Yeah, but you know if a bow is loaded! And if the safety is off! People don't accidentally walk around with a bow at full draw without realizing it. And you should know if someone's drawn on you with a bow. Granted, kids do stupid stuff, and are more likely to be playing around with a bow than a rifle off a shooting range. Archery safety training seems wise as well. Given the low rate of archery homicides, though, licensing seems unneeded:).
Just because a licensing regieme wouldn't stop all criminals from using firearms is rather besides the point. Safety and security training is a good thing in its own right.
Anyway, I agree the assault weapons ban was hopelessly convoluted, and made distictions between kinds of weapons that don't actually matter. If you've got the Class III license, I don't see those restictions actually helping much. The dumbass problem resists a policy resolution, however:).
The right to bear arms is a constitutional right, but not an unlimited one. Surely there are some combinations of weapons and weapon-holders you'll agree shouldn't be legal (MG42 and Charles Manson come to mind), nor does the constitution require them. The issue up for debate is where that line should be drawn. I'm saying "pass a license test" is reasonable in that it won't keep most people from bearing arms, but will improve public safety.
I don't see what about licensing isn't compatible with "a well-regulated militia." While one can argue with whether or not today's militias are really the National Guard, yadda, yadda, the framers were clearly thinking about laws and state action in regards to arms.
Also, think what you will about the 2000 election, but the original Electoral College was about a bunch of state senates appointing cronies to pick the president. While it may have degrades from what we'd like it to be, it is certainly vastly, vastly more democratic than the framers had intended, and rightly so.
They certainly weren't the equivalent from a mass-murder perspective, or a personal safety perspective. That Thompson can kill 10 people in as many seconds. An archer certainly can't. Plus it's a lot harder to shoot someone by accident with a bow.
I'm sure we can agree that some weapons are too dangerous for personal ownership (nuclear bombs, anthrax, etcetera), and some aren't. The question is what is the proper line to draw.
I don't think banning the M1A1 outright is appropriate, by I have no problem with there being higher training requirements to own one. It's lethal, often indiscrimenantly so, and not really useful for personal protection or hunting.
But, as you say, it's a blast, and other issues aside I wouldn't want to deprive you of that pleasure.
It sounds like Texas has a good course (and probably needs help on their driver's license program instead). This is very much along the lines of what I was proposing. Did you feel it was onerous, or about appropriate? Would you feel comfortable if people who weren't able to pass the class were allowed to have concealed weapons?
As for car registration, I wasn't proposing gun registration. Some people have made an interesting case for gun fingerprinting, and I haven't yet heard a compelling (i.e. not paranoid) argument against it. But I honestly haven't looked at that enough.
Lastly, though, I'd think most of the places you can't bring a gun (courthouses, etcetera), don't allow you to drive a car into the building either:).
Well, for one thing the federal government is "Us," not "They." We elected them (wtih a few notable exceptions). Arguments that hinge upon "if a horrible facist coup happened, this law could be used as a pretext for..." don't really fly, because horrible facist coups are more than capable of writting their own laws at the time. Let's assume that the basic nature of our democracy is relatively stable, please.
And certainly, England hasn't decended into a morass of criminal violence and dictatorship due to stronger handgun control laws. Or Canada for that matter. The NRA and like-minded individuals radically overstate the utility of firearms to a society.
The second amendement states that "the people" as in the citizens can't have their rights to firearms removed. Nowhere does it say the rights of a particular citizen can't have them removed, or everybody in some cases. This is done all the time, like in prision, with parolees, in public buildings. However, laws that set so high a burden that most couldn't get firearms should (and I think would) be held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, since it truly would be taking the right away from "the people."
But no right is an absolute. Shouting free speech in a crowded theater is universally held to be illegal, even though it is "speech," due to its danger to the public. Giving someone an order to murder is conspiracy, not free speech. Again, this issue is public safety outweighs the right to speech in this case.
In the same way, someone who isn't willing to engage is basic gun safety is a threat to the public, which overrides their right to be armed.
The "right to bear arms" can be interpreted broadly or narrowly, but not universally. Is there a right to bear hand grenades? Sniper rifles into a presidential speech? Twelve sticks of dynamite strapped to your chest into a bank? Obviously some weapons and situations aren't acceptable, others are (I have no problem with hunting, target shooting, etcetera). The right to be armed isn't an absolute. The policy question is what's the right balance to maximize both second amendement rights and the right to safety of others.
Heck one could argue (I'm not) that the right to bear arms should be limited to the types of arms available when the constitution was ratified, since that was the original intent.
Oh, someone is welcome to have a loaded gun on their person. What's not okay is to leave a loaded gun in an unlocked drawer when you're not in the house, especially if there are kids around.
No gun should be left in a fireable state if it is accessible to others and out of your control.
Ah, but my original proposal wasn't that we bar particular kinds of firearms. I'm suggesting that the government apply training and competancy standards for those who would legally own firearms.
It'd not a bad idea to have licenses for more dangerous weapons to have more difficult licenses to get, much like a commerical trucking license being more difficult to get for a standard passanger vehicle.
I'm all for dealing with the causes of crime as well. I doubt that licensing for firearms would keep criminals from acquiring guns. However, it hopefully would reduce the frequency of accidental shootings, and the rate of gun theft. And maybe even crime of passion shootings.
Patent fees don't mean propritary. MPEG-4, as an ISO standard, is licensed under RAND - Reasonable and Non-Discriminiatory terms. This means no-one gets a sweetheart deal on using it. And it is fully published, with reference software to boot.
So, while it isn't free as in beer, it is for the most part free as in speech.
I'm hoping one of the first Helix Producer projects is to hook the Producer preprocessing engine into the MPEG4IP encoding tools (Xvid, plus AAC-LC, plus a muxer) into a good, open source MPEG-4 authoring tool.
Darwin Streaming Server can serve many file types, and many non-propritary formats. These include
MPEG-1 MPEG-4 MP3 QuickTime movies with non-propritary codecs like H.261 and H.263
QuickTIme has a packet structure for streaming, fully documented, and anyone and their dog can build a codec that can hint to a QuickTime streaming package. Heck, Darwin Streaming Server can even stream formats QuickTime can't play back, like MPEG-4 Advanced Simple.
Oh, privacy is certainly held to be a constitutional right, i.e. Roe v. Wade.
Original intent is hard to argue in the second amendment in lots of cases. It says "right to bear arms" but that has never been interpreted to mean that everyone can have any kind of weapon in any cicrumstances with no restrictions whatsoever. The framers certainly weren't thinking of Class III weapons, since there wasn't anything man portable that could kill more than a couple person a minute at range back then. A spree shooter with a muzzle-loader wasn't a concern they had.
I'm not a fan of "slippery slope" arguments, since almost any good idea becomes a bad idea taken to extremes.
I suppose I could imagine a world so overpopulated where parenting licenses would make sense. I can't imagine away to do them today that wouldn't be horribly coercive.
Although, people certainly do have their parenting rights taken away from them all the time.
Well, if you had a gun would you be able to rest assured you'd NEVER get mugged by an unlicensed, gun-toting, homical maniac?
Nope.
A gun isn't bulletproof dermal plating - a guy with a gun can get shot just as dead as a guy without a gun. Sometimes the guy with the gun can shoot back, and sometimes that's a good thing, and sometimes not. If the guy with the gun shooting back knows how to hit the broadside of a barn, the changes of it being a good thing are somewhat better.
The question isn't whether there are some examples of cases where this wouldn't work. The question is whether more stringent firearms licensing would, in the aggregate, lead to more safety. I think it would. And in a much more second-amendemnent friendly way than say, banning all handguns.
You'd treat it in the same way as an unlicensed driver who insists on driving their kids around, I suppose. There certainly are those who refuse to have a license for some reason or another, and while I can certainly imagine their car being impounded, that doesn't seem like a reason to take the kids away. Now, if they keep driving unlicensed and DRUNK, then I could see taking the kids.
Taking someone's kids away is a huge and extreme sanction, and shouldn't be done unless there was a significant risk. Like if someone really was leaving their loaded gun in the unlocked drawer in a room the kids had access to when a parent wasn't at home.
A good number of people answer the speeding question wrong on drivers tests, and I'm perfectly happy to have them reading the driver's manual again before they start driving.
I feel the same way about the equivalent on a gun safety test. While it certainly wouldn't weed out all unsafe users, it would some of then, and would encorage everyone to take a gun safety class, or at least read the darn book.
Like a driver's test, a good gun license test should pass most people who take it, even if it takes them a few times to get it right.
Okay, we'll never get a consensus to ban firearms in this country (although some municipalities have).
How about this: A gun license should be as hard to get as a driver's license.
This would mean a written exam on safty, a practical exam on basic marksmanship, maintanience, and safety.
Gun inspections like car inspections would probably be too difficult for existing guns. But at least an inspection for new firearms, to ensure they're being sold with triggerlocks and the like. I can understand why some people wouldn't want a triggerlock on (I think they're stupid, since they're much more likely to kill a family member than an intruder, but that's a compelling fantasy for many). But I think every gun should have one, so that it has to be a proactive choice to not use one.
I'm sure the NRA would frantically hate this idea, but I'd feel more comfortable knowing that people who bought guns legally at least demonstrated that they could pick "no" on a multiple choice test asking "is it okay to leave a loaded gun in the bedside table."
This whole conversation is happening on the lower end of the market. Video editors don't reallly spend much time waiting for rendering anymore.
DV-format editors, on both Mac and Windows, do real-time previews for everything on both platforms. Real-time is real-time. No big speed difference there. It's only when rendering the final output that a speed difference matters, which is a small part of the overall project.
On the high end, editing systems have real-time effects in hardware, so CPU speed doesn't matter. You'll still find old 68040 Avid machines every now and then that are still real-time.
AE guys certainly do care about rendering times, of course. The simplest thing to do is to do all of your creative work on the Mac, and then network render with a bunch of headless PC boxes. My main work suite has two Macs, two XP boxes, and a PowerBook. I edit, write, websurf on the Macs. The Windows boxes do video compression and play games. Everyone's happy.
Well, they certainly should hit up the Sorenson guys about this. They didn't mind the SV1/2 decoder support in past versions, so might be willing to provide some information for a SV3 decoder as well.
I've talked to folks at Sorenson who don't mind at all about decode support in MPlayer. After all, they sell ENCODERS, and having more decoders out there only grows their market.
Their new, just-announced Squeeze 3 is a really awesome encoding tool. QuickTime, Windows Media, RealMedia, Flash MX, and MPEG-4 support.
For what it's worth, I've had a number of Apple employees on the QuickTime team say nice things about Crossover. While it isn't officially supported, they're glad it's there, so Linux users can watch QuickTime stuff. They view the engineering effort of a full, official port to *NIX as WAY too big a project to be worth the results.
MPlayer does WM9 by wrapping codecs from Windows, right? I assume this means that it only supports those codecs on x86 platforms.
Anyone tried plugging an x86 emulator in there in order to get PPC, Sparc, etcetera playback? It'd be tricky, since codec performance is rather time critical. Still, only the codec itself would need to be emulated, with blitting, UI, etcetera taking place in native code.
Well, you can tune in a faster compression speed (although 400 MHz is pretty ridiculous - I'd want at least SSE SIMD available).
If I was doing analog capture, I'd be doing a quality-limited mode, not data rate limited (aka 1-pass VBR). Thus increasing the encoder speed just makes a slightly larger file.
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Yeah, but you know if a bow is loaded! And if the safety is off! People don't accidentally walk around with a bow at full draw without realizing it. And you should know if someone's drawn on you with a bow. Granted, kids do stupid stuff, and are more likely to be playing around with a bow than a rifle off a shooting range. Archery safety training seems wise as well. Given the low rate of archery homicides, though, licensing seems unneeded :).
:).
Just because a licensing regieme wouldn't stop all criminals from using firearms is rather besides the point. Safety and security training is a good thing in its own right.
Anyway, I agree the assault weapons ban was hopelessly convoluted, and made distictions between kinds of weapons that don't actually matter. If you've got the Class III license, I don't see those restictions actually helping much. The dumbass problem resists a policy resolution, however
The right to bear arms is a constitutional right, but not an unlimited one. Surely there are some combinations of weapons and weapon-holders you'll agree shouldn't be legal (MG42 and Charles Manson come to mind), nor does the constitution require them. The issue up for debate is where that line should be drawn. I'm saying "pass a license test" is reasonable in that it won't keep most people from bearing arms, but will improve public safety.
I don't see what about licensing isn't compatible with "a well-regulated militia." While one can argue with whether or not today's militias are really the National Guard, yadda, yadda, the framers were clearly thinking about laws and state action in regards to arms.
Also, think what you will about the 2000 election, but the original Electoral College was about a bunch of state senates appointing cronies to pick the president. While it may have degrades from what we'd like it to be, it is certainly vastly, vastly more democratic than the framers had intended, and rightly so.
They certainly weren't the equivalent from a mass-murder perspective, or a personal safety perspective. That Thompson can kill 10 people in as many seconds. An archer certainly can't. Plus it's a lot harder to shoot someone by accident with a bow.
I'm sure we can agree that some weapons are too dangerous for personal ownership (nuclear bombs, anthrax, etcetera), and some aren't. The question is what is the proper line to draw.
I don't think banning the M1A1 outright is appropriate, by I have no problem with there being higher training requirements to own one. It's lethal, often indiscrimenantly so, and not really useful for personal protection or hunting.
But, as you say, it's a blast, and other issues aside I wouldn't want to deprive you of that pleasure.
It sounds like Texas has a good course (and probably needs help on their driver's license program instead). This is very much along the lines of what I was proposing. Did you feel it was onerous, or about appropriate? Would you feel comfortable if people who weren't able to pass the class were allowed to have concealed weapons?
:).
As for car registration, I wasn't proposing gun registration. Some people have made an interesting case for gun fingerprinting, and I haven't yet heard a compelling (i.e. not paranoid) argument against it. But I honestly haven't looked at that enough.
Lastly, though, I'd think most of the places you can't bring a gun (courthouses, etcetera), don't allow you to drive a car into the building either
Well, for one thing the federal government is "Us," not "They." We elected them (wtih a few notable exceptions). Arguments that hinge upon "if a horrible facist coup happened, this law could be used as a pretext for..." don't really fly, because horrible facist coups are more than capable of writting their own laws at the time. Let's assume that the basic nature of our democracy is relatively stable, please.
And certainly, England hasn't decended into a morass of criminal violence and dictatorship due to stronger handgun control laws. Or Canada for that matter. The NRA and like-minded individuals radically overstate the utility of firearms to a society.
The second amendement states that "the people" as in the citizens can't have their rights to firearms removed. Nowhere does it say the rights of a particular citizen can't have them removed, or everybody in some cases. This is done all the time, like in prision, with parolees, in public buildings. However, laws that set so high a burden that most couldn't get firearms should (and I think would) be held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, since it truly would be taking the right away from "the people."
But no right is an absolute. Shouting free speech in a crowded theater is universally held to be illegal, even though it is "speech," due to its danger to the public. Giving someone an order to murder is conspiracy, not free speech. Again, this issue is public safety outweighs the right to speech in this case.
In the same way, someone who isn't willing to engage is basic gun safety is a threat to the public, which overrides their right to be armed.
The "right to bear arms" can be interpreted broadly or narrowly, but not universally. Is there a right to bear hand grenades? Sniper rifles into a presidential speech? Twelve sticks of dynamite strapped to your chest into a bank? Obviously some weapons and situations aren't acceptable, others are (I have no problem with hunting, target shooting, etcetera). The right to be armed isn't an absolute. The policy question is what's the right balance to maximize both second amendement rights and the right to safety of others.
Heck one could argue (I'm not) that the right to bear arms should be limited to the types of arms available when the constitution was ratified, since that was the original intent.
Oh, someone is welcome to have a loaded gun on their person. What's not okay is to leave a loaded gun in an unlocked drawer when you're not in the house, especially if there are kids around.
No gun should be left in a fireable state if it is accessible to others and out of your control.
Ah, but my original proposal wasn't that we bar particular kinds of firearms. I'm suggesting that the government apply training and competancy standards for those who would legally own firearms.
It'd not a bad idea to have licenses for more dangerous weapons to have more difficult licenses to get, much like a commerical trucking license being more difficult to get for a standard passanger vehicle.
I'm all for dealing with the causes of crime as well. I doubt that licensing for firearms would keep criminals from acquiring guns. However, it hopefully would reduce the frequency of accidental shootings, and the rate of gun theft. And maybe even crime of passion shootings.
AFAIK, most people aren't shot by strangers.
Patent fees don't mean propritary. MPEG-4, as an ISO standard, is licensed under RAND - Reasonable and Non-Discriminiatory terms. This means no-one gets a sweetheart deal on using it. And it is fully published, with reference software to boot.
So, while it isn't free as in beer, it is for the most part free as in speech.
I'm hoping one of the first Helix Producer projects is to hook the Producer preprocessing engine into the MPEG4IP encoding tools (Xvid, plus AAC-LC, plus a muxer) into a good, open source MPEG-4 authoring tool.
Sorry, try again.
Darwin Streaming Server can serve many file types, and many non-propritary formats. These include
MPEG-1
MPEG-4
MP3
QuickTime movies with non-propritary codecs like H.261 and H.263
QuickTIme has a packet structure for streaming, fully documented, and anyone and their dog can build a codec that can hint to a QuickTime streaming package. Heck, Darwin Streaming Server can even stream formats QuickTime can't play back, like MPEG-4 Advanced Simple.
Oh, privacy is certainly held to be a constitutional right, i.e. Roe v. Wade.
Original intent is hard to argue in the second amendment in lots of cases. It says "right to bear arms" but that has never been interpreted to mean that everyone can have any kind of weapon in any cicrumstances with no restrictions whatsoever. The framers certainly weren't thinking of Class III weapons, since there wasn't anything man portable that could kill more than a couple person a minute at range back then. A spree shooter with a muzzle-loader wasn't a concern they had.
I'm not a fan of "slippery slope" arguments, since almost any good idea becomes a bad idea taken to extremes.
I suppose I could imagine a world so overpopulated where parenting licenses would make sense. I can't imagine away to do them today that wouldn't be horribly coercive.
Although, people certainly do have their parenting rights taken away from them all the time.
The straw in that strawman is wet.
Well, if you had a gun would you be able to rest assured you'd NEVER get mugged by an unlicensed, gun-toting, homical maniac?
Nope.
A gun isn't bulletproof dermal plating - a guy with a gun can get shot just as dead as a guy without a gun. Sometimes the guy with the gun can shoot back, and sometimes that's a good thing, and sometimes not. If the guy with the gun shooting back knows how to hit the broadside of a barn, the changes of it being a good thing are somewhat better.
The question isn't whether there are some examples of cases where this wouldn't work. The question is whether more stringent firearms licensing would, in the aggregate, lead to more safety. I think it would. And in a much more second-amendemnent friendly way than say, banning all handguns.
You'd treat it in the same way as an unlicensed driver who insists on driving their kids around, I suppose. There certainly are those who refuse to have a license for some reason or another, and while I can certainly imagine their car being impounded, that doesn't seem like a reason to take the kids away. Now, if they keep driving unlicensed and DRUNK, then I could see taking the kids.
Taking someone's kids away is a huge and extreme sanction, and shouldn't be done unless there was a significant risk. Like if someone really was leaving their loaded gun in the unlocked drawer in a room the kids had access to when a parent wasn't at home.
A good number of people answer the speeding question wrong on drivers tests, and I'm perfectly happy to have them reading the driver's manual again before they start driving.
I feel the same way about the equivalent on a gun safety test. While it certainly wouldn't weed out all unsafe users, it would some of then, and would encorage everyone to take a gun safety class, or at least read the darn book.
Like a driver's test, a good gun license test should pass most people who take it, even if it takes them a few times to get it right.
I don't mind this rule for the childless. But I'd especially want people who store firearms in houses with kids to be safety licensed!
Okay, we'll never get a consensus to ban firearms in this country (although some municipalities have).
How about this: A gun license should be as hard to get as a driver's license.
This would mean a written exam on safty, a practical exam on basic marksmanship, maintanience, and safety.
Gun inspections like car inspections would probably be too difficult for existing guns. But at least an inspection for new firearms, to ensure they're being sold with triggerlocks and the like. I can understand why some people wouldn't want a triggerlock on (I think they're stupid, since they're much more likely to kill a family member than an intruder, but that's a compelling fantasy for many). But I think every gun should have one, so that it has to be a proactive choice to not use one.
I'm sure the NRA would frantically hate this idea, but I'd feel more comfortable knowing that people who bought guns legally at least demonstrated that they could pick "no" on a multiple choice test asking "is it okay to leave a loaded gun in the bedside table."
This whole conversation is happening on the lower end of the market. Video editors don't reallly spend much time waiting for rendering anymore.
DV-format editors, on both Mac and Windows, do real-time previews for everything on both platforms. Real-time is real-time. No big speed difference there. It's only when rendering the final output that a speed difference matters, which is a small part of the overall project.
On the high end, editing systems have real-time effects in hardware, so CPU speed doesn't matter. You'll still find old 68040 Avid machines every now and then that are still real-time.
AE guys certainly do care about rendering times, of course. The simplest thing to do is to do all of your creative work on the Mac, and then network render with a bunch of headless PC boxes. My main work suite has two Macs, two XP boxes, and a PowerBook. I edit, write, websurf on the Macs. The Windows boxes do video compression and play games. Everyone's happy.
Well, they certainly should hit up the Sorenson guys about this. They didn't mind the SV1/2 decoder support in past versions, so might be willing to provide some information for a SV3 decoder as well.
I've talked to folks at Sorenson who don't mind at all about decode support in MPlayer. After all, they sell ENCODERS, and having more decoders out there only grows their market.
Their new, just-announced Squeeze 3 is a really awesome encoding tool. QuickTime, Windows Media, RealMedia, Flash MX, and MPEG-4 support.
Yeah. X11 performance on MacOS X is really lousy, so having a Cocoa version of MPlayer helps a LOT.
I've found that it can decode at least WMV7 somehow, but I'm not sure how it does that. Repurposing the PPC WMP code? A clean-room decoder?
I assume WM9 support in MPlayer support is some ways off for non x86 platforms. Microsoft is working on a MacOS X WM9 player, of course.
For what it's worth, I've had a number of Apple employees on the QuickTime team say nice things about Crossover. While it isn't officially supported, they're glad it's there, so Linux users can watch QuickTime stuff. They view the engineering effort of a full, official port to *NIX as WAY too big a project to be worth the results.
MPlayer does WM9 by wrapping codecs from Windows, right? I assume this means that it only supports those codecs on x86 platforms.
Anyone tried plugging an x86 emulator in there in order to get PPC, Sparc, etcetera playback? It'd be tricky, since codec performance is rather time critical. Still, only the codec itself would need to be emulated, with blitting, UI, etcetera taking place in native code.
DV uses 4:1:1, and is about 6.5:1 compressed from the original. Works out to be 25 Mbps.
For playback that doesn't require editing, modern codecs can look darn good at a 50:1 compression. WMV9 can do GREAT at 2Mbps at 720x480 interlaced.
Well, you can tune in a faster compression speed (although 400 MHz is pretty ridiculous - I'd want at least SSE SIMD available).
If I was doing analog capture, I'd be doing a quality-limited mode, not data rate limited (aka 1-pass VBR). Thus increasing the encoder speed just makes a slightly larger file.