http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?000+cod+44-1

"The militia of the Commonwealth of Virginia shall consist of all able-bodied residents of the Commonwealth who are citizens of the United States and all other able-bodied persons resident in the Commonwealth who have declared their intention to become citizens of the United States"

Google dominating for what, 8 years now?

Our young geeks may NOT remember a time before Google, but there was a time where the "hot" search engine changed every two years, and there were new engines launching all the time.

The Wild West phase of the Internet is over, but we're still on the frontier.

> figure out who registered the gun it was fired from

There's your first problem. There isn't a registry of guns. Some states have them. Others don't.

For example, Virginia doesn't have a registry of guns. When the police find a gun they reference it to the manufacturer and that traces back to the FFL dealer that sold the gun. The dealer then provides law enforcement with the identity of the person who purchased it. Now, after that it gets all fuzzy. In Virginia's case, private sales do not have any paper work. I could say "Yeah I sold that gun. Don't remember who I sold it to. Sorry." That'd be the end of that.

Getting states to approve a registry of guns is a bit of a challenge. Best of luck getting that done in the majority of states.

I'm a gun dealer.

> I just pick up brass at the police range and reload it when I murder people.

The stamping is going to be on the primer. If you're reloading, you'll end up popping the old primer out anyway.

> It's an aid to crime solving, in the same way serial numbers on the gun itself are an aid.

The serial numbers on a gun doesn't aid in solving a crime at all. It's there mostly as an identification and tracking system. There aren't any effective matching systems between shell casing/bullet "fingerprint" and serial numbers. Maryland tried it. It failed.

Citation: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/marylands-ballistic-fingerprinting-system-proves-cumbersome

A project carrying an "open source" or "free software" license is not necessarily an "open source" project. Plenty of "Cathedral" projects with paid developers with an open source license that may (or may not) get downstream patches kicked up. Those projects are going to look like any other corporate development group. These are really the core projects.

The "open source projects" of people hacking code make up the bulk of developers in open source, and is the hobbyist developers. People that have a lot of time to devote to a hobby are either single, or older empty nesters. Men can hang out in the single realm and start a family @ 40, women cannot. This limits women from engaging in serious time commitments like open source projects.

The pool of women available to do this is pretty small.

That's without dealing with the fact that women tend to have tighter deviations from the norm in various areas, which means that any group that is selected from extreme outliers is going to be disproportionately male. This is true whether you are selecting politicians that reach Federal office, people that are extremely interested in programming to pursue as a hobby, moving to America as a day laboring immigrant, or criminally oriented men to form a gang. The outliers are predominately (but not exclusively) male.

In local politics, where the time commitment is NOT as extreme and the skill set needed to be elected is NOT that extreme, we have a pretty good mix of men and women on city counsels, school boards, mayoral seats, etc. Not 50-50, but a pretty good representation. We have plenty of female mayors, but we've NEVER had a female governor. Outliers in general are predominately male.

No period between the sentences... that's what is being [sic]'d out.

No. It expects people to be able to act rationally and in their long-term best interest. That's still not how people work.

You presume to know what their long-term best interest is. A bit of fatal conceit?

The lesson you probably learned is that buttkissing gets you further in today's society than delivering good work.

At the same time, if a customer tells you what features he wants and you keep not building it, are you surprised when he's unhappy with what you delivered?

Feedback is a valuable tool. What you do with said feedback is up to you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trespass_to_chattels

Sometimes you think you know the law. And then you find out, you didn't really know that much about the law. That's why lawyers exist.

It seems that Apple is optimizing the GUI for small form-factor devices at the expense of full-size computers.

Yes. Apple is making a killing selling laptops, iPads, and iPhones. The writing is on the wall. Full-sized computers are soooooo 20th century.

I worry that this is part of a larger trend to over-simplify desktop computing, making it less open, flexible and powerful.

Desktop computing is dead.

To your answers to #1 and 2... I could bring the latest Stephen King 1000+ page hard cover novel, which weighs significantly more than a Kindle, and read it through the whole safety briefing, take off, climb to 10,000 ft, yet if I wanted to do the same with a Kindle, I'd be branded a terrorist.

Why not go directly to his website (when it's not slashdotted, of course), click on "Songs" at the top, and have a listen, for free, to his whole catalog (minus a few songs he wrote for other people). No need to pirate when he gives it away for free.

Perhaps you've missed "I Crush Everything"? That's the only song I know of about giant squids. From any artist.

TMBG's Apollo 18 had a giant squid on the cover, but no songs about one.

That's why we should get rid of income tax entirely, and move to a consumption tax. The forklift driver gets to take home ALL of his pay, doesn't have to shuffle it into stock options, and only pays taxes when he buys goods above the povertly level. Same thing with the CEO making $1MM. He only gets taxed when he spends that million dollars at the retail level, buying his new jet. If he invests it all, it isn't touched by the taxman until he pulls it out to spend.