No. Guns are always intended to kill. A policeman does not draw their gun, if they do not intend to use it, and lethally so. When drawn, its role may be to dissuade an assailant from further action, but the officer will use if need be. The mere presence of the gun indicates that the officer is capable of killing you, regardless of whether it is ever used to that end. As for target shooting, that is practice, whether the target shooter ever uses it for anything but, or not.

It does matter, if you are to assert that the deaths caused by them are somehow equivalent. Typical use is important as it refutes such an equivalence as illustrated by my comment on the ream of paper. Such arguments serve only to hide the real questions behind a bunch of BS. They are meant to evoke an emotional response, not a reasoned one. It’s propaganda.

Almost, and it is the closest I’ve seen to being successful. But, in that context, where does the pistol fit in? The sniper rifle? Or, the machine gun? Also, how are you abusing a pistol when you shoot someone? Lastly, the context itself is suspect. While the original uses of gunpowder have become hidden in the mists of time, it is likely to have been military, and if not, it was shortly thereafter.

I never suggested they weren’t a problem, but you are still operating under the impression that the injuries caused by each is somehow equivalent. The purpose of a car is to convey people from place to place; the fact that they also cause injuries is incidental to their existence. With guns, injury is the entirety of their existence. The fact that they can be used in hunting is a point in their favor, and is part of the reason I’m ambivalent with respect to gun control.

The vast majority of such comparisons are false equivalences. Yes, a car can and will cause serious injury to both its occupants and passerby. But, the same argument can be made for practically anything as given enough time a ream of paper can be transformed into a deadly weapon. However, each of these items has a purpose other than causing injury and death. A gun, though, has a single purpose: to kill. Similarly, a knife has a single purpose, to cut, but that purpose is more expansive than inflicting harm on others, so it too would be a false equivalence, albeit closer than the others I’ve run across.

As the only person, that I am aware of, that has worked professionally in sw testing, I’d like to say testing on the complete binary is always necessary. After you’ve strapped together all of the constituent parts, you have to test, first, whether or not they’re comfortable being strapped together (integration testing) and then, second, you need to ensure that it behaves as expected.

The primary form of testing I’ve used is black box testing where the software was matched up against a set of requirements that it had to meet, and it was irrelevant how it did, as long as it did it. From the testers perspective a requirement had to be user (a highly equipped user) accessible and reproducible behavior. By highly equipped user, I mean as a tester you’ll have access to lower levels of the software than your typical user, and the requirements should be written in such a way that the tester could, conceivably, invoke the behavior without resorting to that access. But, some form of shortcutting should be provided to allow you to get to those points faster, so as you don’t have to burn through 5000 sheets of paper to get an out of toner condition, as an example. This may involve you being able to tweak the registry (or, equivalent) to set up the condition.

That’s an interesting question. Technically, yes they are property of the institution, but one of the mandates is to publish. So, I wouldn’t violate that, however the publishing house may have specific rules about it. The ones I tend to go with are more magnanimous than others, i.e. I retain copyright. However, posting those papers here would lift the veil of anonymity that I have tried to maintain. I’d like to do a lengthy post, or four, on some physics, but real life is really getting in the way, and has been for some time. With luck, I’ll graduate soon, and then we’ll see what happens.

Sign the “owner” up for 1000+ free catalogs via snail mail. Annoy the squatter, save the post office: win-win.

yeah, but I was quoting it from memory.

I’ll look up the offending amendment later. Welcome, back! It is good to see you, again. Staying long?

(BTW, I was just looking at your quotes on your profile, again, and I think you missed a good opportunity with Serenity: when they’re just entering the bar. Kaley: I haven’t had anything betwixt my nethers that ain’t run on batteries. Mal: Gah! I didn’t need to know that! Jayne: I could stand hearing more. :) )

Somewhere along the line, we all come to trust the numbers that come out of computers. After all, an infallible device told us it was true. So, let us start with a simple example, on a ten digit calculator enter the following:

1E12 + 1 - 1E12

If the 1 is in any position, but the last one, your calculator spits out 0. Despite the fact that the answer is very clearly 1. Using this example, and others, I try to have my students resist the urge to enter numbers into their calculators until the very end of the problem, and they will then usually avoid such problems. Despite my advice to my students, this bit me twice in two days, leading to a corollary to the first rule:

Science fiction has often relied on matter and antimatter annihilating each other as a power source. With current technology, producing anti-matter is prohibitively expensive, and most view this as the biggest hurdle for these types of power plants. Basic physics may provide another significant hurdle, however.

Physical Review Focus reports that upon reanalyzing data from 12 years ago, an Italian team discovered that – contrary to popular belief – antimatter and matter may bounce off each other before they’re annihilated (Original paper, subscription required). The key to this discovery was the annihilation events in their data were clustered into two groups: The first group occurred when the antiprotons interacted with the helium in their apparatus, and the second set of events (up to 25% of the total number) occurred at a later time. They determined this second set occurred because the antiprotons were reflected off of the back wall of their device to be later annihilated by the helium atmosphere, instead of either annihilating the aluminum in the walls or passing through entirely. This effect is called Rutherford scattering, and at the speeds they were working with (1 – 10 keV, or 0.14 – 0.46% of c) the antiprotons are more likely to find themselves scattered by the aluminum nuclei than they are to annihilate the nuclei. At lower speeds (500 eV, or 0.10% of c), this effect may peak with 50% of the antiprotons that make it to the back wall being reflected by it.

Being an academic, I regularly attend seminars on topics that may not be interesting to anyone else on the planet. Prior to the talk, an abstract is sent out by the speaker to give us an insight into what he/she will be discussing. A good abstract should be no more than an essential summary of what the speaker will discuss; it is usually no more than a paragraph in length, and is often tersely worded. The rare exceptions to this length requirement usually aren’t the best at conveying the essential information. For a seminar I attended recently, the abstract violated this "rule" by weighing in at a whopping four paragraphs. However, even considering this excessiveness, the opening sentence is what really drove me over the edge. The abstract began with the phrase, "One presents a critical analysis…" (Emphasis added).

In January, a jury in Connecticut found substitute teacher Julie Amero guilty of four felony charges of "risking injury to a minor or impairing the morals of a child" due to a 2004 incident in which her classroom PC became infected with pornographic pop-ups. Today, however, an upper judge effectively hit the reset button on the trial, claiming "information discovered after her conviction has direct bearing on whether she is responsible for risking harm to her students when pornographic pop-ups appeared on a classroom computer." Such information likely includes a pro bono complete forensic analysis of Amero’s classroom PC, which was performed by a group of independent security researchers and delivered to the defense attorneys in April. The results of the study, however, will not be released until any potential new trial concludes.