There's a corollary to rule I:
Even if you just watched your friend unload and clear the chamber, the ammo fairies will have reloaded the gun before he handed it to you. It is STILL LOADED.

As an aside, the worst butchers of the English language are Indians (like, from India). I can only assume that this is somehow in retaliation for the hundred plus years of British rule. I once started grammar checking one of their documents and very quickly had more red ink than text.

C# has the added benefit (for a Windows Admin) of being able to easily import and manipulate COM+ objects. Basically if it can be automated in Windows there's a COM+ API for it somewhere. Excel sheets, databases, you name it. Plus if you need .NET or actual Win32 API (*shudder*) you can hack that in too. Double plus added bonus: C# is syntactically similar to Java so if you need to go all platform independent on something a lot of the concepts will transfer nicely.

Umm...that "small" .223 with all that powder behind it will absolutely redmist a groundhog, squirrel or similar small game. They're more reasonably used for small deer, coyotes, wolves, and maybe down as small as foxes. Now a standard .22LR (or hell, even a short .22, if you're using a lever action instead of a semi-auto) is your basic small game gun. Close in size, *vast* differences in muzzle velocity.

A couple of things about your points:

1) Fuck you. Asperger's is not the root cause here. Most Aspies and Autisics are completely non-violent

2) Agreed, that was dumb.

3) I do still blame the nut for pulling the trigger, but the mom definitely had a responsibility to secure her weapons and failed to do so. Still the bulk of the blame is on the psycho for his own actions.

We're not so far off the mark though. 65%-70% of gun deaths in this country are by suicide, and your are 5x as likely to die in a car accident than be killed by someone else with a gun.

In all fairness, he did say Adobe Acrobat (the expensive PDF maker), not Adobe Acrobat Reader (which is free and only reads them). If you're actually generating content then you may very well start with a blank file and run Acrobat from the icon.

Which would be all well and good if I could stay on the fucking desktop and pick which program to run next. The start menu was seamless in this respect. Bringing up the metro menu is a non-option (far too jarring). So my options are a). 3rd party software to hack back in the same functionality I used to have for free b). clutter the hell out of my desktop/quick launch/taskbar or c). shut up and eat the shit Microsoft is shoveling at us.

Also, it's a complete non-starter in enterprise environments for the very simple fact that new apps only appear on the Metro screen of the person who installed them. So if a tech installs, say, Microsoft Office, then only the tech gets the Office app tiles in Metro. Everybody else has to know that Office was installed, go to all apps, pin it *one by one* onto their Metro screen and fix up their UI before they can use the app. That's not as big a deal for dedicated computers, I guess (though training 1000+ users on how to do that would be a clusterfuck of epic proportions), but on shared computers especially it would be hell. Unless a service pack or update fixes this colossal screwup by Microsoft, I won't be able to recommend Win8 to our company...ever.

Shamelessly stealing from another post in another thread:

Well that's the thing. They're appointed for life so there's very little congress or the president could do to impact them. Theoretically they could be impeached, though that's only actually been done once (in 1805, and he was acquitted by the senate). To actually remove the justice in question from office forcibly would require 2/3's of the senate to agree on it. Unless the justice in question has gone completely off the reservation, good luck with that. No, of all political offices in the land, that of Supreme Court Justice is among the most secure. It's by design so that they can render unpopular, but impartial, decisions without fear of retribution.

My favorite was on my Android when I was sending a message to a co-worker named "Veronica" and it auto-corrected to "Erotica".

Luckily this is on the decline, though since 2000 it's bubbled up a bit. Still, going from 1 in 100 (!!!!!!!!!) to 1-2 in 10,000 is pretty decent.

Okay, there's two things going on here. You're assuming confidentiality only when encryption is perfectly capable of providing both confidentiality and integrity. Basically with encryption (if you do it right) you can assure both that the enemy cannot use your signal *and* that the signal you got as legitimately sent from your outer space transmitter.

Of course you could potentially jam the military signal, though Frequency-Hopping Spread Spectrum tends to make this...challenging. So you have an encrypted channel being transmitted at hundreds of different frequency bands that even if you had the encryption keys (good luck) you would still have to have a broad spectrum transmitter in perfect sync with the receivers (even harder) in order to spoof military equipment. This is not your standard civilian swill that you're dealing with.

Protip: the military built the system with the idea in mind that the people they are shooting at would try to fuck it up.

Eventually the moon will replace Florida as *the ultimate* retirement community. It's really only a matter of getting cheap propulsion systems, and then everything else falls into place. If a trip to the moon can be reduced to the cost of, say, 5x a roundtrip cross-country flight, then infrastructure will start to be built, communities set up, regular freight traffic (space truckers!) and then people by their thousands migrating there. Close enough to home but with 1/6 the gravity (and fewer falling injuries, bonus). It's the perfect place to retire to, once the infrastructure gets there.

I'm hoping this happens in the next 40ish years so I can spend my final days there.

Well, that and it's also generally damaging to the self-esteem of the women involved in the trade. They tend to have much higher depression rates and negative self-image vs. women who are not prostitutes.