Irrelevant. The point was in response to the GP's ridiculous assertion about the "current understanding" of gun rights in the United States. It is not and never has been an "understanding" in the United States that everybody should or can have firearms.

I had to get permission from our County Court Judge before I could legally touch a handgun, never mind own or carry one. He could have said no for almost any reason that he wanted. The law says I can't have a license unless I have "proper cause" but does not define what proper cause is.

It is literally a felony to pick up a handgun in New York State without a license. If you so much as touch a pistol without a license you go directly to jail without passing go or collecting $200. That's been the "current understanding" in New York State since 1911, so you'll forgive me if I can't take people like the GP seriously.

You are wrong.

Shouldn't be done anywhere it's inappropriate for a heterosexual couple to do the same. I really don't feel like watching anybody go to first base while I'm trying to eat dinner, thank you very much....

Ah, gun nut, one of the favorite insults of the anti-rights crowd. Much easier to demean those that disagree with you rather than respond to their points, eh?

You're the one who claimed, emphasis mine: "the current understanding of gun rights in the USA is a late 1900s dirty harry style invention of anyone should have a gun ." Don't try and backpedal away from it now.

I could respond to your silly training argument by pointing out:

1. Driving is a privilege, not a constitutionally recognized right.
2. The prefatory clause is not a limiting clause. It was not imagined as such by the people who wrote it nor ever interpreted that way by a court.

Of course, what's the point of having that discussion? You've got the facts so hopelessly wrong that I believe your ignorance is willful. One bloody Google search would have been enough to dispel your misinformed belief about the "current understanding of gun rights in the usa" and you couldn't even be bothered to do that.

Automatic weapons have been heavily regulated since the 1930s, were further regulated in the 1980s, and the civilian ownership thereof is exceedingly rare.

You're thinking of semi-automatic weapons, like the AR-15 which look like their automatic counterparts, but are in fact no deadlier than any semi-automatic firearm. The United States Government has been selling surplus semi-automatic military issue firearms to the general public for decades, so it's a bit late to claim that semi-automatic firearms represent a level of firepower that should be unavailable to civilians.

I will concede that the provocative asshats who open carry AR-15s into Starbucks are just that, provocative asshats trying to piss people off for no reason. I view them the same way I view gay couples that engage in PDA in inappropriate settings (read: anywhere it would be inappropriate for a heterosexual couple to do the same) solely to piss people off.

Unless you:

1. Are a convicted felon.
2. Are a convicted domestic abuser.
3. Are currently charged with any crime punishable by a year or more in prison.
4. Are an unlawful user of any controlled substance.
5. Are addicted to any controlled substance, even one lawfully proscribed.
6. Have been dishonorably discharged from the United States military.
7. Have renounced your American citizenship.
8. Are the subject of an order of protection.
9. Are a fugitive from justice.
10. Are in the United States illegally.

Those are just the people proscribed from ownership under Federal law. Many States have tougher laws and add even more people to the list. Some (my home state, New York) go further and treat gun rights as a privilege, requiring a license, which is doled out at the whim of local bureaucrats who can deny you for virtually any reason they wish.

Point being, nowhere in the United States does the "current understanding" of gun rights say anyone should have firearms. Do you actually know what the existing body of Federal, State, and Local law has to say on this subject or are you just repeating talking points you read somewhere?

You realize that you're using the 1st Amendment on a computer, right? I'll turn in my modern firearm in favor of a musket when you exchange your computer for a printing press.

But I want to make a cup of Earl Grey by converting energy into matter, at enormous cost, because it's clearly easier than having a tank of water and recycling it as needed. :)

Ah, I remember Slamd64. I had that puppy on my first ever 64 bit machine, it took a few years for Slackware to jump on the 64 bit train.

I don't see the issue with using it as a server in a production environment, particularly if you roll servers with a specific role rather than trying to Swiss Army Knife them. If you monitor slackware-current they're as responsive as any distro with security updates and the package management isn't that cumbersome. Of course, if you're using Slackware the odds are good that you've compiled your own daemons and should be on top of patches/security updates yourself.

Either way it's not a deal breaker for a production server, unless you need a big company to hold your hand for everything, and in that instance why not just runa Windows server?

Marriage is a human right now? Seriously? It's just a fucking legal state. It's not required to love someone.

I'm in favor of what has foolishly been described "marriage equality" but that doesn't mean I'm going to get behind the destruction of someone's career merely because he happens to hold an opposing opinion. Y'all have gone too far with the vilification of people who disagree with you. I once suggested that we get Government out of the "marriage" business altogether, no marriage as such but civil unions for everyone who desires the legal benefits (medical decisions, property inheritance, and so on) of what is currently called marriage. Let any two consenting adults enter into a civil union, even siblings; the legal state of marriage has nothing whatsoever to do with "love."

For that suggestion I was immediately attacked as homophobic. WTF?

Enjoy your virtual lynch mobs and group-think. I'm happy we're making progress on this front but it does not need to be a zero sum game between equality and free speech. People are free to express differing points of view and should not be destroyed for doing so.

At the time he gave the money his position was so far out of the mainstream that the current sitting President of the United States of America agreed with him.

Do you really think it was appropriate to drive him out of his job because of a political opinion that's shared by nearly half the country? That's absurd. Were you one of the people who changed your profile pictures to "Je suis Charlie" after the Paris attacks? Because that would be incredibly fucking ironic.

There's always Slackware. I still use it as "go to" distro for both desktop and server roles. It's not as sexy other distros but there's no better way to learn Linux. I highly doubt Patrick is going to jump on the systemd bandwagon any time soon, if ever.

Enjoy

Ah, but how does the traffic get from Netflix's ISP to your ISP?

Hint: The actual internet is more than the oft-imagined cloud on network diagrams. Network operators agree to interconnect with each other, for mutual benefit, and if such an agreement is unbalanced (because one party is handing off more traffic than the amount they're willing or able to deliver) one of the network operators will end up paying the other.

A simplified version, wherein we're both network operators, Case 1, equal traffic flow:

Shakrai: "I have 3 terabit/s of peak hour traffic that you can deliver for me."
suutar: "Perfect. I also have 3 terabit/s of peak hour traffic that I can't deliver but you can. Let's connect our networks."
Shakrai: "Sounds good."

Case 2, unbalanced traffic flow:

Shakrai: "I have 10 terabit/s of peak hour traffic that you can deliver for me."
suutar: "I only have 3 terabit/s to hand off to you. We're going to bill you for the difference, okay?"
Shakrai: "Sure."

That has been the paradigm on the internet for a very long time, because it's recognized that it costs money to get a packet from Point A to Point B. Networks pay for connections to other networks unless they can absorb a roughly equal amount of traffic. You can't dump terabits of traffic into someone's network without offering them something in return.

Netflix wants to blow up this longstanding model because bearing the full cost of delivering their packets eats into their bottom line. It doesn't kill their business model, the fact that they're profitable attests to that, but it sure seems to keep Mr. Hastings up late at night. If you actually drill down into this issue you'll find that they've hijacked the concept of network neutrality. There a ton of arguments to be made in favor of network neutrality but Netflix is not one of them.

POTS is dying, largely because it's unable to respond to more nimble competitors that do not have to deal with a legacy regulatory environment. It's arguably already a niche product, one that will be completely dead in another decade or two at most.

And, incidentally, the law in question hasn't been amended since 1996. When the 33.6kbit/s modem was bleeding edge for consumer internet access. Do you remember those days? Because I do. 19 years later and I have the equivalent of a T3 in my pocket, which works almost anywhere in CONUS. Such a connection was unthinkable for consumer access in 1996.

You'll pardon my skepticism if I think that advancement would have occurred that rapidly if we had sought to apply outdated regulations drafted for Ma Bell to the internet.