Most people who harp on moral relativism grossly misunderstand it.
It's not about condoning others' moral beliefs, it's about acknowledging that they have them, and are sincere about them, and might even be rather attached to them, and then modifying your behavior so that you can get along with them.
Unless you want to convert the world to your own particular morality (i.e., destroy freedom), you have to live and let live to a certain extent. You don't have to endorse others' beliefs to acknowledge that they exist, and that others act as though they were legitimate.
And between the choices of, say, moral relativism and Sharia law, well as nice as it would be not to have to shave any more, I think I'll choose the relativists, thank you.
What you say is absolutely true -- actual learning is about taking the pieces of what others have done, seeing how they work, and putting them together in new and interesting ways.
That said, don't undervalue memorization. A nice broad basis in fact is the antidote to a lot of postmodern-crap-passing-for-profundity, not to mention the importance of knowing what ideas you're working with. Of course one must *understand* what is memorized, but nothing is as impressive as a well-reasoned argument firmly grounded in facts, which you can't produce if you don't know any facts.
They delivered the subpoena to the house he lived at a while back. It's entirely possible that they're suing him for activities he conducted when he lived there and (may've) had internet access.
Now, we're fairly sure that concerning syntax, early human's language surely followed some sort of predicative model - that can be seen when analyzing more isolated and primitive languages (which are mostly dead by now) - especially aboriginal languages of America and Oceania/Australia. Um, languages don't develop like technology, they develop by evolution. There was tremendous complexity in the 250+ native North American languages, and there's no grounds whatsoever to call them "primitive" or to assume that they represent an "earlier stage" in linguistic evolution. That was an intellectual prejudice that went out of style in the late 1800s. It's like saying that North American bison are more "primitive" than European cattle.
Sentences there usually are of the form "This is an Apple. This is red." - instead of "This is a red apple". Basically they were speaking in "features", chaining them together, which resulted in either isolating languages (words have no inflection and are immutable, syntactic structure gives a sentence meaning "This apple is. This red is." Chinese works this way) No it doesn't. Or, I mean, yes, Chinese* is an isolating language in which syntax has grammatical meaning and words don't change form based on grammar -- but in that sense it's very close to English, which has no noun case outside of the pronouns, has a depleted stock of verb endings (compared to relatives like German or Dutch, or even French; English is basically "add an s sometimes") and is highly dependent on word order ("Man bites dog" vs. "Dog bites man"). In your example, in English we would say "This is a red apple," in Chinese we would say "Zhei shi yige hongse de pingguo" (lit. "This is one-[unit] red-color type-of apple", or idiomatically, "This is a red apple").
* Modern Chinese, that is. Actually there's some evidence that ancient Chinese had a case system that's been lost over the millenia.
or agglutinating languages (like early Nahuatl, they would incorporate subjects and objects into their words: "Thisapple and Thisred".) More like "ThisApple redIs" but that still doesn't say anything about how "developed" the language is.
More sophisticated stuff, like polysynthetic languages (Inuktitut) and inflectional languages (Germanic) are thought to have evolved thereafter. But of course, this is one hypothesis and there is no way of proving any of this. No, but there are plenty of ways to disprove it, because it's bogus. For one, consider that English has lost a lot of the features of its Germanic near relatives (which were present in Old English), and you'll see that languages just sort of change arbitrarily, they don't evolve in a coherent direction. You're operating off of linguistic theories from a hundred years and more ago.
Ok, I'm in a decent mood so I'm not really trying to flame, just to correct a couple pretty-far-off things you say here.
The range of phonemes planetwide is vast (far and away larger than can be produced in a language like English) I assume you mean "in any single language." English lacks a lot of varieties of consonants, but it's pretty rich in vowel variety and nasalizations, and has a nice broad selection of rhortics (when you consider regional variations). No single language uses all (or even most) of the possible phonemes out there, but English is actually pretty diverse.
It assumes phonemes were used, for example. There's an island where the native language is communicated by whistles...The series of whistles constitute a series of samples at regular intervals along Spanish words, so there is a 1:1 translation between the two. Whistles, of course, do not use phonemes at all and therefore such a form of communication is not subject to the intelligability of sounds. I've never heard of this, though it sounds kind of incredulous. Regardless, you're contradicting yourself here. If people are understanding the whistles, then obviously they must be intelligible sounds... yeah? In any case, if it's a language-that-talks-by-whistles, then those whistles become phonemes by definition. At least, the varieties of clicks in e.g. Xhosa are phonemic, because they constitute parts of words.
It seems like the real point of this article (haven't read it yet) is whether Neanderthals could've spoken Sapiens languages, not whether they could've had languages themselves -- the existence of ASL pretty much proves that you don't need an interesting vocal tract to provide sufficient symbolic variety (although that may be necessary to evolve the mental language equipment).
Modern languages are heavily based on very complex grammars and therefore don't need a particularly wide range of sounds or symbols. Very early written languages directly descend from pictographic systems and require a considerably greater number of symbols and signifiers. You're smoking here. There's a great variety of grammatical complexity levels in currently spoken languages. English and Chinese (very close to each other) are babylike complexity compared to, say, Japanese or Korean; for that matter, they've both lost considerable grammatical complexity compared to earlier versions (Old English, or Ancient Chinese ca. 450 BCE)
In any event, the number of written signs has nothing to do with the range of vocabulary. Chinese has way more written characters than English, though English has the larger vocabulary.
By inference, I'm going to say that very early spoken languages would also use a much wider range of sounds and fewer rules for inferring a specific meaning for a specific sound in a specific context. If that is correct It isn't. Languages that are not phonemically rich (like Polynesian languages) just tend to add more syllables, rather than developing more grammatical complexity; and phonemic complexity of languages tends to jump arbitrarily. (Incidentally, we have enough preserved writings of, e.g., Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, etc. that there are modern scholars who can speak a pretty good approximation. If by "very early" you mean like, 40,000 BC, well fine, but there's no evidence of anything from that period, so any speculation would be purely imagination).
(If the girl gets plastered, then gets fucked, and then regrets it, was it rape? Why yes, yes it is, actually. And it should be treated as such.
No decent human being would have sex with someone who obviously has no idea what's going on. Whether she chose to become unconscious or not is irrelevant.
And besides, there's plenty research out there that shows that the majority of rapes are committed by a very small group of repeat offenders, and that a lot of these guys intentionally target women to try to make them drunk enough that they're incapacitated before raping them. (Google "Dr. David Lisak" or "Undetected rapist" for more).
It's right there in your quote, actually -- the woman in question "gets fucked", she's not a participant. Sure, if everybody's had a few and they wind up doing things they regret and wouldn't have done sober, that's one thing; if she's (or he's!) "plastered" and then "gets fucked" you're describing a totally different situation that's really no more morally justifiable than having sex with someone in a coma.
but by the time the third or fourth rolls around, they clean the pacifier by sticking it in their own mouths for half a second. I believe I speak for everyone in the non-parent Slashdot community when I say, "Ew."
Given that if you're using a GPS you're already not familiar with the local streets, assuming that you're therefore not familiar with the traffic flows and alternate routes is a fair assumption to make. Right, assuming you're using a GPS. The article is talking about predictive features to be incorporated into MS Live, which (at least as described in the article) is a website competing with Google Maps. If we assume they have a GPS, then you don't need a predictive model -- you just need actual data, displayed in a format that's clear, easy and safe to read while hurtling at 70 mph in a ton of steel.
the basic problem, in the UK at least, is that there just aren't enough roads. Or, alternatively, that there are too many cars.
Anyway, as you've pointed out, what this really is is a shortcut simulator to having good local knowledge of the area you're driving in -- it's a substitute for experience. What they basically have is a complex system that predicts where traffic will be. But what's better than prediction is accurate, current reporting -- and we already have an awesome technology for detecting and avoiding traffic jams, called a "radio." Pretty much every major urban area has at least one station that will give you "traffic on the 9s" or whatever during peak hours.
Now, a real useful service would be a gps with an easy interface (I've used plenty that don't have 'em) that just gives you a map of the local area and shows you realtime updates of the traffic flow (say it colours the streets based on average vehicle velocity). The driver is probably a lot better at making decisions than the computer -- but that wouldn't really have anything to do with MS Live.
MSFT was hoping to buy at the equivalent of $31/share, though they're offering less as their stock slips; YHOO is currently trading at (conservatively) $27.50, and if you think Microsoft can dump several billion dollars' worth of demand into the common market without spurring that trading price up at least $3.50 per share, you're overly optimistic.
Microsoft is simply going to have to pay more, despite their threats to the contrary. Admittedly the Yahoo! stock may be trending up because of irrational confidence brought on by the Board's response to MS's offer, but so far that appears to be a self-fulfilling market prophecy, whether or not it's justified by the company's fundamentals. It remains to be seen what the valuation will be twelve months down the line if Yahoo! resists the takeover attempt.
A startup holding a patent can exclude others from the market or force them to increase their marginal cost of production. Assuming that the big business doesn't already hold a patent on something the small company needs, and form a patent consortium with other large businesses to ensure no newcomers can get a toehold in the market.
FTA: Today the patent system is, if anything, a hindrance to open source.
Sure. Absolutely. The patent system is so out of control that it is, if anything, a hindrance to start-ups, too.
In the words of Dick Cheney, "So?"
What it comes down to is which interest owns more Congressmen. (I'm aware that this is a brief in a court, but any sufficiently broad decision rejecting the idea of software patents would no doubt immediately come under legislative fire).
Also note that even if the scope of "what-is-patentable" is narrowed substantially, there's still hundreds of thousands of bogus software patents out there that aren't going to be deleted with the wave of a gavel, and that would most likely need to be litigated indvidually -- at substantial expense -- before they could be revoked, one-by-one. If they even can be revoked (I'd settle for being rendered officially unenforceable).
They're approaching a Yahoo! acquisition with all the grace of the Mongols taking over a medieval village -- "If you let us in, you'll get a rough deal; if you resist, you'll get an even rougher one."
All it takes is for a couple more major shareholders to insist that Yahoo! is worth more than MS wants to pay, and the bluff will be very effectively called; you can't do a hostile takeover if you can't find shareholders willing to sell a controlling interest, and the shareholders are ultimately the ones who would suffer from an overly low valuation. Sure, maybe the Board is holding out for an unduly high valuation, but more likely MS is mis-valuing Yahoo! -- though I'm sure Yahoo!'s value would drop to whatever MS paid for it pretty quickly, if Ballmer really wants to get this far out of the company's core business.
All the more reason for major shareholders to turn their noses to the deal.
By definition, you cannot be a Christian if you don't believe in the words of the New Testament.
Interesting definition -- where's it from? What if you believe in Christian Gospels that were removed from the New Testament during the Catholic Church's editorial process of assembling an accepted canon?
Given that there's substantial variation between the canonical texts of Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and (say) Coptic Christianity, are all the latter of those non-Christians because they believe in the wrong New Testament?
Given that there's substantial evidence that the Gospels were not written simultaneously, and that John (I think it was) may well not have been written until a hundred years after the events it describes, is it the case that there were no Christians for a hundred years after Christ? You know, since they couldn't have believed a book that wasn't written yet?
Ok, first off, the better solution here is an alarm system with a panic button that calls the cops (or private security, whatever). People are animals: animals are afraid of loud, unexpected noises, even when they have the tactical advantage. And unless you have Rambo breaking into your house, even if he's armed he's not going to try to take hostages when there's a loud, obnoxious alarm, especially when it signals that police are obviously on their way.
That aside, let's look at the self-contradictions in your post.
1) Run away. Get everyone out of the house, in the car, and Far Away. 2) Threaten adversary. Accept possibility that I will be harmed in the process. 3) Harm adversary. Accept possibility that I will be harmed in the process. 4) Kill adversary. Accept possibility that I will be harmed in the process. 1) is obviously the best choice, because it is precisely what you should be practicing regularly if you're seriously concerned about the far greater threat to your safety, fire. You pointed out that 1) might not work, because the intruder might be blocking the primary exit. The exact same thing is true of a fire. If you're really concerned about security, you'll be practicing this regularly, which means it has the advantage of being the security response you're already best at.
Re: 2) -- you say you're not convinced that an armed assailant would be willing to go. However, people are animals, and animals are more responsive to threats when they know they're in hostile territory. But remember that this is intimidation -- which means that if it's doing anything, your attacker will be scared. It is entirely possible that someone scared like that will shoot first without thinking, while you're still in the "parley" stage of this encounter. Better to make the threat without revealing your location (the alarm system). Remember, they're going to have that "fight or flight" response too. Human nature says they'll choose flight -- unless there's an obvious target to fight and no obvious exit. You never want an opponent to feel cornered, and you never want them to know where to shoot.
Anyway, just a couple other points -- Assuming you're actually in a combat situation -- your firearm is locked in the closet in a safe. You're going to take the time to find the keys, get in the closet, open the case, load up, and then confront your adversary? When this whole scenario was predicated on the idea that you didn't have time to get away?
If my opponent has a hostage, I am much less likely to be able to do something with a melee weapon than with a firearm. That's crap. Your shotgun would kill both your hostage and your assailant. Even if you had a more precise weapon, are you *really* a good enough shot to take out an assailant while they have a hostage? No, the answer to a hostage situation is backup. That's what your alarm system was for. Mexican standoffs are entertaining in movies.
many people have a very visceral reaction to the sound of a round being chambered. Yes... and that reaction may be to start blindly pulling the trigger.
- Aluminum bat. Hallways are too narrow for a sword. A hallway too narrow for a sword is too narrow for a good swing (unless you're trying to disable your drywall). You can stab with a sword. Either way, suboptimal, but still.
If a sufficient proportion of people do this, and teach their children, manipulative sales/marketing techniques will decline accordingly. Actually, manipulative sales/marketing techniques will become even more subtle and deviously manipulative because of the increased selective pressure.
The only way we'd get rid of them is the "take all your antibiotics" solution -- if a sizeable-enough proportion of the population ignored them so effectively that advertising cost more than it gained in sales, so that any advertising at all was a profit-losing proposition. I find the chances of this slim.
K, come and take my 4th amendment. It'll give me a chance to practice my 2nd amendment... You're on rather shaky footing here -- all the comma-placement clause debates in the collected corpus of Law Reviews don't insert into the Second Amendment the right to murder government representatives willy-nilly.
I appreciate the sentiment you're trying to express, but (assuming, as I suspect you do, that the 2nd Amdt. is intended to give The People guns to protect them from the Gov't) that "militia" thing is in there for a reason -- effective response to tyrrany can only be carried out in the context of a supportive body of like-minded individuals. Unless you can get most possible juries of your peers convinced that you're in the right, the "object protest" of killing an American soldier in your home is a short route to a short drop -- and you'll probably find it far, far easier to convince your peers of the righteousness of your actions before you pull the trigger, since orange jumpsuits tend to undermine one's moral authority.
Modders modify things. Often cases, but sometimes drivers.
"Hacker" is often taken to mean someone who circumvents computer protections for nefarious purposes, but around here you're more likely to see it used in the original sense of "somebody who's a competent-to-excellent programmer with a knack and desire to solve problems."
In this case he's a modder because he was just making modifications to a driver set that he can't really claim to understand, while a hacker would've reverse-engineered the drivers and rewritten them in lisp, then included a module in them that runs the linux kernel on your sound card. Or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people who harp on moral relativism grossly misunderstand it.
It's not about condoning others' moral beliefs, it's about acknowledging that they have them, and are sincere about them, and might even be rather attached to them, and then modifying your behavior so that you can get along with them.
Unless you want to convert the world to your own particular morality (i.e., destroy freedom), you have to live and let live to a certain extent. You don't have to endorse others' beliefs to acknowledge that they exist, and that others act as though they were legitimate.
And between the choices of, say, moral relativism and Sharia law, well as nice as it would be not to have to shave any more, I think I'll choose the relativists, thank you.
What you say is absolutely true -- actual learning is about taking the pieces of what others have done, seeing how they work, and putting them together in new and interesting ways.
That said, don't undervalue memorization. A nice broad basis in fact is the antidote to a lot of postmodern-crap-passing-for-profundity, not to mention the importance of knowing what ideas you're working with. Of course one must *understand* what is memorized, but nothing is as impressive as a well-reasoned argument firmly grounded in facts, which you can't produce if you don't know any facts.
Here I thought *I* was a dick.
They delivered the subpoena to the house he lived at a while back. It's entirely possible that they're suing him for activities he conducted when he lived there and (may've) had internet access.
In your example, in English we would say "This is a red apple," in Chinese we would say "Zhei shi yige hongse de pingguo" (lit. "This is one-[unit] red-color type-of apple", or idiomatically, "This is a red apple").
* Modern Chinese, that is. Actually there's some evidence that ancient Chinese had a case system that's been lost over the millenia. or agglutinating languages (like early Nahuatl, they would incorporate subjects and objects into their words: "Thisapple and Thisred".) More like "ThisApple redIs" but that still doesn't say anything about how "developed" the language is. More sophisticated stuff, like polysynthetic languages (Inuktitut) and inflectional languages (Germanic) are thought to have evolved thereafter. But of course, this is one hypothesis and there is no way of proving any of this. No, but there are plenty of ways to disprove it, because it's bogus. For one, consider that English has lost a lot of the features of its Germanic near relatives (which were present in Old English), and you'll see that languages just sort of change arbitrarily, they don't evolve in a coherent direction. You're operating off of linguistic theories from a hundred years and more ago.
It seems like the real point of this article (haven't read it yet) is whether Neanderthals could've spoken Sapiens languages, not whether they could've had languages themselves -- the existence of ASL pretty much proves that you don't need an interesting vocal tract to provide sufficient symbolic variety (although that may be necessary to evolve the mental language equipment). Modern languages are heavily based on very complex grammars and therefore don't need a particularly wide range of sounds or symbols. Very early written languages directly descend from pictographic systems and require a considerably greater number of symbols and signifiers. You're smoking here. There's a great variety of grammatical complexity levels in currently spoken languages. English and Chinese (very close to each other) are babylike complexity compared to, say, Japanese or Korean; for that matter, they've both lost considerable grammatical complexity compared to earlier versions (Old English, or Ancient Chinese ca. 450 BCE)
In any event, the number of written signs has nothing to do with the range of vocabulary. Chinese has way more written characters than English, though English has the larger vocabulary. By inference, I'm going to say that very early spoken languages would also use a much wider range of sounds and fewer rules for inferring a specific meaning for a specific sound in a specific context. If that is correct It isn't. Languages that are not phonemically rich (like Polynesian languages) just tend to add more syllables, rather than developing more grammatical complexity; and phonemic complexity of languages tends to jump arbitrarily. (Incidentally, we have enough preserved writings of, e.g., Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, etc. that there are modern scholars who can speak a pretty good approximation. If by "very early" you mean like, 40,000 BC, well fine, but there's no evidence of anything from that period, so any speculation would be purely imagination).
As someone said, "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you. Then you win."
No decent human being would have sex with someone who obviously has no idea what's going on. Whether she chose to become unconscious or not is irrelevant.
And besides, there's plenty research out there that shows that the majority of rapes are committed by a very small group of repeat offenders, and that a lot of these guys intentionally target women to try to make them drunk enough that they're incapacitated before raping them. (Google "Dr. David Lisak" or "Undetected rapist" for more).
It's right there in your quote, actually -- the woman in question "gets fucked", she's not a participant. Sure, if everybody's had a few and they wind up doing things they regret and wouldn't have done sober, that's one thing; if she's (or he's!) "plastered" and then "gets fucked" you're describing a totally different situation that's really no more morally justifiable than having sex with someone in a coma.
You think that's bad? I knew a guy in college who bragged about having completely made up sources for some of his papers.
He became a Rhodes Scholar. Should've been kicked out of school, and instead got a free ride to Oxford.
Nobody cares any more.
If we assume they have a GPS, then you don't need a predictive model -- you just need actual data, displayed in a format that's clear, easy and safe to read while hurtling at 70 mph in a ton of steel.
Anyway, as you've pointed out, what this really is is a shortcut simulator to having good local knowledge of the area you're driving in -- it's a substitute for experience. What they basically have is a complex system that predicts where traffic will be. But what's better than prediction is accurate, current reporting -- and we already have an awesome technology for detecting and avoiding traffic jams, called a "radio." Pretty much every major urban area has at least one station that will give you "traffic on the 9s" or whatever during peak hours.
Now, a real useful service would be a gps with an easy interface (I've used plenty that don't have 'em) that just gives you a map of the local area and shows you realtime updates of the traffic flow (say it colours the streets based on average vehicle velocity). The driver is probably a lot better at making decisions than the computer -- but that wouldn't really have anything to do with MS Live.
Except they're not.
MSFT was hoping to buy at the equivalent of $31/share, though they're offering less as their stock slips; YHOO is currently trading at (conservatively) $27.50, and if you think Microsoft can dump several billion dollars' worth of demand into the common market without spurring that trading price up at least $3.50 per share, you're overly optimistic.
Microsoft is simply going to have to pay more, despite their threats to the contrary. Admittedly the Yahoo! stock may be trending up because of irrational confidence brought on by the Board's response to MS's offer, but so far that appears to be a self-fulfilling market prophecy, whether or not it's justified by the company's fundamentals. It remains to be seen what the valuation will be twelve months down the line if Yahoo! resists the takeover attempt.
But if we allow cell phones on domestic flights, who'd use the $5-a-minute credit-card-op plastic phone from the seat in front of you?
FTA:
Today the patent system is, if anything, a hindrance to open source.
Sure. Absolutely. The patent system is so out of control that it is, if anything, a hindrance to start-ups, too.
In the words of Dick Cheney, "So?"
What it comes down to is which interest owns more Congressmen. (I'm aware that this is a brief in a court, but any sufficiently broad decision rejecting the idea of software patents would no doubt immediately come under legislative fire).
Also note that even if the scope of "what-is-patentable" is narrowed substantially, there's still hundreds of thousands of bogus software patents out there that aren't going to be deleted with the wave of a gavel, and that would most likely need to be litigated indvidually -- at substantial expense -- before they could be revoked, one-by-one. If they even can be revoked (I'd settle for being rendered officially unenforceable).
They're approaching a Yahoo! acquisition with all the grace of the Mongols taking over a medieval village -- "If you let us in, you'll get a rough deal; if you resist, you'll get an even rougher one."
All it takes is for a couple more major shareholders to insist that Yahoo! is worth more than MS wants to pay, and the bluff will be very effectively called; you can't do a hostile takeover if you can't find shareholders willing to sell a controlling interest, and the shareholders are ultimately the ones who would suffer from an overly low valuation. Sure, maybe the Board is holding out for an unduly high valuation, but more likely MS is mis-valuing Yahoo! -- though I'm sure Yahoo!'s value would drop to whatever MS paid for it pretty quickly, if Ballmer really wants to get this far out of the company's core business.
All the more reason for major shareholders to turn their noses to the deal.
By definition, you cannot be a Christian if you don't believe in the words of the New Testament.
Interesting definition -- where's it from? What if you believe in Christian Gospels that were removed from the New Testament during the Catholic Church's editorial process of assembling an accepted canon?
Given that there's substantial variation between the canonical texts of Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and (say) Coptic Christianity, are all the latter of those non-Christians because they believe in the wrong New Testament?
Given that there's substantial evidence that the Gospels were not written simultaneously, and that John (I think it was) may well not have been written until a hundred years after the events it describes, is it the case that there were no Christians for a hundred years after Christ? You know, since they couldn't have believed a book that wasn't written yet?
How on God's green earth am I going to write down my keystroke patterns on a sticky note on my monitor???
That aside, let's look at the self-contradictions in your post. 1) Run away. Get everyone out of the house, in the car, and Far Away.
2) Threaten adversary. Accept possibility that I will be harmed in the process.
3) Harm adversary. Accept possibility that I will be harmed in the process.
4) Kill adversary. Accept possibility that I will be harmed in the process. 1) is obviously the best choice, because it is precisely what you should be practicing regularly if you're seriously concerned about the far greater threat to your safety, fire.
You pointed out that 1) might not work, because the intruder might be blocking the primary exit. The exact same thing is true of a fire. If you're really concerned about security, you'll be practicing this regularly, which means it has the advantage of being the security response you're already best at.
Re: 2) -- you say you're not convinced that an armed assailant would be willing to go. However, people are animals, and animals are more responsive to threats when they know they're in hostile territory. But remember that this is intimidation -- which means that if it's doing anything, your attacker will be scared. It is entirely possible that someone scared like that will shoot first without thinking, while you're still in the "parley" stage of this encounter. Better to make the threat without revealing your location (the alarm system).
Remember, they're going to have that "fight or flight" response too. Human nature says they'll choose flight -- unless there's an obvious target to fight and no obvious exit. You never want an opponent to feel cornered, and you never want them to know where to shoot.
Anyway, just a couple other points --
Assuming you're actually in a combat situation -- your firearm is locked in the closet in a safe. You're going to take the time to find the keys, get in the closet, open the case, load up, and then confront your adversary? When this whole scenario was predicated on the idea that you didn't have time to get away? If my opponent has a hostage, I am much less likely to be able to do something with a melee weapon than with a firearm. That's crap. Your shotgun would kill both your hostage and your assailant. Even if you had a more precise weapon, are you *really* a good enough shot to take out an assailant while they have a hostage? No, the answer to a hostage situation is backup. That's what your alarm system was for. Mexican standoffs are entertaining in movies. many people have a very visceral reaction to the sound of a round being chambered. Yes... and that reaction may be to start blindly pulling the trigger. - Aluminum bat. Hallways are too narrow for a sword. A hallway too narrow for a sword is too narrow for a good swing (unless you're trying to disable your drywall). You can stab with a sword. Either way, suboptimal, but still.
The only way we'd get rid of them is the "take all your antibiotics" solution -- if a sizeable-enough proportion of the population ignored them so effectively that advertising cost more than it gained in sales, so that any advertising at all was a profit-losing proposition. I find the chances of this slim.
I appreciate the sentiment you're trying to express, but (assuming, as I suspect you do, that the 2nd Amdt. is intended to give The People guns to protect them from the Gov't) that "militia" thing is in there for a reason -- effective response to tyrrany can only be carried out in the context of a supportive body of like-minded individuals. Unless you can get most possible juries of your peers convinced that you're in the right, the "object protest" of killing an American soldier in your home is a short route to a short drop -- and you'll probably find it far, far easier to convince your peers of the righteousness of your actions before you pull the trigger, since orange jumpsuits tend to undermine one's moral authority.
Modders modify things. Often cases, but sometimes drivers.
"Hacker" is often taken to mean someone who circumvents computer protections for nefarious purposes, but around here you're more likely to see it used in the original sense of "somebody who's a competent-to-excellent programmer with a knack and desire to solve problems."
In this case he's a modder because he was just making modifications to a driver set that he can't really claim to understand, while a hacker would've reverse-engineered the drivers and rewritten them in lisp, then included a module in them that runs the linux kernel on your sound card. Or something.
DARPA funded, designed, developed, and rolled out the Internet -- or ARPANet, as it was originally known.
See here.