I can agree with most of that. While many gun owners are happy to point to the second amendment, few of them really get that "well regulated militia" bit. I served in the Navy for eight years. They didn't just hand out firearms to anyone. You had to qualify in boot camp with a.22, but that didn't entitle you to carry one around, locked and loaded. Only after further training were you permitted to use real combat weapons. But, still, you weren't issued a weapon to keep beside your bunk - small arms were kept in a small arms locker, and only broken out when there was a need for them.
Well regulated - you get qualified, you learn when to use them and when not to use them, and you TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for them.
Yeah, I can see denying a lot of people the "right" to carry weapons around. They ain't qualified to carry a BB gun, let alone a lethal weapon.
Alright - you've driven your car into the city's sewer plant, and the roof is six inches under the surface of one of the ponds. You and all the other "rights holders" are hoping to use some jumper cables to get the car started again, so that you can drive it out of the pond.
So - you're saying that the couple of decades from your youth are to be considered "normal". We're going to ignore all of the evidence that points to cyclical warming and cooling on planet earth, and use two decades to define "normal".
Does everyone forget that the Native Americans lived on this continent for untold thousand of years, before any Euros showed up? Maybe we should be asking them, "What is "normal" around here?"
Want more stupid bullshit? TFS only compares the past twenty years. Let us go back to my high school days.
The place is West Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Penn Power's electric plant in West Pittsburgh emitted a black column of smoke, 24/7, 365. Back in the day, it was common for housewives to do laundry at home, then hang laundry out on a clothes line. Not in West Pittsburgh, though. Clothes hanging outside would come back inside grungy on the best of days, and when the wind was blowing directly from the electric plant, clothes would turn black.
I can't remember the exact year - it may have been 1971 - when the government forced Penn Power to put up a huge chimney, with "scrubbers" inside of it. After the chimney was put up, a few years of normal weather eventually washed 99.9% of all that soot away, or the vegetation absorbed it. Today, West Pittsburgh is as clean and pretty as any other town in the Beaver Valley.
So, the summary is going back to an arbitrary point in time at which government had ALREADY forced industry to clean up their acts.
Granted - "clean" is a relative thing. Until we reach the point where there is zero pollution, there will always be room for improvement. But grabbing an arbitrary point in time, without any comparison to previous times, then claiming that there is little or no improvement since that time is misleading, even dishonest.
I don't entirely agree with you, but it has been pointed out that some "rights holders" have bought up patents as a defense against being sued by patent trolls. So yeah, it makes sense, in a way, to file for trivial patents as a defense against other trivial patents.
It would be better though, if all the legitimate big players in the patent games would just declare a truce, get together, and lobby for patent reform - along with copyright reform.
The system is most definitely broken. I don't think that Samsung is taking the "best" approach to fixing the real problem - not by a long shot.
We need an analogy here, I think. A housing developer built on some low lying land, in a "classy" area of town. All the in-crowd bought his houses - that is, the "rights holders bought homes in the subdivision. The city's sewer system backs up onto these properties. Samsung's "fix" here, is to add three inches of topsoil to their own property to keep the sewerage from running onto their own property. Of course, that does nothing about the sewerage running in the streets, or on their neighbor's yards. The whole neighborhood still stinks to high heaven, and it's an unhealthy place to live.
It's time for the subdivision to partner with government, and get the damned sewer system fixed, and get the crap out of everyone's neighborhoods!!
You want science, I can't supply that. I can only show the empirical evidence. Not one city can show a decline in crime in general, or violent crime specifically, as a result of passing gun control laws or ordinances. Not one. Various cities and states do, however, have statistics that violent crime decreased, along with crime in general, after relaxing gun control laws.
Actually - no. The violent crime is what goes up, not misdemeanor possession charges. Not even felony possession charges. It's the violent crime that goes up, along with crimes involving weapons. Crooks know that citizens are defenseless after the guns are outlawed. Crooks are crooked, but they aren't necessarily stupid.
Yes - what are you squawking about? Tell you what - take Windows 7 or Windows 8, whichever you prefer. Slap it onto a ten year old computer. See how it crawls. Especially if the original purchaser decided to opt for the minimum amount of RAM. When you're tired of suffering, take that very same ten year old hardware, and install whichever flavor of *nix you care to install. Linux, BSD, Solaris - I don't care which.
None of the *nixes are going to turn that old hardware into a high performance machine, but any of them will keep your machine running pretty painlessly.
I'll note that the more ram installed, the better Windows will do. In that case, the difference between Windows and *nix will be less dramatic, but you're still going to see a difference.
You already knew that - but did you read the article? That was my challenge to AC - those millions of Windows viruses can be reduced by an order of magnitude. Ditto for his claim of 1200 Linux claims.;^)
The Canucks? They've always been a more stable people than we are. You can't use THEM as an example.
So, what is your solution? Repeal the second amendment, confiscate all the weapons? That's more than a hundred million weapons that you know about. God knows how many that you don't know about. How long will it take to round up all the weapons? Ten years? A hundred years? See, I'm not giving MY guns up, and there are several millions other American citizens who aren't going to surrender their weapons. How are you going to get my weapons? Home invasions, and searches? What are you prepared to do to confiscate all the weapons?
The best thing to be done, is to round up all the CRIMINALS who use weapons, and make sure they never walk the streets again. CRIMINALS commit crimes, for which they often go unpunished, or inappropriately punished.
Some moron kid gets caught two or three times with a big of grass, and he goes to the pen for years. A real criminal commits an armed robbery, he goes to the same pen, and he's out in half the time.
Some woman had joint pains. Someone told her that WD-40 would help to ease the joint pains. Instead of asking "how much", or doing any research, the woman supposedly BATHED in a tub of WD-40.
I really don't know how true the story is. My wife told it to me, she swears it's true, yada yada yada . . .
Anyway, please, when you get your moon dust cosmetics, follow the guidelines that Avon and Maybelline publish and distribure with every 3 gram bottle they sell.
It returns for more helium? As for those humans - just tell them to get the docking procedure right the first time. I mean, you don't have to hand off the final approach to a computer, do you?
Just send a super model. Hundreds of thousands of men will start searching for ways to get there.
Better yet - get Avon to hint to the world that moon dust is the new wonder ingredient in the fight against aging. Instead of the men, millions of women will be racing to the moon!
We pissed away more than two decades with that stupid ass "space plane" thing. It's like America said, "Well, we were the first on the moon - we'll never beat that, so we'll just give up now. Oh - launch that space plane thingy occasionally, to give lip service to exploration and research."
There has been a lot of research done, in the form of experimentation. The empirical data gathered suggests a plan of action that is contrary to the gun control zealots. So - that empirical data is suppressed at every opportunity, and more "research" is called for.
When a city or state enacts draconian gun control laws - crime goes up. When a city or state relaxes gun control laws - crime goes down.
Stories about crimes being averted because someone had a gun are squashed. They never get into the mainstream media. Those stories tend to disprove the gun control advocate's theories, so they don't get national attention.
There may be dishonesty on the part of the NRA, or other gun rights activists, but I don't see it. The dishonesty of the gun CONTROL advocates is blatant.
As for the common man with no dog in the fight - he believes what he hears, 45 times each month. He never hears about the teenage boy defending himself AND his little sister from a home invader. Never hears any of the stories about legally owned guns saving lives, saving property, saving virginity, saving dignity. It's only the ILLEGAL guns we hear about, which are ALREADY illegal!
1200 viruses? I think you're exaggerating. Maybe you're counting some variants of the same "virus" - like several times each. I don't know the exact number, to be honest. I do know that I was repairing damage due to exploits on Windows monthly. When I switched to Linux, I stopped repairing computers, until hardware broke.
How many millions of viruses are available for Windows now? So few virus writers support Linux . . . *sigh*
Here's a number that will blow your mind:
"At day’s end on April 12, for example, Symantec published the summary shown below, noting that its latest Virus Definitions file contained 17,702,868 separate signatures."
One of the neighbor kids is looking for a job right now. The boy ain't real bright in a lot of ways, but he knows his way around Linux. Let's put him on as a temp, if he works out, we can consider making him full time for ten dollars an hour. Yeah, he'll help Miss Klamath and Joe Bungler to figure out how to use all those cool new applications. Heck, the FBI has come around asking about him - he must be good!
Nonsense. Nuke from orbit, install Linux, and when the grunts come in, blame THEM for screwing up the machines. "Miss Marvel, what do you MEAN you can't find those reports? Didn't you save them to the server? Get on the server, and FIND THEM! No, no! Don't go crying at me - just get the job done!"
"Jenkins, I need the estimates for the gymnasium equipment ASAP. What do you mean your computer is different? Have you got a pornographic desktop AGAIN? No? So you got rid of that? Alright - get those estimates, I have a meeting with the School Board at ten o'clock! Don't make me come down there!"
Let the grunts figure it out. It's EDUCATION system, right? Let them act educated, or let them go home.
I'm sorry - did you have anything intelligent to say? It sounded to me like you have attempted to justify a home owner's murder by an intruder, by saying that he was trying to get to a weapon. The home owner owns a weapon, so he deserved to die, is that it?
I erred, I believe. I should have just said "bees", where I said "honey bees". Overall, the bees - honey or otherwise - pollinate more human edible crops than any other creatures. It's quite possible that in times past, other creatures such as flies, wasps, and butterflies held a more important position than they do today. But, again - we've very nearly eradicated so many of those other creatures.
From the years 1872 to 2011, the researchers see slight declines in the overall number of bee species in the northeastern United States.
Three species — all bumble bees — showed signs of rapid and recent population collapse. Other species showed more gradual declines.
More than half of all bee species changed in proportion over time. Twenty-nine percent of the species decreased and 27 percent increased.
Bees that showed the greatest increase are mostly species introduced to North America by Europeans that were scarce in the earliest historical samples but made up an ever-increasing proportion of more recent samples.
The declining bee species tend to have larger body sizes, restricted diets, and shorter flight seasons.
“Southern” bees are getting more abundant as the climate warms.
And, with that, I must admit to a lot of ignorance. I have only ever studied honey bees, because of their importance to our food production. I really can't tell you very much about bumble bees, carpenter bees, those little things that I call sweat bees, or even if hornets are closely related to bees. I know more about wasps than I do about most bees. Wasps are wonderful creatures too, but that's another subject!
Yes, I believe the PDF that I linked to specifies that the plants pull it from the soil. If it does not, there are references that indicate that it does - I'll leave you to search for them. I've read as much in at least three different places.
Slashdot Mirror
I can agree with most of that. While many gun owners are happy to point to the second amendment, few of them really get that "well regulated militia" bit. I served in the Navy for eight years. They didn't just hand out firearms to anyone. You had to qualify in boot camp with a .22, but that didn't entitle you to carry one around, locked and loaded. Only after further training were you permitted to use real combat weapons. But, still, you weren't issued a weapon to keep beside your bunk - small arms were kept in a small arms locker, and only broken out when there was a need for them.
Well regulated - you get qualified, you learn when to use them and when not to use them, and you TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for them.
Yeah, I can see denying a lot of people the "right" to carry weapons around. They ain't qualified to carry a BB gun, let alone a lethal weapon.
Alright - you've driven your car into the city's sewer plant, and the roof is six inches under the surface of one of the ponds. You and all the other "rights holders" are hoping to use some jumper cables to get the car started again, so that you can drive it out of the pond.
Maybe you're confusing China with the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prisoner_population_rate_world_2012_map.png
China is a nice pretty green color on that map. The US is some ugly color that I can't identify.
So - you're saying that the couple of decades from your youth are to be considered "normal". We're going to ignore all of the evidence that points to cyclical warming and cooling on planet earth, and use two decades to define "normal".
Does everyone forget that the Native Americans lived on this continent for untold thousand of years, before any Euros showed up? Maybe we should be asking them, "What is "normal" around here?"
" we've had all those things for thousands of years, except for 'destabilitization' which has gone on for millions of years."
I never have mod points when I really want them. +500 insightful!
Want more stupid bullshit? TFS only compares the past twenty years. Let us go back to my high school days.
The place is West Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Penn Power's electric plant in West Pittsburgh emitted a black column of smoke, 24/7, 365. Back in the day, it was common for housewives to do laundry at home, then hang laundry out on a clothes line. Not in West Pittsburgh, though. Clothes hanging outside would come back inside grungy on the best of days, and when the wind was blowing directly from the electric plant, clothes would turn black.
I can't remember the exact year - it may have been 1971 - when the government forced Penn Power to put up a huge chimney, with "scrubbers" inside of it. After the chimney was put up, a few years of normal weather eventually washed 99.9% of all that soot away, or the vegetation absorbed it. Today, West Pittsburgh is as clean and pretty as any other town in the Beaver Valley.
So, the summary is going back to an arbitrary point in time at which government had ALREADY forced industry to clean up their acts.
Granted - "clean" is a relative thing. Until we reach the point where there is zero pollution, there will always be room for improvement. But grabbing an arbitrary point in time, without any comparison to previous times, then claiming that there is little or no improvement since that time is misleading, even dishonest.
AC's response is kinda messed up.
I don't entirely agree with you, but it has been pointed out that some "rights holders" have bought up patents as a defense against being sued by patent trolls. So yeah, it makes sense, in a way, to file for trivial patents as a defense against other trivial patents.
It would be better though, if all the legitimate big players in the patent games would just declare a truce, get together, and lobby for patent reform - along with copyright reform.
The system is most definitely broken. I don't think that Samsung is taking the "best" approach to fixing the real problem - not by a long shot.
We need an analogy here, I think. A housing developer built on some low lying land, in a "classy" area of town. All the in-crowd bought his houses - that is, the "rights holders bought homes in the subdivision. The city's sewer system backs up onto these properties. Samsung's "fix" here, is to add three inches of topsoil to their own property to keep the sewerage from running onto their own property. Of course, that does nothing about the sewerage running in the streets, or on their neighbor's yards. The whole neighborhood still stinks to high heaven, and it's an unhealthy place to live.
It's time for the subdivision to partner with government, and get the damned sewer system fixed, and get the crap out of everyone's neighborhoods!!
"Do you want more carbon in the atmosphere and higher taxes on labour, or less carbon in the atmosphere and lower taxes on labour?"
Are you addressing this question to the ruling class, or to the working class, or to the proles?
You want science, I can't supply that. I can only show the empirical evidence. Not one city can show a decline in crime in general, or violent crime specifically, as a result of passing gun control laws or ordinances. Not one. Various cities and states do, however, have statistics that violent crime decreased, along with crime in general, after relaxing gun control laws.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/02/17/the-nation-toughest-gun-control-law-made-massachusetts-less-safe/3845k7xHzkwTrBWy4KpkEM/story.html
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jan/24/states-crime-rates-show-scant-linkage-to-gun-laws/?page=all
http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt1Zy_ASNyA "I think that's just an invitation to somebody with a gun!"
There is no science that I'm aware of that explains it - but it is obvious that gun control laws FAIL TO GIVE THE DESIRED RESULTS!!
Actually - no. The violent crime is what goes up, not misdemeanor possession charges. Not even felony possession charges. It's the violent crime that goes up, along with crimes involving weapons. Crooks know that citizens are defenseless after the guns are outlawed. Crooks are crooked, but they aren't necessarily stupid.
Yes - what are you squawking about? Tell you what - take Windows 7 or Windows 8, whichever you prefer. Slap it onto a ten year old computer. See how it crawls. Especially if the original purchaser decided to opt for the minimum amount of RAM. When you're tired of suffering, take that very same ten year old hardware, and install whichever flavor of *nix you care to install. Linux, BSD, Solaris - I don't care which.
None of the *nixes are going to turn that old hardware into a high performance machine, but any of them will keep your machine running pretty painlessly.
I'll note that the more ram installed, the better Windows will do. In that case, the difference between Windows and *nix will be less dramatic, but you're still going to see a difference.
You already knew that - but did you read the article? That was my challenge to AC - those millions of Windows viruses can be reduced by an order of magnitude. Ditto for his claim of 1200 Linux claims. ;^)
The Canucks? They've always been a more stable people than we are. You can't use THEM as an example.
So, what is your solution? Repeal the second amendment, confiscate all the weapons? That's more than a hundred million weapons that you know about. God knows how many that you don't know about. How long will it take to round up all the weapons? Ten years? A hundred years? See, I'm not giving MY guns up, and there are several millions other American citizens who aren't going to surrender their weapons. How are you going to get my weapons? Home invasions, and searches? What are you prepared to do to confiscate all the weapons?
The best thing to be done, is to round up all the CRIMINALS who use weapons, and make sure they never walk the streets again. CRIMINALS commit crimes, for which they often go unpunished, or inappropriately punished.
Some moron kid gets caught two or three times with a big of grass, and he goes to the pen for years. A real criminal commits an armed robbery, he goes to the same pen, and he's out in half the time.
Our priorities are so skewed - - -
That reminds me of a story -
Some woman had joint pains. Someone told her that WD-40 would help to ease the joint pains. Instead of asking "how much", or doing any research, the woman supposedly BATHED in a tub of WD-40.
I really don't know how true the story is. My wife told it to me, she swears it's true, yada yada yada . . .
Anyway, please, when you get your moon dust cosmetics, follow the guidelines that Avon and Maybelline publish and distribure with every 3 gram bottle they sell.
It returns for more helium? As for those humans - just tell them to get the docking procedure right the first time. I mean, you don't have to hand off the final approach to a computer, do you?
Just send a super model. Hundreds of thousands of men will start searching for ways to get there.
Better yet - get Avon to hint to the world that moon dust is the new wonder ingredient in the fight against aging. Instead of the men, millions of women will be racing to the moon!
We pissed away more than two decades with that stupid ass "space plane" thing. It's like America said, "Well, we were the first on the moon - we'll never beat that, so we'll just give up now. Oh - launch that space plane thingy occasionally, to give lip service to exploration and research."
User: GuardianLTD
Password: 123password
Yeah, it takes high caliber NSA types to "hack" into most systems.
There has been a lot of research done, in the form of experimentation. The empirical data gathered suggests a plan of action that is contrary to the gun control zealots. So - that empirical data is suppressed at every opportunity, and more "research" is called for.
When a city or state enacts draconian gun control laws - crime goes up. When a city or state relaxes gun control laws - crime goes down.
Stories about crimes being averted because someone had a gun are squashed. They never get into the mainstream media. Those stories tend to disprove the gun control advocate's theories, so they don't get national attention.
There may be dishonesty on the part of the NRA, or other gun rights activists, but I don't see it. The dishonesty of the gun CONTROL advocates is blatant.
As for the common man with no dog in the fight - he believes what he hears, 45 times each month. He never hears about the teenage boy defending himself AND his little sister from a home invader. Never hears any of the stories about legally owned guns saving lives, saving property, saving virginity, saving dignity. It's only the ILLEGAL guns we hear about, which are ALREADY illegal!
1200 viruses? I think you're exaggerating. Maybe you're counting some variants of the same "virus" - like several times each. I don't know the exact number, to be honest. I do know that I was repairing damage due to exploits on Windows monthly. When I switched to Linux, I stopped repairing computers, until hardware broke.
How many millions of viruses are available for Windows now? So few virus writers support Linux . . . *sigh*
Here's a number that will blow your mind:
"At day’s end on April 12, for example, Symantec published the summary shown below, noting that its latest Virus Definitions file contained 17,702,868 separate signatures."
Don't take my word for it - read the article!
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/the-malware-numbers-game-how-many-viruses-are-out-there/4783
One of the neighbor kids is looking for a job right now. The boy ain't real bright in a lot of ways, but he knows his way around Linux. Let's put him on as a temp, if he works out, we can consider making him full time for ten dollars an hour. Yeah, he'll help Miss Klamath and Joe Bungler to figure out how to use all those cool new applications. Heck, the FBI has come around asking about him - he must be good!
Nonsense. Nuke from orbit, install Linux, and when the grunts come in, blame THEM for screwing up the machines. "Miss Marvel, what do you MEAN you can't find those reports? Didn't you save them to the server? Get on the server, and FIND THEM! No, no! Don't go crying at me - just get the job done!"
"Jenkins, I need the estimates for the gymnasium equipment ASAP. What do you mean your computer is different? Have you got a pornographic desktop AGAIN? No? So you got rid of that? Alright - get those estimates, I have a meeting with the School Board at ten o'clock! Don't make me come down there!"
Let the grunts figure it out. It's EDUCATION system, right? Let them act educated, or let them go home.
I'm sorry - did you have anything intelligent to say? It sounded to me like you have attempted to justify a home owner's murder by an intruder, by saying that he was trying to get to a weapon. The home owner owns a weapon, so he deserved to die, is that it?
I erred, I believe. I should have just said "bees", where I said "honey bees". Overall, the bees - honey or otherwise - pollinate more human edible crops than any other creatures. It's quite possible that in times past, other creatures such as flies, wasps, and butterflies held a more important position than they do today. But, again - we've very nearly eradicated so many of those other creatures.
There was a headline in my newsfeed recently about bumble bees - let me look for that again - - - - http://news.discovery.com/animals/insects/study-bumble-bees-at-risk-while-others-thrive-13030.htm#mkcpgn=rssnws1
Here are some of the key findings:
From the years 1872 to 2011, the researchers see slight declines in the overall number of bee species in the northeastern United States.
Three species — all bumble bees — showed signs of rapid and recent population collapse. Other species showed more gradual declines.
More than half of all bee species changed in proportion over time. Twenty-nine percent of the species decreased and 27 percent increased.
Bees that showed the greatest increase are mostly species introduced to North America by Europeans that were scarce in the earliest historical samples but made up an ever-increasing proportion of more recent samples.
The declining bee species tend to have larger body sizes, restricted diets, and shorter flight seasons.
“Southern” bees are getting more abundant as the climate warms.
And, with that, I must admit to a lot of ignorance. I have only ever studied honey bees, because of their importance to our food production. I really can't tell you very much about bumble bees, carpenter bees, those little things that I call sweat bees, or even if hornets are closely related to bees. I know more about wasps than I do about most bees. Wasps are wonderful creatures too, but that's another subject!
Yes, I believe the PDF that I linked to specifies that the plants pull it from the soil. If it does not, there are references that indicate that it does - I'll leave you to search for them. I've read as much in at least three different places.