If possessing a firearm in a private residence was legal this would be much harder as you would have to catch them in process of committing a crime.
This is a troubling argument to me. It sounds like you're arguing that the convenience of arresting someone for a weapons charge is better than picking him up for the attempted robbery that you mention.
While police work shouldn't be impossibly difficult, it also shouldn't necessarily be easy. Make it too easy (or too hard for that matter), and they start cutting corners.
I wonder in addition how many of those picked up had already been convicted of one or more felonies. Such people would (in the US) be prohibited from owning or possessing (or in some cases being in proximity to) any firearms in the first place.
It has been dropping over the last two years, at least for England and Wales. It's still up over what it was in 2002/03. For crimes in the category of "violence against the person" there were 844,692 recorded crimes in that reporting period. This rose to a peak of 1,058,786 in 2005/06 (a 25.3% increase), declining to 960,167 in 2007/08 (a decline of 9.3% from 05/06 but still 13.7% higher than in 02/03).
London and Wales are doing better than they were in 02/03, with recent crimes reported lower overall than they were then, but most are still higher. The mid-2002 population estimate for England and Wales was 52,455,000, and for 2007 it was 54,072,000, a growth of 3.1%, well short of the 13.7% higher crime count. Crime rates for this category for those years are therefore roughly 1610 per 100,000 for 02/03 and 1780 per 100,000 for 07/08, a difference of 10.6%.
All crime numbers are from the Home Office Research Development Statistics site. I'm not comparing them directly to those of the US, as the UK's definition differs from that of the US violent crime statistics; for instance, the US violent crime rates include rape, whereas the UK's does not seem to explicitly cover that; similarly, the UK apparently covers mere possession of a weapon as a crime against the person, but this is not considered a violent crime in the US.
Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have all pointed out that groups equipped with small arms can make a serious nuisance of themselves even against a much more powerful enemy.
The US military is quite expensive to run. We spend close to half a trillion dollars each year supporting roughly two million people. The US has some 250 million firearms in private ownership scattered amongst about 80 million owners. Presuming that the government would prefer, if it came to civil war, to not flatten the entire country, that level of gun ownership presents a real dilemma for someone trying to take a dictatorship role. Sure, there could always be a draft. But then there's the risk of drafting people whose loyalty is questionable, and providing them training on fighting effectively in an urban environment, and then you give them automatic weapons (at the low end).
The guns are not needed for immediate action now, and may never be needed for action in the future. But the deterrent factor is always there, and that was exactly the intention.
I did miss that. Thanks for bringing it up. This kind of thing does go a long way towards addressing the risks that we've identified. I wonder how much it will cost, though. So far, pricing doesn't seem to have been announced.
The supervisor appliances may also be a serious cost issue, as we're not a Cisco shop. In our entire datacenter, we have maybe six or seven Cisco devices. (I work for a California county government, so even a small purchase of a few thousand dollars is a significant cost issue these days.)
I see VDC OS as a possibly bigger headache for those of us in security. Where I work, we already have issues with the ESX systems. VMWare's virtual switches are more akin to virtual hubs. Efficiently segregating the individual servers from each other within the same virtual network is difficult if not impossible.
Some solutions may be coming up for this. We've talked to Checkpoint and Reflex about their technologies to address these issues. Even so, I can't help but think that virtualization providers are in a race to make the sweetest, softest, gooiest center possible for attackers. It's only the threat of host compromise and VM escape that has allowed us to convince management to not approve multi-homing an individual host across multiple DMZs. I don't know how much longer that will last, though.
I know what the point of the program is. NASA has been notoriously bad at making thosee goals, which is why I kept the 'pick two' mantra within their own range of options. They miss budget targets and milestone and launch dates (even when cutting corners), and in some cases have only made the 'smaller' requirement by cutting instruments out to make the launch weight or the schedule.
I'd be interested in a few of the old super-probes which, while certainly expensive and with their own variable calendars, generally were handled more carefully and returned tremendously valuable data at a rate that I think is at least cost-competitive with the machine-gun approach at which we've been sending out probes. We lose a little in flexibility, but I'm not sure that's such a big cost given the timescales over which either project scale works.
Messages sent by the assistant have a clear "Bob accepted on behalf of Alice" kind of structure. The logs also show that it was Bob accepting on behalf of Alice, IIRC. This is useful not only for the tracking perspective, but also so that the recipient knows that it was not necessarily directly handled by the person invited.
It's in comparison to the older programs such as Viking, Galileo, and Cassini, which cost several billion each in current dollars (but which did their jobs incredibly well). The move to smaller, faster, cheaper followed the loss of the Mars Observer.
What NASA management didn't factor into smaller, faster, cheaper is that you can normally pick only two of the three.
You missed the first phase of it, with the contract being awarded without much oversight to the local company after the awarding officer is promised a position, then the sexual antics that follow with executives leading to the downfall of two of them. That part is much more interesting.
Ex post facto applies to criminal law, not civil, and generally only applies when it would criminalize an act or make the punishment more severe. A law may retroactively affect the criminality of an action if it reduces or eliminates the criminality or penalty.
It's a bit more complex than that, but that covers most cases.
Insurers always have the risk of not having the money to cover claims. It's part of the bet that insurers (and the insured) make when figuring out premiums.
(The following is just general mention, not specifically to you, midnitewolf.) No insurance company can cover 100% of its claims at any one time. A company may insure $50 billion in real estate, but they don't keep $50 billion on-hand to cover it. They factor in the payouts over time against expected premium and investment gains, and adjust things accordingly.
Back to your points, there aren't many innocents in this market. It was out and out greed that got things to this spot (kind of like some of the problems in the financial industry in the 1980s), and a severe lack of caring about the futures of families that had no hope of paying off their mortgage. Business may be primarily about making money, but it shouldn't be outright lying to consumers, either. (Cue Slashdot cynicism.)
If AIG goes, it's not just AIG that takes the hit. It's every major bank you've ever heard of and a lot that you haven't, some of which are on shaky ground and some of which are close to it, including many in Europe (I'm not sure how Asia is doing in this mess).
I'm in agreement that the AIG bigwigs shouldn't be getting anything out of this. I think that in any case where the government has to step in (banks, financial institutions, pensions, etc), the senior management should be fired and all bonuses and contract termination options benefiting the individuals should be nullified. The AIG executives and directors may also be on the hook for shareholder lawsuits, and they should get no special shielding from that, either.
You're in favor of their competitors "pick[ing] the meat of their corporate corpse." The problem is that there's so much cross-pollination that for something the size of AIG to fall it will take some of its competitors with it. We've learned that this cross-pollination is a bad idea, and I suspect that much of Graham-Leach-Bliley (which I've been reading allowed most of the recent changes) will be undone because of it.
I'm not saying that AIG's fall would cause an instant depression. But there's already a lot of mistrust in the sector. Banks don't trust other banks to be able to repay even overnight loans, let alone longer-term credit lines. This means that liquidity is being tied up with zero financial gain for the holder, and those that would use it to boost performance can't get it as easily (or at all). If AIG fell, the bond market would take a massive hit as other bond insurers would also have a severe lack of trust, and other insurers would probably fall as well, further locking up capital and making it harder to sell bonds, making it harder to finance corporate operations in an era when the economy is already in a poor state.
The White House has said that bail-outs will be rare, and I support this. They let Lehman Bros. fail. Other institutions are scrambling to find merger partners. Bail-outs should be exceptionally rare, but they should also be closely examined for how they can be avoided in the future, and they should only be done when the damage of letting them fail would be so catastrophic that it would take a significant portion of the sector with it.
I'm not a supporter of the RIAA in these matters, but their suits would hardly qualify as vexatious by the definition that you posted. Their lawsuits may very well have solid grounds (though the evidence collection method may be a bit shaky), and their losses have been dwarfed by their non-losses, including a couple of wins and thousands of suits settled out of court.
That may change if Mr. Beckerman can win his cases, and various other suits knock the MediaSentry evidence out of court.
Do you own any bonds? AIG may insure them. Do any of your investments own bonds? AIG may insure them. AIG also backs close to half a trillion dollars in collateralized debt obligations, and more than 10% of that has sub-prime influence. The holders of the CDOs are not just in the US, but also scattered across Europe and Asia as well. If AIG goes under, its backing becomes worthless, and all of those CDOs become almost impossible to move, and the bonds get shaky, and the entire world's financial industry takes a massive hit.
It's not that you don't know where to look. The count really is down. When I was in school, it was very common for Stage 1 alerts to be issued. Stage 2 alerts were also well-known, and we got the occasional Stage 3 alerts, which sucked because absolutely no physical activity was allowed other than walking between the classroom and the cafeteria, and then we'd have to watch something dumb at lunch like Hang Your Hat on the Wind.
Now, however, even Stage 1 alerts are rare, with some years going by without a single alert being issued. As much as I think we need to improve the air further, I do sometimes want to smack people who complain about current air quality -- particularly those who grew up in other states -- because they either don't remember or don't know how bad it really used to be, and that the area has made amazing progress in the last 20 years.
I wasn't defending Bush in particular. There have been plenty of mistakes while he's been in office. I was pointing out that no president ever gets what most people think of as a vacation.
No party has a hold on incompetence in office. Carter's administration didn't do much good for the economy, either.
Bush hasn't even been present for most of his catastrophic reign
In case this is a reference to his vacations in Crawford, Kennebunkport, and Camp David, it's important to know that no president ever gets a true vacation. Even IT geeks chained at the neck by their Blackberries can find some spot with no signal somewhere away from the cities for a weekend. The president cannot do this. The ranch almost certainly has a room with communications gear, there's a helicopter available to whisk him to the airport, he holds daily meetings with his staff, and he continues in his role as president, even if it means that he meets with fewer guests.
This applies to everyone. Clinton, the elder Bush, and Reagan took vacations, too -- and all of them were surrounded by Secret Service, military personnel, and communications to keep them in touch with the rest of the government. It will apply to the next president, whoever it may be, and for all presidents for the foreseeable future. Being president doesn't just mean always being in the spotlight. It also means never getting a break from the pressure for the entire duration of the office.
Not according to the site. They are using some models and textures from HL2, but the intention still seems to be to recreate the entire original game. I'm expecting to see it around 2017.
IANAP, but it may not make a difference, as the mass is staying within the same gravitational system. Moving it from one body to another may keep the system more or less in balance.
There are still ways to handle this which cover both the need to minimize chances of a recurrence and the desire of users to know what happened and whether they are also at risk. This could include specifying whether this was due to a software bug still under investigation, a configuration error which has been fixed, or possibly an internal sabotage. Exact details could remain forthcoming until such time as complete mitigating solutions are in place, especially if a patch needs to be released to handle it, which should take no more than a few weeks.
Slashdot Mirror
If possessing a firearm in a private residence was legal this would be much harder as you would have to catch them in process of committing a crime.
This is a troubling argument to me. It sounds like you're arguing that the convenience of arresting someone for a weapons charge is better than picking him up for the attempted robbery that you mention.
While police work shouldn't be impossibly difficult, it also shouldn't necessarily be easy. Make it too easy (or too hard for that matter), and they start cutting corners.
I wonder in addition how many of those picked up had already been convicted of one or more felonies. Such people would (in the US) be prohibited from owning or possessing (or in some cases being in proximity to) any firearms in the first place.
Violent crime has been dropping in Britain.
It has been dropping over the last two years, at least for England and Wales. It's still up over what it was in 2002/03. For crimes in the category of "violence against the person" there were 844,692 recorded crimes in that reporting period. This rose to a peak of 1,058,786 in 2005/06 (a 25.3% increase), declining to 960,167 in 2007/08 (a decline of 9.3% from 05/06 but still 13.7% higher than in 02/03).
London and Wales are doing better than they were in 02/03, with recent crimes reported lower overall than they were then, but most are still higher. The mid-2002 population estimate for England and Wales was 52,455,000, and for 2007 it was 54,072,000, a growth of 3.1%, well short of the 13.7% higher crime count. Crime rates for this category for those years are therefore roughly 1610 per 100,000 for 02/03 and 1780 per 100,000 for 07/08, a difference of 10.6%.
All crime numbers are from the Home Office Research Development Statistics site. I'm not comparing them directly to those of the US, as the UK's definition differs from that of the US violent crime statistics; for instance, the US violent crime rates include rape, whereas the UK's does not seem to explicitly cover that; similarly, the UK apparently covers mere possession of a weapon as a crime against the person, but this is not considered a violent crime in the US.
Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have all pointed out that groups equipped with small arms can make a serious nuisance of themselves even against a much more powerful enemy.
The US military is quite expensive to run. We spend close to half a trillion dollars each year supporting roughly two million people. The US has some 250 million firearms in private ownership scattered amongst about 80 million owners. Presuming that the government would prefer, if it came to civil war, to not flatten the entire country, that level of gun ownership presents a real dilemma for someone trying to take a dictatorship role. Sure, there could always be a draft. But then there's the risk of drafting people whose loyalty is questionable, and providing them training on fighting effectively in an urban environment, and then you give them automatic weapons (at the low end).
The guns are not needed for immediate action now, and may never be needed for action in the future. But the deterrent factor is always there, and that was exactly the intention.
I did miss that. Thanks for bringing it up. This kind of thing does go a long way towards addressing the risks that we've identified. I wonder how much it will cost, though. So far, pricing doesn't seem to have been announced.
The supervisor appliances may also be a serious cost issue, as we're not a Cisco shop. In our entire datacenter, we have maybe six or seven Cisco devices. (I work for a California county government, so even a small purchase of a few thousand dollars is a significant cost issue these days.)
I see VDC OS as a possibly bigger headache for those of us in security. Where I work, we already have issues with the ESX systems. VMWare's virtual switches are more akin to virtual hubs. Efficiently segregating the individual servers from each other within the same virtual network is difficult if not impossible.
Some solutions may be coming up for this. We've talked to Checkpoint and Reflex about their technologies to address these issues. Even so, I can't help but think that virtualization providers are in a race to make the sweetest, softest, gooiest center possible for attackers. It's only the threat of host compromise and VM escape that has allowed us to convince management to not approve multi-homing an individual host across multiple DMZs. I don't know how much longer that will last, though.
I know what the point of the program is. NASA has been notoriously bad at making thosee goals, which is why I kept the 'pick two' mantra within their own range of options. They miss budget targets and milestone and launch dates (even when cutting corners), and in some cases have only made the 'smaller' requirement by cutting instruments out to make the launch weight or the schedule.
I'd be interested in a few of the old super-probes which, while certainly expensive and with their own variable calendars, generally were handled more carefully and returned tremendously valuable data at a rate that I think is at least cost-competitive with the machine-gun approach at which we've been sending out probes. We lose a little in flexibility, but I'm not sure that's such a big cost given the timescales over which either project scale works.
Messages sent by the assistant have a clear "Bob accepted on behalf of Alice" kind of structure. The logs also show that it was Bob accepting on behalf of Alice, IIRC. This is useful not only for the tracking perspective, but also so that the recipient knows that it was not necessarily directly handled by the person invited.
It's in comparison to the older programs such as Viking, Galileo, and Cassini, which cost several billion each in current dollars (but which did their jobs incredibly well). The move to smaller, faster, cheaper followed the loss of the Mars Observer.
What NASA management didn't factor into smaller, faster, cheaper is that you can normally pick only two of the three.
You missed the first phase of it, with the contract being awarded without much oversight to the local company after the awarding officer is promised a position, then the sexual antics that follow with executives leading to the downfall of two of them. That part is much more interesting.
Ex post facto applies to criminal law, not civil, and generally only applies when it would criminalize an act or make the punishment more severe. A law may retroactively affect the criminality of an action if it reduces or eliminates the criminality or penalty.
It's a bit more complex than that, but that covers most cases.
Insurers always have the risk of not having the money to cover claims. It's part of the bet that insurers (and the insured) make when figuring out premiums.
(The following is just general mention, not specifically to you, midnitewolf.) No insurance company can cover 100% of its claims at any one time. A company may insure $50 billion in real estate, but they don't keep $50 billion on-hand to cover it. They factor in the payouts over time against expected premium and investment gains, and adjust things accordingly.
Back to your points, there aren't many innocents in this market. It was out and out greed that got things to this spot (kind of like some of the problems in the financial industry in the 1980s), and a severe lack of caring about the futures of families that had no hope of paying off their mortgage. Business may be primarily about making money, but it shouldn't be outright lying to consumers, either. (Cue Slashdot cynicism.)
If AIG goes, it's not just AIG that takes the hit. It's every major bank you've ever heard of and a lot that you haven't, some of which are on shaky ground and some of which are close to it, including many in Europe (I'm not sure how Asia is doing in this mess).
I'm in agreement that the AIG bigwigs shouldn't be getting anything out of this. I think that in any case where the government has to step in (banks, financial institutions, pensions, etc), the senior management should be fired and all bonuses and contract termination options benefiting the individuals should be nullified. The AIG executives and directors may also be on the hook for shareholder lawsuits, and they should get no special shielding from that, either.
You're in favor of their competitors "pick[ing] the meat of their corporate corpse." The problem is that there's so much cross-pollination that for something the size of AIG to fall it will take some of its competitors with it. We've learned that this cross-pollination is a bad idea, and I suspect that much of Graham-Leach-Bliley (which I've been reading allowed most of the recent changes) will be undone because of it.
I'm not saying that AIG's fall would cause an instant depression. But there's already a lot of mistrust in the sector. Banks don't trust other banks to be able to repay even overnight loans, let alone longer-term credit lines. This means that liquidity is being tied up with zero financial gain for the holder, and those that would use it to boost performance can't get it as easily (or at all). If AIG fell, the bond market would take a massive hit as other bond insurers would also have a severe lack of trust, and other insurers would probably fall as well, further locking up capital and making it harder to sell bonds, making it harder to finance corporate operations in an era when the economy is already in a poor state.
The White House has said that bail-outs will be rare, and I support this. They let Lehman Bros. fail. Other institutions are scrambling to find merger partners. Bail-outs should be exceptionally rare, but they should also be closely examined for how they can be avoided in the future, and they should only be done when the damage of letting them fail would be so catastrophic that it would take a significant portion of the sector with it.
I'm not a supporter of the RIAA in these matters, but their suits would hardly qualify as vexatious by the definition that you posted. Their lawsuits may very well have solid grounds (though the evidence collection method may be a bit shaky), and their losses have been dwarfed by their non-losses, including a couple of wins and thousands of suits settled out of court.
That may change if Mr. Beckerman can win his cases, and various other suits knock the MediaSentry evidence out of court.
So law schools aren't really schools, but instead arcane golem factories?
I'd suspect more likely that the torrent advert money is used for hookers and blackjack - Isn't that what you'd use it for?
Absolutely.
In fact, forget the blackjack!
Do you own any bonds? AIG may insure them. Do any of your investments own bonds? AIG may insure them. AIG also backs close to half a trillion dollars in collateralized debt obligations, and more than 10% of that has sub-prime influence. The holders of the CDOs are not just in the US, but also scattered across Europe and Asia as well. If AIG goes under, its backing becomes worthless, and all of those CDOs become almost impossible to move, and the bonds get shaky, and the entire world's financial industry takes a massive hit.
Yes. GP keeps a lot of monkeys in the basement.
It's not that you don't know where to look. The count really is down. When I was in school, it was very common for Stage 1 alerts to be issued. Stage 2 alerts were also well-known, and we got the occasional Stage 3 alerts, which sucked because absolutely no physical activity was allowed other than walking between the classroom and the cafeteria, and then we'd have to watch something dumb at lunch like Hang Your Hat on the Wind.
Now, however, even Stage 1 alerts are rare, with some years going by without a single alert being issued. As much as I think we need to improve the air further, I do sometimes want to smack people who complain about current air quality -- particularly those who grew up in other states -- because they either don't remember or don't know how bad it really used to be, and that the area has made amazing progress in the last 20 years.
I wasn't defending Bush in particular. There have been plenty of mistakes while he's been in office. I was pointing out that no president ever gets what most people think of as a vacation.
No party has a hold on incompetence in office. Carter's administration didn't do much good for the economy, either.
Bush hasn't even been present for most of his catastrophic reign
In case this is a reference to his vacations in Crawford, Kennebunkport, and Camp David, it's important to know that no president ever gets a true vacation. Even IT geeks chained at the neck by their Blackberries can find some spot with no signal somewhere away from the cities for a weekend. The president cannot do this. The ranch almost certainly has a room with communications gear, there's a helicopter available to whisk him to the airport, he holds daily meetings with his staff, and he continues in his role as president, even if it means that he meets with fewer guests.
This applies to everyone. Clinton, the elder Bush, and Reagan took vacations, too -- and all of them were surrounded by Secret Service, military personnel, and communications to keep them in touch with the rest of the government. It will apply to the next president, whoever it may be, and for all presidents for the foreseeable future. Being president doesn't just mean always being in the spotlight. It also means never getting a break from the pressure for the entire duration of the office.
Not according to the site. They are using some models and textures from HL2, but the intention still seems to be to recreate the entire original game. I'm expecting to see it around 2017.
You reminded me to go check on HL: Black Mesa. Still not done. :\
IANAP, but it may not make a difference, as the mass is staying within the same gravitational system. Moving it from one body to another may keep the system more or less in balance.
We had a national telecom network. It abused its customers so badly for so many decades that it was broken up into a bunch of smaller pieces.
There are still ways to handle this which cover both the need to minimize chances of a recurrence and the desire of users to know what happened and whether they are also at risk. This could include specifying whether this was due to a software bug still under investigation, a configuration error which has been fixed, or possibly an internal sabotage. Exact details could remain forthcoming until such time as complete mitigating solutions are in place, especially if a patch needs to be released to handle it, which should take no more than a few weeks.