Re:I've got news for them...
on
Yahoo's Geek Statue
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Not just that, but gmail has indeed changed the way the game is played. When you sign up for gmail, they have a short intro which begins with "GMail is different". They key is that they are not gratuitously different. They are different because they analyzed the email processing process and saw a way to improve it. All the mail clients that I've used before had different ways of arranging things on the screen, but the function that they offered and the paradigm that they supported was the same. It took a little bit for me to get accustomed to the new way of doing things, but now that I'm acclimatized, I'm not going back.
"It's got to be a site that's meaningful from an astrological point of view, but we don't want it to be in place that's so hostile that scientists and people won't go there," Halliday said.
I sincerely hope those astronomers arent consulting astrologers in the placement of the telescope.
No it doesn't. How, when and if garbage collection is performed in Java is implementation dependent. There is nothing in Java that forces it's use.
Yes it does. Under C++, cleaning up of resources no longer used is the responsibility of the programmer. This is not the case with Java - so you are implicitly forced to use the garbage collector.
Yes - thats what you are missing : Change control. It is used to track changes from a known baseline. Your known baseline is the set of requirements that you started from and any changes to that has to be estimated for, designed for and implemented without losing sight of the fact that this is a change - and not part of the base. What you are advocating is throwing out the (good) development methodology baby along with (bad) fact that requirements always change bathwater.
Assuming the technology works correctly, there still seems to be a problem for this use case : it is going to be difficult for the surgeons to figure out what their hands are doing because they cant see their own hands.
The tools themselves are decent and if you are familiar with modelling, are a great help. But woe betide you if you step off the well-beaten path - finding out how to implement some of the lesser known features of UML2 is an excercise in frustration. For example, take the feature called "gates" used in sequence diagram. The entire documentation for Rational Software Modeler doesnt come up with any relevant hit.
Then there are the scripting capabilities of the tools. I know that there are such capabilities, since IBM / Rational does provide consultant written extensions to do certain tasks. But good luck finding out how to write such extensions. IBM / Rational's strategy appears to be "pay us for the tools and pay us for the consultants that will make them really useful", which seems to me to be a stupid strategy. But then, since they are laughing all the way to the bank, and I have $0.02 in my bank account, maybe they know something that I dont.
Thats a standard blurb meant to protect you. Should someone else get hold of your card, the government can ask for it back. Passports are similar. Typically the issuing country owns the passport and if anyone other than the proper "holder" takes possession of it, the issuing country can ask for it back.
Wal-mart has the worst working environment of places that I've worked at bar none. I have heard of worse places, but havent experienced such horror first hand, so Walmart is at the top of my shit list. Let me list a few observations :
Tools required to do your job : while employees are indeed provided with their own phones, contractors work under sweatshop conditions. When I was there, in a 30 x 20 feet area, they had 15 of us stuffed in there and two phones to go around.
Treatment of employess : Others have posted about the low pay at Walmart. That extends to I/T employees too. Furthermore, Walmart requires even its HQ IT employees to every now and then work in the field (in one of its many super-stores located in the Bentonville / Rogers area). Ostensibly the reason is to give the employees field experience. This is complete rubbish. The people who are exploited thus are not the designers / application architects who would be in a position to make a difference should they get such front-line experience.
Cheapskates.com : Walmart has a scheme of monetarily rewarding employees who come up with ideas to save the company money. One of the IT employees I worked with put in the suggestion to do away with some of the janitorial staff by making all the employees empty their trash cans into the public trash area. She was duly rewarded and the policy implemented. Any place which is willing to sacrifice employee morale for the few dollars they save thus needs to be avoided like the plague.
Cafeteria : should you work at Walmart, I advise you to either pack your lunch from home or go home for lunch hour. The cafeteria has a really depressing decor, isnt clean, and the food is utter crap. I used to walk across to the Wendy's across the street and eat fast food on most days. It probably was a healthier choice. The stuff in the vending machines are cheaper, though. At a time when the vending machines in other companies typically priced coke at about 55 cents a can, Walmart had them at 35 cents a can.
Other people have already posted about travellers being required to share rooms
Other than the above list, there are other considerations too that may apply depending on whether you are conservative or not. For example, at the time I was there (1997), one couldnt get MTV on cable, because the consensus was that MTV was satanic ("work of the devil" was the actual quote I heard). The number of churches outnumbered the number of gas stations. And when the neighbouring town of Fayetteville ("First home of Bill and Hillary Clinton" states a prominent billboard as you drive into it) was subject to a new ordinance outlawing the sale of beer in the biggest titty bar in the region, that proved to be yet another nail in the coffin for many contractors who were working there from out of state.
Plus, if you cant take being located in the middle of nowhere, dont work at Walmart HQ.
Generics in Java have a smaller scope, when compared to C++ templates. The objective in Java is to provide a type-safety mechanism for containers. In C++, it is much more than that. Unfortunately, it is this extra ability in C++ that makes for some really complex code. Not sure if this has already been mentioned in this story, but it has been theorized that C++ templates are themselves turing complete (though I havent seen a proof to that effect).
I'm a bit puzzled by all the generics nay-sayers. I have tried out the feature, and they augment the language. I have yet to see a downside to this feature in Java (unless one counts the inability of the compiler to fully utilize the additional type-safety in compiler error messages). What is all the flap about?
Disclaimer : the following anecdote was not verified by me first hand, but given what I know, it sounds very reasonable.
Circa 1978, the Morvi dam in the state of Gujarat burst. The flooding and the resultant loss of life and property was huge. The event made front-page headlines in India. One of the more curious aspects of this incident was apparently that the Indian government was clueless about the occurrence of this disaster, but the US spy satellites in orbit detected the event. The Indian government was informed by the US about the disaster.
At that time, ISRO (the Indian space agency) had been in existence for many many years - but their funding was more of an afterthought. This incident opened the eyes of many to the strategic value of a space presence. As a result, circa 1982, India put its first satellite into space.
People in the US may not appreciate the usefulness of a space presence. The following information was gleaned from a documentary funded by the UN :
India went onto launch many more satellites - a lot of of them for weather forecasting. The neighbouring country of Bangladesh is located in the delta of two major rivers. Flooding is a perpetual annual problem. Subsequent to the Indian weather satellites being available, the UN sponsored the use of the weather forecasting data that was available to provide an early warning system for flooding due to cyclones (known as hurricanes in the US). The first year this was done, the loss of life was 150,000. The previous year it had been 300,000. And no, I am not making these numbers up.
The scientific method is one approach to discovery. It is very powerful in this, and I can see that it would make sense to adopt it to many many purposes even in non-scientific disciplines. But I'm afraid that merely following the scientific method does not make a discipline one of the sciences. The predictive power of the discipline is the acid test. I could follow the scientific method for any number of my daily activities like driving to work, or cooking, or doing the laundry or whatever, but it does not make whatever I am doing "scientific".
I dont have scorn for non-scientific disciplines. There is nothing (to me atleast) predictive about music, for example, but I wouldnt call the study of music a useless endeavor. Economics, in my mind, occupies a similar spot : it is a challenging field worthy of study, but as its predictive powers are little better than random guesses, it doesnt deserve the label of "science".
The fact that members of the social "sciences" go around using the word "science" is a marketing ploy and nothing else. These folks are hoping that their audience will miss the point : that the cornerstone of modern science is its ability to accurately predict based on theories. If a scientist predicts event E and based on theory T and E happens once for one set of input, and for the same set of input to T, event F happens another time, the scientific community will acknowledge that the theory T is broken. This doesnt happen in the social "sciences". The strategy there is to say "well we are dealing with humans after all..." . Perfectly true, but it is equally true then that they dont have scientific theories and therefore shouldnt be calling themselves scientists.
This was exactly the point of Alan Sokal. The sham philosophers and other social "scientists" were misusing the scientific vernacular in totally unscientific ways to gain credibility in the eyes of the world. Just because economists use mathematics, doesnt make their discipline scientific.
Just wanted to point out that the w3C recently published their intention to have a finger in this pie. With this, they hope to be able to support graphic formats that are representable in XML - notably SVG.
....If I read someone's opinion on, say, firearm regulations, I'll find it interresting to know if they are a member of the NRA.....
To what purpose? Knowing about their affiliations will tell you about their motivations. But it wont tell you if their argument is good or bad. For the record, I do think that manned spaceflight should be funded. However, the statement that Van Allen made was correct about the "obfuscations", and I was objecting to your statements about that.
As already pointed out by another poster, the ocean through which the listed explorers travelled could provide sustenance. But much more importantly, wherever these explorers aimed for, they always had a hope that when they came to the end of their journey, the land that they arrived at could sustain them. A journey to the moon or to Mars would be the equivalent of Christopher Columbus setting off on a voyage to the gates of hell in the hope that future generations could somehow make hell hospitable and profit from it (perhaps the flames would provide a free energy source?). So, Van Allen is perfectly correct in calling these obfuscations.
You on the other hand are obfuscating the issue. An opinion is an opinion, and it doesnt matter whether the person voicing it is young or old. The matter should be considered on its merits and not with regard to the age of the speaker.
This is the part of hell where one has to use Java products....
I have a 800MHz Pentium based T20 running Websphere Studio Application Developer. 512 MB of RAM. I'm using 1GB of virtual memory when I run my programs. My CPU regularly spikes through to 100%. Its hell on earth. Wait a minute. Maybe I'm dead and in hell, since this misery seems to be constant....
So the answer to your question about why we need all this power is...Java.
I applaud your sentiments about posting as AC. Really, the folks who make such statements havent thought things through. If I claim on/. that I'm Bruce Perens, instead of "Anonymous Coward", does that really mean I'm Bruce Perens? As far as the readers of this website goes, if you arent somebody who has access to the subscriber db, everyone is anonymous.
Not to mention the fact that ignoring all Anonymous Cowards is tantamount to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.....
Posted non-anonymously, so that this thread is visible and that OP realizes his folly.
Your point is well-taken, but I have to quibble with the words that you used. A scientists goal isnt to prove or disprove anything. The proof or disproof is the means to an end. The true goal of a scientist should be to uncover the truth.
While it is certainly possible to ascribe less than pure motives to all the instances documented in the story, if one applies Occam's razor, one can come up with a simpler but not as interesting explanation : this is the way big business works. In a multi-national corporation, different people collaborate. They have different personalities, and some are more antagonistic than others. Some people are asked to produce marketing materials and others are asked to review them for factual accuracy. Ultimately, before a document is published, several reviewers will go through it, and it would be shocking if edits were not made.
For example, the first example talks about changing the "deploying" to "evaluating". What exactly is damning about this? Perhaps when the marketing material was written, Aventis had plans to deploy and this got changed later. Or maybe, there are some reasons why Aventis, even though it is actually deploying, may not actually want their names used as a reference for the tablet PC. There are a million and one innocuous (sp?) reasons why the change was made, but yeah, they arent as fascinating as the interpretation made on the site.
Another example - the Robbie Bach / Sandy Duncan mixup. Organizational chains are quite tangled in large corporations and can change quite frequently. The author might simply not have had the right information on who was actually in charge - especially if both were Senior Vice Presidents and connected with XBox.
However, had your "we can't win, the odds are overwhelming" attitude been taken in the revolutionary war (and, make no mistake, the odds seemed the same to them), then the US wouldn't exist now, for example.
Who is asking you to give up? Giving up weapons does not equate to giving up the fight.
Yes, governments have a vast array of firepower. But, this firepower is wielded not by some faceless entity, but by brothers, fathers, mothers and sisters of the populace. OK. So why do you need the firearms if you are relying on the solidarity of the arms and legs of the government?
The tools that an armed populace has are much more than firearms. Yet, to simply lay down one set of tools in the face of what seems to be an absurd attempt doesn't quite seem to be the right attitude for a free man.
You seem to be implying that if one gives up the "right" to possess firearms, one has given up the fight. Only in your mind, brother.
Further, I never suggested that a revolution would happen. You inserted that into the conversation yourself, as if you thought you knew what I was thinking. Nice rhetorical ploy, try again.
Rhetoric has nothing to do with it. I was merely anticipating a counter argument from you.
Still, you may wish to live your life as part of the chattel controlled by government, but, personally, my pledge to defend the Constitution (yes, I'm an American) remains a valid pledge for me, even though I'm no longer in the service. If this means that I give my life for principle, then so be it (I think the phrase was "live free or die"). I will not, if it is within my ability, allow the tools that it takes to do so be restrained by people like you.
I've got to laugh here. Did I threaten to take away your candy, and is that why you are throwing a tantrum? There, there, kiddo. Having a longer penis (In case you cant figure it out, thats a metaphor for your gun) does not make you more or less free. Its your spirit that counts.
If more people were concerned about their freedom, and the freedom of others, then our world would be a better place.I'm aghast. We actually agree on something. Wait a minute....this doesnt seem tied into your argument. Hmmm. Maybe its a rhetorical filler....Isn't freedom what people here on Slashdot are constantly pushing for? Ah. So now I'm part of the Slash-borg, which automatically makes me a "bad" boy. Heres a clue : tarring someone with a perjorative label (favourite tactic of the Bush administration) doesnt invalidate that person's argument.Why then, do the most basic of freedoms somehow get pushed into the back of the list? Its a basic right only in your mind. Thats what this argument is about, and so far you havent convinced me that firearms possession by the general populace will actually help one defend against the government.
Conspicuously absent from your reply is a comment about the right to self-preservation. Since you think that "they are prone to taking silence as meaning that they won the argument", why did you not comment on this? Because I acknowledge that this is, in certain circumstances a valid reason to possess a weapon. But that wasnt the pro-gun argument I was trying to address. Not everyone lives in an area populated by bears or snakes. And granting such people the ability to acquire weapons does not mean that possessing weapons needs to be a basic right.
If self-preservation is valid, then so is the right of the populace to at least *attempt* to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. The two go hand in hand. Sure. But where do the firearms come into the picture for the second one? Again, its only in your mind that resistance needs weapons. Weapons which wouldnt do you any good anyway. Weapons which still make you rely on the goodwill of the members of the armed forces.
BTW - where were you with your weapons when Bush took away the right of US citizens to have a fair trial? In case you missed that event, all he has to do today is to call you an enemy combatant and you can be disappeared. And for the record - I am not a US citizen. Why should I care if your country self destructs?
Slashdot Mirror
Not just that, but gmail has indeed changed the way the game is played. When you sign up for gmail, they have a short intro which begins with "GMail is different". They key is that they are not gratuitously different. They are different because they analyzed the email processing process and saw a way to improve it. All the mail clients that I've used before had different ways of arranging things on the screen, but the function that they offered and the paradigm that they supported was the same. It took a little bit for me to get accustomed to the new way of doing things, but now that I'm acclimatized, I'm not going back.
Yes it does. Under C++, cleaning up of resources no longer used is the responsibility of the programmer. This is not the case with Java - so you are implicitly forced to use the garbage collector.
Yes - thats what you are missing : Change control. It is used to track changes from a known baseline. Your known baseline is the set of requirements that you started from and any changes to that has to be estimated for, designed for and implemented without losing sight of the fact that this is a change - and not part of the base. What you are advocating is throwing out the (good) development methodology baby along with (bad) fact that requirements always change bathwater.
Assuming the technology works correctly, there still seems to be a problem for this use case : it is going to be difficult for the surgeons to figure out what their hands are doing because they cant see their own hands.
The tools themselves are decent and if you are familiar with modelling, are a great help. But woe betide you if you step off the well-beaten path - finding out how to implement some of the lesser known features of UML2 is an excercise in frustration. For example, take the feature called "gates" used in sequence diagram. The entire documentation for Rational Software Modeler doesnt come up with any relevant hit.
Then there are the scripting capabilities of the tools. I know that there are such capabilities, since IBM / Rational does provide consultant written extensions to do certain tasks. But good luck finding out how to write such extensions. IBM / Rational's strategy appears to be "pay us for the tools and pay us for the consultants that will make them really useful", which seems to me to be a stupid strategy. But then, since they are laughing all the way to the bank, and I have $0.02 in my bank account, maybe they know something that I dont.
....and Joel has something to say on that topic.
Possibly because the pre-orders for the next Harry Potter book were a significant percentage of that number?
Thats a standard blurb meant to protect you. Should someone else get hold of your card, the government can ask for it back. Passports are similar. Typically the issuing country owns the passport and if anyone other than the proper "holder" takes possession of it, the issuing country can ask for it back.
I have contracted at Walmart.
Wal-mart has the worst working environment of places that I've worked at bar none. I have heard of worse places, but havent experienced such horror first hand, so Walmart is at the top of my shit list. Let me list a few observations :
Other than the above list, there are other considerations too that may apply depending on whether you are conservative or not. For example, at the time I was there (1997), one couldnt get MTV on cable, because the consensus was that MTV was satanic ("work of the devil" was the actual quote I heard). The number of churches outnumbered the number of gas stations. And when the neighbouring town of Fayetteville ("First home of Bill and Hillary Clinton" states a prominent billboard as you drive into it) was subject to a new ordinance outlawing the sale of beer in the biggest titty bar in the region, that proved to be yet another nail in the coffin for many contractors who were working there from out of state.
Plus, if you cant take being located in the middle of nowhere, dont work at Walmart HQ.
Generics in Java have a smaller scope, when compared to C++ templates. The objective in Java is to provide a type-safety mechanism for containers. In C++, it is much more than that. Unfortunately, it is this extra ability in C++ that makes for some really complex code. Not sure if this has already been mentioned in this story, but it has been theorized that C++ templates are themselves turing complete (though I havent seen a proof to that effect).
I'm a bit puzzled by all the generics nay-sayers. I have tried out the feature, and they augment the language. I have yet to see a downside to this feature in Java (unless one counts the inability of the compiler to fully utilize the additional type-safety in compiler error messages). What is all the flap about?
Disclaimer : the following anecdote was not verified by me first hand, but given what I know, it sounds very reasonable.
Circa 1978, the Morvi dam in the state of Gujarat burst. The flooding and the resultant loss of life and property was huge. The event made front-page headlines in India. One of the more curious aspects of this incident was apparently that the Indian government was clueless about the occurrence of this disaster, but the US spy satellites in orbit detected the event. The Indian government was informed by the US about the disaster.
At that time, ISRO (the Indian space agency) had been in existence for many many years - but their funding was more of an afterthought. This incident opened the eyes of many to the strategic value of a space presence. As a result, circa 1982, India put its first satellite into space.
People in the US may not appreciate the usefulness of a space presence. The following information was gleaned from a documentary funded by the UN :
India went onto launch many more satellites - a lot of of them for weather forecasting. The neighbouring country of Bangladesh is located in the delta of two major rivers. Flooding is a perpetual annual problem. Subsequent to the Indian weather satellites being available, the UN sponsored the use of the weather forecasting data that was available to provide an early warning system for flooding due to cyclones (known as hurricanes in the US). The first year this was done, the loss of life was 150,000. The previous year it had been 300,000. And no, I am not making these numbers up.
The scientific method is one approach to discovery. It is very powerful in this, and I can see that it would make sense to adopt it to many many purposes even in non-scientific disciplines. But I'm afraid that merely following the scientific method does not make a discipline one of the sciences. The predictive power of the discipline is the acid test. I could follow the scientific method for any number of my daily activities like driving to work, or cooking, or doing the laundry or whatever, but it does not make whatever I am doing "scientific".
I dont have scorn for non-scientific disciplines. There is nothing (to me atleast) predictive about music, for example, but I wouldnt call the study of music a useless endeavor. Economics, in my mind, occupies a similar spot : it is a challenging field worthy of study, but as its predictive powers are little better than random guesses, it doesnt deserve the label of "science".
The fact that members of the social "sciences" go around using the word "science" is a marketing ploy and nothing else. These folks are hoping that their audience will miss the point : that the cornerstone of modern science is its ability to accurately predict based on theories. If a scientist predicts event E and based on theory T and E happens once for one set of input, and for the same set of input to T, event F happens another time, the scientific community will acknowledge that the theory T is broken. This doesnt happen in the social "sciences". The strategy there is to say "well we are dealing with humans after all..." . Perfectly true, but it is equally true then that they dont have scientific theories and therefore shouldnt be calling themselves scientists.
This was exactly the point of Alan Sokal. The sham philosophers and other social "scientists" were misusing the scientific vernacular in totally unscientific ways to gain credibility in the eyes of the world. Just because economists use mathematics, doesnt make their discipline scientific.
Just wanted to point out that the w3C recently published their intention to have a finger in this pie. With this, they hope to be able to support graphic formats that are representable in XML - notably SVG.
Fair point about Amundsen.
......
To what purpose? Knowing about their affiliations will tell you about their motivations. But it wont tell you if their argument is good or bad. For the record, I do think that manned spaceflight should be funded. However, the statement that Van Allen made was correct about the "obfuscations", and I was objecting to your statements about that.
As already pointed out by another poster, the ocean through which the listed explorers travelled could provide sustenance. But much more importantly, wherever these explorers aimed for, they always had a hope that when they came to the end of their journey, the land that they arrived at could sustain them. A journey to the moon or to Mars would be the equivalent of Christopher Columbus setting off on a voyage to the gates of hell in the hope that future generations could somehow make hell hospitable and profit from it (perhaps the flames would provide a free energy source?). So, Van Allen is perfectly correct in calling these obfuscations.
You on the other hand are obfuscating the issue. An opinion is an opinion, and it doesnt matter whether the person voicing it is young or old. The matter should be considered on its merits and not with regard to the age of the speaker.
Firstly, your conclusion in your sig stopped short of what it should have said : 0.9999.. = 1 not merely 0.999 ~= 1.
Secondly, the proof of equality is much simpler. 1 - 0.9999.... = 10 raised to (- infinity) = 0. Therefore 1 = 0.9999....
This is the part of hell where one has to use Java products....
I have a 800MHz Pentium based T20 running Websphere Studio Application Developer. 512 MB of RAM. I'm using 1GB of virtual memory when I run my programs. My CPU regularly spikes through to 100%. Its hell on earth. Wait a minute. Maybe I'm dead and in hell, since this misery seems to be constant....
So the answer to your question about why we need all this power is ...Java.
Do they....no - surely they dont mean "Shut the Fuck Up"?
I applaud your sentiments about posting as AC. Really, the folks who make such statements havent thought things through. If I claim on /. that I'm Bruce Perens, instead of "Anonymous Coward", does that really mean I'm Bruce Perens? As far as the readers of this website goes, if you arent somebody who has access to the subscriber db, everyone is anonymous.
Not to mention the fact that ignoring all Anonymous Cowards is tantamount to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.....
Posted non-anonymously, so that this thread is visible and that OP realizes his folly.
I hereby formulate Kenneth's law (modelled after Godwin's law) : all sufficiently long threads on the internet will end up mentioning SCO.
Your point is well-taken, but I have to quibble with the words that you used. A scientists goal isnt to prove or disprove anything. The proof or disproof is the means to an end. The true goal of a scientist should be to uncover the truth.
While it is certainly possible to ascribe less than pure motives to all the instances documented in the story, if one applies Occam's razor, one can come up with a simpler but not as interesting explanation : this is the way big business works. In a multi-national corporation, different people collaborate. They have different personalities, and some are more antagonistic than others. Some people are asked to produce marketing materials and others are asked to review them for factual accuracy. Ultimately, before a document is published, several reviewers will go through it, and it would be shocking if edits were not made.
For example, the first example talks about changing the "deploying" to "evaluating". What exactly is damning about this? Perhaps when the marketing material was written, Aventis had plans to deploy and this got changed later. Or maybe, there are some reasons why Aventis, even though it is actually deploying, may not actually want their names used as a reference for the tablet PC. There are a million and one innocuous (sp?) reasons why the change was made, but yeah, they arent as fascinating as the interpretation made on the site.
Another example - the Robbie Bach / Sandy Duncan mixup. Organizational chains are quite tangled in large corporations and can change quite frequently. The author might simply not have had the right information on who was actually in charge - especially if both were Senior Vice Presidents and connected with XBox.
Who is asking you to give up? Giving up weapons does not equate to giving up the fight.
Yes, governments have a vast array of firepower. But, this firepower is wielded not by some faceless entity, but by brothers, fathers, mothers and sisters of the populace.
OK. So why do you need the firearms if you are relying on the solidarity of the arms and legs of the government?
The tools that an armed populace has are much more than firearms. Yet, to simply lay down one set of tools in the face of what seems to be an absurd attempt doesn't quite seem to be the right attitude for a free man.
You seem to be implying that if one gives up the "right" to possess firearms, one has given up the fight. Only in your mind, brother.
Further, I never suggested that a revolution would happen. You inserted that into the conversation yourself, as if you thought you knew what I was thinking. Nice rhetorical ploy, try again.
Rhetoric has nothing to do with it. I was merely anticipating a counter argument from you.
Still, you may wish to live your life as part of the chattel controlled by government, but, personally, my pledge to defend the Constitution (yes, I'm an American) remains a valid pledge for me, even though I'm no longer in the service. If this means that I give my life for principle, then so be it (I think the phrase was "live free or die"). I will not, if it is within my ability, allow the tools that it takes to do so be restrained by people like you.
I've got to laugh here. Did I threaten to take away your candy, and is that why you are throwing a tantrum? There, there, kiddo. Having a longer penis (In case you cant figure it out, thats a metaphor for your gun) does not make you more or less free. Its your spirit that counts.
If more people were concerned about their freedom, and the freedom of others, then our world would be a better place.I'm aghast. We actually agree on something. Wait a minute....this doesnt seem tied into your argument. Hmmm. Maybe its a rhetorical filler....Isn't freedom what people here on Slashdot are constantly pushing for? Ah. So now I'm part of the Slash-borg, which automatically makes me a "bad" boy. Heres a clue : tarring someone with a perjorative label (favourite tactic of the Bush administration) doesnt invalidate that person's argument.Why then, do the most basic of freedoms somehow get pushed into the back of the list? Its a basic right only in your mind. Thats what this argument is about, and so far you havent convinced me that firearms possession by the general populace will actually help one defend against the government.
Conspicuously absent from your reply is a comment about the right to self-preservation. Since you think that "they are prone to taking silence as meaning that they won the argument", why did you not comment on this? Because I acknowledge that this is, in certain circumstances a valid reason to possess a weapon. But that wasnt the pro-gun argument I was trying to address. Not everyone lives in an area populated by bears or snakes. And granting such people the ability to acquire weapons does not mean that possessing weapons needs to be a basic right.
If self-preservation is valid, then so is the right of the populace to at least *attempt* to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. The two go hand in hand. Sure. But where do the firearms come into the picture for the second one? Again, its only in your mind that resistance needs weapons. Weapons which wouldnt do you any good anyway. Weapons which still make you rely on the goodwill of the members of the armed forces.
BTW - where were you with your weapons when Bush took away the right of US citizens to have a fair trial? In case you missed that event, all he has to do today is to call you an enemy combatant and you can be disappeared. And for the record - I am not a US citizen. Why should I care if your country self destructs?