I'm not saying it's entirely useless - better trained is always better. There are plenty of studies and incidents showing that you don't want to be anywhere near someone armed with a knife or trained in hand to hand combat, even if you are better armed.
But there will always be someone stronger, better trained, better armed, or with more friends than you.
If you have a gun, you just need one good shot to neutralize that advantage. It's not a guarantee, but it's a fighting chance.
A lot of people seem to confuse gun rights with young aggressive men who are supposed to be able to hold their own in a fight without weapons. But women, grandmothers, older men, and even young men who just aren't as sure of their physical prowess use guns for defense.
I get the 'you don't need to be armed' mentality. I still go around unarmed most of the time, although I do have keep a gun next to the bed. But the problem is that you don't get to choose when you're going to be attacked, *if* you are going to be attacked. Sure, some places are obviously more dangerous than others, but people are robbed or assaulted in their houses all the time.
The fact is, as horrible as these accidents are, they are much rarer than the chances of being violently attacked in even a safe city. Not saying that we shouldn't be careful with dangerous items... but there's a good reason to have them, and to have them readily available so that if something bad *does* happen, they're actually useful.
And only a handful that would make good rock band songs. There's so much ambient noise and synth stuff that it doesn't convert well to the "two guitars and a drummer" model they use.
Really... so sodium chloride plus 2% random crap out of the ocean is inherently better for you than sodium chloride + 2% safe non-clumping agent and iodine? Because that's pretty much what you're comparing. They're 98% the exact same chemical.
And what good is "self defense" when your opponent has a gun? The thing's a tool, it's not a magic death device. Despite the publicity, relatively few kids are killed by gun accidents even in the US.
The negligence here had very little to do with the loaded gun, almost nothing to do with the wii, and a whole lot to the do with the loaded gun in the apparently unmonitored vicinity of a 3 year old child.
There are quite a few things that you wouldn't want to leave unmonitored around a 3-year old. Pills, cleaning liquid, power tools. How many people walk away from a wood project and leave the saw plugged in when their kid can get to it? The danger is pretty similar.
I couldn't find statistics for power tools, but around 100 children are killed a year in farm equipment accidents. That's fewer than with guns, but roughly similar (around 200 in accidental gun deaths for children). More children (around 350 under 5) die in swimming pools. Doesn't make as juicy of a story, though.
And so, the problem from my vantage point is that they are so set against using real punishment against people who are actively disruptive and doing illegal things, that they have to use these ridiculous notions? If someone puts a brick through a window, that's a property crime, and they should go to jail or have to pay for it. Assault, battery, vandalism are all crimes that reasonable societies have a punishment for when you're an adult that generally works as at least something of a deterrent. Anti-social behavior bracelets? Seriously?
I mean, I have major problems with the American system of "you smoke dope you do time" industry, but this is ridiculous in a whole different direction.
I would like to point out, however, that you can think a shift in the libertarian direction from where we are now makes sense without necessarily wanting them to run the whole system according to their vision. Just as one can support socialized medicine without being a full-on socialist.
Even if we elected a Libertarian majority today, there's no way they could get even halfway to that anarchist vision within several decades. Change doesn't move that quickly without violent revolution.
Actually, in autocross (because you normally run the course all in one gear) it's fairly common to do left-foot braking, so you can hit the brake while the gas is still engaged. It mostly allows for quicker transitions into corners, and helps keep revs up in cars with small engines.
Assuming they do run the logic like you said, that does sound more reasonable than just cutting people because you have both pressed at once (which is what the OP implied).
Probably depends on where you live. I'm not sure the tech company I work for has a single asian man working for us, nor did my last one. A few Indians, African-Americans, all nature of white guys.
I knew plenty of asian programmers in college, but they weren't the majority by any means.
This is in Columbus, Ohio, though, where pretty much the only asians who grew up here have parents working at the Honda plant.
Wonder if the movie studios are trying to shy away from the more obvious stereotypes.
Moreover, it isn't an issue if the app store has everything you want on it (or at least the vast majority of things).
It's offensive on a ideological level, but has little impact on a practical one.
Especially since this probably won't have the same issues going back and forth with ATT on the draw of tethering and VoIP over 3G (the two biggest examples of problem rejections).
I think the problem was really one of what features got added at the same time.
From a user perspective, there is very little improvement to running Vista over XP. It is *better*, but it is not significantly better.
In the only real comparative examples, when windows 95 came out it was head and shoulders better than Windows 3.1, so you put up with the headaches and changes and incompatibilities. When OS X came out, it was so much better than classic in ways that users can notice that you put up with it being a little slower or having some UI annoyances.
Vista offered almost nothing tangible to the user experience. They made some big security fixes - and good for them that they did! But there just wasn't as much of a gap - you got all of the buggy drivers and incompatibilities and oh my old software doesn't install or run right any more without a big enough benefit on the user side to cancel it out.
Also, you can just complain about the developers (driver or otherwise) when as part of the new system you make it 3x as hard to develop (in the driver case), or at least requiring massive rewrite of large portions of code. The vista model of having to care about what rights you have when you run is a better model. I believe it is an improvement 100%. I also know it causes massive, major development headaches when your old code didn't worry about rights, and more importantly, the developers didn't even know they weren't worrying about rights.
And here's the fun thing - I know quite a few devs who still don't test that much on vista, because they aren't getting enough users who care about it yet... fun times.
Yes, because Europe is incapable of innovation to solve these problems? Mostly the high oil prices in Europe have resulted in a few high mpg cars that are actually fun to drive - good, but not earth-shaking. Mostly their climate change actions are just subsidizing solar panels that will never recoup their cost and using cap and trade as a smokescreen for massive industrial subsidies.
I'm not saying the US *couldn't* implement a cap and trade scheme that wasn't rife with loopholes and corporate rent-seeking, I'll just be very surprised if they do given their role model.
That'll be great the one time I launch Chrome/firefox this week.
Pretty much the only time a web browser gets closed on my system is when flash hangs. Same for almost all of the programs that I use daily - why would I ever exit them, when I'm just going to want them again in five minutes?
I agree 100%. Every project team I have been on, I have thought to myself "We could really benefit from someone over 30 who's actually done something vaguely like this before."
The problem is twofold:
1) It is a field where more experience is not directly correlated with better ability. This applies to many things, but is extremely true in programming. My wife's company has many elder programmers - they are the source of her favorite quote that "you can write COBOL in any language."
2) Partially because of this, and partially because non-programmer managers have no way of identifying good programmers to begin with, the salary structure does not reward or encourage experienced, quality programmers who stay in the discipline.
Who knows, though. This may be a short-term artifact. Fourty-year-olds in programming now grew up on punch-cards, BASIC, and COBOL. There have been so many dramatic paradigm shifts in programming during their tenure that it would make sense for them to not have necessarily kept up - even the core rules of how to design software have largely changed. As things slow down a bit in those terms (a normal computer from twenty years ago is at least recognizable as being something similar to today) I wonder how much that will change on its own.
Not to mention the fact that it has been changed and amended on 27 separate occasions.
In any case, I think "living document" is much more accurate to what has *actually* happened with the courts, regardless of the original intent of the framers.
I think scale is what really needs to be taken into account here.
If you make thousands of copies and sell them on every street corner in China, you are significantly impacting the monopoly of the copyright holder. You are, in fact, hurting his ability and right to sell his music there. Your actions have actually impacted the marketplace.
If you as an individual give you friend one CD... the right still exists. Your action was a drop in the bucket that has not in any significant way impacted the holder of that copyright. Your actual damage to the individual is around what they could have made by selling your friend the CD.
This is why I think it is entirely reasonable for them to go after Napster, and possibly specific bittorrent sites, but absolutely ridiculous to claim that one person on those networks is nullifying their natural monopoly in any real way.
That was the intent of copyright law and those massive statutory damages. It is being stretched so far beyond its original intent as to be completely unrecognizable.
Let's say I rob a store. I steal 100 copies of the White Album. I also steal 100 car radios.
If I give away those car radios, I am distributing them. I am generally liable for the cost of the radios plus reasonable damages based on a small multiplier of their value.
If I give away those CDs, by your argument I have committed damage to the copyright holder equivalent to the value of the distribution rights of those songs.
Explain to me how uploading a song is a worse crime than selling those stolen goods, how it violates the right to distribute in a worse way. And if you succeed at that, explain how it is in any way reasonable for selling stolen $20 CD's to be a crime 100x worse than selling stolen $100 car radios.
Remember, though, that flowers and candy are just window dressing. The real treat is normally forcing the guy to dress up and treat her to something different and fun for a night.
Actually, the best thing is to do it a couple weeks early before all of the good places to go to dinner are booked, and you can actually buy good candy and fresh flowers.
So you can get the normal plan with one? I got very mixed signals from the salesmen at the provider stores about whether they would let you have a smartphone on their network at all without the data plan.
On the other hand, if you want a smartphone without a data plan (because you are in range of a wifi signal 95% of the time) you're pretty much up shit creek. I'd love a smartphone for the apps and not having to carry around an ipod everywhere, but I'm not a high-volume caller or texter, and most of the time I'm either at work, at home, or at a friend's house - all of which have wifi.
I did the math on it, and tracfone + an ipod touch saves me over $500 over the life of the contract over an unlocked nexus one on T-Mobile smallest voice plan (assuming they'll even let you do that), and something like $1500 compared to any of the other options and their data-and-massive-voice-plan-required plans (over the life of the contract).
Is it really that weird to want an ipod + a phone without wanting a $100/month phone bill?
The real problem with H.264 is that it's *really* good. It makes it a really hard sell for those who can't afford to use it for various reasons to those who can.
I had thought that a dangerous situation where the bad-guy *might* have a weapon was a good enough reason to at least clear the holster, whether you started pointing at the guy (generally with the finger off the trigger) or not. That said, I am basing this entirely on second-hand knowledge from reading too many gun blogs and police publications, and am entirely willing to admit error.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying it's entirely useless - better trained is always better. There are plenty of studies and incidents showing that you don't want to be anywhere near someone armed with a knife or trained in hand to hand combat, even if you are better armed.
But there will always be someone stronger, better trained, better armed, or with more friends than you.
If you have a gun, you just need one good shot to neutralize that advantage. It's not a guarantee, but it's a fighting chance.
A lot of people seem to confuse gun rights with young aggressive men who are supposed to be able to hold their own in a fight without weapons. But women, grandmothers, older men, and even young men who just aren't as sure of their physical prowess use guns for defense.
I get the 'you don't need to be armed' mentality. I still go around unarmed most of the time, although I do have keep a gun next to the bed. But the problem is that you don't get to choose when you're going to be attacked, *if* you are going to be attacked. Sure, some places are obviously more dangerous than others, but people are robbed or assaulted in their houses all the time.
The fact is, as horrible as these accidents are, they are much rarer than the chances of being violently attacked in even a safe city. Not saying that we shouldn't be careful with dangerous items... but there's a good reason to have them, and to have them readily available so that if something bad *does* happen, they're actually useful.
And only a handful that would make good rock band songs. There's so much ambient noise and synth stuff that it doesn't convert well to the "two guitars and a drummer" model they use.
Really... so sodium chloride plus 2% random crap out of the ocean is inherently better for you than sodium chloride + 2% safe non-clumping agent and iodine? Because that's pretty much what you're comparing. They're 98% the exact same chemical.
Don't take my word for it, ask the May clinic:
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/sea-salt/AN01142
But hell, enjoy your goiters.
And what good is "self defense" when your opponent has a gun? The thing's a tool, it's not a magic death device. Despite the publicity, relatively few kids are killed by gun accidents even in the US.
The negligence here had very little to do with the loaded gun, almost nothing to do with the wii, and a whole lot to the do with the loaded gun in the apparently unmonitored vicinity of a 3 year old child.
There are quite a few things that you wouldn't want to leave unmonitored around a 3-year old. Pills, cleaning liquid, power tools. How many people walk away from a wood project and leave the saw plugged in when their kid can get to it? The danger is pretty similar.
I couldn't find statistics for power tools, but around 100 children are killed a year in farm equipment accidents. That's fewer than with guns, but roughly similar (around 200 in accidental gun deaths for children). More children (around 350 under 5) die in swimming pools. Doesn't make as juicy of a story, though.
And so, the problem from my vantage point is that they are so set against using real punishment against people who are actively disruptive and doing illegal things, that they have to use these ridiculous notions? If someone puts a brick through a window, that's a property crime, and they should go to jail or have to pay for it. Assault, battery, vandalism are all crimes that reasonable societies have a punishment for when you're an adult that generally works as at least something of a deterrent. Anti-social behavior bracelets? Seriously?
I mean, I have major problems with the American system of "you smoke dope you do time" industry, but this is ridiculous in a whole different direction.
I would like to point out, however, that you can think a shift in the libertarian direction from where we are now makes sense without necessarily wanting them to run the whole system according to their vision. Just as one can support socialized medicine without being a full-on socialist.
Even if we elected a Libertarian majority today, there's no way they could get even halfway to that anarchist vision within several decades. Change doesn't move that quickly without violent revolution.
Actually, in autocross (because you normally run the course all in one gear) it's fairly common to do left-foot braking, so you can hit the brake while the gas is still engaged. It mostly allows for quicker transitions into corners, and helps keep revs up in cars with small engines.
Assuming they do run the logic like you said, that does sound more reasonable than just cutting people because you have both pressed at once (which is what the OP implied).
You'd be surprised how many camrys I see at auto-cross. I know I'd be mad as hell at any car that decided to cut my engine because I hit the brakes.
Of course, if the OP were into cars or racing he probably wouldn't be asking the question here.
Probably depends on where you live. I'm not sure the tech company I work for has a single asian man working for us, nor did my last one. A few Indians, African-Americans, all nature of white guys.
I knew plenty of asian programmers in college, but they weren't the majority by any means.
This is in Columbus, Ohio, though, where pretty much the only asians who grew up here have parents working at the Honda plant.
Wonder if the movie studios are trying to shy away from the more obvious stereotypes.
You do realize that they sell an external keyboard, and a stand to put the screen on while you're using it?
Moreover, it isn't an issue if the app store has everything you want on it (or at least the vast majority of things).
It's offensive on a ideological level, but has little impact on a practical one.
Especially since this probably won't have the same issues going back and forth with ATT on the draw of tethering and VoIP over 3G (the two biggest examples of problem rejections).
I think the problem was really one of what features got added at the same time.
From a user perspective, there is very little improvement to running Vista over XP. It is *better*, but it is not significantly better.
In the only real comparative examples, when windows 95 came out it was head and shoulders better than Windows 3.1, so you put up with the headaches and changes and incompatibilities. When OS X came out, it was so much better than classic in ways that users can notice that you put up with it being a little slower or having some UI annoyances.
Vista offered almost nothing tangible to the user experience. They made some big security fixes - and good for them that they did! But there just wasn't as much of a gap - you got all of the buggy drivers and incompatibilities and oh my old software doesn't install or run right any more without a big enough benefit on the user side to cancel it out.
Also, you can just complain about the developers (driver or otherwise) when as part of the new system you make it 3x as hard to develop (in the driver case), or at least requiring massive rewrite of large portions of code. The vista model of having to care about what rights you have when you run is a better model. I believe it is an improvement 100%. I also know it causes massive, major development headaches when your old code didn't worry about rights, and more importantly, the developers didn't even know they weren't worrying about rights.
And here's the fun thing - I know quite a few devs who still don't test that much on vista, because they aren't getting enough users who care about it yet... fun times.
Yes, because Europe is incapable of innovation to solve these problems? Mostly the high oil prices in Europe have resulted in a few high mpg cars that are actually fun to drive - good, but not earth-shaking. Mostly their climate change actions are just subsidizing solar panels that will never recoup their cost and using cap and trade as a smokescreen for massive industrial subsidies.
I'm not saying the US *couldn't* implement a cap and trade scheme that wasn't rife with loopholes and corporate rent-seeking, I'll just be very surprised if they do given their role model.
That'll be great the one time I launch Chrome/firefox this week.
Pretty much the only time a web browser gets closed on my system is when flash hangs. Same for almost all of the programs that I use daily - why would I ever exit them, when I'm just going to want them again in five minutes?
My bad, I lose track of the years and forget that my dad is in his early fifties now. He used to talk about doing punch cards in college.
I agree 100%. Every project team I have been on, I have thought to myself "We could really benefit from someone over 30 who's actually done something vaguely like this before."
The problem is twofold:
1) It is a field where more experience is not directly correlated with better ability. This applies to many things, but is extremely true in programming. My wife's company has many elder programmers - they are the source of her favorite quote that "you can write COBOL in any language."
2) Partially because of this, and partially because non-programmer managers have no way of identifying good programmers to begin with, the salary structure does not reward or encourage experienced, quality programmers who stay in the discipline.
Who knows, though. This may be a short-term artifact. Fourty-year-olds in programming now grew up on punch-cards, BASIC, and COBOL. There have been so many dramatic paradigm shifts in programming during their tenure that it would make sense for them to not have necessarily kept up - even the core rules of how to design software have largely changed. As things slow down a bit in those terms (a normal computer from twenty years ago is at least recognizable as being something similar to today) I wonder how much that will change on its own.
Not to mention the fact that it has been changed and amended on 27 separate occasions.
In any case, I think "living document" is much more accurate to what has *actually* happened with the courts, regardless of the original intent of the framers.
I think scale is what really needs to be taken into account here.
If you make thousands of copies and sell them on every street corner in China, you are significantly impacting the monopoly of the copyright holder. You are, in fact, hurting his ability and right to sell his music there. Your actions have actually impacted the marketplace.
If you as an individual give you friend one CD... the right still exists. Your action was a drop in the bucket that has not in any significant way impacted the holder of that copyright. Your actual damage to the individual is around what they could have made by selling your friend the CD.
This is why I think it is entirely reasonable for them to go after Napster, and possibly specific bittorrent sites, but absolutely ridiculous to claim that one person on those networks is nullifying their natural monopoly in any real way.
That was the intent of copyright law and those massive statutory damages. It is being stretched so far beyond its original intent as to be completely unrecognizable.
Thought experiment.
Let's say I rob a store. I steal 100 copies of the White Album. I also steal 100 car radios.
If I give away those car radios, I am distributing them. I am generally liable for the cost of the radios plus reasonable damages based on a small multiplier of their value.
If I give away those CDs, by your argument I have committed damage to the copyright holder equivalent to the value of the distribution rights of those songs.
Explain to me how uploading a song is a worse crime than selling those stolen goods, how it violates the right to distribute in a worse way. And if you succeed at that, explain how it is in any way reasonable for selling stolen $20 CD's to be a crime 100x worse than selling stolen $100 car radios.
Remember, though, that flowers and candy are just window dressing. The real treat is normally forcing the guy to dress up and treat her to something different and fun for a night.
Actually, the best thing is to do it a couple weeks early before all of the good places to go to dinner are booked, and you can actually buy good candy and fresh flowers.
So you can get the normal plan with one? I got very mixed signals from the salesmen at the provider stores about whether they would let you have a smartphone on their network at all without the data plan.
On the other hand, if you want a smartphone without a data plan (because you are in range of a wifi signal 95% of the time) you're pretty much up shit creek. I'd love a smartphone for the apps and not having to carry around an ipod everywhere, but I'm not a high-volume caller or texter, and most of the time I'm either at work, at home, or at a friend's house - all of which have wifi.
I did the math on it, and tracfone + an ipod touch saves me over $500 over the life of the contract over an unlocked nexus one on T-Mobile smallest voice plan (assuming they'll even let you do that), and something like $1500 compared to any of the other options and their data-and-massive-voice-plan-required plans (over the life of the contract).
Is it really that weird to want an ipod + a phone without wanting a $100/month phone bill?
The real problem with H.264 is that it's *really* good. It makes it a really hard sell for those who can't afford to use it for various reasons to those who can.
That's what concealed carry laws are for.
Oh wait, you're in the middle of the wilderness.
That's what open carry laws are for.
I had thought that a dangerous situation where the bad-guy *might* have a weapon was a good enough reason to at least clear the holster, whether you started pointing at the guy (generally with the finger off the trigger) or not. That said, I am basing this entirely on second-hand knowledge from reading too many gun blogs and police publications, and am entirely willing to admit error.