Citizens being capable of forming up a well-regulated is the explicitly defined purpose of the 2nd amendment. Reasonable people can disagree about the definition of "well-regulated," but the courts believe that it is the state governments that should regulate it. (Would that the states governments weren't the lapdogs of the federal government, but that's a rant for a different day.)
Note that I did not say no guns. I said no military weaponry. There's a subtle distinction there that you may have missed. Note also that the founding fathers did not write into the Constitution OR the Bill of Rights the right to own purely military weaponry. There is no "right to own cannons" in the 2nd amendment, just as there is no "right to own a fully-automatic machine gun" or "right to own a M1A1 Abrams complete with 1,000 HEAT rounds."
The argument you present is that you wish to have the right to shoot at Marines or US Army soldiers should you choose to do so. As a former soldier, I object vociferously to your position. If you are afraid of your government, permit me to point out the idiocy of opposing B-52s with M-16s or AK-47s.
as opposed to assault weapons, which are designed specifically for human targets
You had me up to this point.
There are no such things as "assault weapons." The term passed into the public consciousness in 1994 with the passage of the so-called assault weapons ban, which banned such things as flash-suppressors and folding stocks, but didn't ban semi-automatic rifles. It was emblamatic of the Clinton presidency - he handed a propaganda victory to his party while handing a real victory to his opponenets. (Dismantling welfare? Fine. Gays in the army? Ok, but only if they don't ACT gay. Universal health care? Won't happen for another 20 years, thanks to Hillary.)
Anyway...
If you are really concerned with what anti-gun nuts call "assault weapons," may I suggest that you put your efforts into opposing the sale to civilians of ANY armament which is sold to ANY military organization in the world. If a weapon's intended use is military, as evidenced by its sale to the military, then it is not suitable for civilian ownership. End of discussion. The pro-gun nuts might have a problem with this, but this is an argument that could appeal to people of all political stripes (apart from the extremists on both sides). Anti-gun nuts would rather try and fail repeatedly to ban ALL guns, rather than engaging in reasonable compromises that would remove military weaponry from the hands of civilians. Pro-gun nuts demand the right to own 120mm artillery pieces and 25mm automatic cannons. Ordinary people see no universal right to own an M-16. (I gotta admit, though, that firing one on full-auto is pretty nifty. Anybody who wants to do that is invited to join the military.)
Exponential growth, my friend. When you share it with a couple of friend, you are sharing it with all their friends...and all their friends...and all their friends...and all their friends...until you have global distribution.
Ratio of waste products produced to energy produced is MUCH lower for nukes than for other power plants. Processing 10 tons of waste in the lifetime of a plant is not comparable to processing ten tons of waste per day in the lifetime of a plant.
Actually, the weatherman CAN predict 5 weeks, if you allow him sufficient margin of error. or have you never heard of "summer" and "winter"?
Look, we're not talking about precipitation forecasts in a town...we're talking about CLIMATE, something that occurs on the scale of a planet. Frankly, if you can't model a geological process on geological timescales, then you've got a really lame model.
There are no politicians using 5-day weather in their campaigns. There are LOTS who use the results of climatologists. If a climate model doesn't produce historical results when given historical data, then it's a broken model. What POSSIBLE use can such a model be? Given the inclusion of climate in campaigns, the only reason I can see for promoting a broken climate model is political.
Can I set up a climate that makes Greenland hospitable, run it forward 700 years, and find that the Hudson River freezes hard enough to haul cannons across?
If, given historical conditions, it can't predict the more recent past, then it's nothing but a propaganda tool. It's pretty simple to set up a model that doesn't work (ie its predictions don't match known conditions and outcomes) but either confirms or denies global warming. It's so simple I'll prove it:
f(x)=68 (Look! this model predicts that the average global temperature is about 68 degrees and is not increasing!)
f(x)=68+.02x (Look! This model predicts an average rise in global temperature of about 2 degrees per century!)
Yup. Microsoft is restrained in their evilness by the fact that EVERYONE is a customer. If they tick someone off, they are ticking off a customer. If they tick off a lot of people, they are ticking off a lot of customers.
Apple, on the other hand, can annoy 97% of the computer market and still be successful, as long as they don't annoy the 3% who are buying Macs.
$50 says that Apple had plans BEFORE these "secrets" were published to announce them at MacWorld. So the judge is going to look at this and wonder why, if it's such a secret, they announced it to the largest gathering of journalists, developers, and customers in the world.
I suspect Apple may win their suit and be awarded $1 in damages. If Nick's smart enough to file a countersuit, he's liable to win and be awarded $1 in damages and attorney's fees.
I'll bet Yahoo makes backups of their servers as a matter of course. I'll bet they transfer data between servers when replacing or upgrading their hardware. I'll bet they store information in some sort of database that performs replication.
All of these are forms of copying; do they violate copyright? I'd tend to say no, as usage of their service would require that these copies be made. While a user is alive, if they wish, they can delete the messages to preserve their copyright. After a user dies, if the estate does not want their copyright violated, Yahoo could delete the messages on their behalf.
I think that claiming a copyright on the messages could prove counterproductive, if the goal is to retrieve the messages.
"Being beta" means you KNOW there are bugs in your product; you should be immune from blame for having bugs. Nobody is perfect; some bugs come to light only after large-scale use. If you think public betas should be bug-free...well, don't hold your breath.
"Being beta" means you KNOW you have to fix your bugs. You should not be immune from blame for failing to fix bugs. I have seen no signs of Google refusing to fix this bug. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).
Glacial rebound is a well-known phenomenon. A much better rejoinder would have been to point out that glaciers can recede in decades or centuries but rebound takes millenia. Sure, melting the Greenland icepack won't increase sea levels, if you're considering averages over 20,000 years. Glad to see someone taking the long-term view.
Ah, there's the trouble with your relationships. It all STARTS with your soul. See, you're right about the cumulative upkeep; what you've missed is that infinity=infinity+1. So if you give your soul as often as you can (it grows back, you know), your significant other is indescribably happy and you don't have to shell out $$$ on the Hallmark Holidays.
(Sorry, didn't mean to get all serious and sappy there - it's just that what you said clicked so nicely that I felt compelled to respond =)
To answer your question...now they can say "Shining lasers at pilots? Pfft! We can catch people who do that. Remember that one case, where it was a white guy, operating alone, but we caught him anyway? We're not racist, we're not incompetent, and this threat is NOT an issue. Next question! Vote for me! Whee!"
If you build it standing up, it can be built from the ground up - create the feet, attach the legs, then the torso, etc.
EUREKA!
THAT is what Voltron was trying to teach us! "Form feet and legs! Form arms and body! And then form the head!" Given Earth's current level of technology, this is the only sequence that will permit us to construct giant space combat robots!
The dilemma, now, is to determine the motives of the mysterious entities that sent us message. Are we to build giant space robots to protect ourselves against mutual enemies? Or are they trying to trick us into violating a now-forgotten treaty (one imposed on ancient cultures banning earthlings from building combat robots), thereby giving them the legal basis for a pre-emptive strike against us?
Yup. I was looking at the only known picture of TR and FDR last night and said wistfully to my wife "Why can't we have someone like that be president again?" The answer, of course, is television.
WRT white collar crime - no one walks the streets at night worried that a white collar criminal might kill them pointlessly while looting their pension fund.
throughout high school no one could show me a use for it
Everything you learned in high-school math was known before the Renaissance.
EVERYTHING.
Arithmetic predates civilization. High-school algebra is arguably prehistorical: the solution to the quadratic equation was known to EVERY ancient civilization that left behind written records. Plane geometry was formalized by the Greeks about 2400 years ago. The symbols for the trigonometric functions date back to the 1200s. Given thousands of years of history, you'd think your teachers could have come up with at least one example of the utility of what they were teaching you.
It doth depress thee? Verily, hast thou not known? Yea, hast thou not perceived that thy language doth alter? Ye who read my words, know that I alone have written correctly; for I alone ken the second person pronoun.
So if you're going to gripe about how language changes, why not complain that "you" is used for both singular and plural, for objective and subjective? Why not complain about how conjugation has changed in the last 400 years? The pronoun "their" now functions in English as both the third person plural and the second person neuter singular. It's not accepted as standard written English, yet, but it will be.
ObGrammar correction: shouldn't that be "The sex of the person..."? ObStyle complaint: Wouldn't it be more precise to say "gender" instead of "sex"?
Slashdot Mirror
Citizens being capable of forming up a well-regulated is the explicitly defined purpose of the 2nd amendment. Reasonable people can disagree about the definition of "well-regulated," but the courts believe that it is the state governments that should regulate it. (Would that the states governments weren't the lapdogs of the federal government, but that's a rant for a different day.)
Note that I did not say no guns. I said no military weaponry. There's a subtle distinction there that you may have missed. Note also that the founding fathers did not write into the Constitution OR the Bill of Rights the right to own purely military weaponry. There is no "right to own cannons" in the 2nd amendment, just as there is no "right to own a fully-automatic machine gun" or "right to own a M1A1 Abrams complete with 1,000 HEAT rounds."
The argument you present is that you wish to have the right to shoot at Marines or US Army soldiers should you choose to do so. As a former soldier, I object vociferously to your position. If you are afraid of your government, permit me to point out the idiocy of opposing B-52s with M-16s or AK-47s.
as opposed to assault weapons, which are designed specifically for human targets
You had me up to this point.
There are no such things as "assault weapons." The term passed into the public consciousness in 1994 with the passage of the so-called assault weapons ban, which banned such things as flash-suppressors and folding stocks, but didn't ban semi-automatic rifles. It was emblamatic of the Clinton presidency - he handed a propaganda victory to his party while handing a real victory to his opponenets. (Dismantling welfare? Fine. Gays in the army? Ok, but only if they don't ACT gay. Universal health care? Won't happen for another 20 years, thanks to Hillary.)
Anyway...
If you are really concerned with what anti-gun nuts call "assault weapons," may I suggest that you put your efforts into opposing the sale to civilians of ANY armament which is sold to ANY military organization in the world. If a weapon's intended use is military, as evidenced by its sale to the military, then it is not suitable for civilian ownership. End of discussion. The pro-gun nuts might have a problem with this, but this is an argument that could appeal to people of all political stripes (apart from the extremists on both sides). Anti-gun nuts would rather try and fail repeatedly to ban ALL guns, rather than engaging in reasonable compromises that would remove military weaponry from the hands of civilians. Pro-gun nuts demand the right to own 120mm artillery pieces and 25mm automatic cannons. Ordinary people see no universal right to own an M-16. (I gotta admit, though, that firing one on full-auto is pretty nifty. Anybody who wants to do that is invited to join the military.)
Exponential growth, my friend. When you share it with a couple of friend, you are sharing it with all their friends...and all their friends...and all their friends...and all their friends...until you have global distribution.
Ratio of waste products produced to energy produced is MUCH lower for nukes than for other power plants. Processing 10 tons of waste in the lifetime of a plant is not comparable to processing ten tons of waste per day in the lifetime of a plant.
Actually, the weatherman CAN predict 5 weeks, if you allow him sufficient margin of error. or have you never heard of "summer" and "winter"?
Look, we're not talking about precipitation forecasts in a town...we're talking about CLIMATE, something that occurs on the scale of a planet. Frankly, if you can't model a geological process on geological timescales, then you've got a really lame model.
There are no politicians using 5-day weather in their campaigns. There are LOTS who use the results of climatologists. If a climate model doesn't produce historical results when given historical data, then it's a broken model. What POSSIBLE use can such a model be? Given the inclusion of climate in campaigns, the only reason I can see for promoting a broken climate model is political.
If you mock Godwin's law, then the terrorists have already won.
Can I set up a climate that makes Greenland hospitable, run it forward 700 years, and find that the Hudson River freezes hard enough to haul cannons across?
If, given historical conditions, it can't predict the more recent past, then it's nothing but a propaganda tool. It's pretty simple to set up a model that doesn't work (ie its predictions don't match known conditions and outcomes) but either confirms or denies global warming. It's so simple I'll prove it:
f(x)=68 (Look! this model predicts that the average global temperature is about 68 degrees and is not increasing!)
f(x)=68+.02x (Look! This model predicts an average rise in global temperature of about 2 degrees per century!)
Yup. Microsoft is restrained in their evilness by the fact that EVERYONE is a customer. If they tick someone off, they are ticking off a customer. If they tick off a lot of people, they are ticking off a lot of customers.
Apple, on the other hand, can annoy 97% of the computer market and still be successful, as long as they don't annoy the 3% who are buying Macs.
Think about it.
$50 says that Apple had plans BEFORE these "secrets" were published to announce them at MacWorld. So the judge is going to look at this and wonder why, if it's such a secret, they announced it to the largest gathering of journalists, developers, and customers in the world.
I suspect Apple may win their suit and be awarded $1 in damages. If Nick's smart enough to file a countersuit, he's liable to win and be awarded $1 in damages and attorney's fees.
I'll bet Yahoo makes backups of their servers as a matter of course. I'll bet they transfer data between servers when replacing or upgrading their hardware. I'll bet they store information in some sort of database that performs replication.
All of these are forms of copying; do they violate copyright? I'd tend to say no, as usage of their service would require that these copies be made. While a user is alive, if they wish, they can delete the messages to preserve their copyright. After a user dies, if the estate does not want their copyright violated, Yahoo could delete the messages on their behalf.
I think that claiming a copyright on the messages could prove counterproductive, if the goal is to retrieve the messages.
"Being beta" means you KNOW there are bugs in your product; you should be immune from blame for having bugs. Nobody is perfect; some bugs come to light only after large-scale use. If you think public betas should be bug-free...well, don't hold your breath.
"Being beta" means you KNOW you have to fix your bugs. You should not be immune from blame for failing to fix bugs. I have seen no signs of Google refusing to fix this bug. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).
/me gives up
Irony: just like silvery, only harder.
But it IS irrelevant...if you're willing to wait 20,000 years.
Google is your friend.
Glacial rebound is a well-known phenomenon. A much better rejoinder would have been to point out that glaciers can recede in decades or centuries but rebound takes millenia. Sure, melting the Greenland icepack won't increase sea levels, if you're considering averages over 20,000 years. Glad to see someone taking the long-term view.
Hat's off to you, man. That's the first time in a month that I laughed out loud at a /. comment
It all ends with your soul.
Ah, there's the trouble with your relationships. It all STARTS with your soul. See, you're right about the cumulative upkeep; what you've missed is that infinity=infinity+1. So if you give your soul as often as you can (it grows back, you know), your significant other is indescribably happy and you don't have to shell out $$$ on the Hallmark Holidays.
(Sorry, didn't mean to get all serious and sappy there - it's just that what you said clicked so nicely that I felt compelled to respond =)
No, not free, just cheap. It now costs you an additional $5/day not to tick off your most wealthy clients.
This is an example of how the standard of living increases.
To answer your question...now they can say "Shining lasers at pilots? Pfft! We can catch people who do that. Remember that one case, where it was a white guy, operating alone, but we caught him anyway? We're not racist, we're not incompetent, and this threat is NOT an issue. Next question! Vote for me! Whee!"
If you build it standing up, it can be built from the ground up - create the feet, attach the legs, then the torso, etc.
EUREKA!
THAT is what Voltron was trying to teach us! "Form feet and legs! Form arms and body! And then form the head!" Given Earth's current level of technology, this is the only sequence that will permit us to construct giant space combat robots!
The dilemma, now, is to determine the motives of the mysterious entities that sent us message. Are we to build giant space robots to protect ourselves against mutual enemies? Or are they trying to trick us into violating a now-forgotten treaty (one imposed on ancient cultures banning earthlings from building combat robots), thereby giving them the legal basis for a pre-emptive strike against us?
And I doubt he'd win a modern election.
Yup. I was looking at the only known picture of TR and FDR last night and said wistfully to my wife "Why can't we have someone like that be president again?" The answer, of course, is television.
WRT white collar crime - no one walks the streets at night worried that a white collar criminal might kill them pointlessly while looting their pension fund.
throughout high school no one could show me a use for it
Everything you learned in high-school math was known before the Renaissance.
EVERYTHING.
Arithmetic predates civilization. High-school algebra is arguably prehistorical: the solution to the quadratic equation was known to EVERY ancient civilization that left behind written records. Plane geometry was formalized by the Greeks about 2400 years ago. The symbols for the trigonometric functions date back to the 1200s. Given thousands of years of history, you'd think your teachers could have come up with at least one example of the utility of what they were teaching you.
Naw, not your whole will. Just annex 12-B, "Miscellaneous account access information."
This seems like a useful place to point out an interesting read on Jerry Pournelle's web site on overclocking the brain.
I don't see a direct connection between the two articles, but perhaps someone more informed about neurochemistry could point one out.
It doth depress thee? Verily, hast thou not known? Yea, hast thou not perceived that thy language doth alter? Ye who read my words, know that I alone have written correctly; for I alone ken the second person pronoun.
So if you're going to gripe about how language changes, why not complain that "you" is used for both singular and plural, for objective and subjective? Why not complain about how conjugation has changed in the last 400 years? The pronoun "their" now functions in English as both the third person plural and the second person neuter singular. It's not accepted as standard written English, yet, but it will be.
ObGrammar correction: shouldn't that be "The sex of the person..."?
ObStyle complaint: Wouldn't it be more precise to say "gender" instead of "sex"?
My primary computer is a PII-450. I've got no complaints.