WTF? What are you talking about? You install it and you use it. That's about I've ever done with firefox. What's your problem?

Seriously? I upgraded my laptop from 10.6 to 10.8 to 10.9. The few problems I've had in 10.6 to 10.8 upgrade, were only due to open source software lagging behind and not being Cocoa and 64 bit ready. Everything else worked fine. Once tcl/tk and wxWindows were up to snuff, I could update macports. It was smooth sailing otherwise.

I've upgraded two other machines from 10.6 straight to 10.9. It took way less than a day in spite of it being a major upgrade. I've mostly just let it install, and then let it install all the app store updates necessary. IIRC the Messages needed to have the jabber account removed and re-added, otherwise it couldn't connect. Hardly a major issue, and I can't imagine a minor update, say from 10.9 to 10.9.1 would take much time at all. It never did. The only thing I need to do on my "ancient" laptop is to re-run the TRIM-enabling script for the SSD. That's all. There were some minor glitches in various Apple applications due to Mavericks, but this required no work at all on my end to fix - just wait for Apple to release necessary updates.

Faronics is a place in decline - demonstrably so. They can't fucking manage sell their stuff online! I mean, come the fuck on, it's 2013, not 1993. If a company is irresponsible enough to have their online shopping links simply broken, then they may, from my perspective, go to hell. I don't trust their technical prowess. They are clueless. They just don't get it.

What you say about kids is mostly true, but the blame lies almost always on the parents, sometimes on the school rules as well. Say, those who defend themselves from the bullies are often facing negative repercussions from the fucking school!

They must be idiots, then, since at-home reloading is very common in the U.S., you have many catalogs and sites selling reloading supplies. I've yet to hear that the reloads are somehow fundamentally inferior.

I think this would be news, unless you really talk about "cases" as in "federal court cases" since it's is illegal under federal law to carry a firearm into any establishment that serves alcohol. If you think people would do so openly, think again. They'd be arrested in short order.

I'd go even further. The overall culture in the U.S. is very different than in Europe. It can be best observed in the unfortunately very popular gospel of prosperity approach to life here. Some "churches" (I'd call them money congregations) in the U.S. would be subject of wide ridicule elsewhere in the world, and especially in Europe. So there's something very fundamentally different about the way people here "think".

I'd say that there's a much lower level difference in cultures between the U.S. and the rest of the world, a difference that is somehow very fundamental to the way of life here. It's only my gut feeling at the moment, but somehow I think this is the make-or-break when it comes to the resulting social differences that end up in school shootings.

You're assuming that whatever underlying problem is that leads to those mass school shootings is present in the other countries. Since the problem most demonstrably isn't easy availability of guns, it's not hard to imagine that whatever the real problem is, would be also endemic to the U.S. Let's not forget that guns "made" North America yet school shootings are only very recent.

You've nailed it: these days are the key words here. Guns were widely available in North America since before the U.S.A. was even a country. Yet those mass school shootings seem to be the thing of the last decade. There's the answer everyone is looking for: stuff has changed over time, and enough change in whatever is the underlying parameter (or parameters) has accumulated that in the last 10 years we've got more kids killed by gun in schools than there have been, apparently, in the previous 100 years (or so it'd seem?). I doubt that removal of guns will change much, because the underlying problem will still be there. We'll have mass knifings, mass strangulations (an 18 inch zip tie is all it takes!), etc. instead.

While this would be the "obvious" solution, you should not forget that those shootings seem to be a recent phenomenon. Access to guns hasn't changed much in the U.S. over the last 100 years. Easy access to guns is a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is social change - but how, why and if there's a fix to that, I wouldn't know :(

It's exactly like with poisonous mushrooms: you can ingest a lethal dose in 30 seconds; it doesn't mean you'll be dead in 30 seconds. Radiation poisoning, unless the dose is gigantic so as to cause instant burns, has delayed onset of symptoms and that's why it's so insidious. By the time you figure out what's wrong, there's nothing you can do. The difference between radiation poisoning and mushrooms is that with mushrooms, you can do a tox test. With gamma ray radiation poisoning from Co60, unless you look at the DNA you might never know what the heck happened because it leaves no toxicological nor radiological traces. The symptoms and pathology is all you've got. You are irradiated, but you're not radioactive - your body's atom's nuclei don't transmute into radioactive ones, and you are not being contaminated with radioactive particulates (we assume its a solid, concentrated source). It'd be just like if you received a rather unfocused but very humongous dose of radiation cancer therapy.

Yes, and anyone less than scrupulous could use that to empty your account. If I wanted to transfer money to you, and called your bank and asked for your account number, they wouldn't give it out saying it's private, protected stuff. Basically the only reason you have not been screwed yet is that everyone who handled your check happened not to be a fraudster. Seriously, it's that bad. That's also why corporations don't print their account numbers on stationery in the U.S. They'd get a talking-to from their bank, and they could potentially lose in court should they wish to bring civil suits against people who stole from them.

They are indeed meant to be private!!! In SPITE of being on the checks! Checks are supposed to be handled like confidential/sensitive documents! It's a big nod-and-wink scheme, kludged so bad that some localities have laws against disclosure of such numbers - just to work around the holes in the system in hope of discouraging at least local small-time fraudsters.

Elsewhere in the world, businesses put their account numbers on their stationery and websites. In the U.S. you don't do it, because anyone can use the routing number and account number to do an electronic funds transfer withdrawal from your account. Some accounts, say like the ones used for payroll payments, go through special processing where the combo of account+check number is a one-time thing, and is randomly generated and thus unfeasible to guess in advance. Also the payment amount is treated as part of it, so unless you know the entire quadruplet of the data (routing+account+check#+amount), your withdrawal will be denied. That's a rarity, though, not the way everyone's accounts are set up.

It'd be no biggie to have even private checking accounts set up so that unless you pre-authorize a check, it won't be honored. Yet I don't think any bank offers that for regular consumer use.

Yet that's precisely how it's done in the U.S. You put in a bunch of numbers that are static and your payment goes through. It's going full retard, but the "industry" just doesn't care.

There is no download. Seriously.