Cap'n Refsmmat

I may be forced to go this route soon, just to make the LaTeX BBCode function at all. Apparently IPS is phasing out BBCode in favor of a pure WYSIWYG system.

Interesting ideas. But to make a decent novel you'll need to turn that into stories about individual characters and the problems they face in the interesting universe you've created. Unfortunately I have my own very strange story ideas I'd like to pursue. I hope you'll write something regardless. It's always fun.

I saw that bug report earlier and shuddered a bit. I also managed to break the layout by manually typing quote tags, although for some reason I can't get it to happen any more. As I look through their bug reports, it's apparent that they don't bother with techniques like, say, automated feature testing. It's much more fun to change everything and then wait for customers to see what's broken. Now to figure out why math tags get eaten.

It's pretty crap, isn't it? And if you type in quote tags manually, it breaks the forum layout, because apparently you're not allowed to do that unless you switch out of the WYSIWYG mode. Dumb. I'll try to see if there's a workaround for the math tags being eaten. edit: oh dear. I'm reading bug reports and discussions with the developers and it doesn't look good. Lots of dumb bugs and dumb design decisions.

Answer: you don't use LaTeX for that. You'll have to use ordinary HTML. The inline LaTeX is automatically in math mode, and tables aren't available in math mode; it's as if the code you entered were surrounded by \begin{equation} and \end{equation}.

The new editor is indeed pretty crap. You should hypothetically be able to hit Enter a few times within a quote to split it into pieces, but that seems to only work about half the time. I don't know why. There's an updated version out with some bugs fixed; we'll try to upgrade soon, and hope it works better than the last upgrade.

You can send it to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_(file)

I should also point out other loopholes. California, for instance, bans removable magazines on assault rifles if they're used in conjunction with certain other features, the idea being that removable magazines make it easier to quickly reload and shoot lots of people. Detachable magazines are only allowed if you have to detach them with tools, instead of a button. However, "tools" is loosely defined, so California-legal guns are now made with a magazine release button that can only be pressed with something long and pointy, like a bullet. It requires a tool, so it's not a detachable magazine, but you have the tool already and it takes about five seconds. Whoops. http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2012/05/20/cbs-5-story-inspires-new-legislation-to-ban-bullet-button/ It also turns out that banning 30-round magazines is hard. AR-15 magazines are a NATO standard design so they can be easily interchangeable with those of other assault rifles. Some manufacturers make modified AR-15s chambered for .458 SOCOM, a much bigger bullet than the .223 usually fired, but the bullets fit nicely in NATO standard magazines, ten to a magazine. So, if you sell 10-round .458 magazines, they're not officially high-capacity magazines, but you can put them in your ordinary .223 AR-15 and have thirty rounds. Gun laws are hard.

The only difference is that hunting rifles fire more powerful cartridges and are often heavier; they don't look nearly as scary, though.

Source? Various scholarly sources I've found point to today. Random Internet New Agers claim that it's based on the equinox, which is today.

I'm not sure that's the question we want to answer. A weapon can be unsafe but hideously expensive and impractical to use, like a grenade launcher, and so it only ends up being used by people with too much money having some fun. The question we want to answer is "How do we reduce gun violence?" I don't know what the answer is, but banning weapons that are rarely involved in gun violence doesn't seem to be a candidate. Perhaps guns used in crime tend to be inexpensive models that can be easily purchased; then we could institute an excise tax to make them more difficult to own. Perhaps we could have more effective background checks before allowing gun purchases. Perhaps we could disincentivize gun violence by making it easier to prosecute -- through some sort of ammunition registry or whatnot.

Grenade launchers are legal for civilians to buy in the United States so long as they pay for a $200 federal tax stamp. So no, I don't think it might be a problem. http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_6_21/238534_37mm_and_40mm_Launcher_FAQ.html

The point is that this is an outlier. Unless you genuinely want to ban the most popular kind of rifles in America for the sake of two shooting incidents, an assault weapons ban would achieve little. The tens of thousands of people killed by guns every year would still be killed in equal numbers, but there'd be one or two fewer mass-media incidents.

Why? Until about a decade ago, the most common weapon confiscated by police was a .38 Special revolver, possibly the weapon farthest down the list on "ability to kill quickly" apart from bolt-action rifles. How fast you can kill someone has no correlation with the frequency of a weapon's use in crime. Incidentally, the same factors that make the AR-15 scary also make them one of the most popular civilian-owned weapons sold in the US. I'd guess that, proportionally, AR-15s are used less frequently for violence than shotguns or handguns. District of Columbia v. Heller also poses a legal challenge to banning AR-15-style rifles, because it explicitly grants the Second Amendment right to weapons "in common use" for lawful purposes. edit: I should point out that Connecticut has an assault weapons ban already, and the AR-15 used in the massacre was legal to own under it. That's the trouble with clearly defining what constitutes an assault weapon -- it's very easy to get around.

Yes, the Bushmaster is a semiautomatic version of the M-16. Fully automatic versions are not available to civilians except in limited cases involving weapons already in private hands before the ban. Part of the point of the Second Amendment was that the founders did not want a large standing army, so self-defense would be necessary. But they also believed in the need for the people to be able to defend themselves should the government turn tyrannical. I think it's silly to worry about assault rifles and high-capacity magazines. Most gun violence is not in the form of massacres. Most gun violence is committed with handguns. Most gun violence is suicides, which obviously do not require a large magazine. Banning scary-sounding weapons won't stop any of this.

It was not a fully-automatic rifle. Those are already heavily regulated and difficult to get. The Second Amendment was written so a militia could defend itself. What about modern firearms is in conflict with that purpose?

Most "assault weapons" are used by people having fun, rather than people assaulting people. Most weapons used to assault people are handguns. (at least for civilian-owned weapons)

Sure, but there's a correspondingly smaller number of in-school gun deaths in Oklahoma. It's a matter of proportions, not absolute numbers.

Hang on a moment. We're discussing the practical issues in arming teachers to prevent school shootings. Now, some statistics: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_03.pdf Shootings in schools are a tiny fraction of all homicides (less than 1%), and yet we're talking about arming all school staff. We have something like seven million teachers. Arming them all with a $500 weapon would cost $3.5 billion; training classes and ammunition for all of them would probably cause just as much. On the other hand, you could buy a cheap gun lock for every handgun in America for maybe $1 billion, and give them to every handgun owner there is, preventing dozens of small children and pissed-off teenagers from finding guns and doing something stupid with them. Before we panic over the latest news item and demand action, we should consider whether it will be worth the effort.

I've had it happen once where I could hit Enter as much as I want and it doesn't break out of the quote. I suspect there are some lingering bugs in the new version of the software; let's hope they fix some of them soon.

Now that I think of it, I can actually make a useful contribution to this discussion: http://www.refsmmat.com/articles/unreasonable-math.html My attempt to answer the question "why should I bother with the equations?"

If it's affecting IE as well I'd guess it's either your ISP or some other filtering software or firewall you have. Or those websites are just having a bad week.

Possibilities: Their websites are just dead. Some sort of firewall software is preventing you from accessing them. (I'd recommend against just disabling a firewall, but check to see if it might try to block sites on a blacklist or something.) Your ISP doesn't like the sites you visit. Maybe you have an extension or addon to Chrome that is broken. You could narrow it down by finding a site that doesn't work and testing it in another browser.

My first guess would be something is wrong with the websites. Does it happen consistently with a certain group of sites, or does it happen anywhere?

Could you be more specific about what the error says and where it appears?