I think it depends a lot on your management. If you can get them to recognize your value to the company (assuming you're providing that value) and make yourself especially difficult to replace (due to skillset and work ethic, not sabotage and self-niching), you have some more leverage where you are. I've found it fairly effective to engage on the subject in a more cooperative - rather than adversarial - manner. For instance, making it about what your fair market value is versus what your pay is, rather than an issue about raises not being high enough, or that your lifestyle is exceeding your means. When you can show that your paycheck isn't reflecting your fair market value, it removes a lot of the emotion from the conversation. At that point, you have a couple of ways to deal with it: adversarial (which largely consists of holding your management hostage by threatening to leave or by getting and showing written offers for more money) and cooperative (convincing your management to find a way to get you what you're worth as quickly as possible without an overt or heavily implied threat of leaving).
Ultimately, it doesn't have to get personal and it won't if both parties can avoid making it personal. You're an asset that's worth $x in the market. If the company is paying you.75x and the company doesn't feel it's in their interests to pay you $x, you should work elsewhere. If the company does feel it's in their interests to pay you $x, they can choose to find a way to make that happen. If they don't, there's no reason to be personally offended when the asset finds and accepts a better offer.
Needless to say, it won't always work this way. Some people (on both sides of the table) are just children and will make it all very personal. If you find yourself working for children who can't have adult conversations in an adult manner, you should be seeking additional compensation to account for that and you should leave if it doesn't come. You're only a supplicant if you allow yourself to be one. That doesn't mean be a controlling jerk; it means ensuring you're a valuable asset and only working at places which recognize you as such.
You can fill your car in 5 minutes and go another 600KM. You can battery swap a Model S in 90 seconds and go another 500KM. Or you can wait 20 minutes and get a supercharge that will get you 250KM for zero cost.
Seems like the electric car not only meets your expectations, but rather exceeds them.
What it can do is provide an interface between NGOs and common people. NGOs typically receive much of their funding from governments and rich or wealthy benefactors. Fundraising means getting those folks into a room and convincing them to cough up some cash. Crowdfunding allows a wider audience (literally everyone on the Internet) to see the intended actions of the NGO and then choose to contribute. Rather than getting $45,000 from 100 rich people, they can get $45 from 100,000 without the immense overhead of doing so without using the Internet. That's the real difference. It isn't easier so much as it's a different way of fundraising from a different audience.
The Reading Rainbow Kickstarter campaign isn't going to send men with automatic weapons to break down my door and haul me to prison if I decline to provide it funding. The entity you describe will.
It won't happen for precisely the reason you stated. If one got through, it would open the floodgates and overwhelm the judiciary. I'm not saying it's right, but that's the reality.
BART police shooting of Oscar Grant is another one. Cop grabs his gun and shoots a guy who's laying on the ground and the guy dies the next morning. 2 years. Minus time served. If the roles were reversed and Grant had shot the officer, he'd have spent the rest of his natural born life in prison.
If the general public wakes up, most of them will beg the government for Ambien so they can get back to sleep. This isn't an issue of education; it's a problem of apathy.
FedGov were fine with Bundy and crew while they were hanging out in the middle of nowhere running around with guns being all anti-government. If they got within 50 miles of the DC line, they'd be face-to-face with Apache gunships and worse and every one of them would wind up in a prison cell or a bodybag very quickly. No one will comprehend the full militarization of law enforcement in this country until an incident like that happens. Quite honestly, we're approaching the point where a major metro police force, combined with local Federal law enforcement assets, could hold their own in a fight with the US Army.
That should frighten people. It doesn't, partially because they'd never believe it, but it should. Sadly, I don't know how to turn back that tide. No politician will be seen taking resources away from law enforcement because that's political suicide. Violence would be deadly, destructive, and would only reinforce the need for even more militarization. And if violence is your only resort, you're truly in Hell already. Not really sure what else there is besides finding somewhere else to try again. The Founding Fathers of this country knew having a standing military was a huge risk to the freedom of the people. Restrictions were put in place later to ensure the military couldn't be used against civilians except in cases of total rebellion where the government has fallen. With domestic law enforcement's militarization, we have exactly what the Founding Fathers feared most: a force under the control of the government, operating domestically, which has far more firepower than the citizenry. They feared that because they understood that it removes the fear governments have of the reactions of the citizenry when they start working toward oppression and they understood a simple truth: power begets power, and that inevitably leads to oppression. The balance they sought was to keep a government responsive to the needs and wishes of an informed and at least somewhat wise citizenry. A government of regular citizens who cycle in and out of government service would continuously bring fresh ideas and fresh perspectives to maintain the power balance. Of course, the reality is that it's now just millionaires sponsored by millionaires and billionaires doing whatever they need to do to consolidate power even as they're re-elected decade after decade using political party identification.
Much of this is the fault of the people. We've become so soft and delicate that we can't imagine doing many of the things government now does for us. Police our own streets? That's dangerous! Protect ourselves and our families? That's dangerous! Hell, a good chunk of our population can't even feed itself without the government. We've stepped further and further back away from running our own lives and allowed the government to fill the vacuum. Why? Because it's easier and more comfortable. It's always easier when someone else is taking care of things for you. Everything has to be safe now. Everything has to be clean now. Everything has to be easy. And if it isn't, we expect the government to step in and take it over. Until all that's left is a bunch of sissies in padded outfits in padded rooms staring at a TV and drooling on the floor while an IV keeps them fed. We've allowed ourselves to become so weak and so uninformed that we're almost begging to be taken advantage of at this point.
Here's a simple example: Of the eligible voters who actually vote (see? I've eliminated something like 60% right there), how many can name everyone in the Federal legislature representing them and can describe the voting record of those representatives on the issues most important to that voter? Let's be incredibly generous and assume it's 20% (yeah, right). So that's 8% of the original. Now how many of those can name everyone at the state level representing them and can describe the record of those individuals on the voter's most important issues? Again, let's be incredibly generous and say 10%. Of those, how many follow all available candidates fo
Did those six computers that crashed just happen to be the systems that belonged to the six people under congressional investigation for politically motivated abuses of authority? Did those six computers happen to include the email server(s) and associated storage devices and include any and all backups? And did all of that stuff just happen to crash in such a way that virtually nothing of any consequence was recoverable in a clean room? All happening at the same time as a congressional investigation began?
I don't believe their IT department is enormously competent. In fact, I believe quite the opposite. However, anyone who thinks this is anything other than a deliberate, coordinated campaign to destroy evidence linking higher-ups (not necessarily including the President, but not necessarily excluding him) is a complete idiot. I can believe their admins are incompetent enough to fail to maintain proper server-side retention policies. What I can't believe is that their regular maintenance plans include tearing out desktop and laptop hard drives and smashing them with hammers. And if you want to believe that, go right ahead, but you know and I know that it's bullshit.
This was the earliest, but by far not the only example of "kids today and their rock-and-roll music", as you put it.
Yeah, probably not the "earliest."
Indeed; I had intended to put "the earliest I've seen". The point being made was that this is a complaint as old as humanity, so I would certainly not attempt to pick out any specific genesis for it. I just didn't finish typing the whole thought, which was a simple mistake.
This sounds like round 36 of "kids today and their rock-and-roll music." Teachers indulging in future-shock is just plain trite.
I'd like to direct you to the following quote:
"That a century of the younger men wished to confer with their elders on the question to which persons they should, by their vote, entrust a high command, should seem to us scarcely credible. This is due to the cheapened and diminished authority even of parents over their children in our day." - Titus Livius (Livy), The History of Rome, Book 26
This was the earliest, but by far not the only example of "kids today and their rock-and-roll music", as you put it. Examples exist throughout the last century, especially around the turn of 1900, where long and boring essays were published on the subject. However, the above excert is from Livy's History of Rome, written around 25BC. So when you say it's trite, that's a bit of an understatement. 2000+ years we've been listening to this shit.
Pressing the brakes in a car saves the operator's life. Firing a gun does not save the operator's life. It damages or kills something else. There's no correlation.
Obviously you've never had your life threatened by someone who means to see you dead. Firearms are used defensively millions of times a year. No doubt you'll try to dispute that, but I'm simply getting info from the CDC:
“Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies,” the CDC study, entitled “Priorities For Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence,”
The Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council released the results of their research through the CDC last month. Researchers compiled data from previous studies in order to guide future research on gun violence, noting that “almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year.”
When someone breaks into your home at 3am and comes after you with a knife/gun/hammer, and your gun doesn't work, I assure you the analogy is spot-on. If the biometric/RFID/whatever works properly, an innocent life is saved. If it doesn't, an innocent life (or lives if you have a wife and kids) is/are lost. It's really quite simple. You're just choosing to pretend to not get it because you don't like the point being made. That's asinine.
Most people who shoot other people are not in any danger.[citation needed]
I don't know who "most" people are, but I can tell you that of the few people I've met who've had to use a gun defensively (most of the police officers), they were most certainly in danger before they ever reached for their gun.
Well then I'm quite pleased you didn't have a hand in writing our highest laws. When a person's life is at stake at 3am in their own home, what you want really doesn't matter. They have a natural-born/God-given right to defend themselves. And no amount of undue fear on your part can change that.
That said, I do agree that training is a good thing. In fact, I think it should be mandatory in all public schools (and I'd highly recommend it for private schools) for K-College.
You're missing the point. The point of the analogy is that - in either case - if the sensor fails to function as expected in an emergency situation where stress-induced sweat and lack of fine motor control have major effects, the operator it likely a dead man.
And that's the point. If you won't trust this sensor to activate the brakes on your car when you need them, you shouldn't trust it to activate the firing mechanism on the gun when you need it.
No it won't, because it isn't a good analogy. This would be more like a mandate that all new cars have fingerprint sensors to activate the brakes. No sensor match, no brakes.
Let me know when all the major auto manufacturers voluntarily take the sensor technology used in these "smart guns" and puts it in their emergency brakes to prevent unauthorized passengers from pulling it. And as everyone else has said, let me know when the police and military have this technology in all of their guns. At that point, it'd be worth some consideration. Until then, I think anyone buying one of these things for protection is a fool.
One of the more absurd stretches of the Commerce Clause, to be sure. Also one of the more pathetic examples of the failure of this country's government to secure the rights of its people. Ordering a family to destroy food they've grown for themselves; we ought to be embarrassed.
The feds have stepped in before to shut down operations with no evidence of cross-border activity. If the trade of it crosses the border somewhere, the feds have jurisdiction. Just like in-state kidnappings are under the jurisdiction of the feds (if they want it). Because some kidnappings sometimes cross borders, the feds can assume that all do.
The Feds have stepped all over states' rights since the founding of this country; moreso in the past few decades. The states have finally begun to take notice and many are working to reclaim those rights. The Feds have only been able to get away with it for so long because the states didn't try to stop them. With that changing, things are going to get more and more interesting. As evidence, there have been many recent proposed amendments to state bills on everything from guns to Marijuana that have directed state police to prevent Federal authorities from enforcing Federal laws contrary to the state laws where the state is given priority in the Constitution or at least to not assist Federal authorities in executing such Federal laws. Some have even called for the arrest of Federal authorities taking such actions. While these have been largely defeated thus far, the idea of proposing them would have been unthinkable just a decade ago. There's been a progression that seems to be leading toward state authorities actively resisting Federal authorities enforcing apparently unconstitutional laws.
Ah, so the Supreme Court is wrong, and you are right. But nobody listens to you, so I'll quote the Supreme Court before you.
Not the first time the Supreme Court has been wrong. The Supreme Court decided "separate but equal" was constitutional. It decided Japanese interment was constitutional. And it was apparently constitutional to fire teachers who were members of "subversive" groups. Well, at least until the Supreme Court reversed itself. That's happened numerous times before and it'll almost certainly happen again.
The Supreme Court can rule that Catholicism is the national religion of the United States and that everyone in the US must convert to and practice it zealously. That doesn't make it correct. It can rule that a Federal law stripping all registered Democrats of the right to vote is constitutional. It isn't. Our system of government is imperfect, as is every other. It's run by imperfect humans who are subject to any number of influences that can impede their objectivity. We the people need to stand up, collectively, when our government gets something wrong and get it fixed; not throw our hands up and declare all hope lost because the Supreme Court issued a ruling. We need to be able to do that without a full blown revolution too, since those tend to be very bloody, expensive, and destructive. The way we seem to be tending toward handling this is through our state governments. I think that's one of the healthier ways to correct Federal mistakes and I hope to see the trend continue. As the states assert an increasing level of sovereignty, we'll see the power and scope of the Federal government diminish. Hopefully, that continues until it no longer has such horrifyingly complete dominion over the citizens of the United States.
The Federal government lacks jurisdiction for intrastate commerce. Thus, unless it's being sold across state lines, Federal law doesn't apply. Doesn't matter that the Supreme Court came up with some convoluted reasoning for making the interstate commerce clause apply; the Constitution says what it says. The state's law has the final say for intrastate commerce, and it isn't illegal in all US states.
the [Tesla Model S] impacted a roundabout at 110 mph, shearing off 15 feet of concrete curbwall and tearing off the left front wheel, then smashing through an eight foot tall buttressed concrete wall on the other side of the road and tearing off the right front wheel, before crashing into a tree. The driver stepped out and walked away with no permanent injuries
Yeah, Elon, quit making cars. Leave that to the people who know what they're doing!
As a car maker- they have a "moat". It's a weak moat-- other car makers could come out with electric cars in the same slot.
A guy in Mexico drove his Tesla Model S at over 110mph through a concrete wall and into a tree. He stepped out of the vehicle and walked away. A guy in Florida was driving a Tesla Model S on a highway when he got into a head-on collision with a Honda. Both people in the Honda were killed instantly, the Tesla driver pulled over, got out, and called the police.
They don't have a moat. They have a titanium fortress built on a cloud a mile above the ocean. Unless something drastic changes in the next few years, people will be buying Teslas as much for the safety aspect as anything else. Stick your family in a Tesla and suddenly it doesn't matter if some drunk crosses the median and slams into you full speed. Their safety is assured.
Bond trader: "Oh, I see you're making two very good products that work together, have solid demand, and have intellectual property potential. Why not just make one of them instead?"
CPUs are already plenty fast. They have been for years.
Incorrect. CPUs are plenty fast and have been for years for doing many common tasks. The fact is that they aren't nearly fast enough (particularly for single-threaded items) and almost certainly won't be for another decade or more. There's a limit to what and how much you can multi-thread, and even then, you're still limited by single-thread performance x number of threads.
So yes, for grandma playing Blackjack on Yahoo, today's CPUs are plenty fast. For me and many others? The fastest stuff available is 100x slower than "fast enough".
Do you want one very powerful computer to run everything in your house? Or do you want everything in your house to have its own dedicated, highly efficient CPU that does just what that device needs?
I want computers (and servers, especially) which are able to perform their particular function without me having to wait on them. Ever. I want usable speech recognition feeding into a responsive AI that behaves as expected without delay (and God help you if you answer "Siri" to this). I want Eve Online to be able to stick 50,000 ships in one fight with full collision and damage physics modeling with zero lag. I want to be able to transcode, store, tag, and index 20 hours of home movies and a year worth of pictures without waiting. I want to run realtime and faster simulations of complex systems.
Are these common, everyday needs? Moreso than you might think. A lot of the back-end servers struggle to keep up with workloads that either expand or change over time. While much of what's right in front of your eyes seems pretty happy with the CPU that's there today, there's a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes that isn't. This causes server admins and developers to have to spend inordinate amounts of time, money, and cranial energy figuring out how to make it functional, giving the limited computing power available.
A lot of things need very little power, and they should have very little computers with very little CPUs to make them go. Some things - things you don't think about - need tons of power, either serially or just overall. I'd pay good money if Intel and AMD would stick with 4-12 cores and concentrate on making those cores enormously powerful. As it is, they're risking going the route of SPARC, and obviously that isn't working out well for SPARC. Interestingly enough, Oracle's trying to make SPARC more like x86 even as Intel and AMD are trying to make x86 more like SPARC.
By subsidising the Russian space program with this sweetheart no-bid contract, we, the U.S., help ensure that dozens of very highly skilled engineers and scientists with the ability to lead a team interested in designing and building short, medium, or long-range rockets - for whatever purpose - are kept "on payroll" and reasonably content safely and securely inside Russia. Exactly where we want them. Instead of helping a potential aggressor nation like Iran, North Korea, or theocratic / military dictatorship Du Jour develop accurate, long range weapons for suitcases full of cash, women, mansions and national hero-worship.
It would be an order of magnitude cheaper if we flew those guys to the US, handed them suitcases full of cash, and bought them all houses in southern California. If we really wanted to get fancy, we could even offer them jobs.
Or we can pay their government tons more money to build a rocket engine we don't need.
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I think it depends a lot on your management. If you can get them to recognize your value to the company (assuming you're providing that value) and make yourself especially difficult to replace (due to skillset and work ethic, not sabotage and self-niching), you have some more leverage where you are. I've found it fairly effective to engage on the subject in a more cooperative - rather than adversarial - manner. For instance, making it about what your fair market value is versus what your pay is, rather than an issue about raises not being high enough, or that your lifestyle is exceeding your means. When you can show that your paycheck isn't reflecting your fair market value, it removes a lot of the emotion from the conversation. At that point, you have a couple of ways to deal with it: adversarial (which largely consists of holding your management hostage by threatening to leave or by getting and showing written offers for more money) and cooperative (convincing your management to find a way to get you what you're worth as quickly as possible without an overt or heavily implied threat of leaving).
Ultimately, it doesn't have to get personal and it won't if both parties can avoid making it personal. You're an asset that's worth $x in the market. If the company is paying you .75x and the company doesn't feel it's in their interests to pay you $x, you should work elsewhere. If the company does feel it's in their interests to pay you $x, they can choose to find a way to make that happen. If they don't, there's no reason to be personally offended when the asset finds and accepts a better offer.
Needless to say, it won't always work this way. Some people (on both sides of the table) are just children and will make it all very personal. If you find yourself working for children who can't have adult conversations in an adult manner, you should be seeking additional compensation to account for that and you should leave if it doesn't come. You're only a supplicant if you allow yourself to be one. That doesn't mean be a controlling jerk; it means ensuring you're a valuable asset and only working at places which recognize you as such.
You can fill your car in 5 minutes and go another 600KM. You can battery swap a Model S in 90 seconds and go another 500KM. Or you can wait 20 minutes and get a supercharge that will get you 250KM for zero cost.
Seems like the electric car not only meets your expectations, but rather exceeds them.
What it can do is provide an interface between NGOs and common people. NGOs typically receive much of their funding from governments and rich or wealthy benefactors. Fundraising means getting those folks into a room and convincing them to cough up some cash. Crowdfunding allows a wider audience (literally everyone on the Internet) to see the intended actions of the NGO and then choose to contribute. Rather than getting $45,000 from 100 rich people, they can get $45 from 100,000 without the immense overhead of doing so without using the Internet. That's the real difference. It isn't easier so much as it's a different way of fundraising from a different audience.
The Reading Rainbow Kickstarter campaign isn't going to send men with automatic weapons to break down my door and haul me to prison if I decline to provide it funding. The entity you describe will.
It won't happen for precisely the reason you stated. If one got through, it would open the floodgates and overwhelm the judiciary. I'm not saying it's right, but that's the reality.
BART police shooting of Oscar Grant is another one. Cop grabs his gun and shoots a guy who's laying on the ground and the guy dies the next morning. 2 years. Minus time served. If the roles were reversed and Grant had shot the officer, he'd have spent the rest of his natural born life in prison.
If the general public wakes up, most of them will beg the government for Ambien so they can get back to sleep. This isn't an issue of education; it's a problem of apathy.
FedGov were fine with Bundy and crew while they were hanging out in the middle of nowhere running around with guns being all anti-government. If they got within 50 miles of the DC line, they'd be face-to-face with Apache gunships and worse and every one of them would wind up in a prison cell or a bodybag very quickly. No one will comprehend the full militarization of law enforcement in this country until an incident like that happens. Quite honestly, we're approaching the point where a major metro police force, combined with local Federal law enforcement assets, could hold their own in a fight with the US Army.
That should frighten people. It doesn't, partially because they'd never believe it, but it should. Sadly, I don't know how to turn back that tide. No politician will be seen taking resources away from law enforcement because that's political suicide. Violence would be deadly, destructive, and would only reinforce the need for even more militarization. And if violence is your only resort, you're truly in Hell already. Not really sure what else there is besides finding somewhere else to try again. The Founding Fathers of this country knew having a standing military was a huge risk to the freedom of the people. Restrictions were put in place later to ensure the military couldn't be used against civilians except in cases of total rebellion where the government has fallen. With domestic law enforcement's militarization, we have exactly what the Founding Fathers feared most: a force under the control of the government, operating domestically, which has far more firepower than the citizenry. They feared that because they understood that it removes the fear governments have of the reactions of the citizenry when they start working toward oppression and they understood a simple truth: power begets power, and that inevitably leads to oppression. The balance they sought was to keep a government responsive to the needs and wishes of an informed and at least somewhat wise citizenry. A government of regular citizens who cycle in and out of government service would continuously bring fresh ideas and fresh perspectives to maintain the power balance. Of course, the reality is that it's now just millionaires sponsored by millionaires and billionaires doing whatever they need to do to consolidate power even as they're re-elected decade after decade using political party identification.
Much of this is the fault of the people. We've become so soft and delicate that we can't imagine doing many of the things government now does for us. Police our own streets? That's dangerous! Protect ourselves and our families? That's dangerous! Hell, a good chunk of our population can't even feed itself without the government. We've stepped further and further back away from running our own lives and allowed the government to fill the vacuum. Why? Because it's easier and more comfortable. It's always easier when someone else is taking care of things for you. Everything has to be safe now. Everything has to be clean now. Everything has to be easy. And if it isn't, we expect the government to step in and take it over. Until all that's left is a bunch of sissies in padded outfits in padded rooms staring at a TV and drooling on the floor while an IV keeps them fed. We've allowed ourselves to become so weak and so uninformed that we're almost begging to be taken advantage of at this point.
Here's a simple example: Of the eligible voters who actually vote (see? I've eliminated something like 60% right there), how many can name everyone in the Federal legislature representing them and can describe the voting record of those representatives on the issues most important to that voter? Let's be incredibly generous and assume it's 20% (yeah, right). So that's 8% of the original. Now how many of those can name everyone at the state level representing them and can describe the record of those individuals on the voter's most important issues? Again, let's be incredibly generous and say 10%. Of those, how many follow all available candidates fo
Did those six computers that crashed just happen to be the systems that belonged to the six people under congressional investigation for politically motivated abuses of authority? Did those six computers happen to include the email server(s) and associated storage devices and include any and all backups? And did all of that stuff just happen to crash in such a way that virtually nothing of any consequence was recoverable in a clean room? All happening at the same time as a congressional investigation began?
I don't believe their IT department is enormously competent. In fact, I believe quite the opposite. However, anyone who thinks this is anything other than a deliberate, coordinated campaign to destroy evidence linking higher-ups (not necessarily including the President, but not necessarily excluding him) is a complete idiot. I can believe their admins are incompetent enough to fail to maintain proper server-side retention policies. What I can't believe is that their regular maintenance plans include tearing out desktop and laptop hard drives and smashing them with hammers. And if you want to believe that, go right ahead, but you know and I know that it's bullshit.
This was the earliest, but by far not the only example of "kids today and their rock-and-roll music", as you put it.
Yeah, probably not the "earliest."
Indeed; I had intended to put "the earliest I've seen". The point being made was that this is a complaint as old as humanity, so I would certainly not attempt to pick out any specific genesis for it. I just didn't finish typing the whole thought, which was a simple mistake.
This sounds like round 36 of "kids today and their rock-and-roll music." Teachers indulging in future-shock is just plain trite.
I'd like to direct you to the following quote:
"That a century of the younger men wished to confer with their elders on the question to which persons they should, by their vote, entrust a high command, should seem to us scarcely credible. This is due to the cheapened and diminished authority even of parents over their children in our day." - Titus Livius (Livy), The History of Rome, Book 26
This was the earliest, but by far not the only example of "kids today and their rock-and-roll music", as you put it. Examples exist throughout the last century, especially around the turn of 1900, where long and boring essays were published on the subject. However, the above excert is from Livy's History of Rome, written around 25BC. So when you say it's trite, that's a bit of an understatement. 2000+ years we've been listening to this shit.
Pressing the brakes in a car saves the operator's life. Firing a gun does not save the operator's life. It damages or kills something else. There's no correlation.
Obviously you've never had your life threatened by someone who means to see you dead. Firearms are used defensively millions of times a year. No doubt you'll try to dispute that, but I'm simply getting info from the CDC:
“Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies,” the CDC study, entitled “Priorities For Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence,”
The Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council released the results of their research through the CDC last month. Researchers compiled data from previous studies in order to guide future research on gun violence, noting that “almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year.”
When someone breaks into your home at 3am and comes after you with a knife/gun/hammer, and your gun doesn't work, I assure you the analogy is spot-on. If the biometric/RFID/whatever works properly, an innocent life is saved. If it doesn't, an innocent life (or lives if you have a wife and kids) is/are lost. It's really quite simple. You're just choosing to pretend to not get it because you don't like the point being made. That's asinine.
Most people who shoot other people are not in any danger.[citation needed]
I don't know who "most" people are, but I can tell you that of the few people I've met who've had to use a gun defensively (most of the police officers), they were most certainly in danger before they ever reached for their gun.
Well then I'm quite pleased you didn't have a hand in writing our highest laws. When a person's life is at stake at 3am in their own home, what you want really doesn't matter. They have a natural-born/God-given right to defend themselves. And no amount of undue fear on your part can change that.
That said, I do agree that training is a good thing. In fact, I think it should be mandatory in all public schools (and I'd highly recommend it for private schools) for K-College.
You're missing the point. The point of the analogy is that - in either case - if the sensor fails to function as expected in an emergency situation where stress-induced sweat and lack of fine motor control have major effects, the operator it likely a dead man.
And that's the point. If you won't trust this sensor to activate the brakes on your car when you need them, you shouldn't trust it to activate the firing mechanism on the gun when you need it.
No it won't, because it isn't a good analogy. This would be more like a mandate that all new cars have fingerprint sensors to activate the brakes. No sensor match, no brakes.
You buying one of those?
Let me know when all the major auto manufacturers voluntarily take the sensor technology used in these "smart guns" and puts it in their emergency brakes to prevent unauthorized passengers from pulling it. And as everyone else has said, let me know when the police and military have this technology in all of their guns. At that point, it'd be worth some consideration. Until then, I think anyone buying one of these things for protection is a fool.
One of the more absurd stretches of the Commerce Clause, to be sure. Also one of the more pathetic examples of the failure of this country's government to secure the rights of its people. Ordering a family to destroy food they've grown for themselves; we ought to be embarrassed.
The feds have stepped in before to shut down operations with no evidence of cross-border activity. If the trade of it crosses the border somewhere, the feds have jurisdiction. Just like in-state kidnappings are under the jurisdiction of the feds (if they want it). Because some kidnappings sometimes cross borders, the feds can assume that all do.
The Feds have stepped all over states' rights since the founding of this country; moreso in the past few decades. The states have finally begun to take notice and many are working to reclaim those rights. The Feds have only been able to get away with it for so long because the states didn't try to stop them. With that changing, things are going to get more and more interesting. As evidence, there have been many recent proposed amendments to state bills on everything from guns to Marijuana that have directed state police to prevent Federal authorities from enforcing Federal laws contrary to the state laws where the state is given priority in the Constitution or at least to not assist Federal authorities in executing such Federal laws. Some have even called for the arrest of Federal authorities taking such actions. While these have been largely defeated thus far, the idea of proposing them would have been unthinkable just a decade ago. There's been a progression that seems to be leading toward state authorities actively resisting Federal authorities enforcing apparently unconstitutional laws.
Ah, so the Supreme Court is wrong, and you are right. But nobody listens to you, so I'll quote the Supreme Court before you.
Not the first time the Supreme Court has been wrong. The Supreme Court decided "separate but equal" was constitutional. It decided Japanese interment was constitutional. And it was apparently constitutional to fire teachers who were members of "subversive" groups. Well, at least until the Supreme Court reversed itself. That's happened numerous times before and it'll almost certainly happen again.
The Supreme Court can rule that Catholicism is the national religion of the United States and that everyone in the US must convert to and practice it zealously. That doesn't make it correct. It can rule that a Federal law stripping all registered Democrats of the right to vote is constitutional. It isn't. Our system of government is imperfect, as is every other. It's run by imperfect humans who are subject to any number of influences that can impede their objectivity. We the people need to stand up, collectively, when our government gets something wrong and get it fixed; not throw our hands up and declare all hope lost because the Supreme Court issued a ruling. We need to be able to do that without a full blown revolution too, since those tend to be very bloody, expensive, and destructive. The way we seem to be tending toward handling this is through our state governments. I think that's one of the healthier ways to correct Federal mistakes and I hope to see the trend continue. As the states assert an increasing level of sovereignty, we'll see the power and scope of the Federal government diminish. Hopefully, that continues until it no longer has such horrifyingly complete dominion over the citizens of the United States.
The Federal government lacks jurisdiction for intrastate commerce. Thus, unless it's being sold across state lines, Federal law doesn't apply. Doesn't matter that the Supreme Court came up with some convoluted reasoning for making the interstate commerce clause apply; the Constitution says what it says. The state's law has the final say for intrastate commerce, and it isn't illegal in all US states.
the [Tesla Model S] impacted a roundabout at 110 mph, shearing off 15 feet of concrete curbwall and tearing off the left front wheel, then smashing through an eight foot tall buttressed concrete wall on the other side of the road and tearing off the right front wheel, before crashing into a tree. The driver stepped out and walked away with no permanent injuries
Yeah, Elon, quit making cars. Leave that to the people who know what they're doing!
As a car maker- they have a "moat". It's a weak moat-- other car makers could come out with electric cars in the same slot.
A guy in Mexico drove his Tesla Model S at over 110mph through a concrete wall and into a tree. He stepped out of the vehicle and walked away. A guy in Florida was driving a Tesla Model S on a highway when he got into a head-on collision with a Honda. Both people in the Honda were killed instantly, the Tesla driver pulled over, got out, and called the police.
They don't have a moat. They have a titanium fortress built on a cloud a mile above the ocean. Unless something drastic changes in the next few years, people will be buying Teslas as much for the safety aspect as anything else. Stick your family in a Tesla and suddenly it doesn't matter if some drunk crosses the median and slams into you full speed. Their safety is assured.
What's that piece of mind worth?
Bond trader: "Oh, I see you're making two very good products that work together, have solid demand, and have intellectual property potential. Why not just make one of them instead?"
CPUs are already plenty fast. They have been for years.
Incorrect. CPUs are plenty fast and have been for years for doing many common tasks. The fact is that they aren't nearly fast enough (particularly for single-threaded items) and almost certainly won't be for another decade or more. There's a limit to what and how much you can multi-thread, and even then, you're still limited by single-thread performance x number of threads.
So yes, for grandma playing Blackjack on Yahoo, today's CPUs are plenty fast. For me and many others? The fastest stuff available is 100x slower than "fast enough".
Do you want one very powerful computer to run everything in your house? Or do you want everything in your house to have its own dedicated, highly efficient CPU that does just what that device needs?
I want computers (and servers, especially) which are able to perform their particular function without me having to wait on them. Ever. I want usable speech recognition feeding into a responsive AI that behaves as expected without delay (and God help you if you answer "Siri" to this). I want Eve Online to be able to stick 50,000 ships in one fight with full collision and damage physics modeling with zero lag. I want to be able to transcode, store, tag, and index 20 hours of home movies and a year worth of pictures without waiting. I want to run realtime and faster simulations of complex systems.
Are these common, everyday needs? Moreso than you might think. A lot of the back-end servers struggle to keep up with workloads that either expand or change over time. While much of what's right in front of your eyes seems pretty happy with the CPU that's there today, there's a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes that isn't. This causes server admins and developers to have to spend inordinate amounts of time, money, and cranial energy figuring out how to make it functional, giving the limited computing power available.
A lot of things need very little power, and they should have very little computers with very little CPUs to make them go. Some things - things you don't think about - need tons of power, either serially or just overall. I'd pay good money if Intel and AMD would stick with 4-12 cores and concentrate on making those cores enormously powerful. As it is, they're risking going the route of SPARC, and obviously that isn't working out well for SPARC. Interestingly enough, Oracle's trying to make SPARC more like x86 even as Intel and AMD are trying to make x86 more like SPARC.
I think everyone else is just jealous because they have low voter turnout while Estonia's going to get 3000% in their next election.
The only downside is the overwhelming election of Moot to Prime Minister.
By subsidising the Russian space program with this sweetheart no-bid contract, we, the U.S., help ensure that dozens of very highly skilled engineers and scientists with the ability to lead a team interested in designing and building short, medium, or long-range rockets - for whatever purpose - are kept "on payroll" and reasonably content safely and securely inside Russia. Exactly where we want them. Instead of helping a potential aggressor nation like Iran, North Korea, or theocratic / military dictatorship Du Jour develop accurate, long range weapons for suitcases full of cash, women, mansions and national hero-worship.
It would be an order of magnitude cheaper if we flew those guys to the US, handed them suitcases full of cash, and bought them all houses in southern California. If we really wanted to get fancy, we could even offer them jobs.
Or we can pay their government tons more money to build a rocket engine we don't need.