Sure, if that actually happened, I'd fight tooth and nail to protect my family. Home invasion rape are incredibly rare - it's not something I lose any sleep over, and it's not worth culling 0.01% of your population annually "just in case".

I strongly suspect a gun owner is considerably more likely to accidentally shoot themselves or a member of their family than they are to successfully ward off a rapist.

Wait - what?

Japan's murder rate is 0.3 per 100,000.
China dominates that at 1.0.
UK comes in even higher at 1.2.

The US? No single US state comes in lower than Japan. Iowa, Vermont, and New Hapshire are the only states/territories that come in lower than the UK. The average across the US? 4.2.

Make no mistake - murder rates in the US are unacceptably high.

At that rate, you are more likely to die in an airline catastrophe.

That suggests the figures you took from the previous poster are extremely flawed. Over 30,000 americans die from gunshots every (not to mention the 75,000 who are injured). Air crash deaths are extremely rare - there have been a number of years recently with no air crash deaths in the US.

The catch-22 is that your relative value on human life makes you an incredibly inappropriate person for making those life-and-death decisions.

There are a million and one reasons why someone might be in your house (or why you might think someone's in your house).

I'm not suggesting being robbed isn't most likely explanation, but it's just stuff. Your stuff is not worth extrajudicial killing someone over.

What an absolute load of clap trap.

Why do people get modded up as insightful for spouting the same old NRA propaganda? Analysing the statistics for violent crime, suicide and accidental deaths is a complicated area of research. Finding localised peaks in violent crime figures does not negate the massive drops in gun incidents we saw in Australia following the effective banning of firearms almost 20 years ago.

And what's with this view that being able to shoot someone who wrongs you is better than the tiny risk of being robbed? Seriously? People with that view are exactly who I don't want having weapons anywhere near me.

http://investor.yahoo.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=724306 will work better (without the trailing slash).

Licking his palms.

And for some reason, I has a strange compulsion to reply to this.

The valve is the easy bit (if you don't mind manually switching a tap on in response to an alert).

The sensor is not so simple. Even if digital hydrometers were cheap and easily available, you'd need to find a way of mounting it inside the fermenter such that you're not going to create a haven for bacteria (hint: any kind of non-smooth surface inside the fermentation vessel is a haven for bacteria).

I've heard of people using ultrasonic transducers for measuring the gravity of fluid in a pipe, but it sounds like a lot of work.

You reckon you can do temperature control in an uncontrolled environment with a handful of transistors? Keep in mind the external temperature is uncontrolled. The yeast itself generates heat within the ferment at varying (and often unpredictable) rates.

The simplest approach you can reasonable consider for the level of control they're looking for in their environment would be a PID controller, which if memory serves me correctly will have more than a handful of transistors in it. You're going to need a pretty decent PID to handle temperature profiling, which their solution

They're using cheap, off-the-shelf parts to solve their problem, which in turn allow them to put extra features in there like web control, and it's now much easier for anyone to do the same thing. The parts may not have existed in 1964, but you need to keep in mind The Doors aren't the only good thing to happen since then.

Could explain their web design.

Actually, you're not far off. Their Quality Assurance Coordinator is due to complete their Comp Sci degree this year.

Their "Software Engineer" also plans to graduate this year.

Their "Research Analyst" completed her fine arts degree last year.

Their "Director of Marketing" should finish her Bachelor of Science, Journalism this year.

Odd.

Could be...

The author of this book: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-b35jEu5ZeLQ/UCmyWXslzEI/AAAAAAAAAGQ/Oc86dmx1xDQ/s220-h/door-crop.jpg

The author of the RFCs: http://blog.neustar.biz/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/peterson-dist-eng.jpg

There's certainly a similarity there.

They know they there's no chance Romney will pay up. If he pays up, he likely does more damage to himself than the tax returns ever could.

The alternative is to say, "leave $1M dollars in unmarked bills under some overpass". They're hardly going to hang around waiting to see if he pays.

This launch has so many firsts, that the launch window is instantaneous.

If they didn't launch right on the scheduled launch time, they were not going to have enough fuel to get to the ISS *and* do the test manoeuvres they had planned for the approach.

I never said otherwise, and agree this patent is the result of a significant research.

I was replying to a post, which has since been modded "troll" suggesting there was some sort of double standard, anti-American sentiment going on here.