What utter bullshit. If all of the Jews in Germany had been armed and had decided in 1934 to resist Hitler they still would have been killed, armed Jewish resistance wouldn't have made the Nazis back down, it would have given them the excuse they needed to start the Holocaust a few years earlier. Or let's take the example of the Japanese American internment. What do you think would have happened if Japanese Americans had decided to arm themselves and resist deportation to camps such as Manzanar? Would the government have backed down on deporting the Japanese Americans if a couple of prominent advocates of internment, say Earl Warren, the AG of California at the time, and FDR, had been assassinated by Japanese Americans? No, given the racist tenor of the times the Japanese Americans would have been slaughtered.

That leaves removing the opportunity... which also can't be done, not completely, but the window of opportunity can be dramatically reduced if the potential victims have access to the tools and skills they need to fight back.

Oh, so you're a member of the "let's arm the children crowd". Guess what, you're full of shit. Being trained and having guns didn't prevent four Lakewood police officers from being gunned down by Maurice Clemmons. Having a bunch of guys with guns around them didn't prevent Ronald Reagan and James Brady from being shot in 1981. You need to pull your head out of your ass and stop masturbating to Death Wish.

Or the means, or the opportunity. Removing the means for mass murder is impossible, because there are so very many ways to do it, and all of those means have alternative, productive, useful uses to the non-mass-murdering segment of society.

Bullshit. Fully automatic weapons were banned in 1934 and guess what, no one has been going around and shooting up schools with fully automatic weapons because they're not available to the average nutjob. Enforcing a ban on semi-automatic weapons would be difficult but could be done. At the very least the government could just ban their sale to private citizens and ban sales and transfers of existing semi-automatic weapons. If you already have a semi-automatic weapon you get to keep it, but nobody else gets to buy a Bushmaster and you can't sell your Bushmaster to anyone else. And guess what gun nutz, if you read Scalia's opinion in DC versus Heller this would be entirely constitutional.

Or the government could just ban sales of semi-automatic weapons with detachable magazines. This would be entirely legal and constitutional under Heller. You want a semi-automatic rifle for hunting, hey, you can buy an M1 Garand and have eight shots, which is all you need for hunting. If you need a weapon for defending your house you can buy a revolver, and if you can't resolve a home defense situation with six shots or less then you probably shouldn't have a gun at all.

You're just blustering and repeating right-wing NRA talking points and blowing smoke up everyone's ass.

Wow, spoken like a true racist dogfucker. Let me guess, you're also one of those fucktards who believes that President Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Socialist.

Yes, have you ever heard of Oracle Enterprise Linux? Oracle went out and took RedHat Linux, added OCFS2 and other Oracle enhancements and started selling OEL. Oh, and if you were already licensing Oracle for your database OEL was compelling because it meant that you had one less throat to choke if you were trying to solve a problem with the system and because it was cheaper to add support for OEL to your Oracle license than it was to purchase a support contract from RedHat. Needless to say RedHat was not happy about this but there wasn't anything they could do about it except suck it up and watch as they lost customers to Oracle. Now Oracle has a brilliant business model here. Develop a proprietary product and then let someone else develop an operating system that your product runs on and then you copy their OS and use it to drive sales for your product.

Yeah, and RedHat doesn't (and can't) stop anyone from redistributing its OS. Since CentOS already does it for them, and since non-commercial users use Fedora, they don't have to bother too much about that.

A few years ago I worked for a company that was running Oracle on RedHat. We reached a point where it was time to buy new servers and instead of buying RedHat licenses we bought licenses for Oracle Enterprise Linux, which is basically RedHat Linux except someone downloaded the RedHat source and ran

find . -type f -exec sed -i -e "s/Red Hat/Oracle/g"

Man the RedHat rep was pissed off when I told him that we were switching to OEL from RedHat. I got a big lecture on how Oracle was just piggy-backing on all of RedHat's hard work. It was rather hilarious.

So you hacked together something based upon the Tanenbaum book. Big fucking deal. Just because you created a kernel and boot loader in x86 ASM in two weeks doesn't mean that it was worth a shit. If creating a kernel is so fucking easy then why didn't the GNU project have one back in the late 1980s? Well there are two reasons, one because creating a real kernel for an OS that's going to run in the real world is fairly difficult, regardless of whether or not it's a "micro" kernel or a "monolithic" one, and of course because the GNU project spent three years dicking around and waiting for a license for the Mach Microkernel to become available. But eventually that issue was resolved and as soon as it was GNU wrote a kernel and shipped it right? No, GNU has spent 20 years fucking around with the Hurd, and even after twenty years it's still a piece of shit that nobody uses. So on the one hand you have Linus Torvalds who was able to put together a working monolithic kernel using the GNU tools in a fairly short period of time. On the other hand you have the GNU project, who developed the GNU tools (and you'd think that this would give them an advantage) and who have had over 20 years to develop a kernel and the best that they can do is the Hurd. Oh, and yeah, people develop monolithic kernels all the time because monolithic kernels work and have decent performance. Mach was a great idea and a cool project but Mach kernels never delivered on their initial promise of improved performance and most operating systems that claimed to use Mach based kernels (OSF/1) were actually using hybrid kernels that combined features from Mach with a more traditional monolithic kernel design.

*Windoze crashed constantly when I used it. The acronym BSOD is a household name, because of that "stability" on the MS desktop.

Have you ever considered that perhaps your system had bad hardware, or that perhaps you're just a fucking retard who can't get a Windows system to work?

*OSX is a Unix based OS. It is, by its very design, in the same league as Linux.

Wow, and here you were accusing someone else of inane babbling. OS X is not in the same league as Linux. OS/X is based upon BSD, which, under the hood, is completely different from Linux. OS/X has a great GUI. Linux GUIs are stupid, derivative and bloated. Apple spends lots of time making sure that all of the components of OS/X work with each other, they aren't perfect but they're a Hell of a lot better than any Linux distro out there. When Apple updates a major component of the system, such as the init manager they do it right. Migrating to launchd was transparent and painless, things just worked. Compare and contrast this to the fucked up and retarded way that the dickheads at Ubuntu grafted Upstart on to Debian. Upstart has been shipping with every Ubuntu distro since Lucid, and it's still buggy as Hell and even now, after almost three years there aren't any third party packages that support it. Linux does have better memory management than MacOS X, although that's not saying much, and if you've never had OOM killer fuck up something important then you obviously haven't run too many Linux systems, and it has better filesystems available (XFS) and it's had logical volume management since 2001, whereas Apple didn't introduce volume management until MacOS Lion (10.7).

Yes, I've used both, and I've been using Linux for almost 20 years now and do you know what? It's a shitty desktop operating system. Linux on the desktop fucking sucks ass, Ubuntu is every bit as stupidly bloated as anything Microsoft has ever shipped, don't believe me? Well go install Ubuntu without a GUI and then add Gnome or KDE and watch as Ubuntu downloads several gigabytes of dependencies and loads your system up with crap. And what do you get? A piece of shit desktop that's basically just a ripoff of what Microsoft and Apple are doing, except that it's a piss poorly implemented ripoff. Then there's the fact that Linux has bugs and for the most part companies that sell Linux aren't any better at fixing those bugs than Microsoft or Apple. Canonical certainly isn't. I've been using Ubuntu for the last three years. Upstart is still a buggy, fucked up piece of shit, if you want services to start reliably on a Linux system, you end up having to edit the Upstart scripts in /etc/init, because otherwise Upstart is too fucking stupid to properly mount your NFS filesystems and you end up with orphaned inodes because Upstart doesn't properly unmount the root filesystem before the system is shut down. These are major bugs that were reported over two years ago and they still haven't been fixed. I keep hearing all of you fucking Linux fanbois bitching about how bad Microsoft is but you never bring stuff like this up, either because you're dishonest or you're just ignorant little shits who aren't actually using Linux in a production environment and but who think that because you installed it at home you're super duper 1337. Linux does a lot of things really well. Linux virtualization with libvirt/KVM is amazing. It's not as fully featured as VMware yet, but it's made huge leaps and bounds in the last three years. Companies such as Tivo and DataDomain have shown that Linux is a great operating system for dedicated devices. Companies such as Amazon run on Linux and have been for over a decade. But Linux on the desktop fucking sucks, it's nothing more than stupid, bloated, imitative shit.

You kids these days with your gadgets. Back in my day we had thing-a-ma-jigs, and whatcha-mcallits and we were darned lucky to have even those!

and the dipshits who voted for you. You don't want to believe in evolution and science. Great, you don't have to, but you also don't get to have any access to modern technology. No computers, no internet, no television, no electricity, no modern medicine. None of that. You can live your lives free of all of this Hellish technology and just to make sure those of us who do believe in science will enforce this law with every bit of modern weapons technology at our disposal.

and how much porn they could download with a terabit ethernet connection? But seriously, fuck terabit ethernet, that's for pussies. I say we go with free space communications between nodes over high powered laser links. Sure, there are a few things to work out, such as how to avoid being sliced in half, burned or blinded whenever you have to go into the machine room, but think of the bandwidth! Besides, it would be really cool to be able to repurpose old NICs as death rays.

Canonical have provided the community with a polished and free OS

Free yes, polished? Are you fucking kidding me? I can tell that you've never used Ubuntu for any serious server work. If you had you'd know that it's anything but polished. Take the Upstart init manager as an example. In theory Upstart was supposed to replace the old SYS V init scripts with a leaner, event driven mechanism for system start up. In practice it has done anything but. Some services start through Upstart, some start through init.d and others, such as sshd have different behavior depending upon whether or not you control them via upstart or start and stop them via init.d. Then there's the fact that the braindead dildos who wrote Upstart set it up so that it kills services via kill -9. Yeah, because nothing bad could ever happen if you ran kill -9 to shut your database down, which is exactly what Upstart does when you run

stop mysql

Apparently no one at Canonical understands that "kill -9" is something that you use only as a last resort and certainly isn't something you want to use when you're stopping and starting a database. Then there's the piece of shit Plymouth boot manager. Guess what, servers don't need splash screens. Really, they don't. My servers live in remote sites or are hosted in the cloud. I don't need a cutesy picture when they start, I want screen after screen of detailed output telling me what the system is doing. But go ahead and try to remove Plymouth from your Ubuntu system. Guess what! You can't. Some useless son-of-a-crack-whore set up the package dependencies such that attempting to remove Plymouth, which is a real piece of shit from an Ubuntu system also removes the core system.

Then there's ureadahead. Ureadahead is an OK idea on laptops I guess but does nothing for you when you're on a server and I've started disabling it on the systems I run. Interestingly enough despite ureadahead's supposed performance benefits I haven't seen any penalty for doing so. I could go on and on and on, the out of date rsyslog that ships with Ubuntu (yeah, because collecting log information is boring and old school, who needs that stuff?), bugs in mdraid that cause it to incorrectly detect disk size when it creates your disk label, thus creating a ticking time bomb that can go off and result in massive file corruption, etc, etc, etc. Oh, and the Ubuntu desktop, what a piece of shit. I'd take Windows XP over this POS any day of the week. Newsflash Ubuntu developers, larding your desktop up with shiny crap doesn't make it more useful. The Gnome and Unity UIs are every bit as bloated and stupid as the Windows Vista UI and if any real functionality or value has been added I have yet to see what it is. Gnome and Unity are nothing more than a shiny coat of paint on top of a nasty, stinky turd.

About a year ago I set up a desktop using straight Debian, and it was fucking amazing. Shit just worked and I realized that the only reason why Ubuntu has been able to stay in business so long is because they've been able to ride on Debian's coat tails and that even though they're idiots they haven't been able to fuck up the solid work that the folks at Debian have done over the years. This cartoon describes Ubuntu best.

http://www.xkcd.com/424/#

Seriously, what a fucking load of crap. Apple has introduced one new connector in ten years. OMFG, they're as evil as Hitler times Stalin raised to the power of Osama bin Laden (Hitler*Stalin)^(Osama bin Laden). Let's see, we have people bitching because Apple is using a proprietary connector. Hey, it's their product, they can do what they want with it. Then we have a bunch of useless eco-cunts bitching because of the impact on the environment. What impact? The only thing you need to charge this phone with any device with a USB A port is a $19 cable that weighs a couple of ounces, anyone who is concerned about the impact this might have on the environment should put their money where their mouth is and reduce their carbon footprint by killing themselves. Then we have people saying that Apple should put a micro-USB connector on and a Lightning connector, which would make the device more expensive and complicated because you'd have to put two connectors on the phone and then design the charging circuitry so that it could handle edge cases such as someone plugging chargers into both ports. Then you have a bunch of twats wailing and saying that Apple should use USB 3.0, which is a real piece of shit as standards go, in fact USB 3.0 is such a piece of shit that even Intel, some of you fucks might have heard of them, they invented USB, lagged behind in implementing it on their own chipsets and didn't ship a chipset with integrated USB 3.0 until this year. Oh, and USB 3.0 still isn't finalized, the standards committee is dicking around with power delivery to increase the amount of power that a USB 3.0 port can deliver, so there's a very good chance that any USB 3.0 device you purchase today won't be able to support higher power charging on USB 3.0 devices made in the future. Then there's the USB 3.0 connector itself. The connector design isn't a bad idea, it takes the micro USB connector and adds an additional connector on the side for the new USB 3.0 signals, that's actually a pretty good design. The problem with this is that every single USB 3.0 cable I've seen so far is really flimsy.

There also isn't any standard for how you can get video data off of a USB 3.0 port in On-the-Go mode. In theory you can do this, USB 3.0 has the bandwidth to to this, but converting that signal into something that you can connect to a monitor is going to require some sort of external adapter circuitry. Some of the whiny fucks who are bitching about this will shit themselves and wail and say "well Apple should have put an HDMI port on the phone". Really? Why? I have an HTC Evo, it has a micro USB port and a mini HDMI port for connecting to an external monitor. In the two years I've had this phone I've used that adapter exactly zero fucking times. Are there any other useless ports that you twats would like to see on the new iPhone 5? How about an RS-232 serial port, oh, and a Centronics parallel port in case I want to connect the phone to my old HP LaserWriter, and a pair of PS/2 ports would be nice too, you can never tell when you'll want to plug in an old Logitech keyboard and mouse.

There is, in case you didn't know, a thing called "market research". It's where you go out and try to figure out what people will want to buy so you can make stuff that they'll want to buy. Apple did some market research and said "hey, you know what, most people don't connect their phones to their TV sets and don't really want to, so let's do something other than put a useless mini HDMI connector on our phones. Apple is really good at this and always has been. In the 1970s Jobs and Wozniak said "Hey, we think people would like to buy an affordable computer that's easily programmable and expandable" and the Apple I was born. Which every other manufacturer then proceeded to copy with varying degrees of success. Then in the 1980s Apple looked at the Xerox Star and said "Hey, we think that people would like to buy a computer that's easier to use". They made a few fumbles along the way (the Lisa, the original 128k Mac) but eventually got it right with the Mac Plus and made lots of money. Along the way they came out with what was the best laser printer on the market, the Apple LaserWriter II, and made lots of money, and everyone else, most notably Microsoft, saw what they had done and copied it, which is cool because that's what the game is about, making things that people find useful.

Steve Jobs left the company for a few years and went off to found NeXT. NeXT was a brilliant failure, it never took the market by storm the way Jobs expected, most notably because of the idiotic cubical design and the removable MO drive, but every operating system out there uses the ideas that NeXTstep implemented. Graphical e-mail, the graphical programming environment, the display model, an integrated dictionary for spell check, etc, etc, etc.

Apple fell on hard times after Jobs left but he came back and kicked the company in the ass by aggressively adopting industry standards. Which company was the first to ship a computer with USB ports? Why that would be Apple, who put USB into the original iMac. Everyone bitched about that because it meant that they couldn't use their ADB and AppleSerial devices any more without purchasing an adapter but it was real progress and pushed PC vendors to get on the bandwagon. Jobs also killed off the floppy drive, which a lot of people pissed and moaned about, but he realized that floppies were useless, you couldn't boot a modern operating system off of them because they didn't have the capacity and they were slow and fragile. In 2001 Apple came out with the original iPod, which wasn't the first portable MP3 player, but it was the first portable MP3 player that didn't suck and that was actually useful, and everyone proceeded to first mock them, and then, when people started buying them as fast as Apple could make them, copy them to varying degrees of success. Then, in 2007, Apple came out with the iPhone, remember 2007, that was when RIM was still the king of smartphones. Everyone mocked Apple for coming out with a phone that didn't have a keyboard until they noticed that Apple was selling iPhones as fast as they could make them, and then they tried to copy them with varying degrees of success. A few years later Apple came out with the iPad, everyone mocked them for doing so and then proceeded to copy them.

Now before any of you fanboiz start talking about Android let me just say "fuck you". Android had the potential to be great, until Google decided to license it to every fucking idiot company out there, which meant that Android became as fragmented as CP/M used to be. Application developers hate, hate, hate Dildroid. Why? Well because there's no fucking standard to write to. Quick, what's the latest release of Dildroid? It's Jelly Bean. How many devices run it? About 1.2 percent according to the most recent results from the Google Play store http://www.zdnet.com/android-4-1-jelly-bean-hits-1-2-percent-market-share-7000003814/

I have an HTC Evo, this phone was the top of the line phone that HTC was selling two years ago. A year after it shipped it was an orphan, HTC basically told everyone who bought one "Want a new version of Dildroid? Fuck you, buy a new phone." Compare and contrast this with Apple and IOS 6. Apple has stated that the iPhone 3GS, a phone released 3 years ago, will run IOS 6. It won't support the full IOS 6 feature set, but it's not an orphan. Oh, and even if HTC got off of their worthless asses and ported Jelly Bean to the Evo there's no guarantee that any of the fucking carriers who sell the phone would bother to release it as an update. It took Sprint months to release Gingerbread for the EVO because once you had it they didn't care about supporting it. If you want to look at some real environment destroying activity look at the planned obsolescence model of Android phones. If you purchase an Dildroid phone today that doesn't run Jelly Bean there is no guarantee that it ever will, even if the hardware would support it, because the phone manufacturer might not bother to port it to their older phones and the carriers might not bother to release it, and if history is any guide probably won't. Oh, and before you tell me that I can jailbreak the phone and find a third-party port on XDA-developers let me say "fuck you". I don't want to have to jailbreak my goddamned phone so I can sideload an unsupported version of the OS. I've done it and it sucks. I don't blame the developers, they did a good job with the port, it's just that they can't support me if there are any problems with the phone, and if I want support from my carrier I need to restore the phone to its original condition before I take it into the Sprint store otherwise they'll tell me to fuck off.

If you want to talk about fucking customers over by forcing them to buy new stuff for no good reason and fucking up the environment by doing so then Dildroid phone manufacturers are the real villains here. There's no good reason why my HTC Evo shouldn't be able to run Android 3.x, but HTC and Sprint don't give a fuck, they want you to purchase a new phone every year. Samsung and Motorola aren't any better. By doing this not only are they fucking their customers in the ass they're also fucking developers in the ass. If you're writing an Android app you're forced to write to the lowest common denominator of hardware and OS in order to maximize the number of devices that will be able to run your app and thus be able to maximise your return. With IOS you can say "OK, my app doesn't run on any phone older than this version of the phone and this version of the OS." You're not forced to test your app with hundreds, if not thousands, of potential combinations of hardware and software which are driven by whether or not the vendor has released hardware that can run your app, whether or not a vendor has released a version of Dildroid that can run your app, whether or not a carrier has bothered to crap up that release with their own crapware (the Sprint NASCAR app, the Sprint TV app, the Sprint NFL App, etc, etc, etc) that most customers will never use. The Apple eco-system, with a limited number of phones and limited number of OS releases, benefits developers by making it easier to write, test and support apps and benefits customers by making it easier to determine whether or not a given app will run on a given device. I can go to the App store and determine if an app will run on any given iPhone, iPod touch or iPad and whether or not it supports features such as the iPad's larger screen or the iPad 3's retina display. It's just now that Google has gotten around to doing something similar with Google Play.

It is amazing to me that a company that claims "don't be evil" as one of their core values has managed to create an environment for mobile phones that is even more hostile towards users than the bad old days of MS-DOS and Windows. Google could fix this. If they wanted to be bold they could completely disintermediate the carriers and just sell phones themselves, and there's some evidence that they're considering doing just this, as witness the Nexus phone and Nexus 7 tablet. Doing so would be of real benefit to the users, the carriers don't add any value to the phone by altering the OS and let's face it, most of us don't want them to, we just want them to sell us a data pipe. The third-party vendors don't add much in value or innovation either and as a matter of fact they can't and never will, because they don't have the money to develop ground-breaking features and even if they did wouldn't do so out of fear that if they did that they'd never sell enough devices to recoup the money they spent on developing new features. The only company that has done anything remotely interesting and original with Android, outside of Google themselves, is Amazon with the Kindle Fire devices. And how did Amazon do this? Well they completely forked Android and wrote their own version of the OS, created their own app store and have outright admitted that they're willing to take losses on each device they sell because even if they lose money on the hardware they'll make it up by selling you content. No other company can do this.

Back to the original topic. If the dorks at the EU want to improve the environment then, instead of bitching at Apple for engineering their new phones to use a new connector they should beat the fucking shit out of Google, HTC, Samsung, Motorola and the rest of the retards who are making Android phones and of the cellular carriers for introducing a planned obsolescence model that rips off consumers and fucks over the environment by selling phones that are obsolete, in the sense that there's no guarantee that they'll ever be updated, as soon as they leave the factory floor.

Assuming of course that the Micro plug is correctly attached to the system. I have an HTC Evo and have seen a lot of reports by EVO users of the connector on the phone failing, thus making it impossible to sync the phone or charge it.