Saudi Arabia is blank in that table for "World Bank GINI", which is otherwise the most populated. There is the "GPI Gini" but only a few countries have that, and there seems to be little correspondence to show where Saudi Arabia may be inserted.

Sorting by "World Bank GINI", you are right that at the low end there are a number of former Soviet republics mixed in with the expected EU countries (Denmark, Sweeden, Norway, and Austria are lowest). I think the history of these countries may make them somewhat unusual. Much more relevant to your point is some unexpected ones, such as Egypt and Iraq, nearer the low end.

The other end of the table is more interesting. It is pretty clear that lower income inequality is a requirement, though, as you state, not the only requirement, for democracy.

I'm curious as to what you are referring to as non-democratic nations with "low income inequity". North Korea has a very high level of inequity when you include the government elite. It does not matter if there are huge hordes that are starving equally, since there is a non-zero number not belonging to that set.

I think the fact that Cantor and his supporters felt he had to spend so much money, even though common belief was that he would win, indicates something. And perhaps he lost because he did not spend enough.

I'm pretty certain that in cases where there was more than one democrat in the primary, one of them lost. Are you saying any number of democrats are allowed to win, but republicans are only limited to one? Quick, better notify Fox news!

I think that was a joke, right?

I don't think you understood my comment.

The first amendment cannot be read in the way you state.

The fact that the second can, somewhat, is true. You can't make them equivalent.

However I believe the reason the second amendment is so unclear is not because it was intended to say that alternate reading. It is because when it was written there were some who disagreed. Most likely gun opponents would have preferred to have no amendment, but could not get that so instead they managed to mangle the wording so it does not say anything clearly. It is also possible they managed to completely alter it to "only militia can have guns" but that wording was mangled back by the gun supporters. Perhaps it went back and forth several times, losing meaning each time. In any case the end result is a statement that is very unclear and pretty much means nothing. The best way to interpret it is that it is proof that there was enough writers who supported gun rights that something appeared in the document at all.

Sorry, the 1st amendment reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances

This is quite clearly a selection of things connected by 'or' statements. At best you could claim the 'and' at the end says that you are only free to assemble for redress of grivances.

The true story with the 2nd amendment, which I think everybody really understands and agrees on, is that people were arguing about this back then as much as they do today, and they had to come up with some wording that all agreed on, and they came up with gibberish that says nothing.

many of those military personnel with the neighborhood smoking weapons will support the revolution rather than fire on American Citizens.

I agree, but what does that have to do with private gun ownership?

go tell that to all those terrorist cells and the vietcong

Yea they did great, they are now running the world and everybody loves them.

Also the vietcong had a bit of outside help, you may have forgotten about it but the same country is in the news right now for doing something similar in a country further west.

Studies done by the armed forces have already shown that some of those in the military will turn on their own government if it came down to revolution.

Wow! You really shot yourself in the foot on that one. Yes you have shown how a popular revolution may defeat the military. However that solution does not require private ownership of firearms! In fact there are some indications it may work better if there are no private guns (the military defector is more likely if the people he is going to join are not shooting at him).

Personally I don't see too much problem with guns, but I have to point out that you just made a really stupid statement if you are trying to argue for them.

That is not the same.

What I want is to be able to push a button in one application (or select text) and not have it raise above the other application. I also want to eventually raise that first application (perhaps by clicking the title bar). "layers" does not do this, and in fact "layers" are a very very bad idea.

This is finally causing serious problems with drag & drop (as you cannot drag from a window without it raising) so they are finally starting to get a clue. Unfortunately I am seeing the "windows solution" rear it's ugly head: there are proposals that an app must communicate to the window manager the "drag start target regions" so that raise is prevented.

The real solution is TRIVIAL: don't raise the window when there is a click, and allow the application to raise *if it wants to* in response to a click. Unfortunately slavish copying of Windows has made this actually be considered politically incorrect, including incredible bone-headed statements like "the user will be confused by not knowing if the action will raise the window" (use "standards" to fix that), or that "programs should not raise unexpectedly" (again, use "standards", or you can ignore raise requests if not attached to a click event).

The GP *was* using the proprietary drivers. He was complaining that they were broken, and to his surprise the FOSS driver worked better.

I agree that the open source versions are nowhere near the nVidia proprietary drivers, though.

Yes I would agree. Linux desktops have been broken like this forever.

If I launch a program from the desktop and it exits with an error, can you PLEASE put up a window containing whatever was printed to stderr? It is NOT user-friendly to have nothing to happen. And no, a user is not going to figure this out by "reading the logs".

To be honest, most of the problems with Windows Shell have been slavishly copied by the Linux window managers. Being able to click without raising windows disappeared years ago, and along with that any ability to actually use overlapping windows. Lots of other bad stuff also copied "because it is user friendly" but that is the big one.

Arnold is the real threat