The US Constitution was an open declaration of treason against the Crown

Nonsense. The Revolution had been over for years when the Constitution was ratified.

I think you mean the Declaration of Independence, which didn't have any amendments, much less a second one. Now that was a suicide pact ("Live Free or Die!"). The Constitution on the other hand, was the result of many of those same authors figuring out how to create a government and maintain an orderly society. It was also a counter-revolutionary document, to rein in some of the more extremist notions of democracy and fairness that were going around at the time. It was also designed to preserve slavery, which is a discussion for a different day. And the Second Amendment, very specifically, was designed as a tool to maintain slavery. It had nothing to do with a personal right to own and carry It had nothing to do with making sure tyrants could be overthrown. It was meant to preserve the Southern slave patrols because they were worried that some abolitionist might become President and prevent slave patrols from forming their nasty little posses. The Second Amendment is an artifact of slavery and of a very ugly period in our history. It's something we should be ashamed of. I say this as someone who has owned a gun over 4 decades.

Google's C-levels say things like "privacy is dead" and "if you have something to hide you shouldn't be doing it".

Sigh. This has to go down as one of the most commonly manipulated misquotes in history.

Schmidt was saying something along the lines of "privacy is dead" in response to a question about the PATRIOT Act. He was telling it like it is, giving as much of a warning of what was going on as he could without actually doing a Snowden. He wasn't expressing happyness about that state of affairs, just pointing out that US laws give the US government enormous powers over people's personal information. And his last comment (actually "maybe" you shouldn't be doing it) was an observation of the fact that these things are not black and white: there's a small contingent of people who genuinely need nobody at all to know what they're doing for noble political reasons. And then there are all the people who aren't Snowden and are just trying to hack someone else's nude photos.

Switzerland survives because its main export is untraceable (sort-of) banking. Ireland is still close to being financially untenable. Not exactly worthy models to emulate. No one is served by a race to the bottom.

Um, no. That is dead wrong.

The entire financial sector including pensions and insurance is less than 10% of Swiss GDP. By the way you cannot "export" banking. For things you can export, there is a table of Swiss exports here or in diagram form. Regardless the USA has been incredibly aggressive against the Swiss banking sector in recent years, completely ignoring borders and national sovereignty in order to enforce the absurd US citizenship based taxation policies. They've arrested Swiss bankers and threatened many, many more even though they broke no laws in the country where they live and are based. The result is that Swiss banking secrecy (or privacy if you're of a libertarian bent) is basically dead, especially for Americans.

Regardless, the Swiss economy is still doing fantastically well.

Meanwhile, Ireland was doing just great up until their stupid politicians panicked and guaranteed the debt of one of the major banks, without really thinking through just how huge that debt was. Ireland was brought low by the banks but didn't build their economy on them.

So both your stereotypes about other countries with lower tax rates are not supported by reality.

And? Part of being a cross-platform toolkit is that you must keep up with the underlying platforms, if you start failing to look native or behave native or integrate nicely or lack interfaces to new functionality you'll quickly cease to be useful for that. It'll still function as a toolkit for building KDE though since they define their own native, but then it will gravitate back towards being a Linux-only thing.

P.S. Despite Qt being cross-platform, most KDE SC applications don't seem to be. There's been an ongoing project to make them cross-platform for years, but many still have trouble compiling or working correctly.

Well, you must also know the HTML entities, even in plain text mode... writing æøå doesn't work, but æøå works. In this case µ doesn't work though. And I think all languages have Unicode support good enough to strip control characters and shit if you're not lazy. My impression was that it was more to sabotage the ASCII "art" than anything else.

Well, sometimes they make convenient little assumptions about the write amplification and other things in coming up with that number. Also it's the number they use for warranty claims, so it may not reflect the kind of endurance you'd normally expect. The latest trick is to basically use part of your drive as a semi-permanent SLC cache and only write it to MLC/TLC NAND later, if ever so what you actually get will depend on your usage pattern. If you just keep on rewriting a small file it'll probably not leave SLC at all, while if you use it as a scratch disk filling it up with large files and emptying it you'll hit the MLC/TLC hard. The rating is just to give consumers who don't want an in-depth look something to relate to.

Personally my first idea was, if they can deliver us a MLC drive at 45 cents/GB doesn't that mean they should be able to deliver us a SLC drive at 90 cents/GB? That's not disturbingly much, considerably faster and should have all the endurance you'll ever need. That said, TechReport got 3 (out of 6) consumer drives they've written >1 PB to, so I'm guessing most drives fail from something else than NAND exhaustion. And I don't reinstall my OS disk every day.... I just checked and I've used up 50 of my 3000 P/E cycles after 150 days of 24x7 running so at this rate it should take 25 years.

I know people who turn on their computer maybe 2-3 hours a day on average, just streaming no heavy media usage. Any SSD will last them forever, it's all about $/GB. Now if you want a guess they said 5000 P/E -> 3000 P/E (60%) for 25nm -> 20nm MLC, so I'm guessing 3000 * 0.6 = 1800 P/E for 16nm. And TLC is probably like 500 P/E, though this drive doesn't use that.

Tell that to conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt, who said he believes semi-automatic rifles are great for women because they don't have to worry so much about aiming.

Believe it or not, this is a common trope in the gun community. They need lots of bullets in case they miss.

You will find that all of those quotes except that of George Mason are fraudulent.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/w...

The actual Thomas Jefferson quote is, “No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms [within his own lands or tenements]“

The George Washington quote isn't found anywhere but on Second Amendment activist sites. It doesn't appear anywhere in Washington's papers. The first quote, which you attribute to Alexander Hamilton, is usually attributed to Samuel Adams. The only problem is, Adams never said it either.

That's the thing about this Second Amendment "movement", which as I said, started in the 1980s. They lie. They make stuff up. Maybe they don't realize that people can check these things, or maybe they don't care. As I said above, it tells you everything you need to know about the intellectual honesty of the pro-gun movement.

Because C.

Though assuming you were Musk and were putting some stores out there for people to look around... how would you structure it?

Keep his idea of the slick showroom, but leave out the Apple geniuses.

Put all the data online and populate the store with the equivalent of well-trained booth-babes from both genders. Have a kiosk for payment. Low overhead. Have a couple of cars for test driving.

By the way, I finally drove a Tesla a little bit. They're really nice. The chair of my wife's department at the University bought one and he had us out to the house for a BBQ a few weeks ago. Let me cruise around his tony suburb for a little bit. I love driving a car without engine noise.

If you haven't known Christ, you haven't known liberty. Would that you knew what you're missing.

Judging by the ones who loudly proclaim their Christianity, he's not missing much.

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/...

Well, actually it's the Supreme Judicial Court, or SJC.

Ask the Europeans that constantly tell us Americans we are too enslaved to the notion that we all need our own car.

You just made that up. I don't know if you've ever driven around a European city, but car ownership is pretty widespread, at least judging by driving through Rome/London/Paris/etc.

It's funny what some Americans think about Europe. They've got this AM talk radio version of Europe knocking around in their heads. "Yeah, they're all dying in the streets because of socialized medicine and everybody's gay and you can't get a decent hamburger anywhere. And they're a bunch of carpoolers who don't realize that we fought and died so that people could drive their own 4500lb vehicle like God intended." "You betcha, Mack. Next up is Fred from Midland. So, what grinds your gears about Europeans, Fred?"

I guess that would be an answer if nobody ever took the time to show you how to defend yourself with your hands.

I think you have been listening to people, that have gleefully lied to you.

I think you are projecting.