You don't think someone can balance a great career AND a great social/family life at the same time?
You have 144 hours a week, no more, no less. The more hours you spend at work, the less you spend with friends and family. You can't have a great family life if it consists of kissing your kids before you run out the door in the morning and gazing at them after they've gone to sleep at night.
Super Walmart. Going to be opening here in a few months.. everyone's saying that it's going to destroy local business;
The only way it's going to destroy local business is if people go there instead local businesses; and if they do, then obviously they would prefer a Super Walmart to local buisnesses.
If somebody comes up with an anti-gravity machine, for example, it is QUITE possible that they will try to secure their place in history by announcing it directly to the media, to prevent the news from leaking prematurely or other scientists from stealing the idea, or, heaven forbid, patenting it before the originator can claim "prior art".
I doubt it. First place, you can't steal a patent like that - if it's published, it can't be patented, and it can only be patented by an inventor. Secondly, most scientists, I would assume, would find the respect of their peers more important then that of the world. Grab a front page article of Science or Nature, and you're well on the way to Noble prize if you're right, and can live it down if you're wrong. Grab a front page article of Life, and you've annoyed all your fellow scientists, which you may be able to live down if you're right. There's no way that someone not in the middle of this will be able to grab credit; they won't have the familiarity with the science or the years of experiments you've been doing in this area.
Would Microsoft welcome a perfect disassembler that would reveal all their source code, or would they see this as a threat?
Who cares? It's almost impossible to understand 30 million lines of code, even if the disassembler is a full AI and can add good variable names and comments. Anything it could do, a human could do with enough time.
More on topic, note what Microsoft does to a lot of serious competition - it buys them out and uses them. Note also what Microsoft's competition does; the serious competition doesn't sit around and complain that Microsoft's oppressing them; it drives them to write the best software they can and brag about how good it is. If the oil company were to try and suppress real innovation, the real innovation probably wouldn't spend its time whining about the opression; it would be showing off everything they could as loudly and widely as they could. Honestly, if you handed the plans for a car that gets a hundred miles to a gallon of water to Microsoft or IBM or Sony, do you think anyone could stop them from entering the car industry with a vengance?
Is it too good to be true? That is pretty much the only thing you need to check. Simple antigravity? Too good to be true. Car that runs on water? Too good to be true. Honest politician? Too good to be true.
A mold that can cure disease? Too good to be true. Squaring the circle? I don't see why not. A device that can travel 200,000 miles a second? I don't see why not.
couldn't points "2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work." and "7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation" be used to discredit a scientist on the order of Galileo?
It was pretty clear that a powerful establishment was trying to suppress Galileo's work; and Galileo wasn't exactly the first to propose gravity.
Now would be a good time to point out that science still doesn't understand how aspirin (derived from salicylic acid, which was discovered at least 2000 years ago, works.
Now would also be a good time to point out that folk wisdom doesn't have the foggest how aspirin works. Science, however, does know that aspirin works better then, say, copper bracelets, and universally applies that knowledge (as opposed to folk wisdom, which differs from person to person and community to community.)
If you lie to the system, and say, "This new libzlib.so is libzlib.so.5", you still run the risk of breaking all the apps.
The actual library is libz.so.1, and like any good library, it doesn't gratuitously break the ABI and it fixes bug in bugfixing releases, not ABI-breaking releases. So no lieing to the system necessary.
The only way to know that they all still work is to test them all.
Which is true if you recompile your kernel or install a new version of grep. If it's a decent library, the odds are about the same that something broke; i.e. pretty low.
Reviews shouldn't just be "This was very very very good and everyone should read it"...
There's over a million books in print. If you really want to go through reviews of all the lousy books out there, it'll take a long time. Why bother writing a mediocre review for "Learn C in 32 Days" when it will just get them to pick up "C in a Month"; write a review for "The C Programming Language" by K&R, so they know what to pick up.
This bit me the other day. She wanted to buy something for her "American Girl" doll. So we sat down at the computer. Unfortunately, I typed americangirls.com instead of americangirl.com.
If you're going to trust the saftey of YOUR nuclear reactor, you want that vendor rep standing behind his product, guaranteeing that server won't crash in the middle of the night. You WANT 24/7 dedicated support for your box,
First and foremost, you need it to work. It doesn't matter how much vendor support you have if it sends your reactor critical.
And that's where Linux will never be able to replace Solaris, etc. Linux will never have the dedicated money, equipment, people, and QA testing certification in place to guarantee that kernel x.x.xx will run for a year.
Why? If IBM says that Linux is its high-end Unix that it's selling to power nuclear power plants, then it will have all of those things. Sure, Linus's kernel 2.10.17 won't have that, but IBM's 2.8.12 will. There's no reason that Linux can't be just as commerical as any commerical Unix.
Why? Those aren't config files. The considerations were only in relationship to config files. In any case, who cares? I have far more than 360MB free on the drive, and they're deleted now, so it never mattered whether they took up that extra 360MB or not.
Now, XML doesn't really waste quite that much space if you're intelligent about it (but why bother, I mean what's a little waste?), but this attitude of "who cares, we can afford to be wasteful" is so 1980s.
Have you ever heard the phrase "penny wise and pound foolish"? I store my scans as DjVu files, which are often one tenth the size of the same data stored as PNG files. These scans are B&W whenever possible, which saves me another 90% to 99%. These decisions have probably saved me 10GB, easily. If I needed 16MB of space (again, the size of my entire/etc directory), I'd delete one of the decompressed source trees to GCC or Glibc that I never look at. Heck, one of compressed GCC tarballs, which I could delete and download again if I cared, takes up about 16MB. I could also delete some redundant MP3 files, at 4-5MB a file, or I could delete my copy of my Gutenberg CD on the hard disk for 500MB. Or I could stress out and force every program to use the most compact config format, for a grand total of, what 8-10MB at the absolute most?
Emacs has had a GUI based configurator for most settings since at least version 19.
True. I don't see how it's relevant to the discussion, though - the GUI-based configurator could be dumping out anything, sight-unseen.
More importantly, this is actually a good model to follow since the user only needs to learn one language. The logic of your approach requires at least two: the language for expressing values (e.g. XML) and the language for expressing logic (e.g. shell scripts).
True only for those who use Emacs as an OS. Those who use emacs as an editor actually have to learn how to edit other programs config files too, and may well never learn to write Emacs Lisp. (Even if you know a little Lisp, doesn't mean you know how to do meaningful stuff in Emacs - it's got its own API.)
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck.
Linux was based on MINIX which is not [exactly] a true UNIX.
It's not based on MINIX in any real way. Linus saw MINIX, but Linux doesn't work like MINIX, and they both use the GNU tools.
The *BSDs are directly based on BSD 4.4 UNIX which is a true UNIX,
BSD 4.4 is not a true UNIX(tm), as it never had the right to use the trademark. It shares no code with the earlier Unixes, as that was all owned by AT&T. Since both Linux and BSD are not based on original Unix code, and they were both working towards the same interface, how are they different?
What strikes me here is that if we're now going to call forks legitimate and rogue (or whatever), that implies that there's some authority in charge of authorizing or blessing these forks.
Not really. It's just a judgement - did this person fork the program for good reasons, or for bad? You may of course disagree with the Slashdot editors or anyone else on this issue.
Well, I wonder if he's *ever heard* of freebsd or openbsd or netbsd. They are real unix.
They aren't real UNIX(tm). As for being real Unix systems, how do they differ from Linux in that respect? Both are POSIX-compliant; with the exception of a few newcomers not known to K&R, all the commands in the C library are the same. The system commands all work the same, with the exception of a few knobs here and there there were again added since the time of the first Unix systems.
Is this supposed to be for or against XML? An 18% increase in size after compression is nothing to boast about. (and the XML can never be smaller, it has more information in it)
And back in real life, the smallest any file can be on my system is 4 kilobytes. I don't know of a modern filesystem with sector size less than 1kb. And considering as I just created 2GB of temporary files and 95MB of permanent files, I think worrying about 17 bytes is a little pointless. My/etc is 16MB; that's nothing, nowadays. (Yah, yah, modern waste. If you really still run a Commodore 64, then complain.)
.profile,.bashrc, and.emacs, to name a few, contain source code.
Which explains why nobody but a few Emacs geeks ever mess with.emacs. Oh, maybe a few people get handed a chunk of code and add it to the bottom of.emacs, but many of us would rather not do even that, as it will have fun! consequences when we upgrade..emacs is not the example to look towards for a user-friendly config system.
You don't know jack, the US education system is a joke. While you are still gluing macaroni to card we are learning calculus and second languages.
Well, the part of you they bother to teach. (In Germany, it'd be that part that goes to the Gymnasium.) The majority are considered too dumb to learn, so you send them off to job training programs, while the Americans are still trying to teach them history and math and literature. It's the great lie of international education: that you can validily compare the European students in college-bound schools with the American students in general-education schools, and get a valid result.
Iraq's starting this war? Have you been in a fucking coma since 09/10/01?
There's no evidence - even Bush claims none - that Iraq had anything to do with that. The terrorists were from Egypt and Saudi Arabia - our "friends".
War is a fact of life. If you're not willing to fight, someone else is, and YOU WILL DIE.
Kill them all, and let God sort then out? War is not a fact of life; we as humans can choose to fight, or not. If we choose to fight anyone who scares us, then this planet will be covered with shrines to the battle-god ("Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom -- A field where a thousand corpses lie.") War is horrible, and the man who wants to fight one should remember that.
Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind. Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky And the affrighted steed ran on alone, Do not weep. War is kind.
Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment, Little souls who thirst for fight, These men were born to drill and die. The unexplained glory flies above them, Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom -- A field where a thousand corpses lie.
Do not weep, babe, for war is kind. Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches, Raged at his breast, gulped and died, Do not weep. War is kind.
Swift blazing flag of the regiment, Eagle with crest of red and gold, These men were born to drill and die. Point for them the virtue of slaughter, Make plain to them the excellence of killing And a field where a thousand corpses lie.
Mother whose heart hung humble as a button On the bright splendid shroud of your son, Do not weep. War is kind.
It all strikes me as a bit ludicrous. The idea that a population with a few hand guns are going to prevent a tyranny from forming when the army has tanks, helicopters, and heavy bombers is little short of absurd.
Ever heard of guerrilla warfare? You can't bomb a rebel base spread throught a hundred square miles of metropolis.
I look at it like I'm in a room with some people. One of them has a gun and has killed another person in the room, and beaten other people with his gun. One person says put the gun down down, or I'm going to attack you. The gunman refuses to put the gun down over and over again, in fact he pretends he doesn't even have a gun even though we all know he does. All the other people in the room are content to just ask "please, please, put it down", but at this point it's just obvious he's not going to.
The guy who wants the gun put down, also happens to be the largest guy in the room, and gave the gun to the gun-holder to beat up on a third party. Most of the people in the room have weapons, and aren't really scared of the guy with the gun, despite his obvious irrationality. They're more scared of the guy who keeps demanding the gun get put down - while more rational, he has a history of things like giving guns to irrational people, and picking fights. He's also by far the biggest guy in the room, carries more weaponary then anyone else in the room, and has weapons that everyone in the room agrees should never be used, including one that only he has used. The gun-waver may be dangerous, but you can deal with him, while you're not sure you can deal with the big guy pushing his way whereever he wants, and it's never a happy scene when lead fills the air, and often innocent bystanders get hurt.
Given those extra details, I'm not sure I'd be jumping on the oppertunity to fight this battle.
So Spam has little to do with extra traffic, but the wealth of tools fighting against spam are adding to the load, right? But then since spam is the reason anti-spam tools exist, it's fair to say spam is the root cause of the problem!
So if the Soviet Union had nuked the US over the U2 incident, and wiped out the human race, the US would have been the cause of the problem? Or would Wilbur and Orville Wright have been, because they caused the airplane to exist?
The monster helped to contain another monster -- Iran -- as you point out.
The head of a popularly elected government decided to nationationalize Iranian oil. So we assasinated him and put the Shah back in power. When the students marched, he brought in soliders with machine guns to shoot them. We put this monster into power; why should be surprised that when his government is overthrown, the resulting government doesn't like us?
I've read about the current Iranian government. It's partially democratic, with elections open to all over 15, male or female. (Kuwait, which I assume you don't consider a monster, doesn't let women vote. Saudi Arabia doesn't let anyone vote.) It's not the most nice, liberal government in the world, but the governmental failings present themselves as voter apathy, not rebellions put down at gun point. It's probably optimistic, but I've defenitely got the impression that Iran will go totally democratic in the next decade, possibly without bloodshed.
It can truthfully be said that the purpose of most guns is to prevent violence by the implied or explicit threat of propelling lead at high speed toward living things in order to cause them to cease living.
True -- including those guns used to keep shop keepers from bashing robber's heads in instead of handing over the till.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't think someone can balance a great career AND a great social/family life at the same time?
You have 144 hours a week, no more, no less. The more hours you spend at work, the less you spend with friends and family. You can't have a great family life if it consists of kissing your kids before you run out the door in the morning and gazing at them after they've gone to sleep at night.
Super Walmart. Going to be opening here in a few months.. everyone's saying that it's going to destroy local business;
The only way it's going to destroy local business is if people go there instead local businesses; and if they do, then obviously they would prefer a Super Walmart to local buisnesses.
If somebody comes up with an anti-gravity machine, for example, it is QUITE possible that they will try to secure their place in history by announcing it directly to the media, to prevent the news from leaking prematurely or other scientists from stealing the idea, or, heaven forbid, patenting it before the originator can claim "prior art".
I doubt it. First place, you can't steal a patent like that - if it's published, it can't be patented, and it can only be patented by an inventor. Secondly, most scientists, I would assume, would find the respect of their peers more important then that of the world. Grab a front page article of Science or Nature, and you're well on the way to Noble prize if you're right, and can live it down if you're wrong. Grab a front page article of Life, and you've annoyed all your fellow scientists, which you may be able to live down if you're right. There's no way that someone not in the middle of this will be able to grab credit; they won't have the familiarity with the science or the years of experiments you've been doing in this area.
Would Microsoft welcome a perfect disassembler that would reveal all their source code, or would they see this as a threat?
Who cares? It's almost impossible to understand 30 million lines of code, even if the disassembler is a full AI and can add good variable names and comments. Anything it could do, a human could do with enough time.
More on topic, note what Microsoft does to a lot of serious competition - it buys them out and uses them. Note also what Microsoft's competition does; the serious competition doesn't sit around and complain that Microsoft's oppressing them; it drives them to write the best software they can and brag about how good it is. If the oil company were to try and suppress real innovation, the real innovation probably wouldn't spend its time whining about the opression; it would be showing off everything they could as loudly and widely as they could. Honestly, if you handed the plans for a car that gets a hundred miles to a gallon of water to Microsoft or IBM or Sony, do you think anyone could stop them from entering the car industry with a vengance?
Squaring the circle? Ummm... that one is really too good to be true. I know you don't see why not, but that has been proven impossible.
I know that - I've seen the proof. It was an example of something that common sense might say is fine, but we know is impossible.
Is it too good to be true? That is pretty much the only thing you need to check. Simple antigravity? Too good to be true. Car that runs on water? Too good to be true. Honest politician? Too good to be true.
A mold that can cure disease? Too good to be true. Squaring the circle? I don't see why not. A device that can travel 200,000 miles a second? I don't see why not.
couldn't points "2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work." and "7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation" be used to discredit a scientist on the order of Galileo?
It was pretty clear that a powerful establishment was trying to suppress Galileo's work; and Galileo wasn't exactly the first to propose gravity.
Now would be a good time to point out that science still doesn't understand how aspirin (derived from salicylic acid, which was discovered at least 2000 years ago, works.
Now would also be a good time to point out that folk wisdom doesn't have the foggest how aspirin works. Science, however, does know that aspirin works better then, say, copper bracelets, and universally applies that knowledge (as opposed to folk wisdom, which differs from person to person and community to community.)
If you lie to the system, and say, "This new libzlib.so is libzlib.so.5", you still run the risk of breaking all the apps.
The actual library is libz.so.1, and like any good library, it doesn't gratuitously break the ABI and it fixes bug in bugfixing releases, not ABI-breaking releases. So no lieing to the system necessary.
The only way to know that they all still work is to test them all.
Which is true if you recompile your kernel or install a new version of grep. If it's a decent library, the odds are about the same that something broke; i.e. pretty low.
Where are warnings: "Avoid this like the plague"?
IIRC, they've occasionally shown up on Slashdot.
Reviews shouldn't just be "This was very very very good and everyone should read it"...
There's over a million books in print. If you really want to go through reviews of all the lousy books out there, it'll take a long time. Why bother writing a mediocre review for "Learn C in 32 Days" when it will just get them to pick up "C in a Month"; write a review for "The C Programming Language" by K&R, so they know what to pick up.
This bit me the other day. She wanted to buy something for her "American Girl" doll. So we sat down at the computer. Unfortunately, I typed americangirls.com instead of americangirl.com.
... nothing.
And americangirls.com pulls up
If you're going to trust the saftey of YOUR nuclear reactor, you want that vendor rep standing behind his product, guaranteeing that server won't crash in the middle of the night. You WANT 24/7 dedicated support for your box,
First and foremost, you need it to work. It doesn't matter how much vendor support you have if it sends your reactor critical.
And that's where Linux will never be able to replace Solaris, etc. Linux will never have the dedicated money, equipment, people, and QA testing certification in place to guarantee that kernel x.x.xx will run for a year.
Why? If IBM says that Linux is its high-end Unix that it's selling to power nuclear power plants, then it will have all of those things. Sure, Linus's kernel 2.10.17 won't have that, but IBM's 2.8.12 will. There's no reason that Linux can't be just as commerical as any commerical Unix.
That 2GB just wasted another 360MB.
/etc directory), I'd delete one of the decompressed source trees to GCC or Glibc that I never look at. Heck, one of compressed GCC tarballs, which I could delete and download again if I cared, takes up about 16MB. I could also delete some redundant MP3 files, at 4-5MB a file, or I could delete my copy of my Gutenberg CD on the hard disk for 500MB. Or I could stress out and force every program to use the most compact config format, for a grand total of, what 8-10MB at the absolute most?
Why? Those aren't config files. The considerations were only in relationship to config files. In any case, who cares? I have far more than 360MB free on the drive, and they're deleted now, so it never mattered whether they took up that extra 360MB or not.
Now, XML doesn't really waste quite that much space if you're intelligent about it (but why bother, I mean what's a little waste?), but this attitude of "who cares, we can afford to be wasteful" is so 1980s.
Have you ever heard the phrase "penny wise and pound foolish"? I store my scans as DjVu files, which are often one tenth the size of the same data stored as PNG files. These scans are B&W whenever possible, which saves me another 90% to 99%. These decisions have probably saved me 10GB, easily. If I needed 16MB of space (again, the size of my entire
Emacs has had a GUI based configurator for most settings since at least version 19.
True. I don't see how it's relevant to the discussion, though - the GUI-based configurator could be dumping out anything, sight-unseen.
More importantly, this is actually a good model to follow since the user only needs to learn one language. The logic of your approach requires at least two: the language for expressing values (e.g. XML) and the language for expressing logic (e.g. shell scripts).
True only for those who use Emacs as an OS. Those who use emacs as an editor actually have to learn how to edit other programs config files too, and may well never learn to write Emacs Lisp. (Even if you know a little Lisp, doesn't mean you know how to do meaningful stuff in Emacs - it's got its own API.)
Its not the structure, its the history.
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck.
Linux was based on MINIX which is not [exactly] a true UNIX.
It's not based on MINIX in any real way. Linus saw MINIX, but Linux doesn't work like MINIX, and they both use the GNU tools.
The *BSDs are directly based on BSD 4.4 UNIX which is a true UNIX,
BSD 4.4 is not a true UNIX(tm), as it never had the right to use the trademark. It shares no code with the earlier Unixes, as that was all owned by AT&T. Since both Linux and BSD are not based on original Unix code, and they were both working towards the same interface, how are they different?
What strikes me here is that if we're now going to call forks legitimate and rogue (or whatever), that implies that there's some authority in charge of authorizing or blessing these forks.
Not really. It's just a judgement - did this person fork the program for good reasons, or for bad? You may of course disagree with the Slashdot editors or anyone else on this issue.
Well, I wonder if he's *ever heard* of freebsd or openbsd or netbsd. They are real unix.
They aren't real UNIX(tm). As for being real Unix systems, how do they differ from Linux in that respect? Both are POSIX-compliant; with the exception of a few newcomers not known to K&R, all the commands in the C library are the same. The system commands all work the same, with the exception of a few knobs here and there there were again added since the time of the first Unix systems.
Compress your examples: XML=111b INI=94b (bzip2)
/etc is 16MB; that's nothing, nowadays. (Yah, yah, modern waste. If you really still run a Commodore 64, then complain.)
Is this supposed to be for or against XML? An 18% increase in size after compression is nothing to boast about. (and the XML can never be smaller, it has more information in it)
And back in real life, the smallest any file can be on my system is 4 kilobytes. I don't know of a modern filesystem with sector size less than 1kb. And considering as I just created 2GB of temporary files and 95MB of permanent files, I think worrying about 17 bytes is a little pointless. My
.profile, .bashrc, and .emacs, to name a few, contain source code.
.emacs. Oh, maybe a few people get handed a chunk of code and add it to the bottom of .emacs, but many of us would rather not do even that, as it will have fun! consequences when we upgrade. .emacs is not the example to look towards for a user-friendly config system.
Which explains why nobody but a few Emacs geeks ever mess with
You don't know jack, the US education system is a joke. While you are still gluing macaroni to card we are learning calculus and second languages.
Well, the part of you they bother to teach. (In Germany, it'd be that part that goes to the Gymnasium.) The majority are considered too dumb to learn, so you send them off to job training programs, while the Americans are still trying to teach them history and math and literature. It's the great lie of international education: that you can validily compare the European students in college-bound schools with the American students in general-education schools, and get a valid result.
There's no evidence - even Bush claims none - that Iraq had anything to do with that. The terrorists were from Egypt and Saudi Arabia - our "friends".
War is a fact of life. If you're not willing to fight, someone else is, and YOU WILL DIE.
Kill them all, and let God sort then out? War is not a fact of life; we as humans can choose to fight, or not. If we choose to fight anyone who scares us, then this planet will be covered with shrines to the battle-god ("Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom -- A field where a thousand corpses lie.") War is horrible, and the man who wants to fight one should remember that.
It all strikes me as a bit ludicrous. The idea that a population with a few hand guns are going to prevent a tyranny from forming when the army has tanks, helicopters, and heavy bombers is little short of absurd.
Ever heard of guerrilla warfare? You can't bomb a rebel base spread throught a hundred square miles of metropolis.
I look at it like I'm in a room with some people. One of them has a gun and has killed another person in the room, and beaten other people with his gun. One person says put the gun down down, or I'm going to attack you. The gunman refuses to put the gun down over and over again, in fact he pretends he doesn't even have a gun even though we all know he does. All the other people in the room are content to just ask "please, please, put it down", but at this point it's just obvious he's not going to.
The guy who wants the gun put down, also happens to be the largest guy in the room, and gave the gun to the gun-holder to beat up on a third party. Most of the people in the room have weapons, and aren't really scared of the guy with the gun, despite his obvious irrationality. They're more scared of the guy who keeps demanding the gun get put down - while more rational, he has a history of things like giving guns to irrational people, and picking fights. He's also by far the biggest guy in the room, carries more weaponary then anyone else in the room, and has weapons that everyone in the room agrees should never be used, including one that only he has used. The gun-waver may be dangerous, but you can deal with him, while you're not sure you can deal with the big guy pushing his way whereever he wants, and it's never a happy scene when lead fills the air, and often innocent bystanders get hurt.
Given those extra details, I'm not sure I'd be jumping on the oppertunity to fight this battle.
So Spam has little to do with extra traffic, but the wealth of tools fighting against spam are adding to the load, right? But then since spam is the reason anti-spam tools exist, it's fair to say spam is the root cause of the problem!
So if the Soviet Union had nuked the US over the U2 incident, and wiped out the human race, the US would have been the cause of the problem? Or would Wilbur and Orville Wright have been, because they caused the airplane to exist?
The monster helped to contain another monster -- Iran -- as you point out.
The head of a popularly elected government decided to nationationalize Iranian oil. So we assasinated him and put the Shah back in power. When the students marched, he brought in soliders with machine guns to shoot them. We put this monster into power; why should be surprised that when his government is overthrown, the resulting government doesn't like us?
I've read about the current Iranian government. It's partially democratic, with elections open to all over 15, male or female. (Kuwait, which I assume you don't consider a monster, doesn't let women vote. Saudi Arabia doesn't let anyone vote.) It's not the most nice, liberal government in the world, but the governmental failings present themselves as voter apathy, not rebellions put down at gun point. It's probably optimistic, but I've defenitely got the impression that Iran will go totally democratic in the next decade, possibly without bloodshed.
It can truthfully be said that the purpose of most guns is to prevent violence by the implied or explicit threat of propelling lead at high speed toward living things in order to cause them to cease living.
True -- including those guns used to keep shop keepers from bashing robber's heads in instead of handing over the till.