Are you listening Obama? Do you care about jobs?

Then authorize Blackwater (Xe) and Dynacorp to go after these scallywags in exchange for bounties put up by shipping companies. Pay out $100,000 an ear.

It will stimulate the economy, create jobs, and provide gainful employment for ex-military facing challenges reintegrating into the domestic laborforce. I see no downsides. It will cost the taxpayers nothing.

Then the next time these pirates approach a merchant vessel, they'll see a gunboat coming around the stern of the ship flying a US flag and ready to kick ass and take names.

It will be the economic gift that keeps giving. Just wait until the movies start to come out. "Pirate Hunter", "Pirate Hunter 2: With a Vengeance", "Rambo V: Arrrr!". America could become known worldwide as the finest mercenary exporting nation since the middle ages.

I'm sorry but the line you're claiming is so clear just is not. Yes there are some weapons that are primarily intended for self defense and some that are primarily intended for hunting, but naive approaches like you advocate are the reason we had politicians in the 90s banning one rifle because it had a black stock that looked like "scary" to a bureaucrat but putting essentially the same rifle with a nicely finished wooden stock. The line is hazy at best.

What this man accomplished could have been accomplished with a pump action or semi automatic shotgun, which are both very common hunting weapons and home defense weapons.

Or take the m1 garand, the primary service rifle of WWII and korea. It's a simple semi-automatic rifle. It's essentially equivalent in capability to a modern semi automatic hunting rifle.

A shotgun or rifle is easily modified to be concealed under a coat or loose clothing. Shortening the stock and barrel will compromise accuracy, but that doesn't matter when you're a madman targeting a crowd at close range.

So where do we draw the line? Bolt action? WWI was fought primarily with bolt-action rifles. Even a bolt action rifle can do an enormous amount of damage. Fuck, Kennedy was assasinated with a bolt action rifle. Single shot? It only takes a single shot to kill a person. Initial reports at that the congresswoman was shot at close range.

No, if you combine mental illness and firearms of any kind, you will have dead people. If you then expose that individual to radical political rhetoric, you'll have dead politicians or a dead mentally ill individual or both. Mental illness needs to be identified and treated and those who are mentally ill need to be prevented from possessing firearms. Even the NRA agrees with this.

And let us vote None of the Above. If None of the Above wins, a do-over is called and the parties need to come back with candidates who aren't hacks.

This will just lead to more state parties moving to closed primaries. This means independents, most Americans, will have even less say in who our leaders are.

The 20% of the population who are hardcore partisan douchebags like these make me sick. What we need is a process that let's the other 80% of the population - most of who are so disgusted by this that they don't even vote - have more say, not less.

I remember after seeing the first Indiana Jones I was interested in archaeology and medieval history. All I could find in my school library about archaeology was a 30 year old book in a discard bin. All my teachers could tell me was something I could study after finishing a college degree. Sure, there was history: timelines and name lists from 1492 onward.

I'll always be left to wonder how my life would have turned out differently if I had someone in my life at that time to help me explore the interests provoked by that movie all those years ago. Probably poorer. Maybe happier.

Public education in the USA is an employee factory. That's its history. That's why it was created. That's what it's for.

We will never succeed in making education not an employee factory until we succeed in bringing about a society that does not depend upon a majority of the working age population being employees. We have the technology to satisfy our basic needs with less per capita investment of time than at any point in recorded history.

If we go Net Neutrality, it must be coupled with large public investment in major net infrastructure enhancements.

In a Net Neutrality world, telcos can't afford to roll out major infrastructure enhancements to support 1080p video and similar mass market content, because even if they could charge consumers more directly, which they realistically can't, that infrastructure will just go to support more bittorrent use for the top 5% of users.

In a Net Neutrality world, telcos can't go to Google and Netflix and Hulu and Apple and get funding for major infrastructure enhancements based on deals to ensure QoS of delivery of those providers' content. And consumers and the rest of providers won't get the downstream benefits of those major infrastructure enhancements, because they won't happen.

In a Net Neutrality world, these major infrastructure enhancements will only happen on this schedule if the government funds them directly. Unfortunately this has been something governments have been unwilling to do explicitly. We should just agree that internet infrastructure is like roads and highways inasmuch as it should be publicly funded and owned. Of course that means that the government controls it and monitors it, but the government already does this, and since it's private and not public, they do it with telcos directly without oversight and restriction.

If Verizon had the iPhone too, albeit the results would be similar. 2GB is a ridiculous monthly cap. $10 for every additional GB? What is this, 1995? OK, throttle bandwidth as needed to deliver QoS, but don't put an artificial per-month cap on my usage.

The main advantage of having the iPhone on Verizon will be that it will drive down data plan prices and drive up caps.

And $20/month extra for tethering? Really AT&T? Go shove it up your ass.

I recommend giving Debian a try again next time you're setting up a server since it sounds like you may not have in a while. Of the items you mention, there is now a graphical installer, the installer will produce a sane partitioning scheme for you if you don't want to override the defaults, and apache/mysql setup is straightforward unless you're talking about a distribution-specific configuration GUI.

It's time to accept that the nearest you'll come to the thrill of a head shot, is a riveting game of cribbage with the ladies.

I'd ask you to be my bridge partner but it sounds like your reaction times are really sub par.

Be thankful for the cribbage nights. In another ten years when it takes all you can muster to punch A4 on the bingo card, you'll look back fondly on these times.

His examples are find, xargs, and wget.

It's a sad day when "man discovers UNIX command line" is a headline on Slashdot.

Just wait until he discovers perl.

But it's true. Too many young and not-so-young programmers lack basic UNIX command line and Perl skills. If you get asked to perform a backend data processing, network, or system task, and lack these skills, the best thing you can do is admit that you lack these skills and ask someone else to assist. The worst thing you can do is to built an elaborate multi tier POS to solve such a problem, but I've known no shortage of contractors and hot shot developers who take this as an opportunity to do just that.

I think it would be worth it to go back and try to kill a younger version of myself.

If I successfully kill my younger self and I am still alive, then I think either the many worlds interpretation of QM is true, or effects can occur without causes in the macro world.

But I think I would only do it if I felt confident that the result of my test could be known to those from my own time. I'm not sure that would be possible.

I'm undecided about that. When it comes to this kind of information, at this time, public is probably safer than would-be anonymous.

If anything happens to Assange, the entire world knows where to look. Even the Mossad can't make public figures disappear without leaving a trail. Whereas a would-be anonymous leaking organization can be easily disappeared or infiltrated.

The problem with being anonymous is that you never actually are.

Google phone: Failure
Sony PSP: Marketshare loser

But what if we combined them?!

Why, we'd have a Nokia N-Gage gaming phone. Brilliant.

Hey clueless analysts, 2003 called and they want their shitty ideas back.

Enthusiastically. Let me tell you why.

I'm always interested to see a new discovery like this in the Eocene.

The Eocene is such a cool epoch (and by cool I mean hot, followed by less hot) that I get excited whenever there's something newly discovered. In part because through modern technology, it really isn't so remote.

Through the miracle of anthropomorphic global warming the kind of world in which creatures like this thrived is within reach of our descendants, possibly within living memory.

Tropics replacing deserts. Habitable northern latitudes and even poles. Longer growing seasons. Greater biodiversity, and greater biological productivity on the whole.

The ability of our species to bring about a radical change in climate should be incredibly compelling to us. It presents an amazing opportunity to transform our world for the better. How many of us read and dreamt about terraforming other worlds as youth? Our generation has the capacity to terraform our own.

We are really at a turning point as a species. Either we can continue to wallow in the current ice age or we can take the reigns of destiny and propel ourselves and our world to a better future.

We didn't say it was capricious. We said it was corrupt and stupid, and it was.

The equitable resolution would have been to remember that the point of the rule was to give credit based on the merit of the contribution, and allow a joint credit because in this case it was merited.

The corrupt and stupid decision would be to turn on your own member, ignore the merit of the situation, and basically say my way or the highway purely for the sake of the power of the institution, which is the decision that was made here.

Corporations and unions are both institutions. Fuck institutions. Fuck them especially when they want to control creativity.