In the US, protection from the state itself is a valid reason to own a firearm. The founders believed that the government must always be afraid of the people, not the other way around, and the second amendment was seen (rightly or wrongly) as a means of securing this.

The wall's not that high: Reflector and ILSpy have been around for a long time, and non-obfuscated .NET code decompiles pretty cleanly.

(1) Most all production code is crappy, especially application code. (2) Systems/kernel code is generally high-quality because it has to be. (3) From what I've seen, the .NET API's are pretty decent... both on the outside (with excellent usablity*) and on the inside (with mostly straightforward code**). (4) I haven't seen the .NET run-time code, but Microsoft undoubtedly invested some of their best systems developers in designing the CLR. I'd be surprised if it stank bad enough to drive folks to Java.

* Excepting the huge learning curve with some API's, like WCF and WPF. ** An exception would be the configuration system, which is painful in many ways.

For all we know, Lowe's (or a software vendor contracted by Lowes) may have marketed (or may choose in the future to market) their POS to other parties as a GNOME-based product. It wouldn't be the product name, but it could be trumpeted in the feature listing. For that matter, the GNOME project may reasonably identify an opportunity to produce a POS-specific version of their product and want to call it "GNOME-POS" or something.

The Lowe's example definitely shows the overlapping and competing uses of the name: your average moron in a hurry isn't going to know the difference between a POS named "Gnome" and a Desktop Environment called "GNOME" that can be used to construct POS systems.

Boss: "Should we buy Gnome for our POS?"

Employee: "No, we should use GNOME for our POS."

Boss: "WTF??"

See also 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action (from the book From Dictatorship to Democracy, available here).

Don't underestimate the value of possessing threat capability, even if you're not going to use it. Would Gandhi, King, and Mandela have been equally successful in a society without the simmering potential for all-out race war?

If it only takes 100 guesses, then an attacker can slowly try passwords stretched out over time, depending on his victim's routine behavior of logging in a couple times per day to reset the fail count. Or maybe he can try 1 guess (with 1/100th odds) on each account in the target system. If there are hundreds of accounts... well, you get the idea.

IP-based banning can make this harder (forcing the attacker to find/use multiple victim PC's), but it's not widespread yet (for instance, I don't think Active Directory or slapd support it).

In addition, they serve as a form of price discrimination: you can save a nice chunk of change on groceries by taking an hour each week to clip your way thru the Sunday paper, but once you have enough disposable income (and perhaps less leisure time) it's no longer worth it.

Don't get me wrong: safer programming languages and runtimes definitely help, especially with buffer overflows (thanks C++!), but it's one aspect of many that impact security.

Granted, I lost interest in Haskell somewhere around hitting the Functor/Monad point, but if devs can send raw SQL to the database, they will do so.

Yes, you can.

Good luck spreading that attitude. Makers of device drivers, SCADA, etc., dearly need it.

That helps get us closer, certainty. The language and runtime can help catch/eliminate common, elementary mistakes. It's not the silver bullet though: wherever creative work is being done, therein lies the potential for new vulnerabilities.

Don't be naive... security is a deep and subtle problem, full of nasty surprises. There is no magic bullet solution... your "safe programming language" has thousands of bugs in its standard API and run-time; it won't prevent devs from concatenating SQL with user input, misusing threading primitives, or bungling up an authentication protocol; it certainly won't patch up the numerous ways of subverting https or the modern web browser. To be secure (or have a reasonably good chance at being secure), you must at minimum use an approach where (1) security is a primary design concern thru the entire product lifecycle, (2) security solutions are deployed in a structured/layered approach using (3) actual expertise, and (4) security is an ongoing program with both proactive and reactive elements.

(Convincing your government to help software/hardware/network companies fix their security problems instead of purposely introducing them would be a good idea too, but it looks like society is determined to learn this the hard way.)

How dare those academics use math, specialized jargon, and peer-review! Witchcraft, I tell thee, witchcraft!! (Quick hint for whatever PR firm submitted this: science is extremely complex and extremely specialized these days. Sorry if your marketing degree didn't prepare you for anything better than spreading FUD.)

Yah, we only have one earth at the moment, so it's sort of hard to directly test the effects of (1) implementing or (2) NOT implementing a carbon excise tax on the next 100 years of climate change. Science can't do that. Of course, neither can lobbyists or SIG's or true believers or anyone else.

What science can do (for a sincere policymaker) is provide the firmest foundation of knowledge to work with. And science quite confidently tells us a lot of things we don't want to hear (like "all this carbon is going to make the environment go wack, do something about it" or "your ass is getting fat on all that sugar and processed foods", or "life arose thru such-and-such set of processes and not ex post nihlo, sorry if that challenges your theology LOL").

You forgot to mention the part where Chik-Fil-A's charitable organization was donating millions of dollars to anti-LGBT political organizations. The protests were largely effective at halting those donations.

Obama--for all of his many problems--has done more than any other president to support equal protection under law for people who are LGBT.

Good idea, but you need to get conservatives on board with embracing contraceptives. For many of them, it isn't just about eliminating abortion, it's also about eliminating non-martial sex and boosting the pregnancy rate after marriage. To get there, they are willing to (1) withhold medically pertinent information, (2) cultivate sexual fears and stigmas, (3) encourage premature marriage, and (4) prescribe rigid/misogynistic gender roles. (Source: grew up in a christian school.) A lot of this just naturally flows from the fundamentalist/authoritarian worldview... other christian subcultures may be different.

Actually, the rate of teen pregnancies has hit an historic low.

Oh, I'm sorry. You need libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.35.9), but I'm on libglib2.0-0 (2.34.8) and upgrading it will cause a conflict with libwtf5.0 (1:5.0.99) and also require installing libancientrelic0.8 (0.8.0.012), which I can't seem to find anywhere. Let me suggest removing a bunch of packages (leaving some things broken). Accept this solution? (y/N) Alternately, I could suggest you blow your weekend learning to build a dummy package just to shut me up... there so many wonderful commands that start with deb and dpkg, you'll love digging thru layers and layers of accumulated shell scripts!

And their scripts. Don't forget the piles upon piles of scripts that preclude any straightforward notion of what's going on. (Coincidentally, dpkg is a good example of this failure too.)

Yep, this speciously-reasoned physics paper supports the Absolute Truth(TM) revealed to us in an ancient text of unknown authorship!

Why? Because now if you want to start an internet business (streaming or not) that becomes even modestly successfully, every ISP on the planet will start looking for a way to demand a chunk of your profits. "Yeah, sorry that that little 100ms latency spike is affecting 1 million customers of yours, Blizzard, but we'll be happy to form a collaborative network-tuning relationship with you for $250,000/mo."

Cumulatively, it means that ISP's can rent-seek off of internet businesses, cutting down on the quantity and competitiveness of such businesses while simultaneously forcing them to raise prices.