I find most vocal gun rights advocates leave out the "well regulated militia" clause if the second amendment. I've always been amazed at how poorly that amendment parses. My reading is the same as yours - citizens may have firearms so that they mey function as part of an organized "militia," or protective group. All of the functions which militias performed two hundred years ago have been taken over by standing govenrmental bodies. In fact, the writing most likely applies to the state national guards - you don't get much more of a well-regulated militia than that.
I still believe in the right to own firearms, and have owned several in my lifetime, though none in operational condition at the moment, but I don't agree that the constitution gives the sweeping endorsement it once did.
I'm sure there will be those who ignore reality and say that without personal firearms we are at the mercy of the federal government. I've got bad news for them - there isn't a consumer-led army in the world that could take over the US govenrment, on US soil, defended by the US military. (That is, of course, ignoring the possibility that most/all of the military turns against the CIC and standing legislatures - but then we woouldbe fighting with the military, not against it.)
Back in the early 80s, Reagan figured out how to save a few bucks on the US federal payroll. You see, up until that time, your paycheck was determined by taking your annual salary, as published by the GSA, and dividing it by 2080 hours in a year (52 weeks x 5 days/wk x 8hrs/day). Well, it turns out that - as you noted - there are actually about 2087 hours in an average workyear (well, technically, there's an extra 10 mintues floating around in there). So they recaculated everyone's salary based on a 2087 hour year. 0.33% doesn't seem like much, and a lot of people didn't notice on their paychecks. Part of that was because it occured at a year-break, when the normal "cost of living" increase was given (usu 2-4%), and the rates for taxes withheld and partial benefit costs withheld change. On the govenerment side, it was probably an 80 million dollar a year cost savings. (I don't know the exact numbers...I didn't join the CS until the late 80s, after the change had taken place).
Actually, I thought the same thing about his inability to see what was happening first hand. Most CxOs are supremely out of touch with the day to day runnings of the corporation. Still, I would expect that the filtering of programs and processes would have made it through the several layers of management it would take to hit the CEOs ears. Then again, it's possible that the lower management might have been fearful that top management would not approve of such an arrangement, and that's why the whole thing was kept so quiet. Until, of course, there was no way to hide the fact that the building was only 60-70% staffed during the day.
You're presuming that the people have any say in such a condition, which they do not. Even if the US were not a republic, with representatives listening to the handlers which keep them in office, you are under the incorrect impression that a true democracy would be fouled by the advertising clout that can be brought to bear when billions of dollars is at stake. I do like your optimism though.
The first thing I thought was, "how can a CEO of a major corporation go for two years without knowing what is going on in the day to day operation?" Of course, then I wondered how it is that he couldn't have been fired for such a lack of knowledge. Finally, I realized he must be one slick bastard to keep his job while the entire company was running on a different schedule without his knowledge. Either that or he has a special file with pictures of all the board members doing horrible things to/with farm animals.
Personally, I'm betting on the farm animals angle.
Nobody will stand for it. The Republican party has learned that, aside from stroking the Christian Right, the most effective way to garner support is to give people what they really want - the ability to be lazy. You see, taking a responsible stand on almost any topic generally requires effort. The effort could be reasoned thought, additional cost, or emotional fortitude. It's easy to dislike people who aren't like you, dump sewage and harmful chemicals into waterways to save a few percent in the monthly bills, and believe that eveyone should have the exact same moral center as you do. Standing up in a crowd and telling people that they should be more tolerant, consider the long term view, and empathise with those less fortunate is just not going to get you votes like telling people "you're right, fuck everybody else."
This is not to say that a large portion of the Left doesn't say, "psssst, you know those rich folks should really be paying for your stuff, cause there's the ones causing all the problems." That doesn't exactly scream "against the crowd."
Unfortunately, I'm afraid that I may need to write in Stewart/Colbert in 2008 just so I can sleep at night. At least when stupid things come out of their mouths, they're meant to be stupid.
Okay, so it's not research. But he's also not at the center of some vast terrorist conspiracy to forge boarding passes and blow up the US. The trouble he made was not a serious threat to US security, and if it was we are in some deep fucking trouble because it's clear that the gatekeepers are asleep at the switch.
No, he has already been treated to the "troublemaker" gauntlet, had his brush with the government and his future almost turned upside down. He's still a kid, and kids will do things without thinking (yes, you can be 25 and childish - they guy has probably never lived outside of academia). The TSA is now practicing a little mafia style justice for losing face to this guy.
I think you wrote this comment months ago, and have had it sitting in a vi window just reloading/. every few seconds for that whole time, waiting for an appropriate story in which you could make this a first post.
Nonetheless, it's true. Stress happens everywhere, and it all adds up. I get blistering headaches when I'm under "too much" stress. Oddly, any single area of my life that's under stress won't do it - there needs to be at least two - possibly three - areas that are overwhelmed. Finances, family, work, school - if you can keep at least two in the "low stress" column, the rest is managable.
I have no doubt that cingular's customer service is absolutely abyssmal. In fact, I think all the major providers are tied for last place. I have USCC, and they are absolutely the pits. The best info I've heard is that the 8525 that cingular is selling (a customized version of the HTC TyTn) is not crippled in functionality in any way except that the cingular version of the phone does not have a video-phone camera facing the user or the video-call button. Since I don't have any need for a video phone (appaently I'm neither young enough nor Korean enough to care;-), that's no real loss to me.
Took me a while to get back. The conversion was slow, but technically worked (looked like crap, but worked). Lots of good options I need to learn about - it's a keeper.
I was, however, amazed at mplayer for viewing the original mpg stream. I need to figure out how to make it my default media player, and fingure out the keyboard shortcuts. mplayer managed to play the clip while hovering about 35-40% CPU utilization, whereas WMP10 took 70-85%cpu during playback.
That's interesting about the DUN reactivation. I don't suppose you can do GPS over bluetooth and/or pair multiple devices simulataneously (laptop, headset, gps)?
I'm not for or against palm, as long as I can sync to something with a calendar and contact list.
In serching for the exact workding, the first google hit is the/. discussion here. It's funny to scroll throught he comments from the initial ipod release.
They have proven, with the iPod, that if they can fix the abyssmal ui seen on typical device, they don't need to be massively innovative in hardware - simply "good" is enough. I've got to say that when it comes to cell phones, someone who can make them "just work" has a really good shot at the market. If they can make it "just work" with outlooks calendar, contacts, and email, as well as be a good phone and media player, they're in for a wild ride.
When the US Cellular shackles are removed from me, I'm going to jump to cingular. I'd have considered Verizon, as their overall coverage in my area is the best of any provider, but I just can't handle the crippling they put on their hardware.
(No, I'm not a shill for cingular - I'm not even a customer yet. Yes, it's the second time I've linked to an 8525...what can I say, I think it's a cool pda/phone)
There really is a pretty full market between the wristwatch and the almost-workstation portable. At $400, I'm not sure intel is going to be all that successful. Granted, my linked phone/pda retails on the eopen market for $700, and is sold with strings attached for $300 in the US. Commercially, a consumer machine in this class will be little more than a novelty, imho. Maybe the new generation can deal witha laptop as a sole machine, but I need a real sized keyboard and a mouse to get work done efficiently. Most of the time my laptop is used away from the docking station is for reference (I have PDFs of most of my technical references) in the field, and to surf. Since the reference part can't be done on a machine with limited storage, and complex PDFs seem to take a lot of horsepower to view, that leaves surfing as the primary use for such a "toy." *shrug* If they can sell it, more power to them.
It would be even better if they could put it in a truly portable format. With flash it could even be an instant-on type device! To make it small, and inexpensive, they should keep the screen size and resolution low. MS could probably develop a smaller footprint of win/outlook/office. I'm sure Adobe could slim down their reader a bit. They might even consider going to a "tablet"-like format with a miniture keyboard.
Of course, to be really innovative, they could add wireless and connectivity to the cell high-speed data networks. God, this could be awesome!. Oh, right; so much for cutting edge, I guess.
having separate public and limited-distribution email addresses helps, too
I beg to differ. My limited distribution email scheme has been completely foiled by email list selling (by companies I deal with, including pseudo-government departments) and by worms which have harvested emails in the past. Heck, it only takes a single one of my "trusted" contacts (close friends, family) to decide to forward a message to a group with the list recipients viewable and then any of those people who get a virus will let that email into the wild.
I'm tempted to can the whole partitioning of emails altogether and go back to a single email. The system used to work before there were spam filters, and when I could trust the party on the other end. Since both of those are now false, I may as well just simplify.
Which, of course, defeats the purpose of speedpass, which was to avoid any interaction other than pumping the gas. I'm always amused when I got to Lowes and OfficeMAx, and after I swipe my card in the user terminal, the cashier is required to enter the last four digits of the card manually into the POS terminal. Wouldn't it have been faster for me to hand the cashier the card to begin with and have him/her swipe the card on the POS terminal, since they then don't have to key the digits?
When you have economic growth, the pie gets bigger. Most of the population gets a smaller slice of that pie, though the absolute amount of pie in their given slice will increase incrementally.
You've got three or four full retirement's worth of vested stock. Almost* everybody has some cool thing they'd like to work on, and being independantly wealthy means you get to work on it whenever you want, not just 20% of the time you spend working for someone else for wages.
There are some people who don't have cool projects they want to work on. Those people are generally uncreative and lack internal motivation, and probably are not on Google's roles. Oh, and those people - given the cash to "retire" - would likely do so and then spend the rest of their lives watching The Price Is Right and playing video games.
Sorry, the meaning of my post was not that the US military spends so much , but rather that private individuals could not reasonably outspend them - if not in "current" dollars, then in the massive capital invested for warfare infrastructure. The GP was whining that the right to own guns doesn't really exist because it would limit government. I was merely pointing out that a citizenry with consumer firearms is no longer a threat to a modern military government. This was not true 200 years ago.
There is, in the US, a right to own guns. You may debate until you are blue in the face what the clause "well regulated militia" means at the beginning of the second amendment, but the NRA and gun manufacturers have spent a lot of money to make sure that it is interpreted to mean you have a right to common firearms. Thanks to the advancement of the science of warfare, the government no longer needs to worry about individual gun owners (or the group as a collective) as an impediment to pushing a socialist/oligopolist/nameyourleastfavoritopolist governmental stance.
Consider this: if you could liquidate all of Google's stock, including corporately held shares, at today's close, you still would have less than half the annual operating budget of the US military, and you'd be behind by 40 years of spending on military weapons.
It may be a questionable analogy becuase of the political force of the gun lobby, but gun ownership plays no part in the forceful takeover/overthrow potential of the US government.
Slashdot Mirror
Well said.
I find most vocal gun rights advocates leave out the "well regulated militia" clause if the second amendment. I've always been amazed at how poorly that amendment parses. My reading is the same as yours - citizens may have firearms so that they mey function as part of an organized "militia," or protective group. All of the functions which militias performed two hundred years ago have been taken over by standing govenrmental bodies. In fact, the writing most likely applies to the state national guards - you don't get much more of a well-regulated militia than that.
I still believe in the right to own firearms, and have owned several in my lifetime, though none in operational condition at the moment, but I don't agree that the constitution gives the sweeping endorsement it once did.
I'm sure there will be those who ignore reality and say that without personal firearms we are at the mercy of the federal government. I've got bad news for them - there isn't a consumer-led army in the world that could take over the US govenrment, on US soil, defended by the US military. (That is, of course, ignoring the possibility that most/all of the military turns against the CIC and standing legislatures - but then we woouldbe fighting with the military, not against it.)
An interesting, but totally trivial aside:
Back in the early 80s, Reagan figured out how to save a few bucks on the US federal payroll. You see, up until that time, your paycheck was determined by taking your annual salary, as published by the GSA, and dividing it by 2080 hours in a year (52 weeks x 5 days/wk x 8hrs/day). Well, it turns out that - as you noted - there are actually about 2087 hours in an average workyear (well, technically, there's an extra 10 mintues floating around in there). So they recaculated everyone's salary based on a 2087 hour year. 0.33% doesn't seem like much, and a lot of people didn't notice on their paychecks. Part of that was because it occured at a year-break, when the normal "cost of living" increase was given (usu 2-4%), and the rates for taxes withheld and partial benefit costs withheld change. On the govenerment side, it was probably an 80 million dollar a year cost savings. (I don't know the exact numbers...I didn't join the CS until the late 80s, after the change had taken place).
queue White album joke here...
Seriously, this would be nice, but it will still take 3 of these discs to backup my modest dvd collection.
Touche.
Actually, I thought the same thing about his inability to see what was happening first hand. Most CxOs are supremely out of touch with the day to day runnings of the corporation. Still, I would expect that the filtering of programs and processes would have made it through the several layers of management it would take to hit the CEOs ears. Then again, it's possible that the lower management might have been fearful that top management would not approve of such an arrangement, and that's why the whole thing was kept so quiet. Until, of course, there was no way to hide the fact that the building was only 60-70% staffed during the day.
You're presuming that the people have any say in such a condition, which they do not. Even if the US were not a republic, with representatives listening to the handlers which keep them in office, you are under the incorrect impression that a true democracy would be fouled by the advertising clout that can be brought to bear when billions of dollars is at stake. I do like your optimism though.
The first thing I thought was, "how can a CEO of a major corporation go for two years without knowing what is going on in the day to day operation?" Of course, then I wondered how it is that he couldn't have been fired for such a lack of knowledge. Finally, I realized he must be one slick bastard to keep his job while the entire company was running on a different schedule without his knowledge. Either that or he has a special file with pictures of all the board members doing horrible things to/with farm animals.
Personally, I'm betting on the farm animals angle.
Nobody will stand for it. The Republican party has learned that, aside from stroking the Christian Right, the most effective way to garner support is to give people what they really want - the ability to be lazy. You see, taking a responsible stand on almost any topic generally requires effort. The effort could be reasoned thought, additional cost, or emotional fortitude. It's easy to dislike people who aren't like you, dump sewage and harmful chemicals into waterways to save a few percent in the monthly bills, and believe that eveyone should have the exact same moral center as you do. Standing up in a crowd and telling people that they should be more tolerant, consider the long term view, and empathise with those less fortunate is just not going to get you votes like telling people "you're right, fuck everybody else."
This is not to say that a large portion of the Left doesn't say, "psssst, you know those rich folks should really be paying for your stuff, cause there's the ones causing all the problems." That doesn't exactly scream "against the crowd."
Unfortunately, I'm afraid that I may need to write in Stewart/Colbert in 2008 just so I can sleep at night. At least when stupid things come out of their mouths, they're meant to be stupid.
Okay, so it's not research. But he's also not at the center of some vast terrorist conspiracy to forge boarding passes and blow up the US. The trouble he made was not a serious threat to US security, and if it was we are in some deep fucking trouble because it's clear that the gatekeepers are asleep at the switch.
No, he has already been treated to the "troublemaker" gauntlet, had his brush with the government and his future almost turned upside down. He's still a kid, and kids will do things without thinking (yes, you can be 25 and childish - they guy has probably never lived outside of academia). The TSA is now practicing a little mafia style justice for losing face to this guy.
I think you wrote this comment months ago, and have had it sitting in a vi window just reloading /. every few seconds for that whole time, waiting for an appropriate story in which you could make this a first post.
Nonetheless, it's true. Stress happens everywhere, and it all adds up. I get blistering headaches when I'm under "too much" stress. Oddly, any single area of my life that's under stress won't do it - there needs to be at least two - possibly three - areas that are overwhelmed. Finances, family, work, school - if you can keep at least two in the "low stress" column, the rest is managable.
I have no doubt that cingular's customer service is absolutely abyssmal. In fact, I think all the major providers are tied for last place. I have USCC, and they are absolutely the pits. The best info I've heard is that the 8525 that cingular is selling (a customized version of the HTC TyTn) is not crippled in functionality in any way except that the cingular version of the phone does not have a video-phone camera facing the user or the video-call button. Since I don't have any need for a video phone (appaently I'm neither young enough nor Korean enough to care ;-), that's no real loss to me.
Took me a while to get back. The conversion was slow, but technically worked (looked like crap, but worked). Lots of good options I need to learn about - it's a keeper.
I was, however, amazed at mplayer for viewing the original mpg stream. I need to figure out how to make it my default media player, and fingure out the keyboard shortcuts. mplayer managed to play the clip while hovering about 35-40% CPU utilization, whereas WMP10 took 70-85%cpu during playback.
That's interesting about the DUN reactivation. I don't suppose you can do GPS over bluetooth and/or pair multiple devices simulataneously (laptop, headset, gps)?
I'm not for or against palm, as long as I can sync to something with a calendar and contact list.
In serching for the exact workding, the first google hit is the /. discussion here. It's funny to scroll throught he comments from the initial ipod release.
They have proven, with the iPod, that if they can fix the abyssmal ui seen on typical device, they don't need to be massively innovative in hardware - simply "good" is enough. I've got to say that when it comes to cell phones, someone who can make them "just work" has a really good shot at the market. If they can make it "just work" with outlooks calendar, contacts, and email, as well as be a good phone and media player, they're in for a wild ride.
CmdrTaco, is that you?
not a new phone.
When the US Cellular shackles are removed from me, I'm going to jump to cingular. I'd have considered Verizon, as their overall coverage in my area is the best of any provider, but I just can't handle the crippling they put on their hardware.
(No, I'm not a shill for cingular - I'm not even a customer yet. Yes, it's the second time I've linked to an 8525...what can I say, I think it's a cool pda/phone)
There really is a pretty full market between the wristwatch and the almost-workstation portable. At $400, I'm not sure intel is going to be all that successful. Granted, my linked phone/pda retails on the eopen market for $700, and is sold with strings attached for $300 in the US. Commercially, a consumer machine in this class will be little more than a novelty, imho. Maybe the new generation can deal witha laptop as a sole machine, but I need a real sized keyboard and a mouse to get work done efficiently. Most of the time my laptop is used away from the docking station is for reference (I have PDFs of most of my technical references) in the field, and to surf. Since the reference part can't be done on a machine with limited storage, and complex PDFs seem to take a lot of horsepower to view, that leaves surfing as the primary use for such a "toy." *shrug* If they can sell it, more power to them.
It would be even better if they could put it in a truly portable format. With flash it could even be an instant-on type device! To make it small, and inexpensive, they should keep the screen size and resolution low. MS could probably develop a smaller footprint of win/outlook/office. I'm sure Adobe could slim down their reader a bit. They might even consider going to a "tablet"-like format with a miniture keyboard.
Of course, to be really innovative, they could add wireless and connectivity to the cell high-speed data networks. God, this could be awesome!. Oh, right; so much for cutting edge, I guess.
having separate public and limited-distribution email addresses helps, too
I beg to differ. My limited distribution email scheme has been completely foiled by email list selling (by companies I deal with, including pseudo-government departments) and by worms which have harvested emails in the past. Heck, it only takes a single one of my "trusted" contacts (close friends, family) to decide to forward a message to a group with the list recipients viewable and then any of those people who get a virus will let that email into the wild.
I'm tempted to can the whole partitioning of emails altogether and go back to a single email. The system used to work before there were spam filters, and when I could trust the party on the other end. Since both of those are now false, I may as well just simplify.
Which, of course, defeats the purpose of speedpass, which was to avoid any interaction other than pumping the gas. I'm always amused when I got to Lowes and OfficeMAx, and after I swipe my card in the user terminal, the cashier is required to enter the last four digits of the card manually into the POS terminal. Wouldn't it have been faster for me to hand the cashier the card to begin with and have him/her swipe the card on the POS terminal, since they then don't have to key the digits?
In that case, he was wrong.
When you have economic growth, the pie gets bigger. Most of the population gets a smaller slice of that pie, though the absolute amount of pie in their given slice will increase incrementally.
Not many here could pull that obscure reference from way back in 1981. Truly a classic flick.
(for those who missed it: link)
I wasn't aware that coders were not human.
You've got three or four full retirement's worth of vested stock. Almost* everybody has some cool thing they'd like to work on, and being independantly wealthy means you get to work on it whenever you want, not just 20% of the time you spend working for someone else for wages.
There are some people who don't have cool projects they want to work on. Those people are generally uncreative and lack internal motivation, and probably are not on Google's roles. Oh, and those people - given the cash to "retire" - would likely do so and then spend the rest of their lives watching The Price Is Right and playing video games.
Wasn't that a hit way back in the...ohhhhh, Z udeo. Sorry.
Sorry, the meaning of my post was not that the US military spends so much , but rather that private individuals could not reasonably outspend them - if not in "current" dollars, then in the massive capital invested for warfare infrastructure. The GP was whining that the right to own guns doesn't really exist because it would limit government. I was merely pointing out that a citizenry with consumer firearms is no longer a threat to a modern military government. This was not true 200 years ago.
There is, in the US, a right to own guns. You may debate until you are blue in the face what the clause "well regulated militia" means at the beginning of the second amendment, but the NRA and gun manufacturers have spent a lot of money to make sure that it is interpreted to mean you have a right to common firearms. Thanks to the advancement of the science of warfare, the government no longer needs to worry about individual gun owners (or the group as a collective) as an impediment to pushing a socialist/oligopolist/nameyourleastfavoritopolist governmental stance.
Consider this: if you could liquidate all of Google's stock, including corporately held shares, at today's close, you still would have less than half the annual operating budget of the US military, and you'd be behind by 40 years of spending on military weapons.
It may be a questionable analogy becuase of the political force of the gun lobby, but gun ownership plays no part in the forceful takeover/overthrow potential of the US government.