Yet the overall murder rate trend did not change appreciably - despite the fact that it should have included those massacres. In fact, it briefly went up after the ban, despite there being a massacre immediately before the ban...

Which, I suppose, just goes to show just how small and insignificant those massacres are in the big picture, if you take the media attention they receive out of the equation and look at raw numbers. Yet people keep referring to them as some major factor that should be a significant driver of public policy. It's about as ridiculous as the security theater that followed 9/11.

Well, except that due to the way the US electoral system works, it's possible to get elected without having a majority. Heck, it's possible for 1/4 of the country population to amend the Constitution over the heads of the other 3/4 if they gang up!

So much for democracy.

And then, of course, a state can be a democracy today, and a dictatorship tomorrow. Germans found that out the hard way back in 1933.

Perhaps someone should sue the feds and demand that this law is reworded to be gender-neutral, as it is clearly discriminatory with no good reason.

Use Lojban. A language explicitly designed for clarity and lack of ambiguity (you can be ambiguous in it, but any ambiguity is explicit).

That makes no sense. Are you saying that freedom of speech is not a fundamental right? Perhaps you don't think it is, but the people who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights certainly considered it a natural right - and yet they codified it.

The reason why is very simple. Bill of Rights, for the most part, is the codification of those natural rights that were actually threatened or infringed immediately before or during the American Revolution. Hence why they were deemed to be the most vulnerable, and therefore most deserving of the extra degree of protection that codifying them would yield. That's why BoR has some really weird stuff, like a separate amendment about "quartering soldiers" - because that's precisely what the British did.

The overall trend has been down both before and after, actually. Basically, the ban had zero measurable effect.

Jefferson actually thought that the entire government (including the Constitution) should be thrown out once per generation, because it would be immoral for one generation to legally bind the ones that follow it.

Mosins used rimmed rounds as well, though.

(in fact, a lot of Russian military firearms still do - PK, SVD etc)

First of all, "gun death", "gun suicide", "gun crime" etc are all completely meaningless metric. A murder is a murder, regardless of the tool used to carry it out; ditto for suicide. The only thing that matters is the overall number of crimes, suicides etc.

Now, one thing that you conveniently forgot to mention is that murder rates, violent crime rates etc were all dropping in Australia before the ban, as well. And after a brief post-ban spike (which was likely completely unrelated), they kept dropping at the same rate.

Same thing for suicides. Yes, gun suicides have dropped, but hangings were on the rise (in fact, there was also a spike right after the ban, such that the overall suicide rate was higher - despite the reduction in the number of gun suicides) - and overall suicide rate is basically going down at the same rate as before.

In other words, one thing that Australian statistics shows is that gun ban had zero effect whatsoever on murder rate, violent crime rate, or suicide rate.

Not quite. Gtk and Gnome appeared because Qt was originally proprietary. The reason why Gnome became "the default", though, was because enterprise distros like RedHat pushed for it - and that was because Gtk and Gnome were both LGPL, so closed-source software could link against them. This was not the case with Qt, which was open sourced for a long time, but was GPL rather than LGPL.

If by this you mean the various limitations surrounding Windows Store (aka "Metro") apps, then those happened very much under Ballmer. Hell, the guy have only just recently left, so what exactly has disappeared since then?

At the same time, Satya was heading Cloud & Enterprise business before becoming CEO. And C&E, among other things, includes DevDiv - and Satya has a lot of supporters there. Furthermore, note the meteoric rise of Scott Guthrie, who was always one of the more passionate advocates of a solid and modern developer story for MS (in particular, embracing F/OSS).

Did you miss the entire recent .NET cross-platform push, what with the Xamarin partnership and all?

So, basically, tax oil production - we could call that, say, "carbon credits" - and then invest those into R&D necessary for clean energy and geoengineering?

Sorry, messed up links - I hate posting to Slashdot from a touch device.

http://xamarin.com/pr/xamarin-...

http://blog.xamarin.com/xamari...

Here is the official press release.

Here is the official press release.">Here is the continuation of that story from the Build conference two days ago.