If your gun is a tool, so is my atomic bomb. I plan to use it to cook my pizza. I hope you don't mind if I accidentally vapourize you in the process.
You can argue anything is a tool. It's easy. The question isn't whether or not something may have a legitimate, legal use. Instead, it's whether or not it is too dangerous to allow the potential for misuse.
Cars, trucks, etc. can be very dangerous, that's why they're registered and licensed. Cars and trucks are also very important for commerce, etc. I personally would like to see far fewer cars and trucks, but at the moment our economy depends on them, so that outweighs the potential danger.
Guns are on the same level of dangerousness, but serve no other useful purpose. Sure, it's true that someone could go on a rampage with their car and kill lots of people -- but when was the last time that happened? When people go on a murderous rampage, they tend to use guns.
By outlawing guns, you don't necessarily eliminate the problem, but you sure will reduce it, and at almost no cost to the general population.
Can we get rid of cars without ruining the economy, or trucks? No. Can we get rid of automatic weapons? Yes. I think drunk driving should be taken much more seriously. I'm sure you can find lots of ways to kill people. I just don't think it should be made easy.
Odd that someone with a.co.uk address would talk about the 2nd amendment. In any case, the 2nd amenment doesn't say: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear the tools necessary to commit a massacre, shall not be infringed."
The US one talks about "Arms", which at the time was flintlock muskets. If you want those, that's fine with me. I see nothing in that text about overthrowing a corrupt government. It talks about the "security of a free State", which seems to indicate it's about protection against outside forces.
These days, if you want to overthrow the US government it will take more than a machine gun. You'll also need fighter jets, cluster bombs, tanks, helicopters... If you think it's your right to own those... well tell me where you live so I can move far, far away.
Anyhow, I'm not at all surprised by the fact that criminals use illegal weapons. But what you've got to consider is that if nobody could ever own a certain weapon legally, it would be a lot harder for a criminal to obtain one. If I can buy a "Mark 9 Tyrant Killer Extreme" if I fill out a few forms, the guy at the gun store can have one sitting on his wall. It's an easy matter to slip me one if I don't have all the paperwork in place. On the other hand, if those guns are simply illegal, it is much harder to get one. Here's a better statistic to find: what fraction of crimes are committed using weapons that are completely illegal in every state (as in, not just modified versions of legal weapons).
Yes, a guy who kills a 7-Eleven clerk in a robbery is less bad than Pinochet. Pinochet killed thousands, that is thousands of times worse than killing 1. Would "September 11th" have been just as bad if only 1 person had died? Find me one person on the planet who thinks that the number of people who died didn't matter. But, let's put that disagreement aside.
My point was more about limiting the damage one nutcase can do. Murder has existed for centuries, it isn't going away, but who wants to make mass murder easy? If the most deadly weapon someone could legally possess was a musket or a sword, a nutcase on a rampage would be lucky to kill 10 people. If we make miniguns legal, what's to stop this nutcase from killing hundreds?
So what you're saying is that 1 death and 15 deaths are equally bad, and that an atomic bomb should be seen as simply an overzealous way to cook a pizza?
The argument that golf clubs and automatic weapons are equivalent because both could potentially be used to kill somebody is ridiculous. One is obviously more dangerous than the other one. That's like claiming that an atomic bomb and an oven are equivalent because both can cook a pizza.
There seems to be a general consensus that people shouldn't be allowed to own something that makes it easy for them to kill more than n people in a row. Right now, n is generally agreed to be about 1, although the difficulty in killing that 1 person is pretty low.
I don't want my neighbors owning atomic bombs, land mines, chlorine gas cannisters or guns. The ability to kill people with them is just too high. On the other hand, I don't mind if my neighbor owns a sword, which has never had any functional purpose other than killing and maiming other people. The difference is that if my neighbor goes nuts, I have some small hope of escaping from a crazy neighbor chasing after me with a sword. Bullets are a lot harder to escape.
I agree that the blame primarily rests on the shoulders of the person doing the killing, but I think it's stupid to make it easy for him/her to kill so many people. We have laws to prevent people from doing stupid things: running red lights, walking on a busy highway, etc. Why should we not have laws preventing someone from getting the tool necessary to commit a massacre? Is there some legitimate reason that someone would need a fully-automatic weapon with a 50 round clip?
Yeah, but there's a difference. Say I make a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm hunk of steel and call it "your pet blockhead" and try to sell it as the pet rock of the year 2003. If someone takes that and uses it to kill someone, I can't really be blamed for that, unless somehow they can show that I knew that would be its use, and I did nothing to try to stop it. Even if it becomes the weapon of choice in gang fights, if I didn't design or market it for that purpose, I'm probably safe.
On the other hand, if say I create a sword that hides inside a cane and market it as "the Lady Killer", saying "this product is perfect for killing women, its patented design makes it easy to slip the blade between a woman's 4th and 5th vertebra, and its fingerproof handle makes sure the police won't catch you!" It would be pretty hard to argue that I should be completely in the clear.
Guns are meant to kill or injure animals and people, and some seem to be marketed especially for people to hurt other people. I've even seen some ads that seem to be trying to appeal to the guns being used for nefarious purposes.
The other thing to consider is how much harm something can do. I'm sure there are laws against buying or selling sticks of dynamite except in special cases. Why aren't people protesting this? Couldn't you use a stick of dynamite for legitimate uses like breaking a boulder on your property?
There are some things that are too dangerous to sell except in exceptional cases. Many people feel that certain types of gun (or even all guns) should fall in that category. Even if 99.999% of people use them responsibly, if 1 person uses a gun to shoot up a school, a factory, a convenience store or something that's too many. Even if you want to make sure that hunting stays legal, is it so unreasonable to make sure that it is hard to make the gun automatic, that the clip has fewer than 8 rounds in it?
So you don't mind supporting a sports syndicate like the NFL but you won't support the RIAA?
If you use your 15-year-old nikon to take pictures you want in physical form, you're probably right that it's better than almost every digital camera on the market. If, like most Slashdot readers, you want a lot of those pictures in pixel form, then that's another matter.
Sure, once you go to the store, get the prints made, and scan them in, one by one (making sure to align them perfectly) you might get better quality digital images than a digital camera. On the other hand, for many geeks, it's easier to use a digital camera to get them digital in the first place.
My mom's 20 year old stove makes better food than her microwave, but that doesn't mean the microwave goes unused.
See http://fc.meca.edu/~jvelgos/proposal.html. I noticed this when I saw that the link for one of their projects went to
a meca.edu site. But, rather than discourage me because it is not a big, professional business, this makes me really want to support cool design like this coming out of art schools. Man, I wish I'd had this much fun in university.
And it is to stop people like you that the justice system exists. What's your evidence that Saddam ordered that his people be gassed? "The TV told me so"? It shouldn't be hard to prove that Saddam is guilty of numerous nasty things, but this is a time when crossing every 't' and dotting every 'i' counts.
They don't realize that when they send me an e-greeting, or use a website to "mail this page to a friend", they're releasing the email address I wanted them not to share. I had no spam on my "friends and family" email address for years, but now I get at least 10 a day (and that's the number that makes it by spamassassin).
Two points: One, it's pretty clear from the memos that it doesn't take an "uber-hacker" to skew the election, it simply takes someone with the skill to manipulate an Access database. That's not a very select group. Two, unless your election officials know about the Diebold problems, maybe you should be worried about the results. It could easily be that they're simply saying "Well, the machine said everybody voted for the Nazi party member, hrm... well it is a computer, and computers don't make mistakes, I guess I better practice my German!" Just because you're not worried, doesn't mean they're not doing it.
Yeah, and we all know that standing on a street corner giving away a magazine you bought is illegal. Once you're done with something you buy, you can only save it or destroy it, it is illegal and immoral to let someone else use it.
Hell, MOST thieves who break into cars/houses aren't really going to actually buy any of the stuff they steal either. That's why their [sic] STEALING it.
And when someone steals your (physical) stuff, are you upset because you no longer have it, or because they *also* have it? When copying something (be it digital or even analog) the person with the original is not deprived of it, the only difference is that someone else now has a copy.
Fundamentally if you don't want to pay the cost of something, you have absolutely zero right to enjoy it.
Ok, you're only allowed to enjoy things you buy? You can't enjoy the sky, or the crisp wind, or the smell of a bakery as you walk by?
I have a right to enjoy anything I want, whether I buy it or not. For one, I enjoy making fun of dumbasses like you, and I never paid a cent for that privilege. Does that mean I have a legal right to share copyrighted songs, movies or software that aren't mine? Probably not, but that's another issue entirely.
The Tyndall effect or Raleigh scattering shows that small particles scatter higher frequency (blue) light more than lower frequency (red) light. Both "pass through" air just fine because they're not absorbed, but the lower-frequency light is scattered less easily. At sunrise/sunset, there is much more air (and also more dust) for the sun to go through, so more light is scattered, so more of the red light is scattered, so the sky appears redder.
As for why light is scattered from a (fricken) laser: because there are *lots* of photons there. Green light will scatter more easily than red, but it also has to do with the amount of light they're shining up. Think of a spotlight shining up into the sky. You don't see the light from the spotlight directly, you see it bouncing off things in the atmosphere. Same deal with a laser.
There is nothing special about a laser as compared to a flashlight in how easy it is to see the beam. In a non-dusty environment, you won't see a flashlight beam either. In a dusty environment, you might see a flashlight beam more easily, because it is a wider beam, but you might see the laser beam more easily, because any dust particles will be lit more brightly by the more concentrated beam. The only way in which the in-phase and parallel aspects of the laser contribute to how easy it is to see the beam is that they make the beam narrower.
I've heard that Gates coded stuff at some point. I have trouble believing it. I wish someone had saved the source for that so we could see how badly Billy wrote Basic.
Look, if you're worried about the privacy of implanted RFID tags, *don't get one*! If you're worried about the privacy of credit cards, *don't get one*!
Cash has been around for a couple of millennia, and it doesn't look like it will disappear anytime soon. Sure, there will always be a tradeoff between ease of use and anonymity/privacy.
Until the government starts forcing people to use insecure forms of identification or authentification, why worry? Sure, you can complain when WalMart starts using RFID on consumer products if it's done in an insecure way. You can also vote with your dollars, because I'm sure there will be other stores that won't (at least at first) use RFID-tagged consumer goods.
Gifted programmers? Bah! I've seen the source of the worms. It's not very impressive. When one of them hit back in... 2000 or so, a bunch of my co-workers gathered around to figure the thing out. It was really simple and even though none of us really knew VB script we saw exactly what it was doing in minutes, and then spent a few minutes gleefully thinking of all the improvements we could make to the program to actually make it effective. Then, we went right back to work.
I have yet to see a modern worm/virus/whatever that had any real technical sophistication at all. The fact that there hasn't been a really, uber-nasty worm in the news yet is either because:
The average person who knows enough to write one is smart enough and ethical enough not to.
There aren't many people who are skilled enough to write one.
The really good worms are sneaky enough that they either haven't been found, or have been so well-targeted that the companies or individuals affected don't want to admit it in public.
Well aren't we the great white bossman! I don't think the implication was that a good Engineer would have sneakily installed something other than Windows despite being told otherwise. I don't think anybody is advocating that. I think what the parent poster was implying was that a competent, non-sheep Engineer would have vocally spoken up against the idea of using Windows-based ATMs. The fact that such a huge technical mistake was allowed to happen says that the Engineers are sheep.
Re:Best Management Book ever written?
on
In Search of Stupidity
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Ah, but it also says that leaders should be feared but *respected*. Machiavelli strongly recommends against being hated. He says that's the worst thing that can happen to a leader. Are you sure you've read it?
And what could be more "Machiavellian" than putting pretenses of being nice to your employees to keep them from doing mass walkouts?
And if you had read The Art of War you would see why it is so appropriate. Sun Tzu advocates avoiding war if at all possible. His book isn't about "defeating and humiliting your enemy" and he even recommends against "totally obliterating everyone but yourself on the battlefield". I'm pretty sure he says that you always need to leave your enemy a path of retreat, because nothing is more dangerous than an enemy with its back to the wall.
Remember, don't judge a book by its cover (or its title).
That is, unless you're one of those case modders who doesn't have a metal enclosure for your computer. In that case you're probably not only emitting all kinds of funky EM radiation from your computer components, but you're also not protected against EMPs.
Slashdot Mirror
If your gun is a tool, so is my atomic bomb. I plan to use it to cook my pizza. I hope you don't mind if I accidentally vapourize you in the process.
You can argue anything is a tool. It's easy. The question isn't whether or not something may have a legitimate, legal use. Instead, it's whether or not it is too dangerous to allow the potential for misuse.
Cars, trucks, etc. can be very dangerous, that's why they're registered and licensed. Cars and trucks are also very important for commerce, etc. I personally would like to see far fewer cars and trucks, but at the moment our economy depends on them, so that outweighs the potential danger.
Guns are on the same level of dangerousness, but serve no other useful purpose. Sure, it's true that someone could go on a rampage with their car and kill lots of people -- but when was the last time that happened? When people go on a murderous rampage, they tend to use guns.
By outlawing guns, you don't necessarily eliminate the problem, but you sure will reduce it, and at almost no cost to the general population.
Can we get rid of cars without ruining the economy, or trucks? No. Can we get rid of automatic weapons? Yes. I think drunk driving should be taken much more seriously. I'm sure you can find lots of ways to kill people. I just don't think it should be made easy.
Well I'm pro nunchaku, anti-gun then. ;)
Odd that someone with a .co.uk address would talk about the 2nd amendment. In any case, the 2nd amenment doesn't say: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear the tools necessary to commit a massacre, shall not be infringed."
The US one talks about "Arms", which at the time was flintlock muskets. If you want those, that's fine with me. I see nothing in that text about overthrowing a corrupt government. It talks about the "security of a free State", which seems to indicate it's about protection against outside forces.
These days, if you want to overthrow the US government it will take more than a machine gun. You'll also need fighter jets, cluster bombs, tanks, helicopters... If you think it's your right to own those... well tell me where you live so I can move far, far away.
Anyhow, I'm not at all surprised by the fact that criminals use illegal weapons. But what you've got to consider is that if nobody could ever own a certain weapon legally, it would be a lot harder for a criminal to obtain one. If I can buy a "Mark 9 Tyrant Killer Extreme" if I fill out a few forms, the guy at the gun store can have one sitting on his wall. It's an easy matter to slip me one if I don't have all the paperwork in place. On the other hand, if those guns are simply illegal, it is much harder to get one. Here's a better statistic to find: what fraction of crimes are committed using weapons that are completely illegal in every state (as in, not just modified versions of legal weapons).
Yes, a guy who kills a 7-Eleven clerk in a robbery is less bad than Pinochet. Pinochet killed thousands, that is thousands of times worse than killing 1. Would "September 11th" have been just as bad if only 1 person had died? Find me one person on the planet who thinks that the number of people who died didn't matter. But, let's put that disagreement aside.
My point was more about limiting the damage one nutcase can do. Murder has existed for centuries, it isn't going away, but who wants to make mass murder easy? If the most deadly weapon someone could legally possess was a musket or a sword, a nutcase on a rampage would be lucky to kill 10 people. If we make miniguns legal, what's to stop this nutcase from killing hundreds?
So what you're saying is that 1 death and 15 deaths are equally bad, and that an atomic bomb should be seen as simply an overzealous way to cook a pizza?
The argument that golf clubs and automatic weapons are equivalent because both could potentially be used to kill somebody is ridiculous. One is obviously more dangerous than the other one. That's like claiming that an atomic bomb and an oven are equivalent because both can cook a pizza.
There seems to be a general consensus that people shouldn't be allowed to own something that makes it easy for them to kill more than n people in a row. Right now, n is generally agreed to be about 1, although the difficulty in killing that 1 person is pretty low.
I don't want my neighbors owning atomic bombs, land mines, chlorine gas cannisters or guns. The ability to kill people with them is just too high. On the other hand, I don't mind if my neighbor owns a sword, which has never had any functional purpose other than killing and maiming other people. The difference is that if my neighbor goes nuts, I have some small hope of escaping from a crazy neighbor chasing after me with a sword. Bullets are a lot harder to escape.
I agree that the blame primarily rests on the shoulders of the person doing the killing, but I think it's stupid to make it easy for him/her to kill so many people. We have laws to prevent people from doing stupid things: running red lights, walking on a busy highway, etc. Why should we not have laws preventing someone from getting the tool necessary to commit a massacre? Is there some legitimate reason that someone would need a fully-automatic weapon with a 50 round clip?
Yeah, but there's a difference. Say I make a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm hunk of steel and call it "your pet blockhead" and try to sell it as the pet rock of the year 2003. If someone takes that and uses it to kill someone, I can't really be blamed for that, unless somehow they can show that I knew that would be its use, and I did nothing to try to stop it. Even if it becomes the weapon of choice in gang fights, if I didn't design or market it for that purpose, I'm probably safe.
On the other hand, if say I create a sword that hides inside a cane and market it as "the Lady Killer", saying "this product is perfect for killing women, its patented design makes it easy to slip the blade between a woman's 4th and 5th vertebra, and its fingerproof handle makes sure the police won't catch you!" It would be pretty hard to argue that I should be completely in the clear.
Guns are meant to kill or injure animals and people, and some seem to be marketed especially for people to hurt other people. I've even seen some ads that seem to be trying to appeal to the guns being used for nefarious purposes.
The other thing to consider is how much harm something can do. I'm sure there are laws against buying or selling sticks of dynamite except in special cases. Why aren't people protesting this? Couldn't you use a stick of dynamite for legitimate uses like breaking a boulder on your property?
There are some things that are too dangerous to sell except in exceptional cases. Many people feel that certain types of gun (or even all guns) should fall in that category. Even if 99.999% of people use them responsibly, if 1 person uses a gun to shoot up a school, a factory, a convenience store or something that's too many. Even if you want to make sure that hunting stays legal, is it so unreasonable to make sure that it is hard to make the gun automatic, that the clip has fewer than 8 rounds in it?
So you don't mind supporting a sports syndicate like the NFL but you won't support the RIAA?
If you use your 15-year-old nikon to take pictures you want in physical form, you're probably right that it's better than almost every digital camera on the market. If, like most Slashdot readers, you want a lot of those pictures in pixel form, then that's another matter.
Sure, once you go to the store, get the prints made, and scan them in, one by one (making sure to align them perfectly) you might get better quality digital images than a digital camera. On the other hand, for many geeks, it's easier to use a digital camera to get them digital in the first place.
My mom's 20 year old stove makes better food than her microwave, but that doesn't mean the microwave goes unused.
See http://fc.meca.edu/~jvelgos/proposal.html. I noticed this when I saw that the link for one of their projects went to a meca.edu site. But, rather than discourage me because it is not a big, professional business, this makes me really want to support cool design like this coming out of art schools. Man, I wish I'd had this much fun in university.
And it is to stop people like you that the justice system exists. What's your evidence that Saddam ordered that his people be gassed? "The TV told me so"? It shouldn't be hard to prove that Saddam is guilty of numerous nasty things, but this is a time when crossing every 't' and dotting every 'i' counts.
Do you mean the judges who used to work for him, or the new ones that were "vetted" by the occupying army?
Patriot act.
...
DMCA
Only, my friends and family are dumb.
They don't realize that when they send me an e-greeting, or use a website to "mail this page to a friend", they're releasing the email address I wanted them not to share. I had no spam on my "friends and family" email address for years, but now I get at least 10 a day (and that's the number that makes it by spamassassin).
Oh well. *sigh*
What makes it funnier is that she is described (and shown) wearing a "What would Jesus do?" shirt. Apparently, Jesus would spam.
Two points: One, it's pretty clear from the memos that it doesn't take an "uber-hacker" to skew the election, it simply takes someone with the skill to manipulate an Access database. That's not a very select group. Two, unless your election officials know about the Diebold problems, maybe you should be worried about the results. It could easily be that they're simply saying "Well, the machine said everybody voted for the Nazi party member, hrm... well it is a computer, and computers don't make mistakes, I guess I better practice my German!" Just because you're not worried, doesn't mean they're not doing it.
Yeah, and we all know that standing on a street corner giving away a magazine you bought is illegal. Once you're done with something you buy, you can only save it or destroy it, it is illegal and immoral to let someone else use it.
Hell, MOST thieves who break into cars/houses aren't really going to actually buy any of the stuff they steal either. That's why their [sic] STEALING it.
And when someone steals your (physical) stuff, are you upset because you no longer have it, or because they *also* have it? When copying something (be it digital or even analog) the person with the original is not deprived of it, the only difference is that someone else now has a copy.
Fundamentally if you don't want to pay the cost of something, you have absolutely zero right to enjoy it.
Ok, you're only allowed to enjoy things you buy? You can't enjoy the sky, or the crisp wind, or the smell of a bakery as you walk by?
I have a right to enjoy anything I want, whether I buy it or not. For one, I enjoy making fun of dumbasses like you, and I never paid a cent for that privilege. Does that mean I have a legal right to share copyrighted songs, movies or software that aren't mine? Probably not, but that's another issue entirely.
Dude, get your facts straight.
The Tyndall effect or Raleigh scattering shows that small particles scatter higher frequency (blue) light more than lower frequency (red) light. Both "pass through" air just fine because they're not absorbed, but the lower-frequency light is scattered less easily. At sunrise/sunset, there is much more air (and also more dust) for the sun to go through, so more light is scattered, so more of the red light is scattered, so the sky appears redder.
As for why light is scattered from a (fricken) laser: because there are *lots* of photons there. Green light will scatter more easily than red, but it also has to do with the amount of light they're shining up. Think of a spotlight shining up into the sky. You don't see the light from the spotlight directly, you see it bouncing off things in the atmosphere. Same deal with a laser.
There is nothing special about a laser as compared to a flashlight in how easy it is to see the beam. In a non-dusty environment, you won't see a flashlight beam either. In a dusty environment, you might see a flashlight beam more easily, because it is a wider beam, but you might see the laser beam more easily, because any dust particles will be lit more brightly by the more concentrated beam. The only way in which the in-phase and parallel aspects of the laser contribute to how easy it is to see the beam is that they make the beam narrower.
I've heard that Gates coded stuff at some point. I have trouble believing it. I wish someone had saved the source for that so we could see how badly Billy wrote Basic.
Tinfoil armbands?
Look, if you're worried about the privacy of implanted RFID tags, *don't get one*! If you're worried about the privacy of credit cards, *don't get one*!
Cash has been around for a couple of millennia, and it doesn't look like it will disappear anytime soon. Sure, there will always be a tradeoff between ease of use and anonymity/privacy.
Until the government starts forcing people to use insecure forms of identification or authentification, why worry? Sure, you can complain when WalMart starts using RFID on consumer products if it's done in an insecure way. You can also vote with your dollars, because I'm sure there will be other stores that won't (at least at first) use RFID-tagged consumer goods.
Gifted programmers? Bah! I've seen the source of the worms. It's not very impressive. When one of them hit back in... 2000 or so, a bunch of my co-workers gathered around to figure the thing out. It was really simple and even though none of us really knew VB script we saw exactly what it was doing in minutes, and then spent a few minutes gleefully thinking of all the improvements we could make to the program to actually make it effective. Then, we went right back to work.
I have yet to see a modern worm/virus/whatever that had any real technical sophistication at all. The fact that there hasn't been a really, uber-nasty worm in the news yet is either because:
Well aren't we the great white bossman! I don't think the implication was that a good Engineer would have sneakily installed something other than Windows despite being told otherwise. I don't think anybody is advocating that. I think what the parent poster was implying was that a competent, non-sheep Engineer would have vocally spoken up against the idea of using Windows-based ATMs. The fact that such a huge technical mistake was allowed to happen says that the Engineers are sheep.
Ah, but it also says that leaders should be feared but *respected*. Machiavelli strongly recommends against being hated. He says that's the worst thing that can happen to a leader. Are you sure you've read it?
And what could be more "Machiavellian" than putting pretenses of being nice to your employees to keep them from doing mass walkouts?
And if you had read The Art of War you would see why it is so appropriate. Sun Tzu advocates avoiding war if at all possible. His book isn't about "defeating and humiliting your enemy" and he even recommends against "totally obliterating everyone but yourself on the battlefield". I'm pretty sure he says that you always need to leave your enemy a path of retreat, because nothing is more dangerous than an enemy with its back to the wall.
Remember, don't judge a book by its cover (or its title).
That is, unless you're one of those case modders who doesn't have a metal enclosure for your computer. In that case you're probably not only emitting all kinds of funky EM radiation from your computer components, but you're also not protected against EMPs.