You should still be able to get your report in MD. I did several times. The federal law doesn't make it mandatory in MD until 2k5, but doesn't forbid the practice either. MD law makes it mandatory now. MD has several good examples of what happens when democrats control the gov't, and put consumers rights above corporate rights. (Not that MD doens't have problems, too). They were also way ahead of the feds in requiring healthcare companies to cover women's annual exams at the specialist (gyn) of their choice, instead of only at their PCP/general practitioner.
My experience: I had to correct the same mistake twice on my report. The first time I got an errant 90day item cleared. Then it showed up again the next year, likely due to cross-checking between the big-three while the records were out of sync. Luckily, I had the paperwork from the first time (which took three months to accomplish), and the process took less than 30 days to get corrected.
Perpetual war implies that there would be an endless supply of war-machines (be they robots or airplanes or warships or tanks). The result will be that, for the great military powers, a war would result in a contest to see whos machines are superior, rather than whos soldiers are superior. Once an army is depleted of resouces (robots, in the potential scenereo), it has no choice but to surrender.
The flip side is that the gap between the superpowers and small groups wishing to challenge those in power gets wider. Now, even the ground game results in a phenominal mismatch. This would, of course, include the ability of the second amendment of the US constitution to ensure that the federal government did not get out of reach of overthrow by the poplace in the event of gross corruption. (Which, imho, has been moot since WWI)
That's, um, the point of war. War is an ugly thing, and there really are no rules. Those wich follow supposed "rules" typically end up on the losing side. Imagine a football game without referees. Now, imagine that one team plays by the rules and one team ignores them. Which team is likely to win? Now imagine it's not a game, and the life an liberty of your family is at stake in the outcome. Which approach should you take?
The goal of war is to kill so many people on the other side that they a) give up and b) have no chance of reconsitiuting a military threat. If that means turning entire cities into smoldering radioactive glass, so be it. As I said above, war is an ugly thing. It should not be entered into without exhausting all other avenues. It's my main problem with the current policy of the US governement (re: reasons for Iraq invasion)
Gosh, I forgot to comment on the last sentence. OF COURSE most people that enter the military make more than the average person. Half of the US population is not employed. Many that are are in minimum wage burger-flipper/toilet-cleaner jobs. Hell, if you can make it through a tour or two in the military, you'd better ba able to find a job at better than $10/hr (which is, by the way, around the median for all active workers in the US).
Um, not usually. Military experience is good if you want a career in military support services, and actively pursue connections on the contractor side during your tours. If not, you may as well throw away those years and go flip burgers at McDs.
In fact, in most fields, military experience is not very applicable to business reality. That's why having JUST military on your resume will only impress someone who got their first business-world job after being on the military. It's like having a government job, and interviewing for private industry. If you're a drone in the gov't, used to cushy benefits and fixed hours, an employer is going to think long and hard about hiring you, because a) you're probably not good at deadlines and b) you're going to sit around and complain that the bene's aren't as good.
No, get your degree. Get a job in the field in which you want to work, even if it its at the bottom, and LEARN. Oh, and make as many outside contacts as you can. That's how you'll get the job you really want.
Finally, unless you plan on getting into the top 3 or four "name" schools, you can pretty much ignore where the degree is from. If you're from a name school, you'll get into the "interview" pile with questionable experience, but that's about the extent of it.
Well...I get worked up over my wife handling my DVDs, and won't let my parents (or my in-laws) borrow an original disc from my collection.
While this may seem a bit paranoid, I have a CD collection with the most remarkable range of scratches from casual handling. I swore that my DVDs would not suffer the same fate. Until recently, I had all my DVDs in a jukebox (I no longer own the jukebox...long story). I wasn't really happy with that solution from a payback standpoint, so I'm building a video server now.
But more importantly, with the first suggestion on c.com, you'd be expected to upgrade your player every few months, after the last one was hacked. (This is suggested as a problem in the article, but - suprisingly - is only considered undesirable when applied to either a very popular model or an entire manufacturers line. So make sure you get a really, really popular HD-DVD player, just in case. Actually, I see class action written all over this, even for low-moderate number players)
2) RIGHT$("HDTV",3)="DTV", the H is irrelevant, and only used by geeks
3) Everybody pumped up HDTV for its digital basis, and the marketers knew that digital sounded better than analog to consumers. When broadcasters (incl satellite and cable) realized that "digital" was a more powerful a marketing tool then "high definition" (shorter, more understandable), and that they could provide marginal-quality, but acceptable, digital signals with less effort/money and higher ROI, it was just a CEO stamp away from throwing HD out the window and overnight the mantra "HDTV is coming" to "Digital TV is here."
That article from cryptography.com, should it's seggestions come to pass, would prevent me from making copies of my discs so that my 2 year old wouldn't trash the originals. It would even prevent me from ripping all discs to a server, and making a special remote interface for her.
What's most interesting is that "real" pirates (pressing discs for mass distribution) would likely be able to circumvent all these measures with a bit-accurate re-press. *shrug* At least we know who the industry is really worried about when they talk about pirates...you and me.
BTW, yes, my 2 year old knows how to load a DVD player, and I print the discs so she knows which is which. I reauthor them so that the movie starts immediately without user interaction. I haven't figured out how to make her understand that the top-loading CD player in her room won't play three discs stacked like records, though.;-) (On a side note, I was impressed/suprised to find out that it will function just fine with two discs in the player at once.)
WHat a troll. I used MacOS in two applications in college. Once was for digital editing for the newspaper, once was for documents and such for the marketing arm of an entertainment group associated with the university. Most of this was pre-windows or early windows.
Both times I went screaming back to DOS. Who knew you could hide so much from users, slow down everything, and still claim it to be "progress". Shortly after the last MacOS gig, I got to sit down and test NT. 3.1 wasn't great, but 3.5 rocked. Oh, and I did use other OSs, such as Xwindows, AIX, and VMS to a small extent in engineering applications.
I should mention that photoshop was rather cool, and once it came out on PC, I had no reason to ever look back at Macs.
My take now is that it's all just a pretty face on a mountain of code. The more stable the code is the better. I'm not very happy with certain aspects of XP, but I'm stuck due to the availability of certain apps which are ONLY available on PC.
As a "contractor" I am an independent businessman. I'm only one, but I am a corporation.
When I price myself, I take into account the following:
Of my 100% fee, I must subtract:
Direct compensation (salary) Direct Benefits (10%) Indirect Benefits (vacation/sick) (5%) Downtime/Admin (15%) Marketing (5%) Insurance, business, all types (10%) Other Expenses (10%) Taxes (5%) Profit (10%)
As you can see, my rate is 30% salary, 70% other expenses. In this scenereo, my breakeven point is about 100/30=333% of my salary. If a full time employee would be 60,000/yr, the hourly rate would be 60k/2087*3.33=$96/hr. Which, just so happens to be close to the $90/hr I actually bill.
You don't shop much, do you? Or, I suppose, you shop a LOT, and have no restrictions or value on your time.
I don't have time to go find an employee, ask them for a price check, walk to a regiter in the front of the store (which can be a hundred yards or more these days) get the price, and then go back to my shopping. Heaven forbid I should have my 2 year old with me and have to tote her around during this process.
Of the shops which have barcode scanners (and I'd say that's less than 10% of the shops I know - there's not a single one in ANY shop in the local mall, and I've never seen one in a home improvement store, a cloting store, a craft store, a book store, or, well, anywhere but the local Target, and half of those are inoperational).
It's amazing that 40 years ago, every product in a grocery store was labelled with the price. Whats more amazing is that the cashiers could type in the prices faster than most modern cashiers can scan items. I'd suspect the error rate (manual entry vs shelf/barcode mismatches) is probably not too far off, though I have no proof. At least with the labelled goods, there's no question. With the barcode, you have to go back to the shelf to prove it.
I think the barcode - check it with your phone is a pretty neat idea. But it's still just getting us back to where we were 40 years ago in terms of convenience. Pretty sad, actually.
On the contrary, a PhD allows one to call themselves a Doctor, to add the appropriate prefix and/or suffix to their names. They may increase their suppsed prestige with the title. To get tenure or a teaching position is not an automatic benefit, though if a position required a PhD, this person would, techically qualify.
The President gets the power to do all the top-general things, without ever having been in any type of miliary training (physical or mental). He can know nothing of proper battle tactics, history, capabilities, etc. No true general would skirt those requirements. Luckily, the president has advisors who HAVE had that training.
As for being surrounded by armed SS, yeah...I'll give way on that a bit. It isn't like some joe walking down the street. Of course, in the "game," I don't believe that there is any chance of a guard noticing you and taking you out, so - in this case - he may as well be unarmed.
Sucks, doesn't it. Everybody is talking about BB this and BB that. eBay takes over 350k just to load their home page. If I were to go back to dialup, I think i'd switch to lynx.
The sad thing is that, for satellite, the barriers to entry are so large there won't be any real competition. Even worst, the corps are all looking to try and cherry pick the population centers, and will compete for the high-density areas only. Why? Its' cheaper to advertise to steal your competition's customers than it is to invest in plant. It's all about ROI, and like telephone last century, rural areas get the short end.
Not that the Gov't will try and fix it, nor would they be successful. Heck, based on the rural telco monopoly down the road from me, you don't want them to fix it. Phone rates are astronomical, broadband is worse (can you say $140/mo for 1.5M/256 DSL?), cable is horrible, and even if you want off their system and get satellite...YOU HAVE TO BUY IT THROUGH THEM at jacked up rates ($350+ for a basic receiver and single LNB dish). It's the law - they'll do you without lube just 'cause they can.
Ah, but Newport, Virginia, just 300 miles from the nation's capital and 8 miles from Blacksburg Virginia and Virginia Tech, with multi-gigbit network capabilities, just got DSL last year. It's only available to about 50% of the people (prob. 20% of the area) and is $45/mo for 768/128 which, less than 100yds from the switch is 650/80 throughput.
There is no competition. One provider for phone and cable. No cable internet, no plans (no need...they own the phone co, so who cares?)
And we're lucky, 'cause much of the county is SOL and still on dialup.
No, ubiquitous broadband is a farce. Affordable ubiquitous broadband will never happen, ESPECIALLY if the service providers get their way. There's too much openspace in the US for a real rollout - it's not cost effective to foot all those plant costs. I'm willing to bet that the 20% of househoulds are in less than 2% (prob less than 1%) of geographical area. If every household in LA and NY had service, that would be 80% of their 20M figure.
Yes, an engineer I knew who worked with Ford claimed that 200,000mi was the design criteria. Based on warranty work, parts sales, and other dealership feedback, parts underperforming were redesigned more robustly, and parts overperforming were "value engineered" to produce parts which would not alst as long (techincally they were designed to be produced cheaper, but the upshot was always a shorter lifespan in trade).
Don't kid yourself. Everyone who own's a SUV has a "legitimate" use for it.
Mine is to make of for all the CO2 which is not being generated being by all those damned hybrids. I mean, somebody has to think of makeing sure there's enough CO2 for the trees, right?
Ignoring the whole "what did they mean by the 2nd amendment" argument, yes there it is quite ironoic that the current adminitration (and no doubt all to follow) will be hyper-sensitive to elimiating any talk about damaging the powers that be. It is particularly interesting that the mainstream NRA line is to, of course, support his president and his adminisration. It's all a matter of "what can you do for me" politics.
I have mixed feelings on the 2nd amendment. I like guns, though I no longer own any which are operational. I think most people have legitimate reasons for owning them, including "because they're fun to shoot."
I don't think the 2nd amendment really protects that right - I think that it is for a "well regulate militia," known in the modern world as the (insert your state) National Guard. I also believe that the intent was to prevent a top-heavy, mostly unaccountable government such as the British Monarchy from coming to power.
In this day and age, we have a mostly unaccountable goverment, simply due to the practicalities of running a representative government for 300 million citizens with just 500 or so representatives. That government no longer relies on the state militias to protect the country or wage war. It has a military which far outstrips the ability of any individual to resist, primarily due to the expense and complexity of the military weapons used. The ability for citizens to purchase and maintain weapons of sufficint power to overthrow the US government should it "get out of control" is essentially zero.
Based on that, the 2nd amendment is irrelevent to 21st centry realities. Nonetheless, it is used as a political wedge whenever it comes up. Hurray.
I hand't thought about it until now, but he is the 00 president, which puts him in line for at least a nearly-successful attempt on his life, if not outright assassination. (a US president dies in office every 20 years...RR "broke" the curse in the 80s, but there was still an attempt on his life).
Yeah, I thought the same thing about the "unarmed civilian" aspect. Techically, he's commander-in-chief of the US military. Practically, the president need never have attended any military training, need not know how to even handle a weapon. His title is honorary, like a PhD granted to a prominent celibrity.
Referring to the target as an "unarmed non-combatant" is probably more appropriate. My question to most who are not offended would be: It it okay to market a game which reenacts the Reagan assasination, to see what the odds are that that attempt would have been successful, and, in the game do you get extra points for shooting presidential aides? If you're okay with that game, then you're wlcome to bitch about the people defending the tastelessness of the Kennedy game.
Re:What happens when a human gets shot
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Does that mean we can pay them less. It sure would help the industry out.
Well, I'm pretty sure the term you're looking for is "Torrie" (with a y, maybe?), not fellow citizen. They were on the side of might and right, aligned with the King. And they weren't popular.
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You should still be able to get your report in MD. I did several times. The federal law doesn't make it mandatory in MD until 2k5, but doesn't forbid the practice either. MD law makes it mandatory now. MD has several good examples of what happens when democrats control the gov't, and put consumers rights above corporate rights. (Not that MD doens't have problems, too). They were also way ahead of the feds in requiring healthcare companies to cover women's annual exams at the specialist (gyn) of their choice, instead of only at their PCP/general practitioner.
My experience: I had to correct the same mistake twice on my report. The first time I got an errant 90day item cleared. Then it showed up again the next year, likely due to cross-checking between the big-three while the records were out of sync. Luckily, I had the paperwork from the first time (which took three months to accomplish), and the process took less than 30 days to get corrected.
Perpetual war implies that there would be an endless supply of war-machines (be they robots or airplanes or warships or tanks). The result will be that, for the great military powers, a war would result in a contest to see whos machines are superior, rather than whos soldiers are superior. Once an army is depleted of resouces (robots, in the potential scenereo), it has no choice but to surrender.
The flip side is that the gap between the superpowers and small groups wishing to challenge those in power gets wider. Now, even the ground game results in a phenominal mismatch. This would, of course, include the ability of the second amendment of the US constitution to ensure that the federal government did not get out of reach of overthrow by the poplace in the event of gross corruption. (Which, imho, has been moot since WWI)
That's, um, the point of war. War is an ugly thing, and there really are no rules. Those wich follow supposed "rules" typically end up on the losing side. Imagine a football game without referees. Now, imagine that one team plays by the rules and one team ignores them. Which team is likely to win? Now imagine it's not a game, and the life an liberty of your family is at stake in the outcome. Which approach should you take?
The goal of war is to kill so many people on the other side that they a) give up and b) have no chance of reconsitiuting a military threat. If that means turning entire cities into smoldering radioactive glass, so be it. As I said above, war is an ugly thing. It should not be entered into without exhausting all other avenues. It's my main problem with the current policy of the US governement (re: reasons for Iraq invasion)
.
Gosh, I forgot to comment on the last sentence. OF COURSE most people that enter the military make more than the average person. Half of the US population is not employed. Many that are are in minimum wage burger-flipper/toilet-cleaner jobs. Hell, if you can make it through a tour or two in the military, you'd better ba able to find a job at better than $10/hr (which is, by the way, around the median for all active workers in the US).
Um, not usually. Military experience is good if you want a career in military support services, and actively pursue connections on the contractor side during your tours. If not, you may as well throw away those years and go flip burgers at McDs.
In fact, in most fields, military experience is not very applicable to business reality. That's why having JUST military on your resume will only impress someone who got their first business-world job after being on the military. It's like having a government job, and interviewing for private industry. If you're a drone in the gov't, used to cushy benefits and fixed hours, an employer is going to think long and hard about hiring you, because a) you're probably not good at deadlines and b) you're going to sit around and complain that the bene's aren't as good.
No, get your degree. Get a job in the field in which you want to work, even if it its at the bottom, and LEARN. Oh, and make as many outside contacts as you can. That's how you'll get the job you really want.
Finally, unless you plan on getting into the top 3 or four "name" schools, you can pretty much ignore where the degree is from. If you're from a name school, you'll get into the "interview" pile with questionable experience, but that's about the extent of it.
Well...I get worked up over my wife handling my DVDs, and won't let my parents (or my in-laws) borrow an original disc from my collection.
While this may seem a bit paranoid, I have a CD collection with the most remarkable range of scratches from casual handling. I swore that my DVDs would not suffer the same fate. Until recently, I had all my DVDs in a jukebox (I no longer own the jukebox...long story). I wasn't really happy with that solution from a payback standpoint, so I'm building a video server now.
Uh, yes.
But more importantly, with the first suggestion on c.com, you'd be expected to upgrade your player every few months, after the last one was hacked. (This is suggested as a problem in the article, but - suprisingly - is only considered undesirable when applied to either a very popular model or an entire manufacturers line. So make sure you get a really, really popular HD-DVD player, just in case. Actually, I see class action written all over this, even for low-moderate number players)
1)
HDTV != play on my tv
DTV != play on my tv
therefor HDTV=DTV
2)
RIGHT$("HDTV",3)="DTV", the H is irrelevant, and only used by geeks
3)
Everybody pumped up HDTV for its digital basis, and the marketers knew that digital sounded better than analog to consumers. When broadcasters (incl satellite and cable) realized that "digital" was a more powerful a marketing tool then "high definition" (shorter, more understandable), and that they could provide marginal-quality, but acceptable, digital signals with less effort/money and higher ROI, it was just a CEO stamp away from throwing HD out the window and overnight the mantra "HDTV is coming" to "Digital TV is here."
That article from cryptography.com, should it's seggestions come to pass, would prevent me from making copies of my discs so that my 2 year old wouldn't trash the originals. It would even prevent me from ripping all discs to a server, and making a special remote interface for her.
;-) (On a side note, I was impressed/suprised to find out that it will function just fine with two discs in the player at once.)
What's most interesting is that "real" pirates (pressing discs for mass distribution) would likely be able to circumvent all these measures with a bit-accurate re-press. *shrug* At least we know who the industry is really worried about when they talk about pirates...you and me.
BTW, yes, my 2 year old knows how to load a DVD player, and I print the discs so she knows which is which. I reauthor them so that the movie starts immediately without user interaction. I haven't figured out how to make her understand that the top-loading CD player in her room won't play three discs stacked like records, though.
WHat a troll. I used MacOS in two applications in college. Once was for digital editing for the newspaper, once was for documents and such for the marketing arm of an entertainment group associated with the university. Most of this was pre-windows or early windows.
Both times I went screaming back to DOS. Who knew you could hide so much from users, slow down everything, and still claim it to be "progress". Shortly after the last MacOS gig, I got to sit down and test NT. 3.1 wasn't great, but 3.5 rocked. Oh, and I did use other OSs, such as Xwindows, AIX, and VMS to a small extent in engineering applications.
I should mention that photoshop was rather cool, and once it came out on PC, I had no reason to ever look back at Macs.
My take now is that it's all just a pretty face on a mountain of code. The more stable the code is the better. I'm not very happy with certain aspects of XP, but I'm stuck due to the availability of certain apps which are ONLY available on PC.
As a "contractor" I am an independent businessman. I'm only one, but I am a corporation.
When I price myself, I take into account the following:
Of my 100% fee, I must subtract:
Direct compensation (salary)
Direct Benefits (10%)
Indirect Benefits (vacation/sick) (5%)
Downtime/Admin (15%)
Marketing (5%)
Insurance, business, all types (10%)
Other Expenses (10%)
Taxes (5%)
Profit (10%)
As you can see, my rate is 30% salary, 70% other expenses. In this scenereo, my breakeven point is about 100/30=333% of my salary. If a full time employee would be 60,000/yr, the hourly rate would be 60k/2087*3.33=$96/hr. Which, just so happens to be close to the $90/hr I actually bill.
QED, YMMV
You don't shop much, do you? Or, I suppose, you shop a LOT, and have no restrictions or value on your time.
I don't have time to go find an employee, ask them for a price check, walk to a regiter in the front of the store (which can be a hundred yards or more these days) get the price, and then go back to my shopping. Heaven forbid I should have my 2 year old with me and have to tote her around during this process.
Of the shops which have barcode scanners (and I'd say that's less than 10% of the shops I know - there's not a single one in ANY shop in the local mall, and I've never seen one in a home improvement store, a cloting store, a craft store, a book store, or, well, anywhere but the local Target, and half of those are inoperational).
It's amazing that 40 years ago, every product in a grocery store was labelled with the price. Whats more amazing is that the cashiers could type in the prices faster than most modern cashiers can scan items. I'd suspect the error rate (manual entry vs shelf/barcode mismatches) is probably not too far off, though I have no proof. At least with the labelled goods, there's no question. With the barcode, you have to go back to the shelf to prove it.
I think the barcode - check it with your phone is a pretty neat idea. But it's still just getting us back to where we were 40 years ago in terms of convenience. Pretty sad, actually.
On the contrary, a PhD allows one to call themselves a Doctor, to add the appropriate prefix and/or suffix to their names. They may increase their suppsed prestige with the title. To get tenure or a teaching position is not an automatic benefit, though if a position required a PhD, this person would, techically qualify.
The President gets the power to do all the top-general things, without ever having been in any type of miliary training (physical or mental). He can know nothing of proper battle tactics, history, capabilities, etc. No true general would skirt those requirements. Luckily, the president has advisors who HAVE had that training.
As for being surrounded by armed SS, yeah...I'll give way on that a bit. It isn't like some joe walking down the street. Of course, in the "game," I don't believe that there is any chance of a guard noticing you and taking you out, so - in this case - he may as well be unarmed.
Sucks, doesn't it. Everybody is talking about BB this and BB that. eBay takes over 350k just to load their home page. If I were to go back to dialup, I think i'd switch to lynx.
The sad thing is that, for satellite, the barriers to entry are so large there won't be any real competition. Even worst, the corps are all looking to try and cherry pick the population centers, and will compete for the high-density areas only. Why? Its' cheaper to advertise to steal your competition's customers than it is to invest in plant. It's all about ROI, and like telephone last century, rural areas get the short end.
Not that the Gov't will try and fix it, nor would they be successful. Heck, based on the rural telco monopoly down the road from me, you don't want them to fix it. Phone rates are astronomical, broadband is worse (can you say $140/mo for 1.5M/256 DSL?), cable is horrible, and even if you want off their system and get satellite...YOU HAVE TO BUY IT THROUGH THEM at jacked up rates ($350+ for a basic receiver and single LNB dish). It's the law - they'll do you without lube just 'cause they can.
Pitiful.
Ah, but Newport, Virginia, just 300 miles from the nation's capital and 8 miles from Blacksburg Virginia and Virginia Tech, with multi-gigbit network capabilities, just got DSL last year. It's only available to about 50% of the people (prob. 20% of the area) and is $45/mo for 768/128 which, less than 100yds from the switch is 650/80 throughput.
There is no competition. One provider for phone and cable. No cable internet, no plans (no need...they own the phone co, so who cares?)
And we're lucky, 'cause much of the county is SOL and still on dialup.
No, ubiquitous broadband is a farce. Affordable ubiquitous broadband will never happen, ESPECIALLY if the service providers get their way. There's too much openspace in the US for a real rollout - it's not cost effective to foot all those plant costs. I'm willing to bet that the 20% of househoulds are in less than 2% (prob less than 1%) of geographical area. If every household in LA and NY had service, that would be 80% of their 20M figure.
Warning: FOAF story...
Yes, an engineer I knew who worked with Ford claimed that 200,000mi was the design criteria. Based on warranty work, parts sales, and other dealership feedback, parts underperforming were redesigned more robustly, and parts overperforming were "value engineered" to produce parts which would not alst as long (techincally they were designed to be produced cheaper, but the upshot was always a shorter lifespan in trade).
Damned metric system...
Don't kid yourself. Everyone who own's a SUV has a "legitimate" use for it.
Mine is to make of for all the CO2 which is not being generated being by all those damned hybrids. I mean, somebody has to think of makeing sure there's enough CO2 for the trees, right?
(note to mods...I'm kidding)
Ignoring the whole "what did they mean by the 2nd amendment" argument, yes there it is quite ironoic that the current adminitration (and no doubt all to follow) will be hyper-sensitive to elimiating any talk about damaging the powers that be. It is particularly interesting that the mainstream NRA line is to, of course, support his president and his adminisration. It's all a matter of "what can you do for me" politics.
I have mixed feelings on the 2nd amendment. I like guns, though I no longer own any which are operational. I think most people have legitimate reasons for owning them, including "because they're fun to shoot."
I don't think the 2nd amendment really protects that right - I think that it is for a "well regulate militia," known in the modern world as the (insert your state) National Guard. I also believe that the intent was to prevent a top-heavy, mostly unaccountable government such as the British Monarchy from coming to power.
In this day and age, we have a mostly unaccountable goverment, simply due to the practicalities of running a representative government for 300 million citizens with just 500 or so representatives. That government no longer relies on the state militias to protect the country or wage war. It has a military which far outstrips the ability of any individual to resist, primarily due to the expense and complexity of the military weapons used. The ability for citizens to purchase and maintain weapons of sufficint power to overthrow the US government should it "get out of control" is essentially zero.
Based on that, the 2nd amendment is irrelevent to 21st centry realities. Nonetheless, it is used as a political wedge whenever it comes up. Hurray.
Except, um, isn't Penna Ave blocked due to safety/security now?
I hand't thought about it until now, but he is the 00 president, which puts him in line for at least a nearly-successful attempt on his life, if not outright assassination. (a US president dies in office every 20 years...RR "broke" the curse in the 80s, but there was still an attempt on his life).
There's a sherlock holmes quote areound here somewhere, but I'm not going to be the first to misquote it.
Yeah, I thought the same thing about the "unarmed civilian" aspect. Techically, he's commander-in-chief of the US military. Practically, the president need never have attended any military training, need not know how to even handle a weapon. His title is honorary, like a PhD granted to a prominent celibrity.
Referring to the target as an "unarmed non-combatant" is probably more appropriate. My question to most who are not offended would be: It it okay to market a game which reenacts the Reagan assasination, to see what the odds are that that attempt would have been successful, and, in the game do you get extra points for shooting presidential aides? If you're okay with that game, then you're wlcome to bitch about the people defending the tastelessness of the Kennedy game.
Does that mean we can pay them less. It sure would help the industry out.
Well, I'm pretty sure the term you're looking for is "Torrie" (with a y, maybe?), not fellow citizen. They were on the side of might and right, aligned with the King. And they weren't popular.