You have made the same mistake that everyone who read that article made. You assumed that I was Christian, which I am not. Now, I believe that Jesus should be emulated, but he was not divine. To me God is some disinterested third party. He set the whole thing in motion at the beginning of time. Since then, evolution and the physical laws of the universe have worked their magic. Kind of like a big simulation if you know what I mean. He does not play an active role in the world, ever. That said, I believe life is sacred. Sacred to who, me, but perhaps God as well, as life (as far as we know) is the most complicated result of his "simulation". To review, these are my assumptions. Emulate people like Jesus, Buddha and Socrates. Life is sacred: plants, animals and humans. There is no after life so make sure you use your time here for something worthwhile. Everything comes down to the golden rule.
My main point with using God as the foundation of our rights is that no one can delegitimize that claim as long as we continue to believe it. John Locke does a very good job of explaining this in his Second Treatise. He calls it an "appeal to heaven".
If we truly have inalienable rights then they must sit on a foundation that is unshakable. The Constitution does not grant our rights. Do not fall into that trap. However, it does guarantee them. There is a difference. Ultimately, the Constitution is just a piece of paper and can be thrown out. If it is thrown out, does that mean I suddenly do not have a right to defend myself against force and fraud? I will always have that right even if the legality of it is not recognized. It is an innate right, a God given one if you will.
I think you misunderstood me though. I'm not sure if it was because I did not state my position well-enough or because you did not read carefully enough. Certainly the state should not sanction any particular religion, but a generic public God is not a bad thing.
I will say it again, the Constitution, DOES NOT, grant our rights, but merely declares a subset of them. For proof of this please refer to the Constitution itself, Amendments IX and X.
You must understand that humans are always free to violate the rights of others, as wrong as that may be. Governments throughout history have generally been free to oppress the people that live under them. It does not mean that these actions are moral or do not violate the sanctity of life. Just because the law says you can do something does not make it proper. God does not control what we do nor does he work through us. Yet by invoking him as the source of our inalienable rights we can legitimize them in such a way that they can never be JUSTLY revoked.
You're right, it should be a state matter, but a legislative one in the given state.
As for activist judges, I assume you are referring to Marbury vs. Madison. Read up on tripartite review and Jefferson's response to the ruling. The second time SCOTUS overturned a law was in the Dread Scott case, which was many years later. Also, while you're at it read Federalist #81.
I'm not trying to be an ass, nor do I completely disagree with judicial review, but the judiciary should respect the Ninth and Tenth Amendments when reviewing state laws and it should respect the legislature except in the case of truly unconstitutional laws. (yes it's a slippery slope). uggg.
Ah yes, the Fourteenth Amendment, which has been a most ill-used constitutional instrument for increasing federal power at the expense of the people and the states. The check the states once had on the Federal Government is only there in name now. What's bad about this for us citizens is that the further power is removed from us geographically the harder it is for us to control it. It's not so hard to drive up to the State Capital and protest or talk to a representative that represents 50,000 people. It's very difficult and expensive to travel 2000 miles to DC or speak to a representative that represents 500,000 people. We should want our states to have more power so that we can have more say in it's exercise. The Fourteenth Amendment is such a bitter sweet pill to swallow.
I wonder how things would have been if the South would have been allowed to peacefully secede... If I could change one thing about this country's past it would be to have never imported or used slaves. So much social ill-will has come from it. So much pervision of our constitution has come from correcting its ills.
Also note that liberal judges will erode states' rights, see that the Second Amendment guarantees that only the government has the right to keep and bear arms, impose gay marriage from the bench (whether you are for gay marriage or not, this is a legislative battle and should not be imposed by judicial decree), see to it that God in the public sphere dies (see my blog for why this is bad), and keep supporting unequal rights by judging in favor of affirmative action laws.
The courts, which are composed of unelected members, are usurping powers that were never granted to them and in doing so degrading our Constitutional system. Moreover, liberal judges and activist lawyers are mostly to blame for this. Judges should interpret and clarify the laws on the books, not write new ones. That is the job for the representatives of the people. Every issue you mention above, except the civil liberties one, is a legislative issue, not a judicial one. That is why we need conservative judges. They understand the place of the judiciary. This is the best possible reason to vote Bush tomorrow.
We did in fact port our build platform to cygwin, but it was painfully slow because of the way cygwin handles file system translation. (e.g. "/usr/local/" has to be mapped to "C:\xxx\" everytime to access a file. When you access many many files this becomes very very slow. This is what makes our build system unusable under windows.
You have not found your scripts to slow down under cygwin? How many files are in your project, are they all in the same directory? I believe our project may suffer from slight directory bloat and perhaps this is part of why filesystem access becomes a bottleneck.
We were able to port our Unix development environment to Windows, through Cygwin, but it is totally unworkable and so we scrapped it (on Windows).
Currently we are just using Visual Studio with the whole repository checked out. The problem comes when you edit. All of us are vi or emacs junkies and find the VisStudio editor to be, well, infantile. That's part of the problem. The inefficiencies that are created by editing outside of the IDE are a problem.
I guess the real problem is a cultural one. Many of the people in our office are married to the notion that only code you should have checked out is the code you are working on. That is global libraries that reflect the status of the repository should be kept to link against at all times. For example, I check out foo.cc and work on it, but I don't have to check out bar.cc and baz.cc too. When I compile I link to the library that bar.o and baz.o are in.
We would like a way to work in this mode with windows. We would like to continue to use CVS. We would also like to be able to use the VisStudio debugger when necessary.
-Craig.
Re:Meanwhile, C++ goes nowhere
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What is a good replacement for sprintf? strstream? My use of sprintf is the only place my code would (I believe, I suppose one never really knows) be susceptible to a buffer overflow.
A better question is why is a thirty year old work not in the public domain? Let me answer that, because this aspect of the government is owned by the entertainment industry.
There has to be a REALLY good reason for the public to allow a monopoly... I would guess that if Start Wars lost it's copyright we could procure DVDs of the original for somewhere around five bucks a piece. The fact of the matter is that a thirty year monopoly, and it will inveitably become perpetual, only artifically raises prices, with the only benefactors being the producers. The public does not benefit an inkling from 70+ year copyrights. Copyright should last no more than 14 years, period.
Fuck Star Wars, and fuck Lucas. The movies were cool at one time, but profiteering, and that's exactly what it is, is despicable.
I've tried to stay rational here, tried not to make this personal even when provoked, tried to be congenial, but the name calling has finally gotten to me.
Simply enough, name calling is childish. If you can't make a point without it, you should just shut up. If you believe that everyone who thinks differently than you is delusional, stupid or evil then you are sorely lacking in mental capacity and in turn are setting yourself up for a big fall. Your debate skills are at best sophomoric and even border on irrational at times. Another thing, a holier than thou attitude hardly wins respect. So what if I haven't lived in another country? I suppose not all of us eat with silver spoons either.
I've have no idea how old you are, but you level of maturity smacks of a 17 year-old. Perhaps one day you will learn that smart people with good intentions often arrive at different conclusions given the same premises. Grow up or go back to school, but in either case fuck off.
I do not consider the American Revolution as an example (and I doubt many other would as well): It was a conflict between well organized governments. The colonies at the time where more (rather than less) self-governed.
Of course you don't, but then again I expected that... The fact of the matter is that the colonial governments were somewhat organized, but the force that defeated the British was made up of many citizens who provide their own munitions, the militia if you will. So in a sense an armed citizenry had a decisive impact on the revolution. Of course there were many other factors. For example it could never have succeded without the help of the French.
The Samurai had their swords but nothing else.
Yes, but no one else had swords and the unarmed were in fact legally subject to the whims of the samurai, who could and often did kill people for minor offenses, for example not diverting their eyes from the samurai when they should. Perhaps a peasant who had more than his hands to defend himself with wouldn't have agreed to such subjugation. The point is, at least with a weapon you can die fighting.
Hundreds of examples: Central America (where armed gangs and rebel groups terrorize the populace), Many Africa counties (were armed thugs kill at random), Modern Russia, where crime outside the major cities is out of control (mostly by men with guns). I can tell you have never be anywhere outside the US.
This doesn't sound like an armed populace, where the majority is armed, but instead it sounds like a armed minority, which is always bad, which is what I have been arguing against. If one person is armed everyone should be armed so that the playing field is leveled and so that no one really thinks they have the upperhand. In this way being armed is not special... think about the Swiss.
You inferred this statement.
Yes, I think I stated that plainly when I said you imply. It was merely a way to pick you brain on that subject and I must say it worked well.:)
Civilized, democratic counties work because they are based on the rule of law
Yes and every "civilized democratic country" has eventually become an uncivilized tyrannical one and I believe, that an armed populace ultimately slows that invevitable decline. Agree with me or not. I can back this idea up with facts as much as you can demean it with facts. That is, I can not... It is a hunch. A society who can defend itself, even if not against an entire state's army, can at least deter an army from terroizing it because of the potential losses said army would incur by doing so. What I'm saying is that, you can not overthrow the government, nor can you fight it once its set its sights on you, but that being armed will when all else fails make the state think twice before attacking. This is a lesser form of the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine. Basically an armed populace makes the cost of subjugation too great for an army to attempt such subjugation. If only we had thought about this before we invaded Iraq.
Of course beyond all of this theoretical stuff there is the very real issue of crime and what seems to be the case is that an armed populace results in a real decrease in crime. The inverse also seems to be true, that a disarmed populace results in an increase in crime. Britain seems to fall into the later category. As guns have been prohibited crime has increased. On the other hand in America, as we have passed more concealed carry laws, crime has decreased. And yes, I know there are many other factors involved, but there SEEMS to be some correlation.
The American Revolution is an example. This may have something to do with why Americans cling to the Second Amendment so heartily. Perhaps the French Revolution is also an example, but my knowledge of it is weak so I could not say for sure.
Even if I could not cite an example, the fact that an armed populace has not been exploited in a way that the Jews were during the Holocaust is perhaps evidence enough. There are way too many examples of a government disarming the citizens of a country and subsequently tyrannizing them.
Do you know that when the very long Japanese civil war ended in the 1600s that the only people allowed to keep swords were the samurai and that they could, with no penalty, cut down a peasant for a minor offense.
Why don't you produce an example of when an armed populace has been subject to extreme tyranny.
Curious though, if you don't trust (and you imply that you don't) your fellow citizens with guns, it seems to me ridiculous that you would trust your government with exclusive posession of them.
Re:Why do you think we have the 2nd Amendment?
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First of all, you're right, you could not overthrow the government. A group of say 200,000 armed citizens in some American state/city could about declare themselves independent though. This of course would be a last ditch effort to avoid a calamity being inflicted upon the populace by the government. Think Mao's "Great Leap Forward".
Now, if the state said to the government "we're independent", the government could do one of three things. One, recognize it. Two, negotiate with the independent state to bring it back into the union. Three, conquer it. One and two end up being peaceful. Three, if the government pursues it vigorously enough and the people of said independent state are steadfast, the only possible outcome is that the independent state is utterly destroyed.
Now, this means that those people that rebelled are dead. Still the winners probably did not win much. They destroyed the fruits of their own victory. If played right, the government would have to totally destroy an area to force it back into the union (recall Sherman's march through the South if you will).
This fact alone could keep the government from fighting. What's more important is that this fact I think can also work to keep the government from getting even near the point where a group of people would want to forcibly declare their independence.
Yes absolutely! Military weapons and the weapons referred to as "assault weapons" in that particular piece of legislation are functionally quite different. Military weapons are fully automatic. That means, press the trigger once and lots of bullets fly. The "assault weapons" ban refers to guns that look like military weapons, but are functionally called "semi-automatic". Basically this means, press the trigger once and one bullet comes out. Very very different beasts...
The media always makes this mischaracterization (even Fox:). They never try to distinguish between the two and in doing so basically allow people to think that "assault weapon" means machine gun. Tut tut. Bad media! Anyway, I called the BBC on this. They, IMHO, are either purposefully misleading people or have made an unfortunate factual error.
It is unfortunate, but nevertheless true that an armed citizenry is in the end the only way to ensure liberty. Look at all of the modern examples of tyranny (Hitler, Stalin, Mao) and you will see that civil disarmament was a prerequisite to mass murder. What's more is that gun-registration always seems to be a prerequisite to outright confiscation. For example, (The Third Reich, Modern Britain, and Modern Australia). I do not want to hold my gun at my government's whim. I hold my gun primarily for when my government runs amuck, which inevitably will happen as history has shown again and again. I pray that it will not happen in my lifetime.
Re:One, two, three, four, I declare a flame-war!
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Personally, I think civilians owning guns is not permitted by the constitution, and that militia means a state army. But I do think this is an area where compromises can be reached.
I suppose that's why the founders were so opposed to a standing army? The militia is every able bodied adult citizen. So if you like, yes, only the militia should be armed.
I realize your comments are supposed to be sarcastic, but tell me, doesn't it make just a little bit of sense to scrutinize immigrants from the Middle East a little more than immigrants, from say, Canada? Yes yes, I realize that someone could immigrate to Canada and then the US from there. I also realize that Al Qaeda could recruit agents from many many other places, but still that is all hypothetical. What the facts speak to is that men of Arab and Persian descent would like to destroy us, nay the whole of western civilization because it is at odds with their worldview, one which has changed very little since the middle-ages!
Know thyself and know thy enemy and you will win. We, unfortunately, know our enemy, but seem to in the name of sensitivity or political correctness turn a blind eye to this knowledge. A politically correct war effort is a losing war effort.
Here's another thing. Random searches could actually be very damaging to us and our culture of freedom. As we get more and more used to it we'll accept it more and more often. If it was a single group of people that was being targeted, perhaps we would become less desensitized to the idea of being searched when we go out in public. Personally I take great offense to the idea of being searched in a public place and it scares me that so many people line up like sheep and allow it to happen to them. What's more is the only thing that people complain about is the inconvience and the long lines. You hardly ever hear of anyone objecting to the idea in principle.
Sure without a doubt it's all about the money. Still why waste the money on such a transparently corrupt "study". Just make the decision in a smokey backroom and move on. At least that will save tax payers the burden of paying for something that only amounts to smoke and mirrors.
Recently many in the technology community have been railing against the Inducing Infringements of Copyrights Act of 2004 , or the INDUCE Act. Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the bill and after reading the testimony from that hearing I am, as a technologist, not so sure that the bill is a bad idea. The INDUCE Act will amend United States copyright law to treat as an infringer of a copyright any party who 'intentionally induces' the infringement of another party's copyright. The bill seems to have bipartisan support, and is sponsored, amongst others, by Orin Hatch, Tom Daschle, Hillary Clinton, Patrick Leahy, and Bill Frist. Senator Hatch and Senator Leahy are the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The INDUCE Act is primarily focused on peer-to-peer networks and especially the use of them to illegally copy movies and especially music. The bill is meant to clarify the meaning of secondary liability in respect to copyright infringement. Secondary liability, in this circumstance, involves assigning liability to an actor who assists or facilitates an act of infringement, and has been recognized by the courts for decades. Previously Napster had been found guilty of secondary liability for allowing illegal downloads of copyrighted music, and was subsequently shut down. However, Grokster, another file sharing utility, was exonerated because, unlike Napster a centralized index of files available for download was not maintained. Still, the court realized that Grokster's revenues were linked to its large user base, which only existed because of the opportunities the network provided for the downloading of pirated music. [1] Certainly Grokster was not running an ethical business as it profitted because of the fact others were willing to break the law.
Although peer-to-peer networks are often used to infringe copyrights, it is not the only legitimate use of them. Still, in her testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Marybeth Peters, the Register of Copyrights and Associate Librarian for Copyright, said that unlike the VCR, there was "no dispute that the use of [peer-to-peer network] services constitutes copyright infringement". Certainly many peer-to-peer networks are used primarily for copyright infringement. However, there is one peer-to-peer network The Free Network Project that is, in fact, being used in countries such as China to facilitate the free interchange of political ideas. Users contribute to the network by giving bandwidth and a portion of their hard drive (called the "data store") for storing files. Unlike other peer-to-peer file sharing networks, Freenet does not let the user control what is stored in the data store. Instead, files are kept or deleted depending on how popular they are, with the least popular being discarded to make way for newer or more popular content. Files in the data store are encrypted to reduce the likelihood of prosecution by persons wishing to censor Freenet content. [2]
Any legislation, that prohibited such technology outright would irreparably damage the First Amendment in the digital age. The right to assemble virtually over the Internet, via a peer-to-peer network, or any other mechanism, is a trivial extension of the freedom to assemble in a public place. Any person should have the right to speak and to exchange ideas with any other person over the Internet, just as he does with a person in the physical realm. This "digital right to assemble" should neither be eroded by allowing the government to eavesdrop on conversations unless a proper warrant has been issued.
The INDUCE Act, however, seems aimed primarily at companies that profit from providing technologies that are used to engage in copyright infringement. Now, this is tolerable to an extent, but it seems hard to differentiate the provider of peer-to-peer networking software like Kazaa, from manufacturers of CD burners and other mass storage devices, or a peer-to-peer network like Freenet for that matter. The vagueness of the law seems problemati
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You have made the same mistake that everyone who read that article made. You assumed that I was Christian, which I am not. Now, I believe that Jesus should be emulated, but he was not divine. To me God is some disinterested third party. He set the whole thing in motion at the beginning of time. Since then, evolution and the physical laws of the universe have worked their magic. Kind of like a big simulation if you know what I mean. He does not play an active role in the world, ever. That said, I believe life is sacred. Sacred to who, me, but perhaps God as well, as life (as far as we know) is the most complicated result of his "simulation". To review, these are my assumptions. Emulate people like Jesus, Buddha and Socrates. Life is sacred: plants, animals and humans. There is no after life so make sure you use your time here for something worthwhile. Everything comes down to the golden rule.
My main point with using God as the foundation of our rights is that no one can delegitimize that claim as long as we continue to believe it. John Locke does a very good job of explaining this in his Second Treatise. He calls it an "appeal to heaven".
If we truly have inalienable rights then they must sit on a foundation that is unshakable. The Constitution does not grant our rights. Do not fall into that trap. However, it does guarantee them. There is a difference. Ultimately, the Constitution is just a piece of paper and can be thrown out. If it is thrown out, does that mean I suddenly do not have a right to defend myself against force and fraud? I will always have that right even if the legality of it is not recognized. It is an innate right, a God given one if you will.
I think you misunderstood me though. I'm not sure if it was because I did not state my position well-enough or because you did not read carefully enough. Certainly the state should not sanction any particular religion, but a generic public God is not a bad thing.
I will say it again, the Constitution, DOES NOT, grant our rights, but merely declares a subset of them. For proof of this please refer to the Constitution itself, Amendments IX and X.
You must understand that humans are always free to violate the rights of others, as wrong as that may be. Governments throughout history have generally been free to oppress the people that live under them. It does not mean that these actions are moral or do not violate the sanctity of life. Just because the law says you can do something does not make it proper. God does not control what we do nor does he work through us. Yet by invoking him as the source of our inalienable rights we can legitimize them in such a way that they can never be JUSTLY revoked.
You're right, it should be a state matter, but a legislative one in the given state.
As for activist judges, I assume you are referring to Marbury vs. Madison. Read up on tripartite review and Jefferson's response to the ruling. The second time SCOTUS overturned a law was in the Dread Scott case, which was many years later. Also, while you're at it read Federalist #81.
I'm not trying to be an ass, nor do I completely disagree with judicial review, but the judiciary should respect the Ninth and Tenth Amendments when reviewing state laws and it should respect the legislature except in the case of truly unconstitutional laws. (yes it's a slippery slope). uggg.
Ah yes, the Fourteenth Amendment, which has been a most ill-used constitutional instrument for increasing federal power at the expense of the people and the states. The check the states once had on the Federal Government is only there in name now. What's bad about this for us citizens is that the further power is removed from us geographically the harder it is for us to control it. It's not so hard to drive up to the State Capital and protest or talk to a representative that represents 50,000 people. It's very difficult and expensive to travel 2000 miles to DC or speak to a representative that represents 500,000 people. We should want our states to have more power so that we can have more say in it's exercise. The Fourteenth Amendment is such a bitter sweet pill to swallow.
I wonder how things would have been if the South would have been allowed to peacefully secede... If I could change one thing about this country's past it would be to have never imported or used slaves. So much social ill-will has come from it. So much pervision of our constitution has come from correcting its ills.
Oh, bullshit. What do you think little Bush is gonna declare himself king. Yeah fucking right. Can you spell r-e-v-o-l-u-t-i-o-n?
Also note that liberal judges will erode states' rights, see that the Second Amendment guarantees that only the government has the right to keep and bear arms, impose gay marriage from the bench (whether you are for gay marriage or not, this is a legislative battle and should not be imposed by judicial decree), see to it that God in the public sphere dies (see my blog for why this is bad), and keep supporting unequal rights by judging in favor of affirmative action laws.
The courts, which are composed of unelected members, are usurping powers that were never granted to them and in doing so degrading our Constitutional system. Moreover, liberal judges and activist lawyers are mostly to blame for this. Judges should interpret and clarify the laws on the books, not write new ones. That is the job for the representatives of the people. Every issue you mention above, except the civil liberties one, is a legislative issue, not a judicial one. That is why we need conservative judges. They understand the place of the judiciary. This is the best possible reason to vote Bush tomorrow.
or .troll
Why not a ".music" while we're at it.
We did in fact port our build platform to cygwin, but it was painfully slow because of the way cygwin handles file system translation. (e.g. "/usr/local/" has to be mapped to "C:\xxx\" everytime to access a file. When you access many many files this becomes very very slow. This is what makes our build system unusable under windows.
You have not found your scripts to slow down under cygwin? How many files are in your project, are they all in the same directory? I believe our project may suffer from slight directory bloat and perhaps this is part of why filesystem access becomes a bottleneck.
What exactly are you having problems with?
We were able to port our Unix development environment to Windows, through Cygwin, but it is totally unworkable and so we scrapped it (on Windows).
Currently we are just using Visual Studio with the whole repository checked out. The problem comes when you edit. All of us are vi or emacs junkies and find the VisStudio editor to be, well, infantile. That's part of the problem. The inefficiencies that are created by editing outside of the IDE are a problem.
I guess the real problem is a cultural one. Many of the people in our office are married to the notion that only code you should have checked out is the code you are working on. That is global libraries that reflect the status of the repository should be kept to link against at all times. For example, I check out foo.cc and work on it, but I don't have to check out bar.cc and baz.cc too. When I compile I link to the library that bar.o and baz.o are in.
We would like a way to work in this mode with windows. We would like to continue to use CVS. We would also like to be able to use the VisStudio debugger when necessary.
-Craig.
What is a good replacement for sprintf? strstream? My use of sprintf is the only place my code would (I believe, I suppose one never really knows) be susceptible to a buffer overflow.
A better question is why is a thirty year old work not in the public domain? Let me answer that, because this aspect of the government is owned by the entertainment industry.
There has to be a REALLY good reason for the public to allow a monopoly... I would guess that if Start Wars lost it's copyright we could procure DVDs of the original for somewhere around five bucks a piece. The fact of the matter is that a thirty year monopoly, and it will inveitably become perpetual, only artifically raises prices, with the only benefactors being the producers. The public does not benefit an inkling from 70+ year copyrights. Copyright should last no more than 14 years, period.
Fuck Star Wars, and fuck Lucas. The movies were cool at one time, but profiteering, and that's exactly what it is, is despicable.
I've tried to stay rational here, tried not to make this personal even when provoked, tried to be congenial, but the name calling has finally gotten to me.
Simply enough, name calling is childish. If you can't make a point without it, you should just shut up. If you believe that everyone who thinks differently than you is delusional, stupid or evil then you are sorely lacking in mental capacity and in turn are setting yourself up for a big fall. Your debate skills are at best sophomoric and even border on irrational at times. Another thing, a holier than thou attitude hardly wins respect. So what if I haven't lived in another country? I suppose not all of us eat with silver spoons either.
I've have no idea how old you are, but you level of maturity smacks of a 17 year-old. Perhaps one day you will learn that smart people with good intentions often arrive at different conclusions given the same premises. Grow up or go back to school, but in either case fuck off.
Let me put it this way, "you can wrest my gun from my cold dead hands".
I do not consider the American Revolution as an example (and I doubt many other would as well): It was a conflict between well organized governments. The colonies at the time where more (rather than less) self-governed.
:)
Of course you don't, but then again I expected that... The fact of the matter is that the colonial governments were somewhat organized, but the force that defeated the British was made up of many citizens who provide their own munitions, the militia if you will. So in a sense an armed citizenry had a decisive impact on the revolution. Of course there were many other factors. For example it could never have succeded without the help of the French.
The Samurai had their swords but nothing else.
Yes, but no one else had swords and the unarmed were in fact legally subject to the whims of the samurai, who could and often did kill people for minor offenses, for example not diverting their eyes from the samurai when they should. Perhaps a peasant who had more than his hands to defend himself with wouldn't have agreed to such subjugation. The point is, at least with a weapon you can die fighting.
Hundreds of examples: Central America (where armed gangs and rebel groups terrorize the populace), Many Africa counties (were armed thugs kill at random), Modern Russia, where crime outside the major cities is out of control (mostly by men with guns). I can tell you have never be anywhere outside the US.
This doesn't sound like an armed populace, where the majority is armed, but instead it sounds like a armed minority, which is always bad, which is what I have been arguing against. If one person is armed everyone should be armed so that the playing field is leveled and so that no one really thinks they have the upperhand. In this way being armed is not special... think about the Swiss.
You inferred this statement.
Yes, I think I stated that plainly when I said you imply. It was merely a way to pick you brain on that subject and I must say it worked well.
Civilized, democratic counties work because they are based on the rule of law
Yes and every "civilized democratic country" has eventually become an uncivilized tyrannical one and I believe, that an armed populace ultimately slows that invevitable decline. Agree with me or not. I can back this idea up with facts as much as you can demean it with facts. That is, I can not... It is a hunch. A society who can defend itself, even if not against an entire state's army, can at least deter an army from terroizing it because of the potential losses said army would incur by doing so. What I'm saying is that, you can not overthrow the government, nor can you fight it once its set its sights on you, but that being armed will when all else fails make the state think twice before attacking. This is a lesser form of the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine. Basically an armed populace makes the cost of subjugation too great for an army to attempt such subjugation. If only we had thought about this before we invaded Iraq.
Of course beyond all of this theoretical stuff there is the very real issue of crime and what seems to be the case is that an armed populace results in a real decrease in crime. The inverse also seems to be true, that a disarmed populace results in an increase in crime. Britain seems to fall into the later category. As guns have been prohibited crime has increased. On the other hand in America, as we have passed more concealed carry laws, crime has decreased. And yes, I know there are many other factors involved, but there SEEMS to be some correlation.
The American Revolution is an example. This may have something to do with why Americans cling to the Second Amendment so heartily. Perhaps the French Revolution is also an example, but my knowledge of it is weak so I could not say for sure.
Even if I could not cite an example, the fact that an armed populace has not been exploited in a way that the Jews were during the Holocaust is perhaps evidence enough. There are way too many examples of a government disarming the citizens of a country and subsequently tyrannizing them.
Do you know that when the very long Japanese civil war ended in the 1600s that the only people allowed to keep swords were the samurai and that they could, with no penalty, cut down a peasant for a minor offense.
Why don't you produce an example of when an armed populace has been subject to extreme tyranny.
Curious though, if you don't trust (and you imply that you don't) your fellow citizens with guns, it seems to me ridiculous that you would trust your government with exclusive posession of them.
First of all, you're right, you could not overthrow the government. A group of say 200,000 armed citizens in some American state/city could about declare themselves independent though. This of course would be a last ditch effort to avoid a calamity being inflicted upon the populace by the government. Think Mao's "Great Leap Forward".
Now, if the state said to the government "we're independent", the government could do one of three things. One, recognize it. Two, negotiate with the independent state to bring it back into the union. Three, conquer it. One and two end up being peaceful. Three, if the government pursues it vigorously enough and the people of said independent state are steadfast, the only possible outcome is that the independent state is utterly destroyed.
Now, this means that those people that rebelled are dead. Still the winners probably did not win much. They destroyed the fruits of their own victory. If played right, the government would have to totally destroy an area to force it back into the union (recall Sherman's march through the South if you will).
This fact alone could keep the government from fighting. What's more important is that this fact I think can also work to keep the government from getting even near the point where a group of people would want to forcibly declare their independence.
Yes absolutely! Military weapons and the weapons referred to as "assault weapons" in that particular piece of legislation are functionally quite different. Military weapons are fully automatic. That means, press the trigger once and lots of bullets fly. The "assault weapons" ban refers to guns that look like military weapons, but are functionally called "semi-automatic". Basically this means, press the trigger once and one bullet comes out. Very very different beasts...
:). They never try to distinguish between the two and in doing so basically allow people to think that "assault weapon" means machine gun. Tut tut. Bad media! Anyway, I called the BBC on this. They, IMHO, are either purposefully misleading people or have made an unfortunate factual error.
The media always makes this mischaracterization (even Fox
It is unfortunate, but nevertheless true that an armed citizenry is in the end the only way to ensure liberty. Look at all of the modern examples of tyranny (Hitler, Stalin, Mao) and you will see that civil disarmament was a prerequisite to mass murder. What's more is that gun-registration always seems to be a prerequisite to outright confiscation. For example, (The Third Reich, Modern Britain, and Modern Australia). I do not want to hold my gun at my government's whim. I hold my gun primarily for when my government runs amuck, which inevitably will happen as history has shown again and again. I pray that it will not happen in my lifetime.
Personally, I think civilians owning guns is not permitted by the constitution, and that militia means a state army. But I do think this is an area where compromises can be reached.
I suppose that's why the founders were so opposed to a standing army? The militia is every able bodied adult citizen. So if you like, yes, only the militia should be armed.
I realize your comments are supposed to be sarcastic, but tell me, doesn't it make just a little bit of sense to scrutinize immigrants from the Middle East a little more than immigrants, from say, Canada? Yes yes, I realize that someone could immigrate to Canada and then the US from there. I also realize that Al Qaeda could recruit agents from many many other places, but still that is all hypothetical. What the facts speak to is that men of Arab and Persian descent would like to destroy us, nay the whole of western civilization because it is at odds with their worldview, one which has changed very little since the middle-ages!
Know thyself and know thy enemy and you will win. We, unfortunately, know our enemy, but seem to in the name of sensitivity or political correctness turn a blind eye to this knowledge. A politically correct war effort is a losing war effort.
Here's another thing. Random searches could actually be very damaging to us and our culture of freedom. As we get more and more used to it we'll accept it more and more often. If it was a single group of people that was being targeted, perhaps we would become less desensitized to the idea of being searched when we go out in public. Personally I take great offense to the idea of being searched in a public place and it scares me that so many people line up like sheep and allow it to happen to them. What's more is the only thing that people complain about is the inconvience and the long lines. You hardly ever hear of anyone objecting to the idea in principle.
Ouch! A transparently corrupt non-study. Even worse. Bastards...
They sound like a bunch of useful idiots to me. Hail the totalitarian dupes!
Sure without a doubt it's all about the money. Still why waste the money on such a transparently corrupt "study". Just make the decision in a smokey backroom and move on. At least that will save tax payers the burden of paying for something that only amounts to smoke and mirrors.
Recently many in the technology community have been railing against the Inducing Infringements of Copyrights Act of 2004 , or the INDUCE Act. Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the bill and after reading the testimony from that hearing I am, as a technologist, not so sure that the bill is a bad idea. The INDUCE Act will amend United States copyright law to treat as an infringer of a copyright any party who 'intentionally induces' the infringement of another party's copyright. The bill seems to have bipartisan support, and is sponsored, amongst others, by Orin Hatch, Tom Daschle, Hillary Clinton, Patrick Leahy, and Bill Frist. Senator Hatch and Senator Leahy are the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The INDUCE Act is primarily focused on peer-to-peer networks and especially the use of them to illegally copy movies and especially music. The bill is meant to clarify the meaning of secondary liability in respect to copyright infringement. Secondary liability, in this circumstance, involves assigning liability to an actor who assists or facilitates an act of infringement, and has been recognized by the courts for decades. Previously Napster had been found guilty of secondary liability for allowing illegal downloads of copyrighted music, and was subsequently shut down. However, Grokster, another file sharing utility, was exonerated because, unlike Napster a centralized index of files available for download was not maintained. Still, the court realized that Grokster's revenues were linked to its large user base, which only existed because of the opportunities the network provided for the downloading of pirated music. [1] Certainly Grokster was not running an ethical business as it profitted because of the fact others were willing to break the law.
Although peer-to-peer networks are often used to infringe copyrights, it is not the only legitimate use of them. Still, in her testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Marybeth Peters, the Register of Copyrights and Associate Librarian for Copyright, said that unlike the VCR, there was "no dispute that the use of [peer-to-peer network] services constitutes copyright infringement". Certainly many peer-to-peer networks are used primarily for copyright infringement. However, there is one peer-to-peer network The Free Network Project that is, in fact, being used in countries such as China to facilitate the free interchange of political ideas. Users contribute to the network by giving bandwidth and a portion of their hard drive (called the "data store") for storing files. Unlike other peer-to-peer file sharing networks, Freenet does not let the user control what is stored in the data store. Instead, files are kept or deleted depending on how popular they are, with the least popular being discarded to make way for newer or more popular content. Files in the data store are encrypted to reduce the likelihood of prosecution by persons wishing to censor Freenet content. [2]
Any legislation, that prohibited such technology outright would irreparably damage the First Amendment in the digital age. The right to assemble virtually over the Internet, via a peer-to-peer network, or any other mechanism, is a trivial extension of the freedom to assemble in a public place. Any person should have the right to speak and to exchange ideas with any other person over the Internet, just as he does with a person in the physical realm. This "digital right to assemble" should neither be eroded by allowing the government to eavesdrop on conversations unless a proper warrant has been issued.
The INDUCE Act, however, seems aimed primarily at companies that profit from providing technologies that are used to engage in copyright infringement. Now, this is tolerable to an extent, but it seems hard to differentiate the provider of peer-to-peer networking software like Kazaa, from manufacturers of CD burners and other mass storage devices, or a peer-to-peer network like Freenet for that matter. The vagueness of the law seems problemati
We should hope not!
The Chinese would snort the puss from Cow Pox up their noses, again centuries before the West figured it out.