I recommend antibiotics.

The transition was from a flawed, but still readily identifiable constitutional republic (not a democracy), to a corporate oligarchy.

This has never been a democracy, and furthermore, the constitution insists that the federal government guarantee each state a republican form of government, as in, a republic -- not a democracy. That's in article 4, section 4.

This is why representatives decide the actual matters, and voters don't, in the basic design.

Of course, now even the representatives don't decide -- nor judges -- if the legislation deals in any significant way with business interests. The only way the old system still operates even remotely the way it was designed to is when the issue(s) at hand a purely social ones. Even then, the bill of rights seems to be at the very bottom of any legislator's or judge's list of concerns.

Can't see any of this changing, though. The public is too uninformed, and short of completely revamping the school curriculums, they're going to remain that way.

Guess I should have been a little more explicit. I meant, as distinguished from one that required another object impact. Just an original ring system.

...a collapsed ring system?

> Yeah, there's even another gun-rights organization

Except the NRA really isn't a "gun rights" organization. It's original charter was to encourage the development of marksmanship skills. Basically, they wanted to make sure that people could effectively use the kinds of weapons one might find in the Army or Marines.

You can't really do that if you can't own a rifle.

That whole "well regulated militia" thing can't happen if people at large aren't ever allowed to practice.

The problem with the "lets guess what a psycho will do" game is that it really never ends. We live in a very technologically sophisticated and open society. The means to do stupid or evil things are all around us. It's not just guns. It's our entire modern society. If you think otherwise you're just kidding yourself.

Or you have no imagination whatsoever.

If you try to ban anything that anyone could abuse, then everything will unravel because psychos and terrorists will adapt even if you can't.

> I don't know why you think you can determine what long dead people intended based on grammatically ambiguous language with very little context

People wrote stuff down. None of this is a mystery. You simply can't get away with re-writing history because someone already wrote it down when it wasn't even history yet.

That's the problem with a literate society. You can't just make up nonsense and pretend it's reality. Any one is free to dig up primary sources (or even secondary sources) and demonstrate just how much of a corrupt piece of shit you are.

Fine.

If you want to butcher it then there is a well established procedure for that. Just use it. Good luck with that.

Weak transparent lies just undermine law and order and democracy. Redefining terms to suit your political agenda should be rightfully placed next to the worst political abuses anyone can summon.

Although in truth you are just trying to pretend that a severe and pervasive economic issue is instead a matter of simply interfering with personal property rights.

Easily the nicest thing I could say about him.

Closed source is not inherently safer. Raymond's proposition is theoretically sound, however in actual practice, the NSA has "many eyes"...

Turn on your Heartbleed,
Let it shine, wherever you go
Let it make a happy glow
For the NSA to see...

I just mail the IRS the lifeless bodies of my children...

It's the first computer many people had access to, and especially the first computer they could actually program themselves. In an era where PCs cost thousands of dollars, a C64 cost only a couple hundred. Parents could afford them and the default shell was a BASIC prompt. Plus, it had built-in hardware to support making games (sound chip, sprite generator, joystick port) which made interesting to the kids first learning how to program on it.

translates to:

file= open(firstavailablefile());
sleep(disksize(firstavailablefile()) / 1000);
read(file, memory, disksize(firstavailablefile()));

If you love them, get them all backed up on to a HDD ASAP, and make sure your HDD is backed up regularly as well. You can fit an insane number of C64 floppies on a modern HDD, so keeping the images around won't take much space at all. The only way to really preserve data long term is to maintain it by bringing it with you as you upgrade.