You know the one I mean: Data, Hawking, Einstein and Newton? It's been so long since I've seen it I don't remember the dialogue, but as I recall Hawking teased Einstein about how chance does play a role in life?:)
1. Find a way to live down their past. Alas, for many IT managers the very name Novell still conjures up the once-mighty NetWare and how that has fallen by the wayside as UNIX-based networking has taken over.
Live down their past??? So Netware faded away. So? You still have the finest directory service in the world in eDirectory and one of the best sets of tools for desktop management in Zenworks. Novell has consistently created valuable solutions that they have sold to a very large number of very satisfied customers. After all, they still have the cleanest balance sheet in the IT industry. They didn't get that without revenue.
2. Novell must do a major marketing push to show they are heavily committed to Linux that not only is aimed at the computer-literate crowd, but also to the general public. After all, one of the reasons why IBM succeeded as a huge user of Linux was not only the over US$1 billion IBM spent to port Linux to run on S/390 and AS/400 big iron hardware, but also the fact IBM did a masterful job of publicizing this fact to non-computer literate types in a series of TV commercials shown worldwide.
Please. IBM didn't pay for the port to the mainframe. A handful of developers within IBM found out that some enthusiasts within Suse were working on it and clandestinely helped them out. They got it done in less than six months. At that point, they told IBM's management, who were completely blown away. The first $1 billion IBM w spent was almost entirely on marketing. What didn't go there was spent on ramping up skills within their dev groups to port apps and OSes.
Yes, Novell has do a major marketing push. In case you haven't noticed, THEY ARE DOING JUST THAT! It takes TIME to change perceptions. Give them a year or two to get the message out and sell some support contracts, willya?
Going off topic more than a bit here, so skip this if you're not interested in how choice of distros can affect sysadmin pain.
While I'm a huge fan of Gentoo, I have been forced to concede to myself that the people who create ebuilds do have one very annoying habit. They constantly change where stuff is located from where the original authors intended. I wouldn't mind so much if they limited this activity to just user space apps, but when I find that they have deliberately deviated from basic things like rc.d, well, let's just say I get unhappy.
Anyone maintaining a mixed environment (and who isn't these days?) knows that minimizing differences to just those that really count is A Good Thing (tm). IMO Gentoo's developers' insistence on doing things their own way just because they can makes Gentoo a poor choice for adoption in a large, mixed environment.
It's too bad, too. I REALLY like portage. I've built up both of my home PCs with Gentoo and am very happy with the stability and speed. Both are noticeably faster than my Mandrake installs on those two boxes were, and I no longer have to rebuild from scratch every six months to avoid wierdnesses! W00t!:)
I'm also debating putting up a home server with either Gentoo or Debian. My work laptop runs Debian. Any work recommendation would be for Suse, Redhat, or Debian, though, not Gentoo. At least those distros are actively striving to meet LSB compliance.
Tell ya what: Why don't you go visit South Africa and tell them in person that they are a screwed up, destitute, ignorant bunch of savages whose priorities are completely messed up? You know, the only African country south of the equator to see a peaceful transition of power in the past 50 years?
Unfortunately, for those cards the real issue are the patents that nVidia depends upon belong to someone else. They are not in a position to open source those. nVidia gets around it by creating a small shim that that needs to be compiled into the kernel, then building most of the rest of the functionality in a driver module that interfaces somehow with the shim.
I've never built a kernel for Redhat or Fedora, so I can't speak to your experience. I have built them for Mandrake, Gentoo, and Debian. As long as I followed the directions, the only problems that I ran into were fat fingering the XF86Config-4 entries.
While I haven't done it in a while, I understand that nVidia now has a.run script that is supposed to handle all of the stuff for you. It may be worth visiting their Web site if you get excited about decent Linux gaming again.
Kernel hacks??? Now, THAT's odd. Unless you're referring to the extra stuff required for the graphics cards? If so, these days the major distros generally handle that for you when you first install the OS.
That's been the only time I've ran across this particular issue. No big deal, really. Well worth it for the ability to play games like America's Army or UT2004 on Linux.:)
Re: the idiots who didn't recognize your article for what it was; a slam at ESR: I can't believe the number of people who read Slashdot who don't recognize sarcasm!
You're right, his ability to prognosticate is badly flawed when predicting end results. OTOH, I think he's been pretty accurate in how MS would fight the war, don't you? Go back and re-read the Halloween docs and you'll see what I mean.
Mind you, this was an episode of Star Trek won the 1966-67 Writers' Guild of America Award for Best Teleplay, and the 1967 Hugo Award, the first (only) teleplay to ever do so.
Sounds like both his peers and sci fi fans both regarded it as some of the best stuff written that year.:)
Someone noted a while back that Ellison didn't really get nasty until he started working regularly in Hollywood. Hollywood, the place where dreams are made of and those who first invent the dreams are routinely shit on. Ellison was always an abrasive sort, but Hollywood taught him to attack first, second, and last or see his visions completely warped by the time they hit the screen. And he's been dealing with Hollywood execs for a looong time.
The example where things didn't go his way that is most commonly quoted is "The City on the Edge of Forever" for Star Trek. He wrote that episode in March of 1966. He was still pissed about how it was altered for airing in 1995 when White Wolf published the unaltered screenplay for him. Mind you, this was an episode of Star Trek won the 1966-67 Writers' Guild of America Award for Best Teleplay, and the 1967 Hugo Award, the first (only) teleplay to ever do so.
He's also seen his stories ripped off for movies and television both, accreditation stripped, and on and on. Yes, he's a vengeful sort. Yes, he's got a blind spot the size of Texas when it comes to the differences between fan driven exposure and corporate ripoffs. Yes, it's clear that he thinks a model like Baen Publishing's Free Library is insane.
IMO he's still one of the most original science fiction and fantasy authors of his generation, and I have a deep and abiding respect for what he has accomplished. I'd love to get him on the side of those who would prefer to see more free exposure of his works. I don't think it'll ever happen, though. His experiences during his career have warped his view of the marketplace pretty badly.
I think that's the point he's trying to make: With his installation of Linux he has found it possible to use his desktop as his very own personal server that automates all the repetitive tasks that he has to deal with.
Or, if you're too lazy to type, just click the little house on your taskbar. Of course, that's assuming you're using the [cough]superior[/cough]OTHER big DE.:):):)
Most christians in the US, even the non-KKK variety, were never really outraged against lynching. If they say so now, it's generally more of a political thing, rather than the true sentiment.
What planet are you from? Any true Christian must be outraged by lynching. It goes against the most fundamental precepts of our faith. That is true in the Deep South, it was true in Duluth, MN in the 1920s, and it was true everywhere else it occurred.
I don't deny that people who called themselves Christians participated in lynch mobs. I don't even deny that some of them coldly orchestrated a wave of lynchings to spread fear throughout the Deep South and the Midwest. At no time, however, were those acts perpetrated by 'most' Christians. That's taking the facts and jumping to a conclusion that simply isn't supportable.
Or have you forgotten, for example, that the vast majority of church going blacks in this country are Christian? Many of them Baptist or Methodist, the same branches of Protestantism that the KKK drew so many of its members from? Are you taking the position that the only Christians that would be outraged by a lynch mob would be blacks? Please.
For the record, my great-grandparents were Lutheran, Catholic, Serbian Orthodox, and Methodist. My grandparents were Lutheran and Episcopalian. My parents weren't big on attending church, although they had no objections to us kids going. When I was young, the pastor for the local Grace Bible chapel gave us rides to church. I do not attend church now, but some of my friends do. At no time have I ever heard anyone in my family or my circle of friends express a view that would even remotely be regarded as anything other than outrage by the thought of lynching. Nothing that I've ever read in any magazine published by a mainstream church did anything except condemn lynching in the strongest terms possible. To say that we only do so now only as a matter of political expediency and that we never did in the past is false.
I'm building up a PC for a friend of my aunt's. The PC is a P2 300 MHz box with 56 MB of RAM. No network connection is wanted. I was told no new hardware dollars were available. This is meant to be a donation.
I put Knoppix 3.4 on it, as it's a fairly complete distro. For the heck of it, I've logged in with KDE, WindowMaker, and fluxbox.
fluxbox is by far the fastest to load, looks clean, and will probably be the easiest to teach. KDE takes quite a while to load, but is stable after it's up. WindowMaker has the potential to be too confusing for a newb (I still have trouble navigating it after looking at it several times in the past few years).
I think I'll tell her that I recommend using fluxbox on such a low end PC. I'll show her KDE, and tell her it's there if she ever decides she wants more eye candy. My guess is that since all she wants is something to write articles and a books on then burn them to CD, she won't bother with KDE.
Yes, I'm setting up a link to k3b for her. It's by far the nicest CD burner I've come across. Long load time while it pulls the KDE libs in, but that can't be helped.
I've used Xandros a while now, and while I'm currently on he latest knoppix, I think I'm going back to xandros.
Its debian::is good.
Eh? The Knoppix doco says that once it's installed on the hard drive it's pure Debian. My laptop sure seems to be pure Debian after I installed it from a Knoppix 3.2 CD. It's been stable as a rock for not quite a year. No problems running 'apt-get update; apt-get upgrade' once or twice a month since.
So, how is Knoppix not Debian? Or am I misinterpreting your statement somehow?
Oh, I know I gave up some framerate, although the games that I've checked show substantially higher numbers than 40 fps. I was actually more concerned about ghosting or smearing of moving objects in FPSes when I first got it. That seemed to be the biggest concern in the trade rags. It turned out to not be an issue at all.
I bought an LCD instead of a CRT because:
1) No room on my desk for a 19" CRT. Every one that I looked at was too deep.
2) 19" CRTs are heavy! Most people don't care, I know. However, gamers like me tend to hit at least 3 or 4 LAN parties a year. Hauling a big CRT around gets to be really, really old.
3) That old 17" CRT of mine was dropped once because I couldn't see a patch of ice in front of me. It survived, but I sure don't want to repeat the exercise.
I can only imagine the uptake rate if there was a good 3d game like Battlefield 1942 or Vietnam that was released only for Linux.
IMO what will create more buzz will be more games like America's Army, the Quake series, Doom III, and the Unreal Tournament series that are available for Linux, Windows, and in some cases OSX. As more of those games become available and publicise that fact, the more converts we'll see. Especially as the Linux versions frequently seem to be faster than their Windows counterparts.:)
We have clearly defined support levels for various applications. There's mission critical, business critical, business sensitive, and everything else.
Mission critical apps run with a complete replacement running in a datacenter 1700 miles away. That replacement environment is constantly kept in sync by various means. High availability apps will be designed to run with either environment with no degradation.
Business critical apps run with a backup complete environment that might not exactly match the hardware in production. In some cases, it is the test environment. Data and app updates occur nightly.
Business sensitive apps share a common pool of backup servers. The servers are kept live and up to date with patches. Backup data is stored online in SANs until needed, with rotation to tape on a schedule. App updates occur monthly.
Everything else apps have data backed up offline. Recovery plans consist of ordering new hardware to replace what breaks.
This is a fairly typical disaster recovery plan for many businesses. Tell me again how Microsoft expects their new licensing plan to save us all money?
Samsung 19" 191T LCD monitor: $800 new. I needed to replace the 17" Gateway CrystalScan that finally died after nearly 10 years of abuse. I turn over my PC about every 2 years, so let's count that as one fifth of the new monitor's cost, or ~$160
Mobo w/ 3.2 GHz Intel processor: ~$700.
New DVD/CDR/CDRW/CD drive: ~$80
New case: ~$120
I reused my HDs, but just for the heck of it, two 80 GB HDs: ~$200
GeForce4 w/ 64 MB onboard RAM: ~$250
That's a system that isn't all that hot, and I didn't go out of my way to save money. I still managed to get this whole system together for about $1600. I know several people who could have probably put together an equivalent system (using AMD instead of Intel, for example) for less than $1000.
People who spend more than $1000 for a new PC nowadays do so because they're too lazy to shop around much.:) And yes, I definitely include myself in that.:lol:
If everybody on slashdot spent 3 hours (or $100) on this, it would make the Rifle Association look like chicken scratch.
As a registered Slashdot user and former member of the NRA, I have to comment on this one. I'm a former member because like most geeks I hate the idea of belonging to any group that would have me as a member, not because I disagree with their politics.
Slashdot still has less than 1,000,000 registered users. The NRA boasts 3,000,000 paid members. The potential Slashdot community is limited to geeks and those on the edges of geekdom worldwide. However, for affecting changing laws in the US, we must limit our consideration to US geeks only. Meanwhile, the NRA's potential community are all legal gun owners in the United States. Last time I checked, that was somewhere north of 30,000,000.
Nope, geeks aren't going to ever make the NRA look like chicken scratch.:)
Please don't use the word "illegal" in this context. It propagates the myth that there is such a thing as "international law" or "laws of war." There isn't, and it's a mistake to imply that there is.
This is the second or third time you've made this statement in this thread and I finally had to comment. My great uncle was a law professor specializing in international law at the U of MN for decades. When he died in the '70s, his will donated his law library to the U. I was a teenager at the time, and got drafted to help help do the heavy lifting for the librarians that came to catalog his collection.
They were in rapture over what they found. He about 10,000 volumes in his house. Apparently much of what he had was first edition and/or rare. Some of it dated back to the 1700s. One of the librarians told me that he had created a priceless collection.
So. It seems that at least one law college in the US recognizes the concept of international law. As does a major university's library. And many, many authors dating back a couple of hundred years!:)
Slashdot Mirror
For those of us who actually live outside the metropolis that is the US East Coast, the NYT has never really been relevant. :)
You know the one I mean: Data, Hawking, Einstein and Newton? It's been so long since I've seen it I don't remember the dialogue, but as I recall Hawking teased Einstein about how chance does play a role in life? :)
Live down their past??? So Netware faded away. So? You still have the finest directory service in the world in eDirectory and one of the best sets of tools for desktop management in Zenworks. Novell has consistently created valuable solutions that they have sold to a very large number of very satisfied customers. After all, they still have the cleanest balance sheet in the IT industry. They didn't get that without revenue.
Please. IBM didn't pay for the port to the mainframe. A handful of developers within IBM found out that some enthusiasts within Suse were working on it and clandestinely helped them out. They got it done in less than six months. At that point, they told IBM's management, who were completely blown away. The first $1 billion IBM w spent was almost entirely on marketing. What didn't go there was spent on ramping up skills within their dev groups to port apps and OSes.
Yes, Novell has do a major marketing push. In case you haven't noticed, THEY ARE DOING JUST THAT! It takes TIME to change perceptions. Give them a year or two to get the message out and sell some support contracts, willya?
Going off topic more than a bit here, so skip this if you're not interested in how choice of distros can affect sysadmin pain.
:)
While I'm a huge fan of Gentoo, I have been forced to concede to myself that the people who create ebuilds do have one very annoying habit. They constantly change where stuff is located from where the original authors intended. I wouldn't mind so much if they limited this activity to just user space apps, but when I find that they have deliberately deviated from basic things like rc.d, well, let's just say I get unhappy.
Anyone maintaining a mixed environment (and who isn't these days?) knows that minimizing differences to just those that really count is A Good Thing (tm). IMO Gentoo's developers' insistence on doing things their own way just because they can makes Gentoo a poor choice for adoption in a large, mixed environment.
It's too bad, too. I REALLY like portage. I've built up both of my home PCs with Gentoo and am very happy with the stability and speed. Both are noticeably faster than my Mandrake installs on those two boxes were, and I no longer have to rebuild from scratch every six months to avoid wierdnesses! W00t!
I'm also debating putting up a home server with either Gentoo or Debian. My work laptop runs Debian. Any work recommendation would be for Suse, Redhat, or Debian, though, not Gentoo. At least those distros are actively striving to meet LSB compliance.
Well, is it OK if I say "Just use Knoppix?" :)
Funny, I've seen my salary more than quadruple in the past 15 years doing exactly what the GP post detailed. Tell me again how I'm being abused?
Tell ya what: Why don't you go visit South Africa and tell them in person that they are a screwed up, destitute, ignorant bunch of savages whose priorities are completely messed up? You know, the only African country south of the equator to see a peaceful transition of power in the past 50 years?
Please.
Unfortunately, for those cards the real issue are the patents that nVidia depends upon belong to someone else. They are not in a position to open source those. nVidia gets around it by creating a small shim that that needs to be compiled into the kernel, then building most of the rest of the functionality in a driver module that interfaces somehow with the shim.
.run script that is supposed to handle all of the stuff for you. It may be worth visiting their Web site if you get excited about decent Linux gaming again.
I've never built a kernel for Redhat or Fedora, so I can't speak to your experience. I have built them for Mandrake, Gentoo, and Debian. As long as I followed the directions, the only problems that I ran into were fat fingering the XF86Config-4 entries.
While I haven't done it in a while, I understand that nVidia now has a
Kernel hacks??? Now, THAT's odd. Unless you're referring to the extra stuff required for the graphics cards? If so, these days the major distros generally handle that for you when you first install the OS.
:)
That's been the only time I've ran across this particular issue. No big deal, really. Well worth it for the ability to play games like America's Army or UT2004 on Linux.
Re: the idiots who didn't recognize your article for what it was; a slam at ESR: I can't believe the number of people who read Slashdot who don't recognize sarcasm!
You're right, his ability to prognosticate is badly flawed when predicting end results. OTOH, I think he's been pretty accurate in how MS would fight the war, don't you? Go back and re-read the Halloween docs and you'll see what I mean.
Sounds like both his peers and sci fi fans both regarded it as some of the best stuff written that year.
Yeah, it was routable. The real issue was that it was;
a) proprietary, so it couldn't interoperate with any other platform
b) couldn't scale globally, although Novell tried to sell it that way
c) cost a mint to buy licenses for
d) Had nowhere near the number of apps that TCP/IP had riding on top of it.
TCP/IP was a FAR better protocol from the ground up.
Someone noted a while back that Ellison didn't really get nasty until he started working regularly in Hollywood. Hollywood, the place where dreams are made of and those who first invent the dreams are routinely shit on. Ellison was always an abrasive sort, but Hollywood taught him to attack first, second, and last or see his visions completely warped by the time they hit the screen. And he's been dealing with Hollywood execs for a looong time.
The example where things didn't go his way that is most commonly quoted is "The City on the Edge of Forever" for Star Trek. He wrote that episode in March of 1966. He was still pissed about how it was altered for airing in 1995 when White Wolf published the unaltered screenplay for him. Mind you, this was an episode of Star Trek won the 1966-67 Writers' Guild of America Award for Best Teleplay, and the 1967 Hugo Award, the first (only) teleplay to ever do so.
He's also seen his stories ripped off for movies and television both, accreditation stripped, and on and on. Yes, he's a vengeful sort. Yes, he's got a blind spot the size of Texas when it comes to the differences between fan driven exposure and corporate ripoffs. Yes, it's clear that he thinks a model like Baen Publishing's Free Library is insane.
IMO he's still one of the most original science fiction and fantasy authors of his generation, and I have a deep and abiding respect for what he has accomplished. I'd love to get him on the side of those who would prefer to see more free exposure of his works. I don't think it'll ever happen, though. His experiences during his career have warped his view of the marketplace pretty badly.
I think that's the point he's trying to make: With his installation of Linux he has found it possible to use his desktop as his very own personal server that automates all the repetitive tasks that he has to deal with.
Wow. That still sounds like too much work.
:) :) :)
'kfmclient openProfile filemanagement'
Or, if you're too lazy to type, just click the little house on your taskbar. Of course, that's assuming you're using the [cough]superior[/cough]OTHER big DE.
What planet are you from? Any true Christian must be outraged by lynching. It goes against the most fundamental precepts of our faith. That is true in the Deep South, it was true in Duluth, MN in the 1920s, and it was true everywhere else it occurred.
I don't deny that people who called themselves Christians participated in lynch mobs. I don't even deny that some of them coldly orchestrated a wave of lynchings to spread fear throughout the Deep South and the Midwest. At no time, however, were those acts perpetrated by 'most' Christians. That's taking the facts and jumping to a conclusion that simply isn't supportable.
Or have you forgotten, for example, that the vast majority of church going blacks in this country are Christian? Many of them Baptist or Methodist, the same branches of Protestantism that the KKK drew so many of its members from? Are you taking the position that the only Christians that would be outraged by a lynch mob would be blacks? Please.
For the record, my great-grandparents were Lutheran, Catholic, Serbian Orthodox, and Methodist. My grandparents were Lutheran and Episcopalian. My parents weren't big on attending church, although they had no objections to us kids going. When I was young, the pastor for the local Grace Bible chapel gave us rides to church. I do not attend church now, but some of my friends do. At no time have I ever heard anyone in my family or my circle of friends express a view that would even remotely be regarded as anything other than outrage by the thought of lynching. Nothing that I've ever read in any magazine published by a mainstream church did anything except condemn lynching in the strongest terms possible. To say that we only do so now only as a matter of political expediency and that we never did in the past is false.
I'm building up a PC for a friend of my aunt's. The PC is a P2 300 MHz box with 56 MB of RAM. No network connection is wanted. I was told no new hardware dollars were available. This is meant to be a donation.
I put Knoppix 3.4 on it, as it's a fairly complete distro. For the heck of it, I've logged in with KDE, WindowMaker, and fluxbox.
fluxbox is by far the fastest to load, looks clean, and will probably be the easiest to teach. KDE takes quite a while to load, but is stable after it's up. WindowMaker has the potential to be too confusing for a newb (I still have trouble navigating it after looking at it several times in the past few years).
I think I'll tell her that I recommend using fluxbox on such a low end PC. I'll show her KDE, and tell her it's there if she ever decides she wants more eye candy. My guess is that since all she wants is something to write articles and a books on then burn them to CD, she won't bother with KDE.
Yes, I'm setting up a link to k3b for her. It's by far the nicest CD burner I've come across. Long load time while it pulls the KDE libs in, but that can't be helped.
Eh? The Knoppix doco says that once it's installed on the hard drive it's pure Debian. My laptop sure seems to be pure Debian after I installed it from a Knoppix 3.2 CD. It's been stable as a rock for not quite a year. No problems running 'apt-get update; apt-get upgrade' once or twice a month since.
So, how is Knoppix not Debian? Or am I misinterpreting your statement somehow?
Oh, I know I gave up some framerate, although the games that I've checked show substantially higher numbers than 40 fps. I was actually more concerned about ghosting or smearing of moving objects in FPSes when I first got it. That seemed to be the biggest concern in the trade rags. It turned out to not be an issue at all.
I bought an LCD instead of a CRT because:
1) No room on my desk for a 19" CRT. Every one that I looked at was too deep.
2) 19" CRTs are heavy! Most people don't care, I know. However, gamers like me tend to hit at least 3 or 4 LAN parties a year. Hauling a big CRT around gets to be really, really old.
3) That old 17" CRT of mine was dropped once because I couldn't see a patch of ice in front of me. It survived, but I sure don't want to repeat the exercise.
However, I do take issue with this:
IMO what will create more buzz will be more games like America's Army, the Quake series, Doom III, and the Unreal Tournament series that are available for Linux, Windows, and in some cases OSX. As more of those games become available and publicise that fact, the more converts we'll see. Especially as the Linux versions frequently seem to be faster than their Windows counterparts.
We have clearly defined support levels for various applications. There's mission critical, business critical, business sensitive, and everything else.
Mission critical apps run with a complete replacement running in a datacenter 1700 miles away. That replacement environment is constantly kept in sync by various means. High availability apps will be designed to run with either environment with no degradation.
Business critical apps run with a backup complete environment that might not exactly match the hardware in production. In some cases, it is the test environment. Data and app updates occur nightly.
Business sensitive apps share a common pool of backup servers. The servers are kept live and up to date with patches. Backup data is stored online in SANs until needed, with rotation to tape on a schedule. App updates occur monthly.
Everything else apps have data backed up offline. Recovery plans consist of ordering new hardware to replace what breaks.
This is a fairly typical disaster recovery plan for many businesses. Tell me again how Microsoft expects their new licensing plan to save us all money?
Samsung 19" 191T LCD monitor: $800 new. I needed to replace the 17" Gateway CrystalScan that finally died after nearly 10 years of abuse. I turn over my PC about every 2 years, so let's count that as one fifth of the new monitor's cost, or ~$160
:) And yes, I definitely include myself in that. :lol:
Mobo w/ 3.2 GHz Intel processor: ~$700.
New DVD/CDR/CDRW/CD drive: ~$80
New case: ~$120
I reused my HDs, but just for the heck of it, two 80 GB HDs: ~$200
GeForce4 w/ 64 MB onboard RAM: ~$250
That's a system that isn't all that hot, and I didn't go out of my way to save money. I still managed to get this whole system together for about $1600. I know several people who could have probably put together an equivalent system (using AMD instead of Intel, for example) for less than $1000.
People who spend more than $1000 for a new PC nowadays do so because they're too lazy to shop around much.
If everybody on slashdot spent 3 hours (or $100) on this, it would make the Rifle Association look like chicken scratch.
:)
As a registered Slashdot user and former member of the NRA, I have to comment on this one. I'm a former member because like most geeks I hate the idea of belonging to any group that would have me as a member, not because I disagree with their politics.
Slashdot still has less than 1,000,000 registered users. The NRA boasts 3,000,000 paid members. The potential Slashdot community is limited to geeks and those on the edges of geekdom worldwide. However, for affecting changing laws in the US, we must limit our consideration to US geeks only. Meanwhile, the NRA's potential community are all legal gun owners in the United States. Last time I checked, that was somewhere north of 30,000,000.
Nope, geeks aren't going to ever make the NRA look like chicken scratch.
This is the second or third time you've made this statement in this thread and I finally had to comment. My great uncle was a law professor specializing in international law at the U of MN for decades. When he died in the '70s, his will donated his law library to the U. I was a teenager at the time, and got drafted to help help do the heavy lifting for the librarians that came to catalog his collection.
They were in rapture over what they found. He about 10,000 volumes in his house. Apparently much of what he had was first edition and/or rare. Some of it dated back to the 1700s. One of the librarians told me that he had created a priceless collection.
So. It seems that at least one law college in the US recognizes the concept of international law. As does a major university's library. And many, many authors dating back a couple of hundred years!
Funny. Outside of the somewhat unusual location. that's exactly the way a law abiding US citizen is supposed to get a firearm. So, the problem is?