I didn't say that such systems were new, I said they need to be designed for. IE the house/building needs to be designed correctly to impliment it.
EG - rather than a 30 gallon water heater with 1" of insulation, you get a 100 gallon tank with 4" and a mixer valve that maintains a constant output temperature by mixing cold water in proper proportions when the tank is at its hottest. For the home, proper insulation combined with thermal mass can keep it at a comfortable temperature for hours and hours even without running the heat pump. Also, with such a system adding solar heating is a comparative breeze.
Well, if he really said that, he's a dirty liar. You can trivially get 250HP from a 7.3 powerstroke, which weighs about 1100lb wet.
What about the torque, and would the thing survive the stated 40k hours service life under such severe duty? He didn't mention that any old diesel would be 2k pounds, he mentioned it in the context of lifespan. I'm reminded of generators - standby diesel generators will rotate at 1800 RPM or faster, enabling more power generation from a smaller generator, but prime/continuous generators often operate at 1200 or even 900 RPM, drastically increasing their service life, but they have to be bigger to generate the same amount of power as the standby.
The engine isnot receiving service every 3-4 weeks. A truck that unreliable would be sold for scrap. The most common point of failure is the hydraulic system. Diesel engines regularly run for literally hundreds of thousands of miles without anything more than regular scheduled maintenance service, unless they're six-liter Fords.
You misunderstood what I said then. The 3-4 weeks was the regularly scheduled maintenance to do stuff like swap the oil and filters. It's not that the trucks were unreliable, it's just that they were used in such a severe duty operation that, much like NYC cabs, they ended up having to do oil changes on a frequent basis. The study was doing a lifecycle analysis using a different oil that extended the required service times substantially, even if the oil itself was more expensive, the increased usage time more than justified it.
Like I said "is for torque". Torque, more than horsepower, is what gets a bus going. Meanwhile electric motors are great at low RPM torque, so while I'd go with a heavier duty motor for the bus, it doesn't actually have to be any more powerful, or even all that much heavier.
The lighter weight of a Model S allows it to accelerate much faster, but the power demands are remarkably similar. Note that I mentioned that a Model S battery would be able to provide the current, not the energy. You'd get less range than a Leaf trying to drive a bus on all-electric with a single S battery. So what I was picturing was taking the electric drive-train of a Model-S and more or less converting it into the electric portion of a hybrid system for a bus.
So, record label policies may very well have been both the reason the DRM was in place and the reason Apple was so quick to break any exploits that circumvented it.
Were they really holes though? Real was APPLYING their DRM, not removing it. Depending on the encryption/encoding system, that's not circumventing. The music was still paid for through Real, still protected from copying to the extend the DRM ever worked in the first place, etc...
Diesels in that size are much more efficient, more tolerant of abuse, more tolerant of contaminated fuels, and a lot cheaper to maintain.
Citation? In the video it mentions that a diesel replacement for the power of the turbine would be 2000 pounds, not 200. Not exactly the same size. He also specifies that the turbine requires less maintenance. The turbine(which shouldn't be running all day) is rated at 40k hours(4.5 years continual operation), doesn't use oil lubrication or have a cooling system to worry about. Service parts are filters - fuel and air.
Looking up diesel garbage truck information - I found a study where they had a service interval of 225 hours, probably about every 3-4 weeks. The study mentions going with special motor oil containing stuff that enabled them to 'extend oil change intervals by six times'. So I think that figuring on an oil change between 1-3 months is reasonable. That adds up.
As for contaminated fuels, is that such a big problem here in the USA? Besides, turbines are inherently multi-fuel, so as long as the fuel burns you should be good. If it doesn't even a diesel will hydro-lock and kill itself.
I think that the trick is that you might be thinking of aviation turbines, not power generation turbines. Looking up the Capstone turbine company, they produce power turbines, not aviation turbines.
The important bits I've heard about turbines is a bit that goes like "Small size, wide power band, efficiency, pick two". Aviation turbines aren't as efficient as they could be because they need to operate over a wide power band. However, the turbine isn't hooked to the wheels in this application - it can happily be either off or running in it's ideal power band charging the battery. At which point 1800 pounds saved DOES save fuel because a lighter vehicle can go further on a given amount of energy.
Fun fact, last time hybrid buses came up because of Seattle's disappointing results with them, primarily due to new EPA requirements wrecking the efficiency of the diesel engines), I figured out that the standard bus has about the same horsepower as a Tesla Model S. The primary reason for using a diesel in school buses and such is for torque, reliability, and fuel economy.
So 1, maybe 2 Model S batteries would be able to provide all the current a school bus needs.
Blenders, computers, and even lighting are fairly insignificant power users compared to our efforts to adjust the temperature of things - water heaters, AC systems, heat pumps, etc...
Design things so that these systems are supply driven rather than demand run and you can really swing demand around quite a bit.
At the time, Dr. Rosenberg and others at the C.D.C. were becoming increasingly assertive about the importance of studying gun-related injuries and deaths as a public health phenomenon, financing studies that found, for example, having a gun in the house, rather than conferring protection, significantly increased the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.
And said studies were so flawed that the NRA did indeed act to have their funding removed. We're talking about stuff like including drug dealers and violent felons possessing illegal weapons as a 'gun in the house', without at least separating them out to note that being a criminal with a gun is vastly more dangerous than being a nominally law-abiding citizen with a gun.
I can not open the actual document without paying for it — only the summary is available.
Like I mentioned, university credentials. Wiley accepts them, Taylor Francis doesn't.
So, no — until I see actual statistics showing certain races punished harsher for the same crimes, I'm not going to accept that assertion on face-value.
That's actually what the study I posted looked at. They adjusted for crime, economic standing, state and whatnot, and found longer/harsher sentences for people who were male, black, and young. The trifecta really screws that segment of the population.
is that Asians should be just as much (if not more) a target of the "Whitey" racism as Blacks.
I'm not sure where you're coming from here, but I can tell you that Asians aren't known for criminality like young male blacks are. The result is a perception that they're dangerous, leading to harsher sentences(my hypothesis). Asians today are generally not seen as criminals, but hard workers/good in school.
which means, lots of people saw the exchange, but not one was able to offer the evidence I asked for... Not one person.
I posted it. You didn't accept it. Hell, I pointed out that the studies show that being young/male is a bigger factor than being black.
Until tablet operating systems implement window management more sophisticated than the MS-DOS-era "all maximized all the time" model,
This made me think of Star Trek and their 'PADDS', where you'd see leadership running around with several of them on their desks.
Is there any reason that we couldn't put enough storage into a phone-type device to hold all of a person's important documents, then utilize relatively cheap tablets in a distributed computing mode using short range networking sort of like bluetooth?
The way I'm picturing it each device has enough processing power to display video on it's own screen, and enough synchronized cache that a user can use at least 6-10 documents without having to constantly fetch them from the central device. Ideally you'd only look at the screen of the central device in an emergency, and I'd make it rather thicker than modern cell phones for longer battery life. If you're doing something that's actually computationally expensive, as long as it can be paralleled all the devices pitch in what they can.
Or you wait until you get home and it syncs to your home server to re-compile the latest linux kernal and all it's associated packages.;)
Her laptop runs Vista, and it's so slow as to be almost unusable.
There's a reason you have minimum specifications(IE it'll run), recommended minimums(it'll run satisfactorily if you're not a power user), and recommended specifications(it'll run good unless you're a power user).
From what I've read, they really did some incredible optimizations going from Vista to 7 and even further with 8. That's why the minimum hasn't changed much.
And even the NRA supported the regulation of firearms, at least up to and beyond 1957.
There's a big difference between regulating firearms, and attempting to ban and backdoor ban them as well.
I'm actually for a lot of 'gun control' - regulations on when, where, and what you may fire at, I'm fine with background checks, want gun safety training in schools, etc...
What I don't like are cosmetic bans against firearms that are used in statistically insignificant(though newsworthy) amounts of crime, especially murder.
Hmm... That might be an interesting legal loophole if the sale/purchase of said rifles is illegal, but the construction of them isn't. Person A buys the CNC machine for $1200, uses it to mill 2-3 rifles that are illegal to buy. He then sells it and instructions to Person B for $1k, who does the same, etc...
Or hell, rents the device out for $100 a lower. Done.
The full-auto sear would only be for ancient AR-15s, they've changing the milling so that to make an effective one you'd need to have a custom sear and do some milling work on the lower receiver.
In which case it's the sear itself that's consider the machine gun, as you mention. As far as I know there's absolutely nothing about the bolt that needs to be changed.
Of course, go back to WWII and weapons such as the M-3 'Grease Gun' and you'll find that with basic machining equipment - not even a precision CNC machine, and you can churn out machine guns for less than $100 a pop.
Indeed, as an individual who leans libertarian, I have to admit that while I find the topic of child porn/abuse very disturbing, and have no problems with harsh sentences for child abusers(the creators of the works), I question the necessity to ban something completely, especially when the works people are trying to ban strays into things like 'child porn' where there wasn't any child harmed in the creation, specifically artificial child porn ranging from cartoon depictions to older actors manipulated to look younger through various techniques from makeup to digital editing. Especially when there's no solid evidence that said artificial works increase the odds that a child will be abused. My standard for banning something that doesn't directly cause harm to others is very high.
Take drunk driving - I allow the banning of the act, even though a drunk driver isn't necessarily going to cause harm to somebody else, because there's mountains of evidence that the risks of them doing so is vastly higher. I oppose movements to drop the limits even more though, because it's getting into statistical insignificance. Drunk drivers are much more likely to kill somebody when they're over.2, not below.08. I'd prefer the cops go after the.2 types as a result.
To paraphrase a saying I've heard: "Free speech isn't free if it can't offend anyone". So when considering whether to infringe on free speech we have to look at the most offensive examples. Child Porn. Fred Phelps and the Westboro baptist church. KKK demonstration marches. Mein Kampf, the communist manifesto, etc... That I'm generally very for freedom doesn't mean that I don't like what I fully know some will get up to with it. I just think that it's worth it overall.
I agree on the flamethrowers, though I also remember versions of them being used for pest control as well as controlled burns, snow removal, and other such tasks.
They make a device that pushes out propane or natural gas into animal burrows, turning them into fuel-air explosives, then the operator triggers a spark using the device that detonates it, killing rodents such as gophers in the tunnel network through a combination of overpressure and oxygen deprivation.
It's not what most would consider a flamethrower, but it comes under it in the rules.
As for assault weapons - rifles are used for a statistically insignificant number of murders in the USA, much less the sub-category of 'assault weapons' that are rifles. I have to be specific here because some handguns count as 'assault weapons' as well. The state of California goes above and beyond and counts a firearm that's generally too heavy to be fired unsupported as an assault weapon, even if it's single shot. Never mind that finding a single murder in the USA from that caliber is rather difficult...
Constitutional amendments have nothing to do with debating the merits of the topic.
It does when people start saying things like 'stop hiding behind paper' and 'the constitution is a living document'. Sure it's a living document, there's a way to change it built into the very document itself. Until then, pointing out that many gun control proposals are unconstitutional isn't necessarily out of line.
Also, going by what most recently happened in Colorado, what happened after the first assault weapons ban, and such, pushing for repeal or significant restriction on the 2nd is a good way to lose your office. Outright recalls in Colorado, with 2 politicians losing their seats over their votes(and a 3rd resigning rather than cost the democrats their senate majority), the loss of congress to the republicans because of the AWB, etc...
There's a good chance that the Democrats will lose the senate within the next couple elections because of their law.
Simply put - trying to paint the NRA or gun rights activists as racist is a trick that simply doesn't work anymore. 40-50 years ago it was true, but back then half the country was racist. The whole country - including the gun rights movement - has come a long way.
Consider that 40-50 years ago the NRA wasn't even a gun rights organization at the time, having a history of supporting things like the NFA, various 'Saturday night special' bans*, etc...
Then, as the rights people gained power the NRA did a complete about-face on some of the racist things, started considering gun rights as much as hunter safety and the proper operation of safe ranges.
*A 'Saturday night special is a now older term for a cheap handgun. Gun control laws targeting them at least have the benefit of actually targeting the weapons most criminals use. So few people are actually killed by rifles, much less 'assault weapon' type rifles, that it's a statistically insignificant cause of death. More people are beaten to death with people's bare hands and feet.
U.S. v. Miller, in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson, argued that the Second Amendment is “restricted to the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defense and security.”
I think it's important to note that there was no defense presented in U.S. v Miller because the defendant had died during the appeals process and the firm pushing the case didn't pursue it further due to lack of funds/motivation.
Despite this, per their decision they only allowed the regulation of short barreled shotguns because no military use was presented to them. This was despite there being plenty of evidence available from WWII 'trench guns', but this evidence wasn't presented because, again, no defense was mounted. It was the equivalent of a default judgement, and even then it was actually pretty limited.
Your attempt to include links to such statistics failed. Please, try again. Be sure, your links point to differences between ratios of law-breakers vs. prosecutions by race. Any pointers comparing ratios populations vs. prosecutions are meaningless and will be discarded.
Not the op, but how about this one: The interaction of race, gender, and age in criminal sentencing: the punishment cost of being young, black, and male "(1) young black males are sentenced more harshly than any other group, (2) race is most influential in the sentencing of younger rather than older males, (3) the influence of offender's age on sentencing is greater among males than females, and (4) the main effects of race, gender, and age are more modest compared to the very large differences in sentencing outcomes across certain age-race-gender combinations."
Translation: Young Black Males are the most screwed if they end up in court, likely to receive far longer sentences for the exact same crime. The severity of their likely sentence drops if they're female or a different race, or are older. "Young Black Male" is statistically treated significantly worse than "Young White Male", but once they start passing into middle age the significance drops.
A review of other articles (scholar.google.com) shows that sex&age are probably bigger factors though. An old black guy is about as well/badly off as an old white guy in most criminal trials. I hate Taylor Francis, btw, they don't take my university credentials to see the full papers, so I'm mostly working off of abstracts. Some of the issue seems to be that states with high percentages of poor black populations also tend to be the harshest sentence-wise. So a crime in a predominantly white state where the defendant(90% likely to be white) might get a year regardless of their skin color, but 'down south' where the defendant is statistically black(let's go with 60%), odds are he'll get a decade, again, regardless of skin color. Appropriate sentence for a crime is up to debate, of course, but I'm trying to keep it about race.
Alas, he also had the skills to obtain guns legally.
Thus the 'probably'. Such types are so rare that it's not worth the cost to freedom in having to restrict things like CNC milling equipment - which is useful for a very wide variety of tasks depending on the exact equipment. Either you're restricting the freedom of hundreds of thousands of individuals, or you make getting a permit so loose that the law is ineffective anyways and all it does is either place an additional tax on the people for no good reason or throws our country even deeper in debt.
After all, is a requirement to serialize the firearm produced really going to stop a person so bent on mass murder that they're willing to use CNC equipment to make their weapons?
If we want to stop/slow that we might as well be like how I've heard the Japanese are - everybody gets an annual 'checkup visit' by the police once a year or so. Fixing our healthcare system, specifically the mental health part, would probably help more.
BTW guys, I suggest AGAINST taking the advice of any ACs on gun laws. Every one I've seen is very incorrect. Even I'm incorrect, but I like to think I'm a bit closer.
Since homemade guns are not transferable it was mostly a symbolic idea which at most would add another charge onto an existing arrest and that is about it.
Consult a lawyer before doing this, but 'homemade guns' ARE transferable, you just have to serialize them. 'Billy Bob's #1', 'Billy Bob's #2', etc... would be perfectly acceptable. #1 could be a single shot breech-loading shotgun that you need a screwdriver to reload and #2 could be a semi-automatic handgun, the important part is that they have a unique serial number for the manufacturer(IE you).
Producing firearms with the intent of selling it is illegal without an FFL, but if you make a firearm then use it for a time before deciding to sell it you don't need a FFL.
Please note that the standard varies, but generally speaking if you're making money off your guns(IE selling them for more than it cost you to make them in parts and labor), you're probably going to want that FFL if you're selling more than a couple guns a year.
The initial law suit was over material that was recorded prior to 1972 and was not subject to copyright protection.
My research says that before 1923 is the general time to look for audio recordings that have left copyright, Stuff produced in 1969 still has another 50 years to go. So the only public domain stuff from the '60s would be items that were explicitly put into the public domain, and that's a relatively short(and not very popular) list.
The plaintiffs claim that logs and source code were destroyed in discovery, but this is a normal claim by RIA lawyers when facts don't yield what they want. Of course the RIA is mentioned all over the court findings, including the initial lawsuit started by UMG and RIA. The initial law suit was over material that was recorded prior to 1972 and was not subject to copyright protection.
Perhaps, but if it doesn't favor them then the defense can produce the things to help themselves. Fact is that 'source code and logs' are OFTEN lost on a routine basis even/especially without discovery. Code repositories like git should limit code loss, but that assumes that the git server wasn't lost/purged at some point. We've lost a lot of code from when I was a kid because companies, even major ones, just didn't care.
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I didn't say that such systems were new, I said they need to be designed for. IE the house/building needs to be designed correctly to impliment it.
EG - rather than a 30 gallon water heater with 1" of insulation, you get a 100 gallon tank with 4" and a mixer valve that maintains a constant output temperature by mixing cold water in proper proportions when the tank is at its hottest. For the home, proper insulation combined with thermal mass can keep it at a comfortable temperature for hours and hours even without running the heat pump. Also, with such a system adding solar heating is a comparative breeze.
Well, if he really said that, he's a dirty liar. You can trivially get 250HP from a 7.3 powerstroke, which weighs about 1100lb wet.
What about the torque, and would the thing survive the stated 40k hours service life under such severe duty? He didn't mention that any old diesel would be 2k pounds, he mentioned it in the context of lifespan. I'm reminded of generators - standby diesel generators will rotate at 1800 RPM or faster, enabling more power generation from a smaller generator, but prime/continuous generators often operate at 1200 or even 900 RPM, drastically increasing their service life, but they have to be bigger to generate the same amount of power as the standby.
The engine isnot receiving service every 3-4 weeks. A truck that unreliable would be sold for scrap. The most common point of failure is the hydraulic system. Diesel engines regularly run for literally hundreds of thousands of miles without anything more than regular scheduled maintenance service, unless they're six-liter Fords.
You misunderstood what I said then. The 3-4 weeks was the regularly scheduled maintenance to do stuff like swap the oil and filters. It's not that the trucks were unreliable, it's just that they were used in such a severe duty operation that, much like NYC cabs, they ended up having to do oil changes on a frequent basis. The study was doing a lifecycle analysis using a different oil that extended the required service times substantially, even if the oil itself was more expensive, the increased usage time more than justified it.
Like I said "is for torque". Torque, more than horsepower, is what gets a bus going. Meanwhile electric motors are great at low RPM torque, so while I'd go with a heavier duty motor for the bus, it doesn't actually have to be any more powerful, or even all that much heavier.
The lighter weight of a Model S allows it to accelerate much faster, but the power demands are remarkably similar. Note that I mentioned that a Model S battery would be able to provide the current, not the energy. You'd get less range than a Leaf trying to drive a bus on all-electric with a single S battery. So what I was picturing was taking the electric drive-train of a Model-S and more or less converting it into the electric portion of a hybrid system for a bus.
Lock-in is a normal part of business.
Perhaps, but anti-trust legislation were specifically passed to limit this.
So, record label policies may very well have been both the reason the DRM was in place and the reason Apple was so quick to break any exploits that circumvented it.
Were they really holes though? Real was APPLYING their DRM, not removing it. Depending on the encryption/encoding system, that's not circumventing. The music was still paid for through Real, still protected from copying to the extend the DRM ever worked in the first place, etc...
Questions to be figured out in court, I guess.
Diesels in that size are much more efficient, more tolerant of abuse, more tolerant of contaminated fuels, and a lot cheaper to maintain.
Citation? In the video it mentions that a diesel replacement for the power of the turbine would be 2000 pounds, not 200. Not exactly the same size. He also specifies that the turbine requires less maintenance. The turbine(which shouldn't be running all day) is rated at 40k hours(4.5 years continual operation), doesn't use oil lubrication or have a cooling system to worry about. Service parts are filters - fuel and air.
Looking up diesel garbage truck information - I found a study where they had a service interval of 225 hours, probably about every 3-4 weeks. The study mentions going with special motor oil containing stuff that enabled them to 'extend oil change intervals by six times'. So I think that figuring on an oil change between 1-3 months is reasonable. That adds up.
As for contaminated fuels, is that such a big problem here in the USA? Besides, turbines are inherently multi-fuel, so as long as the fuel burns you should be good. If it doesn't even a diesel will hydro-lock and kill itself.
I think that the trick is that you might be thinking of aviation turbines, not power generation turbines. Looking up the Capstone turbine company, they produce power turbines, not aviation turbines.
The important bits I've heard about turbines is a bit that goes like "Small size, wide power band, efficiency, pick two". Aviation turbines aren't as efficient as they could be because they need to operate over a wide power band. However, the turbine isn't hooked to the wheels in this application - it can happily be either off or running in it's ideal power band charging the battery. At which point 1800 pounds saved DOES save fuel because a lighter vehicle can go further on a given amount of energy.
Fun fact, last time hybrid buses came up because of Seattle's disappointing results with them, primarily due to new EPA requirements wrecking the efficiency of the diesel engines), I figured out that the standard bus has about the same horsepower as a Tesla Model S. The primary reason for using a diesel in school buses and such is for torque, reliability, and fuel economy.
So 1, maybe 2 Model S batteries would be able to provide all the current a school bus needs.
Blenders, computers, and even lighting are fairly insignificant power users compared to our efforts to adjust the temperature of things - water heaters, AC systems, heat pumps, etc...
Design things so that these systems are supply driven rather than demand run and you can really swing demand around quite a bit.
At the time, Dr. Rosenberg and others at the C.D.C. were becoming increasingly assertive about the importance of studying gun-related injuries and deaths as a public health phenomenon, financing studies that found, for example, having a gun in the house, rather than conferring protection, significantly increased the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.
And said studies were so flawed that the NRA did indeed act to have their funding removed. We're talking about stuff like including drug dealers and violent felons possessing illegal weapons as a 'gun in the house', without at least separating them out to note that being a criminal with a gun is vastly more dangerous than being a nominally law-abiding citizen with a gun.
I can not open the actual document without paying for it — only the summary is available.
Like I mentioned, university credentials. Wiley accepts them, Taylor Francis doesn't.
So, no — until I see actual statistics showing certain races punished harsher for the same crimes, I'm not going to accept that assertion on face-value.
That's actually what the study I posted looked at. They adjusted for crime, economic standing, state and whatnot, and found longer/harsher sentences for people who were male, black, and young. The trifecta really screws that segment of the population.
is that Asians should be just as much (if not more) a target of the "Whitey" racism as Blacks.
I'm not sure where you're coming from here, but I can tell you that Asians aren't known for criminality like young male blacks are. The result is a perception that they're dangerous, leading to harsher sentences(my hypothesis). Asians today are generally not seen as criminals, but hard workers/good in school.
which means, lots of people saw the exchange, but not one was able to offer the evidence I asked for... Not one person.
I posted it. You didn't accept it. Hell, I pointed out that the studies show that being young/male is a bigger factor than being black.
Until tablet operating systems implement window management more sophisticated than the MS-DOS-era "all maximized all the time" model,
This made me think of Star Trek and their 'PADDS', where you'd see leadership running around with several of them on their desks.
Is there any reason that we couldn't put enough storage into a phone-type device to hold all of a person's important documents, then utilize relatively cheap tablets in a distributed computing mode using short range networking sort of like bluetooth?
The way I'm picturing it each device has enough processing power to display video on it's own screen, and enough synchronized cache that a user can use at least 6-10 documents without having to constantly fetch them from the central device. Ideally you'd only look at the screen of the central device in an emergency, and I'd make it rather thicker than modern cell phones for longer battery life. If you're doing something that's actually computationally expensive, as long as it can be paralleled all the devices pitch in what they can.
Or you wait until you get home and it syncs to your home server to re-compile the latest linux kernal and all it's associated packages. ;)
Her laptop runs Vista, and it's so slow as to be almost unusable.
There's a reason you have minimum specifications(IE it'll run), recommended minimums(it'll run satisfactorily if you're not a power user), and recommended specifications(it'll run good unless you're a power user).
From what I've read, they really did some incredible optimizations going from Vista to 7 and even further with 8. That's why the minimum hasn't changed much.
And even the NRA supported the regulation of firearms, at least up to and beyond 1957.
There's a big difference between regulating firearms, and attempting to ban and backdoor ban them as well.
I'm actually for a lot of 'gun control' - regulations on when, where, and what you may fire at, I'm fine with background checks, want gun safety training in schools, etc...
What I don't like are cosmetic bans against firearms that are used in statistically insignificant(though newsworthy) amounts of crime, especially murder.
Hmm... That might be an interesting legal loophole if the sale/purchase of said rifles is illegal, but the construction of them isn't. Person A buys the CNC machine for $1200, uses it to mill 2-3 rifles that are illegal to buy. He then sells it and instructions to Person B for $1k, who does the same, etc...
Or hell, rents the device out for $100 a lower. Done.
The full-auto sear would only be for ancient AR-15s, they've changing the milling so that to make an effective one you'd need to have a custom sear and do some milling work on the lower receiver.
In which case it's the sear itself that's consider the machine gun, as you mention. As far as I know there's absolutely nothing about the bolt that needs to be changed.
Of course, go back to WWII and weapons such as the M-3 'Grease Gun' and you'll find that with basic machining equipment - not even a precision CNC machine, and you can churn out machine guns for less than $100 a pop.
Indeed, as an individual who leans libertarian, I have to admit that while I find the topic of child porn/abuse very disturbing, and have no problems with harsh sentences for child abusers(the creators of the works), I question the necessity to ban something completely, especially when the works people are trying to ban strays into things like 'child porn' where there wasn't any child harmed in the creation, specifically artificial child porn ranging from cartoon depictions to older actors manipulated to look younger through various techniques from makeup to digital editing. Especially when there's no solid evidence that said artificial works increase the odds that a child will be abused. My standard for banning something that doesn't directly cause harm to others is very high.
Take drunk driving - I allow the banning of the act, even though a drunk driver isn't necessarily going to cause harm to somebody else, because there's mountains of evidence that the risks of them doing so is vastly higher. I oppose movements to drop the limits even more though, because it's getting into statistical insignificance. Drunk drivers are much more likely to kill somebody when they're over .2, not below .08. I'd prefer the cops go after the .2 types as a result.
To paraphrase a saying I've heard: "Free speech isn't free if it can't offend anyone". So when considering whether to infringe on free speech we have to look at the most offensive examples. Child Porn. Fred Phelps and the Westboro baptist church. KKK demonstration marches. Mein Kampf, the communist manifesto, etc... That I'm generally very for freedom doesn't mean that I don't like what I fully know some will get up to with it. I just think that it's worth it overall.
I agree on the flamethrowers, though I also remember versions of them being used for pest control as well as controlled burns, snow removal, and other such tasks.
They make a device that pushes out propane or natural gas into animal burrows, turning them into fuel-air explosives, then the operator triggers a spark using the device that detonates it, killing rodents such as gophers in the tunnel network through a combination of overpressure and oxygen deprivation.
It's not what most would consider a flamethrower, but it comes under it in the rules.
As for assault weapons - rifles are used for a statistically insignificant number of murders in the USA, much less the sub-category of 'assault weapons' that are rifles. I have to be specific here because some handguns count as 'assault weapons' as well. The state of California goes above and beyond and counts a firearm that's generally too heavy to be fired unsupported as an assault weapon, even if it's single shot. Never mind that finding a single murder in the USA from that caliber is rather difficult...
Constitutional amendments have nothing to do with debating the merits of the topic.
It does when people start saying things like 'stop hiding behind paper' and 'the constitution is a living document'. Sure it's a living document, there's a way to change it built into the very document itself. Until then, pointing out that many gun control proposals are unconstitutional isn't necessarily out of line.
Also, going by what most recently happened in Colorado, what happened after the first assault weapons ban, and such, pushing for repeal or significant restriction on the 2nd is a good way to lose your office. Outright recalls in Colorado, with 2 politicians losing their seats over their votes(and a 3rd resigning rather than cost the democrats their senate majority), the loss of congress to the republicans because of the AWB, etc...
There's a good chance that the Democrats will lose the senate within the next couple elections because of their law.
Simply put - trying to paint the NRA or gun rights activists as racist is a trick that simply doesn't work anymore. 40-50 years ago it was true, but back then half the country was racist. The whole country - including the gun rights movement - has come a long way.
Consider that 40-50 years ago the NRA wasn't even a gun rights organization at the time, having a history of supporting things like the NFA, various 'Saturday night special' bans*, etc...
Then, as the rights people gained power the NRA did a complete about-face on some of the racist things, started considering gun rights as much as hunter safety and the proper operation of safe ranges.
*A 'Saturday night special is a now older term for a cheap handgun. Gun control laws targeting them at least have the benefit of actually targeting the weapons most criminals use. So few people are actually killed by rifles, much less 'assault weapon' type rifles, that it's a statistically insignificant cause of death. More people are beaten to death with people's bare hands and feet.
U.S. v. Miller, in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s solicitor general, Robert H. Jackson, argued that the Second Amendment is “restricted to the keeping and bearing of arms by the people collectively for their common defense and security.”
I think it's important to note that there was no defense presented in U.S. v Miller because the defendant had died during the appeals process and the firm pushing the case didn't pursue it further due to lack of funds/motivation.
Despite this, per their decision they only allowed the regulation of short barreled shotguns because no military use was presented to them. This was despite there being plenty of evidence available from WWII 'trench guns', but this evidence wasn't presented because, again, no defense was mounted. It was the equivalent of a default judgement, and even then it was actually pretty limited.
Your attempt to include links to such statistics failed. Please, try again. Be sure, your links point to differences between ratios of law-breakers vs. prosecutions by race. Any pointers comparing ratios populations vs. prosecutions are meaningless and will be discarded.
Not the op, but how about this one:
The interaction of race, gender, and age in criminal sentencing: the punishment cost of being young, black, and male
"(1) young black males are sentenced more harshly than any other group, (2) race is most influential in the sentencing of younger rather than older males, (3) the influence of offender's age on sentencing is greater among males than females, and (4) the main effects of race, gender, and age are more modest compared to the very large differences in sentencing outcomes across certain age-race-gender combinations."
Translation: Young Black Males are the most screwed if they end up in court, likely to receive far longer sentences for the exact same crime. The severity of their likely sentence drops if they're female or a different race, or are older. "Young Black Male" is statistically treated significantly worse than "Young White Male", but once they start passing into middle age the significance drops.
A review of other articles (scholar.google.com) shows that sex&age are probably bigger factors though. An old black guy is about as well/badly off as an old white guy in most criminal trials. I hate Taylor Francis, btw, they don't take my university credentials to see the full papers, so I'm mostly working off of abstracts. Some of the issue seems to be that states with high percentages of poor black populations also tend to be the harshest sentence-wise. So a crime in a predominantly white state where the defendant(90% likely to be white) might get a year regardless of their skin color, but 'down south' where the defendant is statistically black(let's go with 60%), odds are he'll get a decade, again, regardless of skin color. Appropriate sentence for a crime is up to debate, of course, but I'm trying to keep it about race.
Alas, he also had the skills to obtain guns legally.
Thus the 'probably'. Such types are so rare that it's not worth the cost to freedom in having to restrict things like CNC milling equipment - which is useful for a very wide variety of tasks depending on the exact equipment. Either you're restricting the freedom of hundreds of thousands of individuals, or you make getting a permit so loose that the law is ineffective anyways and all it does is either place an additional tax on the people for no good reason or throws our country even deeper in debt.
After all, is a requirement to serialize the firearm produced really going to stop a person so bent on mass murder that they're willing to use CNC equipment to make their weapons?
If we want to stop/slow that we might as well be like how I've heard the Japanese are - everybody gets an annual 'checkup visit' by the police once a year or so. Fixing our healthcare system, specifically the mental health part, would probably help more.
BTW guys, I suggest AGAINST taking the advice of any ACs on gun laws. Every one I've seen is very incorrect. Even I'm incorrect, but I like to think I'm a bit closer.
Since homemade guns are not transferable it was mostly a symbolic idea which at most would add another charge onto an existing arrest and that is about it.
Consult a lawyer before doing this, but 'homemade guns' ARE transferable, you just have to serialize them. 'Billy Bob's #1', 'Billy Bob's #2', etc... would be perfectly acceptable. #1 could be a single shot breech-loading shotgun that you need a screwdriver to reload and #2 could be a semi-automatic handgun, the important part is that they have a unique serial number for the manufacturer(IE you).
Producing firearms with the intent of selling it is illegal without an FFL, but if you make a firearm then use it for a time before deciding to sell it you don't need a FFL.
Please note that the standard varies, but generally speaking if you're making money off your guns(IE selling them for more than it cost you to make them in parts and labor), you're probably going to want that FFL if you're selling more than a couple guns a year.
The initial law suit was over material that was recorded prior to 1972 and was not subject to copyright protection.
My research says that before 1923 is the general time to look for audio recordings that have left copyright, Stuff produced in 1969 still has another 50 years to go. So the only public domain stuff from the '60s would be items that were explicitly put into the public domain, and that's a relatively short(and not very popular) list.
The plaintiffs claim that logs and source code were destroyed in discovery, but this is a normal claim by RIA lawyers when facts don't yield what they want. Of course the RIA is mentioned all over the court findings, including the initial lawsuit started by UMG and RIA. The initial law suit was over material that was recorded prior to 1972 and was not subject to copyright protection.
Perhaps, but if it doesn't favor them then the defense can produce the things to help themselves. Fact is that 'source code and logs' are OFTEN lost on a routine basis even/especially without discovery. Code repositories like git should limit code loss, but that assumes that the git server wasn't lost/purged at some point. We've lost a lot of code from when I was a kid because companies, even major ones, just didn't care.