Having a gun in a fight works if the fight is nearly fair. Two men with pistols each have a decent chance of winning a gunfight. We aren't talking about that here. We're talking about a civilian against soldiers, plural. Guns don't help there. Other weapons do.

Which is why the Constitution says nothing whatsoever about 'guns' and merely says 'arms,' which includes those other weapons. Yes, I think if someone wants to buy a wire-guided missile or a cruise missile or a howitzer or a fighter jet then he has a constitutional right to do so. And yeah, most folks wouldn't--but they could, which is what liberty is all about.

Do we get to see death in PG and PG-13 movies? Sure. We just don't get to really see the horror that death contains usually. We get a cut-scene where someone pulls a trigger or uses a power and we cut to the hero crying or expounding upon the impact said death had on him and how the evil must be avenged. Make a decent film? Usually. A little reality creeping into a movie? Ummm, no. Death is rarely - if ever - a pretty, clean event where no blood is spilled and a body looks perfect.

In Top Gun, we see Goose break his neck against the cockpit, we see his corpse floating down; we see the hero cradling his broken, bloody body; we see his widow and his now-fatherless son; we see the hero lose all self-confidence and nearly his career.

Not all films make death something minor.

It is the product of a sexually repressed society that someone could consider the sight of female breasts or a limp schlong a sexual thing.

Or, you know, the fact that they are sexually-appealing body parts.

In fact, it's the most repressed cultures which tend to exhibit more sexual devian behaviour. Case in point: the catholic church.

The Catholic Church has a rate of deviance no different than, say, physicians or schoolteachers. Where they stand out is in their inability to manage the media like the AMA or NEA can.

If you are religious, it is hard to understand why a creator God would think up a world in which every interestingly complex creature has to eat other creatures to survive - often causing them excruciating unbearable pain in the process.

I'm pretty sure that the standard religious answer is some variant on 'God didn't designed the universe that way; it was corrupted.' That's always worked for me.

What interests me is why atheists (claim to) see a need for ethical behaviour: if nature doesn't hold itself to any such standard (c.f. all those animals dying in misery every day), why should human beings do so? It doesn't make sense.

Updating software brings your system from a state that you know works to a state that may or may not work for you.

Ummm, no--and that's actually the root of his other problem (not being easily able to upgrade to OpenOffice.org 3): updating the system does not risk anything. I've never had an Ubuntu security update mess things up. That's because it's bugfixes only.

Upgrading is another beast entirely. He (not unreasonably) confuses updating and upgrading; so do you.

Teachers here in CO often have bumper stickers proclaiming: Welcome to Colorado, 49th in funding for schools.

I've lived here for over a decade and have never seen one of those. Moreover, the numbers show that's clearly not the case.

Gladwell argues Asians are not innately more able at math, but culturally more amenable to it based on the felicity of a language which is to our language as the metric system of weights and measures is to the English.

Ummm, the French system is worse than the standard system. If the analogy held then Asians would be worse at math.

French units have one single benefit: they are easily convertable. That's only a benefit on paper, and only a benefit when performing unit conversions. Base-10 is utterly horrible for performing physical manipulations (like, say, cutting lumber or dividing liquids).

And of course many things in real life don't work out cleanly anyway. There's a reason why non-base-10 radians are so useful. A calorie is 4.1868 joules: both measure the same thing and both are French units and both have clean definitions--and yet they work out to have a nasty conversion anyway.

And no, I don't think they should necessarily be hunted to extinction: let them be in wildlife preserves and where man hasn't settled. But wherever there are neighbourhoods, just kill them.

This is why so many people run the other way when Microsoft wants to get on board the Open Source bandwagon. Your throats are scheduled to be slit next.

And once again this demonstrates why the GPL is so vitally necessary. Microsoft can't screw us with GPLed code: all of their modifications are as available to the rest of the Free Software ecosystem as to their own developers and users.

This is a Good Thing.

While I am normally all for the survival of the fittest especially in a business world, this is a bit of a problem in our current situation, as if we let all the "bad companies" go bust, we would end up with millions of people ready to retire suddenly have nothing to retire on.

That's why retirement shouldn't be based on a company pension, nor on company stock, but rather on a diversified investment portfolio. It's better to lose 30% than 100% after all...

That's why 401(k) plans and IRAs are so very important: if your company fails, you still have your retirement because you own it.

You used to have have commercial banks, investment banks, and insurance companies, and each did something different under different rules. Then the rules that had been in place since the Great Depression were repealed by Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and suddenly the legal boundaries between these kinds of financial services was gone.

GLB is part of why the banking sector has imploded entirely: banks that are successful have been able to buy the failing banks.

Europe has integrated banking and it seems to work for 'em.

*AND* we should destroy anyone who was involved in shortselling any commodity related to loans, they should be prosecuted for making (and winning) the bet that tens of thousands of people would lose their livelihoods, their houses.

That doesn't make any sense at all. It's not their fault that anyone lost his home. If I bet that Mariah Carey will die within the next week and she does, it's not my fault. Likewise, if I shorted lumber three months ago it's not my fault that home construction has decreased.