"There are very few of those in the UK, as civilians may not legally own them; the only British civilians in possession of handguns are those who disregard the law, so they're almost bound to be used for crime."
That's a very interesting point, and it deserves some real consideration.
"Given Article 1 Section 10 starts with "No state" and follows with a list of prohibited items... there isn't much of an argument.
Do you READ the things you criticize, or just move your eyes over them? Quote:
"And that may be true, but it doesn't matter."
But YOU just ignored THAT, eh?
You are also ignoring Article 1 Section 8 which says (regarding the powers of congress):"
I ignored nothing. I even MENTIONED it. Try reading the whole thing, and understanding what my argument actually was. Hint: there's some actual LOGIC in it, that you have to follow. You won't be able to just use your eyes, you'll have to kick in your brain, too.
"Can't almost anything that can be bought/sold technically be converted to conventional currency..."
Yes! And that is why the Judge's ruling is hopelessly flawed.
You can trade wheat or rice for any currency on the planet. You can "convert" it to gold (in some places). You can buy it with Yen and sell it for Rubles. You can trade it around the world.
"I can barter my services for goods or other services. Trade one item for another. So, effectively, then this ruling would seem to imply everything is currency, and thus subject to SEC regulation in the States."
United States Constitution, Article 1, Section 10:
"No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts;..."
While the Federal government has the Constitutional power to coin money, it does not have the power to declare anything it wants to be money. Everything has value. That doesn't mean everything can be regulated as money.
People have argued that Article 1, Section 10 applies only to States. And that may be true, but it doesn't matter. If a State may not accept (or force anyone to accept) anything but gold and silver as payment, then gold and silver are in practice the only Constitutional form of money.
A logical corollary to that, then, is that paper dollars are not a Constitutional form of money.
I give OP demerits for dividing the wold into Leaders and Followers. It is quite possible (and often even desirable) to go your own way, and be neither.
"Tissue samples taken from your body, are not your property."
Actually, yes they are, unless you sign away your rights to them. Or at least, they CAN be. It depends on the circumstances, and what country you are in.
In many places (including, historically, the United States), the substance of your body has been the most precious of possessions, and legally inviolable.
The line of cells that was used for decades to develop drugs and treatments, and do other research, were not "normal" human cells at all, but cancer cells.
It wasn't until relatively recently that some scientists pointed out that maybe they weren't such a suitable medium for a lot of the research that had been done in the past.
"... other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."
But copyright was a relatively new concept at the time. History since pretty clearly shows that those countries that had it fared FAR better than those that did not.
"In today's age of machines that exist almost exclusively to copy and fiddle about with data, the concept of copyright is quaint and outdated. Gone are the obstacles to distribution and duplication that existed in days gone by, and as the past decade or two has shown us, dropping copyright as a concept will do nothing to deter people from creating new works, only remove the incentive for people to create static media for a living."
I disagree completely. I think this view comes from a lack of understanding the actual history of copyright (including recent history), and a rather astounding and unjustified leap from "somebody used a thing to do harm" to "we need to abandon the whole concept of that thing".
First, I do not believe that "the past decade or two" have demonstrated anything like what you assert. Certainly, we have seen some recent, bad, changes in copyright law and observed the resulting bad effects. A good example is almost all of the DMCA, which is really not one law but a whole group of laws. People cite the "protection" clauses of the DMCA and point out that they are good things, while completely ignoring the fact that almost none of those protections would have even been necessary if it weren't for other harmful changes made by the DMCA itself.
To put it in other words: almost anything can be abused by unscrupulous people, and copyright law "in the past decade or two" has been a prime example. But the fact that something can be abused is not an indictment of the whole concept. It simply means that the abuse has to end.
Using your logic, I could just as validly say that the entire concepts of mortgages, corporations, and stock markets need to be abolished, because of abuses over "the past decade or two".
And while we're at it, again using that same logic, I could say we need to get rid of all airplanes, credit cards kitchen knives, and hey, let's not forget penises and vaginas.
"The most frequent comment I get on my coilguns is that I should use a lighter projectile to improve performance. This equations [sic] shows why that suggestion is wrong. Itâ(TM)s counter-intuitive, but for a fixed power and distance (e.g. fixed capacitor bank and coil), a lighter projectile will gain less muzzle energy than a heavier one."
But he ALSO writes this:
"Note that equation 3 assumes constant acceleration, which is a close approximation with a highly multi-staged coilgun. Begin by eliminating t by feeding equation 3 into equation 2 and re-arranging to solve for E."
That is a really HUGE assumption for a short, 8-stage coilgun. As he says, "it is a close approximation with a highly multi-staged coilgun". Which his is not. The logical conclusion then is that this is not a close approximation for his version.
Another thing he mentions is that the efficiency goes way up as the projectile velocity increases.
"To get 10X muzzle energy he has draw 10X the energy from the batteries, which means more batteries, which harms the portability goal. To get 5X muzzle speed increase, the coils have to power up and down 5X as fast, which probably requires more smaller coils and probably other circuitry speedups."
I think that's an assumption, not the reality. I'd give you 10 to 1 odds that he is not controlling the "power up" curve of the coils at all, but rather hitting them them with full (but timed) power pulses. The only thing that would change is the timing of the coil firings, not their overall energy.
"'Reputed' implies that there's not much scientific evidence of this at all, with regard to either family or strangers."
No it doesn't. Look it up. "Reputed" means they have that reputation. There is no implication of falsity and no relation whatever to the presence or absence of evidence.
That was my entire point. The data from the UK (see the link in another comment of mine) do not support the argument that gun control reduces crime. Sure, crime is down there. But it is down everywhere else in the Western world, too. Including in places like the U.S., which during that same time has seen fewer gun restrictions, and higher per-capita ownership.
"For that reason I don't think it's fair to say THEY are the ones who deserve the image of crazy and murderous, far more than Americans do."
My only point was that it's a hypocritical argument. I don't really think any of them, as a whole, deserve the label "crazy and murderous". The majority of people in both countries are civil and responsible.
"A better one to cite is the far greater amount of knife crime in the UK."
Another good point: In the U.S., approximately 90% of people who were shot in recent decades ended up surviving the experience. (Wounded, and possibly injured for life, but survived.) While in contrast, approximately 90% of victims who were attacked with knives bled to death before help arrived.
I have no reason to think those figures would be substantially different elsewhere.
The latter is a.pdf. IMPORTANT NOTE: when reading the UK stats, be sure to separate out the parts that refer to air guns. Those just simply aren't considered "firearms" by the rest of the civilized world, and aren't included in anybody else's statistics.
There are a lot of gotchas when comparing stats from two different countries. For example: in the UK, a homicide is not listed in the stats as a "murder" unless someone has been tried and convicted of the murder. In the U.S., on the other hand, it is called a "murder" regardless of whether anybody is caught and convicted of the crime.
"Yes. Because when the assholes who will only have the their guns "taken from their cold dead hands" subsequently get caught with them, that is a firearm crime.
Dumbass."
Dumbshit.
I was referring to violent crimes, including murders, not "getting caught with an illegal firearm". Many of the statistics are freely available from your own government. Try Google.
And just in case that was ambiguous, I repeat: the crime rates I referred to include murder. And even, if you want to go there: mass shootings and school shootings. Despite the newspaper headlines, those are all DOWN from what they were 20 and more years ago.
I should add that figures from before the Bureau of Justice Statistics was formed, and for at least a few years after that, were kept by the Department of Justice, and published on its website.
Those aren't the whole story, though. A lot of it is not so easy to put in a graph. Keep in mind that (A) gun control laws in the U.S., did in fact peak in the early 90s, and (B) per-capita gun ownership in the U.S. has been going steadily up since that same time.
It simply isn't possible for me to put all the data together here for you on Slashdot. I'm not going to take the time to write a book. But you might be able to find some. I would just ask that if you do read a book about it, be sure to check its claims and its statistics against the official numbers, because there is an awful lot of bullshit propaganda going around.
"Gun control only works when the porous borders are within areas of similar gun control. As for the UK, the amount of crime is relatively pointless - the interesting thing is the downturn in the number of murders. "
Actually no, this argument doesn't hold water when you look at the real numbers. It isn't interesting at all. In fact it's likely to be completely meaningless.
Back in the late 90s, when the UK made its last "big" gun restrictions, firearms crime (including murders and other violent gun crime) went UP. Way up. To a level that, at its peak, was almost twice the level it had been for quite a few years before the ban. And it STAYED up, for a period of close to 8 years.
After that, it did decline. BUT... the decline cannot be attributed to the gun laws, because crime has been going down in all other major western countries at the same rate. Including in the United States. But in the United States, for that same period (and even today), per-capita gun ownership has been going UP, not down.
With such a similar reduction in crime, in similar nations, which did NOT decrease or restrict gun ownership, it is impossible to say (and irresponsible to even suggest) that it was the gun laws that are responsible for that reduction.
"In a lot of countries, like the UK, gun control generally works pretty well at preventing gun-crime, by keeping guns out of the hands of criminals. It doesn't work perfectly, but pretty well. It would be a problem if the people wanted a revolution, but I don't think that's what politicians are thinking."
The UK's own official firearms statistics put the lie to this claim.
According to official government figures, immediately after the last major "gun grab" by the UK in the late 90s, gun crime went WAY UP, and stayed that way for something like 8 years. To a level that was 50% or more higher than it had been for quite a few prior years.
Further, the later gradual reduction in crime cannot be attributed to the gun laws, because crime was going down in every other major western country, too, at about the same rate. INCLUDING in the United States, where during that period per-capita gun ownership actually went up.
And further yet: you have to be careful about how you interpret the statistics. Because (again, according to official government figures from both the U.S. and the UK), in the UK there is actually 10x the amount of gun crime per gun (not per person) than in the United States.
So what does that mean? Well, for one thing, it means that the image of Americans as crazy murderous gun nuts is not even remotely related to reality. Citizens of the UK are far less responsible with their guns. THEY are the ones who deserve the image of crazy and murderous, far more than Americans do.
(To be clear: I'm not accusing them of being crazy and murderous. But to say many of them are guilty of "the pot calling the kettle black" is a gross understatement.)
Slashdot Mirror
"There are very few of those in the UK, as civilians may not legally own them; the only British civilians in possession of handguns are those who disregard the law, so they're almost bound to be used for crime."
That's a very interesting point, and it deserves some real consideration.
"Hey dickhead, guess what HAS been used as currency in parts of the world!"
And how does that make me the dickhead???
That was my whole point, dumbass.
"Given Article 1 Section 10 starts with "No state" and follows with a list of prohibited items... there isn't much of an argument.
Do you READ the things you criticize, or just move your eyes over them? Quote:
"And that may be true, but it doesn't matter."
But YOU just ignored THAT, eh?
You are also ignoring Article 1 Section 8 which says (regarding the powers of congress):"
I ignored nothing. I even MENTIONED it. Try reading the whole thing, and understanding what my argument actually was. Hint: there's some actual LOGIC in it, that you have to follow. You won't be able to just use your eyes, you'll have to kick in your brain, too.
"Can't almost anything that can be bought/sold technically be converted to conventional currency..."
Yes! And that is why the Judge's ruling is hopelessly flawed.
You can trade wheat or rice for any currency on the planet. You can "convert" it to gold (in some places). You can buy it with Yen and sell it for Rubles. You can trade it around the world.
I hereby declare wheat and rice to be money.
"I can barter my services for goods or other services. Trade one item for another. So, effectively, then this ruling would seem to imply everything is currency, and thus subject to SEC regulation in the States."
United States Constitution, Article 1, Section 10:
"No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; ..."
While the Federal government has the Constitutional power to coin money, it does not have the power to declare anything it wants to be money. Everything has value. That doesn't mean everything can be regulated as money.
People have argued that Article 1, Section 10 applies only to States. And that may be true, but it doesn't matter. If a State may not accept (or force anyone to accept) anything but gold and silver as payment, then gold and silver are in practice the only Constitutional form of money.
A logical corollary to that, then, is that paper dollars are not a Constitutional form of money.
Yes.
I give OP demerits for dividing the wold into Leaders and Followers. It is quite possible (and often even desirable) to go your own way, and be neither.
"Tissue samples taken from your body, are not your property."
Actually, yes they are, unless you sign away your rights to them. Or at least, they CAN be. It depends on the circumstances, and what country you are in.
In many places (including, historically, the United States), the substance of your body has been the most precious of possessions, and legally inviolable.
... and that is:
The line of cells that was used for decades to develop drugs and treatments, and do other research, were not "normal" human cells at all, but cancer cells.
It wasn't until relatively recently that some scientists pointed out that maybe they weren't such a suitable medium for a lot of the research that had been done in the past.
"... other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."
But copyright was a relatively new concept at the time. History since pretty clearly shows that those countries that had it fared FAR better than those that did not.
"In today's age of machines that exist almost exclusively to copy and fiddle about with data, the concept of copyright is quaint and outdated. Gone are the obstacles to distribution and duplication that existed in days gone by, and as the past decade or two has shown us, dropping copyright as a concept will do nothing to deter people from creating new works, only remove the incentive for people to create static media for a living."
I disagree completely. I think this view comes from a lack of understanding the actual history of copyright (including recent history), and a rather astounding and unjustified leap from "somebody used a thing to do harm" to "we need to abandon the whole concept of that thing".
First, I do not believe that "the past decade or two" have demonstrated anything like what you assert. Certainly, we have seen some recent, bad, changes in copyright law and observed the resulting bad effects. A good example is almost all of the DMCA, which is really not one law but a whole group of laws. People cite the "protection" clauses of the DMCA and point out that they are good things, while completely ignoring the fact that almost none of those protections would have even been necessary if it weren't for other harmful changes made by the DMCA itself.
To put it in other words: almost anything can be abused by unscrupulous people, and copyright law "in the past decade or two" has been a prime example. But the fact that something can be abused is not an indictment of the whole concept. It simply means that the abuse has to end.
Using your logic, I could just as validly say that the entire concepts of mortgages, corporations, and stock markets need to be abolished, because of abuses over "the past decade or two".
And while we're at it, again using that same logic, I could say we need to get rid of all airplanes, credit cards kitchen knives, and hey, let's not forget penises and vaginas.
How utterly outrageous and bizarre.
"The most frequent comment I get on my coilguns is that I should use a lighter projectile to improve performance. This equations [sic] shows why that suggestion is wrong. Itâ(TM)s counter-intuitive, but for a fixed power and distance (e.g. fixed capacitor bank and coil), a lighter projectile will gain less muzzle energy than a heavier one."
But he ALSO writes this:
"Note that equation 3 assumes constant acceleration, which is a close approximation with a highly multi-staged coilgun. Begin by eliminating t by feeding equation 3 into equation 2 and re-arranging to solve for E."
That is a really HUGE assumption for a short, 8-stage coilgun. As he says, "it is a close approximation with a highly multi-staged coilgun". Which his is not. The logical conclusion then is that this is not a close approximation for his version.
Another thing he mentions is that the efficiency goes way up as the projectile velocity increases.
"To get 10X muzzle energy he has draw 10X the energy from the batteries, which means more batteries, which harms the portability goal. To get 5X muzzle speed increase, the coils have to power up and down 5X as fast, which probably requires more smaller coils and probably other circuitry speedups."
I think that's an assumption, not the reality. I'd give you 10 to 1 odds that he is not controlling the "power up" curve of the coils at all, but rather hitting them them with full (but timed) power pulses. The only thing that would change is the timing of the coil firings, not their overall energy.
But I grant that I do not know that for sure.
"'Reputed' implies that there's not much scientific evidence of this at all, with regard to either family or strangers."
No it doesn't. Look it up. "Reputed" means they have that reputation. There is no implication of falsity and no relation whatever to the presence or absence of evidence.
That was my entire point. The data from the UK (see the link in another comment of mine) do not support the argument that gun control reduces crime. Sure, crime is down there. But it is down everywhere else in the Western world, too. Including in places like the U.S., which during that same time has seen fewer gun restrictions, and higher per-capita ownership.
"For that reason I don't think it's fair to say THEY are the ones who deserve the image of crazy and murderous, far more than Americans do."
My only point was that it's a hypocritical argument. I don't really think any of them, as a whole, deserve the label "crazy and murderous". The majority of people in both countries are civil and responsible.
"A better one to cite is the far greater amount of knife crime in the UK."
Another good point: In the U.S., approximately 90% of people who were shot in recent decades ended up surviving the experience. (Wounded, and possibly injured for life, but survived.) While in contrast, approximately 90% of victims who were attacked with knives bled to death before help arrived.
I have no reason to think those figures would be substantially different elsewhere.
"Can you post links to the stats you are talking about? Would actually be interested to see them."
Here are a couple of sources. You might have to look around a bit. But really, this stuff is not too hard to find.
.pdf. IMPORTANT NOTE: when reading the UK stats, be sure to separate out the parts that refer to air guns. Those just simply aren't considered "firearms" by the rest of the civilized world, and aren't included in anybody else's statistics.
U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics
The DOJ kept these stats before the formation of the BJS. For earlier years, you might have to look there.
House of Commons, Firearm Crime Statistics
The latter is a
There are a lot of gotchas when comparing stats from two different countries. For example: in the UK, a homicide is not listed in the stats as a "murder" unless someone has been tried and convicted of the murder. In the U.S., on the other hand, it is called a "murder" regardless of whether anybody is caught and convicted of the crime.
"Yes. Because when the assholes who will only have the their guns "taken from their cold dead hands" subsequently get caught with them, that is a firearm crime. Dumbass."
Dumbshit.
I was referring to violent crimes, including murders, not "getting caught with an illegal firearm". Many of the statistics are freely available from your own government. Try Google.
And just in case that was ambiguous, I repeat: the crime rates I referred to include murder. And even, if you want to go there: mass shootings and school shootings. Despite the newspaper headlines, those are all DOWN from what they were 20 and more years ago.
"You probably are."
And so are you.
"... there is little scientific evidence of their abilities outside of family relationships..."
Fine. But OP and TFA say "the longest social memory ever recorded for a nonhuman animal".
Which makes your argument a straw-man; they say nothing about "family".
But again, as logical as that seems, there is no data that shows that it actually happens.
I should add that figures from before the Bureau of Justice Statistics was formed, and for at least a few years after that, were kept by the Department of Justice, and published on its website.
Here, let me Google that for you...
Seriously, it's pretty ridiculous to ask me to get this for you, when much of the data is so easily available and easy to find.
Those aren't the whole story, though. A lot of it is not so easy to put in a graph. Keep in mind that (A) gun control laws in the U.S., did in fact peak in the early 90s, and (B) per-capita gun ownership in the U.S. has been going steadily up since that same time.
It simply isn't possible for me to put all the data together here for you on Slashdot. I'm not going to take the time to write a book. But you might be able to find some. I would just ask that if you do read a book about it, be sure to check its claims and its statistics against the official numbers, because there is an awful lot of bullshit propaganda going around.
"Gun control only works when the porous borders are within areas of similar gun control. As for the UK, the amount of crime is relatively pointless - the interesting thing is the downturn in the number of murders. "
Actually no, this argument doesn't hold water when you look at the real numbers. It isn't interesting at all. In fact it's likely to be completely meaningless.
Back in the late 90s, when the UK made its last "big" gun restrictions, firearms crime (including murders and other violent gun crime) went UP. Way up. To a level that, at its peak, was almost twice the level it had been for quite a few years before the ban. And it STAYED up, for a period of close to 8 years.
After that, it did decline. BUT... the decline cannot be attributed to the gun laws, because crime has been going down in all other major western countries at the same rate. Including in the United States. But in the United States, for that same period (and even today), per-capita gun ownership has been going UP, not down.
With such a similar reduction in crime, in similar nations, which did NOT decrease or restrict gun ownership, it is impossible to say (and irresponsible to even suggest) that it was the gun laws that are responsible for that reduction.
"In a lot of countries, like the UK, gun control generally works pretty well at preventing gun-crime, by keeping guns out of the hands of criminals. It doesn't work perfectly, but pretty well. It would be a problem if the people wanted a revolution, but I don't think that's what politicians are thinking."
The UK's own official firearms statistics put the lie to this claim.
According to official government figures, immediately after the last major "gun grab" by the UK in the late 90s, gun crime went WAY UP, and stayed that way for something like 8 years. To a level that was 50% or more higher than it had been for quite a few prior years.
Further, the later gradual reduction in crime cannot be attributed to the gun laws, because crime was going down in every other major western country, too, at about the same rate. INCLUDING in the United States, where during that period per-capita gun ownership actually went up.
And further yet: you have to be careful about how you interpret the statistics. Because (again, according to official government figures from both the U.S. and the UK), in the UK there is actually 10x the amount of gun crime per gun (not per person) than in the United States.
So what does that mean? Well, for one thing, it means that the image of Americans as crazy murderous gun nuts is not even remotely related to reality. Citizens of the UK are far less responsible with their guns. THEY are the ones who deserve the image of crazy and murderous, far more than Americans do.
(To be clear: I'm not accusing them of being crazy and murderous. But to say many of them are guilty of "the pot calling the kettle black" is a gross understatement.)