I suspect it is because knives are not included in the second amendment of the constitution. That is a pretty easy argument for people to use against gun regulation (whether or fair or not), but there is no such thing for knives.
Knives are included in “arms.” In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in Heller that the term “arms” has the same meaning as it did in the 18th century and includes anything that can be used for defense, carried for offensive or defensive action, or used to strike another person.
Laws on the books generally don’t get overturned unless they are specifically mentioned in a court ruling, or there is some action by a legislative body. If you want to be able to buy/sell switchblades, you could challenge the law and see where it goes. But apparently nobody has bothered to take it to court.
Wow, thanks for sharing that! So much for my thought.... It makes yours more poignant though. Perhaps it is just a matter of obsession? Are the folks who obsess over firearms different than the folks who obsess over knives?
I would say so, though while looking at reviews for a new pocket knife, I realized there’s a lot of obsessed people who, like gun people, think owning knives is a personality.
Assembly isn’t that hard. It’s the same imperative programming, but more verbose, more work, and more random names and patterns to remember. If you can understand “x += 3 is the same as x = x + 3”, you can understand how the add instruction works.
I wouldn’t be able to write Rollercoaster Tycoon in assembly because keeping track of all that code in assembly files must be hell, but people pretending like you need to be some kind of wizard to write assembly code are exaggerating.
These days, you won’t be able to beat the compiler even if you wrote your code in assembly, maybe with the exception of bespoke SIMD algorithms. Writing assembly is something only kernel developers and microcontroller developers may need to do in their day to day life.
Reading assembly is still a valuable skill, though, especially if you come anywhere near native code. What you think you wrote and what the CPU is actually trying to do may not be the same, and a small bit of manual debugging work can help you get started resolving crashes that make no sense whatsoever. No need to remember thousands of instructions either, 99% of assembly code is just variations of copying memory, checking equality and jumping anyway. Look up the weird assembly instructions your disassembler spits out, they’re documented very well.
Assembly is hard, because you need to understand your problem on multiple levels and get absolute zero guidance by compilers.
Even C guides you a tiny bit and takes away some of the low level details, so you have more mental capacity to actually solve your problem.
Oh, and you have a standard library. Assembly seems to involve solving everything yourself. No simple function call to truncate a string or turn a char array to uppercase.
Unless you’re developing an OS or something, you’ll probably be using the C standard library and maybe a bunch of other libraries provided by most distros. Just because you’re doing assembly doesn’t mean you need to program syscalls manually.
Modern assemblers also come with plenty of macros to prevent common mistakes and provide common methods. For instance. NASM comes with things like %strcat to do string concatenation.
I suppose the lack of compiler warnings can be a challenge, but most low-level compilers don’t exactly provide guidance for when you design your program wrong.
No doubt Assembly is harder than Java or Python, but compared to languages like C, I don’t think it’s as hard as people pretend to it to be.
I wouldn’t be able to write Rollercoaster Tycoon in assembly because keeping track of all that code in assembly files must be hell, but people pretending like you need to be some kind of wizard to write assembly code are exaggerating.
Well, they’ve got a point for the bigger machine codes. Just the barebones specification for x86 is a doorstopper IIRC.
From what I’ve heard, writing big stuff in assembly comes down to play-acting the compiler yourself on paper, essentially.
From what I’ve heard, writing big stuff in assembly comes down to play-acting the compiler yourself on paper, essentially.
I think that’s true for just about any programming languages, though the program you’re “compiling” is a human understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish. Things like val bar = foo.let { it.widget?.frub() ?: FrubFactory::defaultFrub(it) } don’t come naturally to the human mind, you’re already working through the logic required before you start typing.
As for the x86 instruction count: you don’t need to know all of them. For instance, here’s a quick graph of all of the instructions in systemctl on my system:
With the top 15 or maybe to 25 of these instructions, you can probably write any program you can think of, and what’s missing will probably be easily found (just search for “multiply” or “divide”). You don’t need to know punpckldq to write a program.
What language is your pseudocode example modeled after? It vaguely reminds me of some iOs App code I helped debug (Swift?) but I never really learned the language so much as eyeballed it with educated guesses, and even with the few things I double checked it has been a few years, so I have no clue what is or isn’t legal syntax anymore.
That’s Kotlin. Mostly used for programming for the JVM, though it compiles to native code as well these days. Very interesting for cross platform app development, although I rarely do that these days.
I think Swift has a similar syntax, but it doesn’t do some of the less obvious Kotlin tricks as far as I’m aware.
I’ve heard of Kotlin in the context of Android apps, but never actually used or learned it. I did one mobile app dev project with Java in Android Studio, but never had any formal classes on it either and just learned as I went (the result was shit, but we got a decent grade for being able to evaluate the difficulties and shortcomings and point out learnings).
TIL. I had tried to understand it a bit, but felt lost pretty fast, and then eventually found out that’s because it’s huge. Is there a good intro to the basic instructions you’re aware of?
By “play act the compiler” I mean a fairly elaborate system of written notes that significantly exceeds the size of the actual program. Like, it’s no wonder they started thinking about building machine compilers at that stage.
I believe this guide can get you started pretty quickly to get the basics down. There are tons of guides online, but most of them will give you the basics (“this is how to find a prime number”) and then leave you on your own. Once you know how instructions, calling conventions, and system calls work, the rest of assembly programming is just reading documentation or Googling “how do I X in assembly”.
What can help is using websites like godbolt.org to write simple C programs and looking at the compiled output. Look up instructions you don’t recognize and make sure you don’t enable optimizations, unless you want to deal with atrocities like VGF2P8AFFINEINVQB.
If you don’t mind getting started with old assembly, there are also more comprehensive guides for MS-DOS and old Windows that mostly involve 16 bit and 32 bit programs programming. 64 bit programming is different (uses more registers to pass variables, floating point support is guaranteed, etc.) but there aren’t as many good books on the topic anymore now that it’s become a niche.
I think there are quite a few guides out there for ARM these days, if you have something like a Raspberry Pi or an emulator you can also learn ARM assembly (which has fewer supported weird instructions, but also a tonne of weird stuff).
If you want to go deep, you can also check Ben Eater’s youtube channel where he shows step by step how an 8 bit computer on a breadboard works, how instructions relate to memory, and all that. With some intuition from that, learning amd64 assembly may be a lot easier than going from normal programming languages to assembly.
Edit: to get into understanding assembly programming, [Human Resource Machine[(store.steampowered.com/…/Human_Resource_Machine/) will explain the concepts of assembly programming without ever overtly explaining the concepts. Plus, it’s a fun puzzle game.
Having toyed with video game reverse engineering, I definitely feel like I ought to learn a bit more. I understand mov, pointers and registers, and I think there was some inc and add in the code I read to try to figure out base pointers and pointer paths (using Cheat Engine), but I think knowing some more would serve me well there.
Modern decompilers like the one packaged with Ghidra helps a lot for intuiting how instructions work. Unfortunately, a lot of video game code is obfuscated, so you’re probably more likely to run into weird instructions, but OK the other hand you’ll learn what they do faster than when you rarely encounter them.
The CPB doesn’t even own those entities, it only distributes money to them, money that only makes up a portion of their revenue. And the CPB sure as hell doesn’t own “local news” lol. Where’s Sinclair Broadcasting on this chart? Where’s SiriusXM? This clip-art is straight-up misinformation
Here’s a more comprehensive look. Still, it omits that Amazon owns The Washington Post. As an atheist, I actually look to the Christian Science Monitor for uncompromising reporting.
EDIT It suggested “Zoom zoom” on a bicycle accident memorial, which can be seen as insensitive as it could hint at either the cyclist or someone else carelessly “zooming” ahead too fast.
One winter evening I got a notification about possible fraudulent charges on my credit card. I had not in fact gone to Redbox twice that day, so I told them to replace the card. I got home and really had to pee so I beelined it to the bathroom. It occurred to me that it was really cold inside for some reason, and when I got out of the bathroom I noticed the living room window was open. Then I looked around and noticed that on my way to the bathroom I had walked past a bunch of drawers and cabinets that were also open.
Luckily not much of consequence got stolen. Whoever it was probably didn’t have a car because everything that was taken was small. We had a nice TV and my ex had a nice computer that were both still there. On my end, I was missing that credit card (I had accidentally left it on my desk after making an online purchase) and my wedding and engagement rings. I was in the middle of a divorce and wasn’t going to keep them anyway, so hopefully someone else got some enjoyment out of them.
Yo, that would scare the living shit out of me and I would be looking like a real psycho with whatever weapon I could make and teetering my short ass down the joint praying I don't have to come at anyone. Cause I sure as fuck would not be winning that fight. I am glad they ran off with your bs and that you guys were okay. But hot damn. I would be locking everything under the sun from that point on. We went through it once, a friend and I. They went through their window. Later a lady at the smoke shop (because I used to smoke beedis like a real sophisticated "gentleman") gave me the low-low for taking chunks of wood and putting ten pounds of screws in there. Up until that point I basically just would wedge it. Tbh though, while we ended up sleeping together (not like...sexually just we were both Scooby Doo levels of freaked out and would share my bed cause they didn't feel safe in their joint anymore). I just didn't feel the need for more than locking up and a plank. I think they just moved it cause they wanted fresh air and they got lazy with it and that's how stuff goes bad. I think about it sometimes, because I think it was the guys who lived behind us and were sweeter than pie to us. But I also once (when smoking one of my beedis like the "boss bitch" I was) saw something in the shadows and legitimately shouted "CREEPER, NO CREEPING!" Thank baby jesus that my buddies were outside with me cause it actually was a real ass creeper slinking around like a mother fucking creeper. And I think if it wasn't those dudes, it most def was that mother fucker. But either way, nasty people can get fucked.
The greatest of all time make changes to whatever game they are playing. Chomsky changes the realm of ideas. He questions narratives and provides damning evidence in support of his claims. His books reveal the inner workings of the Military-Industrial complex. He contests the positions of US Presidents of both parties. He follows the money, the use of language, and the differences between official fantasies and concrete realities. He raises others up, never sought fame, just did the hard work. Took all the heat that naysayers threw.
Chomsky is the guy that said Ukraine should just surrender to Russia, right? Truly a great example of living king enough to become the villain, and not in a Batman way.
Right, because being America’s whipping boy (yeah, I said it) is really working out for Ukrainians.
America needs Ukraine to buy obsolete weapons now, use them against Russia’s current military capacity so that there’s real-world applications for next generation weapons. Also, all the strategies designed to contain a more militant Russia needed to be gamed out. Ukraine will be paying this war back for generations. Think Haiti’s reparations to France, but with bigger numbers.
A years-long conflict also “softens” Russia up for the next round of sanctions — maybe they’ll be effective this time!
Chomsky said, in effect, ‘Nope, that’s dumb’ (not a quote). Also, there were months and months of Russian build-up on the border. Before that, years of signals, comments, and overt actions showing that they are legit pissed that NATO came knocking. There should’ve been diplomacy, dialogue, deal making. ‘Nope, that’s dumb. War is profitable.’
NATO (read: USA) wasn’t about to be told who can be in their little club. Russia wasn’t about to be told that ICBMs would be parked on their doorstep. So, conflict.
So, what else has Chomsky said?
“the U.S. seems to be fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian, reiterating the conclusion of Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison that in the 1980s the U.S. was fighting Russia to the last Afghan.”
"It is, surely, worthwhile to think seriously about the history of the past 30 years since Bill Clinton launched a new Cold War by violating the firm and unambiguous U.S. promise to Mikhail Gorbachev that “We understand the need for assurances to the countries in the East. If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.”
"Those who want to ignore the history are free to do so, at the cost of failure to understand what is happening now, and what the prospects are for preventing “much worse.”
If your goal was to open boxes, then it was the point. If you’re saying my comment was not to the point, then your question about opening boxes was disingenuous. But surely you know that…?
You don’t need a blade specifically designed for stabbing to open boxes.
If you’re not being purposefully obtuse, then let me clarify: I said boxes “etc,” but the question is clearly about laws and regulation around knives vs. Guns, as indicated by the title, not about how to open boxes.
The idea that an easy-to-open knife is “specifically designed for stabbing” is idiotic, but I guess that type of ignorant reasoning unintentionally addresses the actual question about why these absurd knife laws exist.
Also, for future reference, you can usually spot the questions by the sentences that are followed by a question mark.
The one about techno is probably my favorite. I still have that song stuck in my head and I haven’t heard it in probably 10+ years. I’ll randomly say THE SYSTEM IS DOWN every now and then
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