Most of the casual shooters I know (and a few not so casual) shoot more in any given month that the few dozen sworn officers I know shoot in a year.

The local police academy range has holes and divots in all sorts of "wrong" places indicating serious or potentially serious "accidents" - the public no restrictions range I shoot at has some intentional vandalism damage, but I've not heard of any accidents or near accidents happening there in years.

Some states have even passed laws allowing new manufacture of machine guns *as long as* they are for in-state use. Theory being that the BATFE (and fed gov) only get the ability to restrict/deny based on interstate commerce.

And while I am definately for gun rights, and love shooting full auto (if someone else is buying the ammo) I don't have pockets deep enough to become a test case.

Depends on how many dollar bills I have in my pockets....

Dunno. Depends on the toaster. My current one is a 4 slice model with wide holes, so I can do the nice thick bagels we get from a local bakery. Haven't seen a toaster like it in ages, and if it died I may be tempted to have it fixed or try to fix it myself.

They already did 15 years ago. I put my money where my mouth is - I use Linux not just for the Freedom, but for a stable OS, and yes, I'll cheerfully pay retail for software. In fact, I just unearthed my copies when I cleaned my garage yesterday. All Linux branded versions of Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, UT GOTY Edition, UT2004, Soldier of Fortune, MechWarrior II, Descent 3d, and quite a few others from Loki Games. I even found my unopened l33t tin editon of Q3 for Linux.

Of course, now my son wants to set it all up and play them.... :)

This is why I love my home ISP - it is a telco (windstream) and I'm far enough out that anything more than the 1.5mb service is unreliable (chronic disconnects) but they don't block any ports, and if I connect to a server capable I can download at the full 1.5mb speed (and/or upload at the 384k speed) as long as I want, or at least have tested downloading ISOs from my linode, etc.

So if "we" could wave a magic wand and change copyright law *everywhere* to something "we can all live with" what would you suggest?

Off the top of my head I can think of

1) Copyright begins with first publication/release/distribution. An upthread example shows a guy working on a trillogy where the first book was done in 2001 and that 20 years would be too short. Although I wonder why he hasn't published the first one or two to see if there is a market for more.... and to get income and a fan base going.

2) Copyright gives a fixed number of years of protection. Doesn't matter if it is by a corporation/other legal entitity or an individual (or small group of individuals), Doesn't matter how long the owner(s) live or don't live. Lets say it is 50 years - plenty long enough for most commercial use and exploitation, but it gets stuff into "free(er) to use" territory within living memory.

3) Instead of totally free use that public domain gives, perhaps something along the lines of one of the CC licenses. If Disney grabs $NEXT_BIG_HIT from the pd and creates a hot new princess tale/etc. then that same PD still needs to be available for others to use in the same manner - it can't be locked back up. For software, one of the Free software licenses should work or the FSF should be able to come up with a new one that is acceptable.

Or just figure out their mailing address and sign them up for some Harriet Carter catalogs

Wouldn't providers to home users (ie, not on an expensive business account) just love to be able to deny any connections initiating from outside their edge though? I bet that most non-slashdot types would never know if they suddenly no longer had a "real" ip at home but was instead behind a massive NAT network. They can initiate connections and consume content all they like, but nothing new from outside.

Or any Google product: they're in bed with the very government who's very clearly turned rogue against the US population, and they'll sell you out on request.

1/ MPAA / RIAA lie - news at 10
2/ PR statements are bullshit - news at 10

Where's the surprise here?

This.

I was watching the news the other day. They were reporting that the UN was considering what to do about Kim Jong Un and his horrid regime's human rights violations, in the wake of the Sony cyber-attack.

The first thing that crossed my mind was: the only thing that prompted the UN to start worrying about the poor North Koreans is essentially a computer attack on some big corporation, and the damage it did to its bottom line. Before that, they really didn't give much of a shit, did they?

The UN was really crass, both with their response and with their timing, and if it doesn't show you with glaring clarity whose interests they really have at heart, nothing else will.

So it seems that simply fixing the output to indicate that the filename is in the signed manifest would solve this... when the sum in the signed manifest is checked against the actual file they can change the message back (I would assume that is the reason for such a reassuring message).

Dunno, but I managed to keep one on the line for almost an hour before I had to go get my kid from a football game. I even gave clues that I wasn't on windows - he wanted me to start task manager, I brought up top and read him the output. When I got to the Zombie Processes part, I freaked out.

Finally had to go, so I confessed that I had been screwing with him, and felt it was my duty to keep him on the phone as long as possible to keep him from harming someone clueless. He called me a "miserable son of a bitch" and slammed the phone down.

Wish I had some way of recording stuff like this...

Don't feel bad. One of my students has already taken an Objective C class here, but since he changed his degree track he is now being forced to take "intro to programming concepts".. because the Objective C class has been replaced with (back to) C++ and the degree track changed for new incoming students to required the concepts class before any other real programming class.