The right to bear arms is an individual right that applies to all individuals. There has been extensive research on the subject in the last few decades to determine whether it was indeed the case at the time of writing of the amendment, and that is the conclusion - and SCOTUS agreed with that in their Heller decision. The "well organized militia" part of the amendment is the rationale for its existence, but not a limiting clause.

The irony is that he was co-awarded it along with a North Vietnamese politician for brokering Paris Peace accords; but the latter guy had enough integrity to refuse the prize on the basis that long-lasting peace has not actually being achieved. Kissinger took his, though.

But, seriously, between Kissinger, Arafat and Gorbachev being recipients, and people like Gandhi conspicuously missing from the roll, the Nobel Peace Prize can only be treated as a political black mark.

Because GP is clearly trolling, deliberately pushing on all Slashdot's favorite hot buttons at once.

Trusted computing by itself is not a problem if you're the one holding the master key to it. In fact, it makes it that much harder for someone to install a rootkit or something similar into your OS and use it for wiretapping.

You don't need to print bullets, you can just cast them. It's trivial with lead (did you never cast lead trinkets in clay forms as a kid?).

Producing cartridges, now, is not quite as trivial, and bullet is just one part of it. Smokeless powder is complicated to make; on the other hand, some rounds have been developed for black powder, which is easy to make, and can still be used with such (though that pretty much excludes semi-autos as they will quickly gunk up to the point of being inoperable). Primers are the most complicated part, really.

You don't even need lathe and milling machine. You just need the right kind of tubes, and they're actually readily available. Of course, the resulting firearm will be smoothbore, but it's still plenty efficient.

I don't know about Sten, but here is a book that documents building a 9mm submachine gun at home mainly out of steel tubing - no lathe work or milling involved.

Unfortunately for the author, he is a Brit, and so he's now in jail for "conspiracy to supply firearms". On the other hand, it would seem to indicate that this thing actually works.

The United States is a country where the Constitution can be amended in any way whatsoever if the minority of the population votes the right way - basically, people in smaller states having disproportionally many representatives, enough to provide the 3/4 majority that amendment process requires. I did a calculation once, and it would actually take something like a quarter of popular vote to pass virtually any kind of amendment, if the votes are distributed right.

Constitution is just a piece of paper if enough citizens believe it to be the case. There's no magic protection powers there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_defense_force

In more or less the same way as it would have been if someone killed your friend with a knife.

Which is to say, not at all, but how is it relevant?

I'm not a right-wing "US government is conspiring with UN to set up concentration camps" nutcase, but the amount of incorrect claims in your post is so staggering that I have to play the devil's advocate here.

A democratic government of free people is not supposed to fear those people, you're right. However, is that governments can sometimes devolve from democracy into a populist tyranny of the majority, and ultimately into a dictatorship. Nazi Germany was an extreme example of that; more mild recent ones are Russia and Venezuela. The point is that any people in the government who have similar notions should be fearful of an armed and vigilant populace.

So Civil War was just a bunch of nutcases rising up in armed resistance against U.S. government, really? And not, say, duly elected governments of several states, which at that time considered themselves sovereign, seceding and establishing their own government?

Regardless of the unsavory causes for the sake of which CSA was established, it is as far from what you're trying to portray here as can possibly be. It was an example of two professional, state-funded and state-controlled armies hashing it out in the field, not unorganized militia.

In theory, yes, but for all the talk about how "second amendment is there to ensure that all the others apply", I don't see it actually happening, despite the rapid encroachment on other freedoms over the course of the 20th century, and especially in the last few decades.

"I wonder what it would look like if it explodes"

Nope, it was most definitely "I wonder what it will look like when it explodes" and I found thinking it that way to be jarring in its own right. Ten minutes later I had the answer. Large numbers of people were watching and it caused a level of intensity of emotion and feeling among large numbers of people that the intensity was enough to function at a different and atypical energy level.

"Perhaps you should consider studying in the field of neuroscience, or perhaps deep in to the fields of physics"

I'm too old to change career tracks, I have absolutely zero interest in working in the repressive hamster cage necessary to do research in those fields, living in an ivory tower or playing research paper games. Those fields require a lab, equipment and a lot of money. As soon as you hit string theory and multiverse we simply don't have any way to do experimental research because everything is at a level beyond our current ability to measure anything.

Probably the only ones doing viable research on the subject are Zen masters, though they may also be masters of self deception.

I'm just not opting in to the reductionism that thinks just because we have huge digital computers that they are the right tool to simulate biological intelligence. You might actually be able to fake some of the mechanics but its going to be wildly inefficient and contrived, and I think critical peices will be missing, probably the parts that we call "soul".

Is the end goal of life a high salary?

I understand his advice, if followed, and if you work your way, either through trade school or apprenticeship, to journeyman, and then to master, you can expect a $80K+ a year income.

Is this the end-all, be-all of human existence?

A high salary is not why I went into the sciences - I went in with a passion for knowledge and knowing how things work, and why, and how to build things that, because they were barely within the boundaries of the rules, did amazing and astonishing things. A high salary resulted because I was successful at pursuing this passion.

I would instead advise people to try to find three things for which they feel passion, and are good at, and then find someone willing to pay you to do one of them.

If you can only find one thing for which you have passion, if you can still find someone to pay you to do it, then you are ahead of the game, compared to what Bloomberg suggest, if it happens that none of your objects of passion include plumbing.

There are plenty of people who look at the top end paychecks available in a profession, and choose a profession on that basis. Those who do will never reach the top end of that pay range if they do not posses a passion for the profession; they will always be middle tier, and they will watch the clock until it is time to check out from their job, and "get back to their 'real' life". This is where a lot of unemployed IT "professionals" come from.

For those clock watching 8 hours of their day, they will be miserable, working at something for which they have no passion, having intentionally turned their soul off for those eight hours in exchange for money. They will sell half their waking life into misery to benefit the other half of their waking life. And at the end of the day in their "real life", they will find they can not take joy in their "real life", as they anticipate, after sleeping, returning to their job for the next 8 soulless hours of work.

Do something you love, and for which you have passion; reclaim your soul for those lost 8 hours of your life.