Now that you mention it -- where are the templates to 3D-print ammunition that matches the 3D-printed gun??

Yeah, the challenge was to get the damned thing to the point where you COULD twiddle it at all!! I'd barely gotten it installed and moments later it proceeded to take half an hour (no shit) to crash. One piece at a time. I'd never seen the like. But someone had just handed me 98Lite so I thought what the hell, can't break it worse, and then I noticed that it tended to hang during heavy disk activity during startup... and that was when SysRestore's files were timestamped. Applied the one, killed the other, end of problems.

I don't blame folks for hating it, cuz you don't expect to have to bang on it right out of the box just to get it to finish booting up!

My old WinME machine (which was my testing and media box, so it worked fairly hard) ran for two YEARS without a crash, and it regularly ran months at a time without so much as a reboot. My secret? Apply 98Lite in default mode, and turn off System Restore (which at that point was dreadfully buggy). It went from being unable to even crash properly, to 100% stable, just like that. -- It did have good stable hardware and drivers, which of course helps a lot.

[The same box subsequently dual-booted WinXP, and was rebooted 3 times in 8 years -- once to twiddle the hardware, twice for power outages beyond the UPS's capacity.]

WinME did something I've not seen any other OS do: when presented with a driver disk that didn't include WinME drivers, it would root thru 'em til it found one it deemed correct, and it would *work*.

I will say WinME had shitty memory management compared to other Windows, and I wonder how much was the poor DOS foundation (it prohibited any sort of high memory management). It could be run out of resources at about the same level of "hard work" as Win3.1x. Wouldn't crash, but things like fonts stopped working, indicating an exhausted resource heap.

This is so weird to be reading today... yesterday I was writing along on my SF epic, and decided to throw a side character into a vat of skunky beer. So I had to go research exactly what it was. Had an interesting hour or so reading about the qualities of different containers and hops.

WTF? Last time I checked the commodities market, barley was $100/ton and corn was $400/ton.

In my observation, the average grunt cop is intelligent enough, but incredibly narrow-minded. We're the cops, and everyone else are potential perps, to put it in a nutshell. Misuse of intelligence, one might call it.

I'd rephrase this slightly...

"If you want congressmen to take your opinion seriously, you need to speak in the only language they understand... campaign contributions."

I have no idea, but why are they needed at all? Can't the staff at any high school compile a set of basic competency tests entirely from their existing tests? Simplify a set of finals or suchlike??

Which would also mean anyone wanting a GED could simply hie themselves to the nearest HS, take the test, and 'graduate' on the spot.

Exactly my own observation re the 'progressive left'. Only difference seems to be that they've created their own religion, while the right inherited theirs.

climate change -> climate denialism -> conservative politics -> gun policy -> Godwin

'Zac'ly... and last time the OhNoes of polar ice went around, someone pointed out that there was no less ice than before; rather, it had just moved around, as it normally does. So... it depends entirely where you measure it. Measure it where it wasn't last year and is this year, and suddenly you can show a vast increase in the amount of polar ice. Do the reverse and you can show that it's disappearing.

Kinda like measuring the depth of the ocean over a sandbar.

We have always been at war with global warming.

You can make an effective explosive from propane mixed with liquid ammonia. The question is how much you can drag along before someone says, as noted above, "Why are you carrying a bunch of gallon jugs??"

[Some years ago my neighbor's travel trailer turned into a small bomb from both the gas and fridge systems leaking at the same time. Flattened the trailer, the garage, and a row of mature pines. 'Course, that probably involved 10 gallons of propane, a bit much for carry-on luggage.]

When I was in the 6th grade, I made a bow-and-arrow from two ballpoint pen refills, a straight pin, and a rubber band. Imagine my astonishment when I shot it and my improvised "arrow" flew across the whole classroom and embedded itself in the drywall.

Now imagine a whole army of ballpoint-archer terrorists. ;)

Remember when going out to the airport, parking at the end of the runway, and watching the planes was a popular spectator sport? (Well, at least for those of us old enough that commercial airliners were a novelty...)

Now, you'd barely get parked and get your binoculars out, and the SWAT team would descend on you.