Yeah, but consider: most IT people, to the best of my knowledge, aren't talking about "Metro".
They're talking about how fucking useless "Windows 8's UI" will be, and how they're installing Linux on all their personal machines. They're hoping Valve gets linux gaming underway RFQ.
This is just Microsoft's attempt at truthiness in marketing.
If they'd done that, they'd have found out that it's actually a Unity-meets-Windows3.1 style.
They even implemented a feature we haven't seen much of for the last couple years that many users were sure to miss from the Windows 2000 and earlier XP days - many more clicks are required to Get Shit Done (except it's intentional instead of happenstance to poor security, this time).
Word has it they say W8 was designed using the Tootsierollpop Philosophy, internally.
Apple is the new Microsoft and Microsoft is the new Apple.
Apple is making money hand over fist, quarter after quarter. They have the 'desirable' products which everyone wants and clamors for, and nobody really seems to care that the 'added functionality' of the new products is mostly glam shoved on top of poop, with no concrete improvements or functionality: it's mostly just window dressing. Welcome to Microsoft, circa mid- to late 1990s.
Microsoft is languishing and slowly losing market share to their competitors. They can't focus. Their products are stuck in a slow, grinding revision process with everything good and/or desirable about their products being phased out for the Big New. They've started to stagnate, and people see their products as commodity - you have them because you need them, not necessarily because they're superior or desirable. All of their changes are seen as regressions by the loyal and technically savvy. Welcome to Apple, late 1990s.
In terms of input devices, we're at a point where gaming consoles threaten general purpose computers for "better, more complex input devices". How fucked is that?
Interesting, but most of the construction looks non-functional and aesthetic - like the hands, for instance. It does not look sturdy enough to serve as a riot suppression device, nevermind anything serious.
Bubba with a mig welder, an old Asian cab-over-engine mini-bus type van, a junked Caterpillar frontend loader, and the frame from a US truck could probably make something similarly aesthetic which is actually able to perform work. Betcha it'd be more fun to pilot, too.
It'd certainly be fun to pilot, but what large machinery isn't? For a million dollars, you could build something quite comparable on your own.
Hell, for a bit more than a couple months of training and knowing the right people, you can get paid to operate heavy machinery which has much more capability.
Also I like to go out and drive in an empty parking lot during the first snow or ice storm just to refresh my memory of how things behave and handle in crappy weather.
Absolutely. I do this, too - I'll get up a couple hours early and go to a nearby telco parking lot and spin around, basically testing the vehicle/driver limits.
The worst, IMO, is when there's light snow all night long, so in the morning you've got a 'powder' of 1-2 inches. But it starts while the ground is >32F and the first oh, 1/4" or so is melted on darker or smoother surfaces (like blacktop). So people drive along and stop a couple times, and there's no ice under the snow. Then they hit blacktop and accidents start happening due to a complete lack of expectation.
Thankfully, here in SD, people tend to be less of idiots when the weather gets bad and we don't usually have anything more than the occasional fender bender. I've jumped the curb and intentionally run into things like light poles (at low speeds - no damage just a jolt) when people do something stupid like pull out right in front. Overall, I'd rather be passed @ 10-20mph than hit someone because I'm going to fast.
I've had a couple "sliding 20-30 feet at 5mph" situations when the ice gets really unexpectedly bad. That's a bit terrifying, 4wd or otherwise. It makes you wish you put the chains on.
Sounds like you've got a nice Jeep. I was looking for an i6 Jeep a while back but decided I needed more back seat space (Cherokee isn't wide enough for 3x car seats; a bench in the back of a Blazer is). With the 6.2l diesel in the Blazer, I get the same low-end torque due to my gearing (low, not 100% sure on the ratio but much over 75mph makes her scream) and engine speed. Even the newer FWD mini-sedans, like a Focus, have too much torque for icy roads.
I did miss that - in part because this is Slashdot, which has a certain demographic, and is somewhat prone to "that makes sense, except the opposite" type arguments.
(One of the posts parent to your own was arguing that simply allowing firearm ownership was tyrannical because it forced a violent implement upon people within society who didn't want to believe such things exist - or some such nonsense. I wasn't sure if you were on the same line of thinking.)
Outside the context of 'crazy' you made perfect sense.
By all means, stop funding the NYPD. But make it legal for people to defend themselves at the same time (which it currently is not, in NYC or the greater NYS).
If you didn't have the spectre of "protecting" the people hanging over your head, there isn't a justification for a large police force. Even with the huge influx of illegal aliens and drugs, cities like Austin, Houston, Dallas, and Pheonix have a distinctly lower crime rate and smaller police force than somewhere like LA or NYC - because the criminals are afraid of being killed in the commission of a crime.
On the job work hazards have a way of making people avoid a career.
Most of the time when a gun is used to defend against crime it is not discharged
Or reported. Half of the US populace owns a gun - do the math. By population, most Americans now live in cities or states (NY, NJ, CA, IL) where firearm ownership is all but illegal unless you're highly connected and have a lot of money. Many guns pass under the radar as previous generations die - grandads guns get redistributed to the grandkids or children.
If it's illegal to own a gun, you're not going to call the cops when you scare someone out of your house with a gun. There's no fucking way you can explain that. Sure, you can say "I scared the guy out of the house with a bat" if the threat of bat violence is realistic (Grandma can't do that), but then you may have to contend with the crook claiming you were waving a gun at him... So nobody's going to report it.
Statistically, it's on the order of ten times more likely your gun will accidentally hurt or kill you or a loved one than ever getting the opportunity to be used to defend against crime, let alone successfully.
Your statistics are, at best, specious.
There are between 800k and 2.5M defensive uses of firearms in the US every year (depending on how you collect the statistics).
Meanwhile, there are a scant 10-20k gun deaths in the US, after discounting suicides. Personally, having seen what a hung body looks like, I'd rather have a family member shoot themselves than hang or cut themselves. It's much more humane and more effective than OTC pill overdosing. (If someone wants to go, they're going to go.)
I remember the same hoo-hah bullshit about theft of products off the streets during the late-80s and early-90s for Reebok and Nike shoes, and then later in the 90s of Allstar team jackets. There was the occasional murder. I'm sure it happened, but probably not to the same degree as this.
I think a lot of it is marketing - corporations taking advantage of crime to push their products' popularity. "They're such a valuable rarity that people have to steal them off the streets to be able to get them, they want them so bad. Good thing you can pick your's up for only slightly more at any Walmart/iStore near you!"
With the recent Aurora, CA dipshit shooting spree, there's been a lot of talk about guns and how they make people unsafe. The mayor of NYC said the police force should (would? I forget the specifics) strike unless all guns were banned and collected.
What I'm curious about is why you never hear about people being robbed on the streets of their guns, or of armed people being robbed. Many people carry them 24/7, and they're worth a lot more used than an Apple product is new ($600-1800, give or take, typically). They also have a lot more value in terms of a 'crime investment', supposedly, and can't be remotely disabled/locked by a cell carrier.
Why do you think this doesn't happen with guns carried on a person?
You're doing it wrong. The approach works, but it's kind of like replacing an oil filter on a car: it doesn't really help much unless you also put more oil in.
Use a bucket full of ice with water in it. Double/triple wrap the drive in water-tight plastic bags (test them), and get a good air-tight seal going with the drive inside. Meanwhile, you've got a power and data cable snaked and taped into the bag, attached to the disk.
No condensation - you just have to be careful about splashing. Added bonus, it keeps the drive cool throughout the recovery - with heat or friction-induced mechanical tolerance loss being the primary causes, but other mechanical tolerance issues can also be helped.
"There's a lot of FUD when it comes to self-repairing a broken hard drive.
Not really. There is a lot of anecdotal "it worked for me" experiences. Failed drives are a replacable item. Most people working the field don't replace drives long enough in their field to hit all the corner cases - like that awesome mechanic who's pushing 120 years old and can fix your bent drive shaft in about 15 minutes.
Does sticking it in the freezer help? Hitting it with a hammer?
Yes, but I've found a bucket of ice with some water in it to level it off, and the drive in multiple bags to keep the water out while you try to pull data from it, is a good approach if you want to recover data. This seems to work about half the time when simply using something like I've found that giving a drive a good short drop (4 foot) onto a non-cement floor or a very short drop onto a table, or evenly hitting it with a heavy rubber mallet (eg. and using a 2x4 to distribute the percussive impact), then submersing it, will typically work about half the time when the symptom is the disk won't spin up or has clicking/causes crashing/etc.
Never, never hit it with a metal mallet or drop it on a cement floor. You'll blow the thing up inside (or at least it did the two times I looked).
The oven?
I've never tried it, but it's doubtful unless the problem is electrical current related on the PCB. I suppose it's possible you damaged the drive PCB by hitting it with the hammer could damage it, and the oven might 're-flow' the shitty tin solder on the PCB or within the drive. It might also 'knock down' tin whiskers. I suspect the oven would've fix some of the newer drives which supposedly use better tin based solder to avoid the whisker problem.
Does replacing the PCB actually work?
Can you take the platters out and put them in another drive?
You can, but you're going to want to have a 'clean room' environment to do it. Some people's houses are approaching that, but I would not personally trust any place of business I've seen or my house.
And failing all that, if you have to send the dead drive off to a professional data recovery company, how much does it cost — and what's their chance of success, anyway?
I've only had to do it a 3 times for people. $1200-$2100 and they got "their" drive shipped back to them - same make and model - with their data on it. In one case it was a dump of 'random' recovered files (everything had a seemingly random name, but it all appeared to be there - it took him months to go through it all) and another it was just a normal filesystem. A third time (the more expensive time) they got a newer, larger drive shipped to them with the contents of the disk. In all cases it was "all" of the data, so 3/3 were recoveries with ~100% success rate of useful data.
Unless the face of IT work changes, we're not going to be seeing many more women entering the field than we have now.
IT work is high-paid janitorial work with non-formulaic, stringent mental requirements. It's not an appealing field unless you actually like that specific subset of mental requirements. Most women do not find it appealing.
I've BTDT: I worked IT in a hospital, where you're the only male within spitting distance. It sucked for the exact reasons you mention. It was made worse by the fact that it was a small town and there weren't a whole lot of men there in general, and I was married at the time. I'm also not bad looking, at least for a geek.:)
I had my ass grabbed repeatedly by multiple women, had multiple advances (some which were, at least, interesting, bust most of which were disturbing due to coming from my hag manager), had innuendo flying about all the time, and was "visually undressed" almost constantly. What's worse, it was pretty obvious that it wasn't a give-and-take type situation, as I infrequently got a positive response while joking back. I was ultimately fired by my boss for bogus reasons unrelated to any of this, of course.
It was a right to work state, so there wasn't much recourse on those grounds, but I'm guessing I had a sexual harassment suit had I wanted one. I didn't want the headache. Get up and move on: it was a learning experience. I learned a lot: women get away with imaginable levels of shit men would never be able to get away with in many cases. But more important than that, I learned two things:
* Never work in a healthcare/hospital environment unless the organization is large enough to have a full IT team, IE a team of men * People should not work in fields which makes them a cultural minority if they do not want to deal with that kind of bullshit. Tell them you don't like it, sure. They will either respect you or not. But don't use their misbehavior as a free card for a lawsuit. Be professional and deal with it properly with the person first.
Sure, why not? If he wasn't a shit shot and had the right rifle, he could've shot that many people with only half that many rounds (since a high caliber rifle round designed to kill, not injure or suppress like with an AR-15, will typically go through a fleshy human body).
It was 71 people, by the way. Not that it really matters.
He could just as easily have chained and wired the doors and floor to explode, killing many more than the injured 71 people with the myriad of explosives found in his apartment - all while shooting blanks.
You're correct, of course, but due to how Slashdot threads things, I'm not sure who you applied to.
If you are implying that the 2nd Amendment impinges upon the rights of others and is thus an unjust and tyrannical law, I have news for you. You're really not thinking all that clearly.
I'm not sure where someone is coming from when they argue that lobbying against encroachment of a non-aggressive status quo can be construed as 'tyrannical'. Maybe it's due to a poor understanding of the English language and, you know, words?
There are over 270 million guns in the US. Over half of all newly manufactured guns are sold commercially in the US.
In case you weren't counting: that's 9 guns for every 10 people in the US.
If you have a problem with that, I suggest you talk to other countries which make guns specifically for their importation into the US (because that's where a great many of them are coming from).
I would suspect that, if you were to do a demographic study on the crimes-per-gun across the US as well as globally, you'd find that the US also has the lowest gun per-capita violence rate.
Let's just go over this again: there are 9 guns in the US for every 10 people. Gun ownership estimates are from 39-50% of the population, though there are naturally no concrete numbers. This is somewhat interesting, since the crime centers in the US, which also happen to be population centers, have typically made the ownership of common, everyday objects (guns) illegal.
Um, nice try, but the curb weight of an F150 is about 4600lb and a normal Prius about 3200. (Yes, the Prius C has a curb weight more inline with it's bretheren, like the Honda Civic. But it's also an exception for hybrids - most hybrid mini-sedans weigh as much as full-size traditional sedans.
A 50lb lead-acid battery is a small lead-acid battery (A car auto battery is also commonly only 40lb). It costs very little and takes very little to refine and smelt for. Lithium is a magnitude more intensive to mine due to its rarity and density within the ground; a lot more ore must be smelted to acquire a similar volume of metal - never mind weight. Lithium is roughly a 30th as dense as lead.
I hate to break it to you, but lithium recycling is only valuable due to the high cost of initial production. It is massively more expensive because of the necessity to perform all reclamation operations at -330F.
You also completely missed the significance of my commentary on CO2. CO2 is by no means the end-all, be-all of environmental friendliness.
Here in SD, we have the same problem. There are the pricks in their big 4WD trucks, and yes, they drive stupid, like you said. They skate the risks
80s manual 4wd diesel blazer with manual hubs, here. I'll take it nice and slow and I'll throw studs on the front. But it's not a golden bullet. You still have to be careful.
A jeep, or the longer wheel base Blazer (but still short) is not the best 'winter weather' vehicle when it comes to stability and traction control, though.:)
A person could argue, with fairly sound scientific backing, that the increase in temperature we've seen over the past 15 years have been a direct result of the pollution reduction measures we've taken over the past 20 years.
You're decreasing your (unnatural) cloud cover by reducing emissions. Cloud cover is, as we can all readily observe, pretty damn good at reducing surface temperatures due to the fact that it blocks out sunlight. A cloudy day can easily have a 20-30 degree difference in temperature than the one before or after it (which was sunny) with little else changing.
It's not like volcanic activity often has a temperature subduing effect, or anything, or that large/super volcano eruptions have had a climatic-cooling effect (which were potentially the primary cause of the mini ice age we experienced 500 odd years ago).
Unless your Chevy truck gets better than 53/48 mpg, then my electric hybrid generates less CO2 than your truck since both of our vehicles are powered by the same fuel - gasoline.
Does that include the increased CO2 generation caused by the mining and refinement of the lithium in your battery pack?
Let's not even talk about the added environmentally devastating pollution your hybrid causes indirectly through its manufacture or its later disposal. It's much more convenient to focus on a vague general statistic, like "pounds of CO2 released or produced". (Kinda like those propaganda fliers about how many gallons of water, etc. a single pound of meat "uses" to produce.)
I just finally upgraded from a DOCSIS 1.1 modem to a DOCSIS 3 modem because the 10MBit it allowed wasn't quite enough. I now get roughly 2x that throughput, depending (I'm on a 35Mbit/5Mbit line). I work from home, my wife is a stay-at-home mom, and my 3 children are Internet-capable home schoolers, and the throughput is more than sufficient for concurrent streaming of media (2x netflix + multiple pandora, at times) while doing other things.
Do you know what isn't sufficient?
The fucking latency. The outlying parts of the country (ie not in major metro areas) have more than enough throughput for things already. What we lack is latency good enough to not get irritated by waiting. 80-120ms is still the normative 'good' latency, with 200+ms being not uncommon. Consistent 80ms latency is awesome.
You must live somewhere with seasonal snow, then. RAV4/CRV are the Prius/I don't do anything but commute vehicles for places with snow. Ironically, I've seen a fairly large number of Priuses in the area of late (where the CRV/RAV4 are historically predominant for such idiots).
In California, you can fairly accurately predict erratic behavior and poor driving ability by the type of car they're driving. Priuses win, but BMWs and anything between those two types of vehicles are invariably the worst. Toy SUVs like the CRV or RAV4 (driven more by Mommies than the yuppie and/or Asian set) are pretty bad, too.
Define "free". "Free energy" is almost as stupid and unthinking as "make love not war" or any other hippie platitude which ignores reality.
Wholely and completely free is not possible at all. Someone will have to pay somewhere. There will be costs in man hours and materials to acquire said energy and its prerequisites. And, of course, any sufficiently abundant energy source will result in increased use, making the bananza of energy "sufficient" as the ability to use the energy catches up with production ability.
But let's say for a minute that we discover a 'miracle energy'. Not quite "energy tether to the sun" or "dark matter provides truly infinite energy, as we can conceive it", but "abundant, clean, and cheap to produce". Let's say it's nuclear fusion, and you can have a Mr. Fusion in your basement or your car. What will we see?
* the developed world would quickly adopt the technology, converting or supplementing existing infrastructure. It would take approximately two or three years for the top 80-90% of modern society to adopt the new technology/energy at the personal level (eg. in-house or in-vehicle production). * Existing power and utility companies would try to stifle and control the technology/energy source. Through government regulations, they would have a lot of success. This would be more true in the less economically free countries and regions of the world. * Black markets would develop for the technology. * Weaponization of the technology would occur almost immediately afterwards. It would be a big concern which nobody would be able to address. * The developing world would fall further behind as regional warfare/genocide/whatever breaks out between the haves and have nots. * Access to a Mr. Fusion in the developing world would become a worldwide humanitarian/human rights concern. * "Energy Star" and similar energy conservation technologies would cease to matter, and engineers would design for conservation of materials (until we figure out how to convert one form of of matter, or energy, into something else directly, that is). * Insulation R-factor would become less of a concern than it is even today (due to increasingly efficient air conditioners and heaters). * Transportation costs would become almost negligible (the biggest cost is currently fuel). This would lead to significant efficiency improvements in some industries (shipping, trucking, etc.) but lead to negligible/slow-to-change consumer cost savings in others (anything government controlled, like rail or air travel). * In the US, there would need to be another round of airline bailouts as people opt for taking significantly cheaper transit instead of planes. * The price of copper will go up as the demand for higher amp cabling in older structures increases due to less efficient or more energy demanding electronics. * There will be another bump in the 'green' movement as exploitive startups claim new technologies to clean the atmosphere and sequester carbon. In 30 years time, they will be like slap bracelets or bell bottoms but result in a handful of very rich people. * The desertification effects of solar and wind power will be gradually reversed by the absence of the equipment. * The worldwide water quality would improve significantly due to the reduction in coal and other fossil fuels mining/drilling (but specifically coal, as plastics will still be needed and oil is so adaptable it can be used to make many, many things). Pollution levels in China, specifically, will be reduced due * Developed countries will see a resurgence of industry due to the reduced cost and ecological benefits of Mr. Fusion technology. Smelting and other historically dirty industries will become economically and ecologically feasible again. * New applications for electricity will be researched in an attempt to find a way to use electricity to replace historically chemical processes, such as direct electrical catalytic conversion of chemicals. * Vehicle-portable rail guns would become almost instantly practical. * Mass driver FTL space propulsion and multi-year transits (including colonization) would become a realizable goal. * The economies of countries like Brazil and Saudi Arabia would be very drastically negatively impacted.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but consider: most IT people, to the best of my knowledge, aren't talking about "Metro".
They're talking about how fucking useless "Windows 8's UI" will be, and how they're installing Linux on all their personal machines. They're hoping Valve gets linux gaming underway RFQ.
This is just Microsoft's attempt at truthiness in marketing.
Great, so Windows 8 takes primary aesthetic and design cues from public transit signage.
That truly does explain a lot.
If they'd done that, they'd have found out that it's actually a Unity-meets-Windows3.1 style.
They even implemented a feature we haven't seen much of for the last couple years that many users were sure to miss from the Windows 2000 and earlier XP days - many more clicks are required to Get Shit Done (except it's intentional instead of happenstance to poor security, this time).
Word has it they say W8 was designed using the Tootsierollpop Philosophy, internally.
Apple is the new Microsoft and Microsoft is the new Apple.
Apple is making money hand over fist, quarter after quarter. They have the 'desirable' products which everyone wants and clamors for, and nobody really seems to care that the 'added functionality' of the new products is mostly glam shoved on top of poop, with no concrete improvements or functionality: it's mostly just window dressing. Welcome to Microsoft, circa mid- to late 1990s.
Microsoft is languishing and slowly losing market share to their competitors. They can't focus. Their products are stuck in a slow, grinding revision process with everything good and/or desirable about their products being phased out for the Big New. They've started to stagnate, and people see their products as commodity - you have them because you need them, not necessarily because they're superior or desirable. All of their changes are seen as regressions by the loyal and technically savvy. Welcome to Apple, late 1990s.
In terms of input devices, we're at a point where gaming consoles threaten general purpose computers for "better, more complex input devices". How fucked is that?
Interesting, but most of the construction looks non-functional and aesthetic - like the hands, for instance. It does not look sturdy enough to serve as a riot suppression device, nevermind anything serious.
Bubba with a mig welder, an old Asian cab-over-engine mini-bus type van, a junked Caterpillar frontend loader, and the frame from a US truck could probably make something similarly aesthetic which is actually able to perform work. Betcha it'd be more fun to pilot, too.
It'd certainly be fun to pilot, but what large machinery isn't? For a million dollars, you could build something quite comparable on your own.
Hell, for a bit more than a couple months of training and knowing the right people, you can get paid to operate heavy machinery which has much more capability.
Also I like to go out and drive in an empty parking lot during the first snow or ice storm just to refresh my memory of how things behave and handle in crappy weather.
Absolutely. I do this, too - I'll get up a couple hours early and go to a nearby telco parking lot and spin around, basically testing the vehicle/driver limits.
The worst, IMO, is when there's light snow all night long, so in the morning you've got a 'powder' of 1-2 inches. But it starts while the ground is >32F and the first oh, 1/4" or so is melted on darker or smoother surfaces (like blacktop). So people drive along and stop a couple times, and there's no ice under the snow. Then they hit blacktop and accidents start happening due to a complete lack of expectation.
Thankfully, here in SD, people tend to be less of idiots when the weather gets bad and we don't usually have anything more than the occasional fender bender. I've jumped the curb and intentionally run into things like light poles (at low speeds - no damage just a jolt) when people do something stupid like pull out right in front. Overall, I'd rather be passed @ 10-20mph than hit someone because I'm going to fast.
I've had a couple "sliding 20-30 feet at 5mph" situations when the ice gets really unexpectedly bad. That's a bit terrifying, 4wd or otherwise. It makes you wish you put the chains on.
Sounds like you've got a nice Jeep. I was looking for an i6 Jeep a while back but decided I needed more back seat space (Cherokee isn't wide enough for 3x car seats; a bench in the back of a Blazer is). With the 6.2l diesel in the Blazer, I get the same low-end torque due to my gearing (low, not 100% sure on the ratio but much over 75mph makes her scream) and engine speed. Even the newer FWD mini-sedans, like a Focus, have too much torque for icy roads.
I did miss that - in part because this is Slashdot, which has a certain demographic, and is somewhat prone to "that makes sense, except the opposite" type arguments.
(One of the posts parent to your own was arguing that simply allowing firearm ownership was tyrannical because it forced a violent implement upon people within society who didn't want to believe such things exist - or some such nonsense. I wasn't sure if you were on the same line of thinking.)
Outside the context of 'crazy' you made perfect sense.
By all means, stop funding the NYPD. But make it legal for people to defend themselves at the same time (which it currently is not, in NYC or the greater NYS).
If you didn't have the spectre of "protecting" the people hanging over your head, there isn't a justification for a large police force. Even with the huge influx of illegal aliens and drugs, cities like Austin, Houston, Dallas, and Pheonix have a distinctly lower crime rate and smaller police force than somewhere like LA or NYC - because the criminals are afraid of being killed in the commission of a crime.
On the job work hazards have a way of making people avoid a career.
Most of the time when a gun is used to defend against crime it is not discharged
Or reported. Half of the US populace owns a gun - do the math. By population, most Americans now live in cities or states (NY, NJ, CA, IL) where firearm ownership is all but illegal unless you're highly connected and have a lot of money. Many guns pass under the radar as previous generations die - grandads guns get redistributed to the grandkids or children.
If it's illegal to own a gun, you're not going to call the cops when you scare someone out of your house with a gun. There's no fucking way you can explain that. Sure, you can say "I scared the guy out of the house with a bat" if the threat of bat violence is realistic (Grandma can't do that), but then you may have to contend with the crook claiming you were waving a gun at him... So nobody's going to report it.
Statistically, it's on the order of ten times more likely your gun will accidentally hurt or kill you or a loved one than ever getting the opportunity to be used to defend against crime, let alone successfully.
Your statistics are, at best, specious.
There are between 800k and 2.5M defensive uses of firearms in the US every year (depending on how you collect the statistics).
Meanwhile, there are a scant 10-20k gun deaths in the US, after discounting suicides. Personally, having seen what a hung body looks like, I'd rather have a family member shoot themselves than hang or cut themselves. It's much more humane and more effective than OTC pill overdosing. (If someone wants to go, they're going to go.)
I remember the same hoo-hah bullshit about theft of products off the streets during the late-80s and early-90s for Reebok and Nike shoes, and then later in the 90s of Allstar team jackets. There was the occasional murder. I'm sure it happened, but probably not to the same degree as this.
I think a lot of it is marketing - corporations taking advantage of crime to push their products' popularity. "They're such a valuable rarity that people have to steal them off the streets to be able to get them, they want them so bad. Good thing you can pick your's up for only slightly more at any Walmart/iStore near you!"
With the recent Aurora, CA dipshit shooting spree, there's been a lot of talk about guns and how they make people unsafe. The mayor of NYC said the police force should (would? I forget the specifics) strike unless all guns were banned and collected.
What I'm curious about is why you never hear about people being robbed on the streets of their guns, or of armed people being robbed. Many people carry them 24/7, and they're worth a lot more used than an Apple product is new ($600-1800, give or take, typically). They also have a lot more value in terms of a 'crime investment', supposedly, and can't be remotely disabled/locked by a cell carrier.
Why do you think this doesn't happen with guns carried on a person?
You're doing it wrong. The approach works, but it's kind of like replacing an oil filter on a car: it doesn't really help much unless you also put more oil in.
Use a bucket full of ice with water in it. Double/triple wrap the drive in water-tight plastic bags (test them), and get a good air-tight seal going with the drive inside. Meanwhile, you've got a power and data cable snaked and taped into the bag, attached to the disk.
No condensation - you just have to be careful about splashing. Added bonus, it keeps the drive cool throughout the recovery - with heat or friction-induced mechanical tolerance loss being the primary causes, but other mechanical tolerance issues can also be helped.
"There's a lot of FUD when it comes to self-repairing a broken hard drive.
Not really. There is a lot of anecdotal "it worked for me" experiences. Failed drives are a replacable item. Most people working the field don't replace drives long enough in their field to hit all the corner cases - like that awesome mechanic who's pushing 120 years old and can fix your bent drive shaft in about 15 minutes.
Does sticking it in the freezer help? Hitting it with a hammer?
Yes, but I've found a bucket of ice with some water in it to level it off, and the drive in multiple bags to keep the water out while you try to pull data from it, is a good approach if you want to recover data. This seems to work about half the time when simply using something like I've found that giving a drive a good short drop (4 foot) onto a non-cement floor or a very short drop onto a table, or evenly hitting it with a heavy rubber mallet (eg. and using a 2x4 to distribute the percussive impact), then submersing it, will typically work about half the time when the symptom is the disk won't spin up or has clicking/causes crashing/etc.
Never, never hit it with a metal mallet or drop it on a cement floor. You'll blow the thing up inside (or at least it did the two times I looked).
The oven?
I've never tried it, but it's doubtful unless the problem is electrical current related on the PCB. I suppose it's possible you damaged the drive PCB by hitting it with the hammer could damage it, and the oven might 're-flow' the shitty tin solder on the PCB or within the drive. It might also 'knock down' tin whiskers. I suspect the oven would've fix some of the newer drives which supposedly use better tin based solder to avoid the whisker problem.
Does replacing the PCB actually work?
Can you take the platters out and put them in another drive?
You can, but you're going to want to have a 'clean room' environment to do it. Some people's houses are approaching that, but I would not personally trust any place of business I've seen or my house.
And failing all that, if you have to send the dead drive off to a professional data recovery company, how much does it cost — and what's their chance of success, anyway?
I've only had to do it a 3 times for people. $1200-$2100 and they got "their" drive shipped back to them - same make and model - with their data on it. In one case it was a dump of 'random' recovered files (everything had a seemingly random name, but it all appeared to be there - it took him months to go through it all) and another it was just a normal filesystem. A third time (the more expensive time) they got a newer, larger drive shipped to them with the contents of the disk. In all cases it was "all" of the data, so 3/3 were recoveries with ~100% success rate of useful data.
I disagree.
Unless the face of IT work changes, we're not going to be seeing many more women entering the field than we have now.
IT work is high-paid janitorial work with non-formulaic, stringent mental requirements. It's not an appealing field unless you actually like that specific subset of mental requirements. Most women do not find it appealing.
I've BTDT: I worked IT in a hospital, where you're the only male within spitting distance. It sucked for the exact reasons you mention. It was made worse by the fact that it was a small town and there weren't a whole lot of men there in general, and I was married at the time. I'm also not bad looking, at least for a geek. :)
I had my ass grabbed repeatedly by multiple women, had multiple advances (some which were, at least, interesting, bust most of which were disturbing due to coming from my hag manager), had innuendo flying about all the time, and was "visually undressed" almost constantly. What's worse, it was pretty obvious that it wasn't a give-and-take type situation, as I infrequently got a positive response while joking back. I was ultimately fired by my boss for bogus reasons unrelated to any of this, of course.
It was a right to work state, so there wasn't much recourse on those grounds, but I'm guessing I had a sexual harassment suit had I wanted one. I didn't want the headache. Get up and move on: it was a learning experience. I learned a lot: women get away with imaginable levels of shit men would never be able to get away with in many cases. But more important than that, I learned two things:
* Never work in a healthcare/hospital environment unless the organization is large enough to have a full IT team, IE a team of men
* People should not work in fields which makes them a cultural minority if they do not want to deal with that kind of bullshit. Tell them you don't like it, sure. They will either respect you or not. But don't use their misbehavior as a free card for a lawsuit. Be professional and deal with it properly with the person first.
Sure, why not? If he wasn't a shit shot and had the right rifle, he could've shot that many people with only half that many rounds (since a high caliber rifle round designed to kill, not injure or suppress like with an AR-15, will typically go through a fleshy human body).
It was 71 people, by the way. Not that it really matters.
He could just as easily have chained and wired the doors and floor to explode, killing many more than the injured 71 people with the myriad of explosives found in his apartment - all while shooting blanks.
You're correct, of course, but due to how Slashdot threads things, I'm not sure who you applied to.
If you are implying that the 2nd Amendment impinges upon the rights of others and is thus an unjust and tyrannical law, I have news for you. You're really not thinking all that clearly.
I'm not sure where someone is coming from when they argue that lobbying against encroachment of a non-aggressive status quo can be construed as 'tyrannical'. Maybe it's due to a poor understanding of the English language and, you know, words?
There are over 270 million guns in the US. Over half of all newly manufactured guns are sold commercially in the US.
In case you weren't counting: that's 9 guns for every 10 people in the US.
If you have a problem with that, I suggest you talk to other countries which make guns specifically for their importation into the US (because that's where a great many of them are coming from).
I would suspect that, if you were to do a demographic study on the crimes-per-gun across the US as well as globally, you'd find that the US also has the lowest gun per-capita violence rate.
Let's just go over this again: there are 9 guns in the US for every 10 people. Gun ownership estimates are from 39-50% of the population, though there are naturally no concrete numbers. This is somewhat interesting, since the crime centers in the US, which also happen to be population centers, have typically made the ownership of common, everyday objects (guns) illegal.
Um, nice try, but the curb weight of an F150 is about 4600lb and a normal Prius about 3200. (Yes, the Prius C has a curb weight more inline with it's bretheren, like the Honda Civic. But it's also an exception for hybrids - most hybrid mini-sedans weigh as much as full-size traditional sedans.
A 50lb lead-acid battery is a small lead-acid battery (A car auto battery is also commonly only 40lb). It costs very little and takes very little to refine and smelt for. Lithium is a magnitude more intensive to mine due to its rarity and density within the ground; a lot more ore must be smelted to acquire a similar volume of metal - never mind weight. Lithium is roughly a 30th as dense as lead.
I hate to break it to you, but lithium recycling is only valuable due to the high cost of initial production. It is massively more expensive because of the necessity to perform all reclamation operations at -330F.
You also completely missed the significance of my commentary on CO2. CO2 is by no means the end-all, be-all of environmental friendliness.
Here in SD, we have the same problem. There are the pricks in their big 4WD trucks, and yes, they drive stupid, like you said. They skate the risks
80s manual 4wd diesel blazer with manual hubs, here. I'll take it nice and slow and I'll throw studs on the front. But it's not a golden bullet. You still have to be careful.
A jeep, or the longer wheel base Blazer (but still short) is not the best 'winter weather' vehicle when it comes to stability and traction control, though. :)
Precisely.
A person could argue, with fairly sound scientific backing, that the increase in temperature we've seen over the past 15 years have been a direct result of the pollution reduction measures we've taken over the past 20 years.
You're decreasing your (unnatural) cloud cover by reducing emissions. Cloud cover is, as we can all readily observe, pretty damn good at reducing surface temperatures due to the fact that it blocks out sunlight. A cloudy day can easily have a 20-30 degree difference in temperature than the one before or after it (which was sunny) with little else changing.
It's not like volcanic activity often has a temperature subduing effect, or anything, or that large/super volcano eruptions have had a climatic-cooling effect (which were potentially the primary cause of the mini ice age we experienced 500 odd years ago).
Unless your Chevy truck gets better than 53/48 mpg, then my electric hybrid generates less CO2 than your truck since both of our vehicles are powered by the same fuel - gasoline.
Does that include the increased CO2 generation caused by the mining and refinement of the lithium in your battery pack?
Let's not even talk about the added environmentally devastating pollution your hybrid causes indirectly through its manufacture or its later disposal. It's much more convenient to focus on a vague general statistic, like "pounds of CO2 released or produced". (Kinda like those propaganda fliers about how many gallons of water, etc. a single pound of meat "uses" to produce.)
10MBit isn't quite enough for me.
I just finally upgraded from a DOCSIS 1.1 modem to a DOCSIS 3 modem because the 10MBit it allowed wasn't quite enough. I now get roughly 2x that throughput, depending (I'm on a 35Mbit/5Mbit line). I work from home, my wife is a stay-at-home mom, and my 3 children are Internet-capable home schoolers, and the throughput is more than sufficient for concurrent streaming of media (2x netflix + multiple pandora, at times) while doing other things.
Do you know what isn't sufficient?
The fucking latency. The outlying parts of the country (ie not in major metro areas) have more than enough throughput for things already. What we lack is latency good enough to not get irritated by waiting. 80-120ms is still the normative 'good' latency, with 200+ms being not uncommon. Consistent 80ms latency is awesome.
You must live somewhere with seasonal snow, then. RAV4/CRV are the Prius/I don't do anything but commute vehicles for places with snow. Ironically, I've seen a fairly large number of Priuses in the area of late (where the CRV/RAV4 are historically predominant for such idiots).
In California, you can fairly accurately predict erratic behavior and poor driving ability by the type of car they're driving. Priuses win, but BMWs and anything between those two types of vehicles are invariably the worst. Toy SUVs like the CRV or RAV4 (driven more by Mommies than the yuppie and/or Asian set) are pretty bad, too.
Define "free". "Free energy" is almost as stupid and unthinking as "make love not war" or any other hippie platitude which ignores reality.
Wholely and completely free is not possible at all. Someone will have to pay somewhere. There will be costs in man hours and materials to acquire said energy and its prerequisites. And, of course, any sufficiently abundant energy source will result in increased use, making the bananza of energy "sufficient" as the ability to use the energy catches up with production ability.
But let's say for a minute that we discover a 'miracle energy'. Not quite "energy tether to the sun" or "dark matter provides truly infinite energy, as we can conceive it", but "abundant, clean, and cheap to produce". Let's say it's nuclear fusion, and you can have a Mr. Fusion in your basement or your car. What will we see?
* the developed world would quickly adopt the technology, converting or supplementing existing infrastructure. It would take approximately two or three years for the top 80-90% of modern society to adopt the new technology/energy at the personal level (eg. in-house or in-vehicle production).
* Existing power and utility companies would try to stifle and control the technology/energy source. Through government regulations, they would have a lot of success. This would be more true in the less economically free countries and regions of the world.
* Black markets would develop for the technology.
* Weaponization of the technology would occur almost immediately afterwards. It would be a big concern which nobody would be able to address.
* The developing world would fall further behind as regional warfare/genocide/whatever breaks out between the haves and have nots.
* Access to a Mr. Fusion in the developing world would become a worldwide humanitarian/human rights concern.
* "Energy Star" and similar energy conservation technologies would cease to matter, and engineers would design for conservation of materials (until we figure out how to convert one form of of matter, or energy, into something else directly, that is).
* Insulation R-factor would become less of a concern than it is even today (due to increasingly efficient air conditioners and heaters).
* Transportation costs would become almost negligible (the biggest cost is currently fuel). This would lead to significant efficiency improvements in some industries (shipping, trucking, etc.) but lead to negligible/slow-to-change consumer cost savings in others (anything government controlled, like rail or air travel).
* In the US, there would need to be another round of airline bailouts as people opt for taking significantly cheaper transit instead of planes.
* The price of copper will go up as the demand for higher amp cabling in older structures increases due to less efficient or more energy demanding electronics.
* There will be another bump in the 'green' movement as exploitive startups claim new technologies to clean the atmosphere and sequester carbon. In 30 years time, they will be like slap bracelets or bell bottoms but result in a handful of very rich people.
* The desertification effects of solar and wind power will be gradually reversed by the absence of the equipment.
* The worldwide water quality would improve significantly due to the reduction in coal and other fossil fuels mining/drilling (but specifically coal, as plastics will still be needed and oil is so adaptable it can be used to make many, many things). Pollution levels in China, specifically, will be reduced due
* Developed countries will see a resurgence of industry due to the reduced cost and ecological benefits of Mr. Fusion technology. Smelting and other historically dirty industries will become economically and ecologically feasible again.
* New applications for electricity will be researched in an attempt to find a way to use electricity to replace historically chemical processes, such as direct electrical catalytic conversion of chemicals.
* Vehicle-portable rail guns would become almost instantly practical.
* Mass driver FTL space propulsion and multi-year transits (including colonization) would become a realizable goal.
* The economies of countries like Brazil and Saudi Arabia would be very drastically negatively impacted.