The idea behind regulation is not to infringe upon the right to bear arms, but to encourage those arms to be handled properly, in a way that doesn't needlessly endanger others. As it is now, with firearms, we can't have people just walking around and pointing a loaded gun at people without a just cause for doing so. Such a person would be showing that they can't assume the responsibility that comes with bearing a weapon.

This is much the same idea as with the freedom of speech being limited to not abusing it to create a panic or riot when there is no clear and present danger that requires such speech.

Nukes occupy a special niche in the known arsenal of men. You can't easily create a nuke in your backyard, so it wouldn't be too difficult to regulate the sale/transfer of components or a complete nuke to another person. The sales and transfer of nukes is already heavily regulated, and these regulations appear to be sufficient, as we haven't had an accidental deployment of them ever, or a malicious use of them (where somebody in control of the weapon used it in a way that was unauthorized). Now the regulations that are already in place can appear to be Orwellian when applied to the average Joe, but I would assume that for the most part, they are necessary to ensure they safety of the people who would likely be affected if something untoward were to happen. A person that doesn't recognize the necessity of being regulated or inspected when they are/will be in possession of a weapon that can level a whole city if accidentally fired, and sees such a policy as "too Orwellian" would be a person who would not be allowed to possess those arms.

In order for the nuke to be stored there, it would have to be resistant to such an attack. The planes that smashed into the WTC in 2001 were not very far away from Indian Point. In fact, one of the planes flew right overhead. Those towers would've withstood such an attack, which might be a reason why they weren't targeted.

But without regulation, it would probably be pretty messy if such an event were to occur.

You are absolutely right. I think that a shoulder fired anti-aircraft missile to be a vital component of a home defense arsenal. When we have enemies that use aircraft as weapons against people, it's only proper that people should be able to defend against such weapons.

The only "that's different" part that you might hear from me is from the possibility of negligence in the securing and maintenance of such weapons can be hazardous to the environment or population, and in some circumstances, it would be prudent to have laws that help encourage responsibility in securing, maintaining, and testing some of the more dangerous weapons, by making it a crime (misdemeanor or felony depending on the type of weapon) to neglect to secure a weapon properly to prevent unauthorized use, to neglect to maintain the weapon properly, or to test fire the weapon in a manner that constitutes a danger to other people or their property. I would also support periodic inspection and regulation of some of the most dangerous weapons. Such an approach would have the effect of keeping nukes from people who aren't capable of keeping them secured, while still allowing people who have the resources and capability to exercise their rights.

The jury deliberates in secret. The jury returns a verdict. Judgement in a case depends on the jury returning a verdict. The jury can arrive at a verdict through any means they desire, including determining whether a law is valid or not, whether the facts fit the law, whether the facts are actually facts, or even flipping coins. As long as they all agree on the verdict and they deliberate in secret there is nothing that can be done about this.

Juries are the most powerful entities in our government, more powerful than the legislative, executive, and judicial branches combined. No person can be convicted, or even tried, for a felony, unless first indicted by a grand jury. On top of that, no person can be convicted of any crime, felony or misdemeanor, unless a jury returns a guilty verdict, excepting crimes where there is no trial, due to a guilty plea.

The fact that you don't seem to understand this simple concept is evidence that you've been hoodwinked. As P.T. Barnum was known for saying, "a sucker is born every minute". I was also suckered by this years ago (so I'm not really picking on you, just trying to wake you up), but I've spent some time reading up on the topic, and I've learned just how bad things really are, and have been for years now.

You get shot and killed while defending your right to bear arms.

I wouldn't worry about it. Since you seem to acknowledge an unconstitutional law is a valid law in NY, this situation is unlikely to happen.

Facing the British Isles?

There, fixed that for you.

This is not something that should be left in the hands of the judge.

They do this all the time by trying to separate the synonymous meanings of "arrest" and "detain" to sidestep the laws they've sworn to abide by.

First, gtk+ is for C, while qt is for C++. Another major difference is that qt is more than just a widget toolkit, but an application runtime environment that provides widgets. This means that qt provides string handling, database connectivity, etc., although you don't have to use anything but the widgets and application objects, if you wish.

I thing maemo is mostly written in C, so some parts will probably have to be rewritten in C++.

This article may help a bit, although it only compares qt with gtkmm (the c++ bindings to gtk):
http://www.telegraph-road.org/writings/why.html

This article should be taken with a grain of salt, as it's pretty old, and may be inaccurate today.

I started using gtk+ with python, way back in the 1.x versions. The 2.x bindings for python were much better, allowing me to write more pythonic code using gtk+.

Later on, I decided to try out qt3, and I haven't looked back since. While it took a bit of getting used to, I found that it was easier to use qt, rather than gtk+, although I'm hard pressed to figure out exactly why.

One of the things I liked about qt over gtk+ was the separation of the layout widgets and the interactive widgets. Coming from gtk, this was something that took me a while to understand, but once I got the hang of it, I liked it, and think that it's a better way to organize the widgets. With gtk, a vbox holds child widgets, such as buttons, labels, etc. So if you want to rearrange them in an hbox, you have to destroy those widgets and make new ones in the hbox. In qt, the layout widgets are of type "layout", and you can only have layout children in layout widgets. The interactive widgets are children of the main widget (or a child widget of the main widget). These widgets are "placed" into the layout, but can be removed without being destroyed, allowing you to rearrange the layout more easily.

I also prefer the signal/slot mechanism in qt over the callback mechanism in gtk. On the average, it makes it easier to glue your widgets together, but there are a few circumstances where a callback mechanism is preferred, in which case you have to invent a new signal(s) and chain them together. This is because there is no order of slots called when a signal is emitted.

Also, the qt documentation was better, more organized, and easier to read than the gtk docs (at least around the time I switched ~2004).

Probably the largest reason why we're even having this discussion is due to licensing. Gtk gained a lot of popularity, due qt being licensed under the trolltech license, which restricted developers from using the free version in commercial products. The switch to gpl didn't do much to change this, although you could then create commercial products, but you also had to release the source for those products. So if you wanted to keep the source closed and use qt, you still had to purchase a commercial qt license.

The job of a virus scanner is to scan files for virii, not to monitor the filesystem for changes. It seems that one of the major problems of windows, compared to other OS's, is that there is not a good ecosystem of simple utility services. In a linux environment, it's easy to use fam/gamin to be notified of filesystem changes, and then get the virus scanner to use fam/gamin instead of writing the code necessary to do the filesystem monitoring.

In the absence of such an environment, in order to provide similar functionality, the antivirus developers must write the filesystem monitors themselves. This is also true for antispyware developers, etc. This can cause problems when these programs are from different vendors, and each program has its own means of monitoring the filesystem, which can cause unnecessary lag and memory usage, and sometimes competition over which process get access to which files (causing the system to become less responsive).

These statements may not be as true as they once were, at least with respect to filesystem monitoring. I don't really have much experience with any version of windows after xp, and only limited experience with xp. Regardless, the manner in which commercial software is developed, marketed, and distributed sometimes makes it difficult to use third party "middleware" with a commercial solution. Often, if such middleware isn't developed by Microsoft, and present or available for the target system, the developers must make their own solution. ( http://www.clamwin.com/content/view/35/27/ -- here we see that the clamwin developers are being "forced" to do exactly this)

(I was just looking and came across this article - http://srikanthtechnologies.com/articles/dotnet/file_system_monitoring.html)
It seems that there is an api to do the file system monitoring, but not yet any standard service to perform the action, which is the critical difference.

With regards to Winpooch and XPsp3 (and likely vista, win7, win8 ...) you may want to read the third post on this forum thread: http://forum.sysinternals.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=14895

This is likely the main reason that development on winpooch has stopped.

Even though winpooch is dead, the interaction between winpooch and clamwin demonstrates an appropriate separation of responsibilities. Winpooch monitors, and clamwin scans. So, winpooch doesn't have to scan (as it can call clamwin for that, or another drop-in replacement) and clamwin doesn't have to monitor the filesystem, as it can rely on the monitoring program, in this case winpooch, to call it on alterations in the filesystem.

It would be nice if the clamwin developers were making the filesystem monitor that they are now having to develop as a separate component (even if distributed with the scanner), so that other programs could plug into it, saving them the trouble of having to develop their own solution.

This is where I always get confused, especially when writing programs. A few years ago, I learned about a nifty little python trick, where you map sys.excepthook to a function in your application. When I use pykde, I usually map this function to an error dialog that displays the error message and a traceback in a text area.

http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/useless/trunk/useless/kdebase/error.py

Anyway, I was creating an application for a friend, and I decided to make a different kind of dialog window that had an "email developer" button on it that would let my friend automatically email me when she encountered and error, putting the traceback in the body of the email, but it wouldn't work properly, and the error handler was crashing while it was handling an exception. I had the hardest time trying to figure out what to do about it.

Is there really an issue here? Is it impossible to freely redistribute Chrome? According to this page:

http://code.google.com/chromium/terms.html

It seems that anybody can redistribute the code and/or binaries, with the possible exception of the parts that are trademarked (similar to Mozilla).

I had a friend who bought that game. I tried it too, and also didn't like it as much.

I remember the title, but I don't think I've ever played that one. I just looked it up on wikipedia, and learned that there has been a remake of the game made and is supposedly available at retroremakes.com, but it's probably not the same as the wikipedia article mentions the remake is 3d. While searching for it on the remakes site, I found this remake which looks interesting:

http://slashx.googlepages.com/adventure2600reboot

After looking more closely at the wikipedia article, the game was released in 1989, which is probably why I don't remember it as well. The only games that I bought after 1987 were the sequels to the Bards Tale, and Legacy of the Ancients. Otherwise, I just borrowed games from friends.

Your sig reminds me of an old lawn mower game, I think it was Hover Bovver. I used to like that game. :)

I wasn't trying to imply that vintage wasn't tied to a year (or season) at all, merely that it's probably more closely tied to the vine (or vineyard) than the year. Vintage is both season and vineyard, even though season (or year) is what comes to peoples' minds first these days.

To put it back into perspective to the video game topic, we can easily call a group of more recent EA games a "Challenge Everything" Vintage. While this isn't tied to a year, it is tied to a timespan and a "vineyard of programmers/designers".

It's obvious that the analogy does break down a bit, and isn't accurate, but the word has been misused for so long that the vernacular has become more accustomed to make a connotation base on time of origin in preference to place of origin.

This statement reminds me of Jacques Cousteau finding a Greek vintage vase of wine in a sunken shipwreck. I think that it was in the Guiness Book of World Records as the oldest wine ever drunk.

I used to have a small red lcd D&D game, which was basically just a clone of Hunt the Wumpus. It was the first portable wumpus game that I'm aware of.