Why shouldn't it be an option? Why shouldn't anyone who can do the job get to compete for it? Why should the fact that you happened to be born here give you an advantage over someone who wasn't?
If it were a level playing field, I would agree with you. I lean libertarian and believe in competition, but it has to be honest, fair competition.
Right now the advantage is heavily to the employers, and US workers have to score all their goals uphill.
And how do US workers' obstacles compare with those of workers from Brazil, India, Romania or Mexico? I'll tell you: those workers would be very happy to come to the US and score uphill goals, because the hill is a hell of a lot less steep than the one in their country.
You're still arguing that US workers should be privileged above others merely for having been born here, just trying to throw up a smoke screen to distract from what you're actually saying.
The H1b program is supposed to bring in highly skilled talent in specific areas which can't be found in America.
This is true, but I think it contains some assumptions which are not. It seems to imply that whether or not talent can be found in America is a boolean. Suppose you have a successful, fast-growing tech company with lots of hot projects and more starting up all the time. Suppose, for example, you're Google, and you need to hire 100 highly-capable software engineers per week to keep up with your various teams' demand for headcount. You employ thousands of full-time recruiters who are doing everything possible to find these people, including actively recruiting from competitors. You offer large referral bonuses to existing employees. You advertise (but carefully, because ads tend to find very few good people). You bring in and interview thousands of candidates every week, but you only find about 90 per week who meet the criteria. You offer them lots of money and perks so that 89 of the 90 offers you extend every week are accepted.
Where do you get the other 11? Is H1B hiring a legitimate choice? I mean, you're doing everything you know how to do to find and hire Americans, but you can't find enough. If you only hire Americans you'll fall short of your annual hiring goals by 520 engineers, which will require you to cut some projects and reduce others. On the other hand, it's not true that there are no qualified engineers in the country; heck you hire 89 of them every week! But you need 100.
It's a business decision that is only allowed because of bribing congress. It shouldn't be an option...that's the point.
Why shouldn't it be an option? Why shouldn't anyone who can do the job get to compete for it? Why should the fact that you happened to be born here give you an advantage over someone who wasn't?
I can see the complaints against offshoring, somewhat. Yeah, that Indian guy can do your job for 1/3 the money because his cost of living is 1/5 of yours. That sucks (though I still don't see why he shouldn't have that chance). But in the case of someone coming here, living where you do, there's no cost of living differential.
The only bad things about the H-1B program, IMO, are (1) the limited quotas and (2) the way it turns the visa holders into indentured servants, almost. We should just give them regular work visas and be done with it.
I'm pretty sure I already had ads disabled when subscriptions were added. I remember wondering why I would pay to get the same thing I already had. Though I did actually subscribe for a while, mostly because the site was valuable and I wanted to support it. Getting to see articles a few minutes early was nice, too.
One obvious one is to prevent malicious parties from injecting malicious payloads into your web pages.
You think you're downloading a page from slashdot, but someone else modifies the data in transit, injects a XSS attack to gain access to the banking site you're logged into in another tab
If banking site is vulnerable to CSRF you would think it would be in their own interests in fixing this before the problem is exploited the next time same user clicks the wrong link from a Google search or opens the wrong email.
The point is that the attack can be carried out without the user visiting any malicious site. Yes, the bank should fix its bugs, but enabling malicious injection of content into other sites opens up new attack vectors for the attacker who can manipulate your traffic. If I can convince you to connect to my public Wifi service (trivially easy to do in coffee shops and other areas that offer open Wifi) and you use a non-TLS service, then I don't have to figure out how to send you e-mail, or find some way to social engineer you into visiting my malicious site.
This, by the way, is why you should never use any public Wifi service without using a VPN or proxy service. Or at least never use any non-TLS web sites, which would be really easy if there weren't any. It's really too bad the IETF screwed up SPDY by adding a non-TLS mode when they standardized it as HTTP2.
or injects malicious content that exploits some security vulnerability in your browser or OS to pwn your system and add it to a massive botnet which DoSes the forces of goodness and light. Or, worse, installs the Yahoo toolbar.
If you encrypt all the transports nothing changes. People will still exploit vulnerabilities in all the same ways. The only way to fix this is to fix bugs and all deficiencies that allowed them to exist in the first place.
Same story as above.
Fixing all the bugs is a pipe dream; patching will always be an arms race. Defense in depth is a good idea.
Another important one is simply to establish the default expectation that everything is encrypted. If you only encrypt "important" traffic then anyone spying on you knows which traffic they should care about.
They can probably tell enough already just by IP/SNI.
They can't see content if it's encrypted. Yes, metadata is valuable, but metadata + content is far better.
Above all, it's simply nobody's business what you read/write on line, and encryption keeps that between you and the site you're visiting.
LOL I would care if every site on the Internet wasn't loaded to the hilt with a comical array of global trackers that follow people from site to site everywhere they go... no bumps in any wires required. I honestly can't name a single site except cryptome and eff without multiple global trackers sometimes up to a dozen or more with the capability to follow people around everywhere they go.
At least you know who those are and what they're doing, and you can block them in various ways because they're known. In the case of Google, you can use the Google-provided tools to opt out. There is NO way to avoid tracking if the attacker can read and modify the request and response streams.
And, again, those trackers don't get content, but anyone sitting between you and an unencrypted web site does.
No way will corporations and the lobbying of the chamber of commerce allow this intrusion of socialism to harm profits! Every.com and software company in existence will freak out and open their wallets in unifying opposition!
Silicon Valley tech companies that hire H-1Bs won't care much. Very few of their H-1B employees make less than $110K anyway. If the definition of "wage" includes not just base salary but also bonus (actual awarded amount) and stock (actual value, not some notional future value), then it's likely that all of their H-1B employees already meet this requirement.
But over the past year at least, it has switched from a subscription model to offering reduced-ad access to users with Excellent karma, possibly on the basis that comments from Excellent users bring in more page views.
Slashdot has allowed users with Excellent karma to disable ads for a very long time. I don't recall how long, exactly, but it's several years. Well before subscriptions were introduced.
Fortunately, slashdot will remain accessible as it still hasn't entered the 2010's and added encryption yet!
Get a grip. Not every connection on the web needs to be encrypted. I would argue that *most* connections on the web do not need to be encrypted - Slashdot for example.
Nonsense. There are multiple reasons that all connections need to be encrypted and authenticated.
One obvious one is to prevent malicious parties from injecting malicious payloads into your web pages. You think you're downloading a page from slashdot, but someone else modifies the data in transit, injects a XSS attack to gain access to the banking site you're logged into in another tab, or injects malicious content that exploits some security vulnerability in your browser or OS to pwn your system and add it to a massive botnet which DoSes the forces of goodness and light. Or, worse, installs the Yahoo toolbar.
Another important one is simply to establish the default expectation that everything is encrypted. If you only encrypt "important" traffic then anyone spying on you knows which traffic they should care about.
Above all, it's simply nobody's business what you read/write on line, and encryption keeps that between you and the site you're visiting. Coffee shop wifi operators, ISPs, mobile network operators, etc., don't need to know, and shouldn't know. Ideally it'd be nice to even protect which sites you're frequenting, but that requires more than a point to point secure channel.
Increasingly? INCREASINGLY?? Open source isn't "increasingly" powering Internet services, IT'S BEEN THE BENCHMARK SINCE DARPA.
This is only true if you fail to distinguish between the modern definition of open source (OSI's definition) and proprietary but source-available
The ARPANET started running on the Sigma 7, running BPM. Various other operating systems ran other early nodes, but all of them were proprietary. Many did provide source code to the operating system when you bought the machine, but they were still proprietary. Later, Unix rose in popularity, but Unix was also proprietary. BSD eventually became truly open source, but that wasn't until the mid 90s, by which time Linux was already fairly well established.
Of course, there's a lot more involved in powering Internet services than just an operating system. TCP/IP stacks and associated utilities, plus applications like SMTP servers, web servers, etc. The most widely used early versions of all of these things were from BSD Unix, source-available but proprietary. There were also purely commercial, closed source implementations of all of them (who remembers Trumpet?). Windows NT did become a significant (though minority) force in Internet services, and of course it was all proprietary and closed source (though much Windows' TCP stack was based on BSD).
However, in recent years truly open source solutions have been gradually increasing their dominant position. The rise of cloud computing infrastructure has done a lot to erase Windows' presence and proprietary Unix is getting pretty rare.
Kind of like how the ARM platform is a total flop that no one uses, right? Open Hardware is basically doing what already happens with customization of ARM today, except people wouldn't have to pay ARM Holdings for the privilege.
No. Having to pay ARM for the privilege is an important part of what makes the ARM world work. Not the "writing the check" part, but the "getting ARM Holding's approval" part. Nearly all ARM "customization" is just deciding which of the ARM IP packages to license, which means that a specific instantiation either has a feature set or it doesn't, but if it does the features work in a known way. Additional customization can be done, but it's rare and ARM manages it pretty carefully.
Rot. If people have been stuffing themselves with something since horny hats were all the rage then we know.
But they haven't, that's the point. Fruits and vegetables in particular have been very heavily modified.
Choosing the fattest & most docile pigs to breed from is one thing, but all the champagne & chocolates in the world would not cause one to screw a glow worm.
Cross-species gene transfer is common. Mating is far from the only mechanism to achieve it.
Changing the source and recompiling isn't the same as poking around in the binary.
To use your analogy, gene editing is changing the source and recompiling, while selective breeding (especially mutagen-enhanced selective breeding... you do know what that is, right? Dosing individuals with high levels of mutation-inducing chemicals or radiation to accelerate the process?) is akin to randomly flipping bits of the binary, then looking to see if the code still runs, and if it works better in some way.
Pentium 75? Probably on the order of 32 MiB RAM and maybe 2 GiB of disk. My smart watch has roughly 16X the compute cycles, 16X the RAM and 2X the storage... though the watch's storage is 2-3 orders of magnitude faster. And it's not a particularly new or high end watch.
By that argument you just have to label everything, since you can't prove that there is no problem with any of our foods... nearly all of which have been extensively genetically modified via selective breeding within the last few decades. Many of them with mutagen-enhanced selective breeding, which is far scarier than carefully targeted genetic editing.
If the mass shooting numbers are really that low, why are we even talking about this? 60 per year is down in the realm of people killed by lightning strikes.
I actually believe it and I also find it a convenient insult.
You believe it on what basis? The fact that photoshop can replace one object with another is hardly an argument for there being a relationship between those objects, other than perhaps rough shape... and there are plenty of other objects which are more phallic than guns.
I think it's pretty clear that there is a sexual component to the worship of guns.
Okay, I get that you think this. But why?
And I say this as someone who has owned (and shot) guns for more than 40 years. And I've qualified at various times as a marksman and a sharpshooter.
So, should I conclude that there is a sexual component to your interest in guns? There certainly isn't any in mine.
Less than half of its revenues come from program fees and dues. The bulk of its revenues comes from "contributions, grants, royalty income, and advertising, much of it originating from gun industry sources."
Nope. It is true that just under 50% of the NRA's revenues come from membership dues, but another quarter comes from individual contributions. This means that nearly 3/4 of its revenues come from individuals. Another 5% comes from selling merchandise. Really, there's no reason to read half-baked slanted summaries. The NRA's income tax filings are available and break all of this down.
Um, I could see tens of millions of decent, law-abiding citizens watching GunTV. I would, if I watched TV.
The salient question is, if you watched GunTV, would you do so with your pants on?
The whole "guns are a sexual fetish" meme is very old and tired. Do you actually believe it or do you just find it a convenient red herring/insult?
To answer the question (though I really shouldn't), definitely *on*, because odds are good that my kids would want to come watch it, too, and not having pants on would be really awkward. Though, in general, I can't really imagine watching any TV program without pants, unless I were in bed or something. But i don't have a TV in my bedroom. Or near the bathtub.
The NRA is a de facto heat-shield for the gun-manufacturing lobby.
Whenever a debate arises about the availability of guns that can kill lots of people very quickly, it's the NRA (not manufacturers) that speaks up in favor of keeping these guns in the marketplace.
This is arguably true, but misleading nonetheless. It's misleading because it appears to imply that the NRA exists to front for the gun manufacturers. It may do that, but that's not why it exists. It exists to meet the goals of its individual members, who are also it's primary source of funding. It is true that the interest of those members, who like to be able to buy guns, align nicely with the interests of gun manufacturers, who like to be able to sell guns, but it's the former that the NRA serves.
Does the government have any reason to know how many cars you have?
Forgive my cherry-picking, I only have time to address one of your items: The answer is no*
*unless I am driving on public roads.
If my gun is in my home, it is not the government's business. You could argue that if I carry in public, it is - and the car analogy kinda falls apart then because it suggests carrying in public means ok to require registration
Dig a bit deeper.
With respect to vehicles there is registration of the vehicle and licensing of the driver. These two government involvements have different purposes.
Vehicle registration has three purposes. First, vehicles are titled and the titles are registered with the government because they're high-value items which would otherwise be even more at risk of theft. Titles and registration enable the government to keep track of who owns the vehicle so ownership transfers are done in a controlled way, making vehicle theft less attractive because the stolen vehicle cannot be used in a normal way. A vehicle can be used for a short period of time and then discarded or it can be chopped up for parts, and even that use is limited. So vehicle owners (who think about it) support titling and registration.
Most guns aren't high-value items, and therefore gun owners wouldn't really benefit from titling and registration.
Second, vehicles are registered so they can be taxed, to pay for the roads. There's no analogous public support for guns. Public gun ranges, I suppose, but those can be easily supported by use fees.
Third, vehicles are registered so their safety and emissions characteristics can be controlled and managed. Cars with faulty brakes, broken windshields, nasty exhaust and other negative characteristics endanger everyone on the highway (and elsewhere). Some of this, like broken windshields, can be managed by on-the-highway policing, but other parts can't be. So annual registration provides a control point to enforce inspections.
Faulty guns (e.g. broken safeties, etc.) could conceivably pose similar problems, but they're not sufficiently widespread to warrant a registration and inspection process.
Then there's the licensing of the driver. You do not have to have a license to own or drive a vehicle, but you do have to have a license to drive on a public road. Similarly, you don't have to have a license to own or use a gun, but in most states you do have to have a license (concealed weapon permit) to carry a gun in public places. In both cases, the licensure offers the government a chance to ensure that people driving/carrying in public have the requisite education to be able to do so safely.
Yes, shrinking rapidly, but they still wield the most political power in the most powerful country on the planet. The only group that rivals their power is the 0.01%.
Collectively, this is true. However, it doesn't mean that they don't feel individually disempowered and disenfranchised, and note that statements like yours aren't in the slightest bit reassuring to them. The typical lower middle class white male sees that his lot is significantly worse in pretty much every way from what his father had, and from what he expected to have growing up... and this isn't because his father's situation was particularly good. Of course, his father's situation was much better than, say, the position of a comparable black man of his father's era, but that's not the standard of comparison he grew up using.
There's a very insightful essay entitled The Distress of the Privileged that explores the issue of what happens when you take privileges away from people who are basically decent but have, through no doing of their own, always had a privileged position in society. They are distressed, their distress is real, and understandable, and should be considered. However, their distress cannot in any way be equated with those on whose backs their privilege was built. The distress of the privileged is real, and to them it's a big, important thing, but it's strictly less than the distress of the non-privileged which is being fixed.
What the essay doesn't address, though, is the situation of members of the privileged class who were already feeling pretty distressed by their own life challenges even before the social changes added to their stress by taking away their privileges... while all the time telling them that they are members of a privileged elite. They don't at privileged or elite. They feel like they're at the bottom. They aren't, of course, because again they're still better off than comparable people who aren't a member of their class.
How to fix these problems of perception? Beats me.
If it were just logic, barely anyone would wear a wrist watch anyway. Wherever I go, publicly visible clocks are aboundant, and even my cell phone and my car have one too. I gave up wearing a wrist watch ten years ago, they just got in the way.
But all of those publicly visible clocks only tell you what time it is. They don't tell you when your next meeting is, or change their display to tell you it's in starting in five minutes. Nor do they do any of a hundred other things that your phone does... but when your phone is in your pocket it doesn't do those hundred other things that well, either.
I stopped wearing a watch about the same time you did, but started wearing a smartwatch last year.
Considering that in the US accidental shootings alone kill ~10 times more people than mass shootings, I think more people would die rather than fewer.
CDC figures put the number of accidental firearms deaths at about 600 per year, so I guess this means we only have 60 deaths per year in mass shootings?
Slashdot Mirror
If it were a level playing field, I would agree with you. I lean libertarian and believe in competition, but it has to be honest, fair competition.
Right now the advantage is heavily to the employers, and US workers have to score all their goals uphill.
And how do US workers' obstacles compare with those of workers from Brazil, India, Romania or Mexico? I'll tell you: those workers would be very happy to come to the US and score uphill goals, because the hill is a hell of a lot less steep than the one in their country.
You're still arguing that US workers should be privileged above others merely for having been born here, just trying to throw up a smoke screen to distract from what you're actually saying.
The H1b program is supposed to bring in highly skilled talent in specific areas which can't be found in America.
This is true, but I think it contains some assumptions which are not. It seems to imply that whether or not talent can be found in America is a boolean. Suppose you have a successful, fast-growing tech company with lots of hot projects and more starting up all the time. Suppose, for example, you're Google, and you need to hire 100 highly-capable software engineers per week to keep up with your various teams' demand for headcount. You employ thousands of full-time recruiters who are doing everything possible to find these people, including actively recruiting from competitors. You offer large referral bonuses to existing employees. You advertise (but carefully, because ads tend to find very few good people). You bring in and interview thousands of candidates every week, but you only find about 90 per week who meet the criteria. You offer them lots of money and perks so that 89 of the 90 offers you extend every week are accepted.
Where do you get the other 11? Is H1B hiring a legitimate choice? I mean, you're doing everything you know how to do to find and hire Americans, but you can't find enough. If you only hire Americans you'll fall short of your annual hiring goals by 520 engineers, which will require you to cut some projects and reduce others. On the other hand, it's not true that there are no qualified engineers in the country; heck you hire 89 of them every week! But you need 100.
It's a business decision that is only allowed because of bribing congress. It shouldn't be an option...that's the point.
Why shouldn't it be an option? Why shouldn't anyone who can do the job get to compete for it? Why should the fact that you happened to be born here give you an advantage over someone who wasn't?
I can see the complaints against offshoring, somewhat. Yeah, that Indian guy can do your job for 1/3 the money because his cost of living is 1/5 of yours. That sucks (though I still don't see why he shouldn't have that chance). But in the case of someone coming here, living where you do, there's no cost of living differential.
The only bad things about the H-1B program, IMO, are (1) the limited quotas and (2) the way it turns the visa holders into indentured servants, almost. We should just give them regular work visas and be done with it.
I'm pretty sure I already had ads disabled when subscriptions were added. I remember wondering why I would pay to get the same thing I already had. Though I did actually subscribe for a while, mostly because the site was valuable and I wanted to support it. Getting to see articles a few minutes early was nice, too.
One obvious one is to prevent malicious parties from injecting malicious payloads into your web pages.
You think you're downloading a page from slashdot, but someone else modifies the data in transit, injects a XSS attack to gain access to the banking site you're logged into in another tab
If banking site is vulnerable to CSRF you would think it would be in their own interests in fixing this before the problem is exploited the next time same user clicks the wrong link from a Google search or opens the wrong email.
The point is that the attack can be carried out without the user visiting any malicious site. Yes, the bank should fix its bugs, but enabling malicious injection of content into other sites opens up new attack vectors for the attacker who can manipulate your traffic. If I can convince you to connect to my public Wifi service (trivially easy to do in coffee shops and other areas that offer open Wifi) and you use a non-TLS service, then I don't have to figure out how to send you e-mail, or find some way to social engineer you into visiting my malicious site.
This, by the way, is why you should never use any public Wifi service without using a VPN or proxy service. Or at least never use any non-TLS web sites, which would be really easy if there weren't any. It's really too bad the IETF screwed up SPDY by adding a non-TLS mode when they standardized it as HTTP2.
or injects malicious content that exploits some security vulnerability in your browser or OS to pwn your system and add it to a massive botnet which DoSes the forces of goodness and light. Or, worse, installs the Yahoo toolbar.
If you encrypt all the transports nothing changes. People will still exploit vulnerabilities in all the same ways. The only way to fix this is to fix bugs and all deficiencies that allowed them to exist in the first place.
Same story as above.
Fixing all the bugs is a pipe dream; patching will always be an arms race. Defense in depth is a good idea.
Another important one is simply to establish the default expectation that everything is encrypted. If you only encrypt "important" traffic then anyone spying on you knows which traffic they should care about.
They can probably tell enough already just by IP/SNI.
They can't see content if it's encrypted. Yes, metadata is valuable, but metadata + content is far better.
Above all, it's simply nobody's business what you read/write on line, and encryption keeps that between you and the site you're visiting.
LOL I would care if every site on the Internet wasn't loaded to the hilt with a comical array of global trackers that follow people from site to site everywhere they go... no bumps in any wires required. I honestly can't name a single site except cryptome and eff without multiple global trackers sometimes up to a dozen or more with the capability to follow people around everywhere they go.
At least you know who those are and what they're doing, and you can block them in various ways because they're known. In the case of Google, you can use the Google-provided tools to opt out. There is NO way to avoid tracking if the attacker can read and modify the request and response streams.
And, again, those trackers don't get content, but anyone sitting between you and an unencrypted web site does.
Or just end the program altogether.
Just give them all regular work visas and be done with it. Protectionism is foolish and shortsighted.
Good luck with that.
No way will corporations and the lobbying of the chamber of commerce allow this intrusion of socialism to harm profits! Every .com and software company in existence will freak out and open their wallets in unifying opposition!
Silicon Valley tech companies that hire H-1Bs won't care much. Very few of their H-1B employees make less than $110K anyway. If the definition of "wage" includes not just base salary but also bonus (actual awarded amount) and stock (actual value, not some notional future value), then it's likely that all of their H-1B employees already meet this requirement.
But over the past year at least, it has switched from a subscription model to offering reduced-ad access to users with Excellent karma, possibly on the basis that comments from Excellent users bring in more page views.
Slashdot has allowed users with Excellent karma to disable ads for a very long time. I don't recall how long, exactly, but it's several years. Well before subscriptions were introduced.
Fortunately, slashdot will remain accessible as it still hasn't entered the 2010's and added encryption yet!
Get a grip. Not every connection on the web needs to be encrypted. I would argue that *most* connections on the web do not need to be encrypted - Slashdot for example.
Nonsense. There are multiple reasons that all connections need to be encrypted and authenticated.
One obvious one is to prevent malicious parties from injecting malicious payloads into your web pages. You think you're downloading a page from slashdot, but someone else modifies the data in transit, injects a XSS attack to gain access to the banking site you're logged into in another tab, or injects malicious content that exploits some security vulnerability in your browser or OS to pwn your system and add it to a massive botnet which DoSes the forces of goodness and light. Or, worse, installs the Yahoo toolbar.
Another important one is simply to establish the default expectation that everything is encrypted. If you only encrypt "important" traffic then anyone spying on you knows which traffic they should care about.
Above all, it's simply nobody's business what you read/write on line, and encryption keeps that between you and the site you're visiting. Coffee shop wifi operators, ISPs, mobile network operators, etc., don't need to know, and shouldn't know. Ideally it'd be nice to even protect which sites you're frequenting, but that requires more than a point to point secure channel.
Increasingly? INCREASINGLY?? Open source isn't "increasingly" powering Internet services, IT'S BEEN THE BENCHMARK SINCE DARPA.
This is only true if you fail to distinguish between the modern definition of open source (OSI's definition) and proprietary but source-available
The ARPANET started running on the Sigma 7, running BPM. Various other operating systems ran other early nodes, but all of them were proprietary. Many did provide source code to the operating system when you bought the machine, but they were still proprietary. Later, Unix rose in popularity, but Unix was also proprietary. BSD eventually became truly open source, but that wasn't until the mid 90s, by which time Linux was already fairly well established.
Of course, there's a lot more involved in powering Internet services than just an operating system. TCP/IP stacks and associated utilities, plus applications like SMTP servers, web servers, etc. The most widely used early versions of all of these things were from BSD Unix, source-available but proprietary. There were also purely commercial, closed source implementations of all of them (who remembers Trumpet?). Windows NT did become a significant (though minority) force in Internet services, and of course it was all proprietary and closed source (though much Windows' TCP stack was based on BSD).
However, in recent years truly open source solutions have been gradually increasing their dominant position. The rise of cloud computing infrastructure has done a lot to erase Windows' presence and proprietary Unix is getting pretty rare.
Kind of like how the ARM platform is a total flop that no one uses, right? Open Hardware is basically doing what already happens with customization of ARM today, except people wouldn't have to pay ARM Holdings for the privilege.
No. Having to pay ARM for the privilege is an important part of what makes the ARM world work. Not the "writing the check" part, but the "getting ARM Holding's approval" part. Nearly all ARM "customization" is just deciding which of the ARM IP packages to license, which means that a specific instantiation either has a feature set or it doesn't, but if it does the features work in a known way. Additional customization can be done, but it's rare and ARM manages it pretty carefully.
Rot. If people have been stuffing themselves with something since horny hats were all the rage then we know.
But they haven't, that's the point. Fruits and vegetables in particular have been very heavily modified.
Choosing the fattest & most docile pigs to breed from is one thing, but all the champagne & chocolates in the world would not cause one to screw a glow worm.
Cross-species gene transfer is common. Mating is far from the only mechanism to achieve it.
Changing the source and recompiling isn't the same as poking around in the binary.
To use your analogy, gene editing is changing the source and recompiling, while selective breeding (especially mutagen-enhanced selective breeding... you do know what that is, right? Dosing individuals with high levels of mutation-inducing chemicals or radiation to accelerate the process?) is akin to randomly flipping bits of the binary, then looking to see if the code still runs, and if it works better in some way.
Pentium 75? Probably on the order of 32 MiB RAM and maybe 2 GiB of disk. My smart watch has roughly 16X the compute cycles, 16X the RAM and 2X the storage... though the watch's storage is 2-3 orders of magnitude faster. And it's not a particularly new or high end watch.
Exactly. Hence we need it labled, pretty simple.
By that argument you just have to label everything, since you can't prove that there is no problem with any of our foods... nearly all of which have been extensively genetically modified via selective breeding within the last few decades. Many of them with mutagen-enhanced selective breeding, which is far scarier than carefully targeted genetic editing.
Yeah, the value thing is just one of the reasons. On its own it wouldn't be sufficient.
According to the FBI: yes.
If the mass shooting numbers are really that low, why are we even talking about this? 60 per year is down in the realm of people killed by lightning strikes.
I actually believe it and I also find it a convenient insult.
You believe it on what basis? The fact that photoshop can replace one object with another is hardly an argument for there being a relationship between those objects, other than perhaps rough shape... and there are plenty of other objects which are more phallic than guns.
I think it's pretty clear that there is a sexual component to the worship of guns.
Okay, I get that you think this. But why?
And I say this as someone who has owned (and shot) guns for more than 40 years. And I've qualified at various times as a marksman and a sharpshooter.
So, should I conclude that there is a sexual component to your interest in guns? There certainly isn't any in mine.
Less than half of its revenues come from program fees and dues. The bulk of its revenues comes from "contributions, grants, royalty income, and advertising, much of it originating from gun industry sources."
Nope. It is true that just under 50% of the NRA's revenues come from membership dues, but another quarter comes from individual contributions. This means that nearly 3/4 of its revenues come from individuals. Another 5% comes from selling merchandise. Really, there's no reason to read half-baked slanted summaries. The NRA's income tax filings are available and break all of this down.
But if you like summaries, here's a better one, complete with a nice pie chart: https://www.quora.com/Where-do...
The salient question is, if you watched GunTV, would you do so with your pants on?
The whole "guns are a sexual fetish" meme is very old and tired. Do you actually believe it or do you just find it a convenient red herring/insult?
To answer the question (though I really shouldn't), definitely *on*, because odds are good that my kids would want to come watch it, too, and not having pants on would be really awkward. Though, in general, I can't really imagine watching any TV program without pants, unless I were in bed or something. But i don't have a TV in my bedroom. Or near the bathtub.
I would phrase the question, "What decent, law-abiding citizen is watching GunTV?"
Um, I could see tens of millions of decent, law-abiding citizens watching GunTV. I would, if I watched TV.
The NRA is a de facto heat-shield for the gun-manufacturing lobby.
Whenever a debate arises about the availability of guns that can kill lots of people very quickly, it's the NRA (not manufacturers) that speaks up in favor of keeping these guns in the marketplace.
This is arguably true, but misleading nonetheless. It's misleading because it appears to imply that the NRA exists to front for the gun manufacturers. It may do that, but that's not why it exists. It exists to meet the goals of its individual members, who are also it's primary source of funding. It is true that the interest of those members, who like to be able to buy guns, align nicely with the interests of gun manufacturers, who like to be able to sell guns, but it's the former that the NRA serves.
Does the government have any reason to know how many cars you have?
Forgive my cherry-picking, I only have time to address one of your items: The answer is no* *unless I am driving on public roads. If my gun is in my home, it is not the government's business. You could argue that if I carry in public, it is - and the car analogy kinda falls apart then because it suggests carrying in public means ok to require registration
Dig a bit deeper.
With respect to vehicles there is registration of the vehicle and licensing of the driver. These two government involvements have different purposes.
Vehicle registration has three purposes. First, vehicles are titled and the titles are registered with the government because they're high-value items which would otherwise be even more at risk of theft. Titles and registration enable the government to keep track of who owns the vehicle so ownership transfers are done in a controlled way, making vehicle theft less attractive because the stolen vehicle cannot be used in a normal way. A vehicle can be used for a short period of time and then discarded or it can be chopped up for parts, and even that use is limited. So vehicle owners (who think about it) support titling and registration.
Most guns aren't high-value items, and therefore gun owners wouldn't really benefit from titling and registration.
Second, vehicles are registered so they can be taxed, to pay for the roads. There's no analogous public support for guns. Public gun ranges, I suppose, but those can be easily supported by use fees.
Third, vehicles are registered so their safety and emissions characteristics can be controlled and managed. Cars with faulty brakes, broken windshields, nasty exhaust and other negative characteristics endanger everyone on the highway (and elsewhere). Some of this, like broken windshields, can be managed by on-the-highway policing, but other parts can't be. So annual registration provides a control point to enforce inspections.
Faulty guns (e.g. broken safeties, etc.) could conceivably pose similar problems, but they're not sufficiently widespread to warrant a registration and inspection process.
Then there's the licensing of the driver. You do not have to have a license to own or drive a vehicle, but you do have to have a license to drive on a public road. Similarly, you don't have to have a license to own or use a gun, but in most states you do have to have a license (concealed weapon permit) to carry a gun in public places. In both cases, the licensure offers the government a chance to ensure that people driving/carrying in public have the requisite education to be able to do so safely.
So, the car/gun analogy is pretty good.
Yes, shrinking rapidly, but they still wield the most political power in the most powerful country on the planet. The only group that rivals their power is the 0.01%.
Collectively, this is true. However, it doesn't mean that they don't feel individually disempowered and disenfranchised, and note that statements like yours aren't in the slightest bit reassuring to them. The typical lower middle class white male sees that his lot is significantly worse in pretty much every way from what his father had, and from what he expected to have growing up... and this isn't because his father's situation was particularly good. Of course, his father's situation was much better than, say, the position of a comparable black man of his father's era, but that's not the standard of comparison he grew up using.
There's a very insightful essay entitled The Distress of the Privileged that explores the issue of what happens when you take privileges away from people who are basically decent but have, through no doing of their own, always had a privileged position in society. They are distressed, their distress is real, and understandable, and should be considered. However, their distress cannot in any way be equated with those on whose backs their privilege was built. The distress of the privileged is real, and to them it's a big, important thing, but it's strictly less than the distress of the non-privileged which is being fixed.
What the essay doesn't address, though, is the situation of members of the privileged class who were already feeling pretty distressed by their own life challenges even before the social changes added to their stress by taking away their privileges... while all the time telling them that they are members of a privileged elite. They don't at privileged or elite. They feel like they're at the bottom. They aren't, of course, because again they're still better off than comparable people who aren't a member of their class.
How to fix these problems of perception? Beats me.
If it were just logic, barely anyone would wear a wrist watch anyway. Wherever I go, publicly visible clocks are aboundant, and even my cell phone and my car have one too. I gave up wearing a wrist watch ten years ago, they just got in the way.
But all of those publicly visible clocks only tell you what time it is. They don't tell you when your next meeting is, or change their display to tell you it's in starting in five minutes. Nor do they do any of a hundred other things that your phone does... but when your phone is in your pocket it doesn't do those hundred other things that well, either.
I stopped wearing a watch about the same time you did, but started wearing a smartwatch last year.
Considering that in the US accidental shootings alone kill ~10 times more people than mass shootings, I think more people would die rather than fewer.
CDC figures put the number of accidental firearms deaths at about 600 per year, so I guess this means we only have 60 deaths per year in mass shootings?