Firstly, they are not "machine guns" they are "assault carbine" and "assault rife" respectively, but you are right in that they are banned because of automatic fire, rather than the now defunct "assault weapon" criteria.
Secondly, most people with guns in the United States do not practice regularly either. But my suggestion that they actually get suitable militia weapons rather than useless dick surrogates like the Desert Eagle is (I believe) more palatable to the average American than actually going out for paramilitary training. Small steps, small steps.
Thirdly, modern infantry use M4 and M16 assault carbine/rifle and the M249 light machine gun that all shoot off the 5.56×45mm NATO round. They might have a designated marksman with a M14 battle rifle, or their machine gunner with an old M60, both firing 7.62×51mm NATO rounds, but it is rare these days, the case for comparable rounds is stronger in current military doctrine than the advantages of having different calibres for different roles. Furthermore there is a reason those two calibres have NATO in their names, because you need to share ammo with your allies too.
I have read the 14th amendment, especially section 1 that Slaughterhouse supposedly is based on. The clause "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." was, not only specifically meant in the context of slavery and reconstruction (the context that it emerged under), but "due process of the law" does not specifically exclude an elected body of the people legislating to restrict business practices.
I don't have to look up any 1787 definition of militias, in those days not even professional armies, let alone militias, had a standardised musket calibre, but well regulated then as is now, means something measured against the standards of the era. If you want a well regulated militia these days then the armaments should be standardised to allow easier servicing and pooling of ammunition, to be a credible tactical force. What is patently ridiculous is that the only practical US made light infantry arms, such as the M4 carbine and M16 rifle are banned as "assault weapons", while arms that are prohibited by the Geneva convention (shotguns), arms not suitable for non officers (pistols) and weapons not suitable for national defence (antique firearms) are obtainable. The Swiss are a great example of doing this correctly, they mandate that able bodied men keep and maintain a SIG SG 550 for militia duty since it is a fantastic infantry rifle, perfectly suitable for national defence and standardised to allow for practical battlefield servicing.
However, it seems now that second amendment means now "guns are fun and exciting, let us play with them" and fourteenth amendment means "states no longer have the power to compel people to do anything they don't want to do, 'cause you know, freedom and stuff".
Exactly, to apply federal rights (constitutional amendments) to former slaves and to provide full citizenship to the state where they resided. The court found rightly that federal rights were not abridged and this was not related to the original intent of the amendment (most of the claimants were not even black). Freedom in my mind involves drinking from water that isn't laden with offal, blood and shit, if my state needs to twist some business owner's arms to give me that, I'm no less free... in fact the word could do with a bit more of that.
Just because courts these days have taken to interpreting the constitution as widely as possible to over-rule any action by elected representitives that they don't agree with does not mean that is correct. I'm sure that some meat packing lobby would have made sure the judges found in the "right" way these days.
On the topic of constitutional law, I'm also curious by the way, when is the US government planning on regulating the "well regulated militia" that's been in the works for so long?
Slaughterhouse was the right decision. The 14th amendment merely means that all US citizens within a state have equal rights under state law, it does not mean that the states have no power to control what happens within their boundaries.
I'd be like the half-qualified director of NASA and would make this rousing as hell speech "do you want to be remembered as just some ordinary guy, or as the hero who flew a nuclear powered spaceship into the sun" and all of these cynical know it all guys would be like "you dumbass, you forgot to subtract Earth's orbital velocity from the Sun's escape velocity". And you'd be the promising young mathematician would would run to the front of mission control with a stack of paper and diagrams and be like "no, we need to launch this deadly broken nuclear spaceship at the moon first", then I'd smile and puff my cigar, knowing that everything would be awesome in the end.
OK, that all checks out, in truth I _had_ forgotten that I could subtract the earth's orbital velocity from the sun's escape velocity (also the spacecraft's orbital velocity, but that would work for both escape and de-orbit). So, I would like to change my position ever so slightly to say: "throwing something hazardous into the sun is awesome and _worth_ the extra deltaV".
So, I mention de-orbiting (WRT the Sun) something already IN earth orbit, then you add in the delta V to get into LEO _again_, clearly distorting the number to prove your point. Also, you suggest needing to go to zero, which is untrue, if something enters the corona it will be decelerated, the corona takes about 2 degrees of arc in the sky meaning an elliptical orbit will be just as good, which does not require zero orbital velocity.
Thus, the delta V to completely de-orbit from Earth's orbit is far lower than to escape the solar system. After de-orbiting, hitting the sun is quite easy, it just will tend to fall in.
My opinion is if this thing blows up, it will kill the crew and pollute an area of space millions of kilometres from anything I personally give a shit about. This is pretty much the same end result as if a chemical rocket blows up. Sounds like a fantastic application for nuclear, makes good use of what nuclear is good at (fuel energy density) while minimising what it is bad at.
I figure, presumably after the engine actually works and has been tested etc. we put this thing in orbit without any fuel, make sure it's an orbit that will stay stable for at least 20 years if something screws up. We then send up the fuel in small amounts, so if anything goes wrong, the amount of poisonous uranium or plutonium or whatever released is not going to kill whatever forest or reef or city etc it lands on.
Then if something goes like really bad, we fire up the partially fueled engine and fly it into the sun. If not, we complete the mission.
No, it is not. The members have already signed and ratified the provisions of the original treaty. Australia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Peru and US attend meetings but their status is that of being part of negotiations of the next treaty.
I'm sure Brunei, New Zealand and Singapore are already familiar enough with their fellow Commonwealth member to evaluate its merits without requiring the US to provide a character reference.
And it's always those who define themselves with words like "tolerance", "acceptance", "pluralism", "liberalism", etc. that seem to have the least tolerance towards those who they consider to be preaching against such things.
Personally, I think anyone who has strong and clear enough beliefs has the potential to rationalise themselves into a biggoted arsehole, nomatter what side of the political spectrum. That goes triple if you find yourself in a strong enough local majority.
Plenty of stuff I'd imagine. Slashdot's full of fanboys debating why the console they bought is the best, most people stick to one vendor for OS and cars, because their products feel right.
but everyone knows that the embedded skillset is somewhat more difficult to learn than applications programming
Interesting statement to make. Most embedded stuff I've worked on has been well under 30k lines of C/ASM, commercial applications generally start in the millions. Not to mention that an application runs in an unknown environment with limited possibility of getting better diagnostic information back than "the program crashed".
While most people do not have the skills to write a 3d engine, a high performance distributed database, an operating system or an optimising compiler, but most people are capable of writing simple programs to solve problems in the domain they work in. You'd be amazed what two economists I know can do with Excel + VBA. That doesn't turn them into career programmers, but it does make them into much, much more effective economists.
I agree with what you mean, but I also think that a huge problem in converting "hackers" to "professional software engineers" as you call it is that most of professional software engineering's most passionate proponents have a habit of writing really pompous sounding things like "Professional software engineers deliver business solutions". My suggestion would be to go straight for the ego:
To all you smart, brave and handsome young hackers fighting the battle out there, not only does writing legible code with appropriate comments lets others know how smart you are. If there is a small, easily fixable edge-case, but the other programmers can't read your code, they will think that you wrote it completely wrong and rewrite it with their own implementation, which might not be as good as yours. If your code is legible, they can make a one line change, without smearing it up with grubby fingers, take a few quick gasps at your greatness and move on to messing up someone else's code.
Well, NASA has two stations in Australia, one in Spain, one in Antarctica as well as Alaska, Guam, Hawaii and of course the continental US. Why would the Russians not have something in Vladivostok?
Customs are the arseholes that search you _after_ a 14 hour international flight. Air screening in Australia is not done by federal agents but conducted by the airport operators according to federal government regulations and policies.
Sales and marketing are like any other type of worker. Some are good, some are shitheads. Good ones can tell you what the customers want, what they need and even whether a design you propose will make the customers happy or not. Good ones know the product their selling, what it does, what it can't do and roughly what it could do with a little bit more work. Good ones can generally also go out and make money by persuading customers that might need your product that they need your product, without restorting to lying about functionality. Bad ones have a lot of bad ideas and make a lot of suggestions of things that could waste a lot of programmers time and not translate to sales. They also tend to tell a lot of lies and get everyone into trouble.
The problem is that the design work is being done by someone who doesn't care about typography and usability, not because it is done by someone who is skilled in programming.
If you don't know about about structure, algorithms and logic, it is hard to give an application design that is novel, implementable and will actually work out the way it is envisioned. But to effectively design you need skills in design as well as actually caring about the usecases. Code is the medium to express design, just like paint and stone can be used to express visual art, but an interface designer who can't code is as useless as an artist who cannot use a paintbrush or chisel. Coding isn't that hard if you can structure your thoughts clearly enough to explain your design to others anyway, there's nothing arcane to it.
So the crux is, two things, equally important, the code and what you are coding.
You've got China listed as being 10.5 times the area of the United States and India being 3.6 times as large. They don't teach you maths in Canada or you were just so exited when it put the US in the lead that you forgot to just look over for a brief sanity check?
You know what, since I'm blind drunk, I'm going to elaborate on my previous comment.
I live in China, I am an Australian expatriate, I visited the UK last week. Now, my countrymen several years ago built a Supermax facility called Katingal, since it is in Australia you may snidely refer to it as "le prison de le prison", it was a twisted labyrinth of CCTV cameras that was demolished soon after completion because of complaints from the inmates of it being "too much like driving along the A1" or "akin to visiting St James Park".
Oh, and another thing (while I'm ranting), my ancestors were British, not English/Scottish/Irish/Welsh, but British. I happened to stumble across London new year parade and saw nothing but Saint George's cross and was up to Edinburgh and saw nothing but St Andrew's Saltier, I went to a China-Britain friendship event and on every table was the Chinese 5 stars on red and the European 12 stars on blue, with no Union Flag in sight. It's one thing that you incompetent pricks can't keep the empire together and let Ireland slip through your fingers after 800 years but now you can't even uphold the Act of Union. I think the difference between a British man like me and the English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh like the dregs left on the home islands is that I am actually willing to get off my arse and work more than 6 hours a day without quitting my job to collect a dole check.
My final gripe is that that why do those who's countrymen died to defend Britain from the last European Union (namely Canadians, Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, Indian Sikhs, etc.) have to queue for immigration at Heathrow while Germans, Austrians and Italians can just march through like the victorious armies of the Reich. Then the woman at immigration was asking me stupid questions like "you say you're a computer programmer?", "yes", "but you say you live in China?", "yes", "what do you do in China?", "I'm a computer programmer, it's on the form". "Do you have a problem answering questions sir?!?! Do you need to sit down there until I'm ready to speak to you again?!?". I have never had to answer such stupid questions from such a moronic jobsworth in any other country on earth and yet I seem to be one of the few people who have gotten through British immigration and left without conspiring to commit a mass act of terrorism. Seriously, I love Britain, I love it's beauty, I love its history and it is the home of my queen and my ancestors and I would never wish any more harm to befall it. But if you want to feel anything but hatred towards all that is British, get as far away from that island as you possibly can, things have just gone terribly terribly wrong.
By the way, remember that "Airstrip One was always part of Super Happy Euro Fun Club", Oceania doesn't miss you and I assure you, Eastasia never knew you existed. To quote the Daoguang emperor "Where is England and why does it want to sell us opium?".
I live in China, visited the UK for two weeks for a holiday during Christmas, cameras everywhere. By and large, China is not quite so blatant with those things.
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly, they are not "machine guns" they are "assault carbine" and "assault rife" respectively, but you are right in that they are banned because of automatic fire, rather than the now defunct "assault weapon" criteria.
Secondly, most people with guns in the United States do not practice regularly either. But my suggestion that they actually get suitable militia weapons rather than useless dick surrogates like the Desert Eagle is (I believe) more palatable to the average American than actually going out for paramilitary training. Small steps, small steps.
Thirdly, modern infantry use M4 and M16 assault carbine/rifle and the M249 light machine gun that all shoot off the 5.56×45mm NATO round. They might have a designated marksman with a M14 battle rifle, or their machine gunner with an old M60, both firing 7.62×51mm NATO rounds, but it is rare these days, the case for comparable rounds is stronger in current military doctrine than the advantages of having different calibres for different roles. Furthermore there is a reason those two calibres have NATO in their names, because you need to share ammo with your allies too.
I have read the 14th amendment, especially section 1 that Slaughterhouse supposedly is based on. The clause "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." was, not only specifically meant in the context of slavery and reconstruction (the context that it emerged under), but "due process of the law" does not specifically exclude an elected body of the people legislating to restrict business practices.
I don't have to look up any 1787 definition of militias, in those days not even professional armies, let alone militias, had a standardised musket calibre, but well regulated then as is now, means something measured against the standards of the era. If you want a well regulated militia these days then the armaments should be standardised to allow easier servicing and pooling of ammunition, to be a credible tactical force. What is patently ridiculous is that the only practical US made light infantry arms, such as the M4 carbine and M16 rifle are banned as "assault weapons", while arms that are prohibited by the Geneva convention (shotguns), arms not suitable for non officers (pistols) and weapons not suitable for national defence (antique firearms) are obtainable. The Swiss are a great example of doing this correctly, they mandate that able bodied men keep and maintain a SIG SG 550 for militia duty since it is a fantastic infantry rifle, perfectly suitable for national defence and standardised to allow for practical battlefield servicing.
However, it seems now that second amendment means now "guns are fun and exciting, let us play with them" and fourteenth amendment means "states no longer have the power to compel people to do anything they don't want to do, 'cause you know, freedom and stuff".
Exactly, to apply federal rights (constitutional amendments) to former slaves and to provide full citizenship to the state where they resided. The court found rightly that federal rights were not abridged and this was not related to the original intent of the amendment (most of the claimants were not even black). Freedom in my mind involves drinking from water that isn't laden with offal, blood and shit, if my state needs to twist some business owner's arms to give me that, I'm no less free... in fact the word could do with a bit more of that.
Just because courts these days have taken to interpreting the constitution as widely as possible to over-rule any action by elected representitives that they don't agree with does not mean that is correct. I'm sure that some meat packing lobby would have made sure the judges found in the "right" way these days.
On the topic of constitutional law, I'm also curious by the way, when is the US government planning on regulating the "well regulated militia" that's been in the works for so long?
Slaughterhouse was the right decision. The 14th amendment merely means that all US citizens within a state have equal rights under state law, it does not mean that the states have no power to control what happens within their boundaries.
I like your style.
I'd be like the half-qualified director of NASA and would make this rousing as hell speech "do you want to be remembered as just some ordinary guy, or as the hero who flew a nuclear powered spaceship into the sun" and all of these cynical know it all guys would be like "you dumbass, you forgot to subtract Earth's orbital velocity from the Sun's escape velocity". And you'd be the promising young mathematician would would run to the front of mission control with a stack of paper and diagrams and be like "no, we need to launch this deadly broken nuclear spaceship at the moon first", then I'd smile and puff my cigar, knowing that everything would be awesome in the end.
I'd pay my $8 to see that movie, I really would.
OK, that all checks out, in truth I _had_ forgotten that I could subtract the earth's orbital velocity from the sun's escape velocity (also the spacecraft's orbital velocity, but that would work for both escape and de-orbit). So, I would like to change my position ever so slightly to say: "throwing something hazardous into the sun is awesome and _worth_ the extra deltaV".
So, I mention de-orbiting (WRT the Sun) something already IN earth orbit, then you add in the delta V to get into LEO _again_, clearly distorting the number to prove your point. Also, you suggest needing to go to zero, which is untrue, if something enters the corona it will be decelerated, the corona takes about 2 degrees of arc in the sky meaning an elliptical orbit will be just as good, which does not require zero orbital velocity.
From Wikipedia:
Earth orbital speed: 29.78 km/s
Sun's escape velocity at Earth (42.1 km/s)
Thus, the delta V to completely de-orbit from Earth's orbit is far lower than to escape the solar system. After de-orbiting, hitting the sun is quite easy, it just will tend to fall in.
My opinion is if this thing blows up, it will kill the crew and pollute an area of space millions of kilometres from anything I personally give a shit about. This is pretty much the same end result as if a chemical rocket blows up. Sounds like a fantastic application for nuclear, makes good use of what nuclear is good at (fuel energy density) while minimising what it is bad at.
I figure, presumably after the engine actually works and has been tested etc. we put this thing in orbit without any fuel, make sure it's an orbit that will stay stable for at least 20 years if something screws up. We then send up the fuel in small amounts, so if anything goes wrong, the amount of poisonous uranium or plutonium or whatever released is not going to kill whatever forest or reef or city etc it lands on.
Then if something goes like really bad, we fire up the partially fueled engine and fly it into the sun. If not, we complete the mission.
President Obama along with the other eight TPP leaders agreed to seek to finalize an agreement in the coming year.
I.e. it has not signed the agreement as Chile, Brunei, New Zealand and Singapore have, it is participating in negotiations.
No, it is not. The members have already signed and ratified the provisions of the original treaty. Australia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Peru and US attend meetings but their status is that of being part of negotiations of the next treaty.
I'm sure Brunei, New Zealand and Singapore are already familiar enough with their fellow Commonwealth member to evaluate its merits without requiring the US to provide a character reference.
And it's always those who define themselves with words like "tolerance", "acceptance", "pluralism", "liberalism", etc. that seem to have the least tolerance towards those who they consider to be preaching against such things.
Personally, I think anyone who has strong and clear enough beliefs has the potential to rationalise themselves into a biggoted arsehole, nomatter what side of the political spectrum. That goes triple if you find yourself in a strong enough local majority.
Plenty of stuff I'd imagine. Slashdot's full of fanboys debating why the console they bought is the best, most people stick to one vendor for OS and cars, because their products feel right.
but everyone knows that the embedded skillset is somewhat more difficult to learn than applications programming
Interesting statement to make. Most embedded stuff I've worked on has been well under 30k lines of C/ASM, commercial applications generally start in the millions. Not to mention that an application runs in an unknown environment with limited possibility of getting better diagnostic information back than "the program crashed".
While most people do not have the skills to write a 3d engine, a high performance distributed database, an operating system or an optimising compiler, but most people are capable of writing simple programs to solve problems in the domain they work in. You'd be amazed what two economists I know can do with Excel + VBA. That doesn't turn them into career programmers, but it does make them into much, much more effective economists.
I agree with what you mean, but I also think that a huge problem in converting "hackers" to "professional software engineers" as you call it is that most of professional software engineering's most passionate proponents have a habit of writing really pompous sounding things like "Professional software engineers deliver business solutions". My suggestion would be to go straight for the ego:
To all you smart, brave and handsome young hackers fighting the battle out there, not only does writing legible code with appropriate comments lets others know how smart you are. If there is a small, easily fixable edge-case, but the other programmers can't read your code, they will think that you wrote it completely wrong and rewrite it with their own implementation, which might not be as good as yours. If your code is legible, they can make a one line change, without smearing it up with grubby fingers, take a few quick gasps at your greatness and move on to messing up someone else's code.
Well, NASA has two stations in Australia, one in Spain, one in Antarctica as well as Alaska, Guam, Hawaii and of course the continental US. Why would the Russians not have something in Vladivostok?
Customs are the arseholes that search you _after_ a 14 hour international flight. Air screening in Australia is not done by federal agents but conducted by the airport operators according to federal government regulations and policies.
Sales and marketing are like any other type of worker. Some are good, some are shitheads. Good ones can tell you what the customers want, what they need and even whether a design you propose will make the customers happy or not. Good ones know the product their selling, what it does, what it can't do and roughly what it could do with a little bit more work. Good ones can generally also go out and make money by persuading customers that might need your product that they need your product, without restorting to lying about functionality. Bad ones have a lot of bad ideas and make a lot of suggestions of things that could waste a lot of programmers time and not translate to sales. They also tend to tell a lot of lies and get everyone into trouble.
The problem is that the design work is being done by someone who doesn't care about typography and usability, not because it is done by someone who is skilled in programming.
If you don't know about about structure, algorithms and logic, it is hard to give an application design that is novel, implementable and will actually work out the way it is envisioned. But to effectively design you need skills in design as well as actually caring about the usecases. Code is the medium to express design, just like paint and stone can be used to express visual art, but an interface designer who can't code is as useless as an artist who cannot use a paintbrush or chisel. Coding isn't that hard if you can structure your thoughts clearly enough to explain your design to others anyway, there's nothing arcane to it.
So the crux is, two things, equally important, the code and what you are coding.
You've got China listed as being 10.5 times the area of the United States and India being 3.6 times as large. They don't teach you maths in Canada or you were just so exited when it put the US in the lead that you forgot to just look over for a brief sanity check?
You know what, since I'm blind drunk, I'm going to elaborate on my previous comment.
I live in China, I am an Australian expatriate, I visited the UK last week. Now, my countrymen several years ago built a Supermax facility called Katingal, since it is in Australia you may snidely refer to it as "le prison de le prison", it was a twisted labyrinth of CCTV cameras that was demolished soon after completion because of complaints from the inmates of it being "too much like driving along the A1" or "akin to visiting St James Park".
Oh, and another thing (while I'm ranting), my ancestors were British, not English/Scottish/Irish/Welsh, but British. I happened to stumble across London new year parade and saw nothing but Saint George's cross and was up to Edinburgh and saw nothing but St Andrew's Saltier, I went to a China-Britain friendship event and on every table was the Chinese 5 stars on red and the European 12 stars on blue, with no Union Flag in sight. It's one thing that you incompetent pricks can't keep the empire together and let Ireland slip through your fingers after 800 years but now you can't even uphold the Act of Union. I think the difference between a British man like me and the English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh like the dregs left on the home islands is that I am actually willing to get off my arse and work more than 6 hours a day without quitting my job to collect a dole check.
My final gripe is that that why do those who's countrymen died to defend Britain from the last European Union (namely Canadians, Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, Indian Sikhs, etc.) have to queue for immigration at Heathrow while Germans, Austrians and Italians can just march through like the victorious armies of the Reich. Then the woman at immigration was asking me stupid questions like "you say you're a computer programmer?", "yes", "but you say you live in China?", "yes", "what do you do in China?", "I'm a computer programmer, it's on the form". "Do you have a problem answering questions sir?!?! Do you need to sit down there until I'm ready to speak to you again?!?". I have never had to answer such stupid questions from such a moronic jobsworth in any other country on earth and yet I seem to be one of the few people who have gotten through British immigration and left without conspiring to commit a mass act of terrorism. Seriously, I love Britain, I love it's beauty, I love its history and it is the home of my queen and my ancestors and I would never wish any more harm to befall it. But if you want to feel anything but hatred towards all that is British, get as far away from that island as you possibly can, things have just gone terribly terribly wrong.
By the way, remember that "Airstrip One was always part of Super Happy Euro Fun Club", Oceania doesn't miss you and I assure you, Eastasia never knew you existed. To quote the Daoguang emperor "Where is England and why does it want to sell us opium?".
I live in China, visited the UK for two weeks for a holiday during Christmas, cameras everywhere. By and large, China is not quite so blatant with those things.
In China, you watch CCTV (China Central TeleVision), in Soviet Britain, CCTV watches you!