Does it have to have a logo next to it to put it up as a news story??
Yes. (Sort of.)
Every/. story in placed in a category. That's just the way the system works. If your preferences are set to display the logos, you'll see them next to every story. (Otherwise you'll see a text label like "Star Wars Prequels.)
It's the fact that Sir Guinness played Obi Wan that makes this "News for Nerds." That doesn't mean that we should regard him as only "the guy who played Obi Wan".
The FBI is a very major government organization paid for by our tax dollars. I may not agree with their moves all the time, but I trust that they are only concerned about the best interest of our country.
At first I thought you had to be trolling, but I'll assume you're serious.
Let's get it straight - federal law enforcement is, by and large, Concentrated Evil. Does the word COINTELPRO mean anything to you? We're talking about an organization that tried to blackmail Martin Luther King with information about his sex life. We're talking about an organization that lied again and again and again about the assults at Waco and Ruby Ridge.
Very few federal LEO activities have anything to do with protecting the rights of citizens; mostly, they deal with the organized crime spawned by unconstitutional drug laws and with investigating and intimidating leaders of dissident political groups.
Why would they go out of their way to harm the very citizens who keep them running?
Power corrupts. Or, maybe as David Brin put it, power attracts the corruptible. We've seen it repeatedly in local police forces in New York and Los Angeles over the past few years.
The rule these days is simple: never trust anyone with a badge. They can make a lot of trouble for you, they can do very little to help you when you're in trouble (it's rare that anyone has a cop standing by when they're mugged, isn't it?), they have no legal obligation to help you, and there's little evidence that they have any interest in doing so. Spend some time browsing the CopCrimes web site, it'll open your mind.
(I gave up any last shred of hope in police "protection" last year when my housemate was being stalked by a psycho. The cops' best advice? "Well, you could change your phone number." Despite explicit death threats left of her voice mail, it took weeks for the cops to take action. I think I'm much better off relying on.357 instead of 911 for my personal safety.)
Are there better techniques for dealing with it? What reasons can I give the people I email to take action if they don't have specific policies like Tripod does?
I just assume that all ISPs have an anti-spam policy. (If they don't, I figure clogging their admin's email with copies of spam sent by their customers might motivate one.) Here's the form letter I send to postmaster of ISPs hosting spammers, or who were faked in spam headers:
Dear sysadmin or postmaster:
I'm sure that as a reputable organization you have an AUP that forbids spam. Please make this luser aware of it. By any means necessary, up to and including a sledgehammer to the cranium. I'll gladly lend you a sledgehammer if needed.
If he/she/it faked your address in the headers, maybe you should consider legal action for damage to your reputation. If he/she/it used your machine to relay spam without your knowledge, may I suggest both legal action and tightening your security. (If I can be of assistance in either endeavor, please contact me.)
Thank you.
Feel free to adapt for your own use.
It usually gets a polite form letter reply along the lines of "we have forwarded the matter to the appropriate department for investigation, yada yada yada".
Of course, traceroute, whois, and reverse domain lookups are your friends in figuring out who to send it to.
And WHY should this be? Would you give AOL a monopoly for $33/month nationwide and outlaw ANY other ISP's in exchange for their guarantee that they will cover every area?
No, because universal e-mail is not (yet) as essential to the functioning of a nation as snail mail. And other providers of delivery services are hardly outlawed, they're just restricted from one specific area of business.
The USPS has the worst service and poorest record of any package delivery provider. Send it UPS or FedEx, yes, it's more expensive, but it WILL get there. Or there will be a damn good excuse.
My experience is that UPS is much worse than the USPS. UPS never me a good excuse - hell, any excuse - for any of the packages they damaged, while it's never come up with USPS since they apparently refrain from using my packages for karate kicking practice.
They already have a federally enforced monopoly on first class mail delivery.
...which they get in return for a guarantee of universal service. It's not all gravy; UPS, FedEx, et. al. are free to decline delivery to any neighborhood they don't feel like serving, but the USPS has to get you your mail (unless there's a safety risk).
(I'll also note that UPS's customer service sucks, and they seems to be incapable of delivery without damage - I've had three damaged packages, out of ten or so, in a little over a year. As bad as the service at my local post office is, I'll take USPS over UPS any day.)
When has that ever happened? I've played in many a band, played in many a cover band, and played many a bar. In none of these situations did we ever have to pay composers royalties.
You don't. The bar does. They pay flat fees to BMI and ASCAP, who send people around to sample what music is being played and figure out how the money should be divided up.
With regards to OLGA, it is still there and in my opinion better than ever. It has more tabs then they used to, and more mirrors...don't tell people that OLGA is gone because it isn't.
The OLGA site itself now has only public domain stuff, but mirrors and rogue site endure and can be searched via the same engine. As they say:
The RIAA would go well to examine the saga of OLGA, the On-line Guitar Archive.
Years ago, people started posting guitar transcriptions on USENET. Someone started collecting them on an FTP site at, IIRC, the University of Arizona; later, this evoloved into a web site, olga.net.
The Powers That Be didn't like this very much - in their minds it meant that they were losing money since people weren't buying books of transcriptions anymore. (Never mind that there's a huge difference between not making money and losing money, that these books were overpriced and sucked, that people have been showing each other how to play songs since the beginning of time, and that composers were getting performance royalties when someone like me played stuff they'd learned off the net down at the local bar.) So they brought down their legal might and crushed OLGA.
Which led to dozens of new guitar tab sites springing up all over the web.
You can't stop people from sharing information. Gnapster has built-in support for OpenNAP. Need I say more?
Evolution is actually a shell which embeds several bonobo components, including including mail, contact management, a calendar, etc.
Maybe I'm a dinosuar, but I do not at all understand why people want a mail program, calendar, et, all in one application. I want a good mail program - that's all. (I use exmh, which is pretty good.) If I wanted calendar or address book programs (I actually find dead trees better for my purposes, YMMV), I'd want programs that did just those things, not mail too.
Integrated programs are like Swiss Army knives - convenient, sure, but the saw on my SAK is not as good as the big-ass saw in the tool cabinet, the screwdrivers don't compare to the dozens of different sizes and shapes in the toolbox, the knife isn't as big or sharp as the chef's knife in the kitchen. Tools which do only one job can be much more powerful.
Woz and the rest of the people who started the personal computer revolution should be no less celebrated than say, Christopher Columbus.
Um, I'd say that those who invented PC technology deserve much more celebration than the rat bastard who started the genocide and slavery of the American Indians. (Not to mention that he fudged his figures in planning his circumnavigation of the globe; he was just lucky to run into land before he starved.)
From what I understand, it is 75 years after the work or 50 years after the artists death. I think this is reasonable: it insures that the artist and his immediate children are able to profit from the work.
It is neither reasonable nor Constitutional. Congress has power to grant copyright only to the artist - ergo, copyright cannot legally persist after the artists death.
Section 8. The Congress shall have power...To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to
authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
To authors and inventors. Not to their heirs, employers, or assignees.
Congress is empowered - but not required - to create such rights for the original author or inventor and for a limited time
... which is exactly what I said.
No, it's not. You said that intellectual property rights were guaranteed, which is simply wrong.
which bears almost no resemblance to today's copyright and patent system.
Sure it does. In fact, it is precisely what the current copyright and patent system is, where both only hold for a very short time. What's the problem?
Under the Constitution, copyrights and patents can be granted only to artists and inventors; there's no ability to sell or inherit this right. Any claim of copyright or patent by other than the creator (which would include those lasting past the life of the creator) are unconstitional; even ones that last the creator's whole life violate the intent, if not the letter, of the law - terms of copyright and patent were originally much, much shorter.
First of all, freedom of speech (and capitalism, and...) is predicated on property rights
Completely and totally backwards. Property is a means - one of many - used to ensure people's choice and freedom. Property is secondary, an artifical creation we use to preserve natural rights. Capitalism is a perversion of this concept of property, where property and thus control is concentrated into the hands of a few.
Second, trade secrets, which is what is under issue here, are widely understood to not be freedom of speech.
A perfect example of property being perverted into a means to restrict, rather than protect, freedom.
There are many cases of people going to jail and/or being sued in a civil matter for illegally using trade secerets to make money.
Stuff on Smithsonian Folkways. Etc. In the 1960's, Bob Dylan and his ilk co-opted the term "folk" to describe their music but this has nothing to do with folk music; it is pop music.
You might say that Dylan, etc.'s original compositions were pop rather than folk, but they also played thinks like traditional blues, gospel, Irish ballads, and the like - definitely not pop. That music is now being transmitted partially by recordings - I learned songs like "Whiskey in the Jar" and "Matty Groves", which are hundreds of years old, from recordings.
And music that was pop a few decades ago can be disemminated by performance - there are songs I heard and learned mostly by hearing friends or cover musicians play them.
A right which is guaranteed by the US Constituion, which explictly gives Congress the right to give artists exclusive control over their works for a limited period of time...you're all over freedom of speech, but you neglect the rights of the businesses, which are guaranteed by the Constitution.
Horseshit. No guarantee of intellectual property rights is made by the Constitution. Congress is empowered - but not required - to create such rights for the original author or inventor and for a limited time, which bears almost no resemblance to today's copyright and patent system.
Ah, but you propose to remove the rights from the minority: the big businesses. It's OK to take away rights from the minority?
First, corporations have no rights; second, property rights - especially intellectual property rights - are second to freedom of speech and expression.
The government should just stay the hell out of the situation...
...in which case there are no "intellectual property" rights and nothing to buy, Ford says "Hey, neat tires" and makes Fords work with them, and Chevy isn't able to use government guns to stop them.
But no one's going to get lynched over this trial, or over how they watch their DVD's.
Don't be so sure! Remember, we live in a nation where growing certain plants in your yard can result in masked stormtroopers breaking down your door - or, if proposed legislation goes through, just telling people how to grow such plants can get you a visit from the jackbooted thugs.
A "War on Copying" is a very real, very frightening possibility. A waiting period, background check, and registration of CD burners - or photocopiers. (Or pens). We must, after all, Protect the Children, so we'll have programs in the schools: CARE (Copy Abuse Resistance Education) would encourage kids to report their parents to the friendly neighborhood police officer if they found CD-Rs in the house. And we can mandate the death penalty for pirating kingpins.
I can see the PSA now...a father discovers the bootleg MP3s on his son's computer and demands to know who got him into such an obscene practice. Finally Junior yells "You, all right? I learned it by watching you!". And as Dad's face crumbles as he thinks about that Van Halen CD he burned to have a copy for the car, the voiceover comes up: "Parents who make copies, have kids who make copies."
Music in genre (1) is by definition constantly changing, and its dissemination is weak, and it usually depends on specialized instruments, and specialized talent.
How in the world is does folk music require "specialized" instruments or talents? For most folk songs you need a voice, a guitar, and the ability to play three chords. And how you categorize a song that thousands of people are able to perform as weakly disseminated is beyond me...
I would also note that folk music is now disseminated partly by recording; I've learned many songs by listening to recordings of Peter, Paul, and Mary, or the Grateful Dead, or Fairport Convention.
In the War of 1812, their contributions were insignificant.
The local militia was important in the defence of Baltimore (yes, there was a land battle in addition to the famous naval engagement at Ft. McHenry) during the War of 1812.
In the Spanish-American War we were extremely lucky that Teddy Roosevelt and all the other volunteers weren't killed en masse. And all the poor saps who had to fight in the Phillipines for that matter.
Part of the idea of relying primarily on the militia was that it would prevent us from getting into foreign wars - the militia was to be there "to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions", not to go fight on foreign soil.
Now if your position for the right to arms is about self-defense, that's a whole nother issue and shouldn't be cloaked in a debate about militias and curtailing abusive governmental power and whatnot. That's the difference between people owning handguns and people with semi-automatic rifles, anti-personnel explosives, and anti-tank weapons. Two entirely different issues.
Not at all! They shade into one another; I might be defending myself and/or my neighbors from a single criminal, a gang of bandits, an oppressive govenment, or an invading army. Self-defense is a group as well as an individual right.
The solution is in convincing John Q. Public that running an efficient, clean car (gasoline or otherwise), rather than his big, overpowered SUV, is what he wants to do.
Good luck.
Simply tax gasoline so that the pump price reflects all the costs that are currently externalized - the environmental costs, the foriegn policy costs, etcetera. (Of course, this should be phased in over a few years, not an overnight jump.) When J.Q. Public is paying $4-5/gallon at the pump, suddenly my little 35 mpg Toyota looks much more attractive that his 15 mpg monster SUV.
(And a methanol burner, that maybe even comes with its own still - throw vegetable peels and grass cuttings in the top, out comes methanol, ain't biomass fuels cool - looks even better.)
the US has the weakest gun control laws in the civilized world, and the highest gun death rates in the civilized world.
Depends on which state you live in. Maryland has some of the strongest gun control laws in the nation, and Baltimore has had over 300 murders per year for about a decade; meanwhile, states which have liberal concealed-carry laws tend to have much lower crime.
Yes, the US does have a higher muder rate than other Western nations. (We do, however, tend to have lower crime rate in other categories.) We also have more economic and social disparity, more draconian drug laws, more racial disparity (blacks are six times more likely to be homicide victims and seven times more likely than whites to commit homicide, according to the DOJ), and more people in jail.
That applies only to the highly organized criminals who can get guns smuggled in from out of the country.
One hardly needs to smuggle guns. A skilled machininst with the right equipment can turn them out quickly - IIRC, the French underground in WWII produced their own submachine guns (the "grease gun"). Heck, high school metal shop students can make "zip guns". Ammo's no problem either - thousands of people handload now, and gunpowder is easier to make than crystal meth.
But even if smuggling were necessary, it's not much harder to smuggle a handgun with a box of cartridges than a kilo of cocaine.
Most of the people killed with guns are not killed by criminals, but by perfectly honest, upstanding citizens. They are killed by their families, because someone gets drunk and angry, and grabs the gun out of the gun closet.
False. Most murderers have a prior criminal record - as do most murder victims.
It is true that most murder victims are killed by someone they know. But that's much more likely to be one crack dealer shooting another over a deal gone bad, than a perfectly sane man suddenly snapping, grabbing his gun and killing his wife.
Also, suicides are sometimes counted as part of the "killed by an acquaintance" figure, which is a gross distortion.
Or because they go downstairs for a glass of water in the night, and someone mistakes them for a burglar
This is very, very rare - accidental firearms deaths rank well behind drownings, fires, even poisoning, as a cause of death.
Well regulated does not mean what you think it means. It means trained and effective in military skills.
But it doesn't matter what "well regulated" means; the form is "Because X, the law is Y", not "If X, the law shall be Y" - X is a comment, not a condition. It's like the Preamble to the Constitution, or the comment that the power to grant copyright is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". Don't focus on the comment (a well-armed and drilled militia is important for freedom), interesting and insightful though it is, focus on the code (the government shall not mess with the right to keep and bear arms). If there'd been a C programmer among the architects, we might have:
/* A well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state - set the permissions accordingly. */
...except that in "well regulated miltia" there're the words "well regulated".
...except
well-regulated does not mean what you think it means - in the military parlance of the time, it meant effectively equipped and trained;
it doesn't matter - you're paying more attention to the comment than the code. The form is not "If X, then the law is Y", it's "Because X, the law is Y"; it doesn't matter whether X holds or not, the law is Y and X is just a comment, and
it doesn't matter because constitutional or not, strong gun control laws fail. Always. Repeatedly. They do not keep guns away from criminals any more than drug laws keep heroin away from junkies or porn laws keep Penthouse away from kids; and they prevent law-abiding citizens from defending themselves, leaving them reliant on the police. You know, like the New York City police who stood idlely by and allowed over 50 women to be sexually assulted in Central Park a few weeks ago. Do you think something like that could have happened in a state with concealed carry legislation? One bystander with a handgun could have stopped that whole thing very quickly, probably without firing a shot.
in fact there's already a "well regulated militia" : it's called the army !
Absolutely incorrect. A militia is almost the polar opposite of a standing army.
The idea of the founders was that there would not be a standing army of significant size, but that ordinary citizens would be sufficiently armed and competent ("well-regulated") to repel an invading army. That's why military appropriations are more limited than others ("To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years").
I have some stuff up at my unreasonable.org site; feel free to copy or link if you'd like to join the ranks of thought criminals.
Here's the disclaimer I put on the "how-to" stuff:
The following files contain information about the extraction, preparation and consumption of certain drugs.
This information is for educational purposes ONLY!
Some of the activities described may be illegal, dangerous, or both.
I'm going to repeat that, because it's important:
Some of the activities described may be illegal, dangerous, or both.
I disclaim any liability for any use of the information found here.
However, we cannot have a meaningful discussion of drug policy if we do not have basic information such as how easy it is to grow cannabis; or the relationship between cocaine, freebase cocaine, and "crack"; or how psychedelic drugs can be obtained from common ornamental flowers. It is also my hope that the information on growing and consuming cannabis may be of use to those using it out of medical necessity.
I'm sending the ACLU some money, and writing my Congresscritter, tomorrow.
What part of "well regulated militia" don't you understand?
There's not much to understand - it means every able-bodied man has a gun and knows how to use it. Both federal and state (Maryland, don't know about the rest of you) clearly state that I am in the militia.
But that's beside the point. If a law read "A well-educated populace being necessary to the security of a democracy, the right to keep and read books shall not be infringed," this would in no way allow the government to define a well-educated group of people and restrict possession of books to them.
an untraceable communication protocol being the thing that made it impossible for tax collection agencies like the IRS to trace transactions and thereby bring down our current political/social model.
No communication protocol is going to change the state's ability to levy property taxes (all the crypto blinding and dummy holding companies won't stop the local sheriff from knocking on the front door and saying "We ain't leaving 'till someone gives us $1700"), corporate taxes and capital gains taxes on domestic corporations - or corporations in nations with some sort of reciprocity agreement (since corporations are a creation of the state), or sales taxes at my local grocery store (since their business depends on a well-known physical location).
If other sorts of taxes become difficult to collect, the tax burden will just shift.
Slashdot Mirror
Every /. story in placed in a category. That's just the way the system works. If your preferences are set to display the logos, you'll see them next to every story. (Otherwise you'll see a text label like "Star Wars Prequels.)
It's the fact that Sir Guinness played Obi Wan that makes this "News for Nerds." That doesn't mean that we should regard him as only "the guy who played Obi Wan".
Let's get it straight - federal law enforcement is, by and large, Concentrated Evil. Does the word COINTELPRO mean anything to you? We're talking about an organization that tried to blackmail Martin Luther King with information about his sex life. We're talking about an organization that lied again and again and again about the assults at Waco and Ruby Ridge.
Very few federal LEO activities have anything to do with protecting the rights of citizens; mostly, they deal with the organized crime spawned by unconstitutional drug laws and with investigating and intimidating leaders of dissident political groups.
Power corrupts. Or, maybe as David Brin put it, power attracts the corruptible. We've seen it repeatedly in local police forces in New York and Los Angeles over the past few years.The rule these days is simple: never trust anyone with a badge. They can make a lot of trouble for you, they can do very little to help you when you're in trouble (it's rare that anyone has a cop standing by when they're mugged, isn't it?), they have no legal obligation to help you, and there's little evidence that they have any interest in doing so. Spend some time browsing the CopCrimes web site, it'll open your mind.
(I gave up any last shred of hope in police "protection" last year when my housemate was being stalked by a psycho. The cops' best advice? "Well, you could change your phone number." Despite explicit death threats left of her voice mail, it took weeks for the cops to take action. I think I'm much better off relying on .357 instead of 911 for my personal safety.)
Feel free to adapt for your own use.
It usually gets a polite form letter reply along the lines of "we have forwarded the matter to the appropriate department for investigation, yada yada yada".
Of course, traceroute, whois, and reverse domain lookups are your friends in figuring out who to send it to.
(I'll also note that UPS's customer service sucks, and they seems to be incapable of delivery without damage - I've had three damaged packages, out of ten or so, in a little over a year. As bad as the service at my local post office is, I'll take USPS over UPS any day.)
The RIAA would go well to examine the saga of OLGA, the On-line Guitar Archive.
Years ago, people started posting guitar transcriptions on USENET. Someone started collecting them on an FTP site at, IIRC, the University of Arizona; later, this evoloved into a web site, olga.net.
The Powers That Be didn't like this very much - in their minds it meant that they were losing money since people weren't buying books of transcriptions anymore. (Never mind that there's a huge difference between not making money and losing money, that these books were overpriced and sucked, that people have been showing each other how to play songs since the beginning of time, and that composers were getting performance royalties when someone like me played stuff they'd learned off the net down at the local bar.) So they brought down their legal might and crushed OLGA.
Which led to dozens of new guitar tab sites springing up all over the web.
You can't stop people from sharing information. Gnapster has built-in support for OpenNAP. Need I say more?
Integrated programs are like Swiss Army knives - convenient, sure, but the saw on my SAK is not as good as the big-ass saw in the tool cabinet, the screwdrivers don't compare to the dozens of different sizes and shapes in the toolbox, the knife isn't as big or sharp as the chef's knife in the kitchen. Tools which do only one job can be much more powerful.
Good programs do one thing and do it well.
To authors and inventors. Not to their heirs, employers, or assignees.
And music that was pop a few decades ago can be disemminated by performance - there are songs I heard and learned mostly by hearing friends or cover musicians play them.
A "War on Copying" is a very real, very frightening possibility. A waiting period, background check, and registration of CD burners - or photocopiers. (Or pens). We must, after all, Protect the Children, so we'll have programs in the schools: CARE (Copy Abuse Resistance Education) would encourage kids to report their parents to the friendly neighborhood police officer if they found CD-Rs in the house. And we can mandate the death penalty for pirating kingpins.
I can see the PSA now...a father discovers the bootleg MP3s on his son's computer and demands to know who got him into such an obscene practice. Finally Junior yells "You, all right? I learned it by watching you!". And as Dad's face crumbles as he thinks about that Van Halen CD he burned to have a copy for the car, the voiceover comes up: "Parents who make copies, have kids who make copies."
I would also note that folk music is now disseminated partly by recording; I've learned many songs by listening to recordings of Peter, Paul, and Mary, or the Grateful Dead, or Fairport Convention.
(And a methanol burner, that maybe even comes with its own still - throw vegetable peels and grass cuttings in the top, out comes methanol, ain't biomass fuels cool - looks even better.)
Yes, the US does have a higher muder rate than other Western nations. (We do, however, tend to have lower crime rate in other categories.) We also have more economic and social disparity, more draconian drug laws, more racial disparity (blacks are six times more likely to be homicide victims and seven times more likely than whites to commit homicide, according to the DOJ), and more people in jail.
One hardly needs to smuggle guns. A skilled machininst with the right equipment can turn them out quickly - IIRC, the French underground in WWII produced their own submachine guns (the "grease gun"). Heck, high school metal shop students can make "zip guns". Ammo's no problem either - thousands of people handload now, and gunpowder is easier to make than crystal meth.But even if smuggling were necessary, it's not much harder to smuggle a handgun with a box of cartridges than a kilo of cocaine.
False. Most murderers have a prior criminal record - as do most murder victims.It is true that most murder victims are killed by someone they know. But that's much more likely to be one crack dealer shooting another over a deal gone bad, than a perfectly sane man suddenly snapping, grabbing his gun and killing his wife.
Also, suicides are sometimes counted as part of the "killed by an acquaintance" figure, which is a gross distortion.
This is very, very rare - accidental firearms deaths rank well behind drownings, fires, even poisoning, as a cause of death.Well regulated does not mean what you think it means. It means trained and effective in military skills.
But it doesn't matter what "well regulated" means; the form is "Because X, the law is Y", not "If X, the law shall be Y" - X is a comment, not a condition. It's like the Preamble to the Constitution, or the comment that the power to grant copyright is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". Don't focus on the comment (a well-armed and drilled militia is important for freedom), interesting and insightful though it is, focus on the code (the government shall not mess with the right to keep and bear arms). If there'd been a C programmer among the architects, we might have:
chmod("/people/rights/keep_and_bear_arms",0x544);
- well-regulated does not mean what you think it means - in the military parlance of the time, it meant effectively equipped and trained;
- it doesn't matter - you're paying more attention to the comment than the code. The form is not "If X, then the law is Y", it's "Because X, the law is Y"; it doesn't matter whether X holds or not, the law is Y and X is just a comment, and
- it doesn't matter because constitutional or not, strong gun control laws fail. Always. Repeatedly. They do not keep guns away from criminals any more than drug laws keep heroin away from junkies or porn laws keep Penthouse away from kids; and they prevent law-abiding citizens from defending themselves, leaving them reliant on the police. You know, like the New York City police who stood idlely by and allowed over 50 women to be sexually assulted in Central Park a few weeks ago. Do you think something like that could have happened in a state with concealed carry legislation? One bystander with a handgun could have stopped that whole thing very quickly, probably without firing a shot.
Absolutely incorrect. A militia is almost the polar opposite of a standing army.The idea of the founders was that there would not be a standing army of significant size, but that ordinary citizens would be sufficiently armed and competent ("well-regulated") to repel an invading army. That's why military appropriations are more limited than others ("To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years").
I have some stuff up at my unreasonable.org site; feel free to copy or link if you'd like to join the ranks of thought criminals.
Here's the disclaimer I put on the "how-to" stuff:
I'm sending the ACLU some money, and writing my Congresscritter, tomorrow.But that's beside the point. If a law read "A well-educated populace being necessary to the security of a democracy, the right to keep and read books shall not be infringed," this would in no way allow the government to define a well-educated group of people and restrict possession of books to them.
If other sorts of taxes become difficult to collect, the tax burden will just shift.