The fact is he'll save a hell of a lot more lives giving out those tickets. He could chase down felons seeking out guns everytime it happens for 10 years and not prevent the number of deaths and injuries that occur on a major highway in a month.
Maybe, and it depends on the locality. Around where I live, largely because we have a demographic whose age skews towards the 70s and 80s, far fewer people are hurt or die from speeding than are injured/killed on surface streets and other local roads because people don't observe traffic signals and/or pull out into traffic without looking. I've watched the police sit in the aforementioned median clocking people and totally ignore someone blowing a red light a couple hundred feet away within sight of the officer, and I can name at least five intersections in my town where if they chose to focus their enforcement there, the police could write at least 5 citations per hour just for that. On the nearby interstate, we have about 2-3 fatal accidents per month in my county. The overwhelming cause? Not speeding, but performing lane changes without due care, drunken driving, and inattentiveness. Abuse of speeding citations for revenue generation got to be so bad in my state that the legislature changed the law such that speeding up to 5 mph over the limit is not legally ticketable, and up to 9 mph only carries a $25 fine, with a $100 fine at 10 mph over.
Felonies are generally considered to be much more serious crimes than civil infractions, yet in this case the priority is reversed. If the crime is truly serious and detrimental enough to society to be considered a felony, then IMO it either needs to be investigated and prosecuted with the effort appropriate to a felony, or it needs to *not be* a felony.
Anytime, and happy Friday right back! The reason the cheaper presses sometimes have a mechanical joint (threads and such) is because it costs more to properly mill/grind the socket and arbor to the tolerances needed to allow a decent enough friction fit while keeping runout to a minimum. I got lucky - I've never measured it, but from the store with no mods, my cheap Skil press at home had runout that's low enough and a straight enough pull where I can do holes with a solid 0.5mm carbide bit into 2mm fiberglass PCBs all day long, and the only bit I've broken in the six years I've had it was one that I dropped onto the workbench.
The arbor fits into the spindle socket with a friction fit where the socket grips the arbor hard enough to hold it in place against gravity. Positive longitudinal forces (like normal drilling) are no problem because that's effectively pushing against the arbor into the socket. However, it's still a friction fit with no fasteners, and the arbor will still come out fairly easily (if properly installed) when pulled down with any degree of force (like using a wedge or pickle fork) because it's tapered and designed to work like that. The chuck is solidly attached to the arbor, so if the arbor comes loose out of the socket while it's spinning at a couple thousand RPM, the whole assembly will likely end up going someplace unpredictable at a high rate of speed.
If there's a substantial force pulling down on the bit (like raising the bit while you're milling sideways into something, or your arbor or socket isn't very smooth and encounters a side load that allows the arbor to tip a bit), there's a possibility of pulling the arbor and chuck loose because they're designed to come apart when pulled on. Some cheaper drill presses have the chuck directly mounted to the spindle, and some have arbors that screw into the socket at the top - these won't come apart, but unless you've taken your press apart and know that's how it's constructed, it's better to be safe than sorry. Drill presses aren't particularly rigid in comparison to a mill anyway, so even if it won't come apart, you still will get better performance from a mill.
That's true if you (as the FFL) acquired it with the intent of selling it to "the United States or any department or agency thereof or a State, or a department, agency, or political subdivision thereof". You can also possess a post-1986 select-fire weapon if you bought it from your local police department or other government agency that legally acquired it, but both situations are extreme edge cases.
The NICS system allows for blocking thousands of requests all over the map every day. Following up would require the handful of federal agents to manually investigate.
It would help if local law enforcement picked up some of the slack, since most (if not all) states have laws allowing them to arrest people for federal offenses. If someone lies on their 4473 and says they're not a felon when in fact they are, that in itself is a federal felony, but it's almost never prosecuted. I think it'd be a much better use of local tax dollars to have a county deputy that spends his day going by gun shops to check this kind of thing out, instead of sitting in his car in the highway median clocking people and writing a ticket every 20 minutes. Of course, one activity brings money in and the other one doesn't, so....
It isn't wise to push too far under a 'right' that vanishes the instant a BATFE agent doesn't buy it.
Which brings up another point - if you're going to do something illegal, keep your mouth shut if you want to stay out of jail. Don't be bragging to God and everyone about how you got one over on "the man".
It's this component that, for example, cannot be mailed directly to from a seller to an unlicensed buyer across state lines, and requires buyers undergo a NICS "background check".
As a completed part, yes. With no ATF involvement whatsoever, you can still buy a lower receiver that's 80% complete and only requires a little bit of time with cheap tools at home to finish. You just can't sell it to anyone without stamping a serial number on it and filling out the appropriate ATF paperwork.
And for the price of a finished high-end AR-15 lookalike, you can buy yourself an old (but still quite functional) Bridgeport or other big, solid knee mill, and make whatever you want out of a solid piece of brass, steel, or whatever your tooling can handle. Your point is well taken - people have been making stuff in their home shops since forever, and used mills and lathes (even multi-axis CNC) are quite easy to come by nowadays for a surprisingly little amount of money. Aside from making stuff that will send you to jail, turning a plain block of aluminum or steel into something useful is *way* fun.
I wouldn't try to do any milling with a drill press, though - the press isn't designed to handle lateral loads, and it's happened more than once where someone milling on their press was surprised when the arbor suddenly came loose and the chuck went flying across the room.
It's less that full auto/select fire is illegal, you just have to pay tax and license for such.
As long as it was manufactured before May 19, 1986. If it was made after that, then it's illegal to possess at all under 18 USC 922(o). This single change in law is why a beat-to-hell, non-functional full-auto MP5 will still set you back $25K or so.
i do but its not always available even at a higher cost. and cost is part of the real equation.
This is something I often run into. For example, take the ubiquitous smart RGB LEDs like the WS2812 or APA102. They're great little devices that cost 15 cents or so and very useful for a lot of applications, but no one in the U.S. makes a comparable product at even 10 times the price, so you kinda *have* to get them from China if you want addressable RGB blinkenlights that fit in a 5050 form factor. TI makes some RGB controller chips, but they're not nearly as flexible or capable and don't have the controller and LEDs in a single package.
It may be because the Chinese companies have patents on them in the U.S., but that brings up another problem - in the U.S., intellectual property on such things is usually respected because the courts will smack you down if you don't. In China, it's a free-for-all (despite their government saying otherwise), with outright counterfeits (complete with counterfeit branding) being allowed to be imported into the U.S. You can't compete with that kind of tilted playing field.
To expand on this, it's ridiculously cheap and easy to build a propane or charcoal-fired crucible that will readily melt aluminum at temperatures substantially higher than what's needed here. As you point out, the difficulty is not the temperature, but in handling the required pressures.
Does Facetime require agreement to the EULA before using it - i.e., does it pop a dialog up the first time you run it? I genuinely don't know, since I don't have an iPhone.
If I had to it to do over again, I'd advocate for a *penalty* for negilgent in addition to damages of the greater of treble damages or $1,000. Reckless notices would have a greater penalty, perhaps $10,000 or 5X damages.
I'm in agreement that it's not so much a penalty as "making the unfairly accused whole". To the suggestions you made (and in the spirit of what the OP I responded to said), I would also add that a reckless/negligent notice (or a false accusation that can be proven to be a deliberate action and not an actual mistake) should be considered a federal felony, with appropriate fines and/or prison time. Yeah, that's kind of harsh, but it needs to be as a strong discouragement to make unfounded or malicious DMCA filings.
Understood, but like I said, the existing penalties can't even come into play without first notifying the service that the takedown was in error in the manner that's prescribed in the DMCA. Very few people do that.
The DMCA provides for anyone hit by a false claim to be entitled to "any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it." ( 17 USC 512(f)(2) ).
The primary problem as I see it isn't that there's no penalty, but rather that it's not enforced. The government is quick to bring the hammer down on infringers, but getting them to enforce the *rest* of the DMCA is often an exercise in frustration. Having said that, the DMCA also requires that the service provider's designated agent be notified (IN WRITING, and in a rather specific way) that the takedown notice was not valid before the government will do anything, and many people don't take that necessary step. In fairness though, YouTube doesn't make it particularly easy to do that.
For anyone that may be interested, YouTube's designated agent is:
Copyright Operations YouTube, LLC 901 Cherry Ave San Bruno, CA 94066 Phone: 650-214-3010 Email: copyright@youtube.com
Other U.S. designated agents can be found here. Click on "Search the Directory" at the top right of the page. Per 17 USC 512(g)(3), the required information is:
(A) A physical or electronic signature of the subscriber. (B) Identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or access to it was disabled. (C) A statement under penalty of perjury that the subscriber has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled. (D) The subscriber’s name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located, or if the subscriber’s address is outside of the United States, for any judicial district in which the service provider may be found, and that the subscriber will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person.
Nope, it was the Xerox Alto. The Lisa and Mac UIs owe an awful lot to the tour that Xerox foolishly gave to Apple in 1979, and consequently Apple popularized the desktop metaphor years before NeXT was even a twinkle in Job's eye.
And this is why I don't sign them in the first place, even if they're clearly unenforceable. The ex-employee would have a pretty good case for a tortious interference suit against the first employer if he could prove that happened and the non-compete was unenforceable, but that costs money, and in legal matters especially, proving yourself right can involve bankrupting yourself in the process. Even if he could afford the suit, it's easy to get a judgment, but often a lot harder to collect on it.
Slashdot Mirror
s/crimes/offenses
Civil infractions aren't crimes, I know. :-)
The fact is he'll save a hell of a lot more lives giving out those tickets. He could chase down felons seeking out guns everytime it happens for 10 years and not prevent the number of deaths and injuries that occur on a major highway in a month.
Maybe, and it depends on the locality. Around where I live, largely because we have a demographic whose age skews towards the 70s and 80s, far fewer people are hurt or die from speeding than are injured/killed on surface streets and other local roads because people don't observe traffic signals and/or pull out into traffic without looking. I've watched the police sit in the aforementioned median clocking people and totally ignore someone blowing a red light a couple hundred feet away within sight of the officer, and I can name at least five intersections in my town where if they chose to focus their enforcement there, the police could write at least 5 citations per hour just for that. On the nearby interstate, we have about 2-3 fatal accidents per month in my county. The overwhelming cause? Not speeding, but performing lane changes without due care, drunken driving, and inattentiveness. Abuse of speeding citations for revenue generation got to be so bad in my state that the legislature changed the law such that speeding up to 5 mph over the limit is not legally ticketable, and up to 9 mph only carries a $25 fine, with a $100 fine at 10 mph over.
Felonies are generally considered to be much more serious crimes than civil infractions, yet in this case the priority is reversed. If the crime is truly serious and detrimental enough to society to be considered a felony, then IMO it either needs to be investigated and prosecuted with the effort appropriate to a felony, or it needs to *not be* a felony.
That should read "turn/grind" instead of "mill/grind", but I've been up since 3am yesterday morning. :-/
Anytime, and happy Friday right back! The reason the cheaper presses sometimes have a mechanical joint (threads and such) is because it costs more to properly mill/grind the socket and arbor to the tolerances needed to allow a decent enough friction fit while keeping runout to a minimum. I got lucky - I've never measured it, but from the store with no mods, my cheap Skil press at home had runout that's low enough and a straight enough pull where I can do holes with a solid 0.5mm carbide bit into 2mm fiberglass PCBs all day long, and the only bit I've broken in the six years I've had it was one that I dropped onto the workbench.
The arbor fits into the spindle socket with a friction fit where the socket grips the arbor hard enough to hold it in place against gravity. Positive longitudinal forces (like normal drilling) are no problem because that's effectively pushing against the arbor into the socket. However, it's still a friction fit with no fasteners, and the arbor will still come out fairly easily (if properly installed) when pulled down with any degree of force (like using a wedge or pickle fork) because it's tapered and designed to work like that. The chuck is solidly attached to the arbor, so if the arbor comes loose out of the socket while it's spinning at a couple thousand RPM, the whole assembly will likely end up going someplace unpredictable at a high rate of speed.
If there's a substantial force pulling down on the bit (like raising the bit while you're milling sideways into something, or your arbor or socket isn't very smooth and encounters a side load that allows the arbor to tip a bit), there's a possibility of pulling the arbor and chuck loose because they're designed to come apart when pulled on. Some cheaper drill presses have the chuck directly mounted to the spindle, and some have arbors that screw into the socket at the top - these won't come apart, but unless you've taken your press apart and know that's how it's constructed, it's better to be safe than sorry. Drill presses aren't particularly rigid in comparison to a mill anyway, so even if it won't come apart, you still will get better performance from a mill.
That's true if you (as the FFL) acquired it with the intent of selling it to "the United States or any department or agency thereof or a State, or a department, agency, or political subdivision thereof". You can also possess a post-1986 select-fire weapon if you bought it from your local police department or other government agency that legally acquired it, but both situations are extreme edge cases.
The NICS system allows for blocking thousands of requests all over the map every day. Following up would require the handful of federal agents to manually investigate.
It would help if local law enforcement picked up some of the slack, since most (if not all) states have laws allowing them to arrest people for federal offenses. If someone lies on their 4473 and says they're not a felon when in fact they are, that in itself is a federal felony, but it's almost never prosecuted. I think it'd be a much better use of local tax dollars to have a county deputy that spends his day going by gun shops to check this kind of thing out, instead of sitting in his car in the highway median clocking people and writing a ticket every 20 minutes. Of course, one activity brings money in and the other one doesn't, so....
It isn't wise to push too far under a 'right' that vanishes the instant a BATFE agent doesn't buy it.
Which brings up another point - if you're going to do something illegal, keep your mouth shut if you want to stay out of jail. Don't be bragging to God and everyone about how you got one over on "the man".
It's this component that, for example, cannot be mailed directly to from a seller to an unlicensed buyer across state lines, and requires buyers undergo a NICS "background check".
As a completed part, yes. With no ATF involvement whatsoever, you can still buy a lower receiver that's 80% complete and only requires a little bit of time with cheap tools at home to finish. You just can't sell it to anyone without stamping a serial number on it and filling out the appropriate ATF paperwork.
And for the price of a finished high-end AR-15 lookalike, you can buy yourself an old (but still quite functional) Bridgeport or other big, solid knee mill, and make whatever you want out of a solid piece of brass, steel, or whatever your tooling can handle. Your point is well taken - people have been making stuff in their home shops since forever, and used mills and lathes (even multi-axis CNC) are quite easy to come by nowadays for a surprisingly little amount of money. Aside from making stuff that will send you to jail, turning a plain block of aluminum or steel into something useful is *way* fun.
I wouldn't try to do any milling with a drill press, though - the press isn't designed to handle lateral loads, and it's happened more than once where someone milling on their press was surprised when the arbor suddenly came loose and the chuck went flying across the room.
It's less that full auto/select fire is illegal, you just have to pay tax and license for such.
As long as it was manufactured before May 19, 1986. If it was made after that, then it's illegal to possess at all under 18 USC 922(o). This single change in law is why a beat-to-hell, non-functional full-auto MP5 will still set you back $25K or so.
And Vista, but both Vista and 7 would let you go back to the Win2K UI if you wanted.
i do but its not always available even at a higher cost. and cost is part of the real equation.
This is something I often run into. For example, take the ubiquitous smart RGB LEDs like the WS2812 or APA102. They're great little devices that cost 15 cents or so and very useful for a lot of applications, but no one in the U.S. makes a comparable product at even 10 times the price, so you kinda *have* to get them from China if you want addressable RGB blinkenlights that fit in a 5050 form factor. TI makes some RGB controller chips, but they're not nearly as flexible or capable and don't have the controller and LEDs in a single package.
It may be because the Chinese companies have patents on them in the U.S., but that brings up another problem - in the U.S., intellectual property on such things is usually respected because the courts will smack you down if you don't. In China, it's a free-for-all (despite their government saying otherwise), with outright counterfeits (complete with counterfeit branding) being allowed to be imported into the U.S. You can't compete with that kind of tilted playing field.
To expand on this, it's ridiculously cheap and easy to build a propane or charcoal-fired crucible that will readily melt aluminum at temperatures substantially higher than what's needed here. As you point out, the difficulty is not the temperature, but in handling the required pressures.
Yeah, really. Government interference is bad! (unless it's government cash coming our way...)
And an even bigger difference when cheating paying customers after having been given billions in subsidies by those same customers.
Does Facetime require agreement to the EULA before using it - i.e., does it pop a dialog up the first time you run it? I genuinely don't know, since I don't have an iPhone.
If I had to it to do over again, I'd advocate for a *penalty* for negilgent in addition to damages of the greater of treble damages or $1,000. Reckless notices would have a greater penalty, perhaps $10,000 or 5X damages.
I'm in agreement that it's not so much a penalty as "making the unfairly accused whole". To the suggestions you made (and in the spirit of what the OP I responded to said), I would also add that a reckless/negligent notice (or a false accusation that can be proven to be a deliberate action and not an actual mistake) should be considered a federal felony, with appropriate fines and/or prison time. Yeah, that's kind of harsh, but it needs to be as a strong discouragement to make unfounded or malicious DMCA filings.
Understood, but like I said, the existing penalties can't even come into play without first notifying the service that the takedown was in error in the manner that's prescribed in the DMCA. Very few people do that.
The DMCA provides for anyone hit by a false claim to be entitled to "any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it." ( 17 USC 512(f)(2) ).
The primary problem as I see it isn't that there's no penalty, but rather that it's not enforced. The government is quick to bring the hammer down on infringers, but getting them to enforce the *rest* of the DMCA is often an exercise in frustration. Having said that, the DMCA also requires that the service provider's designated agent be notified (IN WRITING, and in a rather specific way) that the takedown notice was not valid before the government will do anything, and many people don't take that necessary step. In fairness though, YouTube doesn't make it particularly easy to do that.
For anyone that may be interested, YouTube's designated agent is:
Copyright Operations
YouTube, LLC
901 Cherry Ave
San Bruno, CA 94066
Phone: 650-214-3010
Email: copyright@youtube.com
Other U.S. designated agents can be found here. Click on "Search the Directory" at the top right of the page. Per 17 USC 512(g)(3), the required information is:
(A) A physical or electronic signature of the subscriber.
(B) Identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or access to it was disabled.
(C) A statement under penalty of perjury that the subscriber has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.
(D) The subscriber’s name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located, or if the subscriber’s address is outside of the United States, for any judicial district in which the service provider may be found, and that the subscriber will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person.
Nothing will ever top the Commodore 64 for ease of unpack box -> hello world.
The problem with the C64 comes when you need to load that code from a 1541. Might as well take a coffee break. ;-)
It happens, no worries. ;-)
Nope, it was the Xerox Alto. The Lisa and Mac UIs owe an awful lot to the tour that Xerox foolishly gave to Apple in 1979, and consequently Apple popularized the desktop metaphor years before NeXT was even a twinkle in Job's eye.
Just look at the class D amps that are on the market and targeted to audiophiles.
You'll probably find a much better price/performance ratio if you look at amps targeted towards studios and hi-fi PA applications.
And this is why I don't sign them in the first place, even if they're clearly unenforceable. The ex-employee would have a pretty good case for a tortious interference suit against the first employer if he could prove that happened and the non-compete was unenforceable, but that costs money, and in legal matters especially, proving yourself right can involve bankrupting yourself in the process. Even if he could afford the suit, it's easy to get a judgment, but often a lot harder to collect on it.