I've been on projects where the RTM became God and we ended up spending more time documenting how X -> Y -> Z throughout the document tree than we did coding it. There is some sort of happy medium.
OTOH, I'm working on a project now with: No design docs. No requirements in written form unless my company writes them for the client, and even then they are abbreviated severly. The great habit of getting a bug report from QC, wanting to say "Show me the requirement" then realizing there isn't one, then having to discuss, argue, etc. out what the 'requirement' that isn't really should have been.... That's going waaaaaay too far the other way.
Also, unspoken in what you said, a design that meets requirements can still be a bad design. One that meets requirements does at least have a chcne of being a good design. One without requirements is effectively FUBAR from the beginning.
Lastly, I've been on teams where the dev *team* tested things. Now, you tended to not test your own work, but you were involved in testing the product, so it gave you a lot of experience with look and feel of the product, workflow, and just the kinds of issues users would hit. Sometimes, you had to be the one testing your stuff because only you could reasonably setup the failure conditions that needed to be tested (for instance, you're the network/dial-up expert, and you need to generate a lot of failure conditions here). Of course, we also always had a separate QC pass, but nothing went into Dev without a pass from developer smoke testing. It led to much smoother QC iterations and a much better and more stable product.
On the topic of design docs: 1. A document topology roadmap is nice. Ours used to show where the document inter-related with other documents in the project tree. That proved handy on more than one occasion. 2. PICTURES! Message flow diagrams, client-server network layouts, cloud diagrams showing software layers and major internal components/organizations, etc. A diagram plus some reasonable number of words is wroth ten times as many words with no diagram. Visio is your friend. So are modelling tools that produce good diagrams. A lot of times, a diagram alone will tell you a lot of what you need to know about a system's architecture or the interactions between components or computers. 3. Be as specific as you need to, but not more. It's tough to know, but consider your audience and don't go into excess detail (ie don't make your DD a regurgitation of the code). You need to have enough detail to make it quite clear what the implemenation must do, but not to *be* the implementation. 4. XRef to various other documents like the requirements documents and to any background docs people might need to clarify something they read in the DD (mostly background).
Oh no, here comes the science! Because everyone knows, post it on the Internet, it must be so!
As a cyclist myself, I'm not about to suggest that bicycles don't have a place on the road. BUT THERE ARE LAWS. I have *ZERO* issue with law abiding cyclists. I am one. I try to drive with respect for their smaller stature, tendency to flop over from potholes, etc. I even make larger allowances for Rollerbladers who are even more of a road hazard. But that does not give them carte blanche to ignore the laws because they feel like it! Drivers cannot and you rail at the bad drivers in your rant. I also share a disdain for drivers who violate the laws. Speeding through built up areas is a bad idea. Drunk driving is horrid, etc. etc. But we have laws that *are enforced*. I don't see too many people running stop signs in front of cop cars. I have seen cyclists ride across crosswalks and even red lights in front of a cop who didn't even bat an eye.
I'm suggesting the idea of banning all cars is ridiculous. I think motor vehicle exclusion zones are fine, though you can expect few businesses to locate there due to the inability to take deliveries of stock. I think there should also be bike exclusion zones.
CITIES are the biggest source of pollution other than industrial wastes and effluents. Heat pollution, wasted energy, smog, garbage they can't deal with. We going to ban them?
All I'm suggesting is going after commuter cars with an extra levy over and above the levy you already charge which generates *far* more revenue than is expended on car-related items (and hence could go towards pollution fighting mechanisms if we chose to put it there) is ridiculous if it was across the board. Forcing people to achieve higher levels of urbanity is *not the answer*. Forcing higher urban densities is not the answer.
But, by the tone of your writing, you pretty much figure you've got all the answers and the world revolves around you. I can try to point out that there is a wider reality, but you can just go ahead and gulp down the Blue Pill.
However, I thought I had it set to 'plain text'. I usually do. HTML isn't hard to do, just not required most of the time. The fact I can't edit a post is a historical annoyance not present on most modern forums.
So, it was a mistake, yes. And yes, it does make things a lot harder to read, I totally agree. Tags aren't that hard, just not required for most stuff.
Saying there is no such thing as a hole so obscure as to be meaningless is a bit disingenous. Some holes are literally meaningless (More correctly stated, the risk of their exploitation is very low, the severity of any exploit is insignificant, and the methods of exploitation are involved).
Proper security analysis means analyzing the degree of likelihood of an exploit, the difficulty of the exploit, the cost incurred in setting up the exploit, the technical savvy required to conduct the exploit, the availability of tools to conduct the exploit automatically, and then assessing the impact of the exploit, the vulnerability of data or the system itself as a consequence of the exploit, and then moving on to examing the cost of dealing with the possible hole (ideally several options). This cost has to both cover hardware & software costs as well as personel related costs associated with it and any business implications (service outages, etc). Also, of course, another part of the analysis is whether or not there is a business reason (and if so, if it is valid) for the loophole to exist.
In the end result, you have to weigh each exploit and say "Knowing the cost to fix it in terms of cash, time, service issues, and potentially reduced services, and knowing the likelihood of an exploit and the impact it would have, is it worth fixing?" All exploit potentials ARE NOT worth fixing. Not to a business, nor even necessarily to your government.
It depends a lot on what the exploit is. I worked with some top notch security people reviewing several Canadian wireless providers for a Canadian federal policing body. Were there potential exploits in the wireless systems? Sure there were.
The wireless guys built their networks with *network integrity* as their main constraint. Security they applied was related to keeping the network up and going, not protecting user data integrity. So there were holes they had to address before the policing agency would feel comfortable running data over them, even with encryption on the data.
There are more risks than just data loss in these situations - even bogus network access or denial of service can be a critical issue.
In the end, the policing agency and the providers sat down, went over the reports with the consultants, had the consultants elaborate some of the threats and help the provider's network engineers understand them, and then some negotiation was done about which exploitable points would be fixed, what the fixes would be, etc. Not all exploits were dealt with - some were deemed to be too hard, of too little impact, or of too great an expense to fix, even for this type of system. But the major ones of concern were, sometimes by things as banal as a reorg of how network service folks accessed their network. In the end, a reasonably secure result was obtained and things went ahead.
But this is how *real* security consultants work. They know their biz, they learn your biz, they see where your biz can be broken, and they help you understand how to fix things. They don't just provide you with a list of problems and flee. Of course, they send you a *real* bill too... !
Let's examine the flaws here:
1) What about car pooling? Generally a vehicle capable of carrying more people is more efficient. Yet it is often less efficient by itself (if you discount the savings from having more people aboard and less cars moving)?
2) You planning to tax commecial vehicles?
3) Do you think people who have mid to large sized families need this extra taxation?
4) You are *already* taxing guzzlers outrageously at the gas pump. When more than 50% of pump cost is taxation, I think you've got that covered, thank you very much. And you can bet that doesn't go to covering road maintenance, EMS, snow plowing, and such alone. Or we'd have streets paved with gold and an ambulance on every corner.
5) What about anyone who lives in a rural area? A lot of times, rural vehicles such as farm pickups etc. are just inherently less efficient than golf-car sized smart cars. And yet, these are the people that produce our food, etc.
You want a car exclusion zone. I want a bike exclusion zone.... since half the cyclists can't figure out how to obey the laws that govern their conduct on roads in Ontario. Your life might be easier without cars, mine would be easier without cyclists who ride through red lights, ride on sidewalks, ride across crosswalks, fail to signal, cut off cars, pass where they should not, etc.
Talk to me about the pollution costs of cars after you tackle the factory outputs here in Canada, into the air and water. Talk to me about pollution costs of cars after you turn off half the bloody streetlights in the urban centers. They equip cars with lights and bikes are mandated to have lights for a reason. Why is it whenever I fly over cities, I feel like I'm visiting Vegas? Talk to me about pollution from cars after you get rid of coal fired generation. Talk to me about pollution from cars after you address the heat build up that goes on in cities, which drives health care costs associated with smog and also drives huge air conditioning bills.
I think there are a lot of things we could be worried about before we start taxing all the commuter cars. Especially since we're already hitting them hard at the pump.
My point was that if the term is so restricted as to be useless in the particular discussion, we'll have to turf it out in favour of one which covers 'the abilities and allowances we make in terms of activities we allow one another in a society where we recognize that our complete mutual self-driven activity would often result in clashes with others'. Or something like that. The point being,
If Freedom is an absolute, which I'm not willing to grant without further evidence, what we are really talking about is something else that we're giving that name but which needs its own term, because we're not talking about an absolute, we're talking about real situations. So if you don't like the use of the word Freedom because you think it is an absolute, then that's just changing the label applied to the discussion, not affecting the underlying meat of it.
Don't twist words to fit new conceptions (and by new, I mean "within the last few hundred years" new) - open a dictionary,
Because, we all know, dictionaries never change any of their content as times change.... ?
A word or a phrase or a term for something has a commonly ascribed meaning, to be sure, and this is the only meaningful basis for communication. Yet at the same time, most language is imprecise enough to make this definition 'fuzzy'. Add to that the fact that the common ascription of meaning implies a currency of concept - likely to change over time.
Freedom is an absolute? I think not. When person A's freedom clashes with person B's freedom, how can it be an absolute? One of them has to lose out, or maybe both. If you define this simple reality as somehow invalidating the use of the word "Freedom", then we might as well throw it away is it is nigh on useless in any meaningful debate. The only useful definition applies some sort of societal context that isn't quite so absolute but includes the realities of conflicting freedoms and a method to cope with that.
I keep all my Assisnation/Laundering files encrypted
You know, maybe the best passwords are just normal plaintext spelled as slashdot users normally spell them (which is to say abnormally therefore reasonably immune to standard OED attacks... or maybe Webster's if you are in the US....).
I don't know which of us is redefining the meaning of addiction to a greater degree. You seem equally intent in having it only fill your particular perception of it. I'm not sure your perception is borne out by modern literature in the mental health field.
And FWIW, if "Oh Hell, I'll have another biscuit" includes the class of folks who are obese due to overeating despite knowing that a) it is likely to kill them, b) it is socially problematic and c) it is an active negative in their life, then maybe that should be included.
At the end of the day, I'm not sure there is much distinction functionally between someone with what you term a 'real addiction problem' and those whom you might consider 'voluntarily' performing some activity to the deteriment of their own good, even when knowing better. In the end result, both classes are less than entirely functional, are probably not in a good frame of mind about the situation, and are in need of help to get past their problems. The nature of the help may vary, but the end result in either case is a troubled and perhaps unproductive or disadvantaged individual. Really, from a societal point of view, both can be viewed as essentially equally problematic.
Now, it may turn out that the remedy for the one is easier than the other, but which is the easier? Many organic defficiencies can be treated by a drug of one nature or another. Many tougher mental complexes or conditions may not be so easily remedied.
I'm sure you'd just say "They should show some self-discipline" or something to that effect. But that's not really a useful view - they are troubled citizens and they need help, in either case.
May be we should get started on a discussion about the recent progress of American "Democracy".
What exactly does the state of American democracy have to do with France? I believe I asserted you can't champion France as the home of democracy. I don't believe I spoke even offhandedly pro-or-con about American democracy.
I'll ignore your rant about the US (which is what this really is). If you think French democracy doesn't have all sorts of procedural holes (just like every other one), then you are pathetically naive. Or willfully stupid.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Do you think a recommendation from the French academy has any more influence on what words the French use than the "food pyramid" of the US FDA has an influence on what Americans eat?
The French actually make concious attempts to regulate their language and keep out anything that may be creeping into common usage from outside. That process of foreign words creeping in is a grassroots activity and as democratic as it is possible to imagine. And yet they make a serious *funded* attempt to thwart this. And they pass the kind of language legislation that helps support such efforts.
If you love French democracy, maybe you should move there and get a close look at it with open eyes. Or maybe you are a French patriot, who looks at his country and cannot see the flaws. The Emperor's New Clothes are very nice, aren't they?
Go peddle your unsupportable assertions elsewhere, AC. You don't even have the energy or courage to own up to a login name, so why would you bother actually trying to expend the energy to become educated on these matters or to open your mind?
This is because there is no such thing as internet addiction.
Alcohol. niccotine, heroin, caffine and perhaps chocolate are (potentially) addictive. Internet use, gambling, sex and food are merely things some people enjoy so much that they can't bring themselevs to give them up.
Thank you, Doctor Caveman.
And now, back to the 21st Century.... addictions can form to any number of things. Yes, you are correct that there are physical addictions that produce chemical changes in the body and the brain. These are potent. In this, you are correct. However, when you step off the cliff of saying there are no addictions to gambling, sex, etc., I have to call you on that.
An addiction can, in one sense, be defined as a behaviour which the user is unable to successfully resist even if they know their may be or even certainly will be undesirable, damaging, or injurious consequences. This is true of drug abuse, of alcohol abuse, of cigarette smoking, but also of addictions to sex, gambling, food, the Internet, etc. If the sufferer is unable to control their pursuit of the activity or substance even with the full knowledge of likely or definite baneful consequences, that is an addiction.
Now, if you've never suffered from one of these or actually visited with the people who suffer some of them to see how their lives can be destroyed despite their best efforts to the contrary, you might naively say "these people are just weak minded, this isn't really an addiction, they could quit if they just used some willpower". Pray to God you never have such an addiction or have the misfortune to have anyone you know suffer one. People don't intentionally choose these paths and once they're on them, getting off can be very difficult. And every human's brain is put together a wee bit differently. So for you, maybe passing these things up is easy, but maybe not for everyone.
It takes a certain ignorant arrogance to speak to what is and is not an insurmountable challenge in other peoples' lives. You can't *really* ever walk a mile in another man's shoes. So you'll never really know what you would do in their place, because you can't ever *be* them. You can say what you, with your particular aptitudes and capabilities, might be capable of in the same circumstances, but that really doesn't speak to *their* situation.
I'm quite sure these things can be addictive, to the point of having people do things they know are bad for them because they can't resist the lure of the activity or product.
More importantly, whatever you call it, it hurts people. If calling it an addiction gets them the help they need to stop hurting themselves, then the world is a better place.
Yeah, but unfortunately a lot of E-bay sellers like the ability to track parcels that UPS gives. I actually had them (incompetently) attempt to delivery 3 times to my rural Canadian address (and you could see that in the tracking log). Where in the purple hell they were trying to deliver it is anyone's guess... (There turned out to be a two digit transposition in the # on the road, but you'd think failing ONCE would clue you in because there WAS no such place, or you'd look at the name, look in the phonebook, and realize there is precisely ONE of me on the road, OR you might phone Canada post and they'd tell you since they know it backwards and forwards by several different versions since we used to be a Rural Route then got E911 and roads/numbers....).
At any rate, they required my careful direction (including phoning UPS and getting them spun up to speed) to have any chance to deliver the damn thing. But lots of vendours still like them, as blisteringly inept as they are, because they provide that level of tracking of their ineptitude.
And I *still* want to know what the subsequent two delivery runs were about... ("It wasn't there. There was no such place. Maybe if we try again, they'll have built it overnight!")
Man, talk about not pulling from the deep end of the courier gene pool....
They developed the most heavily armored and gunned tanks during the early German Blitz, one French Char B1-Bis held up an entire German Division for an entire day.
They capitulated and had a fairly sizable number of collaborators too. Not sure what either of these sound-bytes has to do with the current situation....
One little short frenchie with a bad attitude almost conquered the entire world, twice.
http://www.napoleonguide.com/ajaccio.htm
Corsican. That ain't the same thing, really.
They were one of the first modern countries to pick on the buzzword "Democracy" long before a bunch of colonists got pissed at their King's latest tax law.
Sure. Starting something gets you some credit. What have they done that was democratic lately? Seems the trend is in the opposite direction. These are the same people who invented (or at the very least endorse) the idea of policing their language. That's about as anti-democratic as you can really get.
France hasn't done much useful for about 150 years now. Resting on your historical laurels isn't really all that respectable and the willingness to sell weapons to both sides in just about every conflict regardless of the consequences doesn't exactly inspire one to think of France as a bastion of worldly wisdom. Nor, unfortunately, does the attitude referenced in this article. I give you that the US has gotten a wee bit adle-pated about patents and IP law, and France is not alone in Europe in being brain-absent, but that doesn't make them any sort of champion to herald....
If you think that is all America contributed to the second world war, you have about as much education on military or geopolitical matters as your average garden gnome.
I'm not American. I don't seek to defend all of their actions through the last century or into this one. But the view you have is naive and ill-founded.
You might not have noticed the red wave that ate the Eastern half of Europe. It wasn't the British that held them up at Berlin. It wasn't the French. It wasn't the Belgians, nor Poles, nor Finns nor even Nazi Germany.
If America served no other role in WW2, and I think one can argue that D-day might never have happened without them quite effectively, they gave the Soviet Red Army something to think about. Perhaps a lot to think about, with Fat Man and Little Boy. If you think Nagasaki was *only* about what was going on in Japan, you're a bit on the naive side. That message was destined for places beyond Tokyo and the Imperial Palace. And it was heard.
Yes, that did leave us in a Cold War state, since no one seemed to game to go with Churchill's interest and head to Moscow. But in the long run, that war ended up being less painful than we feared, and is mostly over now (not entirely, but mostly).
To say all America did was tie up the Japs for a few days and send a bit of food to Britain is historically inaccurate and not factual. If you can't disguise anti-American polemic better than that, I suggest you go back and practice some more.... they aren't perfect, but the facts do prove your premises wrong in this instance...
We are pretty far down the line in Peacekeeping, in foreign aid, and we've let our military suffer serious rust-out so they've withrdrawn from many of our former UN observer missions.
We still think of ourselves as people who do the right things on the international stage, but our charitable donations per capita don't rank very high either.
In the last 10-15 years, we've become a people who cling to a certain set of values but don't pay for them in blood, sweat or dollars. As a consequence, about all we have is the 'belief' that we're a goo people doing all of these things. A simple look at our downsizing of involvement with the UN and our abysmal charitable contribution rates per capita pretty much tells the real story.
It's a nice theory. Maybe we should actually live up to it.
Denis of Much Menace said: - Make Gas with Methanol for Cars madatory (cost $0) - Or tax Gas with Methanol less than gas without (Cost 0$)
[kaladorn] The great thing about Methanol is when you add it to gas, it burns cleaner. This has allowed the Oil companies to burn *poorer* quality gas and still meet the minimum standards. And charge a few extra cents for it per liter. And laugh all the way to the bank. Score: Oil Companies: 1 Consumers: 0 Environment: -1 (because there is a feeling of progress)
-Make license plates for SUVs and Trucks cost more according to their age. (Cost: Profit center!)
[kaladorn] That's a fantastic idea. Don't link it to emission or the care they recieve. Just take perfectly well maintained vehicles off the road because they're old. Score: Car Companies: 1 Consumer: 0 Environment: 0.25 (it would have some benefit, but not much)
That's correct. But in order for the tax to be valid, it should apply with equal sense in all cases. One invalid case should disprove its validity.
Otherwise, it is like saying "Well, aspiring cures 7 out of 10 headaches, and makes the other 3 worse, but we'll still make it the approved headache cure".
Tax people by GVW. Or by surface pressure. Or put a tag in the road and a sensor on the car and at your annual or bi-annual emission test, read the sensor and get a reading of how many miles were transitted in California. Then bill them.
The GPS idea, on the other hand, as an argument for knowing how much people drive (meanwhile blowing any sense of privacy) is a crock. And an intrusive one and undoubtedly something that can be abused (someone with a private satellite selling the data? Hmm..... localized tracking of the responses from vehicles? Lots of options for abuse. Cracking of the DB of records?).
Also a crock is the argument that gas consumption == road damage. I can burn a lot of gas idling in traffic, and not be going anywhere or damaging any road.
I can pull a nice heavy SUV with a more gas economical four cylinder or a diesel, and it can do far more damage than my wee sportscar. And yet, the tax would fall more heavily on me. So it isn't at all a tax for road damage, or at least not a fair and equitable one if that's the root concern.
The flaw, of course, is that larger, heavier vehicles do more damage to the road than lighter cars. Of course, larger, heavier vehicles tend to use more gas, so in reality, the gas tax works just fine. It's the perception that's skewed such that people believe that they're overpaying.
Sorry, larger != more damage. It is all about weight distribution and surface pressure. I drive a sportscar. It probably weight about what a family sedan weighs. It eats more gas, ergo more gas tax. It has more surface area of rubber on the road and probably (slightly) less ground pressure and it doesn't spend as long on any one area of the road (*grin*) so it is fairly debatable whether the 'gas tax' actually represents road damage.
If you justify it as a luxury tax and the luxuriant ones should pay more to support the economic ones, then I can disagree, but at least the premise is internally consistent. The whole more gas == more weight things isn't consistent in that fashion.
Sorry, but if you are worried about strangers (ie the Feds) rooting through your email servers, then you'd best disconnect them from the net, find a nice hole with concrete, dump them in, let it harden, then blow them up with something that will vaporize them like a nuke.
Yes, that is taking it to the ludicrous extreme. But As another poster noted, your ISP could already have tagged onto your email as could many other servers along the way. Technologies exist to pickup what you are typing or reading from a distance - stuff that appears on your monitor or goes through your keyboard. Not to mention, would you really know if the CIA had snuck in and installed a little RF tap inside your keyboard? I think not likely.
So, yes, you may have a slightly more detailed illusion of personal data security than the vast bulk of people, but all that does is make your tinfoil hat more stylish.
Me too! What's wrong with HTML? Do we really need all this bandware hogging crap that reduces browser interoperability?
Well, yes, that's a problem. But from that link you gave, I particularly meant
the HTML <FLASH> atribute
. Flashing like that in your browser is just annoying.:) But yes, Macromedia's Flash is baneful too.
I'll condense some other thoughts by saying a lot of what you say about culture and gun control is accurate in my view.
I will say it is probably harder to murder someone with a knife, rock or other melee weapon (you have to enter their arms-reach). Some Samurai viewed the gun as dishonourable because it allowed you to avoid doing that. If someone has to enter my arms reach with a knife, there is a decent chance if he is untrained that I'll end up feeding it back to him. If he has a gun, unless I can get within about 8', he's probably going to perforate me, and even under 8', I'm taking a gamble.
And having a rapid-firing many-round weapon or weapons does make it more feasible to do Columbine, Montreal or the Scottish massacre whose location I forget (Dunblaine?). You *could* in theory pull that off with a sword or chainsaw, but it'd be a lot harder.
So, there is *some* qualitative difference between guns and alternatives. The underlying disposition to violence just has an easier conduit.
As to the police, they can't offer me complete protection. For that matter, I probably can't offer myself complete protection. I worked with the RCMP for 5 years (and other PDs). They respond to person-affecting crimes up here pretty fast. They respond to property affecting ones slowly. B&Es get attention if there is any chance there is a criminal on-scene. If not, it literally is an insurance matter. This is not a terribly wonderful thing, but the truth is there aren't a lot of successful investigations of property crime (whereas person-affecting crimes have a high rate of being resolved or leading to a charge).
As to your Second Amendment, my understanding is it was the right to bear arms within the context of an organized militia. Now, admitedly the definition of organized militia differed then to how we'd see it now, but I don't think it was an unfettered right, was it?
My definition of firearm safety includes some basic simple practices:
1. Don't point a gun, even a supposedly empty one, at anything you don't want to destroy
2. Touch the trigger only when you plan to shoot something
3. Don't leave firearms in a place where visitors, strangers, or children can get access to them
4. Don't drink and shoot (this includes hunting!)
5. Don't carry one up the spout when it doesn't make sense (when I was in the infantry, in some scenarios it made sense... mostly not though).
Culture does play a big role in it. One of the reasons I think gun control is accepted here is it gets phrased in the form "Do you need a handgun in your house?" Most people answer no. "Do you need a handgun on your person?". Most people answer no. A gun is a tool, but it is also a weapon.
And unlike a hoe, which can be used as a weapon, it can't be used too effectively to till a garden. So there is an essential nature to the firearm that distinguishes it from tools-which-can-become-weapons. The purpose of a firearm is to launch projectiles capable of tearing through flesh and bone. What you do with that capability is a personal choice, but certainly that is the baseline capability and finding truly constructive uses for it takes some work. Finding destructive ones is far easier.
Don't get me wrong, I think we do live in a bit of a 'father knows best' country. We have too much faith in the integrity of institutions and authories or too much apathy to do anything about the problems. We put up with a lot.
Let me explain another cultural factor that differentiates Canada and the USA:
In the USA, many people fear their government. They fear the government has some dark agenda. They fear nefarious authoritarian activities and repression of civil rights. They
Tis obvious you've been around a while Dunbar... your uid is pretty low. Mine used to be a lot lower than it is now, but I confess to not knowing exactly what (other than the semi-bogus scoring bump for posts) was unlocked by getting good karma.
If you feel up to it (or anyone else does), load up the clue-by-four and swing away. I'd love to know what wonderous features I've been underutilizing since my karma reached the stratosphere (or in the old days, the cap at 50).
Thanks in advance for any info. I am genuinely curious. (in both senses)
I have a good handgun and shotgun. All I need now is a good rifle. Many years ago, I was looking at a.300 Weatherby Magnum. The last time I looked, a Remington 300 Short Action Ultra Mag seemed like a good fit for what I wanted. Of course, this is built a few miles away from me and looks like a lot of fun.
Yep, but if they'd stop using FLASH in their HTML, I'd enjoy it more....
Last time I was looking, a Remington 700 with a Harris Bipod, a Leupold Ultra optic (if I could get one, or Ziess otherwise), the big heavy duty floating barrel and the polymer stock was what I thought was kinda good. But that is of course shooting match grade.308 rather than.300 WinMag.
That's dumber than dirt. What's next? Throw rocks at an assailant? Other than the gun issue, I really like Canada.
The truth is, you have to put it in context. If a cop gets killed up here, it is national news, not just local. Someone killed by violence with a gun is major news. Someone just killed is news. We just don't match up quite in the level of violent crime. Yes, maybe the big metro areas are closing the gap, but by en large, we're still a lot safer. And we rely more on police and less on individual citizens. It is a cultural thing. I've never been in a situation where I'd even have required a knife or my Aikido training, let alone a gun.
I do find our habit of making gun ownership annoying enough to make people give it up - the legitemate owners, not the crooks - a bit much. But really, if you have an effective level of policing and less of a culture of resorting to violence to prove who is the big man or whose gang should hold a particular bit of turf, etc, you can enjoy a decent lifestyle without much in the way of legal gun ownership. Still, I enjoy target shooting and if they'd trust me with a Top Secret clearance, it does seem a bit surprising they wouldn't trust me with a Concealed Carry Permit. (I didn't ask, but I know what the answer would be). But the reality is, it just isn't a requirement to be safe up here.
Note, I am ignoring the whole 'keep the gov't honest' aspect, but then one might wonder how well that has worked out down south, given the lobbying and corruption in any gov't of any stripe...
Many of the people who like the.45 ACP don't like Glocks. One of the common complaints is the trigger break. I like the feel of the Glock trigger, but I concede that this is a very subjective matter. No doubt anyone accustomed to a.45 ACP trigger pull that was tuned to their specifications by a skilled gunsmith won't like the Glock.
Haven't fired one, but would like to. Did see Moshe Ayoob in one of the gunmags take one of the small Glocks (shooting.45) and get something like 0.25 MOA at 25 yards. Expanded out, it would have been something like a few inches at 100 yards. That was pretty freakin' impressive. And I do kind of like the idea of the Glock safety, though I've never had a chance to try it out in a real environment. Mind you, the best safety is still training.
The other complaint I hear is the appearance. If you like polished nickel plating and hand carved cocobolo hand grips, the Glock won't satisfy your sense of aesthetics. The Glock is more of a tool, where form follows function. It was designed for durability, ease of maintenance, reliability and accuracy. Appearance was way down on the list. I like the functional appearance, and it's nearly indestructible so it'll take a lot of abuse and still look about the same.
I'm with you here. I'm not much a fan of nickel, chrome, or even wood necessarily. Give me a nice rubberized grip, an easy maintenance finish that is non-reflective, and a comfortable fit in my hand. The last of course mattering as I have normal sized hands but short fingers. I found the M1911 very easy to shoot comfortably. I think single-stackers are for me. Double-stackers of 9mm even can be a
I've shot 9mm from a Cz 75,.380 wadcutters from an S&W semi-auto,.22 LR,.22 short (Olympic Rapid Fire),.45 from an M1911, and have handled some long arms. Back when I was in the military, we had FN C1s and we've moved to C7s and C8s since.
I find handguns are okay for the portability issue, but if I was ever in a gunfight, I want a 7.62x51 or a modern 5.56. (Or ideally, a.300 WinMag from a very long range...)
Of the ones I have fired, I find the.45 was the most accurate and controllable. It may not have such a high muzzle velocity or downrange KE, but I've seen the holes it punched through books we were using as targets (and low-grade steel plate). The hollowpoints especially carved huge wound channels through the books. It isn't ballistic jelly, but it convinced me that if I hit a target anywhere useful, they'd have a huge hole.
And up here, all mags are limited to 5 rounds. So the ability of a new autoloader to hold 15 is irrelevant. Since I can only get 5 in, I want the biggest 5 I can comfortably and accurately shoot. I find many of the higher vee rounds just too hard to control. The.45 had a smoother break to it when the trigger pulled and I shot better with it than with the 9mm, which I found jumpy.
I wanted to buy the Glock 30 or 31 (the.45), until I realized the hassle I was going to get here trying to get one - the barrel length restrictions here also preclude a lot of choices.
And since I can see them outlawing handguns here completely one day soon, I don't see the point of commiting big $$ to a modern wonderpistol. I'll buy a cheap old.45 ACP (M1911, robust!) and make sure I *practice* with it and that's probably more dangerous than I really require. If I can't get the job done with 5, I'm in dire straights and better be able to combat load quick.
Besides, if I was worried about home invasion, with the constricted spaces in my house, I don't doubt that a pump.12 gauge (The Mossie is a lovely gun)(though up here most Shotguns are pinned at 3 rounds) or a katana are just about the best choice. For a lot of close in work, if you don't have proper weapon-retention training, your pistol is fairly dangeorus to you. That's another reason to like a gun that has an additional thumb safety. Not everyone knows about that, even if you lose the gun from your control.
I think.40 is fairly common in police work up here, as is 10mm. I have friends in the OPP and the RCMP. I think the OPP is using a Sig Sauer. I can't recall for certain, but I think last I looked the RCMP guys I knew were using an S&W. The qualification course for the RCMP for the revolver to semi-auto was a pretty serious one, I thought. Not just 'check in the old gun, check out the new one'.
Anyway, as I say, if I have to hunt long pig, gimme a C7:)
I realize this is a bit OT, but Saeed al-Sahaf spake thus:
They seem to have the kind of non-cube farm work environment that smart people want to work in
Sorry, I'll have to ask for data to support that. I had a friend visit MS while escalating a bug (right into their laps, so to speak). His report of their layout and offices seemed to speak to solitary geeks working in seclusion. He didn't like their environment (coming from a cube-farm background) and I don't think I would have either.
I've had both an office and a bunch of cubes... as long as I'm not on a main arterial, I'll take the cube farm anyday. It is a more social, less isolating place. You can still tune out with a set of headphones or a bit of mental focus. But you can also interact more easily with your fellow workers which makes the job feel a bit more human.
Of course, I may not be most people nor smart. That has always been open to debate...:)
Slashdot Mirror
A few points:
I've been on projects where the RTM became God and we ended up spending more time documenting how X -> Y -> Z throughout the document tree than we did coding it. There is some sort of happy medium.
OTOH, I'm working on a project now with:
No design docs.
No requirements in written form unless my company writes them for the client, and even then they are abbreviated severly.
The great habit of getting a bug report from QC, wanting to say "Show me the requirement" then realizing there isn't one, then having to discuss, argue, etc. out what the 'requirement' that isn't really should have been....
That's going waaaaaay too far the other way.
Also, unspoken in what you said, a design that meets requirements can still be a bad design. One that meets requirements does at least have a chcne of being a good design. One without requirements is effectively FUBAR from the beginning.
Lastly, I've been on teams where the dev *team* tested things. Now, you tended to not test your own work, but you were involved in testing the product, so it gave you a lot of experience with look and feel of the product, workflow, and just the kinds of issues users would hit. Sometimes, you had to be the one testing your stuff because only you could reasonably setup the failure conditions that needed to be tested (for instance, you're the network/dial-up expert, and you need to generate a lot of failure conditions here). Of course, we also always had a separate QC pass, but nothing went into Dev without a pass from developer smoke testing. It led to much smoother QC iterations and a much better and more stable product.
On the topic of design docs:
1. A document topology roadmap is nice. Ours used to show where the document inter-related with other documents in the project tree. That proved handy on more than one occasion.
2. PICTURES! Message flow diagrams, client-server network layouts, cloud diagrams showing software layers and major internal components/organizations, etc. A diagram plus some reasonable number of words is wroth ten times as many words with no diagram. Visio is your friend. So are modelling tools that produce good diagrams. A lot of times, a diagram alone will tell you a lot of what you need to know about a system's architecture or the interactions between components or computers.
3. Be as specific as you need to, but not more. It's tough to know, but consider your audience and don't go into excess detail (ie don't make your DD a regurgitation of the code). You need to have enough detail to make it quite clear what the implemenation must do, but not to *be* the implementation.
4. XRef to various other documents like the requirements documents and to any background docs people might need to clarify something they read in the DD (mostly background).
Oh no, here comes the science! Because everyone knows, post it on the Internet, it must be so!
As a cyclist myself, I'm not about to suggest that bicycles don't have a place on the road. BUT THERE ARE LAWS. I have *ZERO* issue with law abiding cyclists. I am one. I try to drive with respect for their smaller stature, tendency to flop over from potholes, etc. I even make larger allowances for Rollerbladers who are even more of a road hazard. But that does not give them carte blanche to ignore the laws because they feel like it! Drivers cannot and you rail at the bad drivers in your rant. I also share a disdain for drivers who violate the laws. Speeding through built up areas is a bad idea. Drunk driving is horrid, etc. etc. But we have laws that *are enforced*. I don't see too many people running stop signs in front of cop cars. I have seen cyclists ride across crosswalks and even red lights in front of a cop who didn't even bat an eye.
I'm suggesting the idea of banning all cars is ridiculous. I think motor vehicle exclusion zones are fine, though you can expect few businesses to locate there due to the inability to take deliveries of stock. I think there should also be bike exclusion zones.
CITIES are the biggest source of pollution other than industrial wastes and effluents. Heat pollution, wasted energy, smog, garbage they can't deal with. We going to ban them?
All I'm suggesting is going after commuter cars with an extra levy over and above the levy you already charge which generates *far* more revenue than is expended on car-related items (and hence could go towards pollution fighting mechanisms if we chose to put it there) is ridiculous if it was across the board. Forcing people to achieve higher levels of urbanity is *not the answer*. Forcing higher urban densities is not the answer.
But, by the tone of your writing, you pretty much figure you've got all the answers and the world revolves around you. I can try to point out that there is a wider reality, but you can just go ahead and gulp down the Blue Pill.
You are quite right.
However, I thought I had it set to 'plain text'. I usually do. HTML isn't hard to do, just not required most of the time. The fact I can't edit a post is a historical annoyance not present on most modern forums.
So, it was a mistake, yes. And yes, it does make things a lot harder to read, I totally agree. Tags aren't that hard, just not required for most stuff.
Saying there is no such thing as a hole so obscure as to be meaningless is a bit disingenous. Some holes are literally meaningless (More correctly stated, the risk of their exploitation is very low, the severity of any exploit is insignificant, and the methods of exploitation are involved).
Proper security analysis means analyzing the degree of likelihood of an exploit, the difficulty of the exploit, the cost incurred in setting up the exploit, the technical savvy required to conduct the exploit, the availability of tools to conduct the exploit automatically, and then assessing the impact of the exploit, the vulnerability of data or the system itself as a consequence of the exploit, and then moving on to examing the cost of dealing with the possible hole (ideally several options). This cost has to both cover hardware & software costs as well as personel related costs associated with it and any business implications (service outages, etc). Also, of course, another part of the analysis is whether or not there is a business reason (and if so, if it is valid) for the loophole to exist.
In the end result, you have to weigh each exploit and say "Knowing the cost to fix it in terms of cash, time, service issues, and potentially reduced services, and knowing the likelihood of an exploit and the impact it would have, is it worth fixing?" All exploit potentials ARE NOT worth fixing. Not to a business, nor even necessarily to your government.
It depends a lot on what the exploit is. I worked with some top notch security people reviewing several Canadian wireless providers for a Canadian federal policing body. Were there potential exploits in the wireless systems? Sure there were.
The wireless guys built their networks with *network integrity* as their main constraint. Security they applied was related to keeping the network up and going, not protecting user data integrity. So there were holes they had to address before the policing agency would feel comfortable running data over them, even with encryption on the data.
There are more risks than just data loss in these situations - even bogus network access or denial of service can be a critical issue.
In the end, the policing agency and the providers sat down, went over the reports with the consultants, had the consultants elaborate some of the threats and help the provider's network engineers understand them, and then some negotiation was done about which exploitable points would be fixed, what the fixes would be, etc. Not all exploits were dealt with - some were deemed to be too hard, of too little impact, or of too great an expense to fix, even for this type of system. But the major ones of concern were, sometimes by things as banal as a reorg of how network service folks accessed their network. In the end, a reasonably secure result was obtained and things went ahead.
But this is how *real* security consultants work. They know their biz, they learn your biz, they see where your biz can be broken, and they help you understand how to fix things. They don't just provide you with a list of problems and flee. Of course, they send you a *real* bill too... !
Let's examine the flaws here: 1) What about car pooling? Generally a vehicle capable of carrying more people is more efficient. Yet it is often less efficient by itself (if you discount the savings from having more people aboard and less cars moving)? 2) You planning to tax commecial vehicles? 3) Do you think people who have mid to large sized families need this extra taxation? 4) You are *already* taxing guzzlers outrageously at the gas pump. When more than 50% of pump cost is taxation, I think you've got that covered, thank you very much. And you can bet that doesn't go to covering road maintenance, EMS, snow plowing, and such alone. Or we'd have streets paved with gold and an ambulance on every corner. 5) What about anyone who lives in a rural area? A lot of times, rural vehicles such as farm pickups etc. are just inherently less efficient than golf-car sized smart cars. And yet, these are the people that produce our food, etc. You want a car exclusion zone. I want a bike exclusion zone.... since half the cyclists can't figure out how to obey the laws that govern their conduct on roads in Ontario. Your life might be easier without cars, mine would be easier without cyclists who ride through red lights, ride on sidewalks, ride across crosswalks, fail to signal, cut off cars, pass where they should not, etc. Talk to me about the pollution costs of cars after you tackle the factory outputs here in Canada, into the air and water. Talk to me about pollution costs of cars after you turn off half the bloody streetlights in the urban centers. They equip cars with lights and bikes are mandated to have lights for a reason. Why is it whenever I fly over cities, I feel like I'm visiting Vegas? Talk to me about pollution from cars after you get rid of coal fired generation. Talk to me about pollution from cars after you address the heat build up that goes on in cities, which drives health care costs associated with smog and also drives huge air conditioning bills. I think there are a lot of things we could be worried about before we start taxing all the commuter cars. Especially since we're already hitting them hard at the pump.
Right enough.
My point was that if the term is so restricted as to be useless in the particular discussion, we'll have to turf it out in favour of one which covers 'the abilities and allowances we make in terms of activities we allow one another in a society where we recognize that our complete mutual self-driven activity would often result in clashes with others'. Or something like that. The point being,
If Freedom is an absolute, which I'm not willing to grant without further evidence, what we are really talking about is something else that we're giving that name but which needs its own term, because we're not talking about an absolute, we're talking about real situations. So if you don't like the use of the word Freedom because you think it is an absolute, then that's just changing the label applied to the discussion, not affecting the underlying meat of it.
Don't twist words to fit new conceptions (and by new, I mean "within the last few hundred years" new) - open a dictionary,
Because, we all know, dictionaries never change any of their content as times change.... ?
A word or a phrase or a term for something has a commonly ascribed meaning, to be sure, and this is the only meaningful basis for communication. Yet at the same time, most language is imprecise enough to make this definition 'fuzzy'. Add to that the fact that the common ascription of meaning implies a currency of concept - likely to change over time.
Freedom is an absolute? I think not. When person A's freedom clashes with person B's freedom, how can it be an absolute? One of them has to lose out, or maybe both. If you define this simple reality as somehow invalidating the use of the word "Freedom", then we might as well throw it away is it is nigh on useless in any meaningful debate. The only useful definition applies some sort of societal context that isn't quite so absolute but includes the realities of conflicting freedoms and a method to cope with that.
I keep all my Assisnation/Laundering files encrypted
You know, maybe the best passwords are just normal plaintext spelled as slashdot users normally spell them (which is to say abnormally therefore reasonably immune to standard OED attacks... or maybe Webster's if you are in the US....).
I don't know which of us is redefining the meaning of addiction to a greater degree. You seem equally intent in having it only fill your particular perception of it. I'm not sure your perception is borne out by modern literature in the mental health field.
And FWIW, if "Oh Hell, I'll have another biscuit" includes the class of folks who are obese due to overeating despite knowing that a) it is likely to kill them, b) it is socially problematic and c) it is an active negative in their life, then maybe that should be included.
At the end of the day, I'm not sure there is much distinction functionally between someone with what you term a 'real addiction problem' and those whom you might consider 'voluntarily' performing some activity to the deteriment of their own good, even when knowing better. In the end result, both classes are less than entirely functional, are probably not in a good frame of mind about the situation, and are in need of help to get past their problems. The nature of the help may vary, but the end result in either case is a troubled and perhaps unproductive or disadvantaged individual. Really, from a societal point of view, both can be viewed as essentially equally problematic.
Now, it may turn out that the remedy for the one is easier than the other, but which is the easier? Many organic defficiencies can be treated by a drug of one nature or another. Many tougher mental complexes or conditions may not be so easily remedied.
I'm sure you'd just say "They should show some self-discipline" or something to that effect. But that's not really a useful view - they are troubled citizens and they need help, in either case.
I'm thinking that beat the 'fire while cloaked' version by quite a piece....
May be we should get started on a discussion about the recent progress of American "Democracy".
What exactly does the state of American democracy have to do with France? I believe I asserted you can't champion France as the home of democracy. I don't believe I spoke even offhandedly pro-or-con about American democracy. I'll ignore your rant about the US (which is what this really is). If you think French democracy doesn't have all sorts of procedural holes (just like every other one), then you are pathetically naive. Or willfully stupid.You have no idea what you are talking about. Do you think a recommendation from the French academy has any more influence on what words the French use than the "food pyramid" of the US FDA has an influence on what Americans eat?
The French actually make concious attempts to regulate their language and keep out anything that may be creeping into common usage from outside. That process of foreign words creeping in is a grassroots activity and as democratic as it is possible to imagine. And yet they make a serious *funded* attempt to thwart this. And they pass the kind of language legislation that helps support such efforts. If you love French democracy, maybe you should move there and get a close look at it with open eyes. Or maybe you are a French patriot, who looks at his country and cannot see the flaws. The Emperor's New Clothes are very nice, aren't they? Go peddle your unsupportable assertions elsewhere, AC. You don't even have the energy or courage to own up to a login name, so why would you bother actually trying to expend the energy to become educated on these matters or to open your mind?This is because there is no such thing as internet addiction.
Alcohol. niccotine, heroin, caffine and perhaps chocolate are (potentially) addictive. Internet use, gambling, sex and food are merely things some people enjoy so much that they can't bring themselevs to give them up.
Thank you, Doctor Caveman.
And now, back to the 21st Century.... addictions can form to any number of things. Yes, you are correct that there are physical addictions that produce chemical changes in the body and the brain. These are potent. In this, you are correct. However, when you step off the cliff of saying there are no addictions to gambling, sex, etc., I have to call you on that.
An addiction can, in one sense, be defined as a behaviour which the user is unable to successfully resist even if they know their may be or even certainly will be undesirable, damaging, or injurious consequences. This is true of drug abuse, of alcohol abuse, of cigarette smoking, but also of addictions to sex, gambling, food, the Internet, etc. If the sufferer is unable to control their pursuit of the activity or substance even with the full knowledge of likely or definite baneful consequences, that is an addiction.
Now, if you've never suffered from one of these or actually visited with the people who suffer some of them to see how their lives can be destroyed despite their best efforts to the contrary, you might naively say "these people are just weak minded, this isn't really an addiction, they could quit if they just used some willpower". Pray to God you never have such an addiction or have the misfortune to have anyone you know suffer one. People don't intentionally choose these paths and once they're on them, getting off can be very difficult. And every human's brain is put together a wee bit differently. So for you, maybe passing these things up is easy, but maybe not for everyone.
It takes a certain ignorant arrogance to speak to what is and is not an insurmountable challenge in other peoples' lives. You can't *really* ever walk a mile in another man's shoes. So you'll never really know what you would do in their place, because you can't ever *be* them. You can say what you, with your particular aptitudes and capabilities, might be capable of in the same circumstances, but that really doesn't speak to *their* situation.
I'm quite sure these things can be addictive, to the point of having people do things they know are bad for them because they can't resist the lure of the activity or product.
More importantly, whatever you call it, it hurts people. If calling it an addiction gets them the help they need to stop hurting themselves, then the world is a better place.
Yeah, but unfortunately a lot of E-bay sellers like the ability to track parcels that UPS gives. I actually had them (incompetently) attempt to delivery 3 times to my rural Canadian address (and you could see that in the tracking log). Where in the purple hell they were trying to deliver it is anyone's guess... (There turned out to be a two digit transposition in the # on the road, but you'd think failing ONCE would clue you in because there WAS no such place, or you'd look at the name, look in the phonebook, and realize there is precisely ONE of me on the road, OR you might phone Canada post and they'd tell you since they know it backwards and forwards by several different versions since we used to be a Rural Route then got E911 and roads/numbers....).
At any rate, they required my careful direction (including phoning UPS and getting them spun up to speed) to have any chance to deliver the damn thing. But lots of vendours still like them, as blisteringly inept as they are, because they provide that level of tracking of their ineptitude.
And I *still* want to know what the subsequent two delivery runs were about... ("It wasn't there. There was no such place. Maybe if we try again, they'll have built it overnight!")
Man, talk about not pulling from the deep end of the courier gene pool....
They developed the most heavily armored and gunned tanks during the early German Blitz, one French Char B1-Bis held up an entire German Division for an entire day.
They capitulated and had a fairly sizable number of collaborators too. Not sure what either of these sound-bytes has to do with the current situation....
One little short frenchie with a bad attitude almost conquered the entire world, twice.
http://www.napoleonguide.com/ajaccio.htm
Corsican. That ain't the same thing, really.
They were one of the first modern countries to pick on the buzzword "Democracy" long before a bunch of colonists got pissed at their King's latest tax law.
Sure. Starting something gets you some credit. What have they done that was democratic lately? Seems the trend is in the opposite direction. These are the same people who invented (or at the very least endorse) the idea of policing their language. That's about as anti-democratic as you can really get.
France hasn't done much useful for about 150 years now. Resting on your historical laurels isn't really all that respectable and the willingness to sell weapons to both sides in just about every conflict regardless of the consequences doesn't exactly inspire one to think of France as a bastion of worldly wisdom. Nor, unfortunately, does the attitude referenced in this article. I give you that the US has gotten a wee bit adle-pated about patents and IP law, and France is not alone in Europe in being brain-absent, but that doesn't make them any sort of champion to herald....
If you think that is all America contributed to the second world war, you have about as much education on military or geopolitical matters as your average garden gnome.
I'm not American. I don't seek to defend all of their actions through the last century or into this one. But the view you have is naive and ill-founded.
You might not have noticed the red wave that ate the Eastern half of Europe. It wasn't the British that held them up at Berlin. It wasn't the French. It wasn't the Belgians, nor Poles, nor Finns nor even Nazi Germany.
If America served no other role in WW2, and I think one can argue that D-day might never have happened without them quite effectively, they gave the Soviet Red Army something to think about. Perhaps a lot to think about, with Fat Man and Little Boy. If you think Nagasaki was *only* about what was going on in Japan, you're a bit on the naive side. That message was destined for places beyond Tokyo and the Imperial Palace. And it was heard.
Yes, that did leave us in a Cold War state, since no one seemed to game to go with Churchill's interest and head to Moscow. But in the long run, that war ended up being less painful than we feared, and is mostly over now (not entirely, but mostly).
To say all America did was tie up the Japs for a few days and send a bit of food to Britain is historically inaccurate and not factual. If you can't disguise anti-American polemic better than that, I suggest you go back and practice some more.... they aren't perfect, but the facts do prove your premises wrong in this instance...
We are pretty far down the line in Peacekeeping, in foreign aid, and we've let our military suffer serious rust-out so they've withrdrawn from many of our former UN observer missions.
We still think of ourselves as people who do the right things on the international stage, but our charitable donations per capita don't rank very high either.
In the last 10-15 years, we've become a people who cling to a certain set of values but don't pay for them in blood, sweat or dollars. As a consequence, about all we have is the 'belief' that we're a goo people doing all of these things. A simple look at our downsizing of involvement with the UN and our abysmal charitable contribution rates per capita pretty much tells the real story.
It's a nice theory. Maybe we should actually live up to it.
Denis of Much Menace said:
- Make Gas with Methanol for Cars madatory (cost $0)
- Or tax Gas with Methanol less than gas without (Cost 0$)
[kaladorn] The great thing about Methanol is when you add it to gas, it burns cleaner. This has allowed the Oil companies to burn *poorer* quality gas and still meet the minimum standards. And charge a few extra cents for it per liter. And laugh all the way to the bank. Score: Oil Companies: 1 Consumers: 0 Environment: -1 (because there is a feeling of progress)
-Make license plates for SUVs and Trucks cost more according to their age. (Cost: Profit center!)
[kaladorn] That's a fantastic idea. Don't link it to emission or the care they recieve. Just take perfectly well maintained vehicles off the road because they're old. Score: Car Companies: 1 Consumer: 0 Environment: 0.25 (it would have some benefit, but not much)
That's correct. But in order for the tax to be valid, it should apply with equal sense in all cases. One invalid case should disprove its validity.
Otherwise, it is like saying "Well, aspiring cures 7 out of 10 headaches, and makes the other 3 worse, but we'll still make it the approved headache cure".
Tax people by GVW. Or by surface pressure. Or put a tag in the road and a sensor on the car and at your annual or bi-annual emission test, read the sensor and get a reading of how many miles were transitted in California. Then bill them.
The GPS idea, on the other hand, as an argument for knowing how much people drive (meanwhile blowing any sense of privacy) is a crock. And an intrusive one and undoubtedly something that can be abused (someone with a private satellite selling the data? Hmm..... localized tracking of the responses from vehicles? Lots of options for abuse. Cracking of the DB of records?).
Also a crock is the argument that gas consumption == road damage. I can burn a lot of gas idling in traffic, and not be going anywhere or damaging any road.
I can pull a nice heavy SUV with a more gas economical four cylinder or a diesel, and it can do far more damage than my wee sportscar. And yet, the tax would fall more heavily on me. So it isn't at all a tax for road damage, or at least not a fair and equitable one if that's the root concern.
The flaw, of course, is that larger, heavier vehicles do more damage to the road than lighter cars. Of course, larger, heavier vehicles tend to use more gas, so in reality, the gas tax works just fine. It's the perception that's skewed such that people believe that they're overpaying.
Sorry, larger != more damage. It is all about weight distribution and surface pressure. I drive a sportscar. It probably weight about what a family sedan weighs. It eats more gas, ergo more gas tax. It has more surface area of rubber on the road and probably (slightly) less ground pressure and it doesn't spend as long on any one area of the road (*grin*) so it is fairly debatable whether the 'gas tax' actually represents road damage.
If you justify it as a luxury tax and the luxuriant ones should pay more to support the economic ones, then I can disagree, but at least the premise is internally consistent. The whole more gas == more weight things isn't consistent in that fashion.
Sorry, but if you are worried about strangers (ie the Feds) rooting through your email servers, then you'd best disconnect them from the net, find a nice hole with concrete, dump them in, let it harden, then blow them up with something that will vaporize them like a nuke. Yes, that is taking it to the ludicrous extreme. But As another poster noted, your ISP could already have tagged onto your email as could many other servers along the way. Technologies exist to pickup what you are typing or reading from a distance - stuff that appears on your monitor or goes through your keyboard. Not to mention, would you really know if the CIA had snuck in and installed a little RF tap inside your keyboard? I think not likely. So, yes, you may have a slightly more detailed illusion of personal data security than the vast bulk of people, but all that does is make your tinfoil hat more stylish.
. Flashing like that in your browser is just annoying. :) But yes, Macromedia's Flash is baneful too.
I'll condense some other thoughts by saying a lot of what you say about culture and gun control is accurate in my view.
I will say it is probably harder to murder someone with a knife, rock or other melee weapon (you have to enter their arms-reach). Some Samurai viewed the gun as dishonourable because it allowed you to avoid doing that. If someone has to enter my arms reach with a knife, there is a decent chance if he is untrained that I'll end up feeding it back to him. If he has a gun, unless I can get within about 8', he's probably going to perforate me, and even under 8', I'm taking a gamble.
And having a rapid-firing many-round weapon or weapons does make it more feasible to do Columbine, Montreal or the Scottish massacre whose location I forget (Dunblaine?). You *could* in theory pull that off with a sword or chainsaw, but it'd be a lot harder.
So, there is *some* qualitative difference between guns and alternatives. The underlying disposition to violence just has an easier conduit.
As to the police, they can't offer me complete protection. For that matter, I probably can't offer myself complete protection. I worked with the RCMP for 5 years (and other PDs). They respond to person-affecting crimes up here pretty fast. They respond to property affecting ones slowly. B&Es get attention if there is any chance there is a criminal on-scene. If not, it literally is an insurance matter. This is not a terribly wonderful thing, but the truth is there aren't a lot of successful investigations of property crime (whereas person-affecting crimes have a high rate of being resolved or leading to a charge).
As to your Second Amendment, my understanding is it was the right to bear arms within the context of an organized militia. Now, admitedly the definition of organized militia differed then to how we'd see it now, but I don't think it was an unfettered right, was it?
My definition of firearm safety includes some basic simple practices:
1. Don't point a gun, even a supposedly empty one, at anything you don't want to destroy
2. Touch the trigger only when you plan to shoot something
3. Don't leave firearms in a place where visitors, strangers, or children can get access to them
4. Don't drink and shoot (this includes hunting!)
5. Don't carry one up the spout when it doesn't make sense (when I was in the infantry, in some scenarios it made sense... mostly not though).
Culture does play a big role in it. One of the reasons I think gun control is accepted here is it gets phrased in the form "Do you need a handgun in your house?" Most people answer no. "Do you need a handgun on your person?". Most people answer no. A gun is a tool, but it is also a weapon.
And unlike a hoe, which can be used as a weapon, it can't be used too effectively to till a garden. So there is an essential nature to the firearm that distinguishes it from tools-which-can-become-weapons. The purpose of a firearm is to launch projectiles capable of tearing through flesh and bone. What you do with that capability is a personal choice, but certainly that is the baseline capability and finding truly constructive uses for it takes some work. Finding destructive ones is far easier.
Don't get me wrong, I think we do live in a bit of a 'father knows best' country. We have too much faith in the integrity of institutions and authories or too much apathy to do anything about the problems. We put up with a lot.
Let me explain another cultural factor that differentiates Canada and the USA:
In the USA, many people fear their government. They fear the government has some dark agenda. They fear nefarious authoritarian activities and repression of civil rights. They
Tis obvious you've been around a while Dunbar... your uid is pretty low. Mine used to be a lot lower than it is now, but I confess to not knowing exactly what (other than the semi-bogus scoring bump for posts) was unlocked by getting good karma.
If you feel up to it (or anyone else does), load up the clue-by-four and swing away. I'd love to know what wonderous features I've been underutilizing since my karma reached the stratosphere (or in the old days, the cap at 50).
Thanks in advance for any info. I am genuinely curious. (in both senses)
I have a good handgun and shotgun. All I need now is a good rifle. Many years ago, I was looking at a .300 Weatherby Magnum. The last time I looked, a Remington 300 Short Action Ultra Mag seemed like a good fit for what I wanted. Of course, this is built a few miles away from me and looks like a lot of fun.
Yep, but if they'd stop using FLASH in their HTML, I'd enjoy it more....
Last time I was looking, a Remington 700 with a Harris Bipod, a Leupold Ultra optic (if I could get one, or Ziess otherwise), the big heavy duty floating barrel and the polymer stock was what I thought was kinda good. But that is of course shooting match grade .308 rather than .300 WinMag.
That's dumber than dirt. What's next? Throw rocks at an assailant? Other than the gun issue, I really like Canada.
The truth is, you have to put it in context. If a cop gets killed up here, it is national news, not just local. Someone killed by violence with a gun is major news. Someone just killed is news. We just don't match up quite in the level of violent crime. Yes, maybe the big metro areas are closing the gap, but by en large, we're still a lot safer. And we rely more on police and less on individual citizens. It is a cultural thing. I've never been in a situation where I'd even have required a knife or my Aikido training, let alone a gun.
I do find our habit of making gun ownership annoying enough to make people give it up - the legitemate owners, not the crooks - a bit much. But really, if you have an effective level of policing and less of a culture of resorting to violence to prove who is the big man or whose gang should hold a particular bit of turf, etc, you can enjoy a decent lifestyle without much in the way of legal gun ownership. Still, I enjoy target shooting and if they'd trust me with a Top Secret clearance, it does seem a bit surprising they wouldn't trust me with a Concealed Carry Permit. (I didn't ask, but I know what the answer would be). But the reality is, it just isn't a requirement to be safe up here.
Note, I am ignoring the whole 'keep the gov't honest' aspect, but then one might wonder how well that has worked out down south, given the lobbying and corruption in any gov't of any stripe...
Many of the people who like the .45 ACP don't like Glocks. One of the common complaints is the trigger break. I like the feel of the Glock trigger, but I concede that this is a very subjective matter. No doubt anyone accustomed to a .45 ACP trigger pull that was tuned to their specifications by a skilled gunsmith won't like the Glock.
Haven't fired one, but would like to. Did see Moshe Ayoob in one of the gunmags take one of the small Glocks (shooting .45) and get something like 0.25 MOA at 25 yards. Expanded out, it would have been something like a few inches at 100 yards. That was pretty freakin' impressive. And I do kind of like the idea of the Glock safety, though I've never had a chance to try it out in a real environment. Mind you, the best safety is still training.
The other complaint I hear is the appearance. If you like polished nickel plating and hand carved cocobolo hand grips, the Glock won't satisfy your sense of aesthetics. The Glock is more of a tool, where form follows function. It was designed for durability, ease of maintenance, reliability and accuracy. Appearance was way down on the list. I like the functional appearance, and it's nearly indestructible so it'll take a lot of abuse and still look about the same.
I'm with you here. I'm not much a fan of nickel, chrome, or even wood necessarily. Give me a nice rubberized grip, an easy maintenance finish that is non-reflective, and a comfortable fit in my hand. The last of course mattering as I have normal sized hands but short fingers. I found the M1911 very easy to shoot comfortably. I think single-stackers are for me. Double-stackers of 9mm even can be a
I've shot 9mm from a Cz 75, .380 wadcutters from an S&W semi-auto, .22 LR, .22 short (Olympic Rapid Fire), .45 from an M1911, and have handled some long arms. Back when I was in the military, we had FN C1s and we've moved to C7s and C8s since.
.300 WinMag from a very long range...)
.45 was the most accurate and controllable. It may not have such a high muzzle velocity or downrange KE, but I've seen the holes it punched through books we were using as targets (and low-grade steel plate). The hollowpoints especially carved huge wound channels through the books. It isn't ballistic jelly, but it convinced me that if I hit a target anywhere useful, they'd have a huge hole.
.45 had a smoother break to it when the trigger pulled and I shot better with it than with the 9mm, which I found jumpy.
.45), until I realized the hassle I was going to get here trying to get one - the barrel length restrictions here also preclude a lot of choices.
.45 ACP (M1911, robust!) and make sure I *practice* with it and that's probably more dangerous than I really require. If I can't get the job done with 5, I'm in dire straights and better be able to combat load quick.
.12 gauge (The Mossie is a lovely gun)(though up here most Shotguns are pinned at 3 rounds) or a katana are just about the best choice. For a lot of close in work, if you don't have proper weapon-retention training, your pistol is fairly dangeorus to you. That's another reason to like a gun that has an additional thumb safety. Not everyone knows about that, even if you lose the gun from your control.
.40 is fairly common in police work up here, as is 10mm. I have friends in the OPP and the RCMP. I think the OPP is using a Sig Sauer. I can't recall for certain, but I think last I looked the RCMP guys I knew were using an S&W. The qualification course for the RCMP for the revolver to semi-auto was a pretty serious one, I thought. Not just 'check in the old gun, check out the new one'.
:)
I find handguns are okay for the portability issue, but if I was ever in a gunfight, I want a 7.62x51 or a modern 5.56. (Or ideally, a
Of the ones I have fired, I find the
And up here, all mags are limited to 5 rounds. So the ability of a new autoloader to hold 15 is irrelevant. Since I can only get 5 in, I want the biggest 5 I can comfortably and accurately shoot. I find many of the higher vee rounds just too hard to control. The
I wanted to buy the Glock 30 or 31 (the
And since I can see them outlawing handguns here completely one day soon, I don't see the point of commiting big $$ to a modern wonderpistol. I'll buy a cheap old
Besides, if I was worried about home invasion, with the constricted spaces in my house, I don't doubt that a pump
I think
Anyway, as I say, if I have to hunt long pig, gimme a C7
I realize this is a bit OT, but Saeed al-Sahaf spake thus:
They seem to have the kind of non-cube farm work environment that smart people want to work in
Sorry, I'll have to ask for data to support that. I had a friend visit MS while escalating a bug (right into their laps, so to speak). His report of their layout and offices seemed to speak to solitary geeks working in seclusion. He didn't like their environment (coming from a cube-farm background) and I don't think I would have either.
I've had both an office and a bunch of cubes... as long as I'm not on a main arterial, I'll take the cube farm anyday. It is a more social, less isolating place. You can still tune out with a set of headphones or a bit of mental focus. But you can also interact more easily with your fellow workers which makes the job feel a bit more human.
Of course, I may not be most people nor smart. That has always been open to debate... :)