When Googling which district he was in, I found something even better: his campaign was funded by criminals. I guess criminals would want law-abiding citizens to be forced to use guns that don't work.

He's from Massachusetts, home of the gerrymander. His district is just north of Boston. His seat is in no real threat.

But you're right, this is just another pointless "feel-good" measure to prove to his constituents that he's "tough on crime." It's also a ploy to get Republicans to vote against it, allowing that stupid "mayors for gun control" PAC to run ads against them.

It's worse than that - thanks to Citizen's United, the only way you can possibly legislate campaign contributions is with a constitutional amendment. Since campaign contributions count as political speech, they can't be regulated otherwise.

A dystopian future full of broken buildings, weird piles of wood and leaves that may have been trees, and lumps in the road where cars used to be.

Whatever they're using to automatically generate 3D buildings is kind of cool in theory - it just produces hilariously awful results.

No, it doesn't. Hibernate doesn't log you out, it keeps all your programs running and does what you expect it to do.

The new "fast boot" system Windows 8 uses makes it so that "shutdown" will log you out (like you'd expect) and then, rather than completely shutdown, essentially hibernates at the log in screen.

The idea is that it will be faster to load from hibernation than it would be to do a full cold boot. I'm pretty sure that this isn't true, especially as RAM sizes in modern PCs increase. I'd have to time it to be sure, but I'm fairly sure my Windows 8 PC boots faster with the "fast boot" option off than it does with it on.

And, as I've posted previously, there's a good chance you didn't really shut down the computer - instead you just logged out and hibernated. (Which is what "shutdown" does now.)

Actually shutting down the computer all the way involves a hidden setting somewhere in the power options - you have to "change what the power buttons do" and then uncheck "fast startup." Only then will shutting down the computer allow you to do a clean boot at a later point in time.

As an additional exercise, figure out how to log out. Remember how it always used to be an option in the shutdown menu? It's not any more.

The answer: turns out your account name on the start screen can be clicked on. I never noticed it was even there until it was pointed out to me, because my use of the Windows 8 start menu was almost exclusively "press start key, type search terms" - which makes the username vanish.

They might, actually. Don't forget, the Boston marathon bomber is being charged with constructing and using a weapon of mass destruction.

No joke, he really is. Because, you know, killing three people is "mass destruction."

But apparently it's legally accurate (IANAL) - the legal definition of "weapon of mass destruction" is basically "any explosive device." Meaning that it's entirely possible that your examples would qualify as WMDs.

Congratulations on demonstrating why the founding fathers didn't want to create the Bill of Rights in the first place.

Those aren't restrictions - they're clarifications. The government never had those powers in the first place, because they were never granted to them. All the Bill of Rights does is spell it out in plain language that these are things that the government cannot do.

(Which it does anyway: see gun control, health care laws, obscenity laws, and most recently, the refusal to allow the Boston marathon bomber his right to an attorney.)

The Tenth Amendment tries to make this clear, but no one ever bothers to pay it any attention.

Well, that, and there's the fact that the cameras did not identify the suspects.

Just to be clear, no one knew who they were until Tamerlan Tsarnaev was dead. They were only identified after Tamerlan was taken to the hospital and finger-printed.

The camera footage will likely make Dzhokhar's trial an open-and-shut case, but it proved to be absolutely useless for identifying them. They were only really caught because they told their carjacking victim who they were and he escaped. Killing the MIT cop probably didn't help, but it's likely that without the report by the carjacking victim that "these are the bombers" the police wouldn't have gone quite all-out in their pursuit. (Or have been able to use the carjacking victim's phone to track their movements.)

It is, of course, impossible to speculate on whether the images would eventually have turned up leads and whether or not they would have been successful in carrying out their New York attack, but the cameras did nothing to identify them or catch them in this case.

So, wait, are talking about "tech websites" or "traditional journalists" here? Because when I first heard about the explosions (from Twitter, naturally), I went to boston.com - which was in some kind of "low bandwidth" mode where they front page was only showing tweets related to the explosions.

"Traditional" media throughout the aftermath referenced tweets. NPR referenced the Boston Police Department's Twitter feed for updates. Local TV stations turned to Twitter, Vine, and YouTube to find videos of the explosion.

I guess only tech websites aren't "allowed" to mine Twitter? Because from what I could tell, everyone was doing that, from print to radio to TV to the web.

It was Steam. Thank you! I'd never have guessed that an audio stream that Steam left open would prevent Windows from going to sleep. That has to be one of the least intuitive things ever.

Well, it's supposed to. It may just be a driver problem, but Windows 8 only actually goes to sleep mode when it's supposed to maybe 50% of the time (and that might be high).

So instead I end up having to turn it off manually for the night if I don't want fan noise. I'd just manually tell Windows 8 to hibernate, but, well...

My favorite Windows 8-ism, and I swear this is true, is that they removed the ability to shutdown the computer.

No, really. They did.

There's still a "shutdown" option in the new "power charm." It even brings your computer to a power-off state. It just doesn't shutdown the OS.

Instead, "shutdown" logs you out (closing all your open applications), and then hibernates the machine rather than shutting down.

The concept is that this makes booting "faster" but in my experience, it's at best a wash. (I think booting fresh is slightly faster than restoring the entirety of memory.) In any case, you still have to wait for all your applications to restart when you log in, so what's the point?! Plus, generally when I choose "shutdown," it's because I want the OS is shut all the way down for some reason. If all I wanted to do was turn the power off, I'd just hibernate the machine.

Which brings me to my next point. The Hibernate option does not exist in the "Power charm." You can't Hibernate anymore. Apparently there's a setting somewhere that can reenable this feature, but searching for "hibernate" in the new Start Menu didn't find anything useful.

Anyway, long rant short: Windows 8 managed to break the ability to turn your PC off!

Offline mode is only useful if you know ahead of time you will be offline.

It's entirely useless when you don't know that Comcast is going to go and lose Internet access in your area for a day and a half, or for the half-hour outages that occur at random times.

The problem with always-on DRM is that it not only assumes that everyone will have an Internet connection, it also assumes that they're 100% reliable. They're not.

And the whole "must be online to be offline" thing that Steam does is just beyond ridiculous.

Doesn't yet. They have added a new feature called "PSN Plus" which is a monthly subscription and is required to access some basic functionality.

We're talking about Sony. They don't shy away from removing features in their console that users have been using. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they make it so that NetFlix only works if you have PSN Plus.