"Knife crime might have risen because the majority of handgun owners were in an area where they worried about getting stabbed. Take away their guns, guess what? Now they're getting stabbed."
Their guns were for sport only before that point, and had to be kept locked away in a safe. If you carried your gun, other than to a sporting event/practice, you would likely be charged with a criminal offence. I fou used it to "defend" yourself and killed an attacker you would be charged with manslaughter at the least.
I'm sorry, there really is no "they took ur guns!" argument to made about the UK.
If you want to argue about the possibility that if the UK was armed there would be less crime, then that's a different debate. I just wanted to point out that the NRA talking point "look what happened! They took their guns and suddenly millions of innocent citizens are being murdered!" is not only wrong (crime did not rocket, murder rate is still considerably lower than the US) but also that nobody took away any means of defence, guns were not that beforehand.
"That's where all the money has gone, to shareholders of firms involved in the various privatisation scams."
Not all of it by any means. There is the basic problem that the government in the UK is just doing too much, and it (and it's contracts with private firms) need to be cut massively.
Personally I agree with privatisation of a lot of stuff, but only when it's really private, there is fair competition and the contracts are written by people who are competent and genuinely interested in getting a good business deal, not just funneling money off to their friends.
"If you ask me, the UK government is in denial over the correlation between the rise in knife violence and its ban on firearms."
Good job nobody asked you then, because knife crime has been falling.
Oh, and nobody's carried a gun "for defence" over here in several decades. I know, I know, you want to say "they took your guns in 1998!!", but that's a bunch of crap.
Handguns were banned, this is true. However in a country of 60 million there were only around 125K individuals licensed to own (not carry, own) firearms. And there still are, it's just they have to have shotguns and rifles now.
So sorry, there's no turning point to find in the handgun ban and any knife crime rise. If both happened in 1998 (and I'm yet to be convinced there's been anything but more media attention to the crime rates) then they are unrelated because people in this country overwhelmingly did not own guns before that date.
Correlation of "more video games are being bought" and "more crime is being committed" encompasses such a huge, nebulous array of potentially related or unrelated societal trends that... well it's meaningless.
Correlation between "plays video games" and "has committed violent crime" is also very very dodgy given that most (if not almost all) kids play them.
Tax is now the way to achieve anything in the UK. Anything at all, the solution is to take more tax from those that earn money in the private sector and use it to set up yet another government office.
Wanna know why our economy is in the crapper? The public sector in this country is a millstone around our collective necks. I'm not even taling about the NHS (I'm massively pro NHS), it's the endless council workers that do... what? Sweet FA most of the time as far as I can tell.
Enforcing the law in the UK is just sooooo last century.
We don't do that any more, it's just not cool. No, what we do instead is bring in hundreds of new laws outlawing things that were already illegal (terrorist activity), remove a few liberties whilst we're at it, direct the police towards legitimate protest and speech (they're all terrorists now!), bring in nebulous measures like ASBOs which allow anyone to enjoy the feeling of the courts coming down on them and imposing restrictions on their lives over any trivial matter that doesn't even have to be illegal... all whilst shouting about drugs and morality.
this is just one more reason I'm getting the hell out.
I got one of those too. A 901 linux. Lovely little machine.
IMHO Asus totally screwed up on the software. It would scream about updates being ready and then refuse to install them, claim to be out of space when you wanted to install anything else and (most annoyingly) randomly switch between US and UK keymaps.
I had to re-image with debian to get a useful system out of it. It's a shame Asus put a broken OS on there, and I can see people who are not as linux-geeky as I am either taking it back as broken or just getting pissed off with it.
What astounds me is that Nursie doesn't understand why other people don't find it intuitive as well. The fact that you have to type in certain character strings (not even words) in a predetermined order with no hint from the prompt as to what to do, the fact that the computer does not understand near misses like "app-get install firefox" or "install firefox" or "aptget install firefox" or "apt-get firefox" is a far cry from the GUI that guides the user down a limited set of possible choices. Presumably Nursie would scratch his/her head trying to figure out what's so funny about following obquote taken from http://www.bash.org/?464385:
Then you, like many others, entirely missed the point of my post.
I HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH THE GUI.
Use the gui, use it if you're a newb or if you like graphical environments or if you just find that it works for you or whatever. That's not what I'm laughing at.
For god's sake....
The guy professes to have used MS DOS and Windows for two decades. Yet he finds one of the simplest, least argumented programs in existence to be scarily complicated, and goes so far as to say that even hardcore geeks are scared of it. This is what's funny. Not "OMG! N00bs can't use apt!!"
"Should a hardcore geek know that IBM dropped support for 31 bit mainframes 2 years ago?"
31 bit mainframes sure, but not 31 bit executables. Especially on zLinux. Which is where my system Z experience lies. z/OS is a whole different ballgame.
People are writing about problems which used to exist on linux 5 years ago, or people are writing about very obscure situations in which other OSs also fail.
It's blatantly biased, but being Anti-linux seems to be "cool" right now and shows you're a free thinker or something.
GIMP isn't as good as photoshop! People shout. May or may not be true, I'm not a graphic designer, I don't know. What gets me wondering though, is how many of you people actually, you know, paid for and have a license to use photoshop?
"Regarding the "what's up with 'apt'?" question, I've gotten gobs of responses ranging from a polite explanation to being called a "f-ing tool" repeatedly. None recognize that, details of explanation aside, it's not obvious - how the he11 am I supposed to know the command is "apt-get" if I don't know that the package is called "Aptitude"?"
You're still being a tool.
You don't need to know that, as has been said repeatedly, all you need to do is run the GUI software installer.
You are insulted because you keep whining about command lines and refuse to actually look at what is being said to you. You are wilfully ignorant.
However, given that debian (and as a result Ubuntu) now has over 23K pieces of software, you'd be hard pushed not to find what you need in the official repos.
You may need to add non-free and contrib. I believe Ubuntu is more automated and sets up more by default compared to debian.
No, no I don't. Unless you mean people blaming the operating system for abandonware and broken software, which is just wrong.
Lets us OSX as a counter example:
1. find the software you want to install 2. Oh, nobody makes it for Mac. FAIL.
Or windows
1. find the software you want to install 2. Download it from the internet 3. Get infected with spyware.
Going back to your linux list, why would you search the web when you can look in the repository first?
Hmm, I want a media player. So I start Synaptic, hit "search", type "media player", select one or more and then install it.
What could be easier?
I haven't had to get an app outside the distro repositories in... well since I switched to using linux as a main OS a couple of years back. There is now probably more software for linux than there is for windows, and certainly more that's (cost) free.
What SPECIFIC examples do you have of when you've come across that situation?
And you'll miss the point again that the guy is just wrong in his summation of apt. Nobody is forcing anyone to use the GUI. Nobody is even trying to get him to use a command line.
Look, if I said about Windows - "lets use windows explorer to look at a directory (we could use "dir" but it's complicated and even windows experts shy away from it)", would you not laugh at me?
What's a perfect example of why linux, a multi-billion dollar industry, will never get anywhere?
Did you see me say that every last user needs to know the ins and outs of repository management and dependencies? Did you? Or did you read into my first comment the idea that I'm sneering at him for not explaining the command line?
Use the GUI if you like, it probably is better and more intuitive for windows users and is as fully functioned as the command line.
But to say that apt is complex and difficult is laughable. As is your reading comprehension.
Personally I'm not that fond of mainframes. Dreadfully slow beasts. Reliable I'm sure, no disrespect, but I have yet to see what makes them particularly special beyond being bulletproof.
And 31 bit.
Also, I don't give a flying crap what your opinion of Linux is. If you can't remember "apt-get install 'package'" you're not a hardcore geek. Sorry.
"Linux, well, why doesn't "app-install get X" work? Oh, right, it's "app-get X install"... er... "app-get install X"... er... crap, it was some stupid mis-spelling that made no sense..."
I'm sorry, now you're just being a complete fucking tool.
Open GUI package manager, locate software you want, click install. We're done. Even easier than Mac because you don't even have to go on the web or put in a CD.
Apple clearly learned this concept when they made the app store.
"There's more types of hardcore geeks than the kind that are good at Linux."
1. He said every time, implying he's done it multiple times 2. He can't remember apt-get install "package"
Sorry, but not a geek in my book. For anyone that's not just pants-wettingly scared of command lines to start with, apt-get is very simple. It's not like you have a huge long string of arguments to remember and get wrong, it's just a command, a directive and what you want to install.
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I would think the new marvell sheeva chips are pretty close. They run in the 1.2-1.6 GHz range.
The level of support?
It flat out won't run x86 code.
Whereas debian and other linuxes have full distros aimed at ARM.
We have "Liberty", which seems to limnit its actual activities to whining in the press.
I'm sure they do much more than that, but they don't have the same presence as the ACLU.
"Knife crime might have risen because the majority of handgun owners were in an area where they worried about getting stabbed. Take away their guns, guess what? Now they're getting stabbed."
Their guns were for sport only before that point, and had to be kept locked away in a safe. If you carried your gun, other than to a sporting event/practice, you would likely be charged with a criminal offence. I fou used it to "defend" yourself and killed an attacker you would be charged with manslaughter at the least.
I'm sorry, there really is no "they took ur guns!" argument to made about the UK.
If you want to argue about the possibility that if the UK was armed there would be less crime, then that's a different debate. I just wanted to point out that the NRA talking point "look what happened! They took their guns and suddenly millions of innocent citizens are being murdered!" is not only wrong (crime did not rocket, murder rate is still considerably lower than the US) but also that nobody took away any means of defence, guns were not that beforehand.
"That's where all the money has gone, to shareholders of firms involved in the various privatisation scams."
Not all of it by any means. There is the basic problem that the government in the UK is just doing too much, and it (and it's contracts with private firms) need to be cut massively.
Personally I agree with privatisation of a lot of stuff, but only when it's really private, there is fair competition and the contracts are written by people who are competent and genuinely interested in getting a good business deal, not just funneling money off to their friends.
"If you ask me, the UK government is in denial over the correlation between the rise in knife violence and its ban on firearms."
Good job nobody asked you then, because knife crime has been falling.
Oh, and nobody's carried a gun "for defence" over here in several decades. I know, I know, you want to say "they took your guns in 1998!!", but that's a bunch of crap.
Handguns were banned, this is true. However in a country of 60 million there were only around 125K individuals licensed to own (not carry, own) firearms. And there still are, it's just they have to have shotguns and rifles now.
So sorry, there's no turning point to find in the handgun ban and any knife crime rise. If both happened in 1998 (and I'm yet to be convinced there's been anything but more media attention to the crime rates) then they are unrelated because people in this country overwhelmingly did not own guns before that date.
4) They are unrelated societal trends
Correlation of "more video games are being bought" and "more crime is being committed" encompasses such a huge, nebulous array of potentially related or unrelated societal trends that... well it's meaningless.
Correlation between "plays video games" and "has committed violent crime" is also very very dodgy given that most (if not almost all) kids play them.
This is true, but I have a horrible feeling that this guy was actually appointed as some sort of government advisor recently.
Oh, and tax, I forgot to mention tax.
Tax is now the way to achieve anything in the UK. Anything at all, the solution is to take more tax from those that earn money in the private sector and use it to set up yet another government office.
Wanna know why our economy is in the crapper? The public sector in this country is a millstone around our collective necks. I'm not even taling about the NHS (I'm massively pro NHS), it's the endless council workers that do... what? Sweet FA most of the time as far as I can tell.
Didn't you get the memo?
Enforcing the law in the UK is just sooooo last century.
We don't do that any more, it's just not cool. No, what we do instead is bring in hundreds of new laws outlawing things that were already illegal (terrorist activity), remove a few liberties whilst we're at it, direct the police towards legitimate protest and speech (they're all terrorists now!), bring in nebulous measures like ASBOs which allow anyone to enjoy the feeling of the courts coming down on them and imposing restrictions on their lives over any trivial matter that doesn't even have to be illegal... all whilst shouting about drugs and morality.
this is just one more reason I'm getting the hell out.
"just gotten an Eee Pc with linux"
I got one of those too. A 901 linux. Lovely little machine.
IMHO Asus totally screwed up on the software. It would scream about updates being ready and then refuse to install them, claim to be out of space when you wanted to install anything else and (most annoyingly) randomly switch between US and UK keymaps.
I had to re-image with debian to get a useful system out of it. It's a shame Asus put a broken OS on there, and I can see people who are not as linux-geeky as I am either taking it back as broken or just getting pissed off with it.
Then you, like many others, entirely missed the point of my post.
I HAVE NO PROBLEM WITH THE GUI.
Use the gui, use it if you're a newb or if you like graphical environments or if you just find that it works for you or whatever. That's not what I'm laughing at.
For god's sake....
The guy professes to have used MS DOS and Windows for two decades. Yet he finds one of the simplest, least argumented programs in existence to be scarily complicated, and goes so far as to say that even hardcore geeks are scared of it. This is what's funny. Not "OMG! N00bs can't use apt!!"
FFS, how many times do I have to explain this?
"Should a hardcore geek know that IBM dropped support for 31 bit mainframes 2 years ago?"
31 bit mainframes sure, but not 31 bit executables. Especially on zLinux. Which is where my system Z experience lies. z/OS is a whole different ballgame.
People are writing about problems which used to exist on linux 5 years ago, or people are writing about very obscure situations in which other OSs also fail.
It's blatantly biased, but being Anti-linux seems to be "cool" right now and shows you're a free thinker or something.
Yes, yes it does.
Have you been following the android dev work for it though?
One of the more recent images even had GPRS working...
I always love the photoshop argument.
GIMP isn't as good as photoshop! People shout. May or may not be true, I'm not a graphic designer, I don't know. What gets me wondering though, is how many of you people actually, you know, paid for and have a license to use photoshop?
Yeah, that's what I thought.
"Regarding the "what's up with 'apt'?" question, I've gotten gobs of responses ranging from a polite explanation to being called a "f-ing tool" repeatedly. None recognize that, details of explanation aside, it's not obvious - how the he11 am I supposed to know the command is "apt-get" if I don't know that the package is called "Aptitude"?"
You're still being a tool.
You don't need to know that, as has been said repeatedly, all you need to do is run the GUI software installer.
You are insulted because you keep whining about command lines and refuse to actually look at what is being said to you. You are wilfully ignorant.
Hmm.
gunzip file (to un-gzip it just like zip)
tar xf file (to extract the file content)
pretty simple. Of course nowadays you just have to double click it and the gnome archive manager will jump up.
You may well have to.
However, given that debian (and as a result Ubuntu) now has over 23K pieces of software, you'd be hard pushed not to find what you need in the official repos.
You may need to add non-free and contrib. I believe Ubuntu is more automated and sets up more by default compared to debian.
"Now do you see why this is a REAL problem ?"
No, no I don't. Unless you mean people blaming the operating system for abandonware and broken software, which is just wrong.
Lets us OSX as a counter example:
1. find the software you want to install
2. Oh, nobody makes it for Mac. FAIL.
Or windows
1. find the software you want to install
2. Download it from the internet
3. Get infected with spyware.
Going back to your linux list, why would you search the web when you can look in the repository first?
Hmm, I want a media player.
So I start Synaptic, hit "search", type "media player", select one or more and then install it.
What could be easier?
I haven't had to get an app outside the distro repositories in... well since I switched to using linux as a main OS a couple of years back. There is now probably more software for linux than there is for windows, and certainly more that's (cost) free.
What SPECIFIC examples do you have of when you've come across that situation?
And you'll miss the point again that the guy is just wrong in his summation of apt. Nobody is forcing anyone to use the GUI. Nobody is even trying to get him to use a command line.
Look, if I said about Windows - "lets use windows explorer to look at a directory (we could use "dir" but it's complicated and even windows experts shy away from it)", would you not laugh at me?
Because you damn well should.
What's a perfect example of why linux, a multi-billion dollar industry, will never get anywhere?
Did you see me say that every last user needs to know the ins and outs of repository management and dependencies? Did you? Or did you read into my first comment the idea that I'm sneering at him for not explaining the command line?
Use the GUI if you like, it probably is better and more intuitive for windows users and is as fully functioned as the command line.
But to say that apt is complex and difficult is laughable. As is your reading comprehension.
Personally I'm not that fond of mainframes. Dreadfully slow beasts. Reliable I'm sure, no disrespect, but I have yet to see what makes them particularly special beyond being bulletproof.
And 31 bit.
Also, I don't give a flying crap what your opinion of Linux is. If you can't remember "apt-get install 'package'" you're not a hardcore geek. Sorry.
"Linux, well, why doesn't "app-install get X" work? Oh, right, it's "app-get X install" ... er ... "app-get install X" ... er ... crap, it was some stupid mis-spelling that made no sense ..."
I'm sorry, now you're just being a complete fucking tool.
Open GUI package manager, locate software you want, click install. We're done. Even easier than Mac because you don't even have to go on the web or put in a CD.
Apple clearly learned this concept when they made the app store.
"There's more types of hardcore geeks than the kind that are good at Linux."
1. He said every time, implying he's done it multiple times
2. He can't remember apt-get install "package"
Sorry, but not a geek in my book. For anyone that's not just pants-wettingly scared of command lines to start with, apt-get is very simple. It's not like you have a huge long string of arguments to remember and get wrong, it's just a command, a directive and what you want to install.
Yes, I still doubt his hardcore geek credentials.