No, they are stolen by people who then use them in crimes. The number one source of crime guns is theft (directly or indirectly). If there were no legal guns, criminals would have a greatly reduced supply.
Yeah, right. Pay a visit to Brazil's biggest skidrows.;-)
You're just "half right". Banning legally owned firearms will, in fact, reduce the incidence of stolen firearms on crimes.
But will not reduce the incidence of firearms in crimes. There's a vast and available supply of illegal firearms around the world. Our countries can't prevent tons and tons of drugs from being trafficked to our countries, exactly how do you expect that illegal firearms would be kept out?
(Not saying you're wrong - just saying that's not enough, and probably undesired, to simply ban all firearms on civil hands)
The sad fact is that you should be deeply concerned even if you shoot anyone inside your home.
The only way to shoot a burglar in your home without being arrested for murder attempt is if the burglar is already inside the walls your home (the building, not the area) and you can prove that your life was in danger *and* the burglar has a firearm himself. But since you will probably alive (as the dead doesn't have concerns), you will automatically have the system against you.
Oh, the burglar had a knife and you wasn't trained on corporal fights? You're screwed. Brazilian laws expect that you, politely, restrain yourself from using the firearm and take your chances with your hands - after all, the burglar is not armed with firearms and the law expects that you reacts proportionally to the danger you are exposed.
And not, it's not "easy" to have access (legally) to firearms except if you have good contacts inside the Police or some other public institution. The rules to get a firearm license are very harsh, and completely out of reach from the common man. (I'm not sure if this is bad anyway, given our terrible status quo on Civil Education).
Most mailing software generates unique images to track opens, so you're still being tracked. It's actually decreases privacy for Google to auto-download the images
As a matter of fact, it does nothing about privacy. What it does is just make it useless.
As Google *always* cache the image, the sender does not knows anymore when or even if the image was viewed and, so, doesn't knows anymore if the email was opened.
It's interesting you defends banning of all firearms while also defending the legalization of all drugs.
You are just ignoring that drugs are, easy, the biggest motivator for crime at these same time you completely ignores that guns, on the right hands, also saves lives.
It's strange that every single defender of the firearms ban justs ignores the Swiss status quo.
I'm from Germany, were gun laws are much, MUCH stricter and therefore we aren't seeing such tragedies on a yearly basis like it's come to be anticipated in the US.
In Swiss, every single person that once belonged to the army are not just allowed, but expected to have personal arms in home.
The guns aren't the problem. People are.
Guns are almost banned in Brazil, for example, and we have simply the worst ratio of firearm killed people in the world.
Banning firearms does no good. What EUA (and, yet more urgently, Brazil) should start to do is banning bad firearms owners.
Code modeled in RP sounds like VHDL, Verilog et all - the languages used to model modern Programmable Logic Arrays, Programmable Gate Arrays and Programmable Logic Devices - aka, hardware.
No doubt this approach has its merits, but this kind or "programming" has its gotchas - a lot of gotchas.
I stand aside for now, looking with great interest.
You don't keep a secondary, old fashion, phone attached to the wall on a easily accessible location on your house in order to call for help in emergencies?
Dumb, classical phones are like spare tires or fire extinguishers on your car: they're useless almost all the time, but once you need them, you thanks God you have them.
... if the keypads that would accept the code is guarded by a squad of trigger happy elite shooters.
Knowing the password worths squat if you get shoot before touching the keypad - and you will get shoot if you try to get near one without proper authorization.
Your 12k Km line of fiber worths me squat, if I can't used because my cell phone runned out of juice and I don't have how to recharge it.
Moreover: if a tree falls over a copper line, you can fix it (kind of) easily by soldering the cables. Static and noises will not stop you to ask for help while in emergencies - hell, hit the hook three times on a land line and the cops will get to you even if you don't say a single word!
It's unmistakably clear that this story is specifically about the US, where what I said holds. Bringing in irrelevant issues from other parts of the world is utterly pointless and only serves to confuse the issue unnecessarily. I can only assume you're doing so because you don't happen to like the facts I provided, which undermine your opinions...
You're so full of it.
Please go back to school and learn something more from the country you live in. Not all America is like Texas or San Francisco, plenty of empty spaces to be fulfilled with roads and cars.
I would recommend, in special, reading about Katrina and New Orleans - yes, New Orleans is a USA city, located in a state called Louisiana (I'm making it easir for you!).
That's so painfully obvious that it's just banality to bring it up. If you want to suggest some SPECIFIC situation where POTS does better that is significant enough to be worth the cost of maintaining the 4X redundant infrastructure of POTS, be my guest... but you haven't done so yet.
Stop bitching and start reading something useful, as the following posts about exactly what you asked:
Long-term blackouts don't exist in the modern western world. In areas that are highly vulnerable, people buy generators. And a tiny little solar panel costs about $5, NOTHING next to the cost of a smartphone, and will indefinitely provide enough talk time for emergency use.
Stop thinking about what would work for you alone, and (at least try) to remember that you're not alone in the world. In such emergency, A LOT of people will be in trouble. Refugees that would be inside buildings and metro stations. People that will not have access to a garden where their cell phones could be charged by solar panels.
If you're going to be troll, at least do it properly: do your ad hominem attacks anonymously and perhaps you would manage to make read it twice - because, you know, all I have to do now is just "foe" you and never loose my time with you again.:-)
I'd say the majority of smartphone users already have a solution for that... Anyone who has ever used their smartphone for navigation bought a $5 car charger, and will be able to charge up their phone, and their neighbor's, for at least a few days.
Personally, I've got a pocket-sized $10, 1W solar panel that'll charge AAA/AA batteries, and/out output to USB, so I'll be good to go indefinitely (as will anyone else who has ever gone camping) and I'll keep my immediate neighbors up and connected, too.
And I will reply that you're wrong, as the majority of the people in this world don't own a car, and by the way things are going, fewer and fewer people will manage to get the resources (and the desire) to buy one.
So, no. Relying on automotive chargers are suicide on the long run.
Solar chargers will help. for sure. But only on sunny days - and emergencies don't happens only on clear, bright, warm and sunny days,
the analog phone operators can redirect their power supplies in order to keep the phone lines working
POTS has problems with being overloaded after disasters, too. Authorities used-to encourage people to look for pay phones and hang-up the handset if they've fallen off to help... POTS is superior, but it benefits from its' declining use, in the same way cell towers suffer from their popularity. Cell towers, like POTS, could be designed with more call capacity. Government agencies like the FCC simply have not set a high enough bar for cellular service, to ensure available in emergencies, like they formers did with POTS.
*Every* service will have problems with overloading after disasters. Every single one of them.
What I'm advocating is that different services have different characteristics, and so have different resilience to different kinds of emergencies.
I think that there're situations where POTS will manage to save more lives than cell phones, in special, long term blackouts where a powered plug will be something that you simply will not have access.
Of course there're situations where cell phones would do better - what is a good reason to have both!
I've been wondering for a while: during an emergency, why not formally limit mobile phones in the area to 911 calls and text messages? Or maybe limit voice to 1 minute calls once every ~10 minutes?
Slashdot Mirror
No, they are stolen by people who then use them in crimes. The number one source of crime guns is theft (directly or indirectly). If there were no legal guns, criminals would have a greatly reduced supply.
Yeah, right. Pay a visit to Brazil's biggest skidrows. ;-)
You're just "half right". Banning legally owned firearms will, in fact, reduce the incidence of stolen firearms on crimes.
But will not reduce the incidence of firearms in crimes. There's a vast and available supply of illegal firearms around the world. Our countries can't prevent tons and tons of drugs from being trafficked to our countries, exactly how do you expect that illegal firearms would be kept out?
(Not saying you're wrong - just saying that's not enough, and probably undesired, to simply ban all firearms on civil hands)
Brazilian here too.
The sad fact is that you should be deeply concerned even if you shoot anyone inside your home.
The only way to shoot a burglar in your home without being arrested for murder attempt is if the burglar is already inside the walls your home (the building, not the area) and you can prove that your life was in danger *and* the burglar has a firearm himself. But since you will probably alive (as the dead doesn't have concerns), you will automatically have the system against you.
Oh, the burglar had a knife and you wasn't trained on corporal fights? You're screwed. Brazilian laws expect that you, politely, restrain yourself from using the firearm and take your chances with your hands - after all, the burglar is not armed with firearms and the law expects that you reacts proportionally to the danger you are exposed.
And not, it's not "easy" to have access (legally) to firearms except if you have good contacts inside the Police or some other public institution. The rules to get a firearm license are very harsh, and completely out of reach from the common man. (I'm not sure if this is bad anyway, given our terrible status quo on Civil Education).
I understand that Wikipedia should not be taken as definitive source of information for anything, but this doesn't means it should be dismissed.
So:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Switzerland
As far exerybody can thrust the submitter =P on the matter, giving us some links for references would not had hurt anyone. :-)
Most mailing software generates unique images to track opens, so you're still being tracked. It's actually decreases privacy for Google to auto-download the images
As a matter of fact, it does nothing about privacy. What it does is just make it useless.
As Google *always* cache the image, the sender does not knows anymore when or even if the image was viewed and, so, doesn't knows anymore if the email was opened.
I don't like what I see, but this doesn't changes what I see.
I see saved lives *and* two lost ones.
Make drugs legal and guns illegal.
It's interesting you defends banning of all firearms while also defending the legalization of all drugs.
You are just ignoring that drugs are, easy, the biggest motivator for crime at these same time you completely ignores that guns, on the right hands, also saves lives.
It's strange that every single defender of the firearms ban justs ignores the Swiss status quo.
I'm from Germany, were gun laws are much, MUCH stricter and therefore we aren't seeing such tragedies on a yearly basis like it's come to be anticipated in the US.
In Swiss, every single person that once belonged to the army are not just allowed, but expected to have personal arms in home.
The guns aren't the problem. People are.
Guns are almost banned in Brazil, for example, and we have simply the worst ratio of firearm killed people in the world.
Banning firearms does no good. What EUA (and, yet more urgently, Brazil) should start to do is banning bad firearms owners.
Oh and BTW the schools are 'gun free zones'
The schools *should* be gun free zones. Obviously, they aren't.
I'm one of these guys, by the way.
Our clients insists on using Windows Servers, even when a lot of our software is still in Java... Goes figure it out... =P
I keep my sanity using CYGWIN as my command line shell. It save my sorry arse more than once.
I see your point.
But there are still professional niches where you just can't stay away from Microsoft - they still have a lockout on some areas.
FLOSS programs for Windows allows these guys to use FLOSS.
Good luck trying to use WinAmp in a few Windows Updates.
"Programmable Obsolescence" : does it make rings a bell somewhere?
winamp always worked for me. So simple, so tiny...
So missed. :-(
Interesting.
Code modeled in RP sounds like VHDL, Verilog et all - the languages used to model modern Programmable Logic Arrays, Programmable Gate Arrays and Programmable Logic Devices - aka, hardware.
No doubt this approach has its merits, but this kind or "programming" has its gotchas - a lot of gotchas.
I stand aside for now, looking with great interest.
What?
You don't keep a secondary, old fashion, phone attached to the wall on a easily accessible location on your house in order to call for help in emergencies?
Dumb, classical phones are like spare tires or fire extinguishers on your car: they're useless almost all the time, but once you need them, you thanks God you have them.
... if the keypads that would accept the code is guarded by a squad of trigger happy elite shooters.
Knowing the password worths squat if you get shoot before touching the keypad - and you will get shoot if you try to get near one without proper authorization.
Your 12k Km line of fiber worths me squat, if I can't used because my cell phone runned out of juice and I don't have how to recharge it.
Moreover: if a tree falls over a copper line, you can fix it (kind of) easily by soldering the cables. Static and noises will not stop you to ask for help while in emergencies - hell, hit the hook three times on a land line and the cops will get to you even if you don't say a single word!
I don't know about you, but I have extra batteries, genrators, and hell, a *car* I can charge my cell phone with.
Cars were so useful in New Orleans...
http://pendletonpanther.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/new-orl.jpg
This is going to be fun. :-)
It's unmistakably clear that this story is specifically about the US, where what I said holds. Bringing in irrelevant issues from other parts of the world is utterly pointless and only serves to confuse the issue unnecessarily. I can only assume you're doing so because you don't happen to like the facts I provided, which undermine your opinions...
You're so full of it.
Please go back to school and learn something more from the country you live in. Not all America is like Texas or San Francisco, plenty of empty spaces to be fulfilled with roads and cars.
I would recommend, in special, reading about Katrina and New Orleans - yes, New Orleans is a USA city, located in a state called Louisiana (I'm making it easir for you!).
That's so painfully obvious that it's just banality to bring it up. If you want to suggest some SPECIFIC situation where POTS does better that is significant enough to be worth the cost of maintaining the 4X redundant infrastructure of POTS, be my guest... but you haven't done so yet.
Stop bitching and start reading something useful, as the following posts about exactly what you asked:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4504003&cid=45562197
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4504003&cid=45562197
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4504003&cid=45561569
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4504003&cid=45562711
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4504003&cid=45561327
Long-term blackouts don't exist in the modern western world. In areas that are highly vulnerable, people buy generators. And a tiny little solar panel costs about $5, NOTHING next to the cost of a smartphone, and will indefinitely provide enough talk time for emergency use.
Stop thinking about what would work for you alone, and (at least try) to remember that you're not alone in the world. In such emergency, A LOT of people will be in trouble. Refugees that would be inside buildings and metro stations. People that will not have access to a garden where their cell phones could be charged by solar panels.
If you're going to be troll, at least do it properly: do your ad hominem attacks anonymously and perhaps you would manage to make read it twice - because, you know, all I have to do now is just "foe" you and never loose my time with you again. :-)
I'd say the majority of smartphone users already have a solution for that... Anyone who has ever used their smartphone for navigation bought a $5 car charger, and will be able to charge up their phone, and their neighbor's, for at least a few days.
Personally, I've got a pocket-sized $10, 1W solar panel that'll charge AAA/AA batteries, and/out output to USB, so I'll be good to go indefinitely (as will anyone else who has ever gone camping) and I'll keep my immediate neighbors up and connected, too.
And I will reply that you're wrong, as the majority of the people in this world don't own a car, and by the way things are going, fewer and fewer people will manage to get the resources (and the desire) to buy one.
So, no. Relying on automotive chargers are suicide on the long run.
Solar chargers will help. for sure. But only on sunny days - and emergencies don't happens only on clear, bright, warm and sunny days,
POTS has problems with being overloaded after disasters, too. Authorities used-to encourage people to look for pay phones and hang-up the handset if they've fallen off to help... POTS is superior, but it benefits from its' declining use, in the same way cell towers suffer from their popularity. Cell towers, like POTS, could be designed with more call capacity. Government agencies like the FCC simply have not set a high enough bar for cellular service, to ensure available in emergencies, like they formers did with POTS.
*Every* service will have problems with overloading after disasters. Every single one of them.
What I'm advocating is that different services have different characteristics, and so have different resilience to different kinds of emergencies.
I think that there're situations where POTS will manage to save more lives than cell phones, in special, long term blackouts where a powered plug will be something that you simply will not have access.
Of course there're situations where cell phones would do better - what is a good reason to have both!
No.
I saying that idiots always fuck up because they think that because something had worked ONCE for them, it will always work for everybody.
I've been wondering for a while: during an emergency, why not formally limit mobile phones in the area to 911 calls and text messages? Or maybe limit voice to 1 minute calls once every ~10 minutes?
As someone's else mentioned somewhere else in this thread, this already exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACCOLC">ALLOCS.
This will help, for sure, in short longed emergencies.
On the long run, however, every cell phone will run out of battery and will need to be recharged - a problem that land lines don't have.
Yeah. Solar chargers are SOOOOO useful at night... :-)
We're talking about emergencies. Emergencies happens anytime, not only on daylight.
I'm not saying solar chargers are useless, but they (alone) don't solve the problem.
As far as I know, deaf people (and trained dogs) can just take the phone off hook and hit the hook three times to signaling need of assistance.
Since land lines don't move around, the Police know exactly where to send help.
If you are right, then texting HELP on such emergency is precisely what we should do!