The Beretta 92fs is a dream. The 96, not so much. Much preferred is the Glock 22c. That little c actually makes a difference to me. A big difference. YMMV, and those suckers stopped making them, IIRC.

There's no doubt that they are used but the prevalence is likely as exaggerated as "stranger danger".
In the UK 75 cases of suspected dosing were investigated and only one person turned out to have a date-rape drug in their tox screen. The other cases appeared to be people drinking to excess.
This doesn't put the blame on the victim instead of a rapist. We should also be aware that the regular old issue of people getting shitfaced is still a real contributor to creating vulnerable targets for predators.

The original creator comes up with the idea, usually among many ideas. Then they have to decide which one to go with. Then you have to design and implement, refine, and see what works, until you have something worth releasing.
Then you might have to put the effort into social media or advertising.
Then you might become popular.
Then someone else looks at what you created and breaks the concept down into components that are easily reproducible in a day or two, while their artist copies your art. They flood the store with them.
The only real counter to something like that is to create a game that's complicated enough that reproducing the game mechanics that make it popular takes long enough that the clones don't come out in time to bite into the profit during the critical first week/month.

It's "forked up", if that's what you mean.

Indeed. Civilized nerds don't fight; they fork. (God won't let us fork the Middle East, unfortunately.)

I have to agree with conservatives on one point: we don't know enough about Earth to make any reliable predictions.

Maybe the Earth will somehow balance itself and the warming will level out. Or trigger positive feedback mechanisms that accelerate warming and/or change. We just don't know.

However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about altering the "normal" path. It's pretty clear we are gambling big-time via pollution and green-house gasses.

Some of the more thoughtful conservatives say we should go ahead and gamble: humans will adapt around change. Even though I disagree, that's a valid position, for science can't tell us WHAT to do, only what will happen (at best). If simulations show that juggling rakes has a 20% of putting your eye out, and you agree with the odds, and do juggle rakes and your eye gets put out, and you accept the consequences, at least you are honest. Blind, foolish, but honest.

I guess some conservatives want to be proverbial lion trainers. The problem is that we all have to be in the same cage with them.

Those who believe we should end EVERYTHING because it's not perfect generally need medication or serious counseling. I mean it. Get some help, dude.

Given how this is supposed to be a community of nerds, I'm surprised at how many people here are proudly stating that they don't even have a wireless router (or they choose not connect anything to it, or they don't even have an internet connection).

I mean, the whole point of technology is to improve quality of life, right?

You're missing the point. I don't have any of that technology in your list. I have a desktop PC and a phone. Having wi-fi is not going to improve the quality of my life.

Resembles my last X-Ray: Digestive track of an overweight dude.

There's a fungus among us.

Suddenly the world was more productive!

No, we all came to troll on Slashdot instead

Too late. I wore it out printing nukes

I looked through one of those from a relative, and it sucked eggs. Don't do it. Horrible horrible optics. Maybe it's better than nothing, but barely.

That's a bunch of hogwash. I have a 60mm refractor and it can see bands on Jupiter and the Cassini gap between the inner Saturn ring and outer (under ideal conditions). Binoculars will not even show the rings separate from the ball of Saturn, and will not show bands on Jupiter. I can also see spots on Mars and the polar caps under ideal conditions. It did take some practice to learn to see some of these, though. It wasn't instant.

Just make sure the optics say "precision ground". That has a legally-enforced trade meaning.

That being said, reflectors are more cost effective for looking at nebula. For "bright" objects like the moon and planets, refractors are more bang for the buck because the center mirror in the reflectors tends to blur planets etc. via diffraction. It's a trade-off.

It all depends on the preferences and behavior and discipline of the kid.

I have a cheap mount (simple tripod). It's annoying, but I've learned to live with it via practice by knowing how to manually track. Being bare-bones, it didn't stop me from seeing anything I wanted to see.

And don't be fooled by extra or gimmicky attachments, such as a Barlow lens. They are often useless. The only attachment I really enjoyed was the sun filter lens, but there are other ways to view the sun via projection.

Auto-targeting gizmos can be nice, but they do take a fair amount of setup and fiddling before they can do their job.

But, I personally think it's better to just learn how to aim the thing manually. Start with the moon to get used to aiming, tracking, and focusing. You then apply those skills to progressively dimmer objects.

If the kid is not disciplined or motivated to practice and use the scope to its potential, then no scope is "good".

from a probe built in the mid 70s.