Not to mention, this sounds like the kind of plan that could easily result in the loss of two crews, instead of one.

When I drive more than an hour or two, I'm making a journey that crosses state lines. If I felt I had that kind of money to waste driving a rental across state lines, I wouldn't be worried about putting miles on the car I have.

That's a far more interesting phenomenon than the one I thought was being described.

It's not "unpossible". Protons (like most things at the sub-atomic scale) are not like the physical objects you're accustomed to, with seemingly concrete boundaries. It's not like a very small kind of baseball.

Protons are more like the broadcast range of a wifi hotspot (assuming, like any good physicist, that the hotspot signal is exactly spherical, to make the math easier). You might look at signal-to-noise ratio, which will produce one definition of "size", or you might look at wattage, which produces a different measurement of "size", or you might look at some other factor entirely, producing yet another definition of "size". These will not give you the game size, but are all "correct" within their contexts.

And, of course, since protons are actually composed of 2 up quarks and 1 down quark, that complicates the question of "size" further, since you could define proton size based on measurements and modeling of the quarks, which would be analogous to considering the shape and location of the antennae in the aforementioned wifi hotspot.

What? It's not like they'd drive someone to suicide.

Slow news day on Slashdot, apparently.

"Dammit, why did my car just shut off again?!"

I think anyone here will recognize how easily "smart gun technologies" will be circumvented on the streets, either by hardware hacks or software ones, meaning the technology will be useless at preventing illegal firearms transfers after a few days of being introduced. The only kind of crime that would be prevented by biometric or RFID identification would be stealing someone's gun to use on them in the heat of the confrontation. This seems somewhat desirable for peace officers and security personnel, but only if the technology can be made robust enough to prevent false negatives. No officer would ever want to place their lives in the hands of a gun that might refuse to fire at the most important moment.

For the majority case, sport and range shooting, the "feature" is nothing more than a potential nuisance, something else that can break in an already complex, dangerous system.

10% or less of the time. I've bought and assembled 4 "enthusiast" PCs for myself across the last 12 years, each time time making a multiple-generation leap in hardware. Actually, I had little choice but to replace the motherboard with the CPU each time, because the march of technology had pretty much rendered my old hardware obsolete each time.

I've also bought a dedicated file server and a used "enthusiast" PC that I could dedicate to CPU-intensive tasks.

I find it amusing that people are trying to argue that there are other enthusiasts out there beyond the ones trying to build fast, powerful hardware. It's like saying that there are car enthusiasts out there who aren't trying to build fast, powerful vehicles. I'm sure they exist, but for every one of them there are at least a dozen others doing doughnuts every night a few miles down the road from me, flashing their illegal lighting modifications in an impressively gaudy display of car nerdery that, in my mind, invalidates any and all criticism they might have over my hobbies.