In other news, AI researchers were startled to discover that self-driving AI's trained on Florida streets now leave their left blinkers on all the time.
And what's next? Since criminals use automobiles, and the cops "need" to know who's driving any given car in the vicinity of a crime, will the DoT also require an ID transmitter in every car?
The FCC found out that requiring every CB operator in the country to have a "license" was a huge burden on them, and served no functional purpose, and finally gave it up as a bad job. I suspect the millions of quadcopters and hexcopters (do we have octocopters yet?) will be the same. Perhaps they should stop conflating hobby and small-business quadcopters with actual _drones_, and they'd stop thinking both types of object need to be licensed and controlled in the same way and for the same reasons.
The problem is that, while a 2"x6" board at Lowe's measures about 5.5", and can be used as a replacement for any of my rotted deck planks, the boards at Home Depot are sufficiently less than 5.5" that they look terrible if used as a replacement. I found this out the hard way by buying several cedar 2"x6" boards at HD and using them to replace a few deck planks that were more worn or rotted than the rest of the deck. Being frugal, I wasn't going to throw them away and buy replacements elsewhere, but the result looked terrible for several years. Zoom forward a few years, and I have just completed almost 3 weeks of part-time work replacing most of the decking - about 125 boards - and it looks like the original deck again.
Before I began my renovation, I made the rounds of our local Lowe's, Home Depot, and Menard's, and measured the width of their available cedar lumber. Lowe's was fine, Home Depot was still too narrow to be used, and I couldn't find any at Menard's...maybe if I had found somebody on the floor to ask, they could have pointed me to lumber stored outside, but there was none to be seen inside on the lumber racks, so I don't know if Menard's lumber is undersize, or not.
Dimensioned lumber has gotten increasingly smaller over the years, and it has nothing to do with drywall or any other practical explanation. It has more to do with it being cheaper to mill it undersize than use precision milling equipment, and/or being able to get more boards out of a log if the boards are milled even further under their nominal size.
I once owned a gingerbread Victorian home and, during roofing and other renovations, I found that the lumber used was extremely close to the stated dimensions - my roof purlins were an _actual_ 2"x6", not 1.75"x5.5" or any other lesser dimensions. I couldn't even buy custom-milled pieces for replacements of special trim, because nobody makes milling cutters of those sizes any more.
Seems to me that is what Doug Engelbart implemented in the NLS system decades ago. It wasn't yet networked, only running on local servers (multiple servers, so it did have some networking), but that's only because the networking wasn't quite available when NLS development began, pre-ARPANet (and their research funding probably limited them to a single, small, server anyway).
Our Army project used NLS across the ARPANet from many sites around the US, and my team wanted to fund Engelbart to add the necessary networking hooks ahead of some other things that were higher on his development priority list. Ultimately, HQ AMC nixed the funding for that expansion, we eventually dropped use of NLS because someone objected to using a proprietary system (of course, every other system we used was proprietary...), and re-wrote an equivalent system ourselves, in C. That system, too, was eventually dropped when HQ AMC management changed and the new managers manifested a "not developed here" (i.e., by them) mentality.
At any rate, I was using something looking almost exactly like Ted Nelson's Hypertext back in the late 1970's, and developing applications for it well into the 1980's. Except neither Engelbart nor we implemented Nelson's silly micro-payment system for use of others' copyrighted works; personally, I figured Fair Use pretty much covered linking and embedding, since the links always pointed back to the original.
I'm thinking that his CAD/CAM drawings are just as useful when fed into a CNC milling machine, which is also priced within hobbyist reach these days. I know hobbyists who have built their own, for that matter.
Once you have the computerized engineering drawings, nothing says you can only input them to a plastic-output machine.
You're being snobbishly insulting to "militia style groups mostly in rural areas" with that stupid comment. If you meant it to be humorous,it doesn't read that way.
Besides, anybody can operate a 3D printer - the expertise is in weapons design, manufacture, and asembly (in great abundance in said populations) and the ability to use CAD/CAM software (which is not exactly in short supply in said populations).
You're missing the difference between making bad acts illegal, and using illegal Prior Restraint on a civil right to illegalize an object that might be used for a few llegal purposes as well as for its many obviously legal and beneficial purposes.
You don't have to make guns illegal if you have laws making murder and assault illegal, by whatever means accomplished. Much simpler than trying to take 300,000,000 guns away from 100,000,000 law-abiding gun owners, who have a Constitutionally enshrined right to have them..
Those aren't remotely like the numbers I see in statistical charts. I'm assuming you're using _all_ deaths by firearms, which is heavily weighted to suicides, rather than homicides, where the US is much lower. Yes, in countries that don't have many guns, suicide numbers will obviously be much lower, although the suicide rate may well be considerably higher than in the US.
From the same chart, homicides by firearm is 3.2 for the US and.4 for the UK - I'm guessing the rate is held down somewhat by including Scotland with England in the "UK" numbers. If by "type of crime" you mean "by means of what weapon", it may make a difference in the numbers, though violent crime is violent crime. Without looking it up, though, I know that gun crime skyrocketed in England after they confiscated guns from all the law-abiding people - somehow, that didn't affect the guns possessed by criminals, who even started importing full-auto firearms from Eastern Europe.
Note also that a large number of the US homicides are also criminal-on-criminal, not criminal-on-innocent-citizen - while that observation doesn't change the raw numbers, it changes what they really mean to us.
"the presence of a gun is a prerequisite to any form of gun violence" - dumb statement. The presence of a violent criminal is a prerequisite to any form of violence. I might point out that in the US, there are anywhere from one to three MILLION cases each year where the mere presence of a firearm stopped or prevented a violent crime, usually without needing to fire the gun. Personally, I don't think it worthwhile to trade off 1-3,000,000 potential homicides prevented each year for 15,000 committed, especially since most ot the "committed" ones are criminals shooting other criminals. As a non-criminal, I think I'll keep my defensive pistol, thank you very much - I like the odds in _my_ favor.
Anyone can become a programmer. However, to be a good, even great, programmer you have to have:
1) A flair for logic; 2) OCD; 3) Paranoia (otherwise you write code with hidden bugs - it's hard to write idiot-proof code because idiots are so ingenious, and you have to intuit the many ways users, connected programs, and bad data can screw up your code).
Oh, yeah, and 10-20 years of making programming mistakes helps a lot, too. If you're any good, you tend not to make the same mistake more than 2-3 times, and to recognize the results of any particular coding error in the output of anyone else's code.
No, they originally thought they could implement it in 2 to 3 years, with part of it in place after 1 year. Took 'em 5 years to get the first supply command (CECOM) up and running, but without most of the Finance part of the system. They implemented the second command at the 9 year mark, and the remaining three Commands *all at the same time* at the 10 year mark (talk about a data migration nightmare!).
The debacle occurred for reasons of ignorance and, perhaps, a fair measure of arrogance.
The people at HQ Army Materiel Command (AMC) who wanted to contract out the replacement of the existing Army-wide integrated system didn't understand the existing legacy system. They thought it was obsolete - no, it wasn't, that was part of their ignorance, because the HQ AMC people who had originally sponsored the system had long since left and nobody then at HQ AMC really knew anything about the existing system..
The contractor, CSC, had no clue whatsoever about the level of difficulty of government procurement, requisitioning, supply management, finance, provisioning, maintenance, etc. They thought because their consulting staff knew how SAP worked, they could implement an off-the-shelf solution "with a little tweaking for public law and Army & DoD policy". The supply stuff is the easy part; probably 90% of the existing system - the largest, most integrated and complex supply system in the world - was "public law and policy guidance". And both law and policy changed rapidly - one such major change occurred after the contract was let, and there was a 5-year argument over whether it had to be included in the new SAP system, or if they should field the new system first, and then ask for more money for the out-of-scope "change" to be added on afterward (they didn't understand that the needs of the troops in the field meant that _all_ changes were in-scope when it came to operating the worldwide production Army logistics system).
CSC picked up about 200 of the original 300 Army system developers and functional experts on the Wholesale software side; something similar was done on the Depot side of the Army logistics house. They thought they were going to be able to fire them all after 3 years. These people were hired primarily to maintain the old systems while the new SAP system was developed but, because all non-critical changes were frozen, there was quite a bit of spare time to help with development of the new system. Again, CSC thought they knew it all, and refused to let the ex-Army civil servants help with the development of the new system (even though they received SAP training specifically to do so), nor even to work on data cleansing and migration from the old system to import into the new one. The Army system developers and functional experts had over 30 years experience doing that - moving from the Vietnam-war era systems custom-built at each Army supply command and Depot to the "new" Army-wide standard Wholesale and Depot systems, and then doing major upgrades as functionality was added or public law and Army/DoD policy changes required major changes. Along the way, Unix and other mini-computer systems, as well as PC's, were added to the original mainframe system with it's custom-written DBMS specifically designed for the hierarchical nature of supply data.
GAO has some valid criticisms of the whole mess but, typical of GAO, still doesn't understand major computer systems after 40-50 years of auditing them, and misses many things done wrong, and completely misunderstands the legitimate reasons the process was going to take that long whether well or badly managed.
My perspective on all this is as a programmer, analyst, and team leader for 3 years helping to develop, implement, and run one of the Vietnam-era systems for one of the Army supply commands, then the same for the new AMC-developed Army-wide standard system for 30+ years, then finally working for CSC for 10 years maintaining the Wholesale legacy system and, occasionally, working on the new SAP (LMP) system in minor ways. An "insider" perspective, for sure.
Surely, comments like yours are why _individual_ weapons ownership is a right, enshrined in the Constitution.
The original poster got one thing right: "...it's never because there are just too many guns on the street or that they're too easy to purchase." Absolutely correct; the number of guns on the street, or the ease of purchase has nothing to do with crime - only criminals have anything to do with crime.
I'd like to know why Nidi62 thinks responsible gun owners store their ammunition separately from the guns. Does (s)he think bullets magically jump into nearby guns and cause them to start firing by themselves? If there's a worry about someone stealing your guns and ammo, surely they can steal them from two different places - it's not like burglars are going to go to only one place in your entire house looking for things to steal. Personally, I store most of my ammo separately from the guns only because I don't have enough room where the guns are; otherwise, I'd store it all next to the guns for convenience. Reloading components (gunpowder and primers) are another story - they get stored in a dry, cool, place (which equals "basement" for those gun owners that have basements), simply because they are slightly volatile (not very much under normal conditions) and heat and humidity can degrade them over time.
I suspect that, if they really wanted to charge someone suspected of starting a fire with a firearm, there are other than firearms laws to use - "reckless endangerment" and the like. For the most part, it appears to be a rant by the usual anti-gun suspects trying to make political hay out of something that has nothing reasonably to do with regulation of guns.
Here's a 1-hour documentary on Vimeo; I've watched most of about half of it so far - even multi-tasking while doing so, it's pretty interesting. So many remembered images from my collection of Heavy Metal magazines!
You use one of the mouse keys to modify a lower-case chord keyset character to upper-case. With 3 mouse buttons to play with, you could type numbers, lower-case alphabet (both those with just the keyset), upper-case alphabet, and all punctuation and other special characters.
No, it's very easy to use. It was originally used in conjunction with a 3-button mouse, and the mouse keys gave you the ability to do uppercase and special characters as well as numbers and lower-case alphabet. It made using Engelbart's NLS windowed CRT system extremely easy, as the UI was primarily one-character commands (the leading character of the command you were typing - you would type an "i", and the system would echo "insert" and prompt you for the next thing, be it a command, text, mouse point, or something else). NLS came with a full keyboard, too but, once you learned the keyset, you almost never used it -I only used the keyboard when typing paragraphs of text, such as this comment.
I loved that system and used it for several years on a big US Army office automation project (my 7-person team was, AFAIK, the only ones other than Engelbart's in-house group that ever wrote applications for NLS) After the NLS system disappeared off the commercial market, I hoped for years his team would port everything to the PC, but it never happened - part of the NLS software was ported, but not the 3-button mouse and chord keyset.
I think I still have a couple of the little pocket cards that gave the mouse/keyset combinations; the keyset is so simple, though, that I only ever used it to check on special-character combinations when I was first learning the system. The numbers and lower-case alphabet were just binary combinations - you learned certain key characters, and then mentally counted up from those for the next few characters. After a very short time, if became as easy as learning to touch-type or play the piano or guitar.
It looks to me like a strategic move by Google to get Twitter to re-allow them to crawl the twitter-feed (and maybe get Facebook to do so, too - good luck with that!).
If it looks to Twitter as if Google search is getting more traction with G+ content included, they may get nervous enough to re-establish their previous deal allowing Google to crawl their content. Frankly, I don't see why they killed the deal in the first place - they may want to become a major search engine themselves, but that will never happen, so it only makes sense to me to let everybody and his brother crawl their feed in order to get referrals. Apparently they see it differently, and they're the ones that have the inside track on their strategic business model. Seems counter-intuitive to me to try to sell your data to people who will give you referral business for free - guess they're using the New York Times business model.
It's not just "geek" issues, it's a set of issues. If the candidate is_ for_ any of the following list of examples, he/she is anti-Liberty and should be avoided:
SOPA/PIPA/S.978 The Patriot Act Warrantless _anything_ by the police "Enhancements" to domestic and/or international copyright and patent law (as opposed to lessening their reach and impact) Abortion and/or Contraception control Gun Control
Sadly, it's probably going to be a pretty short list if you're able to find any politicians at all who are _against_ that entire list of issues. For Presidential candidates, I think the list is down to one - Gary Johnson, who just gave up on the GOP and is now running for the Libertarian nomination. And I don't yet know enough about him to be sure he 100% belongs on the "short list", either. None of the people running for national office from my Congressional and Senatorial districts satisfy all of the above criteria, although a couple of them _may_ be better than the incumbents (their main attraction is that they are not the incumbent).
At least as cool as the actual event is the phrase "This morning, an armada of spacecraft..." - did you think you'd ever hear that phrase in a news report in your lifetime?
No, customers are voting on the stupidity of their elected representatives and the stupid laws they passed that require citizens to pay taxes where no cost was incurred by the state, and where other taxes are paid to the state in lieu of sales taxes. The delivery carrier pays employees, employee taxes, property taxes, fuel taxes, corporate income taxes, and more. The state doesn't lose anything if a citizen doesn't pay a bogus "use tax"; they gain quite a bit more than that by the fact that the citizen had it delivered rather than went out and bought it at a local store. And, as someone else pointed out in another sub-thread, those local stores are also Amazon affiliates, and sell interstate themselves (if they have an ounce of sense, they do, anyway), so nobody loses if _all_ the numbers are added up. To those that think Amazon has an advantage over local brick-and-mortar stores because they pay no building rent, etc., have you ever looked at those Amazon shipping warehouses? Talk about bricks and mortar by the metric mega-ton!
What about WIndows Meeting Space (the current replacement for the old Windows NetMeeting)? It's free, seems to have all the right features, and supports up to 10 users (PCs). Don't think there's any form of it that supports Mac's, though - you'd be limited to Windows boxes.
"If it were a government contract, it would be illegal to be paid twice, once by the government and a second time by consumers."
This is not true. There are many ways to write a gov't contract and, although the general policy is that anything bought by the government becomes public property, there are common exceptions.
> It's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference > between a police raid and a home invasion. The cops will not > even attempt to be subtle once they start moving in.
I guess you missed the past news reports from multiple cities where the bad guys took to dressing up more-or-less like SWAT cops, yelling "police!" as they broke down doors, handcuffing the residents, and then looting the residence. Sometimes it was drug houses, and they were after the drugs, weapons, and cash and sometimes it was non-crime residences where they were just after an easy score (since the drug dealers were somewhat likely to shoot when were raided by the "cops").
The benefit you get is compatibility with the OS you're running on your office's Sun iron. Since I run Solaris at work, I'd prefer to run Solaris on my own box at home, rather than BSD or one of the Linux flavors. I've spent quite a few years on Sun systems, and am familiar with the foibles of Solaris - why would I want to run something with a different set of bahaviors if I can get a personal copy of Solaris for free?
So, what do they define as a "copyright holder" for the purposes of paying out the funds from this new tax? Under other laws, I have a copyright on anything I create (including this comment), which would my half of cell phone conversations, anything I post on my web page or blog, any email I send or letters I write... Since, conceivably, someone could record my copyrighted content (how about the person on the other end of the cell phone call who is receiving my copyrighted content? they're receiving it on a cell phone they've had to pay the tax on...), I should be able to collect, right? If they don't pay me, who do I sue?
Slashdot Mirror
In other news, AI researchers were startled to discover that self-driving AI's trained on Florida streets now leave their left blinkers on all the time.
And what's next? Since criminals use automobiles, and the cops "need" to know who's driving any given car in the vicinity of a crime, will the DoT also require an ID transmitter in every car?
The FCC found out that requiring every CB operator in the country to have a "license" was a huge burden on them, and served no functional purpose, and finally gave it up as a bad job. I suspect the millions of quadcopters and hexcopters (do we have octocopters yet?) will be the same. Perhaps they should stop conflating hobby and small-business quadcopters with actual _drones_, and they'd stop thinking both types of object need to be licensed and controlled in the same way and for the same reasons.
The problem is that, while a 2"x6" board at Lowe's measures about 5.5", and can be used as a replacement for any of my rotted deck planks, the boards at Home Depot are sufficiently less than 5.5" that they look terrible if used as a replacement. I found this out the hard way by buying several cedar 2"x6" boards at HD and using them to replace a few deck planks that were more worn or rotted than the rest of the deck. Being frugal, I wasn't going to throw them away and buy replacements elsewhere, but the result looked terrible for several years. Zoom forward a few years, and I have just completed almost 3 weeks of part-time work replacing most of the decking - about 125 boards - and it looks like the original deck again.
Before I began my renovation, I made the rounds of our local Lowe's, Home Depot, and Menard's, and measured the width of their available cedar lumber. Lowe's was fine, Home Depot was still too narrow to be used, and I couldn't find any at Menard's...maybe if I had found somebody on the floor to ask, they could have pointed me to lumber stored outside, but there was none to be seen inside on the lumber racks, so I don't know if Menard's lumber is undersize, or not.
Dimensioned lumber has gotten increasingly smaller over the years, and it has nothing to do with drywall or any other practical explanation. It has more to do with it being cheaper to mill it undersize than use precision milling equipment, and/or being able to get more boards out of a log if the boards are milled even further under their nominal size.
I once owned a gingerbread Victorian home and, during roofing and other renovations, I found that the lumber used was extremely close to the stated dimensions - my roof purlins were an _actual_ 2"x6", not 1.75"x5.5" or any other lesser dimensions. I couldn't even buy custom-milled pieces for replacements of special trim, because nobody makes milling cutters of those sizes any more.
If you're doing cyber-security hacking, the _whole point_ is cheating.
Well, I guess if we can't figure out how to program computers to work like brains, we'll just program brains to work like computers.
Seems to me that is what Doug Engelbart implemented in the NLS system decades ago. It wasn't yet networked, only running on local servers (multiple servers, so it did have some networking), but that's only because the networking wasn't quite available when NLS development began, pre-ARPANet (and their research funding probably limited them to a single, small, server anyway).
Our Army project used NLS across the ARPANet from many sites around the US, and my team wanted to fund Engelbart to add the necessary networking hooks ahead of some other things that were higher on his development priority list. Ultimately, HQ AMC nixed the funding for that expansion, we eventually dropped use of NLS because someone objected to using a proprietary system (of course, every other system we used was proprietary...), and re-wrote an equivalent system ourselves, in C. That system, too, was eventually dropped when HQ AMC management changed and the new managers manifested a "not developed here" (i.e., by them) mentality.
At any rate, I was using something looking almost exactly like Ted Nelson's Hypertext back in the late 1970's, and developing applications for it well into the 1980's. Except neither Engelbart nor we implemented Nelson's silly micro-payment system for use of others' copyrighted works; personally, I figured Fair Use pretty much covered linking and embedding, since the links always pointed back to the original.
I'm thinking that his CAD/CAM drawings are just as useful when fed into a CNC milling machine, which is also priced within hobbyist reach these days. I know hobbyists who have built their own, for that matter.
Once you have the computerized engineering drawings, nothing says you can only input them to a plastic-output machine.
You're being snobbishly insulting to "militia style groups mostly in rural areas" with that stupid comment. If you meant it to be humorous,it doesn't read that way.
Besides, anybody can operate a 3D printer - the expertise is in weapons design, manufacture, and asembly (in great abundance in said populations) and the ability to use CAD/CAM software (which is not exactly in short supply in said populations).
Nice strawman. Pretty transparent, though.
You're missing the difference between making bad acts illegal, and using illegal Prior Restraint on a civil right to illegalize an object that might be used for a few llegal purposes as well as for its many obviously legal and beneficial purposes.
You don't have to make guns illegal if you have laws making murder and assault illegal, by whatever means accomplished. Much simpler than trying to take 300,000,000 guns away from 100,000,000 law-abiding gun owners, who have a Constitutionally enshrined right to have them..
Those aren't remotely like the numbers I see in statistical charts. I'm assuming you're using _all_ deaths by firearms, which is heavily weighted to suicides, rather than homicides, where the US is much lower. Yes, in countries that don't have many guns, suicide numbers will obviously be much lower, although the suicide rate may well be considerably higher than in the US.
From the same chart, homicides by firearm is 3.2 for the US and .4 for the UK - I'm guessing the rate is held down somewhat by including Scotland with England in the "UK" numbers. If by "type of crime" you mean "by means of what weapon", it may make a difference in the numbers, though violent crime is violent crime. Without looking it up, though, I know that gun crime skyrocketed in England after they confiscated guns from all the law-abiding people - somehow, that didn't affect the guns possessed by criminals, who even started importing full-auto firearms from Eastern Europe.
Note also that a large number of the US homicides are also criminal-on-criminal, not criminal-on-innocent-citizen - while that observation doesn't change the raw numbers, it changes what they really mean to us.
"the presence of a gun is a prerequisite to any form of gun violence" - dumb statement. The presence of a violent criminal is a prerequisite to any form of violence. I might point out that in the US, there are anywhere from one to three MILLION cases each year where the mere presence of a firearm stopped or prevented a violent crime, usually without needing to fire the gun. Personally, I don't think it worthwhile to trade off 1-3,000,000 potential homicides prevented each year for 15,000 committed, especially since most ot the "committed" ones are criminals shooting other criminals. As a non-criminal, I think I'll keep my defensive pistol, thank you very much - I like the odds in _my_ favor.
Anyone can become a programmer. However, to be a good, even great, programmer you have to have:
1) A flair for logic;
2) OCD;
3) Paranoia (otherwise you write code with hidden bugs - it's hard to write idiot-proof code because idiots are so ingenious, and you have to intuit the many ways users, connected programs, and bad data can screw up your code).
Oh, yeah, and 10-20 years of making programming mistakes helps a lot, too. If you're any good, you tend not to make the same mistake more than 2-3 times, and to recognize the results of any particular coding error in the output of anyone else's code.
No, they originally thought they could implement it in 2 to 3 years, with part of it in place after 1 year. Took 'em 5 years to get the first supply command (CECOM) up and running, but without most of the Finance part of the system. They implemented the second command at the 9 year mark, and the remaining three Commands *all at the same time* at the 10 year mark (talk about a data migration nightmare!).
The debacle occurred for reasons of ignorance and, perhaps, a fair measure of arrogance.
The people at HQ Army Materiel Command (AMC) who wanted to contract out the replacement of the existing Army-wide integrated system didn't understand the existing legacy system. They thought it was obsolete - no, it wasn't, that was part of their ignorance, because the HQ AMC people who had originally sponsored the system had long since left and nobody then at HQ AMC really knew anything about the existing system..
The contractor, CSC, had no clue whatsoever about the level of difficulty of government procurement, requisitioning, supply management, finance, provisioning, maintenance, etc. They thought because their consulting staff knew how SAP worked, they could implement an off-the-shelf solution "with a little tweaking for public law and Army & DoD policy". The supply stuff is the easy part; probably 90% of the existing system - the largest, most integrated and complex supply system in the world - was "public law and policy guidance". And both law and policy changed rapidly - one such major change occurred after the contract was let, and there was a 5-year argument over whether it had to be included in the new SAP system, or if they should field the new system first, and then ask for more money for the out-of-scope "change" to be added on afterward (they didn't understand that the needs of the troops in the field meant that _all_ changes were in-scope when it came to operating the worldwide production Army logistics system).
CSC picked up about 200 of the original 300 Army system developers and functional experts on the Wholesale software side; something similar was done on the Depot side of the Army logistics house. They thought they were going to be able to fire them all after 3 years. These people were hired primarily to maintain the old systems while the new SAP system was developed but, because all non-critical changes were frozen, there was quite a bit of spare time to help with development of the new system. Again, CSC thought they knew it all, and refused to let the ex-Army civil servants help with the development of the new system (even though they received SAP training specifically to do so), nor even to work on data cleansing and migration from the old system to import into the new one. The Army system developers and functional experts had over 30 years experience doing that - moving from the Vietnam-war era systems custom-built at each Army supply command and Depot to the "new" Army-wide standard Wholesale and Depot systems, and then doing major upgrades as functionality was added or public law and Army/DoD policy changes required major changes. Along the way, Unix and other mini-computer systems, as well as PC's, were added to the original mainframe system with it's custom-written DBMS specifically designed for the hierarchical nature of supply data.
GAO has some valid criticisms of the whole mess but, typical of GAO, still doesn't understand major computer systems after 40-50 years of auditing them, and misses many things done wrong, and completely misunderstands the legitimate reasons the process was going to take that long whether well or badly managed.
My perspective on all this is as a programmer, analyst, and team leader for 3 years helping to develop, implement, and run one of the Vietnam-era systems for one of the Army supply commands, then the same for the new AMC-developed Army-wide standard system for 30+ years, then finally working for CSC for 10 years maintaining the Wholesale legacy system and, occasionally, working on the new SAP (LMP) system in minor ways. An "insider" perspective, for sure.
Surely, comments like yours are why _individual_ weapons ownership is a right, enshrined in the Constitution.
The original poster got one thing right: "...it's never because there are just too many guns on the street or that they're too easy to purchase." Absolutely correct; the number of guns on the street, or the ease of purchase has nothing to do with crime - only criminals have anything to do with crime.
I'd like to know why Nidi62 thinks responsible gun owners store their ammunition separately from the guns. Does (s)he think bullets magically jump into nearby guns and cause them to start firing by themselves? If there's a worry about someone stealing your guns and ammo, surely they can steal them from two different places - it's not like burglars are going to go to only one place in your entire house looking for things to steal. Personally, I store most of my ammo separately from the guns only because I don't have enough room where the guns are; otherwise, I'd store it all next to the guns for convenience. Reloading components (gunpowder and primers) are another story - they get stored in a dry, cool, place (which equals "basement" for those gun owners that have basements), simply because they are slightly volatile (not very much under normal conditions) and heat and humidity can degrade them over time.
I suspect that, if they really wanted to charge someone suspected of starting a fire with a firearm, there are other than firearms laws to use - "reckless endangerment" and the like. For the most part, it appears to be a rant by the usual anti-gun suspects trying to make political hay out of something that has nothing reasonably to do with regulation of guns.
Here's a 1-hour documentary on Vimeo; I've watched most of about half of it so far - even multi-tasking while doing so, it's pretty interesting. So many remembered images from my collection of Heavy Metal magazines!
http://vimeo.com/38272217
You use one of the mouse keys to modify a lower-case chord keyset character to upper-case. With 3 mouse buttons to play with, you could type numbers, lower-case alphabet (both those with just the keyset), upper-case alphabet, and all punctuation and other special characters.
No, it's very easy to use. It was originally used in conjunction with a 3-button mouse, and the mouse keys gave you the ability to do uppercase and special characters as well as numbers and lower-case alphabet. It made using Engelbart's NLS windowed CRT system extremely easy, as the UI was primarily one-character commands (the leading character of the command you were typing - you would type an "i", and the system would echo "insert" and prompt you for the next thing, be it a command, text, mouse point, or something else). NLS came with a full keyboard, too but, once you learned the keyset, you almost never used it -I only used the keyboard when typing paragraphs of text, such as this comment.
I loved that system and used it for several years on a big US Army office automation project (my 7-person team was, AFAIK, the only ones other than Engelbart's in-house group that ever wrote applications for NLS) After the NLS system disappeared off the commercial market, I hoped for years his team would port everything to the PC, but it never happened - part of the NLS software was ported, but not the 3-button mouse and chord keyset.
I think I still have a couple of the little pocket cards that gave the mouse/keyset combinations; the keyset is so simple, though, that I only ever used it to check on special-character combinations when I was first learning the system. The numbers and lower-case alphabet were just binary combinations - you learned certain key characters, and then mentally counted up from those for the next few characters. After a very short time, if became as easy as learning to touch-type or play the piano or guitar.
It looks to me like a strategic move by Google to get Twitter to re-allow them to crawl the twitter-feed (and maybe get Facebook to do so, too - good luck with that!).
If it looks to Twitter as if Google search is getting more traction with G+ content included, they may get nervous enough to re-establish their previous deal allowing Google to crawl their content. Frankly, I don't see why they killed the deal in the first place - they may want to become a major search engine themselves, but that will never happen, so it only makes sense to me to let everybody and his brother crawl their feed in order to get referrals. Apparently they see it differently, and they're the ones that have the inside track on their strategic business model. Seems counter-intuitive to me to try to sell your data to people who will give you referral business for free - guess they're using the New York Times business model.
It's not just "geek" issues, it's a set of issues. If the candidate is_ for_ any of the following list of examples, he/she is anti-Liberty and should be avoided:
SOPA/PIPA/S.978
The Patriot Act
Warrantless _anything_ by the police
"Enhancements" to domestic and/or international copyright and patent law (as opposed to lessening their reach and impact)
Abortion and/or Contraception control
Gun Control
Sadly, it's probably going to be a pretty short list if you're able to find any politicians at all who are _against_ that entire list of issues. For Presidential candidates, I think the list is down to one - Gary Johnson, who just gave up on the GOP and is now running for the Libertarian nomination. And I don't yet know enough about him to be sure he 100% belongs on the "short list", either. None of the people running for national office from my Congressional and Senatorial districts satisfy all of the above criteria, although a couple of them _may_ be better than the incumbents (their main attraction is that they are not the incumbent).
At least as cool as the actual event is the phrase "This morning, an armada of spacecraft..." - did you think you'd ever hear that phrase in a news report in your lifetime?
No, customers are voting on the stupidity of their elected representatives and the stupid laws they passed that require citizens to pay taxes where no cost was incurred by the state, and where other taxes are paid to the state in lieu of sales taxes. The delivery carrier pays employees, employee taxes, property taxes, fuel taxes, corporate income taxes, and more. The state doesn't lose anything if a citizen doesn't pay a bogus "use tax"; they gain quite a bit more than that by the fact that the citizen had it delivered rather than went out and bought it at a local store. And, as someone else pointed out in another sub-thread, those local stores are also Amazon affiliates, and sell interstate themselves (if they have an ounce of sense, they do, anyway), so nobody loses if _all_ the numbers are added up. To those that think Amazon has an advantage over local brick-and-mortar stores because they pay no building rent, etc., have you ever looked at those Amazon shipping warehouses? Talk about bricks and mortar by the metric mega-ton!
What about WIndows Meeting Space (the current replacement for the old Windows NetMeeting)? It's free, seems to have all the right features, and supports up to 10 users (PCs). Don't think there's any form of it that supports Mac's, though - you'd be limited to Windows boxes.
"If it were a government contract, it would be illegal to be paid twice, once by the government and a second time by consumers."
This is not true. There are many ways to write a gov't contract and, although the general policy is that anything bought by the government becomes public property, there are common exceptions.
> It's usually not all that difficult to tell the difference
> between a police raid and a home invasion. The cops will not
> even attempt to be subtle once they start moving in.
I guess you missed the past news reports from multiple cities where the bad guys took to dressing up more-or-less like SWAT cops, yelling "police!" as they broke down doors, handcuffing the residents, and then looting the residence. Sometimes it was drug houses, and they were after the drugs, weapons, and cash and sometimes it was non-crime residences where they were just after an easy score (since the drug dealers were somewhat likely to shoot when were raided by the "cops").
The benefit you get is compatibility with the OS you're running on your office's Sun iron. Since I run Solaris at work, I'd prefer to run Solaris on my own box at home, rather than BSD or one of the Linux flavors. I've spent quite a few years on Sun systems, and am familiar with the foibles of Solaris - why would I want to run something with a different set of bahaviors if I can get a personal copy of Solaris for free?
So, what do they define as a "copyright holder" for the purposes of paying out the funds from this new tax? Under other laws, I have a copyright on anything I create (including this comment), which would my half of cell phone conversations, anything I post on my web page or blog, any email I send or letters I write... Since, conceivably, someone could record my copyrighted content (how about the person on the other end of the cell phone call who is receiving my copyrighted content? they're receiving it on a cell phone they've had to pay the tax on...), I should be able to collect, right? If they don't pay me, who do I sue?