So your solution is 'Give everyone a gun!'. My solution is 'Don't give crazy people guns.'
And my solution to the drug problem is 'don't give addicts drugs.'
Nobody's giving crazy people guns. They find guns themselves. If they couldn't find them legally, there's no particular reason, other than wishful thinking, to believe that they wouldn't find them illegally. If you live in a major city, try this exercise: go to the inner city and ask people on the street where to buy a gun.
In addition to the impossibility of eliminating enough guns to dry up the black market, there's the minor problem that laws against readily-produced, concealable items like drugs and guns are fundamentally unenforceable, and encourage -- even require -- erosion of the right against unreasonable search and seizure. Certainly even you can appreciate that right?
No analogy is perfect, so try this one: There's a global moratorium on nuclear weapons, but a few Asian countries keep launching nuclear ICMBs at western cities. You want the West to avoid building nukes, because gosh someone might get hurt!
Criminals and unstable lunatics will never agree to get rid of their guns, and a war on guns (or any other small, easily-produced items) would be just as ineffective as the war on drugs. Some drugs are interdicted. Some guns would be. But, ultimately, not enough to keep them out of the hands of criminals.
There are no shortage of crackpot physics theories supported by allegedly upstanding scientists. Often it's not even anyone's fault. Someone sees a sliver of evidence for some wild theory and latches on to it, wildly grasping at straws to support it. It's human nature, but most scientists manage to overcome the desire to selectively interpret evidence for their own purposes.
If you want to debunk current science, start by learning modern physics and the experiments used to defend modern physics. You can't effectively criticize theories when you don't know what they say or how past experiments have validated them.
The above crackpot sites might not even be wrong. It could be that the scientific establishment is corrupt, misinterpreting evidence, and unreasonably trying to squash competing theories. However, the way those crackpots are going about trying to disprove currently accepted physics is simply the wrong way to go about it. If any of them would design a repeatable experiment that conflicts with existing theories, they'd become instantly famous. Why don't they? Either they're lazy or they're frauds. In either case, they have no business calling themselves scientists.
Why not accept that some higher power that we might not be able to comprehend exists, or are we so arrogant as to think that we are the top tier of existence?
As opposed to the supreme arrogance of believing we're God's favorite creature?
You can view atheism as arrogance, but that says more about you than about atheism. Most regard it as humbling to be a cousin of both chimpanzees and drosophila, all of us children of stardust and chaos rather than children of God.
And no scientist should ever tell you that we're the top tier of existence, because that presumes we're the only and/or most advanced civilization in the universe/multiverse, which is far from certain.
I'm not that optimistic about the silver lining. Our plurality voting system ensures a 2-party-dominated system*, except for very occasional shake-ups. Aberrations like the Ventura victory (at a state level) or the Perot catastrophe (at the federal level) are due to idealistic grassroots efforts that ignore, or in rare cases can overcome, the mathematical reality of the voting system. Look at most of the "independent" reps and senators in the Federal government. They didn't start as independents. They started in a major party, gained reputation, and voters got attached to them; only then could they survive as independents.
And really, does the belief of whether evolution is a fact or not really affect much today
Admittedly, the problem is not belief in evolution per se. My problem is the associated ignorance, stupidity, etc. that correlates with it, and its large negative impact on social and international policy.
Evolution is a common litmus test for scientific literacy. People who are scientifically sophisticated understand that evolution is a complex theory, and that while there are some gaping holes that seem to defy our grasp, enough of evolution makes sense and has scientific backing that most of them would agree, in a poll, with the statement that evolution is widely supported and has broad scientific support. Creation of the first cell through random congregation of the necessary components is certainly mind-boggling to me, and I can't quite imagine how something that's not similar to a cell can gradually mutate into a cell. Nevertheless, ask me if I think there's broad support and evidence for evolution, and I'll answer "yes" with no hesitation.
In particular, creationists' claims about the fossil record are bogus. It's plausible that merely a few tweaked genes cause significant structural differences. Thus, there may not even be intermediate species (with intermediate skeletal structure) in the sense that creationists and some cautious scientists intuitively expect there to be. Intuition is very often wrong.
Let's not judge people's intelligences by what they believe . ..
So if I believe truly and honestly in the FSM, you can't judge me for that?
If I believe truly and honestly that the world is run by a gnome in Cygnus X-1, you can't judge me for that?
You want major organized religions to be insulated from ridicule. Why?
Japanese election law limits the broadcasting of speeches, which are aired only on public broadcaster NHK.
This is the central issue. It seems to me that they want to avoid allowing demagogues to promote themselves by allowing their speeches to be engrained in voters' minds through repetition. Limiting reproduction of election-related speeches is one way to accomplish that.
I personally am not sure it's a wise choice, but I don't think it's unfair, and I don't think free speech necessarily applies to election-related content. Total censorship is unacceptable, but I'm much less sure about limits of the sort in this case.
Claims like that demonstrate the failure of scientists and the media to communicate science to the general public. Like so many others who think Earth (or life) represents an impossible increase in "order", you think you understand entropy but you don't.
Learn what thermodynamics actually says. Google for "fermi thermodynamics site:amazon.com". Some (not much) calculus required.
Wonderful... they're not ignorant, they're simply illiterate? I may not read an entire article linked from slashdot, or I may not read it at all, but then again I don't volunteer to answer questions about those articles.
Any binary distribution has two modes of updates. One is an updated package within the same release; the other is a mass-update from one release to another. Gentoo combines the two, since the distinction is artificial. What you call "changing a lot of stuff" is merely keeping packages reasonably current so that you never have to do a mass-update or complete reinstall.
Anyone who considers the Gentoo update process too difficult either hasn't used Gentoo (upgrades are easy, and there aren't that many of them if you stick to stable x86) or has never dealt with package conflicts in binary distributions. That is the real horror I want to avoid, and I avoid it nicely by running Gentoo.
I accused you of not understanding life or thermodynamics because you stated that life violates the 2nd law of thermo. I did not accuse you of anything simply because you're a Christian. You saw fit to gripe about the limits of science, yet you don't understand that science. The 2nd law applies to closed systems, which Earth is not. When energy is dumped into a system, that system can become more organized without decreasing global entropy.
I understand that energy is never created or destroyed, yet it is here. (How can something exist if was never created?)
That's a damned good question. How can God exist if God was not created? If you propose a mechanism for God's existence, I can use that mechanism to explain the existence of a Godless universe -- the universe becomes God, in a sense.
If the best you can do to defend your position is to quote Einstein, you'd better give up. Einstein was not a Christian.
There's a continuum of types of God, and some scientists (but not Einstein) retain the label of "Christian" or "Jew" even when they've abandoned notions of a Christian or Jewish God. The few physicists who label themselves according to a major organized religion are either hypocrites, subscribing to religious beliefs where their scientific knowledge ends, or they are part of a fringe group within their religion where God and religious doctrine has been toned down to such an extent that it does not interfere with scientific thought. I don't know whether you belong to the second group or not. If you do, I would not call you a Christian.
You labeled yourself a Christian, and you don't know physics. You're so consumed with defending your faith that you evidently haven't bothered to read up on entropy and correct your mistaken beliefs. I suggest you obtain Fermi's wonderful treatise on Thermodynamics, cheaply available on Amazon and published by Dover. The big bang? Fine, ascribe/that/ to God if you want. You can even believe that God created life; science cannot prove otherwise. But don't suggest that natural occurrence of life, or the propagation of life, violates thermodynamic laws unless you have a thorough scientific argument or experiment to prove it. Otherwise, you come across as a religious scientific illiterate, whether you are one or not.
...life breaks the second law of thermodynamics,...
Finally, as a Christian myself, I humbly ask that slashdotters stop seeing every article that deals with dinosaurs, evolution/Darwin, stem cells or genetics as an excuse to slap me in the face with it. The only thing worse that pushing your religion on others is trying to take other's religion away.
You want to know why many people slap you in the face with your Christianity? Because you spout off about "life break[ing] the second law of thermodynamics," demonstrating that you either don't understand life or you don't understand thermodynamics... perhaps both. Yet you're obviously willing to insult scientific principles based on something you read on some crackpot website. I think it's written somewhere that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And you have the audacity to complain about people who believe crackpot 9/11 theories?! Maybe you should first cast the beam out of your own eye.
Oh, I'm an agnostic. I have no problem with the idea that there might be a God. We're not very far along in understanding the universe, so who's to say the universe wasn't created by something even more incomprehensible. I do not, however, see how the possible existence of God has any relevance to government, society, science, or morals
I get prickly when people use religion as filler for science or social policy. If your religion keeps you from examining the scientific and pragmatic realities of dinosaurs, evolution, stem cells, genetic engineering/cloning, abortion, women's rights, etc., then I think you deserve to have your religion stuffed down your throat.
The amazing thing about the Bible is that it illuminates so much hypocrisy among Christians. And, since I don't subscribe to the Bible wholesale, my glee in watching people like you get raked over the coals in scientific discussions does not make me a hypocrite. If I'm wrong about something, which happens, I accept it. I don't go on to whine about how I'm persecuted because I prefer science over faith.
The car analogy. Oh Gods! Cars are driven at high speed on public roads. People operating them had better know how to avoid running into other people, which means understanding traffic laws.
You need no license, no vehicle registration, and no insurance to drive on private property.
Guns cannot be used in public except in exigent circumstances involving prompt commission of a violent crime by someone else. You may also note that it is legal to drive vehicles without a license, without registration, in the event of an emergency.
Guns are not evil. They do not have consciousness or souls. They create no problems by themselves. They are not chemically unstable, radioactive, or biotoxic. (Lead is moderately toxic, but if you want to do something about that, push to unban less-toxic and non-toxic "armor-piercing" ammunition. That term is one of the worst frauds about the entire gun regulation system: the notion that some solid ammunition is "armor piercing" and some is not. It is all a matter of degree. Chunks of metal hurled at high velocity are dangerous. Period. They will go through some stuff, and not go through other stuff. BTW, the worst fraud is that "silencers" are treated identically to guns. Thanks to that bit of genius legislation, significant hearing loss is an ever-present concern for shooters.)
Guns are pretty much undetectable when carried in public, and the means of production (machine tools) are not regulated. There is a large market for guns, like drugs. Reasonably accurate firearms like AK-47s can be made in machine shops; they were made in villages in the Soviet Union during the cold war.
More accurate firearms, and specially treated barrels, require CNC machines and cryo facilities, but those are also unregulated.
The only way to get rid of guns is to fight them like drugs: pick people semi-randomly, and use any excuse you can to invalidate their 4th amendment rights so you can search them, their car, their home.
You worry about known criminals with guns? Keep them locked up, or support the death penalty for more violent crimes. You don't want them walking around with guns? I'd rather they weren't walking around at all. The nature of our society is such that it can't defend against evil if we knowingly allow evil to walk among us.
Even if it were true that a world without guns would be a better place, that world is unattainable. Guns are here to stay until more effective weapons arrive.
The best we can do is:
Do our part to make sure that people we know who are crazy, dangerous, etc. are kept away from guns. Laws don't work. Personal intervention does.
Put no restrictions on other people acquiring guns.
As for background checks, WHY?! Guns are not the only means of murder. If you're worried that some John Doe buying a gun is a murderer, you should be worried about John Doe whether or not he has a gun. If he's a murderer, he will kill people. If he can't get a gun legally, he'll get one illegally. In the unlikely event he needs to kill someone right now and can't find a gun on short notice, he'll use a brick, a kitchen knife, a chainsaw (GOOD HEAVENS, THEY SELL CHAINSAWS WITHOUT BACKGROUND CHECKS? OHMY SWEET JESUS!), or the Americium from a bunch of smoke detectors.
sorry for the semi stream-of-consciousness nature of this reply, but I don't feel like reorganizing it.
I find ctrl sequences to be a total pain. Most of the time, I want to use several commands in a row. Rather than hit ctrl+ each time, I only have to hit escape once (all sane vim users remap capslock to escape), then the commands, then i to start inserting text again.
I just deleted my.vimrc to make sure, and ctrl-end and ctrl-home work for me. Although G and gg tend to be faster, because home and end require significant hand repositioning.
Roaming profiles, as mentioned plenty of times before, offer pretty much the same functionality unless users need to customize their machines.
The two common uses of VMs for mainstream users are: 1. To run apps written for another operating system. 2. To create a chinese wall around some applications to prevent security vulnerabilities from affecting the main OS and data stored there.
Using a VM for the user's main visible OS doesn't fall under either of those categories. If there's no other way to implement a system that allows roaming users, it is a solution. However, it's not a very good one.
I remember reading about this compound or something very similar back in ~1995, in one of the popular science or computing magazines. It claimed there would be organic 3d memory cubes in 8 years.
I bet they'd get a lot less "bricked router" returns if they'd release instructions on how to unbrick.
I haven't needed to unbrick any of mine, but allegedly you can short pins 15 and 16 of the intel flash chip and then tftp upload a new image to 192.168.1.1.
All my new wireless routers are going to be the wrtsl54gs. The best of the WRT54GS, plus USB, all for around $100. If you want more than that, you can get something from routerboard.com.
Well, since I've gotten exactly 0 spam with hashcash, what happens right now is that Joe sets his 386 to generate 10-bit stamps, which probably takes a while but not intolerably long.
When 10 bit stamps are not sufficient and nobody accepts them, Joe is right back in the situation everyone's in today. He has to rely on recipients' bayesian filters to recognize his mail as legitimate and pass it through.
Your argument is that we should not adopt anything unless every email sender can take advantage of it. That's garbage. Enough people using hashcash will raise the cost for spammers, maybe enough so that future Ralsky clones won't be able to build luxury homes with their profits.
As for low-power devices, sure, that's a problem. Unless you have a better idea, though, you'll just have to live with TMDA or some other solution that doesn't require as much cpu time. You could even send your key to recipients ahead of time and get them to pre-whitelist it.
As for the other comments, you ought to read about camram. camram whitelists by pgp keys, not by sender. Initial messages have both a hashcash stamp and a pgp key. If the hashcash stamp has enough bits, the pgp key gets whitelisted. Spam operations would have to generate a high-value stamp for each recipient. Sure, they could send to the same recipient address twice, but why would they?
Furthermore, any pgp keys that spammers manage to get people to whitelist could be added to a DNSBL-type blacklist. The spammer would then have to generate a new key and generate hashcash stamps for every recipient all over again to get that new key whitelisted. Think RAZOR with a feature that feeds obvious spammers' keys into a dnsbl.
This is nonsense. Sender-pays systems guarantee no false positives for people who are willing to work within the system. False positives are what I'm concerned with. I don't care if a little bit of spam ends up in my mailbox. What ruins email for me is having to go through my spam mailbox every so often to look for false positives.
Slashdot Mirror
And my solution to the drug problem is 'don't give addicts drugs.'
Nobody's giving crazy people guns. They find guns themselves. If they couldn't find them legally, there's no particular reason, other than wishful thinking, to believe that they wouldn't find them illegally. If you live in a major city, try this exercise: go to the inner city and ask people on the street where to buy a gun.
In addition to the impossibility of eliminating enough guns to dry up the black market, there's the minor problem that laws against readily-produced, concealable items like drugs and guns are fundamentally unenforceable, and encourage -- even require -- erosion of the right against unreasonable search and seizure. Certainly even you can appreciate that right?
No analogy is perfect, so try this one: There's a global moratorium on nuclear weapons, but a few Asian countries keep launching nuclear ICMBs at western cities. You want the West to avoid building nukes, because gosh someone might get hurt!
Criminals and unstable lunatics will never agree to get rid of their guns, and a war on guns (or any other small, easily-produced items) would be just as ineffective as the war on drugs. Some drugs are interdicted. Some guns would be. But, ultimately, not enough to keep them out of the hands of criminals.
If you cared, you could easily find many pages debunking the "electric universe" theory. e.g. http://www.tim-thompson.com/electric-sun.html
There are no shortage of crackpot physics theories supported by allegedly upstanding scientists. Often it's not even anyone's fault. Someone sees a sliver of evidence for some wild theory and latches on to it, wildly grasping at straws to support it. It's human nature, but most scientists manage to overcome the desire to selectively interpret evidence for their own purposes.
http://www.steorn.net/
http://www.rexresearch.com/coler/coler2.htm
http://www.blacklightpower.com/
http://www.relativitychallenge.com/
http://www.thefinaltheory.com/
If you want to debunk current science, start by learning modern physics and the experiments used to defend modern physics. You can't effectively criticize theories when you don't know what they say or how past experiments have validated them.
The above crackpot sites might not even be wrong. It could be that the scientific establishment is corrupt, misinterpreting evidence, and unreasonably trying to squash competing theories. However, the way those crackpots are going about trying to disprove currently accepted physics is simply the wrong way to go about it. If any of them would design a repeatable experiment that conflicts with existing theories, they'd become instantly famous. Why don't they? Either they're lazy or they're frauds. In either case, they have no business calling themselves scientists.
As opposed to the supreme arrogance of believing we're God's favorite creature?
You can view atheism as arrogance, but that says more about you than about atheism. Most regard it as humbling to be a cousin of both chimpanzees and drosophila, all of us children of stardust and chaos rather than children of God.
And no scientist should ever tell you that we're the top tier of existence, because that presumes we're the only and/or most advanced civilization in the universe/multiverse, which is far from certain.
I'm not that optimistic about the silver lining. Our plurality voting system ensures a 2-party-dominated system*, except for very occasional shake-ups. Aberrations like the Ventura victory (at a state level) or the Perot catastrophe (at the federal level) are due to idealistic grassroots efforts that ignore, or in rare cases can overcome, the mathematical reality of the voting system. Look at most of the "independent" reps and senators in the Federal government. They didn't start as independents. They started in a major party, gained reputation, and voters got attached to them; only then could they survive as independents.
Support Range Voting.
* see, for instance, Downs' An Economic Theory of Democracy, chapter 8.
Admittedly, the problem is not belief in evolution per se. My problem is the associated ignorance, stupidity, etc. that correlates with it, and its large negative impact on social and international policy.
Evolution is a common litmus test for scientific literacy. People who are scientifically sophisticated understand that evolution is a complex theory, and that while there are some gaping holes that seem to defy our grasp, enough of evolution makes sense and has scientific backing that most of them would agree, in a poll, with the statement that evolution is widely supported and has broad scientific support. Creation of the first cell through random congregation of the necessary components is certainly mind-boggling to me, and I can't quite imagine how something that's not similar to a cell can gradually mutate into a cell. Nevertheless, ask me if I think there's broad support and evidence for evolution, and I'll answer "yes" with no hesitation.
In particular, creationists' claims about the fossil record are bogus. It's plausible that merely a few tweaked genes cause significant structural differences. Thus, there may not even be intermediate species (with intermediate skeletal structure) in the sense that creationists and some cautious scientists intuitively expect there to be. Intuition is very often wrong.
So if I believe truly and honestly in the FSM, you can't judge me for that?
If I believe truly and honestly that the world is run by a gnome in Cygnus X-1, you can't judge me for that?
You want major organized religions to be insulated from ridicule. Why?
This is the central issue. It seems to me that they want to avoid allowing demagogues to promote themselves by allowing their speeches to be engrained in voters' minds through repetition. Limiting reproduction of election-related speeches is one way to accomplish that.
I personally am not sure it's a wise choice, but I don't think it's unfair, and I don't think free speech necessarily applies to election-related content. Total censorship is unacceptable, but I'm much less sure about limits of the sort in this case.
The first half of this video, Neil Tyson's presentation from Beyond Faith, is directly relevant.
You "see design" at the limits of your knowledge. Appeal to "design" ends rational inquiry. Historical appeals to "design" have been premature.
Claims like that demonstrate the failure of scientists and the media to communicate science to the general public. Like so many others who think Earth (or life) represents an impossible increase in "order", you think you understand entropy but you don't.
Learn what thermodynamics actually says. Google for "fermi thermodynamics site:amazon.com". Some (not much) calculus required.
Wonderful... they're not ignorant, they're simply illiterate? I may not read an entire article linked from slashdot, or I may not read it at all, but then again I don't volunteer to answer questions about those articles.
You say Gentoo wants to change a lot of stuff?
Any binary distribution has two modes of updates. One is an updated package within the same release; the other is a mass-update from one release to another. Gentoo combines the two, since the distinction is artificial. What you call "changing a lot of stuff" is merely keeping packages reasonably current so that you never have to do a mass-update or complete reinstall.
Anyone who considers the Gentoo update process too difficult either hasn't used Gentoo (upgrades are easy, and there aren't that many of them if you stick to stable x86) or has never dealt with package conflicts in binary distributions. That is the real horror I want to avoid, and I avoid it nicely by running Gentoo.
> > or that teenage girls should have have hands-on sex ed in junior high
> Well, the question is, hands-on whom? ;)
Other girls, of course. :)
Thank you for proving mine.
I accused you of not understanding life or thermodynamics because you stated that life violates the 2nd law of thermo. I did not accuse you of anything simply because you're a Christian. You saw fit to gripe about the limits of science, yet you don't understand that science. The 2nd law applies to closed systems, which Earth is not. When energy is dumped into a system, that system can become more organized without decreasing global entropy.
I understand that energy is never created or destroyed, yet it is here. (How can something exist if was never created?)
That's a damned good question. How can God exist if God was not created? If you propose a mechanism for God's existence, I can use that mechanism to explain the existence of a Godless universe -- the universe becomes God, in a sense.
If the best you can do to defend your position is to quote Einstein, you'd better give up. Einstein was not a Christian.
There's a continuum of types of God, and some scientists (but not Einstein) retain the label of "Christian" or "Jew" even when they've abandoned notions of a Christian or Jewish God. The few physicists who label themselves according to a major organized religion are either hypocrites, subscribing to religious beliefs where their scientific knowledge ends, or they are part of a fringe group within their religion where God and religious doctrine has been toned down to such an extent that it does not interfere with scientific thought. I don't know whether you belong to the second group or not. If you do, I would not call you a Christian.
You labeled yourself a Christian, and you don't know physics. You're so consumed with defending your faith that you evidently haven't bothered to read up on entropy and correct your mistaken beliefs. I suggest you obtain Fermi's wonderful treatise on Thermodynamics, cheaply available on Amazon and published by Dover. The big bang? Fine, ascribe /that/ to God if you want. You can even believe that God created life; science cannot prove otherwise. But don't suggest that natural occurrence of life, or the propagation of life, violates thermodynamic laws unless you have a thorough scientific argument or experiment to prove it. Otherwise, you come across as a religious scientific illiterate, whether you are one or not.
Finally, as a Christian myself, I humbly ask that slashdotters stop seeing every article that deals with dinosaurs, evolution/Darwin, stem cells or genetics as an excuse to slap me in the face with it. The only thing worse that pushing your religion on others is trying to take other's religion away.
You want to know why many people slap you in the face with your Christianity? Because you spout off about "life break[ing] the second law of thermodynamics," demonstrating that you either don't understand life or you don't understand thermodynamics... perhaps both. Yet you're obviously willing to insult scientific principles based on something you read on some crackpot website. I think it's written somewhere that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And you have the audacity to complain about people who believe crackpot 9/11 theories?! Maybe you should first cast the beam out of your own eye.
Oh, I'm an agnostic. I have no problem with the idea that there might be a God. We're not very far along in understanding the universe, so who's to say the universe wasn't created by something even more incomprehensible. I do not, however, see how the possible existence of God has any relevance to government, society, science, or morals
I get prickly when people use religion as filler for science or social policy. If your religion keeps you from examining the scientific and pragmatic realities of dinosaurs, evolution, stem cells, genetic engineering/cloning, abortion, women's rights, etc., then I think you deserve to have your religion stuffed down your throat.
The amazing thing about the Bible is that it illuminates so much hypocrisy among Christians. And, since I don't subscribe to the Bible wholesale, my glee in watching people like you get raked over the coals in scientific discussions does not make me a hypocrite. If I'm wrong about something, which happens, I accept it. I don't go on to whine about how I'm persecuted because I prefer science over faith.
You have not thought this through.
The car analogy. Oh Gods! Cars are driven at high speed on public roads. People operating them had better know how to avoid running into other people, which means understanding traffic laws.
You need no license, no vehicle registration, and no insurance to drive on private property.
Guns cannot be used in public except in exigent circumstances involving prompt commission of a violent crime by someone else. You may also note that it is legal to drive vehicles without a license, without registration, in the event of an emergency.
Guns are not evil. They do not have consciousness or souls. They create no problems by themselves. They are not chemically unstable, radioactive, or biotoxic. (Lead is moderately toxic, but if you want to do something about that, push to unban less-toxic and non-toxic "armor-piercing" ammunition. That term is one of the worst frauds about the entire gun regulation system: the notion that some solid ammunition is "armor piercing" and some is not. It is all a matter of degree. Chunks of metal hurled at high velocity are dangerous. Period. They will go through some stuff, and not go through other stuff. BTW, the worst fraud is that "silencers" are treated identically to guns. Thanks to that bit of genius legislation, significant hearing loss is an ever-present concern for shooters.)
Guns are pretty much undetectable when carried in public, and the means of production (machine tools) are not regulated. There is a large market for guns, like drugs. Reasonably accurate firearms like AK-47s can be made in machine shops; they were made in villages in the Soviet Union during the cold war.
More accurate firearms, and specially treated barrels, require CNC machines and cryo facilities, but those are also unregulated.
The only way to get rid of guns is to fight them like drugs: pick people semi-randomly, and use any excuse you can to invalidate their 4th amendment rights so you can search them, their car, their home.
You worry about known criminals with guns? Keep them locked up, or support the death penalty for more violent crimes. You don't want them walking around with guns? I'd rather they weren't walking around at all. The nature of our society is such that it can't defend against evil if we knowingly allow evil to walk among us.
Even if it were true that a world without guns would be a better place, that world is unattainable. Guns are here to stay until more effective weapons arrive.
The best we can do is:
As for background checks, WHY?! Guns are not the only means of murder. If you're worried that some John Doe buying a gun is a murderer, you should be worried about John Doe whether or not he has a gun. If he's a murderer, he will kill people. If he can't get a gun legally, he'll get one illegally. In the unlikely event he needs to kill someone right now and can't find a gun on short notice, he'll use a brick, a kitchen knife, a chainsaw (GOOD HEAVENS, THEY SELL CHAINSAWS WITHOUT BACKGROUND CHECKS? OHMY SWEET JESUS!), or the Americium from a bunch of smoke detectors.
sorry for the semi stream-of-consciousness nature of this reply, but I don't feel like reorganizing it.
You can add "startinsert" to your .vimrc
.vimrc to make sure, and ctrl-end and ctrl-home work for me. Although G and gg tend to be faster, because home and end require significant hand repositioning.
I find ctrl sequences to be a total pain. Most of the time, I want to use several commands in a row. Rather than hit ctrl+ each time, I only have to hit escape once (all sane vim users remap capslock to escape), then the commands, then i to start inserting text again.
I just deleted my
Any other complaints?
Sit in the lotus position, then telepathically control your keyboard.
You'd better hurry, before Microsoft patents that, too.
Roaming profiles, as mentioned plenty of times before, offer pretty much the same functionality unless users need to customize their machines.
The two common uses of VMs for mainstream users are:
1. To run apps written for another operating system.
2. To create a chinese wall around some applications to prevent security vulnerabilities from affecting the main OS and data stored there.
Using a VM for the user's main visible OS doesn't fall under either of those categories. If there's no other way to implement a system that allows roaming users, it is a solution. However, it's not a very good one.
I remember reading about this compound or something very similar back in ~1995, in one of the popular science or computing magazines. It claimed there would be organic 3d memory cubes in 8 years.
I bet they'd get a lot less "bricked router" returns if they'd release instructions on how to unbrick.
I haven't needed to unbrick any of mine, but allegedly you can short pins 15 and 16 of the intel flash chip and then tftp upload a new image to 192.168.1.1.
All my new wireless routers are going to be the wrtsl54gs. The best of the WRT54GS, plus USB, all for around $100. If you want more than that, you can get something from routerboard.com.
What is SCO's plan?
Originally there were the jokes... 1. claim copyright on core portions of linux, 2. ? 3. Profit.
It seems like 2. will never end, and how they'll accomplish 3. is still quite unknown.
Well, since I've gotten exactly 0 spam with hashcash, what happens right now is that Joe sets his 386 to generate 10-bit stamps, which probably takes a while but not intolerably long.
When 10 bit stamps are not sufficient and nobody accepts them, Joe is right back in the situation everyone's in today. He has to rely on recipients' bayesian filters to recognize his mail as legitimate and pass it through.
Your argument is that we should not adopt anything unless every email sender can take advantage of it. That's garbage. Enough people using hashcash will raise the cost for spammers, maybe enough so that future Ralsky clones won't be able to build luxury homes with their profits.
As for low-power devices, sure, that's a problem. Unless you have a better idea, though, you'll just have to live with TMDA or some other solution that doesn't require as much cpu time. You could even send your key to recipients ahead of time and get them to pre-whitelist it.
As for the other comments, you ought to read about camram. camram whitelists by pgp keys, not by sender. Initial messages have both a hashcash stamp and a pgp key. If the hashcash stamp has enough bits, the pgp key gets whitelisted. Spam operations would have to generate a high-value stamp for each recipient. Sure, they could send to the same recipient address twice, but why would they?
Furthermore, any pgp keys that spammers manage to get people to whitelist could be added to a DNSBL-type blacklist. The spammer would then have to generate a new key and generate hashcash stamps for every recipient all over again to get that new key whitelisted. Think RAZOR with a feature that feeds obvious spammers' keys into a dnsbl.
This is nonsense. Sender-pays systems guarantee no false positives for people who are willing to work within the system. False positives are what I'm concerned with. I don't care if a little bit of spam ends up in my mailbox. What ruins email for me is having to go through my spam mailbox every so often to look for false positives.