Wow, I hadn't seen that one. It's definitely real. You can make out the artifacts a lot more visibly in this one. It wouldn't be tolerable for serious photography, but for something like newspaper imagery this would be (is) killer.
That's true, but what's the link between running our industrial economies full bore and helping find ways to live with climate change? It's not as if our current, total inability to cope with this crisis has anything to do with a lack of energy or resources--it's a failure of politics and priorities. Always has been. Given the overwhelmingly strong evidence that we are measurably impacting the climate, the only prudent course of action is to hedge our bets, clamp down on emissions, and start spending a whole shitload of time, money and energy researching our way out of this.
Explain to me what is drastic about attempting to move the global ecological equilibrium a little bit back toward where it was before we came and started mucking with it. You know, the one that created all life as we know it and sustained it for 3.7 billion years? Seems like things were going pretty good there, barring some notable mass extinctions--which have been almost to a one linked to (surprise!) big, sudden swings in surface temperatures. My whole point is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. It's a really simple argument. You've done nothing to undermine it.
And BTW, if anyone is overstating their case, it's you, pal. 2002 called, it wants its wait-and-see attitude back. The debate over whether humans are changing the climate is settled, the supporting evidence is overwhelming, and the only people I come across these days still bloviating to the contrary have an agenda to peddle. What's yours?
Who cares if we're primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary? I simply don't understand all the hoopla about whether or not global warming is anthropogenic. We can all agree that 5 degrees celsius warmer in 100 years would be a catastrophe for every ecosystem on the planet, and for our own viability as a species, yes? And we certainly can agree that our spewing billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution is having some sort of effect, yes? Then WTF? Shouldn't we be doing everything in our power to try to ward off this impending crisis? No matter how small the effect of our actions, to continue blindly on the same path we've been on for the past 200 years is signing our own death warrant. Doing nothing is completely unjustifiable in all cases. Am I missing something?
Man, you people are just great. You want irony? How about the high-strung, douchebag libertarian who writes a 220 (I counted) word rebuttal to a 67-word fake newsbrief in a joke newspaper. God... that works on so many levels. Are any editors of the Onion reading this? Shit just writes itself.
Done. The only mention I found of the police had something to do with roadblocks. I did find this, however:
Federal, state and local governments have created inefficient service monopolies throughout the economy. From the US Postal Service to municipal garbage collection and water works, government is forcing citizens to use monopoly services. These are services that the private sector is already capable of providing in a manner that gives the public better service at a competitive price.
That sounds a lot like what the parent poster was talking about. One could easily see that sort of thinking leading to something a lot more extreme, if we were ever stupid enough to vote you wackos into power. (This seems like a good time to plug one of my favorite The Onion articles of all time.)
And I'm measuring my words carefully when I say "wacko." I don't see how else you could characterize this:
Solutions: We oppose all laws at any level of government restricting, regulating or requiring the ownership, manufacture, transfer or sale of firearms or ammunition. We oppose all laws requiring registration of firearms or ammunition. We support repeal of all gun control laws. We demand the immediate abolition of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Wow. Congratulations on being to the right of the NRA. Not very many people can claim that.
I agree with a great many of the positions espoused in your platform, but in the end you libertarians are just as pie-in-the-sky detached from reality as the lefties you so ardently despise. Who knows, maybe AK in every garage and a chicken in every pot sounds like a great idea to a bunch of white computer programmers living in the suburbs. Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination, plus maybe a very passing acquaintance with human nature, to see what a monstrously reckless idea that is that you are advocating.
I'm not defending Al's being an energy glutton, but you've still got it all wrong. On net, he's still responsible for less carbon than each of those vaunted twenty households. A lot less. Like, say, zero. The net carbon impact of Gore Manor is zero. So who is made worse off? Who's starving? Nobody.
In your words, Gore may eat as much as he wants, but he grows his own food. And if everybody did like Al, guess what? We'd all be fat and happy.
Okay, I'll bite. Fuck you. Fuck you seven ways to Sunday. Fuck you until the cows come home. The thing that really pisses me off about the Al Gore story isn't the fact that he's using 20x the average amount of juice. In and of itself, that's actually kind of newsworthy, even for a dyed-in wool liberal Gore fan like myself. It's that, lost amongst all this fair and balanced coverage of the issue, is the fact that every single last electron of that is offset by purchasing green power credits. That's right, neocon wankers! Gore is carbon neutral. Back to square fucking one!
Nothing confirms my feeling of being right on this issue more than seeing all you little asshats aiming for new lows in character assassination in lieu of actually debating the issue. Can't win it on the merits?
Because Debian maintainers are really busy people, and it takes more than armchair quarterbitching on Slashdot to make these things happen. WTF were you doing that whole time?
Theheh... god I just love this site sometimes... the ol'/. syllogism. "I disagree with you. People who disagree with me are stupid. Therefore, you are stupid." Actually, I as a researcher in the social sciences, I work with tons of government data. Gobs and gobs of it. Much of it from the 70s, 80s and 90s, so I guess that might qualify as legacy too. And you know what? I would give my left arm if they had been all done in in well-formed XML, as opposed to fixed-column tape archives with no typing, often times not even a column layout to go by. Boy, I drool at the mere thought of it. And let me tell you, anytime a government office actually bothers to write down how it's going to do things, that, my friend, is a victory in and of itself. One wonders if you've actually worked with and of these data.
So, can you suggest any tangible way in which XML is a bad choice? Or are you just going to stick with that handwave about our grandchildrens' formats? And before you answer, I want you to dwell for a bit on the fact that XML was specifically created to handle this sort of problem. It supports Unicode, so there are no issues with I18N. It's machine and human readable, so there will never be a case of someone being confronted with a mystery bit stream in 30 years' time, a situation I myself have personally experienced. It's self-documenting, which is almost worth the price of admission all by itself. It's very easy to validate.
I'm not saying XML is the be-all, end-all of formats. It's pretty heavy for mobile apps, for example. But the whole issue of closed document standards that weren't interoperable was the original impetus for the creation of the standard. Having read most of the posts in this story, I still have yet to see a coherent argument for why we shouldn't be using it for what it was intended for.
All this carping about the use of XML is really asinine. I mean hey, it's Slashdot, this site is nothing without a million of you, but still... yours is the third post I have read appeals to this mystical competing format, as if the law is some form of lock-in. Can you even name another "published standard format" that fits the bill? I doubt it, because there really aren't any. Nothing else approaches XML in terms of widespread adoption and mature, pre-existing libraries for every platform in existence. Remember, XML is a container format. We're not talking about how to structure the actual document, which CA wisely left an open question. XML was built for exactly this type of application, it works, everyone uses it, it's free and open, and I have a hard time seeing it becoming obsolete for a long time. So why are we complaining again?
Just get a Mac! Seriously! I'm not trying to troll or start a flamefest here, but the Mac user experience on a laptop (bold for all you would-be flamers out there) is light years ahead of Linux or Windows. Let's face it, Linux laptop support has never been a top priority. And even using OEM equipment from Dell, HP, IBM, etc., I've never had a laptop that was perfectly stable, power management worked 100% of the time, and always came out of hibernate and suspend, all the buttons worked, the screen never went funny, got the stated battery life... until I started using a MacBook. To say nothing about the actual design of the laptops themselves, which beats the crap out of every other maker out there. I would never pay the Mac tax for a desktop, because Linux + KDE or Gnome easily gives it a run for its money at 1/4 the cost. But laptops are a whole other story.
Or until Apple can come up with something competitive with MS Office, whichever comes first. I don't know how it is in other parts of the world, but here in the US, as I'm sure anyone who works in a medium+ sized corporation will agree, companies are absolute slaves to the Office suite. Specifically, Outlook, Excel and Word. Completely beholden. Yes, Office for Mac exists, but it's totally different and rumor has it it's going to be discontinued after 2K8 seeing as VBA support has been canned. I'm not saying it's impossible, but companies have literally billions of dollars in human capital locked up in MS Office. The thought of transitioning any large organization over to a new Office suite is probably sufficient to send its CIO running through the nearest window. Any Mac clone would have to a) have a very similar UI and b) be extremely compatible with existing versions of Office.
Interestingly, I think it's actually Google that might have the best shot at this. A free office suite that requires zero install and can be accessed from anywhere seems to me to be the only shot at gradually chipping away at Microsoft's overarching dominance.
Egg-zactly. Think about how far storage and bandwidth have come in the last five years and then ask yourself if you really see the need for lossy audio compression continuing indefinitely. While it may always be the case that you can store/stream twice as much using a lossy format, sooner or later the difference will be pointless. The way things are going, the iPod of 2012 is going to hold a couple hundred gigs of music, possibly even a terabyte. Do I really care if I have one or two years of continuous portable audio at my disposal? Similarly, even now the difference between downloading a full FLACd album and a full VBR MP3 version on a broadband link is about 30 minutes. Put simply, MP3 et al. are headed the way of the dodo (except maybe for mobile devices.)
I don't know how people "naturally" think; for me grokking functional programming was one of those eureka! moments and it really felt natural. I still write a lot of functional stuff even in procedural/OO languages; Ruby lends itself well to that. But I agree with your larger point. One of the things that really blew me away about RoR was seeing someone implement a really good declarative security mechanism in about 300 lines. The Java version (JAAS) is an entire library that I never was able to fully figure out; I was left scratching my head wondering Why? Why did they make something so simple so ludicrously complex.
Re:Rails is Doomed
on
Rails Cookbook
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yes, it's easy to obfuscate almost any language. I think someone who wasn't being quite so tendentious might write: (defun fib (n)
"nth element of the Fibonacci sequence"
(check-type n (integer 0 *))
(if (< n 2) n
(+ (fib (1- n)) (fib (- n 2)))))
Lisp is a pretty good language. Its reasons for not catching on have more to do with its grassroots beginnings (no M$ Visual Lisp) and the fact that GC/automatic memory management was about 40 years ahead of its time in terms of the hardware needed to run it well. And besides, who was it that said that behind every C or C++ program lurks a buggy, slow implementation of Common Lisp? All the cool ideas in languages these days (first class functions, dynamic typing, OOP, metacircular evaluation) were originally implemented in Lisp.
I am really excited about this new technology, both in terms of cost and also environmental impact. Since I know these things typically take years to make it to the market, I was hoping Xerox might speed the process up. First, fire whose ever idea it was in the first place. This will eliminate the need for them to work up the verve to form a startup and produce something that is actually worth owning--potentially shaving years off the time to market. At the same time, promote any and all naysayers at the middle management level, especially the ones who claim this product has no "potential." Finally, go ahead and start drawing up filing papers against those who ultimately succeed in capitalizing on this fantastic, paradigm shifting idea.
It's a tough road ahead, Xerox, but the strategy is sound and has the weight of history on its side. Good luck.
I love how the default reaction of/. to someone who thought of something that/. didn't is a mad rush to come up with some trivial, glaringly obvious nitpick that's primed to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down. As if Xerox simply put 700 monkeys in a gymnasium and somebody peeked in one morning to discover that they'd just happened to invent a new, revolutionary way to print things.
I mean.. these people have PhDs for crying out loud. If Xerox designed a whole entire technology around reusable, reprintable paper, then something tells me they'd spend a little more time engineering the reuse part of the equation, no? So how relevant? Not very, I'd say. Yesterday's printers weren't built for it; sounds like tomorrow's may well be.
"Gun rights are human rights"--wow, that is the most hysterical thing I have heard all week. Thank you. Your history is of course way off (maybe the USSR didn't invade us by ground because there hasn't been a ground link between the USSR and North America for 70,000 years, dumbass) but many people smarter and better versed on the issues than me have spent countless hours refuting this idiocy, so I'll just leave it at that. If non-winger type is reading this and interested, Google around for
And boy, that's a lot of ad hominem in your 2nd para there. When you can't win the argument on the merits, just attack the person!--a tried and true stratagem ripped from the pages of the winger playbook. Keep trying. Having read it several times I still can't discern any logical argument (sorry, was there one?) but since there was some vague ramble about market forces, let me just remind you and all the other laissez faire wankers (ugh, wingers) out there that the first fundamental theorem of welfare economics (the one responsible for all those wet dreams) fails in the absence of complete markets. If there are externalities (air pollution happens to be the canonical example), markets fail and government intervention can be Pareto improving. I doubt you understand a word of that.
Yeah the AK thing was a play on the old NRA canard about how assault weapons are useful hunting tools. Good to see it bouncing right off your forehead with a resounding thud. While we're interpreting things over-literally, perhaps you'd care to explain to me how your possession of said weapon helps to maintain "a well regulated militia"? Thanks.
Damn right I support forcing them to. I never disputed that. My only point was forcing you to do something that isn't that arduous, doesn't deprive you of your rights to life, liberty, and/or happiness in any fundamental way (yes, fundamental is a subjective term, but thankfully my interpretation is right), and has positive externalities, isn't such a bad deal. Think of it as the price you pay for living in the richest, most prosperous, and, yep, most free nation ever known.
After all, not everyone on this planet can just plunk down $800 for something as frivolous as your AK. Terrorists, Congolese militia leaders, and Iraqi breadwinners all get theirs donated.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I hadn't seen that one. It's definitely real. You can make out the artifacts a lot more visibly in this one. It wouldn't be tolerable for serious photography, but for something like newspaper imagery this would be (is) killer.
That's the tradeoff with all noise filters. These samples definitely look on par with Noise Ninja, which is saying something.
Oops. Looks like I forgot the word "other".
Lucky winner #4,372 in our on-going sweepstakes, "We sued somebody to hush them up, and now people on five continents are reading about it!!!"
That's true, but what's the link between running our industrial economies full bore and helping find ways to live with climate change? It's not as if our current, total inability to cope with this crisis has anything to do with a lack of energy or resources--it's a failure of politics and priorities. Always has been. Given the overwhelmingly strong evidence that we are measurably impacting the climate, the only prudent course of action is to hedge our bets, clamp down on emissions, and start spending a whole shitload of time, money and energy researching our way out of this.
Explain to me what is drastic about attempting to move the global ecological equilibrium a little bit back toward where it was before we came and started mucking with it. You know, the one that created all life as we know it and sustained it for 3.7 billion years? Seems like things were going pretty good there, barring some notable mass extinctions--which have been almost to a one linked to (surprise!) big, sudden swings in surface temperatures. My whole point is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. It's a really simple argument. You've done nothing to undermine it.
And BTW, if anyone is overstating their case, it's you, pal. 2002 called, it wants its wait-and-see attitude back. The debate over whether humans are changing the climate is settled, the supporting evidence is overwhelming, and the only people I come across these days still bloviating to the contrary have an agenda to peddle. What's yours?
Who cares if we're primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary? I simply don't understand all the hoopla about whether or not global warming is anthropogenic. We can all agree that 5 degrees celsius warmer in 100 years would be a catastrophe for every ecosystem on the planet, and for our own viability as a species, yes? And we certainly can agree that our spewing billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution is having some sort of effect, yes? Then WTF? Shouldn't we be doing everything in our power to try to ward off this impending crisis? No matter how small the effect of our actions, to continue blindly on the same path we've been on for the past 200 years is signing our own death warrant. Doing nothing is completely unjustifiable in all cases. Am I missing something?
I just want to say that the headline for this story is one of the funniest I have seen in a long time.
Man, you people are just great. You want irony? How about the high-strung, douchebag libertarian who writes a 220 (I counted) word rebuttal to a 67-word fake newsbrief in a joke newspaper. God... that works on so many levels. Are any editors of the Onion reading this? Shit just writes itself.
That sounds a lot like what the parent poster was talking about. One could easily see that sort of thinking leading to something a lot more extreme, if we were ever stupid enough to vote you wackos into power. (This seems like a good time to plug one of my favorite The Onion articles of all time.)
And I'm measuring my words carefully when I say "wacko." I don't see how else you could characterize this:
Wow. Congratulations on being to the right of the NRA. Not very many people can claim that.
I agree with a great many of the positions espoused in your platform, but in the end you libertarians are just as pie-in-the-sky detached from reality as the lefties you so ardently despise. Who knows, maybe AK in every garage and a chicken in every pot sounds like a great idea to a bunch of white computer programmers living in the suburbs. Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination, plus maybe a very passing acquaintance with human nature, to see what a monstrously reckless idea that is that you are advocating.
I'm not defending Al's being an energy glutton, but you've still got it all wrong. On net, he's still responsible for less carbon than each of those vaunted twenty households. A lot less. Like, say, zero. The net carbon impact of Gore Manor is zero. So who is made worse off? Who's starving? Nobody.
In your words, Gore may eat as much as he wants, but he grows his own food. And if everybody did like Al, guess what? We'd all be fat and happy.
Okay, I'll bite. Fuck you. Fuck you seven ways to Sunday. Fuck you until the cows come home. The thing that really pisses me off about the Al Gore story isn't the fact that he's using 20x the average amount of juice. In and of itself, that's actually kind of newsworthy, even for a dyed-in wool liberal Gore fan like myself. It's that, lost amongst all this fair and balanced coverage of the issue, is the fact that every single last electron of that is offset by purchasing green power credits. That's right, neocon wankers! Gore is carbon neutral. Back to square fucking one!
Nothing confirms my feeling of being right on this issue more than seeing all you little asshats aiming for new lows in character assassination in lieu of actually debating the issue. Can't win it on the merits?
Because Debian maintainers are really busy people, and it takes more than armchair quarterbitching on Slashdot to make these things happen. WTF were you doing that whole time?
Theheh... god I just love this site sometimes... the ol' /. syllogism. "I disagree with you. People who disagree with me are stupid. Therefore, you are stupid." Actually, I as a researcher in the social sciences, I work with tons of government data. Gobs and gobs of it. Much of it from the 70s, 80s and 90s, so I guess that might qualify as legacy too. And you know what? I would give my left arm if they had been all done in in well-formed XML, as opposed to fixed-column tape archives with no typing, often times not even a column layout to go by. Boy, I drool at the mere thought of it. And let me tell you, anytime a government office actually bothers to write down how it's going to do things, that, my friend, is a victory in and of itself. One wonders if you've actually worked with and of these data.
So, can you suggest any tangible way in which XML is a bad choice? Or are you just going to stick with that handwave about our grandchildrens' formats? And before you answer, I want you to dwell for a bit on the fact that XML was specifically created to handle this sort of problem. It supports Unicode, so there are no issues with I18N. It's machine and human readable, so there will never be a case of someone being confronted with a mystery bit stream in 30 years' time, a situation I myself have personally experienced. It's self-documenting, which is almost worth the price of admission all by itself. It's very easy to validate.
I'm not saying XML is the be-all, end-all of formats. It's pretty heavy for mobile apps, for example. But the whole issue of closed document standards that weren't interoperable was the original impetus for the creation of the standard. Having read most of the posts in this story, I still have yet to see a coherent argument for why we shouldn't be using it for what it was intended for.
All this carping about the use of XML is really asinine. I mean hey, it's Slashdot, this site is nothing without a million of you, but still... yours is the third post I have read appeals to this mystical competing format, as if the law is some form of lock-in. Can you even name another "published standard format" that fits the bill? I doubt it, because there really aren't any. Nothing else approaches XML in terms of widespread adoption and mature, pre-existing libraries for every platform in existence. Remember, XML is a container format. We're not talking about how to structure the actual document, which CA wisely left an open question. XML was built for exactly this type of application, it works, everyone uses it, it's free and open, and I have a hard time seeing it becoming obsolete for a long time. So why are we complaining again?
The two slow-mo clips of the guys kicking the robot remind me strangely of this. Ahh, nerds.
Just get a Mac! Seriously! I'm not trying to troll or start a flamefest here, but the Mac user experience on a laptop (bold for all you would-be flamers out there) is light years ahead of Linux or Windows. Let's face it, Linux laptop support has never been a top priority. And even using OEM equipment from Dell, HP, IBM, etc., I've never had a laptop that was perfectly stable, power management worked 100% of the time, and always came out of hibernate and suspend, all the buttons worked, the screen never went funny, got the stated battery life ... until I started using a MacBook. To say nothing about the actual design of the laptops themselves, which beats the crap out of every other maker out there. I would never pay the Mac tax for a desktop, because Linux + KDE or Gnome easily gives it a run for its money at 1/4 the cost. But laptops are a whole other story.
Or until Apple can come up with something competitive with MS Office, whichever comes first. I don't know how it is in other parts of the world, but here in the US, as I'm sure anyone who works in a medium+ sized corporation will agree, companies are absolute slaves to the Office suite. Specifically, Outlook, Excel and Word. Completely beholden. Yes, Office for Mac exists, but it's totally different and rumor has it it's going to be discontinued after 2K8 seeing as VBA support has been canned. I'm not saying it's impossible, but companies have literally billions of dollars in human capital locked up in MS Office. The thought of transitioning any large organization over to a new Office suite is probably sufficient to send its CIO running through the nearest window. Any Mac clone would have to a) have a very similar UI and b) be extremely compatible with existing versions of Office.
Interestingly, I think it's actually Google that might have the best shot at this. A free office suite that requires zero install and can be accessed from anywhere seems to me to be the only shot at gradually chipping away at Microsoft's overarching dominance.
Egg-zactly. Think about how far storage and bandwidth have come in the last five years and then ask yourself if you really see the need for lossy audio compression continuing indefinitely. While it may always be the case that you can store/stream twice as much using a lossy format, sooner or later the difference will be pointless. The way things are going, the iPod of 2012 is going to hold a couple hundred gigs of music, possibly even a terabyte. Do I really care if I have one or two years of continuous portable audio at my disposal? Similarly, even now the difference between downloading a full FLACd album and a full VBR MP3 version on a broadband link is about 30 minutes. Put simply, MP3 et al. are headed the way of the dodo (except maybe for mobile devices.)
I don't know how people "naturally" think; for me grokking functional programming was one of those eureka! moments and it really felt natural. I still write a lot of functional stuff even in procedural/OO languages; Ruby lends itself well to that. But I agree with your larger point. One of the things that really blew me away about RoR was seeing someone implement a really good declarative security mechanism in about 300 lines. The Java version (JAAS) is an entire library that I never was able to fully figure out; I was left scratching my head wondering Why? Why did they make something so simple so ludicrously complex.
Yes, it's easy to obfuscate almost any language. I think someone who wasn't being quite so tendentious might write:
(defun fib (n)
"nth element of the Fibonacci sequence"
(check-type n (integer 0 *))
(if (< n 2) n
(+ (fib (1- n)) (fib (- n 2)))))
Lisp is a pretty good language. Its reasons for not catching on have more to do with its grassroots beginnings (no M$ Visual Lisp) and the fact that GC/automatic memory management was about 40 years ahead of its time in terms of the hardware needed to run it well. And besides, who was it that said that behind every C or C++ program lurks a buggy, slow implementation of Common Lisp? All the cool ideas in languages these days (first class functions, dynamic typing, OOP, metacircular evaluation) were originally implemented in Lisp.
I am really excited about this new technology, both in terms of cost and also environmental impact. Since I know these things typically take years to make it to the market, I was hoping Xerox might speed the process up. First, fire whose ever idea it was in the first place. This will eliminate the need for them to work up the verve to form a startup and produce something that is actually worth owning--potentially shaving years off the time to market. At the same time, promote any and all naysayers at the middle management level, especially the ones who claim this product has no "potential." Finally, go ahead and start drawing up filing papers against those who ultimately succeed in capitalizing on this fantastic, paradigm shifting idea.
It's a tough road ahead, Xerox, but the strategy is sound and has the weight of history on its side. Good luck.
I love how the default reaction of /. to someone who thought of something that /. didn't is a mad rush to come up with some trivial, glaringly obvious nitpick that's primed to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down. As if Xerox simply put 700 monkeys in a gymnasium and somebody peeked in one morning to discover that they'd just happened to invent a new, revolutionary way to print things.
.. these people have PhDs for crying out loud. If Xerox designed a whole entire technology around reusable, reprintable paper, then something tells me they'd spend a little more time engineering the reuse part of the equation, no? So how relevant? Not very, I'd say. Yesterday's printers weren't built for it; sounds like tomorrow's may well be.
I mean
"Gun rights are human rights"--wow, that is the most hysterical thing I have heard all week. Thank you. Your history is of course way off (maybe the USSR didn't invade us by ground because there hasn't been a ground link between the USSR and North America for 70,000 years, dumbass) but many people smarter and better versed on the issues than me have spent countless hours refuting this idiocy, so I'll just leave it at that. If non-winger type is reading this and interested, Google around for
And boy, that's a lot of ad hominem in your 2nd para there. When you can't win the argument on the merits, just attack the person!--a tried and true stratagem ripped from the pages of the winger playbook. Keep trying. Having read it several times I still can't discern any logical argument (sorry, was there one?) but since there was some vague ramble about market forces, let me just remind you and all the other laissez faire wankers (ugh, wingers) out there that the first fundamental theorem of welfare economics (the one responsible for all those wet dreams) fails in the absence of complete markets. If there are externalities (air pollution happens to be the canonical example), markets fail and government intervention can be Pareto improving. I doubt you understand a word of that.
Yeah the AK thing was a play on the old NRA canard about how assault weapons are useful hunting tools. Good to see it bouncing right off your forehead with a resounding thud. While we're interpreting things over-literally, perhaps you'd care to explain to me how your possession of said weapon helps to maintain "a well regulated militia"? Thanks.
Damn right I support forcing them to. I never disputed that. My only point was forcing you to do something that isn't that arduous, doesn't deprive you of your rights to life, liberty, and/or happiness in any fundamental way (yes, fundamental is a subjective term, but thankfully my interpretation is right), and has positive externalities, isn't such a bad deal. Think of it as the price you pay for living in the richest, most prosperous, and, yep, most free nation ever known.
After all, not everyone on this planet can just plunk down $800 for something as frivolous as your AK. Terrorists, Congolese militia leaders, and Iraqi breadwinners all get theirs donated.