Well, I'm tired of the idea that "gun control" automatically engenders the idea that "ZOMG gubmint's comin' fer mah guns!"
Is it too much to ask that a person go through the same training, testing, and safe operation requirements for a weapon as they do for a car?
Pay for training. Demonstrate in both written and demonstrative form your grasp of the safe use and operation of said equipment, in the witness of a duly authorized enforcement officer. Take a vision test so you can see what you're aiming at (with the car or the gun). Maybe take a psych test (if all your inkblots look like dead people, you may wait for further instructions). Pay for a license. Periodically renew it through testing. Pay for the insurance against your accidental or intentional misuse of or improper operation of said equipment.
The above doesn't seem so unreasonable. We all take our shoes off at the airport because ONE guy FAILED to sneak in a bomb ONCE in a shoe.
Yes, there will be criminals. But hey, criminals rob banks, too, and we still have laws against that to make it harder for them. People kill other people all the time, and we still have laws against murder. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We won't stop them all. The point is to *try.* Guns are inherently dangerous things. By their nature, they infringe on life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, yadda yadda. Responsible gun owners treat them with respect, why can't the commerce surrounding them be treated with the same careful respect?
And FFS, just because we talk about regulating the acquisition and use of guns doesn't mean we can't ALSO talk about better mental health care and more empathetic communities, too. We're smart people, we can figure it out, as long as we're not paid or tricked to not to.
Or it allows someone who is not an assassin, a trained killer, or physically strong the ability to present another weapon for an attacker to take.
In any crisis situation, the one who has control is the one who's more willing to break rules of engagement, society, or behavior. In a perfect "Mexican standoff" the only question is who's going to drop the gun first. Who's more willing to start shooting and who's has more to lose by putting themselves and whatever they're defending at risk. Chances are not good that the law-abiding defender is going to be more willing to engage in a firefight than the criminal who already broke the social contract by attempting the crime.
Second amendment freedoms are paid with blood of innocents. Lower local/state/federal "debt" is paid with less of a safety net to catch and care for the mentally ill. Tough-it-out, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, self-made-man mentality is paid with shame and violent reactions when reality can't support the tough-guy ideal.
Guns *do* enable a tragedy like this. Not necessarily because of their availability, but because of our obsession with having them moving freely about society. Our culture supports ideas and concepts like, "he needed killin'" and "guns make you ___." (safe, powerful, unstoppable, a man, etc. Fill in the blank). Guns are an acceptable and common solution to something that threatens you, makes you angry, makes you fearful, makes you feel a number of negative emotions. In the mind of someone mentally wounded, yes, guns do enable their use.
I really don't see how you come to the conclusion that guns in the hands of common citizens would lead to anything other than chaos and death in a crisis situation. Nobody picks up a gun and shoots perfectly without practice. Common citizens do not pick up weapons and make that split-second decision to fire them and let loose an irrevocable chain of events. Even trained crisis responders are just that--trained. The scenario where the average joe picks up a handgun and fires with steady hands and cool head in crisis is as fictional as a video game. And quite honestly, so is the idea of widespread firearms education in much of the US.
More guns in society won't keep more crazy people from causing tragedies. But maybe more mental health professionals and a better understanding and acceptance of mental health--and the signs of the lack thereof--will result in less crazy people. So as hard as you advocate for second amendment freedoms, it's in your best interests to advocate twice as hard for mental health care.
When I was in school, teachers walked around with hand-held attendance-taking devices that employed auditory call-and-response functions to log locative-based data. The method proved durable, low-cost, and resistant to outside tampering. It interfaced easily with other record-keeping archival systems then-employed by the school system and remained compatible through all upgrades.
They put a check mark next to your name in the lesson book if you answered, "Here" when they called out your name.
Dunno where you live, but around here, the government *pays* oil and gas companies. They don't get any revenue from them, these companies pay negative taxes (that means they get refunds). So...I'll dance a jig in my front yard the day the government sees their "revenues" "dry up" from oil and gas.
I find that interesting because as I hinted to, I've experienced the same thing from a male's perspective, from my own family. I experience gender bias all the time from people who proudly label themselves "feminists." They make generalizations about men, they side with my wife every time the two of us have a dispute and we seek support from family, they speak for me as if they know what I'm going to do and the false assumptions they make are based on the fact that I have a penis. Women think they know what I'm thinking and what my intentions are just because I'm a man. So I know exactly how it feels and I do experience it, only I experience it from the same people who complaining about it most vocally.
What you may perceive as "gender bias" might actually be "lack of (unconscious) privilege." Sexism is both individual and institutional/societal. Some of it is perpetuated by individuals, such as the "B16B00B5" thing, and some is perpetuated by institutional assumptions and practices (who gets the "benefit of the doubt" more often, or which gender acts as the "baseline" by which both genders are measured).
Some of it is correctable by individuals--do not engage in overtly or covertly sexist behavior, be considerate to other people, etc. Some of it is systemic, and can only be recognized by individuals--be aware of your assumptions and whether or not they are based on gender, be aware of societal treatment can be biased. And some of it can be approached only when a critical mass of individuals recognize and acknowledge the biases that exist before attempting to craft solutions.
The pinnacle predator of Capitalism is achieving 100% profit with 0% cost. In short, the most efficient way for me to become the top capitalist is to take all your stuff. The easiest way for me to get away with that is to make it legal for me to take all your stuff, or remove the teeth of any legal system that might infringe upon my ability to take all your stuff.
Capitalism is an awful method of social organization, unless you're the guy for whom it's legal to take everyone else's stuff.
On the somewhat-upside, if you can hang in until you're 65 and Medicare kicks in (in theory), you become more attractive to employers because you won't need the HI.
Or you should become a bank. I mean, that's what *they* did. Or an airline. They did that, too.
I have a harder time blaming individuals with underwater mortgages than I do industries that played fast and loose with market slot machines. Individual people and families did not get into underwater mortgages because they were greedy--most of them, when confronted with the question of, "Can I afford this house?" went to a professional expert--a loan officer or mortgage lender--and asked that question of the professional (whom they would assume would a.) know the answer and b.) give them an honest one). When the professional expert said, "Yes, you can. Sign here." That would have been the end of it in most people's minds. They got what they thought was good advice from a professional expert and used that advice to make a decision.
What the people didn't know was that those professional experts were turning around and placing bets on their likelihood of default, with a fat score at the end if they did default. They didn't realize they were buying sausages from dysentery medicine salesmen. Not to mention all the instances where the answer of "Can I afford this house?" started out as "Yes," and then moved to "Not anymore," when a life situation changed, and enough of them did so that the overall value of *everybody's* properties went down.
KDE has worked for me from 4.0 on. I liked 3.5, but once 4 came out I was crazy about it, and have been so ever since. OSX is too kindergarten-simple, so if you work differently, you have a heck of a time changing anything. For me, KDE just works. It's pretty, it lets me work how I want to work, and I know I can get help if I run into a question or problem. I like the suite of tools it comes with, and I like the fact that it works fine as is, or I can choose to tinker.
Note: if you want to defend the separation of RSS feed reading from Web browsing, please explain to me - in a fashion convincing to me; convincing to you, by itself, doesn't even come close to sufficing - why I would not want to read a feed of Web pages in a Web browser. But I digress....)
Not sure if this will convince you, but drawing down my feeds outside of a web browser helps my productivity--if I've got a browser open, then I'm viewing about 18 different tabs and refreshing feeds when I should be working on other thngs. Having Akregator running lets me read my rss feeds without the temptation of a browser when I have internet connectivity, yet still lets me read downloaded feeds without internet access.
I'm no power user, but neither am I a complete idiot. I really like KDE4. I hit the kickoff, then type in the name of the program and I can run it. I know how to get under the hood and clank around if I need or want to with linux/KDE4. With OSX, everything is very kindergarten-simple...as long as you work their way. If you want to work your way and not theirs, it's up to you to change.
I'm not a command-line commando, either. I'm smart enough to know how to use an application and just finicky enough to want to use it my way. Maybe I've been lucky, but KDE 4 has worked for me from 4.0 on.
Ehh, for the longest time your PC could be any color as long as it was putty. Now your laptop comes in black, black, black, or maybe gray and for an additional wad of cash, you can get red or purple.
Most people don't know what kinds of choices are important for their computers, or where those choices reside (OS, manufacturer, hardware, or software). Personally, when I first saw Win7, I saw all the places they'd totally ripped off KDE4.x, and KDE4.x was more robust, prettier, and had more options to it. But where it shined was in places that may have been different under the hood, but capitalized on the same user-actions people had been trained to think were ubiquitous. The x in the corner, a start menu, etc. In my experience people want different...but not too different. They want to be eased into the experience.
Not saying Canonical has to hold hands or anything, but if you're looking to appeal to the widest variety of adventurous spirits, you give them something slightly different at first, then pique their curiosity and let them push you further. That way it looks like it was their idea all along.
Given the disconnect between the stock market and Things People Actually Value, I'm less inclined to "trust the market" as it were. All the stock market means anymore is that the rarified class of financial investors and top-1%ers have been told that X company will be pulling in more money in the next quarter or next year by any number of means that may or may not be wise for the long-term. It's no longer a true indicator of solid long-term growth, it's the next act in a sleight-of-hand accounting sideshow.
Most internet companies/innovators have always had this problem--there's no facile way to translate it into money. Value, yes, money, not so much. It's more of a problem with our system of values than anything else.
How is it "adversarial"? What interest do I have in companies not having this information? What harm does it do me if they do have it?
Well, for starters, there's more than likely someone eyeballing it who may or may not be working for way too little and not averse to kickbacks for quietly sharing or letting slip some information to, say, an employer, a bank, or a health insurance company. Why *have* you been doing extensive searches on a certain type of kidney disorder lately? And look--you've visited your doctor more than the usual lately. And gee, sorry about that, but you've just become a risk that the insurance company and employer can't afford to take, so sorry about losing your job for a trumped-up reason, but you see, there's no real harm in these companies having this information.
Is it okay for Procter & Gamble to read your colonoscopy results or your cancer screenings and then deluge your house, your email, and your doctor's office with cancer drug adverts?
Is it okay to peep at you naked if you don't know the perv ist getting off?
Maximizing profit needs to be tempered with responsibility. Too often, profit is put over top off everything else, including good sense, civic respect, and civil rights. Also, this letter they sent is 100% fine aged whine. Business is hard, and you have to be creative to turn a profit, not spend your time and resources trying to get the rules changed to make it easier on you. Sure, it'd be a lot easier if corporations could just reach into our bank accounts and take money outright without having to bother with interruptions like "delivering a product" or "providing a service" but people still start 'em every day.
As far as I know no Christian church will stone you or put you in jail for wearing a mini skirt.
The biggest reason for that in some churches is that the rule of law independent of the church forbids it.
When you let religions run countries, they also run amok.
My instinct is that this version of 'putting a 20th century model in a 21st century package' is problematic because it essentially wastes so very much potential in that 21st century package. Consider it like using the TV to air radio drama, with all the actors standing around in a sound stage and reading from scripts, instead of acting out their story. Some kid somewhere, or some start-up with no assumptions and only half a clue is going to figure out some new and fantastic way of using tablets to deliver content that is unique to its technology, if they haven't already.
Where The Daily's value comes in is that it, like most of the News Corp products, is targeted towards a demographic that is somewhat resistant to change. There's a reason Glenn Beck's set looks like Archie Bunker's living room. It's irrelevant to the content he delivers but the visual cues provide an air of the familiar that a more technologically-advanced set couldn't do. The Daily presents its content in a way that turns the ipad into a magazine without pages, but something that still functions like something that you flip through in the doctor's office. Granny might not get 3-axis gyroscope sensing, but she can still lick her finger and 'turn' a page.
Chances are, it'll hang on long enough for some upstart to figure out a better way, then it will copycat and reverse engineer and attempt to take over the market, maybe successfully, maybe not so much.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm tired of the idea that "gun control" automatically engenders the idea that "ZOMG gubmint's comin' fer mah guns!"
Is it too much to ask that a person go through the same training, testing, and safe operation requirements for a weapon as they do for a car?
Pay for training.
Demonstrate in both written and demonstrative form your grasp of the safe use and operation of said equipment, in the witness of a duly authorized enforcement officer.
Take a vision test so you can see what you're aiming at (with the car or the gun).
Maybe take a psych test (if all your inkblots look like dead people, you may wait for further instructions).
Pay for a license. Periodically renew it through testing.
Pay for the insurance against your accidental or intentional misuse of or improper operation of said equipment.
The above doesn't seem so unreasonable. We all take our shoes off at the airport because ONE guy FAILED to sneak in a bomb ONCE in a shoe.
Yes, there will be criminals. But hey, criminals rob banks, too, and we still have laws against that to make it harder for them. People kill other people all the time, and we still have laws against murder. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We won't stop them all. The point is to *try.* Guns are inherently dangerous things. By their nature, they infringe on life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, yadda yadda. Responsible gun owners treat them with respect, why can't the commerce surrounding them be treated with the same careful respect?
And FFS, just because we talk about regulating the acquisition and use of guns doesn't mean we can't ALSO talk about better mental health care and more empathetic communities, too. We're smart people, we can figure it out, as long as we're not paid or tricked to not to.
Or it allows someone who is not an assassin, a trained killer, or physically strong the ability to present another weapon for an attacker to take.
In any crisis situation, the one who has control is the one who's more willing to break rules of engagement, society, or behavior. In a perfect "Mexican standoff" the only question is who's going to drop the gun first. Who's more willing to start shooting and who's has more to lose by putting themselves and whatever they're defending at risk. Chances are not good that the law-abiding defender is going to be more willing to engage in a firefight than the criminal who already broke the social contract by attempting the crime.
Everything has its price.
Second amendment freedoms are paid with blood of innocents.
Lower local/state/federal "debt" is paid with less of a safety net to catch and care for the mentally ill.
Tough-it-out, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, self-made-man mentality is paid with shame and violent reactions when reality can't support the tough-guy ideal.
Guns *do* enable a tragedy like this. Not necessarily because of their availability, but because of our obsession with having them moving freely about society. Our culture supports ideas and concepts like, "he needed killin'" and "guns make you ___." (safe, powerful, unstoppable, a man, etc. Fill in the blank). Guns are an acceptable and common solution to something that threatens you, makes you angry, makes you fearful, makes you feel a number of negative emotions. In the mind of someone mentally wounded, yes, guns do enable their use. I really don't see how you come to the conclusion that guns in the hands of common citizens would lead to anything other than chaos and death in a crisis situation. Nobody picks up a gun and shoots perfectly without practice. Common citizens do not pick up weapons and make that split-second decision to fire them and let loose an irrevocable chain of events. Even trained crisis responders are just that--trained. The scenario where the average joe picks up a handgun and fires with steady hands and cool head in crisis is as fictional as a video game. And quite honestly, so is the idea of widespread firearms education in much of the US. More guns in society won't keep more crazy people from causing tragedies. But maybe more mental health professionals and a better understanding and acceptance of mental health--and the signs of the lack thereof--will result in less crazy people. So as hard as you advocate for second amendment freedoms, it's in your best interests to advocate twice as hard for mental health care.
When I was in school, teachers walked around with hand-held attendance-taking devices that employed auditory call-and-response functions to log locative-based data. The method proved durable, low-cost, and resistant to outside tampering. It interfaced easily with other record-keeping archival systems then-employed by the school system and remained compatible through all upgrades. They put a check mark next to your name in the lesson book if you answered, "Here" when they called out your name.
If I had score to give you I would.
Because smog is so much prettier when viewed through the gas mask?
Dunno where you live, but around here, the government *pays* oil and gas companies. They don't get any revenue from them, these companies pay negative taxes (that means they get refunds). So...I'll dance a jig in my front yard the day the government sees their "revenues" "dry up" from oil and gas.
What you may perceive as "gender bias" might actually be "lack of (unconscious) privilege." Sexism is both individual and institutional/societal. Some of it is perpetuated by individuals, such as the "B16B00B5" thing, and some is perpetuated by institutional assumptions and practices (who gets the "benefit of the doubt" more often, or which gender acts as the "baseline" by which both genders are measured).
Some of it is correctable by individuals--do not engage in overtly or covertly sexist behavior, be considerate to other people, etc. Some of it is systemic, and can only be recognized by individuals--be aware of your assumptions and whether or not they are based on gender, be aware of societal treatment can be biased. And some of it can be approached only when a critical mass of individuals recognize and acknowledge the biases that exist before attempting to craft solutions.
It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game.
The pinnacle predator of Capitalism is achieving 100% profit with 0% cost. In short, the most efficient way for me to become the top capitalist is to take all your stuff. The easiest way for me to get away with that is to make it legal for me to take all your stuff, or remove the teeth of any legal system that might infringe upon my ability to take all your stuff. Capitalism is an awful method of social organization, unless you're the guy for whom it's legal to take everyone else's stuff.
On the somewhat-upside, if you can hang in until you're 65 and Medicare kicks in (in theory), you become more attractive to employers because you won't need the HI.
Or you should become a bank. I mean, that's what *they* did. Or an airline. They did that, too.
I have a harder time blaming individuals with underwater mortgages than I do industries that played fast and loose with market slot machines. Individual people and families did not get into underwater mortgages because they were greedy--most of them, when confronted with the question of, "Can I afford this house?" went to a professional expert--a loan officer or mortgage lender--and asked that question of the professional (whom they would assume would a.) know the answer and b.) give them an honest one). When the professional expert said, "Yes, you can. Sign here." That would have been the end of it in most people's minds. They got what they thought was good advice from a professional expert and used that advice to make a decision.
What the people didn't know was that those professional experts were turning around and placing bets on their likelihood of default, with a fat score at the end if they did default. They didn't realize they were buying sausages from dysentery medicine salesmen. Not to mention all the instances where the answer of "Can I afford this house?" started out as "Yes," and then moved to "Not anymore," when a life situation changed, and enough of them did so that the overall value of *everybody's* properties went down.
KDE has worked for me from 4.0 on. I liked 3.5, but once 4 came out I was crazy about it, and have been so ever since. OSX is too kindergarten-simple, so if you work differently, you have a heck of a time changing anything. For me, KDE just works. It's pretty, it lets me work how I want to work, and I know I can get help if I run into a question or problem. I like the suite of tools it comes with, and I like the fact that it works fine as is, or I can choose to tinker.
Note: if you want to defend the separation of RSS feed reading from Web browsing, please explain to me - in a fashion convincing to me; convincing to you, by itself, doesn't even come close to sufficing - why I would not want to read a feed of Web pages in a Web browser. But I digress....)
Not sure if this will convince you, but drawing down my feeds outside of a web browser helps my productivity--if I've got a browser open, then I'm viewing about 18 different tabs and refreshing feeds when I should be working on other thngs. Having Akregator running lets me read my rss feeds without the temptation of a browser when I have internet connectivity, yet still lets me read downloaded feeds without internet access. I'm no power user, but neither am I a complete idiot. I really like KDE4. I hit the kickoff, then type in the name of the program and I can run it. I know how to get under the hood and clank around if I need or want to with linux/KDE4. With OSX, everything is very kindergarten-simple...as long as you work their way. If you want to work your way and not theirs, it's up to you to change. I'm not a command-line commando, either. I'm smart enough to know how to use an application and just finicky enough to want to use it my way. Maybe I've been lucky, but KDE 4 has worked for me from 4.0 on.
Ehh, for the longest time your PC could be any color as long as it was putty. Now your laptop comes in black, black, black, or maybe gray and for an additional wad of cash, you can get red or purple. Most people don't know what kinds of choices are important for their computers, or where those choices reside (OS, manufacturer, hardware, or software). Personally, when I first saw Win7, I saw all the places they'd totally ripped off KDE4.x, and KDE4.x was more robust, prettier, and had more options to it. But where it shined was in places that may have been different under the hood, but capitalized on the same user-actions people had been trained to think were ubiquitous. The x in the corner, a start menu, etc. In my experience people want different...but not too different. They want to be eased into the experience. Not saying Canonical has to hold hands or anything, but if you're looking to appeal to the widest variety of adventurous spirits, you give them something slightly different at first, then pique their curiosity and let them push you further. That way it looks like it was their idea all along.
Given the disconnect between the stock market and Things People Actually Value, I'm less inclined to "trust the market" as it were. All the stock market means anymore is that the rarified class of financial investors and top-1%ers have been told that X company will be pulling in more money in the next quarter or next year by any number of means that may or may not be wise for the long-term. It's no longer a true indicator of solid long-term growth, it's the next act in a sleight-of-hand accounting sideshow. Most internet companies/innovators have always had this problem--there's no facile way to translate it into money. Value, yes, money, not so much. It's more of a problem with our system of values than anything else.
How is it "adversarial"? What interest do I have in companies not having this information? What harm does it do me if they do have it?
Well, for starters, there's more than likely someone eyeballing it who may or may not be working for way too little and not averse to kickbacks for quietly sharing or letting slip some information to, say, an employer, a bank, or a health insurance company. Why *have* you been doing extensive searches on a certain type of kidney disorder lately? And look--you've visited your doctor more than the usual lately. And gee, sorry about that, but you've just become a risk that the insurance company and employer can't afford to take, so sorry about losing your job for a trumped-up reason, but you see, there's no real harm in these companies having this information.
Is it okay for Procter & Gamble to read your colonoscopy results or your cancer screenings and then deluge your house, your email, and your doctor's office with cancer drug adverts? Is it okay to peep at you naked if you don't know the perv ist getting off? Maximizing profit needs to be tempered with responsibility. Too often, profit is put over top off everything else, including good sense, civic respect, and civil rights. Also, this letter they sent is 100% fine aged whine. Business is hard, and you have to be creative to turn a profit, not spend your time and resources trying to get the rules changed to make it easier on you. Sure, it'd be a lot easier if corporations could just reach into our bank accounts and take money outright without having to bother with interruptions like "delivering a product" or "providing a service" but people still start 'em every day.
You win the internet
As far as I know no Christian church will stone you or put you in jail for wearing a mini skirt. The biggest reason for that in some churches is that the rule of law independent of the church forbids it. When you let religions run countries, they also run amok.
My instinct is that this version of 'putting a 20th century model in a 21st century package' is problematic because it essentially wastes so very much potential in that 21st century package. Consider it like using the TV to air radio drama, with all the actors standing around in a sound stage and reading from scripts, instead of acting out their story. Some kid somewhere, or some start-up with no assumptions and only half a clue is going to figure out some new and fantastic way of using tablets to deliver content that is unique to its technology, if they haven't already. Where The Daily's value comes in is that it, like most of the News Corp products, is targeted towards a demographic that is somewhat resistant to change. There's a reason Glenn Beck's set looks like Archie Bunker's living room. It's irrelevant to the content he delivers but the visual cues provide an air of the familiar that a more technologically-advanced set couldn't do. The Daily presents its content in a way that turns the ipad into a magazine without pages, but something that still functions like something that you flip through in the doctor's office. Granny might not get 3-axis gyroscope sensing, but she can still lick her finger and 'turn' a page. Chances are, it'll hang on long enough for some upstart to figure out a better way, then it will copycat and reverse engineer and attempt to take over the market, maybe successfully, maybe not so much.