Hey, the U.S. underwrote Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War, despite his, uh, indiscretions with the Kurds and others.
I find it hard to assess the merits of each of these catastrophes; I do know that "holier than thou" is a dangerous game, and that admitting our past transgressions does not paralyze us from moving forward.
I wouldn't have made it out of the harbor in one piece, so I don't mean to criticize too harshly.:)
Someone must be burning to know that the Earth is about 8,000 in diameter, fatter at the Equator. There, that's as much showing off as I can muster. More.
Grr, I botched the link to the statute. Well, actually/. botched it because it doesn't allow long strings even in an href. Here is a link to 18 U.S.C. 921. Search for "assault."
Careful who you call stupid, you're likely to get it all over yourself.
It is legally sufficient to ban some weapons and not others even if it is not logical -- this is not about equal protection for firearms. The important thing in a criminal statute is that it give notice what is proscribed. Also, the wisdom of the law as a whole is a different matter from the meaning of its parts; some parts being illogical or even unconstitutional will likely not invalidate the other parts. And as a matter of policy, I think it is silly, for example, to argue that grenade launchers shouldn't be illegal because no crimes have been committed with them. No crimes have been committed with nuclear weapons -- should they be legal? Or, less ridiculous-sounding, flame throwers, exploding bullets, land mines, hand grenades, silencers... you get my point. And this is all beside the point here of interpreting the law.
I'll speculate M16 does not need inclusion in the assault rifle list because it has burst and full-auto capabilities, thus falls under existing "machine gun" regulations. It is however an assault rifle if one has ever existed, and meets the generic definition of one in the statute. It is also referred to thus, perhaps informally, in military parlance. If you must get really picky, with the flip of a switch an M16 can be placed in semiauto mode; thus it has the capability of being an assault weapon and thus ought to be illegal altogether. If the statute establishes a broader meaning to assault weapon, so be it; if a machine gun is not technically an assault weapon, fine; what is important is the content of what is or is not banned, not the label.
If you feel weapons functionally similar to those banned are still legal, then lobby Congress to include them in the interest of fairness. Logically machine guns should be included; let's see that they are! The rule in criminal prosecutions, importantly, is the "rule on leniency": ambiguities in the statute are resolved in favor of the defendant. Regardless, having spent some time in my life interpreting the law, I am 100% in favor of legislative clarity. One rarely sees it.
Finally, here is the ideal cite to the statutory definition of "assault rifle" in the United States Code (embarassing I forgot Cornell posted the Code -- they're my alma mater and the professor in charge of the site was my property instructor). As you have not identified any errors in the Brady site description of the law, the point is moot, though I would immediately notify them of any, as I would the NRA. You haven't identified any errors in what I wrote, either.
Feel free to raise any concrete objections to the interpretation of the law but not again the wisdom of its passage. The latter is politics.
hint #1: you don't succeed by calling people that visit your site "thieves"
But they're not calling their visitor-customers thieves. They are talking to the site owners and calling the end-users thieves, to appeal to the site owners' notion that they've been wronged, and even injecting a little moral outrage in there.
I know it sounds stupid, but is it up to you or the site owner to choose their business model?
What are the intentions of the site owner it allowing you to view their page? Do you have any obligations to honor them?
Closest to home, is using ad-blocking software to view slashdot morally equivalent to using an ad-blocking subscription? If you say yes, are you sure the site owners agree? If no, doesn't isn't disregarding their desires contemptuous? (Hey, maybe they don't care. But if they really don't care, they should drop the ads for everyone who doesn't affirmatively choose to see them.)
I don't think it is, and I know which choice will kill slashdot and which will sustain it, assuming they can't raise money another way -- which is their business to explore. The/. FAQ makes clear why they're doing the ads. (Also see here.) If I don't like what they're doing with the site, ads included, they lose me as a customer.
I think there's plenty to discuss here, and I'm not saying I know the answer. If you can not be moved to view the ads, let me suggest this: subscribe or walk. Don't invent your own private third option.
At the outset, let me say I'm trying to be informative, not to start a debate over the wisdom of gun control. That's for another day.
True, assault weapons are not machine guns; they are semi-automatic, so one trigger pull fires one round. The legal definition is confusing and weird, but this is partly because of the pressure exerted by the gun lobby to eek out exceptions. A pure assault weapon ban might make more sense, but given the variety of weapons made, it's pretty tough to come up with an unassailable definition. Ultimately the line is going to be arbitrary, as with so many regulations.
I don't think "assault weapon" is a propaganda term; certainly the military has a sense of the difference between assault weapons (M-16) and not (9mm sidearm). Assault was used as a synonym for "unusually dangerous," but there is some defensible logic behind that. Pushing for a ban on "unusually dangerous weapons" sound kind of lame, if more accurate.
I disagree that the difference is cosmetic. Most of the elements in the definition focus on functional attributes that make the weapon more portable or more deadly and so on. I mentioned here a link to some information concerning the statutory definition. The statute is quite clear which weapons are OK and which are not; and if you are prosecuted if will do you no good to point to a weapon that is similar but legal. You do run into situations like "What is a silencer?" -- one case I saw involved a guy who tried to make a pathetic silencer from a Coke can or something, but I think he may have been convicted on his intent to make the device, not his success.
Gun regulation dates back 100 years, and there is considerable caselaw. The assault weapon ban just added a little more scope to it (no pun intended).
His spelling makes it sounds a bit like "insult weapons."
Anyone interested in the statutory definition of "assault weapon," as set forth by the 1994 gun control law, can check here. Note that factors such as clip size are paramount -- IMHO, as this may draw ire, if you can't finish off your mugger with 10 rounds you need to spend more time at the firing range. (pardon my citing a partisan source; I try to avoid that but don't feel like going to the trouble of finding the statute itself. Anyone seriously interested should do so.)
Some things like silencers I believe are unlicensable, and are subject to a stiff prison term. Machine guns are legal but strictly limited to the 100,000 licenses extant.
The law does not call refusing to watch commercials theft or any other criminal offense. We don't live in an Orwellian time where you could be forced to watch the commercials. It's also not any civil offense I can think of -- you're not breaking any agreement you gave real or implied consent to. I think it's going to be pretty hard to make out any implied legally binding promise on your part to watch ads.
To use TV as an analogy, muting all the commercials is fine, and is anticipated by the advertisers. If anything the mute button has encouraged them to make ads less bombastic and more entertaining. However, it can get stickier, at least if you are recording and if you are using technology to block the ads. Recording is legal as a form of fair use, but I wonder if routine ad-blocking would raise a problem. I've heard this discussed in the context of these personal video recorders, where they could make ad-skipping very easy, but have made it slightly inconvenient to placate the industry. I don't know if this is out of legal concerns or political pressure. Now, ad blocking software might be a similarly suspect technology. But that seems weak, and as a practical matter the software will not be challenged.
However, I do think an ethical argument could be made that you should watch the ads, perhaps just occasionally as a compromise. We now the ads are what keep the lights on, and that the advertisers are asking for a little of our time in return to make their pitch. If they ask you up front, would you be willing to watch a few ads in exchange for your nighttime dose of Stargate? Slashdot or Salon ask us to pay a subscription to suppress ads; surely it's implied that they'd rather you didn't do it on your own, thus evading both their revenue streams and being at least a bit of a leech. You're not subscribing for the convenience of having them block the ads, you're paying to block the ads, period.
But this is perhaps just a lot of handwringing. Certainly ad-blocking is not a crime, but we have to acknowledge that in many cases, as with TV, we prefer ad-sponsorship over other models, such as paying. I used to use ad-blocking software and got tired of managing it. I now glance at the ads occasionally, or at least don't treat them like the Medusa, where a mere glance might be lethal. And, significantly, I avoid ad-choked sites altogether, denying myself the content while making the point that theirs is not a site to which I will give a "hit." If enough people do this, ad revenue drops and the site has to improve its scheme or perish.
Vote with your feet. Boycott sites you don't like, and respect the sites that you do visit by suffering the content the webmaster has to include not to die. If you don't like it, walk, and if you care enough, send the webmaster a note explaining why.
Sorry my prose rambles -- I'm still mulling this over.
Yep, there is money to be made, but not much and not for a long time. I'm particularly grumpy about humans in space, because they cost so much and divert funds from unmanned research probes. A lot of aerospace engineers feel the same.
Columbus was a better investment bet. I don't know how much was invested in the 1492 project (3 used ships and crews?), but I doubt it amounts to much of anything in 2002 dollars. Probably not enough to get a grapefruit into space. (Actually, that would be a cool statistic -- I just dropped an email to a professor who asked the same Q.)
What? You've never heard of the politically influential Flat Earth Society? They have a Web site and might send you a brochure.;-)
It's a textbook myth. You can find info about Columbus and his contemporary science online. It was pretty much impossible to be a sailor and not notice the round earth. I think C estimated its diameter at about 4,000 miles, so he was waaayyy off in his estimate of the distance to India, plus he had no idea of the intervening continent unless he was hanging out at the Viking bars. (The intervening continent turned out to be worth a lot, though.)
I don't know where these idiotic ideas of flat earths and cherry trees come from. As a starting point you might enjoy the book "Lies My Teacher Told Me." It has a web site; with a quiz!
Right, but my assessment was that the past only provides data they may or may not help up to hone our future projections -- and will not directly supply that probability. In other words, a system with a "true" 10% chance of failure might survive 100 launches without incident, but how probable is that? Here, I'm not interested in challenging NASA's own 1-in-300 estimate, which I assume to be conservative and take into account all the variables of aging equipment etc.
I noticed that the Apple calculator does exponents (after a mere 18 years!), and if I remember what to do the 1-in-300 per-launch probabilty yields a 100-launch survival probability of (299/300)^100 or about 72%. So if 1-in-300 is right, that's the number for planning purposes regardless of whether 1 or 100 of the last 113 launches ended in failure.
Where we disagree is when (approximately) it because unreasonable to get into bed with the Nazis. I think this point was before our government declared war, and even before Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Now, "What did they know, and when did they know it?"
It's like slavery; there was no magic moment when it became unacceptable. American popular opinion was split, but I'd like to think to an honest observer who could see beyond self-interest, the answer was long obvious. Even when the Constitution was written it was a hot issue among and within the states, so it's weird to give Jefferson or Washington a pass for "not realizing" holding his slaves was wrong (plus Pres. J. at times attacked slavery, and there's the Sally Hemings business -- complex and remarkable guy).
Similarly, I'm reluctant to let IBM or Ford off. Nazi Germany was terrifying well before the extermination camps existed (even we set up camps, for Japanese-Americans); their anti-Semitic practices, written into law, made apartheid South Africa look like Disneyland. And their propaganda, although it helped conceal some ugliness, also demonized Jews and other "undesirables," as well as claiming that Germans were sold out at Versailles and deserved a greater destiny, Aryan idealism, and so on. Wow. I hope and pray we would not be so complacent about such a situation today; and even if we are, we are not the isolationist America of the 30's.
But this is a factual debate (call it "When?" to boycott), and at least what we're talking about here implicitly recognized that corporations do have a responsibility to refrain at times from activity that may be legal (call this question "Whether?"). And however you draw the line, assuredly at least some Americans crossed that line, either because of indifference or, likely in Ford's case, sympathy to the Nazi cause, a cause I think starkly immoral even had it gone no farther than Nuremberg (check out the content of the laws -- they're quite something). IBM probably did not know its system would be used for such a ghoulish purpose but the contention is that they should at least used better judgment. A factual Q.:)
I haven't heard his group tagged so much as the disease vector, except for VD that I guess was very common in Europe. Syphilis can kill, but it was smallpox that did a number on North America IIRC.
Native Americans removed to Europe tended not to last long, and thus were quickly deemed unsuitable slaves. The absence of so much disaease among the Indians is still a puzzle (some think the bugs didn'ts survive teh Arctic trip), but it was real.
Lastly, as for discovers of America, it would have to be the Native Americans I think, who numbered in the millions before any Europeans showed up. Plus they got there the hard way -- they walked! But "discoverer" has different meanings depending on the context.
It would be tough to do the spin, and nature isn't so perverse about falling satellite parts.
As for debunking UL's -- ys, rumors cancel out -- the good debunking sites reference authorities one can check, or else they'd be no better than the UL's. Some debunkers are authoritative enough that their word is good enough. I wouldn't accept less, and I checked up on this falling coin guy; he's real, and so it the NASA facility, so I'm more inclined to believe him until I see an experiment where they cracked concrete. Then there will be a real dispute.
We've always been susceptible to leaping at what seems like a good idea at the time. For example, choosing == to mean "equals" -- it is so special the bizzaro results I remember getting after typing one =. I don't think these new phones will much help us protect ourselves from our own carelessness.
Yes, well, partially true -- and one of the reasons I admire President Truman taking an internationalist stance and promoting the Marshall Plan, with its radical notion of giving money (largely purchase credits to stimulate American production) to former enemies. And NATO, and the UN, and the Berlin Airlift, and.. he did some important work stabilizing post-war Europe.
Yeah, well, I knew that but didn't want to bring it up because it gets people all pissy. There's even a theory, not well proven, that Africans may have made it to the Carribean. Interesting and inconclusive debate.
I think Columbus can be defended as not so much first (who really cares, only history books and monument makers do) but most clearly identifiable wellspring of the New World development that most concerns us moderns. "In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue." See, that's accurate and doesn't say anything about "first.":) He didn't do any building, either, and the only settlement he left behind got promptly massacred by natives, but he certainly piqued the interest of the monarchs.
Double-edged sword is a metaphor meaning use for an intended purpose or its opposite. Yes, you could do plenty of damage with a single-edge, or an icepick for that matter.:) And I meant to equate gov't and tech in the sense that you can't just say, "Oh, we trust technology to save the day." Humans are in charge, and deserve credit or blame.
As for China versus America, I pick the latter. In a heartbeat. Which I'm likely to have many more of, living here.
I agree that America has a legally superior system, which is why I added a little about how factual deficiencies and corruption can creep in anyway. In the Cruz case, the system did work... but in a limping way that not many would endorse.
America does do extrajudicial killings, particularly now that the Presidential ban on assassinations has been eased. An example is the recent Predator attack in Yemen, not a war zone, and which killed 6 including an American citizen. Yes, yes, these were presumably bad people, but so much for checks and balances. This is novel.
I'm no Luddite, I think all this innovation is fine and dandy (although, sorry, I do not salivate at the prospect of MS getting into my phone)... but can anyone promise that I'll still be able to buy plain, simple, boring phones and basically do telephone calls? And don't need an engineering degree to operate? Please?
This is from someone who misses corded dial telephones that never broke, or if they did the phone company swapped you for a new one. There were a lot of problems with that era, but some nice things, too. I still have a classic ugly-beige tabletop phone with a hard-to-turn dial and a REAL BELL. And even Alexander Graham Bell could probably use it in minutes.
Flamebait my butt. It order to see outward clearly, we must see inward, too. It may be flamebait for people who dislike introspection, but should they run the show.
It's disrespectful of China to criticize it without being honest about ourselves, and hypocrisy undermines our authority to criticize. If it is OK, then the story itself is flamebait.
Note also that I focus on the facts. My only real expression of opinion aside from suggesting global balance is to criticize China. And really, do you get much more wishy-washy than:
The point of all this? Well, if we take issue with certain foreign practices, we may well be right to do so. But that same indignation should perhaps we applied at home. I offer no conclusions about capital punishment, but many questions
Um, however moving the analogy or thumbnail representation of history may be, may I least point out there aren't any Indians in orbit who got there first and need slaughtering? Or that many of those settlers were not so much seeking new opportunities as fleeing the oppression of Europe?
Sorry to be crass about it, but these are very difficult situations. In no way does space harber the readily exploitable economic bonanza that did the New World, and much of other investment there is on faith or the gee-whiz factor, not any assurance of long-term gain.
Also, Columbus's expedition was not a Star Trek like project as the myth paints it. It was intended for profit, acquiring new trade routes, real estate, resources, and, on later trips, slaves. (As we head into thanksgiving, recall that Squanto learned English when he was forcibly removed to Europe as a slave. When he made his way back to Massachusetts, infection had destroyed his tribe... leaving the nice fields for the Pilgrims to plant in thickly forested New England.)
Finally, Columbus never made it to what we thing of as America, unless you count finding a American Virgin Island or two. In five trips he never set sight on the mainland. And it's false that everyone though the world was flat! Aristotle determined it wasn't. Columbus's error was he significantly underestimated the diameter.
I'm not suggesting anyone in particular was a bad guy we need to be ashamed of, but protest substituting a caricature of the past, and especially basing our future decisions on that caricature.
I've wondered about this -- I wouldn't want to fall into the trap of sanctimony -- but I just don't buy it. It is easier to reconstruct what people knew and when they knew it than to decide when people of reasonable intelligence should have or probably did read between the lines. but for me, the 1935 Nuremberg laws deprived Jews of German citizenship and imposing numerous indignities were a point of no return. It was evident well before that that Hitler and his crew were a bunch of thugs. Finally the 1938 Kristallnacht was as blunt as one could get -- yet was met with apathy in the West. Our major affliction was not ignorance but isolationism, and it took Pearl Harbor to change our philosophy to interventionism.
There is no binary switch between moral and immoral conduct. Nor was there a precise moment of epiphany that it was time to spurn the Nazis. But of course some companies crossed the line. And why should we think they did not -- not even one of them? Even today we see that corporate run the gamut from pristine to deplorable, so logically some companies must have continued doing business even after the writing was on the wall. They should acknowledge their mistakes, or at least all the facts surrounded their conduct, address any necessary restitution, and get on with things. We expect no less of ordinary shoplifters.
If the plight of the Nazis Germans is not enough, recall that the infrastructure American companies helped Germany to build was in time turned against us.
The example I mention elsewhere in this thread is Henry Ford, a virulent anti-Semite who even bought a newspaper to publish his views. A google of Ford and Nazi provides plenty of reading. Most dramatic is Ford receiving the highest Nazi civilian honor in 1938.
Parenthetically, we are to varying degrees engaged in the problems with the trade issues you identify, perhaps too much, perhaps too little, according to whom you ask. But we do not have to be guiltless to smell something rotten from the past.
American companies such as Sun, Microsoft, Nortel are helping to limit the freedoms of people around the world, even leading to executions.
I am horrified by the tales of China's brutal use of capital punishment on crimes as nonviolent tax evasion, their well-documented corruption, and the brutal infliction of the penalty itself. A nice final touch is that the family is billed for the price of the bullet, the thought being they share culpability (and may well suffer repercussions regardless).
I'm also a patriot. And in the spirit of impartiality, remember that Amnesty International -- and the European Union -- condemns us, also, as one of the countrie practicing capital punishment, particularly on juveniles. I'm sure all these companies play a hand in that somehow.
Those are the legal aspects of our system; the practical ones include a disturbingly high error rate despite the greater integrity and defendant rights in our system. For example, after a dozen exonerations of death row inmates on the basis of innocence and not legalisms -- for reasons such as witnesses recanting, other persons confessing, and DNA evidence proving impossibility -- the state of Illinois placed a moritorium on executions until they could figure out what was going on. There are numerous examples.
The point of all this? Well, if we take issue with certain foreign practices, we may well be right to do so. But that same indignation should perhaps we applied at home. I offer no conclusions about capital punishment, but many questions.
Disclosure and digression -- I clerked for a Chicago federal appeals court for two years, and although I never worked directly on a capital case I saw the sorts of defects that occur in trial of "mere murderers" (I wrote up a judicial bribery case concerning a murder-for-hire). I also witnesses the unfolding of the incredible case of Rolondo Cruz, who went through three trials before several investigators and prosecutors were indicted for manufacturing evidence and other abuses(!). BTW, Scott Turow was one of the local attorneys who took up this particular cause, all the way to the Supreme Court as they say; he came and spoke about it and other corruption cases (he's a good attorney as well as writer).
But I digress. How about this truism: Technology like business is a double-edged sword, with no inherent moral authority.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, the U.S. underwrote Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War, despite his, uh, indiscretions with the Kurds and others.
I find it hard to assess the merits of each of these catastrophes; I do know that "holier than thou" is a dangerous game, and that admitting our past transgressions does not paralyze us from moving forward.
I wouldn't have made it out of the harbor in one piece, so I don't mean to criticize too harshly. :)
Someone must be burning to know that the Earth is about 8,000 in diameter, fatter at the Equator. There, that's as much showing off as I can muster. More.
Here is an exercise.
Grr, I botched the link to the statute. Well, actually /. botched it because it doesn't allow long strings even in an href. Here is a link to 18 U.S.C. 921. Search for "assault."
Careful who you call stupid, you're likely to get it all over yourself.
... you get my point. And this is all beside the point here of interpreting the law.
It is legally sufficient to ban some weapons and not others even if it is not logical -- this is not about equal protection for firearms. The important thing in a criminal statute is that it give notice what is proscribed. Also, the wisdom of the law as a whole is a different matter from the meaning of its parts; some parts being illogical or even unconstitutional will likely not invalidate the other parts. And as a matter of policy, I think it is silly, for example, to argue that grenade launchers shouldn't be illegal because no crimes have been committed with them. No crimes have been committed with nuclear weapons -- should they be legal? Or, less ridiculous-sounding, flame throwers, exploding bullets, land mines, hand grenades, silencers
I'll speculate M16 does not need inclusion in the assault rifle list because it has burst and full-auto capabilities, thus falls under existing "machine gun" regulations. It is however an assault rifle if one has ever existed, and meets the generic definition of one in the statute. It is also referred to thus, perhaps informally, in military parlance. If you must get really picky, with the flip of a switch an M16 can be placed in semiauto mode; thus it has the capability of being an assault weapon and thus ought to be illegal altogether. If the statute establishes a broader meaning to assault weapon, so be it; if a machine gun is not technically an assault weapon, fine; what is important is the content of what is or is not banned, not the label.
If you feel weapons functionally similar to those banned are still legal, then lobby Congress to include them in the interest of fairness. Logically machine guns should be included; let's see that they are! The rule in criminal prosecutions, importantly, is the "rule on leniency": ambiguities in the statute are resolved in favor of the defendant. Regardless, having spent some time in my life interpreting the law, I am 100% in favor of legislative clarity. One rarely sees it.
Finally, here is the ideal cite to the statutory definition of "assault rifle" in the United States Code (embarassing I forgot Cornell posted the Code -- they're my alma mater and the professor in charge of the site was my property instructor). As you have not identified any errors in the Brady site description of the law, the point is moot, though I would immediately notify them of any, as I would the NRA. You haven't identified any errors in what I wrote, either.
Feel free to raise any concrete objections to the interpretation of the law but not again the wisdom of its passage. The latter is politics.
I don't know about you, but I've got a long list of people I'd like to launch into space.
hint #1: you don't succeed by calling people that visit your site "thieves"
But they're not calling their visitor-customers thieves. They are talking to the site owners and calling the end-users thieves, to appeal to the site owners' notion that they've been wronged, and even injecting a little moral outrage in there.
I'm analyzing not defending their sales tactics.
I know it sounds stupid, but is it up to you or the site owner to choose their business model?
/. FAQ makes clear why they're doing the ads. (Also see here.) If I don't like what they're doing with the site, ads included, they lose me as a customer.
What are the intentions of the site owner it allowing you to view their page? Do you have any obligations to honor them?
Closest to home, is using ad-blocking software to view slashdot morally equivalent to using an ad-blocking subscription? If you say yes, are you sure the site owners agree? If no, doesn't isn't disregarding their desires contemptuous? (Hey, maybe they don't care. But if they really don't care, they should drop the ads for everyone who doesn't affirmatively choose to see them.)
I don't think it is, and I know which choice will kill slashdot and which will sustain it, assuming they can't raise money another way -- which is their business to explore. The
I think there's plenty to discuss here, and I'm not saying I know the answer. If you can not be moved to view the ads, let me suggest this: subscribe or walk. Don't invent your own private third option.
At the outset, let me say I'm trying to be informative, not to start a debate over the wisdom of gun control. That's for another day.
True, assault weapons are not machine guns; they are semi-automatic, so one trigger pull fires one round. The legal definition is confusing and weird, but this is partly because of the pressure exerted by the gun lobby to eek out exceptions. A pure assault weapon ban might make more sense, but given the variety of weapons made, it's pretty tough to come up with an unassailable definition. Ultimately the line is going to be arbitrary, as with so many regulations.
I don't think "assault weapon" is a propaganda term; certainly the military has a sense of the difference between assault weapons (M-16) and not (9mm sidearm). Assault was used as a synonym for "unusually dangerous," but there is some defensible logic behind that. Pushing for a ban on "unusually dangerous weapons" sound kind of lame, if more accurate.
I disagree that the difference is cosmetic. Most of the elements in the definition focus on functional attributes that make the weapon more portable or more deadly and so on. I mentioned here a link to some information concerning the statutory definition. The statute is quite clear which weapons are OK and which are not; and if you are prosecuted if will do you no good to point to a weapon that is similar but legal. You do run into situations like "What is a silencer?" -- one case I saw involved a guy who tried to make a pathetic silencer from a Coke can or something, but I think he may have been convicted on his intent to make the device, not his success.
Gun regulation dates back 100 years, and there is considerable caselaw. The assault weapon ban just added a little more scope to it (no pun intended).
Nah, most people appreciate pedants!
His spelling makes it sounds a bit like "insult weapons."
Anyone interested in the statutory definition of "assault weapon," as set forth by the 1994 gun control law, can check here. Note that factors such as clip size are paramount -- IMHO, as this may draw ire, if you can't finish off your mugger with 10 rounds you need to spend more time at the firing range. (pardon my citing a partisan source; I try to avoid that but don't feel like going to the trouble of finding the statute itself. Anyone seriously interested should do so.)
Some things like silencers I believe are unlicensable, and are subject to a stiff prison term. Machine guns are legal but strictly limited to the 100,000 licenses extant.
The law does not call refusing to watch commercials theft or any other criminal offense. We don't live in an Orwellian time where you could be forced to watch the commercials. It's also not any civil offense I can think of -- you're not breaking any agreement you gave real or implied consent to. I think it's going to be pretty hard to make out any implied legally binding promise on your part to watch ads.
To use TV as an analogy, muting all the commercials is fine, and is anticipated by the advertisers. If anything the mute button has encouraged them to make ads less bombastic and more entertaining. However, it can get stickier, at least if you are recording and if you are using technology to block the ads. Recording is legal as a form of fair use, but I wonder if routine ad-blocking would raise a problem. I've heard this discussed in the context of these personal video recorders, where they could make ad-skipping very easy, but have made it slightly inconvenient to placate the industry. I don't know if this is out of legal concerns or political pressure. Now, ad blocking software might be a similarly suspect technology. But that seems weak, and as a practical matter the software will not be challenged.
However, I do think an ethical argument could be made that you should watch the ads, perhaps just occasionally as a compromise. We now the ads are what keep the lights on, and that the advertisers are asking for a little of our time in return to make their pitch. If they ask you up front, would you be willing to watch a few ads in exchange for your nighttime dose of Stargate? Slashdot or Salon ask us to pay a subscription to suppress ads; surely it's implied that they'd rather you didn't do it on your own, thus evading both their revenue streams and being at least a bit of a leech. You're not subscribing for the convenience of having them block the ads, you're paying to block the ads, period.
But this is perhaps just a lot of handwringing. Certainly ad-blocking is not a crime, but we have to acknowledge that in many cases, as with TV, we prefer ad-sponsorship over other models, such as paying. I used to use ad-blocking software and got tired of managing it. I now glance at the ads occasionally, or at least don't treat them like the Medusa, where a mere glance might be lethal. And, significantly, I avoid ad-choked sites altogether, denying myself the content while making the point that theirs is not a site to which I will give a "hit." If enough people do this, ad revenue drops and the site has to improve its scheme or perish.
Vote with your feet. Boycott sites you don't like, and respect the sites that you do visit by suffering the content the webmaster has to include not to die. If you don't like it, walk, and if you care enough, send the webmaster a note explaining why.
Sorry my prose rambles -- I'm still mulling this over.
Yep, there is money to be made, but not much and not for a long time. I'm particularly grumpy about humans in space, because they cost so much and divert funds from unmanned research probes. A lot of aerospace engineers feel the same.
Columbus was a better investment bet. I don't know how much was invested in the 1492 project (3 used ships and crews?), but I doubt it amounts to much of anything in 2002 dollars. Probably not enough to get a grapefruit into space. (Actually, that would be a cool statistic -- I just dropped an email to a professor who asked the same Q.)
What? You've never heard of the politically influential Flat Earth Society? They have a Web site and might send you a brochure. ;-)
It's a textbook myth. You can find info about Columbus and his contemporary science online. It was pretty much impossible to be a sailor and not notice the round earth. I think C estimated its diameter at about 4,000 miles, so he was waaayyy off in his estimate of the distance to India, plus he had no idea of the intervening continent unless he was hanging out at the Viking bars. (The intervening continent turned out to be worth a lot, though.)
I don't know where these idiotic ideas of flat earths and cherry trees come from. As a starting point you might enjoy the book "Lies My Teacher Told Me." It has a web site; with a quiz!
Right, but my assessment was that the past only provides data they may or may not help up to hone our future projections -- and will not directly supply that probability. In other words, a system with a "true" 10% chance of failure might survive 100 launches without incident, but how probable is that? Here, I'm not interested in challenging NASA's own 1-in-300 estimate, which I assume to be conservative and take into account all the variables of aging equipment etc.
:)
I noticed that the Apple calculator does exponents (after a mere 18 years!), and if I remember what to do the 1-in-300 per-launch probabilty yields a 100-launch survival probability of (299/300)^100 or about 72%. So if 1-in-300 is right, that's the number for planning purposes regardless of whether 1 or 100 of the last 113 launches ended in failure.
If I'm right, which is why I asked.
Where we disagree is when (approximately) it because unreasonable to get into bed with the Nazis. I think this point was before our government declared war, and even before Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Now, "What did they know, and when did they know it?"
:)
It's like slavery; there was no magic moment when it became unacceptable. American popular opinion was split, but I'd like to think to an honest observer who could see beyond self-interest, the answer was long obvious. Even when the Constitution was written it was a hot issue among and within the states, so it's weird to give Jefferson or Washington a pass for "not realizing" holding his slaves was wrong (plus Pres. J. at times attacked slavery, and there's the Sally Hemings business -- complex and remarkable guy).
Similarly, I'm reluctant to let IBM or Ford off. Nazi Germany was terrifying well before the extermination camps existed (even we set up camps, for Japanese-Americans); their anti-Semitic practices, written into law, made apartheid South Africa look like Disneyland. And their propaganda, although it helped conceal some ugliness, also demonized Jews and other "undesirables," as well as claiming that Germans were sold out at Versailles and deserved a greater destiny, Aryan idealism, and so on. Wow. I hope and pray we would not be so complacent about such a situation today; and even if we are, we are not the isolationist America of the 30's.
But this is a factual debate (call it "When?" to boycott), and at least what we're talking about here implicitly recognized that corporations do have a responsibility to refrain at times from activity that may be legal (call this question "Whether?"). And however you draw the line, assuredly at least some Americans crossed that line, either because of indifference or, likely in Ford's case, sympathy to the Nazi cause, a cause I think starkly immoral even had it gone no farther than Nuremberg (check out the content of the laws -- they're quite something). IBM probably did not know its system would be used for such a ghoulish purpose but the contention is that they should at least used better judgment. A factual Q.
I haven't heard his group tagged so much as the disease vector, except for VD that I guess was very common in Europe. Syphilis can kill, but it was smallpox that did a number on North America IIRC.
Native Americans removed to Europe tended not to last long, and thus were quickly deemed unsuitable slaves. The absence of so much disaease among the Indians is still a puzzle (some think the bugs didn'ts survive teh Arctic trip), but it was real.
Lastly, as for discovers of America, it would have to be the Native Americans I think, who numbered in the millions before any Europeans showed up. Plus they got there the hard way -- they walked! But "discoverer" has different meanings depending on the context.
It would be tough to do the spin, and nature isn't so perverse about falling satellite parts.
As for debunking UL's -- ys, rumors cancel out -- the good debunking sites reference authorities one can check, or else they'd be no better than the UL's. Some debunkers are authoritative enough that their word is good enough. I wouldn't accept less, and I checked up on this falling coin guy; he's real, and so it the NASA facility, so I'm more inclined to believe him until I see an experiment where they cracked concrete. Then there will be a real dispute.
We've always been susceptible to leaping at what seems like a good idea at the time. For example, choosing == to mean "equals" -- it is so special the bizzaro results I remember getting after typing one =. I don't think these new phones will much help us protect ourselves from our own carelessness.
Micro-rant of recovering programmer.
Yes, well, partially true -- and one of the reasons I admire President Truman taking an internationalist stance and promoting the Marshall Plan, with its radical notion of giving money (largely purchase credits to stimulate American production) to former enemies. And NATO, and the UN, and the Berlin Airlift, and .. he did some important work stabilizing post-war Europe.
Yeah, well, I knew that but didn't want to bring it up because it gets people all pissy. There's even a theory, not well proven, that Africans may have made it to the Carribean. Interesting and inconclusive debate.
:) He didn't do any building, either, and the only settlement he left behind got promptly massacred by natives, but he certainly piqued the interest of the monarchs.
I think Columbus can be defended as not so much first (who really cares, only history books and monument makers do) but most clearly identifiable wellspring of the New World development that most concerns us moderns. "In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue." See, that's accurate and doesn't say anything about "first."
Double-edged sword is a metaphor meaning use for an intended purpose or its opposite. Yes, you could do plenty of damage with a single-edge, or an icepick for that matter. :) And I meant to equate gov't and tech in the sense that you can't just say, "Oh, we trust technology to save the day." Humans are in charge, and deserve credit or blame.
... but in a limping way that not many would endorse.
As for China versus America, I pick the latter. In a heartbeat. Which I'm likely to have many more of, living here.
I agree that America has a legally superior system, which is why I added a little about how factual deficiencies and corruption can creep in anyway. In the Cruz case, the system did work
America does do extrajudicial killings, particularly now that the Presidential ban on assassinations has been eased. An example is the recent Predator attack in Yemen, not a war zone, and which killed 6 including an American citizen. Yes, yes, these were presumably bad people, but so much for checks and balances. This is novel.
I'm no Luddite, I think all this innovation is fine and dandy (although, sorry, I do not salivate at the prospect of MS getting into my phone) ... but can anyone promise that I'll still be able to buy plain, simple, boring phones and basically do telephone calls? And don't need an engineering degree to operate? Please?
This is from someone who misses corded dial telephones that never broke, or if they did the phone company swapped you for a new one. There were a lot of problems with that era, but some nice things, too. I still have a classic ugly-beige tabletop phone with a hard-to-turn dial and a REAL BELL. And even Alexander Graham Bell could probably use it in minutes.
Flamebait my butt. It order to see outward clearly, we must see inward, too. It may be flamebait for people who dislike introspection, but should they run the show.
:)
It's disrespectful of China to criticize it without being honest about ourselves, and hypocrisy undermines our authority to criticize. If it is OK, then the story itself is flamebait.
Note also that I focus on the facts. My only real expression of opinion aside from suggesting global balance is to criticize China. And really, do you get much more wishy-washy than:
The point of all this? Well, if we take issue with certain foreign practices, we may well be right to do so. But that same indignation should perhaps we applied at home. I offer no conclusions about capital punishment, but many questions
M2 strike thee down.
Um, however moving the analogy or thumbnail representation of history may be, may I least point out there aren't any Indians in orbit who got there first and need slaughtering? Or that many of those settlers were not so much seeking new opportunities as fleeing the oppression of Europe?
... leaving the nice fields for the Pilgrims to plant in thickly forested New England.)
Sorry to be crass about it, but these are very difficult situations. In no way does space harber the readily exploitable economic bonanza that did the New World, and much of other investment there is on faith or the gee-whiz factor, not any assurance of long-term gain.
Also, Columbus's expedition was not a Star Trek like project as the myth paints it. It was intended for profit, acquiring new trade routes, real estate, resources, and, on later trips, slaves. (As we head into thanksgiving, recall that Squanto learned English when he was forcibly removed to Europe as a slave. When he made his way back to Massachusetts, infection had destroyed his tribe
Finally, Columbus never made it to what we thing of as America, unless you count finding a American Virgin Island or two. In five trips he never set sight on the mainland. And it's false that everyone though the world was flat! Aristotle determined it wasn't. Columbus's error was he significantly underestimated the diameter.
I'm not suggesting anyone in particular was a bad guy we need to be ashamed of, but protest substituting a caricature of the past, and especially basing our future decisions on that caricature.
I've wondered about this -- I wouldn't want to fall into the trap of sanctimony -- but I just don't buy it. It is easier to reconstruct what people knew and when they knew it than to decide when people of reasonable intelligence should have or probably did read between the lines. but for me, the 1935 Nuremberg laws deprived Jews of German citizenship and imposing numerous indignities were a point of no return. It was evident well before that that Hitler and his crew were a bunch of thugs. Finally the 1938 Kristallnacht was as blunt as one could get -- yet was met with apathy in the West. Our major affliction was not ignorance but isolationism, and it took Pearl Harbor to change our philosophy to interventionism.
There is no binary switch between moral and immoral conduct. Nor was there a precise moment of epiphany that it was time to spurn the Nazis. But of course some companies crossed the line. And why should we think they did not -- not even one of them? Even today we see that corporate run the gamut from pristine to deplorable, so logically some companies must have continued doing business even after the writing was on the wall. They should acknowledge their mistakes, or at least all the facts surrounded their conduct, address any necessary restitution, and get on with things. We expect no less of ordinary shoplifters.
If the plight of the Nazis Germans is not enough, recall that the infrastructure American companies helped Germany to build was in time turned against us.
The example I mention elsewhere in this thread is Henry Ford, a virulent anti-Semite who even bought a newspaper to publish his views. A google of Ford and Nazi provides plenty of reading. Most dramatic is Ford receiving the highest Nazi civilian honor in 1938.
Parenthetically, we are to varying degrees engaged in the problems with the trade issues you identify, perhaps too much, perhaps too little, according to whom you ask. But we do not have to be guiltless to smell something rotten from the past.
American companies such as Sun, Microsoft, Nortel are helping to limit the freedoms of people around the world, even leading to executions.
I am horrified by the tales of China's brutal use of capital punishment on crimes as nonviolent tax evasion, their well-documented corruption, and the brutal infliction of the penalty itself. A nice final touch is that the family is billed for the price of the bullet, the thought being they share culpability (and may well suffer repercussions regardless).
I'm also a patriot. And in the spirit of impartiality, remember that Amnesty International -- and the European Union -- condemns us, also, as one of the countrie practicing capital punishment, particularly on juveniles. I'm sure all these companies play a hand in that somehow.
Those are the legal aspects of our system; the practical ones include a disturbingly high error rate despite the greater integrity and defendant rights in our system. For example, after a dozen exonerations of death row inmates on the basis of innocence and not legalisms -- for reasons such as witnesses recanting, other persons confessing, and DNA evidence proving impossibility -- the state of Illinois placed a moritorium on executions until they could figure out what was going on. There are numerous examples.
The point of all this? Well, if we take issue with certain foreign practices, we may well be right to do so. But that same indignation should perhaps we applied at home. I offer no conclusions about capital punishment, but many questions.
Disclosure and digression -- I clerked for a Chicago federal appeals court for two years, and although I never worked directly on a capital case I saw the sorts of defects that occur in trial of "mere murderers" (I wrote up a judicial bribery case concerning a murder-for-hire). I also witnesses the unfolding of the incredible case of Rolondo Cruz, who went through three trials before several investigators and prosecutors were indicted for manufacturing evidence and other abuses(!). BTW, Scott Turow was one of the local attorneys who took up this particular cause, all the way to the Supreme Court as they say; he came and spoke about it and other corruption cases (he's a good attorney as well as writer).
But I digress. How about this truism: Technology like business is a double-edged sword, with no inherent moral authority.