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Comment Re:"an act of social provocation"? (Score 1) 367

The funny (tragic) part is that the kind of people who tend to be strongly pro-gun, also tend to be strong against social programs that could prevent a great deal of the violence typically associated with guns.

Ain't that the truth...

It's not really the truth. If you doubt it, go to the neighborhoods in your city most thoroughly covered by "social programs."

I wouldn't go there unarmed, but that's up to you.

All of those violent neighborhoods would benefit from more of the law-abiding residents being armed to the teeth. The old saying goes "an armed society is a polite society," as nothing deters assholery so much as the sudden onset of room temperature-ness.

Comment Re:Just Askin' (Score 1) 367

All the conditions you give above, are circumstances under which people are considered to have waived their rights as ordinary citizens

Irrelevant. The point was in response to the GP's ridiculous assertion about the "current understanding" of gun rights in the United States. It is not and never has been an "understanding" in the United States that everybody should or can have firearms.

I had to get permission from our County Court Judge before I could legally touch a handgun, never mind own or carry one. He could have said no for almost any reason that he wanted. The law says I can't have a license unless I have "proper cause" but does not define what proper cause is.

It is literally a felony to pick up a handgun in New York State without a license. If you so much as touch a pistol without a license you go directly to jail without passing go or collecting $200. That's been the "current understanding" in New York State since 1911, so you'll forgive me if I can't take people like the GP seriously.

And I could be wrong, but item 8, as I understand it, is a State issue, not Federal.

You are wrong.

Comment Re:"Conservatives" hating neutrality baffles me (Score 1) 550

ok, I'll bite. I understand how the internet works as well as most people who don't spend most of their time writing RFCs (I owned an ISP back in the dial-up days and I've configured BGP as a network admin).

However, I also understand public choice economics and the fact that once the FCC begins to regulate the Internet (in the name of Net Neutrality), their incentives are driven by the politics of the commissioners (hence why this decision was 3 Dems vs. 2 Reps) and by the companies they regulate. It's nice when that sometimes coincides with the interests of the "regular guy", but it typically doesn't over time. Examples from history abound. See Baptists and Bootleggers.

I also understand that Comcast vs. Netflix was about contractual rights and was solved by the various parties making private agreements for bandwidth and transit usage, not by government regulation.

The supposed "reason" for the FCC regulations (prioritizing content providers by ISPs) isn't something that is actually happening in a widespread manner nor negatively affecting consumers, so why give a small government body control over the Internet so that they can over time regulate it pretty much however they want to.... and by want to, I mean how their political and embedded corporate interests want them to.

Comment Re:Just Askin' (Score 3) 367

You're the one who claimed, emphasis mine: "the current understanding of gun rights in the USA is a late 1900s dirty harry style invention of anyone should have a gun ." Don't try and backpedal away from it now.

I could respond to your silly training argument by pointing out:

1. Driving is a privilege, not a constitutionally recognized right.
2. The prefatory clause is not a limiting clause. It was not imagined as such by the people who wrote it nor ever interpreted that way by a court.

Of course, what's the point of having that discussion? You've got the facts so hopelessly wrong that I believe your ignorance is willful. One bloody Google search would have been enough to dispel your misinformed belief about the "current understanding of gun rights in the usa" and you couldn't even be bothered to do that.

Comment Re:So what you're saying... (Score 1) 367

Automatic weapons have been heavily regulated since the 1930s, were further regulated in the 1980s, and the civilian ownership thereof is exceedingly rare.

You're thinking of semi-automatic weapons, like the AR-15 which look like their automatic counterparts, but are in fact no deadlier than any semi-automatic firearm. The United States Government has been selling surplus semi-automatic military issue firearms to the general public for decades, so it's a bit late to claim that semi-automatic firearms represent a level of firepower that should be unavailable to civilians.

I will concede that the provocative asshats who open carry AR-15s into Starbucks are just that, provocative asshats trying to piss people off for no reason. I view them the same way I view gay couples that engage in PDA in inappropriate settings (read: anywhere it would be inappropriate for a heterosexual couple to do the same) solely to piss people off.

Comment Re:Just Askin' (Score 4, Informative) 367

the current understanding of gun rights in the USA is a late 1900s dirty harry style invention of anyone should have a gun

Unless you:

1. Are a convicted felon.
2. Are a convicted domestic abuser.
3. Are currently charged with any crime punishable by a year or more in prison.
4. Are an unlawful user of any controlled substance.
5. Are addicted to any controlled substance, even one lawfully proscribed.
6. Have been dishonorably discharged from the United States military.
7. Have renounced your American citizenship.
8. Are the subject of an order of protection.
9. Are a fugitive from justice.
10. Are in the United States illegally.

Those are just the people proscribed from ownership under Federal law. Many States have tougher laws and add even more people to the list. Some (my home state, New York) go further and treat gun rights as a privilege, requiring a license, which is doled out at the whim of local bureaucrats who can deny you for virtually any reason they wish.

Point being, nowhere in the United States does the "current understanding" of gun rights say anyone should have firearms. Do you actually know what the existing body of Federal, State, and Local law has to say on this subject or are you just repeating talking points you read somewhere?

Comment Re:Just Askin' (Score 1) 367

but if we're talking about gun control doing the same thing with an 18th century amendment is somehow good? Pick one, conservatives.

You realize that you're using the 1st Amendment on a computer, right? I'll turn in my modern firearm in favor of a musket when you exchange your computer for a printing press.

Comment Re:"Conservatives" hating neutrality baffles me (Score 1) 550

You literally had no reason for including the second half of your response except to "show" that Republicans really aren't that bad, honest, because their opponents did something fifty years ago when the Democrats were the socially conservative party that the GOP is guilty of now.

The only thing I am "literally" doing is wondering what in the world you are ranting about, or what you mean by "guilty". Guilty of what? Did you reply to the wrong post?

Comment Re:Not ready for primetime (Score 1) 765

Ah, I remember Slamd64. I had that puppy on my first ever 64 bit machine, it took a few years for Slackware to jump on the 64 bit train.

I don't see the issue with using it as a server in a production environment, particularly if you roll servers with a specific role rather than trying to Swiss Army Knife them. If you monitor slackware-current they're as responsive as any distro with security updates and the package management isn't that cumbersome. Of course, if you're using Slackware the odds are good that you've compiled your own daemons and should be on top of patches/security updates yourself.

Either way it's not a deal breaker for a production server, unless you need a big company to hold your hand for everything, and in that instance why not just runa Windows server?

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