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bwhite

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In situations in which it is legal for you to employ deadly force, you won't be convicted of any criminal statute if you apply that force or any lesser force. That is, if you have an adequate reason to shoot to kill, a application of force which results in a wound is treated equally with one which results in death. The reverse, obviously, is not true.

In all cases, you may be sued civilly for a wrongful death, battery, or any number of other things. And lots of parties can bring the suit: the individual himself, various members of his family, your homeowners association, etc. N is fairly big, removing one of the N probably is not meaningful. Do these sort of civil suits tend to pay more for woundings than deaths? I have no data on this but would be surprised if that were the case.

I expect the only thing the OP meant is that slain person cannot testify the killer. This is self-evident but not really helpful. How is it different than "if you're going to rob someone, you should also kill them". I suppose this might be good practical, tactical advice for criminals but it isn't advancing the discussion here.

The spec for baseball is available. [0]

Regarding the bat itself, the regulations say it must be "round" (1.10), which probably rules out this particular handle. Other than round, the maximum weight, length, and diameter are specified. While bats close to these maximums were once widely used, almost all modern bats are well shy of those figures. Presumably the lighter, smaller bats of today more than make up in control and speed what they lack in mass.

[0] http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/downloads/y2010/official_rules/2010_O...

GoPro IPO on LOYAL3 12 years ago

You are describing a Direct Public Offering [0], which was widely used in the US in the 19th century but waned in the 20th.

Loyal3 does not appear to be underwriting GoPro's IPO. If they are being traditionally underwritten, some other syndicate is doing that and a select fraction of their clients are getting the IPO price. Loyal3 is apparently merely including it -- immediately, on the IPO day -- in the list of securities it permits its clients to transact in. Many brokers, including discount brokers, will do this. Also, it looks like Loyal3 does dollar-based investing. That is, you specify how many USDs you want to spend and Loyal3 eventually delivers some quantity of the security in exchange for those dollars. If you expect a stock's price and availability to fluctuate significantly on its IPO day, you may find that you get a lot less for your dollar that you thought you would.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_public_offering

You need a Federal Firearms License if you are "engaged in the business", which is clarified further as having a "principal objective of livelihood and profit through the sale or distribution of the firearms manufactured". See 18.921.a.21.A. The ATF and FBI have employed a wide range of interpretations for this clause, so an FFL might be warranted.

There are already shows and traveling folks with portable CNC setups who will mill a block of aluminum into various types of frames or AR-15 lowers. The 3d-printed issue seems quite similar to that.

This is so true. I remember how irate I was when I realized that Rambo III insisted that a thinly mocked-up Browning was actually a DShK. That annoyed me but not nearly as much as Neo's Scorpions ejecting what looked like 5.56 casings on the floor during the lobby gun fight. Maybe necked-down brass looks sexier pinging off the floor.

But worse than all of this is what happens in movies when people are shot. People inevitably fly backwards, sometimes tens of feet. There's a nice Quora answer about this [1]. I get the need for a great action shot, but it's a thumb in the eye to everyone who actually has even a ballpark concept of kinetic energy delivery.

[1] http://www.quora.com/Guns-and-Firearms/Does-shooting-someone....

I assume you mean to say that you think this is a lousy idea and indicates that BTC/USD is about to fall. However, if you're serious, the answer is that while there is no mechanism to short BTC/fiat like you can a NYSE-traded equity, there are venues in which you can buy and sell BTC/fiat futures, like ICBIT. You can also participate in "betting" pools, which are derivatives similar to certain types of options, such as BTCLevels and BTCOracle.

Caveat emptor, obviously.

In many places, none of these suggestions would help someone who realizes he is carrying a handgun.

1) There are guidelines for how the firearm must be shipped; simply sliding it into your checked baggage will not work.

2) Handguns are generally prohibited from being mailed via the USPS.

3) The person seeing you off may not be properly licensed to transport the handgun.

4) Storing a valuable object in a vehicle which is in long-term parking sounds like a bad idea. Municipalities which have strict theft-reporting requirements do not have exceptions for "I was out of town and didn't know that my car had been burgled."

Like many office buildings, it is of pretty good size and houses a goodly number of workers. What sets it apart from almost all other buildings its that it is symbolic. The financial reporters are still frequently "on location" there, it is in downtown Manhattan, and there is an enormous American flag covering the Broad St side of the building.

I assume the NCLB standardized tests cover things which are widely considered to be core reading and math skills. PBS has a number of sample questions here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/education/no_ch.... The topics seem pretty core to me. If teachers broadly find themselves having to devote significant additional time to these subjects in order to pass the tests, what does that say about pre-NCLB curricula? Learning to take a test is a skill which would not necessarily be taught in the pre-NCLB world, but how much time does that really take? Are there any real studies of this? It seems to me that a child with a decent grasp of the subjects appearing on that test would not require an inordinate amount of instruction in test taking.

Lithium-ion batteries are supposed to be pretty good as resisting self-discharge, losing only .3-.5% per day (or around 10% per month). The Tesla S has the 60 kWh or 85 kWh battery, so replacing around half a percent of that each day is 300-425 Wh. That's not much at all! If the battery replacement machines are simple and foolproof, perhaps home delivery of batteries and a small trickle charger could be a competitive model to full-blown home chargers?

Storing the batteries at the station will require much more volume than the analogous amount of gas/diesel. And a dumb tank beats a smart battery charger with software and EEPROMs if your concern is resiliency. Some EV problems are pretty clearly chicken/egg adoption problems. But there are some real infrastructure problems, too, and other changes may bear far more fruit towards the goal of more efficient energy exploitation.

Gas stations are incredibly common. Public EV charging stations will never be as common unless a different business model is adopted.

If EVs become common, people will have home charging stations. Demand for non-at-home charging stations will come from (1) folks who drive a lot and need to charge intraday (and who cannot charge at work) and (2) road trippers. The sum of both of these categories is fairly small and less demand means less supply. So if you do fit into one of those two categories, you will need to plan your driving carefully instead of figuring that you'll be able to pick up some gas when you need it. This can be overcome by arranging for the proliferation of public EV charging stations even absent the demand. Perhaps the manufacturer or municipalities will subsidize it.

You're not the first person with this idea: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/05/better-place/

To some extent there is a standards problem: there is not a common battery pack (like there is a gas tank fill point). But even if there were, the batteries would continue to run down after delivery (unless supplied with a non-trivial amount of power). And the space required to physically store these batteries would occupy a lot of volume. After all, gasoline/diesel is far more energy-dense than modern batteries.

You can push the argument further. Postulate that climate change is real, and that you could accurately describe the policy steps necessary to eliminate it, and that you could bring about those policy changes on a global scale. What are the negative impacts? What is the chance of climate change occurring anyway? Anthropogenic change is peanuts compared a huge mess of Siberian volcanoes firing off for a million years.

The Federal Constitution (amended over time) has a list of reasons and qualifications which cannot be used to deny the vote. It is otherwise silent on the matter. Until the 14th and 15th amendments (1868, 1870), that list only included "religious test" (as in no religious test may be used to deny someone the franchise).

The several states each had (and have!) their own laws and regulations. Immediately following the ratification of the Constitution, states largely restricted voting rights to landholding white men. But by the 1840s most states had extended the right to vote to almost all white men, having done away with the requirement to own land, or pay taxes.

States continue to have different laws regarding voting rights, perhaps most notably surrounding the the rights of convicted felons.

In a couple weeks, options will be available on the stock and you can buy puts. The upside isn't as good but the downside is capped instead of unlimited.

The cost of market data and a system equipped to process it are not inconsiderable.

Historical tick data (quotes and trades) for US equities will run you $20k/year, minimum. US equities runs about 30-40GB/day so you are looking at almost 10TB/year. You need to be able to access the data quickly so you probably don't want to compress it and probably do want to duplicate the data, slicing and dicing it in different ways. Call it 20TB, minimum, per year of data.

Futures and options data will run another $20k/year, each, and futures has about as much data as equities and options has an order of magnitude more. That is another 100TB/year, minimum, per year, probably closer to 200TB.

How are going to to study these data? Even if you were able to operate at disk speed (which seems unlikely unless you have lots of disks and have duplicated and distributed your data amongst them) it would take you five minutes to run against one day's worth of data, or close to a day to run a year's simulation. If you consider more than a few cores in parallel, reading from disk is going to be seriously hampered.

None of this even considers the cost of the software necessary to support this effort: contending with corporate actions, tracking halts, etc.

This all adds up to a significant financial hurdle.

It is straightforward, but impractical. Getting good historical market data is very, very expensive. Even recording current market data is not cheap and not without significant difficulty.

There are plenty of prop shops that would let you trade with a very modest (low 5-figure or even 4-figure) dollar amount. Some will leverage your money, some will flat-out stake you in addition to your input. These places have the benefit of offering you relatively low costs -- minuscule compared to the cost of a retail trade at your average discount broker -- but they do not necessarily have the sort of investment in supercharged hardware.

It is a good thing that your actual trading costs are not anywhere near those at the retail brokers you have in mind. 2%/day is an outrageously huge return. $1,000 at 2% compounded 250 times (approximate number of trading days in a earth year) is over $140k; you would return 14,000% annually.

The bottom line is that it is harder than it looks.