Well, I write Perl code daily, and I personally find it quite easy to write modern Perl applications with UTF-8 support. I don't think I'm particularly brilliant, either, but even I can do it! So... either I need to find out what I'm doing "wrong" to make this such a non-issue for me, or your concerns are a little bit overstated.

Perl has exceptional support for Unicode. The accepted answer on this SO question provides a pretty comprehensive list of the challenges that Unicode brings, and why there cannot possibly be a magic "switch." Such a switch would surely break a lot of code, so pre-UTF-8 code that needs to support UTF-8 does need to be updated, but writing modern Perl programs that support Unicode is really easy.

What would a "standard" UI toolkit buy us? Just pick one of the many available tookits on CPAN and be happy. They're all great.

In production? There probably shouldn't be any hands, but I'm sure there are.

Perl 6 is nifty, but I would still call it "academic" at this point. Fortunately Perl 5 is still rock solid, and it is still a wonderful choice for many production applications.

Too bad Bruce doesn't support your choice to not give up yours. He would benevolently take away everybody's right to self defense by the bearing of arms and not "miss it." Lovely...

Anyway, it's a common knee-jerk reaction to a situation like this, to think that guns enable this sort of tragedy. In reality, it would be more helpful for us to realize that guns are just what they are. They were invented, and they exist. There is no way to put the lid on Pandora's Box. You can try to control them by legislation, but you inevitably end up just making it more difficult for honest citizens to have them. Our experience has shown that such "experiments" do little, if anything, to prevent criminals and lunatics from having guns, but we know that they are emboldened by the prospect that others are less likely to have guns. Case in point: this tragedy happened in a so-called "gun-free zone."

A common retort to my above point is to then assert that guns in the hands of common citizens would lead to more chaos and death. I'll just head that off now. This assumption probably comes from hollywood where it is common to see clueless characters holding guns--presumably for the first time--who do humorous and dangerous things, such as let the firearm fly out of their hands on recoil or close their eyes when shooting. This may be a recipe for a good comedy movie, but it is by no means an accurate portrayal of common reactions. Thus, this false assertion is more common among people who have never handled firearms; they project their own unease with firearms on others and imagine that everyone will act how they think they might act in a tense situation. Regardless, the truth is that common citizens are very capable of training and handling firearms safely, and it really doesn't even take that much training. The scenario where clueless people flail their guns around, shooting randomly, is fictional. Simple as that.

To push the point further, nobody is saying that guns in the hands of untrained people is a good idea. This discussion won't change anything about today's sad tragedy, but how might this situation have turned out differently if the teachers had been allowed to opt to train with a firearm (if they so chose) and allowed to keep a secure firearm on their person. Even now, you may have let the false scenario of the clueless teacher flailing her gun pop into your mind; now it's your responsibility to remember that that scenario is indeed false and ridiculously so.

This is your opinion, but as you will see, you haven't supported it very well.

Obvious. What's the point?

Unfortunately, this just isn't true. Criminals have easy access to guns, even in places with tougher gun laws. As the GP rightly pointed out, criminals do not follow the law. That alone does not mean that guns laws have no effect on the ease by which criminals can obtain guns, so your theory could still be correct. However, the reality has shown that gun laws are far more effective at making it harder for honest citizens to obtain firearms for their own self protection than they are at preventing criminals from having guns.

Yeah... this isn't true either, one of the most-cited counterexamples being the steep rise in violent crimes in Washington D.C. after the gun ban of 1976. At best, as the NY Times pointed out, there are a lot of factors to take into consideration. Of course, this isn't the only counterexample, by far, but I only need one to prove your assertion incorrect, so I'll leave it at that.

Umm, no... You realize that the vast majority of armed robberies do not end in any shots even being fired, right? The threat is usually enough. Obviously the posession of a gun by a criminal does not imply his intention to kill. These points are so easy to counter, it makes me wonder at how serious you are.

Similarly false, and even more absurd.

Most likely, you feel like you would panic in that situation and so you imagine in your mind that others would act as you think you would. Your imagination does not match reality. Common citizens are capable of training with firearms in order to react appropriately, and it really doesn't take much training. This is obviously true because many common citizens do train and choose to carry concealed weapons. Nobody is suggesting that it is a good idea for untrained people to use guns. The scenario you envision where clueless people flail their guns around in "panic situations" exists in some fictional hollywood movies and your own imagination.

In reality, it would have been a very good idea for the teachers to be able to opt to retrieve training (if they wish) and be allowed to keep a gun on their person for such a situation. The body count could have been much lower.

Gun deaths are lower in Japan, so you assume this has something to do with gun laws? This is a simple case of the false-cause fallacy. In reality, crime, generally, is lower in Japan than the US. It follows that gun-related crime would also be lower, but it does not follow that gun laws have anything to do with this; that's just your assumption. A much safer assumption is that the US has culture and class-disparity problems, not to mention the dismal state of the mental health industry.

Thanks for your little list, but it isn't really "evidence" so much as it is a list of incorrect assumptions. If you really want to provide some evidence for your claims, try to avoid taking logical leaps and instead try providing links to some real research or something.

That's actually really easy to "deal with" since this is just a simple case of the false-cause fallacy.

You: There are more shootings in the US, therefore it is because of weaker gun laws.
Reality: Crime, in general, is higher in the US than many other countries. Obviously gun-related crime will be higher as well.

If you want to feel all warm and fuzzy by putting blame somewhere, a much more rational place would be to lay it on the dismal state of the mental health industry in the US.

Fortunately there is no reason why any company would ever have to support "all the distros." My main desktop runs Gentoo. My laptop runs Arch. I also do not care whether or not Valve or any other company with a proprietary product decides to support my niche distros. Those of us who choose to run a non-mainstream distro presumably also know how to make it work with whatever software we want to run. Your concern over the lack of support companies give to people like me is heart-warming, but it's also quite unnecessary.

Any proprietary package built for Ubuntu can easily be repackaged to work with any community distro that is capable of providing secure and more-or-less up-to-date packages--and, if there is any demand at all, it will be. Shared library versioning and distro packaging policies work together to make this whole thing a non-issue.

Mostly, these mythical users with a wrong understanding of optimization exist only in your head. This straw man is revived every time there's an opportunity to snipe at Gentoo. In reality, the vast majority of people who use Gentoo do so because of Portage and the vast potential for customization at every level, not speed. It's a great distro, as is Debian and Fedora. It's not what I recommend for Grandma, but Gentoo certainly has earned its place on the short list of great meta-distributions.

Yeah, he would never see any benefit from it. Except the fact that it would make the whole Linux system more viable, thus attracting more users, thus bringing in more people who don't have the sub-licensing issues that nvidia does and may choose to contribute.

I also love the over-the-top language GPL advocates always use: "Alan Cox would have his hard work stolen from him against his will..." Yeah... his hard work is absolutely stolen. Oh wait, I thought we can't call copyright infringement stealing since it actually doesn't take anything away from the copyright owner. It's actually even more ridiculous in this situation since Alan gives away his code for free (as in beer) anyway, whereas a digital music file or video actually has a price.

Fortunately, the trend for new software is to be licensed more openly (usually the apache or MIT license). People are figuring out that the GPL actually doesn't promote return code contributions nearly as well as it was supposed to, and it brings a whole host of complicated compatibility concerns with other open source licenses.

The GPL can be a useful license for businesses in some cases, but it really sucks as a general-purpose open source (or "free" software) license, and not just because of the distribution issues with "evil" corporations but also for end-users who miss out on better software that is the result of proprietary-friendly open source licenses. Stallman has really done a disservice to the software/computer industry by getting so many sheep to believe in his religious ideology, so let me be at least one voice saying the truth: Your computer is more useful when open source and proprietary software work together. Screaming "proprietary software is always and unequivocally evil" was never helpful, and people are awakening to the realization of how ridiculously false that notion is.

Is compiz still a talking point among people trying to promote desktop linux? Nevermind that OS X was first with useful, hardware-accelerated compositing, I guess. Maybe I've just gotten older, but wobbly windows and spinning cubes stopped being interesting quite a few years ago.

I used a Mac since 2003 and have since used predominantly Linux and BSD. Without compiz. I'm glad that my desktop environment isn't as "snazzy" as yours; any time my window manager draws my attention to itself and away from the applications is wasted time. However, I'm not way big on evangelizing--just use what works, I say--so maybe you know better how to promote desktop linux than I do.

I don't see very much Windows Phone hate. Mostly I see wonder at how Microsoft could be so late to this party and mild amusement at their struggle to remain relevant in that market. As for the MS/Nokia deal and considering who Nokia's CEO is, it doesn't take much tin foil to realize that something smells bad there.

This shouldn't be the case unless your operating system sucks at caching, and I am speaking as an early adopter (have had one SSD or another for 3+ years). The GP's point is valid: SSDs are great for improving bootup and application startup time, but unless you plan to put all your files on SSD (or, like I said, your OS sucks at caching), the returns are definitely diminishing. Better to max out the DRAM.

That said, I generally do recommend SSDs; just get a small, cheap one for the OS. You don't need the headaches of moving files between SSD and HDD. Just keep the distinction clear; SSD is for the OS and apps (/) and HDD is for all my files (/home). Easy. I would only get a hybrid if it was for a laptop and there was only one slot for a hard drive.

I also put the swap on my SSDs. I only have 4G DRAM in one of my machines with such a setup; when I occasionally and unintentially start thrashing, having the swap on an SSD keeps the computer usable and the problem is easily fixed without the UI locking up too badly.

Yeah, probably. This is definitely a great new political trick. As it was, the bill was only barely able to pass using all kinds of [documented cases of] bribery and interesting legislative tricks. If it had been called a tax in the first place, the bill obviously would not have even passed. If we can expect to see more of this, legislators can just stop using the word "tax" entirely and let the courts call it what it is. God knows there's a large enough portion of the American populace sucking on the government tit as it is and don't care care about anything besides getting more "free" stuff, getting their "fair share," or screwing the "rich" generally, but for those who do care about the details (like how to actually pay for something), there probably is a significant portion of them who are too retarded to see a spade for a spade or a tax for a tax without their legislators using the correct keywords. It obviously worked this time.