A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
"A well regulated militia". Well regulated indicates that it's a body with some official backing and organisation, not a bunch of yahoo's with guns shooting up anyone they don't like. Regulation implies control and organisation, therefore the militia must be raised by some existing body. Regulation, in this context, also implies training as each member of the force would need to be aware of the scope of their actions and influence, indeed the reason they are participating in the milia.
"being necessary to the security of a free state". Links it to the states so now we know where the well regulation is supposed to come from. Without that you could have churches raising their own militia to kill off other faiths (remember, the first ammendment only stops the federal government outlawing religeons, it doesn't stop other faiths taking up arms).
"the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.". This is the bit that people often remember. If that was the entirety of the ammendment then it would be a protection of a person's right to keep and bear arms regardless of the purpose. It is not, however, the full text of the ammendment. The ammendment explicitly states that people should be allowed to keep and bear arms for participation in a well regulated state militia.
Why is there an inherent mistrust of government and authority built into our founding document? It is because the Founding Fathers were wise in knowing that nameless, faceless organizations take what they can get and use it to the full extent possible.
Bear in mind that under contemporary definitions your 'Founding Fathers' would have been considered dangerous terrorists.
The founding fathers were pretty much driven by paranoia of a geographically and socially distant government becoming plutocratic and disconnected from the governed. That is why one of the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights is that of the states to raise and train a civil militia (and the right of the civilians to keep and bear arms for participation in that militia) to oppose and even overthrow the federal government. Given their experiences such paranoia could be considered some what justified.
I'm mildly annoyed because a 72hr outage was caused by a cow (supercow powers) munching through some BT cable. Don't they bury these things?
They used to back when BT was owned by the government. Now to save time and money where ever they can they lay cables along the surface (or bury them only a few inches below the surface).
That's the difference between properly run nationalised industries that are driven by service delivery and improperly run private sector monopolies that are driven by shareholder dividends and boardroom bonus expectations.
About 15 years ago several cities lost high speed connectivity because the cables/fiber had been laid out alongside canal towpaths and some enterprising building contractors had come along one weekend and 'reclaimed' the cable they found 'just laying around' and figured had been dumped. What makes that even funnier was that exactly the same thing had happened to Mercury Telecoms the year before.
One way, admittedly a slow one, is to approach it like infrastructure upgrades of a very big company's IT systems. You still have the old legacy systems that can't be disposed of right now (too expensive, can't have down time, not enough time cos there's more important work to be done &c) much like in a town or city you have old areas that are badly laid out for public transport. New systems will come along with time so you build them to suit the current technological environment, with your town new areas are built over what was previously greenfields sites; eventually the old systems will fail or go out of support so have to be replaced, areas will become derilict or unsuitable for modern usage so need to be demolished and rebuilt or converted to different usage.
This is happening in the city I live in (Birmingham, UK). Over the last 5 years the old city centre has been pretty much demolished and rebuilt. Areas that were optimised for private car use have been optimised for public transport use. Old factory and office units have been converted to shops, pubs, clubs and residences (although the latter have tended to be at the luxury end of the market). There have been mistakes, things that didn't work out as planned, but you get them in any project of that size.
It can be as simple and making sure that when you build an out of town business park, the local bus companies can run a bus service to it or a spur from the local train lines or as complex as totally redesigning a city centre. The trick is to do as much as you can when you, not just throw up your hands at the start and say it's too big. Same as if you're updating the IT infrastructure of your company. It's unlikely that you'll be able to replace the whole MS-Windows/MS-Office desktop infrastructure to open source equivalents over night. You might be able to convert them to OpenOffice.org/StarOffice and Mozilla running on MS-Windows this year then get the company's vertical apps moved over to browser based (in Mozilla) and eventually change to buying PCs with Linux preinstalled instead of Windows.
Consider that by putting a $1600 per seat price tag on it they're not putting it against products like Crystal Reports, they're going up against things like Business Objects, Oracle Discoverer and other fully fledged business intelligence tools. From what I read on the site, the product seems to fall short of the mark. Tableau looks like it's closer to Crystal Reports, and little ahead of Microsoft Access and Excel, as a tool than it is to other products in the same price range.
I suspect that there would be a lot of people like myself who are Linux (or which ever OS you prefer) users by choice at home but Windows users by necessity (i.e. it's what's there) at work. Until we get more work places onto Linux, Windows will always dominate stats. I'm pretty sure that if you looked at the logs for/. you'd see a lot of Windows hits, same for the websites of any of the big Linux vendors even. Where I work it is actually impossible to access the web from a non-Windows machine as the proxy (Novell Border Manager) authentication uses client side VBScript!
How about something like Styrene (what a lot of packaging materials are made of) and many other plastics are hard to recycle and takes a long time to break down. Paper is easy to recycle and (if dumped in landfill) breaks down fairly quickly. Levy a surcharge on non-recyclable/biodegradable packaging and use the funds raised to fund subsidies to efforts to recycle. Companies will have to choose whether to raise their price, adsorb the extra costs or switch to a recylable/recycled packaging material where possible.
The Bill of Rights (what we're discussing here) talks about rights that the people and states have, not that the federal government has. Some rights (or constraints there of) for the federal government might be inferred from it but they are not granted by that document. The ammendment that comes closest to what you seem to be trying to say would be the 10th
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively,
or to the people.
The 9th ammendment seems to be talking about situations where the constitution does not enumerate a right for the people but another (probably, from the wording, pre-existing) document does. You have to read documents like the constitution and laws very carefully indeed and consider the exact meaning of the precise wording. that's part of the reason why the US has more lawyers than plumbers.
Can you point to a document where it says that a government agency cannot ask to see your ID?
That would be the Fourth Constitutional Amendment.
Which basically says that the federal government can't enter your home or go through your pockets without your permission, probable cause or a warrant signed by a judge. Doesn't stop them asking you for some ID before getting on a plane. Heck, there's nothing in there to stop them walking up to you in the street and saying "Excuse me, could we see some ID please?"
One thing that we do seem to agree on is that an airline is not the government. Them asking for ID is no different, really, to me asking you for proof of ID before I let you into my home to read the electric meter.
Firstly she's 21 now so definately an adult. Secondly the age of criminal culpability (the age where you're judged to be liable for your own actions unless explicitly ruled incompetant based on psychiatric evaluation) is around 10-14 years depending on jurisdiction. North Carolina has executed 14 year olds in living memory and Texas (where Katie Tarbox lived) has laws on it's books allowing the execution of 11 year olds (those are laws recently introduced, not old laws still hanging around from a couple of hundred years ago). If the law considers her cognizant enough of her actions to be executed for them then it must surely consider her cognizant enough to be sued.
And at the time that was probably quite legal. Age of consent has changed from time to time and culture to culture. As I recall Juliet (in the play Romeo and Juliet) is only supposed to be 14 (when first introduced it is stated that she'll be 14 at Lammastide which is in a 'fortnight and odd days') when she married Romeo (who was supposed to be 16, although I don't think it's explicitly stated in the play). In that society that was quite old for a girl to be unmarried. Mind you it was normal for a couple to marry at a very young age but not consumate the marriage for some years.
The two references you cited were refering to the US. Not really relevant to a discussion about the UK, the UK has a very different political structure. Control is much more centralised (so is corruption but that tends to more in the hands of unelected civil servants rather than elected politicians). I'm told that most if not all money collected in fines goes into a criminal injuries compensation fund so if, for example, you were hit by an uninsured driver (insurance is a legal requirement to drive in the UK) then costs incurred by you that normally would have been claimed from their insurer will be paid from that fund (although probably you won't get as much as you would have from their insurer).
Personally I think that driving whilst banned should result in punishment severe enough to dissuade people from doing it (automatic life time ban (if it wasn't already), significant jail time &c). Obviously there's still the problem of catching the perpetrators, but then that's a problem with a lot of crimes. Also, if they've been picked up for bad driving enough times to get them banned, what are the odds of them being picked up again for bad driving? Probably pretty good.
Emergency services drivers on duty breaking speed limits to respond to calls where slowing down could result in loss of life is fair enough. Hopefully they will have had advanced driver training and regular medical checkups so that they can do so a lot more safely than the average driver. Anyone else or any other time, no way. That's my opinion anyway.
Please cite your source as this is the first I've heard about it. With the frequency I hear complaints about speed cameras come up on BBC News I would expect to have heard about this before.
I take it from your statement about the points system that you agree with my idea to use it (and short term bans) more instead of fines. Cool.
Just wanted to respond to a couple of points, in general I agree with you.
I think annual retests would be too frequent to be workable. Say an eyetest every year with written and road tests every 10 years (or 5 or 7, somewhere around that sort of regularity), when you accumulate so many 'points' for minor offenses (here in the UK you get points on your license for minor offenses, after a certain amount of time they expire but if you get more than 12 then you get banned from driving for a time), to get your license back after a ban &c. Maybe test older drivers and drivers with degenerative medical conditions more regularly.
There are frequent complaints here in the UK about speed cameras being used as a source of income. Drivers just don't seem to be able to get their heads around the fact that if they didn't speed, jump red lights or make illegal turns then they wouldn't get fined. I'd like to see more use of short term bans for speeding and similar "driving like a bloody idiot" offenses.
When I was learning C back in 1996 the tutor showed us the 'easter egg' he'd put in the control firmware for a bomb disposal robot in the late 1980s. Programmers are always still programmers. I would be very surprised if there isn't some system somewhere in SAC that occasionally greets people with "Greetings Professor Falken. Would you like to play a game?" or something similar.
Closed source is the real Trojan horse. Open source is only like the Trojan horse if the horse were made out of glass and had a big sign on the front inviting everyone to come in and have a look around.
With closed source you have little or no idea what's going on under the hood. Sure under shared source agreements you are given a copy of the source code, but what guarantee do you have that the source code you were given is the same as the binary you're installing? Even compiling the source and comparing to the binaries installed won't necessarily be a good check as minor variations in the compiling environment can produce different binary code that is functionally different. Who's to say that the differences are due to differences in the compiling environment or due to differences in the source code?
That probably sounds paranoid, but in the defense business paranoia is the core of the business.
Your experience is then opposite of my experience. Everyone I know who has had their PS2 (or indeed any other games console) modded had it done so they could play pirated games.
In this sort of arena there are two possible directions to write laws. You either go with "It's generally legal but has some illegal uses." or "It's generally illegal but has some legal uses.". You then write the law to deal with the majority then add clauses/restrictions/other laws to handle the exceptions.
If something is generally used legally for positive and productive things (e.g. computers, knives and even cars) then you make laws that protect their legal use and then add laws that prevent their dangerous/negative use. So in the case of computers there are laws that are used to prosecute those who crack into systems to cause damage, in the case of cars there're laws that allow you to use them only after proper training in their safe use and when in a fit state to do so. And so on for other cases.
If something is predominantly used in harmful ways or to commit or prevent the detection of things that are already crimes (e.g. mod chips used to play pirated games, equipment to change the IMEI number of stolen mobile phones &c) then you make the thing itself illegal and add other laws to allow it's possession and use in the exceptional circumstances.
I remember seeing an interview with Gary Jules (the guy who did a cover of 'Mad World', originally by Tears for Fears, that was used in Donnie Darko) where he attributed the sucess the single had enjoyed, especially in the US, to online music sharing. People who other wise would not have had a chance to hear the song (very few radio stations would give it air play until it was already a hit) got to hear it. They liked it so they put pressure on the distributors to release it more widely and then went out and bought it. It sold an insane number of copies.
Slashdot Mirror
Amendment II
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
"A well regulated militia". Well regulated indicates that it's a body with some official backing and organisation, not a bunch of yahoo's with guns shooting up anyone they don't like. Regulation implies control and organisation, therefore the militia must be raised by some existing body. Regulation, in this context, also implies training as each member of the force would need to be aware of the scope of their actions and influence, indeed the reason they are participating in the milia.
"being necessary to the security of a free state". Links it to the states so now we know where the well regulation is supposed to come from. Without that you could have churches raising their own militia to kill off other faiths (remember, the first ammendment only stops the federal government outlawing religeons, it doesn't stop other faiths taking up arms).
"the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.". This is the bit that people often remember. If that was the entirety of the ammendment then it would be a protection of a person's right to keep and bear arms regardless of the purpose. It is not, however, the full text of the ammendment. The ammendment explicitly states that people should be allowed to keep and bear arms for participation in a well regulated state militia.
Stephen
Bear in mind that under contemporary definitions your 'Founding Fathers' would have been considered dangerous terrorists.
The founding fathers were pretty much driven by paranoia of a geographically and socially distant government becoming plutocratic and disconnected from the governed. That is why one of the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights is that of the states to raise and train a civil militia (and the right of the civilians to keep and bear arms for participation in that militia) to oppose and even overthrow the federal government. Given their experiences such paranoia could be considered some what justified.
Stephen
They used to back when BT was owned by the government. Now to save time and money where ever they can they lay cables along the surface (or bury them only a few inches below the surface).
That's the difference between properly run nationalised industries that are driven by service delivery and improperly run private sector monopolies that are driven by shareholder dividends and boardroom bonus expectations.
About 15 years ago several cities lost high speed connectivity because the cables/fiber had been laid out alongside canal towpaths and some enterprising building contractors had come along one weekend and 'reclaimed' the cable they found 'just laying around' and figured had been dumped. What makes that even funnier was that exactly the same thing had happened to Mercury Telecoms the year before.
Stephen
One way, admittedly a slow one, is to approach it like infrastructure upgrades of a very big company's IT systems. You still have the old legacy systems that can't be disposed of right now (too expensive, can't have down time, not enough time cos there's more important work to be done &c) much like in a town or city you have old areas that are badly laid out for public transport. New systems will come along with time so you build them to suit the current technological environment, with your town new areas are built over what was previously greenfields sites; eventually the old systems will fail or go out of support so have to be replaced, areas will become derilict or unsuitable for modern usage so need to be demolished and rebuilt or converted to different usage.
This is happening in the city I live in (Birmingham, UK). Over the last 5 years the old city centre has been pretty much demolished and rebuilt. Areas that were optimised for private car use have been optimised for public transport use. Old factory and office units have been converted to shops, pubs, clubs and residences (although the latter have tended to be at the luxury end of the market). There have been mistakes, things that didn't work out as planned, but you get them in any project of that size.
It can be as simple and making sure that when you build an out of town business park, the local bus companies can run a bus service to it or a spur from the local train lines or as complex as totally redesigning a city centre. The trick is to do as much as you can when you, not just throw up your hands at the start and say it's too big. Same as if you're updating the IT infrastructure of your company. It's unlikely that you'll be able to replace the whole MS-Windows/MS-Office desktop infrastructure to open source equivalents over night. You might be able to convert them to OpenOffice.org/StarOffice and Mozilla running on MS-Windows this year then get the company's vertical apps moved over to browser based (in Mozilla) and eventually change to buying PCs with Linux preinstalled instead of Windows.
Stephen
Consider that by putting a $1600 per seat price tag on it they're not putting it against products like Crystal Reports, they're going up against things like Business Objects, Oracle Discoverer and other fully fledged business intelligence tools. From what I read on the site, the product seems to fall short of the mark. Tableau looks like it's closer to Crystal Reports, and little ahead of Microsoft Access and Excel, as a tool than it is to other products in the same price range.
Stephen
I suspect that there would be a lot of people like myself who are Linux (or which ever OS you prefer) users by choice at home but Windows users by necessity (i.e. it's what's there) at work. Until we get more work places onto Linux, Windows will always dominate stats. I'm pretty sure that if you looked at the logs for /. you'd see a lot of Windows hits, same for the websites of any of the big Linux vendors even. Where I work it is actually impossible to access the web from a non-Windows machine as the proxy (Novell Border Manager) authentication uses client side VBScript!
Stephen
How about something like Styrene (what a lot of packaging materials are made of) and many other plastics are hard to recycle and takes a long time to break down. Paper is easy to recycle and (if dumped in landfill) breaks down fairly quickly. Levy a surcharge on non-recyclable/biodegradable packaging and use the funds raised to fund subsidies to efforts to recycle. Companies will have to choose whether to raise their price, adsorb the extra costs or switch to a recylable/recycled packaging material where possible.
Stephen
The Bill of Rights (what we're discussing here) talks about rights that the people and states have, not that the federal government has. Some rights (or constraints there of) for the federal government might be inferred from it but they are not granted by that document. The ammendment that comes closest to what you seem to be trying to say would be the 10th
The 9th ammendment seems to be talking about situations where the constitution does not enumerate a right for the people but another (probably, from the wording, pre-existing) document does. You have to read documents like the constitution and laws very carefully indeed and consider the exact meaning of the precise wording. that's part of the reason why the US has more lawyers than plumbers.
Can you point to a document where it says that a government agency cannot ask to see your ID?
Stephen
Which basically says that the federal government can't enter your home or go through your pockets without your permission, probable cause or a warrant signed by a judge. Doesn't stop them asking you for some ID before getting on a plane. Heck, there's nothing in there to stop them walking up to you in the street and saying "Excuse me, could we see some ID please?"
One thing that we do seem to agree on is that an airline is not the government. Them asking for ID is no different, really, to me asking you for proof of ID before I let you into my home to read the electric meter.
Stephen
Firstly she's 21 now so definately an adult. Secondly the age of criminal culpability (the age where you're judged to be liable for your own actions unless explicitly ruled incompetant based on psychiatric evaluation) is around 10-14 years depending on jurisdiction. North Carolina has executed 14 year olds in living memory and Texas (where Katie Tarbox lived) has laws on it's books allowing the execution of 11 year olds (those are laws recently introduced, not old laws still hanging around from a couple of hundred years ago). If the law considers her cognizant enough of her actions to be executed for them then it must surely consider her cognizant enough to be sued.
Stephen
And at the time that was probably quite legal. Age of consent has changed from time to time and culture to culture. As I recall Juliet (in the play Romeo and Juliet) is only supposed to be 14 (when first introduced it is stated that she'll be 14 at Lammastide which is in a 'fortnight and odd days') when she married Romeo (who was supposed to be 16, although I don't think it's explicitly stated in the play). In that society that was quite old for a girl to be unmarried. Mind you it was normal for a couple to marry at a very young age but not consumate the marriage for some years.
Stephen
Who are Penguin's biggest competitor(s)? Send visitors there.
Or maybe send them to Project Gutenberg?
Stephen
The two references you cited were refering to the US. Not really relevant to a discussion about the UK, the UK has a very different political structure. Control is much more centralised (so is corruption but that tends to more in the hands of unelected civil servants rather than elected politicians). I'm told that most if not all money collected in fines goes into a criminal injuries compensation fund so if, for example, you were hit by an uninsured driver (insurance is a legal requirement to drive in the UK) then costs incurred by you that normally would have been claimed from their insurer will be paid from that fund (although probably you won't get as much as you would have from their insurer).
Stephen
At one of my previous employers productivity significantly increased (like two fold) when the production manager went away on leave.
Stephen
Personally I think that driving whilst banned should result in punishment severe enough to dissuade people from doing it (automatic life time ban (if it wasn't already), significant jail time &c). Obviously there's still the problem of catching the perpetrators, but then that's a problem with a lot of crimes. Also, if they've been picked up for bad driving enough times to get them banned, what are the odds of them being picked up again for bad driving? Probably pretty good.
Emergency services drivers on duty breaking speed limits to respond to calls where slowing down could result in loss of life is fair enough. Hopefully they will have had advanced driver training and regular medical checkups so that they can do so a lot more safely than the average driver. Anyone else or any other time, no way. That's my opinion anyway.
Stephen
Please cite your source as this is the first I've heard about it. With the frequency I hear complaints about speed cameras come up on BBC News I would expect to have heard about this before.
I take it from your statement about the points system that you agree with my idea to use it (and short term bans) more instead of fines. Cool.
Stephen
Just wanted to respond to a couple of points, in general I agree with you.
I think annual retests would be too frequent to be workable. Say an eyetest every year with written and road tests every 10 years (or 5 or 7, somewhere around that sort of regularity), when you accumulate so many 'points' for minor offenses (here in the UK you get points on your license for minor offenses, after a certain amount of time they expire but if you get more than 12 then you get banned from driving for a time), to get your license back after a ban &c. Maybe test older drivers and drivers with degenerative medical conditions more regularly.
There are frequent complaints here in the UK about speed cameras being used as a source of income. Drivers just don't seem to be able to get their heads around the fact that if they didn't speed, jump red lights or make illegal turns then they wouldn't get fined. I'd like to see more use of short term bans for speeding and similar "driving like a bloody idiot" offenses.
Stephen
When I was learning C back in 1996 the tutor showed us the 'easter egg' he'd put in the control firmware for a bomb disposal robot in the late 1980s. Programmers are always still programmers. I would be very surprised if there isn't some system somewhere in SAC that occasionally greets people with "Greetings Professor Falken. Would you like to play a game?" or something similar.
Stephen
The golf course hasn't put in WiFi yet.
Stephen
HTH, HANDN
Stephen
Closed source is the real Trojan horse. Open source is only like the Trojan horse if the horse were made out of glass and had a big sign on the front inviting everyone to come in and have a look around.
With closed source you have little or no idea what's going on under the hood. Sure under shared source agreements you are given a copy of the source code, but what guarantee do you have that the source code you were given is the same as the binary you're installing? Even compiling the source and comparing to the binaries installed won't necessarily be a good check as minor variations in the compiling environment can produce different binary code that is functionally different. Who's to say that the differences are due to differences in the compiling environment or due to differences in the source code?
That probably sounds paranoid, but in the defense business paranoia is the core of the business.
Stephen
Your experience is then opposite of my experience. Everyone I know who has had their PS2 (or indeed any other games console) modded had it done so they could play pirated games.
Stephen
In this sort of arena there are two possible directions to write laws. You either go with "It's generally legal but has some illegal uses." or "It's generally illegal but has some legal uses.". You then write the law to deal with the majority then add clauses/restrictions/other laws to handle the exceptions.
If something is generally used legally for positive and productive things (e.g. computers, knives and even cars) then you make laws that protect their legal use and then add laws that prevent their dangerous/negative use. So in the case of computers there are laws that are used to prosecute those who crack into systems to cause damage, in the case of cars there're laws that allow you to use them only after proper training in their safe use and when in a fit state to do so. And so on for other cases.
If something is predominantly used in harmful ways or to commit or prevent the detection of things that are already crimes (e.g. mod chips used to play pirated games, equipment to change the IMEI number of stolen mobile phones &c) then you make the thing itself illegal and add other laws to allow it's possession and use in the exceptional circumstances.
It really is that simple and clear.
Stephen
I remember seeing an interview with Gary Jules (the guy who did a cover of 'Mad World', originally by Tears for Fears, that was used in Donnie Darko) where he attributed the sucess the single had enjoyed, especially in the US, to online music sharing. People who other wise would not have had a chance to hear the song (very few radio stations would give it air play until it was already a hit) got to hear it. They liked it so they put pressure on the distributors to release it more widely and then went out and bought it. It sold an insane number of copies.
Stephen
It's not so much paying more because you've got more appliances as paying more for the right to use it on more appliances at the same time.
Stephen