I once had a Server 2003 install go bananas and completely fuck up an Exchange message store. "Never again!" I cried, and within a few hours was installing from a day old backup.

When you look at the Second Amendment within the context of how the US was formed as an outgrowth of revolution against what was viewed as a tyrannical regime. Many of the underlying concepts of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are essentially answers to the reasons for revolt and secession against Great Britain laid out in the Declaration of Independence. The Second Amendment was clearly intended to preserve liberties against future tyrants.

I have absolutely no problem with a sane, sober individual possessing a weapon. I myself am a Canadian, but I remember camping trips with my grandparents out in the backcountry of British Columbia, and he always kept his hunting rifle loaded (that would get him arrested in Canada these days), not because he even really hunted by that point, but because of the risk from bears and other predators with young kids around. I learned to shoot when I was pretty young, and while I have no more adoration for guns than I do for hammers or screwdrivers, I respect their power and believe firmly that whether anyone owns a gun or not, they should know how one works, both for gun safety and in the hopefully unlikely event they actually need to use one.

The fact of the matter is that if someone is out to kill lots of people, guns, while perhaps the most convenient method, are hardly the only one. Some college kid just stabbed five people to death at a house party, apparently with a knife that was in the house where the party was being held. If someone goes nuts and decides it's time to kill lots of people, there's damned little anyone can do about it. Maybe, if we're lucky, we find out about their dastardly plan in advance, but bad luck can take anyone out; whether it be a maniac with a weapon, a car accident, or hell, falling off a ladder.

CTRL-S is your friend.

What happens to the vast minority of people who always think they are in the vast majority?

They join some Libetarian populist movement and demand all government services with the exception of those they partake of to be slashed or eliminated?

And yes, oh ye mighty moderators, this is trolling.

I support more mod points for the irony challenged!

How about "The Founders and over two centuries of jurisprudence." Is that sufficiently pedantic for you?

Apparently some company in Redmond, WA is putting out a mobile clone of OpenOffice.

Of course the Founders intended the constitution to be amended. But the position that the Second Amendment meant something other than the text is revisionism.

I'd say the mere fact that this ex-justice feels the need to add words to the Second Amendment to specifically alter and limit its context says to me he knows full well what the Founders intended. Now one can certainly debate whether the Second Amendment is still useful or desirable or however you want to frame it, but whatever side of the gun debate you sit on, to pretend that the Founders meant anything other than general gun ownership is revisionism of the most extreme kind.

Russia may cite what it likes, but as I've said before, the situation in Kosovo was such that Kosovo's secession was necessary to prevent further crimes against humanity; in particular ethnic cleansing that was almost certain to approach, if not become genocide. There is no indication that any Russian or other minority in Ukraine was under that kind of threat.

What is more, the secession of Kosovo was done under the watchful eye of numerous international agencies, whereas the Crimean "secession" was done with the Russian military and a puppet government running the entire show. To equate Kosovo and Crimea is ludicrous; both from the point of justification and from the point of how the secession was carried out.

It might be one thing if Putin and the Russian parliament hadn't been preparing annexation instruments at the very same time this referendum was being prepared.

Debian was a bit longer, so far as mainline releases go (I don't use testing branches). I have several servers and routers running 6.0, and they're all using OpenSSL 0.9.8, whereas my servers I use as KVM virtualization hosts are running Wheezy and did have vulnerable versions of OpenSSL. I had been thinking over the last few months that I should upgrade my old Debian Squeeze servers and appliances, a number of which are used for my OpenVPN WAN routers and remote client servers. I'm very glad my business/procrastination prevented me from upgrading these systems, and hence they remained untouched, and I don't have to go through the pain of regenerating keys and rolling them out to remote routers and to all the road warriors and work-at-home types.

Only if one buys that "security through obscurity" is a legitimate form of network safety. A decade's worth of Internet Explorer and ActiveX vulnerabilities would suggest you're wrong.

Indeed. If there are still a significant-enough number of OS/2 users out there to warrant OpenSSL upgrades, then someone will fill the need. But we all know there isn't enough users of these old OSs to actually warrant ancient code being maintained.

International law does not support annexations no matter how you read it. Self-determination is not in and of itself sufficient to see the borders of a sovereign state undermined. Good grief, what the hell do you think the UN was formed for, to prevent precisely what has happened.