fywacro

FYI, tungsten carbide (tungsten + carbon) is a different substance from the pure metal tungsten... They have very different physical properties.

But I do appreciate your story about tungsten carbide, too :-)

"For street cleaning, he first reached out to Teddy Roosevelt, who basically said, ‘What, are you nuts? Nobody should do that. That’s an impossible job. I’m not going to do that.’ So Roosevelt took over the police department, which was also in dire need of reform."

Back in college, a history-buff friend told me this story, but I thought she was telling me a joke. Who'da thunk it?

The salt is different for EVERY secret. When you hash/store a new password, you randomly generate a salt for THAT password, and you store each salt & password together.

Because each salt is ~unique, the attacker must rebuild a separate dictionary for every single stored secret. That's functionally the same as having no dictionary, at all.

I believe it should be noted that federal law requires an FFL for anybody engaged in a "primary business" of selling guns. There's no bright line, here. People who regularly sell guns (at gun shows, or otherwise) but don't hold FFLs are playing with fire, if the ATF decides to take an interest in them.

I'm not so sure that most US firearm purchases are recorded.

In many US states, direct private gun sales are perfectly legal. For instance, a Pennsylvania resident can directly sell (most) guns to another PA resident. They don't need to run background checks, keep records, or submit forms to the government. As long as the buyer doesn't know that the seller is a prohibited person (convicted/indicted felon, etc), it's kosher.

Because these sales aren't documented or reported, it's harder to count them. There are estimates, but I can't find anything that seems reliable. I did find an interesting article that discusses this issue at length, though:

* http://www.policymic.com/articles/24070/gun-control-policy-u...

Anecdotally, I know dozens of people who've collectively purchased many, many guns through private sales. Also, take a peek at Armslist.com, GunBroker.com, GunAuction.com, GunsAmerica.com, and similar sites.

Philosophically, I believe you're correct. But in practice, it's all too easy for a government official to harass political opponents for partisan ends, while steadfastly claiming to be objective and neutral. Barring an outright admission of bias, there's no simple way to prove a political agenda.

As a result, US jurisprudence has grown to recognize the potential for government acts to have "chilling effects" on individual rights, even with no evidence of overt bias. Under this theory, certain civil rights (speech, religion, voting, due process) are so terrifically important that government must err on the side of caution, rather than risk discouraging their exercise.

Of course, as with any civil rights issue, we do consider the severity of circumstances in each case. Unfettered free speech swings a lot of weight, but there are always exceptions. Preventing violent terrorist acts (as in your last example) might justify allowing some chilling effects on speech.

However, the courts have vigorously protected speech advocating NON-violent criminal acts (sit ins, protests, draft-card burning) and changes to current laws (drug prohibition). This category seems to cover both your earlier example (marijuana reform), as well as the original situation (tax reform).

And FWIW, kids: This little back-and-forth is a great example of why arguments by analogy don't work.

You appear to be missing the exact point, here. In a free society, it's specifically NOT reasonable for government to investigate anybody based solely on their political advocacy. Government powers should not be used to pursue or dissuade a political agenda. Even the mere threat of an investigation can be a frightening weapon, possibly enough to discourage citizens from political activities.

Your point seems reasonable & logical. But in my experience, it's also incorrect: Plenty of gun collecting is predominantly around modern, mass-produced, non-scarce guns. I believe it's because scarcity is not a significant driver of value, in most gun owners' minds. Gun collectors derive a large portion of their guns' value from using (firing) them in a sports setting. Contrast with art or stamps, which don't really have recreational uses, just "stand-back-and-appreciate-it" value. Some guns DO have this museum-style appreciation-value, too, but the contribution is negligable WRT most mass-produced, modern guns. Also, modern guns have plenty of mythological cachet. Film & video games have celebrated and iconified the distinctive lines of particular guns, like the AR-15 and its variants. Even with millions of ARs in circulation, it may have a higher "cool factor" than an older, rarer flintlock pistol, especially to the younger set. Which brings me to my final point: In the US, gun ownership appears to be on the rise, lately, in non-traditonal demographics. More so than in decades past, you'll find new gun owners trendng: * young * politically liberal * high disposable income * shooting paper or zombies, not hunting * getting introduced to guns via friends, not family They buy guns for the same reason they buy video games--Fun. To that end, their buying habits tend toward the gun equivalents of the Honda Civic or Jeep Wrangler: Reliable, cost-effective, semi-automatic. Generally, that means a modern, mass-produced gun.

These benchmarks DO represent meaningful results.

Some benchmarks are designed to measure absolute performance, in order to answer questions like "How many servers should we buy, if we expect to handle X hits/second?" or "What's the limit of our app stack's scalability, in hits/second?" But... the O.P is NOT benchmarking for absolute performance.

But the O.P. here is benchmarking toward a different purpose: comparing relative performance. These tests are designed to answer a totally different kind of question: "Which of these app stacks performs best, given the same hardware budget for each stack?" or "How many extra servers do we need to buy, if we want to use Apache/mod_php instead of Nginx/php-fpm?"

With relative-performance benchmarks, we have to assume that it's valid to extrapolate from small servers to large, and from one server to many. That is, if Ngnix beats Apache by 1000% on a lonely 500MHz Pentium 3 box, what can we predict about NGinx vs. Apache performance on a dozen-strong cluster of quad-core, dual-socket 3.6GHz machines? In more general terms: How well does each application "scale up/out, horizontally"?

The answer depends on the application type and software architecture. For example, most modern web servers are multi-thread/process apps, with minimal shared state in between. Also, modern web stacks generally push cross-request state into a separate datastore layer (if any). As a result, modern web apps tend to scale up linearly, to the performance limits of the datastore layer. Until your database becomes a bottleneck, you can expect that 2x web servers == 2x hits/second.

Um... What about Australia? Canada? Barbados?

At least a dozen former British colonies established their independence gradually and peacefully, with the willing cooperation of the UK. No fighting, animosity, or anything that could be remotely considered a "revolution".

(Now of course, not ALL former colonies separated peacefully: India, The United States, etc. But there are plenty of examples on both sides.)

And how about Iceland?

Depends on what you mean by realtime. In most cases (stats-wise, anyway) analyzing a non-stored infinite-length data stream is a very different challenge from analyzing a stored, finite-length data set.

Streaming algorithms do exist for many basic statistical measures. But in many other cases, the best streaming algos aren't cheap or accurate enough to be useful.

Bucketing can sometimes substitute for a bona fide streaming algorithm. But again, there's plenty of cases where bucketing won't work well enough to make it useful.

I haven't really looked at Statwing yet--the premise is really tantalizing, though. Gotta find an excuse to throw a spreadsheet in there and see what comes back.