No doubt others will take up some of the points here. I just want to correct a couple of inaccuracies.
Hitler was elected by a majority...
Hitler received about 36% of the popular vote. As far as we know he never had the support of the majority of Germans. His campaign of genocide began after democracy had been abolished.
and no one had a problem with his attempted genocide
Except all the political opponents that he also killed.
Slavery was considered ok by a majority people in the US for a very long time, and those who even thought about protesting or abolishing slavery, like Lincoln, were killed.
It is worth pointing out that Lincoln was elected president before he was killed. The abolition of slavery in the US is an example of democracy working.
Intellectually our nation is more based on French thinkers than British.
Not even close to being true. American revolutionaries were primarily influenced by English Republicans like John Locke. Keep in mind that the French revolution followed the American Revolution. The English had already had two revolutions by that time, and many of those involved had moved to America (the so called regicides who executed the King of England actually sought and received refuge in America).
Look at Russia or Ukraine and other former republics...
Look at Japan and Western Europe. The problems in Eastern Europe are not hang-overs from WWII, or any other war (except perhaps in the balkans). They are the result of decades of communism.
Does the US know how to feed 23 million people in time?
Actually what often goes unnoticed with all the attention paid to gee-whiz smart weapons is the real strength of the US military - logistics. There is no other organization on the face of the Earth that is better able to organize and move men and material. The US managed to feed Berlin under much more difficult conditions.
This new 'democracy' will kill even more once there is no dictator there, who is tough enough to kill those opposing to him...
As they have in Afghanistan the US will either buy-out or kill any opposition to the new democratic government in Iraq.
You'll quash the problems in Iraq and piss off some group in Syria or Indonesia, etc. who will take their place.
I think that depends entirely on what the Bush administration does after the war. There are some very odd divisions in the current administration. The State department is internationalist, generally opposed to military action, and opposed to democratization. The Defense department is unilateralist, generally in favor of military action, and very much in favor of democratization. Where things go from here depends on which combination of policies wins out.
The total failure of the State department's internationalist approach might mean more unilateralism to come. The worst possible outcome would be for Rumsfeld to get his unilateral(ish) wars, and for the State department to get to keep its dictators. Then the US really will be isolated. On the other hand if the hawks also get their democratization then things might work out quite well. The US will not stand alone for long if it seriously takes up the task of spreading democracy.
Have you lived through a war or through post-war times? My grandparents lived through the second world war and together with my parents through the post-war times in the former USSR.
So you think that the experiences that other people had 50 years ago make you an expert on such matters? I actually enjoy pointing out the obvious so here it is - the US is not destroying infra-structure, they are not population bombing, and this is not Stalin's Russia that we are talking about.
Food and humanitarian aid is already heading into the parts of Iraq that are controlled by the US. Did humanitarian disasters ensue in Afgahnistan, Kosovo, Haiti, Panama, or Grenada? Those invasions have a lot of similarities with the current invasion of Iraq. By contrast the post-war situation in the USSR could not be more different.
I guess this means that once we beat up Iraq, we'll invade North Korea. Iran and Cuba aren't far behind.
Cuba. Some conservatives would like to invade Cuba (not to mention a whole lot of Cubans), and some are even talking about bio-weapons programs there, but there is no chance that an invasion will happen or even be seriously discussed. In fact nothing at all will happen with Cuba. The Cubans will lie low and the US will ignore them.
Iran. This will be the next big story, but an invasion will not be necessary. By the time the US takes up the problem of ending the Iranian nuclear weapons program the US will have strategiclly encircled Iran. Iran is already on the knife-edge of revolution. There is no way that they will risk US intervention, so a diplomatic solution will be found.
North Korea. Who knows. Probably the US will convince the Chinese that the US is serious about using military action, and the Chinese will whip the N. Koreans back into line. This action in Iraq will certainly make a diplomatic solution much easier.
You can't impose American free market orthodoxy on a country in this stage of development (look at all the discussions on patents and trade abuse).
Iraq has a reasonably well educated population, and a ready source of income. Re-organising the economy is not going to be a serious problem. A more serious problem is the question of how to reconcile religious and ethnic factionalism with democratic government. Dealing with this problem will be difficult, but even here Iraq is probably a good test case to see whether democracy can work in the middle east. A large part of the country is already democratic (the Kurdish north), and everyone is tired of war. People often forget that religious toleration in the west was not born of some sort of intellectual revolution. It was born of exhaustion from a century or more of religious wars. Right now I think the Iraqi's are probably exhausted enough to think seriously about playing nicely with eachother.
Afghanistan is now perilously close to the position it was in that led to the taliban takeover - warlords and chaos.
Same warlords, less chaos. There is no comparison with pre-invasion circumstances. There is no civil war (as there was before the invasion) and the number of people being killed in any ongoing strife is now down to a few here and there, as opposed to the thousands here and there that we saw before the invasion.
...or "Blitzkreig", as the Nazi party used to call it. Not a new or original tactic
In one sense this is right. The idea is to over-run/confuse/and discourage the enemy to such an extent that they are unable to organise a response (as Akasani points out above this is a strategem that is almost as old as war itself). In another sense you are wrong. Blitzkreig was just one theory about how to put this idea into practice, with WWII era weapons. It was an idea that was developed by the British, even if it was first practiced by the Germans. The current "shock and awe" campaign is a novel approach to achieving the same goals, with modern weapon systems. Some parts are the same (rapid armor advance), some parts are quite new. It includes an aspect that you might think of as comming from WWII island hoping - they are simply by-passing points of resistence - cutting them off both geographically and in terms of communication. In addition to the previous practice of attacking c3 targets there is a concerted effort to target the political structure (as distinct from the military command structure). Finally there is an entirely new approach to the use of air power and targeting. The previous approach was to maximise destruction of the means of waging war. The new approach is minimise destruction while maximising loss of function.
Probably because of all the tree-hugger's who burst into tears every time a drop of oil is spilled on the ground.
Re:The only thing war has ever done is...
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The only reason Eastern Europe countries "voiced their support" for the US is to improve their chances to get in NATO.
The *most* vocal supporters of the US (Poland and the CR are already in NATO. Get a clue.
Actually the real reason is most likely that they took a look at their own security concerns and made an educated guess that in the long run the US was more likely to back them up in the future, than any European power.
Re:The only thing war has ever done is...
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If you check the public opinion then there is only one country in the world where >50% of the population is for the war and it's the US.
Actually there are at least three countries where public opinion is 50%+ in favor of the war - US, UK, and Iraq. Of course Iraqi public opinion is the most diffcult to assess, but it is also the least divided. Support for the war runs extremely high among ex-pat Iraqi's, those in Northern Iraq who can speak freely, and even in the rest of Iraq journalists have been saying for days that Iraqi's have started to speak out candidly in favor of the war.
So it looks like everyone who is actually involved in the war is in favor of it. Why are you opposed?
Re:The only thing war has ever done is...
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The USSR brand of authoritian communism defeated itself, it was not defeated by the US...
Maybe you should point that out to all the countries in Eastern Europe who came out early and voiced their support for the US even though France threatened to keep several of them out of the EU in retaliation.
Re:Not a troll: How many civilians died last time?
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About 2500 civillians were killed in the First Gulf War. Both the US and Iraqi governments agree on figures close to that (2,248 according to the government of Iraq). Many more died from disease or malnutrition after the war. A higher number of civillian deaths is expected in the Second Gulf War because there is likely to be more urban combat, but on the other hand the number of deaths that follow the war is likely to be far lower.
You can get estimates of death tolls for various wars, and other man-made disaters here:
1. US companies who give contracts to India/China/whatever for SW/HW/HDL development must pay custom fees as automotive industry pays for every car imported. Nowdays IP is a product.
Trade in IP is largely one-way. The US produces it. Everyone else buys it. The out-sourcing of IT jobs, and the importing of foreign workers is just a tiny trickle in the other direction. What this means is that the US will start imposing tarrifs on IP shortly after hell freezes over.
All new technologies seem to originate in Japan, appear simultanously or shortly thereafter in Europe, and then after up to a decade finally make it to the US. And why do a lot of people in the US seem to think we are the vanguard of scientific research and development.
Several factors are at work.
One is just the effect of anecdotal evidence. If you already suspect that technology is moving faster in other places then you will notice stories that confirm your belief, and discount stories that dis-confirm your belief. If you want to gret real evidence one way or the other then you need to look at the relevant statistics on R&D expenditure, and patent applications (both of which show the US way out in front on basic research, and product development).
Another factor is the difference in markets. Japan has a very high proportion of early adopters, so new technologies tend to do far better in Japan, and have a much better chance of getting established there, than anywhere else. I don't know whether the same can be said for Europe. In any case, this is a matter of where technolgies first go to market, not a matter of where they get developed, or whether the initial research was done.
A third factor may just be the particular market you are looking at. Japanese companies dominate the consumer electronics market, so if you are looking at consumer electronics to judge the pace of technological development then of course Japan will appear to be leading. If you look at other technology markets then the picture looks quite different.
Thank you for illustrating my point. No doubt most juries would think exactly the way that you just did, even though it is wrong, and contrary to the law.
The police are supposed to be held accountable for the choices that they make, given the information available when they make those choices, not what happens after they make such choices. The fact that someone decides to throw his hands up a split second after the cop decides to pull the trigger does not make the cop "guilty of a misjudgement". What matters is where the guys hands were 3/4 of a second earlier when the cop decided to fire.
As I said in my original post, any still image would not show how things were when the cop decided to pull the trigger. It would only show how things were after he decided to pull the trigger.
(of 28,000 US gun deaths in 2000, a whopping 12,000 of them were accidental deaths among children 19 and younger; see source [cdc.gov])
Just in case anyone was wondering these figures are BS. His link does not take you to any CDC figures. Actual CDC figures for year 1998 show 158 accidental deaths amongst children aged 17 and under, so it is totally implausible that the year 2000 figure for under 20's would be around 80(!) times higher.
Take a look here some actual figures (from an anti-gun source):
More likely he is quoting total firearm related deaths for under 20's (not just accidental). Considering that ages 15-25 are the peak years for both murder and suicide, 12,000 is no big surprise.
I like that idea too, although I think that still images could be seriously misleading. It takes about 3/4 of a second for a person to see something and then act. A lot can change in that much time. Any photo taken at the moment when the gun fires would not show exactly what the cop saw before he decided to pull the trigger.
Suppose for example that the "perp" throws his hands up just as the cop fires. The gun would give us a nice picture of the cop shooting a guy with his hands in the air. Good luck to any cop who has to try to explain a photo like that to a jury.
A lot of NRA types would reject technology like this out of hand. I would not, but I do have a few problems with it.
Keeping guns out of criminal hands - long term.
This gun will not do it, and I doubt if any feasible security system could. No matter how well designed, unless it actually wrecks the gun when tampered with, any security system could potentially be by-passed. I doubt if it would take criminals long to figure out how to do it.
Keeping guns out of criminal hands - short term.
If the only aim is to prevent a criminal from pulling a cop's gun and shooting him, or using a home-owner's gun against the home-owner, then a system like this might work, but is really over-kill. The electronic firing mechanism is designed for long-term security. A mostly mechanical firing mechanism with regular amunition would be just as good for short term security, without the problems asociated with special amunition.
Reliability.
A lot of gun owners, and cops, would be concerned about reliability. Personally I think this is an issue that could be over-come. If such a fire-arm could pass the sort of reliability tests used by most police departments then it would be fine with me. What I would object to is legislation that foisted such fire-arms on the public before they had passed such tests. Ideally the police and/or military should be required to use the same technology if it is forced upon private gun owners.
Hardening
As long as such firearms are sensitive to EMP effects, or any other method by which the state could easily disable them, I think that any law which mandated them would be unconstitutional. If the 2nd Amendment protects anything at all it is the right to keep and bear arms that could be used effectively against the state.
Again this is a problem that could be over-come. Military hardware is hardened against EMP effects. In principle there is no reason why a un like this could not be hardened as well.
Price
Technologies like this push the price of firearms beyond what the average citizen can reasonably afford. US society already suffers from an unhealthy prevalence of inequality. Any law that reserved firearms for the wealthy would make things considerably worse.
Innocent people do not, and will not, have a chance in Iraq until Saddam is driven out of power.
No illegal war to impose another murderous dictator.
No disagreement here. Iraq has already violated the 1991 ceasefire agreement, as the UN security council stated unanimously in resolution 1441, so there is no possibility of the unpcomming war with Iraq being illegal. Fortunately the war aims of the US and its allies do not include imposing a dictator either.
That's how capitalism works. When it's cheaper to have guys in a cheaper area doing the work (i.e. PROGRAMMERS IN INDIA), then the jobs will move there.
Yes, it is how capitalism works. Resources tend to get allocated in the most efficient manner possible. The flip side of jobs moving to where the cheap labour is, is of course the provision of goods at lower prices. Over all workers might get paid less, but over all the cost of living will also decline. Whether workers in the US wind up somewhat better off as a result, or somewhat worse off, depends on a whole host of factors, and is generally hard to predict. In general the standard of living in the US is still high, the unemployement rate is still low, and this process has been going on since some time in 50's, so there does not seem to be anything to panic about.
Of course it is true that the unemployment rate has increased recently, but this has much more to do with the dot.com bubble, 9/11, war, and a bunch of other effects. Even with all of these effects the unemployment rate has not been terribly high by historical standards.
Asside from the effects of job movement that are local to the US, we should also consider the global effects. This is just one of the ways in which capitalism is working to produce a more egalitarian world (i.e. a world of greater economic equality). It is the movement of capital, jobs, and the more efficient production of goods, that is raising living standards all over the world.
Potectionists who want to keep the US wealthy by keeping the rest of the world poor are reprehensible, and when they cloak their arguments in the language of social justice they are dishonest as well.
Good point. We have a "war on drugs", not a "war on the drug trade". In this case we need a "war on closed source" not a "war on piracy". If these scum bags didn't keep producing proprietary code, we wouldn't have to worry about our kids using it.
People will acess the web by standing in front of really large flat screens and waving their arms around. The NIH will mandate the use of browsers that require the user to know Tai Chi as part of a campaign against obessity.
When chosing between the two: time being infinite or God being infinite, I'd chose God any day.
You might have heard of a principle called Ockam's Razor. His orginal principle was that we should not multiply metaphysical entities, but the modern version is that we should prefer simple explanations over complex explanations, if they do the same explanatory work.
While the principle sounds straight forward enough, it can be hard to say exactly which of two explanations is most simple. Now it seems to me that you prefer the God explanation because it seems simple to you, or at least easier to comprehend, but if you really think about the explanation it is really quite hard to comprehend. Even leaving asside all the traditional puzzles about the existence of God (divine foreknowledge, the problem of evil, and so on) we still have to wonder how something could come to exist that knows everything, can do anything, and which is morally perfect, and which is infinite in every other respect. Such a thing is far more complex than anything ever suggested in scientific theories.
But that's not the only reason why I believe in God...the whole history of mankind serves as a testimony as to why I believe in God.
I tend to think the opposite. I would hate to think that so much evil had taken place while a god stood by and watched. Better to think that he was never there.
If I may ask, are you a professional biologist? Meaning, is that what your college degree is in and what you do on a daily basis?
I started out in physics and computer science, but I now do political philosophy.
Slashdot Mirror
No doubt others will take up some of the points here. I just want to correct a couple of inaccuracies.
Hitler was elected by a majority...
Hitler received about 36% of the popular vote. As far as we know he never had the support of the majority of Germans. His campaign of genocide began after democracy had been abolished.
and no one had a problem with his attempted genocide
Except all the political opponents that he also killed.
Slavery was considered ok by a majority people in the US for a very long time, and those who even thought about protesting or abolishing slavery, like Lincoln, were killed.
It is worth pointing out that Lincoln was elected president before he was killed. The abolition of slavery in the US is an example of democracy working.
Intellectually our nation is more based on French thinkers than British.
Not even close to being true. American revolutionaries were primarily influenced by English Republicans like John Locke. Keep in mind that the French revolution followed the American Revolution. The English had already had two revolutions by that time, and many of those involved had moved to America (the so called regicides who executed the King of England actually sought and received refuge in America).
Look at Russia or Ukraine and other former republics...
Look at Japan and Western Europe. The problems in Eastern Europe are not hang-overs from WWII, or any other war (except perhaps in the balkans). They are the result of decades of communism.
Does the US know how to feed 23 million people in time?
Actually what often goes unnoticed with all the attention paid to gee-whiz smart weapons is the real strength of the US military - logistics. There is no other organization on the face of the Earth that is better able to organize and move men and material. The US managed to feed Berlin under much more difficult conditions.
This new 'democracy' will kill even more once there is no dictator there, who is tough enough to kill those opposing to him...
As they have in Afghanistan the US will either buy-out or kill any opposition to the new democratic government in Iraq.
You'll quash the problems in Iraq and piss off some group in Syria or Indonesia, etc. who will take their place.
I think that depends entirely on what the Bush administration does after the war. There are some very odd divisions in the current administration. The State department is internationalist, generally opposed to military action, and opposed to democratization. The Defense department is unilateralist, generally in favor of military action, and very much in favor of democratization. Where things go from here depends on which combination of policies wins out.
The total failure of the State department's internationalist approach might mean more unilateralism to come. The worst possible outcome would be for Rumsfeld to get his unilateral(ish) wars, and for the State department to get to keep its dictators. Then the US really will be isolated. On the other hand if the hawks also get their democratization then things might work out quite well. The US will not stand alone for long if it seriously takes up the task of spreading democracy.
Have you lived through a war or through post-war times? My grandparents lived through the second world war and together with my parents through the post-war times in the former USSR.
So you think that the experiences that other people had 50 years ago make you an expert on such matters? I actually enjoy pointing out the obvious so here it is - the US is not destroying infra-structure, they are not population bombing, and this is not Stalin's Russia that we are talking about.
Food and humanitarian aid is already heading into the parts of Iraq that are controlled by the US. Did humanitarian disasters ensue in Afgahnistan, Kosovo, Haiti, Panama, or Grenada? Those invasions have a lot of similarities with the current invasion of Iraq. By contrast the post-war situation in the USSR could not be more different.
I guess this means that once we beat up Iraq, we'll invade North Korea. Iran and Cuba aren't far behind.
Cuba. Some conservatives would like to invade Cuba (not to mention a whole lot of Cubans), and some are even talking about bio-weapons programs there, but there is no chance that an invasion will happen or even be seriously discussed. In fact nothing at all will happen with Cuba. The Cubans will lie low and the US will ignore them.
Iran. This will be the next big story, but an invasion will not be necessary. By the time the US takes up the problem of ending the Iranian nuclear weapons program the US will have strategiclly encircled Iran. Iran is already on the knife-edge of revolution. There is no way that they will risk US intervention, so a diplomatic solution will be found.
North Korea. Who knows. Probably the US will convince the Chinese that the US is serious about using military action, and the Chinese will whip the N. Koreans back into line. This action in Iraq will certainly make a diplomatic solution much easier.
You can't impose American free market orthodoxy on a country in this stage of development (look at all the discussions on patents and trade abuse).
Iraq has a reasonably well educated population, and a ready source of income. Re-organising the economy is not going to be a serious problem. A more serious problem is the question of how to reconcile religious and ethnic factionalism with democratic government. Dealing with this problem will be difficult, but even here Iraq is probably a good test case to see whether democracy can work in the middle east. A large part of the country is already democratic (the Kurdish north), and everyone is tired of war. People often forget that religious toleration in the west was not born of some sort of intellectual revolution. It was born of exhaustion from a century or more of religious wars. Right now I think the Iraqi's are probably exhausted enough to think seriously about playing nicely with eachother.
Afghanistan is now perilously close to the position it was in that led to the taliban takeover - warlords and chaos.
Same warlords, less chaos. There is no comparison with pre-invasion circumstances. There is no civil war (as there was before the invasion) and the number of people being killed in any ongoing strife is now down to a few here and there, as opposed to the thousands here and there that we saw before the invasion.
In one sense this is right. The idea is to over-run/confuse/and discourage the enemy to such an extent that they are unable to organise a response (as Akasani points out above this is a strategem that is almost as old as war itself). In another sense you are wrong. Blitzkreig was just one theory about how to put this idea into practice, with WWII era weapons. It was an idea that was developed by the British, even if it was first practiced by the Germans. The current "shock and awe" campaign is a novel approach to achieving the same goals, with modern weapon systems. Some parts are the same (rapid armor advance), some parts are quite new. It includes an aspect that you might think of as comming from WWII island hoping - they are simply by-passing points of resistence - cutting them off both geographically and in terms of communication. In addition to the previous practice of attacking c3 targets there is a concerted effort to target the political structure (as distinct from the military command structure). Finally there is an entirely new approach to the use of air power and targeting. The previous approach was to maximise destruction of the means of waging war. The new approach is minimise destruction while maximising loss of function.
Probably because of all the tree-hugger's who burst into tears every time a drop of oil is spilled on the ground.
The only reason Eastern Europe countries "voiced their support" for the US is to improve their chances to get in NATO.
The *most* vocal supporters of the US (Poland and the CR are already in NATO. Get a clue.
Actually the real reason is most likely that they took a look at their own security concerns and made an educated guess that in the long run the US was more likely to back them up in the future, than any European power.
If you check the public opinion then there is only one country in the world where >50% of the population is for the war and it's the US.
Actually there are at least three countries where public opinion is 50%+ in favor of the war - US, UK, and Iraq. Of course Iraqi public opinion is the most diffcult to assess, but it is also the least divided. Support for the war runs extremely high among ex-pat Iraqi's, those in Northern Iraq who can speak freely, and even in the rest of Iraq journalists have been saying for days that Iraqi's have started to speak out candidly in favor of the war.
So it looks like everyone who is actually involved in the war is in favor of it. Why are you opposed?
The USSR brand of authoritian communism defeated itself, it was not defeated by the US...
Maybe you should point that out to all the countries in Eastern Europe who came out early and voiced their support for the US even though France threatened to keep several of them out of the EU in retaliation.
About 2500 civillians were killed in the First Gulf War. Both the US and Iraqi governments agree on figures close to that (2,248 according to the government of Iraq). Many more died from disease or malnutrition after the war. A higher number of civillian deaths is expected in the Second Gulf War because there is likely to be more urban combat, but on the other hand the number of deaths that follow the war is likely to be far lower.
You can get estimates of death tolls for various wars, and other man-made disaters here:
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstatx.htm
1. US companies who give contracts to India/China/whatever for SW/HW/HDL
development must pay custom fees as automotive industry pays for every car imported. Nowdays IP is a product.
Trade in IP is largely one-way. The US produces it. Everyone else buys it. The out-sourcing of IT jobs, and the importing of foreign workers is just a tiny trickle in the other direction. What this means is that the US will start imposing tarrifs on IP shortly after hell freezes over.
All new technologies seem to originate in Japan, appear simultanously or shortly thereafter in Europe, and then after up to a decade finally make it to the US. And why do a lot of people in the US seem to think we are the vanguard of scientific research and development.
Several factors are at work.
One is just the effect of anecdotal evidence. If you already suspect that technology is moving faster in other places then you will notice stories that confirm your belief, and discount stories that dis-confirm your belief. If you want to gret real evidence one way or the other then you need to look at the relevant statistics on R&D expenditure, and patent applications (both of which show the US way out in front on basic research, and product development).
Another factor is the difference in markets. Japan has a very high proportion of early adopters, so new technologies tend to do far better in Japan, and have a much better chance of getting established there, than anywhere else. I don't know whether the same can be said for Europe. In any case, this is a matter of where technolgies first go to market, not a matter of where they get developed, or whether the initial research was done.
A third factor may just be the particular market you are looking at. Japanese companies dominate the consumer electronics market, so if you are looking at consumer electronics to judge the pace of technological development then of course Japan will appear to be leading. If you look at other technology markets then the picture looks quite different.
Thank you for illustrating my point. No doubt most juries would think exactly the way that you just did, even though it is wrong, and contrary to the law.
The police are supposed to be held accountable for the choices that they make, given the information available when they make those choices, not what happens after they make such choices. The fact that someone decides to throw his hands up a split second after the cop decides to pull the trigger does not make the cop "guilty of a misjudgement". What matters is where the guys hands were 3/4 of a second earlier when the cop decided to fire.
As I said in my original post, any still image would not show how things were when the cop decided to pull the trigger. It would only show how things were after he decided to pull the trigger.
Actually taking a look at the figures, even 12,000 total deaths is implausible. It looks like he included injuries as well.
(of 28,000 US gun deaths in 2000, a whopping 12,000 of them were accidental deaths among children 19 and younger; see source [cdc.gov])
w .h tm?doc_id=116926
Just in case anyone was wondering these figures are BS. His link does not take you to any CDC figures. Actual CDC figures for year 1998 show 158 accidental deaths amongst children aged 17 and under, so it is totally implausible that the year 2000 figure for under 20's would be around 80(!) times higher.
Take a look here some actual figures (from an anti-gun source):
http://www.futureofchildren.org/faq2864/faq_sho
More likely he is quoting total firearm related deaths for under 20's (not just accidental). Considering that ages 15-25 are the peak years for both murder and suicide, 12,000 is no big surprise.
I like that idea too, although I think that still images could be seriously misleading. It takes about 3/4 of a second for a person to see something and then act. A lot can change in that much time. Any photo taken at the moment when the gun fires would not show exactly what the cop saw before he decided to pull the trigger.
Suppose for example that the "perp" throws his hands up just as the cop fires. The gun would give us a nice picture of the cop shooting a guy with his hands in the air. Good luck to any cop who has to try to explain a photo like that to a jury.
A lot of NRA types would reject technology like this out of hand. I would not, but I do have a few problems with it.
Keeping guns out of criminal hands - long term.
This gun will not do it, and I doubt if any feasible security system could. No matter how well designed, unless it actually wrecks the gun when tampered with, any security system could potentially be by-passed. I doubt if it would take criminals long to figure out how to do it.
Keeping guns out of criminal hands - short term.
If the only aim is to prevent a criminal from pulling a cop's gun and shooting him, or using a home-owner's gun against the home-owner, then a system like this might work, but is really over-kill. The electronic firing mechanism is designed for long-term security. A mostly mechanical firing mechanism with regular amunition would be just as good for short term security, without the problems asociated with special amunition.
Reliability.
A lot of gun owners, and cops, would be concerned about reliability. Personally I think this is an issue that could be over-come. If such a fire-arm could pass the sort of reliability tests used by most police departments then it would be fine with me. What I would object to is legislation that foisted such fire-arms on the public before they had passed such tests. Ideally the police and/or military should be required to use the same technology if it is forced upon private gun owners.
Hardening
As long as such firearms are sensitive to EMP effects, or any other method by which the state could easily disable them, I think that any law which mandated them would be unconstitutional. If the 2nd Amendment protects anything at all it is the right to keep and bear arms that could be used effectively against the state.
Again this is a problem that could be over-come. Military hardware is hardened against EMP effects. In principle there is no reason why a un like this could not be hardened as well.
Price
Technologies like this push the price of firearms beyond what the average citizen can reasonably afford. US society already suffers from an unhealthy prevalence of inequality. Any law that reserved firearms for the wealthy would make things considerably worse.
Give innocent people a chance.
Innocent people do not, and will not, have a chance in Iraq until Saddam is driven out of power.
No illegal war to impose another murderous dictator.
No disagreement here. Iraq has already violated the 1991 ceasefire agreement, as the UN security council stated unanimously in resolution 1441, so there is no possibility of the unpcomming war with Iraq being illegal. Fortunately the war aims of the US and its allies do not include imposing a dictator either.
That's how capitalism works. When it's cheaper to have guys in a cheaper area doing the work (i.e. PROGRAMMERS IN INDIA), then the jobs will move there.
Yes, it is how capitalism works. Resources tend to get allocated in the most efficient manner possible. The flip side of jobs moving to where the cheap labour is, is of course the provision of goods at lower prices. Over all workers might get paid less, but over all the cost of living will also decline. Whether workers in the US wind up somewhat better off as a result, or somewhat worse off, depends on a whole host of factors, and is generally hard to predict. In general the standard of living in the US is still high, the unemployement rate is still low, and this process has been going on since some time in 50's, so there does not seem to be anything to panic about.
Of course it is true that the unemployment rate has increased recently, but this has much more to do with the dot.com bubble, 9/11, war, and a bunch of other effects. Even with all of these effects the unemployment rate has not been terribly high by historical standards.
Asside from the effects of job movement that are local to the US, we should also consider the global effects. This is just one of the ways in which capitalism is working to produce a more egalitarian world (i.e. a world of greater economic equality). It is the movement of capital, jobs, and the more efficient production of goods, that is raising living standards all over the world.
Potectionists who want to keep the US wealthy by keeping the rest of the world poor are reprehensible, and when they cloak their arguments in the language of social justice they are dishonest as well.
Good point. We have a "war on drugs", not a "war on the drug trade". In this case we need a "war on closed source" not a "war on piracy". If these scum bags didn't keep producing proprietary code, we wouldn't have to worry about our kids using it.
People will acess the web by standing in front of really large flat screens and waving their arms around. The NIH will mandate the use of browsers that require the user to know Tai Chi as part of a campaign against obessity.
When chosing between the two: time being infinite or God being infinite, I'd chose God any day.
You might have heard of a principle called Ockam's Razor. His orginal principle was that we should not multiply metaphysical entities, but the modern version is that we should prefer simple explanations over complex explanations, if they do the same explanatory work.
While the principle sounds straight forward enough, it can be hard to say exactly which of two explanations is most simple. Now it seems to me that you prefer the God explanation because it seems simple to you, or at least easier to comprehend, but if you really think about the explanation it is really quite hard to comprehend. Even leaving asside all the traditional puzzles about the existence of God (divine foreknowledge, the problem of evil, and so on) we still have to wonder how something could come to exist that knows everything, can do anything, and which is morally perfect, and which is infinite in every other respect. Such a thing is far more complex than anything ever suggested in scientific theories.
But that's not the only reason why I believe in God...the whole history of mankind serves as a testimony as to why I believe in God.
I tend to think the opposite. I would hate to think that so much evil had taken place while a god stood by and watched. Better to think that he was never there.
If I may ask, are you a professional biologist? Meaning, is that what your college degree is in and what you do on a daily basis?
I started out in physics and computer science, but I now do political philosophy.