Goddammit, I'm undoing my mods to post this since you're just blatantly misinformed - and I know you're not the only one. With the exception of a few highly restrictive states like California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, and the non-state of D.C., you can own pretty much anything you want (though due to the Hughes amendment, machine guns must be made prior to 1986). It's a common misconception that silencers, real assault rifles (meaning that you can select between semi-auto and full auto and / or burst fire), machine guns, explosives, rocket launchers, etc are illegal in the US. They're not, you simply have to jump through some hoops to get them, but if you can legally buy a gun, you can legally obtain an NFA (read: restricted) item just fine. It just requires more paperwork, a $200 fee to the ATF for a tax stamp certifying that you legally own the item, and waiting a few months for the ATF to drag their feet on processing the paperwork. Silencers are pretty cheap even - it depends on the caliber, but $800 is a pretty common price. Machine gun prices / real assault rifle prices are artificially inflated by the government though due to the post-1986 ban so a gun that should cost about $2,000 will end up costing more like $15,000 due to the artificial scarcity. Hopefully we can get that fixed one of these days....
Oh, as for "No one sane is going to take on anything with a semi-automatic rifle", the majority of the time the military doesn't even flip their rifles (well, usually carbines to be exact) to burst fire / full auto because it's very hard to control and you burn through your ammo a lot faster without being more effective. As for US citizens being able to fight back against the military? The US military has roughly 3 million soldiers (this counts desk jockeys and members of the reserve as well as the coast guard and national guard) and we'll round up and say 1 million police officers / federal agents (again, counting desk jockeys). The LOW estimate for the number of gun owners in the US is 40 million people with about 90 guns in private hands per 100 people in the country (that includes children), so not only is there a large abundance of weapons and ammo in private hands, but private citizens who own guns outnumber the police and military by around 10 to 1. Sure, they have tanks and bombers, but unless they REALLY wanted to destroy their own infrastructure and a lot of non-combatants on their own side, they wouldn't use them (because even if they won, the country would be totally FUBAR'd for decades).
Note: I'm not promoting or hoping for any conflict between citizens and the military - merely stating some facts regarding the number of people on each side (assuming gun owners all sided together) and how well equipped they are.
Or they just don't value it enough. Some people can buy music, but torrent it because the don't find it worth paying for. If they can't get the new album from *insert band name here* for free, they have no problem not listening to it because they're no worse off if they don't hear it.
Re:Your right to what?
on
BTJunkie No More?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
We also know that in the absence of said torrents, people won't start fishing out thousands and thousands of dollars for that software / movie / music - they'll simply not use it at all.
The US military are scum and soldiers are criminals.
There was no reason for this war and yet the US won't take responsibility for the consequences. Fuck the US military and those who support it. Scumbags.
And that's all very true - but it still has jack shit to do with Iraqi's looting their own universities,
Yea, I won't be buying this crap. When I first heard of it, I thought Alan Moore was writing it and I was interested. Once I found out that this was just DC being dicks and tarnishing his work, I lost interest.
Users want a controlled market place with safe apps. And guess what, they do.
Really? I don't know anyone who wants a company telling them what programs they can and cannot run on their computer.
The general market is quite happy with Apple.
Well that explains Apple's almost non-existent desktop / laptop market share, their stagnant phone market share, and their rapidly falling tablet market share.
trying to convince the user that they asked for red but got blue, and they really wanted the blue all the time and were confused previously
You work as a used car salesman, don't you? Someone walks in and says they want a Mustang and you spend hours BS-ing them about how they REALLY want this old DeVille instead and that they really wanted it all along but only wanted a Mustang because they were too stupid to know that they wanted a DeVile.
Quite true. I also have to question their intelligence of wanting to waste billions more developing a bigger bomb instead of just working their collective IQ of 5 for a few minutes and realizing that they could use TWO of the existing bombs in succession.
That's great, so roughly 45 years after my unborn grandchildren die of old age, the copyright will finally expire.
but definitely don't steal it.
First off, you cannot steal something if they still have the item. Secondly, by their own words, buying used = pirating, so why not? The greedy fucks view it the same, so why pay any money to Gamestop for it then?
No, they can't, because it's ILLEGAL. Do you not understand the doctrine of first sale? The problem is that gamers on an individual level don't have the money for a lawsuit - but if people organized a class action lawsuit over the internet, we could get the government to bitchslap them so hard that they'd almost be having to pay us every time we play a game.
That means the entire experience is going to require you be authenticated with their service, constantly, and some of the core content will only exist on that service. In other words it's going to look at lot more like Steam, and a lot less like the 1980's.
And that means that there will be a lot more piracy or people who just stop buying from the major game studios until they quit being greedy little shits who think they can violate the doctrine of first sale to make perpetual profits off of one copy of a game.
So he's not just some random executive, he's a gamer at heart.
A gamer who wants to badly fuck other gamers over to make an easy buck. It's utterly absurd that he thinks he has a right to perpetual profits after the original point of sale for a particular copy of a game.
I simply point out it's a violation of the doctrine of first sale.
Which poses the question, why hasn't some group (say Slashdot for example) helped organize people for a class action lawsuit against the entire gaming industry for violating the doctrine of first sale on a massive level?
Literally, I want you to name a single American business which is now government owned because of the stimulus.
At this second? None I'm aware of. However, you cannot deny that they took over GM after they ran themselves into the ground (can't let those union workers end up unemployed - better to bend over the rest of the American people and shove the union picket signs up their ass), then the truly horrific thing is that they then gave GM MORE taxpayers money (from TARP funds) to "pay back" the "loans" that they used to keep from going bankrupt. Then to put the icing on the shit filled cake, GM then spent taxpayers money to make commercials lying about how they'd paid off their loans because they were so profitable.
Every political party (except the Greens) voted for it. Very few NZ citizens agree with it.
Hence why I laugh at the notion that the people actually control the government in a democracy. The politicians do whatever they please because the people have no recourse but to vote for a different politician with the same goals.
Dude, look at the local and states laws in California. They LOVE the dictator mentality and having the government meddle in every last area of their lives.
Of course by "started the war" you mean "peaceably left and the North kept troops stationed in a sovereign nation, which then attacked when said sovereign nation tried to remove them".
You can thank the exponential growth of bureaucracy over the last 70 years for that. It's the same reason why it took 7 years to build the original World Trade Center and now more than a decade after 9/11, they're "hoping" that it will be almost done by 2020 (19 years after).
True, and almost every economist is intelligent enough to know the difference between "we need higher gas taxes" and "If we want to achieve goal X, we must increase gas taxes" - apparently Knittel is not among these economists. Knittel also fails to realize that consumers have CHOICE. If someone really wants a car that gets over 40 mpg, there are plenty of them out there. If they want something super fast and don't care about mpg, there are plenty of those as well - there's also a massive variety in between.
or C) Apple is just a bunch of asshats. Seeing how that's tons of documented evidence of complete and utter asshattery coming out of Cupertino, I'm going with C).
Ask Uncle Sam how well that fight against pornography worked. Or the war on drugs.
Or the war on alcohol - which is the greatest example of why the government does far more harm than good when it tries to tell people what they should want. Not only do the majority ignore the laws and do it anyways, but they also create a large number of violent criminals to supply said product to the masses.
Bingo. If it was priced at say $100 for the 16 GB model and then $25-$50 more for each increment in storage, I'd snap one up. My view is that for the next couple of years tablets will progress so fast that anything you buy will be utter crap so fast that it's not worth the money.
It should be called SOAA - Stop Online Activity Act, because that's the real agenda here. Companies that failed to adapt to a changed market and blaming the internet for their failures and want it banned.
Slashdot Mirror
Goddammit, I'm undoing my mods to post this since you're just blatantly misinformed - and I know you're not the only one. With the exception of a few highly restrictive states like California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, and the non-state of D.C., you can own pretty much anything you want (though due to the Hughes amendment, machine guns must be made prior to 1986). It's a common misconception that silencers, real assault rifles (meaning that you can select between semi-auto and full auto and / or burst fire), machine guns, explosives, rocket launchers, etc are illegal in the US. They're not, you simply have to jump through some hoops to get them, but if you can legally buy a gun, you can legally obtain an NFA (read: restricted) item just fine. It just requires more paperwork, a $200 fee to the ATF for a tax stamp certifying that you legally own the item, and waiting a few months for the ATF to drag their feet on processing the paperwork. Silencers are pretty cheap even - it depends on the caliber, but $800 is a pretty common price. Machine gun prices / real assault rifle prices are artificially inflated by the government though due to the post-1986 ban so a gun that should cost about $2,000 will end up costing more like $15,000 due to the artificial scarcity. Hopefully we can get that fixed one of these days....
Oh, as for "No one sane is going to take on anything with a semi-automatic rifle", the majority of the time the military doesn't even flip their rifles (well, usually carbines to be exact) to burst fire / full auto because it's very hard to control and you burn through your ammo a lot faster without being more effective. As for US citizens being able to fight back against the military? The US military has roughly 3 million soldiers (this counts desk jockeys and members of the reserve as well as the coast guard and national guard) and we'll round up and say 1 million police officers / federal agents (again, counting desk jockeys). The LOW estimate for the number of gun owners in the US is 40 million people with about 90 guns in private hands per 100 people in the country (that includes children), so not only is there a large abundance of weapons and ammo in private hands, but private citizens who own guns outnumber the police and military by around 10 to 1. Sure, they have tanks and bombers, but unless they REALLY wanted to destroy their own infrastructure and a lot of non-combatants on their own side, they wouldn't use them (because even if they won, the country would be totally FUBAR'd for decades).
Note: I'm not promoting or hoping for any conflict between citizens and the military - merely stating some facts regarding the number of people on each side (assuming gun owners all sided together) and how well equipped they are.
Or they just don't value it enough. Some people can buy music, but torrent it because the don't find it worth paying for. If they can't get the new album from *insert band name here* for free, they have no problem not listening to it because they're no worse off if they don't hear it.
We also know that in the absence of said torrents, people won't start fishing out thousands and thousands of dollars for that software / movie / music - they'll simply not use it at all.
The US military are scum and soldiers are criminals.
There was no reason for this war and yet the US won't take responsibility for the consequences. Fuck the US military and those who support it. Scumbags.
And that's all very true - but it still has jack shit to do with Iraqi's looting their own universities,
Yea, I won't be buying this crap. When I first heard of it, I thought Alan Moore was writing it and I was interested. Once I found out that this was just DC being dicks and tarnishing his work, I lost interest.
Users want a controlled market place with safe apps. And guess what, they do.
Really? I don't know anyone who wants a company telling them what programs they can and cannot run on their computer.
The general market is quite happy with Apple.
Well that explains Apple's almost non-existent desktop / laptop market share, their stagnant phone market share, and their rapidly falling tablet market share.
trying to convince the user that they asked for red but got blue, and they really wanted the blue all the time and were confused previously
You work as a used car salesman, don't you? Someone walks in and says they want a Mustang and you spend hours BS-ing them about how they REALLY want this old DeVille instead and that they really wanted it all along but only wanted a Mustang because they were too stupid to know that they wanted a DeVile.
Quite true. I also have to question their intelligence of wanting to waste billions more developing a bigger bomb instead of just working their collective IQ of 5 for a few minutes and realizing that they could use TWO of the existing bombs in succession.
Just wait until the copyright expires.
That's great, so roughly 45 years after my unborn grandchildren die of old age, the copyright will finally expire.
but definitely don't steal it.
First off, you cannot steal something if they still have the item. Secondly, by their own words, buying used = pirating, so why not? The greedy fucks view it the same, so why pay any money to Gamestop for it then?
No, they can't, because it's ILLEGAL. Do you not understand the doctrine of first sale? The problem is that gamers on an individual level don't have the money for a lawsuit - but if people organized a class action lawsuit over the internet, we could get the government to bitchslap them so hard that they'd almost be having to pay us every time we play a game.
That means the entire experience is going to require you be authenticated with their service, constantly, and some of the core content will only exist on that service. In other words it's going to look at lot more like Steam, and a lot less like the 1980's.
And that means that there will be a lot more piracy or people who just stop buying from the major game studios until they quit being greedy little shits who think they can violate the doctrine of first sale to make perpetual profits off of one copy of a game.
So he's not just some random executive, he's a gamer at heart.
A gamer who wants to badly fuck other gamers over to make an easy buck. It's utterly absurd that he thinks he has a right to perpetual profits after the original point of sale for a particular copy of a game.
I simply point out it's a violation of the doctrine of first sale.
Which poses the question, why hasn't some group (say Slashdot for example) helped organize people for a class action lawsuit against the entire gaming industry for violating the doctrine of first sale on a massive level?
Literally, I want you to name a single American business which is now government owned because of the stimulus.
At this second? None I'm aware of. However, you cannot deny that they took over GM after they ran themselves into the ground (can't let those union workers end up unemployed - better to bend over the rest of the American people and shove the union picket signs up their ass), then the truly horrific thing is that they then gave GM MORE taxpayers money (from TARP funds) to "pay back" the "loans" that they used to keep from going bankrupt. Then to put the icing on the shit filled cake, GM then spent taxpayers money to make commercials lying about how they'd paid off their loans because they were so profitable.
Every political party (except the Greens) voted for it. Very few NZ citizens agree with it.
Hence why I laugh at the notion that the people actually control the government in a democracy. The politicians do whatever they please because the people have no recourse but to vote for a different politician with the same goals.
Dude, look at the local and states laws in California. They LOVE the dictator mentality and having the government meddle in every last area of their lives.
Of course by "started the war" you mean "peaceably left and the North kept troops stationed in a sovereign nation, which then attacked when said sovereign nation tried to remove them".
You can thank the exponential growth of bureaucracy over the last 70 years for that. It's the same reason why it took 7 years to build the original World Trade Center and now more than a decade after 9/11, they're "hoping" that it will be almost done by 2020 (19 years after).
Clearly you never did marching band in high school or college.
True, and almost every economist is intelligent enough to know the difference between "we need higher gas taxes" and "If we want to achieve goal X, we must increase gas taxes" - apparently Knittel is not among these economists. Knittel also fails to realize that consumers have CHOICE. If someone really wants a car that gets over 40 mpg, there are plenty of them out there. If they want something super fast and don't care about mpg, there are plenty of those as well - there's also a massive variety in between.
or C) Apple is just a bunch of asshats. Seeing how that's tons of documented evidence of complete and utter asshattery coming out of Cupertino, I'm going with C).
Kim Jong-un has higher approval ratings than Congress. But Congress doesn't care, because the electorate doesn't have the power to punish them.
FTFY
Ask Uncle Sam how well that fight against pornography worked. Or the war on drugs.
Or the war on alcohol - which is the greatest example of why the government does far more harm than good when it tries to tell people what they should want. Not only do the majority ignore the laws and do it anyways, but they also create a large number of violent criminals to supply said product to the masses.
Bingo. If it was priced at say $100 for the 16 GB model and then $25-$50 more for each increment in storage, I'd snap one up. My view is that for the next couple of years tablets will progress so fast that anything you buy will be utter crap so fast that it's not worth the money.
Just remember, AMD's 8150 FX processor hit 8.5 GHz with two cores.
It should be called SOAA - Stop Online Activity Act, because that's the real agenda here. Companies that failed to adapt to a changed market and blaming the internet for their failures and want it banned.