But I want to make a cup of Earl Grey by converting energy into matter, at enormous cost, because it's clearly easier than having a tank of water and recycling it as needed. :)

Better they 'make their money' through the form of taxes, which is a heck of a lot more efficient than trying to do it through fines and such.

Especially when a DUI conviction often carries work disruption that 'earns' nobody money, being a form of 'broken window'.

As I understand it, the complaint is really about arcane regulations on what firearms can be shipped by mail. Here, the specialized CNC mill makes what is called a "lower receiver" for the AR 15, a common rifle used by the US armed forces. The lower receiver houses both the trigger mechanism and the magazine so it is a critical part of the gun, required in order to operate the weapon.

I believe what they really want is to ship firearms via mail without interference from the feds.

Or it was staged. It's not that hard to find someone to play the jerk and you don't have to tell anyone else you're doing it.

What's really changed about military technology? Most of the high end gear requires a ridiculous supply chain. Sure, I grant that most people probably shouldn't have nuclear weapons which in theory one can own without requiring a fancy supply chain to maintain it in working order and can cause damage far in excess of any conceivable use, including the overthrow of a tyrannical government. But I just don't see the problem for typical military hardware, be it assault rifles, artillery, or patrol boats.

The US allowed a lot of crazy stuff over the years, and it just hasn't caused much problems, especially given the firepower we're speaking of.

Who really wants the regulation to "work"? There's a bigger issue here than just a bunch of people wanting to simplify firearm manufacturing regulation. What's the real problem here is that you have a bear who when poked has the power to make a new stupid regulation. Do something about the bear.

Ah, I remember Slamd64. I had that puppy on my first ever 64 bit machine, it took a few years for Slackware to jump on the 64 bit train.

I don't see the issue with using it as a server in a production environment, particularly if you roll servers with a specific role rather than trying to Swiss Army Knife them. If you monitor slackware-current they're as responsive as any distro with security updates and the package management isn't that cumbersome. Of course, if you're using Slackware the odds are good that you've compiled your own daemons and should be on top of patches/security updates yourself.

Either way it's not a deal breaker for a production server, unless you need a big company to hold your hand for everything, and in that instance why not just runa Windows server?

I'm happy to agree with you that Mozilla had every right to do what they did. Allowing people/companies, etc... make bad choices about what to do with their own resources is a valuable part of freedom. They just suffer the consequences if it was a bad choice.

Nothing you wrote disputes my point that when a company's values become more focused on A rather than B, when they used to be known for B, they will tend to drift off of success at B.

It applies to companies, people, countries, etc... they become successful because of a positive trait/action (like hard work, innovation, whatever) and then they become prideful and change their focus to something else and lose track of the values that got them there, then wonder why they start becoming less successful over time.

Someone's freedom doesn't extend to me being required to agree with them, just that I don't use force to stop them. Of course, many folks have lost sight of that, seeming to want to punish people for disagreeing with them on the latest controversial issue.

Marriage is a human right now? Seriously? It's just a fucking legal state. It's not required to love someone.

I'm in favor of what has foolishly been described "marriage equality" but that doesn't mean I'm going to get behind the destruction of someone's career merely because he happens to hold an opposing opinion. Y'all have gone too far with the vilification of people who disagree with you. I once suggested that we get Government out of the "marriage" business altogether, no marriage as such but civil unions for everyone who desires the legal benefits (medical decisions, property inheritance, and so on) of what is currently called marriage. Let any two consenting adults enter into a civil union, even siblings; the legal state of marriage has nothing whatsoever to do with "love."

For that suggestion I was immediately attacked as homophobic. WTF?

Enjoy your virtual lynch mobs and group-think. I'm happy we're making progress on this front but it does not need to be a zero sum game between equality and free speech. People are free to express differing points of view and should not be destroyed for doing so.

I don't see anything above in the form of Socratic questioning. So let's start this off properly with the questions you should have asked instead:

To help us live longer and better given the constraints of the world we live in - particularly the economic constraints. We have frail bodies and minds. I also will point out at this time that medical care does help. This means the whole exercise is not pointless.

Medical care is deeply imperfect. There is no physical reason (as in thermodynamics, rather than trying to wring out an indefinite life span from our current crude knowledge) that we can't live in a healthy, vigorous state for as long as we desire. And I don't rule out radical medical care such as completely redesigning the human body or uploading human minds into a computer.

I'll discuss that third question in a minute.

Now, in your post, aside from the tiresome and baseless bragging, there are two interesting aspects. First, why mention "rule of law"? Is it somehow physically impossible for legislators to pass laws allowing forced experimentation on human test subjects? Or are you implying that because they exist, the current laws must be best possible and any backsliding on these laws quickly slides down the slope to complete lawlessness?

Second, why mention "ease of mind", but not whether medical care and research actually works? Is it more important that my mind is "eased" rather than if I'm living a vastly longer, better life? Is it more important than whether or not humanity loses a war with the machines?

I think this "ease of mind" cuts to the core of what is wrong with modern medicine. We have many regulators of medical research. But they only get in trouble, if something bad happens to research subjects on their watch. They have no responsibility or incentive to care about what didn't happen due to the constraints they impose. That's why I said:

Because the people we delegated this responsibility to have those incentives. And a lot of the problems of modern medical care, such as its extreme cost, lack of competition, and glacial pace of progress are due to that fundamental obstruction.

At the time he gave the money his position was so far out of the mainstream that the current sitting President of the United States of America agreed with him.

Do you really think it was appropriate to drive him out of his job because of a political opinion that's shared by nearly half the country? That's absurd. Were you one of the people who changed your profile pictures to "Je suis Charlie" after the Paris attacks? Because that would be incredibly fucking ironic.

There's always Slackware. I still use it as "go to" distro for both desktop and server roles. It's not as sexy other distros but there's no better way to learn Linux. I highly doubt Patrick is going to jump on the systemd bandwagon any time soon, if ever.

She did something useful. Let's keep that in mind.

Enjoy

What would be the point? You'd have the same people on the internet, you'd have the same people running it. And nothing keeping people from making their own internet right now.