Where this is even possible, schools of higher learning, the bastions of freedom of thought and expression, the foundations of critical thought, where the right to hold alternative beliefs and opinions is sacred, are no more. When it comes to education there should be nothing remotely resembling lobby group amendments.
Oh come now. Why get pissed when it finally spills over into the education realm? Were all of the other gross examples of corruption not enough to incite outrage? And yet where is the action? Where is the change? Until and unless the masses become seriously inconvenienced or suddenly develope critical thinking skills, it will all remain the same.
Once again I wish there were a "Mod Parent Up +10,000", because that's about the most, and the only, important message to be made here. The reality is, whoever has the money wins. And in a contest between an organized and ruthless multi-billion dollar industry, and tens of thousands of disorganized, scattered, apathetic individuals, the fight doesn't even merit the name.
Is it? The whole point of the 2nd Amendment was to make the civilian population a credible deterrant against internal or external threats. Technology has advanced, but truly effective weapons of war are out of the hands of everyone but the government. Fighter-bombers, SSBNs, and main battle tanks are all beyond the financial and technological capabilities of private individuals. And the few significant exceptions to that are uniformly either heavily regulated or outright prohibited. Not many people realize that possession of surface-to-air missiles, for instance, is completely illegal for anyone but the government (or its agents), anywhere, for any reason, period. We can thank a 2004 anti-terrorism bill for that (which also helped protect us from the terrorist threat by outlawing nuclear and chemical weapons).
We can keep our rifles, because in the end they're never going to win against outright tyranny. When a modern military truly decides to roll over and quash resistence, nothing much is going to stop them but another modern military. Replace the U.S. military in Vietnam and Iraq with the Nazi Wehrmacht, and things would be concluded very quickly-although the glass fields would continue to glow faintly for a while.
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years , the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped,or turned back, for their private benefit.
-- The Judge in "Life-Line"
Who was the official who made the statement not that long ago, along the lines "The peculiar notion has arisen amongst corporations that the past profitability entitles them to government protection of future profitability?" For the life of me I can't find anything on Google, and I recall reading that quote several times not too long ago. Anyone?
Oh, right, because it's perfectly reasonable that gp must go to every single person who knows his/her name, and politely ask them never to post pictures of them on Facebook/Myspace/etc, or to ever mention their names on the internet. Most normal people would not respond well to requests like that, and most people aren't going to make such requests, even if they value privacy, specifically because of the social repercussions of acting paranoid. There is a distinct trade-off for most people between sacrificing privacy and maintaining normal social ties.
The difference is, the American moviegoer has never been interested in quality or substance. Hype is the only real reason most people go pay $9 for the privilege of paying $10 more for Coke and popcorn while watching a movie that will cost them $2-3 for the same benefits, two months later. It doesn't matter if the next Star Wars is produced by some college students for $10,000-without a nationwide advertising budget, internet word-of-mouth is only going to reach a fraction of the total market.
So why isn't the media screaming bloody murder about that fact itself? The answer is obvious. If people cared, we would see attention focused on the issue, instead of being relegated to a blurb on page 12. Spice Girls concerts are considered to be more important than the lives of thousands of people living in a 3rd world shithole-that's the honest ethical viewpoint of our society.
Perhaps your post is simply a masterpiece of subtle irony, but your own words betray your argument. Misusing each word to draw attention to common mistakes ignores the fact that, regardless of the fact that the entire sentence is wrong, the idea you're trying to convey (agreenment with his point) is still readily understood. Language is first and foremost a tool for the communication of thoughts and ideas. There is no evolutionary imperative for it, or anything else, to remain constant over time. If anything, the opposite prevails: society evolves new words, phrases, and rules specifically in order to facilitate better communication.
Have you ever tried arming people? Without detailed instruction, they're probably not going to have any real idea what to do. How to load, fire, unload, and clean their rifles, for instance. In an all-out genocide, it might concievably be of some value to at least give the victims a remote chance to fight back, but short of that point, it's only going to incite crackdowns by the government.
You've got it all backwards...Al Gore's campaign to prevent global warming stems from his guilt complex over having ruined the environment by inventing the internet. He's just trying to undo his horrible mistake.
Mentioned in the body of the story is that the vest withstood a 9mm Luger round fired at 1777 feet per second. I'm not quite understanding the ballistics tables provided in the link, but the numbers seem wildly high to me. Their numbers for the.357 Magnum and.44 Magnum are both much higher than any standard loading as well. A standard 9mm load would be a 115 or 124 grain projectile moving in the vicinity of 1000-1200 feet per second. Sample loads available online indicate 383 foot-pounds of energy for a 124gr projectile moving at 1180 fps.
To replicate that energy level, but traveling at 1777 fps, would require a projectile weight of 54.6 grains (ignoring ballistic coefficient, I believe). Or in other words, to get those velocity figures, they would have to drop the projectile weight roughly in half. I suppose it's possible they were using a projectile only slightly lighter than normal, but with insanely high chamber pressures (in some sort of test platform), but even then I don't know enough to say if it's even theoretically possible to create those sorts of velocities from a 9mm Luger case using a projectile as light as 100gr.
Unless they were using MagSafe ammunition, which sells a 9mm load which reaches 1800 fps with a 60 gr projectile. The catch is, MagSafe makes prefragmented ammunition, which is most definitely not designed to penetrate vests. In fact, it's specifically created to NOT over-penetrate and shoot through walls, furniture, etc, and instead to stop fairly quickly when encountering something other than a person. The Defender load (1800 fps/60gr) is stated as being capable of limited penetration, but it's still most definitely not going to penetrate nearly as much as a standard defensive hollowpoint. If they're using MagSafe as their standard for testing, it seems to me that their claims should definitely be considered suspect in regards to their ability to defeat handgun cartridges.
Except that your logic completely fails if you consider the situation rationally. Your argument, in essence, is that during a crisis people will have no means to recognize the difference between one armed individual and another. While confusion is always present in emergencies, the assertion that it would automatically lead to friendly fire is erroneous. Those ten students or teachers are already busy going about their normal tasks: sitting in classrooms, or working in offices. When that eleventh person comes running in shooting, people tend to figure out what's going on rather quickly. The distinguishing characteristic of homicidal maniacs is that they're walking around randomly shooting at people, whereas armed citizens aren't. And in a crisis, it's not too difficult to figure out which is the threat: the person at the doorway shooting into the room, or the person sitting next to you that you were just having a conversation with.
Read up on history, and find out what percentage of people murdered by organizations in the last century were killed by governments, as opposed to terrorists. Which do I fear more? Loosely organized bands of criminals in another hemisphere armed with low-tech 70s-era ex-Soviet hardware? Or the single strongest military force on the face of the planet, backed up by trillions of dollars of men and material? Judge not by intentions, but by capabilities.
All judges do not share knowledge from a common pool. They are not the Borg. Grandparent was trying to say that this might be a sign that the negative publicity is such that even judges who might not have otherwise known about the tactics of the RIAA, are aware of them now and are responding accordingly in their courtrooms.
Calling the internet a "war zone" is idiotic hype. If you want to see what one actually looks like, go to Iraq, or Somalia, or any number of other low intensity conflicts around the globe. A far better metaphor would be calling the internet a playground filled with shouting, arguing children who sometimes say threatening or stupid things.
Frankly, hand-to-hand combat is the whole thing we're trying to avoid. When you say that you can't imagine such a situation, the true issue is not the thought of gunfire, but rather violent crime in general. If every firearms in America disappeared overnight, we would still have significant levels of violence. The guns, however, even the playing field for the law-abiding citizen.
Sure, I could theoretically spend all of my spare time body building, training in martial arts, and attempting to become extremely proficient in martial arts, but none of that will do much good if I get attacked by multiple (more than 2 or 3) people at once. And realistically, there will always be bladed and blunt weapons available to any criminal. The first rule of a knife fight is to bring a gun, and that's not a joke. Being armed is simple prudence in an environment with a non-zero risk of violence. It's never going to reduce my chances of survival, only increase them.
The basic issue is that New Zealand does not have a serious crime problem. The United States does. Until such a time that things change, it will remain a wise decision to make use of tools that offer increased safety to one's self and family.
While they may seem foreign to you (I'm guessing based on the tone of your post), I'll bet that if you get a chance to go to the range and have someone give you some decent training, you'll find that firearms aren't really all that scary. Millions of people safely carry handguns everyday, and millions more enjoy shooting on a regular basis. With observation of a few basic safety rules, firearms can be both a source of protection and fun.
When was the last time the United States expressed a serious intent to launch a first strike with ICBMs against civilian targets? Or Russia? Or Franch? Or Britain? Or Israel? The Israelis have nukes as a form of deterrance against nuclear or non-nuclear attack by surrounding nations-it's that simple. They've been buying and equipping a small sub fleet specifically in order to have a second-strike capability in the event someone manages to lob a couple of fission devices onto their cities. Do the Israelis have a cultural or political drive to try to annihilate the Middle East? I'm not usually defending their actions, but realistically this shouldn't even be an argument, it's so bloody obvious.
It just says that their technology sucks, and the test was a failure. Not that it didn't occur, but that the yield was less than intended.
Also, it's worth asking what countries are continuously monitoring the globe for signs of missile launches and/or detonations. Being the two nuclear superpowers, it would make sense that both Russia and the US would be best equipped to detect and analyze an event.
In short: you don't give a damn what happens, because you never valued privacy and liberty to begin with. At least you're not going to miss it once it's gone.
Slashdot Mirror
Where this is even possible, schools of higher learning, the bastions of freedom of thought and expression, the foundations of critical thought, where the right to hold alternative beliefs and opinions is sacred, are no more. When it comes to education there should be nothing remotely resembling lobby group amendments.
Oh come now. Why get pissed when it finally spills over into the education realm? Were all of the other gross examples of corruption not enough to incite outrage? And yet where is the action? Where is the change? Until and unless the masses become seriously inconvenienced or suddenly develope critical thinking skills, it will all remain the same.
Thank you for explaining the economics of the situation much more clearly than anyone else I've heard so far. That was an outstanding post.
Once again I wish there were a "Mod Parent Up +10,000", because that's about the most, and the only, important message to be made here. The reality is, whoever has the money wins. And in a contest between an organized and ruthless multi-billion dollar industry, and tens of thousands of disorganized, scattered, apathetic individuals, the fight doesn't even merit the name.
Is it? The whole point of the 2nd Amendment was to make the civilian population a credible deterrant against internal or external threats. Technology has advanced, but truly effective weapons of war are out of the hands of everyone but the government. Fighter-bombers, SSBNs, and main battle tanks are all beyond the financial and technological capabilities of private individuals. And the few significant exceptions to that are uniformly either heavily regulated or outright prohibited. Not many people realize that possession of surface-to-air missiles, for instance, is completely illegal for anyone but the government (or its agents), anywhere, for any reason, period. We can thank a 2004 anti-terrorism bill for that (which also helped protect us from the terrorist threat by outlawing nuclear and chemical weapons).
We can keep our rifles, because in the end they're never going to win against outright tyranny. When a modern military truly decides to roll over and quash resistence, nothing much is going to stop them but another modern military. Replace the U.S. military in Vietnam and Iraq with the Nazi Wehrmacht, and things would be concluded very quickly-although the glass fields would continue to glow faintly for a while.
Aha! Heinlein FTW:
,or turned back, for their private benefit.
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years , the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped
-- The Judge in "Life-Line"
Who was the official who made the statement not that long ago, along the lines "The peculiar notion has arisen amongst corporations that the past profitability entitles them to government protection of future profitability?" For the life of me I can't find anything on Google, and I recall reading that quote several times not too long ago. Anyone?
Oh, right, because it's perfectly reasonable that gp must go to every single person who knows his/her name, and politely ask them never to post pictures of them on Facebook/Myspace/etc, or to ever mention their names on the internet. Most normal people would not respond well to requests like that, and most people aren't going to make such requests, even if they value privacy, specifically because of the social repercussions of acting paranoid. There is a distinct trade-off for most people between sacrificing privacy and maintaining normal social ties.
The difference is, the American moviegoer has never been interested in quality or substance. Hype is the only real reason most people go pay $9 for the privilege of paying $10 more for Coke and popcorn while watching a movie that will cost them $2-3 for the same benefits, two months later. It doesn't matter if the next Star Wars is produced by some college students for $10,000-without a nationwide advertising budget, internet word-of-mouth is only going to reach a fraction of the total market.
So why isn't the media screaming bloody murder about that fact itself? The answer is obvious. If people cared, we would see attention focused on the issue, instead of being relegated to a blurb on page 12. Spice Girls concerts are considered to be more important than the lives of thousands of people living in a 3rd world shithole-that's the honest ethical viewpoint of our society.
Perhaps your post is simply a masterpiece of subtle irony, but your own words betray your argument. Misusing each word to draw attention to common mistakes ignores the fact that, regardless of the fact that the entire sentence is wrong, the idea you're trying to convey (agreenment with his point) is still readily understood. Language is first and foremost a tool for the communication of thoughts and ideas. There is no evolutionary imperative for it, or anything else, to remain constant over time. If anything, the opposite prevails: society evolves new words, phrases, and rules specifically in order to facilitate better communication.
Have you ever tried arming people? Without detailed instruction, they're probably not going to have any real idea what to do. How to load, fire, unload, and clean their rifles, for instance. In an all-out genocide, it might concievably be of some value to at least give the victims a remote chance to fight back, but short of that point, it's only going to incite crackdowns by the government.
You've got it all backwards...Al Gore's campaign to prevent global warming stems from his guilt complex over having ruined the environment by inventing the internet. He's just trying to undo his horrible mistake.
I'll start to worry when they build and deploy Reason.
Or maybe a bunch of lines on their forehead? Seems like it would work out pretty well, right? Right?
\loves the smell of karma burning in the morning
\\smells like victory
Please tell me that I'm not the only one around here geeky enough to get the hidden reference in the end of the last sentence...
Mentioned in the body of the story is that the vest withstood a 9mm Luger round fired at 1777 feet per second. I'm not quite understanding the ballistics tables provided in the link, but the numbers seem wildly high to me. Their numbers for the .357 Magnum and .44 Magnum are both much higher than any standard loading as well. A standard 9mm load would be a 115 or 124 grain projectile moving in the vicinity of 1000-1200 feet per second. Sample loads available online indicate 383 foot-pounds of energy for a 124gr projectile moving at 1180 fps.
To replicate that energy level, but traveling at 1777 fps, would require a projectile weight of 54.6 grains (ignoring ballistic coefficient, I believe). Or in other words, to get those velocity figures, they would have to drop the projectile weight roughly in half. I suppose it's possible they were using a projectile only slightly lighter than normal, but with insanely high chamber pressures (in some sort of test platform), but even then I don't know enough to say if it's even theoretically possible to create those sorts of velocities from a 9mm Luger case using a projectile as light as 100gr.
Unless they were using MagSafe ammunition, which sells a 9mm load which reaches 1800 fps with a 60 gr projectile. The catch is, MagSafe makes prefragmented ammunition, which is most definitely not designed to penetrate vests. In fact, it's specifically created to NOT over-penetrate and shoot through walls, furniture, etc, and instead to stop fairly quickly when encountering something other than a person. The Defender load (1800 fps/60gr) is stated as being capable of limited penetration, but it's still most definitely not going to penetrate nearly as much as a standard defensive hollowpoint. If they're using MagSafe as their standard for testing, it seems to me that their claims should definitely be considered suspect in regards to their ability to defeat handgun cartridges.
Except that your logic completely fails if you consider the situation rationally. Your argument, in essence, is that during a crisis people will have no means to recognize the difference between one armed individual and another. While confusion is always present in emergencies, the assertion that it would automatically lead to friendly fire is erroneous. Those ten students or teachers are already busy going about their normal tasks: sitting in classrooms, or working in offices. When that eleventh person comes running in shooting, people tend to figure out what's going on rather quickly. The distinguishing characteristic of homicidal maniacs is that they're walking around randomly shooting at people, whereas armed citizens aren't. And in a crisis, it's not too difficult to figure out which is the threat: the person at the doorway shooting into the room, or the person sitting next to you that you were just having a conversation with.
Read up on history, and find out what percentage of people murdered by organizations in the last century were killed by governments, as opposed to terrorists. Which do I fear more? Loosely organized bands of criminals in another hemisphere armed with low-tech 70s-era ex-Soviet hardware? Or the single strongest military force on the face of the planet, backed up by trillions of dollars of men and material? Judge not by intentions, but by capabilities.
All judges do not share knowledge from a common pool. They are not the Borg. Grandparent was trying to say that this might be a sign that the negative publicity is such that even judges who might not have otherwise known about the tactics of the RIAA, are aware of them now and are responding accordingly in their courtrooms.
Calling the internet a "war zone" is idiotic hype. If you want to see what one actually looks like, go to Iraq, or Somalia, or any number of other low intensity conflicts around the globe. A far better metaphor would be calling the internet a playground filled with shouting, arguing children who sometimes say threatening or stupid things.
Frankly, hand-to-hand combat is the whole thing we're trying to avoid. When you say that you can't imagine such a situation, the true issue is not the thought of gunfire, but rather violent crime in general. If every firearms in America disappeared overnight, we would still have significant levels of violence. The guns, however, even the playing field for the law-abiding citizen.
Sure, I could theoretically spend all of my spare time body building, training in martial arts, and attempting to become extremely proficient in martial arts, but none of that will do much good if I get attacked by multiple (more than 2 or 3) people at once. And realistically, there will always be bladed and blunt weapons available to any criminal. The first rule of a knife fight is to bring a gun, and that's not a joke. Being armed is simple prudence in an environment with a non-zero risk of violence. It's never going to reduce my chances of survival, only increase them.
The basic issue is that New Zealand does not have a serious crime problem. The United States does. Until such a time that things change, it will remain a wise decision to make use of tools that offer increased safety to one's self and family.
While they may seem foreign to you (I'm guessing based on the tone of your post), I'll bet that if you get a chance to go to the range and have someone give you some decent training, you'll find that firearms aren't really all that scary. Millions of people safely carry handguns everyday, and millions more enjoy shooting on a regular basis. With observation of a few basic safety rules, firearms can be both a source of protection and fun.
Cults are just nature's way of genetically trimming out gullibility in humans.
When was the last time the United States expressed a serious intent to launch a first strike with ICBMs against civilian targets? Or Russia? Or Franch? Or Britain? Or Israel? The Israelis have nukes as a form of deterrance against nuclear or non-nuclear attack by surrounding nations-it's that simple. They've been buying and equipping a small sub fleet specifically in order to have a second-strike capability in the event someone manages to lob a couple of fission devices onto their cities. Do the Israelis have a cultural or political drive to try to annihilate the Middle East? I'm not usually defending their actions, but realistically this shouldn't even be an argument, it's so bloody obvious.
It just says that their technology sucks, and the test was a failure. Not that it didn't occur, but that the yield was less than intended.
Also, it's worth asking what countries are continuously monitoring the globe for signs of missile launches and/or detonations. Being the two nuclear superpowers, it would make sense that both Russia and the US would be best equipped to detect and analyze an event.
In short: you don't give a damn what happens, because you never valued privacy and liberty to begin with. At least you're not going to miss it once it's gone.