Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there going to be some sort of legislature dictating that cell phone makers use a universal charging standard by this point? Everyone else has managed micro usb, why is it so hard for apple?
Apple signed a 2009 agreement with the EU intended to reduce iWaste by having all phones, and even the majority of portable devices in general, all use the same charging standard, via a microUSB connector.
Apple "satisfied" this pledge by offering a $20 dongle (aka "yet another piece of iWaste you have to carry around and will end up in the landfill when they come out with Lightning v1.1") that converts microUSB to Lightning.
But hey, Apple users have always had more dollars than sense, so whatever. I really shouldn't even care, since I already voted by sending my dollars to Samsung - But still - C'mon Apple, biggest in the world doesn't do it for you? You that hard up for an extra $20 from people who don't want one of your damned docks?
and yet somehow the inability to roll in the Lightning port to a product that was begun before Apple even acknowledged it exists is "doomed".
Why would they bother developing yet another USB charging hub? The entire point of this project centered around not needing to carry around 27 different dongles to all do effectively the same task at the same Li-ion-friendly voltage. Ironically enogh, we shouldn't even have a need for this, since Apple promised (and lied to) the EU to switch to a unified charging standard. Did they break the letter of the law? Apparently not. But does their latest proprietary CashGrab-enabled CopperInPlastic(tm) technology serve any purpose (to the end user) at all?
No. No, it does not. So yeah, Fuck Apple.
I wonder, what's to stop iPhone 5 users from plugging in a Lightning cable into one of the powered USB ports on this device? Nothing? So why the need to cancel it?
Just $20. Though I have no doubt, if they could make these things teleport nickels and dimes straight to Cupertino, they would have gone with that approach per-use instead.
What do you think about going after al-Qaeda bomb makers, instead of just the dupes whom they get to bury them by the roadside, or trigger them? And why do you think it?
That kinda depends on who you mean by "bomb makers".
If you mean the guy who knowingly rigged some sort of explosive to a washing machine timer and offered a passing 8YO a shiny new shekel to plant it on the side of the road outside the bazaar - I would agree that in that case, the "manufacturer" has some liability from which passing the buck to a random kid doesn't absolve him.
If, however, you mean the bomb-planter grabbed a brick of semtex from the local quarry, then no, I wouldn't blame either Omnipol or Explosia.
Some products simply count as inherently dangerous, and no reasonable steps will make them less so. When you buy a product intended to kill medium sized mammals, however, don't go crying to Uncle Sam when you discover that humans count as medium-sized mammals.
Good to know conservatives don't have a problem with me choosing to smoke marijuana in my own home...
Smoke up, friend! Would you like a hooker to go with that?
Hell, I don't care if you want to snort the gross domestic product of Columbia off the ass of a Filipino tranny - Just don't send your orphans my way with their pockets out when your head explodes.
Serious, non-sarcastic advice - "Neocon" does not equal "conservative". Always keep that in mind.
Because most users other than you have not been trained in how to "very easily manage who [they] allow to put cookies on [their] machine".
"Daddy, why don't we steer the car, like I can on my bike?"
"Well, son, it used to take way too long to train people how to handle such a complex task as steering. So, the government made a law to protect us!"
"So why do I still need to do math in school? That takes too long, too!"
[chuckles], "Don't worry, they'll get rid of that soon enough - No one needs math harder than making change nowadays, anyway!"
[the car drives them off into the sunset]
Do you really think the liberty of millions of Americans is worth twenty children?
I really think the liberty of twenty Americans outweighs millions of lives (the "children" aspect just tries to confuse the issue with an irrelevant detail) - "Give me liberty, or give me death" ain't just campaign-speak.
Personal liberty is no longer as important as it once was.
No worries then, you won't even notice that you don't deserve to have any.
As for me, you can pry my buckyballs out of my cold, necrotic intestines. Oh, no, wait - I don't eat the damned things, so that won't happen. Huh, imagine that! Now if only, if only, nature had some sort of, I dunno, reproductive feedback loop whereby people dumb enough to eat them could somehow get removed from the gene pool... Hmm...
Really? What happened to those bedrock conservative principles of accountability and responsibility?
What happened to them? Simple - You completely misunderstood them.
I bear complete responsibility for my actions. If I choose to smoke, if I choose to drive recklessly, if I chose to play Russian Roulette with a semiautomatic - Then I bear the responsibility for the outcome. Not Marlboro, not Ford, not Ruger. Not the corner paki, not the car dealership, not Walmart. Me.
Pity, really that such a concept so eludes the "progressives" that someone would actually, legitimately mistake not finger-pointing at the manufacture as giving up the idea of "responsibility".
The author mostly had me with the first half of the article, then went overboard praising the Product Safety Commission and even worse, safety-related lawsuits. I'm glad guns are exempt -- many if not most product safety lawsuits are shining examples of why we need tort reform.
But but but... Buckyballs!
How can we expect to survive in a world where stupid tweens can get magnets they then intentionally stick to their tongues to look cool?
I, for one, look forward to the new Nerf Sauer 9mm, capable of firing over 150 squishy rounds almost fifteen feet! Take that, home invaders and rapists!
The way you've used "We The People" ("We The People don't care..."), besides demonstrating amazing hubris on your part, distills down to mob rule. Until you develop a logical rationale and dividing line to support what you claim ought to be done, you can quite rightly be ignored.
If the banks (including the "payment processors", whether you like it or not) don't want to learn what "mob rules" really means, they really aught to join the winning side before the winning side lines them up and castrates them in front of their wives and children.
Not good enough. Where do you draw the line between large and small?
In 2010, Visa processed 3.2 trillion dollars per year. The US Federal gross receipts for 2010 came out to a mere 2.2 trillion dollars (receipts, not GDP which came to 14.5 trillion for that year).
You want a line? When you single-handledly take in more money than the federal government, you cannot just say no. And more practically, I'd set the line quite a bit lower than that, somewhere around 3% of GDP, or roughly half a trillion dollars - Which would coincidentally "catch" both Mastercard (at 2 trillion) and Amex (at 700 billion).
You have to actually think through these issues and justify the conclusion of why you apply the principle only to some and not to all
The entire banking crisis (and don't give me that shit about the credit card companies not counting as banks - It may have a legal distinction, but We The People don't care whether you call it a striped horse or a zebra) came about because large banks/companies/dontcarewhatyoucallthem, with financial activity best described in percent of GDP rather than in actual dollars, had the freedom to screw around as though they functioned as small businesses. When MomCo bets the till on the ponies, MomCo goes under. When JP Morgan Chase effectively does the same, the whole goddamned stock market takes a dive and grandma's (not to mention, my) 401k edges lower and lower and lower...
That pesky Fourteenth Amendment, you know...
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
I think visiting Slashdot so much throws off its algorithm, as does all the video game sites I hang out at.
Back in my youth, a friend consciously chose a handwriting style specifically to throw off so-called "handwriting" analysts. Of course, he chose to incorporate all the worst traits possible, meaning anyone looking at a sample of his writing would either immediately get the joke, or would back away slowly in fear for their life.
Funny to think that in the modern world, "handwriting" has become an all-but-deprecated "legacy" skill, but I did take a lesson from his example - I use an entirely synthetic online writing style, right down to an artificial regional dialect (though oddly, not the one I try for - automated profilers such as the summary links usually describe me as midwestern for reasons I don't quite know - Though still badly wrong, so, no harm done).
I don't know about WWI/WWII acronyms but it seems unlikely that they were all exactly five letters long and had letter frequency like this
Regardless of either the plaintext or the encoding algorithm (though some specifically require this), splitting things into pentagrams (as in, 5-gram, not the occult symbol) pretty much ruled the crypto world for all of the modern era up to the computer age. It hides the original sentence structure (which can, in some cases, give away almost as much as an actual decryption), and works out conveniently for transcribing (that whole "seven short term memory slots" thing - If you've ever wondered why Microsoft keys use groups of five, now you know).
It is not the law's job to "keep up with technology" which will always be a moving target. It is the responsibility of people to be cognizant of the law and obey it.
What a silly idea!
Of course the law needs to keep up with technology, because the law needs to keep up with society.
"The law" doesn't exist as some immutable monolithic construct laid down by our ancient forefathers for all eternity. We have mechanisms in place to change the law precisely because it needs to deal with the realities of today, not 4000BCE, not 1776CE, and not 1976CE.
That said, we also have "tiers" of laws that take more effort to change, because we consider them fundamental rules of human behavior rather than situationally dependent - But even those can still change, and in fact, that makes one of the best counterarguments to your premise: In 1800, the US didn't recognize slaves as complete humans, largely because the technology of the day required the use of human labor to keep the economy moving. By the civil war, technology had almost made (agricultural) slavery barely a breakeven (and more popular in the South largely because they had slow-moving swamps rather than the North's swiftly flowing rivers). By 1900, using human labor instead of technology would cost more than it would save.
The law doesn't always get it right. And when the law disagrees with reality, reality will always win - eventually.
Keep telling yourself you will draw first. I'll laugh the day you get shot up by a tweaker because you didn't see him coming.
Your hand, uh... You really should play it a little closer, if you want to feign outrage.
Wow. To hell with the kinder-gentler-socialist-fluffy-BS, and right to the "ban guns just so I can watch your defenseless ass die"? Kudos for the honesty, I guess.
a disorganized group of people with no training in how to fight with a gun would do more harm than good.
Have you ever even met a gun owner? Yes, you have the casual hunters (usually from states that ban firearms, surprise surprise), who tremble so much they couldn't hit a deer at 10 yards; but for the most part, people take gun ownership seriously. They train, and try to include as wide a variety of training scenarios as possible just to make them "ready" when a real situation arises.
Google "El Presidente" - An unwinnable combat scenario, yet people run through thousands of rounds drilling it in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, they'll only have two assailants and make it out with just a flesh wound.
You can bring up 100 knife attacks, and I'll show you 1000 shootings that had more deaths.
Wow, you sound fairly confident! Okay, Fair enough. And since you chose the weapon, I get to choose the time. And I pick "before 1100CE"
So, for, say, the Battle of Hastings - Can you give me a breakdown of shooting vs slashing deaths?
Oh, what? You only meant to refer to the modern era of readily available firearms? Gee, sorry, I forgot that no one ever died before the invention of gunpowder. My bad.
Now, I don't mean to sound like a complete bastard here. More to the point, we smart-but-violent monkeys will find ways to kill each other. I, for one, would rather have the ability to defend myself from all the unmedicated psychos out there, than pretend that the absence of a single method of monkey-v-monkey will magically keep me safe. And as a non-athletic computer geek, hey, my best chance at surviving any sort of real combat involves drawing first, not five rounds of hand-to-hand combat with a tweaker looking for $5.
You're all a bunch of arrogant bastards who don't give a damn who the fuck gets hurt, so long as you can twist it towards your pathetic agenda.
Of course I care who gets hurt - Not me or mine! Just like the rest of you frauds pretending you care about anything but the same.
And if my "agenda" means making damned sure my loved ones have the legal right to defend themselves when some whackjob bursts in on them and open fire - Damned straight I'll use this tragedy to push my agenda!
Now look - I won't pretend I give the least damn about the victims here. But if every teacher in that building had carried, do you seriously suppose the shooter would have made it through two rooms full of kids?
In fact, tens of thousands of guns are stolen each year (can you cite tens of thousands of cases of gun owners successfully stopping crimes each year?)
The NVCS (the "official" numbers the government uses for this) reports 60k-80k instances per year of reported defensive gun use. Other sources come up with almost absurdly higher estimates (as high as 3.7 million). The real answer probably lies somewhere between 60k and 3.7 million - Though I'd guess closer to 60k than 3.7 million. So yes, given several months to do the research, I could.
Better question - When your mother or wife gets raped, do you wish she fell into that "mere" 60k? When an armed gunman busts into your elementary school kid's class, do you hope their teacher becomes a statistic for or against gun control?
Three examples of guns saving lives?
Do you really want 10k+ links?
Here are three examples of gun owners being shot with their own gun:
Killed with a tool they choose to own... vs 20 innocent elementary school kids dead. Yeah, clearly identical situations there.
yet it's perfectly acceptable for every dude with a John Wayne fetish to suggest that had *he* been there with his gun, things would have turned out differently.
Well, because when John Wayne does have his gun on him at such an event, fewer people die.
It sounds great to say "guns bad, kids died, don't go there today!", but in situations like these, more guns do save lives.
Note also that if you want to make your house off-the-grid (as option) with solar, that requires much more expense. Batteries, inverter switches, etc.
While true, no one except the "survivalists" really wants to go off-grid as a practical matter.
More realistically, you don't even need a big enough installation to meet 100% of your normal load. You go with a grid-tie system with a manual disconnect, and size it so as to get 4-6 hours a day out of your "necessities" (furnace + fridge + laptop).
99.9% of the time, it just sits there quietly dropping your electric bill by 50-75%. When the power goes out, you turn off all your non-essentials, flip the grid disconnect, and enjoy having power again. And I can tell you from personal experience, a modest-sized UPS (1500VA) charging for 6 hours a day will easily support running a few LED lights, your (non-gaming-rig) laptop, and your modem/router for the rest of the day (and night).
Slashdot Mirror
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there going to be some sort of legislature dictating that cell phone makers use a universal charging standard by this point? Everyone else has managed micro usb, why is it so hard for apple?
Apple signed a 2009 agreement with the EU intended to reduce iWaste by having all phones, and even the majority of portable devices in general, all use the same charging standard, via a microUSB connector.
Apple "satisfied" this pledge by offering a $20 dongle (aka "yet another piece of iWaste you have to carry around and will end up in the landfill when they come out with Lightning v1.1") that converts microUSB to Lightning.
But hey, Apple users have always had more dollars than sense, so whatever. I really shouldn't even care, since I already voted by sending my dollars to Samsung - But still - C'mon Apple, biggest in the world doesn't do it for you? You that hard up for an extra $20 from people who don't want one of your damned docks?
and yet somehow the inability to roll in the Lightning port to a product that was begun before Apple even acknowledged it exists is "doomed".
Why would they bother developing yet another USB charging hub? The entire point of this project centered around not needing to carry around 27 different dongles to all do effectively the same task at the same Li-ion-friendly voltage. Ironically enogh, we shouldn't even have a need for this, since Apple promised (and lied to) the EU to switch to a unified charging standard. Did they break the letter of the law? Apparently not. But does their latest proprietary CashGrab-enabled CopperInPlastic(tm) technology serve any purpose (to the end user) at all?
No. No, it does not. So yeah, Fuck Apple.
I wonder, what's to stop iPhone 5 users from plugging in a Lightning cable into one of the powered USB ports on this device? Nothing? So why the need to cancel it?
Just $20. Though I have no doubt, if they could make these things teleport nickels and dimes straight to Cupertino, they would have gone with that approach per-use instead.
What do you think about going after al-Qaeda bomb makers, instead of just the dupes whom they get to bury them by the roadside, or trigger them? And why do you think it?
That kinda depends on who you mean by "bomb makers".
If you mean the guy who knowingly rigged some sort of explosive to a washing machine timer and offered a passing 8YO a shiny new shekel to plant it on the side of the road outside the bazaar - I would agree that in that case, the "manufacturer" has some liability from which passing the buck to a random kid doesn't absolve him.
If, however, you mean the bomb-planter grabbed a brick of semtex from the local quarry, then no, I wouldn't blame either Omnipol or Explosia.
Some products simply count as inherently dangerous, and no reasonable steps will make them less so. When you buy a product intended to kill medium sized mammals, however, don't go crying to Uncle Sam when you discover that humans count as medium-sized mammals.
so don't piss in the street like an animal?
So next time I visit your town, I can stop in to pee?
Cool, thanks!
/ Still just an animal, but I can pee on the seat in style!
Good to know conservatives don't have a problem with me choosing to smoke marijuana in my own home...
Smoke up, friend! Would you like a hooker to go with that?
Hell, I don't care if you want to snort the gross domestic product of Columbia off the ass of a Filipino tranny - Just don't send your orphans my way with their pockets out when your head explodes.
Serious, non-sarcastic advice - "Neocon" does not equal "conservative". Always keep that in mind.
Because most users other than you have not been trained in how to "very easily manage who [they] allow to put cookies on [their] machine".
"Daddy, why don't we steer the car, like I can on my bike?"
"Well, son, it used to take way too long to train people how to handle such a complex task as steering. So, the government made a law to protect us!"
"So why do I still need to do math in school? That takes too long, too!"
[chuckles], "Don't worry, they'll get rid of that soon enough - No one needs math harder than making change nowadays, anyway!"
[the car drives them off into the sunset]
/ Awfully glad I'm a beta!
Do you really think the liberty of millions of Americans is worth twenty children?
I really think the liberty of twenty Americans outweighs millions of lives (the "children" aspect just tries to confuse the issue with an irrelevant detail) - "Give me liberty, or give me death" ain't just campaign-speak.
Personal liberty is no longer as important as it once was.
No worries then, you won't even notice that you don't deserve to have any.
As for me, you can pry my buckyballs out of my cold, necrotic intestines. Oh, no, wait - I don't eat the damned things, so that won't happen. Huh, imagine that! Now if only, if only, nature had some sort of, I dunno, reproductive feedback loop whereby people dumb enough to eat them could somehow get removed from the gene pool... Hmm...
/ I own a set of Jarts, too. Run, nannyists, run!
Really? What happened to those bedrock conservative principles of accountability and responsibility?
What happened to them? Simple - You completely misunderstood them.
I bear complete responsibility for my actions. If I choose to smoke, if I choose to drive recklessly, if I chose to play Russian Roulette with a semiautomatic - Then I bear the responsibility for the outcome. Not Marlboro, not Ford, not Ruger. Not the corner paki, not the car dealership, not Walmart. Me.
Pity, really that such a concept so eludes the "progressives" that someone would actually, legitimately mistake not finger-pointing at the manufacture as giving up the idea of "responsibility".
The author mostly had me with the first half of the article, then went overboard praising the Product Safety Commission and even worse, safety-related lawsuits. I'm glad guns are exempt -- many if not most product safety lawsuits are shining examples of why we need tort reform.
But but but... Buckyballs!
How can we expect to survive in a world where stupid tweens can get magnets they then intentionally stick to their tongues to look cool?
I, for one, look forward to the new Nerf Sauer 9mm, capable of firing over 150 squishy rounds almost fifteen feet! Take that, home invaders and rapists!
The way you've used "We The People" ("We The People don't care..."), besides demonstrating amazing hubris on your part, distills down to mob rule. Until you develop a logical rationale and dividing line to support what you claim ought to be done, you can quite rightly be ignored.
If the banks (including the "payment processors", whether you like it or not) don't want to learn what "mob rules" really means, they really aught to join the winning side before the winning side lines them up and castrates them in front of their wives and children.
And pray we stop at that.
Jus' sayin'.
Not good enough. Where do you draw the line between large and small?
In 2010, Visa processed 3.2 trillion dollars per year. The US Federal gross receipts for 2010 came out to a mere 2.2 trillion dollars (receipts, not GDP which came to 14.5 trillion for that year).
You want a line? When you single-handledly take in more money than the federal government, you cannot just say no. And more practically, I'd set the line quite a bit lower than that, somewhere around 3% of GDP, or roughly half a trillion dollars - Which would coincidentally "catch" both Mastercard (at 2 trillion) and Amex (at 700 billion).
You have to actually think through these issues and justify the conclusion of why you apply the principle only to some and not to all
The entire banking crisis (and don't give me that shit about the credit card companies not counting as banks - It may have a legal distinction, but We The People don't care whether you call it a striped horse or a zebra) came about because large banks/companies/dontcarewhatyoucallthem, with financial activity best described in percent of GDP rather than in actual dollars, had the freedom to screw around as though they functioned as small businesses. When MomCo bets the till on the ponies, MomCo goes under. When JP Morgan Chase effectively does the same, the whole goddamned stock market takes a dive and grandma's (not to mention, my) 401k edges lower and lower and lower...
That pesky Fourteenth Amendment, you know...
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
Sorry Mitt, but corporations ain't people.
None of this makes historical or geographic sense.
"Navigable" doesn't mean "suitable for hydro-power".
And yes, you can find counterexamples to anything. Would you care to address my point now, or continue to pick nits over throw-away asides?
Why did you post as AC? You have the single most insightful comment yet!
No one interested in this tech cares what reproductive hardware you have - They care what you'll buy, simple as that.
Kudos for the good call!
I think visiting Slashdot so much throws off its algorithm, as does all the video game sites I hang out at.
Back in my youth, a friend consciously chose a handwriting style specifically to throw off so-called "handwriting" analysts. Of course, he chose to incorporate all the worst traits possible, meaning anyone looking at a sample of his writing would either immediately get the joke, or would back away slowly in fear for their life.
Funny to think that in the modern world, "handwriting" has become an all-but-deprecated "legacy" skill, but I did take a lesson from his example - I use an entirely synthetic online writing style, right down to an artificial regional dialect (though oddly, not the one I try for - automated profilers such as the summary links usually describe me as midwestern for reasons I don't quite know - Though still badly wrong, so, no harm done).
I don't know about WWI/WWII acronyms but it seems unlikely that they were all exactly five letters long and had letter frequency like this
Regardless of either the plaintext or the encoding algorithm (though some specifically require this), splitting things into pentagrams (as in, 5-gram, not the occult symbol) pretty much ruled the crypto world for all of the modern era up to the computer age. It hides the original sentence structure (which can, in some cases, give away almost as much as an actual decryption), and works out conveniently for transcribing (that whole "seven short term memory slots" thing - If you've ever wondered why Microsoft keys use groups of five, now you know).
It is not the law's job to "keep up with technology" which will always be a moving target. It is the responsibility of people to be cognizant of the law and obey it.
What a silly idea!
Of course the law needs to keep up with technology, because the law needs to keep up with society.
"The law" doesn't exist as some immutable monolithic construct laid down by our ancient forefathers for all eternity. We have mechanisms in place to change the law precisely because it needs to deal with the realities of today, not 4000BCE, not 1776CE, and not 1976CE.
That said, we also have "tiers" of laws that take more effort to change, because we consider them fundamental rules of human behavior rather than situationally dependent - But even those can still change, and in fact, that makes one of the best counterarguments to your premise: In 1800, the US didn't recognize slaves as complete humans, largely because the technology of the day required the use of human labor to keep the economy moving. By the civil war, technology had almost made (agricultural) slavery barely a breakeven (and more popular in the South largely because they had slow-moving swamps rather than the North's swiftly flowing rivers). By 1900, using human labor instead of technology would cost more than it would save.
The law doesn't always get it right. And when the law disagrees with reality, reality will always win - eventually.
Keep telling yourself you will draw first. I'll laugh the day you get shot up by a tweaker because you didn't see him coming.
Your hand, uh... You really should play it a little closer, if you want to feign outrage.
Wow. To hell with the kinder-gentler-socialist-fluffy-BS, and right to the "ban guns just so I can watch your defenseless ass die"? Kudos for the honesty, I guess.
a disorganized group of people with no training in how to fight with a gun would do more harm than good.
Have you ever even met a gun owner? Yes, you have the casual hunters (usually from states that ban firearms, surprise surprise), who tremble so much they couldn't hit a deer at 10 yards; but for the most part, people take gun ownership seriously. They train, and try to include as wide a variety of training scenarios as possible just to make them "ready" when a real situation arises.
Google "El Presidente" - An unwinnable combat scenario, yet people run through thousands of rounds drilling it in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, they'll only have two assailants and make it out with just a flesh wound.
You can bring up 100 knife attacks, and I'll show you 1000 shootings that had more deaths.
Wow, you sound fairly confident! Okay, Fair enough. And since you chose the weapon, I get to choose the time. And I pick "before 1100CE"
So, for, say, the Battle of Hastings - Can you give me a breakdown of shooting vs slashing deaths?
Oh, what? You only meant to refer to the modern era of readily available firearms? Gee, sorry, I forgot that no one ever died before the invention of gunpowder. My bad.
Now, I don't mean to sound like a complete bastard here. More to the point, we smart-but-violent monkeys will find ways to kill each other. I, for one, would rather have the ability to defend myself from all the unmedicated psychos out there, than pretend that the absence of a single method of monkey-v-monkey will magically keep me safe. And as a non-athletic computer geek, hey, my best chance at surviving any sort of real combat involves drawing first, not five rounds of hand-to-hand combat with a tweaker looking for $5.
You're all a bunch of arrogant bastards who don't give a damn who the fuck gets hurt, so long as you can twist it towards your pathetic agenda.
Of course I care who gets hurt - Not me or mine! Just like the rest of you frauds pretending you care about anything but the same.
And if my "agenda" means making damned sure my loved ones have the legal right to defend themselves when some whackjob bursts in on them and open fire - Damned straight I'll use this tragedy to push my agenda!
Now look - I won't pretend I give the least damn about the victims here. But if every teacher in that building had carried, do you seriously suppose the shooter would have made it through two rooms full of kids?
4) Crime drops when gun laws are enacted.
Given that, perhaps you can explain why the states with the most permissive carry laws in the US have the lowest rates of violent crime?
7) teacher firing a someone one in a panic situation means more people would have been likely to die.
One "oops" beats 28 "gotcha!"s
All the evidence [I just made up] shows, overall, people are safer with very strict gun laws.
In the immortal words of Wiki - [citation needed].
In fact, tens of thousands of guns are stolen each year (can you cite tens of thousands of cases of gun owners successfully stopping crimes each year?)
The NVCS (the "official" numbers the government uses for this) reports 60k-80k instances per year of reported defensive gun use. Other sources come up with almost absurdly higher estimates (as high as 3.7 million). The real answer probably lies somewhere between 60k and 3.7 million - Though I'd guess closer to 60k than 3.7 million. So yes, given several months to do the research, I could.
Better question - When your mother or wife gets raped, do you wish she fell into that "mere" 60k? When an armed gunman busts into your elementary school kid's class, do you hope their teacher becomes a statistic for or against gun control?
Three examples of guns saving lives?
Do you really want 10k+ links?
Here are three examples of gun owners being shot with their own gun:
Killed with a tool they choose to own... vs 20 innocent elementary school kids dead. Yeah, clearly identical situations there.
yet it's perfectly acceptable for every dude with a John Wayne fetish to suggest that had *he* been there with his gun, things would have turned out differently.
Well, because when John Wayne does have his gun on him at such an event,
fewer
people
die.
It sounds great to say "guns bad, kids died, don't go there today!", but in situations like these, more guns do save lives.
Note also that if you want to make your house off-the-grid (as option) with solar, that requires much more expense. Batteries, inverter switches, etc.
While true, no one except the "survivalists" really wants to go off-grid as a practical matter.
More realistically, you don't even need a big enough installation to meet 100% of your normal load. You go with a grid-tie system with a manual disconnect, and size it so as to get 4-6 hours a day out of your "necessities" (furnace + fridge + laptop).
99.9% of the time, it just sits there quietly dropping your electric bill by 50-75%. When the power goes out, you turn off all your non-essentials, flip the grid disconnect, and enjoy having power again. And I can tell you from personal experience, a modest-sized UPS (1500VA) charging for 6 hours a day will easily support running a few LED lights, your (non-gaming-rig) laptop, and your modem/router for the rest of the day (and night).