I figure that trolling is one of the reasons for the US's 1st amendment.

Speech that upsets somebody for some reason is the only kind that somebody is going to try and restrict.

If you're not upsetting somebody, you're doing life wrong.

The UK is a lost country. It's a shame.

Disclaimer: I have no Enfield experience.

It turns out that patent encumberance isn't the only thing that makes something difficult to make.

Many older weapon designs were optimized for low volume manufacturing by skilled machinists, and required hand fitting by gunsmiths and armorers. That made sense when human labor was cheap and skilled.

The Garand and M14 receivers, for instance, are very complicated to build. The 1911 is also a much loved design, but most 1911s are either built to loose tolerances or require custom, per-example fitting.

Comparatively, the AKM receiver is bent sheet metal. Any workshop that can do basic metal work can build an AKM; the barrel is the only specialized part.

The M4/AR15/M16/AR10 family of receivers were designed post-aerospace industry, and are made to be mass produced by machining down aluminum forgings. I know multiple people who have completed their own AR15 receivers on CNC equipment.

The SIG handguns manufactured in the USA are taken from billet to serial number in a single machining center; no operator intervention required.

It turns out that it can be very difficult to re-create old things. Often, the original tooling is missing. The techniques used may no longer be taught nor widely practiced.

Comparatively, building a modern mass produced firearm is a matter of having the right CAD files.

Court's judgement, not Google's.

Quit offloading the responsibility for your censorship onto a third party. KTHXBAI.

The NeXT heritage is still very strong in OSX

Calling it "Mach" is correct in the sense that the kernel is still the Mach microkernel, which came from NeXTSTEP. It does not have a BSD kernel.

It's BSD in the sense that _much_ of its userland is BSD, but certainly not all.

It also has many things that BSD does not have, which were proprietary from {NeXT/Open}STEP. For instance, the "netinfo" subsystem, the "defaults" subsystem, the plist architecture, Objective-C, XCode (which, afaik, is a modernization of NeXTs InterfaceBuilder).

OSX is much more like NeXTSTEP than it is *BSD.

Apple has of course added some more of its own stuff that isn't BSDish at all. Look at how the system startup stuff works, for instance.

If you tolerate people that want Linux called "GNU/Linux", because they are separating the userland and the kernel, the right thing to call OSX might be "BSD/Mach", but that nomenclature really ignores all of the things that NeXT did and that Apple has done since..

I spent lots of time on NS 3.3, OS 4.2, Rhapsody DRx, and every released version of OSX.

(in my view, OSX is a regression in usability from NeXTSTEP . Get off my lawn!)

sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio

It'll never touch your settings again!

Also, it's incredibly poorly designed, and they won't take patches that fix things.

It's interesting what Cisco is becoming.

A decade, even half a decade, ago, Cisco was greatly admired for their ability to acquire without attrition. When a company acquired another company, you usually saw 10-12% attrition in the first 6 months, after the pay-for-stay for key personnel expired, and another 8-10% at the end of 12 months. That meant that between 18% and 22% of what you just bought had walked out your door in your first year.

Cisco's numbers were 2% and 5% for 6 and 12 months, respectively. Cisco knew how to do an "acquihire", and keep the talent that it bought the company for, and in acquisitions which weren't simply talent plays, it knew how to do that too.

It seems that this expertise has been lost along the way, or that in one of these annual "transformations", something broke. Either way, with the way they are acting like IBM Global Services these days, or perhaps the post acquisition EDA or post-divestiture Agilent, they are unlikely to be able to repeat their past successes in acquisition, since the trust has been lost.

Which is really a shame, since they were the envy of the entire tech industry for their capability in this regard, not just Silicon Valley. We used to have meetings at IBM about how we could possibly do what they did, with the numbers they got, and thus avoid killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Similar meeting took place at Apple, particularly prior to the acquisition of P.A. Semi (and much of the team deserted Apple for places like Google anyway, after the lockout handcuffs were removed so that the people who were there prior to the acquisition could cash out and skedaddle.

It's interesting what they are becoming, because it's not the old Cisco; it most resembles, if I had to pick a company and an era, the post Carly Fiorina H.P.; here's hoping it doesn't turn out the same for them, and that they can correct their course before the rudder falls off entirely.

Ah yes. Making the asshole tormentor show up at her house to intimidate by his presence in person. That has generally fixed all my problems, knowing that the bully knows where I live, so as soon as the parents are not constantly riding herd on the little asshole, he and a couple of his friends can break into the house, shit on a plate, write a note, and leave it in the fridge.

Some people don't count as human beings, and despite the best efforts of their parents to program them to be human beings, the little psychopaths are unfixable. Yeah, that's also politically incorrect in this day and age where the fault is always external to the human exhibiting the bad behaviour.

You don't need to be computer literate to verify that paint is gone from a wall and/or painted over. You keep assuming that the parents are not only computer literate, that they are *more* computer literate than little Timmy, such that little Timmy couldn't pull a fast one on the old parents.

That's just not the case, in the majority of circumstances.

If by "stirring up trouble", you mean "not allowing Arab countries who deny the right of Israel to exist as a nation-state to destroy Israel without giving Israel aid", how about we don't, and they instead just agree to quit shooting at Israel, and Israel agrees to quit shooting back?

The problems with taking this article to mean what Lamarckism people would dearly love for it to mean are:

(1) It applies to memories, not to morphological traits; Lamarckism is specific to inherited morphological traits on the basis of environmental pressures.

(2) "it may give the sheen of respetability" - a "sheen" is not the same thing as actually being respectable, and "may" is not the same as "does".

Come back with a multigenerational study that demonstrates a change in morphology (such as those Dr. John Legler was attempting, and failed to demonstrate, with Chelodina Longicolis in the early 1980's), and we can perhaps revisit the subject.

And Lamarckism is still thought impossible.

I think the main issue Canonical has with Wayland and X is that they are Not Invented Here. Canonical has their own priorities and regardless of the technical merits vs. Wayland and others Canonical wants to be in control of the display server so they can lead it to their interests and not have to convince other parties to go their way.