I was going to suggest going North Korean on his ass. Death by mortar fire, death by flame thrower or death by hungry dogs? It's just so damned hard to choose.

I once had a Server 2003 install go bananas and completely fuck up an Exchange message store. "Never again!" I cried, and within a few hours was installing from a day old backup.

You say that like it's necessarily a bad thing.

We've got to stop acting as if the Founding Fathers were like Moses descending from Mount Sinai with the Constitution chiseled on a couple of stone tablets. They were brilliant, enlightened men for their day, but the Constitution is not a document of divine inerrancy.

The US Constitution is the COBOL of constitutions. Yes, it was a tremendous intellectual innovation for its time. Yes, it is still being used successfully today. But nobody *today* would write a constitution that way, *even if their intent was exactly the same* as the founders.

For one thing it's full of confusingly pointless ("To promote the Progress of Science") and hoplessly vague ("securing for *limited times*") phraseology that leaves courts wondering exactly what the framers meant, or whether they were just pointlessly editorializing ("A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State").

It's also helplessly out of date. The Constitution was drafted before the existence of mass media and advertising; before photography even. It was the appearance of photography in newspapers that woke people up to the idea that they might have privacy rights that were being threatened. A Constitution written in 1900 would almost certainly have clauses explicitly recognizing a right to individual privacy and empowering the government to protect that right. A Constitution written in 2000 would almost certainly have clauses restricting the government from violating individual privacy.

And then there is slavery, an outright *evil* which is enshrined in the founder's version of the Constitution. That alone should disqualify any claim they may have had to superhuman morality.

So if we take it as given that the US Constitution is not divinely ordained, it's not necessarily a bad thing that the current generation should choose to butcher what the founders established. Would you re-institute slavery? Allow *states* to deprive citizens of liberty and property without due process? Eliminate direct election of senators?

So it's perfectly reasonable to butcher anything in the Constitution when you're proposing an *amendment* to the Constitution. That's the whole point. We should think for ourselves. In doing so, we're actually carrying on the work the framers themselves were doing. Every generation should learn from its predecessors, but think for itself.

When you look at the Second Amendment within the context of how the US was formed as an outgrowth of revolution against what was viewed as a tyrannical regime. Many of the underlying concepts of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are essentially answers to the reasons for revolt and secession against Great Britain laid out in the Declaration of Independence. The Second Amendment was clearly intended to preserve liberties against future tyrants.

I think you are feeling very confused: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

You actually live in something *better* than a direct democracy.

A direct democracy enjoys no constitutional guarantees of rights. It's strictly majority rule.

I have absolutely no problem with a sane, sober individual possessing a weapon. I myself am a Canadian, but I remember camping trips with my grandparents out in the backcountry of British Columbia, and he always kept his hunting rifle loaded (that would get him arrested in Canada these days), not because he even really hunted by that point, but because of the risk from bears and other predators with young kids around. I learned to shoot when I was pretty young, and while I have no more adoration for guns than I do for hammers or screwdrivers, I respect their power and believe firmly that whether anyone owns a gun or not, they should know how one works, both for gun safety and in the hopefully unlikely event they actually need to use one.

The fact of the matter is that if someone is out to kill lots of people, guns, while perhaps the most convenient method, are hardly the only one. Some college kid just stabbed five people to death at a house party, apparently with a knife that was in the house where the party was being held. If someone goes nuts and decides it's time to kill lots of people, there's damned little anyone can do about it. Maybe, if we're lucky, we find out about their dastardly plan in advance, but bad luck can take anyone out; whether it be a maniac with a weapon, a car accident, or hell, falling off a ladder.

Right this way sir... here's some bread, we hope you enjoy the circus.

CTRL-S is your friend.

This study defines "rich people" as those making around $146000/year.

If you think about it, there's no control for expenses there, so it's not a very effective definition (I'm always kind of a amazed at the mindset in the US that tries to simplify things by drawing a numeric line in the sand, as if there were no other issues. And people put up with it. We need better schools.

I define "rich" as: wealthy enough to be living in a manner comfortable in every material way to the individual or family, and able to survive indefinitely in that state, or in an increasingly wealthy state without relying on income from, or charity of, others. Regardless of if one actually chooses to exist in that state, or not.

Not trying to force that definition on anyone else, but that's how I see it personally.

I recommend antibiotics.

The transition was from a flawed, but still readily identifiable constitutional republic (not a democracy), to a corporate oligarchy.

This has never been a democracy, and furthermore, the constitution insists that the federal government guarantee each state a republican form of government, as in, a republic -- not a democracy. That's in article 4, section 4.

This is why representatives decide the actual matters, and voters don't, in the basic design.

Of course, now even the representatives don't decide -- nor judges -- if the legislation deals in any significant way with business interests. The only way the old system still operates even remotely the way it was designed to is when the issue(s) at hand a purely social ones. Even then, the bill of rights seems to be at the very bottom of any legislator's or judge's list of concerns.

Can't see any of this changing, though. The public is too uninformed, and short of completely revamping the school curriculums, they're going to remain that way.

What happens to the vast minority of people who always think they are in the vast majority?

They join some Libetarian populist movement and demand all government services with the exception of those they partake of to be slashed or eliminated?

And yes, oh ye mighty moderators, this is trolling.

Guess I should have been a little more explicit. I meant, as distinguished from one that required another object impact. Just an original ring system.

...a collapsed ring system?