Old designs were safe for their rated life time. The trouble is that due to the inability to permit new plants, many old plants that should have been retired and replaced have been pushed into years or decades of additional service. Every time the licenses are extended it is based on the best estimates of the engineers as to how much longer the plant can last after needed rework is complete. But every time you rework and push another x years out of an old plant, you increase the chances that something will go wrong.
Get a reasonably safe storage plan or store securely on-site and permit new standardized plants.
The problem with civilian nuclear power is each power plant is largely re-engineered from scratch. Every company wants the latest and greatest technical advantages versus something that just works. You see this with other power sources than nuclear, but it stands out more there because so few new nuclear plants are built today versus coal or gas plants.
If the shipyards built vessels for the Navy the way civil engineers design power plants, each nuclear sub - for example - would have this great big bulge on the hull in the reactor area. Each individual sub in a particular "class" would have the bulge be a different shape and be in a different spot. Some would come with multiple bulges. All would drive varying numbers of screws.
Military nuclear has worked relatively well because they have largely repeated what works well enough. I'm sure they all have changes they would like to make and some do get integrated in over time, but it isn't redesigned from scratch for every new ship.
Nuclear can work and some of the newer modern nuclear designs are pretty much fail safe. If we'd standardize on one of them and reuse its plans for every new plant we built, we'd be in much better shape and costs would be much less. If you have a standard layout and control system like the military does for a given class of ship, you'd reduce the operating cost as well - both in terms of people manning the control rooms and doing repairs and in parts.
For what it is worth, there is nothing in the Bible that says the fossil record is fake. There is also nothing in the Bible to say that the carbon dating of those fossil records is appreciably inaccurate. For God to have done that, he would have been intentionally trying to deceive His creation and that doesn't fit His nature.
Therefore, I assume that the interpretation of the Bible wielded by the young Earth creationists is in error and look for an alternative view. Fortunately that isn't hard to do and leads to a more consistent reading of the Bible.
While not a fan of the long time period "day", I also am straining to see the inconsistencies. Most of 2 deals with the creation of a specific place for man and describes it in some detail. The earlier sections are dealing with a general reconstruction period where the earth is restored to a second habitable state post Lucifer's fall.
If anything, the description between the day 7 rest and the detailed description of Eden can refer easily to the original creation from Gen 1:1 or possibly simply refer to the fact that the new plants had not yet fully matured. It could also be a description of the particular place where Eden was located before its specific creation.
The Bible makes no claims as to the age of anything you mention. It all hinges on three words "In the beginning" which could be any time. Any Bible interpretation suggesting a young age, is just that - an interpretation. My interpretation is that the same Bible requires an old age.
None of this is relevant to the primary work of the Bible - to show the reason why man needs to be reconciled to God, to show the method of that reconciliation, and to warn of the consequences of not reconciling.
You're forgetting Passover. Crucifixion Wedn. afternoon, high holy special Sabbath for the Passover celebration (Wedn. sunset to Thursday sunset), normal day (Thursday sunset to Friday sunset) during which time the women prepared the items to take to the tomb, normal Sabbath (Friday sunset to Saturday sunset), resurrection after Saturday sunset, followed by their first day of the week and the discovery that He was risen.
The only of the 10 commandments that was not carried forward to the new testament defining what sin was was specifically the admonition to keep the Sabbath. That was because of what the religious order of Jesus day had done to the tradition of Sabbath keeping. In fact, God, through Christ, went out of His way on occasion to specifically annoy the religious order in their Sabbath traditions by healing on the Sabbath and then commanding the man who was healed to take up his bed and carry it home.
The rest is still there in the new testament. The old testament commandments relating to food are gone because the Jewish people were not wandering about as nomads any longer. The old testament rules for sacrifice that were implemented to specifically cover the people's sin and acknowledge God are gone since Christ paid the price on the cross to do this. Everything else is still there. In fact, over and over again in the sermon on the mount Christ used a phrase similar to - you have heard it said ----, but I say unto you ---- where His standards and thus the standards of the new testament were higher and tougher than what was imposed in the old testament for how people should treat each other, specifically because He had come and was in the process of showing them how it was possible to live righteously and because He would send the Holy Spirit to in-dwell believers and, if they obeyed His promptings, lead them on the right path. Clearly, most don't and they will answer for that before God one day. The higher the position of authority, the more they will have to answer for.
But the law still remains as it is what will be used on the day of the great white throne judgment at the end of the recorded history in the Bible when God judges those who did not accept His plan of salvation before sending them to hell for eternity.
The new covenant is simply the final means of salvation which was alluded to from the time of man's downfall in the garden of Eden. It doesn't eliminate the definitions of sin that cause people to need salvation in the first place, and it certainly gives no indication that God treats it any more lightly on an eternal basis.
Strictly speaking Christ only said Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.
He doesn't say anything about the month or year. That many have made themselves laughingstocks in making projections is clear. But it is entirely possible for the Father to have told someone later and have the passage still be true as recorded. We weren't directly addressed as part of the "ye" in the verse. After all, there are still many passages of prophecy in the Bible to be fulfilled.
St. Malachy either spoke a valid prophecy or he did not. Only time will tell which was true. Neither result would affect my Christianity at all.
If he did speak truth, then many outcomes are possible. We could have not understood the last entry, the last entry could have indeed been added at a later point by another person as some have speculated, there could be a time period between the list and the final pope which we have now entered (the 49 years to rebuild Jerusalem, the 434 years from then to Christ's death followed by the long church age, followed by the seven years of tribulation being one example of the Daniel's 70 weeks prophecy with a gap), or perhaps the Catholic church is going to come apart and be judged by God, or perhaps the end really is near for everyone. Only time will tell, and again, it doesn't matter to my Christianity.
I can say that the various messages in tongues and interpretations given in services I have attended in the last couple of years have included messages indicating His soon return, which I don't remember hearing in earlier years. I may just be paying better attention as I have gotten older. Regardless, I may not live to see tomorrow, so I need to be ready to meet Him at any time anyway.
Like most other government legislated thresholds, it hasn't been adjusted for inflation. It would be around $59,350 if it had been adjusted as computed by an online inflation calculator using 1970 (Bank Secrecy Act passage) as the base year. That's still low, but more reasonable than $10,000.
The difference is that most local retail stores bring in their goods by truck - frequently their own trucking system like Walmart. They get economies of scale for their delivery charges. If I purchase something on line, depending on the retailer, I may have a very large shipping and handling charge to transport each single item.
They shouldn't get to play the "It's unfair competition on prices. Because you don't pay sales tax we're dying," card.
If the government wants to enforce an extremely regressive form of taxation like the sales tax, that's another debate. But no whining about a tiny percentage of the cost for sales tax causing suffering when most stores - with the exception of Amazon - sometimes - charge outrageous S&H charges - and still beat on price by much more than the sales tax percentage.
The small stores should open up their own web front if they want to compete. Then they'll be whining "Don't make us figure out the complexities of every localities on-line sales tax rules!"
There's always rc.local. You can just use the old init.d list for service start order and start everything that is really important yourself in the right order. Shutdown isn't as clean, but if you don't like the way systemd does things you can at least disable most of it and do it by hand. I know that isn't an ideal solution, but at least my services now end up running when I have a login prompt. I couldn't guarantee that with systemd.
We made this decision for our C library on our embedded 65816 processor used in industrial controllers. We had no reason to represent times before the controller was installed, so losing the sign wasn't an issue. But we thought that 2038 was within the possible useful life span of the controller. 2106, not so much.
I realize that many people thought that about hardware produced for the century turnover as well, so everything about the time range is internally documented well, but we didn't have any justification for building the math routines to work with 64-bit ints just for this one function. Unsigned was the simplest solution. No host communicating with the controller could handle 64-bit time stamps or wanted to waste the extra bytes of bandwidth to read 4 zeros either.
While your value of 150,000 isn't far off according to the debt clock, the actual amount we're currently obligated for via the legislated pensions and entitlements along with the popular debt value that is bandied about and used to get the number you gave comes to something around $86.8 trillion. This is roughly 550% of the GDP. The Wall Street Journal had a good editorial on this a month or so ago.
There are many contemporary quotes from their papers and other general position papers of the time that I could use in support of my comments, but today - I like this one.
"Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American... The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People."
— Tench Coxe, 1788.
No, we were not OK with it. We're still not OK with it even with a valid cert. But I'd wager that the number of corporate VIPs and others who use unauthorized e-mail clients like gmail is larger than you'd care to admit. IT rarely wins against the VIPs regardless of policy breaches.
One of the disadvantages of small businesses is that you have to prioritize where your IT budget goes. Every decision is a tradeoff. Going with a self-signed cert in the old days worked and gave our employees some level of security against the direct snooping of credentials and content when on work sites or at home. It wasn't perfect for all the reasons you mentioned, but as a small business was deemed acceptable due to the low probability of any company actually caring enough about us to set up a MITM attack.
The only point I was making was that you can't just use POP3 or IMAP3 as a replacement for POP3S/IMAP3S due to the STARTTLS announcement from most modern e-mail servers.
Yes, actually it does. Our company was getting along nicely with a self-signed cert which we added to all the company devices as a trusted source. One enterprising engineer was using gmail. When they dropped the change on us, he could no longer use gmail and in the spirit of letting VIPs get away with anything they want mostly, we were forced to buy real certs. I'm not against real certs - especially for a company - but you can't just use plain socket access because our server broadcasts STARTTLS as an option for security in credentials - as it should, which google immediately tries to use and rejects due to the self signed cert. I'm sure we could force off the STARTTLS option, but that is actually used as a feature by some of our locations, so it isn't that simple.
It is true that the 2nd amendment was written in a time when none of these existed. But it was also written in the time immediately after the Revolutionary War when we fought for our freedom from England. Every weapon of war was included in their minds when they wrote that amendment. They didn't exclude cannons. They didn't exclude warships. If they'd just wanted people to have guns to hunt with, they would have. They wanted a people who were armed and ready to fight the next war that came along.
The reason they didn't need to worry about Farmer Jones up the road going off with a cannon and firing a shot at the school house is exactly the same reason you don't have to worry about nuclear weapons or cruise missiles or tanks or F-15s parked on your street. The big ordnance was expensive then and it is expensive today. Sheer cost of purchase, maintenance, and operating limited the people who could afford them then, just as now. But you can be assured that if modern weapons had been around then and used to fight off the British, there wouldn't have been an exception for them in the 2nd. Every military weapon was included so a militia could be called up at a moments notice to protect against any and all invaders.
Yes, we have armed forces now. Yes, we have a National Guard now. But a lot of them are elsewhere and are likely to be elsewhere for the long term. They aren't hanging around the U.S. So just because times have changed doesn't mean the risk has. I hope we never have a government go actively against its citizens in the U.S. But it has happened recently in many other countries. I don't like the fact that so many people feel the need to potentially defend themselves against the government at all. I personally don't. But I do respect their positions considering all that has gone on in the world in the last century by supposedly benign governments.
I wish there was no need to worry about crime as well, but the police manifestly cannot be everywhere at once. They mostly react to crimes that go on for a long time (riots for example) or react after a crime has occurred. Both make it necessary for a large portion of the population to wish to have a gun to protect themselves and the bigger the advantage that gun has over what the intruder might have, the better.
I appreciated the comment by seumas. He summed the argument threads up nicely.
All armed guards and checkpoints would do is use up one or two bullets early on in the rampage. The cost to provide bunker like checkpoints and the time it would take to process the kids in and out of them would be prohibitive.
Knife wielding attacker, but then I'd prefer to be armed at the time. I'd also prefer that any teacher that wanted to be armed be armed, and that any student that wanted to be armed be armed.
I don't think the amount of violence perpetrated would change significantly - gang violence in the streets of some big cities is proof that violence against students will occur regardless of whether there are safe gun-"free" zones in schools or not. Open carry, however, might seriously reduce the likelihood of nuts targeting areas where there are likely to be lots of people who would shoot back.
I happen to think the Constitution got it right with the 2nd amendment.
It is impossible to predict what would have happened had the audience been armed - or even a small minority of the audience - but I suspect that like here, there would have been fewer deaths. Possibly not 0, but fewer.
It is completely possible that there would have been 0 deaths there because the gunman wouldn't have picked a spot where he might encounter armed resistance who might be a better shot than he was. It isn't so much the quick draw wild west winner as the deterrent effect of knowing there is likely to be someone around - probably off duty cop, ex cop, active duty military, ex military, who will kill you that would help reduce the crazies. Joe Random Good Citizen probably wouldn't have the psych training to weather the surprise attack well - even if he/she were a good shot. But there are those who could and would. They are the true deterrent effect that would put a stop to the nuts.
The MAD philosophy of the Cold War era worked - even with regimes which were not what we would consider the most stable.
Another way to do this is to stop being the world's policemen. Let war and civil unrest get out of hand again in many of the developing countries and it will be a good reason for US companies to rethink outsourcing.
No. It just means the virus writers have to be a bit more complete in their attack so they sign the e-mail by the computer user. Add a key logger if needed to gather the key password. Then their e-mails look legitimate if originating from hijacked computers.
Spammers who purchase temporary e-mail accounts they know will be shut down would get a signing key with their account. I don't expect the major abused e-mail service providers would do any better checking with the extra level of signing security then than they do now for a simple account.
For an individual - no. For a company or an organization, it does make a big difference.
At our company we automatically grey list or black list sources of spam for a particular amount of time while automatically white listing people our employees send mail to. This is all done at the system level without the user having to do anything. It drops the spam load by an order of magnitude. Once spam is seen by one user - everyone on the corporate mail system automatically benefits.
Some of this can be done using remote black lists and wouldn't be affected. However there are still many messages whose content points to black listed locations where the mail originator hasn't yet been shut down or black listed which we can harvest and block at the system level after letting spam assassin do its job and analyzing its results. While that might be possible if it was pushed to the user level - with the variety of mail clients and devices it would be much more difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
Hope that's programmable as the interstate speed limits in large portions of the country are 75 or 80.
Old designs were safe for their rated life time. The trouble is that due to the inability to permit new plants, many old plants that should have been retired and replaced have been pushed into years or decades of additional service. Every time the licenses are extended it is based on the best estimates of the engineers as to how much longer the plant can last after needed rework is complete. But every time you rework and push another x years out of an old plant, you increase the chances that something will go wrong.
Get a reasonably safe storage plan or store securely on-site and permit new standardized plants.
Design once... replicate the design.
The problem with civilian nuclear power is each power plant is largely re-engineered from scratch. Every company wants the latest and greatest technical advantages versus something that just works. You see this with other power sources than nuclear, but it stands out more there because so few new nuclear plants are built today versus coal or gas plants.
If the shipyards built vessels for the Navy the way civil engineers design power plants, each nuclear sub - for example - would have this great big bulge on the hull in the reactor area. Each individual sub in a particular "class" would have the bulge be a different shape and be in a different spot. Some would come with multiple bulges. All would drive varying numbers of screws.
Military nuclear has worked relatively well because they have largely repeated what works well enough. I'm sure they all have changes they would like to make and some do get integrated in over time, but it isn't redesigned from scratch for every new ship.
Nuclear can work and some of the newer modern nuclear designs are pretty much fail safe. If we'd standardize on one of them and reuse its plans for every new plant we built, we'd be in much better shape and costs would be much less. If you have a standard layout and control system like the military does for a given class of ship, you'd reduce the operating cost as well - both in terms of people manning the control rooms and doing repairs and in parts.
For what it is worth, there is nothing in the Bible that says the fossil record is fake. There is also nothing in the Bible to say that the carbon dating of those fossil records is appreciably inaccurate. For God to have done that, he would have been intentionally trying to deceive His creation and that doesn't fit His nature.
Therefore, I assume that the interpretation of the Bible wielded by the young Earth creationists is in error and look for an alternative view. Fortunately that isn't hard to do and leads to a more consistent reading of the Bible.
While not a fan of the long time period "day", I also am straining to see the inconsistencies. Most of 2 deals with the creation of a specific place for man and describes it in some detail. The earlier sections are dealing with a general reconstruction period where the earth is restored to a second habitable state post Lucifer's fall.
If anything, the description between the day 7 rest and the detailed description of Eden can refer easily to the original creation from Gen 1:1 or possibly simply refer to the fact that the new plants had not yet fully matured. It could also be a description of the particular place where Eden was located before its specific creation.
The Bible makes no claims as to the age of anything you mention. It all hinges on three words "In the beginning" which could be any time. Any Bible interpretation suggesting a young age, is just that - an interpretation. My interpretation is that the same Bible requires an old age.
None of this is relevant to the primary work of the Bible - to show the reason why man needs to be reconciled to God, to show the method of that reconciliation, and to warn of the consequences of not reconciling.
You're forgetting Passover. Crucifixion Wedn. afternoon, high holy special Sabbath for the Passover celebration (Wedn. sunset to Thursday sunset), normal day (Thursday sunset to Friday sunset) during which time the women prepared the items to take to the tomb, normal Sabbath (Friday sunset to Saturday sunset), resurrection after Saturday sunset, followed by their first day of the week and the discovery that He was risen.
Three days and three nights. Consistent.
The only of the 10 commandments that was not carried forward to the new testament defining what sin was was specifically the admonition to keep the Sabbath. That was because of what the religious order of Jesus day had done to the tradition of Sabbath keeping. In fact, God, through Christ, went out of His way on occasion to specifically annoy the religious order in their Sabbath traditions by healing on the Sabbath and then commanding the man who was healed to take up his bed and carry it home.
The rest is still there in the new testament. The old testament commandments relating to food are gone because the Jewish people were not wandering about as nomads any longer. The old testament rules for sacrifice that were implemented to specifically cover the people's sin and acknowledge God are gone since Christ paid the price on the cross to do this. Everything else is still there. In fact, over and over again in the sermon on the mount Christ used a phrase similar to - you have heard it said ----, but I say unto you ---- where His standards and thus the standards of the new testament were higher and tougher than what was imposed in the old testament for how people should treat each other, specifically because He had come and was in the process of showing them how it was possible to live righteously and because He would send the Holy Spirit to in-dwell believers and, if they obeyed His promptings, lead them on the right path. Clearly, most don't and they will answer for that before God one day. The higher the position of authority, the more they will have to answer for.
But the law still remains as it is what will be used on the day of the great white throne judgment at the end of the recorded history in the Bible when God judges those who did not accept His plan of salvation before sending them to hell for eternity.
The new covenant is simply the final means of salvation which was alluded to from the time of man's downfall in the garden of Eden. It doesn't eliminate the definitions of sin that cause people to need salvation in the first place, and it certainly gives no indication that God treats it any more lightly on an eternal basis.
Actually, all Christians are by definition God's representatives on Earth. To bad we don't do a better job.
Strictly speaking Christ only said Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh. He doesn't say anything about the month or year. That many have made themselves laughingstocks in making projections is clear. But it is entirely possible for the Father to have told someone later and have the passage still be true as recorded. We weren't directly addressed as part of the "ye" in the verse. After all, there are still many passages of prophecy in the Bible to be fulfilled. St. Malachy either spoke a valid prophecy or he did not. Only time will tell which was true. Neither result would affect my Christianity at all. If he did speak truth, then many outcomes are possible. We could have not understood the last entry, the last entry could have indeed been added at a later point by another person as some have speculated, there could be a time period between the list and the final pope which we have now entered (the 49 years to rebuild Jerusalem, the 434 years from then to Christ's death followed by the long church age, followed by the seven years of tribulation being one example of the Daniel's 70 weeks prophecy with a gap), or perhaps the Catholic church is going to come apart and be judged by God, or perhaps the end really is near for everyone. Only time will tell, and again, it doesn't matter to my Christianity. I can say that the various messages in tongues and interpretations given in services I have attended in the last couple of years have included messages indicating His soon return, which I don't remember hearing in earlier years. I may just be paying better attention as I have gotten older. Regardless, I may not live to see tomorrow, so I need to be ready to meet Him at any time anyway.
Like most other government legislated thresholds, it hasn't been adjusted for inflation. It would be around $59,350 if it had been adjusted as computed by an online inflation calculator using 1970 (Bank Secrecy Act passage) as the base year. That's still low, but more reasonable than $10,000.
The difference is that most local retail stores bring in their goods by truck - frequently their own trucking system like Walmart. They get economies of scale for their delivery charges. If I purchase something on line, depending on the retailer, I may have a very large shipping and handling charge to transport each single item.
They shouldn't get to play the "It's unfair competition on prices. Because you don't pay sales tax we're dying," card.
If the government wants to enforce an extremely regressive form of taxation like the sales tax, that's another debate. But no whining about a tiny percentage of the cost for sales tax causing suffering when most stores - with the exception of Amazon - sometimes - charge outrageous S&H charges - and still beat on price by much more than the sales tax percentage.
The small stores should open up their own web front if they want to compete. Then they'll be whining "Don't make us figure out the complexities of every localities on-line sales tax rules!"
There's always rc.local. You can just use the old init.d list for service start order and start everything that is really important yourself in the right order. Shutdown isn't as clean, but if you don't like the way systemd does things you can at least disable most of it and do it by hand. I know that isn't an ideal solution, but at least my services now end up running when I have a login prompt. I couldn't guarantee that with systemd.
We made this decision for our C library on our embedded 65816 processor used in industrial controllers. We had no reason to represent times before the controller was installed, so losing the sign wasn't an issue. But we thought that 2038 was within the possible useful life span of the controller. 2106, not so much.
I realize that many people thought that about hardware produced for the century turnover as well, so everything about the time range is internally documented well, but we didn't have any justification for building the math routines to work with 64-bit ints just for this one function. Unsigned was the simplest solution. No host communicating with the controller could handle 64-bit time stamps or wanted to waste the extra bytes of bandwidth to read 4 zeros either.
While your value of 150,000 isn't far off according to the debt clock, the actual amount we're currently obligated for via the legislated pensions and entitlements along with the popular debt value that is bandied about and used to get the number you gave comes to something around $86.8 trillion. This is roughly 550% of the GDP. The Wall Street Journal had a good editorial on this a month or so ago.
There are many contemporary quotes from their papers and other general position papers of the time that I could use in support of my comments, but today - I like this one.
"Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People."
— Tench Coxe, 1788.
No, we were not OK with it. We're still not OK with it even with a valid cert. But I'd wager that the number of corporate VIPs and others who use unauthorized e-mail clients like gmail is larger than you'd care to admit. IT rarely wins against the VIPs regardless of policy breaches.
One of the disadvantages of small businesses is that you have to prioritize where your IT budget goes. Every decision is a tradeoff. Going with a self-signed cert in the old days worked and gave our employees some level of security against the direct snooping of credentials and content when on work sites or at home. It wasn't perfect for all the reasons you mentioned, but as a small business was deemed acceptable due to the low probability of any company actually caring enough about us to set up a MITM attack.
The only point I was making was that you can't just use POP3 or IMAP3 as a replacement for POP3S/IMAP3S due to the STARTTLS announcement from most modern e-mail servers.
Yes, actually it does. Our company was getting along nicely with a self-signed cert which we added to all the company devices as a trusted source. One enterprising engineer was using gmail. When they dropped the change on us, he could no longer use gmail and in the spirit of letting VIPs get away with anything they want mostly, we were forced to buy real certs. I'm not against real certs - especially for a company - but you can't just use plain socket access because our server broadcasts STARTTLS as an option for security in credentials - as it should, which google immediately tries to use and rejects due to the self signed cert. I'm sure we could force off the STARTTLS option, but that is actually used as a feature by some of our locations, so it isn't that simple.
It is true that the 2nd amendment was written in a time when none of these existed. But it was also written in the time immediately after the Revolutionary War when we fought for our freedom from England. Every weapon of war was included in their minds when they wrote that amendment. They didn't exclude cannons. They didn't exclude warships. If they'd just wanted people to have guns to hunt with, they would have. They wanted a people who were armed and ready to fight the next war that came along.
The reason they didn't need to worry about Farmer Jones up the road going off with a cannon and firing a shot at the school house is exactly the same reason you don't have to worry about nuclear weapons or cruise missiles or tanks or F-15s parked on your street. The big ordnance was expensive then and it is expensive today. Sheer cost of purchase, maintenance, and operating limited the people who could afford them then, just as now. But you can be assured that if modern weapons had been around then and used to fight off the British, there wouldn't have been an exception for them in the 2nd. Every military weapon was included so a militia could be called up at a moments notice to protect against any and all invaders.
Yes, we have armed forces now. Yes, we have a National Guard now. But a lot of them are elsewhere and are likely to be elsewhere for the long term. They aren't hanging around the U.S. So just because times have changed doesn't mean the risk has. I hope we never have a government go actively against its citizens in the U.S. But it has happened recently in many other countries. I don't like the fact that so many people feel the need to potentially defend themselves against the government at all. I personally don't. But I do respect their positions considering all that has gone on in the world in the last century by supposedly benign governments.
I wish there was no need to worry about crime as well, but the police manifestly cannot be everywhere at once. They mostly react to crimes that go on for a long time (riots for example) or react after a crime has occurred. Both make it necessary for a large portion of the population to wish to have a gun to protect themselves and the bigger the advantage that gun has over what the intruder might have, the better.
I appreciated the comment by seumas. He summed the argument threads up nicely.
All armed guards and checkpoints would do is use up one or two bullets early on in the rampage. The cost to provide bunker like checkpoints and the time it would take to process the kids in and out of them would be prohibitive.
Knife wielding attacker, but then I'd prefer to be armed at the time. I'd also prefer that any teacher that wanted to be armed be armed, and that any student that wanted to be armed be armed.
I don't think the amount of violence perpetrated would change significantly - gang violence in the streets of some big cities is proof that violence against students will occur regardless of whether there are safe gun-"free" zones in schools or not. Open carry, however, might seriously reduce the likelihood of nuts targeting areas where there are likely to be lots of people who would shoot back.
I happen to think the Constitution got it right with the 2nd amendment.
It is impossible to predict what would have happened had the audience been armed - or even a small minority of the audience - but I suspect that like here, there would have been fewer deaths. Possibly not 0, but fewer.
It is completely possible that there would have been 0 deaths there because the gunman wouldn't have picked a spot where he might encounter armed resistance who might be a better shot than he was. It isn't so much the quick draw wild west winner as the deterrent effect of knowing there is likely to be someone around - probably off duty cop, ex cop, active duty military, ex military, who will kill you that would help reduce the crazies. Joe Random Good Citizen probably wouldn't have the psych training to weather the surprise attack well - even if he/she were a good shot. But there are those who could and would. They are the true deterrent effect that would put a stop to the nuts.
The MAD philosophy of the Cold War era worked - even with regimes which were not what we would consider the most stable.
Another way to do this is to stop being the world's policemen. Let war and civil unrest get out of hand again in many of the developing countries and it will be a good reason for US companies to rethink outsourcing.
No. It just means the virus writers have to be a bit more complete in their attack so they sign the e-mail by the computer user. Add a key logger if needed to gather the key password. Then their e-mails look legitimate if originating from hijacked computers.
Spammers who purchase temporary e-mail accounts they know will be shut down would get a signing key with their account. I don't expect the major abused e-mail service providers would do any better checking with the extra level of signing security then than they do now for a simple account.
For an individual - no. For a company or an organization, it does make a big difference.
At our company we automatically grey list or black list sources of spam for a particular amount of time while automatically white listing people our employees send mail to. This is all done at the system level without the user having to do anything. It drops the spam load by an order of magnitude. Once spam is seen by one user - everyone on the corporate mail system automatically benefits.
Some of this can be done using remote black lists and wouldn't be affected. However there are still many messages whose content points to black listed locations where the mail originator hasn't yet been shut down or black listed which we can harvest and block at the system level after letting spam assassin do its job and analyzing its results. While that might be possible if it was pushed to the user level - with the variety of mail clients and devices it would be much more difficult.