Can you bring these things down with birdshot? I foresee a lot more bird hunting. Too bad it'll be tough on the birds. They can't outlaw Cheney's own sport.
In the future, when computers are recognized as citizens with rights, botnet operators will be viewed as slavers, and any punishments they will have received be viewed as a mark of moral growth in society. (Personally, I don't agree that computers should be citizens. But given how so many people are stupid enough to see a soul in a zygote, there's little hope that in 20 years or so they won't see souls in their household devices, too.)
Why shouldn't kids who damage thousands of computers be subject to the same penalties as the kids who burned down those churches recently? The economic damage is about the same. The excuse, "This started as a joke!," about the same. The amount of effort required to start a fire or set loose a virus, about the same. It's destruction of property, with great economic loss, and serious inconvenience to thousands of people's lives - in both cases.
If we'd do the sensible thing and repeal the drug laws, we'd have plenty of room in our jails for these thugs.
A whistleblower is anyone who protects the public interest by releasing information of wrongdoing. In the case of California elections, the officials in charge of them have been arguably complicit in using uncertified as well as easily-hackable equipment. Reporting the problem quietly to them would be like going to the mob-associated mayor and telling him the proof you had about the city garbage contract - you'd be likely to find yourself amongst the garbage in the next truck. (Nor is there anyone on the federal level to report it to when it's a state law being violated.)
Responsible whistle-blowing goes public. That's what it means: You're standing there blowing the whistle as loudly as you can to get attention to the wrongdoing. You're not finding some official to whisper quietly to about it.
(1) They haven't ticketed me. (2) Everyone in America knows that the custom is for cops to allow a measure of grace of 5 (in some places 10) mph above the "speed limit" before writing tickets. (3) That's certainly the custom throughout Vermont and New Hampshire -- in practice cops stop nobody not going at least 5 over, and we've all driven through speed traps enough to know that that's the social contract about speed limits. Signs mean nothing outside of context; and in context these signs mean "not more than 5 mph over." It would be nice to impose literalism and raise all speed limits 5 mph while actually enforcing that -- but too many people wouldn't get the word and would drive too fast during the transition period. It's sort of like metric conversion: makes sense; won't happen.
I'm in a small Vermont town recently featured on the front page of the Washington Post because the police chief got an earmark grant to spend $100,000 putting 19 surveillance cameras throughout the 1.2 square mile village of 3,000. He said, "Trust me, we'd never abuse this. Heck, you're not that interesting to watch!" When the public rose up about 5 to 1 against the proposal, the village trustees voted to have the cops buy digital radios instead of the cameras. The cops immediately began issuing traffic tickets to everyone going 2 or 3 mph over the 15 mph speed limit through downtown, while working to intimidate people into signing their new petition to revert to the camera plan.
On the one hand, I've never heard so many great speechs from citizens about bedrock American values as occurred in the village trustees' meeting that focused on the chief's camera plan. On the other hand, I haven't seen on a local level such a total willingness to abuse power on the part of the cops, over what in the scheme of things should be but a minor disappointment to them (they still get shiney new radios!), and so soon after the chief's claim that they'd never abuse power.
The median real estate broker makes about the equivalent of minimum wage. The ones that make the big bucks are a small minority in the profession, and they generally bring personal assets that aren't common, and aren't the product of "a few months' night classes." The pay distribution is pretty similar to that of writers -- sure there are a few writers who make millions of dollars for what's for them pretty easy work, but the median income for writers from their writing similary is not even a living wage. The ones who make the big money in writing, like the big money real estate brokers, may have gotten a minimal education in their craft which helped, but the main thing is a natural talent for it.
The difference with engineering is that those without a real aptitude for it, if they work hard enough and pursue enough years of education, can still get decent-paying work in the field. Still, even in engineering it's the people with natural talent who take most of the big financial rewards -- often rewards in the same ballpark as top realtors and writers.
Okay, it won't obey robots.txt. But what will the spider present itself as so we can lock it out? Or, even better, what are the sure signs that it's really Google or Yahoo or MS snarfing up my sites? Because I don't really care if other spiders get don't ahold of anything - close to 100% of legitimate searchers come through the big three engines. Should be possible to configure and script it so that anything but the spiders we approve of don't come up with much. If there are more than so many requests per minute, for more than so many pages - or it it goes to honeypot pages that aren't what the real public is interested in - lock the suckers out or feed them garbage. They'll find an Internet filled with hagiographies of the Bush family.
Let's say I roll dice with the normal six sides numbered 1 to 6. You can't predict any one roll, but you can do very well at predicting the distribution of results of 100,000 roles, presuming the dice aren't loaded. So "predicting the weather in five days" you'll be very poor at, but "predicting the long term weather" you'll be fairly excellent at.
Now let's load the dice. Let's put an off-center weight in that makes them 50% more likely to come up 6s than anything else. If you know how the dice have been loaded, you'll still only be negligably - if at all - better at predicting the roll in five days (although if 6s are considered "hot," the odds are a bit better for a "hot" outcome, and you can bet on that and win over time, although it's uncertain for any given day). But knowing how the dice are loaded, you'll still be able to do as excellently as before at predicting the long-term results.
Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide by 30-40-50% loads the dice. (When I went to school the logic of rolling dice was taught by 8th grade. With a post like "but we can't even predict the weather in 5 days" I have to wonder: Are you lacking basic math education, or do you know better and just expect to sway the uneducated people who've modded you up?)
Jobs is an artist selling art supplies. For most of their history Macs have enjoyed their greatest success as tools for graphic designers. Design always has required a single, personal vision to succeed. Those great looking toasters and clocks and cars that industry turned out in the middle of the 20th century weren't designed by committee. There were rather a handful of recognized top designers, some of whom spanned everything from streamlined steam locomotives to soap wrappers.
So Jobs has been an industrial designer producing tools mostly used by graphic designers, who of course are sensitive to good industrial design. That's worked. More recently he's gone into the music/fashion accessories business - also one which melds easily with design, and also one where to top lines always come from a single designer's vision rather than committee. And with Pixar, as the good-looking but shallow-on-info slide show says, he knew enough about "creatives" to keep the teams small and together.
None of this should be taken to imply that Jobs' success illustrates the right approach for industries in which design is not properly the central focus. For instance, Carter was famously a micro-managing president. Look how that worked out. The Soviet economy was micro-managed from the top (and they even started out as a culture with some very good designers). Results? Nada. The hard-earned lesson that micro-managing is bad still applies across most of the spectrum. Jobs is just fortunate to be in one of the few niches where the generalization fails.
Re:Monkeys and middle-schoolers
on
The Primate Police
·
· Score: 3, Funny
That machines don't engage in semantics has been extensively argued by philosopher John Searle through many books. He started out as a student of Chomsky, and then was a very important philosopher of language (speech acts, in particular) before working his way into the topic of consciousness, so he has at least as good a grounding as writers of more mass-market, popular bent such as Pinker (who also studied with Chomsky) and Dennett (who spends hundreds of pages explaining away consciousness with great rhetorical skill... except that real philosophers don't need so many pages to come to a point, the mark of their profession is to proceed more directly).
Machines won't be consciousness. Machines can't be conscious. I loved The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress too, but alas....
It was trendy to use aluminum for residential wiring back in the 60s. That resulted in a lot of fires, because of the thermal expansion coefficient as you say. It can be hard to find insurance if you own one of those aluminum-wired homes.
Guess that wouldn't be such a problem for cat5, but that's more likely to just be supplanted by wireless anyway.
Sirius, unlike XM, is VRB - variable bit rate. They have an algorithm to trade off between their different channels, according to which have the more complex content at the moment. It works pretty well, mostly. I don't like mp3s at 128, and certainly not at 64, but I find Sirius quite listenable at least for a few hours. On longer car trips, say five hours into things, it's not so psychoacoustically satisfying, but there's little of the "oh that's just too thin" response I have to standard mp3 recordings.
Off topic, but reminds me of the recent research showing that those who smoke nothing but pot have lower lung cancer incidence than those who smoke nothing at all. Although the smoke does do some damage to the lungs, chemicals in it actually are protective - the opposite of the chemical effects from tobacco smoke.
It would be appropriately weird if something that has added so much particularly to the musical culture of the last century has also been the preventer of both brain damage and lung cancer for many thousands of people, just as a side effect.
I know if my back's out badly - which in the theory of many osteopaths restricts the flow of cerebro-spinal fluid and thus puts some pressure on the brain - pot is a great help in thinking more clearly (including thinking about how to get my back better). This would fit with the recent finding that people with recurrent back trouble evidence some brain shrinkage. The question would be: Would people with recurrent back trouble who are regular smokers exhibit less?
Frippertronics is _highly_ melodic as well as harmonic, and is more like whirling swaths of inter-related sound than anything you'd recognize as a guitar riff. When he does this stuff in solo live performance it's just amazing. Definitely not guitar hero stuff; more like going centuries into a future where humanity has become calm, meditative and wise, while gazing out across... um... wider vistas than anything we now can imagine.
If the patent is about pausing a television when a link embedded in a show is clicked, what about when instead of having a Weblink contained in a show, the show is contained in a Webpage? The patent certainly can't cover having a control in a Webpage that pauses a video stream. Can it cover having a link in a Webpage that pauses a video stream and also invokes some other change? Is this another idiotic "one-click" patent?
Will it become illegal to have two lights on a single switch?
Just got a 3100 from pricejapan.com. Came in less than a week, at under $600. (Could have wished for packing material between the retail box and the shipping box, but it arrived intact despite that lack.) Then put pdaXrom on it and it's a real Linux computer. I'm also running Debian Handheld on it in a chroot -- haven't got that fully ironed out yet, but it does run nicely enough. And this is nearly twice as fast as the model under discussion, with a 4 gig HD as well as SD and CF card slots. It fits in a normal pocket, yet the screen is sharp and the keyboard usable by a large guy like me (in two-finger style, but still, quick enough). There are a half-dozen other Linux variants that also run on it, including the Japanese QT-based version it comes with, which has been well-translated to English (and German) by Trisoft.de, who'd be worth buying from if you're in Europe.
Before you argue that no societal interest overrides religious freedom, please note that all of the following "crimes" have tried to use the religious freedom defense:
* Prostitution
* Possession and distribution of drugs
Right. Those are not legitimately crimes. The child abuse stuff you cite is. But someday the ineffective prohibitions against prostitution and certain intoxicants will be seen as what they are: intrusions of government on the inalienable rights of individuals in a society too scared of the power of real freedom to let it be enjoyed. And that power, for some of us, is the very core of true religion. When courts don't recognize that, too bad for the courts.
Personally, I would never, sitting on a jury, convict anyone of these false crimes, nor will I ever respect anyone who has.
Look, I have no problem with people having guns. I think that comes under privacy rights. But...
You're performing a semantic trick there by separating a sentence in the middle which is meant to be whole, as it is written. "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." You want it say two things: (1) A militia is necessary to the the security of a free state. (2) Arms are also necessary for individuals, outside of state militias. But it's one sentence, not two. There's no "also." It's a dependent clause. It's a "because." It means because the states need to be free, and so need to have militias, which by definition need to be armed, the federal government shall not have the power to strip the state militias of their arms. Now, if the states want to let their militia members take their arms home at night, that's implicitly fine under these terms. But the amendment says nothing about people who are not part of state militias having any right to bear arms.
I suppose you could make some tortured argument about a situation in which a state wants to recruit new militia members and doesn't have arms to issue them, so depends on individuals already owning those arms... but again that would be a matter of the state's rights. A state for that matter could just say, "Everyone in the state is part of the militia and is required to bear arms." Except the federal government, under the second amendment, could object if the state didn't make sure that extensive militia was well regulated. It's not just about everyone freely walking about with guns.
Again, I think it's fine for people to have a few guns about (not machine guns, but within reason). It's just not quite an honest reading of the second amendment to claim that's where you get the right. Rather, it's one of those rights not enumerated that's left to the people and the states, which comes out of the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, in which it was accepted that a free man could bear certain arms.
You're using "commerce" in the modern, commercial sense. It's like using "intercourse" just to mean sex. Both "commerce" and "intercourse" meant all sorts of human interactions, not just those that we today would call strictly commercial or strictly sexual. If you look into the research into what "commerce" meant at the time of the Constitution -- both to the general public and specifically in the Founding Fathers' other uses of it -- you'll see that it wasn't at all limited to what we call commercial trade. They meant it quite broadly. You may disagree with them, but playing on the modern use of a word rather than its contemporary one is not a legitimate way to discern the original intent.
BTW, I agree that drug laws abridge inalienable rights, specifically to privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. Nor does the privacy right have to be "in" the Constitution; it was assumed as a background truth by the founders, as something so obvious as to not need enumeration. Without the right to be privately about your life, no other right means much anyway.
Thanksgiving saw me across the table from some high-level Comcast executives. Comcast is very excited about their consolidation of services, including VOIP. Personally, I'm not in their territory, get my TV from Dish, and my broadband from a local ISP. But knowing that Comcast is politically fairly far to the selfish end of the spectrum (e.g., union busting), I asked, "So, will you be blocking 3rd-party VOIP offerrings?" I was assured the Comcast fully understands that from a public relations standpoint they can't do anything to block or shape traffic, regardless of any legal implications.
I'm sure Comcast is quite ready and able to take Bell South's business away from them over much of their territory. I was also assured they see their future growth at the various phone companies' expense.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you bring these things down with birdshot? I foresee a lot more bird hunting. Too bad it'll be tough on the birds. They can't outlaw Cheney's own sport.
In the future, when computers are recognized as citizens with rights, botnet operators will be viewed as slavers, and any punishments they will have received be viewed as a mark of moral growth in society. (Personally, I don't agree that computers should be citizens. But given how so many people are stupid enough to see a soul in a zygote, there's little hope that in 20 years or so they won't see souls in their household devices, too.)
Why shouldn't kids who damage thousands of computers be subject to the same penalties as the kids who burned down those churches recently? The economic damage is about the same. The excuse, "This started as a joke!," about the same. The amount of effort required to start a fire or set loose a virus, about the same. It's destruction of property, with great economic loss, and serious inconvenience to thousands of people's lives - in both cases.
If we'd do the sensible thing and repeal the drug laws, we'd have plenty of room in our jails for these thugs.
That's why everybody's first choice is Yahoo for searches, and Google's been forgotten!
A whistleblower is anyone who protects the public interest by releasing information of wrongdoing. In the case of California elections, the officials in charge of them have been arguably complicit in using uncertified as well as easily-hackable equipment. Reporting the problem quietly to them would be like going to the mob-associated mayor and telling him the proof you had about the city garbage contract - you'd be likely to find yourself amongst the garbage in the next truck. (Nor is there anyone on the federal level to report it to when it's a state law being violated.)
Responsible whistle-blowing goes public. That's what it means: You're standing there blowing the whistle as loudly as you can to get attention to the wrongdoing. You're not finding some official to whisper quietly to about it.
(1) They haven't ticketed me. (2) Everyone in America knows that the custom is for cops to allow a measure of grace of 5 (in some places 10) mph above the "speed limit" before writing tickets. (3) That's certainly the custom throughout Vermont and New Hampshire -- in practice cops stop nobody not going at least 5 over, and we've all driven through speed traps enough to know that that's the social contract about speed limits. Signs mean nothing outside of context; and in context these signs mean "not more than 5 mph over." It would be nice to impose literalism and raise all speed limits 5 mph while actually enforcing that -- but too many people wouldn't get the word and would drive too fast during the transition period. It's sort of like metric conversion: makes sense; won't happen.
I'm in a small Vermont town recently featured on the front page of the Washington Post because the police chief got an earmark grant to spend $100,000 putting 19 surveillance cameras throughout the 1.2 square mile village of 3,000. He said, "Trust me, we'd never abuse this. Heck, you're not that interesting to watch!" When the public rose up about 5 to 1 against the proposal, the village trustees voted to have the cops buy digital radios instead of the cameras. The cops immediately began issuing traffic tickets to everyone going 2 or 3 mph over the 15 mph speed limit through downtown, while working to intimidate people into signing their new petition to revert to the camera plan.
On the one hand, I've never heard so many great speechs from citizens about bedrock American values as occurred in the village trustees' meeting that focused on the chief's camera plan. On the other hand, I haven't seen on a local level such a total willingness to abuse power on the part of the cops, over what in the scheme of things should be but a minor disappointment to them (they still get shiney new radios!), and so soon after the chief's claim that they'd never abuse power.
The median real estate broker makes about the equivalent of minimum wage. The ones that make the big bucks are a small minority in the profession, and they generally bring personal assets that aren't common, and aren't the product of "a few months' night classes." The pay distribution is pretty similar to that of writers -- sure there are a few writers who make millions of dollars for what's for them pretty easy work, but the median income for writers from their writing similary is not even a living wage. The ones who make the big money in writing, like the big money real estate brokers, may have gotten a minimal education in their craft which helped, but the main thing is a natural talent for it.
The difference with engineering is that those without a real aptitude for it, if they work hard enough and pursue enough years of education, can still get decent-paying work in the field. Still, even in engineering it's the people with natural talent who take most of the big financial rewards -- often rewards in the same ballpark as top realtors and writers.
Okay, it won't obey robots.txt. But what will the spider present itself as so we can lock it out? Or, even better, what are the sure signs that it's really Google or Yahoo or MS snarfing up my sites? Because I don't really care if other spiders get don't ahold of anything - close to 100% of legitimate searchers come through the big three engines. Should be possible to configure and script it so that anything but the spiders we approve of don't come up with much. If there are more than so many requests per minute, for more than so many pages - or it it goes to honeypot pages that aren't what the real public is interested in - lock the suckers out or feed them garbage. They'll find an Internet filled with hagiographies of the Bush family.
Let's say I roll dice with the normal six sides numbered 1 to 6. You can't predict any one roll, but you can do very well at predicting the distribution of results of 100,000 roles, presuming the dice aren't loaded. So "predicting the weather in five days" you'll be very poor at, but "predicting the long term weather" you'll be fairly excellent at.
Now let's load the dice. Let's put an off-center weight in that makes them 50% more likely to come up 6s than anything else. If you know how the dice have been loaded, you'll still only be negligably - if at all - better at predicting the roll in five days (although if 6s are considered "hot," the odds are a bit better for a "hot" outcome, and you can bet on that and win over time, although it's uncertain for any given day). But knowing how the dice are loaded, you'll still be able to do as excellently as before at predicting the long-term results.
Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide by 30-40-50% loads the dice. (When I went to school the logic of rolling dice was taught by 8th grade. With a post like "but we can't even predict the weather in 5 days" I have to wonder: Are you lacking basic math education, or do you know better and just expect to sway the uneducated people who've modded you up?)
Jobs is an artist selling art supplies. For most of their history Macs have enjoyed their greatest success as tools for graphic designers. Design always has required a single, personal vision to succeed. Those great looking toasters and clocks and cars that industry turned out in the middle of the 20th century weren't designed by committee. There were rather a handful of recognized top designers, some of whom spanned everything from streamlined steam locomotives to soap wrappers.
So Jobs has been an industrial designer producing tools mostly used by graphic designers, who of course are sensitive to good industrial design. That's worked. More recently he's gone into the music/fashion accessories business - also one which melds easily with design, and also one where to top lines always come from a single designer's vision rather than committee. And with Pixar, as the good-looking but shallow-on-info slide show says, he knew enough about "creatives" to keep the teams small and together.
None of this should be taken to imply that Jobs' success illustrates the right approach for industries in which design is not properly the central focus. For instance, Carter was famously a micro-managing president. Look how that worked out. The Soviet economy was micro-managed from the top (and they even started out as a culture with some very good designers). Results? Nada. The hard-earned lesson that micro-managing is bad still applies across most of the spectrum. Jobs is just fortunate to be in one of the few niches where the generalization fails.
At least we don't throw excrement at each other.
Thank the Gods for bombs and bullets!
That machines don't engage in semantics has been extensively argued by philosopher John Searle through many books. He started out as a student of Chomsky, and then was a very important philosopher of language (speech acts, in particular) before working his way into the topic of consciousness, so he has at least as good a grounding as writers of more mass-market, popular bent such as Pinker (who also studied with Chomsky) and Dennett (who spends hundreds of pages explaining away consciousness with great rhetorical skill ... except that real philosophers don't need so many pages to come to a point, the mark of their profession is to proceed more directly).
Machines won't be consciousness. Machines can't be conscious. I loved The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress too, but alas....
It was trendy to use aluminum for residential wiring back in the 60s. That resulted in a lot of fires, because of the thermal expansion coefficient as you say. It can be hard to find insurance if you own one of those aluminum-wired homes.
Guess that wouldn't be such a problem for cat5, but that's more likely to just be supplanted by wireless anyway.
Sirius, unlike XM, is VRB - variable bit rate. They have an algorithm to trade off between their different channels, according to which have the more complex content at the moment. It works pretty well, mostly. I don't like mp3s at 128, and certainly not at 64, but I find Sirius quite listenable at least for a few hours. On longer car trips, say five hours into things, it's not so psychoacoustically satisfying, but there's little of the "oh that's just too thin" response I have to standard mp3 recordings.
Off topic, but reminds me of the recent research showing that those who smoke nothing but pot have lower lung cancer incidence than those who smoke nothing at all. Although the smoke does do some damage to the lungs, chemicals in it actually are protective - the opposite of the chemical effects from tobacco smoke.
It would be appropriately weird if something that has added so much particularly to the musical culture of the last century has also been the preventer of both brain damage and lung cancer for many thousands of people, just as a side effect.
I know if my back's out badly - which in the theory of many osteopaths restricts the flow of cerebro-spinal fluid and thus puts some pressure on the brain - pot is a great help in thinking more clearly (including thinking about how to get my back better). This would fit with the recent finding that people with recurrent back trouble evidence some brain shrinkage. The question would be: Would people with recurrent back trouble who are regular smokers exhibit less?
Nuclear waste could never wipe out the polar bears.
Global warming can!
Stop nuclear power!
Drown the bears!
Frippertronics is _highly_ melodic as well as harmonic, and is more like whirling swaths of inter-related sound than anything you'd recognize as a guitar riff. When he does this stuff in solo live performance it's just amazing. Definitely not guitar hero stuff; more like going centuries into a future where humanity has become calm, meditative and wise, while gazing out across ... um ... wider vistas than anything we now can imagine.
If the patent is about pausing a television when a link embedded in a show is clicked, what about when instead of having a Weblink contained in a show, the show is contained in a Webpage? The patent certainly can't cover having a control in a Webpage that pauses a video stream. Can it cover having a link in a Webpage that pauses a video stream and also invokes some other change? Is this another idiotic "one-click" patent?
Will it become illegal to have two lights on a single switch?
Just got a 3100 from pricejapan.com. Came in less than a week, at under $600. (Could have wished for packing material between the retail box and the shipping box, but it arrived intact despite that lack.) Then put pdaXrom on it and it's a real Linux computer. I'm also running Debian Handheld on it in a chroot -- haven't got that fully ironed out yet, but it does run nicely enough. And this is nearly twice as fast as the model under discussion, with a 4 gig HD as well as SD and CF card slots. It fits in a normal pocket, yet the screen is sharp and the keyboard usable by a large guy like me (in two-finger style, but still, quick enough). There are a half-dozen other Linux variants that also run on it, including the Japanese QT-based version it comes with, which has been well-translated to English (and German) by Trisoft.de, who'd be worth buying from if you're in Europe.
Strangely, only decaf raises blood pressure. (Serves 'em right!)
Before you argue that no societal interest overrides religious freedom, please note that all of the following "crimes" have tried to use the religious freedom defense:
* Prostitution
* Possession and distribution of drugs
Right. Those are not legitimately crimes. The child abuse stuff you cite is. But someday the ineffective prohibitions against prostitution and certain intoxicants will be seen as what they are: intrusions of government on the inalienable rights of individuals in a society too scared of the power of real freedom to let it be enjoyed. And that power, for some of us, is the very core of true religion. When courts don't recognize that, too bad for the courts.
Personally, I would never, sitting on a jury, convict anyone of these false crimes, nor will I ever respect anyone who has.
Look, I have no problem with people having guns. I think that comes under privacy rights. But ...
... but again that would be a matter of the state's rights. A state for that matter could just say, "Everyone in the state is part of the militia and is required to bear arms." Except the federal government, under the second amendment, could object if the state didn't make sure that extensive militia was well regulated. It's not just about everyone freely walking about with guns.
You're performing a semantic trick there by separating a sentence in the middle which is meant to be whole, as it is written. "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." You want it say two things: (1) A militia is necessary to the the security of a free state. (2) Arms are also necessary for individuals, outside of state militias. But it's one sentence, not two. There's no "also." It's a dependent clause. It's a "because." It means because the states need to be free, and so need to have militias, which by definition need to be armed, the federal government shall not have the power to strip the state militias of their arms. Now, if the states want to let their militia members take their arms home at night, that's implicitly fine under these terms. But the amendment says nothing about people who are not part of state militias having any right to bear arms.
I suppose you could make some tortured argument about a situation in which a state wants to recruit new militia members and doesn't have arms to issue them, so depends on individuals already owning those arms
Again, I think it's fine for people to have a few guns about (not machine guns, but within reason). It's just not quite an honest reading of the second amendment to claim that's where you get the right. Rather, it's one of those rights not enumerated that's left to the people and the states, which comes out of the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, in which it was accepted that a free man could bear certain arms.
You're using "commerce" in the modern, commercial sense. It's like using "intercourse" just to mean sex. Both "commerce" and "intercourse" meant all sorts of human interactions, not just those that we today would call strictly commercial or strictly sexual. If you look into the research into what "commerce" meant at the time of the Constitution -- both to the general public and specifically in the Founding Fathers' other uses of it -- you'll see that it wasn't at all limited to what we call commercial trade. They meant it quite broadly. You may disagree with them, but playing on the modern use of a word rather than its contemporary one is not a legitimate way to discern the original intent.
BTW, I agree that drug laws abridge inalienable rights, specifically to privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. Nor does the privacy right have to be "in" the Constitution; it was assumed as a background truth by the founders, as something so obvious as to not need enumeration. Without the right to be privately about your life, no other right means much anyway.
Thanksgiving saw me across the table from some high-level Comcast executives. Comcast is very excited about their consolidation of services, including VOIP. Personally, I'm not in their territory, get my TV from Dish, and my broadband from a local ISP. But knowing that Comcast is politically fairly far to the selfish end of the spectrum (e.g., union busting), I asked, "So, will you be blocking 3rd-party VOIP offerrings?" I was assured the Comcast fully understands that from a public relations standpoint they can't do anything to block or shape traffic, regardless of any legal implications.
I'm sure Comcast is quite ready and able to take Bell South's business away from them over much of their territory. I was also assured they see their future growth at the various phone companies' expense.
Are you talking about the power applied at American Media, Inc. in Boca? Yowsir, you insensitive.... And right there in Florida, too!