FWIW, a republic CAN be a democracy. At least in principle, and if you aren't too picky about exact definitions. (I'm not asserting that the US states were ever more of a democracy than was classical Athens, however.)
It will if you're using C or C++.
FWIW, *most* of the text I'm working with is ASCII-7, but some of it isn't. Short quotation in, e.g., Greek. I need to be able to count the chars, etc. Utf-32 is an immense waste of space...and I already expect to be doing a lot of paging because of excessive memory use.
> Yeah, there's even another gun-rights organization
Except the NRA really isn't a "gun rights" organization. It's original charter was to encourage the development of marksmanship skills. Basically, they wanted to make sure that people could effectively use the kinds of weapons one might find in the Army or Marines.
You can't really do that if you can't own a rifle.
That whole "well regulated militia" thing can't happen if people at large aren't ever allowed to practice.
The problem with the "lets guess what a psycho will do" game is that it really never ends. We live in a very technologically sophisticated and open society. The means to do stupid or evil things are all around us. It's not just guns. It's our entire modern society. If you think otherwise you're just kidding yourself.
Or you have no imagination whatsoever.
If you try to ban anything that anyone could abuse, then everything will unravel because psychos and terrorists will adapt even if you can't.
> I don't know why you think you can determine what long dead people intended based on grammatically ambiguous language with very little context
People wrote stuff down. None of this is a mystery. You simply can't get away with re-writing history because someone already wrote it down when it wasn't even history yet.
That's the problem with a literate society. You can't just make up nonsense and pretend it's reality. Any one is free to dig up primary sources (or even secondary sources) and demonstrate just how much of a corrupt piece of shit you are.
Fine.
If you want to butcher it then there is a well established procedure for that. Just use it. Good luck with that.
Weak transparent lies just undermine law and order and democracy. Redefining terms to suit your political agenda should be rightfully placed next to the worst political abuses anyone can summon.
Although in truth you are just trying to pretend that a severe and pervasive economic issue is instead a matter of simply interfering with personal property rights.
Blaming the committee, group or department is a cop out. You should know that by now.
By this argument, we need to strengthen our right to openly carry swords and nunchaku.
I need my own navy of laser appointed sharks, sirrah!
In short, the 2nd amendment favors the rich because they can arm themselves to the hilt, should they wish. Not very equal, is it?
Did you just make a "life isn't fair" argument?
Nope. I didn't. Read it again.
Well, yeah, raping children and giving them drugs, it's pretty illegal, but has nothing to do with the 2nd Amendment.
At the time there were limited arms (you took about 2 minutes to reload) vs able to empty a couple clips in that same amount of time, now.
Further, rifle, cannon and naval mines were about all there were. The most literal interpretation of that 2nd amendment means I could possess nuclear weapons, bacterial weapons, chemical weapons, and were I wealthy enough, my own tanks, APCs, fighter jets, bombers, etc. In short, the 2nd amendment favors the rich because they can arm themselves to the hilt, should they wish. Not very equal, is it?
And American residents and businesses are spending something like US$432 BILLION per year (according to some economists) for tax compliance. We need a drastically simpler tax system, if only to cut this spending by 60% or more.
and we are one step closer to a 1984 'Big Brother is watching' world....
and active investigations only my ass -they will stockpile this for the rest of our lives and when they find some association 20 years from now they will backtrack all the way to all other associations NSA 'metadata' style with the same deniability.
-I'm just sayin' -we're screwed
o Sunglasses
o Facial Hair
o Make-up
o Big Floppy Hat
These are your weapons, use them wisely.
Let's see how they handle that, as I keep messing around with facial hair 8^{)>
C++ (and do a lesser extent C) lose support because of their extremely poor support for utf8. And the absurd part of it is that they could easily do a good job. Utf8 is just a byte array with various routines to interpret the code. Glibc does a reasonable job for a C library...not ideal, but reasonable.
All the array needs is a way to address a chunk by character # rather than by byte #, a way to copy of a character or a slice of chars, and a way to determine the general character classification of any character. Also a few methods: first(), last(), hasnext(), hasprior(), next() and prior(). And these all "sort of" exist, except getting the general character classification. (Do note that these functions need to operate on utf-8 characters rather than on bytes.) But several different ways of doing this are already known. Vala, e.g., handles it without difficulty, and is able to emit C code (using Glibc libraries).
So it's not a programming difficulty that's holding things up. It's the standards bodies...or, perhaps, some members of them.
But I've looked at C++11, and it is not a satisfactory answer. Vala has a good answer. D (Digital Mars D) has a different good answer. Even Python3 has a pretty good answer. (I don't like that in Python you can't determine memory allocation within the string.) Also Racket, etc. But C++ doesn't.
1 + 1 = 3, for large values of 1.
