While you're linking to youtube, you might checkout the homemade flamethrowers. I can't claim to have made one but plenty of my friends have (including my school physics club). The mechanics of a flame thrower is just a squirt gun + a match. I can buy propane "flame throwers" as is at the local hardware store (used for burning weeds).

Why are people making all these flame throwers? Because something that shoots jets of flame is freaking cool. As far as I could discern on a quick google search, none of them have been used to commit murder.

What I personally find horrific is the idea that anyone would be so afraid of their fellow citizens that their first assumption on hearing they have access to a projectile shooter/flame maker/etc. is "OH GOODNESS HOW ARE THEY GOING TO USE THAT MURDER ME?" I realize unhinged people are out there, and will do bad things, but there are also bears in the woods which could find their way to my house and easily maul me to death. But the statistics are low enough that I don't worry about. I suppose my luck could run out some day, but trusting my fellow citizens not to murder me has worked so far, and I wouldn't care to live any other way. I like the idea of a society and a government that assumes I have good intentions until proven otherwise and I consider it worth some risk to have it even if I am not personally a person who is interested in owning a weapon.

I could make a comment about how, since 0bama, poor is the majority -

If Obama had reduced the wealth of a majority of people, then ultimately he made everyone richer, since in the US... poor is relative. They call you poor if you want more and you have less material stuff than what the media portrays as the average person.

The rich are defined as the people who have more stuff you want, or more access to money than you.

If you had a time machine, and brought someone here from the early 1900s... they would look at all the resources the poorest of the americans have access to, and call us all rich, even the ones with the fewest resources.

Today they call you poor if you can't afford to buy a prefabricated home or apartment built by someone else located in a high-traffic area, with electricity, running water, mechanical transportation, and manufactured food products created by someone else.

By timeless standards.... if you don't have to exert your own labor to build your own shelter from parts scavenged from nature, treat your own injuries, scavenge for your water sources, walk on your own two feet to get from place to place, hunt and gather your own food using sharpened sticks, and your own bare hands, then you are probably richer than 99% of those who ever lived.

Having fun isn't necessarily stupid. Having fun with flamboyantly dangerous things isn't necessarily stupid. It's endangering unwilling bystanders that's stupid.

Some people like to build and shoot powerful crossbows, or even replicas of medieval siege weapons. These are extremely dangerous and useless things. The dangerous power of a trebuchet to throw an upright piano 150 yards is part of the charm.

But a trebuchet is something that takes certain amount of thought and sacrifice to obtain and use. This flamethrower thing is more like a powerful handgun. There's been a recent fad for ridiculously overpowered handguns, which pack superfluously fatal power into a convenient, affordable form factor. The recent brouhaha over "armor piercing" ammunition was a side effect of a manufacturer selling a cut-down semi-automatic carbine as a "handgun", even though if you look at videos of people using them they're obviously terrible as handguns. This raised the question of whether 5.56 NATO ammunition should be regulated as "handgun ammunition", and in the end I think the decision not to was reasonablee. These aren't cop-killing or military handguns. They're extremely dangerous toys designed to get your rocks off.

There are some who'd say that because these guns are dangerous and impractical they should be banned. But I don't agree. "Impractical" isn't the same as "useless" because getting your rocks off is a legitimate use for a thing. I think people should be able to enjoy their ridiculous firearms as long as they do it at some kind of appropriate range. I also think there's a real danger though from stupid people who will go plinking in the woods with the things like they were BB guns.

That's really the only problem I have with this flamethrower, whether it's gold, chrome, or gunmetal gray. Any idiot can buy one, but it'd take someone reasonably intelligent and determined to find a place where it can be used safely. I'm not against people buying them, but I am for coming down hard on people who use them where they're a danger or public nuisance.

I think its going to be hard for anyone to show how Google's actions hurt them.

Buyer's remorse. Example scenario:

Google used cookies to track me and display the most effective advertising that most greatly appealed to my preferences and was most persuasive to me.

Because the advertisement shown was more persuasive; they talked me into purchasing X with a more persuasive Ad, even though buying X was not worth it.

I would not have purchased it, if the more persuasive ad wasn't shown as a result of tracking me and tailoring ad selection to my vulnerabilities (preferences).

Therefore, Google should be responsible for my lost $$$ in non-refundable digital purchases.

Have you ever tried to reason with a PHB? Especially when your argument, however correct and well-supported, doesn't come from someone who has that specific responsibility?

Well, in the end you have to ask "did he get away with it?". Or, given that he turned himself in later, "did he have some purpose in escaping that he fulfilled?"

Intelligence is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. It includes things like thinking through unintended consequences before acting that quite clever people are sometimes bad at.

What objects are moving away from us faster than light and how was this determined?

Then get your local government to change their policies. In my state user costs (how long your commute takes) are as high a priority as project cost. I've seen projects do things that added 30% to the cost (huge time restrictions on lane impacts) to limit the impact to the public's lives. More than half the projects my state issues these days don't even allow lane closures during any hours were it will impact traffic. I'm about to issue a job where the only work hours are between 8pm and 6am M-Sat (they can work all day Sunday), in other words it's ALL night work.

Your state simply doesn't care about user costs, and that's YOUR fault. If you want them to care you need to make that known, frequently and to as many people as possible. You need to make clear that you don't care if it costs more.

because they usually can hide their text messages from freedom of information act requests.

This is probably because IT policies for maintaining compliance with the law and the courts in some regards to retention of public records simply haven't caught up with the new technology.

The electronic records laws generally do not exclude new methods of stored documents or communications. Once upon a time when e-mail was brand new.... e-mail messages were also "claimed" not to be records.

It's just a matter of time, before someone is penalized legally for failure to produce SMS messages.

Portray as a nut? He IS a nut.

He had the gall to question Obama's citizenship (born in Hawaii to an American woman and Kenyan father), when Cruz was born in Canada (to an American woman) and has a Cuban father.

But now it's crazy to question his ability to run for the presidency because his mother was American, ya know just like Obama which he claimed meant Obama didn't meet the requirements because the birth certificate is a forgery and he was actually born in Indonesia, a foreign country, just like Canada. But most of the birthers will leave him alone because he's not Black. Though I can't wait to see how he defends all the crazy shit his Dad has said over the years. His Dad would fit in with the west-borough baptist church with some of the shit he's spewed.

All politicians are emissaries of Satan but Hillary Clinton is only a 1st level Imp while all of the Republican candidates are first level commanders right below the Great Satan himself with a direct link to the orders of the dark lord.

I'd rather have GW Bush back in office again for 8 years rather than ANY of the republicans running for office these days.

But if a Clinton get's elected again, I know at least one thing for sure, that is that she won't start approving tax cuts while boosting spending (gotta boost that Military industrial complex or they might not get their checks at election time) like the Republicans want. You know Tax-cut and spend, the new Republican Motto since the NeoCons took over the party. I'll take a tax and spend Democrat over a tax-cut and spend Republican any day of the week.

This is a party that has made "no new spending without offsetting reductions elsewhere" their party platform under Obama but they get control of both houses and the first thing they do is write a bill to boost Defense spending 200 billion and don't pay for it. You also have the duplicity of groups like the Koch brothers that scream and yell about competition and free market but the first chance they get they get a law passed in Florida barring people from using any power that they didn't buy from the power company (because ideals don't count if it hurts the bottom line).

Since when did poor become a minority?

In many cities, there may be some correlation between wealth of an area and race composition of the residents, just like there is some correlation between race and having a criminal record. Therefore, if a broadband carrier isn't very careful about the manner in which they exclude "unwealthy" areas, they may consequently find themselves at the wrong end of a lawsuit at some point.

It's why the US government has suggested that employers discriminating against applications with a criminal record might constitute unlawful racial discrimination, if the employer adopts a de-facto blanket policy of refusing employment to criminals, then they are opening themselves up to lawsuits against discrimination through "disparate impact" theory.

Ted Cruz is a Canadian.

Was astounding. Especially since I heard at least three better plans- community sponsored healthcare (in which LOCAL taxes fund LOCAL facilities with LOCAL doctors, managed like schools used to be with a local hospital board), subscription based healthcare (in which the rich pay more to fund clinics for the poor, but everybody pays what healthcare really costs, not job based but rather what it costs to have doctors on duty in clinics and hospitals, whether you are sick or not), and finally, free market health care (with no middle man, but again, no assurance of care).

Of course, all three of these cut out the insurance middle man cash cow- who was Obama's cronies as well as the cronies of certain key Republicrats. Can't hurt the cronies, so once again any form of subsidiarity goes on the back burner in favor of federal control.

Fox News is the largest Psyops campaign ever run on the american people. You have an entire channel (actually several) whose news and stories are being scripted by one of the political parties.

It's amazing to me how many people aren't horrified by this. The old FCC regulation about fairness wouldn't have allowed that, but it was sunk years ago, and rather deliberately.