We need real protest. We don't need empty gestures and symbolic marches. We need action. We need rioting, and yes, even outright violence. The system is hostile toward us, why not repay the favor?
Here's the problem with that sort of approach: Rioting and violence makes it easier to portray the protesters as a bunch of anarchist malcontents who will happily invade your home and take your stuff. And it doesn't even take a huge percentage of protesters to create that impression - during the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle approximately 1000 people at most engaged in violence and looting, and yet that is the popular memory, if there is any memory at all, of those protests.
The reason Egypt and Tunisia worked, and to some degree Wisconsin worked, were because the protesters were not prepared to continue protesting, all day, every day, until their demands were met. The Occupy Wall St effort was a 1-day affair - it happened, everyone went home, they could be safely ignored. Much harder to ignore is thousands of people protesting every single day from 7 AM to 7 PM.
So this is what's actually needed, if you want to really get things going in New York and elsewhere: 1. Wait for Washington to force unemployment benefits to run out, as the Republicans seem intent on doing. 2. Offer free food and shelter to anyone coming to New York to protest at Wall St (or Washington DC to protest at the Mall or the Pentagon). 3. Wait for the crowd of malcontented, malnourished, homeless unemployed people to show up. Give them signs, demands, chants etc to start off with. 4. Sustain the effort for as long as it takes.
The example I typically bring up in these kinds of discussions: In 2003, in anticipation of the start of the Iraq War, peaceniks worldwide organized protests that involved (depending on which source you believe) 5-10 million people, meaning that something like 1 out of every 1000 people in the world were protesting that day. These protests are nearly forgotten. Similarly unreported were the facts that public polls on the Iraq War favor immediate withdrawal by a 20% margin for 5 years, and more recently have developed a similar pattern on the Afghanistan War.
Noam Chomsky isn't right about everything, but on the idea that corporate-owned media leads to pro-corporate biases he's right on the money. Particularly when the most "liberal" of the major news outlets is owned by General Electric, which profits handsomely from defense contracts.
Which is exactly why products of intellect (of which patents are a sub group) should immutably be attached to the mind that created them.... the above only applies if there, actually, exist patents.
If it's in the public domain, anybody can use it for anything they want. To take it out of the realm of software for a moment, consider the design of the humble wire paper clip.
If you open a box of generic paper clips, you will most likely find a design known as the "Gem" clip with long sides, rounded ends, and an extra rounded end inside. That design was created in 1894, and never patented by anybody (instead, a particular machine to make them was patented). That meant that it was and remains perfectly legal for anybody to bend a wire in that particular configuration to make paper clips. And when the
By contrast, some of its competitors were patented, which meant that if somebody just happened to bend a wire in that particular configuration in order to keep their papers together, they could be sued. It's no surprise then, that only the original company ever made those styles of paper clips, and while you can find some of those designs still in use, they're far less common.
What that means for a do-it-yourself creator of paper clips is that he's far safer in a world without patents, where he can bend wire in any way he likes without being sued. Since Free Software is all about combining the efforts by a huge number of do-it-yourself efforts, it too is much better off in a world without patents.
Very few wars have ever really been about liberty, even though they were fought in the name of liberty. Even if we limit ourselves to just major US wars:
* The American Revolution was largely a dispute about taxes, and also a distraction about an economic downturn that was causing significant starvation problems.
* The War of 1812 was about merchants not getting their ships to their destinations because their sailors were getting press-ganged into the British Navy (Also, the US basically lost that one).
* The Indian Wars were all about taking land by force.
* The Mexican-American War and the related War for Texas Independence were about taking land by force.
* The Civil War was arguably an exception for the Union rank-and-file, but for high command it started out as more a matter of economics and national authority and only became (for most) about freeing slaves after folks like General Sherman pointed out that the slaves were a major military asset in the Confederacy. For the Confederates, on the other hand, it was all about money, because slaves were a major investment.
* imperialist conflicts in 1890-1910 - These were all about ensuring cheap and easy access to markets by multinational corporations.
* World War I - protecting 2 of the more important trading partners and military allies of the United States.
* World War II - pretty much the same story, with Nationalist China thrown in as well. Stopping the Holocaust was not a big priority for high command (no special effort was made to target, say, rail lines to Dachau), nor was stopping the various massacres by the Japanese in the 1930's (we didn't do anything of significance about them).
* Cold War - Access to foreign markets and resources was basically the name of the game. The US was quite pro-dictator so long as they were our dictators.
* Vietnam War - rubber plantations
* Gulf War - oil in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
* Iraq War - oil in Iraq.
* Afghanistan War - oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea region to the Indian Ocean.
* although not major, the Libya War as about Muammar Gaddafi asking for a higher price for Libya's oil than the major oil companies wanted to pay.
* As far as the more general War on Terror is concerned, if you think it's about liberty, read the USA Patriot Act.
I assume you're referring to Ron Paul here, but you're somewhat wrong about the idea that the only opposition to war comes from libertarians. Among others, you can point to Ron Paul's frequent Democratic ally on stopping wars, Dennis Kucinich - he's staunchly anti-war, and staunchly pro-welfare, and polls about as well nationally as Ron Paul.
Almost every ordinary person buys all the stuff they need using income from work that has been taxed, and in most states pay a sales tax of some kind. The corporation they bought the item from was also taxed in various ways, and some of that cost (not all of it - read about Tax incidence) gets factored into the price, making the price higher than it would be without the taxes. And if whatever that person bought improves the value of their property, they'll get taxed again via their local property tax. And so on. The same dollars basically get taxed almost every time they change hands.
For some reason, though, the concept of "double taxation" only comes up when talking about taxing investments. Which suggests the objection is not really to taxing the same money twice (which would inevitably happen if there's more than 1 kind of tax in existence), but rather either (a) paying any kind of tax at all (a much more common position than you might think), or (b) really rich people paying taxes at all (which probably was why some think tank guy game up with "double taxation" in the first place). I simply see it as yet another expression of this gem by John Cleese in How to Irritate People:
The rich don't say "We want more money." They say "This increased taxation is reducing personal incentive."
Short version of your argument seems to be: If the bad guys has some BS patent guns, we need to have some too. There are 3 major problems with that:
1. If you use the tactics of the force you oppose, you become identical to the force you oppose. If everybody starts charging for Linux, instead of a free software ecosystem where everyone is freely giving stuff away, you have a system which, just like the proprietary world, is pay-to-play. Plus there will be endless infighting about who actually gets to own the patents, who gets the money, who ends up suing who, which consumers give money to which player, whether Debian can continue to give its stuff away even if Mandriva is charging $10 for it, etc. In other words, the Unix Wars all over again.
2. We're never going to win by opposing Microsoft or other proprietary software vendors using the same methods and tactics as they do. They have billions of dollars, thousands of patents, and lots of lawyers, and they will move quickly to prevent any effort like this from getting off the ground. Let's say you create your Linux Patent Consortium, which is a completely unified body organized on the principles you describe. They get a few patents, Microsoft realizes what they're up to and sues them out of existence, forcing them to sell of their patents to pay the damages. When opposing a force that's much more powerful than you, you have to use guerrilla tactics, which means appearing as amorphous and disorganized as possible.
3. If you have a unified consortium, with enough patents to be dangerous, but it's any kind of open election process, you will see Microsoft use its allies like Intel and it's sagans of dollars to get on the ballot and crush the organization from within, and then create proprietary alternatives that appear to be the same but are really quite different. How do we know? OLPC, that's how.
Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late. I use the side door, that way Lumbergh can't see me. Uh, and after that, I just sorta space out for about an hour. I just stare at my desk but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too. I'd probably, say, in a given week, I probably do about fifteen minutes of real, actual work.
Although the bit about how many soldiers fire during combat might have something to do with many people's general moral revulsion in killing other people, not so much laziness.
The amusing piece of flawed logic appears to be the idea (very very common in the popular and business press) of thinking that a bug that nobody knows about is a bug that doesn't exist. It's the logical equivalent of assuming that if you can't see it, it can't see you.
Exactly what problem does putting the contents of your wallet in your phone solve? Maybe it's just me, but a physical wallet is hardly a great burden to be carrying around, given it's an object sizing somewhere around 12 cm x 10 cm x 1 cm and weighing well under 1 kg.
See, that's my definition of "progress": Using technology and knowledge to solve a demonstrable problem. If you haven't solved a problem, all you've done is created Yet Another Payment System.
Well, not exactly - Cuba gets the best bang for the buck, but in terms of patient outcomes the World Health Organization thinks France has the best health care system in the world. The US, by contrast, ranks 37th, and Cuba 39th, despite Cuba spending a fraction of what the US does per capita.
The US government has an electronic currency: US Dollars. Most dollars exist as simply numbers in a database somewhere in a bank, and many transactions involve only the transfer of electronic information (like account / routing numbers or credit card numbers). Whether you're talking point-of-sale or online, all transactions go through a bunch of middlemen, each of whom take a fee for their services.
All that these efforts to create a 'virtual wallet' do is change the list of middlemen involved to include whichever tech company owns the wallet. The value proposition to merchants is pretty much nil (Why spend the money to accommodate Google, Microsoft, etc if I can just ask them to use a credit card?). The value proposition is less than nil for the customer: They might be able to pay for things slightly more easily, but they're trusting their money to a business that is not regulated like a bank, and any virtual wallet that they can easily empty, a thief can also easily empty.
This one: Profits of big 4 media companies: Disney $4.6 billion, GE $15.6 billion, News Corp $3.7 billion, Time Warner $2.5 billion, Viacom $0.8 billion, CBS $3 billion for a total of about $30 billion. Non-profits opposed to DMCA: EFF $3.4 million, Creative Commons $3.7 million, others probably no more than $10 million.
$30,000 million > $17 million. See, they have a clear majority!
What they ask you also has a lot to do with how serious the case was and who the judge was. For instance, when I got called for a felonious assault case, I was given treatment similar to what the parent described - What do you do for a living, do you know any of these people, etc. The defense council also got to ask some questions, and I had to explain why I enjoyed Law and Order (namely, it allows an examination of social issues using the police and courts as a way to do that). I raised some eyebrows when I affirmed rather than swore in as well, but that didn't boot me off the jury.
However, down the hall, they were giving jurors the third degree. That made total sense, because the trial was a prominent first-degree murder case.
While I agree with you as far as that goes, you still have to make a distinction between a kid that's "troubled", and a kid that's homicidal on the level of mass murder. The latter is going to be dangerous in any environment, and will be motivated enough to find a way to kill people, guns or no.
That's the second part of my argument. Assume homicidal kid is trying to find a way to kill people without a gun.
Now, as you mentioned, they might be able to build a bomb. But building a bomb without mom, dad, a neighbor, or the police noticing is going to be pretty difficult. So the homicidal kid gets caught, and ends up unable to carry out his plan.
So maybe he's not going to build a bomb, but goes after people with a sword or crossbow or something. Well, in that case, the kid gets to his target, pulls out his weapon, and everyone has a good chance of escaping his attack. He might kill one or two people who were nearby, but he'll have a much harder time killing a lot of people because his weapons have a shorter range (in the case of melee weapons) or much longer reload time (in the case of projectiles). So in this case, the homicidal kid hurts or kills a few people, but 2-3 on the deck is better than 15-25 people down.
If I were proposing regulations on guns in homes with kids, I'd go with the same sort of practices that some gun owners do already: If parents / guardians aren't around, guns stay locked up and unloaded, with the ammunition locked in a separate location. Kids only get to handle guns with permission and supervision. These kind of regs would go a long way towards preventing the "6-year-old playing with gun shoots his best friend" kind of scenarios as well as the much less common "homicidal kid takes parent's gun, goes on shooting rampage" situation.
Loaded guns, in fact, because an unloaded gun isn't much use if someone's breaking into your house.
Just because the gun is unloaded doesn't mean that the invader knows it's unloaded. In a lot of homeowner-stops-invader stories (and even in some military situations), just brandishing the gun is enough to send the bad guy running.
If you really want to catch a liar (particularly in written stuff), get somebody who was trained well in the study of history. That's because history is all about figuring out what actually happened based off of faulty documents. Great historians not only know how to look through dusty archives, they also know how to use the information in those dusty archives and sort out who's telling the truth, who's lying, who's wrong and in what way, who's telling fish stories, and ultimately put together a description of events that match what probably happened.
The one place that C programming and the like will help is when people are lying to you with faulty logic and / or faulty math.
I Am Not A Lawyer, but the Constitution is pretty darn clear about this: You always have the right to refuse to incriminate yourself. Period. End of story. A good example of this: An officer pulls over a citizen and asks "Do you know how fast you were going?" - the citizen does not have to answer, even though they are not under arrest and have not been informed of their rights. (I haven't been pulled over very often, but my answer to that question is "What did you clock me at?" as calmly and politely as I can muster.)
The point of Miranda is that in certain police-citizen encounters, the Supreme Court requires that the police give the citizen a quick lesson in their constitutional rights in order for the evidence obtained in that encounter to be legally admissible. But the rights are always there, whether the police tell you about them or not.
Franken might be against the whole damned thing, but in favor of putting in the amendment because he thinks the entire bill will likely pass and he wants to make it suck less.
And the whole point of the amendment is that TOS violations won't be a felony.
Oh, you mean like gcc has been doing since basically forever?
I'm not saying this isn't good, it clearly is, but it highlights a difference between open source tooling and closed tooling: Both gcc and Microsoft's compilers need to be able to show their own developers the internals in order for them to write good compilers. Because gcc was open source, though, they could build this in a way that made it available to their user base, whereas Microsoft had to hide or remove theirs before shipping.
Parenting makes the difference. Taking guns out of the equation just means that Junior Sociopath will start googling "fertilizer explosive".
It's far easier for a troubled kid to pick up, say, dad's irresponsibly handled guns, than it is for that same kid to build a fertilizer explosive capable of doing significant damage completely undetected.
No reasonable person would argue that "kid can't get a gun" implies "kid can't hurt or kill anyone". There's a big difference between that (flawed) argument and the argument that "kid can't get a gun" means "kid more likely to be caught before he hurts or kills someone" and "kid able to kill or hurt fewer people than if he had a gun".
I don't claim that children without a gun don't kill themselves or stab others with knifes, yet it seems striking to me that the violent crimes (aka "running amok") by children (and probably also adults) are so violent because they have one or more guns. At least to me as a non-violent layman from Europe it seems much easier to shoot a dozen classmates than to club them to death or stab them.
The counterargument from most pro-gun folks in the US is that if one bad guy opens fire, all the good guys can shoot back and stop him more easily.
This isn't born out by reality. In fact, most mass shootings in the US are stopped by the gunman being tackled and taken down by non-lethal force. For instance, when Jared Loughner shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and kept firing, there were people armed with guns and military training in the area, and not one of them opened fire on Loughner (citing reasons like the risk of hitting people other than the target and the police not knowing who the bad guy was if they had started shooting).
Nowadays, whenever somebody sues the government, particularly those agencies that deal with military or law enforcement, for breaking its own laws, the executive branch just says "National security requires we can't reveal the information that would allow us to defend this case" and the judiciary is happy to throw out the suit. This response seems to be true even if the information in question was previously on the front page of major newspaper, and the only reason the executive is claiming the "state secrets" privilege is because it's plainly guilty.
It's not the fault of all federal judges, because all this kind of thing requires is 5 SCOTUS judges willing to go along with it.
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We need real protest. We don't need empty gestures and symbolic marches. We need action. We need rioting, and yes, even outright violence. The system is hostile toward us, why not repay the favor?
Here's the problem with that sort of approach: Rioting and violence makes it easier to portray the protesters as a bunch of anarchist malcontents who will happily invade your home and take your stuff. And it doesn't even take a huge percentage of protesters to create that impression - during the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle approximately 1000 people at most engaged in violence and looting, and yet that is the popular memory, if there is any memory at all, of those protests.
The reason Egypt and Tunisia worked, and to some degree Wisconsin worked, were because the protesters were not prepared to continue protesting, all day, every day, until their demands were met. The Occupy Wall St effort was a 1-day affair - it happened, everyone went home, they could be safely ignored. Much harder to ignore is thousands of people protesting every single day from 7 AM to 7 PM.
So this is what's actually needed, if you want to really get things going in New York and elsewhere:
1. Wait for Washington to force unemployment benefits to run out, as the Republicans seem intent on doing.
2. Offer free food and shelter to anyone coming to New York to protest at Wall St (or Washington DC to protest at the Mall or the Pentagon).
3. Wait for the crowd of malcontented, malnourished, homeless unemployed people to show up. Give them signs, demands, chants etc to start off with.
4. Sustain the effort for as long as it takes.
The example I typically bring up in these kinds of discussions: In 2003, in anticipation of the start of the Iraq War, peaceniks worldwide organized protests that involved (depending on which source you believe) 5-10 million people, meaning that something like 1 out of every 1000 people in the world were protesting that day. These protests are nearly forgotten. Similarly unreported were the facts that public polls on the Iraq War favor immediate withdrawal by a 20% margin for 5 years, and more recently have developed a similar pattern on the Afghanistan War.
Noam Chomsky isn't right about everything, but on the idea that corporate-owned media leads to pro-corporate biases he's right on the money. Particularly when the most "liberal" of the major news outlets is owned by General Electric, which profits handsomely from defense contracts.
Which is exactly why products of intellect (of which patents are a sub group) should immutably be attached to the mind that created them. ... the above only applies if there, actually, exist patents.
If it's in the public domain, anybody can use it for anything they want. To take it out of the realm of software for a moment, consider the design of the humble wire paper clip.
If you open a box of generic paper clips, you will most likely find a design known as the "Gem" clip with long sides, rounded ends, and an extra rounded end inside. That design was created in 1894, and never patented by anybody (instead, a particular machine to make them was patented). That meant that it was and remains perfectly legal for anybody to bend a wire in that particular configuration to make paper clips. And when the
By contrast, some of its competitors were patented, which meant that if somebody just happened to bend a wire in that particular configuration in order to keep their papers together, they could be sued. It's no surprise then, that only the original company ever made those styles of paper clips, and while you can find some of those designs still in use, they're far less common.
What that means for a do-it-yourself creator of paper clips is that he's far safer in a world without patents, where he can bend wire in any way he likes without being sued. Since Free Software is all about combining the efforts by a huge number of do-it-yourself efforts, it too is much better off in a world without patents.
Very few wars have ever really been about liberty, even though they were fought in the name of liberty. Even if we limit ourselves to just major US wars:
* The American Revolution was largely a dispute about taxes, and also a distraction about an economic downturn that was causing significant starvation problems.
* The War of 1812 was about merchants not getting their ships to their destinations because their sailors were getting press-ganged into the British Navy (Also, the US basically lost that one).
* The Indian Wars were all about taking land by force.
* The Mexican-American War and the related War for Texas Independence were about taking land by force.
* The Civil War was arguably an exception for the Union rank-and-file, but for high command it started out as more a matter of economics and national authority and only became (for most) about freeing slaves after folks like General Sherman pointed out that the slaves were a major military asset in the Confederacy. For the Confederates, on the other hand, it was all about money, because slaves were a major investment.
* imperialist conflicts in 1890-1910 - These were all about ensuring cheap and easy access to markets by multinational corporations.
* World War I - protecting 2 of the more important trading partners and military allies of the United States.
* World War II - pretty much the same story, with Nationalist China thrown in as well. Stopping the Holocaust was not a big priority for high command (no special effort was made to target, say, rail lines to Dachau), nor was stopping the various massacres by the Japanese in the 1930's (we didn't do anything of significance about them).
* Cold War - Access to foreign markets and resources was basically the name of the game. The US was quite pro-dictator so long as they were our dictators.
* Vietnam War - rubber plantations
* Gulf War - oil in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
* Iraq War - oil in Iraq.
* Afghanistan War - oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea region to the Indian Ocean.
* although not major, the Libya War as about Muammar Gaddafi asking for a higher price for Libya's oil than the major oil companies wanted to pay.
* As far as the more general War on Terror is concerned, if you think it's about liberty, read the USA Patriot Act.
I assume you're referring to Ron Paul here, but you're somewhat wrong about the idea that the only opposition to war comes from libertarians. Among others, you can point to Ron Paul's frequent Democratic ally on stopping wars, Dennis Kucinich - he's staunchly anti-war, and staunchly pro-welfare, and polls about as well nationally as Ron Paul.
Almost every ordinary person buys all the stuff they need using income from work that has been taxed, and in most states pay a sales tax of some kind. The corporation they bought the item from was also taxed in various ways, and some of that cost (not all of it - read about Tax incidence) gets factored into the price, making the price higher than it would be without the taxes. And if whatever that person bought improves the value of their property, they'll get taxed again via their local property tax. And so on. The same dollars basically get taxed almost every time they change hands.
For some reason, though, the concept of "double taxation" only comes up when talking about taxing investments. Which suggests the objection is not really to taxing the same money twice (which would inevitably happen if there's more than 1 kind of tax in existence), but rather either (a) paying any kind of tax at all (a much more common position than you might think), or (b) really rich people paying taxes at all (which probably was why some think tank guy game up with "double taxation" in the first place). I simply see it as yet another expression of this gem by John Cleese in How to Irritate People:
The rich don't say "We want more money." They say "This increased taxation is reducing personal incentive."
Short version of your argument seems to be: If the bad guys has some BS patent guns, we need to have some too. There are 3 major problems with that:
1. If you use the tactics of the force you oppose, you become identical to the force you oppose. If everybody starts charging for Linux, instead of a free software ecosystem where everyone is freely giving stuff away, you have a system which, just like the proprietary world, is pay-to-play. Plus there will be endless infighting about who actually gets to own the patents, who gets the money, who ends up suing who, which consumers give money to which player, whether Debian can continue to give its stuff away even if Mandriva is charging $10 for it, etc. In other words, the Unix Wars all over again.
2. We're never going to win by opposing Microsoft or other proprietary software vendors using the same methods and tactics as they do. They have billions of dollars, thousands of patents, and lots of lawyers, and they will move quickly to prevent any effort like this from getting off the ground. Let's say you create your Linux Patent Consortium, which is a completely unified body organized on the principles you describe. They get a few patents, Microsoft realizes what they're up to and sues them out of existence, forcing them to sell of their patents to pay the damages. When opposing a force that's much more powerful than you, you have to use guerrilla tactics, which means appearing as amorphous and disorganized as possible.
3. If you have a unified consortium, with enough patents to be dangerous, but it's any kind of open election process, you will see Microsoft use its allies like Intel and it's sagans of dollars to get on the ballot and crush the organization from within, and then create proprietary alternatives that appear to be the same but are really quite different. How do we know? OLPC, that's how.
As Peter Gibbons explains:
Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late. I use the side door, that way Lumbergh can't see me. Uh, and after that, I just sorta space out for about an hour. I just stare at my desk but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too. I'd probably, say, in a given week, I probably do about fifteen minutes of real, actual work.
Although the bit about how many soldiers fire during combat might have something to do with many people's general moral revulsion in killing other people, not so much laziness.
The amusing piece of flawed logic appears to be the idea (very very common in the popular and business press) of thinking that a bug that nobody knows about is a bug that doesn't exist. It's the logical equivalent of assuming that if you can't see it, it can't see you.
Exactly what problem does putting the contents of your wallet in your phone solve? Maybe it's just me, but a physical wallet is hardly a great burden to be carrying around, given it's an object sizing somewhere around 12 cm x 10 cm x 1 cm and weighing well under 1 kg.
See, that's my definition of "progress": Using technology and knowledge to solve a demonstrable problem. If you haven't solved a problem, all you've done is created Yet Another Payment System.
William Shatner thinks the work he's done far outweighs the work of, say, Harrison Ford.
Well, not exactly - Cuba gets the best bang for the buck, but in terms of patient outcomes the World Health Organization thinks France has the best health care system in the world. The US, by contrast, ranks 37th, and Cuba 39th, despite Cuba spending a fraction of what the US does per capita.
The US government has an electronic currency: US Dollars. Most dollars exist as simply numbers in a database somewhere in a bank, and many transactions involve only the transfer of electronic information (like account / routing numbers or credit card numbers). Whether you're talking point-of-sale or online, all transactions go through a bunch of middlemen, each of whom take a fee for their services.
All that these efforts to create a 'virtual wallet' do is change the list of middlemen involved to include whichever tech company owns the wallet. The value proposition to merchants is pretty much nil (Why spend the money to accommodate Google, Microsoft, etc if I can just ask them to use a credit card?). The value proposition is less than nil for the customer: They might be able to pay for things slightly more easily, but they're trusting their money to a business that is not regulated like a bank, and any virtual wallet that they can easily empty, a thief can also easily empty.
Yo mamma is so fat that she was mistaken for a naked gas giant!
This one:
Profits of big 4 media companies: Disney $4.6 billion, GE $15.6 billion, News Corp $3.7 billion, Time Warner $2.5 billion, Viacom $0.8 billion, CBS $3 billion for a total of about $30 billion.
Non-profits opposed to DMCA: EFF $3.4 million, Creative Commons $3.7 million, others probably no more than $10 million.
$30,000 million > $17 million. See, they have a clear majority!
What they ask you also has a lot to do with how serious the case was and who the judge was. For instance, when I got called for a felonious assault case, I was given treatment similar to what the parent described - What do you do for a living, do you know any of these people, etc. The defense council also got to ask some questions, and I had to explain why I enjoyed Law and Order (namely, it allows an examination of social issues using the police and courts as a way to do that). I raised some eyebrows when I affirmed rather than swore in as well, but that didn't boot me off the jury.
However, down the hall, they were giving jurors the third degree. That made total sense, because the trial was a prominent first-degree murder case.
That can't be right: I was able to understand everything he wrote without using an interpreter.
But seriously, I'm glad he's OK, because there are about 100 people that are not.
While I agree with you as far as that goes, you still have to make a distinction between a kid that's "troubled", and a kid that's homicidal on the level of mass murder. The latter is going to be dangerous in any environment, and will be motivated enough to find a way to kill people, guns or no.
That's the second part of my argument. Assume homicidal kid is trying to find a way to kill people without a gun.
Now, as you mentioned, they might be able to build a bomb. But building a bomb without mom, dad, a neighbor, or the police noticing is going to be pretty difficult. So the homicidal kid gets caught, and ends up unable to carry out his plan.
So maybe he's not going to build a bomb, but goes after people with a sword or crossbow or something. Well, in that case, the kid gets to his target, pulls out his weapon, and everyone has a good chance of escaping his attack. He might kill one or two people who were nearby, but he'll have a much harder time killing a lot of people because his weapons have a shorter range (in the case of melee weapons) or much longer reload time (in the case of projectiles). So in this case, the homicidal kid hurts or kills a few people, but 2-3 on the deck is better than 15-25 people down.
If I were proposing regulations on guns in homes with kids, I'd go with the same sort of practices that some gun owners do already: If parents / guardians aren't around, guns stay locked up and unloaded, with the ammunition locked in a separate location. Kids only get to handle guns with permission and supervision. These kind of regs would go a long way towards preventing the "6-year-old playing with gun shoots his best friend" kind of scenarios as well as the much less common "homicidal kid takes parent's gun, goes on shooting rampage" situation.
Loaded guns, in fact, because an unloaded gun isn't much use if someone's breaking into your house.
Just because the gun is unloaded doesn't mean that the invader knows it's unloaded. In a lot of homeowner-stops-invader stories (and even in some military situations), just brandishing the gun is enough to send the bad guy running.
If you really want to catch a liar (particularly in written stuff), get somebody who was trained well in the study of history. That's because history is all about figuring out what actually happened based off of faulty documents. Great historians not only know how to look through dusty archives, they also know how to use the information in those dusty archives and sort out who's telling the truth, who's lying, who's wrong and in what way, who's telling fish stories, and ultimately put together a description of events that match what probably happened.
The one place that C programming and the like will help is when people are lying to you with faulty logic and / or faulty math.
I Am Not A Lawyer, but the Constitution is pretty darn clear about this: You always have the right to refuse to incriminate yourself. Period. End of story. A good example of this: An officer pulls over a citizen and asks "Do you know how fast you were going?" - the citizen does not have to answer, even though they are not under arrest and have not been informed of their rights. (I haven't been pulled over very often, but my answer to that question is "What did you clock me at?" as calmly and politely as I can muster.)
The point of Miranda is that in certain police-citizen encounters, the Supreme Court requires that the police give the citizen a quick lesson in their constitutional rights in order for the evidence obtained in that encounter to be legally admissible. But the rights are always there, whether the police tell you about them or not.
Franken might be against the whole damned thing, but in favor of putting in the amendment because he thinks the entire bill will likely pass and he wants to make it suck less.
And the whole point of the amendment is that TOS violations won't be a felony.
Oh, you mean like gcc has been doing since basically forever?
I'm not saying this isn't good, it clearly is, but it highlights a difference between open source tooling and closed tooling: Both gcc and Microsoft's compilers need to be able to show their own developers the internals in order for them to write good compilers. Because gcc was open source, though, they could build this in a way that made it available to their user base, whereas Microsoft had to hide or remove theirs before shipping.
Parenting makes the difference. Taking guns out of the equation just means that Junior Sociopath will start googling "fertilizer explosive".
It's far easier for a troubled kid to pick up, say, dad's irresponsibly handled guns, than it is for that same kid to build a fertilizer explosive capable of doing significant damage completely undetected.
No reasonable person would argue that "kid can't get a gun" implies "kid can't hurt or kill anyone". There's a big difference between that (flawed) argument and the argument that "kid can't get a gun" means "kid more likely to be caught before he hurts or kills someone" and "kid able to kill or hurt fewer people than if he had a gun".
I don't claim that children without a gun don't kill themselves or stab others with knifes, yet it seems striking to me that the violent crimes (aka "running amok") by children (and probably also adults) are so violent because they have one or more guns. At least to me as a non-violent layman from Europe it seems much easier to shoot a dozen classmates than to club them to death or stab them.
The counterargument from most pro-gun folks in the US is that if one bad guy opens fire, all the good guys can shoot back and stop him more easily.
This isn't born out by reality. In fact, most mass shootings in the US are stopped by the gunman being tackled and taken down by non-lethal force. For instance, when Jared Loughner shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and kept firing, there were people armed with guns and military training in the area, and not one of them opened fire on Loughner (citing reasons like the risk of hitting people other than the target and the police not knowing who the bad guy was if they had started shooting).
Nowadays, whenever somebody sues the government, particularly those agencies that deal with military or law enforcement, for breaking its own laws, the executive branch just says "National security requires we can't reveal the information that would allow us to defend this case" and the judiciary is happy to throw out the suit. This response seems to be true even if the information in question was previously on the front page of major newspaper, and the only reason the executive is claiming the "state secrets" privilege is because it's plainly guilty.
It's not the fault of all federal judges, because all this kind of thing requires is 5 SCOTUS judges willing to go along with it.