Interesting, I guess that explains why a US friend of mine suggested I remove the references section from my resume. It was quite shocking to me - round here, nobody would think of hiring you without a few good references.
Granted for a first position these cannot be former employers but for that they tend to accept people of a certain community standing who can attest to your character - such a religious leader whose services you attend, a lecturer you studied under and the like.
>Just show up and surf the web and play solitaire all day long; if you can't quit, then they surely can't fire you either
That doesn't follow. You just agree not to resign - they can still kick your ass out the door. At least in this country where unemployement is high - you do not want to get fired from a job, it makes it nearly impossible to get another one. Not to mention, if you're a newer employee (to the job market I mean) - you presumably want a good reference when you do leave ? You need as many as you can get.
>Here in America, while it obviously isn't great as you can see from all the comments here, one nice thing is that if your old employer bad-mouths you to a new employer, you can sue them
They don't need to dude. People who call references have long since learned the secret - they only really care about the answer to ONE question: "If he applied with you right now, would you hire him again ?" And the other guy will just say "yes" or "no". He won't give a reason (and it's assumed in the question that things like budgets and such are not considered). If your old employer wouldn't hire you back - you won't get the job, trust me.
No, it really isn't. It's not an embodiment of anything. Only physical objects can embody something... this as bad as people who misuse "literally" when they mean "figuratively".
Incorrect in that the product X is not a a mathematical formula. A computer program is a mathematical formula. All of them. No exceptions.
What is a computer program ? It is a mathematical formula. If you don't know that then you don't know how computers WORK. A computer program is the same thing as: 2+2=4 It's just a much more complicated one, but that's what a computer program is - it's what every computer program is. In fact, it gets better, if you know computational theory then you know that a mathematical formula (any of them) is also a number. A computer program is just a very big number.
Can you patent 5 ? How about if you write in binary - can you patent 101 ? So why the hell can you patent it if you just stick on a bunch more 1s and 0s ? Even scripting languages are ultimately just that: a number. It's just the timing of the translation that's changed.
A computer program is a number.
A car-part is not a number. There are maths involved in designing it, but it isn't itself maths.
There's maths involved in adding 2 and 2 together to get 4 - but 4 is still maths. A computer program is like 4, it's not like the car part.
Anybody who tells you different doesn't know how computers work.
This is not a hard problem to solve. I was given significant training by one of my early employers, even paid to attend a college course and receive more training.
It came with a catch though: I had to sign an agreement that I revoked my own right to resign for 2 years. So they had a chance to get a return on their investment. This is common practise here in South Africa, why would American companies not figure it out ? If an employee doesn't want to sign such a deal - then give the training to one who does. Sure it has downsides (guess how much over inflation my increase was the next year despite one of the best performance reviews in the department [don't ask me how I know that;) ] ) - zilch. After all, why give a decent increase to somebody who can't quit anyway ?
But when my two year contract expired I was out of there like a shot. Now of course, if they had during those two years treated me well and not tried to milk the guy who can't quit for all he was worth - I may well have stuck around. Just because that company messed up the second half of the system, doesn't mean it's not obvious how to do it right.
There is a huge difference between "can be described mathematically" and "actually IS a mathematical formula". Every computer program ever written IS a mathematical formula. It's not something that can be DESCRIBED by a mathematical formula (which is what you're talking about) - it is the formula ITSELF.
That's what programs are. You have fallen for the smoke and mirrors.
Code is math, in every and any way you can imagine. Everything that makes it LOOK like it isn't math is deliberate window dressing to allow non-mathematicians to do the math - but that's all it is, smoke and mirrors. It's still really all just math. The act of programming is really just a more efficient way of counting to a number that suits your purposes.
If you know anything about computational theory you would realize that there isn't a single aspect of programming that is NOT in fact 100% pure maths. The patent system is perfectly equipped to deal with things that are maths: it must exclude them from patent-ability. Problem solved.
>Which should make it obvious that, most people using desktop linux are using it on older hardware.
That is just plain not true. In fact the vast majority of desktop linux users happen to be technical people, programmers and sysadmins and such - and most of us like to have new and fast computers.
Granted I also have several older computers which I run older distro's on - but I don't use them as my day-to-day desktop, and I have no need to put skype on that - I use it where I actually work most of the time which is my laptop and my big gaming box at home. A core i5 and core i7 respectively - both with more than 8gb of ram.
You mean aside from the fact that it means installing a crap load of duplicate libraries ? Some of us find that er... incredibly annoying to have to do just to support one single app. The only other app where this is still needed is wine and at least the wine guys are working really hard to fix that - and they have an excuse (the difficulty of supporting the very different multilib architecture that windows 64-bit uses) - skype is just too lazy to set up a 64-bit build-box.
>Slackware packages are also tarballs, but they contain some standardized scripts for configuration and installation on slackware. They are typically binary-only packages as well, as opposed to regular tarballs which typically (but far from always) are used for source distribution
Actually that's not quite true. Slackware does still support tgz packages but ever since slackware 13 they have not been standard. All standard slackware packages are in, and all official slackbuilds produce, txz packages which are compressed with lzma. The slackware package tools handle the two formats interchangeably (it's just the compression that's been changed) but I'm not sure that alien is even aware of that - and all official slackware scripts as well as any post slack-13 accepted SBO slackbuilds are required to produced txz instead.
There's a major factor here on top - which is that there are two major versions of libv4l - with incompatible interfaces- for a long time skype didn't support v4l2 but I think they fixed that now.
Even that isn't all of it, many webcams (my own logitech for example) require codec-style interpretation to be done by the drivers/apps. For a long time I couldn't get my cam to work with skype despite it being fully supported on Linux. Why ? Because the codec part of the driver was in a 64-bit kernel and skype didn't implement any alternative to handle the job as a 32-bit app.
If they had added a fix to interpret the signal correctly for cams like that (the ovl series for example) that would be a major boon, and my cam would actually work with skype.
I've been using google video for camming for a long time now because of this. Mind you - skype just saw a horrible image, adobe flash can't see my camera at all despite every attempt I've made to adjust settings, I've given up on ever using omegle....what do you mean "pervert" ?:P
Doesn't have to - you can configure and compile your kernel with only the pieces you want, and leave the Microsoft code out if you don't want it.
If you use the Linux-Libre builds of the kernel from Gnusense (which are already packaged so they can be installed on Ubuntu-like systems) then there is nothing in there which isn't GPL'd.
The GP only claimed it could be explained by common sense at it's foundation. Practically all of them can be explained by common sense 4000 years ago !
The start of the Abrahamic religions for example may well have been something like this. There was this dude called Abraham - we know he WAS real (there is massive proof) who lived in a city called Ur. Ur's reality is beyond question - we've FOUND the place, part of the old Mesopotamian civilization - one of the first large human settlements. They were a polytheistic culture that set great store by physical symbols of idols (e.g. statue worship and the like) - this too is well verifiable fact (the archeologist found some of the idols and their religious scripture).
Abraham however wasn't satisfied with the fickle gods, they just didn't conform to his experience of the world - as a shepherd he encountered seasons and the way nature worked - regularly, and things weren't fitting.
So he moved out and began to think, clearly there was something bigger than himself out there (up to this point, science says the exact same thing)... then he made one small logical error - he turned "something bigger" into "Someone bigger". He named that some-one El Shadai - which means "That which is" (in the modern Bible it is translated as "God". Suddenly everything made sense- this much more powerful being controlled all the things that happened apparently randomly and senselessly yet showed clear patterns. They showed patterns because they were logical and wise, but they were unpredictable because they were the wisdom of a mind far greater than his own. Throw in a bit of the mythology from his homeland (Gilgamesh becomes Noah) and you have the book of Genesis resulting.
All very common sensible - for 6000 years ago. Not so much today.
No I don't, on the contrary - I explicitely stated that these crimes do happen regardless of the levels of gun ownership in society - I even gave an example of one that happened without guns. I also indicated that in the absence of guns the potential harm done during such events is hugely reduced, and they are ended much more easily.
Suicide vests are a different and completely unrelated type of crime - that's politically motivated, not insanity. It may be extreme politics, but it's politics.
It's the difference between Colombine and McVeigh.
>But this doesn't prove that their initial madness was in any way influenced by owning or not owning one.
This I wanted to respond to - I never ever suggested it was. In fact, I assumed that they would have done the same thing whether or not a gun was available all along. What I said was that most of the ones that do use guns use legal ones. This fits the profile. Not having a gun available won't stop them doing it (compare the wannabe terrorist at MIT last year who went on a drive-over-people-spree on campus) - but it reduces the harm hugely (he didn't manage to kill anybody at all) and it's a lot easier to stop them when they start. Three unarmed guys can easily tackle a bat-wielding maniac -before he's hit more than once at somebody - it's rather more difficult to take down an uzi-wielding maniac.
>And I should only be allowed to have things that you think I can benefit from? Government is there to watch over and pamper me so that I don't hurt myself? You are a sad commentary on humanity.
Oh absolutely not. The argument is rather more liberty-conscious than that. Your freedom DOES after all end where mine begins. You should only be allowed to own things that pose a severe RISK to MY wellbeing if the benefit to society as a whole of allowing that risk outweighs the risk itself.
That's why you need a license to drive a car (to try and reduce the risk so the benefit of people owning cars is worth it).
When you want to own something that has no useful purpose except violence (that is the harming of other citizen's rights) then the burden of proof is on you to show that letting you own it is sufficiently beneficial to society to outweigh the risk of harm to other people's liberty (life is a liberty as well).
>We are in agreement here so far. Still, I wouldn't call it "easily verifiable facts". There are way too many studies on the subject that are biased either way - and they tend to be more popular (and therefore coming up first in Google etc) because they are promoted by the respective lobby groups, such as NRA on one side and Brady on the other.
That one doesn't rely on studies, it's a simple case of taking gun ownership levels and crime levels across a large sample of countries and seeing what you find. Some countries have lots of guns and lots of crime, some have lots of guns and little crime, some have neither.
>And here I'm going to again ask for references that clearly establish the causation. Which is very tricky to do, mind you, since you'll need to find two societies which are more or less the same except for gun laws to be able to meaningfully say that higher suicide rates and "going postal" scenarios are indeed caused by larger number of guns, rather than something else.
Actually there are other strong indicators: like the fact that going postal cases (unlike other forms of violent crime) use legal guns in the vast majority of cases. So that suggests that more legal guns will mean more of the people who go postal will do so with guns (as opposed to say - a bat or a knife - which does a lot less damage). That's because people who go postal by definition are not career criminals and don't have the contacts or skills to acquire illegal guns.
That said - we have such a case in recent history: Norway had the Breivik spree just a few months ago. That's a country with gun laws almost the opposite of Americas. You can compare how often such events occur in both (frequently in the USA -while Norway has had only one or two cases - ever). And the outcomes. Turns out the outcomes when they did happen were pretty much the same (so gun ownership clearly doesn't reduce the impact of people going postal armed), but it certainly seems to correlate strongly with these events happening more often.
>. How many people die every year in killing sprees in developed countries? How many people die in car accidents, or even from choking on a hamburger?
Perhaps - but we do license people to drive and demand a minimum training level before we let them - exactly to reduce the risk of them killing somebody. So why is requiring at least a high skill level and safety awareness before buying something DESIGNED to kill things such a big deal ? More-over your own argument also supports the opposite conclusion: all those things are higher risk than killing sprees, but they are also (all of them) a magnitude higher than the risk of being a crime victim (for the vast majority of people). We don't refuse to go out on the streets because of the risk of a car accident - but we may try to drive safer. It's fine to minimize risk - but in this example you are trying to defend against a very LOW risk (robbery), by doing something that has a number of very HIGH risks (owning a gun). Guns can missfire, your kid may go in your room the ONE time you forgot to lock the cabinet you keep it in, you could have an accident with it and kill an innocent person while just walking around. This stuff happen more often than robberies do.
That's not the worst of it, what you're doing to reduce the small risk of robbery is known not to work - it's a known fact that even a cursory glance at police records anywhere will confirm that owning guns means you become a PREFERRED target to robbers. It does NOT deter them, it ENCOURAGES them - because they know you have guns, guns are valuable, so valuable that they are worth the risk if you can manage to steal one.
The simple truth is - a weapon you don't know how to use belongs to your enemy.
> However, in the vast majority of defensive firearms uses, the mere presence of a firearm is enough to deter a would-be criminal.
False, in fact, fire-arms have such high black-market value that the presence of fire-arms will, if anything, ATTRACT criminals. Criminals like breaking into houses with guns - so they can steal the guns.
In fact, if you are facing an armed assailant and you're a gun owner, there's about an 8 out 10 chance that it's YOUR gun he is armed with.
>In the unlikely event of a break-in, you might survive, but how would you feel about yourself if you passively allowed your home to be robbed?
Maybe not so great, I mean I've got testicles too - I know how they affect emotions - but I'm not stupid enough to confuse an evolved desire for heroics with rational thought. Having said that- you paint all those worst case scenarios - as if they are a common and serious risk, when in fact they are very rare but you ignore the risks you create by drawing a gun. You know what would feel about a million times worse than watching a bad guy shoot your girlfriend while you're unarmed ? Trying to shoot at the bad guy, missing because you're stressed, full of adreniline, not breathing right and almost certainly aiming terribly... then killing her with a ricochet of your own bullet. Where-ass if you stay calm and just let him take what he wants - all you're out is your no-claims bonus with your insurance, everyone walks out of there alive.
You know something - I prefer the idea of everybody walking out alive, even the bad guy. Because even though it may be LEGAL to shoot him for stealing, I don't think it's MORAL to do so. It's not legal for the government to give somebody the death penalty for stealing a TV so they hell should a home-owner have that power - to be judge, jury and executioner ? That's not justice. The law may say it's okay - but I don't.
The point where I will use deadly force against somebody, is the point where I am absolutely certain he will use deadly force against me or my family- until then I'll try to diffuse the situation in whatever way is least likely to get anybody hurt (just like a good cop is supposed to do), because the punishment for theft should not be death - that's not a punishment that fits the crime. At that point if I have to fight to defend myself, I'm probably BETTER off attacking the guy with my nice butcher's knife (I love cooking - I have some really good knives in the house and I keep them very sharp like any enthusiastic cook does) than with a gun. Exactly BECAUSE it's not a ranged weapon. Because I have to get close, the risk of me accidentally stabbing my wife while trying to hit the robber is almost zero... the risk of my hitting her with a stray bullet while I trying to shoot under extreme pressure is insanely high.
Here's a little something you learn if you study marksmanship. The single biggest and most important thing a good shot needs to do is control their breathing, absolute calm -deep breaths - and you fire ONLY at exactly the right part of expelling the air. In fact, this is so important that the most common illegal performance enhancers in sport shooting are all anxiety meds - anything that slows down your heart rate and breathing gives you an edge. Now tell me, when you're panicking about being in a very dangerous situation - with a loved one at risk - especially if you're also angry and want to fight... just how slow and calm do you think you will be breathing ? Right that second the only safe place to stand in the house is directly between you and the criminal because that is the one place the bullet almost certainly will NOT be travelling. On the other hand, being pumped full of adreniline actually INCREASES your odds of hurting the right person with a kitchen knife.
Again I ask you... how if having a gun in the house at all beneficial ? Every single statistic ever taken from crime after crime where home-owners owned guns tell you it's a really, really bad idea.
I love my wife too much to risk her life just to satisfy my ego.
All those "bold assertions" are well known, easily verifiable facts - where I am unsure of a number, I clearly state that (and I don't build arguments on those - I actually say the exact number doesn't matter to the argument I'm making).
As for what you put in brackets: I actually did the opposite, I showed that in fact, there seems to be no correlation at all between gun laws and violent crime rates. Guns impact on other deaths, but straight up street crime seems to be ENTIRELY determined by factors OTHER than gun ownership.
A lot of guns don't reduce it, zero guns don't reduce it. A lot of guns don't increase it, zero guns don't increase it.
So if it doesn't actually impact on violent crime - then we should look at the issue in the light of OTHER things that gun laws DO impact on - like suicide rates and the "going postal" scenarios (yes I know that's technically a form of violent crime but even where it's most common it's the rarest form of violent crime and those who commit almost never have any prior history of criminal activity - it's clearly a different scenario to street crime, and this is why it's perfectly sensible to say that something could affect the two differently, or affect one but not the other).
I'm the son of an ex-cop. I am a former champion shot, from a country which has won more medals in olympic shooting than any other (including the USA). My sister actually WAS an olympic shot.
She's a rifle expert, I'm a hand-gun expert. I know more about handguns, and can use them better, than most trained soldiers can - because I didn't just have a few months military training with them, I have had years since childhood of intensive training in all aspects of firearms.
Guess how many weapons I have in my house ?
Not one.
I keep the sports guns I use in storage when they are not in use. I also own a military-model.33 semi-automatic rifle which is an heirloom, that too is kept in an off-site safe-storage facility.
No guns in my house. I can hit a man's eye in the dark with a one-handed draw. I could probably hit a human sized target shooting from the hip 9 out 10 times with a pistol -even. And I am absolutely convinced that in the highly unlikely event of a break-in in my house, that having a gun there would REDUCE my and my families chances of survival. I am absolutely certain that me and my family are safer if I don't try to shoot them than if I do - and frankly the vast majority of people don't have 1% of my odds of even hitting their target in a real firefight.
Hell FBI agents in fire-fights only hit their target with 1 out of ever 8 bullets fired !
So there's your risk assesment for you: an expert shot who escalates a robbery into a firefight is REDUCING the safety of himself and his family. Joe Sixpack sure as hell doesn't have better odds than I do.
He shouldn't own a gun.
Hell even my dad, the ex-cop who has actual fire-fight experience and does keep his guns in the house, keeps them dismantled with the parts spread across two safes. You need both combinations to reconstruct any of them.
He also believes that in the event of a robery, he and my mum are safer if they are NOT armed.
Er... those statistics support MY risk assesment, not yours, in fact I cited some of them myself.
1) Most gun deaths are suicides - you want to tell me fewer guns won't reduce these ? I mean sure suicidal people will try other means, but all the other means have this in common: their a hell of a lot less effective, a failed attempt and treatment is your best chance of reducing suicides. You don't get many failed suicide attempts when guns are around. More-over fatality rate in suicides is much higher for men, and men are more than three times as likely to use a gun over another method if one is available, and the risk of trying suicide in the first place is 4 times higher for men than women.
So think about that, the highest risk of suicides at all, is also the people who have the highest risk of using a gun if they can get one... interesting.
That said -suicide is not exactly something against which a gun is an effective defence now is it ?
>For homocides 75% of those killed have a criminal record. The number of handguns used in crime (approximately 7,500 per year) is very small compared to the approximately 70 million handguns in the United States.
So what you're saying is that all those other guns are not being used for defence. Let's say 30% of them are used for other legal purposes - hunting and the like (feel free to correct that number if you have it, I doubt it will make a major difference). That still leaves around 50 million guns which server absolutely no purpose. They are just lying around, waiting for somebody go postal, or have an accident.
Aaah say you "but without them surely the crime ones would be much higher"... except this doesn't follow - at all. America's violent gun-death rate is the highest in the world (excluding active war zones), by an order of magnitude. And still so low that the risk of anybody ever facing an armed criminal is lower than the risk of being hit by a drunk driver. Countries with similar levels of gun ownership (like Canada) have near-zero levels of violent crime. Many countries with near-zero levels of gun ownership also have near-zero levels of violent crime.
In fact - there is no correlation between violent crime levels and gun ownership at all. It simply doesn't seem to have any real impact. What it does impact is the frequency of people going postal (I'm sure they go postal just as often everywhere else, but elsewhere they don't get to use a gun - so they can't do much damage). But ordinary crime correlates worldwide with many known sociological figures such as poverty, drug abuse etc. It does NOT correlate in any way at all, to civilian gun ownership levels.
So more guns don't make you safer from crime, but they do increase your risk of accidents, suicides and people who go postal... how exactly then is a good risk assessment NOT to reduce the number of guns ?
As a percentage of the population - how many people are in group 4 ? Because that's how many guns your society then ought to contain on average... well even then, none of the examples you give represent people who are likely to actually BENEFIT from owning the gun anyway.
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Interesting, I guess that explains why a US friend of mine suggested I remove the references section from my resume. It was quite shocking to me - round here, nobody would think of hiring you without a few good references.
Granted for a first position these cannot be former employers but for that they tend to accept people of a certain community standing who can attest to your character - such a religious leader whose services you attend, a lecturer you studied under and the like.
>Just show up and surf the web and play solitaire all day long; if you can't quit, then they surely can't fire you either
That doesn't follow. You just agree not to resign - they can still kick your ass out the door. At least in this country where unemployement is high - you do not want to get fired from a job, it makes it nearly impossible to get another one.
Not to mention, if you're a newer employee (to the job market I mean) - you presumably want a good reference when you do leave ? You need as many as you can get.
>Here in America, while it obviously isn't great as you can see from all the comments here, one nice thing is that if your old employer bad-mouths you to a new employer, you can sue them
They don't need to dude. People who call references have long since learned the secret - they only really care about the answer to ONE question: "If he applied with you right now, would you hire him again ?"
And the other guy will just say "yes" or "no". He won't give a reason (and it's assumed in the question that things like budgets and such are not considered).
If your old employer wouldn't hire you back - you won't get the job, trust me.
No, it really isn't. It's not an embodiment of anything. Only physical objects can embody something... this as bad as people who misuse "literally" when they mean "figuratively".
Incorrect in that the product X is not a a mathematical formula. A computer program is a mathematical formula. All of them. No exceptions.
What is a computer program ? It is a mathematical formula. If you don't know that then you don't know how computers WORK. A computer program is the same thing as: 2+2=4
It's just a much more complicated one, but that's what a computer program is - it's what every computer program is.
In fact, it gets better, if you know computational theory then you know that a mathematical formula (any of them) is also a number. A computer program is just a very big number.
Can you patent 5 ? How about if you write in binary - can you patent 101 ?
So why the hell can you patent it if you just stick on a bunch more 1s and 0s ? Even scripting languages are ultimately just that: a number. It's just the timing of the translation that's changed.
A computer program is a number.
A car-part is not a number. There are maths involved in designing it, but it isn't itself maths.
There's maths involved in adding 2 and 2 together to get 4 - but 4 is still maths. A computer program is like 4, it's not like the car part.
Anybody who tells you different doesn't know how computers work.
http://silentcoder.co.za/2010/08/why-computer-programs-should-not-be-patentable-in-easy-to-understand-terms/
This is not a hard problem to solve. I was given significant training by one of my early employers, even paid to attend a college course and receive more training.
It came with a catch though: I had to sign an agreement that I revoked my own right to resign for 2 years. So they had a chance to get a return on their investment. This is common practise here in South Africa, why would American companies not figure it out ? If an employee doesn't want to sign such a deal - then give the training to one who does. Sure it has downsides (guess how much over inflation my increase was the next year despite one of the best performance reviews in the department [don't ask me how I know that ;) ] ) - zilch. After all, why give a decent increase to somebody who can't quit anyway ?
But when my two year contract expired I was out of there like a shot. Now of course, if they had during those two years treated me well and not tried to milk the guy who can't quit for all he was worth - I may well have stuck around. Just because that company messed up the second half of the system, doesn't mean it's not obvious how to do it right.
There is a huge difference between "can be described mathematically" and "actually IS a mathematical formula".
Every computer program ever written IS a mathematical formula. It's not something that can be DESCRIBED by a mathematical formula (which is what you're talking about) - it is the formula ITSELF.
That's what programs are. You have fallen for the smoke and mirrors.
Code is math, in every and any way you can imagine. Everything that makes it LOOK like it isn't math is deliberate window dressing to allow non-mathematicians to do the math - but that's all it is, smoke and mirrors.
It's still really all just math. The act of programming is really just a more efficient way of counting to a number that suits your purposes.
If you know anything about computational theory you would realize that there isn't a single aspect of programming that is NOT in fact 100% pure maths.
The patent system is perfectly equipped to deal with things that are maths: it must exclude them from patent-ability.
Problem solved.
>Which should make it obvious that, most people using desktop linux are using it on older hardware.
That is just plain not true. In fact the vast majority of desktop linux users happen to be technical people, programmers and sysadmins and such - and most of us like to have new and fast computers.
Granted I also have several older computers which I run older distro's on - but I don't use them as my day-to-day desktop, and I have no need to put skype on that - I use it where I actually work most of the time which is my laptop and my big gaming box at home. A core i5 and core i7 respectively - both with more than 8gb of ram.
You mean aside from the fact that it means installing a crap load of duplicate libraries ? Some of us find that er... incredibly annoying to have to do just to support one single app.
The only other app where this is still needed is wine and at least the wine guys are working really hard to fix that - and they have an excuse (the difficulty of supporting the very different multilib architecture that windows 64-bit uses) - skype is just too lazy to set up a 64-bit build-box.
>So who is doing video/audio over jabber?
Google ? Jingle is just a jabber extension.
>Tarball: .tar.gz. .tgz.
>Slackware package:
>Slackware packages are also tarballs, but they contain some standardized scripts for configuration and installation on slackware. They are typically binary-only packages as well, as opposed to regular tarballs which typically (but far from always) are used for source distribution
Actually that's not quite true. Slackware does still support tgz packages but ever since slackware 13 they have not been standard. All standard slackware packages are in, and all official slackbuilds produce, txz packages which are compressed with lzma.
The slackware package tools handle the two formats interchangeably (it's just the compression that's been changed) but I'm not sure that alien is even aware of that - and all official slackware scripts as well as any post slack-13 accepted SBO slackbuilds are required to produced txz instead.
That is very likely, but I'll have a look tonight and see if my home-cam actually plays nice with the new skype.
There's a major factor here on top - which is that there are two major versions of libv4l - with incompatible interfaces- for a long time skype didn't support v4l2 but I think they fixed that now.
Even that isn't all of it, many webcams (my own logitech for example) require codec-style interpretation to be done by the drivers/apps. For a long time I couldn't get my cam to work with skype despite it being fully supported on Linux. Why ? Because the codec part of the driver was in a 64-bit kernel and skype didn't implement any alternative to handle the job as a 32-bit app.
If they had added a fix to interpret the signal correctly for cams like that (the ovl series for example) that would be a major boon, and my cam would actually work with skype.
I've been using google video for camming for a long time now because of this. Mind you - skype just saw a horrible image, adobe flash can't see my camera at all despite every attempt I've made to adjust settings, I've given up on ever using omegle. ...what do you mean "pervert" ? :P
Doesn't have to - you can configure and compile your kernel with only the pieces you want, and leave the Microsoft code out if you don't want it.
If you use the Linux-Libre builds of the kernel from Gnusense (which are already packaged so they can be installed on Ubuntu-like systems) then there is nothing in there which isn't GPL'd.
The GP only claimed it could be explained by common sense at it's foundation. Practically all of them can be explained by common sense 4000 years ago !
The start of the Abrahamic religions for example may well have been something like this. There was this dude called Abraham - we know he WAS real (there is massive proof) who lived in a city called Ur. Ur's reality is beyond question - we've FOUND the place, part of the old Mesopotamian civilization - one of the first large human settlements. They were a polytheistic culture that set great store by physical symbols of idols (e.g. statue worship and the like) - this too is well verifiable fact (the archeologist found some of the idols and their religious scripture).
Abraham however wasn't satisfied with the fickle gods, they just didn't conform to his experience of the world - as a shepherd he encountered seasons and the way nature worked - regularly, and things weren't fitting.
So he moved out and began to think, clearly there was something bigger than himself out there (up to this point, science says the exact same thing)... then he made one small logical error - he turned "something bigger" into "Someone bigger".
He named that some-one El Shadai - which means "That which is" (in the modern Bible it is translated as "God".
Suddenly everything made sense- this much more powerful being controlled all the things that happened apparently randomly and senselessly yet showed clear patterns. They showed patterns because they were logical and wise, but they were unpredictable because they were the wisdom of a mind far greater than his own. Throw in a bit of the mythology from his homeland (Gilgamesh becomes Noah) and you have the book of Genesis resulting.
All very common sensible - for 6000 years ago. Not so much today.
No I don't, on the contrary - I explicitely stated that these crimes do happen regardless of the levels of gun ownership in society - I even gave an example of one that happened without guns.
I also indicated that in the absence of guns the potential harm done during such events is hugely reduced, and they are ended much more easily.
Suicide vests are a different and completely unrelated type of crime - that's politically motivated, not insanity. It may be extreme politics, but it's politics.
It's the difference between Colombine and McVeigh.
>But this doesn't prove that their initial madness was in any way influenced by owning or not owning one.
This I wanted to respond to - I never ever suggested it was. In fact, I assumed that they would have done the same thing whether or not a gun was available all along. What I said was that most of the ones that do use guns use legal ones. This fits the profile. Not having a gun available won't stop them doing it (compare the wannabe terrorist at MIT last year who went on a drive-over-people-spree on campus) - but it reduces the harm hugely (he didn't manage to kill anybody at all) and it's a lot easier to stop them when they start. Three unarmed guys can easily tackle a bat-wielding maniac -before he's hit more than once at somebody - it's rather more difficult to take down an uzi-wielding maniac.
>And I should only be allowed to have things that you think I can benefit from? Government is there to watch over and pamper me so that I don't hurt myself? You are a sad commentary on humanity.
Oh absolutely not. The argument is rather more liberty-conscious than that. Your freedom DOES after all end where mine begins. You should only be allowed to own things that pose a severe RISK to MY wellbeing if the benefit to society as a whole of allowing that risk outweighs the risk itself.
That's why you need a license to drive a car (to try and reduce the risk so the benefit of people owning cars is worth it).
When you want to own something that has no useful purpose except violence (that is the harming of other citizen's rights) then the burden of proof is on you to show that letting you own it is sufficiently beneficial to society to outweigh the risk of harm to other people's liberty (life is a liberty as well).
>We are in agreement here so far. Still, I wouldn't call it "easily verifiable facts". There are way too many studies on the subject that are biased either way - and they tend to be more popular (and therefore coming up first in Google etc) because they are promoted by the respective lobby groups, such as NRA on one side and Brady on the other.
That one doesn't rely on studies, it's a simple case of taking gun ownership levels and crime levels across a large sample of countries and seeing what you find. Some countries have lots of guns and lots of crime, some have lots of guns and little crime, some have neither.
>And here I'm going to again ask for references that clearly establish the causation. Which is very tricky to do, mind you, since you'll need to find two societies which are more or less the same except for gun laws to be able to meaningfully say that higher suicide rates and "going postal" scenarios are indeed caused by larger number of guns, rather than something else.
Actually there are other strong indicators: like the fact that going postal cases (unlike other forms of violent crime) use legal guns in the vast majority of cases. So that suggests that more legal guns will mean more of the people who go postal will do so with guns (as opposed to say - a bat or a knife - which does a lot less damage). That's because people who go postal by definition are not career criminals and don't have the contacts or skills to acquire illegal guns.
That said - we have such a case in recent history: Norway had the Breivik spree just a few months ago. That's a country with gun laws almost the opposite of Americas. You can compare how often such events occur in both (frequently in the USA -while Norway has had only one or two cases - ever). And the outcomes. Turns out the outcomes when they did happen were pretty much the same (so gun ownership clearly doesn't reduce the impact of people going postal armed), but it certainly seems to correlate strongly with these events happening more often.
>. How many people die every year in killing sprees in developed countries? How many people die in car accidents, or even from choking on a hamburger?
Perhaps - but we do license people to drive and demand a minimum training level before we let them - exactly to reduce the risk of them killing somebody. So why is requiring at least a high skill level and safety awareness before buying something DESIGNED to kill things such a big deal ?
More-over your own argument also supports the opposite conclusion: all those things are higher risk than killing sprees, but they are also (all of them) a magnitude higher than the risk of being a crime victim (for the vast majority of people). We don't refuse to go out on the streets because of the risk of a car accident - but we may try to drive safer. It's fine to minimize risk - but in this example you are trying to defend against a very LOW risk (robbery), by doing something that has a number of very HIGH risks (owning a gun).
Guns can missfire, your kid may go in your room the ONE time you forgot to lock the cabinet you keep it in, you could have an accident with it and kill an innocent person while just walking around.
This stuff happen more often than robberies do.
That's not the worst of it, what you're doing to reduce the small risk of robbery is known not to work - it's a known fact that even a cursory glance at police records anywhere will confirm that owning guns means you become a PREFERRED target to robbers. It does NOT deter them, it ENCOURAGES them - because they know you have guns, guns are valuable, so valuable that they are worth the risk if you can manage to steal one.
The simple truth is - a weapon you don't know how to use belongs to your enemy.
> However, in the vast majority of defensive firearms uses, the mere presence of a firearm is enough to deter a would-be criminal.
False, in fact, fire-arms have such high black-market value that the presence of fire-arms will, if anything, ATTRACT criminals. Criminals like breaking into houses with guns - so they can steal the guns.
In fact, if you are facing an armed assailant and you're a gun owner, there's about an 8 out 10 chance that it's YOUR gun he is armed with.
>In the unlikely event of a break-in, you might survive, but how would you feel about yourself if you passively allowed your home to be robbed?
Maybe not so great, I mean I've got testicles too - I know how they affect emotions - but I'm not stupid enough to confuse an evolved desire for heroics with rational thought. Having said that- you paint all those worst case scenarios - as if they are a common and serious risk, when in fact they are very rare but you ignore the risks you create by drawing a gun.
You know what would feel about a million times worse than watching a bad guy shoot your girlfriend while you're unarmed ? Trying to shoot at the bad guy, missing because you're stressed, full of adreniline, not breathing right and almost certainly aiming terribly... then killing her with a ricochet of your own bullet.
Where-ass if you stay calm and just let him take what he wants - all you're out is your no-claims bonus with your insurance, everyone walks out of there alive.
You know something - I prefer the idea of everybody walking out alive, even the bad guy. Because even though it may be LEGAL to shoot him for stealing, I don't think it's MORAL to do so. It's not legal for the government to give somebody the death penalty for stealing a TV so they hell should a home-owner have that power - to be judge, jury and executioner ? That's not justice. The law may say it's okay - but I don't.
The point where I will use deadly force against somebody, is the point where I am absolutely certain he will use deadly force against me or my family- until then I'll try to diffuse the situation in whatever way is least likely to get anybody hurt (just like a good cop is supposed to do), because the punishment for theft should not be death - that's not a punishment that fits the crime. At that point if I have to fight to defend myself, I'm probably BETTER off attacking the guy with my nice butcher's knife (I love cooking - I have some really good knives in the house and I keep them very sharp like any enthusiastic cook does) than with a gun.
Exactly BECAUSE it's not a ranged weapon. Because I have to get close, the risk of me accidentally stabbing my wife while trying to hit the robber is almost zero... the risk of my hitting her with a stray bullet while I trying to shoot under extreme pressure is insanely high.
Here's a little something you learn if you study marksmanship. The single biggest and most important thing a good shot needs to do is control their breathing, absolute calm -deep breaths - and you fire ONLY at exactly the right part of expelling the air. In fact, this is so important that the most common illegal performance enhancers in sport shooting are all anxiety meds - anything that slows down your heart rate and breathing gives you an edge.
Now tell me, when you're panicking about being in a very dangerous situation - with a loved one at risk - especially if you're also angry and want to fight... just how slow and calm do you think you will be breathing ?
Right that second the only safe place to stand in the house is directly between you and the criminal because that is the one place the bullet almost certainly will NOT be travelling.
On the other hand, being pumped full of adreniline actually INCREASES your odds of hurting the right person with a kitchen knife.
Again I ask you... how if having a gun in the house at all beneficial ? Every single statistic ever taken from crime after crime where home-owners owned guns tell you it's a really, really bad idea.
I love my wife too much to risk her life just to satisfy my ego.
All those "bold assertions" are well known, easily verifiable facts - where I am unsure of a number, I clearly state that (and I don't build arguments on those - I actually say the exact number doesn't matter to the argument I'm making).
As for what you put in brackets: I actually did the opposite, I showed that in fact, there seems to be no correlation at all between gun laws and violent crime rates. Guns impact on other deaths, but straight up street crime seems to be ENTIRELY determined by factors OTHER than gun ownership.
A lot of guns don't reduce it, zero guns don't reduce it. A lot of guns don't increase it, zero guns don't increase it.
So if it doesn't actually impact on violent crime - then we should look at the issue in the light of OTHER things that gun laws DO impact on - like suicide rates and the "going postal" scenarios (yes I know that's technically a form of violent crime but even where it's most common it's the rarest form of violent crime and those who commit almost never have any prior history of criminal activity - it's clearly a different scenario to street crime, and this is why it's perfectly sensible to say that something could affect the two differently, or affect one but not the other).
All the statistics in the other posts I made in this thread back up my conclusion.
So does all the scientific research about criminology mind you.
Now I'm going to really shock you.
I'm the son of an ex-cop. I am a former champion shot, from a country which has won more medals in olympic shooting than any other (including the USA). My sister actually WAS an olympic shot.
She's a rifle expert, I'm a hand-gun expert. I know more about handguns, and can use them better, than most trained soldiers can - because I didn't just have a few months military training with them, I have had years since childhood of intensive training in all aspects of firearms.
Guess how many weapons I have in my house ?
Not one.
I keep the sports guns I use in storage when they are not in use. I also own a military-model .33 semi-automatic rifle which is an heirloom, that too is kept in an off-site safe-storage facility.
No guns in my house. I can hit a man's eye in the dark with a one-handed draw. I could probably hit a human sized target shooting from the hip 9 out 10 times with a pistol -even. And I am absolutely convinced that in the highly unlikely event of a break-in in my house, that having a gun there would REDUCE my and my families chances of survival. I am absolutely certain that me and my family are safer if I don't try to shoot them than if I do - and frankly the vast majority of people don't have 1% of my odds of even hitting their target in a real firefight.
Hell FBI agents in fire-fights only hit their target with 1 out of ever 8 bullets fired !
So there's your risk assesment for you: an expert shot who escalates a robbery into a firefight is REDUCING the safety of himself and his family. Joe Sixpack sure as hell doesn't have better odds than I do.
He shouldn't own a gun.
Hell even my dad, the ex-cop who has actual fire-fight experience and does keep his guns in the house, keeps them dismantled with the parts spread across two safes. You need both combinations to reconstruct any of them.
He also believes that in the event of a robery, he and my mum are safer if they are NOT armed.
Er... those statistics support MY risk assesment, not yours, in fact I cited some of them myself.
1) Most gun deaths are suicides - you want to tell me fewer guns won't reduce these ? I mean sure suicidal people will try other means, but all the other means have this in common: their a hell of a lot less effective, a failed attempt and treatment is your best chance of reducing suicides. You don't get many failed suicide attempts when guns are around.
More-over fatality rate in suicides is much higher for men, and men are more than three times as likely to use a gun over another method if one is available, and the risk of trying suicide in the first place is 4 times higher for men than women.
So think about that, the highest risk of suicides at all, is also the people who have the highest risk of using a gun if they can get one... interesting.
That said -suicide is not exactly something against which a gun is an effective defence now is it ?
>For homocides 75% of those killed have a criminal record. The number of handguns used in crime (approximately 7,500 per year) is very small compared to the approximately 70 million handguns in the United States.
So what you're saying is that all those other guns are not being used for defence. Let's say 30% of them are used for other legal purposes - hunting and the like (feel free to correct that number if you have it, I doubt it will make a major difference). That still leaves around 50 million guns which server absolutely no purpose.
They are just lying around, waiting for somebody go postal, or have an accident.
Aaah say you "but without them surely the crime ones would be much higher"... except this doesn't follow - at all.
America's violent gun-death rate is the highest in the world (excluding active war zones), by an order of magnitude. And still so low that the risk of anybody ever facing an armed criminal is lower than the risk of being hit by a drunk driver. Countries with similar levels of gun ownership (like Canada) have near-zero levels of violent crime. Many countries with near-zero levels of gun ownership also have near-zero levels of violent crime.
In fact - there is no correlation between violent crime levels and gun ownership at all. It simply doesn't seem to have any real impact. What it does impact is the frequency of people going postal (I'm sure they go postal just as often everywhere else, but elsewhere they don't get to use a gun - so they can't do much damage). But ordinary crime correlates worldwide with many known sociological figures such as poverty, drug abuse etc.
It does NOT correlate in any way at all, to civilian gun ownership levels.
So more guns don't make you safer from crime, but they do increase your risk of accidents, suicides and people who go postal... how exactly then is a good risk assessment NOT to reduce the number of guns ?
As a percentage of the population - how many people are in group 4 ? Because that's how many guns your society then ought to contain on average... well even then, none of the examples you give represent people who are likely to actually BENEFIT from owning the gun anyway.