I'd guess that it's because the US is at the top of the list of "the person whose house you're about to invade is likely to be heavily armed."

I spent two weeks in the UK recently, with their largely-unarmed police force in full showing (mind you, I also walked by Buckingham Palace and Parliament, where I saw very heavily armed cops). They know that the vast majority of their citizenry is similarly unarmed.

Compare that to the US. I'm guessing SWAT officers are rather more trigger-twitchy because of that. I would be.

A government strong enough to give you everything you want, is also strong enough to take away everything you have.

Look strawman: Even an incredibly weak government can take everything you have.

Weird, I've never seen it with an S in there, only as LOC and xK LOC. I though maybe it was something different than the LOC counts I'd seen before. Of course, I've never dealt with projects that were in the millions either, so maybe that's why I've never heard the S variations.

As soon as I can get my DSLR out of its case!

What's an emslock?

Inertia mainly - I stopped writing JEs regularly, and lost the drive to write them. Not sure what (if anything) would kick me back into any kind of regularity on them again. Though I suppose once every 18 months isn't too aggressive of a schedule to shoot for!

Guilty as charged :)

Happy birthday!

I was actually referring to all immigrants to Europe, not Muslims in particular, though they certainly seem to get the double whammy of "you're not from around here, are you?" combined with hostility towards their religion.

Europe is traditionally a place that people leave so it's not surprising that they haven't figured out how to assimilate immigrants.

^^^^^^^^ This ^^^^^^^^

People who think the United States is hostile towards immigrants should spend some time in Europe as one, particularly one of color.

The best part: It is "Gold" as in , I have a perfect installation. Something goes wrong, and I got back to the LVM snapshot where it was pristine. This never happened, but sometimes, instead of uninstalling stuff I need to test, I just rollback any way. It runs wonderfully on one E3-1260L core and 512MB RAM.

This is exactly how Windows XP should be used these days, and it works perfectly fine. XP for Win32 functionality, the rest on Linux.

You're quoting the Ma Bell divestiture as an example of helpful regulation?! Ma Bell:

1. Took her universal service obligations seriously.
2. Invested money into keeping her plant modern and current.
3. Was friendly to labor.
4. Threw gobs of money at Bell Labs for the sake of science, with no expectation of immediate payout or profit.

The contrast with modern day ILECs is telling. I'm less than one thousand feet from our central office and can't get DSL faster than 3mbit/s because Verizon wants out of the wireline business and is bleeding it to death. And who can blame them? They've forced to compete against unregulated cable companies while still meeting all of the legacy ILEC obligations, ranging from service commitments to labor contracts.

If Ma Bell was still around I would have had fiber many years ago. For all her flaws she put money back into the business and planned for the future.

You left 'customers' out of the list. Many taxes are simply passed onto customers as a cost of doing business. Of course, you're exactly right, and I've said this for a long time. A corporation can only transfer money to individuals in the form of salary (taxed) or dividends (also taxed); taxing corporate income is a form of double taxation and at the end of the day is little more than a hidden backdoor tax on individuals.

You missed his point. His point was that something will always be prohibited and they'll just move into selling that instead. It doesn't have to be drugs. Explosives and other forms of weaponry come to mind as items that are either outright banned or at least highly regulated in most of the World. Are you going to legalize and deregulate them too? Laissez faire for C-4? It would make the Fourth of July a lot more enjoyable but other than that I'm not certain it's a good idea.