But you're right, we do think so little of mass shootings that we refuse to regulate the access to firearms. And we are absolutely correct to do so. 100 deaths per year in a country of 300 million is negligable.

Although mass shootings get all the headlines, controlling access to firearms will save a whole lot more than 100 lives per year. Most of the savings will come from reduced accidental deaths and suicides.

There is a widespread belief that having a gun in the house makes you safer: this is not true.

In the 1990s, a team headed by Arthur Kellermann of Emory University looked at all injuries involving guns kept in the home in Memphis, Seattle and Galveston, Tex. They found that these weapons were fired far more often in accidents, criminal assaults, homicides or suicide attempts than in self-defense. For every instance in which a gun in the home was shot in self-defense, there were seven criminal assaults or homicides, four accidental shootings, and 11 attempted or successful suicides. source

(other sources along those lines)

There is also a widespread belief a person who dies from suicide would have done so no matter what method: this also is not true. Most suicide attempts are impulsive acts, and most are unsuccessful. An impulse act with pills or slit wrists is unlikely to succeed: it takes time, the person may have second thoughts, and usually recovers through medical and psychological treatment. A suicide attempt by a gun is much, much more likely to succeed. If that suicidal person did not have ready access to a gun, and had to resort to a different method, the changes are good that most (i.e., more than 50%) of those people would still be with us today.

Or you could do like most working stiffs and brown-bag it: make a simple lunch at home and bring it to work with you. Most of my lunches consist of leftover dinners, which I cooked, or a simple sandwich, which I made at home in about three minutes. To prepare and cook a nutritious 8-serving meal, from scratch, takes only slightly longer than the same meal made for 4.

My time is important to me, and I'd rather spend it enjoying my meal, making leisurely use of my lunch break, or making productive use of that time, rather than waiting in line in the cafeteria or a food truck. The notion that my time is important to me extends to the kitchen, too: I enjoy the time I spend cooking for myself and my family, it is time that is valuable to me, not a chore that I begrudge. My money is important to me, too, and bringing lunch costs me about 1/4 what it would to buy it each day.

Unfortunately, I don't think you could count on steganography. YouTube transcodes, resizes, and manipulates the raw video fifty ways till sunday - whatever information you've stored in the frames could easily be lost or corrupted. What is more, you have to worry about playback problems: dynamic bitrates, dropped frames, and the like. By the time you add in all the checksums, error correcting code, and other data to make the system robust, you'd probably end up with a 10-minute video just to transmit a few hundred bytes of data. You'd do better to do something clever with the subtitles.

Steganography works quite well when you have access to the actual file, preferably in its entirety. This technique might even work under controlled conditions. But I seriously doubt that one could make it work robustly in the real world. (If you want to consider that a challenge and prove me wrong by making it work, by all means.)

A decent amplifier with powered USB fed DAC and a way to provide various horizontal docks for a variety of handheld devices would be cool. I don't really need much beyond that. A tablet with 64 gb or 128 gb solid state storage makes for a decent mobile AV system

Soooooo, you're looking for an iPad and about $50 of accessories to patch it into your car? You could wander down to a big box store and get yourself outfitted today for less than the cost of a typical OEM car stereo.

Take a consumer SSD and put it in a deep freeze to -50C look it still works!

When the 2013 model year cars were being designed 4-5 years ago, consumer SSDs barely existed.

Thank you for bringing in the Blade Runner reference - very appropriate. Take it to its logical conclusion...

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe....All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

More context: [link]

Or, like the owner of my company, occasionally fly his helicopter from home to office.

The liver is used to living at the tail end of the circulatory supply, after all the other organs have gotten their share. Plus, one of its main jobs is detoxifying the blood, so it can put up with higher levels of contaminants in the blood. In other words, if you are testing out an organ-sustaining machine, and you can't guarantee that you can keep the blood pristine, the liver is a pretty good choice for trying things out.

It is good if you can keep it alive, because it keeps it viable for transplant to a dying patient for longer. So keeping the liver alive longer means more people receive transplants, so more people live longer, fuller lives.

Actually, if they could form Cooper pairs, to the point where it becomes superconductive, it would be f&%$ing awesome!

the main problem with household LED lighting is they are made as stupid cheap as possible

Simple solution: don't buy cheap shit. There is good, quality consumer LED products out there; it isn't hard to find them. Stick to products from reputable vendors, have extensive reviews, test results, and certifications. Yes, you'll pay perhaps 2x per bulb. But those bulbs will be far more efficient and will last much longer. Spend the money, then stop worrying for the next decade or two.

Yeah, they say that like everyone knows what a "1 GW power plant" is

Everyone who gives a damn about energy - where it comes from, how much it costs, how we use it and how we can use less - damn well better know how much 1 GW, and how large a 1 GW power plant is. On slashdot, it should be assumed that everyone knows the answer to that question. I would even expect a lot of the general, unwashed masses to know the answer to that, just as I would expect them to know what mileage their car gets, what the cost of a gasoline/diesel is, how many kWh of electricity their home consumed last month, and what they paid for that.

I'm not being a snob or an elitist: I just expect people to know stuff.

The rotating chart is a very efficient means of recording one or more readings continuously without using a huge roll of paper

I am familiar with those (see the last sentence of my first paragraph). Yes, they are efficient in terms of the resulting record (a disc of paper with lots of data on it) and the mechanism (a pair of motors), but few would claim they are all that good in terms of readability. And, I'll note, they all have gridlines printed on them, so that you can actually read the data afterwards. For a dashboard such as Facebook is trying to implement, you don't have those same constraints: you can produce a very readable display just as easily as a crap one.

I wonder what Edward Tufte would have to say about these graphs. Instead of nice orderly graphs with a straightline X and Y axis, they implemented them as circular graphs, on polar axes, where amplitude is radial and time is angle. There is something to be said for "now" always being up at 12 o'clock. Then again, it might have been nice for the "now" to sweep across the face in time with the local hour. The appearance mimics the circular pen plots you might see on old temperature and humidity monitors.

On the other hand, they failed at one of the axioms of data presentation: they didn't provide scale for their axes. The human eye/brain isn't that good at judging radial amplitude, just like it isn't good at discerning logarithmic amplitude (which is why we have log plots: to linearize it). Down in the corner they mention that the circle represents the past 24 hours, but they aren't any graduations on the graph (e.g., 1-hour tick marks). Because the graph represents 24 hours instead of 12, our usual sense of time:angle from analog clocks is off by a factor of two. If you look at it long enough, you can work it out, but a good data representation shouldn't require that. If you hover over a particular measure (e.g., PUE), it'll hide the other traces (a nice touch, perhaps), and will show you the scale minimum and maximum. But, again, because it is a polar plot without gridlines, it's damn near impossible to read and figure out, say, what the PUE was 5 hours ago.

Oh, but wait, they added a cursor, so that you can roll it back to a certain time and get the values. How very clever! I'll bet the 20-year old intern that implemented that got an awesome pat on the back and course credit for industrial design. But it doesn't negate the fact that a good data visualization should be self-evident: you look at it and immediate see what's going on. You shouldn't need to "query" the graph by interacting with it; it should stand alone.

Would an ordinary X-Y plot, with gridlines, really have been that difficult, or cramped their precious design that much?