The general rule of guns vs knives is that it is best to run from a knife but attack a gun. This is mainly at relative close quarters but the logic is that a gun is really only deadly at one point extending out of the barrel and that point is actually pretty small. If you can keep it off of you then the gun is harmless. A knife on the other hand can do damage more easily, again in closeish quarters, and as such it is best to retreat and attempt to counter-attack from range. You are correct that the best way to deal with the bat would be to move in very close and if possible flatten the attacker. Interestingly, as I stated that's the same idea with the gun if you're already within range for such a move.

I'm going to counter your example by saying that yes you're right most rapes are committed by people known by the person raped. However, if you think a person who has a gun at hand isn't going to shoot someone they know who is in the process of trying to rape them you're smoking crack.

I realize that the plural of anecdote isn't data, however those I have personally known seriously regrets not having a gun at hand to shoot their rapist.

As to your second point that isn't logical. Responsibility for an external act does not transfer simply because someone didn't take a theoretical step to protect against that act.

One could argue that if hit in a car and I'm not wearing a safety belt that some responsibility for the extent of my injuries may be mine, but that does not transfer nor impact the responsibility of who caused the accident.

I believe he's asking you to assume that a gun is an inanimate object incapable of independent action and that it is the person wielding it that ultimately makes it dangerous or rather uses it in a dangerous manner.

Can it be used more effectively than the other items listed? Sure. Does that negate the point? It does not. You want to imbue it with special powers beyond those of the person holding it as it seems what you really want to do is blame the thing and ignore the user.

A baseball bat in the hands of a mad man is most certainly a deadly weapon and without adequate resistance can easily kill a goodly number of people in a relatively short period of time. Longer than a gun perhaps but that really depends on the targets and environment.

A sword would be even more effective and again absent adequate resistance would be extremely deadly even in the hands of the untrained mad man.

While you're mentioning the evil uses of the canceling properties it seems highly disingenuous not to mention the practically infinitely more common instances:
The 90 pound woman defending herself against a rapist.
The gay man defending against the mob intent on beating him senseless.
The old and the infirm defending against the young and strong

And so on.

A community is a group of individuals banding together for common purpose with agreed upon customs and norms, spoken or unspoken. Any software development project with almost any degree of openness quickly forms into a community as a natural consequence of human behavior.

The norms of that community are well established and nothing you've said changes my points. :)

Okay, in that case she's been a part of it for a while now and has (so far as I know) suddenly decided she doesn't like the way things are. That's fine. Asking for change and such is fine to a point. However, this is also closely related to the ridiculous idea that people have a right not to be offended or to hear things they don't like. No such right exists.

If they are unwilling to change, and I unsurprisingly tend to agree with Linus's stance on the fakery involved in being "professional", then she can either deal with it or leave. The people on that list were the way they were long before she got there even if she has been involved with it for the last few years.

What is insightful about this? It isn't the same thing at all.

What you're referring to is a group already part of a society campaigning for equality within the society. One could argue that they could have simply left but those who were doing the campaigning didn't have that option nor was it necessarily the appropriate option. They also were not attempting to force society to adopt their standards and beliefs but to force society to apply its own standards and beliefs to them and treat them equally.

If this person on the LKML was saying that she wanted to be allowed to curse and such because she had been told women shouldn't do such things then your point would be valid, or at least more so. Instead she's demanding that everyone else change to accommodate her desires and world view.

Yet also a fair statement. After all, when you attempt to join a community you either abide by the rules and customs of that community or else you leave and go elsewhere. You do not demand that community change to meet your world view.

To me this is the worst result of consoles being the primary development target. Dumbed down games. Overly simple console compatible control interfaces, overly simple game play, being shackled to what the current generation console is capable of while PCs race ahead in power.

Result: Piles of same old same old games with occasional kinda sorta bursts of something that resembles innovation. Mostly railshooters and sports games out the ass with occasional exceptions. Hell, what's the greatest thing about the new Call of Duty game? The dog and it is very pretty. Otherwise, it will likely be waist high walls as far as the eye can see between cut scenes. Because console.

While the idea, amend vice ignore, is good their proposed amendment is deeply flawed. The language used would not only prohibit corporate speech, thus killing any right to advertise or promote their products unless granted permission by government, it would have the effect of eliminating all rights from any corporation. Including rights of property and many others.

Clearly it was put forth by someone who really just hates corporations for no logical reason while failing to remember that the vast majority of corporations are small affairs who would be destroyed by such a thing just as much as the megaliths they presumably are against.

It is also amusing to me, and has been since the ruling, that no one was up in arms over Unions (frequently corporations themselves) were buying elections and it only became a problem when organizations that were not unions got into the act.

The dichotomy is not false, it just simply hasn't come to fruition yet. If we look to history when you have large numbers of people from different ethnic or cultural values coming together one of two things must happen. They all blend to form a new people or, in the best case, they live together with mutual tension and the occasional flare up and/or war.

It is not possible to be both one people and many. You can have a country made up of many different peoples. You cannot have a Nation made up of such.

The American model is not a loss of all distinctiveness. It is a subsuming of their past beneath their current home. They come here and become American, the shared ideal we all in theory hold. If other places can't mange that maybe that says more about them than it does about the US, no?

Then it is a good thing that they included provisions for modifying it, isn't it? The problem is that many people want to just pick and choose the parts they like and interpret the others in ways that make no logical sense when taken as a whole and accounting for the intentions of those who wrote it.

If one does not like it, one should campaign to amend it and not merely ignore or interpret away the parts one does not like.

Point of order... that's because the US has no official language. It is generally held that such would be a violation of the First Amendment. :)

Some States, California among them, have passed official language laws but as far as I know they all lack enforcement clauses.

The divide between the wealthy and poor means exactly jack shit unless you can demonstrate that the poor are becoming more poor relative to themselves. It doesn't matter a bit if the rich are getting richer unless you can prove that they are getting that way by directly harming the poor.

You also fail at life for saying that China is an example of the government getting out of the way and trying to compare the US to any of the places you listed. Yet clearly the solution to all our problems is more government regulation and ever higher taxes and penalties. Surely that will jump start the economy!

I'm going to have to call bullshit on this. Meat might be relatively expensive but there are lots and lots and lots of foods that are both inexpensive and good for you. On the other hand they aren't full of sugar and they require both knowledge and time to prepare. Which is to say they aren't compatible with being lazy and just wanting to whip out a box of something and call it "food".

Speaking from my own experience of crossing the border *a lot* I can't say I've ever seen or experienced even the slightest interest in my laptop or drives. Maybe they have more time at the land borders than they do at the airports I can't say. I haven't crossed at one of those in years but at the airports there's simply no time to deal with such things.

Yes... that's a thing.