited has the assurance that nothing is running wild all over their network unsupervised. If you don't have anything to hide, you're typically fine with this approach. If you aren't fine with this approach, something else is going on behind the scenes and most of the time that'll be something you're trying to hide.

Two hours for a one-way commute? That doesn't sound like a very good life balance. I think if that was our teams that we'd end up doing a mixed online/f2f meeting as if some of the team were remote.

Yep, you can improve acoustics a little with soft furnishings and plants for instance. Bonus is a better environment.

Polycom isn't necessary. I work with two remote scrum teams who both try standing around a shared desktop in their rooms for their stand-ups via Lync. One of them has great audio, the other doesn't. Both are in large echoey rooms. The only difference in systems is their mic and room decoration.

The team in the room we can't hear clearly have resolved the issue by doing all meetings from their desks using headsets. They also now have long drawn out stand-ups. Hmmm, proves the point about standing up.

Never tried SmallTalk?

Most BD players do have storage. BD-Live depends upon it for instance.

Any BD-J apps will need to be signed with a private key that matches the public key in the cert pressed to the disc, won't they?

This is neurotic navel gazing. Take responsibility for your own actions, which includes getting drunk in the first place because you know before the first drink that this will lead to suspension of judgement. If you choose to use a tool like a robot to get you a drink, that's your decision, even if it kills you. What next - a controlling nanny state that raises the drinking age to 21 or it makes it illegal to jaywalk?

I switched to Chrome a few years ago because I was fed-up with Firefox's monolithic single process architecture. With a single process I have no way to tell which tab is draining my battery, which is a bigger issue than the constant memory leaking. The devs at Mozilla and Netscape before it have never really understood the benefits of multi-processing.

My laptop failed a few days ago so I'm on an old machine I haven't used for three years, but seeing as Firefox is the default I thought I'd update it and give it a shot. Mistake. One tab having trouble loading a web page blocks the whole UI leaving me wondering whether the app has hung up and needs to be killed via Task Manager. What a load of utter shit. Internet Explorer is better these days.

When did they promise that Electrolysis would be done this Feb? How many years have they been promising it full-stop? Now it seems it'll be later this year. No commitment, and apparently incapable of either running a decent engineering operation that can deliver anything sensible in a predictable and reasonable time frame.

Back to Chrome.

Actually rapid charge isn't that bad; you normally only rapid charge to 80%. It's rapid charging to 100% that's the most problematic.

Not only cost though.

People just like having great cars. Electric cars are quiet, zippy, reliable and easy to use. When you go back to a fossil fuel car afterwards, it's like going back in time.

> So electric cars have electric heaters; I had not thought about that aspect before. That would be a considerable inefficiency;

To some extent. The main problem is that it flattens the battery more quickly and impacts range in winter time, the actual cost of the heater for an hour or two is generally relatively trivial compared to the other costs of running the car.

The newer electric cars have much less of an issue though. Instead of using electric heaters they run the air conditioner in reverse (it's an 'air source heat pump' in fact) and most of the heat energy then comes from the external environment rather than resistive heating. The heat pump uses about 1/3 of the power.

Nope, even the worst case is not a deal breaker for most people.

The thing is, most people don't empty the battery most days. A lot of people do like 20 miles a day, so in practice, even with a conventional socket, the car is full again each morning; even on 110 volts.

If you have a 240 volt socket, which are very, very widely available, it's even less of an issue.

And the extra cost to install a higher current charging point is very low. Where I live most premises have a 30 amp, 240 volt circuit already for their electric cookers. That's about 6kW, and the Nissan Leaf has a 24kWh battery; it can do an 80% charge in about 4 hours.