Right, which is why one in fifty cops gets to keep a gun. To hunt down the psycho who thinks that’s a good idea and come home afterwards for doing what his job actually is as per the social contract.

I can hate cops as they are today but still want for the actual safety of the public through the proven institution of “policing.” No, not the glorified slave-catchers American cops are, but real police.

I loathe the way things are in this country. Please don’t put words in my mouth to the opposite effect. I don’t own a firearm and veyy deliberately choose not to.

However, you go ahead and convince cowboy hat wearing rednecks with more pickup trucks than teeth that the system is fucked and their guns are part of the problem.

And adding barriers to voting is also very obviously not the answer either. Its not that I don’t want to change the system or think it can’t or shouldn’t improve. I’m living inside the shit hole. I smell it every day.

There’s also still reality, and we must all accept it like it or not. Decidedly not here.

Remote lock…by a supervisor

ACAB, first of all. However, and please bear with me;

I remember very vividly the video of a cop in Brooklyn minding his own damn business in his cruiser, probably eating a doughnut, when some dude walked up to his open window and blew his brains out. So how much time does that guy’s partner have to radio HQ and request the weapon be unlocked before he is also looking at a new breathing hole in his skull?

I do agree that not nearly every cop should have lethal weapons. The temptation to go for it when frightened is just too high, especially for the type of people that tend to become cops in the US. However, having them remotely locked and requiring explicit permission also entirely defeats their unfortunately very real excuse for being out there in the first place. Let them all have tasers and batons as that’s far more than enough for the vast majority of interactions as you pointed out, but to have the one lethal option perpetually out of reach even when its available and in that one in ten thousand case where it is actually required? Not entirely sure I agree there.

And just to be sure, I haven’t forgotten OWS, so NYPD can choke on an entire bag of dicks one at a time and I’ll sit back and watch sipping on an Arizona.

Obscurity as in there are how many flavors each with their own repos and dependencies? And which one are you using? So which vulnerabilities work on you? And are you even aware of them?

Hiding among the weeds obscures you from view.

And while AUR isn’t Linux code and I definitely understand that, it is very much what you’re talking about; if anybody bothered to RTFM, they’d have had as many AUR issues as I did when the shit hit the fan - precisely none. And I’m only on Arch because Cachy is basically iOS for Arch if you can read and utilize copy/paste functions, a dazzlingly high bar for entry that somehow even I am capable of.

Then again, I also know enough to have a clue as to how much I really don’t know. Most people just assume magic box makes pretty pictures happen and anybody who knows how to change operating systems are literal wizards.

And so I would argue that being on Linux and the variety of flavors is, again, a form of obscurity in and of itself. Yeah, its all open source. Did you plot an attack for that distro? That file structure? How about a missing dependency? It simply isn’t worth it to plot Linux malware at this market share just like 20 years ago it wasn’t worth it to put malware on Macs; their use is still too obscure. Once critical mass is achieved, watch Ubuntu and Mint malware variants increase by an order of magnitude. Until then, the whales are all on Windows and Mac.

Linux is safer than Windows

Yes and no. Security through obscurity doesn’t innately mean its more secure. The recent AUR debacle proved that all it takes is a competent and malicious actor with the time and dedication to make something to target Linux. And why has nobody done it? Because the Linux market share is still absolutely pathetic compared to Windows, and is even abysmal when compared to MacOS. The returns on hacking a single Linux distro simply aren’t worth the investment.

I would also argue it is far easier to unintentionally brick your system with Linux, and if people don’t know what they’re doing (see: most end users) they can and will very easily leave themselves more exposed in the long run than by using the spyware that is Windows/MacOS/iOS/Android.

This pretty effectively explains all your other bullet points with minimal extrapolation; everything else you listed requires significant know-how for the systems to function properly. These are the super-deep superusers. Some of them probably tossed a few bones to Microsoft and their end-users, but as others have pointed out individuals and companies have vastly different motivations.

Between those main ideas… Yeah…

Part of why it worked for the Russians though, is because for every ten soldiers they only had one gun. Kill four soldiers, you’ve still got the same number of guns pointed at you. Now multiply it by a hundred or a thousand and see how, while not exactly sustainable, it ends up working as it did in the right circumstances. Like, I dunno, brutal winters with nowhere to retreat to and an enemy struggling with the reality of logistics in the same conditions

Totally tubular!

A man of exquisite taste here, folks. Kemosabe is choice, brother man.

Not without additional calisthenics, but if you do a combo of walking/running, martial arts, and calisthenics then yeah, actually, it can. It requires serious dedication, but it is possible if unlikely.

Try Tai Chi.

Low impact, not competitive, and not only gets you in shape, but teaches you self defense at the same time without you even realizing it.