I'd expect the police might get interested and I'd explain calmly what I was doing, but I'd be OK with being detained over it even if I knew it was wrong.
You'd be okay with being illegally detained?
I wouldn't. I'd file a complaint. And if I felt seriously harassed I'd file a lawsuit. Police officers are required to know and respect your rights.
Ummm, he was on private property. Just because two or more people can see each other doesn't make a place, public.
Then the most they can do is ask him to leave. Period.
Exactly.
I'm only posting to add that even private property owners have some limitations if they allow the public to enter. Stores and other locations that are open to the public fall into the legal of category "public accommodation". Public accommodations are private property but there are significant limits on what they can do. For example, although they can ask you to leave for almost any reason, they can't do it because you're a member of a protected minority. There are various other ways in which the public accommodation owner's control over speech and other behaviors are limited as compared to private property where the public is not allowed.
Specific to my state, there's also a limitation on the trespassing statute. It is a valid defense to a trespassing charge that the trespasser was on property that was open to the public at the time and was not interfering with the owner's use of the property. So, basically, the owner of a public accommodation has to show that your actions in some way harmed his business, otherwise the trespassing charge won't stick.
Go ahead then. I guarantee you're going to need a lawyer though. I hope the fun is worth it.
It's not about "fun", and it's certainly not about taking the easy way out.
The fact is that if we want to HAVE rights, it's necessary to assert them. Do you really have a right to take pictures in public if you can be legally harassed, cuffed and hauled in for questioning for doing it? You do not.
Does it matter whether or not you can take a picture of an ATM? Probably not. But it definitely DOES matter that you aren't required to abide by the whims of random company employees, that they can't force you to identify themselves to you just because they don't like the way you looked at them. And it matters that the police be able to understand that citizens who did nothing wrong should not be harassed.
But if everyone is like you, if no one is willing to stand up, even though it's unpleasant, inconvenient and occasionally expensive, over time we'll lose the option of deciding whether we want to go along to get along or not.
Civil rights activists of all sorts are necessary, especially the ones who just want to take the opportunity to assert their right to remain more or less anonymous.
In some states, an adult is legally required to provide ID to any cop who asks - it's actually illegal to walk down the street without a driver's license (or non-driver's ID). We seem to have little regard for the Constitution.
Cite?
There are many states with "stop and identify" statutes, but courts have held that to comply with the requirement it's only necessary to *verbally* provide your name and address.
Most (if not all) states also require you to show your driver's license upon demand by any peace officer if you are operating a motor vehicle, but that's a different issue. In that case you're proving that you are authorized to drive.
The EU army will declare martial law and march on France, same way the U.S. army marched on the rebellious southern states circa 1863. That's how a central government gains ultimate authority over its member states. Through force.
The parent was modded flamebait, but I wouldn't be surprised to see something like that happening in 100 years. The EU doesn't have as much authority over its member states now as the US federal government did in 1789, but it'll grow and it's not at all unlikely that it will eventually reach the point where EU member states are forcibly deprived of the opportunity of secession.
I had a boss, who used to suggest with total seriousness that all politicians should be sent directly to jail after they serve their terms; without trial, without jury, straight from their table to their cell.
Years ago I read a short science fiction story (don't recall name, author or even much of the story) about a planet where the system was structured to personally reward politicians for removing regulations/crimes and in which the successful passage of a new law was finalized by the execution of the politician who proposed it. The idea was to design a legislative system such that only laws that people really *care* about can be passed. Indeed someone has to be willing to give their life.
Extreme to the point of silliness, of course, as the author intended. But still, food for thought. Is there some way a system could be structured to provide a deterrent for limiting rights, yet still provide a means for government to do what's really important?
Actually, that's one of the things I really like about the original, long-forgotten model of the United States: given a federal government whose role is restricted to the areas outlined in the Constitution, the bulk of lawmaking is done by the states, which enables citizens who dislike the laws of their current state to simply relocate to a state whose laws they like better.
But, alas, we gave up on that idea some 80 years ago when FDR bent the Supreme Court to his will and they dutifully "decided" that the Commerce Clause grants unlimited authority to the federal government.
I've done less extensive tests on other configs since then, and I can only find specific I/O patterns where the hardware card is a slight win; it's usually about the same as software RAID.
It sounds like you have done quite a bit more testing than I have, but in my experience there are also plenty of cases where software raid provides a non-trivial performance boost.
My experience is primarily with RAID-5 and RAID-6, though. I haven't done so much with mirroring.
Unless it's one known for its ability to work on various and sundry drives (as opposed to identical ones), and probably built into whatever OS OP is running...don't recommend softraid.
Is there some software raid solution that doesn't work on various and sundry drives?
Controller card/motherboard goes [...] and all his data's gone.
This is a reason to avoid hardware raid, not software raid. With hardware raid, if you lose your raid controller your data's toast unless you can get another that understands the same layout (not typically a huge problem, but still an issue). With software raid you can throw the drives into any old box, connected to any set of controller cards. All you need is the same OS and possibly some knowledge of the configuration, if the softraid doesn't put everything it needs on the drives themselves (as Linux md raid does).
IMO, the only reason to favor hardware raid is to get better performance from servers whose CPUs are frequently fully utilized when I/O is also heavy.
In that (sadly) it is becoming easier to obtain guns within Europe
Do you have evidence for this claim? By all accounts I've read, it's becoming gradually *harder* to obtain guns in Europe. With no significant benefit to the violent crime rate, I might add.
Ah, the old "That's not fair!
Fairness has nothing to do with it. Let me explain this as simply as I can:
I argued that the incidence and success of school shooters would be reduced if the shooter expected armed resistance, as supported by evidence that mass shootings only occur in so-called "gun free" zones.
You countered that this would just cause shooters to be prepared.
I asked for an example of a case where this had occurred.
williambh gave the example of the DC sniper -- not a school shooter, and not a case where the shooter could expect any real armed resistance. In other words: Not the scenario under discussion.
More to the point, if we could eliminate school shootings like the one in Germany and force those shooters to adopt the far less effective and much more difficult approach of the DC sniper, that would be a good thing.
John Allen Muhammad was an expert marksman with a $2000 rifle and a car customized into a sniper nest. If we can make *those* the minimum requirements to "succeed" as a mass killer -- and it's worth noting that Tim Kretschmer was far more "successful" than Muhammad, in spite of his inferior equipment and skills -- then the incidence of kids shooting up their schools would drop to near zero.
I realize that your position is that the better approach is simply to take all guns away from citizens, but that's simply impossible, and it would be wrong even if it were possible. Compared to the number of situations in which law-abiding citizens successfully defend themselves with firearms (which even the Brady Campaign grudgingly estimates at 100,000 per year), not to mention the vast recreational uses and the even more important civil liberty issues, the rare firearms tragedy is an acceptable cost. It is one of the ways in which the tree of liberty is watered by the blood of patriots.
Given that removing the guns is neither practical nor moral, the question is: What can we do to reduce the death toll of innocents?
The answer is: Encourage law-abiding, rational citizens to be armed. There's significant statistical evidence of the effectiveness of this approach, at least in the US. Numerous studies have documented the decrease in violent crime in US states that liberalize the issuance of concealed carry permits, even when the numbers are controlled against the nationwide decline in violence and relevant socio-economic factors. I can provide citations, if you like.
I don't argue this idly, by the way. I carry a 9mm handgun and 27 rounds of ammunition nearly everywhere I go. I don't expect ever to use it. I *hope* never to use it. But I do my part to ensure that in my community there is always a firearm available and in the hands of a competent, calm individual.
Well, gee, I wonder whether in a discussion about the regulation of a killing tool, events where that killing tool is the only common factor might be important or enlightening. Hmmm...
So stop with the vague implication and explain how it is enlightening. Start with explaining how it helps us understand the proper regulation of automobiles.
One more comment, this time at the meta-discussion level: I find it fascinating how difficult it is to find an anti-gun person who is capable of debating rationally, of stating their arguments forthrightly without the use of innuendo, sarcasm, derision or ridicule. Nor do those taking anti-gun positions ever seem to want to focus on facts, statistics, data or the results of peer-reviewed studies.
Do yourself a favor if you want to continue this discussion, and raise the level of your discourse.
That just seems wrong to me. They actually damaged something nearly 100 years old just to make it smaller. It could just be me, but they should have just taken it into space the way it was without damaging it. Seems shameful to me.
There are lots of old basketballs around. The thing that was special about this one was that Edwin Hubble had used it..
Do you think Hubble would have minded that "his" ball had to be deflated in order for it to go into space? This was a man who spent his life studying the Universe, but who died before mankind had even managed to put an object in orbit.
I think he'd consider it amazingly cool that the ball he played with went into space along with astronauts doing repair work on the space-based telescope named after him.
The fact that the NSA was willing to participate at all strongly suggests to me that the NSA was just playing games, and was not in fact utilizing anywhere near their full capabilities in this exercise. Which says something pretty impressive about the NSA.
With my phone (Motorola RAZR V3i), I can set an alarm and then turn it off. The alarm still functions and will activate exactly when it is meant to.
That's a feature of many embedded microprocessors, they have a timer circuit which is kept running with a very small trickle of power. It's a countdown, and when it hits zero the CPU powers up.
As others have pointed out, that could allow the phone to wake up every few minutes, power up the receiver and see if the black helicopters have sent any instructions. If such scans were sufficiently brief, perhaps they wouldn't drain the battery too much.
Of course, that means it's impossible to actually alter future events in a given time line (instead, by changing things in the past, you'd create and occupy a *new* timeline), which directly contradicts basically every other time travel-based Star Trek episode (eg, The City on the Edge of Forever, Yesterday's Enterprise, etc).
Unless there are two forms of time travel, one of which is travel within the timeline and the other of which crosses between many-worlds timelines.
Maybe it is because of my background in the USN, but the 4th wall was completely destroyed for me by the clumsy way the writers inserted Kirk into the Enterprise chain of command.
I certainly agree with that. I whined about that, and about the way that they gave him permanent command at the end. Other than that I found it very entertaining -- and I really like the idea of some more shows with screwed-up-orphan Kirk and emotional Spock.
Maybe it's my personal experience, but every single person I have talked to has said it is not faithful in it's representation of star trek
Then every person you've talked to is dense. This movie is quite clear about the fact that it's an alternative universe/timeline trek, and even sets up the rationale for the differences.
It's not "faithful" to the previous Star Trek universe, because it's *not* the previous Star Trek universe. The basic social structure is the same (Federation, Klingons, Romulans, etc.), and many of the characters are the same people, but the major characters undergo some very different life experiences and are somewhat different people as a result.
I think it was a great movie, and I look forward to more movies and TV shows that explore this alternate timeline, with an angrier, more aggressive Kirk who is also a hero and a starship captain at a younger age (lots of opportunity for stories about a less experienced but still excellent captain), a more outspoken and assertive Uhura, and a more openly emotional Spock (who is, nevertheless, still struggling with his dual heritage).
There's no doubt about it that this is a *different* take on the Trek universe. I, for one, find it an intriguing one and I'm very interested in what can be done with it.
Though it's sad that we do, we've seen enough actual shootings to base our decisions on actual data.
Happily, in countries with decent gun controls, we haven't.
Germany is certainly getting there. Though if they were wise they'd take the opportunity to learn from the incidents in the US. The foolish don't learn from their own experiences, the wise learn from the experiences of others.
Since you asked for only one - plenty of guns drive up and down the highways each day, and the Beltway snipers didn't seem to care.
Lame. Obviously handguns pose no deterrent to snipers, therefore the DC snipers had no expectation of armed resistance. For that matter, soldiers armed with rifles would have posed no significant deterrent to a sniper firing a single shot from a deep hide. Care to try again?
Hmm, let me think how innocent deaths by handguns might be relevant to a conversation about preventing innocent deaths by handguns. Tricky one; I'll get back to you on that.
That's like bringing up statistics of people accidentally backing over toddlers in a discussion of mass murders committed with automobiles (which happens in the US as well, unfortunately; we have a violent society). The only commonality between the situations is the killing tool; motive, approach, scale and volume are completely different.
So it strikes me as very tricky indeed to find a reason that accidents caused by negligent parents are relevant to a discussion of deliberate mass murders.
I think a good measure of what a the police can do without a warrant, is what a normal person can do without a warrant.
Can you (legally) pull over cars on a public road?
In certain situations, yes.
Again, yes, given appropriate justification.
Cops can do a lot of things that the rest of us can't.
Yes, they can, even though neither of the two you mentioned fall into that category. Those additional authorizations that they have, however, are clearly spelled out in the law, along with the circumstances under which they can do those things.
Outside of the specifically-authorized police powers, police and citizens should be exactly equal under the law.
That would change. They do so because they expect they are outnumbered by marksmen in body armour, not because they think Grandpa Jim the fat history teacher has a gun he can barely aim
And yet, when faced by (a) a vice principal with a handgun, or (b) a restaurant owner with a shot gun or (c) a couple of adult students with their personal pistols, the shooters stopped.
Do you have any examples of shooters who have been opposed by armed citizens (not cops) and not given up?
There is a lot of conjecture out there, most of it (like yours) badly misinformed. Though it's sad that we do, we've seen enough actual shootings to base our decisions on actual data.
I'd be surprised if there have been three school shootings in Germany.
Ah, there's nothing like making sure the gunman is prepared for the resistance...
Show me one example of a gunman who chose to commit mass murder in a location where he knew he'd encounter armed resistance.
Actually, there have been a couple that were staged by organized terror groups, but those don't count; you can't stop those with anything less than serious military forces.
Those accidents tend to happen at home. There have been plenty of cases of small children blowing away their siblings because they played cowboys and indians with daddy's gun.
And those are relevant to this discussion how? I'm talking about adults carrying concealed weapons for defense.
I should mention, though, that most people vastly overestimate the scale of the offtopic problem you mention. There are less than 100 such incidents per year in the US, and the numbers decline every year. In 2006, the most recent year for which the CDC has numbers available, there were 56 children ages 0-14 killed in firearms accidents. Each one is tragic, and I think their parents should be prosecuted for not teaching them gun safety and for not keeping the weapons out of their reach, but the scale of the problem is often exaggerated.
If that's true, why don't handset makers exploit it to provide a super-low-power mode that can, say, wake up periodically to check for text messages or voicemails? It seems like there would be a good market for phones with a mode that gives them years of standby at the expense of not being able to receive voice calls.
Also, do you have ANY evidence of this secret FBI circuit, beyond urban legend? Given the tens of thousands of people in multiple countries and hundreds of companies involved in creating the hardware and software for the billions of handsets, it seems like something would leak out.
I think allowing law-abiding, responsible adults to carry firearms is a solution. I guarantee you that we're not going to see any successful mass school murders in Utah, where I live, since any adult (21+) with a clean record can get a concealed firearm permit and carry at any school. At the primary and secondary level, many teachers are armed, and at the university level many students are armed.
The key to stopping active shooters is to get armed resistance on-scene ASAP. After Columbine, this caused US law enforcement to change their tactics. Before (and at) Columbine, the approach was to wait for SWAT, with their rifles and body armor, to maximize officer safety. After Columbine, the doctrine changed: Now, the first armed officer on scene enters immediately to stop the shooter. Experience has shown that active shooters generally kill themselves at the first sign of armed resistance.
What's even better is if armed people are on scene all the time, so that armed resistance is seconds away, not minutes. There have been three school shootings in the US where armed citizens have intervened. In all three cases, the shooter was stopped instantly, and LONG before police arrived.
Even better than that is if potential shooters know that armed people are on scene at all times, so they know they're not going to get the opportunity to deal death unopposed.
Oh, and before someone goes off about all the accidents that will be caused by all the guns "lying around" I'll point out that Utah has allowed school carry since 2002. In seven years there have been ZERO incidents at any of the dozen universities or hundred-plus primary or secondary schools. And by "incidents" I mean not just shootings, but threats, brandished weapons, etc. I don't believe there have even been any weapons left lying around; it hasn't made the news, anyway.
That maxim has a clear corollary in lawmaking: "Never pass a law that huge numbers of people will break". Passing such laws does little or nothing to change human behavior, but does a great deal to undermine the rule of law.
It also gives you a legal reason to throw practically whoever you want in jail. Never underestimate the power of that little benefit.
Yes, that's one major aspect of how such widely-broken laws undermine the rule of law. The single biggest purpose of the "rule of law" is to avoid a society where citizens/subjects scurry around in perpetual fear of government officials.
Nonetheless, there are plenty of otherwise necessary rules that give some people hard times, and we can't just have people doing as they please legal or not because of it.
There's an ancient military aphorism taught to all soon-to-be-commissioned officers: "Never give an order that you know will not be obeyed." Giving orders that won't be obeyed accomplishes nothing and undermines the officer's authority. Having ignored one command, it becomes easier for the soldiers to ignore others.
That maxim has a clear corollary in lawmaking: "Never pass a law that huge numbers of people will break". Passing such laws does little or nothing to change human behavior, but does a great deal to undermine the rule of law.
Given that there are large numbers of people who are willing to take tremendous risks to come to the US and work, and there is no shortage of Americans willing to employ them, setting immigration quotas too low is simply stupidity on the part of our immigration system. It makes no sense to blame the illegals, who are just trying to make a living. It makes some sense to blame their employers, but unless there are plenty of Americans clamoring for the jobs being filled by illegals (and, by and large, there *aren't*. Illegals mostly do work that no one else wants to) then even that is silly.
It is true. Phones are NEVER off, they are in sleep mode.
If by "sleep mode" you mean:
Radio turned off (send and receive)
CPU turned off
GPS turned off
Camera turned off
DRAM refresh turned off (RAM state decays to garbage)
Tiny trickle of power through the power button and the set of relays within the CPU that sense the powerup signal.
The most important bit there, of course, is "radio turned off". If the radio weren't off, your battery would go dead in a matter of days even when the phone is off, just as it does when the phone is on. It might last a couple days longer off than on, but that's all.
Since that doesn't happen -- turn the phone off with a full battery and turn it on a month later and you'll still have most of a full charge -- that means the radio is off. And if the radio is off, then the FBI can't send your phone any signals telling it to turn anything on.
The CPU being off and the RAM refresh off, by the way, are the reasons that when you turn your phone on it takes anywhere from 20 to 60 seconds to become functional. It's gotta boot.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd expect the police might get interested and I'd explain calmly what I was doing, but I'd be OK with being detained over it even if I knew it was wrong.
You'd be okay with being illegally detained?
I wouldn't. I'd file a complaint. And if I felt seriously harassed I'd file a lawsuit. Police officers are required to know and respect your rights.
Ummm, he was on private property. Just because two or more people can see each other doesn't make a place, public.
Then the most they can do is ask him to leave. Period.
Exactly.
I'm only posting to add that even private property owners have some limitations if they allow the public to enter. Stores and other locations that are open to the public fall into the legal of category "public accommodation". Public accommodations are private property but there are significant limits on what they can do. For example, although they can ask you to leave for almost any reason, they can't do it because you're a member of a protected minority. There are various other ways in which the public accommodation owner's control over speech and other behaviors are limited as compared to private property where the public is not allowed.
Specific to my state, there's also a limitation on the trespassing statute. It is a valid defense to a trespassing charge that the trespasser was on property that was open to the public at the time and was not interfering with the owner's use of the property. So, basically, the owner of a public accommodation has to show that your actions in some way harmed his business, otherwise the trespassing charge won't stick.
Go ahead then. I guarantee you're going to need a lawyer though. I hope the fun is worth it.
It's not about "fun", and it's certainly not about taking the easy way out.
The fact is that if we want to HAVE rights, it's necessary to assert them. Do you really have a right to take pictures in public if you can be legally harassed, cuffed and hauled in for questioning for doing it? You do not.
Does it matter whether or not you can take a picture of an ATM? Probably not. But it definitely DOES matter that you aren't required to abide by the whims of random company employees, that they can't force you to identify themselves to you just because they don't like the way you looked at them. And it matters that the police be able to understand that citizens who did nothing wrong should not be harassed.
But if everyone is like you, if no one is willing to stand up, even though it's unpleasant, inconvenient and occasionally expensive, over time we'll lose the option of deciding whether we want to go along to get along or not.
Civil rights activists of all sorts are necessary, especially the ones who just want to take the opportunity to assert their right to remain more or less anonymous.
In some states, an adult is legally required to provide ID to any cop who asks - it's actually illegal to walk down the street without a driver's license (or non-driver's ID). We seem to have little regard for the Constitution.
Cite?
There are many states with "stop and identify" statutes, but courts have held that to comply with the requirement it's only necessary to *verbally* provide your name and address.
Most (if not all) states also require you to show your driver's license upon demand by any peace officer if you are operating a motor vehicle, but that's a different issue. In that case you're proving that you are authorized to drive.
The EU army will declare martial law and march on France, same way the U.S. army marched on the rebellious southern states circa 1863. That's how a central government gains ultimate authority over its member states. Through force.
The parent was modded flamebait, but I wouldn't be surprised to see something like that happening in 100 years. The EU doesn't have as much authority over its member states now as the US federal government did in 1789, but it'll grow and it's not at all unlikely that it will eventually reach the point where EU member states are forcibly deprived of the opportunity of secession.
I had a boss, who used to suggest with total seriousness that all politicians should be sent directly to jail after they serve their terms; without trial, without jury, straight from their table to their cell.
Years ago I read a short science fiction story (don't recall name, author or even much of the story) about a planet where the system was structured to personally reward politicians for removing regulations/crimes and in which the successful passage of a new law was finalized by the execution of the politician who proposed it. The idea was to design a legislative system such that only laws that people really *care* about can be passed. Indeed someone has to be willing to give their life.
Extreme to the point of silliness, of course, as the author intended. But still, food for thought. Is there some way a system could be structured to provide a deterrent for limiting rights, yet still provide a means for government to do what's really important?
Actually, that's one of the things I really like about the original, long-forgotten model of the United States: given a federal government whose role is restricted to the areas outlined in the Constitution, the bulk of lawmaking is done by the states, which enables citizens who dislike the laws of their current state to simply relocate to a state whose laws they like better.
But, alas, we gave up on that idea some 80 years ago when FDR bent the Supreme Court to his will and they dutifully "decided" that the Commerce Clause grants unlimited authority to the federal government.
I've done less extensive tests on other configs since then, and I can only find specific I/O patterns where the hardware card is a slight win; it's usually about the same as software RAID.
It sounds like you have done quite a bit more testing than I have, but in my experience there are also plenty of cases where software raid provides a non-trivial performance boost.
My experience is primarily with RAID-5 and RAID-6, though. I haven't done so much with mirroring.
Unless it's one known for its ability to work on various and sundry drives (as opposed to identical ones), and probably built into whatever OS OP is running...don't recommend softraid.
Is there some software raid solution that doesn't work on various and sundry drives?
Controller card/motherboard goes [...] and all his data's gone.
This is a reason to avoid hardware raid, not software raid. With hardware raid, if you lose your raid controller your data's toast unless you can get another that understands the same layout (not typically a huge problem, but still an issue). With software raid you can throw the drives into any old box, connected to any set of controller cards. All you need is the same OS and possibly some knowledge of the configuration, if the softraid doesn't put everything it needs on the drives themselves (as Linux md raid does).
IMO, the only reason to favor hardware raid is to get better performance from servers whose CPUs are frequently fully utilized when I/O is also heavy.
In that (sadly) it is becoming easier to obtain guns within Europe
Do you have evidence for this claim? By all accounts I've read, it's becoming gradually *harder* to obtain guns in Europe. With no significant benefit to the violent crime rate, I might add.
Ah, the old "That's not fair!
Fairness has nothing to do with it. Let me explain this as simply as I can:
More to the point, if we could eliminate school shootings like the one in Germany and force those shooters to adopt the far less effective and much more difficult approach of the DC sniper, that would be a good thing.
John Allen Muhammad was an expert marksman with a $2000 rifle and a car customized into a sniper nest. If we can make *those* the minimum requirements to "succeed" as a mass killer -- and it's worth noting that Tim Kretschmer was far more "successful" than Muhammad, in spite of his inferior equipment and skills -- then the incidence of kids shooting up their schools would drop to near zero.
I realize that your position is that the better approach is simply to take all guns away from citizens, but that's simply impossible, and it would be wrong even if it were possible. Compared to the number of situations in which law-abiding citizens successfully defend themselves with firearms (which even the Brady Campaign grudgingly estimates at 100,000 per year), not to mention the vast recreational uses and the even more important civil liberty issues, the rare firearms tragedy is an acceptable cost. It is one of the ways in which the tree of liberty is watered by the blood of patriots.
Given that removing the guns is neither practical nor moral, the question is: What can we do to reduce the death toll of innocents?
The answer is: Encourage law-abiding, rational citizens to be armed. There's significant statistical evidence of the effectiveness of this approach, at least in the US. Numerous studies have documented the decrease in violent crime in US states that liberalize the issuance of concealed carry permits, even when the numbers are controlled against the nationwide decline in violence and relevant socio-economic factors. I can provide citations, if you like.
I don't argue this idly, by the way. I carry a 9mm handgun and 27 rounds of ammunition nearly everywhere I go. I don't expect ever to use it. I *hope* never to use it. But I do my part to ensure that in my community there is always a firearm available and in the hands of a competent, calm individual.
Well, gee, I wonder whether in a discussion about the regulation of a killing tool, events where that killing tool is the only common factor might be important or enlightening. Hmmm...
So stop with the vague implication and explain how it is enlightening. Start with explaining how it helps us understand the proper regulation of automobiles.
One more comment, this time at the meta-discussion level: I find it fascinating how difficult it is to find an anti-gun person who is capable of debating rationally, of stating their arguments forthrightly without the use of innuendo, sarcasm, derision or ridicule. Nor do those taking anti-gun positions ever seem to want to focus on facts, statistics, data or the results of peer-reviewed studies.
Do yourself a favor if you want to continue this discussion, and raise the level of your discourse.
That just seems wrong to me. They actually damaged something nearly 100 years old just to make it smaller. It could just be me, but they should have just taken it into space the way it was without damaging it. Seems shameful to me.
There are lots of old basketballs around. The thing that was special about this one was that Edwin Hubble had used it..
Do you think Hubble would have minded that "his" ball had to be deflated in order for it to go into space? This was a man who spent his life studying the Universe, but who died before mankind had even managed to put an object in orbit.
I think he'd consider it amazingly cool that the ball he played with went into space along with astronauts doing repair work on the space-based telescope named after him.
The fact that the NSA was willing to participate at all strongly suggests to me that the NSA was just playing games, and was not in fact utilizing anywhere near their full capabilities in this exercise. Which says something pretty impressive about the NSA.
That's just what they want you to think.
With my phone (Motorola RAZR V3i), I can set an alarm and then turn it off. The alarm still functions and will activate exactly when it is meant to.
That's a feature of many embedded microprocessors, they have a timer circuit which is kept running with a very small trickle of power. It's a countdown, and when it hits zero the CPU powers up.
As others have pointed out, that could allow the phone to wake up every few minutes, power up the receiver and see if the black helicopters have sent any instructions. If such scans were sufficiently brief, perhaps they wouldn't drain the battery too much.
Of course, that means it's impossible to actually alter future events in a given time line (instead, by changing things in the past, you'd create and occupy a *new* timeline), which directly contradicts basically every other time travel-based Star Trek episode (eg, The City on the Edge of Forever, Yesterday's Enterprise, etc).
Unless there are two forms of time travel, one of which is travel within the timeline and the other of which crosses between many-worlds timelines.
Maybe it is because of my background in the USN, but the 4th wall was completely destroyed for me by the clumsy way the writers inserted Kirk into the Enterprise chain of command.
I certainly agree with that. I whined about that, and about the way that they gave him permanent command at the end. Other than that I found it very entertaining -- and I really like the idea of some more shows with screwed-up-orphan Kirk and emotional Spock.
Maybe it's my personal experience, but every single person I have talked to has said it is not faithful in it's representation of star trek
Then every person you've talked to is dense. This movie is quite clear about the fact that it's an alternative universe/timeline trek, and even sets up the rationale for the differences.
It's not "faithful" to the previous Star Trek universe, because it's *not* the previous Star Trek universe. The basic social structure is the same (Federation, Klingons, Romulans, etc.), and many of the characters are the same people, but the major characters undergo some very different life experiences and are somewhat different people as a result.
I think it was a great movie, and I look forward to more movies and TV shows that explore this alternate timeline, with an angrier, more aggressive Kirk who is also a hero and a starship captain at a younger age (lots of opportunity for stories about a less experienced but still excellent captain), a more outspoken and assertive Uhura, and a more openly emotional Spock (who is, nevertheless, still struggling with his dual heritage).
There's no doubt about it that this is a *different* take on the Trek universe. I, for one, find it an intriguing one and I'm very interested in what can be done with it.
Though it's sad that we do, we've seen enough actual shootings to base our decisions on actual data. Happily, in countries with decent gun controls, we haven't.
Germany is certainly getting there. Though if they were wise they'd take the opportunity to learn from the incidents in the US. The foolish don't learn from their own experiences, the wise learn from the experiences of others.
Since you asked for only one - plenty of guns drive up and down the highways each day, and the Beltway snipers didn't seem to care.
Lame. Obviously handguns pose no deterrent to snipers, therefore the DC snipers had no expectation of armed resistance. For that matter, soldiers armed with rifles would have posed no significant deterrent to a sniper firing a single shot from a deep hide. Care to try again?
Hmm, let me think how innocent deaths by handguns might be relevant to a conversation about preventing innocent deaths by handguns. Tricky one; I'll get back to you on that.
That's like bringing up statistics of people accidentally backing over toddlers in a discussion of mass murders committed with automobiles (which happens in the US as well, unfortunately; we have a violent society). The only commonality between the situations is the killing tool; motive, approach, scale and volume are completely different.
So it strikes me as very tricky indeed to find a reason that accidents caused by negligent parents are relevant to a discussion of deliberate mass murders.
I think a good measure of what a the police can do without a warrant, is what a normal person can do without a warrant.
Can you (legally) pull over cars on a public road?
In certain situations, yes.
Again, yes, given appropriate justification.
Cops can do a lot of things that the rest of us can't.
Yes, they can, even though neither of the two you mentioned fall into that category. Those additional authorizations that they have, however, are clearly spelled out in the law, along with the circumstances under which they can do those things.
Outside of the specifically-authorized police powers, police and citizens should be exactly equal under the law.
That would change. They do so because they expect they are outnumbered by marksmen in body armour, not because they think Grandpa Jim the fat history teacher has a gun he can barely aim
And yet, when faced by (a) a vice principal with a handgun, or (b) a restaurant owner with a shot gun or (c) a couple of adult students with their personal pistols, the shooters stopped.
Do you have any examples of shooters who have been opposed by armed citizens (not cops) and not given up?
There is a lot of conjecture out there, most of it (like yours) badly misinformed. Though it's sad that we do, we've seen enough actual shootings to base our decisions on actual data.
I'd be surprised if there have been three school shootings in Germany.
This (incomplete) list has six.
Ah, there's nothing like making sure the gunman is prepared for the resistance...
Show me one example of a gunman who chose to commit mass murder in a location where he knew he'd encounter armed resistance.
Actually, there have been a couple that were staged by organized terror groups, but those don't count; you can't stop those with anything less than serious military forces.
Those accidents tend to happen at home. There have been plenty of cases of small children blowing away their siblings because they played cowboys and indians with daddy's gun.
And those are relevant to this discussion how? I'm talking about adults carrying concealed weapons for defense.
I should mention, though, that most people vastly overestimate the scale of the offtopic problem you mention. There are less than 100 such incidents per year in the US, and the numbers decline every year. In 2006, the most recent year for which the CDC has numbers available, there were 56 children ages 0-14 killed in firearms accidents. Each one is tragic, and I think their parents should be prosecuted for not teaching them gun safety and for not keeping the weapons out of their reach, but the scale of the problem is often exaggerated.
If that's true, why don't handset makers exploit it to provide a super-low-power mode that can, say, wake up periodically to check for text messages or voicemails? It seems like there would be a good market for phones with a mode that gives them years of standby at the expense of not being able to receive voice calls.
Also, do you have ANY evidence of this secret FBI circuit, beyond urban legend? Given the tens of thousands of people in multiple countries and hundreds of companies involved in creating the hardware and software for the billions of handsets, it seems like something would leak out.
Because there's basically no drain on the battery.
I thought the idea was that the government could turn certain functions on remotely without us realising?
That idea is wrong. When the phone is off, it's off.
You think deregulating the weapons is a solution?
I think allowing law-abiding, responsible adults to carry firearms is a solution. I guarantee you that we're not going to see any successful mass school murders in Utah, where I live, since any adult (21+) with a clean record can get a concealed firearm permit and carry at any school. At the primary and secondary level, many teachers are armed, and at the university level many students are armed.
The key to stopping active shooters is to get armed resistance on-scene ASAP. After Columbine, this caused US law enforcement to change their tactics. Before (and at) Columbine, the approach was to wait for SWAT, with their rifles and body armor, to maximize officer safety. After Columbine, the doctrine changed: Now, the first armed officer on scene enters immediately to stop the shooter. Experience has shown that active shooters generally kill themselves at the first sign of armed resistance.
What's even better is if armed people are on scene all the time, so that armed resistance is seconds away, not minutes. There have been three school shootings in the US where armed citizens have intervened. In all three cases, the shooter was stopped instantly, and LONG before police arrived.
Even better than that is if potential shooters know that armed people are on scene at all times, so they know they're not going to get the opportunity to deal death unopposed.
Oh, and before someone goes off about all the accidents that will be caused by all the guns "lying around" I'll point out that Utah has allowed school carry since 2002. In seven years there have been ZERO incidents at any of the dozen universities or hundred-plus primary or secondary schools. And by "incidents" I mean not just shootings, but threats, brandished weapons, etc. I don't believe there have even been any weapons left lying around; it hasn't made the news, anyway.
That maxim has a clear corollary in lawmaking: "Never pass a law that huge numbers of people will break". Passing such laws does little or nothing to change human behavior, but does a great deal to undermine the rule of law.
It also gives you a legal reason to throw practically whoever you want in jail. Never underestimate the power of that little benefit.
Yes, that's one major aspect of how such widely-broken laws undermine the rule of law. The single biggest purpose of the "rule of law" is to avoid a society where citizens/subjects scurry around in perpetual fear of government officials.
Nonetheless, there are plenty of otherwise necessary rules that give some people hard times, and we can't just have people doing as they please legal or not because of it.
There's an ancient military aphorism taught to all soon-to-be-commissioned officers: "Never give an order that you know will not be obeyed." Giving orders that won't be obeyed accomplishes nothing and undermines the officer's authority. Having ignored one command, it becomes easier for the soldiers to ignore others.
That maxim has a clear corollary in lawmaking: "Never pass a law that huge numbers of people will break". Passing such laws does little or nothing to change human behavior, but does a great deal to undermine the rule of law.
Given that there are large numbers of people who are willing to take tremendous risks to come to the US and work, and there is no shortage of Americans willing to employ them, setting immigration quotas too low is simply stupidity on the part of our immigration system. It makes no sense to blame the illegals, who are just trying to make a living. It makes some sense to blame their employers, but unless there are plenty of Americans clamoring for the jobs being filled by illegals (and, by and large, there *aren't*. Illegals mostly do work that no one else wants to) then even that is silly.
No, in this situation the problem is the law.
It is true. Phones are NEVER off, they are in sleep mode.
If by "sleep mode" you mean:
The most important bit there, of course, is "radio turned off". If the radio weren't off, your battery would go dead in a matter of days even when the phone is off, just as it does when the phone is on. It might last a couple days longer off than on, but that's all.
Since that doesn't happen -- turn the phone off with a full battery and turn it on a month later and you'll still have most of a full charge -- that means the radio is off. And if the radio is off, then the FBI can't send your phone any signals telling it to turn anything on.
The CPU being off and the RAM refresh off, by the way, are the reasons that when you turn your phone on it takes anywhere from 20 to 60 seconds to become functional. It's gotta boot.