No problem. Keep enough cash on hand to cover the damages caused by any car or boat accident, rebuild your home, enrich your beneficiaries if you die (I recommend saying "screw 'em, I don't think it's a good idea to be worth more dead than alive"), pay cash for all your health, dental, and vision needs, pay for your pets (what, is there some moron who actually buys pet insurance?), cover your own (and your bank's, if you don't own your house outright) losses in the event of a flood, etc. Me, I don't have enough money to provide that kind of reserves, but maybe you do.

There's lots of things one can lay at the feet of lawyers, but almost none of these qualifies.

My mistake.

I didn't mention left-wingers. But now that you bring it up, I would have said that most left-wingers would at least "have a fucking clue" that Hillary Clinton didn't work for the government any more, that John Kerry was Secretary of State now They might say "there isn't any difference, he's just the same", but that's not the same as not knowing.

But ok, you're just some random nonpolitical idiot who doesn't have a clue.

Don't go confusing the rightwingers with facts. If they actually had any facts, they'd be insufferable.

Also from The Pirate Bay.

This wasn't just a publicity stunt by DefDist, was it?

Yeah, that was my initial response, "isn't "patent expert Florian Mueller" an oxymoron? IIRC that's the guy who claimed the GPL was a "source of infection", and Oracle was going to clean Google's clock. Over at groklaw that name tends to be associated with phrases such as "self-described patent expert" and "on Microsoft's payroll". He was also on Oracle's payroll.

The point was, the wikipedia article you cited did not support your claim, it showed that the numbers in Australia (where the baseline measurement was rather low to begin with) are poorly understood.

Wierd. Right after the word "state." in the part you quoted, it said that it reduced homicides similarly. Guess you missed that.

FWIW, I agree with you on suicides. But it would be much safer for everyone around you if you could go to the pharmacy and purchase a cyanide cap, to be consumed only on the premises (so you didn't take it home to poison someone else). I'm thinking that, even if they had to provide a little annex for you to occupy and a free can of pop to wash it down, it would still be cheaper than a gun, and certainly less hazardous to those around you.

I don't know whether reducing the accessibility of guns reduces murders, it's entirely possible that if you sit down and think "I'm determined to kill Bill, but how?" you'll find a way, even if it's not as easy as a gun. But I'm pretty sure that it reduces homicides. I'd expect that it would reduce unplanned, spur-of-the-moment, and accidental killings, killings by small children, etc. by a lot.

If the party doesn't have access to a gun, there may well be no "crime of passion". It's really a lot harder to kill someone with a baseball bat than it is to squeeze a trigger. You may well stop at some point short of completion and say, "shit, I didn't mean to do that".

From that article, "cut firearm suicides by 74%... no evidence of substitution of method of suicide in any state. The estimated effect on firearm homicides was of similar magnitude but less precise". Other studies found no effect or were inconclusive. So I don't think you can say it is "evidenced".

How about "deaths by firearm"? What percentage of those have criminal records? Indeed, note that the accused perp of the Boston Marathon killings had no criminal record. But if it is true, it blows a hole in the argument that people need guns to protect themselves. At least, if they're not in gangs.

I'm trying to think of some category of murder that's not "crime-related", including crimes of passion. Nope, I'm drawing a blank, unless you're only talking about suicide (which I don't count as murder)..

You mean, culture that is more than 70 years out of date?

They could indeed respond to the DMCA request and get their stuff put back up. But then, potentially, lawyers get involved. And when lawyers get involved, it gets very very expensive. Maybe the EFF or the ACLU will take your case, but they don't have the staff or money (donate today!) to take every case, so they might not be able to, in which case you'll have to hire your own.

Yep, periodically I have to use AUTORUNS and stomp that stuff out. There is no earthly reason why a program that I run once every month or so should be constantly eating any RAM or CPU. I can live with it taking 20s more to start once a month, but I don't want it to be adding that 20s to every boot sequence.

Yes, brain bubble, sorry. Neutral. (Which is normally grounded at the panel.) In the US, 131v is alarmingly high for line voltage, no matter when the house was electrified.

If you're spiking to 131V, you may have a bad (house or pole) ground. With a good ground the voltage should never be above nominal (110-120, depending on you local utility). With a bad ground, worst case is 2X nominal (if the ground doesn't function at all), which is very dangerous.

The minimum number of write cycles seems to be around 10K, and could be 1M or more (depending on type of memory). If you have the least durable flash, and turn your phone off once a day, that's 27 years. (Most people don't seem to ever turn their phone off.) What do you suppose the service lifetime of the average phone is? 3 years?

Sort of. A $15 HD/USB adapter works, though it slows the process down some. But it's not as if you have to stay there and supervise it.

This is true. For whatever reason, for me HDs that are smaller than 1G don't seem to hook up to USB very well, either.