Wasn't there just an article a while back about some volcanic island springing up in the Pacific? I wonder if some chunk of land in international waters could be purchased for/total/ privacy/security. Maybe a node in the arctic or antarctic?
At first glance I'd have to say, making a web site named "TheBarbies.com" is a blatent and obvious infringement. It is arguable whether TheBarbies.com is in a different market and thus not applicable to trademark infringement. However, I can see TheBarbies.com leading to confusion and dilution with Mattel's Barbie computer games, and if it ever wanted to put up Barbie sites.
The only thing I use MS Office for is to write my staff report...which can easily be done in Plain Old Text. Of course, executives up the food chain often send email with MS Word documents as attachments. Other people around here use PowerPoint for presentations. Other than that I don't see why we should be sinking so much money into the black hole of MS office. I don't know of any special features of MS office we actually USE, as opposed to some generic word processor. We could probably just switch to Wordpad or something at least. From the comments of my coworkers it seems that the consensus is that MS Office is just a necessary evil that we have to live with. Besides a staff report once every two weeks, the hundreds of dollars of MS Office software on this machine is totally wasted and useless.
"do you even know C++? const in C++ has nothing to do with java's final directive. final is the opposite of virtual in C++."
The final keyword in Java also serves the purspose of constant declarator for variables. This/is/ what const is used for in C++, right? You/can/ declare constants in Java. Is there something else special "const" does that you are saying Java does not support?
"In java, in addition to Object, you need a classloader to load your code. And you get no strings, because the compiler has specific syntactic sugar for dealing with strings (why oh why did they hack this into the compiler isntead of just supporting operator overloading?) I'm sure there are more, but its been a while since I hacked java at that low a level."
If you are griping that VMs are too dependent on the Java language itself...well, tough. Sun created the VM spec FOR the Java language...not as some universal VM and byte code instruction set that anybody could write any arbitrary language on top of (although that is certainly possible). People write Java in Java...they don't write in bytecode, against the VM directly.
Also, somebody was griping that the standard libraries and default utilites from the Sun JDK were written in Java. Well...DUH. They are Java libraries and tools. They should be written in Java. Java was created for easy cross-platform development...it would be stupid then to write all the libraries and tools in some native language, then have to ALSO port all those on top of writing a VM. With the libraries and tools written in Java itself, all VM writers have to worry about is writing a VM, and presto, the support libraries and tools are all magically available. It would be hypocritical and tragically stupid to write the supporting tools and libraries for platform-neutral Java in some platform-dependent language.
Hmm...what about MAS by getting RID off all the damn nuclear weapons. MAD works only when both parties DON'T want to die. It doesn't work when one party is just friggen off its rocker and doesn't CARE whether it dies or not, or accidentally fires. In that case, REDUCTION, and ELIMINATION and real defense against such weapons (not defense by the assumption that the enemy is too afraid of being eliminated himself) is the ONLY way to safety.
Take the advice of one of the other posters. Stick a "GUN FREE HOUSE" sticker on your front door and post to us a year later how you've faired.
And again, you are just falling into the tragedy of the commons, arms race, short term mentality. "The world is dangerous, therefore I should stockpile as much dangerous stuff as fast as I can". In the LONG RUN this is not a solution. Having a world in which everybody is brimming with nuclear weapons, assured that if ANYBODY fires, we're all toast, having to teach our children how to avoid or live in a nuclear aftermath - THAT is not peace. THAT is not safety.
By getting a gun for personal protection, you do not increase the threat to everyone else, you decrease it. The knowledge that you may have a gun is a deterrant to would be violent criminals. Your statement assumes that *everyone* is a would be violent criminal. I personally take that as an insult.
Bullshit. Again you fail to realize that many, or perhaps most, deaths with firearms are caused by accident or as a matter of opportunity. I am not claiming a gun owner is a criminal at all. I am claiming that by having a gun, increasing the number of guns own domestically, will increase accidental and opportunistic injury. What about the kid who finds it and accidentally kills himself or somebody? What about the angry and distraught teenager, who, in a fit of angst decides to kill somebody because the gun is available. What about the guy who gets into a heated argument, and, having a gun in arms reach, in a fit of rage, murders somebody?? All of these cases are accidental or opportunistic. They occur in direct proportion the number of guns we have domestically. Unfortunately, the DON'T only happen to the gun owner or family of the gun owner, so the RISK is increased to society as a whole.
Yes, and as we can see those rebels fighting the Russions sure has helped alot. And what will they do when the Russians start rolling in artillary or bombing them??
Consider the open source vs free software debate. Everyone here knows that these terms refer to the same thing. OSI, who tried to trademark "open source" has a detailed set of criteria for determining what is open source and what isn't. By and large, free software is open souce and vice versa by OSI's own definition. Stallman argued that the open source label presented the idea in the wrong way, that people won't understand that there is freedom associated with open source software that isn't available with non open source software. The counterargument was roughly that free software is a fine label, but after 15 years, there was only a fraction of the interest in the software that insued within a few months after the term open source was coined. The fact remains that of all the users who might be using free software in say, ten years, only a small proportion will recognize the difference between it and proprietary software, let alone care about the details the Stallman is trying to push.
Open Source and Free Software may in fact refer to the same thing, but they have different connotations. As Mr. ESR makes very clear, with slights of RMS along the way, Open Source is about the ECONOMIC feasibility and superiority of open source/free software. On the other hand, Free Software is about the PHILOSOPHICAL/SOCIAL superiority of open source/free software. That open source/free software is actually a better economic model is only incidental to the fact that it is better philosophically and socially. If there were no economic benefits whatsoever, RMS would still insist that Free Software was inherently "better" than any proprietary software. This is where these "movements" differ. The product may be the same, but the reason for the product's existence is different. It is unfortunate that the English language does not have a nicer word for "freedom"-free, and that RMS was forced to overload an existing word and risk losing the meaning (which is obviously happening). Perhaps Stallman's intractable because for the last two or three decades people have been misinterpreting, and reappropriating his words, forgetting the original tenets of the Free Software movement because Open Source sounds better. I think I'd be quite peeved also. And if in 10 years nobody knows the difference between free software and proprietary software, that will be very sad, and will be a consequence of Open Source's promotion of the economic benefit over other benefits. As for the GNU/Linux thing, I think in the same thread, RMS has lost his credit. Linux runs a whole lot of the worthwhile sites on the 'net, and Linux is increasingly gaining public awareness, but on every Linux machine is a whole set of utilities that RMS wrote, which helped, if not enabled, the creation of Linux - yet who knows who RMS is?
Couldn't they set up some phony building in canada and/say/ they were working there, but just telecommute? Heck, couldn't they just tunnel right back to their desktops in the US?
Sun has drawn a lot of fire for its stance towards open source. But I believe they have a (valid) reason for what they do. Remember Joy was one of the original BSD guys. He understands free software. While Java is very powerful and used in many places for many things, it is still in the "proving grounds" stage of its development to many (witness a new version every 8 months or so). It is not ready to be decentralized and exposed to the world at large yet. There are still some rather big sharks out there that would like nothing more than to take all of Sun's work (which has been for the most part just "given away" - specs, implementations, documentation, etc.) and run with it...branch it, assimilate it, extinguish it. Java is not ready for the possibility of being branched into many flavors. For a while more I think Sun is correct in keeping Java under central control while it's in its nascent stage. I don't know much about ISO, but couldn't ISO decide that we just needed/this/ little feature or/that/ little feature in Java? There are major features currently in development - like genericity/parameterized types. These things haven't crystallized yet. Sun already has published specs which are enough (AFAIK) to make your own implementation, and nobody is stopping you. Sun is forming this committee from companies it trusts and has worked with closely. I don't see what's wrong with that. I think sometimes we doth protest too much.
"The truth about RMS http://tlug.linux.or.jp/rms.html"
I don't find anything wrong with that interview. Should I? I found his responses very prescient. A lot of people are locked into very rigid traditional mindsets and are unable to make some fundamental distinctions, that the English language doesn't provide for in some cases. In 10, 15, 20 years, we'll all be amazed at how ahead of his time Stallman was (and is currently). We lambaste him now because he apparently nitpicks words and meanings, but he knows what he means and wants to say.
It's called the theory of MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction. If you fSck with me, I can fSck back, HARD!
And we'll all be very safe when we're all dead right? That's not what I call safety, and that's not a world worth living in.
That is what kept the nuclear peace (and still does) for these 50 or so years that nuclear weapons have existed.
Being afraid of nuclear incineration daily, and having to teach our children to duck under desks and wear fallout gas masks is not what I consider "peace".
If disarmament Pollyanas like you had had your "Better Red than Dead" policies enacted in the 60's and 70's, we'd probably be Red by now. But guess what? We didn't disarm, we kept the peace and we're still free.
I don't know what jingoistic world you are living in, but Reagon (what a Pollyana) made the START treaty, and Clinton START 2 for Reduction and Limitation of nuclear arms. We DID disarm, keep the peace and remain free. God knows what would have happened if we CONTINUED the arms race. Did you learn NOTHING from the Cold War? Your McCarthyistic claims that we'd turn "Red" are sensationalist 50s mentality. Nobody is or would have turned "Red". But if we did turn "Red" (like those damn hippies! gasp!), I sure would rather be alive.
Witness Tiananmen Square, the forced resettlement of Ukrainians by Stalin, Indonesia and East Timor, the Kurds in Iraq, the Kosovars, Pol Pot, El Salvadoran death squads, etc. History is unfortunately populated with the skeletons of populations who did not possess such a counterbalancing force.
And I'm sure firearms would have solved all of these problems. I'm sure the soldiers, seeing the students had firearms would put down their weapons and give up instead of just slaughtering them faster and more indescriminantly. Same goes for the other situations. Firearms would NOT have prevented those situations. They would merely cause more casualties on both sides. I cannot believe the arms-race mentality of gun advocates. Annihilating your enemy MORE than he annihilates you is NOT a victory. If we were talking about nuclear weapons would your opinion be the same? Naturally the safety of ALL would be increased if we were locked in a nuclear stalemate...right? When you are all dead, does it MATTER how many of the other side you have killed? You do not solve violence by more violence.
Part of those numbers also include idiot gunowners being selected out in a Darwin-like fashion when they clean their loaded guns.
I submit that this is hardly a logical rationalization. How about doing away with restrictive seatbelt or driving laws and just selecting for people with the thickest skulls and ribcages? Or maybe doing away with FDA regulation and just selecting for those who best survive dangerous chemicals?
But even a large portion of those homicides would likely have been committed with or without the use of a projectile weapon.
What about ACCIDENTAL deaths? Rosy O'Donnell cries "12 children die every minute". How many children a minute is acceptable to YOU? Do you really think that children would have gotten their heads blown off "with or without the use of a projectile weapon"?
The reason the gun issue rose again was, face it, the Colorado incident and the media hype surrounding it. Sure, it was a tragedy. Sure, it shouldn't have happened. But did anyone mention that there are TENS OF MILLIONS of high school students in the United States (millions who do have access to guns in their parents' homes -- I did) who didn't decide to take out the wrestling champ or the homecoming queen?
I ENTIRELY agree with you here. Columbine was not "because" of guns (although tighter regulation might have avoided their first attempt at getting weapons...they probably could get them elsewhere). Sometimes the liberals obscure the real issue with the whining. Guns were not the cause here. Video games were not the cause. The cause was, for whatever reason, an environment which made two young men emotionally unstable enough to commit a heinous crime. Why and how these individuals felt they should do such a thing should be questioned. Normal people don't just buy guns and blow up stuff randomly.
People *HAVE* the right to keep arms, however, the government *HAS* the right to "regulate" them. If you disagree with this don't bitch about it here, change the Bill of Rights.
I am not arguing that people NOT have the right to keep arms. IMHO it is ridiculous how LITTLE regulation guns have compared to products of other industries. I don't disagree with this at all. But the NRA and the gun lobby do. They like the former right, but they don't like that latter at all. And I'm sure they have no qualms about changing (and plenty of money to help them) the Bill of Rights.
I wouldnt even get into this shit anymore with you anti-gun people. Just do me a favor.
PUT A "GUNFREE HOUSE" SIGN ON YOUR DOOR. Please? Prettyplease?
This is a typical mentality. It is actually a classic case of tragedy of the commons. Here is the rationalization:
* I percieve that there is some vague threat to my safety.
* I obtain a gun. This reduces the threat to myself some amount, and increases the threat to everybody else by some amount. But this amount is shared.
* This is entirely logical and appears sound to me. Every other rational person behaves in this logical manner, figuring that the safety it affords them as an individual is greater than the danger it poses to the society as a whole.
* Everybody follows this rationale until the whole system collapses at some point because the system as a whole can no longer bear the stress that everybody introduces into it with their individual actions.
Replace "guns" with "nuclear missiles" and you will see this mentality is very stupid. I will not participate in arms-race mentality with you.
Because just as the founders of this nation rebelled against THEIR government, so may the people one day have to rise up against the US Government.
Well, this, I guess is really what I take issue with. Sure, I understand the reasoning of the writers of the constitution. I _understand_ that they wanted to build in the ability to overthrow the system. But face it - it's not 1776 anymore. Nobody is overthrowing the government with firearms. It makes the whole argument that "we have weapons to ensure the government behaves because otherwise we'll overthrow it" totally bogus. Nobody is overthrowing anything with firearms. Tanks, bombs, missiles...maybe. Firearms...nope. And IF that provision no longer makes sense, what really is the justification for the collateral damage it causes in excessive accidental or opportunistic violence? What are we really GETTING for this price we pay?
It's about individual rights, not gun rights, etc. Gun control is just one of these rights trying to be stripped or made extremely difficult to excersise. Extremism is rampant, and it would seem to me that the extremists are the ones pushing to eliminate individual rights from either the right or left.
Agreed. Although extremists come in various flavors. Some want to prevent you from doing things they don't think you should do, while others would like to have new rights conferred to them.
As per gun control, etc. I am going to argue infinately that an armed society is a polite one.
Perhaps you are right. An armed society is a polite one because if you're not polite you get shot. Great. I don't want to live in a society in which people are free and able to shoot each other because they don't think others are "polite" in some manner. Being afraid of being shot by everybody is an inhibition on my freedom. I don't want to live in a state in which my neighbors are the police.
When people feel as though they are not protected by the police, friends, family, or while walking home in the evening etc. they feel violated. Why do people feel violated when they are left completely defenseless you ask? -- I would charge you to ask yourself that question again.
I don't feel violated walking home in the evening or when police, friends and family are not around. Why should I? Should I be scared? It sure seems gun advocates are really paranoid. It's amazing how other western countries who have much stronger gun control have much lower gun voilence and a much higher percieved sense of safety. Somehow England, Europe, the Scandanavian countries, which have tighter gun control and a less armed populace are so much safer. You can go overseas and walk the streets of capitals feeling much safer than you can in the middle of nowhere in the US.
The constitution was written at a time when firearms were hand-made and unreliable. The term "well-regulated" referred to the firearms themselves, not to the militia. A well-regulated firearm is one that is kept in good working order, like a "well-regulated clock."
I guess I'll have to take your word for it. A "well regulated militia", seems to me to mean a well regulated, and organized body of people. Although I suppose it could also mean a militia well-equipped with quality firearms.
The founders abhorred the concept of a standing army. In fact, the constitution does not allow for a standing army.
Yes, well, we HAVE one. And for a democracy, we have a very damn large one. Either we shouldn't have a standing army because of the very threats the founding fathers were afraid of (and because, perhaps, at least to me, it seems hypocritical for a democracy to have to defend itself with a large conscripted peace-time army). Or we should institute a standing army and domestic police force which should render the necessity for the average person to bear firearms void (sure, if you live in a dangerous area, like guns for collecting or hunting, or are just really insecure I suppose you might want to have a gun).
The founders intended that the ordinary citizens possess the power to defend themselves, not only against foreign enemies, but against their own government if necessary.
That may be true, but in this day and age it is just plain ridiculous. Arm everybody in the US. We're still not going to overthrow the system with firearms. Perhaps the founding fathers should have made provisions for artillary, bombers, missiles, etc.
A modern translation of the amendment would be, "Because it is necessary that the citizens be able to personally defend their freedom, and because it is necessary to ensure that the citizens have working weapons to do so, the government may not interfere with private gun ownership.
I still don't think a gun defends anybody's freedom. A gun may protect your life. But at least in my opinion, the loss of life and potential violence, accidental and opportunistic, of an entirely armed populace far outweighs that of an individual being able to protect themselves from arbitrary and sporadic violence. In short, I believe More Guns = More Injured/Dead Innocent People. Apparently the gun lobby does not agree with this and would rather everybody live in the false security of a personal arms race (I feel safe because a neighbor only has firepower enough to kill off my family 5 times over, while I have enough to kill off his family 10 times over). Shouldn't, by the same token, nuclear proliferation and stockpiling keep us all much "safer"?
The reason our society is violent isn't because of the guns. It's mostly because we are living under drug prohibition -- which has progressed farther and destroyed more of our freedom then alcohol prohibition ever did, and because the government is actively waging a civil war -- the drug war -- against its own people. Violence is the natural result of prohibition and the black markets it creates.
Well, that comment came out of thin air. Are you saying that society is violent because people are upset with not being able to take any drugs they want? Most of the senseless gun violence I remember involved insane, emotionally disturbed people, or was accidental. I can't remember the last time some person who was unhappy about not being able to use drugs shot some place up... Sure, the war on drugs is expensive (in various ways) and stupid. But I don't think that is what is causing gun violence. The sickness is much deeper in the society than a bunch of people being barred from using drugs...
Continuing its long tradition of simplifying the user interface, Apple also announced its new screen-less monitor. According to an Apple spokesperson, the moniter is controlled by squinting and grimacing by the user. Apple is betting that people will appreciate the reclaimable desk space. In a move reminiscent of its innovative abandonment of the floppy drive, another rumor afloat is that Apple's next version of the Mac OS will need no input devices whatsoever. Instead the OS will simply percieve psychically what the user wants to do. "We think this is another innovative step forward" said an Apple spokesperson. When questioned on the feasibility of such an OS, the spokesperson offhandedly commented "Well, we determine for the user what they want to do anyway". Analysts are predicting that Apple may be building the road to its own extinction. "In the future, by the mere thought of getting any real work done, Apple users might end up causing the Mac to vanish altogether".
Slashdot Mirror
(caustic sarcasm)
And just think, Wave America could have caught this dissident and "normalized" him.
(/caustic sarcasm)
So where can donations go?
Wasn't there just an article a while back about some volcanic island springing up in the Pacific? I wonder if some chunk of land in international waters could be purchased for /total/ privacy/security. Maybe a node in the arctic or antarctic?
Hey, it's the Swiss bank of data...
At first glance I'd have to say, making a web site named "TheBarbies.com" is a blatent and obvious infringement. It is arguable whether TheBarbies.com is in a different market and thus not applicable to trademark infringement. However, I can see TheBarbies.com leading to confusion and dilution with Mattel's Barbie computer games, and if it ever wanted to put up Barbie sites.
One word: Bobo
9 /front.htm
http://www.newsweek.com/nw-srv/talk/cover/00032
The only thing I use MS Office for is to write my staff report...which can easily be done in Plain Old Text. Of course, executives up the food chain often send email with MS Word documents as attachments. Other people around here use PowerPoint for presentations. Other than that I don't see why we should be sinking so much money into the black hole of MS office. I don't know of any special features of MS office we actually USE, as opposed to some generic word processor. We could probably just switch to Wordpad or something at least. From the comments of my coworkers it seems that the consensus is that MS Office is just a necessary evil that we have to live with. Besides a staff report once every two weeks, the hundreds of dollars of MS Office software on this machine is totally wasted and useless.
"do you even know C++? const in C++ has nothing to do with java's final directive. final is the opposite of virtual in C++."
/is/ what const is used for in C++, right? You /can/ declare constants in Java. Is there something else special "const" does that you are saying Java does not support?
The final keyword in Java also serves the purspose of constant declarator for variables. This
"In java, in addition to Object, you need a classloader to load your code. And you get no strings, because the compiler has specific syntactic sugar for dealing with strings (why oh why did they hack this into the compiler isntead of just supporting operator overloading?) I'm sure there are more, but its been a while since I hacked java at that low a level."
If you are griping that VMs are too dependent on the Java language itself...well, tough. Sun created the VM spec FOR the Java language...not as some universal VM and byte code instruction set that anybody could write any arbitrary language on top of (although that is certainly possible). People write Java in Java...they don't write in bytecode, against the VM directly.
Also, somebody was griping that the standard libraries and default utilites from the Sun JDK were written in Java. Well...DUH. They are Java libraries and tools. They should be written in Java. Java was created for easy cross-platform development...it would be stupid then to write all the libraries and tools in some native language, then have to ALSO port all those on top of writing a VM. With the libraries and tools written in Java itself, all VM writers have to worry about is writing a VM, and presto, the support libraries and tools are all magically available. It would be hypocritical and tragically stupid to write the supporting tools and libraries for platform-neutral Java in some platform-dependent language.
Hmm...what about MAS by getting RID off all the damn nuclear weapons. MAD works only when both parties DON'T want to die. It doesn't work when one party is just friggen off its rocker and doesn't CARE whether it dies or not, or accidentally fires. In that case, REDUCTION, and ELIMINATION and real defense against such weapons (not defense by the assumption that the enemy is too afraid of being eliminated himself) is the ONLY way to safety.
And again, you are just falling into the tragedy of the commons, arms race, short term mentality. "The world is dangerous, therefore I should stockpile as much dangerous stuff as fast as I can". In the LONG RUN this is not a solution. Having a world in which everybody is brimming with nuclear weapons, assured that if ANYBODY fires, we're all toast, having to teach our children how to avoid or live in a nuclear aftermath - THAT is not peace. THAT is not safety.
Bullshit. Again you fail to realize that many, or perhaps most, deaths with firearms are caused by accident or as a matter of opportunity. I am not claiming a gun owner is a criminal at all. I am claiming that by having a gun, increasing the number of guns own domestically, will increase accidental and opportunistic injury. What about the kid who finds it and accidentally kills himself or somebody? What about the angry and distraught teenager, who, in a fit of angst decides to kill somebody because the gun is available. What about the guy who gets into a heated argument, and, having a gun in arms reach, in a fit of rage, murders somebody?? All of these cases are accidental or opportunistic. They occur in direct proportion the number of guns we have domestically. Unfortunately, the DON'T only happen to the gun owner or family of the gun owner, so the RISK is increased to society as a whole.
Yes, and as we can see those rebels fighting the Russions sure has helped alot. And what will they do when the Russians start rolling in artillary or bombing them??
"You're sure you want to do this, eh?"
[Eh!] [Nah!]
Couldn't they set up some phony building in canada and /say/ they were working there, but just telecommute? Heck, couldn't they just tunnel right back to their desktops in the US?
Sun has drawn a lot of fire for its stance towards open source. But I believe they have a (valid) reason for what they do. Remember Joy was one of the original BSD guys. He understands free software. While Java is very powerful and used in many places for many things, it is still in the "proving grounds" stage of its development to many (witness a new version every 8 months or so). It is not ready to be decentralized and exposed to the world at large yet. There are still some rather big sharks out there that would like nothing more than to take all of Sun's work (which has been for the most part just "given away" - specs, implementations, documentation, etc.) and run with it...branch it, assimilate it, extinguish it. Java is not ready for the possibility of being branched into many flavors. For a while more I think Sun is correct in keeping Java under central control while it's in its nascent stage. I don't know much about ISO, but couldn't ISO decide that we just needed /this/ little feature or /that/ little feature in Java? There are major features currently in development - like genericity/parameterized types. These things haven't crystallized yet. Sun already has published specs which are enough (AFAIK) to make your own implementation, and nobody is stopping you. Sun is forming this committee from companies it trusts and has worked with closely. I don't see what's wrong with that. I think sometimes we doth protest too much.
"The truth about RMS http://tlug.linux.or.jp/rms.html"
I don't find anything wrong with that interview. Should I? I found his responses very prescient. A lot of people are locked into very rigid traditional mindsets and are unable to make some fundamental distinctions, that the English language doesn't provide for in some cases. In 10, 15, 20 years, we'll all be amazed at how ahead of his time Stallman was (and is currently). We lambaste him now because he apparently nitpicks words and meanings, but he knows what he means and wants to say.
And we'll all be very safe when we're all dead right? That's not what I call safety, and that's not a world worth living in.
Being afraid of nuclear incineration daily, and having to teach our children to duck under desks and wear fallout gas masks is not what I consider "peace".
I don't know what jingoistic world you are living in, but Reagon (what a Pollyana) made the START treaty, and Clinton START 2 for Reduction and Limitation of nuclear arms. We DID disarm, keep the peace and remain free. God knows what would have happened if we CONTINUED the arms race. Did you learn NOTHING from the Cold War? Your McCarthyistic claims that we'd turn "Red" are sensationalist 50s mentality. Nobody is or would have turned "Red". But if we did turn "Red" (like those damn hippies! gasp!), I sure would rather be alive.
You know, I think my taxes are too high...I think I'm going to walk down to Washington and throw off that old yoke of tyranny with my revolver here...
And I'm sure firearms would have solved all of these problems. I'm sure the soldiers, seeing the students had firearms would put down their weapons and give up instead of just slaughtering them faster and more indescriminantly. Same goes for the other situations. Firearms would NOT have prevented those situations. They would merely cause more casualties on both sides. I cannot believe the arms-race mentality of gun advocates. Annihilating your enemy MORE than he annihilates you is NOT a victory. If we were talking about nuclear weapons would your opinion be the same? Naturally the safety of ALL would be increased if we were locked in a nuclear stalemate...right? When you are all dead, does it MATTER how many of the other side you have killed? You do not solve violence by more violence.
I submit that this is hardly a logical rationalization. How about doing away with restrictive seatbelt or driving laws and just selecting for people with the thickest skulls and ribcages? Or maybe doing away with FDA regulation and just selecting for those who best survive dangerous chemicals?
What about ACCIDENTAL deaths? Rosy O'Donnell cries "12 children die every minute". How many children a minute is acceptable to YOU? Do you really think that children would have gotten their heads blown off "with or without the use of a projectile weapon"?
I ENTIRELY agree with you here. Columbine was not "because" of guns (although tighter regulation might have avoided their first attempt at getting weapons...they probably could get them elsewhere). Sometimes the liberals obscure the real issue with the whining. Guns were not the cause here. Video games were not the cause. The cause was, for whatever reason, an environment which made two young men emotionally unstable enough to commit a heinous crime. Why and how these individuals felt they should do such a thing should be questioned. Normal people don't just buy guns and blow up stuff randomly.
I am not arguing that people NOT have the right to keep arms. IMHO it is ridiculous how LITTLE regulation guns have compared to products of other industries. I don't disagree with this at all. But the NRA and the gun lobby do. They like the former right, but they don't like that latter at all. And I'm sure they have no qualms about changing (and plenty of money to help them) the Bill of Rights.
This is a typical mentality. It is actually a classic case of tragedy of the commons. Here is the rationalization:
* I percieve that there is some vague threat to my safety.
* I obtain a gun. This reduces the threat to myself some amount, and increases the threat to everybody else by some amount. But this amount is shared.
* This is entirely logical and appears sound to me. Every other rational person behaves in this logical manner, figuring that the safety it affords them as an individual is greater than the danger it poses to the society as a whole.
* Everybody follows this rationale until the whole system collapses at some point because the system as a whole can no longer bear the stress that everybody introduces into it with their individual actions.
Replace "guns" with "nuclear missiles" and you will see this mentality is very stupid. I will not participate in arms-race mentality with you.
Well, this, I guess is really what I take issue with. Sure, I understand the reasoning of the writers of the constitution. I _understand_ that they wanted to build in the ability to overthrow the system. But face it - it's not 1776 anymore. Nobody is overthrowing the government with firearms. It makes the whole argument that "we have weapons to ensure the government behaves because otherwise we'll overthrow it" totally bogus. Nobody is overthrowing anything with firearms. Tanks, bombs, missiles...maybe. Firearms...nope. And IF that provision no longer makes sense, what really is the justification for the collateral damage it causes in excessive accidental or opportunistic violence? What are we really GETTING for this price we pay?
Agreed. Although extremists come in various flavors. Some want to prevent you from doing things they don't think you should do, while others would like to have new rights conferred to them.
Perhaps you are right. An armed society is a polite one because if you're not polite you get shot. Great. I don't want to live in a society in which people are free and able to shoot each other because they don't think others are "polite" in some manner. Being afraid of being shot by everybody is an inhibition on my freedom. I don't want to live in a state in which my neighbors are the police.
I don't feel violated walking home in the evening or when police, friends and family are not around. Why should I? Should I be scared? It sure seems gun advocates are really paranoid. It's amazing how other western countries who have much stronger gun control have much lower gun voilence and a much higher percieved sense of safety. Somehow England, Europe, the Scandanavian countries, which have tighter gun control and a less armed populace are so much safer. You can go overseas and walk the streets of capitals feeling much safer than you can in the middle of nowhere in the US.
I guess I'll have to take your word for it. A "well regulated militia", seems to me to mean a well regulated, and organized body of people. Although I suppose it could also mean a militia well-equipped with quality firearms.
Yes, well, we HAVE one. And for a democracy, we have a very damn large one. Either we shouldn't have a standing army because of the very threats the founding fathers were afraid of (and because, perhaps, at least to me, it seems hypocritical for a democracy to have to defend itself with a large conscripted peace-time army). Or we should institute a standing army and domestic police force which should render the necessity for the average person to bear firearms void (sure, if you live in a dangerous area, like guns for collecting or hunting, or are just really insecure I suppose you might want to have a gun).
That may be true, but in this day and age it is just plain ridiculous. Arm everybody in the US. We're still not going to overthrow the system with firearms. Perhaps the founding fathers should have made provisions for artillary, bombers, missiles, etc.
I still don't think a gun defends anybody's freedom. A gun may protect your life. But at least in my opinion, the loss of life and potential violence, accidental and opportunistic, of an entirely armed populace far outweighs that of an individual being able to protect themselves from arbitrary and sporadic violence. In short, I believe More Guns = More Injured/Dead Innocent People. Apparently the gun lobby does not agree with this and would rather everybody live in the false security of a personal arms race (I feel safe because a neighbor only has firepower enough to kill off my family 5 times over, while I have enough to kill off his family 10 times over). Shouldn't, by the same token, nuclear proliferation and stockpiling keep us all much "safer"?
Well, that comment came out of thin air. Are you saying that society is violent because people are upset with not being able to take any drugs they want? Most of the senseless gun violence I remember involved insane, emotionally disturbed people, or was accidental. I can't remember the last time some person who was unhappy about not being able to use drugs shot some place up... Sure, the war on drugs is expensive (in various ways) and stupid. But I don't think that is what is causing gun violence. The sickness is much deeper in the society than a bunch of people being barred from using drugs...
how my post got to "Insightful" I have no idea...
Continuing its long tradition of simplifying the user interface, Apple also announced its new screen-less monitor. According to an Apple spokesperson, the moniter is controlled by squinting and grimacing by the user. Apple is betting that people will appreciate the reclaimable desk space. In a move reminiscent of its innovative abandonment of the floppy drive, another rumor afloat is that Apple's next version of the Mac OS will need no input devices whatsoever. Instead the OS will simply percieve psychically what the user wants to do. "We think this is another innovative step forward" said an Apple spokesperson. When questioned on the feasibility of such an OS, the spokesperson offhandedly commented "Well, we determine for the user what they want to do anyway". Analysts are predicting that Apple may be building the road to its own extinction. "In the future, by the mere thought of getting any real work done, Apple users might end up causing the Mac to vanish altogether".
;)
(ok, that last bit was flame bait