The wording of the Second Amendment is not particularly clear, period. Unfortunately.

But we do know that the authors were pro-militia in large part because they were very nervous about the alternative--a large standing army.

The world and technology have changed so much since then that I'd be very nervous about our not having a somewhat large standing army.

Do the math here:

http://www.bloomberg.com/perso...

Saving 10% of your salary is going to give you a lot more than a million dollars over 30 years, even in constant dollars.

Yeah, I have a lot of those too. I even ended up with a duplicate copy of Civ IV and all its expansions, plus games like Sniper Elite and Red Faction: Armageddon that I definitely never purchased. Also, the multiplayer for a lot of games is a separate Steam title.

...and are married to somebody with comparable income. Swap that wife out for somebody who doesn't make much more than minimum wage, and your $28k/yr basically evaporates. You'd save more being single, but your non-discretionary expenses as a single aren't that much lower than a couple's.

It used to be that the 3-letter acronyms whose existence was never confirmed - only alluded to - could claim the "right" to hide their malicious mischief under the guise of national security, but apparently no longer. The Federal Bureau of Instigation whose long record of abuse against the unworthy among us is a matter of record now feels free to confirm their addition to the other worthies.

I realize that Bush 43 thought the Constitution essentially a worthless scrap of paper, but, to paraphrase what someone once said over a millennia ago, "Who shall guard against these self-same guardians?"

The 70's are full of TV shows that had evil computer episodes. The plot would revolve around a billing error, and when the protagonist would bring it up with the store they would be told that computers don't make mistakes. Then they would trigger an error in their favor, and comedy would ensue. Partridge family, Eight is Enough, and I think the Brady Bunch. Those are the easy ones that come to mind.

The uproar was that with computers long term storage the IRS could do things like make you pay taxes on something your parents did 60 years ago, or use the power of tagging to harass specific organizations based on political leanings. What absurd notions those people of ancient times had!

Chuckle.

Thank goodness that never came to be, #37809.

Some open source projects will have better code then closed source projects and vice vesa, you can't just make a clean line.

That there is the true secret to my success.

True, and that's a much more rational analysis than "the US is run by an oligarchy".

Considering nearly all of what Americans call Christianity has purged "the good samaritan" from what they teach and instead taken a "if you have money it proves you deserve the love of Jesus" approach then what empathy was there for the poor in the first place?
Also people just cannot see themselves falling into that position so they blame the victims. The attitudes to and of the Katrina refugees pointed that out very well - we had "pious" people like Barbara Bush saying that people who were homeless before Katrina should not be helped and we had people that suddenly found themselves becoming the "worthless homeless person" they never imagined they would be and having to rely on charity, even if it was only for a short time.
Another way to look at it is at this time any homeless person in the USA has a more positive financial balance sheet than Donald Trump. He defaulted on a couple of vast fortunes in debt and comes nowhere near matching them since, but his connections allow him to be respected instead of despised like the homeless people that also ran out of money.

Shantytowns are symbolic of failure,

The failure doesn't disappear just because you make the shantytown illegal. All that accomplishes is make the people who lived there even worse off, for the sake of letting those who didn't pretend the problem doesn't exist. And in a way, it doesn't: a "failure" implies an unintended undesirable consequence of some decision or policy, while demolishing the homes of worst-off members of society for the sake of appearances is an intentional, deliberate action. It confirms that you are okay with this outcome, of treating people like garbage to be thrown aside and disposed of if they aren't economically useful; in other words, you haven't failed, you're simply evil.

You can buy a 4K monitor today for $700. And it's not some Korean mystery brand either:
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=210-ACHO

One thing that isn't obvious though is that it's a 30Hz monitor. All the 60Hz ones, as far as I can tell, are still in $1000+ territory.

now we're treated like terrorists and crimminals, so much better

As a developer, what do you think your job is?

We may be suffering from a terminology problem here. I think developers produce code as their work product. Which is turned over to a build environment for subsequent testing and finally installation.

If you have a different job description for a developer, I'd like to hear it. I wouldn't hire it, but I always get a chuckle out of projects that are so deeply layered that there are people which we don't really know what they do.

If you produce anything that affects the configuration of the final product, it had damned well better be under configuration control. And that means your administrative 'privilege' is restricted by some processes and procedures. If you have them at all. That's the way its done in avionics, medical, financial and a lot of other software houses. If you are just hacking out games, then who cares? Fiddle with your development environment all you want.

Sadly we gave them away for free, in the name of (false) security, not long after September 11, 2001.

The West declared the cold war, not the Soviet Russia. Actually the cold war period is so short as compared to very long history of Russia-Western relationships. The cold war period can be neglected for insignificance. All petty differences pale when compared to the defeat of Nazi Germany. If Russia had failed to defeat Nazis at Stalingrad, at Moscow and generally at the front, we would had no Jew these days in Europe, not one. And genocide for other nations. Nazis killed many. Imagine what they would have done if they had won.
You've got no other friend like this like Russia.
And mark my words. Should neocon madmen succeed in isolating Russia, the fragile world, peace, the USA, and the world economy will go down to hell.

FTFY

Then how are you informed about what is happening in technology, in world affairs, in your local area or anything else if there are no good media?

No one can do that reliably. It's luck.

That's not true. There are people who can do that. You need enough money to be allowed to freely invest in private firms and such though.

And you need to have not so much money, as well. Too little money OR too much money, and you cannot make good returns. It is not as if your potential return is independent from the amount of money you have, there, so it is a bit meaningless to throw around numbers such as 18%.

If you have too little money -- then you don't get access to investments (except ones that have already become public companies, which suck) ---- if you have too much money, then you actually exhaust what good options are available.

Wasn't that pretty much the only reason to buy Computer Shopper?

(well, except for the Lab of Doom and Pepsi-Cola)

First of all, built means compiled and modified means I switched off u32 support as well as targeting a Xeon processor class.

I did not need to write code, the kernel had to be rebuilt and the binary replaced/modified for the target processor and memory architecture.

You use the .config for that and rebuild the kernel tree. You don't need to write code.

SO! The included Redhat kernel was way too generic for the application performance required.

Among other things. But the point is, you can't do that with an OS binary, so LINUX as an OS Kernel, is far more flexible than a proprietary one.

It doesn't matter if you find an account with a 5% return. At $5K per year you are not going to get to a million dollars between the time you graduate college and want to retire.

$417 per month ($5004 per year) at a rate of 5% compounded yearly will take 49 1/4 years to get to $1,006,351.71. Realistically you're not going to get a job right out of school that allows you to save that kind of cash, especially if you have student loans and need to start a household. Nor is a 5% rate of return all that realistic currently.

At a 3% rate of return it'll take almost 66 years.

But do you really get more money back from the cards than you pay for the bundles?

You only buy at $1?

Or do it because you kinda want the games anyhow and they become cheaper if you sell the badges?

First - props to developers who put in the hard work to bring these features to market; I guess we'll even find some of them useful.

BUT - IMHO - the 8,000 lb. gorilla remains the crippled Bluetooth stack and especially the HID components that were lost when the transition was made from Mobile OS 6.x; funny how resolving this issue which has over 11,000 votes in some MS blogs never even made the review.

Presenting this OS as business-oriented as some have done is blatantly half-fast as you'd know if you ever tried doing some real work with Office Mobile without something approaching a real keyboard and mouse. Yah - you can get things done, but at nothing approaching an efficient use of time.

Imagine my joy 2 years ago when upgrading to my old-by-now HTC Trophy from my Motorola Q9c only to discover I'd been ambushed by this issue which remains the red-headed stepchild all these years later.

And I'm only one of at least 11,000 still waiting.

My 9mm quickly ended an attempted car-jacking/robbery, while I was driving back from school late at night. The nice individuals attempted to box me in at an intersection. I was in the right lane, they pulled into my lane so I couldn't move. The driver jumped out with some kind of hand gun, unfortunately for them they picked an combat infantry veteran. By the time he jumped out, I was already aimed center mass. The driver quickly jumped back into his car and drove off as fast as he could. No shots fired, no injuries. My ROE is always that the barrel has to be pointed at me.

  I don't carry everywhere. If I am in the "nice" part of town, the 9mm is locked, loaded and my finger is the safety.

What could be worse than food!?

Taco Bell

In that case, shouldn't it be "What good print media are left?", media being plural and all?

So do cell phones.

Microsoft is really onto something with the whole Surface Pro idea, and It boggles my mind that not a single one of the "regular" OEMs have managed to build anything even in the same league. This product alone is justification for Microsoft being in the non-peripheral hardware business, despite the OEM friction it undoubtedly causes.

The Surface Pro is further proof that Steve Jobs was flat wrong when he said of iPad competitors, "If you see a stylus, they blew it!"

First of all, a quality digitizer pen is not a stylus. Second, and far more importantly, there are *really* good reasons why we gave up drawing and writing with rocks and fingers, and started using sticks, brushes, and pens instead...

Shithole? You mean the United States? The rest of the world has bullying issues in schools of course, but no-where near as horrific as in the US with their zero-tolerance approach making bulling virtually impossible to deal with. I promise you it's nowhere near as bad elsewhere.

Plus, it's your world as much as it is anyone elses. Keep in mind that the news always reports bad news in dominance, so perhaps you should stay away from most news sites/TV/radio for a while so that you can realign your views of the world in a more balanced way. The world has plenty of great, positive things about it. Being addicted to the news would definitely ruin you without balance though.

Oh yes, I'm sure the CoS people have read them, but it will be state representatives who go to the constitutional convention. Do you trust your state government, and the rest of the state governments, enough that they will end up with something better? I sure don't.

Of course the NYT is liberal, remember how liberally Judith Miller helped Cheney sell the war?

I just cannot buy the line that the only options are 'assuming the fetal position' and picking a fight with Russia. Surely there is some kind of middle ground where we can be tough when we have to be without taking every possible opportunity to prove it?