Given the option of being responsible with my gun and being attacked by an intruder, I'll take the former. I agree that he should lose his right (not privilege) to own a gun, but I also think he should be up on felony manslaughter charges. So, for that matter, should the mother, since she was close enough to see the gun.
Accidental firearm death in the US is still fairly rare, being under 800 total as of 2005 and under 650 as of 2006 according to the CDC's WISQARS database. Of the 642 documented cases in 2006, 54 were age 14 or under.
A two-year sentence is a felony conviction, and a felony conviction means that he would be barred from owning or possessing a firearm for the rest of his life.
On top of that, firearms licenses are generally not required to own a gun in the US, even in places like California. In most situations, one only has to pass the background check and possibly a firearms safety exam, most of which is common sense.
"Just let them fail" is what the US did in the 1930s. Most economists since then have agreed that it was a Very Bad Idea. It would have been an even worse idea now, as the banking system is even more tied together. Insurance plans are underwritten by companies that have investments in funds that invest in companies that hold stock in weak banks.
The first phase of operations was the correct one: support the financial system long enough to get past the major crisis. The second phase that is needed is unlikely to happen: untangle the mess by undoing the laws allowing one-stop financial services. This would mean forcing breakups of mergers that were allowed in the 1990s. It would also be a good idea to ask the question, "How big is too big?" It's not an easy one to answer, especially if the company got to its size through natural growth instead of mergers. Regulators can block a merger by saying that it will own too much of the market or will have some other destabilizing effect, but it's very hard to justify breaking up a company simply because its customers liked it so much that they did more and more business with it.
It's part of a declining trend, at least in newspapers. The LA Times and the Orange County Register both used to have crimelogs, and the Times has not had it in several years. The last time I went looking for it in the Register, I couldn't find it.
The idea of not being able to have an arrest reported in the paper lies perilously close to the government being able to arrest someone and not have anyone know about it. BTW, the names of juveniles charged can (and do) appear in the press, but law enforcement generally cannot provide the names to the press. I understand the rationale of limiting the name release of juveniles, but a combination of open courts and free press mean that the names of those charged as adults should always be printable.
Their records can be sealed when they turn 18, not expunged. An expunged record means that it never happened in the eyes of the court, no exceptions. A sealed record means that it legally never happened, though there are exceptions. A petition must be made to the court (at least in some states) to seal the records, and they are then available only in very limited circumstances. The court may deny the petition, and certain serious crimes (murder, arson, carjacking, etc.) are not eligible for seal.
They can impose limits based on common sense, as allowed by BMW v. Gore.
However, you're right in that there should be a legislative fix. California used to have a mechanism whereby someone could be sued by an unaffected person when that suit was "in the public interest." As an example, places of business were sued because the restroom door was perhaps one-half of an inch too narrow according to statute for wheelchair-accessible restrooms. Thousands of others were filed asking for damages of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Most settled, because the costs of going into court were too high. In virtually all cases, the suits were filed by someone who was not in any way disabled, and in many cases settled out of court. The plaintiff was also often an attorney, meaning every dime awarded was personally kept.
This seems like one of those things that should be able to sail through Congress on voice vote in about an hour for each house. Maybe the $10 trillion maximum price tag will gather someone's interest there and spark the necessary bill.
I accept that you believe what you wrote. More than that, I am not required to do. However, I tend to be skeptical when it comes to people believing that they have premonitions (or any other supernatural abilities). I merely put forth a plausible alternate explanation, one based on a more likely set of events.
So, you may either accept what I wrote, or reject it. More than that, you are not required to do, though as you have demonstrated, there are other things that you might do. I suspect that most of them will have little impact upon me.
You could have seen your van (or one very similar to it) either in the distance or in your peripheral vision but did not consciously notice it. Your subconscious mind may have noted it, mixed it with other factors (time of day, type of neighborhood, perhaps general unfamiliarity with the area), and turned it into a more specific fear.
I used to work with a bunch of Aussies. My image of them is of a fun-loving group that has fun five work hours a day and then in the remaining three hours of work outperforms everyone else actually working eight hours a day.
I use a bookmarklet with a keyword for the map function. I just type in "gm 31071" and it jumps to http://maps.google.com/maps?q=31071, and it worked for directions as well. I have a number of others including for dictionaries, synonyms, and one that used to work on CFR lookups, but broke at some point in the past and which I haven't fixed.
Maybe I'm missing something in Ubiquity's capabilities, but as others have said, I don't know that people are really screaming out for such things, especially if even the geeks rarely use it.
Are you suggesting that SpaceX has more than the $35 billion in assets that Boeing and Lockheed each have? He must have raise a lot of money very quietly in that case.
It sounds like you're thinking about user-selected PINs, and I'm thinking of pre-generated PINs. Instead of 10,000 PINs, it may drop to 9000. But more importantly, consider someone observing the PIN entry but from an imperfect vantage point. Knowing what is valid and what is not may remove some possible options, making possible a more educated guess at the actual PIN.
If I read your post right, this kind of concept could not work in device-level fuel cells, correct? The temps would have to come down for a notebook battery, for example, or even a notebook recharger, which would make this an ineffective solution for that, whereas platinum or palladium would work there.
For those of us whose systems block the Wayback machine as an anonymizer, you might try http://dilbert.com/2001-10-25/ instead. (They started putting pretty much all of the old Dilberts online a few months ago.)
You bring this up as a humor point, but it can be a small problem, I think, when "non-random" sequences are removed from possible random number generations. For example, if a 4-digit pre-generated PIN is not allowed to use certain sequence types such as sequential, all the same, paired pairs, etc., it may take a fair slice out of the available keyspace (not sure that's the right word, but it's close enough), at least enough to narrow down the ambiguity in case some hints about the PIN are known by an attacker.
It's less of a problem with longer passwords, as the maximum entropy for a given entry expands while patterns take smaller bites out the available space, but it does reduce the possible entropy slightly.
It also reminds me of a Dilbert strip where he visits the accounting trolls, and they take him to their random number generator, which is another troll saying, "9... 9... 9... 9..." Dilbert asks if it's really random, and the first troll says, "That's the problem with randomness: you never really know."
Certain odd programs like VMWare Workstation can trigger multiple UAC prompts during installation, first for the actual install, and then for the virtual driver installations. However, it is very much the exception.
We actually did have to get off of the train and take the bus on several occasions, but Chicago's bus lines were years ahead of those of Los Angeles. They ran with narrow time spacing, moved at a decent clip, and certainly had friendlier drivers. I don't know about getting quickly to soul food, but the longest bus ride that we had to put up with was just under 30 minutes, and that got us close to ten miles' driving distance from the station (though there were a few sections that ran along unpopulated areas, which probably cut down the time somewhat).
Chicago can probably improve. New York/Newark, though, are what a mass transit system should be like. But the cost of building it out in a place like Los Angeles would probably be in the range of several hundred billion dollars.
Having used the mass transit in the Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York/Newark areas, I dare say that you either got very luck with where you were going in the LA area, or you never left the downtown area. In a week in Chicago, I was able to get almost everywhere except for the Navy Pier and the Museum of Science & Technology via mass transit, and over a week in New York/Newark, I only rode in a car when going out to rural areas not reached by New Jersey's trains. Even when reaching a relatively rural area on Long Island, it took only about 30 minutes from Penn Station. Compare this to the local bus for me (closest train station is several miles and runs perpendicular to the route I would need to take): In the center of the main population mass of Orange County, the path from the closest bus stop to work runs just under eight miles, and takes just over an hour. This is one bus going straight down one street, no turns.
All of the rail systems in the LA/Orange County area combine for just under 600 miles of track to provide for around 5000 square miles of land. Chicago has 600 miles of track providing for around a thousand square miles, and New York has more than 900 miles of track for only a few hundred square miles of land. It's going to take a lot of billions to get anywhere close to those.
And then inheritance and child custody issues go all to hell.
Government has a Supreme Court-recognized interest in promoting the family. They are always -- always -- delicate in how they word that, and they always address the balance between personal rights and improving society. They have in a number of cases taken away government's power to regulate family life -- interracial marriages, adoption/child custody by gays, use of birth control -- and I expect that in the near future they will remove the power to prevent gays from marrying. I recommend reading some of the decisions that have discussed these points, as the logic used by the Court is usually very solid and well-defined, with the risks of over-extension realized and addressed.
But part of the promotion of family is the structure of laws that govern marriage, part of which addresses inheritance without wills and what happens in child custody cases, particularly involving the death of a spouse. Some regulation of family life is recognized by the courts and by social scientists to have benefits to keeping order in society, and some amount of order helps to protect the people -- the most basic role a government is intended to perform.
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Given the option of being responsible with my gun and being attacked by an intruder, I'll take the former. I agree that he should lose his right (not privilege) to own a gun, but I also think he should be up on felony manslaughter charges. So, for that matter, should the mother, since she was close enough to see the gun.
Accidental firearm death in the US is still fairly rare, being under 800 total as of 2005 and under 650 as of 2006 according to the CDC's WISQARS database. Of the 642 documented cases in 2006, 54 were age 14 or under.
A two-year sentence is a felony conviction, and a felony conviction means that he would be barred from owning or possessing a firearm for the rest of his life.
On top of that, firearms licenses are generally not required to own a gun in the US, even in places like California. In most situations, one only has to pass the background check and possibly a firearms safety exam, most of which is common sense.
LUYPS was one of the best books ever written for the GM/DM/referee. It helped me dramatically improve my games.
It's been years since I ran a game. Now I want to play Cyberpunk. :\
"Just let them fail" is what the US did in the 1930s. Most economists since then have agreed that it was a Very Bad Idea. It would have been an even worse idea now, as the banking system is even more tied together. Insurance plans are underwritten by companies that have investments in funds that invest in companies that hold stock in weak banks.
The first phase of operations was the correct one: support the financial system long enough to get past the major crisis. The second phase that is needed is unlikely to happen: untangle the mess by undoing the laws allowing one-stop financial services. This would mean forcing breakups of mergers that were allowed in the 1990s. It would also be a good idea to ask the question, "How big is too big?" It's not an easy one to answer, especially if the company got to its size through natural growth instead of mergers. Regulators can block a merger by saying that it will own too much of the market or will have some other destabilizing effect, but it's very hard to justify breaking up a company simply because its customers liked it so much that they did more and more business with it.
It's part of a declining trend, at least in newspapers. The LA Times and the Orange County Register both used to have crimelogs, and the Times has not had it in several years. The last time I went looking for it in the Register, I couldn't find it.
The idea of not being able to have an arrest reported in the paper lies perilously close to the government being able to arrest someone and not have anyone know about it. BTW, the names of juveniles charged can (and do) appear in the press, but law enforcement generally cannot provide the names to the press. I understand the rationale of limiting the name release of juveniles, but a combination of open courts and free press mean that the names of those charged as adults should always be printable.
It's a necessary evil that goes along with a free press. Besides, most arrests don't go reported in the newspaper.
Their records can be sealed when they turn 18, not expunged. An expunged record means that it never happened in the eyes of the court, no exceptions. A sealed record means that it legally never happened, though there are exceptions. A petition must be made to the court (at least in some states) to seal the records, and they are then available only in very limited circumstances. The court may deny the petition, and certain serious crimes (murder, arson, carjacking, etc.) are not eligible for seal.
They can impose limits based on common sense, as allowed by BMW v. Gore.
However, you're right in that there should be a legislative fix. California used to have a mechanism whereby someone could be sued by an unaffected person when that suit was "in the public interest." As an example, places of business were sued because the restroom door was perhaps one-half of an inch too narrow according to statute for wheelchair-accessible restrooms. Thousands of others were filed asking for damages of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Most settled, because the costs of going into court were too high. In virtually all cases, the suits were filed by someone who was not in any way disabled, and in many cases settled out of court. The plaintiff was also often an attorney, meaning every dime awarded was personally kept.
This seems like one of those things that should be able to sail through Congress on voice vote in about an hour for each house. Maybe the $10 trillion maximum price tag will gather someone's interest there and spark the necessary bill.
I accept that you believe what you wrote. More than that, I am not required to do. However, I tend to be skeptical when it comes to people believing that they have premonitions (or any other supernatural abilities). I merely put forth a plausible alternate explanation, one based on a more likely set of events.
So, you may either accept what I wrote, or reject it. More than that, you are not required to do, though as you have demonstrated, there are other things that you might do. I suspect that most of them will have little impact upon me.
You could have seen your van (or one very similar to it) either in the distance or in your peripheral vision but did not consciously notice it. Your subconscious mind may have noted it, mixed it with other factors (time of day, type of neighborhood, perhaps general unfamiliarity with the area), and turned it into a more specific fear.
Actually, it's "You are fined one-half credit for a sotto voce violation of the verbal moralities statute." An outright violation is one credit.
I really should find something more productive to do.
I hope that you realize that Firefox has this nifty feature called "keywords" that you can use to make searches in the url bar
Yes, I know. In fact, I stated that in my first sentence.
I use a bookmarklet with a keyword for the map function.
I used to work with a bunch of Aussies. My image of them is of a fun-loving group that has fun five work hours a day and then in the remaining three hours of work outperforms everyone else actually working eight hours a day.
Man, I miss those guys.
More likely it was through a human with open wounds butchering bush meat from an infected ape. Animal slaughter in Africa isn't exactly hygienic.
I use a bookmarklet with a keyword for the map function. I just type in "gm 31071" and it jumps to http://maps.google.com/maps?q=31071, and it worked for directions as well. I have a number of others including for dictionaries, synonyms, and one that used to work on CFR lookups, but broke at some point in the past and which I haven't fixed.
Maybe I'm missing something in Ubiquity's capabilities, but as others have said, I don't know that people are really screaming out for such things, especially if even the geeks rarely use it.
They each have access to more than $9 billion in cash, not to mention billions in lines of credit. SpaceX's resources are still dwarfed.
Are you suggesting that SpaceX has more than the $35 billion in assets that Boeing and Lockheed each have? He must have raise a lot of money very quietly in that case.
It sounds like you're thinking about user-selected PINs, and I'm thinking of pre-generated PINs. Instead of 10,000 PINs, it may drop to 9000. But more importantly, consider someone observing the PIN entry but from an imperfect vantage point. Knowing what is valid and what is not may remove some possible options, making possible a more educated guess at the actual PIN.
If I read your post right, this kind of concept could not work in device-level fuel cells, correct? The temps would have to come down for a notebook battery, for example, or even a notebook recharger, which would make this an ineffective solution for that, whereas platinum or palladium would work there.
For those of us whose systems block the Wayback machine as an anonymizer, you might try http://dilbert.com/2001-10-25/ instead. (They started putting pretty much all of the old Dilberts online a few months ago.)
You bring this up as a humor point, but it can be a small problem, I think, when "non-random" sequences are removed from possible random number generations. For example, if a 4-digit pre-generated PIN is not allowed to use certain sequence types such as sequential, all the same, paired pairs, etc., it may take a fair slice out of the available keyspace (not sure that's the right word, but it's close enough), at least enough to narrow down the ambiguity in case some hints about the PIN are known by an attacker.
It's less of a problem with longer passwords, as the maximum entropy for a given entry expands while patterns take smaller bites out the available space, but it does reduce the possible entropy slightly.
It also reminds me of a Dilbert strip where he visits the accounting trolls, and they take him to their random number generator, which is another troll saying, "9... 9... 9... 9..." Dilbert asks if it's really random, and the first troll says, "That's the problem with randomness: you never really know."
Certain odd programs like VMWare Workstation can trigger multiple UAC prompts during installation, first for the actual install, and then for the virtual driver installations. However, it is very much the exception.
We actually did have to get off of the train and take the bus on several occasions, but Chicago's bus lines were years ahead of those of Los Angeles. They ran with narrow time spacing, moved at a decent clip, and certainly had friendlier drivers. I don't know about getting quickly to soul food, but the longest bus ride that we had to put up with was just under 30 minutes, and that got us close to ten miles' driving distance from the station (though there were a few sections that ran along unpopulated areas, which probably cut down the time somewhat).
Chicago can probably improve. New York/Newark, though, are what a mass transit system should be like. But the cost of building it out in a place like Los Angeles would probably be in the range of several hundred billion dollars.
Having used the mass transit in the Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York/Newark areas, I dare say that you either got very luck with where you were going in the LA area, or you never left the downtown area. In a week in Chicago, I was able to get almost everywhere except for the Navy Pier and the Museum of Science & Technology via mass transit, and over a week in New York/Newark, I only rode in a car when going out to rural areas not reached by New Jersey's trains. Even when reaching a relatively rural area on Long Island, it took only about 30 minutes from Penn Station. Compare this to the local bus for me (closest train station is several miles and runs perpendicular to the route I would need to take): In the center of the main population mass of Orange County, the path from the closest bus stop to work runs just under eight miles, and takes just over an hour. This is one bus going straight down one street, no turns.
All of the rail systems in the LA/Orange County area combine for just under 600 miles of track to provide for around 5000 square miles of land. Chicago has 600 miles of track providing for around a thousand square miles, and New York has more than 900 miles of track for only a few hundred square miles of land. It's going to take a lot of billions to get anywhere close to those.
And then inheritance and child custody issues go all to hell.
Government has a Supreme Court-recognized interest in promoting the family. They are always -- always -- delicate in how they word that, and they always address the balance between personal rights and improving society. They have in a number of cases taken away government's power to regulate family life -- interracial marriages, adoption/child custody by gays, use of birth control -- and I expect that in the near future they will remove the power to prevent gays from marrying. I recommend reading some of the decisions that have discussed these points, as the logic used by the Court is usually very solid and well-defined, with the risks of over-extension realized and addressed.
But part of the promotion of family is the structure of laws that govern marriage, part of which addresses inheritance without wills and what happens in child custody cases, particularly involving the death of a spouse. Some regulation of family life is recognized by the courts and by social scientists to have benefits to keeping order in society, and some amount of order helps to protect the people -- the most basic role a government is intended to perform.