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Comment Re:From Mall of America visitor rules: (Score 1) 241

I can understand the restrictions on firearms in environments where people are expected to get intoxicated or otherwise get their judgment impaired. Those kinds of restrictions are actually very old policy in most places they exist, dating back to 18th century, and I suspect that when they were enacted, it was very much experience-driven (i.e. that drunken shootouts were not uncommon, prompting such laws).

But everywhere else, your sole argument seems to be, "people are more likely to use it for suicide". Which is extremely dubious, especially in case of places such as malls and the like, since 1) people wouldn't generally go there to commit suicide in any case, 2) even if they did, it doesn't really affect you in any different way compared to witnessing the same thing in the street, and 3) if they really want to do it, they'll just ignore the sign/law.

As far as on-campus carry goes, it's really two unrelated things. One is for people who are basically just visiting the campus (this includes the students who don't permanently reside there) - in that scenario, it's not really different from a mall or any other public place, and it's still not at all clear why it requires a different policy from a busy street just outside it (or, for that matter, a small town 50 miles away). The other is for students residing on campus; but at that point you're talking about restrictions on possession in general, not just carry, and your suicide argument is really about possession as well.

Comment Re:From Mall of America visitor rules: (Score 2) 241

An automatic weapon is generally the one that is capable of firing bursts. Getting a full auto weapon in US legally is possible in some states, but prohibitively expensive (on the order of $15,000K for a Vietnam-era M16), and puts you under ATF scrutiny and on their registry. There was exactly one legal full auto gun used in a crime in the past several decades, and that one was by a cop.

As far as terrorist attacks with firearms go, notice how it happened in France first - a place that's presumably pretty tight on their gun laws. Yet the guys who did it had no trouble sourcing a few full auto AKs (again, something pretty damn hard even in US) and even an RPG.

And I don't think that anyone says that more guns in the hands of citizens is going to solve the problem. But it will reduce the impact compared to what we saw in Kenya, for example. There's a difference between slaughtering unarmed civilians, and getting into a firefight, even when the other side has less effective weapons.

Comment Re:From Mall of America visitor rules: (Score 1) 241

Who said anything about automatic weapons?

You already have many malls "full of handguns" all over the country, by the way. Not all of them post "gun free zone" signs, and those signs don't have the force of law in many states in any case, so many people simply ignore them.

I understand the general mindset that leads towards gun control. But given that guns are out there anyway, under the current legal regime, how are "gun free zones" doing anything helpful at all?

Comment Re:Wow (Score 1) 66

I don't think you can have an arbitrary console app generate streams of objects. You basically have to write a cmdlet for that, there isn't really any on-the-wire protocol for stdout that you could just generate and have it magically parsed into objects.

(I actually dislike PS for that reason - the idea of structured data on the wire is great and a big improvement over plain text streams, but I think it would be better served by something like JSON over regular stdin/out/err. I think someone actually started working on an experimental Unix shell that does that, but I can't find it now or even remember the name.)

Comment Re:Different from Microsoft.. (Score 1) 149

Well, why shouldn't phone manufacturers license Android on a per market basis? Or at least on a per device basis (and then sell a particular device only in one particular market)?

The problem is that this results in strangulation of local services that are otehrwise competitive in a regional market (because, for a particular country, they may well be better than Google's - e.g. Yandex Maps are generally better than Google Maps in Russia, so users would prefer them). The end result is Google monopoly everywhere. Why is that a good thing for the users?

Comment Re:Wow (Score 3, Interesting) 66

If I were in charge of that, you'd have it like yesterday :)

On a more serious note, at this point I wouldn't put it into the "never gonna happen" bucket anymore, just based on all the things I've seen the company do in the past year that were in that bucket two years before. But either way, it will take a long time - bash (and any Unix shell, really) really expects a lot of Unixisms from the environment that it runs it. Basically, I don't think you can get a proper *sh without having a proper POSIX layer underneath. And all we have today is Cygwin, which is basically a giant hack.

On the other hand, command prompt is getting some long needed love in Win10, and hopefully beyond. And when they asked about what people want from that effort, the requests for things Unix ranked pretty high on the list. These guys have said that they'll pay close attention to feedback, so I hope they'll deliver on that promise.

Comment Re:Does Yandex own towers? (Score 1) 149

Tower ownership is not an issue in Russia, unlike US, because mobile operators are decoupled from phone manufacturers. All networks are GSM and inter-compatible, so the same phone works on them all, and people can switch freely. The operators also don't control the software that runs on the phones.

Comment Re:Different from Microsoft.. (Score 1) 149

Google has never done that. If you are an Android phone manufacturer you can sell Windows phones as well. As a consumer you can change the search engine to Bing if you like; or if you prefer you can buy a phone that defaults to Bing. Manufacturers can and do sell tablets without the Google Play app store, or even with an alternative app store.

What Yandex seems to be claiming is that manufacturers are, in fact, strong-armed to decide whether they want to ship all their phones with Google Play, or none of them. They are specifically claiming that a manufacturer was prevented from entering into an agreement with them to pre-install Yandex software, because they want to ship phones in other countries with Play, and Google's terms for Play require that they ship it in all countries.

Comment Re:"Difficult to install" == "Difficult to compete (Score 1) 149

Their main complaint here is not just the tie-in, but that it applies all across the regional markets. In other words, if some Android manufacturer makes a deal with Yandex to ship Yandex apps, or set Yandex as default search, on Android phones sold in Russia (which is quite reasonable, since many Russian users expect those anyway), they can no longer preinstall Google apps on their Android phones sold in US.

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