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It could absolutely be done as NICS: rather than a phone call, plug your form 4473 info into a website. Once they do the check, it emails you the code which is good for N days. Your seller then just verifies the code on the ATF website and checks that your ID matches the name for the code. It would be more convenient for everyone, including the ATF employees.

Sure!

I've only used my FFL03 once, to order a Mosin Nagant rifle, but it still worked out cheaper than a single gun transfer in California ($30 for the FFL03 vs. $60+ for a transfer at a gun store)

Part of having a FFL03 is the requirement that you maintain a "bound book" of all transactions done under that license. You can buy these online or print out sheets, but basically you must record who you bought it from, when, for how much, the serial number, etc.

It has not happened to me in 3 years of licensing, but the BATFE may request to inspect your bound book and your firearms to make sure everything's in order.

As for attaining the FFL, I filled out a form (ATF form 7CR) with a bunch of personal information and mailed it off with a $30 check. They did their background checks and after a month or two mailed back my license. You need to renew it every 3 years, but it's basically a matter of making sure the information is correct and sending in a check.

The benefits of having an FFL03:

- Eligible guns can be shipped direct to your door (no handguns shipped in California)

- You can buy C&R eligible guns out-of-state and bring them back with you.

In any case, you must provide the seller with a copy of your license prior to purchase.

It's not entirely clear from the article, but the data they're using appears to include all types of Federal Firearms Licensees. FFL01 is the license for a traditional gun store. However I hold an FFL03, which is a license to collect Curio & Relic firearms. These comprise guns over 50 years old and some special items on a federal list. With this license I can purchase C&R-eligible guns and have them shipped direct to my door, unlike the general public who must transfer Internet purchases through a FFL01 licensee. I am not, however, allowed to deal in guns, just to make an occasional sale when I decide I don't want a specific gun any more.

AMA about FFL03 if you're curious, I guess.

Regarding private sales, I'd really like a system whereby the buyer can generate a 1-time code (by filling out some information on a gov't website, for instance) that's good for say a month. The seller can then enter that code, see that "John Smith" is clear to buy a gun, and after checking the buyer's photo ID can sell him the gun in relative confidence that he's not selling to a prohibited possessor.

This would help eliminate private party sales to prohibited possessors, but it has the unfortunate (to gun control advocates) of making firearm sales more convenient and safe; their desired solution is of course to eliminate private sales.

Pretty rough on somebody with a Thinkpad 3-button trackpoint, maybe use +- or [] or something to zoom in and out.

And we all saw how well that worked out for Arthur Dent!

I'm a fan of ring roads, Rochester for instance had a small inner loop and a much wider outer loop of freeways (with freeway segments and decent arterials connecting the inner to the outer, it looked kind of like a wagon wheel) that meant you could get almost anywhere pretty quickly.

The problem of getting from one side of town to the other very quickly, without clogging up the "walkable neighborhoods" in the middle, with their narrow streets and wide sidewalks. The people going through get on the highway, out of the way of the people actually living in the town.

I've seen people create their own README and move the upstream one to README.upstream or similar. Seemed sensible to me.

If only there were some way to evaluate whether or not students were learning things better with one style of teaching or another... some sort of evaluation, a test if you will, a standardized way to judge what's been learned. Then maybe we'd get some more rigor in education!

On another note, everyone I knew in high school who really bought into "learning styles" were the kids who didn't like such-and-such class and wanted to whine.

> Coming from academia, I was trained to fiercely defend my intellectual territory, pissing all over anything that seemed remotely close to my area of interest.

Anyone who has ever been through a conference/journal submission process knows this pain. You can usually tell from the comments which of the reviewers is working in your field and wants to shut you out.

65mph through the streets of downtown San Francisco was pretty interesting, but on the other hand we did get back to our hotel in about 3 minutes.

That's a pretty standard way to comment out a huge chunk of code, because /* */ will get screwed up if there's another comment using the same convention inside, and putting // in front of every single line looks bad/makes copying code around painful.

#if 0 is also a convenient way to flip bits of test/debug code on and off.

I analyzed 250 SaaS pages, and all of them were using Bootstrap

I stopped getting razor burn when I switched from disposables to a safety razor, and it's no less convenient. My main complaint was the high up-front cost for the razor but I'm now seeing starter kits in Wal-mart in the $20 range which IIRC included razor, blades, brush, and soap.

Yeah but they're probably going to store their little collection of cricket pilots in a box inside the house... and if I know kids, they'll plop down at the kitchen table to load up a cricket before heading outside to play.

Seems like a really odd target market: kids who don't think bugs are gross, have moms who'll allow a box of live crickets in the house, have easy access to a source of live crickets, have parents who aren't totally weirded out by the idea of feeding a constant stream of crickets into this thing for a child's mild amusement as it rams into a table leg over and over again.

You can get Almond Roca everywhere but Aplets and Cotlets are a pretty WA-specific thing, I've never seen them outside of the state.

Those and the Idaho Spud are my #1 treats when I'm back home.

I grew up on "turkish delight" in Washington state, home of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Orchards which makes "Aplets and Cotlets", Turkish Delight flavored with apples and apricots. (It's incredible)

Scumbag Steve, his hat aslant

My keyboard is... weird. When I type Shift-9, I see ')' instead of '(' and I can't even figure out how to type a '+' character.

I was thinking of Micotil, my mistake.

Animal antibiotics are not the same as human antibiotics. LA-200, for instance, will kill a human but is quite effective in treating sick cattle.

> IMHO TV was better OTA than on cable. You had a small number of local channels and they had to compete for eyeballs.

OTA TV still exists and it's not bad. $15 for an antenna and I'm getting about 40 channels in Albuquerque.

What basis? "Asians wise, Westerners dumb"

This reminds me of how philosophers seem to spend 50% of their time writing about how important philosophy is. The other 50% is often spent writing philosophy based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the topic (see: any philosophy of technology book)

You're right, nobody is attempting to act against them. All the (ludicrous, unworkable, unenforceable, sometimes blatantly unconstitutional) bills that get drafted (and sometimes passed) in California, NY, Illinois, and Washington DC, those are just figments of gun-addled imaginations.

Most powerful in terms of money spent? Because they don't even make the top 30. CVS, the pharmacy chain, spends more money on lobbying.

Or do you mean more powerful because they're backed up by the huge percentage of gun owners in this country? How big does a group represented have to be before you stop calling them a "special interest lobby"? There are more gun owners than there are teachers, but the teachers spend more on lobbying.

That's acme, Plan 9's answer to emacs that does a really good job of managing tiled (text-only) "windows". It also served as an inspiration to the wmii tiling window manager on Linux

And they will fight you every step of the way, every time you suggest they use the indentation character for indentation.

cmdrtaco's screenshot is a great example of how, back in 2002, we hadn't yet learned "just because you can, doesn't mean you should".