The truth is, if a few good citizens were armed and nearby, they would have had a chance to stop the killer before he could do any more harm.and went on to say how if a person really wanted to, they'd break laws to get guns, so gun control doesn't achieve anything, except leaving the good guys unable to defend themselves. Sure, they'd break laws to get guns. You can't stop them if they really want to, but you can make it harder. And you have to make it harder universally. It's no good if one state cracks right down, if people can just pop over to the next state and pick up a firearm instead. I agree with Steven. Leave the gun toting to the people trained in their use (i.e. law enforcement). Frankly, it disturbs me that "defending yourself" equates to being able to shoot the attacker. I think it's Texas where you can legally shoot trespassers. Scary stuff. Pro Guns Person A went on to say:
To close, again without intending offense, please do not call for gun control if you aren't even a citizen of this country. The real problem is the societal issues that drive people to do these things. The truth is, fifty years ago in this country, people could leave loaded guns in their unlocked cars, even in high school parking lots...and nothing like this ever happened. But now, even though we have far more restrictive gun laws, things like this do happen, because of the societal problems.I have the right to express my opinion, irrespective of my citizenship, as do you, Mr Pro Guns Person A. You don't have to like my opinion, just as I don't have to like yours, but I respect your right to have your opinion. No offense taken, either. You were very polite in putting across your point, I appreciate it. (By the way, I agree. Society's gone to pot.) Pro Guns Person B's email was along a similar theme: the bad people will always get their mitts on a gun, and the good people won't be able to defend themselves.
Think about these figures (I'll write about the US, since that's the nation you wrote about now): In the state of Arizona the gun per person ratio is 2,5 (on average 2,5 guns owned by 1 person, and these are the legally purchased ones). In the state of New York there is an official prohibition on guns. So why is it that New York has the higher armed crime rate among those two? (and one of the highest across the country)I don't think reverting the entire US to a "wild wild west" scenario is really going to help matters at all. Sarah was saying that she'd found some statistic somewhere, probably saying something like what this page is saying. Now this was done at a Federal level, so that's why it worked, whereas anything done piecemeal, is going to cause a situation like what Pro Gun Person B was describing in his email.
"an offender visited approximately 550 domestic properties in Weston-super-Mare with a fake comic relief sponsor form. This person obtained property by deception, (i.e. convinced them to part with money) from no less than 542 separate victims. Following good work from the police, he was caught, arrested, interviewed and I understand he will be cautioned for all the offences. My sources tell me that as a result of the arrest, the North Somerset District was or is planning to claim 542 'detections' for this one job. This will prove to be an amazing result for the bean-counters and has no doubt salvaged the whole 'performance target' result for the area in 2006. Indeed, the local Police Community Support Officers have spent the week going door to door in an attempt to locate every household that was conned, and get them to sign a pro-forma statement of complaint to bolster the clear-up rate"Do you know other examples where setting a target has had unintended effects? Do you have a suggestion how to set better targets for the police here? Me, I like the suggestion of one anonymous commenter:
"The Police should be measured on the absence of crime not by detecting it."
This BoF comes out from several ideas posted in Planet Debian by Erich Schubert, Sven M ller, Joachim Breitner, Mike Homey and myself (so far). It's not to be "chaired" by any of us particularly, but I expect an interesting brainstorming session.Note that, following Nomeata's suggestion, I'm presenting this for Debcamp - If you are not attending Debcamp and are interested, we will try to set this up via some sort of videoconferencing (or at least the usual video feed + IRC feedback), and I do hope we can have something showable (at least a broken concept) after Debconf.
There are several different init systems present in Debian - However, we are only supporting currently one of them, good ol' sysv-rc - We have close to a thousand packages providing init scripts suitable for it, and close to none for all of the other systems.
In current systems, full of hot-pluggable devices, changing network configurations and so on, however, I think this situation is quite prone to change - sysv-rc and its runlevels are better suited for stable server-like systems, and is hard to adapt for future needs.
We will talk about the potential difficulties Debian will face in order to better support more init schemes, and discuss some ideas to solve them.
This should be a brainstorming session, not much material will be prepared (maybe some sketches by each of us, but nothing formal). If you plan on attending, take a look at the messages linked to in the 'links' section.
Reading Veblen nearly a century after he wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class, it is not easy to know which parts of the book to take seriously. It comes off as equal parts intellectual theory, social satire, and crackpot polemic, (and goes on for a full more paragraph) and then says Where Veblen is prescient, however, is his sense that in a consumption economy, consumer goods would become markers of who we are. p. 103In this way he can say, ok Veblen is useful because of this specific reason” and yet communicate to his academic readers that he knows the limits of Veblen. No matter how much I love the book, and now matter how I think his use of the caveat is stunning, there are two problems I have with it. In one case, I think he fails to give one of the most important caveats. He paints a picture in which all of American society is ensnared in dominant social codes and mores (which somehow all point back to consumerism and capitalism and a desire to improve the self). While there are points he seems to back away from that sort of statement, and a few rare points where he ascribes his insights to the group I think he should mainly be sticking to white, liberal-leaning middle-class Americans I think there are more instances where he paints a picture of America as far more uniform than it actually is. According to his account, no one is immune to the forces he so eloquently writes of and so in the end the environmentalist activist, is as caught up in the traps of consumer life-style as is the investment banker on Wall Street. It lead hims to say such statements as
Many Americans today learn who they want to be by listening to a Methodist minister or a civics teacher but by watching advertisements for The Gap.Ok while he bit about the civics teacher may be true, any consideration of lets, say… the religious right in this country, which, as we know from recent elections, don’t represent a teeny-tiny itsy-bitsy minority (and for a fascinating glimpse into the world, I would recommend Jesus Camp), would bring holes, and sizable ones, to that sort of statement. Many Americans do in fact listen to their minster. And this does not only help explain the deep divisions in this country, but I bet because they do listen to their pastors, their notions of the good, the self, etc, are going to be pretty distinct from those he describes (and gain see Jesus Camp to get at this point) It is not that the religious right exists outside of the web of consumerism we are all at least partially caught in, and indeed, a lot of the new Protestant religious movements here and elsewhere as Jean and John’s Comaroff’s work has shown can be all about securing a more robust middle class lifestyle. But we must remember that even something as powerful as consumer capitalism or dominant ideals of an authentic, beautiful self though powerful and more often than not work in concert with each other do not quite have the power to efface all meaningful difference between lets say a white, liberal middle class woman and let’s say, many Latinos, who, do, let’s not forget, comprise a huge portion of America. Many Americans have a very different picture of the ideal female body than the picture he explores, which is skinny and lanky and forever youthful (and hence the appeal of botox and lipo). Let me provide just one example drawn from the annual Puerto Rican day parade and this hold true for the one held either in NYC or Chicago. Along with a blizzard of Puerto Rican flags, what you may also notice is the abundance of really bright spandex being donned on ladies that are not by any standard of the word slim. I am sure that any middle class lady (you know, the type who spends 5 days of the week working out at the gym, wishing her thighs were just a little thinner), would feel morally repulsed in seeing that sort of image, that is if they even bothered to go to the parade. But among many Puerto Rican men (not all) a sexylicious and extra-curvy, meaty Puerto Rican woman, decked out in tight & bright spandex, will like bring on a loud HAY MAMITA, ven ac ”………………… which roughly translates into You are HOT… Like I want you NOW. (more…)
Likely<typename T> whose instances hold either a
return value of type T or an exception. A function that
can fail has a specialisation of this template as its return type.
The caller can check for failure if it knows how to handle it, or it
can ignore it - in which case the conversion to T or the
destructor will throw the exception. This is clever but doesn't seem
to be entirely satisfactory. The destructor which throws does first
check that no exception is already being processed, avoiding collision
of the two exceptions and consequent abrupt termination of the
program, but this can result in errors being unexpectedly ignored.
Introduction to Component-Level Testing, John Lakos
A marathon 3-hour talk on designing and testing software,
particularly C++ programs (the subject of his well-known
book) as a set of well-defined components.
Lakos first defined these components as being "physical" i.e. sets
of source files - normally a header file defining an interface, an
implementation file, and a test driver file. They may also include
metadata for the build system. He talked about the value of reusable
components (as if this wasn't obvious!) and the risk of introducing
circular dependencies - which essentially turn many components into
one and reduce reusability - if we fail to keep track of dependencies.
Software built out of components can be viewed as a hierarchy or stack
defined by dependencies. In a large system, components with similar
dependencies and dependents can be grouped together into packages or
package groups to simplify a view of these dependencies.
He explained that the test driver's dependencies count just as much
as the implementation's, because we cannot reasonably test a component
until we have tested its dependencies. Test drivers should also be
written to avoid depending on environmental settings and
configuration, so far as possible.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he spent a long time talking
about how to construct test cases and test data. I might try to
summarise this in a later entry if anyone's interested.
The Appliance of Science: Things in Computer Science that every
practitioner should know, Andrei Alexandrescu
Andrei began by complaining that OpenOffice Impress was even worse
than PowerPoint, but being able to use Linux (specifically Ubuntu)
more than made up for the pain.
He briefly presented four key ideas that he believes programmers
should understand and be ready to make use of:
const
std::initializer_list<T> & and when constructed with
this new form of initialiser they will receive this wrapper for a
constant array of element values. For types that do not, the values
in the list are treated as arguments to some other constructor, if one
matches. Otherwise, for compatibility, this may be treated as
aggregate initialisation.
C++ Standard Library report, Alisdair Meredith
There was far too much information here for me to even begin
to summarise. Suffice to say there are lots of good things coming
bu the library committee will have its work cut out to get them
all properly specified in time for the Committe Draft coming late
this year.
Next.