Myself, I'm looking forward to the time when I can leave the rat-race to the machines, and spend my days engaging in 'back-breaking' agrarian labor on my family farm.
Someone who can afford that much for a single weapon can afford various other extremely effective means of murder.
Side note: From what I've read in news articles and darknet listings, most hitmen charge between $5,000 and $15,000 for a contract killing, and the buyer doesn't have to soil their own hands.
To that end, I was perusing the comments on the NPR page cited in the summary.. you would not believe the sheer volume of people there who seem to believe either A) you can show the gun a picture of someone, and it will go hunt them down all by itself, or B) it's some sort of auto-turret that can be set up in a location and indiscriminately mow down anyone unfortunate enough to step in front of the barrel.
The sad part isn't that people think in such a ridiculous manner; it's the fact morons like that get to vote.
Your novice wouldn't even get a chance to fire, even with this rifle.
Assuming the Secret Service saw the assassin. I suspect camouflage/hiding is at least as important as marksmanship.
You have obviously never been within several miles of an acting US President.
G.W. Bush came to my town once, back in '07 or '08. Even though my workplace was several miles from where the President was giving his speech (we did have line of sight, though), pretty much every venture outdoors was met with a highway patrol chopper hovering a few dozen feet over my head, and several of the men within training rather intimidating looking weapons on where I happened to be standing.
Needless to say, I spent most of that day indoors.
Heck, Reagan came within a hair's breadth of being killed by a guy with a pistol. Sheer luck he didn't die.
NOBODY is getting within arms reach of the President while holding a long rifle, so I doubt that's really a concern in this case.
There are lots of countries where it is common for hunters to sell their game meat to (specialty) stores and restaurants. Just because wherever you live you can't buy game meat in a store, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
Perhaps not, but it does make the "why don't you just go buy game meat" argument moot.
Seriously, NPR needs to stop being subsidized by the taxpayer if they are going to spend this much time and effort carrying water for the gun control lobby.
Hilarious irony: When Bush II was prez, his administration accused NPR of being "too liberal."
To answer your rather silly question, if it's an effective weapon, of course someone will eventually use it to kill someone else since violence is part of human nature. Maybe the first victim will be an innocent child or maybe it'll be a pedophile threatening an innocent child.
At $17-22,000 a piece, I doubt any person who isn't already the enemy of some government will be killed with one of these for a long, long time.
Every artist with any IP on the web should send letters to Canipre, informing them that they will be sued for potential copyright infringement if they do not fork over $7,500 immediately.
In other words, give them a heaping helping of their own medicine.
Alright, well, maybe not diametrically opposed - I suppose you could create a dataset based on the opinions of what all speakers of a particular language consider offensive, cull the list down to just the terms that all surveyed name as offensive, then compare it against a list of existing autocompletion terms... But damn, what a stupid waste of fucking time that would be!
A better plan: Let's all join together and decide, conclusively, that:
Is there an empirical study of the probability of any autocomplete being offensitve in some language?
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess 'no,' based on the simple observation that "being offensive" is purely subjective, and thus diametrically opposed to empirical data.
I suppose the same thing as when you get the evacuation order when your car's gas gauge is at 1/4, and the filling stations are already jammed with mile-long lines of panicking evacuees wiping out all available local fuel reserves.
Ah, I believe the technical term for that is "kiss your ass goodbye."
Hope you can hitch a ride out of town with someone else. At least the hybrid/electric cars won't end up burning through all their fuel idling in the 6-hour traffic jam of everyone leaving town.
A general guess that batteries will continue to improve doesn't seem like an overly "particular" future; true, we might all be back to stone tools and animal skins after the zombie apocalypse.
Not sure if it was intentional or not, but I love how the tone of that sentence basically assumes the zombocalypes to be inevitable.
But a continued slow-and-steady emphasis on rolling out new EV-compatible infrastructure in tandem with the slow-and-steady progress in EV research and availability seems like a decent plan (better than "do nothing whatsoever! fossil fuels forever!") --- it's even useful at every stage along the way (as your articles indicate, EVs aren't perfect for every application today, but they do pretty well in the places they're generally appearing first --- and can continue to spread *where they are useful*), and if it ends up not panning out in the long term to replace all cars, it's still a useful tech for urban commuter scenarios in regions with access to clean electricity.
Fair enough. Plus, as someone else mentioned, there's the underground gearhead world I completely forgot about. Suddenly I'm kinda looking forward to what sort of hacks and performance upgrade we can come up with in our home shops.
heaving a big heavy battery pack onto a big heavy truck frame doesn't seem like an insurmountable technological marvel.
Hmmm.... wonder where I can find some big ass batteries (already have a frame)...
Most of the time, you're going to be charging it at home, overnight. For that, charging stations are unnecessary if you're staying in-range.
Hypothetical situation: You come home after a long (200+ mile) journey, plug in your almost-dead EV, and go watch the news.
Two hours later, an evacuation order comes out and you must leave the county NOW, but your EV only has enough charge to get you to the other side of town. Solution?
Granted, emergency situations are typically few and far between... but they are inevitable, and those are the times you need reliability and expedience the most.
An eight-year warranty isn't "abysmal battery life."
To most people, that's going to depend on cost. If replacing the batteries every 8 years is the same or more than they would have paid for an equivalent IC based vehicle, EV's aren't going to win any fans among the Plebes.
The Supercharger setup comes very close to solving the long-trip problem, though. When you have 200+ miles of electric range and get get 150 more miles for half an hour at a Supercharger (with time to stretch your legs, get a snack, etc.), it's a lot less of a problem.
Sure, when you have access to them, and there's not a line of people waiting to charge up; not a problem today, but we're talking mass adoption. If you think waiting 10 minutes on the slow-ass old man at the gas pump is bad right now, wait til he tries to figure out that new-fangled charger-majiggy, and you're the fourth car back.
If I were in the market for a high-end luxury car, the Model S would be at the top of my list.
To each his own, I always say; were I in the market for a $60,000 - 70,000 ride, I think I'd be leaning more towards one of these bad boys.
Where I'm actually more interested in EVs is as the ultimate flex-fuel vehicle during the energy transition we need to be doing this century. Most people don't drive new cars - it's a horribly wasteful economic investment unless you have a pretty high income. And an old gas car will only ever efficiently burn gas. An old EV though, aftermarket mods that replace most the batteries with a small natural gas generator, or Mr. Fusion, or whatever the compact electric generating system du-jour is and you have a far more environmentally friendly vehicle than an old gas-burner. Even burning gas in a small turbine generator and using batteries as a buffer to provide the extra "oomph" occasionally needed is likely to be a significant improvement. We just need to get large electric motor production to the point that they benefit from the same economies of scale as internal combustion engines and things can start getting interesting.
Huh... I guess I should be ashamed, being a gearhead who never considered the 'aftermarket modification' potential of electric cars...
See, now I'm thinking... do you have any idea what you've done?!?! This can only end badly for the guinea pigs...
Slashdot Mirror
Myself, I'm looking forward to the time when I can leave the rat-race to the machines, and spend my days engaging in 'back-breaking' agrarian labor on my family farm.
Yes, some people actually enjoy such activities.
Someone who can afford that much for a single weapon can afford various other extremely effective means of murder.
Side note: From what I've read in news articles and darknet listings, most hitmen charge between $5,000 and $15,000 for a contract killing, and the buyer doesn't have to soil their own hands.
So... yea.
Agreed, lots of FUD on this one.
To that end, I was perusing the comments on the NPR page cited in the summary.. you would not believe the sheer volume of people there who seem to believe either A) you can show the gun a picture of someone, and it will go hunt them down all by itself, or B) it's some sort of auto-turret that can be set up in a location and indiscriminately mow down anyone unfortunate enough to step in front of the barrel.
The sad part isn't that people think in such a ridiculous manner; it's the fact morons like that get to vote.
Your novice wouldn't even get a chance to fire, even with this rifle.
Assuming the Secret Service saw the assassin. I suspect camouflage/hiding is at least as important as marksmanship.
You have obviously never been within several miles of an acting US President.
G.W. Bush came to my town once, back in '07 or '08. Even though my workplace was several miles from where the President was giving his speech (we did have line of sight, though), pretty much every venture outdoors was met with a highway patrol chopper hovering a few dozen feet over my head, and several of the men within training rather intimidating looking weapons on where I happened to be standing.
Needless to say, I spent most of that day indoors.
Heck, Reagan came within a hair's breadth of being killed by a guy with a pistol. Sheer luck he didn't die.
NOBODY is getting within arms reach of the President while holding a long rifle, so I doubt that's really a concern in this case.
There are lots of countries where it is common for hunters to sell their game meat to (specialty) stores and restaurants. Just because wherever you live you can't buy game meat in a store, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
Perhaps not, but it does make the "why don't you just go buy game meat" argument moot.
That's pretty normal when you shoot a deer. They seldom just drop dead right on the spot.
This.
I once detonated a deer's heart with a single shot, and still had to chase the rat bastard a hundred yards into the brambles.
Seriously, NPR needs to stop being subsidized by the taxpayer if they are going to spend this much time and effort carrying water for the gun control lobby.
Hilarious irony: When Bush II was prez, his administration accused NPR of being "too liberal."
He was wrong, too.
In the last school shooting it was the mother's insufficiently secured guns that were used.
Is that verified? Because thus far, I've heard at least 3 contradictory stories about how he accessed the weapons.
To answer your rather silly question, if it's an effective weapon, of course someone will eventually use it to kill someone else since violence is part of human nature. Maybe the first victim will be an innocent child or maybe it'll be a pedophile threatening an innocent child.
At $17-22,000 a piece, I doubt any person who isn't already the enemy of some government will be killed with one of these for a long, long time.
Every artist with any IP on the web should send letters to Canipre, informing them that they will be sued for potential copyright infringement if they do not fork over $7,500 immediately.
In other words, give them a heaping helping of their own medicine.
How on earth do they manage to sell this bullshit to politicians and sponsors?
http://www.bullshitbingo.net/cards/bullshit/
How do you know you're not trapped inside a computer right now?
2 reasons:
1 - no respawn
2 - my cat won't respond to regular expressions
How do you know it isn't already?
OOooooooo! Spooky!
This is why I regularly thank my toaster.
As a former Catholic and current Humanist minister, I applaud and thank you for not being one of those hypocritical d-bags.
If you favorite plant was so good, then why doesn't industry use it?
... There is no conspiracy with industry. It's just ignorant politicians listening to ignorant people
I do so love it when people answer their own questions.
Considering the high rate of violent, non-gun-related crime, I don't think "sensible" is a word I would use to describe the situation.
Nice try, though.
You seem not to be aware that words can have multiple meanings.
Sure - there's the actual meaning, then the one that bigotted douche-bags come up.
Hence the reason I can't use the term "niggardly" in polite company; Racist assholes ruined it.
For the boys, hitch a ride with your older siblings; threaten to rat them out to mom and dad if they get shitty about it.
For the girls... well, I suppose the same way 16-year-old girls have always gotten into the pubs... fake IDs and waaaaay too much makeup.
Alright, well, maybe not diametrically opposed - I suppose you could create a dataset based on the opinions of what all speakers of a particular language consider offensive, cull the list down to just the terms that all surveyed name as offensive, then compare it against a list of existing autocompletion terms... But damn, what a stupid waste of fucking time that would be!
A better plan: Let's all join together and decide, conclusively, that:
A) No one has a right to be offended, and
B) No harm == no foul
Seems a lot more practical.
Is there an empirical study of the probability of any autocomplete being offensitve in some language?
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess 'no,' based on the simple observation that "being offensive" is purely subjective, and thus diametrically opposed to empirical data.
I suppose the same thing as when you get the evacuation order when your car's gas gauge is at 1/4, and the filling stations are already jammed with mile-long lines of panicking evacuees wiping out all available local fuel reserves.
Ah, I believe the technical term for that is "kiss your ass goodbye."
Hope you can hitch a ride out of town with someone else. At least the hybrid/electric cars won't end up burning through all their fuel idling in the 6-hour traffic jam of everyone leaving town.
One of the many reasons to own an enduro bike
A general guess that batteries will continue to improve doesn't seem like an overly "particular" future; true, we might all be back to stone tools and animal skins after the zombie apocalypse.
Not sure if it was intentional or not, but I love how the tone of that sentence basically assumes the zombocalypes to be inevitable.
But a continued slow-and-steady emphasis on rolling out new EV-compatible infrastructure in tandem with the slow-and-steady progress in EV research and availability seems like a decent plan (better than "do nothing whatsoever! fossil fuels forever!") --- it's even useful at every stage along the way (as your articles indicate, EVs aren't perfect for every application today, but they do pretty well in the places they're generally appearing first --- and can continue to spread *where they are useful*), and if it ends up not panning out in the long term to replace all cars, it's still a useful tech for urban commuter scenarios in regions with access to clean electricity.
Fair enough. Plus, as someone else mentioned, there's the underground gearhead world I completely forgot about. Suddenly I'm kinda looking forward to what sort of hacks and performance upgrade we can come up with in our home shops.
heaving a big heavy battery pack onto a big heavy truck frame doesn't seem like an insurmountable technological marvel.
Hmmm.... wonder where I can find some big ass batteries (already have a frame)...
Most of the time, you're going to be charging it at home, overnight. For that, charging stations are unnecessary if you're staying in-range.
Hypothetical situation: You come home after a long (200+ mile) journey, plug in your almost-dead EV, and go watch the news.
Two hours later, an evacuation order comes out and you must leave the county NOW, but your EV only has enough charge to get you to the other side of town. Solution?
Granted, emergency situations are typically few and far between... but they are inevitable, and those are the times you need reliability and expedience the most.
An eight-year warranty isn't "abysmal battery life."
To most people, that's going to depend on cost. If replacing the batteries every 8 years is the same or more than they would have paid for an equivalent IC based vehicle, EV's aren't going to win any fans among the Plebes.
The Supercharger setup comes very close to solving the long-trip problem, though. When you have 200+ miles of electric range and get get 150 more miles for half an hour at a Supercharger (with time to stretch your legs, get a snack, etc.), it's a lot less of a problem.
Sure, when you have access to them, and there's not a line of people waiting to charge up; not a problem today, but we're talking mass adoption. If you think waiting 10 minutes on the slow-ass old man at the gas pump is bad right now, wait til he tries to figure out that new-fangled charger-majiggy, and you're the fourth car back.
If I were in the market for a high-end luxury car, the Model S would be at the top of my list.
To each his own, I always say; were I in the market for a $60,000 - 70,000 ride, I think I'd be leaning more towards one of these bad boys.
Where I'm actually more interested in EVs is as the ultimate flex-fuel vehicle during the energy transition we need to be doing this century. Most people don't drive new cars - it's a horribly wasteful economic investment unless you have a pretty high income. And an old gas car will only ever efficiently burn gas. An old EV though, aftermarket mods that replace most the batteries with a small natural gas generator, or Mr. Fusion, or whatever the compact electric generating system du-jour is and you have a far more environmentally friendly vehicle than an old gas-burner. Even burning gas in a small turbine generator and using batteries as a buffer to provide the extra "oomph" occasionally needed is likely to be a significant improvement. We just need to get large electric motor production to the point that they benefit from the same economies of scale as internal combustion engines and things can start getting interesting.
Huh... I guess I should be ashamed, being a gearhead who never considered the 'aftermarket modification' potential of electric cars...
See, now I'm thinking... do you have any idea what you've done?!?! This can only end badly for the guinea pigs...
No, I'm 6'5"
Then you would be thin.
If you think 160 lbs is undernourishment, you've never actually been malnourished.