You *can* (submitter appears to be a bit confused) but there is certainly no guarantee it will work well. When you go against the Ubuntu way and start making your own decisions it's easy to get well outside of what is tested and supported.
Even KDE is IIRC only maintained by external volunteers, Ubuntu is built around the idea that they decide and you use what they decided on. If you want to make choices there are plenty of better distributions to use.
Read this slowly and carefully. You do not have a right not to be offended. No one has any obligation to be 'sensitive' to you. Grow up and get a life.
But we were not talking about a particularly difficult program to configure. If you will read the message I replied to you will see it has nothing to do with that, the poster thought that using a text editor for system configuration should be excluded from consideration on purely chronological basis.
Noscript is a very large part of what keeps me using firefox. Chrome was so creepy it was uninstalled and manually purged within a few hours.
But I currently have 14 extensions involved, there are maybe 2 or 3 that I could live without. I used to setup firefox for all my friends and family and I would spend 5 minutes to set it up and be done with it. Now if I try that I get this crazy thing I dont even know how to use myself. I spend hours of my time keeping it working through updates on my machine but it's unreasonable for me to do that with every one of my friends and acquaintances, so they get IE or Safari instead these days.
"No you wouldn't. You can't stab or club someone who can run faster than you, and you can see off a knife wielder with a chair, pool cue or beer glass (done that, admittedly with a rather large one)."
Sure, anytime a situation turns violent all kinds of things can happen. A 90 year old man can brain a 20 year old tough guy with a lucky shot from a tire iron, but you're a fool if you are betting on him to actually pull it off.
The vast majority of the time, violent human behavior comes from young males. There are clear biological reasons for this and no chance of it changing anytime in the foreseeable future. The young male is physically superior, on aggregate, to any other demographic, so if there are no weapons in play he has a dominant position and can do much damage. Weapons serve as an equalizer here, and the better the weapons involved the closer to equal the contest becomes. The 90 year old man confronted by a 20 year old tough, in other words, has no chance with bare fists, but a very good chance if he has a loaded shotgun. And the tough guy is going to simply back off the moment he sees it, because he knows what it does to that power relationship himself.
So what you do when you remove the weapons is empower the most violent demographic and encourage their worst tendencies. Think about it.
You and many others see fit to inform me over and over again that the number of 'successful' suicides, at least, will indeed drop if you restrict weapons (and, presumably, everything else similarly deadly, the idea is just to make sure there are no good implements around to do it with so that there is more chance that the attempted suicide wakes up in a hospital instead of dying.) I wont dispute that this is relatively better as long as those are the only alternatives that are taken note of, sure. Even on that level you are talking about violating fundamental human rights in order to eke out a marginal improvement in aggregate material welfare but I get that you dont want to see it that way.
I still have not seen any sort of response to the suggestion that the root problems be addressed before it comes to the point of attempting suicide and either a) dying or b) waking up in a hospital half dead.
What method could possibly be more convenient, simple, and appropriate than opening the file with your text editor of choice and deleting the line?
What do you expect? Some bulky "management interface" to hold your hand while you take 10 times as long as necessary to do the simple task of *removing an entry from a text file*? What is wrong with you?
"Gun control" in this country has always been about race. The first laws were just to prohibit coloured men from exercising their rights. As time went on that kind of discrimination became less acceptable, so they had to rewrite the laws. So the next wave was to outlaw inexpensive firearms, "saturday night specials," because those were the kind the coloured man was likely to be able to afford.
You know the nazi gun laws in California? Guess how they got pushed through the legislature? A bunch of coloured folk called themselves "Black Panthers" got real uppity, reading the Constitution and trying to exercise their rights under it, and the people that were supposed to defend the Constitution were so pathetically frightened of black skin that they shredded it themselves.
A great many have indeed endorsed this strange 'theory' that the fourth amendment means what it says; and Judge Andrew Napolitano comes immediately to mind so here you go.
"Because in the best case, using these "tools" in an urban environment correctly and safely for their designed and intended purpose, at least one person will die."
"Used properly" would entail that they certainly never, ever be discharged in an urban environment (barring properly constructed indoor shooting ranges) unless at least one persons life is already in jeopardy.
In many cases they wind up saving one without taking the other, in fact, because the aggressor will normally cease aggression when he realizes his target is armed. In cases where that does not happen, I would consider it better for the defender to live and the attacker to die than the other way around, would you not? Why not?
It is a cultural sickness, a culture that glorifies violence, that disparages the peacemaker and worships the killer.
The guns are just a tool. Without them we would have fewer gunshot wounds and more stabbings, more people with their heads caved in, etc.
But as long as we can blame it on the guns, and on law-abiding gun owners who never hurt anyone, we can keep distracting ourselves from the national illness and keep pretending we are fine. It's just those nasty guns, and these silly hicks that dont want to give theirs up. No need to re-examine our values and way of life, no need to think hard questions. Just outlaw the guns. That'll do it.
"WTF? What are you talking about? You install it and you use it. "
Eh, no. The draw for Firefox FROM THE BEGINNING was that it was a bare bones, sane browser that was easily extensible. Firefox adoption was driven by extensions, and I dont know anyone that dropped netscape until the necessary extensions were ready to use.
Over time they have continually introduced severe UI regressions. Each time people fix it the best they can, using extensions, or hunting around about:config for obscure settings to get things working correctly again.
At this point, after using firefox for about a decade, a bare install is about the ugliest, least usable, and least functional piece of software I have ever seen. Even Internet Explorer beats it handily, as much as it hurts me to say that.
"Where were these slef styles defenders of liberty when Bush was setting up the gulag in Gitmo and using torture? They were cheering him on."
No, I assure you I was not. I was out protesting and organizing against it. Where were YOU when I was looking for help?
Lobbying for victim disarmament and health care disaster?
"If there ever was a fascist takeover of the US, the NRA would be there in their jackboots and pillowcases rounding up opponents to help the new regime."
I think it IS a given that a prescription which does not make any attempt whatsoever to address the underlying problems that make people want to commit suicide, but instead attempts to limit their opportunities to carry through on that desire, is the wrong direction to go in the long run.
I used to do this but these days it takes hours to get firefox anywhere near sane or usable after installing or defaulting it. It's simply too much work. Safari for windows is surprisingly functional with defaults however.
"After Sandy Hook, a couple of Colorado Democrats passed some legislation that stated something to the effect of if you were mentally ill you couldn't get a gun. One of them was recalled and another resigned because it looked as if the recall effort was going to pass"
Well they should be forced to resign if they are so ignorant of a subject they did not realize that this is ALREADY federal law.
There's quite a bit of truth in your post, sprinkled in amongst the poor assumptions and false implications.
"There's really not all that much you can do to prevent people and especially children from going psycho every once in a while. That doesn't mean you should stop trying, of course, but the main thing you'll first have to take care of is just this: If someone cracks, see to it that this person can't inflict that much damage on himself or his environment."
Sure.
Now, I believe you are implying that having fewer weapons around serves this purpose.
That is not such a straightforward proposition however. Because the amount of damage someone can do is not simply a straightforward derivation from their opportunities to acquire a weapon. The ability of their intended victims to fight back plays a role as well as many other elements of circumstance.
A young male (the type statistically most likely to cause a problem) is relatively advantaged by limitations on weapons, while females and the elderly (statistically less likely to cause problems) are relatively disadvantaged. This is not new or specific to firearms - before they were invented we had essentially the same issue with swords and knives. Where it was lawful to be openly armed, swords were worn, which give an older man with experience a chance to beat a younger man. Where it was not lawful, knives were carried as they could be concealed, and this gives the advantage to the younger, faster man instead.
Violence is a serious social problem, and one that needs to be addressed as such. Demonizing tools does nothing to help and often winds up hurting, directly or indirectly.
Do you even read this stuff and try the laugh test before you post it?
Local tribesmen raided a school. Not someone at the school going off shooting, wild 'indians' raided it. Not the same thing at all.
And then the next item is a guy that shot a headmaster so abusive that the jury acquitted him. Sounds like an interesting case but barely relevant here.
That list doesnt actually get going until much more recent years.
"The vast majority are suicides and accidental shootings. Making guns illegal would practically eliminate those causes of death."
This is naive and illogical. I suppose you think the first suicide came after the invention of the firearm? There are many ways to commit suicide, and many, many dangerous items with which one can kill oneself accidentally as well.
Suicide is an act of hopelessness. If you want to prevent it, you should act to give hope to the hopeless, not to take what little they do have away from them. And accidental deaths are best addressed with safe handling training. People that handle firearms carefully and correctly are not the problem there.
The fact is that US school shootings prior to the last couple of decades were... unheard of. It's a very recent phenomena.
And for most of our history, school children routinely carried loaded firearms to school in the US!
The local elementary school here once had a safe room where students' weapons were placed during classes, they were returned to the children at the end of the day so they could hunt for dinner on the way home, and that was not all that long ago, and no one ever got into a shootout.
"You're obviously not a developer if you think that a site specifically for posting code "should" allow itself to be spammed with fake projects that are actually designed to take offensive positions for shock value."
The ad hominen is total fail. In fact they do host quite a few parody projects, which is what we are talking about, and they dont seem to have a problem with it in general. Only in this case because a pack of professional complainers are involved. And while I can appreciate they probably took this route to avoid confrontation and save money, history indicates it is likely to have the opposite effect. See Danegeld and Streisand Effect for starters.
Btw, if you think that parody is "offensive" and "shock[ing]" that is pretty sad in and of itself, and that is the saddest thing about this story. That there are not just a few, but a swarming mass of people in this country that are so completely uneducated and unenlightened and unable to behave in public as this. The correct word is not offensive, or shocking. Hopefully it's funny. And maybe it fails at that, but at worst it's just not funny. Where did people get this idea that it's ok to be so offended by your neighbors attempts at humor that you want to forcibly shut him up anyway?
Really, if you find it so offensive, stop reading. Read something else. Problem solved.
Just having a right to do something does not guarantee it is what you should be doing, and it does not mean your decision is beyond criticism. In this case it appears to be a decision that was indeed entirely within their rights, but also a very poor decision that they can and should be spanked hard for in the arena of public opinion.
The difference is that this is really critical functionality that should have been built in and tested from day one, but gets pushed way down the priority stack because of googles conflict of interest in the matter. So it's like that situation a little, but not really.
Slashdot Mirror
You *can* (submitter appears to be a bit confused) but there is certainly no guarantee it will work well. When you go against the Ubuntu way and start making your own decisions it's easy to get well outside of what is tested and supported.
Even KDE is IIRC only maintained by external volunteers, Ubuntu is built around the idea that they decide and you use what they decided on. If you want to make choices there are plenty of better distributions to use.
Read this slowly and carefully. You do not have a right not to be offended. No one has any obligation to be 'sensitive' to you. Grow up and get a life.
Some sort of a traitorous browser is required here and I think I would try to close that hole first.
But we were not talking about a particularly difficult program to configure. If you will read the message I replied to you will see it has nothing to do with that, the poster thought that using a text editor for system configuration should be excluded from consideration on purely chronological basis.
Noscript is a very large part of what keeps me using firefox. Chrome was so creepy it was uninstalled and manually purged within a few hours.
But I currently have 14 extensions involved, there are maybe 2 or 3 that I could live without. I used to setup firefox for all my friends and family and I would spend 5 minutes to set it up and be done with it. Now if I try that I get this crazy thing I dont even know how to use myself. I spend hours of my time keeping it working through updates on my machine but it's unreasonable for me to do that with every one of my friends and acquaintances, so they get IE or Safari instead these days.
"No you wouldn't. You can't stab or club someone who can run faster than you, and you can see off a knife wielder with a chair, pool cue or beer glass (done that, admittedly with a rather large one)."
Sure, anytime a situation turns violent all kinds of things can happen. A 90 year old man can brain a 20 year old tough guy with a lucky shot from a tire iron, but you're a fool if you are betting on him to actually pull it off.
The vast majority of the time, violent human behavior comes from young males. There are clear biological reasons for this and no chance of it changing anytime in the foreseeable future. The young male is physically superior, on aggregate, to any other demographic, so if there are no weapons in play he has a dominant position and can do much damage. Weapons serve as an equalizer here, and the better the weapons involved the closer to equal the contest becomes. The 90 year old man confronted by a 20 year old tough, in other words, has no chance with bare fists, but a very good chance if he has a loaded shotgun. And the tough guy is going to simply back off the moment he sees it, because he knows what it does to that power relationship himself.
So what you do when you remove the weapons is empower the most violent demographic and encourage their worst tendencies. Think about it.
You and many others see fit to inform me over and over again that the number of 'successful' suicides, at least, will indeed drop if you restrict weapons (and, presumably, everything else similarly deadly, the idea is just to make sure there are no good implements around to do it with so that there is more chance that the attempted suicide wakes up in a hospital instead of dying.) I wont dispute that this is relatively better as long as those are the only alternatives that are taken note of, sure. Even on that level you are talking about violating fundamental human rights in order to eke out a marginal improvement in aggregate material welfare but I get that you dont want to see it that way.
I still have not seen any sort of response to the suggestion that the root problems be addressed before it comes to the point of attempting suicide and either a) dying or b) waking up in a hospital half dead.
What method could possibly be more convenient, simple, and appropriate than opening the file with your text editor of choice and deleting the line?
What do you expect? Some bulky "management interface" to hold your hand while you take 10 times as long as necessary to do the simple task of *removing an entry from a text file*? What is wrong with you?
"Gun control" in this country has always been about race. The first laws were just to prohibit coloured men from exercising their rights. As time went on that kind of discrimination became less acceptable, so they had to rewrite the laws. So the next wave was to outlaw inexpensive firearms, "saturday night specials," because those were the kind the coloured man was likely to be able to afford.
You know the nazi gun laws in California? Guess how they got pushed through the legislature? A bunch of coloured folk called themselves "Black Panthers" got real uppity, reading the Constitution and trying to exercise their rights under it, and the people that were supposed to defend the Constitution were so pathetically frightened of black skin that they shredded it themselves.
A great many have indeed endorsed this strange 'theory' that the fourth amendment means what it says; and Judge Andrew Napolitano comes immediately to mind so here you go.
"Because in the best case, using these "tools" in an urban environment correctly and safely for their designed and intended purpose, at least one person will die."
"Used properly" would entail that they certainly never, ever be discharged in an urban environment (barring properly constructed indoor shooting ranges) unless at least one persons life is already in jeopardy.
In many cases they wind up saving one without taking the other, in fact, because the aggressor will normally cease aggression when he realizes his target is armed. In cases where that does not happen, I would consider it better for the defender to live and the attacker to die than the other way around, would you not? Why not?
It is a cultural sickness, a culture that glorifies violence, that disparages the peacemaker and worships the killer.
The guns are just a tool. Without them we would have fewer gunshot wounds and more stabbings, more people with their heads caved in, etc.
But as long as we can blame it on the guns, and on law-abiding gun owners who never hurt anyone, we can keep distracting ourselves from the national illness and keep pretending we are fine. It's just those nasty guns, and these silly hicks that dont want to give theirs up. No need to re-examine our values and way of life, no need to think hard questions. Just outlaw the guns. That'll do it.
Not.
"WTF? What are you talking about? You install it and you use it. "
Eh, no. The draw for Firefox FROM THE BEGINNING was that it was a bare bones, sane browser that was easily extensible. Firefox adoption was driven by extensions, and I dont know anyone that dropped netscape until the necessary extensions were ready to use.
Over time they have continually introduced severe UI regressions. Each time people fix it the best they can, using extensions, or hunting around about:config for obscure settings to get things working correctly again.
At this point, after using firefox for about a decade, a bare install is about the ugliest, least usable, and least functional piece of software I have ever seen. Even Internet Explorer beats it handily, as much as it hurts me to say that.
"Where were these slef styles defenders of liberty when Bush was setting up the gulag in Gitmo and using torture? They were cheering him on."
No, I assure you I was not. I was out protesting and organizing against it. Where were YOU when I was looking for help?
Lobbying for victim disarmament and health care disaster?
"If there ever was a fascist takeover of the US, the NRA would be there in their jackboots and pillowcases rounding up opponents to help the new regime."
I have nothing to do with the NRA. Try JPFO.
I think it IS a given that a prescription which does not make any attempt whatsoever to address the underlying problems that make people want to commit suicide, but instead attempts to limit their opportunities to carry through on that desire, is the wrong direction to go in the long run.
I used to do this but these days it takes hours to get firefox anywhere near sane or usable after installing or defaulting it. It's simply too much work. Safari for windows is surprisingly functional with defaults however.
Your "wild west" rot is a creation of hollywood, not of mine, or reality.
I am talking about normal people walking around with their tools, using them correctly, and safely. What's so wrong with that?
"After Sandy Hook, a couple of Colorado Democrats passed some legislation that stated something to the effect of if you were mentally ill you couldn't get a gun. One of them was recalled and another resigned because it looked as if the recall effort was going to pass"
Well they should be forced to resign if they are so ignorant of a subject they did not realize that this is ALREADY federal law.
There's quite a bit of truth in your post, sprinkled in amongst the poor assumptions and false implications.
"There's really not all that much you can do to prevent people and especially children from going psycho every once in a while. That doesn't mean you should stop trying, of course, but the main thing you'll first have to take care of is just this: If someone cracks, see to it that this person can't inflict that much damage on himself or his environment."
Sure.
Now, I believe you are implying that having fewer weapons around serves this purpose.
That is not such a straightforward proposition however. Because the amount of damage someone can do is not simply a straightforward derivation from their opportunities to acquire a weapon. The ability of their intended victims to fight back plays a role as well as many other elements of circumstance.
A young male (the type statistically most likely to cause a problem) is relatively advantaged by limitations on weapons, while females and the elderly (statistically less likely to cause problems) are relatively disadvantaged. This is not new or specific to firearms - before they were invented we had essentially the same issue with swords and knives. Where it was lawful to be openly armed, swords were worn, which give an older man with experience a chance to beat a younger man. Where it was not lawful, knives were carried as they could be concealed, and this gives the advantage to the younger, faster man instead.
Violence is a serious social problem, and one that needs to be addressed as such. Demonizing tools does nothing to help and often winds up hurting, directly or indirectly.
Do you even read this stuff and try the laugh test before you post it?
Local tribesmen raided a school. Not someone at the school going off shooting, wild 'indians' raided it. Not the same thing at all.
And then the next item is a guy that shot a headmaster so abusive that the jury acquitted him. Sounds like an interesting case but barely relevant here.
That list doesnt actually get going until much more recent years.
"The vast majority are suicides and accidental shootings. Making guns illegal would practically eliminate those causes of death."
This is naive and illogical. I suppose you think the first suicide came after the invention of the firearm? There are many ways to commit suicide, and many, many dangerous items with which one can kill oneself accidentally as well.
Suicide is an act of hopelessness. If you want to prevent it, you should act to give hope to the hopeless, not to take what little they do have away from them. And accidental deaths are best addressed with safe handling training. People that handle firearms carefully and correctly are not the problem there.
The fact is that US school shootings prior to the last couple of decades were... unheard of. It's a very recent phenomena.
And for most of our history, school children routinely carried loaded firearms to school in the US!
The local elementary school here once had a safe room where students' weapons were placed during classes, they were returned to the children at the end of the day so they could hunt for dinner on the way home, and that was not all that long ago, and no one ever got into a shootout.
How does that make sense in your world view?
"You're obviously not a developer if you think that a site specifically for posting code "should" allow itself to be spammed with fake projects that are actually designed to take offensive positions for shock value."
The ad hominen is total fail. In fact they do host quite a few parody projects, which is what we are talking about, and they dont seem to have a problem with it in general. Only in this case because a pack of professional complainers are involved. And while I can appreciate they probably took this route to avoid confrontation and save money, history indicates it is likely to have the opposite effect. See Danegeld and Streisand Effect for starters.
Btw, if you think that parody is "offensive" and "shock[ing]" that is pretty sad in and of itself, and that is the saddest thing about this story. That there are not just a few, but a swarming mass of people in this country that are so completely uneducated and unenlightened and unable to behave in public as this. The correct word is not offensive, or shocking. Hopefully it's funny. And maybe it fails at that, but at worst it's just not funny. Where did people get this idea that it's ok to be so offended by your neighbors attempts at humor that you want to forcibly shut him up anyway?
Really, if you find it so offensive, stop reading. Read something else. Problem solved.
Just having a right to do something does not guarantee it is what you should be doing, and it does not mean your decision is beyond criticism. In this case it appears to be a decision that was indeed entirely within their rights, but also a very poor decision that they can and should be spanked hard for in the arena of public opinion.
The difference is that this is really critical functionality that should have been built in and tested from day one, but gets pushed way down the priority stack because of googles conflict of interest in the matter. So it's like that situation a little, but not really.