Indeed, I've bought 2 separate sets of lock picks on Amazon. Prime eligible, even. Perfectly legal to own and use in my state, so long as I don't have criminal intent. I've even used them on a fire safe a coworker lost the key to years ago.

I've also toyed with the idea of learning at least basic gunsmithing, to do more than just basic maintenance on my perfectly legal collection of guns (and finally fix one that keeps misfeeding).

Uh, yeah, I did this in the 80s and 90s as a pre-teen and teen, during the summer months. Hell, even into college it wasn't unusual. It's a little harder now, though weekends are a wildcard (this Memorial Day weekend, I think the earliest I went to sleep was about 6am). It's a bit easier these days, with the internet, but between dialup and writing code back then (with whatever stations didn't go off the air at night), it was certainly possible to keep occupied.

I lived and died, and lived again over 25 years of enduring the thunderdromes that are the Washington DC beltway and Rt. 267 in northern Virginia. It got so bad that, at one point, I took a hiatus from work for 2 years to enjoy life outside of 2 hour-each-way commutes that covered distances that in no traffic at 3am on a Sunday morning would take 25 minutes to do, tops - just to spend my time in an open office floor plan with two monitors in front me displaying stuff that the two monitors that I already had at home could do just as well. Since then, I've committed to be a remote work-from-home type and, on the balance, I much prefer it. There is no commute to dread and the stress and frustration it breeds, my car insurance is much lower, my car will last longer and costs less to gas up and maintain, and I'm home to have dinner with my wife and kids every. single. day.

Yeah, sometimes I do miss the social interaction that the office brings and, up until COVID19 hit the landscape, I was seriously considering trying out a nearby low-key co-working space once a week to see if that brought any benefits in that category of life. But you know, that's also what weekends are for, or nights out. This Microsoftie seems to errantly think that work IS life, which is kind of the #1 reason people are waking up and don't want to put up with that bullsh*t anymore.

Google ads don't hog bandwidth or CPU. They're reasonably sized static images or text content.
So, no, there's no exception for Google ads. But it wouldn't change anything if there were

This was true in 2005. It is no longer so.

I hate to break this to you, but... Linksys has been owned by Belkin since 2013... Somewhat coincidentally, I stopped recommending or buying Linksys gear sometime around 2013... Mostly went with TP-Link gear supported by OpenWRT, but eventually grew tired of trying to find the stuff that was supported, whether or not I had to first downgrade the firmware, install DD-WRT, and *then* install OpenWRT, with somewhat flaky radios.

And I think we're there.

You think we're there? What cringeworthy, random, flailing act on the part of this administration can you possibly point to to make that claim? Contact tracing depends upon one very important datum - knowing exactly where the disease is and is not at any given point in time. Given that the goal thus far has been to block access to testing in order to keep the confirmed case count down, how could you possibly assert that it's even possible to know this?

And even if you managed to get that far, all you'd do is meaningfully establish where the starting blocks are. To characterize anything Trump has done as an effort comparable to the Apollo or Mahatten(sic) projects is an exaggeration on par with Caligula claiming to have conquered England after some legionaries whacked some reeds with their swords.

We will know if GM built a bettter car battery in 8 years or so. I am sort of dubious, because it's more like your cell phone battery than a lithium car battery. It uses cobalt. GM brags that their EV battery uses less cobalt "than other EV batteries", but Tesla uses none. We know that Tesla batteries last. It will take a while to know that about GM batteries.

Musk is great. He took a lot of things that everyone knew about and nobody would dare to do, and made them work from a business perspective. We need lots more people like that.

Blast wind: At the explosion site, a vacuum is created by the rapid outward movement of the blast. This vacuum will almost immediately refill itself with the surrounding atmosphere. This creates a very strong pull on any nearby person or structural surface after the initial push effect of the blast has been delivered. As this void is refilled, it creates a high-intensity wind that causes fragmented objects, glass and debris to be drawn back in toward the source of the explosion.

Here. I found several on the web with a single search.

I would think that welds are quite chaotic in nature. The heat changes the crystal structure of the steel, the welds are not uniform, etc.

Steel is really complicated stuff. It's a matrix of iron alloy and hard nonmetallic crystals like carbides. The iron alloy can have five different crystal structures, and can transition between them through heating - which welding does. There is also thermal stress from welding, which you can relax by annealing, but annealing the entire vehicle is not practical.