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.

There are already dumbots in that range. Any new robot should come with at least an Allwinner ARM CPU ($7) and a camera as standard. That's enough for some vision processing and at least 2D SLAM. The hardware to put some real smarts in a little bot is now cheap and there's enough open source software available to get started on making it smart.

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.

The trouble with being a plumber is that most of the work is in building and remodeling. With housing construction way down, most of the people in the building trades are hurting. It's great during a building boom, though.

A related trade is HVAC - heating, ventilating, and air conditioning. There's more electronics and control involved than in plumbing.

Seems like it will continue - despite any ruling. Look at the overall indicators and trend, not just one specific ruling or data point.

Those cool, adventurous science-fiction dystopias in Bladerunner and the like. Well, they aren't so cool for most people to live in. They certainly aren't cool for the people who witness the transitions - from the 70s to post 2001...

It's a long way from the top, now. And we didn't tie a rope to climbe back.