28 May 2000 »
work
Debugging the OSF netscape image running on Suse, which apparently shipped with the 6.4 image. In 2.2.14, there’s two unimplemented osf syscalls + a poorly guessed osf syscall causing the hard wedges. Does anyone have good OSF (TruUnix) documentation of the syscalls? I’m interested in calls 0, 53 and set_program_attributes.
guns
Wow, most of my postings go unnoticed (because I lead a mostly dull life 😉 – but the gun thing got a few people going. Greets to samth, jdub, graydon, barryp, and apgarcia. It looks like I’m preaching to the choir here, which is good in my humble opinion. I was worried for a while when I read Cryptonomicon and the casual linking of geeks == guns for a portion of that book (especially the surreal scene where geeks with trench coats and long barrelled shotties are in a carpark whilst the police are present. In Australia, you’d be front page news, depicted in your last few minutes on the planet before the police “resolved” the incident; unfortunately here deadly force is met with deadly force far too often). I thought I was strange for not liking guns, but obviously not. I used to shoot rifles (.22 and .303’s) when I was a teenager as part of school “sports” (we had a small rifle range on site), but I’ve since put it behind me as I’ve come to realise how evil these things are.
I just wish Eric would respect the (needless) dead, and take into account the possible feelings of those affected by the waste of human life. I would prefer for him to not post the .sig on days that people die from firearm related deaths. This obviously means no more gun related .sigs, which would make me happy.
When the government of the day so clearly outguns its own citizenry, there’s no chance of – say, a bad patch of Minnesota rising up against the “tyranny” of the state. The framers of the second amendment might have thought it a good idea at the time, because the British could only ship so many people over, and in the civil war, everyone had roughly the same level of firepower in terms of range, deadliness and rounds per minute. These days, even if you can get a mini-gun, capable of mowing down crowds in seconds, it’s no match to the army, navy, or airforce, or even the ATF or the FBI, as Waco proved. If you want change, you have to do it at the ballot box, and not with guns.
Today, at least 250,000 and probably more than 500,000 Australians (including myself) marched in celebration of reconcilliation, and in plain defiance of our cowardly prime minister who refuses to apologise to the aboriginals and seriously talk reconcilliation for the past genocide and work on fixing up today’s ills (such as compensation for the stolen generations, third world health and sanitatary conditions in most of the outback, and very short lives – the average lifespan of aboriginals is only 56-64, whereas if you’re from *any* other background, it’s 75-81 depending on being male/female).
At the next election, he’s history – he wont need to go to pollsters on Monday to find this out – when more than 1/8th of your largest city marches against you, you are *so* gone. That’s how every civilised nation works. When there’s significant public sentiment against the policies of the day, they get sorted out through non-violent means at the ballot box. Guns are not part of the solution. See Fiji for a practical reason why this is so. Fiji will be a disaster zone for years to come until racist terrorists like George Speight learn the lesson the hard way. Fundamental change can only come from the people wishing to have a change, and they will do this through the ballot box.
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