So we require all laser pointer enthusiasts to have dome enclosures over their property as the solution to all this?
We require anyone owning a laser pointer to refrain from pointing it at anyone without that person's consent, upon pain of fine or imprisonment. That includes pointing it at the sky unless you have specifically confirmed the area clear of air traffic.
Your right to shine a bright light ends at my eyeballs. (Or at my property, for lasers strong enough to damage objects.)
(In other words, "get back in the queue [i.e. line]" was correct.)
No. It wasn't. You queue a Star Trek joke if maybe you're sending a bunch of rec.humor posts about Kirk v. Picard to the printer via lpr; you cue a Star Trek joke when you say "it is now time for a Star Trek joke."
So, you are saying Jammie Thomas should pull a Moahmed Bouazizi?
Not directed at me, but...I wouldn't say anyone should, but someone's going to. They'll get screwed over in court by the RIAA and refuse to pay the fine, and have a shootout when the sheriff comes to seize their all their worldly possessions, or they'll get sued for rooting their phone and walk into their local Apple store with a suicide vest.
That being said, those states with more gun control laws generally have fewer deaths. Hawaii for instance has very little gun violence and has some of the most strict gun laws.
Idaho's murder rate is lower than Hawaii's (200.9 per 100,000 vs 287.2 for 2011); its gun laws are so weak that the Brady campaign gives Idaho 2/100. (For those outside the U.S., the "Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence" is a leading advocate for the criminalization of gun ownership; in their scale, a higher number means more legal obstacles to exercising the right of self-defense.) Mississippi has a murder rate close to Hawaii's, 269.8; it gets 4 on the Brady's scorecard.
Illinois gets 25 from Brady, and a murder rate of 429.3.
Brady's favorite state is CA, with 81 points; homicide rate 411.1. Texas gets a 4 from Brady, and has almost the same murder rate as California, 408.5.
The Bradys don't rank DC, but we know it has some of the strictest gun laws in the country; it has a murder rate of 1,202.1. (The cynic in me thinks this is why Brady doesn't rate it...) The lowest murder rate is Maine, 123.2, a whole order of magnitude less than D.C.'s rate; its permissive gun laws get a 7 on Brady's scale.
Across U.S. states, gun control laws seem to have no correlation with murder rates. The same applies internationally and across our own history -- the U.S. homicide rate has fallen 50% since the early 90s, the decline starting before the Brady bill and the "assault weapons" ban and continuing after the ban expired, while more and more states liberalized CCW laws and the number of guns in private hands increased.
Don't need to buy a white (actually, pink) noise generator when you've got a computer. Get sox. Simple white (actually, pink) noise script, with many comments and variations, here: http://unreasonable.org/node/303. (Someone even ran with the idea and made a fancy, documented script and put it on github: http://gist.github.com/1209835.)
And/or, if you have an Android phone or tablet, try the Relax and Sleep app. (Free as in beer.) Kept me napping on a long plane ride to Japan last year in the midst of coach-class noise.
That the Smithsonian writes about dirigibles, doesn't change that the agreement with the Wrights technically forbids them to do so. Most of us do forbidden things and never get called on it. The author was making a point about the overreach of the Wright's claims.
The penny per click they get on a clearly marked text ad, out of every 4 trillion impressions, which come from 8 trillion page views, doesn't pay the bills.
The price for common things is low. The price for rare things is high.
Make ads rare. And make them meaningful, a deliberate and knowing sponsorship relationship between publisher and advertiser rather than space for rent to the highest bidder..
And for cryin' out loud, serve them from your own server. No cross-site ad networks spying on us.
I'm still not going to click on them, because when I'm reading your site I'm not shopping, I'm reading.
Really? And that's good how? So local IT staff can manage the in-house mail and document management system in their spare time?
That's good because preserving student's privacy is more important than preserving tax breaks for the wealthy. Restore taxes to their Clinton-era rates, hire more IT staff with the money. Jobs and privacy, a win all around.
Not quite. Google Apps for Non-Profits does show ads, yes, but Google Apps for Education does not show advertisements to students or staff
It's not just about showing ads, it's about spying on your data to make ads (to you or to others) more effective.
Without showing you ads, they could collect your data and build a thick dossier on you, and sell it to others or save it for later for when you use one of their ad-based services. Or they could collect your data for general research ("people who mention the Springfield Isotopes in e-mail are more likely to also mention Duff beer").
Show me random ads, I don't care much, I'll just Adblock them anyway. Try to track and spy me, and that's where the problem starts.
The nation has always had a top list of most wanted, and dead or alive for a terrorist isn't a problem.
Yes, it is actually. Authorizing the execution without trial of an American citizen, even one accused of terrorism, is illegal, a violation of the Constitution's guarantee of due process. And authorizing the assassination of a citizen of another county who is not a combatant or a military commander is a violation of international law.
A soldier with a gun is (if he's operating lawfully) firing at combatants on a battlefield. Drones have largely been used to slaughter people who are not currently engaging in hostile activities and are not on a battlefield.
Yes, the President could kill or order the killing of someone who was about to set of a bomb and kill many innocents. But he needs zero government power to do that -- if you or I saw someone about to push the button on a dirty bomb, we have the legal right (perhaps even the moral responsibility) to shoot them if we're able. That has fuck-all to do with how drones have been used; and given the crimes that have already been perpetrated, it's reasonable to question what further crimes
Any President who used a drone on innocent civilians without an overwhelming need to protect thousands more, would be impeached, and likely thrown in prison.
None of the three American citizens slaughtered so far in drone attacks were convicted of crimes, or belonged to the military of any nation, and therefore were legally innocent civilians. There was no imminent need to kill them. Yet Obama remains unimpeached and free.
Odds are that there was a problem with communication and that it was an honest mistake. Doctor's that would intentionally or negligently harm a patient are quite rare.
Intentional harm is rare, but make no mistake: this sort of "honest mistake" IS negligence.
The medical field is rife with negligence. Surgical supplies are left in patients, despite the fact that this is solvable with paper and pencil inventories. Doctors continue to wear neckties, despite studies showing them to be disease vectors. 195,000 people die from medical errors each year in the U.S. -- about ten times the number of malpractice suits.
Sure, it's sneaky and underhanded, and a skilled lawyer can turn it into a case where the hospital was intentionally deceiving a patient to mislead them into trusting someone... but it's ultimately what's necessary to get anything done.
Is it? Maybe so, but I'm not going to just take "trust us, we're doctors". If there's a consensus in the medical field that such behavior is professional and normal, than a lawyer won't get anywhere with it, and should get slapped down by the courts for trying. (Frivolous lawsuits are a problem; interfering with my right to see data you have about me is not a solution.)
I think a patient has a right to understand everything regarding their treatment. Just dumping raw medical records on them won't do that, though.
Full access to medical records is necessary, but not sufficient, for that understanding. Perhaps such records should be accompanied by explanations of why the more "interesting" bits are there. But "you couldn't understand your records" -- screw that.
To you it's trash and littering, to them its a product being delivered.
And since it's my property, my perspective on the issue dominates. Otherwise it would be legal and legitimate for me to leave bags of dog crap on your front lawn -- they're free samples for my new manure delivery service.
The fundamental issue is the power of the federal government to restrict speech by a group of people as opposed to an individual. Conflating the two is completely disingenuous.
What's completely disingenuous is conflating a mere group of people with a corporation -- a legal entity, an immortal unnatural person created by state fiat..
The laws and court decisions affirming the "corporate person" idea date back to the late 1800s!
A corporation is nothing more than an organized group of people.
Nope. A corporation is an artificial immortal person created by state fiat, and capable of doing nothing other than seeking profit (or, for non-profits, whatever other purpose may be specified in its charter). The so-called "owners" of a corporation have natural rights; the corporation does not.
It's not littering, people have tried to use that argument before.
It is littering; the fact that courts have failed to acknowledge that points up the stupidity of the courts, not that unwanted material left on my property is not litter.
My point was that it is normal for attitudes to change in response to tragic events.
It's historically normal, yes. Such change, however, is usually an irrational and counter-productive panic reaction, exploited by those who find event fit into an agenda they've previously been trying to impose (be it increased surveillance, invading other countries, restricting members of a certain ethnic or religious minority, or criminalizing firearms possession); it's not "normal" in the sense of "acceptable or desirable".
Anyway, to address your original point:
...regulation is necessary because many unstable twats out there have access to the internet,
Unstable twats need to be under some form of supervision: prison, parole, probation, or psychiatric care. Interfering with my right of self-defense not only doesn't help, not only makes me less safe, but wastes resources that could be used to keep unstable twats under supervision.
And if you're going into combat with a homemade lower receiver as your only form of defense you're an idiot.
The first rule of a gun fight is, bring a gun. If the only gun I could get (for some political reason) had homemade components, I'd take it.
Resistance movement in Nazi-occupied territories made Sten submachine guns in underground workshops; today back-alley gunsmiths in the Philippines do the same. If the shit hit the fan I'd rather have one of their guns than no gun at all. (We're not talking zip guns here, we're talking about automatic weapons.)
This sort of work helps ensure that if the shit does hit the fan, some sort of guns will still be available to the general public, regardless of what misguided, ignorant, or tyrannical politicians may want.
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
An army raised for two years is, ipso facto, not a standing army. The idea was the Congress could raise up an army for a brief time when needed, not keep one going indefinitely.
As Hamilton noted in Federalist Paper 26, "The legislature of the United States will be OBLIGED, by this provision, once at least in every two years, to deliberate upon the propriety of keeping a military force on foot; to come to a new resolution on the point; and to declare their sense of the matter, by a formal vote in the face of their constituents. They are not AT LIBERTY to vest in the executive department permanent funds for the support of an army, if they were even incautious enough to be willing to repose in it so improper a confidence."
Sadly, militarism triumphed, and serving in an standing army whose very existence the Founders opposed is now trumpeted as patriotic behavior.
The Constitution grants power for a standing navy because 1) building ships takes a long time, and 2) it is much less of a threat, both to your own people and to other nations; you can't use a navy by itself to put down a popular uprising or to invade and conquer another country.
Slashdot Mirror
We require anyone owning a laser pointer to refrain from pointing it at anyone without that person's consent, upon pain of fine or imprisonment. That includes pointing it at the sky unless you have specifically confirmed the area clear of air traffic.
Your right to shine a bright light ends at my eyeballs. (Or at my property, for lasers strong enough to damage objects.)
No. It wasn't. You queue a Star Trek joke if maybe you're sending a bunch of rec.humor posts about Kirk v. Picard to the printer via lpr; you cue a Star Trek joke when you say "it is now time for a Star Trek joke."
Like telephone service spreading to the developing world, this won't happen with wires.
I've got a 5Mbps wireless broadband connection right now, and that's WiMAX, old tech. Verizon's LTE does close to 10 Mbps..
My connection costs me $50/month; if we imagine opening things up to real competition, $20/mo doesn't seem unreasonable.
If we had the political will to make 20Mbps broadband as accessible as voice communication is today, yes, we could do it in under a decade.
Not directed at me, but...I wouldn't say anyone should, but someone's going to. They'll get screwed over in court by the RIAA and refuse to pay the fine, and have a shootout when the sheriff comes to seize their all their worldly possessions, or they'll get sued for rooting their phone and walk into their local Apple store with a suicide vest.
Think Aaron Swartz with more boom.
As soon as you can copy it with affecting my use of it, sure.
Information is not things.
Idaho's murder rate is lower than Hawaii's (200.9 per 100,000 vs 287.2 for 2011); its gun laws are so weak that the Brady campaign gives Idaho 2/100. (For those outside the U.S., the "Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence" is a leading advocate for the criminalization of gun ownership; in their scale, a higher number means more legal obstacles to exercising the right of self-defense.) Mississippi has a murder rate close to Hawaii's, 269.8; it gets 4 on the Brady's scorecard.
Illinois gets 25 from Brady, and a murder rate of 429.3.
Brady's favorite state is CA, with 81 points; homicide rate 411.1. Texas gets a 4 from Brady, and has almost the same murder rate as California, 408.5.
The Bradys don't rank DC, but we know it has some of the strictest gun laws in the country; it has a murder rate of 1,202.1. (The cynic in me thinks this is why Brady doesn't rate it...) The lowest murder rate is Maine, 123.2, a whole order of magnitude less than D.C.'s rate; its permissive gun laws get a 7 on Brady's scale.
Across U.S. states, gun control laws seem to have no correlation with murder rates. The same applies internationally and across our own history -- the U.S. homicide rate has fallen 50% since the early 90s, the decline starting before the Brady bill and the "assault weapons" ban and continuing after the ban expired, while more and more states liberalized CCW laws and the number of guns in private hands increased.
Don't need to buy a white (actually, pink) noise generator when you've got a computer. Get sox. Simple white (actually, pink) noise script, with many comments and variations, here: http://unreasonable.org/node/303. (Someone even ran with the idea and made a fancy, documented script and put it on github: http://gist.github.com/1209835.) And/or, if you have an Android phone or tablet, try the Relax and Sleep app. (Free as in beer.) Kept me napping on a long plane ride to Japan last year in the midst of coach-class noise.
That the Smithsonian writes about dirigibles, doesn't change that the agreement with the Wrights technically forbids them to do so. Most of us do forbidden things and never get called on it. The author was making a point about the overreach of the Wright's claims.
Advertising is disinformation.
You sound like you must work in the field. Please follow Bill Hicks's advice. Thank you, have a nice day.
The price for common things is low. The price for rare things is high.
Make ads rare. And make them meaningful, a deliberate and knowing sponsorship relationship between publisher and advertiser rather than space for rent to the highest bidder..
And for cryin' out loud, serve them from your own server. No cross-site ad networks spying on us.
I'm still not going to click on them, because when I'm reading your site I'm not shopping, I'm reading.
Off-topic, but...I've been assuming that sig is a joke, since it also misuses "begs the question".
That's good because preserving student's privacy is more important than preserving tax breaks for the wealthy. Restore taxes to their Clinton-era rates, hire more IT staff with the money. Jobs and privacy, a win all around.
It's not just about showing ads, it's about spying on your data to make ads (to you or to others) more effective.
Without showing you ads, they could collect your data and build a thick dossier on you, and sell it to others or save it for later for when you use one of their ad-based services. Or they could collect your data for general research ("people who mention the Springfield Isotopes in e-mail are more likely to also mention Duff beer").
Show me random ads, I don't care much, I'll just Adblock them anyway. Try to track and spy me, and that's where the problem starts.
Bambuser lets you stream video from your smartphone.
Yes, it is actually. Authorizing the execution without trial of an American citizen, even one accused of terrorism, is illegal, a violation of the Constitution's guarantee of due process. And authorizing the assassination of a citizen of another county who is not a combatant or a military commander is a violation of international law.
In fact, the Army is expressly forbidden from offering a reward for an enemy "dead or alive". (Assuming this hasn't been superseded since this was written in the "anything does" post-9/11 moral decay of the U.S.)
A soldier with a gun is (if he's operating lawfully) firing at combatants on a battlefield. Drones have largely been used to slaughter people who are not currently engaging in hostile activities and are not on a battlefield.
Yes, the President could kill or order the killing of someone who was about to set of a bomb and kill many innocents. But he needs zero government power to do that -- if you or I saw someone about to push the button on a dirty bomb, we have the legal right (perhaps even the moral responsibility) to shoot them if we're able. That has fuck-all to do with how drones have been used; and given the crimes that have already been perpetrated, it's reasonable to question what further crimes
None of the three American citizens slaughtered so far in drone attacks were convicted of crimes, or belonged to the military of any nation, and therefore were legally innocent civilians. There was no imminent need to kill them. Yet Obama remains unimpeached and free.
Intentional harm is rare, but make no mistake: this sort of "honest mistake" IS negligence.
The medical field is rife with negligence. Surgical supplies are left in patients, despite the fact that this is solvable with paper and pencil inventories. Doctors continue to wear neckties, despite studies showing them to be disease vectors. 195,000 people die from medical errors each year in the U.S. -- about ten times the number of malpractice suits.
Is it? Maybe so, but I'm not going to just take "trust us, we're doctors". If there's a consensus in the medical field that such behavior is professional and normal, than a lawyer won't get anywhere with it, and should get slapped down by the courts for trying. (Frivolous lawsuits are a problem; interfering with my right to see data you have about me is not a solution.)
Full access to medical records is necessary, but not sufficient, for that understanding. Perhaps such records should be accompanied by explanations of why the more "interesting" bits are there. But "you couldn't understand your records" -- screw that.
And since it's my property, my perspective on the issue dominates. Otherwise it would be legal and legitimate for me to leave bags of dog crap on your front lawn -- they're free samples for my new manure delivery service.
Not to say anything about TV being "child abuse". But in one post you say:
Then you say:
I think the problem is obvious...
What's completely disingenuous is conflating a mere group of people with a corporation -- a legal entity, an immortal unnatural person created by state fiat..
Actually, "corporate personhood" was introduced illegitimately by a court reporter.
The government has broad powers to regulate commerce; advertizing time bough by a for-profit corporation is nothing more or less than commerce.
Nope. A corporation is an artificial immortal person created by state fiat, and capable of doing nothing other than seeking profit (or, for non-profits, whatever other purpose may be specified in its charter). The so-called "owners" of a corporation have natural rights; the corporation does not.
It is littering; the fact that courts have failed to acknowledge that points up the stupidity of the courts, not that unwanted material left on my property is not litter.
It's historically normal, yes. Such change, however, is usually an irrational and counter-productive panic reaction, exploited by those who find event fit into an agenda they've previously been trying to impose (be it increased surveillance, invading other countries, restricting members of a certain ethnic or religious minority, or criminalizing firearms possession); it's not "normal" in the sense of "acceptable or desirable".
Anyway, to address your original point:
Unstable twats need to be under some form of supervision: prison, parole, probation, or psychiatric care. Interfering with my right of self-defense not only doesn't help, not only makes me less safe, but wastes resources that could be used to keep unstable twats under supervision.
The first rule of a gun fight is, bring a gun. If the only gun I could get (for some political reason) had homemade components, I'd take it.
Resistance movement in Nazi-occupied territories made Sten submachine guns in underground workshops; today back-alley gunsmiths in the Philippines do the same. If the shit hit the fan I'd rather have one of their guns than no gun at all. (We're not talking zip guns here, we're talking about automatic weapons.)
This sort of work helps ensure that if the shit does hit the fan, some sort of guns will still be available to the general public, regardless of what misguided, ignorant, or tyrannical politicians may want.
An army raised for two years is, ipso facto, not a standing army. The idea was the Congress could raise up an army for a brief time when needed, not keep one going indefinitely.
As Hamilton noted in Federalist Paper 26, "The legislature of the United States will be OBLIGED, by this provision, once at least in every two years, to deliberate upon the propriety of keeping a military force on foot; to come to a new resolution on the point; and to declare their sense of the matter, by a formal vote in the face of their constituents. They are not AT LIBERTY to vest in the executive department permanent funds for the support of an army, if they were even incautious enough to be willing to repose in it so improper a confidence."
Sadly, militarism triumphed, and serving in an standing army whose very existence the Founders opposed is now trumpeted as patriotic behavior.
The Constitution grants power for a standing navy because 1) building ships takes a long time, and 2) it is much less of a threat, both to your own people and to other nations; you can't use a navy by itself to put down a popular uprising or to invade and conquer another country.