Generally speaking, self-defense is specifically listed as a valid reason in laws pertaining to negligent or reckless discharge of firearms. But you'd need to prove that you specifically fired in self-defense, and show that the direction of the shot etc was conductive to that claim. Following Joe Biden's suggestion and discharging a shotgun in the air to scare off the intruder would likely get you charged, for example.

Yes. With a sabot slug and a rifled barrel or choke, it's possible. Not with smoothbore & birdshot. And definitely not aiming up at a moving target.

Especially if you are looking to wirelessly transmit 1080i/p reliably. I've tried and wireless was so unreliable (display artifacts and whatnot not present with wired) that I wound up going to the crawlspace and running wires to every device in the house.

There are proprietary solutions, and generic solutions.

I've seen proprietary HDMI to wireless to HDMI adapters - one end plugs into an HDMI ouput, the other end plugs into an HDMI input and it's supposed to work, but no idea how it works internally.

Then there's non-proprietary solutions like Miracast which is built into Windows 8/8.1 and can cast your screen to it, but it's laggy as all heck.

Which is to be expected - a raw RGB888 HDMI image at 1080p60 is a large datarate (4Gbps) so you're going to lose something due to compression unless you run 10gE through your house.

If it isn't wired, you're not gonna game with it.

A pro-Linux bias on Slashdot is

A complete myth. At least these days.

Slashdot has several bags of crazy, all competing with one another at various times.

There's Windows fanbois, Linux fanbois, and Apple fanbois. Over the years the ratio of those has swung back and forth, these days I'd say on balance you'd be hard pressed to say there's a strong bias one way or another.

At various times it's been chic to tend more to one or another, now it seems like Slashdot has grown enough that there's at least 30 different kinds of batshit crazy at any given time, all struggling to get out.

But let's face it, the actions of the Linux people in their unwavering belief in the perfection of Linux is no less sketchy than the people whose unwavering defense of Microsoft defies logic.

I'd like to say Slashdot has a bias towards rational thought. I'd like to, but if anything I'd say Slashdot has an increasing bias towards fixed positions and screeching monkeys flinging poo.

There's always been poo flinging, but now there's less rational discourse.

Thanks.

Sure it was good behavior.

But it was borne entirely out of the Linux people saying "OMG, teh Samsung is teh sux0r".

I do give them a lot of credit. More than the people who apparently insisted it was the fault of Samsung in the first place.

After many complaints that Samsung SSDs corrupted data when used with Linux

There was definitely some self-interest there.

Samsung can't have people saying their SSDs corrupt data when it's not them doing it.

and anal fumigation by tobacco smoke used in that "CPR" of the 1700s are exactly the same as modern CPR

Oh, come on, you're just blowing smoke up our asses.

Honestly, what I want to know is ... who the hell was the first person to decide to try that?

I'm sure there's some "rule #34" porn out there for the adventurous. Somehow I suspect urban dictionary has a definition which includes this.

The mind reels.

I'd be curious about the distribution of the lights. Turning off lights in cities isn't going to help astronomers much. And if they're turning them off in places where there are few people walking, such as rural lanes, it might help astronomers without hurting pedestrians. (Criminals would be less likely to gather there, though those pedestrians had better be really aware of cars.)

I could see it working if there were more streetlights than we really needed. If that were the case, it could yield positive results. But it would also be invalid to extrapolate from those to the majority of lights in more densely populated places.

Indeed. There was an article floating around a few months ago with a hypothetical review of a gasoline-powered car if electric cars dominated. A lot of the downsides of ICEs that we take for granted would be really aggravating if we hadn't grown up with them.

Gasoline Car Test Drive: Noisy, Wasteful, Polluting, Fast But Pricey Refueling

Even for you, there could be considerable advantages to hiring an automatic car rather than owning one. You offload the maintenance overhead (though that's smaller for an electric car than an internal-combustion engine); that doesn't save money but it does save time. What would save you money is if your car were off servicing four or five other families during the times you didn't need it. Cutting a $30,000 expense by a factor of 4 or 5 would be a huge cost saving to you. Even if the service imposed an overhead of a factor of 2, it's still not an amount of money you'd give up on lightly.

It need not even reduce your flexibility, if you could summon anybody's car on five minutes' notice. It's easy to see how that could happen, if large fleets were deployed strategically, even in the suburbs. (It would work less well as the density dropped, but even in a residential neighborhood, a car can move a fair distance in five minutes. Your house, your work site, your grocery store, etc. are all likely to be five minutes from a lot.)

There are still advantages to just having your own car. Mine is full of my crap, for example. I haven't taken my toolbox out in a while, but I will, and I don't know when. If I were calling for a car every day I wouldn't lug my toolbox around, and thus wouldn't have it. Customization is nice. Not having to worry about peak usage times would be nice (though peak usage will also coincide with peak traffic, which I try to avoid anyway).

Still... I'd consider ditching a car entirely if it saved me that much money. My car hit 200k miles, and while it's a Honda, I'm still gonna need to fork out $20k within the next few years. (I'm cheap, and don't want a luxurious car. I just want it to get me places.) A two-car household would likely make it very compelling to at least split the difference.

On the one hand, yes, CPR traces it's history to the 1700s, even if it wasn't the entire modern version.

On the other hand I can find at least two references which acknowledge Jude as being part of the modern version of it.

But, more to the point ... thanks to all of the people throughout history who have helped us find ways to save lives.

And you can be damned sure that the use of CPR in its modern form has saved a tremendous amount of lives.

Sorry for your loss, voxelman. Few people can claim to have contributed to saving so many lives.

The future will be driverless cars, mass transit and bicycles in urban/suburban areas.

The sea change is already happening - car ownership of all kinds is lowest among millenials. In fact, having a driver's license is no longer the rite of passage it once was - there's a growing group of millenials who do not have a driver's license and have no intention of getting one. Granted, they're generally limited to areas with good public transit, but the car as a form of status symbol no longer applies.

And public transit, especially subways and the like, often get people around faster than being stuck in traffic. (The daily grind of traffic jams will rapidly wear down even the strongest driving advocate). And we know this because distracted driving is either #1 or rapidly becoming the #1 cause of accidents (drunk driving is/was #1) - because driving is boring and horrendous.

Heck, some employers have reported difficulty recruiting people because of the commute. And what was once a good idea to move to an industrial park where land is cheap and you can stuff people in like cattle, businesses are finding that they need to be more urban to attract employees who don't want, or can't, do the commute and want to be close to amenities.

Hands are just incredibly complicated. There are a lot of tendons and ligaments in there, and I imagine that fine motor control comes from a lot of different nerves. How much dexterity can he be expected to get out of this?

I imagine that getting it done young means that he's got years to re-establish connections and train pathways for it. Still... anybody know how good it might get? Will he be able to play the violin?

You don't think Oracle would allow something to be designed which didn't maximize license revenue, do you?

Why, yes, we'll sell you this CPU for $800 ... but the licensing costs for your organization running this in production in a web-facing environment will be 16 trillion dollars.

Oracle is all about maximizing license revenues.

One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison. It costs a lot of money to maintain private islands and yachts.