That won't work. Not only is it wrong to abandon our fellow creators simply because we create executable math and they create physical devices, but that approach leaves us divided and vulnerable.
We need to band together to get rid of patents altogether. They're nothing more than corporate welfare. Like any welfare-mama, America's corporations sit back with their hands out, greedy for public money for something that isn't of value at all. We have patents because proponents have linked them to progress. We simply need to show how they're nothing but welfare, companies refusing to work because handouts are easier, and stop funding the system.
Patents are a horrible financial idea, costing society far in excess of the benefits they grant to creators, and at that - usually rewarding the "wrong" people. We simply need to force the patents-speed-innovation people to prove their claims.
There are performance metrics in place that try to ensure that examiners aren't rubber stamping applications with either 'reject' or 'allow.'
Unfortunately though, there aren't quality standards on the patents as a whole. It's entirely based on prior art, regardless of the complexity or how obvious it is.
The 1-click patent is a perfect example. Any web developer who could have written a standard "shopping cart" could rework it to work in a 1-click fashion without any technical help.
These low standards mean that literally any trivially new process can be patented. It doesn't matter how obvious it is, all the matters is if there's prior art. If something was just so obvious nobody bothered to write about it you can patent it. If you've got enough money for tens of thousands of patents applications you can camp on what everyone's doing, and yet add nothing of value to society.
Patents are a brake on society, theoretically justifiable by a corresponding benefit to a subset of society (the inventors).
Considering it's us who foots the bill in the end we should tally up how much patents cost us in higher prices, ditch patents to recover the cost, then tax that recovered money and distribute it to the creators of the most-helpful inventions. (Judged by use in devices multiplied by the number of devices sold, research enabled, etc)
Then instead of a costly system, which screws up more often than it works - denying the inventor rights to their own creation, we'd have a relatively cheaply administered system where nearly all money went to the people who helped us, not the patent trolls and their lawyers. This sort of system would encourage people to share instead of hoarding, and because using those ideas would be free again, to use those shared ideas.
Best of all, the rewards could be given outside of the scope of the traditional patent system. Currently if you wrote a physics paper that changed the world and enabled great advances you'd get nothing - but if you patented some trivial piece of software (1-click for instance) you could make billions. Under the proposed system that physicist would get the same rewards as a traditional inventor would. Finally we'd be rewarding the people who do most of the work, instead of just the parasites with lawyers.
A car makes sense to treat as property - it was made by someone from raw materials of less value and if I take it you don't have it anymore. Information isn't like that. People would be capable of duplicating the image of the house without your help, but would be forbidden to by a law specifically written to give you money - as a useless permission granting middle-man. I don't see how you can't see the extortion in that.
All it would do is enable you to censor people (someone who was trying to use a photo of your house for any reason, such as a landmark, evidence in a court case, warning people about bad Halloween-candy, etc.) and demand fees to duplicate it. Neither of which help anyone else.
So why on earth would we make the image of your house property? The last thing we need are more useless rent-seekers in society. You want welfare with that?
Diarmait, whose decision in history’s first copyright case was logical: "To every cow her calf; to every book its copy".
I don't think logical applies. Simple-minded and crazy perhaps. Why a cow/calf? How about a dog/bark, tree/branches, cloud/rain? How are these any less related to books than cows? How is a calf - that becomes a cow capable of making more cows, anything like a book which takes human work to duplicate? It's law-by-mumbo-jumbo and soundbite.
the story ends with Columcille's not-so-pacifistic followers defeating Diarmait’s soldiers in battle, [...] which I guess is one way to resolve copyright disputes!
And if you consider trade embargoes as being the first step of a war, it's much like what we do now. The side with the most guns makes the rules, copyright and otherwise.
At least they were honest about it - law of the jungle, now we pretend we're enacting IP laws to benefit society.
It's precisely by building a house so close to the street and having unreasonable standards that the homeowner is interfering in the rights of the photographer to take pictures in public. They could simply buy curtains and instead they're meddling in everyone's laws by crying for help.
Well I was skeptical, but then you extorted me to think of the vagina-creatures. I still didn't quite buy in - I was willing to let them all suffer until you tied it to my jealousy by making me think of the ones I own, like my wife and daughter, sister, mom, etc... nobody should see a vagina of mine! Fury! I now wholeheartedly support your plan to censor the net to stop any images. And here I was just going to get them curtains./sarcasm
If weirdos like you were busy 24/7 watching boobies you wouldn't be agitating for useless laws. Seems like a win.
Your website would also be a good reference to check how good your curtains were. Just set an alarm on skin at your house and you'll be warned if you need to get better curtains. Without this you'd have to stalk around outside at night trying to judge this.
I paid for these attributes to my architect, I invested in landscaping and such. I think how my home looks - good or bad - is also owned by me, is it not?
You got a house and a nice yard to look at. Isn't that good enough? Why do you need an extortion racket as well?
don't you see a bit paradoxical the fact that a logo/trademark is defended with such an force by the "intellectual property" laws, while the image of a home (which is a more concrete object of ownership) is not?
No. The trademark of a company is protected so consumers will know who they're dealing with. To prevent counterfeiters.
The image of the corporate warehouse, like the image of your house, isn't protected because it doesn't serve society to do so.
Seriously, what did you think the law was for? To reward your "concrete object of ownership"? Grow up.
No, you don't. That's why we call it public. It's where you don't have an expectation of privacy.
You may have some control over publication of your likeness but that's nothing that would prevent the picture from being taken and distributed privately - in other words, not privacy.
O. M. G. That photo - the house-number is the date my grandfather died in a POW camp, I'm going to hunt the occupants down and slaughter them for revenge. Oh, what city pls? I'm sure there are many of that number in my city, but your photo makes me want to target that one./sarcasm
Is that why they object? They're afraid of random attacks? "What an ugly house - let's track it down and egg it?"
There's always a clueless twat willing to demand you stop doing something harmless. If you give in they just demand something else. I've been asked not to take a picture of a park, not because of a child in the photo but simply because children play in the park sometimes.
Civility would be taking advantage of your right to curtains instead of demanding people not take pictures of your house.
It's your legal system that determines it. Which do you want, a copyright designed to increase the public domain for the benefit of everyone, or to decrease the public domain to benefit useless gatekeepers?
Your money, your call.
I suggest releasing it. If you need a place to put it I'll help seed a torrent.
Make sure you take pictures of the discs and anything else related, makes notes on anything not included in the audio, etc, and include them in the torrent for more context.
What "freedom" does a user have if the software he wants never exists in the first place, because the GPLed code prevents a company from investing time and money into the product that the user wants?
If the GPL prevented you from "investing time and money" into a product you were either 1) unable to close the GPLed code for "your" product, or 2) had an idea for a niche already filled by a free alternative and weren't needed. Neither hurts the user.
Most users don't give a fuck about having access to the source code. Whether the source is open or closed has approximately zero value to them.
Bullshit. Most users don't know if their software is open source, but it has tremendous value to them if it is. That's the guarantee you won't lose your data when your key suddenly stops working.
They want to buy it from a company who spent time and money ensuring that it will work, won't lose data, won't catch on fire, etc. A company that provides a warranty and support.
Yeah, right. Which software company provides a warranty? Microsoft? Apple? EA? Hardly. Read your EULA, or your corporate licensing agreement. You have no warranty. That's classic MS FUD - warning that you don't get a warranty with free software, all the while hoping you don't notice they don't even promise their software works at all.
If your business plan involves taking something someone else wrote and released for everyone and hiding away your modifications to it to prevent "competition", you're an asshole.
BSDL means being able to be an asshole to users because someone was nice to you. Wow, what an important "freedom".
Well, for one, auditors usually perform surprise inspections and such to avoid these problems. But why do you think government inspectors are less prone to bribery? That's the very thing I'm talking about, the idea that someone's suddenly more trustworthy simply because they're a government employee. This is a problem *now*. The Minerals Management Service that was supposed to be watching BP, for example. We aren't auditing properly and people are fucking around.
The secret is enough auditing. And yes, auditing does involve redoing some work. One guy inspects, another audits randomly, others randomly inspect both audited and unaudited work. Swap auditors around, make them work in pairs. Record everything they do, etc. Throw dishonest ones in jail for as long as they'd have been jailed for poisoning the product they were inspecting.
You need to make the profit motive for the auditors involve finding problems. One company auditing itself seems likely to fail, but independent auditing companies who get paid to catch dishonesty by being guaranteed the bribe money if they turn the briber in, would be ruthless.
But still, the problems don't go away by just pretending government employees are honest and corporate employees are all dishonest. The police and army are all government employees and yet have a stunningly bad record of hiding information from their civilian overseers, and performing horrible abuses while confident in their job security.
How many ignorant people aren't going to read the update or the patent and subsequently go on thinking Apple is "mining app store submissions for patent ideas"
But they are. They're just doing it the way the patent-system encourages - looking at what someone else built and patenting a bunch of possible innovations to it, properly referencing the prior art. So it's not like they're patenting an app out from under the author, but they definitely are looking at what the apps do and patenting as much as they think they can of everything the apps don't already do.
They might have key features of a version-2 app already being patented though.
It's amazing how easy it is to emotionally rile up Slashdot regardless of any facts. Just mention one of the following: 1.) Patents
Well, patents are universally bad. "IP" laws are just another form of corporate welfare. The tremendous cost, in enforcement and as a burden to society, aren't paid at all by the patent-holder. Patents aren't granted, at all, on the assumption of accruing a benefit to society as was the idea, they're just a government-printed license to sue, with the benefit of the doubt no less.
So yeah, the headline was wrong but everyone was right to expect Apple(/someone) crushing independent developers with patent law. That's just what monopolies are. The only "news" is that it's just business as usual, not some new and interesting screw like it appeared to some.
preach to us that government IS the problem (rather than the people making up the government being the problem) and therefore we should shrink all of it
A sense of entitlement is your problem - other people's sense of entitlement to your money simply because they've always gotten it. The government wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't the ultimate welfare job - high-paying, union, and no risk of layoffs.
Now that the TSA exists it's doing its damnedest to catch and convict enough people, regardless of their guilt, to prove its value. We can look forward to an agency bound and determined to waterboard enough trivia out of everyone and convict enough of us to appear worthy of their endless handout. The more desperate they are for a raise the more brutal they'll get. Like police in states that let them keep drug-bust confiscation money (from houses, cars, etc).
And not just a matter of semantics either. It wouldn't be enough to privatize something by signing a permanent no-bid deal with a chosen company either. The issue is one of people trying to guarantee themselves a paycheck forever, without having to meet performance metrics.
But IMHO the courts/etc are supposed to allow safe privatization of the meat inspectors. We should be able to hire private companies (and audit them sufficiently) to ensure they meet applicable standards, without having to make them government employees. Investigate and enforce heavily to prevent situations like the MMS/BP fraud.
With restructuring I think you could reduce the number of government employees (everything but the elected officials and army) down to a few hundred people, essentially those people for whom an NDA wouldn't quite be enough, without changing the functioning of anything at first. Simply move everyone else (all of the IRS for instance) into newly created companies and hire them, at the same rates and same union agreements at first, then offer up it all up for regular outsourcing later to introduce competition.
It raises the issues of data security, etc, but it's not like that's not an issue now - merely that we pretend like it is. Either way we need real security, not faith backed by the ability to bring charges of treason. We certainly won't get anywhere though as long as we keep guaranteeing the incumbents a job. We need to hire, and fire, by merit.
They have nuclear missiles and platoons of armored soldiers with grenade launchers, machine guns, and tanks. You have a deer rifle. The government is going to win.
Exactly. It's already fucked.
But, think of how it would/(should?) work. He'd be part of the militia - what would be the army with conscription - and he'd be armed. His neighborhood would have a tank, etc, and a bunch of people - those actively practiced in using it - would have keys.
The problem is a standing army, and one loyal to a body of the government, not the people of their communities. I think the secret to making the 2nd amendment work again is near-universal military service, like Switzerland has.
Defense, at any level, isn't something you can outsource. When your current mercenary force providers (police, army) are looking to set themselves up with a monopoly on force they've switched from protectors to owners.
Even a trained Special Forces operator isn't going to be able to defeat dozens of people before someone takes him down.
Even facing certain death later I imagine not more than a few people would step up to try after the first few failed horrifically.
Especially because knowing the current panic the bad guys will try something quiet and have a cover story about merely needing to fly to Cuba to escape jail - they won't be calling their god and threatening the infidels in a convenient tip-off.
I wonder if they've considered shipping a few operatives via an air-courier and escaping the hold while in the air.
I could hire a virtual army of body guards to patrol outside my house and I'll be pretty safe from a break in.
Yes and no. If you had a problem with people breaking in and the police couldn't stop them, yet what you had didn't justify them coming back in force, then sure, an army of guards might help. But if what you have justifies a greater effort, no. An excess of protection in one area will simply be walked around elsewhere. The thieves will get jobs as guards, or con their way in, and you'll be no safer.
In fact, much like us now with the hype on silly threats (binary explosives) and thus stupid precautions (forcing the use of small bottles) which distract us from actually saving people - such as reducing the people (target) density at security checkpoints, or re-enforcing cockpit doors.
Slashdot Mirror
That won't work. Not only is it wrong to abandon our fellow creators simply because we create executable math and they create physical devices, but that approach leaves us divided and vulnerable.
We need to band together to get rid of patents altogether. They're nothing more than corporate welfare. Like any welfare-mama, America's corporations sit back with their hands out, greedy for public money for something that isn't of value at all. We have patents because proponents have linked them to progress. We simply need to show how they're nothing but welfare, companies refusing to work because handouts are easier, and stop funding the system.
Patents are a horrible financial idea, costing society far in excess of the benefits they grant to creators, and at that - usually rewarding the "wrong" people. We simply need to force the patents-speed-innovation people to prove their claims.
There are performance metrics in place that try to ensure that examiners aren't rubber stamping applications with either 'reject' or 'allow.'
Unfortunately though, there aren't quality standards on the patents as a whole. It's entirely based on prior art, regardless of the complexity or how obvious it is.
The 1-click patent is a perfect example. Any web developer who could have written a standard "shopping cart" could rework it to work in a 1-click fashion without any technical help.
These low standards mean that literally any trivially new process can be patented. It doesn't matter how obvious it is, all the matters is if there's prior art. If something was just so obvious nobody bothered to write about it you can patent it. If you've got enough money for tens of thousands of patents applications you can camp on what everyone's doing, and yet add nothing of value to society.
Patents are a brake on society, theoretically justifiable by a corresponding benefit to a subset of society (the inventors).
Considering it's us who foots the bill in the end we should tally up how much patents cost us in higher prices, ditch patents to recover the cost, then tax that recovered money and distribute it to the creators of the most-helpful inventions. (Judged by use in devices multiplied by the number of devices sold, research enabled, etc)
Then instead of a costly system, which screws up more often than it works - denying the inventor rights to their own creation, we'd have a relatively cheaply administered system where nearly all money went to the people who helped us, not the patent trolls and their lawyers. This sort of system would encourage people to share instead of hoarding, and because using those ideas would be free again, to use those shared ideas.
Best of all, the rewards could be given outside of the scope of the traditional patent system. Currently if you wrote a physics paper that changed the world and enabled great advances you'd get nothing - but if you patented some trivial piece of software (1-click for instance) you could make billions. Under the proposed system that physicist would get the same rewards as a traditional inventor would. Finally we'd be rewarding the people who do most of the work, instead of just the parasites with lawyers.
A car makes sense to treat as property - it was made by someone from raw materials of less value and if I take it you don't have it anymore. Information isn't like that. People would be capable of duplicating the image of the house without your help, but would be forbidden to by a law specifically written to give you money - as a useless permission granting middle-man. I don't see how you can't see the extortion in that.
All it would do is enable you to censor people (someone who was trying to use a photo of your house for any reason, such as a landmark, evidence in a court case, warning people about bad Halloween-candy, etc.) and demand fees to duplicate it. Neither of which help anyone else.
So why on earth would we make the image of your house property? The last thing we need are more useless rent-seekers in society. You want welfare with that?
Diarmait, whose decision in history’s first copyright case was logical: "To every cow her calf; to every book its copy".
I don't think logical applies. Simple-minded and crazy perhaps. Why a cow/calf? How about a dog/bark, tree/branches, cloud/rain? How are these any less related to books than cows? How is a calf - that becomes a cow capable of making more cows, anything like a book which takes human work to duplicate? It's law-by-mumbo-jumbo and soundbite.
the story ends with Columcille's not-so-pacifistic followers defeating Diarmait’s soldiers in battle, [...] which I guess is one way to resolve copyright disputes!
And if you consider trade embargoes as being the first step of a war, it's much like what we do now. The side with the most guns makes the rules, copyright and otherwise.
At least they were honest about it - law of the jungle, now we pretend we're enacting IP laws to benefit society.
It's precisely by building a house so close to the street and having unreasonable standards that the homeowner is interfering in the rights of the photographer to take pictures in public. They could simply buy curtains and instead they're meddling in everyone's laws by crying for help.
Well I was skeptical, but then you extorted me to think of the vagina-creatures. I still didn't quite buy in - I was willing to let them all suffer until you tied it to my jealousy by making me think of the ones I own, like my wife and daughter, sister, mom, etc... nobody should see a vagina of mine! Fury! I now wholeheartedly support your plan to censor the net to stop any images. And here I was just going to get them curtains. /sarcasm
If weirdos like you were busy 24/7 watching boobies you wouldn't be agitating for useless laws. Seems like a win.
Your website would also be a good reference to check how good your curtains were. Just set an alarm on skin at your house and you'll be warned if you need to get better curtains. Without this you'd have to stalk around outside at night trying to judge this.
Everyone knows that if your house is blurred the pedos and thieves just assume you've got good stuff, cute kids, etc.
The smart money is on getting Google to replace the street-view of your house with a shabby one with ugly children playing outside...
I paid for these attributes to my architect, I invested in landscaping and such. I think how my home looks - good or bad - is also owned by me, is it not?
You got a house and a nice yard to look at. Isn't that good enough? Why do you need an extortion racket as well?
don't you see a bit paradoxical the fact that a logo/trademark is defended with such an force by the "intellectual property" laws, while the image of a home (which is a more concrete object of ownership) is not?
No. The trademark of a company is protected so consumers will know who they're dealing with. To prevent counterfeiters.
The image of the corporate warehouse, like the image of your house, isn't protected because it doesn't serve society to do so.
Seriously, what did you think the law was for? To reward your "concrete object of ownership"? Grow up.
No, you don't. That's why we call it public. It's where you don't have an expectation of privacy.
You may have some control over publication of your likeness but that's nothing that would prevent the picture from being taken and distributed privately - in other words, not privacy.
Roughly, not for "editorial" usage which is roughly everything except advertising.
I'd need a release to use your photo in an ad implying you endorsed your clothing for instance, but not much else.
O. M. G. That photo - the house-number is the date my grandfather died in a POW camp, I'm going to hunt the occupants down and slaughter them for revenge. Oh, what city pls? I'm sure there are many of that number in my city, but your photo makes me want to target that one. /sarcasm
Is that why they object? They're afraid of random attacks? "What an ugly house - let's track it down and egg it?"
Keep in mind the people opting out simply contacted Google and were done with it- no harassment involved.
Yeah, not at all, unless you count the harassment they received that forced them to implement the policy in the first place.
This article has nothing to do with amateur photographers pursuing their hobby
Except in that the same people make exactly the same unreasonable demands of amateur photographers too.
Reasonable people buy curtains, unreasonable people throw a fit.
Or, he wants a complete database without any holes.
There's always a clueless twat willing to demand you stop doing something harmless. If you give in they just demand something else. I've been asked not to take a picture of a park, not because of a child in the photo but simply because children play in the park sometimes.
Civility would be taking advantage of your right to curtains instead of demanding people not take pictures of your house.
It's your legal system that determines it. Which do you want, a copyright designed to increase the public domain for the benefit of everyone, or to decrease the public domain to benefit useless gatekeepers?
Your money, your call.
I suggest releasing it. If you need a place to put it I'll help seed a torrent.
Make sure you take pictures of the discs and anything else related, makes notes on anything not included in the audio, etc, and include them in the torrent for more context.
What "freedom" does a user have if the software he wants never exists in the first place, because the GPLed code prevents a company from investing time and money into the product that the user wants?
If the GPL prevented you from "investing time and money" into a product you were either 1) unable to close the GPLed code for "your" product, or 2) had an idea for a niche already filled by a free alternative and weren't needed. Neither hurts the user.
Most users don't give a fuck about having access to the source code. Whether the source is open or closed has approximately zero value to them.
Bullshit. Most users don't know if their software is open source, but it has tremendous value to them if it is. That's the guarantee you won't lose your data when your key suddenly stops working.
They want to buy it from a company who spent time and money ensuring that it will work, won't lose data, won't catch on fire, etc. A company that provides a warranty and support.
Yeah, right. Which software company provides a warranty? Microsoft? Apple? EA? Hardly. Read your EULA, or your corporate licensing agreement. You have no warranty. That's classic MS FUD - warning that you don't get a warranty with free software, all the while hoping you don't notice they don't even promise their software works at all.
If your business plan involves taking something someone else wrote and released for everyone and hiding away your modifications to it to prevent "competition", you're an asshole.
BSDL means being able to be an asshole to users because someone was nice to you. Wow, what an important "freedom".
Pft, BSDL is all about denying choice to users.
Well, for one, auditors usually perform surprise inspections and such to avoid these problems. But why do you think government inspectors are less prone to bribery? That's the very thing I'm talking about, the idea that someone's suddenly more trustworthy simply because they're a government employee. This is a problem *now*. The Minerals Management Service that was supposed to be watching BP, for example. We aren't auditing properly and people are fucking around.
The secret is enough auditing. And yes, auditing does involve redoing some work. One guy inspects, another audits randomly, others randomly inspect both audited and unaudited work. Swap auditors around, make them work in pairs. Record everything they do, etc. Throw dishonest ones in jail for as long as they'd have been jailed for poisoning the product they were inspecting.
You need to make the profit motive for the auditors involve finding problems. One company auditing itself seems likely to fail, but independent auditing companies who get paid to catch dishonesty by being guaranteed the bribe money if they turn the briber in, would be ruthless.
But still, the problems don't go away by just pretending government employees are honest and corporate employees are all dishonest. The police and army are all government employees and yet have a stunningly bad record of hiding information from their civilian overseers, and performing horrible abuses while confident in their job security.
How many ignorant people aren't going to read the update or the patent and subsequently go on thinking Apple is "mining app store submissions for patent ideas"
But they are. They're just doing it the way the patent-system encourages - looking at what someone else built and patenting a bunch of possible innovations to it, properly referencing the prior art. So it's not like they're patenting an app out from under the author, but they definitely are looking at what the apps do and patenting as much as they think they can of everything the apps don't already do.
They might have key features of a version-2 app already being patented though.
It's amazing how easy it is to emotionally rile up Slashdot regardless of any facts. Just mention one of the following: 1.) Patents
Well, patents are universally bad. "IP" laws are just another form of corporate welfare. The tremendous cost, in enforcement and as a burden to society, aren't paid at all by the patent-holder. Patents aren't granted, at all, on the assumption of accruing a benefit to society as was the idea, they're just a government-printed license to sue, with the benefit of the doubt no less.
So yeah, the headline was wrong but everyone was right to expect Apple(/someone) crushing independent developers with patent law. That's just what monopolies are. The only "news" is that it's just business as usual, not some new and interesting screw like it appeared to some.
preach to us that government IS the problem (rather than the people making up the government being the problem) and therefore we should shrink all of it
A sense of entitlement is your problem - other people's sense of entitlement to your money simply because they've always gotten it. The government wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't the ultimate welfare job - high-paying, union, and no risk of layoffs.
Now that the TSA exists it's doing its damnedest to catch and convict enough people, regardless of their guilt, to prove its value. We can look forward to an agency bound and determined to waterboard enough trivia out of everyone and convict enough of us to appear worthy of their endless handout. The more desperate they are for a raise the more brutal they'll get. Like police in states that let them keep drug-bust confiscation money (from houses, cars, etc).
And not just a matter of semantics either. It wouldn't be enough to privatize something by signing a permanent no-bid deal with a chosen company either. The issue is one of people trying to guarantee themselves a paycheck forever, without having to meet performance metrics.
But IMHO the courts/etc are supposed to allow safe privatization of the meat inspectors. We should be able to hire private companies (and audit them sufficiently) to ensure they meet applicable standards, without having to make them government employees. Investigate and enforce heavily to prevent situations like the MMS/BP fraud.
With restructuring I think you could reduce the number of government employees (everything but the elected officials and army) down to a few hundred people, essentially those people for whom an NDA wouldn't quite be enough, without changing the functioning of anything at first. Simply move everyone else (all of the IRS for instance) into newly created companies and hire them, at the same rates and same union agreements at first, then offer up it all up for regular outsourcing later to introduce competition.
It raises the issues of data security, etc, but it's not like that's not an issue now - merely that we pretend like it is. Either way we need real security, not faith backed by the ability to bring charges of treason. We certainly won't get anywhere though as long as we keep guaranteeing the incumbents a job. We need to hire, and fire, by merit.
They have nuclear missiles and platoons of armored soldiers with grenade launchers, machine guns, and tanks. You have a deer rifle. The government is going to win.
Exactly. It's already fucked.
But, think of how it would/(should?) work. He'd be part of the militia - what would be the army with conscription - and he'd be armed. His neighborhood would have a tank, etc, and a bunch of people - those actively practiced in using it - would have keys.
The problem is a standing army, and one loyal to a body of the government, not the people of their communities. I think the secret to making the 2nd amendment work again is near-universal military service, like Switzerland has.
Defense, at any level, isn't something you can outsource. When your current mercenary force providers (police, army) are looking to set themselves up with a monopoly on force they've switched from protectors to owners.
Even a trained Special Forces operator isn't going to be able to defeat dozens of people before someone takes him down.
Even facing certain death later I imagine not more than a few people would step up to try after the first few failed horrifically.
Especially because knowing the current panic the bad guys will try something quiet and have a cover story about merely needing to fly to Cuba to escape jail - they won't be calling their god and threatening the infidels in a convenient tip-off.
I wonder if they've considered shipping a few operatives via an air-courier and escaping the hold while in the air.
I could hire a virtual army of body guards to patrol outside my house and I'll be pretty safe from a break in.
Yes and no. If you had a problem with people breaking in and the police couldn't stop them, yet what you had didn't justify them coming back in force, then sure, an army of guards might help. But if what you have justifies a greater effort, no. An excess of protection in one area will simply be walked around elsewhere. The thieves will get jobs as guards, or con their way in, and you'll be no safer.
In fact, much like us now with the hype on silly threats (binary explosives) and thus stupid precautions (forcing the use of small bottles) which distract us from actually saving people - such as reducing the people (target) density at security checkpoints, or re-enforcing cockpit doors.