Whilst I understand the dilemma, this is a defeatist attitude & not in the heart of democracy.

We had a similar problem in the UK with Labour & the Conservatives. The Conservatives lost many voters due to the huge controversies created during their reign in the 80's & 90's (symbolised by Thatcher), and the following Labour government took us into an illegal war & steered us into the financial crisis (it was the collapse of Lehman's in London that sent the dominoes falling).
The disillusion gave way to the Liberal Democrats getting their highest share of the vote in a *century*, forcing a coalition government. They didn't get a majority, however it gave the two leading parties a massive reality check & kick in the backside.

Prior to the election, we were all warned to vote tactically & that a vote for one of the minor parties would be a vote wasted.

If enough people act, change CAN happen.

Your comparison's a bit moot given you're comparing it to the wrong sport. "Rugby", y'know, from the bit you quoted from.

What complete bollocks. The usage of an armed response is so infrequent here that every event is heavily scrutinised. The media circus surrounding the 2011 Mark Duggan case as a good example.

I think you just made your own post redundant...

Countless physical artefacts, several of the world's dominant languages & entire fucking cities. A touch more solid than 2000 year old fairy tales.

Whilst I would expect someone involved enough to start hacking their servers would be better informed, the general population are *very* uninformed about foreign politics. Forgiveable given the local politics mirrors a soap opera.

I made reference to the NSA & recent events during a meeting at a state department here & only one person in the room had any clue what I was talking about.

Unless they've changed in the last 10 years, they *are* taught & examined as different subjects. The difference is that unless you specifically take science as a subject, study of the 3 sciences rotates in 2 slots & the final qualification is only worth 2 GCSEs instead of 3.

This promise means one of either 3 things:
a) A subject will be dropped from the curriculum to make way for the extra science classes;
b) More will be put on the already overloaded curriculum (especially an issue when all finals are sat over the same period, with no gaps);
c) Empty words, Bollocks & Bullshit.

Trying to cover operating costs whilst providing users a free service != hate.
If you don't want to pay for the content you consume, to complain when they try to make up costs some other way.

Bar pop-ups & intrusive flash ads, I see ad-blocking as unethical. Don't like the ads? Don't consume their content.

Dear Mr Pot, ...

The Lib Dems are strongly pro EU...

Wow, props for the well addressed, calm response. It deserves a reply.
There were a number of areas I didn't make reference to purely for the sake of being brief, but I'll raise them now.

I did consider the issue of sports, however that can easily be tidied up with tighter restrictions on equipment. As is the case in many (most?) other countries, the equipment isn't owned by individuals, but "leased" from the ranges. Ammo is counted in & out, so it can't go "missing".
As for your burglary comment, I again point out that in an unarmed state it's highly unlikely that the intruder would have a gun themselves. This would be due to a) lack of availability & b) being caught in possession of a firearm can turn a 6 month sentence into a 40 year sentence.

I can possibly empathise with people not wanting to give up their arms once they've already got them. a) for sentimentality, b) because the non law abiding citizens who have now got hold of guns, won't mind breaking the law to keep them. This leaves the law abiding citizens at a distinct disadvantage.
This isn't an argument *not* to disarm the populace, just that it would need to be done carefully.
You can probably draw a very similar analogy with nuclear proliferation & MAD - no one wants to make themselves vulnerable by backing down first, but everyone agrees it's a counter-productive situation that needs to be resolved. In fact it's almost exactly like MAD, except with nations instead of individuals.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm a fully fledged, card holding civil libertarian & I'm not averse to arguing controversially strong views in support of our civil rights. However, I don't think every man, woman & child should have the natural right to possess equipment whose sole design & purpose is to kill other people.
I the same light, I also don't have problems with the government restricting the public's access to lethal chemicals & radioactive compounds (which have legitimate scientific use).

Proceeding onto the research & article...

Unless the PA is a total anomaly which bears no similarities to other states, I think it's fair to draw inferences - and 667 cases isn't a bad sample size. At no point did the study overstate the certainty of its conclusions.
As for the other factors you mention, are they relevant? The aim of the study was simple: Will being armed make you safer?

Yes, there are still gun related crimes in the UK, that's unavoidable. However, incidents tend to be limited to the rare gang shootings on a couple of infamous council estates. Armed crimes (lethal or not) outside of this tiny subset are infrequent enough that it'll be covered in the national news for days.
The Duggan case you refer to was a good example of this. The alleged gang member was in mere possession of a gun, having only just received it & the police were all over him.
Our homicide by firearm rate is 0.1/100,000 (40/yr). Taking into account that most incidents are within the small communities mentioned above, I think that shines quite well on us as a whole.

As to your last point - the fact people have died in gun fights isn't an argument for more guns.

That doesn't address my comment on the nature of the "demand".

There's a demand for substances, because people like to get "high";
There's a demand for guns, because people are afraid of other people with guns.

Disarm everyone, and you stem the demand. The problem is when each side tries to out-arm the other, and you just end up with a big lethal mess with everyone's finger on the trigger (literally).

The belief that possessing a firearm makes you safer is a fallacy.

For comparison, the homicide rate per capita is 5x higher in the US than in the UK. (source, UN)

If I were to have a confrontation with somebody, my chances would be far better than if we were faced with an "I'll shoot you before you shoot me" situation.
American Journal of Public Health:

(source)

And it's not even a case of law abiding UK citizens being defenceless. Because of the tight restrictions, there are less guns in circulation, and because less people are armed, crimes are far less lethal.
If a shop keeper were to be targeted here, no one would get shot, the perp'd just get hit upside the head with a chair & chased down the street.

That's a false analogy. People only want guns because other people have guns. It's a self-perpetuating arms race - there's a demand because there's a supply.

Also, the "War against Drugs" didn't create drugs. The majority of illicit substances were created in a lab, and usually for a completely different purpose to how they ended up being used recreationally.

"How often do you really use the command line anyway?"

You gotta' be kidding me? Forget work, even in my daily personal use I open a terminal at least once or twice a day. Once you understand how things work & learn the tools you have at your disposal, the command line is faster & more efficient by far.

Starting & stopping services;
Debugging processes;
Load management;
Checking logs;

If it hadn't cut my teeth on Slackware, I'd have no clue how to compile a program from source, have no idea about how to work around dependencies & would have only the vaguest idea of what a kernel is. If my experiences were limited to the likes of Debian & Red Hat (heck, even OpenBSD) then I'd be heavily reliant on general use binaries & package managers, & be completely stuck when it came to dealing with conflicting dependencies or rebuilding programs with obscure flags. I might as well use Windows.

If you have to ask that question, Slackware isn't for you.

You jest, but what's the old adage? "If you want to learn Debain, use Debian. If you want to learn Linux, us Slackware."
(replace "Debian" with your packaged distro of choice)

It really depends on what your aim is. Is this for personal use, or career/study? If the former, then go the Ubuntu/Mint route as most people are is suggesting, but if the latter, then throw yourself in the deep end & learn to swim.
The major desktop distros are so stable now that you will rarely, if ever, need to delve under the hood. This won't teach you "Linux". If someone sat you down at a terminal, or with a distribution you had never used before, you'd be completely lost. But if you go for a system that requires you to get your hands dirty, then you will learn very quickly.

The lessons you learn with Slackware will be transferable to every Linux/POSIX environment you find yourself in.
The lessons you learn with Ubuntu/CentOS/$distro will only teach you how to use that particular distro.