Until your child who has never been taught about firearms goes on a sleep over to one of those irresponsible parents mentioned above who don't teach their children and secure their firearms. Then they play cowboys and Indians and your kid is the Indian.

I disagree. I have been shooting from the time I was about 6. Moving from BB guns to 22 rifles to large bore rifles and handguns.

It was a fun, educational, and enjoyable experience and provided me a means to connect with my parents/grandparents and kept me outdoors and engaged.

Kids should be shooting, but in controlled and well supervised environments. I was taught to respect firearms and to understand their danger and their utility. That is what should be done.

However, I do agree that parents who do not secure their firearms or let kids play with them like toys should be charged. I didn't have access to my guns as a kid unless my father got them out and I would have lost my privileges if I ever did anything more than pick it up, point it down range, fire, then put it back on the designated area.

Hell, replace the handgun with anything dangerous a idiot parent might leave out or let a kid play with.

Brian was about to head home for dinner, his best friend was playing in his mom's car and accidentally placed it in neutral causing it to run Brian over.

Brian was about to head home for dinner, his best friend was playing with his mom's chef knife and accidentally stabbed Brian in the neck pretending to be a sword fighter.

Brian was about to head home for dinner, his best friend was playing with his mom's matches and accidentally burned down the house killing Brian and his sleeping inattentive mother.

Which is exactly what happened. She just put in her two weeks and found a new employer who pays better and hasn't neutered their health insurance.

It doesn't matter if it's true or not. What matters is companies use it as an excuse to fuck over their employees. My wife and a few of my friends have all seen their coverage decline over the last year to "get ready for expected increases in insurance costs". Companies see this as an excuse to fuck over their employees and employees blame it on obama.

You just answered your own question. If the wealthy are making profits from pollution, then polluting is a valid business strategy.

The best thing that will not go bad is ammo, not gold.

This only works when we are well off enough to care that we might need trade in the future. I understand well and good the purpose of money and what it is. I understand the purpose of trade. I can also tell you I would never accept gold for trade if I was in the situation described above. It would hold no purpose for me. If you have services I need, I'd give you my goods/services for them (trade). If you simply want what I have, but have no goods or services I need, then I have no need of gold. So gold is worthless in this situation. You could have millions of pounds of it, I wouldn't trade you for it.

Now when we get to a point where life is 'comfortable' (infrastructure is being rebuilt, stores being created, farming for more than staying alive, etc) then maybe I'd care about objects that represent wealth. Before that however, I'd be much more inclined to take something totally useful as use it as currency. Maybe 5.56 rounds. I can use them to feed my family, I can use them to defend my family, and I could trade you those for medicine so you could continue to do the same.

My point is if SHTF and I'm in a no government survival situation the economy has collapsed and government is struggling and soon to follow, then gold is useless to me. What is useful is food, heating oil, gas, rounds for hunting/self defense, clean water. I'd rather trade my goods for those things then for gold, which will not help me survive in any way (besides spending time finding another sucker to take gold).

Is it valuable now? Sure. I own a small amount of gold and it is part of my investment strategy. But gold is only valuable because we believe it is valuable.

What makes gold valuable to a common man? Is gold food? Is gold shelter? Sure gold has modern applications in electronics and other areas, but gold is just like paper money in most cases. It is simply something we think is valuable so it is valuable.

If the world governments collapsed tomorrow, gold is not money. Bullets, oil, food, matches, etc. These are money. Gold is like bottle caps. It's currency because we needed something limited and abstract to trade when carting a hundred pounds of grain was no longer feasible.

lastpass.com

As if ubuntu can't be used for running large complicated data centers. I used to manage a datacenter that has over 100 ubuntu servers. It is just as rock solid as it's parents and has commercial support business requires.

Ubuntu server is a fine OS with a nice installer (I love the minimal for VM install) and has no tools (like yast) in the way to prevent you from doing any customization.

I want a minimalist government that focuses mostly on preserving and the rights of our constitution while at the same time working to wean us off big government, give us back freedoms that were taken from us, and fix our patent and copyright systems.

Can you do that?

I probably will upgrade the video card in that 6 years. But I highly doubt I'll be buying a new PC. CPU power just isn't a compelling factor in games and RAM is 'fast enough'.

16-32G of ram and the latest i5 or i7 processor will last a long time.

I'm not a windows guy. My laptop is a macbook pro and my day to day workstation is debian. However, I recently built a windows gaming computer and I like windows 8. Is it different? Yes. Does it have a learning curve? Yes. In the end it's stable, solid, easy to use, and looks nice.

The reason PC sales are down is because computing power has reached a point where we don't need a new computer every 2-3 years. My mac mini is 6 years old. I only need to replace it because apple won't support it any longer. Otherwise it's speed and power is fine. I expect my new desktop windows 8 PC will last me at least 6 or 7 years.

Gone is the day of the power computer. Desktop computing has reached the point where there is no leap in upgrading. It's incremental, people only do incremental upgrades when their old equipment dies.