The fuel in a solid model rocket engine burns quickly and expands fast. So does Gasoline. Whether they are "explosives" or not is entirely a function of what kind of container you try to contain that expansion in. Allow the quick expansion to be released in a controlled manner, either out the rocket exhaust hole, or by moving a piston head, and it's a propellant. Try to contain the expansion until it bursts, and it's an explosive.
An explosive is nothing more than a thing that burns so fast that it can expand quickly.
Not that this excuses the stupid legislation, mind you. It just means that the difference between, say, a rocket engine and a steam engine is just a matter of degree, rather than of type. Both can explode if used improperly.
Prior to the late 1990's, it was common practice to write the year as just two digits. And no, I'm not talking about in computer programs. I mean in documents and handwriting. You could write a check and give it a date like 1/2/85 and that would be accepted. Everyone did this. If you are writing a log of an activity, you used a two digit date. If you are keeping a ledger, you used a two digit date. Therefore I don't accept the claim that storage savings was the primary drive behind keeping only two digits for the year. If you wanted to save bytes that tightly, you shouldn't even be writing out the date in inefficient ascii form anyway. It would be done as an integer. Doing that, you can store a date in three bytes - a byte int for the month, a byte int for the day of the month, and a byte int for the offset since 1900. That would have saved 3 bytes more than the MMDDYY format, and lasted until the year 1900 + 255 = 2155. Even if you did it using IBM/COBOL's insane "Binary Coded Decimal" format, you could still express all dates from 1900 to 1999 in three bytes that way.
So I don't believe it was done for space savings. It was done merely because it was the same convention people used *outside* computers, and so that's what the programmers were familiar with.
My reply only missed the point if the point was "let's talk about executive orders and absolutely nothing else." But the topic was "Let's talk about abuse of executive power" - in whatever form it may take.
The PATRIOT act was penned wholly and entirely within the executive branch, and the legastative members voted it through without most of them even reading the brief summary of the thing, because the executive got the legastative in an 'emergency - hurry up and pass this' mindset and got them to be dumb enough to trust the executive.
Legally, no it's not an executive order. But because our congress was a bunch of idiotic asleep-at-the-wheel people with no backbone, with a fear of looking "unpatriotic", it has all the same features of an executive order - decree from the executive branch, no changes made by congress, changes the rules without any review.
Then what you are doing is looking at the mail in mutt, and using w3m as an external viewing app - is that the case? No, this wasn't clear from the above link. I was picturing you were reading a web-mail website with w3m, and thought, "what a silly idea".
Those measures would have helped, but for a few problems: 1 - Back then, remotable MS Windows (in other words "catching up with Unix") was not that mature. So using KVM to display what's on a Windows machine was not a viable option. 2 - Back then, Exchange was a rather new thing. It required a rather new computer. It was not practical to try running it on an older used model with small memory and slow CPU. 3 - The company was short on cash at the time. Putting two computers on everyone's desk wasn't really an option. The attitude would have been "Why does this guy need two computers when the windows programmers only need one? I guess that's just one more way that Unix is too expensive..."
4 - The real reason I left was not this specific problem. It was the ignorance on the part of the technical director who made all the decisions about future technologies the company should use. This problem was just the thing that made this person's ignorance become very apparent to me. As I tried to discuss the problem with him, I became aware of a number of things:
4.1 - He thought running a gui on unix would eat up too much bandwith. He had apparently read something about how X works over a network and uses a lot of bandwith for that, and come to the wrong conclusion that this is *always* the case when running X - ignoring the case where the X server runs on the local host. The fact that the case in which X takes up extra bandwith is a case where it's doing something Windows can't even do at all (at the time this was true), and that if you use it locally just like you have to use Windows locally all the time, there is no bandwith used by X at all. This was lost on him. I tried being polite in explaining the difference between the stats he'd read, and the way I'd be using X if it was on a unix machine on my own desk, but it was like talking to a wall.
4.2 - Somehow in a conversation it had come up about how we were moving all the source code repositories over to Visual SourceSafe, even the unix ones. During this conversation, the topic of how things currently worked on the unix side came up. At this point, Mr Ignorant pointed out how we had in the past been using something called "SCCS", and now we were using something called "RCS" (note: CVS was still very much alphaware at this point). That made sense to me, until he started explaining *why* we had switched to RCS. The reason was allegedly because SCCS was freeware, and RCS was proprietary, and proprietary is always better quality than some cheap freeware toy. At this I raised an eyebrow and was about to speak, when I caught a glance from a senior technical unix guru behind Mr Ignorant, who was shaking his head, mouthing "no", and making hand-cut-across-the-neck motions. It occurred to me that someone had probably pulled the wool over Mr Ignroant's eyes to get RCS moved into the company, because he wouldn't have accepted it if he knew it was not proprietary.
4.3 - This Mr Ignorant is the guy who decides where the company will go in the future, technology-wise. He had just convinced the CEO to sign up as a partner with Microsoft in a new vertical market scheme they were trying to get going (This was for large scale distribution of goods, so it covered warehousing, transportation, that sort of thing - our piece of the partnership would be managing the work in warehouses (that's what the software we built was for).) Knowing full well what happens to "partners" of Microsoft, especially the smaller ones, I started getting scared.
This all happened just as the company was going public, so I had a shot at buying in to some shares at a discount from their initial price, as an employee. If the company was successful, or even just moderately floating along, that would have been a sweet deal. But I had such a lack of faith in their ability to find their own head if it wasn't attached, that I declined to buy into the shares, even though I could have just as I was quitting, and I could have done the asinine thing of b
Did he ever get congress to pass a bill changing fundamental aspects of law enforcement (which is under the exceutive branch) without them EVEN READING IT?, like what happened with Patriot/USA? That was quite a coup. I'm more pissed at the congress over that then the president. The executive branch always naturally tries to increase it's power. Part of the job of the legaslative branch is to be a check against excecutive power. No major changes to executive power are supposed to happen without their overview and approval. They failed to even *attempt* to do their job, with the one exception of Feingold. Lazy bastards! Get rid of the lot of 'em.
To a large extent, how much money the government takes from your income is not nearly as important as how much restriction there is preventing you from using your money the way you like. Consider: If 50% of your money is taken in taxes, BUT you get to spend the remaining 50% however you like, then you actually have more control over your money than you would if the government only took 25% of it, but then put rules in place that prevented you from using the remaining 75% of it the way you want, such that 90% of the uses you would like to put it to weren't legal. This is what happens when you let monopolies take over too many things. Instead of a lack of choice of how to spend your money because the government took some of it, you have a lack of choice of how to spend ALL of your money, even the part you "keep".
Making it mandatory to be a customer of a company is just as bad, if not worse, than mandatory taxation by the government. (Actually, they're about the same, but mandatory consumerism is a bigger threat right now because people don't see it as a problem.)
I agree with your assesment as to why nobody's working on it (Most linux coding is being done by people who are not using it for desktop corporate work - if it's corporate, it's server work, and if it's desktop, it's at home.) But it is a *huge* hurdle to getting linux to be accepted in the business environment. Setting up meetings, and scheduling things for people, is a core need of any large company - but to make it work, everybody has to be on the system. If my desktop doesn't use Exchange, then you can't tell what my schedule is, and you can't use the tool to help decide when to invite me to a meeting.
So if the company uses Exchange for meetings, then I end up having to have Windows on my desktop so that other people can work with my schedule. And the frustrating thing is that this purely administrative need ends up driving what I have on my desk, and if my technical needs suffer because of this, then I just have to suck it up. This is one of the reasons I left the company I was working at 8 years ago. They switched everything to Exchange, even the ISO9000 documents that were mandatory for getting things done. And so then I had to have Windows on my desktop, even though my job was 100% unix programming, and they had remote X firewalled off - so that meant nothing but textual interfaces to my work, and all through a windows terminal program. The company's response was that this shouldn't be a problem since Unix never does anything but text anyway... (Which is blatantly false, of course, and shows extreme igornace on the part of the people directing the future of the company - that's when I started looking for work elsewhere)
What would a species of unisexual creatures understand about the term "androgynous behaviour"? They wouldn't even *have* a concept of gender roles in society. They might have other social strata roles, but they wouldn't think of dividing them on gender lines.
"What's androgynous behaviour?" "Oh that's when you act like either a man or a woman instead of ambiguously halfway between." "Oh. Okay. I've got it now" "Good." "Just one question, though." "Okay" "What's a 'man'? What's a 'woman'?"
The term "androgynous" wouldn't even mean anything to them until maybe they had contact with other species.
Now could they have told the story of the early federation without time travel? Yes, but they could NOT have told a story about the early beginnings of the federation under attack by time travellers from the future without time travel.
The show was not billed as being about time travel. It was billed as being about the start of the federation. And that was the show I was attempting to watch. But a show about preserving the future of the federation is not a show about the start of the federation.
Wouldn't that be as useless as passing a law that makes lungs mandatory in humans? If it's part of the race's biology, then why the need to make it mandatory? The race is going to be androgynous regardless of what the laws say.
While I agree that the time travel is ONE aspect of the show, I do not agree that it was the basis of the series. It was one TOOL used to help the basis along. Saying it was the basis of the story would be like saying Babylon 5 was a show where rotational intertia was the basis of the show, because that's how the station got it's gravity.
They could have told the story of the start of the federation without using that tool. It was not crucial to the story, and I agree with previous posters who say it was detremental to include it.
"Kazaa is designed specifically to be capable of sharing copyrighted material, with the intent to share or proliferate. If you downnload a copyrighted song with it, you are using it for exactly what it was made for. " Right? ?
Wrong.
With this counterexample I have refuted your argument in its totality.
Wow. That's the biggest fucking handgun I've ever seen. You did notice I said HANDgun, right?
Your Kazaa example is irrelevant anyway. You speak of a single product. I was speaking of a class of products.
time travel involved which is THE BASIS OF THE SERIES
I admit that I stopped watching Enterprise in the middle of the first season, but since when was time travel the BASIS of it? The BASIS was how Earth got started toward becoming the Federation. That they chose to make a time-travel plot come up a lot doesn't make it the basis for the show.
While I agree that the quality of Star Trek has been pretty bad (which is a shame because it's a workable universe in which to place good stories, but they rarely ever did), DS9 was actually the best of the group (such as it was), because it had a continuing plot. By setting it on a space station, they could have things that happen in one episode affect the next episode. There was fallout from the decisions the crew made. (And the actors were generally better, in my opinion, on DS9, although I don't know what to attribute that to. Especially the actor for Sisko, who was originally a Shakesperian stage actor, and it shows in his delivery. When he'd get righteously indignant about something, you damn well *felt* it in his booming voice.)
The problem with Voyager was that they destroyed what made it potentially a good series - the feel of being one ship alone without federation support, and needing to cut deals to make things work. The ship could just magically heal itself between episodes. It should have gotten more and more dingy and battle-scarred as the series went on, and the politcal fallout from deals the crew had to make should have had plotwise sweeping effects, but they just didn't.
Enterprise could have been good from the setup - you get to watch how Earth took it's first steps toward becoming the Federation, before the Federation existed. But, I stopped watching in the middle of season 1 because the message, over and over and over, was always, "Doing nothing is the best option because when you act, you end up making huge mistakes." Unsurprisingly, that doesn't make for a good show. I mean, COME ON! The last episode I watched was the one where the challenge of the whole entire episode was that they had to try to figure out what one crew member's favorite *food* was, for crying out loud. That's not gripping television.
The only reason I watched it was that it was the lead-in for Special Unit 2 - a show that was cheesy, but it reveled in it's cheesiness and had fun with it. It had more "soul" than the Star Treks did. And they cancelled it for no apparent reason. It was their third highest rated show, and had a way cheaper budget than Star Trek, and they cancelled it for no good reason and kept Star Trek.
A handgun is designed specifically to be capable of destroying flesh, with the intent to wound or kill. If you shoot someone with it, you are using it for exactly what it was made for. The fact that it can be a deterrent to crime is just a side-effect of this feature. It is not a seperate type of use altogether, as the gun lobby tries to phrase it. (Note: I favor gun ownership rights - I just think that this particular argument is a stupid way to try to support it. The reason I support gun ownership rights is specifically *because* guns are an unbalancing factor that makes it trivially easy to kill - that's the kind of power that shouldn't be solely in the hands of government.) Digital copying, on the other hand, has uses that are totally independant of copyright violations. Outlawing it is like trying to reduce traffic fatalities by making it illegal for anybody to own a car.
Somolia is considerably drier than Vietnam. If you have to travel through a wet jungle to get where you're going, then your gun is going to get messy whether you are a professional who knows this is a bad thing or not. Knowing that you should clean your gun as soon as you get a chance is unhelpful if the enemy chooses to attack you right after you've been slogging through wet mud. He won't wait for you to clean your gun first.
Slashdot Mirror
The fuel in a solid model rocket engine burns quickly and expands fast. So does Gasoline. Whether they are "explosives" or not is entirely a function of what kind of container you try to contain that expansion in. Allow the quick expansion to be released in a controlled manner, either out the rocket exhaust hole, or by moving a piston head, and it's a propellant. Try to contain the expansion until it bursts, and it's an explosive.
An explosive is nothing more than a thing that burns so fast that
it can expand quickly.
Not that this excuses the stupid legislation, mind you. It just means that the difference between, say, a rocket engine and a steam engine is just a matter of degree, rather than of type. Both can explode if used improperly.
The relevant difference is:
The death star: didn't exist until evil people started building it.
Redmond: predates Microsoft.
Prior to the late 1990's, it was common practice to write the year as just two digits. And no, I'm not talking about in computer programs. I mean in documents and handwriting. You could write a check and give it a date like 1/2/85 and that would be accepted. Everyone did this. If you are writing a log of an activity, you used a two digit date. If you are keeping a ledger, you used a two digit date. Therefore I don't accept the claim that storage savings was the primary drive behind keeping only two digits for the year. If you wanted to save bytes that tightly, you shouldn't even be writing out the date in inefficient ascii form anyway. It would be done as an integer. Doing that, you can store a date in three bytes - a byte int for the month, a byte int for the day of the month, and a byte int for the offset since 1900. That would have saved 3 bytes more than the MMDDYY format, and lasted until the year 1900 + 255 = 2155. Even if you did it using IBM/COBOL's insane "Binary Coded Decimal" format, you could still express all dates from 1900 to 1999 in three bytes that way.
So I don't believe it was done for space savings. It was done merely because it was the same convention people used *outside* computers, and so that's what the programmers were familiar with.
Hey - lots of people live in Redmond who's only crime is being neighbors with evil rather than being part of the evil.
My reply only missed the point if the point was "let's talk about executive orders and absolutely nothing else." But the topic was "Let's talk about abuse of executive power" - in whatever form it may take.
The PATRIOT act was penned wholly and entirely within the executive branch, and the legastative members voted it through without most of them even reading the brief summary of the thing, because the executive got the legastative in an 'emergency - hurry up and pass this' mindset and got them to be dumb enough to trust the executive.
Legally, no it's not an executive order. But because our congress was a bunch of idiotic asleep-at-the-wheel people with no backbone, with a fear of looking "unpatriotic", it has all the same features of an executive order - decree from the executive branch, no changes made by congress, changes the rules without any review.
Then what you are doing is looking at the mail in mutt, and using w3m as an external viewing app - is that the case? No, this wasn't clear from the above link. I was picturing you were reading a web-mail website with w3m, and thought, "what a silly idea".
Those measures would have helped, but for a few problems:
1 - Back then, remotable MS Windows (in other words "catching up with Unix") was not that mature. So using KVM to display what's on a Windows machine was not a viable option.
2 - Back then, Exchange was a rather new thing. It required a rather new computer. It was not practical to try running it on an older used model with small memory and slow CPU.
3 - The company was short on cash at the time. Putting two computers on everyone's desk wasn't really an option. The attitude would have been "Why does this guy need two computers when the windows programmers only need one? I guess that's just one more way that Unix is too expensive..."
4 - The real reason I left was not this specific problem. It was the ignorance on the part of the technical director who made all the decisions about future technologies the company should use. This problem was just the thing that made this person's ignorance become very apparent to me. As I tried to discuss the problem with him, I became aware of a number of things:
4.1 - He thought running a gui on unix would eat up too much bandwith. He had apparently read something about how X works over a network and uses a lot of bandwith for that, and come to the wrong conclusion that this is *always* the case when running X - ignoring the case where the X server runs on the local host. The fact that the case in which X takes up extra bandwith is a case where it's doing something Windows can't even do at all (at the time this was true), and that if you use it locally just like you have to use Windows locally all the time, there is no bandwith used by X at all. This was lost on him. I tried being polite in explaining the difference between the stats he'd read, and the way I'd be using X if it was on a unix machine on my own desk, but it was like talking to a wall.
4.2 - Somehow in a conversation it had come up about how we were moving all the source code repositories over to Visual SourceSafe, even the unix ones. During this conversation, the topic of how things currently worked on the unix side came up. At this point, Mr Ignorant pointed out how we had in the past been using something called "SCCS", and now we were using something called "RCS" (note: CVS was still very much alphaware at this point). That made sense to me, until he started explaining *why* we had switched to RCS. The reason was allegedly because SCCS was freeware, and RCS was proprietary, and proprietary is always better quality than some cheap freeware toy. At this I raised an eyebrow and was about to speak, when I caught a glance from a senior technical unix guru behind Mr Ignorant, who was shaking his head, mouthing "no", and making hand-cut-across-the-neck motions. It occurred to me that someone had probably pulled the wool over Mr Ignroant's eyes to get RCS moved into the company, because he wouldn't have accepted it if he knew it was not proprietary.
4.3 - This Mr Ignorant is the guy who decides where the company will go in the future, technology-wise. He had just convinced the CEO to sign up as a partner with Microsoft in a new vertical market scheme they were trying to get going (This was for large scale distribution of goods, so it covered warehousing, transportation, that sort of thing - our piece of the partnership would be managing the work in warehouses (that's what the software we built was for).) Knowing full well what happens to "partners" of Microsoft, especially the smaller ones, I started getting scared.
This all happened just as the company was going public, so I had a shot at buying in to some shares at a discount from their initial price, as an employee. If the company was successful, or even just moderately floating along, that would have been a sweet deal. But I had such a lack of faith in their ability to find their own head if it wasn't attached, that I declined to buy into the shares, even though I could have just as I was quitting, and I could have done the asinine thing of b
Did he ever get congress to pass a bill changing fundamental aspects of law enforcement (which is under the exceutive branch) without them EVEN READING IT?, like what happened with Patriot/USA? That was quite a coup. I'm more pissed at the congress over that then the president. The executive branch always naturally tries to increase it's power. Part of the job of the legaslative branch is to be a check against excecutive power. No major changes to executive power are supposed to happen without their overview and approval. They failed to even *attempt* to do their job, with the one exception of Feingold. Lazy bastards! Get rid of the lot of 'em.
To a large extent, how much money the government takes from your income is not nearly as important as how much restriction there is preventing you from using your money the way you like. Consider: If 50% of your money is taken in taxes, BUT you get to spend the remaining 50% however you like, then you actually have more control over your money than you would if the government only took 25% of it, but then put rules in place that prevented you from using the remaining 75% of it the way you want, such that 90% of the uses you would like to put it to weren't legal. This is what happens when you let monopolies take over too many things. Instead of a lack of choice of how to spend your money because the government took some of it, you have a lack of choice of how to spend ALL of your money, even the part you "keep".
Making it mandatory to be a customer of a company is just as bad, if not worse, than mandatory taxation by the government. (Actually, they're about the same, but mandatory consumerism is a bigger threat right now because people don't see it as a problem.)
Why are you looking at e-mail in a web browser? What about pine or mutt or something like that?
You're forgetting that the air force is running many of their systems on Microsoft's software.
I agree with your assesment as to why nobody's working on it (Most linux coding is being done by people who are not using it for desktop corporate work - if it's corporate, it's server work, and if it's desktop, it's at home.) But it is a *huge* hurdle to getting linux to be accepted in the business environment. Setting up meetings, and scheduling things for people, is a core need of any large company - but to make it work, everybody has to be on the system. If my desktop doesn't use Exchange, then you can't tell what my schedule is, and you can't use the tool to help decide when to invite me to a meeting.
So if the company uses Exchange for meetings, then I end up having to have Windows on my desktop so that other people can work with my schedule. And the frustrating thing is that this purely administrative need ends up driving what I have on my desk, and if my technical needs suffer because of this, then I just have to suck it up. This is one of the reasons I left the company I was working at 8 years ago. They switched everything to Exchange, even the ISO9000 documents that were mandatory for getting things done. And so then I had to have Windows on my desktop, even though my job was 100% unix programming, and they had remote X firewalled off - so that meant nothing but textual interfaces to my work, and all through a windows terminal program. The company's response was that this shouldn't be a problem since Unix never does anything but text anyway... (Which is blatantly false, of course, and shows extreme igornace on the part of the people directing the future of the company - that's when I started looking for work elsewhere)
"What's androgynous behaviour?"
"Oh that's when you act like either a man or a woman instead of ambiguously halfway between."
Ooops. Obviously I meant that the other way around.
Maybe you would be happier if you took the show at face value
Expecting that the show will suck still doesn't make it suck less.
Nice try. That's not the same gun you mentioned before.
What would a species of unisexual creatures understand about the term "androgynous behaviour"? They wouldn't even *have* a concept of gender roles in society. They might have other social strata roles, but they wouldn't think of dividing them on gender lines.
"What's androgynous behaviour?"
"Oh that's when you act like either a man or a woman instead of ambiguously halfway between."
"Oh. Okay. I've got it now"
"Good."
"Just one question, though."
"Okay"
"What's a 'man'? What's a 'woman'?"
The term "androgynous" wouldn't even mean anything to them until maybe they had contact with other species.
Now could they have told the story of the early federation without time travel? Yes, but they could NOT have told a story about the early beginnings of the federation under attack by time travellers from the future without time travel.
The show was not billed as being about time travel. It was billed as being about the start of the federation. And that was the show I was attempting to watch. But a show about preserving the future of the federation is not a show about the start of the federation.
unisexual race where angrogyny is manditory.
Wouldn't that be as useless as passing a law that makes lungs mandatory in humans? If it's part of the race's biology, then why the need to make it mandatory? The race is going to be androgynous regardless of what the laws say.
While I agree that the time travel is ONE aspect of the show, I do not agree that it was the basis of the series. It was one TOOL used to help the basis along. Saying it was the basis of the story would be like saying Babylon 5 was a show where rotational intertia was the basis of the show, because that's how the station got it's gravity.
They could have told the story of the start of the federation without using that tool. It was not crucial to the story, and I agree with previous posters who say it was detremental to include it.
"Kazaa is designed specifically to be capable of sharing copyrighted material, with the intent to share or proliferate. If you downnload a copyrighted song with it, you are using it for exactly what it was made for. "
Right?
?
Wrong.
With this counterexample I have refuted your argument in its totality.
Wow. That's the biggest fucking handgun I've ever seen. You did notice I said HANDgun, right?
Your Kazaa example is irrelevant anyway. You speak of a single product. I was speaking of a class of products.
Either point out to me where I claimed otherwise, or apologise for your utterly bullshit insult.
time travel involved which is THE BASIS OF THE SERIES
I admit that I stopped watching Enterprise in the middle of the first season, but since when was time travel the BASIS of it? The BASIS was how Earth got started toward becoming the Federation. That they chose to make a time-travel plot come up a lot doesn't make it the basis for the show.
While I agree that the quality of Star Trek has been pretty bad (which is a shame because it's a workable universe in which to place good stories, but they rarely ever did), DS9 was actually the best of the group (such as it was), because it had a continuing plot. By setting it on a space station, they could have things that happen in one episode affect the next episode. There was fallout from the decisions the crew made. (And the actors were generally better, in my opinion, on DS9, although I don't know what to attribute that to. Especially the actor for Sisko, who was originally a Shakesperian stage actor, and it shows in his delivery. When he'd get righteously indignant about something, you damn well *felt* it in his booming voice.)
The problem with Voyager was that they destroyed what made it potentially a good series - the feel of being one ship alone without federation support, and needing to cut deals to make things work. The ship could just magically heal itself between episodes. It should have gotten more and more dingy and battle-scarred as the series went on, and the politcal fallout from deals the crew had to make should have had plotwise sweeping effects, but they just didn't.
Enterprise could have been good from the setup - you get to watch how Earth took it's first steps toward becoming the Federation, before the Federation existed. But, I stopped watching in the middle of season 1 because the message, over and over and over, was always, "Doing nothing is the best option because when you act, you end up making huge mistakes." Unsurprisingly, that doesn't make for a good show. I mean, COME ON! The last episode I watched was the one where the challenge of the whole entire episode was that they had to try to figure out what one crew member's favorite *food* was, for crying out loud. That's not gripping television.
The only reason I watched it was that it was the lead-in for Special Unit 2 - a show that was cheesy, but it reveled in it's cheesiness and had fun with it. It had more "soul" than the Star Treks did. And they cancelled it for no apparent reason. It was their third highest rated show, and had a way cheaper budget than Star Trek, and they cancelled it for no good reason and kept Star Trek.
A handgun is designed specifically to be capable of destroying flesh, with the intent to wound or kill. If you shoot someone with it, you are using it for exactly what it was made for. The fact that it can be a deterrent to crime is just a side-effect of this feature. It is not a seperate type of use altogether, as the gun lobby tries to phrase it. (Note: I favor gun ownership rights - I just think that this particular argument is a stupid way to try to support it. The reason I support gun ownership rights is specifically *because* guns are an unbalancing factor that makes it trivially easy to kill - that's the kind of power that shouldn't be solely in the hands of government.) Digital copying, on the other hand, has uses that are totally independant of copyright violations. Outlawing it is like trying to reduce traffic fatalities by making it illegal for anybody to own a car.
Somolia is considerably drier than Vietnam. If you have to travel through a wet jungle to get where you're going, then your gun is going to get messy whether you are a professional who knows this is a bad thing or not. Knowing that you should clean your gun as soon as you get a chance is unhelpful if the enemy chooses to attack you right after you've been slogging through wet mud. He won't wait for you to clean your gun first.