When I was in the Boy Scouts (also early 70's), we learned that (Robert?) Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scouts with an eye toward training boys early in militarily-applicable skills, and he called them Boy Scouts after a famous Army unit called the Selous Scouts (in Rhodesia, I believe). I stayed in the Scouts when we lived in Canada for a few years, and we did train with arms there. My Asst. Scoutmaster was an NCO in the Canadian Forces; he took us to the rifle range. He and my Dad were our shooting instructors. Kids with guns? Sure! Let them do grownup things and require that they act responsibly whenever they're around weapons. It takes a lot of loving effort, patience and clear communication, but that's what parents and Scoutmasters are supposed to do, right?
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The way they planned it, government officials don't get to - are expressly prohibited by the Constitution from - fishing in your stuff just for fun, out of curiosity or to see if you might have done something wrong, much less to try to guess whether you might do something wrong in the future. They're supposed to work for us.
Fundamental Human Rights aren't granted by governments.
It doesn't work to say, You need to get an amendment passed that does away with that right. I know - wait; I believe - that you're satirizing the issue, but clarity is good: there are certain conditions that are necessary in order to live as a human being (to be able to defend oneself against predators, for example; to speak freely; to assemble; all that stuff) These requirements are just there, like gravity. No amendment, law, ordinance, decree or statute can change what is necessary for one to live as a human being.
The Constitution prohibits our government from violating a number of fundamental human rights, and it provides for the granting of other rights: patents, for instance (no flame war please, we're dancing on the fringes of the Bruce Sterling discussion already).
In a democratically-operated system, one cost is that people will vote for things that cannot work. Let's not help them to do so.
Yup, in Miller, the Supreme Court said that the government could lawfully restrict the sale or possession of sawed-off shotguns specifically because they are not really suitable military weapons. Under Federal law, if you're a male U.S. citizen between 18 and 45 years old ("except for certain public officials," it says), then You're in the Militia. Until about 100 years ago, heads of households were also required by law to provide their own suitable infantry weapons (current-model rifles of the era). Not muskets, and not tanks, either, but rifles.
The modern equivalent would be for you and for me to be required by law to own an M-14 or M-16 capable of fully-automatic fire, although other weapons of equivalent capability, and even decent bolt-action rifles, would probably be OK.
"A Well-regulated militia?" Yes, indeed: you aren't allowed to show up with "non-regulation," outdated weapons or "non-regulation" rifles that fire odd-caliber amminition. That would cause a supply problem and maybe get you killed if you ran out of ammunition. A Well-Regulated militia means "The right of the people to keep and bear...arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country..." --James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434 (June 8, 1789).
Want another quote? "Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest." - Mahatma Gandhi
Please {smile}. New info for me (on the Ross). Your father described the Lee-Enfield in the same way that my Dad spoke of the "A3-03" Springfield (the U.S. Rifle, Model 1903-A3, the WWII version of the WWI Springfield 1903). I'd like to keep reading your comments. Thanks!
growing food on your land is somehow quintessentially American... OK, that's less of a geek thing
- I disagree; we're a nation of tinkerers, on the land as well as in the machine shop or the electronics lab. I think you've drawn a terriffic parallel. Geo. Washington Carver, Luther Burbank, generations of others - it wasn't just the black soil of the Midwest that caused this place to become the breadbasket of the world; it was also our ancestors' tinkering with the crops that were available.
You write about the one "conformist" crop that you must have where I live: tomatoes.
Damn! Drat! I'm not trying to patronize, but I expect that the first time you slice up a ripe tomato from your own garden and bite into it, you won't be too upset about conforming to that local custom. If you like not getting ripped off, as you say (and if you eat tomatoes at all), you might reflect on the price and quality (sometimes a negative number) of grocery store tomatoes and pat yourself on the back for having tended and watered those damned tomato plants all summer. It's like they're not even the same species. Remember: lots of water, and Enjoy!
How about dropping the Linux, Apache et al. servers (that one Personally Owns or is responsible for) from the Net on the day that the Congressional RIAA Caucus holds its first meeting? They've imposed draconian laws about unauthorized computer access and are trying to fix as law the ability and legal right for copyright owners to crack our computers and break things in the course of their fishing expeditions. Now they're forming a conspiracy of elected officials to cripple the cutting edge in an effort protect their outdated cronies. It's time to show them whom they're dealing with. They've forgotten whose minds created the realm they presume to rule, and they've deluded themselves into forgetting whose hands keep it all running. Bad employee! No more time in Congress for You!
The majority? No; that's removing the physical objects that I've had printed to give to a whole bunch of people; it's effectively stealing the advertising dollars I've spent, because such an action makes a whole bunch of the fliers unavailable to my customers. It's the functional equivalent of simply destroying one of my displays. If they come in and take one, however, and then they make whatever use that they may of all the information it contains, then that's an expected part of advertising. It's always happened. There's no legal way to make something available to the public while denying it to my competitors. They're part of the public. All I can say is, "one to a customer," and I'd better treat the competitor as if he were a customer as long as he's in my store. Anything else has too great a PR downside. If I recognize him, though, it's fair game to point him out and crow to all within earshot, "Hey, look! Even my competitors shop here!" I'd love to run a commercial showing him in my store, too.
Guess what? You're absolutely right when you write that not everybody is able to come up with certain types of innovation. Often, only those few out of millions who spend years of their lives developing the skills to do so, at the cost of other profitable ways to spend their time, are the ones who can. Should we reward them, or should we reward the folks who drank and screwed their way through college, or those who spend their time making larger monthly incomes in marketing, or their bankers, or ???
If you've got the ideas but not the technical savvy (no insult to you; I speak of myself here), then make your fortune as a book author spinning your ideas for other people to read, or in another of the million ways you can use your talents to thrive. The area where geosynchronous satellites orbit is called "the Clarke Belt," after author Arthur C. Clarke, who (correct me if I'm wrong) never with his own hands made a satellite fly. Instead, he inspired others to do so. That's my plan, as it happens: I love this stuff, but I'm a technically-inclined dabbler rather than a focused hard-technology genius. I'm grateful to the people who actually find ways to make all of this cool stuff work.
I take issue with one statement of yours, though, and it's far too common a fallacy. You write that
Technical people are not the only ones who should be able to benefit from patents, Creatives should as well...
These are NotNotNot separate groups! There are technical and non-technical people in the world, and a person can separately be described as either creative or uncreative. They are separate issues, and to muddle the two helps you not. Go do what calls you. You'll amaze yourself. Maybe you'll be the one that runs the company that makes what you describe, or maybe you're the next Bucky Fuller. Find out.
while the "freeness" of data itself can be debated, accessing data is *not* free. To provide the pricing data over the web - intended as a service to their customers, no less - costs the company money
these are not private data. They've put their prices on the web in order to convince people to become their customers, and that's called Advertising. Advertising costs money; it always has. There's no "two-drink minimum" on the Net. Whether the company knows everything about how the Net operates is irrelevant.
Advertising costs what it costs, and the Net behaves the way it behaves. I'll laugh if I ever get sued by a grocery store who sent me an advertising flier in the mail, because it cost them money and I didn't buy anything. The Net is a public forum. That's why it's attractive to commercial entities.
This guy (?) is (non-redundantly) describing an important influence on the phenomena being discussed here. Also, the smartest guy I ever worked with couldn't spell either {g}.
They call it what they call it for reasons of their own. Read it or not, as you please, but the name was around long before we were born. Would everything have been different in 2001 if only we'd put Goodyear tires on our cars? Evaluate the writing on its merits, with your own brain; if you object to every historical artifact that's etymologically indefensible, you'll be very, very busy.
And that "culture" includes ways of thinking, problem solving and interacting with others that are congruent with the academic openness and idea-sharing that were exemplified by those intellectual ancestors such as the Tech Model Railroad Club, SAIL, the ARPANET wizards of yore, and Ham radio operators everywhere. These have always been the antitheses of such cultures as the old IBM, real railroads, and heavy industries such as steel and coal mining.
Why? If you give away your coal, you don't have it any more. If you share a new idea, and we all follow your habit, then we all have so much more that the increase becomes qualitative rather than just quantitative, and we get the sort of emergent phenomena that have turned the market's paradigms upside-down.
"Unix" has come to mean more than the trademarked code of its current ownership corporation, and more than the trademarked code of its parent corporation. That change in meaning has occurred because of the way the the term has been used by the call-them-"generations" of programmers whose efforts and dedication to specific, commercially-unorthodox principles have been the direct cause of its dominance.
It's become a philosophy. Of course, the name of the philosophy is an old AT&T / Bell Labs, then Berkeley product name, but the right to control that trademark was lost when the companies that had the rights to the name in days long past made use of the genius of those for whom it became a philosophy. They got paid for their investment! They profited by letting it happen, and that's good. It's too late now to turn back the clock, and if they (AT&T, et al.) had kept "Unix" under lock and key as closely as a coal company must keep control of its coal, they would never have seen their brainchild become the core of much of the world's commerce and communication.
Guns are not the end all be all solution to crime.
I Agree!!!
If guns are a good solution to crime, then countries where guns can be owned, carried and used more easily (like the USA) should be relatively crime-free, (*
etc.*)
I think that if all else were equal, then that would follow. However, I really believe that differences in history in different countries, differences in the variability of the philosophies held by regular people in different cultures, and the particular lifestyles of the folks you're assessing overwhelm the ability to draw straightforward arms-versus-personal-safety comparisons. I have encountered no effective way to measure the effects of those factors so that they can be taken into account for statistically-valid comparisons. Better to compare the crime statistics in a particular place before and after the passage of laws that make it easier to carry guns for their own protection, for those regular, non-criminal folks who wish to do so. And in those places, the numbers fit the possibility that a greater number of criminals are taking into account the possibility that their potential victims may be armed, just as you've said. When states here have passed more liberal "concealed-carry" permit-issuance laws, violent crimes have decreased.
That said, here's a further example. I've lived in Tokyo and visited Washington, D.C. I believe that in neither place would you ever want to be found carrying a pistol. It's strictly prohibited except to a very few groups of people in those places. I never met anybody in Tokyo who felt they were at the slightest risk walking down a dark street in the middle of the night there. I'm not going to try that in D.C. (and I apologize to the people in that beautiful city who might be offended by my bringing it up).
By contrast, most of us in a lot of places in the rural United States are heavily armed. We hunt (and fish, but not with guns), history enthusiasts collect old weapons, some shoot competitively and there are a lot of other reasons people have them. I feel safer among the gun owners I know than around almost anybody else. They've all made choices to become competent and moral enough to handle dangerous weapons safely. They tend to be relaxed, polite and conscientious. Hey, I'm no saint. I yell at other drivers on the road when I'm alone in my car with the windows rolled up and they can't see me, but I never act like that if I am around weapons. I'd feel scared if I were a pheasant or a wild turkey (during hunting season). I'd never try a home-invasion robbery around here, though; it's been done, and that isn't safe.
Here's my fundamental premise: one does not have to justify a fundamental human right. To protect one's own life is a fundamental human right. Governments violate human rights or they don't, but those rights are still essential to a person's ability to live as a human being.
I've heard that there's lovely hunting in Finland; Enjoy!
Last I heard, IBM was asking SCO to state specifically what code they were alleging that IBM had used, and IBM had gotten no answer. Today's story still has IBM describing SCO's allegations as "unsupported." If the nice folks at SCO can't back up their claims, are they just betting that the effect of the news stories on their business ("no bad publicity") will be greater than the losses they'll take for filing a frivolous lawsuit? What am I missing here?
Gee, like in Great Britain? Australia? Sorry, too many of my friends have been raped. One didn't get raped a third time (the first time, the guy tied her up and it lasted four hours) when she pulled a revolver she'd recently purchased and been trained with. She didn't need to fire it; he ran. Have a nice whatever...
A carbine is called that because carbines were originally used by cavalry, and they had a D-ring or snap-link (just like a mountain climber's carabiner) for attaching it to the saddle by means of a lanyard. If dropped while a trooper was on horseback, the rifle could be retrieved rather than being lost entirely. It was short so it wasn't too awkward to fire while mounted, and so it would fit in a scabbard attached to the saddle. Before long, many armies found that short, handy rifles were useful for many kinds of troops (artillery and mortar crews, tank crews, infantry officers who wanted more than just a pistol), and the historical term "carbine" remained after the lanyard ring was gone.
As has been said, the original (and for me, the "true") definition of an assault rifle is that it can fire like a machine gun, and is typically smaller than a "main battle rifle" like the M1 of World War II. Legislators in the U.S. have used the term for semiautomatic (= "self-loading") rifles; these fire 1 shot each time you pull the trigger. Legislators in various places use the term for any "scary-looking" rifle, especially those with a pistol grip, a flash hider, a metal lug for attaching a bayonet, a removeable magazine that holds a lot of cartridges, & on, & on...
Imagine that you're a WWII German soldier assaulting a position outside Stalingrad. You're a lot happier when you get issued something that fires like a machine gun. Also, its cartridges are less powerful than standard rifle cartridges of the era, and that makes these weapons more controllable in fully-automatic fire than if they'd used the usual rifle ammunition. The ammunition is lighter, as well, so you can carry more ammunition than before with an equivalent amount of fatigue. The Allies had enough M1s, Enfields, Mosin-Nagants, guys, tanks, ships, aircraft, etc., etc., etc., that a nifty infantry weapon wasn't enough to help the Wehrmacht much. Still, the concept has been adopted all over the world. The AK-47 and M16 (especially in its current M4 (yes - carbine!) variant) both act like assault rifles, though I think the US military calls the M16 a main battle rifle. Maybe somewhat redundant, but HTH.
It's also on the U.S. Naval Academy's reading list for prospective Marine Corps officers. The reading list [sorry, please cut & paste] is at
http://www.usna.edu/Library/Marineread.htm
The main focus of the book for me was that Ender's primary character trait was the ability to get people to want to do as he asked them to do (OK, ordered - it took place in a military setting). As they did so, they learned that their abilities were more than they'd ever imagined. The conclusion of the book is a warning that Nuremburg was real, and that everyone is responsible for his own actions. And yes, that war is not a game.
and print DMCA on yours with your Lexmark printer! Then you can additionally sue everybody else for using an inferior but infringing design (toilet paper without the DMCA logo is like a CD without DRM or even the artists's name, right?) and failing to pay you royalties. You guys are going to be rich!
And IRB (140733): no insult intended; I think that you guys are both right.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, it sounds like one of his luser-punishing techniques might have got a bit out of hand.
When I was in the Boy Scouts (also early 70's), we learned that (Robert?) Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scouts with an eye toward training boys early in militarily-applicable skills, and he called them Boy Scouts after a famous Army unit called the Selous Scouts (in Rhodesia, I believe). I stayed in the Scouts when we lived in Canada for a few years, and we did train with arms there. My Asst. Scoutmaster was an NCO in the Canadian Forces; he took us to the rifle range. He and my Dad were our shooting instructors. Kids with guns? Sure! Let them do grownup things and require that they act responsibly whenever they're around weapons. It takes a lot of loving effort, patience and clear communication, but that's what parents and Scoutmasters are supposed to do, right?
It doesn't work to say, You need to get an amendment passed that does away with that right. I know - wait; I believe - that you're satirizing the issue, but clarity is good: there are certain conditions that are necessary in order to live as a human being (to be able to defend oneself against predators, for example; to speak freely; to assemble; all that stuff) These requirements are just there, like gravity. No amendment, law, ordinance, decree or statute can change what is necessary for one to live as a human being.
The Constitution prohibits our government from violating a number of fundamental human rights, and it provides for the granting of other rights: patents, for instance (no flame war please, we're dancing on the fringes of the Bruce Sterling discussion already).
In a democratically-operated system, one cost is that people will vote for things that cannot work. Let's not help them to do so.
The modern equivalent would be for you and for me to be required by law to own an M-14 or M-16 capable of fully-automatic fire, although other weapons of equivalent capability, and even decent bolt-action rifles, would probably be OK.
"A Well-regulated militia?" Yes, indeed: you aren't allowed to show up with "non-regulation," outdated weapons or "non-regulation" rifles that fire odd-caliber amminition. That would cause a supply problem and maybe get you killed if you ran out of ammunition. A Well-Regulated militia means "The right of the people to keep and bear...arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country..." --James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434 (June 8, 1789).
Want another quote? "Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest." - Mahatma Gandhi
- I disagree; we're a nation of tinkerers, on the land as well as in the machine shop or the electronics lab. I think you've drawn a terriffic parallel. Geo. Washington Carver, Luther Burbank, generations of others - it wasn't just the black soil of the Midwest that caused this place to become the breadbasket of the world; it was also our ancestors' tinkering with the crops that were available.
You write about the one "conformist" crop that you must have where I live: tomatoes.
Damn! Drat! I'm not trying to patronize, but I expect that the first time you slice up a ripe tomato from your own garden and bite into it, you won't be too upset about conforming to that local custom. If you like not getting ripped off, as you say (and if you eat tomatoes at all), you might reflect on the price and quality (sometimes a negative number) of grocery store tomatoes and pat yourself on the back for having tended and watered those damned tomato plants all summer. It's like they're not even the same species. Remember: lots of water, and Enjoy!
The majority? No; that's removing the physical objects that I've had printed to give to a whole bunch of people; it's effectively stealing the advertising dollars I've spent, because such an action makes a whole bunch of the fliers unavailable to my customers. It's the functional equivalent of simply destroying one of my displays. If they come in and take one, however, and then they make whatever use that they may of all the information it contains, then that's an expected part of advertising. It's always happened. There's no legal way to make something available to the public while denying it to my competitors. They're part of the public. All I can say is, "one to a customer," and I'd better treat the competitor as if he were a customer as long as he's in my store. Anything else has too great a PR downside. If I recognize him, though, it's fair game to point him out and crow to all within earshot, "Hey, look! Even my competitors shop here!" I'd love to run a commercial showing him in my store, too.
If you've got the ideas but not the technical savvy (no insult to you; I speak of myself here), then make your fortune as a book author spinning your ideas for other people to read, or in another of the million ways you can use your talents to thrive. The area where geosynchronous satellites orbit is called "the Clarke Belt," after author Arthur C. Clarke, who (correct me if I'm wrong) never with his own hands made a satellite fly. Instead, he inspired others to do so. That's my plan, as it happens: I love this stuff, but I'm a technically-inclined dabbler rather than a focused hard-technology genius. I'm grateful to the people who actually find ways to make all of this cool stuff work.
I take issue with one statement of yours, though, and it's far too common a fallacy. You write that
These are NotNotNot separate groups! There are technical and non-technical people in the world, and a person can separately be described as either creative or uncreative. They are separate issues, and to muddle the two helps you not. Go do what calls you. You'll amaze yourself. Maybe you'll be the one that runs the company that makes what you describe, or maybe you're the next Bucky Fuller. Find out.Advertising costs what it costs, and the Net behaves the way it behaves. I'll laugh if I ever get sued by a grocery store who sent me an advertising flier in the mail, because it cost them money and I didn't buy anything. The Net is a public forum. That's why it's attractive to commercial entities.
How soon will we see the "Robot-Coupe," (Fr. kitchen appliance, pron. Ro-bo-Koop') in which the losing team gets tossed into a Cuisinart?
I promise that I was already typing my 4:43 reply to "A Quick History Lesson" when you posted this. Yours is a lot more concise.
Why? If you give away your coal, you don't have it any more. If you share a new idea, and we all follow your habit, then we all have so much more that the increase becomes qualitative rather than just quantitative, and we get the sort of emergent phenomena that have turned the market's paradigms upside-down.
"Unix" has come to mean more than the trademarked code of its current ownership corporation, and more than the trademarked code of its parent corporation. That change in meaning has occurred because of the way the the term has been used by the call-them-"generations" of programmers whose efforts and dedication to specific, commercially-unorthodox principles have been the direct cause of its dominance.
It's become a philosophy. Of course, the name of the philosophy is an old AT&T / Bell Labs, then Berkeley product name, but the right to control that trademark was lost when the companies that had the rights to the name in days long past made use of the genius of those for whom it became a philosophy. They got paid for their investment! They profited by letting it happen, and that's good. It's too late now to turn back the clock, and if they (AT&T, et al.) had kept "Unix" under lock and key as closely as a coal company must keep control of its coal, they would never have seen their brainchild become the core of much of the world's commerce and communication.
That said, here's a further example. I've lived in Tokyo and visited Washington, D.C. I believe that in neither place would you ever want to be found carrying a pistol. It's strictly prohibited except to a very few groups of people in those places. I never met anybody in Tokyo who felt they were at the slightest risk walking down a dark street in the middle of the night there. I'm not going to try that in D.C. (and I apologize to the people in that beautiful city who might be offended by my bringing it up).
By contrast, most of us in a lot of places in the rural United States are heavily armed. We hunt (and fish, but not with guns), history enthusiasts collect old weapons, some shoot competitively and there are a lot of other reasons people have them. I feel safer among the gun owners I know than around almost anybody else. They've all made choices to become competent and moral enough to handle dangerous weapons safely. They tend to be relaxed, polite and conscientious. Hey, I'm no saint. I yell at other drivers on the road when I'm alone in my car with the windows rolled up and they can't see me, but I never act like that if I am around weapons. I'd feel scared if I were a pheasant or a wild turkey (during hunting season). I'd never try a home-invasion robbery around here, though; it's been done, and that isn't safe.
Here's my fundamental premise: one does not have to justify a fundamental human right. To protect one's own life is a fundamental human right. Governments violate human rights or they don't, but those rights are still essential to a person's ability to live as a human being.
I've heard that there's lovely hunting in Finland; Enjoy!
Last I heard, IBM was asking SCO to state specifically what code they were alleging that IBM had used, and IBM had gotten no answer. Today's story still has IBM describing SCO's allegations as "unsupported." If the nice folks at SCO can't back up their claims, are they just betting that the effect of the news stories on their business ("no bad publicity") will be greater than the losses they'll take for filing a frivolous lawsuit? What am I missing here?
But again, a short, handy rifle.
As has been said, the original (and for me, the "true") definition of an assault rifle is that it can fire like a machine gun, and is typically smaller than a "main battle rifle" like the M1 of World War II. Legislators in the U.S. have used the term for semiautomatic (= "self-loading") rifles; these fire 1 shot each time you pull the trigger. Legislators in various places use the term for any "scary-looking" rifle, especially those with a pistol grip, a flash hider, a metal lug for attaching a bayonet, a removeable magazine that holds a lot of cartridges, & on, & on...
Imagine that you're a WWII German soldier assaulting a position outside Stalingrad. You're a lot happier when you get issued something that fires like a machine gun. Also, its cartridges are less powerful than standard rifle cartridges of the era, and that makes these weapons more controllable in fully-automatic fire than if they'd used the usual rifle ammunition. The ammunition is lighter, as well, so you can carry more ammunition than before with an equivalent amount of fatigue. The Allies had enough M1s, Enfields, Mosin-Nagants, guys, tanks, ships, aircraft, etc., etc., etc., that a nifty infantry weapon wasn't enough to help the Wehrmacht much. Still, the concept has been adopted all over the world. The AK-47 and M16 (especially in its current M4 (yes - carbine!) variant) both act like assault rifles, though I think the US military calls the M16 a main battle rifle. Maybe somewhat redundant, but HTH.
http://www.usna.edu/Library/Marineread.htm
The main focus of the book for me was that Ender's primary character trait was the ability to get people to want to do as he asked them to do (OK, ordered - it took place in a military setting). As they did so, they learned that their abilities were more than they'd ever imagined. The conclusion of the book is a warning that Nuremburg was real, and that everyone is responsible for his own actions. And yes, that war is not a game.
And IRB (140733): no insult intended; I think that you guys are both right.