Ctrl-S was always for pausing the display, I didn't know it was also saving anything - must have been some social engineering on the part of the NSA to make it save my work also. In any case, I prefer saving things at the points of my choosing on my own media. The real issue today is where does it save it? It's one thing to have a temp copy on hardware and media in your possession but something entirely more ominous if all the steps in your works-in-progress are being journaled forever in some corporate or government database entirely outside of your control or knowledge with only the appearance of "it's just a copy for your own good."

Jesus saves, Moses invests, Budha lives on the interest. - the rest of the story.

regardless if it was the last 5 years or the last 14 years, its fairly obvious that they are a shadow of what they used to be.

In the very earliest days of the Mac I remember having to buy a by then obsolete Lisa to write and compile because the Mac couldn't be used for that yet, then reboot it with a special OS to write a Mac disk so you could then try to run it on a nearby Mac because you couldn't run it on the Lisa. I was porting a package from the PC at the time and not too long before that the compile on the PC took most of a day sitting around swapping floppies for hours hoping there wouldn't be some dumb typo 5 hours in - not much better than the punched cards (except you could edit on a screen).

At least with the forms one could see the code and make changes, but it was up to you to see any errors. Punch cards gave you one line per card and disaster if if the wind got you while you were carrying your box(es) full of cards on the way to drop them off at the computer center so you could come back the next day to pick up your syntax errors. Still, both were a big step up from patch panels. Around 1981 I was working for a large medical instrumentation company (at that point I had an Apple II on my desk and z80 and 6800 machines nearby) and one day saw the dumpster full of wired up patch panels. Curious, I asked about it and found out that those were backups of old "code" that had been stored "just in case." My department head told me that they were keeping them around for when all the fuss over microcomputers would blow over and everything would get back to normal.

United States v. Verdugo-Urquirdez, 110 S. Ct. 3039 (1990). This case involved the meaning of the term "the people" in the Fourth Amendment. The Court unanimously held that the term "the people" in the Second Amendment had the same meaning as in the Preamble to the Constitution and in the First, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments, i.e., that "the people" means at least all citizens and legal aliens while in the United States. This case thus resolves any doubt that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right.

even before our constitution every settler was REQUIRED to have at least TWO muskets, a bag of powder, and so many pounds of ball shot. It was expected that every able-bodied male of 14 years old or older (at the time that was enough to be considered a man enough to fight) to participate in the defense of your town, state, or property from invaders.

Even field artillery was considered a 2nd amendment issue

United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876). This was the first case in which the Supreme Court had the opportunity to interpret the Second Amendment. The Court recognized that the right of the people to keep and bear arms was a right which existed prior to the Constitution when it stated that such a right "is not a right granted by the Constitution...[n]either is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence." The indictment in Cruikshank charged, inter alia, a conspiracy by Klansmen to prevent blacks from exercising their civil rights, including the bearing of arms for lawful purposes. The Court held, however, that because the right to keep and bear arms existed independent of the Constitution, and the Second Amendment guaranteed only that the right shall not be infringed by Congress, the federal government had no power to punish a violation of the right by a private individual; rather, citizens had "to look for their protection against any violation by their fellow-citizens" of their right to keep and bear arms to the police power of the state.

Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252 (1886). Although the Supreme Court affirmed the holding in Cruikshank that the Second Amendment, standing alone, applied only to action by the federal government, it nonetheless found the states without power to infringe upon the right to keep and bear arms, holding that "the States cannot, even laying the constitutional provision in question out of view, prohibit the people from keeping and bearing arms, as so to deprive the United States of their rightful resource for maintaining the public security and disable the people from performing their duty to the general government."

U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939). This is the only case in which the Supreme Court has had the opportunity to apply the Second Amendment to a federal firearms statute. The Court, however, carefully avoided making an unconditional decision regarding the statute's constitutionality; it instead devised a test by which to measure the constitutionality of statutes relating to firearms and remanded the case to the trial court for an evidentiary hearing (the trial court had held that Section 11 of the National Firearms Act was unconstitutional). The Court remanded to the case because it had concluded that:
** In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a "shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length" at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense.
  Thus, for the keeping and bearing of a firearm to be constitutionally protected, the firearm should be a militia-type arm

it takes a 2/3rd majority of both house and senate to amend the constitution. Thats never going to happen. We cant even get enough to agree in order to override a veto from the POTUS. You also have the 1936 SCOTUS ruling that says that you should be allowed to have the same weapons used by the military of the day. At the time, a short barreled shotgun was NOT used by the standing army. So he violated the NFA by not registering it and paying his $200 tax stamp. The ONLY reason the 1986 full-auto ban still exists is because NOBODY has yet brought it before the courts and sited the 1936 SCOTUS ruling. Clearly 3-shot burst and full-auto M4's are widely used by many branches of our military.

btw today's state militia is the Sheriff's department and by extension the local police forces granted their authority from said sheriff's departments.

The bowl was plastic with the inside forming a hemisphere. Fill it with water, take it outside to freeze, have a couple of beers while waiting, then take out a 6" f/1.0 lens made of ice. Focus the sun on a piece of paper or something flammable. It's not the greatest lens for imaging but it will start paper on fire. Water can make interesting optics, both liquid and solid.

Agreed, unless you don't have one handy. The point was for the kids (they were 2nd grade) to think about stuff around them in new ways. I used to win bar bets when I lived in Wisconsin by claiming to be able to start a fire using the bowl that the peanuts were in and some water. Only worked when it was sunny and freezing outside, though, but it was a good excuse to have another couple of beers.

Back around 1985 I worked with a teacher in a grade school with a lot of low income students creating a microscope that the kids could build and use out of trash quickly. We used a cardboard box that used to hold wooden matches and cut a flap in the wide sides so light could illuminate the inside and covered one end with aluminum foil. Other boxes could also be used but the slide made it easy to focus. A small hole was punched in the center of the foil. The object to be examined was placed inside on top of the part of the box that slid in and out (which was now exposed to light) and a drop of water put in the hole in the foil. It worked remarkably well and the kids had a great time with it looking at all sorts of things inside and outdoors but maybe the greatest thing was that the kids started thinking about how things worked and coming up with novel solutions rather than just buying something to do the job.

Of course they don't want to make it simple, it would destroy their business. A friend who was a CFO at the time use to refer to Intuit as "The Devil" in the way they were always putting themselves into your business and then holding you hostage later. The tax industry produces nothing of value and should be replaced and the billions of dollars and millions of people put to better use. It wouldn't be hard. The government makes the money, puts it into circulation, and then at the point of greatest dispersion the huge tax industry works to get some of it back based on rules so lengthy, complex, and open to interpretation that no one person can understand them all anymore let alone apply them fairly. If you can afford the guns you can shoot your way out but for everyone else you just keep paying out. It's a formula for strife, conflict, anger, and fraud. If I ran a business that way I would have to make all my customers keep track of everything - every transaction, every special and refund all year long and then all have all their documentation on one special day for a grand reckoning. I'd probably need a bunch of armed guards that day, too. Everyone would have to keep all these records for years just in case. I would need an army of accountants and more of my resources would be tied up in that system than the whole rest of the business! Of course, that is exactly what we have with the tax system today and the industry that thrives off of it. The entire tax system and the huge industry supporting it could be replaced by a few people and a small truck (or maybe just a small computer). At the point where the money is created and goes into circulation a portion is sent to the IRS. Done. Billions saved, resources freed, and all the pain gone, just the memory of how ridiculous it used to be.

It's all a monumental waste consuming time and resources that could be better used. The government makes the money, puts it into circulation, and then at the point of greatest dispersion makes everyone work hard to get some of it back. It's a formula for strife, conflict, anger, and fraud. If I ran a store that way I would have to make all my customers keep track of everything - every transaction, every special, and any refunds all year long and then all show up with all their documentation on one special day for a grand reckoning. I'd probably need a bunch of armed guards that day, too. I would need an army of accountants and more of my resources would be tied up in that system than the whole rest of the business! Of course, that is exactly what we have with the tax system today. The entire tax system and the huge industry supporting it could be replaced by a few people and a small truck (or maybe just a small computer). At the point where the money is created and goes into circulation a portion is sent to the IRS. Done. Billions saved, resources freed, and all the pain gone - just a bad memory like emptying chamber pots out the window and hoping that somehow the street will get cleaned up soon.

The Oculus Rift was an amazing design and the first practical and affordable VR tool to come out of the woodwork in a long time. Sad it has come to this. Especially sad for the Kickstarter supporters. That being said, I'm sure that much has been learned along the way. I suspect the creative people will soon drift away and, hopefully now flush with cash, can take the next step and do something even more amazing and build on what they now know. How about a 180 degree horizontal/90 degree vertical field of view in something much smaller and lighter? I remember putting on a LEEPsystems headset back in the late 1980's and the immersion was stunning because of that - anything less is like wearing blinders. I don't remember the actual specs but the field of view was around that, I'll have to dig it out - I'm sure I still have some of their old tech papers. I remember it stated that if you can see the frame around the display then it's not really virtual reality. They even had a demo film camera and viewer to show off the optics (they had to use CRT's back then and only film could show off the possible detail). It wasn't so lightweight but their lens design did the trick and seems to have disappeared into the past. The other thing they did was put most of the resolution in the center with less detail out toward the edges so that the apparent resolution was much greater than the actual. A redesign of that concept with modern displays and trackers, maybe tracking eye movements to move the resolution to where it would matter would be a huge next step.

I remember the Heinlein story - it's been many years, I'll have to dust off that old book and read it again - but I also recall that regular LED's have always done this too, but just very poorly on the light to electricity conversion part. Seems I remember a project long ago taking advantage of this - something from Forrest Mims maybe?