About three years ago in Colorado Springs, three drunk teenagers broke into the home of a 93 year old man and his wife. The teenagers were all swinging baseball bats and tire irons. The 93 year old male pulled out a Colt .45 ACP fired one warning shot and then drilled the first kid in the chest, one-shot. Great. The other two advanced, and hit his arm with the bat. At that point, his aim was no longer ideal. He took four more shots to get one in the arm of the attacker, then a second round that disabled him. At this point the third attacker fled, and he fired one more shot that grazed the buttocks of the third attacker. Police, called by the wife at the start of the attack, took 4 minutes to arrive. They followed the blood drops to the third attacker who was arrested.

Total rounds fired: 8
Rounds remaining: 2 or 3 (not sure if he had a chamber + 10, or just the 10 in the mag)

Had the third attacker continued to press, he would have had a chance to drop them. The three attackers were later linked to another home invasion where they had beaten an 80+ year old couple to death after repeatedly raping the wife. Your three round limit would have ensured two more dead victims, and only one dead attacker.

If you limit weapons to three rounds, all you ensure is that home-invasion teams will start having at least four members.

This is interesting, but will this tell us if his brain is truly different from any other physicist, mathematician? Before we go making any pronouncements, I think we should do a little more research into people of his profession.

To each his own and different strokes makes the world go 'round, etc. But I found the first half of Anathem incredibly good and the second half (once they left the Math) much less exciting. Part of that may be because I'm a fan and amateur student of philosophy.

Two things. First, a three year old doesn't have to unlearn years of expectations of a system acting a certain way. Second, what a three year old is trying to accomplish on a PC might be just slightly different from the purposes of a typical business user.

When it doesn't even burn at arm's length? You're an idiot.

No, it would take evidence that these are actually a problem beyond a few alarmists over-reacting when they see a green light. The optics in a hand-held laser are cheap and even with good optics, no laser beam lacks divergence. The laser I use for pointing out stars to my son spreads about ten centimeters for every 100 meters. By the time such a beam would hit a cockpit, it could easily spread to over a meter across and anyone seeing it would be exposed to 1/1000th the brightness of looking directly into the beam at arm's length.

This is just the latest technophobe scare story. No different than worries about x-rays from color televisions, behavior effects of video games, gangs hanging out at arcades, etc.

Yooo-hooo! Mr. DHS officer? Yeah, I think this guy knows BlueStrat.

Personally, I think I'd prefer to let a few people get fake IDs now and then rather than force all of us who need ID to drive to put up with a facial recognition system. I promise you this will find more and more uses in a "post-9/11 world" where bureaucrats fall over themselves to grab more control.

Okay ... I'm getting up and moving to a seat a little farther away from BlueStrat.

What's that? No, no, I don't know that guy. Never saw him before in my life.

That same article states:

"Yes, 35.8 percent of children in the study have lumps or cysts, but this is not the same as cancer," said Naomi Takagi, an associate professor at Fukushima University Medical School Hospital, which administered the tests.

"We do not know that cause of this, but it is hard to believe that is due to the effects of radiation," she said. "This is an early test and we will only see the effects of radiation exposure after four or five years."

I've already demonstrated elsewhere in this thread that it's not "two cents a month". That's a number you've pulled firmly out your backside. The real number is somewhere between $0.60 and nearly $5 a month, depending on whose numbers you take as gospel. It's also been three days since this happened. I can guarantee you haven't gotten your next bill yet to see whether or not DirecTV *has* cut your billing.

It amazes me how you blame everything here on DirecTV, who is a distributor of goods, and not on the manufacturer of those goods that is demanding an increase in prices. Do you expect the grocery store to eat the cost when the price of milk goes up from the distributor?

You point out that DirecTV wants to make a profit as if that were some horrible thing. Ask yourself how much profit they have to make to pay to launch a $2B satellite so you can watch Sponge Bob? And then you want them to have redundancy, so it's not just one satellite but two or three. And then everyone wants their local channels available, so it's not 200 channels, it's 2000 or more. Each satellite only has so much capacity. And when you reach that limit, it's another $2B to add the next channel. These aren't minor costs, and they can't pass those costs on to the customer. That's *their* cost of doing business. The only cost they can control at all is how much they pay to the suppliers for content to rebroadcast. And you criticize them for doing that.

You expect a company to "absorb the costs". Hey, great idea, let's do that to all companies out there. You know, it costs more to make a car now than in 1903, when cars cost $800. You should go in to your local dealership and tell them they should "absorb the cost" of the increases from their suppliers. It's only fair, right? Heck, when I was a kid in the 70's cars were under $3000, and that's like a promise to me, so they should sell me a car at the cost it was when I was born, right?

Get real, it's not a rental contract. They wrote into the contract that they will pass on substantial cost increases to the consumer. Go get your contract, read it. It's in there. You signed it. Tough luck.

And, yes, if they can't resolve the issue with Viacom, then they should offer a rate reduction of between $1.20 and $10 per month (see calculations in another message) which is the cost of the Viacom channels. I expect if they truly reach an impasse, that's what they'll do.

Fine, let's take the lowball of $144M. DirecTV has a well-known number of customers, namely 20,000,000. Viacom's channels are part of core programming, so everyone gets them. We divide $144M by 20M and we get $7.20 per subscriber per year. Okay, easy enough, that's a $0.60 per month increase, matching Viacom's claim of "pennies" per month. (60 pennies is still less than a dollar.)

DirecTV is putting a dollar figure on all their scrolls, a number I haven't seen Viacom deny. That number is $1,000,000,000 per year. Dividing by number of customers, that's $50 per customer, per year, or about $4.25 per month increase in the bill. Guess what, 425 pennies is still "pennies" per month.

If we go with your estimate of splitting the difference, it's $20 per year, and $1.75 per month. Again, if you want to stretch the term, it's still "pennies per month."

Now, if DirecTV is lying about the $1B number, why is Viacom not shouting "Liar Liar!" from the rooftops and giving out the real number instead? All they give us is "pennies per month" which describes absolutely *nothing* in terms of actual cost, other than greater than $0.01, since it's plural.

Both sides are using semantics. One is using them to defend my wallet, the other to pick my pocket. I know which side I'm naturally going to come down on.

So, you would prefer that DirecTV simply accept any rate increase of the content provider and pass them on to you? So, the $1B increase ($50/year/subscriber) should just be passed on to you? Like Viacom says, "it's only pennies a day."

And once that precedent is set, when Disney want's another $5 a month, and HBO does, and every other network, and your bill goes to $400 a month, will you vent your anger at the content providers or will you scream at DirecTV for not attempting to argue with the content providers to maintain a fair rate?

I'm no fanboi of DirecTV (although I do have it) but I'd rather they fought against a price increase even if it means temporarily losing channels, rather than tagging another $5 a month onto my bill.