The obvious answer is because it is probably illegal to track everyone everywhere, but as long as knowledge of this doesn't go to the court no one will know and therefore they cannot rule it illegal. That's sketchy.
It is VERY illegal in my state for Law Enforcement to even look up a license plate without probable cause of at least a traffic infraction.
And yes, LEOs have gotten in serious trouble for it. They are required by law to log their requests for information, with a reason for the request.
And by the way, in case you were wondering: no, license plates and owner information are not a matter of public record here. They are protected by law.
In my opinion (and I guess I agree with at least some others), guns are offensive weapons
80+ years of official Unites States Government statistics disagree with you.
For early years those statistics can be obtained from the Department of Justice. For more recent years, the Bureau of Crime Statistics.
I am rather amused that someone is using, as a supporting argument, the testimony of a sole person in the farthest Left and most pro-gun-control state of all 50.
Most police and sheriff's departments, and even police unions and organizations, say that handguns are the defensive weapon of choice, and support private ownership of handguns.
By the way: major crimes in this country are DOWN a full 50% from 20 years ago, and even more compared to 30 years ago. During that entire time, per-capita gun ownership (including handguns) has gone steadily up, and "concealed carry" has virtually exploded over that same period. Watch that chart for a moment. (Note: blue in that chart very much does NOT mean "blue state".)
If concealed handguns aren't being used "defensively", then what are they all being used for? Whatever it is, it sure isn't crime.
Not a global warming denier? Perhaps you protest too much? Let's see what you have said:
You're just proving my point. Again.
What I wrote on THIS page, originally, was nothing more than an explanation of how your own pet theory is supposed to work. Because somebody else had gotten it wrong.
In exchange I was insulted, modded down, and argued with. Which is just plain hilarious.
Whatever you think I "am" is irrelevant to this discussion, and your shrill protests just continue to prove that you don't want to argue science, but just ideology.
Those are the facts. I am not even a little bit interested in your opinion of "what I am". I came here to discuss facts. I did so. Goodbye.
[A] is complete bullshit. Handguns were created as weapons for riders, because you can shot them single-handedly, while with a long gun, you have to stop your horse and then shot both-handedly. Handguns are primarily attack weapons.
You are hundreds of years out-of-date. Handguns WERE primarily attack weapons. Today, in the United States, they are used vastly more often defensively. I mean in a ratio of something like 1000 to 1. So yes, they are primarily defensive weapons. Today. In the United States.
(Note: "used" defensively does not necessarily mean "fired". Statistics suggest that they stop crime many times more often just by showing them than they do by shooting. And even when they are shot in defense, often they don't hit anything, yet they still deter the crime.)
Maybe 100 years ago you were right, but these days the tech available to a modern army is so much better than what Joe Blow can afford it's not even a contest. To say nothing of the training a soldier gets.
There are so many invalid assumptions in this fallacy that I hardly know where to start.
(1) You'd have to get the military to fight its own people. Which is not very likely. In my estimation 90% of them would jump ship first.
(2) There are about 1.5 active U.S. military personnel. They have lots of high-tech weapons, and lots and lots of ammo. (They don't, however, have as many guns as lots of people think. Only a few per man at any given time.)
Now, contrast that to the fact that there are 300 million people in the United States, with more than 300 million firearms plus ammunition. That's MORE THAN one firearm for every man, woman, and child. Which means that even if you could get the entire military to fight its own citizens, it would be outnumbered by an ARMED enemy by 200 to 1. Those are pretty shitty odds, when you consider the trouble they had with a very poorly-armed minority of citizens in Afghanistan and Iraq. THEN, you have to consider:
(3) A military, in every situation, depends on its supply line. Soon after the military started to be used against the citizenry, they would find that nobody is making ammunition for them anymore, or supplying them with food or water or gasoline or spare parts or tires or...
I could go on, but the point is made. It is not something to fear. It would never get anywhere in the current United States. Somebody would have to be very stupid to try it.
That's why they want to restrict your freedoms (and your firearms). Because as long as those exist, they simply could not win. Period.
Then you haven't been paying attention. The whole theory being discussed here is that DoJ may be forcing banks to shut down bank accounts that belong to people who engage in the businesses of (among other things) firearms and ammunition sales.
I'm sure you'd believe that, except that Obama and company have actually been the ones walking the walk, and talking the talk on it.
You both make good points. But I would also like to point out that Canada's government (for some unfathomable reason) was particularly friendly with Bush, and not necessarily so much with Obama. So I think I detect a bit of bias there.
They have BOTH been abnormally (abysmally?) sad administrations, and many of Obama's more serious abuses can trace at least their beginnings back to the Bush administration, and the aftermath of "9/11". A lot of what Obama has done was Bush policy, just more and worse.
According to Paul, it was someone on his staff who actually made those statements, not him. Yes, it appeared over his signature but you have to give your campaign managers the permission to say things on your behalf. That's the way it works.
I am as bothered by those statements as you, but I have no reason to doubt that what Paul said about it was true. Shit like that does happen. Nothing like it occurred before that, and nothing like it has occurred since.
Further, I would like to point out that many articles from Leftist press sources (easy to find them on Google) have seriously stretched the truth by taking that could easily be interpreted as NOT racist, and interpreting them in a very racist way. I could do that to anybody. But the fact is that the Left had very strong motivation to label Paul as racist (just as they're doing right now today, to Libertarians and right-wingers they don't like.)
I do not endorse intentional racism. But at the same time, he may not have actually made the statements, over 20 years ago, and his detractors had every reason to try to portray him as a racist. So I am willing to give him some benefit of the doubt.
It canonizes Fourier as the effect's founding father but fails to mention -- as you have correctly tried to point out -- that he carried out experiments with 'real greenhouse' apparatus with a physical barrier, (correctly) identified convection as the heating mechanism yet also (incorrectly) envisioned there might be an atmospheric phenomenon that also acted as a true barrier.
Thank you for pointing this out. I really didn't want to get into whether it was true or false here; I was simply trying to explain to them how their own pet theory is supposed to work.
I'm sitting here laughing at you guys, because I didn't (myself) even make any arguments against Global Warming.
All I did at first was explain some of the physics of your own theory, which the person who made the comment I was originally replying to got wrong. And you can even see that my own comments were explaining actual greenhouse warming theory, by comparing to the Wikipedia link somebody else so graciously supplied.
In exchange for explaining how the whole thing is really supposed to work, according to their own theory, I got people arguing with me, modding me down, and calling me names.
I think a completely objective person would find that very interesting.
When somebody who is pushing the idea doesn't even get the physics of his own position straight (and he didn't, which I explained in another post, at length), then he was "believing and following uncritically". Understand now?
Wow. Physicist are physics? Physicists challenge evolution and heliocentrism. So what?
The issue at hand was a physics issue, and what they are challenging is the physics of the theory. Not evolution or heliocentrism. That's what. (And since you brought it up, I don't know of any notable physicists today who challenge heliocentrism. And back when it was popular to do so, there really did not yet exist much of what we call "physics" in the modern sense.)
Ron Paul was a good candidate, and would have been a good no-BS leader. Not perfect, but good.
Gary Johnson was a fiscal and popular success in New Mexico. Hell, he was even liked by Democrats. He was a good candidate too.
What will it take before people realize that a third party vote is not a "wasted vote"? On the contrary, it's one of the few viable answers we have left.
The great aspect to the US legal system is it was shaped to protect from extrajudicial punishment and protects free speech, assembly, press, privacy and much more.
Or at least, it's supposed to. The foundation is there.
Check out 18 U.S.C. 242: "Deprivation of Rights Under the Color of Law".
While many people think this is "just" a discrimination statute, a careful reading of the law shows that it applies to ALL Constitutional and natural rights.
And government employees are not immune. Not even the President. (In fact, this statute was specifically intended to prevent government abuse.) The maximum penalty is life in prison.
Private citizens were limited to long guns (rifles and shotguns), and they had to register them. But they were generally available to almost anyone that wanted one. The idea that all dictatorships ban private weapons, or conversely, that an armed citizenry always prevents tyranny, is clearly false.
You don't need total confiscation. When you need to crack down on citizens, all you need is [A] that they don't own handguns (because those are primarily defensive weapons), and [B] that all other weapons are registered.
Then you're home free. When you know who has the weapons and who doesn't, you pretty much control them.
While I agree that "not all dictatorships ban private weapons", they don't have to. All they have to do is control who has them and who doesn't. Example: while it has often been denied, the Nazis did in fact grab guns... from the Jews. I recently read an article that had a picture of the original Nazi decree that Jews could not have guns or bank accounts. (!!!)
For all the Ponzi-this, tulips-that that gets posted every time Bitcoin makes the news, this is one of the problems they're trying to solve. A prude at Chase or the DoJ can't close your bank accounts if you have no need of a bank in the first place.
That's a good point. And so is "trying to solve" as opposed to "solved".
For all the promise of Bitcoin, the exchanges have corrupted it by insisting on knowing ownership, charging for transactions, etc. Both of these problems have to be addressed before it will be "solved".
With a properly-designed system, there should be very little need for formal exchanges.
I reject the excuse that it's all optional on the part of the banks. Having Big Brother breathing down your neck and Strongly Suggesting that you do something is absolutely inappropriate, and I'd love to see Washington, DC held accountable for this in some way.
It seems to me, too, that even though many banks are "local" institutions, if they accept FDIC regulation I think they are supposed to play by Federal anti-discrimination and fair business rules. Which would prohibit Government from shutting down legal businesses just because they are "unwanted" by somebody in said government..
I'm not making any claims, I'm just making an observation:
Some of the things on DoJ's "Laundry List" of so-called "high financial risk" businesses are historically not high-risk AT ALL.
Like ammunition and firearms. Far from being "high-risk": manufacturers and retailers have historically been both large and long-lived. There is an ammunition manufacturer not all that far from here and they have been in business for 60 years. And the vast majority of ammunition is sold through major sporting-goods franchises, not mom-and-pop shops. Same with firearms.
Further, where people DO engage in small-scale ammunition or firearms sales or manufacturing, it is often a perfectly legitimate, specialty product. I know somebody who made and sold custom cartridges, and I have also met a guy who makes firearms. All perfectly legit and legal.
So pardon me for saying so, and I don't want to be misunderstood as being some kind of right-wing nut or anything, but it kind of looks like some things on this list are in fact Obama agenda items. Which is illegal.
Is it possible to buy an external monitor that's essentially a tablet with mini HDMI *IN*, with the backlight powered by battery? because that sounds really cool.
I looked, and have not found one.
AOC makes one with a USB connector, for arond $80. USB sounded a little strange, but I guess they work fine, as long as you aren't trying to do anything "fast" with them like playing games.
But I think the main point I was making is that enough computing power can be put in a tablet, so inevitably it will be. But what will people do with all that power? Well, a single-tasking (or only one foreground task anyway) tablet OS just doesn't cut it anymore. So what will that be replaced with? Surprise! A desktop OS. It's a natural fit and it already exists... as of about 20 years ago.
I can almost do it now. If I had a quad-core Snapdragon (or equivalent) processor, some half-decent video capability, and an external monitor, I already have everything else I need.
For the work I do, that's still a little weak on the processor but it's getting there.
And I should add: they should keep the touchscreen, for drawing apps and the like, it's a natural. But otherwise I'd set it in a stand and use a separate keyboard.
Heh heh! Always amusing when you come along with your one link to a blog, claiming that you and the blogger are know climate science better than all the world's climate scientists.
Strange... I linked to no blog.:)
Here's now the green house effect works. There is no controversy about it.
Thank you, because that is precisely how I explained it in my long comment above. No "insulation" effect is involved. The theory is based on "trapping of radiation".
Just as I mentioned above, and just as Wikipedia says right there in the first paragraph. I agree... there is no controversy about how the greenhouse effect theory works. That is precisely what I was saying in my comments above.
I just love it when you try to argue with me, and end up actually supporting what I wrote.
Slashdot Mirror
The obvious answer is because it is probably illegal to track everyone everywhere, but as long as knowledge of this doesn't go to the court no one will know and therefore they cannot rule it illegal. That's sketchy.
It is VERY illegal in my state for Law Enforcement to even look up a license plate without probable cause of at least a traffic infraction.
And yes, LEOs have gotten in serious trouble for it. They are required by law to log their requests for information, with a reason for the request.
And by the way, in case you were wondering: no, license plates and owner information are not a matter of public record here. They are protected by law.
Wow. Trouble with links today.
.gif, so watch for a moment.
Third try: U.S. "right to carry" since 1986
It's an animated
That link did not come through for some reason.
Here is the chart to which I was referring.
If you think this WHOLE DISCUSSION is "tinfoil hat", then what the hell are you doing here?
I remind you: these ideas are speculative only. But the fact that you (and maybe even me) think they're crazy is not reason to not talk about them.
In my opinion (and I guess I agree with at least some others), guns are offensive weapons
80+ years of official Unites States Government statistics disagree with you.
For early years those statistics can be obtained from the Department of Justice. For more recent years, the Bureau of Crime Statistics.
I am rather amused that someone is using, as a supporting argument, the testimony of a sole person in the farthest Left and most pro-gun-control state of all 50.
Most police and sheriff's departments, and even police unions and organizations, say that handguns are the defensive weapon of choice, and support private ownership of handguns.
By the way: major crimes in this country are DOWN a full 50% from 20 years ago, and even more compared to 30 years ago. During that entire time, per-capita gun ownership (including handguns) has gone steadily up, and "concealed carry" has virtually exploded over that same period. Watch that chart for a moment. (Note: blue in that chart very much does NOT mean "blue state".)
If concealed handguns aren't being used "defensively", then what are they all being used for? Whatever it is, it sure isn't crime.
Correction: "1.5 active military" should have been "1.5 MILLION". According to Wikipedia.
Not a global warming denier? Perhaps you protest too much? Let's see what you have said:
You're just proving my point. Again.
What I wrote on THIS page, originally, was nothing more than an explanation of how your own pet theory is supposed to work. Because somebody else had gotten it wrong.
In exchange I was insulted, modded down, and argued with. Which is just plain hilarious.
Whatever you think I "am" is irrelevant to this discussion, and your shrill protests just continue to prove that you don't want to argue science, but just ideology.
Those are the facts. I am not even a little bit interested in your opinion of "what I am". I came here to discuss facts. I did so. Goodbye.
[A] is complete bullshit. Handguns were created as weapons for riders, because you can shot them single-handedly, while with a long gun, you have to stop your horse and then shot both-handedly. Handguns are primarily attack weapons.
You are hundreds of years out-of-date. Handguns WERE primarily attack weapons. Today, in the United States, they are used vastly more often defensively. I mean in a ratio of something like 1000 to 1. So yes, they are primarily defensive weapons. Today. In the United States.
(Note: "used" defensively does not necessarily mean "fired". Statistics suggest that they stop crime many times more often just by showing them than they do by shooting. And even when they are shot in defense, often they don't hit anything, yet they still deter the crime.)
Maybe 100 years ago you were right, but these days the tech available to a modern army is so much better than what Joe Blow can afford it's not even a contest. To say nothing of the training a soldier gets.
There are so many invalid assumptions in this fallacy that I hardly know where to start.
(1) You'd have to get the military to fight its own people. Which is not very likely. In my estimation 90% of them would jump ship first.
(2) There are about 1.5 active U.S. military personnel. They have lots of high-tech weapons, and lots and lots of ammo. (They don't, however, have as many guns as lots of people think. Only a few per man at any given time.)
Now, contrast that to the fact that there are 300 million people in the United States, with more than 300 million firearms plus ammunition. That's MORE THAN one firearm for every man, woman, and child. Which means that even if you could get the entire military to fight its own citizens, it would be outnumbered by an ARMED enemy by 200 to 1. Those are pretty shitty odds, when you consider the trouble they had with a very poorly-armed minority of citizens in Afghanistan and Iraq. THEN, you have to consider:
(3) A military, in every situation, depends on its supply line. Soon after the military started to be used against the citizenry, they would find that nobody is making ammunition for them anymore, or supplying them with food or water or gasoline or spare parts or tires or...
I could go on, but the point is made. It is not something to fear. It would never get anywhere in the current United States. Somebody would have to be very stupid to try it.
That's why they want to restrict your freedoms (and your firearms). Because as long as those exist, they simply could not win. Period.
Um, no, it doesn't sound familiar.
Then you haven't been paying attention. The whole theory being discussed here is that DoJ may be forcing banks to shut down bank accounts that belong to people who engage in the businesses of (among other things) firearms and ammunition sales.
I'm sure you'd believe that, except that Obama and company have actually been the ones walking the walk, and talking the talk on it.
You both make good points. But I would also like to point out that Canada's government (for some unfathomable reason) was particularly friendly with Bush, and not necessarily so much with Obama. So I think I detect a bit of bias there.
They have BOTH been abnormally (abysmally?) sad administrations, and many of Obama's more serious abuses can trace at least their beginnings back to the Bush administration, and the aftermath of "9/11". A lot of what Obama has done was Bush policy, just more and worse.
According to Paul, it was someone on his staff who actually made those statements, not him. Yes, it appeared over his signature but you have to give your campaign managers the permission to say things on your behalf. That's the way it works.
I am as bothered by those statements as you, but I have no reason to doubt that what Paul said about it was true. Shit like that does happen. Nothing like it occurred before that, and nothing like it has occurred since.
Further, I would like to point out that many articles from Leftist press sources (easy to find them on Google) have seriously stretched the truth by taking that could easily be interpreted as NOT racist, and interpreting them in a very racist way. I could do that to anybody. But the fact is that the Left had very strong motivation to label Paul as racist (just as they're doing right now today, to Libertarians and right-wingers they don't like.)
I do not endorse intentional racism. But at the same time, he may not have actually made the statements, over 20 years ago, and his detractors had every reason to try to portray him as a racist. So I am willing to give him some benefit of the doubt.
It canonizes Fourier as the effect's founding father but fails to mention -- as you have correctly tried to point out -- that he carried out experiments with 'real greenhouse' apparatus with a physical barrier, (correctly) identified convection as the heating mechanism yet also (incorrectly) envisioned there might be an atmospheric phenomenon that also acted as a true barrier.
Thank you for pointing this out. I really didn't want to get into whether it was true or false here; I was simply trying to explain to them how their own pet theory is supposed to work.
I'm sitting here laughing at you guys, because I didn't (myself) even make any arguments against Global Warming.
All I did at first was explain some of the physics of your own theory, which the person who made the comment I was originally replying to got wrong. And you can even see that my own comments were explaining actual greenhouse warming theory, by comparing to the Wikipedia link somebody else so graciously supplied.
In exchange for explaining how the whole thing is really supposed to work, according to their own theory, I got people arguing with me, modding me down, and calling me names.
I think a completely objective person would find that very interesting.
"believed and followed uncritically"?
You don't get it, do you?
When somebody who is pushing the idea doesn't even get the physics of his own position straight (and he didn't, which I explained in another post, at length), then he was "believing and following uncritically". Understand now?
Wow. Physicist are physics? Physicists challenge evolution and heliocentrism. So what?
The issue at hand was a physics issue, and what they are challenging is the physics of the theory. Not evolution or heliocentrism. That's what. (And since you brought it up, I don't know of any notable physicists today who challenge heliocentrism. And back when it was popular to do so, there really did not yet exist much of what we call "physics" in the modern sense.)
That's why we should vote both parties out.
Ron Paul was a good candidate, and would have been a good no-BS leader. Not perfect, but good.
Gary Johnson was a fiscal and popular success in New Mexico. Hell, he was even liked by Democrats. He was a good candidate too.
What will it take before people realize that a third party vote is not a "wasted vote"? On the contrary, it's one of the few viable answers we have left.
I should add: conviction rates for violations of 18 USC 242, once charges are brought, are exceptionally high: somewhere in the 90% range.
The great aspect to the US legal system is it was shaped to protect from extrajudicial punishment and protects free speech, assembly, press, privacy and much more.
Or at least, it's supposed to. The foundation is there.
Check out 18 U.S.C. 242: "Deprivation of Rights Under the Color of Law".
While many people think this is "just" a discrimination statute, a careful reading of the law shows that it applies to ALL Constitutional and natural rights.
And government employees are not immune. Not even the President. (In fact, this statute was specifically intended to prevent government abuse.) The maximum penalty is life in prison.
Private citizens were limited to long guns (rifles and shotguns), and they had to register them. But they were generally available to almost anyone that wanted one. The idea that all dictatorships ban private weapons, or conversely, that an armed citizenry always prevents tyranny, is clearly false.
You don't need total confiscation. When you need to crack down on citizens, all you need is [A] that they don't own handguns (because those are primarily defensive weapons), and [B] that all other weapons are registered.
Then you're home free. When you know who has the weapons and who doesn't, you pretty much control them.
While I agree that "not all dictatorships ban private weapons", they don't have to. All they have to do is control who has them and who doesn't. Example: while it has often been denied, the Nazis did in fact grab guns... from the Jews. I recently read an article that had a picture of the original Nazi decree that Jews could not have guns or bank accounts. (!!!)
Sound familiar?
For all the Ponzi-this, tulips-that that gets posted every time Bitcoin makes the news, this is one of the problems they're trying to solve. A prude at Chase or the DoJ can't close your bank accounts if you have no need of a bank in the first place.
That's a good point. And so is "trying to solve" as opposed to "solved".
For all the promise of Bitcoin, the exchanges have corrupted it by insisting on knowing ownership, charging for transactions, etc. Both of these problems have to be addressed before it will be "solved".
With a properly-designed system, there should be very little need for formal exchanges.
I reject the excuse that it's all optional on the part of the banks. Having Big Brother breathing down your neck and Strongly Suggesting that you do something is absolutely inappropriate, and I'd love to see Washington, DC held accountable for this in some way.
It seems to me, too, that even though many banks are "local" institutions, if they accept FDIC regulation I think they are supposed to play by Federal anti-discrimination and fair business rules. Which would prohibit Government from shutting down legal businesses just because they are "unwanted" by somebody in said government..
I'm not making any claims, I'm just making an observation:
Some of the things on DoJ's "Laundry List" of so-called "high financial risk" businesses are historically not high-risk AT ALL.
Like ammunition and firearms. Far from being "high-risk": manufacturers and retailers have historically been both large and long-lived. There is an ammunition manufacturer not all that far from here and they have been in business for 60 years. And the vast majority of ammunition is sold through major sporting-goods franchises, not mom-and-pop shops. Same with firearms.
Further, where people DO engage in small-scale ammunition or firearms sales or manufacturing, it is often a perfectly legitimate, specialty product. I know somebody who made and sold custom cartridges, and I have also met a guy who makes firearms. All perfectly legit and legal.
So pardon me for saying so, and I don't want to be misunderstood as being some kind of right-wing nut or anything, but it kind of looks like some things on this list are in fact Obama agenda items. Which is illegal.
"ideology"? "physics-challenged"? Really?
An ideology is not necessarily false. It's just something that is believed and followed uncritically.
Yes, "physics-challenged" because physicists and engineers have been challenging it. Just one example of many.
Anything else?
Is it possible to buy an external monitor that's essentially a tablet with mini HDMI *IN*, with the backlight powered by battery? because that sounds really cool.
I looked, and have not found one.
AOC makes one with a USB connector, for arond $80. USB sounded a little strange, but I guess they work fine, as long as you aren't trying to do anything "fast" with them like playing games.
But I think the main point I was making is that enough computing power can be put in a tablet, so inevitably it will be. But what will people do with all that power? Well, a single-tasking (or only one foreground task anyway) tablet OS just doesn't cut it anymore. So what will that be replaced with? Surprise! A desktop OS. It's a natural fit and it already exists... as of about 20 years ago.
I can almost do it now. If I had a quad-core Snapdragon (or equivalent) processor, some half-decent video capability, and an external monitor, I already have everything else I need.
For the work I do, that's still a little weak on the processor but it's getting there.
And I should add: they should keep the touchscreen, for drawing apps and the like, it's a natural. But otherwise I'd set it in a stand and use a separate keyboard.
Heh heh! Always amusing when you come along with your one link to a blog, claiming that you and the blogger are know climate science better than all the world's climate scientists.
Strange... I linked to no blog. :)
Here's now the green house effect works. There is no controversy about it.
Thank you, because that is precisely how I explained it in my long comment above. No "insulation" effect is involved. The theory is based on "trapping of radiation".
Just as I mentioned above, and just as Wikipedia says right there in the first paragraph. I agree... there is no controversy about how the greenhouse effect theory works. That is precisely what I was saying in my comments above.
I just love it when you try to argue with me, and end up actually supporting what I wrote.