Doesn't that back up my implication that they're a bad idea then? They're so difficult to change that you force the elected representatives of the current population to bend the rules. Better to allow flexibility in the first place and allow everyone to scream if a bad change is proposed.
The second amendment to the US constitution seems destined to cause huge problems in my opinion. Cheap weapons / guns are going to be designed that can take out an entire room with the press of a single trigger. Will these be allowed? If not why not?
Setting down your position in stone is always going to be caught out by changes in technology, society and so on.
Part of me wants a constitutional right to Free Speech here in the UK, but in practice we do ok with a tradition of Free Speech that informs our current lawmakers. I admit some of our more egregious laws to do with hate speech are an abomination but I suspect they'll be repealed should they ever be shown to genuinely curtail proper debate of issues.
Any kind of set in stone right is bound to butt up against another supposed right, a constitution just causes paralysis.
Of course I may be wrong, the USA is doing pretty well although coming from an Old World country I'd have to say that it's still early days for the US.
The inadvertent blocking of Wikipedia was quickly reversed though. Surely a sign that the system has checks and balances?
The blocking of individual ISPs has been authorised by individual court decisions. I may (in fact I do) disagree with most of these but it is fully transparent.
When you say you are not sure what they will be blocking next month then, yes that is true, but when they do block it you'll know about it and have a chance to complain.
We have plenty of stupid laws, when they get too annoying they get reversed, that's the way the system works.
You kind of contradict yourself here. You point out that the average Brit was not put off by the IRA which I agree was a far bigger threat (sponsored by Americans I may add), but then claim that we're afraid of the Islamist idiots.
I don't think we are at all afraid of the Islamist idiots. The media doesn't barage us with stories either. Sure there are a few but most people don't take much notice.
As for surveillance, I think the prevailing attitude is that spies spy. What on Earth do we expect them to do? We pay a lot for them. they have several very large buildings in plain sight. If they start to abuse it in the ways that have been suggested then there will be a reaction as there has always been.
If you fundamentally don't trust your government, like many American posters, then you are screwed. I think the UK government is pretty useless but they're not evil or corrupt.
I admire the USA but the fundamental mistake of allowing supposed 'free speech' law to allow the debasing of politics by stopping the rich from buying politicians is becoming clearer and clearer.
Thank goodness we've never succumbed to the temptation of a constitution. Writing any rules in stone is a mistake. Arguments need to be replayed by each generation.
It amazes me that people in the US actively fight against universal coverage.
Governments are ideally suited to provide this kind of service. They can still contract out to provate suppliers if they wish.
I don't see the same people suggesting that the road networks should be privatised so they'd have to negotiate a price for each stretch of road they used.
Ideology trumping experience. If you can't look at Europe > Universal cover even for the homeless coupled with Lower costs, and admit it is better then you are an idiot.
The greatest traitor your nation has ever seen? I suggest you read some history mate. And a dictionary.
By the way I'm an agnostic, as any rational person should be, and I don't believe in unicorns. There is no evidence of God and no way of proving there is no God. We could be living in a simulation. No way of knowing, no point in arguing. Agnosticism is the only sensible standpoint.
My thoughts exactly. Isn't 'flow based programming' just a renaming of 'procedural programming'?
I still think that your average business application that mainly updates a db and has pretty vanilla looking maintenance screen is easier to code using the old style procedural approach, rather than trying to treat an invoice / customer / complaint as an object.
I realise you wouldn't write GTA using procedural programming, but for certain tasks it just makes things simpler.
No disrespect, but how did your post get +5 Insightful?
I guess people understood what I meant even if I said inflation rather than deflation.
Taking ten hours to point out the same error that other posters had covered, and using rather inelegant prose (i.e, to write badly) to do it probably explains your post's score.
I'm probably being naive here, but without the ability to issue new bitcoins isn't the currency doomed?
If all of the bitcoins have been mined then surely either the currency will collapse, or inflation will be rampant. If inflation is rampant then people will just hoard the coins and the currency will collapse. Also I'm guessing bitcoins will be 'lost' in the same way that gold or paper notes are lost, so long term without the ability to mine new coins the total number is gonna go down.
I might be missing something but I have a feeling that a proper currency probably needs new money. A proper useful currency anyway.
The rest of you Anglophones are being dragged behind us into the same morass of mawkish religion and consumerism
Not sure what you mean exactly. Apart from the US, religion is pretty unimportant in English speaking countries. Certainly in England, it barely features in politics.
Muslims here are still reasonably devout, but having worked with a lot of them, I think it's more of a social identity and will gradually die out like Christianity has.
They say that an American President has to at least pretend to believe in God, but the opposite is pretty much true in England. Tony Blair appears to be the only recent prime minister that actually believed, and he made a point of not really mentioning it as it is considered slightly odd by most people.
I'm not sure if the Data Protection Act only applies to EU citizens, it probably does, but I'm pretty sure a judge over here would invoke Human Rights legislation to override that if it thought he might lose his liberty.
Absolutely. I've not seen anything at all that I would consider intelligent come from a computer and yet some people act like Watson is almost a fully fledged AI.
Like you say, maybe we'll accidentally create one by meshing enough of these supposedly intelligent systems together but I doubt it.
I've always thought that we are missing something fundamental from Physics that can account for why I actually feel alive. This idea that consciousness just emerges as a result of complex interactions seems simplistic to me.
I know Roger Penrose used to argue along these lines although I believe he's back tracked a bit now.
The government response has been to say that many surgeons choose to perform more risky surgeries on a Friday because any subsequent complications that take up their time will not run into other scheduled operations.
In other words they have Saturday and Sunday free. Bit like performing updates to an IT system on Friday night or Saturday I guess.
In areas of the country with less restrictive gun laws and higher gun ownership, violent crime is lower. The stats speak for themselves.
The reason that the gun laws are more restrictive in those parts of the country is because they've realised what a huge problem they represent. The stats certainly do speak for themselves but you have to look at the right stats.
For almost all areas, when making international comparisons the USA is compared to other 'similar' countries normally meaning Western Europe, Canada, Japan Australia and so on. In other words the 'Western World'. These are countries with similar levels of education, democracy freedom and wealth.
For many areas the USA compares impressively well but there is a glaring discrepancy when it comes to prison population and gun crime. The two are obviously linked but I'll ignore the prison population since we are talking about guns.
Look at this chart and tell me that guns are making you safer.
I also notice that you start talking about 'accidental' gun deaths for children. I didn't mention 'accidental' deaths I just stated the plain truth that thousands of children are being injured or killed by guns in your country every year. I suppose if they are not accidents you don't care?
Look to the real tyranny that has taken place during the 20th century - 20 million killed by Stalin, millions dead by Hitler's regime, 3 million (out of a population of 8 million) killed due to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, millions killed by Mao, etc. Each of these populations had been disarmed. The history of the 20th century was the history of tyranny and the fight against it and if the populations had arms they may have been able to resist their oppressors.
I think possibly because the USA is a relativley new country it doesn't place as much emphasis on history teaching as older countries do. Certainly you appear to be pretty uninformed.
Hitler's regime did not disarm the German people, like all European countries the vast majority of people in Germany were never armed, certainly not in the 20th century and certainly never with guns. The regime was very popular and won power through the ballot box and through propaganda.
if the populations had arms they may have been able to resist their oppressors
The majority of Germans never saw themselves as being oppressed, you do not know what you are talking about.
The same argument goes for Stalin's Russia. The people were not disarmed. You are simply incorrect.
Bringing Cambodia into your argument is pretty desperate but again the population of Cambodia had no history of being armed. The truly unfortunate events that took place in that country were a tragic combination of colonial withdrawal and cold war power play. You can lay the blame at France, Russia and the USA but to suggest that the problem was that the peasants didn't have guns is ridiculous.
You are blind to the harm guns cause in your country because you like guns.
The argument that you need them to keep the government at bay is unbelievably weak and does not justify those dead or maimed children that you ignore, or the large number of suicides that wouldn't happen if guns did not make it so easy.
Iraq had plenty of guns and your government and mine had little trouble taking over. The idea that people with pistols or rifles are going to make any difference to the US military is laughable.
By the way boats have plenty of good uses. Tell me what use a.55 Magnum has.
But by any measure, carrying a gun puts you and those around you at more risk not less.
Do you realise how many kids are hurt by guns in your country?
Imagine if there was a tasty food that injured 15,000 kids every year. You think anyone would be allowed to sell it because it didn't hurt the majority of people and people really liked it?
What about the 15,000 children injured by guns each year in the US? I've no idea how to find out the rate in England in 2010, I suspect it would be near zero.
Your arguing that most deliberate acts are done by criminals, and I'm sure you are right, but you have a missive amount of accidental injury and death because of the proliferation of legal guns, don't they figure in your calculations or thoughts?
Having guns around also makes suicide much easier and as a result your suicide rate is far higher than it would be without guns. Again does this ever enter into your calculations?
People argue as if the 2nd Amendment is the end of the matter but you can change the constitution you just need to persuade enough people that it's for their own good.
I believe the main difference between us is that I see my freedom as being protected by giving the exclusive right to bear arms to the govrrnment of the day.
Allowing anuone else access to weapons refuces my freedom to live my life peacefully.
You obvously see the government as a pitential threat rather than an ally.
I can certainly appreciate your point of view but it seems a bit too hypothetical to justigy the actual rwal harm that guns clearly do in your society. How do you measure the huge number of children killed against you supposed increase in freedom for exsmple? Clearly if 50% of kids were beong shot you wouldn't tolerate it so somewhere between your current level, which seems amazingly high to the rest of the world, and that 50% there is a point where you'd give up guns. Where do you yhink thst figure lies?
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't that back up my implication that they're a bad idea then? They're so difficult to change that you force the elected representatives of the current population to bend the rules. Better to allow flexibility in the first place and allow everyone to scream if a bad change is proposed.
The second amendment to the US constitution seems destined to cause huge problems in my opinion. Cheap weapons / guns are going to be designed that can take out an entire room with the press of a single trigger. Will these be allowed? If not why not?
Setting down your position in stone is always going to be caught out by changes in technology, society and so on.
Part of me wants a constitutional right to Free Speech here in the UK, but in practice we do ok with a tradition of Free Speech that informs our current lawmakers. I admit some of our more egregious laws to do with hate speech are an abomination but I suspect they'll be repealed should they ever be shown to genuinely curtail proper debate of issues.
Any kind of set in stone right is bound to butt up against another supposed right, a constitution just causes paralysis.
Of course I may be wrong, the USA is doing pretty well although coming from an Old World country I'd have to say that it's still early days for the US.
The inadvertent blocking of Wikipedia was quickly reversed though. Surely a sign that the system has checks and balances?
The blocking of individual ISPs has been authorised by individual court decisions. I may (in fact I do) disagree with most of these but it is fully transparent.
When you say you are not sure what they will be blocking next month then, yes that is true, but when they do block it you'll know about it and have a chance to complain.
We have plenty of stupid laws, when they get too annoying they get reversed, that's the way the system works.
You kind of contradict yourself here. You point out that the average Brit was not put off by the IRA which I agree was a far bigger threat (sponsored by Americans I may add), but then claim that we're afraid of the Islamist idiots.
I don't think we are at all afraid of the Islamist idiots. The media doesn't barage us with stories either. Sure there are a few but most people don't take much notice.
As for surveillance, I think the prevailing attitude is that spies spy. What on Earth do we expect them to do? We pay a lot for them. they have several very large buildings in plain sight. If they start to abuse it in the ways that have been suggested then there will be a reaction as there has always been.
If you fundamentally don't trust your government, like many American posters, then you are screwed. I think the UK government is pretty useless but they're not evil or corrupt.
I admire the USA but the fundamental mistake of allowing supposed 'free speech' law to allow the debasing of politics by stopping the rich from buying politicians is becoming clearer and clearer.
Thank goodness we've never succumbed to the temptation of a constitution. Writing any rules in stone is a mistake. Arguments need to be replayed by each generation.
We (the British) do not have fabulous web-filters, we have a black list of child porn websites maintained by an independent charity called the IWF.
I'm pretty much against any kind of censorship but having a small blacklist of websites like this is pretty tame really. Not exactly 1984.
one of Orwell's fantasies to finally abolish any opposition to his classistic view of the world. Poor Britain. :-(
What does this mean? classistic isn't a word or even a likely typo that I can think of.
Because Americans share a common language and sense of identity.
As a Brit I'm happy for the wealthier parts of my country to subsidise in various ways (including sharing a common currency) the less well off bits.
The problem with the Euro is that people from one country are not happy to subsidise other countries that they may perceive to be workshy.
The Euro will collapse at some point because Northern Europeans think that Southern Europeans are lazy.
It amazes me that people in the US actively fight against universal coverage.
Governments are ideally suited to provide this kind of service. They can still contract out to provate suppliers if they wish.
I don't see the same people suggesting that the road networks should be privatised so they'd have to negotiate a price for each stretch of road they used.
Ideology trumping experience. If you can't look at Europe > Universal cover even for the homeless coupled with Lower costs, and admit it is better then you are an idiot.
You should set up a National Health Service like we have in the UK.
Employer's don't have to spend any time thinking about health care provision. Everyone is covered.
Nobody worries about their health care when changing jobs, or taking a break to start a business.
Governments are good at some things.
The greatest traitor your nation has ever seen? I suggest you read some history mate. And a dictionary.
By the way I'm an agnostic, as any rational person should be, and I don't believe in unicorns. There is no evidence of God and no way of proving there is no God. We could be living in a simulation. No way of knowing, no point in arguing. Agnosticism is the only sensible standpoint.
How about if people started sharing a portion of their wireless broadband,
People used to do this, but then the media companies started suing them when people 'misused' it.
My thoughts exactly. Isn't 'flow based programming' just a renaming of 'procedural programming'?
I still think that your average business application that mainly updates a db and has pretty vanilla looking maintenance screen is easier to code using the old style procedural approach, rather than trying to treat an invoice / customer / complaint as an object.
I realise you wouldn't write GTA using procedural programming, but for certain tasks it just makes things simpler.
No disrespect, but how did your post get +5 Insightful?
I guess people understood what I meant even if I said inflation rather than deflation.
Taking ten hours to point out the same error that other posters had covered, and using rather inelegant prose (i.e, to write badly) to do it probably explains your post's score.
I'm probably being naive here, but without the ability to issue new bitcoins isn't the currency doomed?
If all of the bitcoins have been mined then surely either the currency will collapse, or inflation will be rampant. If inflation is rampant then people will just hoard the coins and the currency will collapse. Also I'm guessing bitcoins will be 'lost' in the same way that gold or paper notes are lost, so long term without the ability to mine new coins the total number is gonna go down.
I might be missing something but I have a feeling that a proper currency probably needs new money. A proper useful currency anyway.
Wish I had mod points to mod this up
Record companies use the number of followers a band has when they are considering signing them up.
Just one example, there are lots more.
The rest of you Anglophones are being dragged behind us into the same morass of mawkish religion and consumerism
Not sure what you mean exactly. Apart from the US, religion is pretty unimportant in English speaking countries. Certainly in England, it barely features in politics. Muslims here are still reasonably devout, but having worked with a lot of them, I think it's more of a social identity and will gradually die out like Christianity has. They say that an American President has to at least pretend to believe in God, but the opposite is pretty much true in England. Tony Blair appears to be the only recent prime minister that actually believed, and he made a point of not really mentioning it as it is considered slightly odd by most people.
You think the Greeks haven't changed in 4000 years?
Take a look at the statues from the Classical Greek period. Now take a look at the hairy arsed guys who live in Greece now.
Err, he's on his way to Ecuador I think.
He might be better off asking GCHQ in the UK.
I'm not sure if the Data Protection Act only applies to EU citizens, it probably does, but I'm pretty sure a judge over here would invoke Human Rights legislation to override that if it thought he might lose his liberty.
First of all, we don't know what I is.
Absolutely. I've not seen anything at all that I would consider intelligent come from a computer and yet some people act like Watson is almost a fully fledged AI.
Like you say, maybe we'll accidentally create one by meshing enough of these supposedly intelligent systems together but I doubt it.
I've always thought that we are missing something fundamental from Physics that can account for why I actually feel alive. This idea that consciousness just emerges as a result of complex interactions seems simplistic to me.
I know Roger Penrose used to argue along these lines although I believe he's back tracked a bit now.
People forget that the rule of law, a free press and an independent judiciary are all pre-requisites to a functioning democracy.
I'd rather live in a non democratic country that had all of those, such as 19th century England, than in a supposedly democratic country which didn't.
Installing democracy without the necessary counter balances is dangerous.
The government response has been to say that many surgeons choose to perform more risky surgeries on a Friday because any subsequent complications that take up their time will not run into other scheduled operations.
In other words they have Saturday and Sunday free. Bit like performing updates to an IT system on Friday night or Saturday I guess.
Sounds plausible to me.
In areas of the country with less restrictive gun laws and higher gun ownership, violent crime is lower. The stats speak for themselves.
The reason that the gun laws are more restrictive in those parts of the country is because they've realised what a huge problem they represent. The stats certainly do speak for themselves but you have to look at the right stats.
For almost all areas, when making international comparisons the USA is compared to other 'similar' countries normally meaning Western Europe, Canada, Japan Australia and so on. In other words the 'Western World'. These are countries with similar levels of education, democracy freedom and wealth.
For many areas the USA compares impressively well but there is a glaring discrepancy when it comes to prison population and gun crime. The two are obviously linked but I'll ignore the prison population since we are talking about guns.
Look at this chart and tell me that guns are making you safer.
I also notice that you start talking about 'accidental' gun deaths for children. I didn't mention 'accidental' deaths I just stated the plain truth that thousands of children are being injured or killed by guns in your country every year. I suppose if they are not accidents you don't care?
Look to the real tyranny that has taken place during the 20th century - 20 million killed by Stalin, millions dead by Hitler's regime, 3 million (out of a population of 8 million) killed due to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, millions killed by Mao, etc. Each of these populations had been disarmed. The history of the 20th century was the history of tyranny and the fight against it and if the populations had arms they may have been able to resist their oppressors.
I think possibly because the USA is a relativley new country it doesn't place as much emphasis on history teaching as older countries do. Certainly you appear to be pretty uninformed.
Hitler's regime did not disarm the German people, like all European countries the vast majority of people in Germany were never armed, certainly not in the 20th century and certainly never with guns. The regime was very popular and won power through the ballot box and through propaganda.
if the populations had arms they may have been able to resist their oppressors
The majority of Germans never saw themselves as being oppressed, you do not know what you are talking about.
.55 Magnum has.
The same argument goes for Stalin's Russia. The people were not disarmed. You are simply incorrect.
Bringing Cambodia into your argument is pretty desperate but again the population of Cambodia had no history of being armed. The truly unfortunate events that took place in that country were a tragic combination of colonial withdrawal and cold war power play. You can lay the blame at France, Russia and the USA but to suggest that the problem was that the peasants didn't have guns is ridiculous.
You are blind to the harm guns cause in your country because you like guns.
The argument that you need them to keep the government at bay is unbelievably weak and does not justify those dead or maimed children that you ignore, or the large number of suicides that wouldn't happen if guns did not make it so easy.
Iraq had plenty of guns and your government and mine had little trouble taking over. The idea that people with pistols or rifles are going to make any difference to the US military is laughable.
By the way boats have plenty of good uses. Tell me what use a
But by any measure, carrying a gun puts you and those around you at more risk not less.
Do you realise how many kids are hurt by guns in your country?
Imagine if there was a tasty food that injured 15,000 kids every year. You think anyone would be allowed to sell it because it didn't hurt the majority of people and people really liked it?
What about the 15,000 children injured by guns each year in the US? I've no idea how to find out the rate in England in 2010, I suspect it would be near zero.
Your arguing that most deliberate acts are done by criminals, and I'm sure you are right, but you have a missive amount of accidental injury and death because of the proliferation of legal guns, don't they figure in your calculations or thoughts?
Having guns around also makes suicide much easier and as a result your suicide rate is far higher than it would be without guns. Again does this ever enter into your calculations?
People argue as if the 2nd Amendment is the end of the matter but you can change the constitution you just need to persuade enough people that it's for their own good.
Thanks for the reply.
I believe the main difference between us is that I see my freedom as being protected by giving the exclusive right to bear arms to the govrrnment of the day.
Allowing anuone else access to weapons refuces my freedom to live my life peacefully.
You obvously see the government as a pitential threat rather than an ally.
I can certainly appreciate your point of view but it seems a bit too hypothetical to justigy the actual rwal harm that guns clearly do in your society. How do you measure the huge number of children killed against you supposed increase in freedom for exsmple? Clearly if 50% of kids were beong shot you wouldn't tolerate it so somewhere between your current level, which seems amazingly high to the rest of the world, and that 50% there is a point where you'd give up guns. Where do you yhink thst figure lies?