Kent state as I remember it was the national guard, not the US military per se. It was also a largely peaceful demonstration until the cops moved in and then things escalated. Even when it came to gun fire form the guard (& no one knows for sure why they fired) only 29 of 77 guardsmen would actually do it.

In many real ways we are already in a economy where capital is the only success factor. Their are some great picture representations of this which show wealth by population percentile. They show the bottom 40% (in the us) share less than a percent of wealth and our `middle class` that middle 20% share about 4% of the wealth. The top 40% get the rest (and the lower half of that shares around 10%). All together that leaves the top 20% of the population with their oft quoted 80% of the countries wealth.

I`ve seen studies that follow movement between percentiles and it really says that outside a miarcle upward mobility is nonexistent. So capital really does decide your place in the economy, even now.

This is actually what the mexican farmers have been saying about NAFTA and it's effect on them. Even what had been luxury food products could be farmed cheaper in the US than they could in mexico and so farms started dying out. Some have struggled to hang on, but they are a minority.

Now that is the mexican farmer take on the subject, I have no idea how true it is.

Maybe it's just me, but as someone without a 3D printer I somehow doubt that a almost completely plastic 3D printed gun is cheaper than say a $50 handgun from the pawnshop...

So that explains all those old school CEOs who go to exotic places to shoot things being so damn stupid...

Even if the story is true... It takes 3 failures of both gun safety and intelligence to get there:
1. Manage to be stupid enough to not only keep your shotgun loaded, but with a round chambered.
2. Manage not to have a safety on.
3. Ask someone barely big enough to carry the item to you.

Ok, maybe you do keep your gun loaded, I personally wouldn't unless I was in a 'warzone' or had immediate cause to have a loaded gun handy. Heck with things like clips of ammo and speed loaders the need to keep a weapon loaded is very very low. Even classic break-open (ie breech loading) shotguns aren't usually kept loaded as it takes only a second or two to slap in a cartridge and be ready to fire.

However if you fail all three steps then you have truly proved yourself an idiot and certainly should never have owned a firearm.

Actually I have, and the Nvidia drivers did just as bad in my experience. Neither set of binary blob drivers wanted to install and function in 3D. Having said that I haven't used anything newer than a Radeon HD 6970. Maybe it's not true for some newer cards, but my linux 3D experience was a non starter.

I cannot believe people still complain about this. In the last five years I've built many a system, some with Nvidia cards and some with AMD cards and frankly I've never seen any serious graphics issues with either brand. The biggest issue I've seen has actually been overheating and that has far more to do with standard case design and default fan settings on the cards...

Stardock loves to remind me regularly that for a couple of dollars I can have the start menu again in Windows 8... Though I'm not running windows 8 anywhere, so I have little need for their software. If a 3rd party can do it, I'm sure MS could as well... The question becomes do they want to do that. Personally I don't think they do, screenshots of Blue show that so far they haven't bothered.

They could do, you know, what police used to do before they all became lazy. Back in the day we called it 'Walking a beat'. You know we'd go and assign them a neighbor and they could direct lost kids home, help old ladies cross the street, etc. All sorts of little things they did made neighborhoods want to have a cop around, rather then never wanting to see them. Not that there weren't bad cops back then, there were, but even the bad ones tended to do some good... Now 'innocent' people don't trust them and they only seem to do crap like this story....

Admittedly this was nearly five years ago now, so details I recall are a little blurry... But I know it had 3 RAID cards in it... I'm assuming each ran 2 sets of IDE ports (2 channels per card). I have no idea why it had those, it just did. I spent $0 and put a bunch of junk in one place. Win/win for me... Oh yeah... and it did serve webpages... so win/win/win...?

I've done this before in an old 'server' I was re-using. As is typical this had been laying around in the server room for 7 or 8 years even after it had been replaced (once upon a time it ran WinNT). My company at the time gave me no budget and said they wanted our website (which not even 500 people a year ever looked at) moved inhouse. So I repurposed this guy and seeing as how the enclosure was designed to hold a dozen or so drive I stuffed it full of old 40 GB drives I'd pulled from desktops and set up a RAID 5 arrangement with 10 of them. Was never really any reason not to do it. It made an ok little linux webserver running a CLI environment for remote access.

You'll note I said "outside Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, or Philly". I could move an hour south to Pittsburgh and make similar, but up here by lake erie where I own a house (which is unlikely to ever sell as the market is dead) wages are stagnant and low to begin with. On the other hand 40k here means you can own a house, car, and with some work support a family (my own parents never made more than 50k combined here).

Sure if you consider budgeting, planning, and executing large IT projects 'helpdesk'. Those range from building mesh wireless networks (when wireless was still 'new'), linux remote desktop kiosk setups, and state compliant customer information databases on one side... To 'normal' things like setting up file servers, network storage backups, email servers, etc.

Personally I was supporting Windows, Linux, and Apple... So no, not just windows. I also was not the only one, I worked with admins from a dozen companies from time to time and pay varied from $40k-55k. Those making $55k were in their 50's and had started (often at these companies) during the 70's or at most 80's...