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Anyone who liked the Reagan or bush Sr. admin must just hate the people of America and the world.
http://www.thefreespeechzone.net/images/charts/bush_deficit_graphic.gif
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Dh_elMeIWA4/SNlX_nBMCWI/AAAAAAAAAJY/QcjlCQ_j_80/s400/gini.gif
Trickle down... Reaganomics... Do you cut yourself too?

"I am interested in your composite money-time concept and would like to subscribe to your newsletter"

I don't have a newsletter, I reposted it here, feel free to comment

I was obsessed with the NS Savannah recently because she is such a beautiful ship - I love ships and this cargo ship looks like a yacht. Whilst I am not a fan of the Nuclear Industry in it's current form her reactor appeared to be reasonably well constructed and whilst designed to cruise at 21 knots, she outperformed her design spec by steadily cruising at 24 knots - pretty fast for a cargo ship. Check page 16 of the MARAD documentation (warning - pdf).

There is significant historical information about her operation. Until 9/11 she was part of the National Defense Reserve Fleet (NDRF) but her reactor was permanently disabled due to concerns she could be used as quite a convenient weapon of terror. Sadly, her hybrid design condemned her to a short operational life (10 years) and she is now a ghost ship. There are plans to make her a museum ship whilst waiting for her decommissioned reactor to cool down for eventual disassembly, but no one seems interested in the project. Despite that the seafarers Union have been working to maintain the ship by improving her general appearance.

NS Savannah's crew dispute was because the executive officers traditionally got paid more than the engineering crew on board the ship, this dispute, high running costs, low oil costs all contributed to her eventual demise. An interest group (with mailing list) is looking for photos and artefacts whist she was in operation.

lots more photos, her community organisation, glory days, historical landmark program, service history and specifications, floorplan and schematics, current status, passenger lounge, reactor control room, dry docked , and finally a flickr photo stream and a rather excellent photo essay of the NS Savannah. A little bit of history for you to enjoy.

Viurt is nasty and fairly difficult to repair. Most malware removers recommend reinstallation rather than attempt to repair damaged system files.

There's no mention of the Blaster/Sasser worm, Sircam, CIH or Magistr. All of which caused panic and damage at least on the same scale as Conficker. All of which had much more damaging payloads than any of those noted.

Seems to be a fairly dodgy, or poorly researched list.

(U//FOUO) Domestic Extremism Lexicon

(U) Definitions

(U) aboveground (U//FOUO) A term used to describe extremist groups or individuals who operate overtly and portray themselves as law-abiding.

(U) alternative media (U//FOUO) A term used to describe various information sources that provide a forum for interpretations of events and issues that differ radically from those presented in mass media products and outlets.

(U) hacktivism (U//FOUO) (A portmanteau of "hacking" and "activism.") The use of cyber technologies to achieve a political end, or technology-enabled political or social activism. Hacktivism might include website defacements, denial-of-service attacks, hacking into the target's network to introduce malicious software (malware), or information theft.

"the mindset is dangerously close to the rationalization used recently by a KDE spokesperson and lampooned by the Linux Hater Blog " Miguel de Icaza on 15 Jul 2008

"As usual, the Linux Hater Blog has some great commentary. Some of his feedback on KDE 4.0 applies to our own decision making. Worth a read " Miguel de Icaza on 14 Jul 2008

This is the kind of commentator he recommends people read:

"I was getting a little worried that I wouldn't have something appropriate to close of K-pride week with, but then sweet feces rained down from heaven"

Pay to post? That will slowly convert youtube into a repository of advertising. Would you go there very often?

Pay to view? Well, the freemium model is getting a lot of traction these days. Perhaps the UGC stuff can be free and the professionally produced stuff can be a pay-per-view.

I wasn't aware of this 'blog' until the above poster referenced it. It is curious that even 'back in 2008' at the very genesis of the OpenGraphics project we already have someone pissing all over it. This is high quality trolling, professionally written. Either that or it's satire right up there with ShellytheRepublican, it's hard to tell really. Else that blogs author is mentally challenged, after all who in his right mind would set up a blog dedicated to something he obviously has total contempt for, as well as the people working in the Open Source arena. Tell me something 'Jamie's Nightmare', are you a Linux advocate too, who just wants Linux to be better. Either way, I'd much prefer if you and your 'Linux hater' friend would piss off and stop pissing all over slashdot ..

You've missed this story then?
Sadly, the blog that was initially involved in this, and where the 'riddle' was solved, seems to have removed the entire blog post + comments (lawyers?), but the posts can still be found here

And in the end, all this inconvenience to cell phone, PDA, media player, netbook, and laptop users (not to mention American's with Disability Act violation - some people need cameras) will be about as successful as drug interdiction at the border.

Joe consumer can buy a camera (still and video with audio) disguised as, for example, a working ball point pen (doubles as a 4GB USB flash drive) for $35.17, delivered (lower end model under $20). Another is rather poorly disguised as an ID badge (required in many places where cameras are banned); poor implementation but you can see where that is headed. Another is disguised as a wrist watch. Another as a necktie. Another small model. Miniaturization has made camera interdiction at the border all but impossible. Unless you are going to strip search and body cavity search everyone, provide them with substitute clothing, and prevent them from taking anything inside, cameras will get in.

Ironically, before all this stuff was available to the consumer for the price of dinner, there were government facilities that had these kinds of no camera security precautions while on the inside engineers were developing spy cameras that were small enough to circumvent the exact same security provisions at the other country's facilities.

Miniature equipment has been available for over a hundred years if you had the cash. And if the stakes were high enough to justify banning cameras, the camera cost was minor compared to what the pictures were worth.

The only difference with your portable electronics gear is plausible deniablity if you get caught before you snap the pictures.

A great post about this ridiculous project was made to the Linux Hater's Blog back in 2008. Worth a read if you want to know why it's a piece of crap.

The swine flu has already been renamed due to it's similarity to Internet Sensation Mitchell Hayenga.... http://mitchell-hayenga-rumors.blogspot.com/ The similarities are striking, although Mitchell has not yet confirmed or denied the link via his account http://www.twitter.com/lucidresearch

No, but i can build my own car (ie make a copy) using the components (or equivalent copies) used to build a Mercedes.

Whether that's financially viable or not is the difference. The cost of purchasing the parts and required tools, plus the time it takes me to assemble the vehicle and ensure everything works as expected is probably going to be more than $50,000 thus Mercedes are providing good value for money.

On the other hand, the cost of purchasing a blank CD/DVD, downloading a game and writing it is unlikely to outweigh $50 plus the inconvenience of waiting for delivery or visiting a store, thus the game publisher is providing poor value for money.

If car manufacturers increased their prices such that it was possible to assemble a vehicle from components for less money (including your time spent, or the cost of hiring someone to do it) then i would do that rather than buying a new pre-assembled car.

It is perfectly legal to build your own car from components, even if you build a car which is an exact copy (replica) of an existing model.

http://carscoop.blogspot.com/2007/08/jaguar-e-type-convertible-replica-based.html gives an example of someone who built a replica of a Jaguar E-type,

Many of the components could be bought directly from the manufacturer you are trying to copy, third parties also make copies of components and if you have the appropriate tools there's nothing stopping you from producing your own components from scratch using raw materials.

Shouldn't that be the U.S Trade Protectionist Lobby (USTP)

"Today's Special 301 Report guides our efforts to protect American innovation and creativity around the world," said Ambassador Ron Kirk. "Our creative and innovative products can hit the global marketplace sometimes with just a keystroke. If we and our trading partners are not vigilant in protecting and enforcing intellectual property rights, they can vanish just as quickly"

The Absurdity of the USTR's Blame Canada Approach

Chevron Lobbyists Misleading USTR Over Ecuador Environmental Case

Measures Concerning the Importation, Marketing and Sale of Tuna and Tuna Products

People have been designing Apple chips for a long time. Wake me when they make an edible iPod shuffle.

It's been a while since I used mandriva, here's a review of the latest:
http://adventuresinopensource.blogspot.com/2008/11/distro-review-mandriva-one-2009.html

And more timely reviews here under 2009:
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mandriva

I suspect lithium-ion batteries will be only a temporary solution. Because there is some research that promises an even better technology, the Sodium-ion Battery. The original article is on nature materials and costs $ to view, but this blog has an overview:
http://entropyproduction.blogspot.com/2007/10/sodium-ion-batteries.html

So if the electric car industry takes off in a big way, there will be enough money in making batteries that this technology should see serious research. My bet is that Lithium-ion will be rather popular in the medium term, but in the long term there will be something even better.

I remember "Tales from a loser" or something like that, a blog before the word even existed

Actually, that one is still active after 14 years: Keeper of Lost Lives.

And you may notice that you missed my point. Not that I particularly agree with my point; the new prisons will not house nearly enough people to make any sizeable dent in the unemployment figures. For that, we have to employ them in local government.

Or let the government pay them to work at macdonalds

As someone who has a lot of customers that have older hardware (and I myself keep a 9 year old 1.1GHz Win2K box around as a low power netbox) I have found Kmeleon CCF ME to be a great replacement on older hardware. Not only does it use less resources than FF3, but it has built in Adblock Plus and by following this guide here and downloading a couple of free files it will run on anything from Win95 up.

So please, be kind to yourself as well as the Internet and stop using IE6 if you are on older hardware. Both Kmeleon and Kmeleon CCF ME will run on as little as a 233MHZ with 64MB of RAM ( they say 32MB but lets be real here) so there really isn't a reason to keep running that virus laden pile of.....eewww that is IE6. It really wasn't nice to begin with and now it is just nasty.

And you are one of those that probably believed "Inside every gook is an American waiting to get out" but it didn't work out that way, did it? Old Saddam kept order by gassing everyone that disagreed with him. I can't really see Americans dropping mustard gas, which is pretty much the ONLY way you are going to "win" there. But believe Fox News and run us further into debt and waste American lives on a total fucking pointless waste of time. And PLEASE don't give us that "democracy" bullshit,okay? It is about OIL, it has ALWAYS been about OIL, and if Somalia had the oil reserves that we see under Iraq we would be "liberating" them now as we speak. Old Saddam was going to go to the Euro. The petro dollar is pretty much the only damned thing we have left in the country, so pretending that we actually gave a shit about "democracy" while we make deals with China(true evil) is not only BS, it is kinda insulting,okay?

Let us look at the facts, okay? FACT- There was NO Iraq until the British made it, it was a bunch of little warlords and fiefdoms that frankly didn't like each other very much. FACT- Iraq is made up of THREE completely separate groups that frankly can't agree on shit. These are of course the Sunni, The Shia, and the Kurds. ALL THREE want TOTAL control of the country, or to have the country split up into autonomous regions that THEY control. ALL THREE want TOTAL control on the oil, and ALL THREE want power, TOTAL power. See the problem?

This ain't Democrats VS Republicans, bud, Hell these groups make the Hatfield VS McCoy feud look downright neighborly. The Shia and Sunnis have been killing each other for centuries, a hell of a lot longer than the USA has been around. You think your mighty planes and bombs are gonna make them into peace lovin hippies? Sorry bud, we tried that shit once before in a little place called Vietnam. Didn't work out too well there either. We thought bringing American style civilization (and a government that would listen to us) would solve their problems and they would love us. Instead they gave AK47s to kids and did every single thing in their power to kill us. HMMM...why does this sound familiar?

So I hate to be the one to break your "America, fuck yeah!" RDF, but they ain't NEVER gonna be like us. All the planes and smart bombs and dead American kids on the streets of Baghdad ain't never gonna change that. You could blow a billion buck a day and pave their streets in American blood and they will just keep on coming. So mark my words, we WILL get out. Just like Nam, it is just a matter of when. And the hawks will blame the dems for not letting them "win" when the simple fact is you can NEVER win. Folks become civilized because they WANT to, not because you stuck a gun in their face and told them to be good citizens. Sorry, but it just ain't never gonna work. It will just billions out of our already depressed economy and way too many American kids sent home in wheelchairs and bodybags. And all for nothing. How fucking sad.

Most innovations typically play along the periphery of what is permitted because the norm is, by definition, in the middle. By its very nature, social networking runs contrary to U.S. constitutional rights to privacy. That doesn't stop facebook's popularity but I guess that it could cause any large corporation's legal department to blow a gasket. As a participant in an enterprise offering in social networking, I've run in to the opposite end of this spectrum. Companies don't want to reveal their internal problems yet risk doing so as they start searching around in social networks not directly under their control.

That's a very good point.

When Sun was buying MySQL, there was a lot of FUD how it was going to ruin it, but looking at MySQL job trends it seems as if MySQL adoption has increased.

Even after the acquisition, people try to paint Sun in a bad light over what's been going on with MySQL. For example, when it was announced that MySQL was going to come out with some features that would only be available in the closed source, enterprise version, the decision was attributed to Sun, when it seemed like it was really Mickos' decision. He was the former CEO of MySQL AB.

When Sun reversed the decision, the news was the MySQL made the change.

Even recently, what's been going on with Monty Widenus leaving Sun has been used to make Sun sound like it was hurting MySQL, but if you read Monty's blog about why he left Sun, it sounds more like he was unhappy with MySQL management, and not Sun.

I get the impression that Monty wasn't all that happy with MySQL AB even before they were bought by Sun. When Sun bought them, he was hoping for things to improve but that never happened.

Unfortunately, even a company like Sun is not the same as a startup before VC money and board members come in. It seems it's not as stifling as other companies though, but not what Monty was expecting.

People like Monty probably aren't meant for that type of atmosphere. Probably why people like Andy Bechtolstein come and go frequently.

You think that isn't happening now?

CIO of Harvard Medical School, among other jobs writes pretty frequently about electronic healthcare records. He's also the one that got an RFID chip in his arm and got his genome sequenced a few months ago.

There are three layers.

Bottom: Data and semantics (HTML, semantic )
Middle: Layout and formatting (CSS)
Top: Post-load dynamics (JS)

If the lower-level layers operate without depending on the higher-level layers, no problem exists.

The problem is, people don't think of it that way, and keep designing pages which depend on javascript to work, or become horribly hard to use without stylesheets.

I wrote about this some time ago:
http://chjacobsen.blogspot.com/

I must admit, at first glance, I was concerned since I only knew about recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com, but beckermanlegal.com is in TFS, so I would imagine it too is genuine Ray Beckerman.

In the last year there was an episode of Law & Order named"Rapture" where something like this happens. One of three Christians who were supposed to log in didn't due to losing internet access, another of course because he was murdered. So, in the world of the show, emails were sent that were not supposed to be until after the rapture.

Obviously the IT person didn't understand RAID well enough.

In the last year there was an episode of Law & Order named"Rapture" where something like this happens. One of three Christians who were supposed to log in didn't due to losing internet access, another of course because he was murdered. So, in the world of the show, emails were sent that were not supposed to be until after the rapture.

How odd that this story would come up today.

Ben wasn't my uncle for long, and I didn't know him well, but we lost him on Saturday in the most senseless way. My other uncle, who knew him since childhood, posted a tribute to him on his blog.

I only met Ben once, when my grandfather married his mother, but I could tell he was a great guy then. I wasn't the only one. Why people have to die like this is beyond me, but at least now more people can know who Ben was, and what he meant to his community.

I hope they add transcoding (perhaps hardware accelerated) because without it, streaming various formats is very trouble some.

Currently I am using PMS (PS3 Media Server for Win/Mac/Linux http://ps3mediaserver.blogspot.com/) to watch movies on my PS3 and there is minimal quality from transcoding as PMS can create 70+Mbps MPEG2 streams on the fly. Only thing it current is missing is ability to playback ripped DVDs.

or has NASA backtracked from calling 2008 the start of a new one?

Never mind, I just found a couple of things that suggest NASA, nor anyone else, really know when cycle 24 will actually start:

http://solarchaos.blogspot.com/2008/11/history-of-cycle-24-predictions.html

http://solarchaos.blogspot.com/2009/04/nasa-4.html

And this shows actual sunspots have been deviating from predicted sunspots for the last 6 months or so:

http://sidc.oma.be/html/wolfjmms.html

or has NASA backtracked from calling 2008 the start of a new one?

Never mind, I just found a couple of things that suggest NASA, nor anyone else, really know when cycle 24 will actually start:

http://solarchaos.blogspot.com/2008/11/history-of-cycle-24-predictions.html

http://solarchaos.blogspot.com/2009/04/nasa-4.html

And this shows actual sunspots have been deviating from predicted sunspots for the last 6 months or so:

http://sidc.oma.be/html/wolfjmms.html

There's only one true opt-out... and it's at the receiver's end.

This is really possible only if I created a unique, unguessable email address each time I gave my email out.

This is not as impossible as you think. For instance, Gmail supports the "+arbitrary_tag" convention. So email sent to:
    example+listserv1@gmail.com
    example+bank1@gmail.com
    example+dad@gmail.com
  -- all shows up in the Gmail inbox of 'example@gmail.com'.

If you started getting spam at one of the 'example+...@gmail.com', you can guess who gave your address out.

See: http://alblue.blogspot.com/2007/05/multiple-addresses-with-gmail.html

Note, Gmail's convention leaves out the 'unguessable' bit of this idea out - so spammers can easily build rules to harvest real addresses from gmail addresses containing a '+' sign.

Relating to this, India's going through elections and E-Voting is being used there. We've used a different approach alltogether towards this problem and thought readers might like to read if they're interested. :)

Here's the main article covering the devices used:

http://techaos.blogspot.com/2004/05/indian-evm-compared-with-diebold.html

Here's the /. article covering that:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/14/1448230&art_pos=5

How about Rod Page's timemap mashup?

http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/flu/

As described on his blog http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2009/04/h1n1-swine-flu-timemap.html

It's much worse than that. Last year the NIH cracked down on scientists found to have indulged in 'Brain Doping!'

Or simply viewing it online.

http://creditspectrum.blogspot.com/2008/12/state-of-financial-engineering.html#0

This is copied from my humble blog: http://thefortifiedhill.blogspot.com/2009/04/rejecting-cloud.html

To understand the reason the Cloud is a bad idea, we need to look at the short history of the web since the late 90's. The best example to look at is e-mail, but the same arguments apply to most Cloud applications. In those days, you got email access through POP and later IMAP. The service you were paying for was just a reliable email server and an account on it. Some free sites generated ad revenue by injecting text ads into the bottom of your emails (some still do). Since then, various web clients have come about. The main reason for the exodus to web clients was not that the web email clients had a better user-interface but because users could have the same user interface at any computer terminal. This is incredibly attractive to many users who do not care that much about their email client's features.

There are a number of problems with "Cloud" applications.

First, is that you cannot access the service unless you're online. You may argue that you're almost always online, but this is hardly true for mobile users. The fact is that a user should be able to access their data even when offline. This is the reason Google has their Gears project. There is another implication: you don't posses and own the data. You don't actually know if it's safe, being sold, or even managed securely. You just have to take it on faith that the service provider is doing their job. In some cases you may not even be able to extract your work or data in a usable way. What if the provider goes under, what if they are bought and the service is canceled? Not completely owning and possessing your work should be a major concern for users.

Second, the user gets an augmented version of the service. By this I mean that the service starts to be branded and enhanced by the provider. It gets integrated with the providers other features and starts delivering unique features. At first this seems like a good thing, a result of competition between providers. The reality is that this results in broken APIs and interoperability issues. These enhancements make it difficult for a user to leave a provider or to integrate a provider's features with their other work.

Third, the browser is a bad platform for these kinds of applications. The browser was never designed to be a host for dynamic applications of this complexity. Their are numerous development and usability issues in web development. Almost all web work involves hacks and workarounds to accommodate situations where browsers don't adhere to the web standards. The browser has been contorted to fill a role that your computer environment should have filled all along.

This may be good. By now, this judge should realize he made a big mistake in the Napster case. When "Statutory Damages in Copyright Law: A Remedy in Need of Reform" by Pamela Samuelson and Tara Wheatland came out, the Napster case was featured as one of the examples of how justice has gone wrong. Courts have strayed far from the intentions of Congress who wrote the laws governing compensation to copyright holders who's IP have been infringed. There is, for example, absolutely no basis in the law for the practise of awarding huge settlements for the purpose of "setting an example to deter other potential infringers". Congress intended for statutory damages to be mainly compensatory in nature and its wishes have not been respected in the case law. "The application of statutory damages has too often strayed from the compensatory impulse underlying statutory damages ... and has focused too heavily on deterrence and punishment, especially given that too many ordinary infringements are treated as willful infringements" concludes the authors of this paper. I first freely accessed this paper via a temporary link on Recording Industry vs People. Unfortunately, that link has been replaced by a link to where you can buy the paper, but is it no longer available for free, so I will not supply that link.

What, like ZFS?

Where's all my cool Linux stuff on Solaris, though?

he Chinese will soon deploy a new hypersonic anti-ship ballistic missile that is a Mach 10 problem for the Navy

Citation?

here and here

The Phalanx is being replaced by the RAM. More important than replacing the Phalanx though is investing in fighter aircraft that can keep the launching platforms from getting into range to begin with. It's much easier to shoot down a bomber carrying missiles (or a scout plane trying to find your location so shore/ship based ones can be fired) than it is to shoot down the missiles after launch. In that vein I think it was a mistake to retire the F-14 and the Phoenix missile -- we should have fielded upgraded versions of both -- but DoD apparently thought differently.

Attacking the launch platform with fighters is not useful a missile has a range of 1200 miles. Notice how ineffective that strategy was vs. Saddam's mobile scuds in Gulf War I. Next time, we must assume the opponent has missiles that can actually fly in one piece to the target.

Carrier operations in the Persian gulf vs. Iran would be a tricky proposition right now and I doubt they will try it.

Says who? All those missiles are useless if you can't locate the carrier to begin with. To locate the carrier you need to get an aircraft, ship or satellite within radar range. All three of those platforms can be detected, engaged and destroyed during wartime. The Iranian missile threat is cause for concern but I doubt they've negated our navy.

Locating a carrier is not all that tough when you have satellites. Taking them out would be super-critical. Are you sure we can find and hit ALL of them? And what happens if Russia shares their satellite intel with China -- just like the US did with the UK during the Falklands war? Do we attack their satellites too?

There is nothing especially stealthy about a carrier battle group, and to be useful it has to be within a reasonable distance of the battle zone. We cannot expect to be undetectable. The anti-missile defenses need more refinement vs. supersonic ASMs and the hypersonic ballistic missile threat needs to be dealt with. The Chinese will have that missile flying before we have a reliable defense.

I am more concerned about a barrage of supersonic ASMs, which Russia is selling in bulk to all customers. A 95% shoot-down rate is not good enough against a barrage of 50 missiles.

A conflict with China or Iran would NOT be the usual lopsided battle scenario that the Navy has faced in the past. If we lost so much as ONE carrier, the rest of the fleet would be effectively removed from the battle. Do you imagine Obama having the guts to take such a loss and risk another?

The original post expresses what I believe to be some very real concerns about the future viability of MySql now that it will be in the hands of competitor Oracle. The tone of this discussion completely ignores this most salient point. Instead, we seemed to be more concerned about what constitutes the legal definition of binding from the context of the GPL or which DBMS is better MySql or PostGreSql.

The reality is that there are a lot of web sites out there using MySql. Is anyone here responsible for one of those sites? Do you have any concerns about this Oracle deal with Sun? What is your migration strategy were Oracle to poison or sunset MySql?

"If only they'd release the collection code..."

Yea, how is anyone supposed to figure out how to use it with only the complete API reference

"...originality has been rejected by art. There is no such thing. It's all just different forms of appropriation. So it seems to me that Wikipedia is a perfect place to expose the current state of affairs"

M'kay. Perhaps in Mr. Mecklenburg's art-philosophy opinion notebook it is, but not in mine and I feel relatively assured that this guy might have just took a big dump on that book were he still alive.

Still, Wikipedia needs to back off now that it's won on it's own site; squelching a .org is just, well, bad form.

Material from space has already been shown to exhibit chirality. There's quite a nice review on...

http://scienceandreason.blogspot.com/2009/04/amino-acid-chirality.html

We do not know that this chirality comes from life. People have presented this as evidence that life exists in space, that life was seeded from space, and all sorts of other stuff. All we actually seem to know is that some stuff out there shows a handedness. If your light is passing through chiral material in space it will pick up a polarization.

This is not to say that this is not a test. If we find a star with planets, and one of the planets reflects more of one circular polarization than the other, then whatever it is that was doing it is probably on or about that planet. A good start would be to see whether we can pick out earth from space this way. I think they are planning to do just that.

This is my article "Large Recording Companies vs. The Defenseless : Some Common Sense Solutions to the Challenges of the RIAA Litigations", which appeared in The Judges Journal in August of last year, in its "equal access to justice" issue. The Judges Journal is a quarterly publication of the American Bar Association for its judicial section, which is comprised mostly of judges.

It isn't, it's an affront to safety.

No more so than say, mayors goofing around with assault rifles. http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2008/02/restoring-right-to-resist.html

In fact, I would guess that there are many fewer fatalities due to accidents with guns than with cars. So why not take away everyone's car? Both guns and cars provide utility. For brevity, I will cut short the reductio ad absurdam.

In any case, your desire to prevent me or anyone else from having a gun infringes on the freedoms of others predicated on a perceived risk, not on a committed crime, and thus you prejudge people before they have in fact comitted a crime which is generally a no-no.

And besides which, your safety concerns (if they were genuinely only safety concerns) would easily be remedied by civilian firearms training programs. These are required by several states, especially for concealed carry permits. If you would still see this as a safety issue even with adequate training (whatever that may be), why don't you feel the same about government employees having those weapons? I grew up in DC and I feel a vague sense of unease when an armed government employee is in close proximity. Perhaps this is because I've been around much more police violence than you have. But surely you remember Rodney King.

Secondly you make an assumption that if everyone were armed then those who would seek to do harm would be interested in the continuance of thier lives. This is also a falsehood in todays current climate. Those who would seek to do harm in the situation you're likely describing care nothing more than completing a 'mission' with no regards to their own lives.

Here you misread my argument. The vast majority of crime is still robbery/rape/etc. and is motivated by self-interested greed/power hunger. These are people to whom death may not scare to the same extent it scares most people in our society, but these are not suicidal people in general. My argument in its main is directed at what a traveler would do to protect him/herself in their destination after the flight (though yes, armed people will also protect their lives against those unconcerned with the loss of their own). It is sad that people believe that they are safer when frequently apathetic "public servants" and criminals have weapons. This next link is only a sample of what is beginning to happen as we entrust more of our safety to people in government. http://www.newsvine.com/_question/2009/04/08/2656511-did-transit-workers-do-enough-in-subway-rape-case

And that's when the police themselves aren't the criminals: http://www.lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w84.html
Or inciting/perpetrating violence at demonstrations and trying to cover it up. http://digg.com/world_news/British_police_kill_passer_by_at_London_G20_protests_Video

The answer is that we must each take responsibility for our own safety to a large extent.

As far as "opposite ends of the political spectrum" goes, you may be right, but only if you're of the socialist-fascism bent rather than the socialist bent. I'm (as you should be able to tell from my posting history) also very much against the majority of the acts of the Republicans in the last decade. I am a civil libertarian on all fronts.

Well, the semantics between a branch and a fork are confusing, but his branch/fork was born before the take over talks .

It does seems like it from the few working experiences that we have around the world [1,2]. I hope this is realized that we do need to guarentee a public network, maybe along the private one but nonetheless a good public network!

We need ISP agnostic fiber to the homes, now!

For those in Canada (note the "eh" in the title :P), give your voice below, the CRTC is asking for advise (for what it's worth...):

http://isppractices.econsultation.ca/ (english)

http://pratiquesfsi.econsultation.ca/ (franÃais)

[1]. http://cis471.blogspot.com/2009/04/why-is-connectivty-in-stockholm-so-much.html

[2]. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/shocker-aussies-to-build-own-open-access-fiber-backbone.ars