yes, if were proposing that a wave of my magic wand and all guns would disappear would be rather stupid. but i am not saying that.
Except that there is no proposal to eliminate guns from the entire world. Not even from an entire country, Japan actually did this, it actually worked too. At least until the US decided to enguage in literal "gunboat diplomacy". Typicall "gun control" calls for specific people such as police and soliders having (even being issued with) guns. You'd still need a magic wand to ensure that all these people are honest and incorruptable.
gun=technology to kill, unnecessary in any other regard, therfore, we can lose it.
There are uses of guns which do not involve killing anyone. Some of them are olymic sports. Even the killing part does not necessarly imply killing people.
Hows a terrorist going to get your DNA? your retina scan info, your birth mother and fathers name, finger print, social security number, bank account, employer, and credit card + medical info.
By gaining access to the database which holds the reference data. Then they can simply subsitute their biometric data. Or they simply create a whole new person. How secure do you think a system with over 200 million records will be in practice?
I actually support a national ID card, terrorists wouldnt be able to get the card, and it would be easier to hunt them down.
There has never been a document made which cannot be forged. Or where it has not been possible to buy a "real" one.
Also we wouldnt have illegal immagrants in our country working illegally, robbing people, starting organized crime, and other bad stuff because it would be very easy to track them.
Except that any with links to organised crime will probably be able to produce documents demonstrating that they are US citizens.
It wouldn't even have prevented the 9/11 tragedy. The people who committed it weren't on anyone's list of possible criminals.
Some of them were using stolen identities of people thousands of miles away. Goodness knows who they really were.
It also makes it that much easier to screw with people. If you can crack the database, you could potentially exchange your neighbor's biometric info with a known felon and watch with glee as your neighbor is arrested when you drop him off at the airport and he passes under the computer scanners.
Especially if your neighbour is called "Angela Bennet".
I cannot for the life of me get one single gun nut to explain to me what they think "WELL REGULATED" means in the Second Amendment if it doesn't mean government regulation.
Relevent meanings of "well" would appear to include "suitable", "favourable", "satisfactorily", "skillfully", "easily". Relevent meanings of "regulated" would appear to include "put in order", "control by law", "work correctly". Anyone got an 18th century dictionary handy?
Sure, but how does this make driver licences necessary? Vehicles are licenced, tested, and insured seperatly from drivers anyway,
So you never have situations anywhere in the US where insurance is carried by the driver or related to a specific driver & vehicle combination
and it's not like the lack of identification makes it impossible to enforce traffic laws any more than the lack of pedestrian licences makes it impossible to enforce jaywalking laws,
"Jaywalking" is a peculiarly American concept. In most of the rest of the world pedestrians have right of way over motor vehicles.
Sorry, but it doesn't follow that drivers licenses lead to police states that require "papers on demand."
It also depends exactly what it is used for. If we have a document who's only purpose is to prove that the holder has passed some kind of certification to drive certain types of motor vehicle then there isn't much risk. When the same document is required for things unrelated to driving, such as banking, buying alcohol, getting a telephone, etc then things start to smell bad.
A police state, were the few watch the many, would at the apex of order, quickly slide into chaos. A solution that does a poor job of even addressing the symptom, let alone the disease.
It slides into chaos because the few have "information overload". A classic example would be the German Democratic Republic, who had files on everyone, more hardware in their telephone system dedicated to bugging than actually handling telephone calls, a huge army of informants.
I am not a criminal either, and I therefore object to being treated as if I were a criminal.
Indeed such a situation can easily increase the number of criminals. If people are judged as "guilty" anyway they might well rationally conclude that they have little reason to bother obeying the law.
The fact of the matter is that the US cities have done a horrible job of building pedestrian infrastructure.
Even now in "progressive" California, the bike lanes are narrow and abused, sidewalks lack efficient direction etc. The best city for non-auto-possessor is SF (of course) but it still isn't near the efficiency level of cities like Vienna or anywhere in The Netherlands.
A possible reason for this is that European cities existed for hundreds of years before cars were invented. Whereas many US cities (or at least major parts of them) both postdate the invention of the car and were planned on the assumption of everyone using a car.
Israel's recent actions in the West Bank may in fact be justified if it turns out Israel has evidence supporting their claims that the people they are arresting are in fact militants
Arresting some possible terrorists is no excuse for holding ambulances at gunpoint, booting out journalists and systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure and government. Let alone that Israel appears to be deliberatly bluring the distinction between potential terrorists and police/militia. IMHO it is hypocritical to argue for the right of Israel to defend itself without also arguing for exactly the same rights for the PA.
Example 3: Twenty-first century Israel. How ironic, considering that within the lifetimes of many of those living there the Jews were themselves the targets of one of history's great atrocities by a police state. And now, by and large, they have become one themselves. Granted, Prime Minister Sharon and his predecessors have not been as evil as Hitler and Stalin,
A example missing from the list, which probably should be there, is late 20th century Serbia.
It makes more sense to realize that the shit that went down on 9-11 has been years in the making and the only reason it blindsided so many people is because we've had our heads in the sand for so goddam long.
It's by no means clear that the heads are out of the sand even now.
You make my argument better than I do. In one breath, you rail that the government must do something, and in the next, you say the CIA is a joke. The problem is, the CIA is not a joke (though INS certainly is).
You can also make the case that some part of the FAA and who ever was running things at NORAD and The Pentagon is in the "joke" catagory. If anything the implications of The Pentagon being hit are even more serious than the WTC.
A monolithic (government) agency can not defend against a distributed threat (terrorism). No amount of misguided legislation will change that.
Especially if a terrorist organisation is capable of evaluating and reacting to what is, after all, a threat to it's own aims and objectives.
The sentiment is 'the government will protect me.' What's the big change except the expectation that, golly, the government has to be a whole lot more intrusive to protect me, since they obviously weren't intrusive enough before.
In order to be more intrusive they would need to take on additional tasks. Which makes little sense. Since on that morning the US government simply didn't manage to do the things they should have done. You could argue that having radar based air traffic control is "intrusive" too.
Disarming the general populace is a solution to reducing crime.
How exactly do you propose to disarm criminals, passing a law requiring them to disarm is rather pointless. Let alone that if someone wants a weapon they will find one. Be it a bit of tree or a bit of aircraft cabin fitting...
Agreed. But this is the worst thing to happen on US soil since the Civil War. It needs a serious reaction. And it isn't the only thing we are doing. Life does go on, but a big reaction is needed.
Sensible reactions would be attempting to identify who was responsible, which is tricky since those who were involved obviously planted false "evidence"; they would also include asking some very pointed questions of the FAA and NORAD; also considering such things as if all aircrew should be trained in martial arts. Bombing a country the US dosn't like isn't really a sensible response.
But what are we to do? Become completely isolationist?
That might help, but it's a bit late now that all the weapons have been supplied, at the US tax payers' expense.
Try to run the whole world?
I really don't think the US wants to pay the price for that...
And some of what is in the middle involves what we have done in the Middle East, and what we still will do.
Taking sides is never "in the middle".
Is some of the terrorists gripes have to do with bad things we have already done? Yes, but how could anything we have done possibly compare to what they have done?
You are right it's impossible for any "terrorist group" to do anything even remotly comparable with the sort of things the US has done. Do you really thing Osama Bin Laden could obliterate the US federal government and install an Al Queda puppet government in it's place? Could they reduce even one US city to rubble?
Why is it that the only people who spout off about this "holy war" bullshit are people who have no real knowledge of arab religion or culture. If you think they'd still give a rats ass about us if we didn't have such a major presence in the middle east, then you're seriously smoking something. How do you think we'd feel if arabs decided to occupy texas, oppressing the current residents and arming it to the extent that it could easily destroy the entire rest of the US...might you be slightly upset?
The analogy would work better if you also had these Arab occupiers systematically demolishing Texan cities, looting and killing people.
This is a classic argument. Do you punish the criminal? Or do you explain his crime in the larger context of society? The man who steals a loaf of bread to feed his family certainly can be excused. But I don't see how that kind of crime can even begin to be equated with the terrorists of Sept. 11th.
In order to punish a criminal you first need to identify and capture them. All there is with the September 11 actions is a conspiracy theory involving a Saudi exile.
But it might stop a criminal or a terrorist from getting a real license.
It probably won't do much against organised crime or terrorism with anything richer than a small nation state behind it. They will have the resources to ensure that they can get "real" documents.
It must have been difficult for you to do anything that requires a credit check, like purchasing a cell phone. I used to sell them for Verizon and I know that they simply will not process an app without a driver's license.
When did a telephone become a car? How is having a driving licence even remotly relevent to credit, except to obtain a car? All this sort of stupidity does is make identity theft a bigger problem.
Hell people look at me in shock when I say that I'll just walk the 1.5mi, after all, what the hells 1.5mi but 20 or so minutes of my time
In quite a few urban areas across the world you would actually get there quicker, since the average traffic speed is actually slower than walking pace. (Assuming people don't get gassed from hundreds of idling car engines.) Of course a 1.5 mile pedestrian route might correspond to a longer car route (especially considering parking.)
It costs a lot more to call a cab, and
it takes a lot of time wait for public transportation (if available),
You need to weigh this against the fact that you don't need to find somewhere to park a taxi, bus, train, etc. No-one has yet invented a car you can simply fold up and carry with you. Also you need to make sure you factor in all the costs of a private car. Purchase costs, maintanance, insurance, fuel, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
B) Immature little warez kiddies turning in sites that belong to "opposing" warez groups.
What makes you thing this catagory won't extend to software companies?
yes, if were proposing that a wave of my magic wand and all guns would disappear would be rather stupid. but i am not saying that.
Except that there is no proposal to eliminate guns from the entire world. Not even from an entire country, Japan actually did this, it actually worked too. At least until the US decided to enguage in literal "gunboat diplomacy".
Typicall "gun control" calls for specific people such as police and soliders having (even being issued with) guns. You'd still need a magic wand to ensure that all these people are honest and incorruptable.
gun=technology to kill, unnecessary in any other regard, therfore, we can lose it.
There are uses of guns which do not involve killing anyone. Some of them are olymic sports. Even the killing part does not necessarly imply killing people.
Hows a terrorist going to get your DNA? your retina scan info, your birth mother and fathers name, finger print, social security number, bank account, employer, and credit card + medical info.
By gaining access to the database which holds the reference data. Then they can simply subsitute their biometric data. Or they simply create a whole new person. How secure do you think a system with over 200 million records will be in practice?
I actually support a national ID card, terrorists wouldnt be able to get the card, and it would be easier to hunt them down.
There has never been a document made which cannot be forged. Or where it has not been possible to buy a "real" one.
Also we wouldnt have illegal immagrants in our country working illegally, robbing people, starting organized crime, and other bad stuff because it would be very easy to track them.
Except that any with links to organised crime will probably be able to produce documents demonstrating that they are US citizens.
It wouldn't even have prevented the 9/11 tragedy. The people who committed it weren't on anyone's list of possible criminals.
Some of them were using stolen identities of people thousands of miles away. Goodness knows who they really were.
It also makes it that much easier to screw with people. If you can crack the database, you could potentially exchange your neighbor's biometric info with a known felon and watch with glee as your neighbor is arrested when you drop him off at the airport and he passes under the computer scanners.
Especially if your neighbour is called "Angela Bennet".
I cannot for the life of me get one single gun nut to explain to me what they think "WELL REGULATED" means in the Second Amendment if it doesn't mean government regulation.
Relevent meanings of "well" would appear to include "suitable", "favourable", "satisfactorily", "skillfully", "easily".
Relevent meanings of "regulated" would appear to include "put in order", "control by law", "work correctly".
Anyone got an 18th century dictionary handy?
Sure, but how does this make driver licences necessary? Vehicles are licenced, tested, and insured seperatly from drivers anyway,
So you never have situations anywhere in the US where insurance is carried by the driver or related to a specific driver & vehicle combination
and it's not like the lack of identification makes it impossible to enforce traffic laws any more than the lack of pedestrian licences makes it impossible to enforce jaywalking laws,
"Jaywalking" is a peculiarly American concept. In most of the rest of the world pedestrians have right of way over motor vehicles.
Sorry, but it doesn't follow that drivers licenses lead to police states that require "papers on demand."
It also depends exactly what it is used for. If we have a document who's only purpose is to prove that the holder has passed some kind of certification to drive certain types of motor vehicle then there isn't much risk. When the same document is required for things unrelated to driving, such as banking, buying alcohol, getting a telephone, etc then things start to smell bad.
A police state, were the few watch the many, would at the apex of order, quickly slide into chaos. A solution that does a poor job of even addressing the symptom, let alone the disease.
It slides into chaos because the few have "information overload". A classic example would be the German Democratic Republic, who had files on everyone, more hardware in their telephone system dedicated to bugging than actually handling telephone calls, a huge army of informants.
I am not a criminal either, and I therefore object to being treated as if I were a criminal.
Indeed such a situation can easily increase the number of criminals. If people are judged as "guilty" anyway they might well rationally conclude that they have little reason to bother obeying the law.
The fact of the matter is that the US cities have done a horrible job of building pedestrian infrastructure.
Even now in "progressive" California, the bike lanes are narrow and abused, sidewalks lack efficient direction etc. The best city for non-auto-possessor is SF (of course) but it still isn't near the efficiency level of cities like Vienna or anywhere in The Netherlands.
A possible reason for this is that European cities existed for hundreds of years before cars were invented. Whereas many US cities (or at least major parts of them) both postdate the invention of the car and were planned on the assumption of everyone using a car.
Israel's recent actions in the West Bank may in fact be justified if it turns out Israel has evidence supporting their claims that the people they are arresting are in fact militants
Arresting some possible terrorists is no excuse for holding ambulances at gunpoint, booting out journalists and systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure and government. Let alone that Israel appears to be deliberatly bluring the distinction between potential terrorists and police/militia. IMHO it is hypocritical to argue for the right of Israel to defend itself without also arguing for exactly the same rights for the PA.
Example 3: Twenty-first century Israel. How ironic, considering that within the lifetimes of many of those living there the Jews were themselves the targets of one of history's great atrocities by a police state. And now, by and large, they have become one themselves. Granted, Prime Minister Sharon and his predecessors have not been as evil as Hitler and Stalin,
A example missing from the list, which probably should be there, is late 20th century Serbia.
It makes more sense to realize that the shit that went down on 9-11 has been years in the making and the only reason it blindsided so many people is because we've had our heads in the sand for so goddam long.
It's by no means clear that the heads are out of the sand even now.
You make my argument better than I do. In one breath, you rail that the government must do something, and in the next, you say the CIA is a joke. The problem is, the CIA is not a joke (though INS certainly is).
You can also make the case that some part of the FAA and who ever was running things at NORAD and The Pentagon is in the "joke" catagory. If anything the implications of The Pentagon being hit are even more serious than the WTC.
A monolithic (government) agency can not defend against a distributed threat (terrorism). No amount of misguided legislation will change that.
Especially if a terrorist organisation is capable of evaluating and reacting to what is, after all, a threat to it's own aims and objectives.
The sentiment is 'the government will protect me.' What's the big change except the expectation that, golly, the government has to be a whole lot more intrusive to protect me, since they obviously weren't intrusive enough before.
In order to be more intrusive they would need to take on additional tasks. Which makes little sense. Since on that morning the US government simply didn't manage to do the things they should have done. You could argue that having radar based air traffic control is "intrusive" too.
Disarming the general populace is a solution to reducing crime.
How exactly do you propose to disarm criminals, passing a law requiring them to disarm is rather pointless. Let alone that if someone wants a weapon they will find one. Be it a bit of tree or a bit of aircraft cabin fitting...
Agreed. But this is the worst thing to happen on US soil since the Civil War. It needs a serious reaction. And it isn't the only thing we are doing. Life does go on, but a big reaction is needed.
Sensible reactions would be attempting to identify who was responsible, which is tricky since those who were involved obviously planted false "evidence"; they would also include asking some very pointed questions of the FAA and NORAD; also considering such things as if all aircrew should be trained in martial arts.
Bombing a country the US dosn't like isn't really a sensible response.
But what are we to do? Become completely isolationist?
That might help, but it's a bit late now that all the weapons have been supplied, at the US tax payers' expense.
Try to run the whole world?
I really don't think the US wants to pay the price for that...
And some of what is in the middle involves what we have done in the Middle East, and what we still will do.
Taking sides is never "in the middle".
Is some of the terrorists gripes have to do with bad things we have already done? Yes, but how could anything we have done possibly compare to what they have done?
You are right it's impossible for any "terrorist group" to do anything even remotly comparable with the sort of things the US has done. Do you really thing Osama Bin Laden could obliterate the US federal government and install an Al Queda puppet government in it's place? Could they reduce even one US city to rubble?
Why is it that the only people who spout off about this "holy war" bullshit are people who have no real knowledge of arab religion or culture. If you think they'd still give a rats ass about us if we didn't have such a major presence in the middle east, then you're seriously smoking something. How do you think we'd feel if arabs decided to occupy texas, oppressing the current residents and arming it to the extent that it could easily destroy the entire rest of the US...might you be slightly upset?
The analogy would work better if you also had these Arab occupiers systematically demolishing Texan cities, looting and killing people.
This is a classic argument. Do you punish the criminal? Or do you explain his crime in the larger context of society? The man who steals a loaf of bread to feed his family certainly can be excused. But I don't see how that kind of crime can even begin to be equated with the terrorists of Sept. 11th.
In order to punish a criminal you first need to identify and capture them. All there is with the September 11 actions is a conspiracy theory involving a Saudi exile.
But it might stop a criminal or a terrorist from getting a real license.
It probably won't do much against organised crime or terrorism with anything richer than a small nation state behind it. They will have the resources to ensure that they can get "real" documents.
It must have been difficult for you to do anything that requires a credit check, like purchasing a cell phone. I used to sell them for Verizon and I know that they simply will not process an app without a driver's license.
When did a telephone become a car? How is having a driving licence even remotly relevent to credit, except to obtain a car? All this sort of stupidity does is make identity theft a bigger problem.
If you want to use the tranportation methods of the 19th Century, go right ahead
About the only transportation method which was new in the 20th century is aviation.
Hell people look at me in shock when I say that I'll just walk the 1.5mi, after all, what the hells 1.5mi but 20 or so minutes of my time
In quite a few urban areas across the world you would actually get there quicker, since the average traffic speed is actually slower than walking pace. (Assuming people don't get gassed from hundreds of idling car engines.) Of course a 1.5 mile pedestrian route might correspond to a longer car route (especially considering parking.)
It costs a lot more to call a cab, and it takes a lot of time wait for public transportation (if available),
You need to weigh this against the fact that you don't need to find somewhere to park a taxi, bus, train, etc. No-one has yet invented a car you can simply fold up and carry with you.
Also you need to make sure you factor in all the costs of a private car. Purchase costs, maintanance, insurance, fuel, etc.