No, in the 18th century there was already a clear separation between man-portable "arms" and larger "ordnance," and all the examples you mention would definitely qualify as ordnance. You *might* be able to make an argument for chemical & biological weapons, but any sane court would by long precedence consider those to be outside of the realm of what a citizen's militia should possess.

Yeah, the OP seems to imply that there are other people who have newer hardware running something other than XP -- he's talking about stragglers. One of the starting points is to go see whoever is responsible for budget planning. In my experience, they're more likely than anyone to be locked into the full-blown Windows version of Excel (full-blown meaning VBA, Solver, particular statistics packages, etc). Ask them how much of the budget data flow is broken if people don't have Excel compatibility at that level. And whether they're willing to rebuild the data flow around a different spreadsheet program (again, my experience is that the answer to that is not only "no," but "Hell, no!").

You forgot massive and unnecessarily burdensome documentation of your identity to help make sure college students, the elderly, and the working poor don't vote.

Neither. It seems a cogently argued point to me. Sony is a hardware company with its own fab resources and established relationships with manufacturer, and it controls a popular gaming platform.

What advantages does Oculus VR have that can match or overcome that?

Or enough math to do the physics for warp drive. Ask anyone who's taken math-heavy graduate classes: notation, the language, matters a lot. The British fell behind Continental Europe in terms of advancing analysis, and stayed behind, until they finally tossed Newton's notation in favor of Leibniz.

Yes, and you failed to specify per capita spending when you said, "If they spent the same on education as they did on locking people up per year then maybe you wouldn't have to lock so many people up." If that was truly your intent, then you should have actually said it.

One big difference is that jobs lost during that time period were largely fungible with new opportunities, because none of those jobs required much in the way of training -- just work ethic and physical ability. Close one factory, open a new one, get people training on a new repetitive assembly line task.

One big difference with the automation revolution is that automation is going to completely eliminate all jobs that don't require training and education, because those are the jobs most easy to automate. We've already been suffering a lot since the 80s in America's transition towards a service economy, as cheap foreign labor and robots took away all the industrial jobs.

When even service jobs become automated, there will be nothing for the non-professional class to do except try to retrain before the next job gets automated. And that ignores the elephant in the room -- that many people who work unskilled or low-skilled jobs simply aren't willing or able to train for more skilled jobs, and those people will still have themselves and families to feed.

I agree with you that we shouldn't recoil in terror from automation and enter some kind strawman dystopia where all innovation must get vetted for release, but we need to be prepared for the implications of automation, and we need to consider whether or not our economy as it stands today is simply incompatible the coming technological shift -- and which is more important?

My standards for my own code are considerably lower. I settle for, "If I can read it and understand how it all works after not touching it for six months, that's good enough." Once upon a time I had to use APL to to handle a batch of numerical problems, and never managed to reach that bar no matter how hard I tried :^)

Funny, because you're the one who made the comparison without understanding the order of magnitude difference in the first place.

Oh! While I knew I was oversimplifying a bit, I wasn't aware of where Timoshenko came from.
Thanks for clearing that up.

Because they aren't viewed as traitors by the side that's taking them. Think of them like Confederate soldiers who crossed the line to join the Union because they were put the nation before their home state. The Confederates would consider them traitors; the Union would consider them loyalists.

It's actually a lot like that time period, because the people in Ukraine consider themselves more loyal to their factional groups than to the country as a whole. Imagine how bad partisanship would be in America if both parties represented groups that literally did not speak the same language and that had the backing of different, foreign powers upon who their prosperity depended.

They didn't have the firepower necessary to hold off even an immediate attack, much win the conflict they would have started when things escalated. All they could accomplish would be to get themselves and possibly others killed. Worse, the example of Georgia has shown that the Russians will use any violent resistance as an excuse to just seize even more territory.

Some of the bases personnel essentially chose to engage in nonviolent protest, marching with flag and no guns (despite getting warning shots from the Russians). It's been a really weird conflict so far, from this distance.