You know, registration is required, licenses are required, insurance is required. In some states, an inspection is required.
This is one of the stupidest arguments that gun control advocates makes, because you don't need any of that to own a car, only to drive one on the public roads.
I don't have a problem with requiring that folks have a permit to carry a handgun in public (provided it's a "shall-issue" to any qualified person and is affordable to all citizens), though of course Johnny Gangbanger isn't going to stop carrying just because he lacks a permission slip from the government. But telling me that I can't own a firearm on my own property, though, is a different matter.
It sounds perfectly reasonable to me that it would be much harder for them to injure each other without weapons.
You've confused "without weapon" with "without firearms".
Despite the easy availability of firearms in the U.S., about 30% of our homicides are committed without them -- with knives, clubs, fists and feet, fire, poison, and so on.
Which would cause more problems: all the guns in the country spontaneously jamming and failing to fire, or all the cars in the country breaking down?
If cars break down, there are bikes, busses, mass transit, and walking. It's inconvenient but civilization as we know it could survive.
If firearms stop working, every human being is at the mercy of larger and stronger people. As the cliche goes, ""God created men, but Sam Colt made them equal." A free and democratic nation cannot exist without firearms.
Homicides using firearms number about 10,000/year in the U.S.; defensive gun use estimates range from 55,000 to 2,500,000 (yes, the error bars are that huge). Guns are used far more often to protect people than to murder.
If we make some (currently sensible) assumptions about sizeof(int), yes, that's safe. The problem is that somewhere down the road, the newbie who maintains your code is going to change it to
sprintf( buffer, "After long and careful consideration, our system has calculated your number=%d", i );
Secure code is not just "code containing no flaws", it's "code structured in such a way to guard against the introduction of flaws in further development and maintenance".
For some reason the banks and credit card companies are very friendly on phone. They seem to trust the caller id and an actual human being on the phone.
It's worth nothing that the ANI that your bank gets when you call their 800 number, is different than the "caller ID" service you might have on your home phone. Caller ID is much easier to spoof.
Asserting that "women are more nurturing then men", and then making social policy that turns that assertion into a self-fulfilling prophecy, is how sexism works. If Dad doesn't get to bond with the kid as much as Mom does, then it's likely he won't be as nurturing -- then people point at that and say,
"see, men aren't as nurturing, we don't need to give them time to bond with their kids."
Who is Lauren Weinstein and why does he get to submit his own blog post to the front page of slashdot?
Lauren Weinstein was working on technology and privacy issues when you were in diapers. (One of my closest brushes with an Internet great was having him correct me when I thought "Lauren" was a woman's name...oops.)
No. It's defective by design. It cannot co-exist with general-purpose computers, and so the content cartel seeks to eliminate general-purpose computers and put them under some form of centralized control. That is, in a word, evil.
My focus here is the aspect of how DRM protects the rights of content creators (aka, artists) and helps to prevent people freely distributing their works and with no compensation.
There is no "right" to prevent others from reading or copying a work. I'm all for authors and musicians getting paid, but I've been arguing for over a decade now that the way to do that is to eliminate copyright and establish a royalty-right, modeled after songwriter royalties. I can sing "Tangled Up In Blue" for free at a party; if I play it at the bar, using it to make money, Dylan gets his nickel. I'm happy if people share my book or my album for free; if they make money off of it (putting it on an ad-supported site, for example), I want a cut. (The book is not CC licensed but will be DRM free; I intend to CC license a later edition after my publishing contact expires.)
My point is that once you allow a state legislature dictate what should be taught in class...
Who do you think should set curriculum, then? It's either got to be an elected person or group of people, or a bureaucracy with powers devolved from an elected person or group of people.
... you open the door for another state legislature to dictate what should not be taught in class.
Not when that state legislature violates the First Amendment as extended to the state by the Fourteenth, no.
If it's okay for the legislature to pass a bill mandating that all schools teach science fiction then it becomes okay for legislature to pass a bill mandating that evolution should banned from the classroom.
The reason that it's not ok to ban evolution from the classroom has nothing to do with whether that decision comes for the state, local, or federal level, or from a legislature or a Board of Education. The reason it's not ok is because It's wrong because the alternative is teaching religion. (Or not teaching biology at all, but failing to give kids a basic education is child abuse.)
One, how can they presume our mental state would be significantly altered by unknown future technology. History would presume to suggest the opposite of what they suggest, actually.
Not at all. Our mental state has been greatly transformed by two previous inventions -- speech and writing. We are now in the midst of the third great transformation, brought about by a new communications method: networked humanity.
To generate some sense of outrage against Israel and Jews for doing something that every other country on the planet does
Citation needed. What other counties demand access to tourists' e-mail? And outrage against Israel's human rights crimes is not "anti-semitic" or "outrage against Jews". Anyone with a lick of sense is tired of Israel playing the victim card.
I feel safer walking down the street in Tel Aviv than I do walking down the street in Detroit.
Damning with faint praise, there. And if you're Jewish, that's like a white person in 1965 talking about how safe he felt in Alabama, Bloody Sunday be damned.
Yes, they do. Compared to other industrialized nations and to our own history, our overall tax burden is low (though it varies from state to state). When you consider that we've rung up two wars on the national credit card, taxes have to go up. The only question is on whom.
Which is why most of their cops don't even carry guns.
I believe you may have confused Japan with the U.K. Cops I saw on the street in my months in Osaka routinely carried revolvers. Not that it matters; a police state has nothing to do with whether police carry firearms, it has to do with totalitarian government -- which, when the population has been disarmed, can function quite well even with low-level functionaries not carrying firearms.
Catching the people who injured 170 people and killed 3 in a terrorist attack.
Except that it didn't. The suspect was caught after the lockdown was lifted. People cowering in their homes can't "see something, say something". The lockdown was an utter and complete tactical failure. It let cops run around playing soldier, but delayed the actual capture of the bad guy.
There's no reason why software should be free, anymore so than anything else. Since nothing else free, we need to stop giving away our labor.
Thank you for demonstrating your complete misunderstanding of the term "Free Software". I'd provide a link to help you, but suspect you don't care to remedy your ignorance.
CONGRESS told him in no uncertain terms he could not hold civilian trials.
At which point Obama had the obligation to say, "Either these suspects get the trials to which they are entitled under the Constitution, or I am obligated by my oath to release them. What's it going to be, Congress?"
And Congress told him he could not close a "secret base" in spite of the fact that the previous president NEVER ASKED to use Gitmo in this manner.
Obama is Commander-in-Chief. He could reassign everyone out of Gitmo, Congress gets no say it it.
For all the posturing in the media, the GOP LIKE the way things are.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one of the stupidest arguments that gun control advocates makes, because you don't need any of that to own a car, only to drive one on the public roads.
I don't have a problem with requiring that folks have a permit to carry a handgun in public (provided it's a "shall-issue" to any qualified person and is affordable to all citizens), though of course Johnny Gangbanger isn't going to stop carrying just because he lacks a permission slip from the government. But telling me that I can't own a firearm on my own property, though, is a different matter.
...because when the population is disarmed, crooks don't need guns to inflict a violent crime rate much higher than that of the U.S.
A 20-something male mugger doesn't need a gun to attack the average 70-year-old lady; Grandma needs the gun to protect herself.
You've confused "without weapon" with "without firearms".
Despite the easy availability of firearms in the U.S., about 30% of our homicides are committed without them -- with knives, clubs, fists and feet, fire, poison, and so on.
If cars break down, there are bikes, busses, mass transit, and walking. It's inconvenient but civilization as we know it could survive.
If firearms stop working, every human being is at the mercy of larger and stronger people. As the cliche goes, ""God created men, but Sam Colt made them equal." A free and democratic nation cannot exist without firearms.
Homicides using firearms number about 10,000/year in the U.S.; defensive gun use estimates range from 55,000 to 2,500,000 (yes, the error bars are that huge). Guns are used far more often to protect people than to murder.
Skilled metal workers? Zip guns are more like the work of juvenile delinquents and prison inmates. Skilled black market machinists can make much better weapons, like submachine guns.
DRM'ed textbooks...more and more it looks like we're headed for the world RMS envisioned in The Right To Read.
Since Israel's only claim to legitimacy is the U.N.'s declaration, I suppose this means no legitimate state occupies that land?
If we make some (currently sensible) assumptions about sizeof(int), yes, that's safe. The problem is that somewhere down the road, the newbie who maintains your code is going to change it to
sprintf( buffer, "After long and careful consideration, our system has calculated your number=%d", i );
Secure code is not just "code containing no flaws", it's "code structured in such a way to guard against the introduction of flaws in further development and maintenance".
It's worth nothing that the ANI that your bank gets when you call their 800 number, is different than the "caller ID" service you might have on your home phone. Caller ID is much easier to spoof.
Says who?
Asserting that "women are more nurturing then men", and then making social policy that turns that assertion into a self-fulfilling prophecy, is how sexism works. If Dad doesn't get to bond with the kid as much as Mom does, then it's likely he won't be as nurturing -- then people point at that and say, "see, men aren't as nurturing, we don't need to give them time to bond with their kids."
There is a large difference between the malum prohibitum of copyright, and the malum in se of evidence tampering.
No, we didn't, because, as you say...
Exactly. All you had to do to have a private conservation was go to where no one else was around.
Lauren Weinstein was working on technology and privacy issues when you were in diapers. (One of my closest brushes with an Internet great was having him correct me when I thought "Lauren" was a woman's name...oops.)
You are reduced to apprentice geek.
No. It's defective by design. It cannot co-exist with general-purpose computers, and so the content cartel seeks to eliminate general-purpose computers and put them under some form of centralized control. That is, in a word, evil.
There is no "right" to prevent others from reading or copying a work. I'm all for authors and musicians getting paid, but I've been arguing for over a decade now that the way to do that is to eliminate copyright and establish a royalty-right, modeled after songwriter royalties. I can sing "Tangled Up In Blue" for free at a party; if I play it at the bar, using it to make money, Dylan gets his nickel. I'm happy if people share my book or my album for free; if they make money off of it (putting it on an ad-supported site, for example), I want a cut. (The book is not CC licensed but will be DRM free; I intend to CC license a later edition after my publishing contact expires.)
Who do you think should set curriculum, then? It's either got to be an elected person or group of people, or a bureaucracy with powers devolved from an elected person or group of people.
Not when that state legislature violates the First Amendment as extended to the state by the Fourteenth, no.
The reason that it's not ok to ban evolution from the classroom has nothing to do with whether that decision comes for the state, local, or federal level, or from a legislature or a Board of Education. The reason it's not ok is because It's wrong because the alternative is teaching religion. (Or not teaching biology at all, but failing to give kids a basic education is child abuse.)
Most, yes. Like musicians, a handful become stars and get rich, the rest make a marginal living at best, usually with some other job.
Not at all. Our mental state has been greatly transformed by two previous inventions -- speech and writing. We are now in the midst of the third great transformation, brought about by a new communications method: networked humanity.
Citation needed. What other counties demand access to tourists' e-mail? And outrage against Israel's human rights crimes is not "anti-semitic" or "outrage against Jews". Anyone with a lick of sense is tired of Israel playing the victim card.
Damning with faint praise, there. And if you're Jewish, that's like a white person in 1965 talking about how safe he felt in Alabama, Bloody Sunday be damned.
Yes, they do. Compared to other industrialized nations and to our own history, our overall tax burden is low (though it varies from state to state). When you consider that we've rung up two wars on the national credit card, taxes have to go up. The only question is on whom.
I believe you may have confused Japan with the U.K. Cops I saw on the street in my months in Osaka routinely carried revolvers. Not that it matters; a police state has nothing to do with whether police carry firearms, it has to do with totalitarian government -- which, when the population has been disarmed, can function quite well even with low-level functionaries not carrying firearms.
In many cities we call that a "weekend". We don't shut down because of it.
Except that it didn't. The suspect was caught after the lockdown was lifted. People cowering in their homes can't "see something, say something". The lockdown was an utter and complete tactical failure. It let cops run around playing soldier, but delayed the actual capture of the bad guy.
Thank you for demonstrating your complete misunderstanding of the term "Free Software". I'd provide a link to help you, but suspect you don't care to remedy your ignorance.
At which point Obama had the obligation to say, "Either these suspects get the trials to which they are entitled under the Constitution, or I am obligated by my oath to release them. What's it going to be, Congress?"
Obama is Commander-in-Chief. He could reassign everyone out of Gitmo, Congress gets no say it it.
Of course. So do the Democrats.