No, your argument is more like one a friend of mine made. He said that, if it was his right to marry whom he pleased, he wanted Dorothy Parker as she was nearly a century ago, and it was the Government's job to make it happen. (Personally, I don't think he and Dorothy would get along that well, but that's only one man's opinion.)
You have the right to bear arms. You have the right of freedom of the press. These are restrictions on what the government can do, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, and what these mean is that you can bear any arms you can acquire and print what you like on a press you own or rent or borrow or whatever.. (You do have the right to an expensive trial with a jury and legal counsel in some circumstances, but the government is not required to supply you these in general; it simply may not try you for certain things without providing them.)
Rights can be things people have to pay for. If the government decides we all have a right to health care, the government can pay enough money to health care providers to cover it. In the long run, if providing X isn't too icky, paying enough money will result in enough X. Aside from how it is administered, I don't see much difference between a right to health care and a right to freedom of press. Heck, the Bill of Rights asserts that we have the right to a jury trial and legal counsel in certain situations, and those have to be paid for.
Cable companies need to run cable, which mean they need some sort of government license to use public property and sometimes to cut through private property. This means they need an agreement with local government, and local governments commonly require public access channels in the agreement. They are not a case of government forcing them in the sense you seem to mean.
The government can't force gun makers to give away free guns. The government could buy guns from them and give them to people (spending for the general welfare), or a contract between a gun maker and the government could require a certain amount of free guns to be available to citizens.
They need to study suicide by gun. Many suicide attempts are made on impulse, and the person involved often regrets it immediately (if in a position to do so). If I have an impulse to commit suicide, and have a handy pistol, I can use that, and probably die. If I use another handy household method, I'm much less likely to die immediately. You mention one case (Australia in 1996) when it looked like total suicides didn't drop, but that's hardly conclusive.
While it's significant that violent crime is down, there's a large number of reasons that go into it. Clearly, increased gun ownership isn't that bad, but it still may be increasing the crime rate, which would be masked because of other reasons (less lead in the environment comes to mind).
Owning a gun is neither a disease nor a health problem. Getting shot is indeed a health problem, and gun ownership is probably a contributing factor. A significant number of people die each year due to being shot, and many more are seriously injured. Many of these deaths aren't in conjunction with a crime, but are suicide or accidents.
The CDC is restricted to studying the matter, not imposing solutions. It may find that gun ownership is hazardous. It's also found that obesity and smoking are hazardous, but we don't ban those.
You got a trademark on that word, guy? If not, I think I'll start using it to apply to libertarians of the stupid variety. I suppose I could use Libertards, but that still seems ambiguous.
I don't know about the decision being improper. The upstream provider had to react to the takedown demand or risk being held liable (since this isn't covered by the DMCA, there is no safe harbor). How easy would it have been for the upstream provider to shut down just the offending account of the downstream provider?
An armed citizenry has no chance against an organized army. The US Army has better rifles than civilians are allowed to own, and has in addition plenty of heavier weapons. What they have in addition is training, which is one of the main reasons it's so effective. If you study the partisan actions of WWII, you'll notice that partisans had a great deal of difficulty, and not much success, in fighting badly equipped badly led badly trained regular troops. The US Army gives its troops very good weapons and training, and has at least decent leadership.
In a civilian uprising, the deciding factor would be what the Army did. If it refused to oppose the uprising, for whatever reason, the uprising could win. If it joined in, the uprising would win.
AIUI, you can't buy new assault rifles at all, just those that already existed in 1986 or so. I regard this as a violation of the Second Amendment, which obviously means that people should be able to get military weapons if it means anything.
Pedantry: voting is not a Constitutional right in the sense that bearing arms is. The Constitution says nothing about a right to vote, except in a reference to eligibility established by individual states.
DMCA takedown requests apply only to copyright infringement, but they're part of the "safe harbor" provisions. If a site hosts user-supplied content that may violate a copyright, and reacts appropriately to a takedown notice, the site has no liability.
I know of no similar safe harbor provisions for trademark law, which means that a site that hosts user-supplied content that violates trademark law probably has no legal shield from it. Normally, trademark holders are content with a prompt response to a cease-and-desist letter, but if they don't get that it looks to me like the site is liable.
Let me address the "party of war" idea. You do realize, don't you, that the timing of WWI, WWII, and the Korean war were not set by US Presidents, and that a President of any party would have had to deal with the situations? It's pretty definite that Johnson, if not Kennedy, greatly expanded and mismanaged the Vietnam War, I'll give you that. However, the invasion of Iraq was unnecessary, thoroughly mismanaged, and was preceded by Republican propaganda. (I'm not claiming that all the Republicans were in on the propaganda; Powell, for example, was set up by Cheney.) I'll give the Republicans a pass on Afghanistan, since that was justified, but in my lifetime the Republicans seem to have been a bit more warmongering than the Democrats.
You can commit illegal acts and not be a criminal. Crimes are actions which are against certain specific laws. Conviction of a crime requires a trial where the defendant has certain rights and must be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and the consequences include jail or prison time (not always enforced). Is it actually a crime to be an illegal immigrant, or a different sort of violation? Typically they get deported rather than imprisoned, which suggests that it isn't treated as a crime. I don't know the actual law, but unless someone can find where a prison term is specified it isn't a crime.
You do know that the listed synonyms don't mean exactly the same things, I hope. "Felon" refers to a proper subset of criminals, while "lawbreaker" and "offender" are proper supersets.
Have you looked at what Obama's accomplished? He's brought down the deficit tremendously. He hasn't started quagmire wars like Afghanistan (which we had reason to get into) and Iraq (which we didn't). The economy is doing well. He's restored our image in the world after what Bush did to it. He's done things I disagree with, but every President does. In what ways has he done a terrible job? It looks to me like there's unreasoning prejudice against him and a determination on the part of many people to not believe he's done a good job. Heck, the First Lady is a class act, and I see all sorts of horrible things said about her.
You do realize that Trump's been sued for illegal discrimination on a number of occasions, don't you? I don't think either Obama or Clinton have.
The single black mother probably doesn't have good facilities for having her gun on her at all times and keeping her child from it. If her gun is inaccessible or unloaded, it's no good for self-defense, and if her child can get it there's a very real potential for horrifying accidents.
You're not doing yourself any favors in argument by claiming to have taught yourself to excel in critical thinking while thoroughly misstating my position.
My basic claim is that there are inherent differences in ability. These differences can be dwarfed by technology and education, but they exist. Your neighbor would move things better than you if he thought about using levers. I can go faster than a marathon runner, until you get him or her a car like mine. Technology does improve, and education improves, just much more slowly. There can be breakthroughs in how to teach and do things. There are very definitely different ways to do most things, and often some ways are definitely better than others.
So far, you aren't refuting me. You point to people who used a better memorization technique and did much better than the previous experts. Fine. Teach two people that technique and they'll be much better at arbitrary memorization than someone not taught that, but the one with the better memory overall will still be better. (This isn't particularly related to learning, by the way. Unless you're learning something like historical dates, which are a very minor part of history, learning requires a LOT more than indelibly memorizing certain facts. Not that historical dates are completely useless; I had a friend a long time ago whose telephone numbers contained the date of the battle of Manzikert, so it helped me remember her number. Would you feel more educated if I told you that the date was 1071, or if I told you the strategic consequences of the Byzantine loss?)
Rather than concede that I might be better at math than the average person, you make up a story about some people needing more energy, which isn't so much disagreeing with me as it is using different terminology to maintain the appearance that I'm wrong.
You have consistently failed to address my big objection: that I haven't seen any major effects in society. For decades, people have been claiming that intelligence is a matter of education, and, according to you, succeeding in demonstrating that. If you could raise a person's IQ by 30 points or so with better education, you could teach people to be much more successful. Somebody would have set up a school using these techniques. (I was first taught geometry with a set of books on Skinnerian principles, as if understanding mathematics was a matter of operant conditioning, so people have been using modern psychological findings in education for a long time.) The graduates of that school would have been sufficiently successful that other schools would adopt the same methods. This wouldn't happen fast, but it wouldn't take many decades.
This would have consequences in society, and we would have seen them. I haven't noticed them.
OK, what sort of sting would you have used on the shooter that would have worked? He wasn't trying to be on jihad there, as far as I can tell, so offering him a jihad buddy likely would not have worked. He'd been interviewed by the FBI twice, so he might have suspected a convenient fellow jihader to be an FBI plant. This is by no means a sure thing, and it takes time and money to do it right. Moreover, if we do it with every suspicious person, word will get around, and all we'll be accomplish is to increase distrust and paranoia among the bad guys. Worth doing, sure, if it isn't too expensive, but it won't stop lone shooters.
Right. Therefore, will you accept that they already have the prices set so they get the maximum profit? And, if they could increase profit by raising prices, they'd have already done so?
You are required to forfeit nothing. If you don't earn any money, and don't spend any, and don't own property, you don't owe taxes. I'm not recommending this as a lifestyle, but it's one legal way to avoid all taxes. If you do decide to take advantage of what society offers, society gets a cut.
A slave does what he or she is told. You can do whatever you can get away with, although some of your money will be taxed. A slave eats what is provided, and lives where quartered. You can buy all sorts of food and live wherever you can afford.
Calling taxation slavery is trivializing slavery, and makes it clear that you have no sense of proportion.
We need to collect taxes. We should do so as fairly as possible (recognizing that "fair" means different things to different people). Having some people who can avoid taxes and people in similar circumstances who can't isn't fair.
If everybody were to avoid their taxes, government would collapse. There would be no road building or maintenance, no police, no restraint on what natural monopolies like the power company can do, no national defense, no public education or libraries, etc. Everybody except criminals would be far worse off.
It's also a lot easier to hide income than to hide outgo. Particularly in a country where people evade their income taxes in a big way, a consumption tax may be the way to go.
How much faith do you have in the altruistic tendencies of companies to get less money out of you than they could? Not quite a mustard seed's worth? Companies already set their prices for maximum profit. Assuming they do it right, if they lower the price they sell more but the reduced profit on each item more than offsets that. If they raise the price, they make more profit on each sale, but enough fewer sales to offset that.
Basically, if they could make more money by raising the prices to compensate for something, they'd have raised the prices already.
Increased corporate taxes may cause prices to go up, but the biggest impact will be on profits, not price. (Corporate income tax is paid out of profits. Since whatever is done to maximize profits will also maximize profits / 2, maximizing profits (at least in the short run) will result in the exact same behavior regardless of the tax rate.)
Do NOT roll your own encryption. Approximately nobody here has the expertise to come up with a really good cipher (this being Slashdot, I assume a few of us do). Use something standard, devised by people who really know what they're doing, and heavily tested. The security isn't in the cipher being obscure, it's about the key being unknown.
Basically, cryptology is about secrecy compression. Take a large document you want secret, and encrypt it with AES-256. You've reduced the secrecy to eight bytes, which is far easier to move around securely than the plaintext document. If the cryptosystem has to be unknown for the cipher to work, there's a lot bigger minimal secret there.
Slashdot Mirror
No, your argument is more like one a friend of mine made. He said that, if it was his right to marry whom he pleased, he wanted Dorothy Parker as she was nearly a century ago, and it was the Government's job to make it happen. (Personally, I don't think he and Dorothy would get along that well, but that's only one man's opinion.)
You have the right to bear arms. You have the right of freedom of the press. These are restrictions on what the government can do, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, and what these mean is that you can bear any arms you can acquire and print what you like on a press you own or rent or borrow or whatever.. (You do have the right to an expensive trial with a jury and legal counsel in some circumstances, but the government is not required to supply you these in general; it simply may not try you for certain things without providing them.)
Rights can be things people have to pay for. If the government decides we all have a right to health care, the government can pay enough money to health care providers to cover it. In the long run, if providing X isn't too icky, paying enough money will result in enough X. Aside from how it is administered, I don't see much difference between a right to health care and a right to freedom of press. Heck, the Bill of Rights asserts that we have the right to a jury trial and legal counsel in certain situations, and those have to be paid for.
Cable companies need to run cable, which mean they need some sort of government license to use public property and sometimes to cut through private property. This means they need an agreement with local government, and local governments commonly require public access channels in the agreement. They are not a case of government forcing them in the sense you seem to mean.
The government can't force gun makers to give away free guns. The government could buy guns from them and give them to people (spending for the general welfare), or a contract between a gun maker and the government could require a certain amount of free guns to be available to citizens.
And, in fact, Federal government funds may not be used to pay for an abortion.
They need to study suicide by gun. Many suicide attempts are made on impulse, and the person involved often regrets it immediately (if in a position to do so). If I have an impulse to commit suicide, and have a handy pistol, I can use that, and probably die. If I use another handy household method, I'm much less likely to die immediately. You mention one case (Australia in 1996) when it looked like total suicides didn't drop, but that's hardly conclusive.
While it's significant that violent crime is down, there's a large number of reasons that go into it. Clearly, increased gun ownership isn't that bad, but it still may be increasing the crime rate, which would be masked because of other reasons (less lead in the environment comes to mind).
Owning a gun is neither a disease nor a health problem. Getting shot is indeed a health problem, and gun ownership is probably a contributing factor. A significant number of people die each year due to being shot, and many more are seriously injured. Many of these deaths aren't in conjunction with a crime, but are suicide or accidents.
The CDC is restricted to studying the matter, not imposing solutions. It may find that gun ownership is hazardous. It's also found that obesity and smoking are hazardous, but we don't ban those.
You got a trademark on that word, guy? If not, I think I'll start using it to apply to libertarians of the stupid variety. I suppose I could use Libertards, but that still seems ambiguous.
I don't know about the decision being improper. The upstream provider had to react to the takedown demand or risk being held liable (since this isn't covered by the DMCA, there is no safe harbor). How easy would it have been for the upstream provider to shut down just the offending account of the downstream provider?
An armed citizenry has no chance against an organized army. The US Army has better rifles than civilians are allowed to own, and has in addition plenty of heavier weapons. What they have in addition is training, which is one of the main reasons it's so effective. If you study the partisan actions of WWII, you'll notice that partisans had a great deal of difficulty, and not much success, in fighting badly equipped badly led badly trained regular troops. The US Army gives its troops very good weapons and training, and has at least decent leadership.
In a civilian uprising, the deciding factor would be what the Army did. If it refused to oppose the uprising, for whatever reason, the uprising could win. If it joined in, the uprising would win.
AIUI, you can't buy new assault rifles at all, just those that already existed in 1986 or so. I regard this as a violation of the Second Amendment, which obviously means that people should be able to get military weapons if it means anything.
Pedantry: voting is not a Constitutional right in the sense that bearing arms is. The Constitution says nothing about a right to vote, except in a reference to eligibility established by individual states.
DMCA takedown requests apply only to copyright infringement, but they're part of the "safe harbor" provisions. If a site hosts user-supplied content that may violate a copyright, and reacts appropriately to a takedown notice, the site has no liability.
I know of no similar safe harbor provisions for trademark law, which means that a site that hosts user-supplied content that violates trademark law probably has no legal shield from it. Normally, trademark holders are content with a prompt response to a cease-and-desist letter, but if they don't get that it looks to me like the site is liable.
Let me address the "party of war" idea. You do realize, don't you, that the timing of WWI, WWII, and the Korean war were not set by US Presidents, and that a President of any party would have had to deal with the situations? It's pretty definite that Johnson, if not Kennedy, greatly expanded and mismanaged the Vietnam War, I'll give you that. However, the invasion of Iraq was unnecessary, thoroughly mismanaged, and was preceded by Republican propaganda. (I'm not claiming that all the Republicans were in on the propaganda; Powell, for example, was set up by Cheney.) I'll give the Republicans a pass on Afghanistan, since that was justified, but in my lifetime the Republicans seem to have been a bit more warmongering than the Democrats.
Just one team?
You can commit illegal acts and not be a criminal. Crimes are actions which are against certain specific laws. Conviction of a crime requires a trial where the defendant has certain rights and must be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and the consequences include jail or prison time (not always enforced). Is it actually a crime to be an illegal immigrant, or a different sort of violation? Typically they get deported rather than imprisoned, which suggests that it isn't treated as a crime. I don't know the actual law, but unless someone can find where a prison term is specified it isn't a crime.
You do know that the listed synonyms don't mean exactly the same things, I hope. "Felon" refers to a proper subset of criminals, while "lawbreaker" and "offender" are proper supersets.
Have you looked at what Obama's accomplished? He's brought down the deficit tremendously. He hasn't started quagmire wars like Afghanistan (which we had reason to get into) and Iraq (which we didn't). The economy is doing well. He's restored our image in the world after what Bush did to it. He's done things I disagree with, but every President does. In what ways has he done a terrible job? It looks to me like there's unreasoning prejudice against him and a determination on the part of many people to not believe he's done a good job. Heck, the First Lady is a class act, and I see all sorts of horrible things said about her.
You do realize that Trump's been sued for illegal discrimination on a number of occasions, don't you? I don't think either Obama or Clinton have.
The single black mother probably doesn't have good facilities for having her gun on her at all times and keeping her child from it. If her gun is inaccessible or unloaded, it's no good for self-defense, and if her child can get it there's a very real potential for horrifying accidents.
You're not doing yourself any favors in argument by claiming to have taught yourself to excel in critical thinking while thoroughly misstating my position.
My basic claim is that there are inherent differences in ability. These differences can be dwarfed by technology and education, but they exist. Your neighbor would move things better than you if he thought about using levers. I can go faster than a marathon runner, until you get him or her a car like mine. Technology does improve, and education improves, just much more slowly. There can be breakthroughs in how to teach and do things. There are very definitely different ways to do most things, and often some ways are definitely better than others.
So far, you aren't refuting me. You point to people who used a better memorization technique and did much better than the previous experts. Fine. Teach two people that technique and they'll be much better at arbitrary memorization than someone not taught that, but the one with the better memory overall will still be better. (This isn't particularly related to learning, by the way. Unless you're learning something like historical dates, which are a very minor part of history, learning requires a LOT more than indelibly memorizing certain facts. Not that historical dates are completely useless; I had a friend a long time ago whose telephone numbers contained the date of the battle of Manzikert, so it helped me remember her number. Would you feel more educated if I told you that the date was 1071, or if I told you the strategic consequences of the Byzantine loss?)
Rather than concede that I might be better at math than the average person, you make up a story about some people needing more energy, which isn't so much disagreeing with me as it is using different terminology to maintain the appearance that I'm wrong.
You have consistently failed to address my big objection: that I haven't seen any major effects in society. For decades, people have been claiming that intelligence is a matter of education, and, according to you, succeeding in demonstrating that. If you could raise a person's IQ by 30 points or so with better education, you could teach people to be much more successful. Somebody would have set up a school using these techniques. (I was first taught geometry with a set of books on Skinnerian principles, as if understanding mathematics was a matter of operant conditioning, so people have been using modern psychological findings in education for a long time.) The graduates of that school would have been sufficiently successful that other schools would adopt the same methods. This wouldn't happen fast, but it wouldn't take many decades.
This would have consequences in society, and we would have seen them. I haven't noticed them.
OK, what sort of sting would you have used on the shooter that would have worked? He wasn't trying to be on jihad there, as far as I can tell, so offering him a jihad buddy likely would not have worked. He'd been interviewed by the FBI twice, so he might have suspected a convenient fellow jihader to be an FBI plant. This is by no means a sure thing, and it takes time and money to do it right. Moreover, if we do it with every suspicious person, word will get around, and all we'll be accomplish is to increase distrust and paranoia among the bad guys. Worth doing, sure, if it isn't too expensive, but it won't stop lone shooters.
Right. Therefore, will you accept that they already have the prices set so they get the maximum profit? And, if they could increase profit by raising prices, they'd have already done so?
You are required to forfeit nothing. If you don't earn any money, and don't spend any, and don't own property, you don't owe taxes. I'm not recommending this as a lifestyle, but it's one legal way to avoid all taxes. If you do decide to take advantage of what society offers, society gets a cut.
A slave does what he or she is told. You can do whatever you can get away with, although some of your money will be taxed. A slave eats what is provided, and lives where quartered. You can buy all sorts of food and live wherever you can afford.
Calling taxation slavery is trivializing slavery, and makes it clear that you have no sense of proportion.
We need to collect taxes. We should do so as fairly as possible (recognizing that "fair" means different things to different people). Having some people who can avoid taxes and people in similar circumstances who can't isn't fair.
If everybody were to avoid their taxes, government would collapse. There would be no road building or maintenance, no police, no restraint on what natural monopolies like the power company can do, no national defense, no public education or libraries, etc. Everybody except criminals would be far worse off.
It's also a lot easier to hide income than to hide outgo. Particularly in a country where people evade their income taxes in a big way, a consumption tax may be the way to go.
How much faith do you have in the altruistic tendencies of companies to get less money out of you than they could? Not quite a mustard seed's worth? Companies already set their prices for maximum profit. Assuming they do it right, if they lower the price they sell more but the reduced profit on each item more than offsets that. If they raise the price, they make more profit on each sale, but enough fewer sales to offset that.
Basically, if they could make more money by raising the prices to compensate for something, they'd have raised the prices already.
Increased corporate taxes may cause prices to go up, but the biggest impact will be on profits, not price. (Corporate income tax is paid out of profits. Since whatever is done to maximize profits will also maximize profits / 2, maximizing profits (at least in the short run) will result in the exact same behavior regardless of the tax rate.)
Do NOT roll your own encryption. Approximately nobody here has the expertise to come up with a really good cipher (this being Slashdot, I assume a few of us do). Use something standard, devised by people who really know what they're doing, and heavily tested. The security isn't in the cipher being obscure, it's about the key being unknown.
Basically, cryptology is about secrecy compression. Take a large document you want secret, and encrypt it with AES-256. You've reduced the secrecy to eight bytes, which is far easier to move around securely than the plaintext document. If the cryptosystem has to be unknown for the cipher to work, there's a lot bigger minimal secret there.