I'm also a Libertarian, but I don't like the ideal of nationalization or statetionalization (which is really what the States do to the roads anyway).
I prefer the idea of one of the other responders to Nationalize!: get rid of the monopoly right-of-way grants for running lines and let the rights-of-way revert to their original owners, who can then charge (or not; perhaps they could trade right-of-way for service) for access to their house/business/whatever. Much more Libertarian solution.
...it's members include people of all backgrounds.
Its (note proper non-apostrophe) members are all in favor of the civil liberties of authoritarian liberals, but wish to get rid of the civil liberties of gun owners, freedom speakers, and lots of others whose liberties the ACLU has been firmly in favor of limiting.
I've read the article. There are more ways to ban a model rocket than are dreamt of in your inane capital letters.
First, they restrict storage. Then, they restrict transportation. Then, they restrict buyers. Then, they restrict sales. Pretty soon there's a "ban" without anybody having "banned" anything.
...but for those who can change something with their vote I strongly suggest to think carefully next time before giving the wrong people a seat into the Whitehouse.
Is that actually true (about the kids and buckets) ? Is that only 'kids' dying from hand-guns or all people?
I'm pretty sure the statistic about kids killed by handguns being fewer than those drowned in buckets is true. The numbers I remember (kids under 12!) are 30 for handguns and 50 for buckets. Many places you will see "children" of 18 and under included in this statistic. Including 18-year-olds includes all the "children" being killed in the crossfire of the War On Drugs (which is really a war on self-medication). You Netherlanders have this one right, at least.
There are thousands more older-than-12-years deaths due to firearms in the U.S., but if you took out the Drug War crossfire (think about it: are you going to call the police if a rival is invading your turf?), the number would be in the hundreds, not thousands.
Why is that? It's because the Canadians don't live in fear. Yoda had it right, fear *does* lead to hate, and to violence as well.
"A life lived in fear is a life half-lived." -- Baz Luhrmann, Australian, in "Strictly Ballroom" (actually Baz Luhrmann admits he didn't write this himself, but stole the line from some Oz TV show -- listen to his commentary on the Strictly Ballroom DVD)
In summary, your post looks like a well-disguised NRA troll. You say: restricting what individuals can own isn't a panacea for terrorism, hence it is useless. The truth is that, yes, stupid restrictions like for rocket motors will be ineffective, but that this has no real implications of restricting e.g gun ownership.
Your post looks like a well-disguised Handgun Control, Inc. troll (HCI, not as well known as an abbreviation). Victim disarmament, whether it occurs on an airplane, in a school, or in a post office, is still victim disarmament. It leads to horrors like 9/11, Columbine, any number of P.O. shootings.
The truth (wow, now there's a concept) is that governments have disarmed their victims since time immemorial, with the disarmament of the Jews just before the Holocaust being one of the more egregious examples of this trend. Consider the disarmament of 2.5 million Cambodians by Pol Pot as another example.
Don't troll for HCI by accusing someone else of trolling for the NRA.
FYI, I am a former member of HCI, would never even think of becoming a member of the NRA (the gun control arm of the Republican Party), and am a proud charter member of the JPFO.
Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling?
An analogy will illustrate just how radical this trust really is. What if I proposed that we hand three sticks of dynamite and a detonator to anyone who asked for them. All an applicant would need is money to pay for the explosives. You'd have to be an idiot to agree with my plan--at least based on the assumptions you picked up in school about human nature and human competence.
And yet gasoline, a spectacularly mischievous explosive, dangerously unstable and with the intriguing characteristic as an assault weapon that it can flow under locked doors and saturate bulletproof clothing, is available to anyone with a container. Five gallons of gasoline have the destructive power of a stick of dynamite. The average tank holds fifteen gallons, yet no background check is necessary for dispenser or dispensee. As long as gasoline is freely available, gun control is beside the point. Push on. Why do we allow access to a portable substance capable of incinerating houses, torching crowded theaters, or even turning skyscrapers into infernos? We haven't even considered the battering ram aspect of cars--why are novice operators allowed to command a ton of metal capable of hurtling through school crossings at up to two miles a minute? Why do we give the power of life and death this way to everyone?
It's a really good question. One that legislators ought to be forced:-) to think about before enacting the kind of stupid, fascist, power-grabbing legislation that is the anti-Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Act, and the upcoming anti-Patriot II. Watch for it in a legisature near you. Coming Soon!
This is a good idea for lawsuits generally. Loser pays. Would make for a lot less legal harrassment and a lot more legal sense.
It also happens to be the rule in England, where you don't see people winning $15,000,000.00 lawsuits for being stupid enough to drop hot coffee in their laps. The risk of loss is too high, so no self-respecting lawyer (is that an oxymoron?) will take such frivolities.
For example, it could be argued that sales taxes I pay on book purchases in a physical stores help the state or locality maintain the streets I use to get to the book store, and maintain a business-friendly beaurocracy that help make it easier for the bookstore to locate near where I live.
Hmmm... What if, instead of being charged at the bookstore for roads you didn't use (maybe you biked or walked to the bookstore), the road was charged to your account as you used it (ExpressPay or some other sort of auto-toll). Wouldn't that make more sense than paying extra at the bookstore?
And if there weren't any business-unfriendly bureaucracies, you wouldn't have to pay for that either. So you could still be anti-tax, and with good reason.
As it is, it sounds like you're only anti-tax because you don't like paying taxes. That's a bad reason.
Why oh why do they still insist on charging tax as *extra* in retail stores in the US?
Because that way the tax is visible and an American knows how much tribute he has to pay to his government masters. Europeans, on the other hand, don't even know how much extra the government is soaking them for.
I, for one, am glad that sales taxes are totted up separately, because if they get too big, people will complain, and government will be forced to limit its leeching.
Carmack needs to look into the latest technology for rockets, candle wax: purified (oilless) paraffin, with some additives. He could then get either gaseous or liquid oxygen from just about any welding supply house.
Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? The police have been wrong about possession of pornography before, and will be again. Pornography planted on/in a person's house isn't impossible.
And besides, mere posession of any kind of *whatever* should never be construed as a crime. Crimes are actions that have victims. Possession of a non-human *anything* doesn't make "it" a victim.
The current inhuman view that possession of drugs, pornography, "weapons of mass destruction," etc. is criminal and deserves the death sentence is in and of itself criminally inhuman.
And if you think "death sentence" is exaggeration in that last sentence, consider what happens when a person loses his entire reason for living by being put in prison, excluded from contributing to FreeBSD, or whatever other consequences flow from being *accused* of possession of what some government flunky doesn't like.
Are you trying to suggest that Engels and Marx would look at what Stalin and lenin did and say, "Yup, that's prett y much how we envisioned the revolution happening and yup, that's pretty much what we expected communism in action to be"? They would be absolutely horrified as to how "communism" played out in the 20th century.
Well, no, I wasn't implying that. Any human (Marxist or otherwise) should be horrified at what Communism turned out to be in practice. But that doesn't excuse either Marx or Engels, both of whom planted the seeds for the anti-humanism of Communism. They might have been surprised at the results, but they shouldn't have been.
Repressive socialism is the legacy of Stalin and Lenin, not communism. They never got there and once they were firmly entrenched in the seat of power, they gave up on the revolution. They loved the power.
Unfortunately both socialism and communism are about power and its inevitable misuse. Both socialism and communism are about using the force and violence of Government to forcibly redistribute (against the will of those being redistributed) the money and productive ability of citizens. And if you can't see the power, force, and violence in that, then I do believe you're a Chico, Harpo, Groucho Marxist, not the other kind.
The "style" of communism to which you refer is actually more of a repressive socialism than real communism. Basically all the East Bloc countries entered phase 1 of the communist revolution and got stuck there.
Interesting that you can't name (or couldn't think of) any countries that ever got past phase 1. Did this possibility slip your mind, or is it just that there aren't any examples. I can't think of any. Can you?
The revolution is supposed to overthrow the corrupt government. Then and interim government steps in until such a time when said government is no longer needed and the people are able to truly govern themselves.
Yeah. Yeah. Dictatorship of the Proletariat and all that. Name me one country where the plan actually happened as you so ideally lay it out. Just one. Can't think of any? Neither can I.
Communism and democracy can live hand in hand. It's just that we Americans tend to think democracy and capitalism are the same thing. Democracy can foster and nurture capitalism or communism. What really matters is the will of the people.
It's interesting to note that the will of the people has always gone the other direction from communism. Note the current Russia. Note China adopting Hong Kong as its model. Note countries like North Korea and Cuba that retain the phase 1 model and are still mired in starvation and poverty.
What know of as communism is so far from actually being communist it's laughable Charles Engels and Karl Mark would be horrified to see what Lenin and Stalin did with their ideas... just as the American Founding Fathers would be appaled at what we've done to their ideals.
I disagree with the first part of this sentence but agree heartily with the second. Since you seem to confuse Harpo and Chico with Karl, I suspect you wouldn't know a Marxist if one bit you on the behind. But it's true that we've gone very far in the direction of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." in these formerly free United States. In fact, we've gone so far in that direction that we now fight wars over petty dictators in the Middle East for which we have no more motivation than the price of oil. Sigh.
Communisisim is not any better or worse than Capitalisism. It all depends on the society implementing the system and wether or not they wanted it or it was forced upon them.
WTF???? Where have you been the last ten years? The last twenty? The last fifty? the last 100?
Every time "C"ommunism has been tried, it has failed, regardless of whether the people of the country "voted" it in or not.
It's really unfortunate that the supposedly civilized Western countries have adopted communism's hateful and fascist phrase, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Translating this from the German, you have to note that this means: "Use the force and violence of Government to take money from people who have worked hard to better themselves and their employees, and give that hard-earned money to those who believe that their need exceeds the Tao's admonition that 'you shall not steal.'"
Communism is simply warfare by people whose envy of the productive efforts of their fellows exceeeds their own productive abilities.
And if you don't believe this, look at North Korea, Cuba, and other economic basket cases where the Government can barely feed the people, let alone give them an environment where they can better themselves and their country.
And, to bring this back on topic, Steve Jobs probably is a Communist. But he's running a capitalist organization that has granted him a Gulfstream as reward for his relatively successful efforts. And that capitalist company makes computers that Just Work. That's enough for me.
As the first manager of support for Fontographer, I can attest to the fact that it takes a lot longer to make a quality font than you might think if you've just fiddled with Fontographer a bit. You can make a simple, low quality font in a couple of hours. To make a publication-ready font probably takes a month at least; three months for one that is completely hinted with all the Eurpean characters, etc. etc. etc. etc.
But Your Mileage May Vary, and it's been awhile since I've actually made a font (1993 was the last time I went throught the complete process).
If you want a complete Unicode font, well, then all bets are off, since those can be huge.
...please watch out how you think something is ok just because it's based on open source code. Shipping and integrating an open source product is still just as bad, it's still anti-competitive.
Anti-competitive with what? Mozilla is free. IE Mac 5 is free. What's there to complain about? They're all free. Chimera is free. So who's being anti-competitive? I don't get the complaint.
If someone were still making a profit from browsers (iCab?) then maybe there'd be a point to this.
But anyway, the DOJ's complaint about MSIE was old before it was even presented before a judge. MS will kill itself with screwball "activation" and licensing, and doesn't need the DOJ to help it out.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod Parent Up. See The Real Lincoln for more info.
Nope. Benjamin Franklin said that. See actual quote below.
I prefer the idea of one of the other responders to Nationalize!: get rid of the monopoly right-of-way grants for running lines and let the rights-of-way revert to their original owners, who can then charge (or not; perhaps they could trade right-of-way for service) for access to their house/business/whatever. Much more Libertarian solution.
First, they restrict storage. Then, they restrict transportation. Then, they restrict buyers. Then, they restrict sales. Pretty soon there's a "ban" without anybody having "banned" anything.
Voting for D/R duopoly losers is the sure way to drive these United States into more fascism and police-statism.
There are thousands more older-than-12-years deaths due to firearms in the U.S., but if you took out the Drug War crossfire (think about it: are you going to call the police if a rival is invading your turf?), the number would be in the hundreds, not thousands.
The truth (wow, now there's a concept) is that governments have disarmed their victims since time immemorial, with the disarmament of the Jews just before the Holocaust being one of the more egregious examples of this trend. Consider the disarmament of 2.5 million Cambodians by Pol Pot as another example.
Don't troll for HCI by accusing someone else of trolling for the NRA.
FYI, I am a former member of HCI, would never even think of becoming a member of the NRA (the gun control arm of the Republican Party), and am a proud charter member of the JPFO.
It also happens to be the rule in England, where you don't see people winning $15,000,000.00 lawsuits for being stupid enough to drop hot coffee in their laps. The risk of loss is too high, so no self-respecting lawyer (is that an oxymoron?) will take such frivolities.
If Moore were really interested in protecting the rights of the "little people," he'd stop running around preventing them from defending themselves against armed and dangerous criminals, including those who wear a badge or a black jacket with an acronym in yellow on the back.
And if there weren't any business-unfriendly bureaucracies, you wouldn't have to pay for that either. So you could still be anti-tax, and with good reason.
As it is, it sounds like you're only anti-tax because you don't like paying taxes. That's a bad reason.
I, for one, am glad that sales taxes are totted up separately, because if they get too big, people will complain, and government will be forced to limit its leeching.
Carmack needs to look into the latest technology for rockets, candle wax: purified (oilless) paraffin, with some additives. He could then get either gaseous or liquid oxygen from just about any welding supply house.
And besides, mere posession of any kind of *whatever* should never be construed as a crime. Crimes are actions that have victims. Possession of a non-human *anything* doesn't make "it" a victim.
The current inhuman view that possession of drugs, pornography, "weapons of mass destruction," etc. is criminal and deserves the death sentence is in and of itself criminally inhuman.
And if you think "death sentence" is exaggeration in that last sentence, consider what happens when a person loses his entire reason for living by being put in prison, excluded from contributing to FreeBSD, or whatever other consequences flow from being *accused* of possession of what some government flunky doesn't like.
Grin.
Every time "C"ommunism has been tried, it has failed, regardless of whether the people of the country "voted" it in or not.
It's really unfortunate that the supposedly civilized Western countries have adopted communism's hateful and fascist phrase, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Translating this from the German, you have to note that this means: "Use the force and violence of Government to take money from people who have worked hard to better themselves and their employees, and give that hard-earned money to those who believe that their need exceeds the Tao's admonition that 'you shall not steal.'"
Communism is simply warfare by people whose envy of the productive efforts of their fellows exceeeds their own productive abilities.
And if you don't believe this, look at North Korea, Cuba, and other economic basket cases where the Government can barely feed the people, let alone give them an environment where they can better themselves and their country.
And, to bring this back on topic, Steve Jobs probably is a Communist. But he's running a capitalist organization that has granted him a Gulfstream as reward for his relatively successful efforts. And that capitalist company makes computers that Just Work. That's enough for me.
But Your Mileage May Vary, and it's been awhile since I've actually made a font (1993 was the last time I went throught the complete process).
If you want a complete Unicode font, well, then all bets are off, since those can be huge.
One word: Spamfire.
If someone were still making a profit from browsers (iCab?) then maybe there'd be a point to this.
But anyway, the DOJ's complaint about MSIE was old before it was even presented before a judge. MS will kill itself with screwball "activation" and licensing, and doesn't need the DOJ to help it out.
Oh wait... You didn't mean that kind of Sun.