Just for context: Google Apps is an online groupware/user management application. Microsoft Office is a suite of office-oriented applications (word processor, spreadsheet, etc.) While Google offers a suite of office oriented applications (Google Docs), and like most Google tools, it can be managed with Google Apps, it's not really the same kinda thing. If I had to link equivalent products, I'd say Active Directory::Google Apps, Exchange/Outlook::GMail, Microsoft Office::Google Docs.
In each case, the Google version is entirely online, so it's not like you can manage people's PCs using Google Apps. But you do manage their accounts, rights, etc, when it comes to the online tools tied into the system.
this guy went on a rampage because he was going to be involntary comitted
Has been claimed by one person, with others contradicting it. Other than a vague belief, for reasons currently not clearly known, that the shooter may have thought his mother loved the children he shot more than him, we don't really have anything concrete at the moment. It's certainly not a statement of known fact that he was about to be committed. Even if it was his mother's intention, the "committed" version of the story doesn't suggest he was about to be, rather that his mother was about to start a process that would, in a few months, result in his committal.
Yes, you can indeed to do that, and indeed you could go one step further and improvise with a rusty pipe. But all you've proven is that you can take the non-regulated parts of an AR-15 (or plumbing supplies...), and make your own gun from them by substituting one regulated item with something else that isn't regulated at all until it becomes part of your finished gun, and after that is barely regulated. What you've made with that barrel and claw hammer is a zip gun, and that's fine and legal and entirely your business.
As I said, the ATF is interested in the lower receiver because it defines the legally regulatable capabilities of the gun. It is part of a set of required components that turns it from being an improvised launcher of.223 missiles into an actual finished rifle, and it defines the regulatable capabilities of that finished rifle, which the hammer, barrell, stock, etc, do not do.
You're thinking purely in terms of "Ah, but I can make a _gun_ if I..." while the ATF is thinking "Ah, but someone can make a gun that we're required to _regulate_ if...". In that light, it makes more sense for the ATF to regulate a lower receiver, than to expand its jurisdiction to the aisles of Home Depot.
I don't disagree. And as I said above, the AR-15 was defined as an AW by name, not by function, which made the whole thing sillier. It was a case of "I don't know much about guns, but I know what I don't like."
That's completely ridiculous. Accidents are avoidable, that's what makes them accidents. An accident is a mistake that leads to something bad happening. That's the definition.
Meanwhile, crashes can be avoidable or unavoidable. The term is neutral.
Are you sure you didn't get the story wrong and the usage changed because some crashes weren't avoidable?
The idea is that you can get an AR-15 by buying all the legal, unregulated, components online, and print your own lower receiver. So while you're correct that you're not able to print the entire thing, it's still significant that you can print that receiver. Essentially you get the government out of the loop completely.
That said, you can buy AK-47 receiver blanks online too, entirely legally. You then drill the holes in the right places, and bend the receiver into the right shape. The tools, plate, etc, generally costs under $200, including a bending rig. So it's not actually 100% true that the Makerbot thingie suddenly makes obtaining firearms a newly completely unregulated activity.
I suspect that it was picked as the "gun" for the AR-15 because it's where the "logic" goes. That is, the trigger is there, the safety, and anything that selects between different firing modes.
Fully automatic (machine gun) and burst (three shots with one pull of the trigger) modes of fire would be implemented in the lower receiver, for example. These are heavily regulated. So it's in the ATF's interests to distinguish between AR-15 lower receivers that have these features implemented, and those that don't.
For the most part, a barrel doesn't have the same kind of regulatory impact. There are some restrictions on length, but these tend to apply to the gun as a whole. Calibre is virtually entirely unregulated, and the barrel doesn't affect the capabilities of the weapon, just the accuracy.
He might have meant "queue", in an attempt to cut down the number of libertarians posting such comments he might want them to post one at a time, in some kind of order.
Assault Rifles and Assault Weapons are not the same thing. The latter was defined by the AWB in 1994, and the former is defined by the US military, and others, as being, essentially, an intermediate-ammunition firing battle rifle.
Moreover, the term AR-15 covers a firearm design pattern that includes M-16s and M-4s. So yes, some AR-15s are Assault Rifles.
All AR-15s are Assault Weapons, that is, they're defined as such by the AWB. I don't mean the AWB says "Weapons that have the following features are AWs" and you can see that the AR-15 fits the bill, I mean the AWB defines the AR-15 as an Assault Weapon by name.
and on the gun freedom side they are likely fully aware that the way the ban (in the past) was written it was so easy to circumvent that manufacturers barely skipped a beat.
Kinda, kinda not.
The AWB banned guns both by name and by featureset. The problem was the featureset was even more stupid than the list of guns, concentrating on features that were mostly cosmetic, and in a few cases, were useful to both military and non-military (legal, peaceful) shooters alike. The features that distinguish a "military weapon" from something used for target practice and shooting bears were just ignored.
So Bushmaster cranked out hundreds of thousands of stripped down AR-15 clones during the ban that weren't really AR-15s as you'd recognize them but were at least modular and had enough in common for enthusiasts of the concept to buy them, but they weren't semi-automatic versions of a military weapon by a long shot. Circumventing? Not really, this is what the framers of the AWB intended, more or less.
The only case I heard of where the laws were actively circumvented were in the production of large capacity detachable magazines. Because older magazines were grandfathered in, Colt et al just manufactured millions before the ban, stockpiling them so they could be sold afterwards. Dirty, but unlikely to have affected the effectiveness of the AWB in any real sense.
I think the "AWB was full of loopholes" meme is overdone. In reality, it was just a dumb law. It was aimed at getting military-style weapons off the streets. But there's nothing about "military style" that's relevent to effective gun control. It probably was effective at what it was designed to do, it's just what it was designed to do wasn't useful in any real sense.
There was a decline in gun violence related to weapons covered by the ban during the AWB's existence. But gun violence as a whole wasn't affected. So the AWB wasn't circumvented, it was, actually, an effective ban of something that wasn't a cause of anything. Likewise, if Pepsi were banned tomorrow, you'd expect to see the proportion of people who are overweight because of the amount of Pepsi they drink to reduce dramatically. But the number of people who are overweight would probably remain the same, as Coke, RC Cola, not to mention MacDonalds, Burger King, chocolate, ice cream, and other causes of weight gain would remain legal.
While you're waiting, interesting fact about the infamous "Assault Weapons Ban" that cost the Democrats the 1994 election: it was passed with almost unanimous support in the Senate. Republicans and Democrats alike supporting it in overwhelming numbers.
Because it was a good bill? Hell no, it's a terrible piece of legislation, but that's not the point: back when it was passed, there wasn't this "Left = gun control, Right = guns for all" crap. Even before the AWB, Saint Reagan himself, as governor of California, had signed into law some of the worst gun control legislation ever seen.
From what I can discern, the NRA decided that the best way to protect its members was to (relatively arbitrarily) pick a party, and throw its weight behind it knowing that if that party knew that was going on, it would avoid crossing the NRA to avoid losing its support. This policy started in the late seventies, but really took hold in 1994 when they went all out to elect a party that was equally to blame for the hated AWB as their opponents. As long as the supported party stayed in power, and was sufficiently scared of losing support to not waver from pro-NRA positions, the NRA's policies would be bolstered.
And that action drove the usually civil-liberty-loving liberals into the hands of the NRA's opponents. Take a step back a moment: does it really make much sense that liberals, who detest restrictions on speech, on what you can do with your own bodies, on people being jailed, would actually, normally, be in favor - in principle - of someone owning a device as long as they used it responsibly?
And that leads to an obvious conclusion: we can safely assume that it's highly improbable that gun control will pass in the next two years, even token gun control. But let's fast forward to 2014. Congress finally is switched to blue in both houses, as the trends suggest (there was a popular vote victory for the Democrats in the House this year and it was only because of the way district boundaries are drawn that Republicans won the House.) The Democrats celebrate by passing sweeping laws outlawing most semi-automatic weapons with a gun buyback program to get the weapons finally out of circulation.
Who has created the political climate where the Democrats would be so anti-gun it would do such a thing? Where the party of the ACLU would delight in stepping on the rights of millions of peaceful, non-threatening, gun owners?
Maybe, just maybe, the NRA should change its strategy.
At a guess, the submitter's thought process was that these are "Chilling guidelines" in that they're guidelines that "chill" the UK Communications Act, rather than "Scary guidelines" for a "Scary act".
Quite. It's well known that the latest trick with spammers is to hijack legitimate domain names of private POP3 servers (by hacking DNS, obviously), set up a dummy POP3 server, point the domain name at that server, and then feeding email to...
...wait, no it isn't. What? Where the fuck did this "spammers do this" claim come from, and why would anyone think it's even remotely believable? It's stupid, and anyone who claims this is to do with Google cutting down on spam is a stupid person.
I don't have the slightest idea why Google is doing this, but I can honestly tell you it has nothing to do with preventing spammers from finding a way to inject spam into a GMail account.
Given most corporate entities forced their users to use IE back when IE was a security and standards nightmare, why, exactly, would they change their minds now that recent versions of IE isn't significantly worse, either with security or standards compliance, than Chrome or Firefox?
It's not exactly 1999-2006 any more. The world has moved on.
Their whole goal is to offend people to the point that someone physically attacks them, then they sue everyone they possibly can.
I thought (this is a genuine query) that US law had a concept called "fighting words", where provoking someone into hitting you by using strong enough insults and offensive speech made you, not them, legally liable.
From what I can determine from Wikipedia, the Westboro baptist thing hasn't been fully tested (in that yes, it's gone to the Supreme Court, but in the context of "Can we ban this", rather than "Can a citizen throw a punch")
The FCC has jurisdiction over pretty much all interstate communication systems. I'm not sure why you and the sibling poster thinks its limited to radio communications, that's one of its jobs, but it's been regularing wireline services (phone,cable TV, etc) forever too.
Well, there's that constitution thing we'd have to deal with first;-)
Actually, I suspect that it's not as easy as copying a bunch of gun control laws. Switzerland, as has been pointed out numerous times, has those infamous "assault weapons" in more homes proportionally than, well, any part of the Deep South, and doesn't have anything like the gun violence. Britain has had several massacres (albeit nothing like as frequently as the US, even with differences in population taken into account) and has had... if not strong gun laws initially, then relatively infrequent gun ownership, during the entire 25 years I lived there. Michael Ryan had a Kalashnikov, and when he used it, that was the first time most of us Brits (as I was then) had heard of it.
I'm not convinced that the problems with gun violence in the US have anything to do with the availability of guns. But with the focus by everyone concerned, media, NRA, Brady and Brady-like campaigns, on what degree of control we should put over gun availability, it's not as if we're willing to have a discussion that looks at the bigger picture. I'm glad I've heard the term "Mental health" a few times in the context of this massacre, because that at least is an improvement, even if it turns out that the killer was otherwise sane until this morning. At least we're talking about it.
I know several people with more than one gun, they're gun enthusiasts. And other than being Republicans (nobody's perfect) I'd consider them all pretty well adjusted.
I appreciate you don't understand the appeal, but that should make you less inclined to propose criteria by which people are considered "suspicious", not more.
It sounds ineffective. I'll tell you why. There was a law like that on the books from the mid-nineties to the mid-2000s, called the Assault Weapons Ban. It was actually a little stricter. Detachable magazines (be careful with the term clips, gun nuts get kinda crazy about it...) were heavily restricted on semi-automatic guns to the point that it was pretty much impossible to make something AR-15-like with one (you had to sacrifice other features, such as a forward pistol grip, if you wanted one.)
Was it effective? Well, in 1999, this happened. There were other massacres of course, it's just that incident seems closest to what happened today. And in general, the consensus is that the AWB was a complete waste of time and money, and didn't actually do a thing to cut gun violence.
With the exception of those focussing on mental health screening, it seems most of those advocating new laws are going the "Let's revive the AWB", either in name or by implication. We've tried it. It doesn't work. If some action to prevent such a massacre is going to happen as a result of today's incident, let us make it effective, not symbolic and self defeating.
OK, what do you propose, and what are you proposing that wasn't in the Assault Weapons Ban, the gun ban that did things like ban large magazines and restrict the capabilities of semi-automatic weapons, that was in force during the Columbine Massacre?
Yes, we can have a rational discussion of gun control, but let's be rational.
Slashdot Mirror
Just for context: Google Apps is an online groupware/user management application. Microsoft Office is a suite of office-oriented applications (word processor, spreadsheet, etc.) While Google offers a suite of office oriented applications (Google Docs), and like most Google tools, it can be managed with Google Apps, it's not really the same kinda thing. If I had to link equivalent products, I'd say Active Directory::Google Apps, Exchange/Outlook::GMail, Microsoft Office::Google Docs.
In each case, the Google version is entirely online, so it's not like you can manage people's PCs using Google Apps. But you do manage their accounts, rights, etc, when it comes to the online tools tied into the system.
Has been claimed by one person, with others contradicting it. Other than a vague belief, for reasons currently not clearly known, that the shooter may have thought his mother loved the children he shot more than him, we don't really have anything concrete at the moment. It's certainly not a statement of known fact that he was about to be committed. Even if it was his mother's intention, the "committed" version of the story doesn't suggest he was about to be, rather that his mother was about to start a process that would, in a few months, result in his committal.
Yes, you can indeed to do that, and indeed you could go one step further and improvise with a rusty pipe. But all you've proven is that you can take the non-regulated parts of an AR-15 (or plumbing supplies...), and make your own gun from them by substituting one regulated item with something else that isn't regulated at all until it becomes part of your finished gun, and after that is barely regulated. What you've made with that barrel and claw hammer is a zip gun, and that's fine and legal and entirely your business.
As I said, the ATF is interested in the lower receiver because it defines the legally regulatable capabilities of the gun. It is part of a set of required components that turns it from being an improvised launcher of .223 missiles into an actual finished rifle, and it defines the regulatable capabilities of that finished rifle, which the hammer, barrell, stock, etc, do not do.
You're thinking purely in terms of "Ah, but I can make a _gun_ if I..." while the ATF is thinking "Ah, but someone can make a gun that we're required to _regulate_ if...". In that light, it makes more sense for the ATF to regulate a lower receiver, than to expand its jurisdiction to the aisles of Home Depot.
I don't disagree. And as I said above, the AR-15 was defined as an AW by name, not by function, which made the whole thing sillier. It was a case of "I don't know much about guns, but I know what I don't like."
The problem is I don't get to retain my advantage over midgets.
Also, sideways. You should be able to still fire your weapon if you hold it sideways, so you can look cool.
OK, but I'm 6'2". How is it in my best interests for someone who's 4'11" to be able to attack me with equal force? Hmmm?
Didn't think of that did you.
That's completely ridiculous. Accidents are avoidable, that's what makes them accidents. An accident is a mistake that leads to something bad happening. That's the definition.
Meanwhile, crashes can be avoidable or unavoidable. The term is neutral.
Are you sure you didn't get the story wrong and the usage changed because some crashes weren't avoidable?
The idea is that you can get an AR-15 by buying all the legal, unregulated, components online, and print your own lower receiver. So while you're correct that you're not able to print the entire thing, it's still significant that you can print that receiver. Essentially you get the government out of the loop completely.
That said, you can buy AK-47 receiver blanks online too, entirely legally. You then drill the holes in the right places, and bend the receiver into the right shape. The tools, plate, etc, generally costs under $200, including a bending rig. So it's not actually 100% true that the Makerbot thingie suddenly makes obtaining firearms a newly completely unregulated activity.
I suspect that it was picked as the "gun" for the AR-15 because it's where the "logic" goes. That is, the trigger is there, the safety, and anything that selects between different firing modes.
Fully automatic (machine gun) and burst (three shots with one pull of the trigger) modes of fire would be implemented in the lower receiver, for example. These are heavily regulated. So it's in the ATF's interests to distinguish between AR-15 lower receivers that have these features implemented, and those that don't.
For the most part, a barrel doesn't have the same kind of regulatory impact. There are some restrictions on length, but these tend to apply to the gun as a whole. Calibre is virtually entirely unregulated, and the barrel doesn't affect the capabilities of the weapon, just the accuracy.
He might have meant "queue", in an attempt to cut down the number of libertarians posting such comments he might want them to post one at a time, in some kind of order.
Assault Rifles and Assault Weapons are not the same thing. The latter was defined by the AWB in 1994, and the former is defined by the US military, and others, as being, essentially, an intermediate-ammunition firing battle rifle.
Moreover, the term AR-15 covers a firearm design pattern that includes M-16s and M-4s. So yes, some AR-15s are Assault Rifles.
All AR-15s are Assault Weapons, that is, they're defined as such by the AWB. I don't mean the AWB says "Weapons that have the following features are AWs" and you can see that the AR-15 fits the bill, I mean the AWB defines the AR-15 as an Assault Weapon by name.
There's a lot of controversy about the term, but it sounds like you've heard a somewhat confused explanation about them. For more information, check out the excellent Wikipedia pages on both terms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_Rifle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_Weapon
Kinda, kinda not.
The AWB banned guns both by name and by featureset. The problem was the featureset was even more stupid than the list of guns, concentrating on features that were mostly cosmetic, and in a few cases, were useful to both military and non-military (legal, peaceful) shooters alike. The features that distinguish a "military weapon" from something used for target practice and shooting bears were just ignored.
So Bushmaster cranked out hundreds of thousands of stripped down AR-15 clones during the ban that weren't really AR-15s as you'd recognize them but were at least modular and had enough in common for enthusiasts of the concept to buy them, but they weren't semi-automatic versions of a military weapon by a long shot. Circumventing? Not really, this is what the framers of the AWB intended, more or less.
The only case I heard of where the laws were actively circumvented were in the production of large capacity detachable magazines. Because older magazines were grandfathered in, Colt et al just manufactured millions before the ban, stockpiling them so they could be sold afterwards. Dirty, but unlikely to have affected the effectiveness of the AWB in any real sense.
I think the "AWB was full of loopholes" meme is overdone. In reality, it was just a dumb law. It was aimed at getting military-style weapons off the streets. But there's nothing about "military style" that's relevent to effective gun control. It probably was effective at what it was designed to do, it's just what it was designed to do wasn't useful in any real sense.
There was a decline in gun violence related to weapons covered by the ban during the AWB's existence. But gun violence as a whole wasn't affected. So the AWB wasn't circumvented, it was, actually, an effective ban of something that wasn't a cause of anything. Likewise, if Pepsi were banned tomorrow, you'd expect to see the proportion of people who are overweight because of the amount of Pepsi they drink to reduce dramatically. But the number of people who are overweight would probably remain the same, as Coke, RC Cola, not to mention MacDonalds, Burger King, chocolate, ice cream, and other causes of weight gain would remain legal.
While you're waiting, interesting fact about the infamous "Assault Weapons Ban" that cost the Democrats the 1994 election: it was passed with almost unanimous support in the Senate. Republicans and Democrats alike supporting it in overwhelming numbers.
Because it was a good bill? Hell no, it's a terrible piece of legislation, but that's not the point: back when it was passed, there wasn't this "Left = gun control, Right = guns for all" crap. Even before the AWB, Saint Reagan himself, as governor of California, had signed into law some of the worst gun control legislation ever seen.
From what I can discern, the NRA decided that the best way to protect its members was to (relatively arbitrarily) pick a party, and throw its weight behind it knowing that if that party knew that was going on, it would avoid crossing the NRA to avoid losing its support. This policy started in the late seventies, but really took hold in 1994 when they went all out to elect a party that was equally to blame for the hated AWB as their opponents. As long as the supported party stayed in power, and was sufficiently scared of losing support to not waver from pro-NRA positions, the NRA's policies would be bolstered.
And that action drove the usually civil-liberty-loving liberals into the hands of the NRA's opponents. Take a step back a moment: does it really make much sense that liberals, who detest restrictions on speech, on what you can do with your own bodies, on people being jailed, would actually, normally, be in favor - in principle - of someone owning a device as long as they used it responsibly?
And that leads to an obvious conclusion: we can safely assume that it's highly improbable that gun control will pass in the next two years, even token gun control. But let's fast forward to 2014. Congress finally is switched to blue in both houses, as the trends suggest (there was a popular vote victory for the Democrats in the House this year and it was only because of the way district boundaries are drawn that Republicans won the House.) The Democrats celebrate by passing sweeping laws outlawing most semi-automatic weapons with a gun buyback program to get the weapons finally out of circulation.
Who has created the political climate where the Democrats would be so anti-gun it would do such a thing? Where the party of the ACLU would delight in stepping on the rights of millions of peaceful, non-threatening, gun owners?
Maybe, just maybe, the NRA should change its strategy.
At a guess, the submitter's thought process was that these are "Chilling guidelines" in that they're guidelines that "chill" the UK Communications Act, rather than "Scary guidelines" for a "Scary act".
So, you guys, just chillax about it, OK? ;-)
Quite. It's well known that the latest trick with spammers is to hijack legitimate domain names of private POP3 servers (by hacking DNS, obviously), set up a dummy POP3 server, point the domain name at that server, and then feeding email to...
I don't have the slightest idea why Google is doing this, but I can honestly tell you it has nothing to do with preventing spammers from finding a way to inject spam into a GMail account.
Given most corporate entities forced their users to use IE back when IE was a security and standards nightmare, why, exactly, would they change their minds now that recent versions of IE isn't significantly worse, either with security or standards compliance, than Chrome or Firefox?
It's not exactly 1999-2006 any more. The world has moved on.
I thought (this is a genuine query) that US law had a concept called "fighting words", where provoking someone into hitting you by using strong enough insults and offensive speech made you, not them, legally liable.
From what I can determine from Wikipedia, the Westboro baptist thing hasn't been fully tested (in that yes, it's gone to the Supreme Court, but in the context of "Can we ban this", rather than "Can a citizen throw a punch")
The FCC has jurisdiction over pretty much all interstate communication systems. I'm not sure why you and the sibling poster thinks its limited to radio communications, that's one of its jobs, but it's been regularing wireline services (phone ,cable TV, etc) forever too.
Did I say that it was exclusively nuts that got crazy about it?
Well, there's that constitution thing we'd have to deal with first ;-)
Actually, I suspect that it's not as easy as copying a bunch of gun control laws. Switzerland, as has been pointed out numerous times, has those infamous "assault weapons" in more homes proportionally than, well, any part of the Deep South, and doesn't have anything like the gun violence. Britain has had several massacres (albeit nothing like as frequently as the US, even with differences in population taken into account) and has had... if not strong gun laws initially, then relatively infrequent gun ownership, during the entire 25 years I lived there. Michael Ryan had a Kalashnikov, and when he used it, that was the first time most of us Brits (as I was then) had heard of it.
I'm not convinced that the problems with gun violence in the US have anything to do with the availability of guns. But with the focus by everyone concerned, media, NRA, Brady and Brady-like campaigns, on what degree of control we should put over gun availability, it's not as if we're willing to have a discussion that looks at the bigger picture. I'm glad I've heard the term "Mental health" a few times in the context of this massacre, because that at least is an improvement, even if it turns out that the killer was otherwise sane until this morning. At least we're talking about it.
I know several people with more than one gun, they're gun enthusiasts. And other than being Republicans (nobody's perfect) I'd consider them all pretty well adjusted.
I appreciate you don't understand the appeal, but that should make you less inclined to propose criteria by which people are considered "suspicious", not more.
In fairness, Bruce is hardly a disinterested party, having had a bit of a problem with people who have a problem with "gun control": http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1999/04/msg00623.html
It sounds ineffective. I'll tell you why. There was a law like that on the books from the mid-nineties to the mid-2000s, called the Assault Weapons Ban. It was actually a little stricter. Detachable magazines (be careful with the term clips, gun nuts get kinda crazy about it...) were heavily restricted on semi-automatic guns to the point that it was pretty much impossible to make something AR-15-like with one (you had to sacrifice other features, such as a forward pistol grip, if you wanted one.)
Was it effective? Well, in 1999, this happened. There were other massacres of course, it's just that incident seems closest to what happened today. And in general, the consensus is that the AWB was a complete waste of time and money, and didn't actually do a thing to cut gun violence.
With the exception of those focussing on mental health screening, it seems most of those advocating new laws are going the "Let's revive the AWB", either in name or by implication. We've tried it. It doesn't work. If some action to prevent such a massacre is going to happen as a result of today's incident, let us make it effective, not symbolic and self defeating.
OK, what do you propose, and what are you proposing that wasn't in the Assault Weapons Ban, the gun ban that did things like ban large magazines and restrict the capabilities of semi-automatic weapons, that was in force during the Columbine Massacre?
Yes, we can have a rational discussion of gun control, but let's be rational.