Not only do they have those employees but they also need to make a profit on them. So it will not be cheaper either.
Google Apps costs $5/user/month (or $50/user/year if prepaid for the year) for a whole bunch of useful services (e.g. mail, calendar, sync+sharing, etc.). There's plenty of other companies that provide similar services at generally similar price points.
I'm not really sure how any reasonable company can provide a comparable service "in house" for less money. Buying physical servers is expensive. Having trained staff configure them in a way that's geographically redundant, fault-tolerant, and scalable is expensive. Operating costs like electricity, connectivity, maintenance, upgrades, etc. are expensive. Spam is annoying for users and can consume staff time and energy, not to mention server resources. Google (or other similar services) has considerably more expertise in building and maintaining such systems than most corporate IT departments. Economies of scale make it more efficient for them to provide service to many business customers than having businesses each setup their own internal mail systems.
By outsourcing relatively common, standard things like email and calendar, business IT departments can focus on more "core" things that relate to their specific business. A university I used to work for outsourced ~35,000 student email accounts to Google Apps, freeing up considerable IT resources which could then be used for more "core" university purposes like high-performance computing for research rather than having to deal with email. For academic institutions Google offers Google Apps at no cost, which is a major perk -- even with the paid services for business there's still a lot of room for cost savings and other advantages.
Are there concerns about letting a third-party host important business infrastructure? Yes, absolutely. Are there benefits to such outsourcing? Yes. Should administrators seriously weigh the pros and cons of such outsourcing? Again, yes.
Of course, there's nothing preventing the company from using commercially-supported distributions (like Red Hat) on critical systems if they really need the support and clones (like CentOS) on other systems.
No, not terribly user-unfriendly, I agree... then again, you may not be the best example of an average user, having listed PGP and S/MIME keys on your website:)
Hah! Indeed.:)
I wish they'd allow smartcard/token authentication instead of the calculator though, as that'd likely be a bit faster. Oh well.
I don't think it's inconsistent to argue that all semi-auto guns should be banned. I am personally very opposed to such a ban, but I acknowledge that it's logically consistent.
You've described just about every semi-automatic gun on the market today.
I can see how those features would make them somewhat more useful in a mass shooting, but I don't see how it makes them any less useful for any of the other perfectly legitimate uses that people use them for. Indeed, those features seem like they would be ideal for a self-defense firearm and would be quite useful in many other situations, like competition.
Also, that doesn't really help distinguish such a gun from any of the other popular semi-auto guns on the market today. The Mini-14, for example, can be reloaded quickly, is of comparable size, is semi-auto, and can accept magazines of arbitrary size yet it wasn't banned during the 1994-2004 ban. The exact same rifle with some different plastic bits, however, would. That doesn't really make any sense as the functionality and lethality of the gun are the same.
The Browning BAR is an extremely common semi-auto rifle marketed to hunters. It's semi-auto, only 3.5 inches longer than an AR, can be reloaded quickly, and can accept magazines of arbitrary size. Is it an assault weapon?
It would be consistent to argue that all semi-auto guns should be banned, or those that can accept detachable magazines. I disagree, but that's a personal opinion. It isn't consistent to argue that some semi-auto guns should be banned as being particularly dangerous while others shouldn't be: there's no functional difference between them.
As I mentioned in another post, it'd be like saying that a Honda Civic with a spoiler, strips, racing stickers, and a stock engine is a "race car" and shouldn't be street-legal while a Honda Civic without those cosmetic features is somehow safer and more appropriate. They're the same car.
I don't really follow. How, exactly, are "assault weapons" only useful in mass shootings? Do they have some sort of distinguishing feature that makes them more lethal or dangerous than other common, semi-automatic rifles like the Browning BAR? If so, I'd love to hear what makes them different from other semi-auto rifles that evidently are not "only useful for mass shootings". Please be specific.
An AR-15 in its default.223 Remington configuration is quite suitable for vermin control, small game hunting, and with soft-point ammo is suitable for hunting deer -- most state hunting laws limit rifles to 5 round magazines, regardless of what type of rifle is used. It can be easily modified to fire other common hunting cartridges like.308 Winchester,.300 Win Mag, etc. It's comparable in accuracy to other common hunting rifles, including semi-auto ones. Indeed, there's several AR-pattern rifles that are marketed specifically for hunting, like the Remington R-25. In short: they're quite good for hunting, actually.
I'm not really sure where you're going with the "useless for self-defense" bit. I think that shotguns are a better choice for a home-defense situation, but a rifle is far from useless.
And restricting such guns would have some sort of meaningful effect on violent crime...how, exactly? (Consider the fact that they're used only very rarely in crime as it is.)
Yes, the Tucson shooter was inconvenienced (and ultimately stopped) because he had to change magazines and he fumbled the reload. Of that there's no doubt. I, for one, am extremely glad that he was stopped and wish that he (like others) were stopped sooner.
However, just because it happened once doesn't mean that it's statistically meaningful or should form the basis of sound public policy. Yes, it's certainly meaningful to the people whose lives were spared because the shooter was stopped when he did, but the government needs to address things from a "big picture" standpoint and take into account more than a single incident: mass shootings are (thankfully!) very rare events but even so, it seems that restricting magazines would not have any sort of meaningful effect on either violent crime as a whole or on mass shooters.
Even if one could legally restrict the sale and production of magazines above a certain capacity, there's still zillions out there. Even if they could somehow be made to disappear, it's not like a box-with-a-spring is hard to make. From a purely practical standpoint, such a law would do little to stop criminals from getting their hands on such things.
Did I say they were meaningless? No. Any violent crime is a tragedy.
You may have misinterpreted my statements to mean that I don't believe that violent crime is a problem simply because I'm opposed to gun restrictions -- that's incorrect.
I support many different proposals that I think will be effective at reducing violent crime: ending the War on Drugs, treating personal drug use like a public health issue rather than a crime, cracking down on gun trafficking, universal healthcare (both for medical and mental health), and improving poverty-stricken communities that are often plagued by drug and gang-related violence. Are those ideas cheap or easy? No, but I think it'd do a heck of a lot more good than restricting certain popular guns that are rarely used in crime. I'm certainly willing to pay the bill, in the form of increased taxes, if it helps improve the lives of more people and reduces violent crime.
I'm simply saying that I think it's an overreaction to ban or seriously restrict the most commonly sold rifle and used in the country simply because it has been misused in a few high-profile crimes.
Firearm-related homicide rates have been decreasing year-over-year for decades and are currently at their lowest level since 1964. The number of guns-per-capita in the country is at an all-time high. Although the media makes it seem like things are getting worse, the average person (read: not involved in drug or gang activity) is safer now than they have been in nearly 50 years. Are the current rates too high? Absolutely. Can we as a society do more to help reduce them and to improve the lives of more people? Yes, certainly. Is banning certain types of guns that look scary going to have any real meaningful effect? Probably not.
As for storing guns at the range, that's an interesting proposal but what would it really accomplish? Would it reduce violent crime? Not in any meaningful way, as criminals wouldn't store their guns there and these types of guns are rarely used in crime -- it's basically a "feel good" measure that really wouldn't do much. If it were a problem, I'd be a lot more open to the idea, but it seems a bit excessive. I prefer more meaningful action that can actually help people.
Did he get a license or permit to transport his gun through the state? If not, he should have done his due diligence of using a licensed professional to transport is equipment.
It doesn't matter: Federal law specifically protects the transport of firearms through areas where a gun is restricted so long as the gun is legal to own at the start and ending points of the journey and that the person transporting the guns keeps them unloaded and not immediately accessible (e.g. in a trunk or locked container) and does not make any extended stops in the area where the guns are restricted (stopping for food or gas is acceptable, though it's unclear if staying overnight at a hotel is acceptable or not).
Automatic weapons have been heavily restricted since 1934 and any machine gun manufactured after 1986 is illegal for private sale. No legally-owned machine guns have been used in crime in decades, as they're almost exclusively owned by wealthy collectors.
The AR-15, while it looks like the M16, is functionally identical to many other civilian-legal firearms in that it only fires one shot per pull of the trigger. It's not very commonly used in massacres of any type, as handguns are much more frequently used in such situations (handguns are also very commonly used for self-defense. Rifles of any kind, including AR-15s, were used in only 3.7% of gun-related homicides in 2011 and have been trending downwards for years.
It's a very common misconception that just because a gun (say the AR-15) looks like a machine gun (say the M16), then it is a machine gun. This is not true, though I don't fault you for being somewhat confused.
ObSlashdotCarAnalogy: A Honda Civic with a spoiler, a stripe, some racing stickers, and a stock engine may look like a race car, but it's functionally no different than a normal Civic or other common cars.
AR-15s are very commonly used for recreational, sport, and competitive shooting (including the National Matches). There's no real pressing or justifiable reason to ban or restrict them.
Gun-related crime rates haven't been this low since 1964.
The background check isn't a huge deal. I'm not particularly opposed to it or in support of it.
As for the magazine requirements, it really wouldn't have made a difference. Nearly everyone, when confronted with a gunman, attempts to flee or hide and offer little resistance to the gunman. Reloading takes, at most, a few seconds for someone with even the most rudimentary of training and its unlikely that the gunman would be the least bit inconvenienced by needing to change magazines.
- The Newtown shooter fired ~100 rounds in ~10 minutes and reloaded frequently. The police say that they found many 30 round magazines where he only fired 15 shots, then changed magazines. - The Aurora shooter had his 100-round drum magazine jam and had to switch to another weapon. Didn't seem to have any real effect. - The VT shooter used 10 and 15 round magazines and had tons of them, reloading frequently. - The Columbine shooters had a mixed-bag of guns, ranging from a double-barrel shotgun to other guns with larger magazines. They reloaded frequently without any opposition.
The only scenario where it may have had some sort of effect was the shooter in Tucson who fumbled a reload and dropped his next magazine and someone grabbed it. This disadvantage could have easily been overcome had he simply stood slightly further away so someone couldn't grab it or if he simply reached for another magazine.
In short: there's no real evidence that magazine capacity limits would have any effect on reducing the effectiveness of mass shooters or even ordinary violent criminals.
One slight flaw: assault weapons are designed for one purpose - to kill lots of other people quickly. For cars that's only a secondary effect, their primary purpose is transportation. Clothing and luggage are rarely fatal.
Does it really matter what something was designed to do if it's almost never used for that purpose?
I mean, yes, a grenade was designed to explode and kill/injure people nearby. It *can* be used as a baseball, but that's just foolish and stupid and it's never actually used for that.
The vast, overwhelming majority all "assault weapons" like the AR-15 are used for perfectly legitimate purposes, like recreational, sport, and competitive shooting (they're exceedingly common at high-end competitions like the National Matches). Their popularity in hunting is increasing as hunters realize that having a lightweight, durable, rugged, and reliable gun that fires the same ammo as "traditional-looking hunting rifles" can be useful.
They're almost never used in crime: FBI crime stats show that rifles of any kind (including "assault weapons") are used in about 3.7% of all firearm-related homicides and that number has been decreasing year over year for decades.
My M1 has a bayonet mount, as that's just the standard mil-spec part of the gas tube.
It's not clear if "detachable magazine with a capacity greater than 7 rounds" also includes "detachable en-bloc clips with a capacity greater than 7 rounds". It's rather unlikely that the lawmakers gave the bill much thought from a technical perspective.
The weapons you are describing are military derivative firearms and by all rights, SHOULD be banned IMO.
Why? Many guns, including traditional-looking hunting guns, are derivatives of military design. Why does that matter in any way?
I understand saying "Full-auto machine guns are functionally different than semi-auto guns and thus pose a significant danger and should be restricted." -- in general, I agree with that statement. What I don't understand is why saying "Some semi-auto guns are somehow more dangerous than semi-auto guns and should be restricted" even though they are functionally identical and differ only in appearance.
Since AR-15s are used extremely rarely in crime (rifles if any sort, including AR-15s, are only used in about 3.7% of gun-related homicides according to FBI crime stats, and both the rate and absolute numbers have been doing down year-over-year for a long time), why should they be singled out?
Even with all the widely-publicized news stories about gun crime, America today has lower rates of gun-related homicide since 1964 and the downward trend is continuing.
Can things be done to help reduce violent crime even more? Absolutely. Will banning the most popular rifle in the country (which is rarely used in crime) have any meaningful effect on reducing violent crime? No.
The law does contain a lot of really beneficial improvements that may well improve things, but the "one-feature" test for so-called "assault weapons" will apply to a rather large number of common sporting and competition guns, requires that they be registered within the year, and once registered these now-banned guns cannot be sold or transferred to another New Yorker -- they can only be transferred to a licensed gun dealer or to an out of state buyer -- even if the registered owner dies.
Not even legally-transferrable machine guns, what few there are, are so strictly regulated.
De-grandfathering pre-ban magazines with a capacity greater than 10 rounds is asinine (are people supposed to turn them in?), as is banning any newly-produced magazines with a capacity greater than 7 rounds. (You can keep your current 10-round magazines but you can't load more than 7 rounds into them.)
They could have kept such absurd provisions out of the law and people probably would think that it's a reasonable, if somewhat restrictive, law that may do some good stuff...but those extra provisions go way too far.
I'm pretty sure the First Amendment would protect such speech: there's plenty of widely-published dead-tree magazines and books that talk about the production and use of illicit drugs, manufacturing machine guns, silencers, and other legally-restricted or prohibited items.
Restricting something like DeCSS is somewhat plausible because (arguably) the information infringes on someone else's rights. But if the original creator says "Take this information and share it everywhere! It's in the public domain!" then it's unlikely that there's any real legal grounds for restricting it.
Even if there was legal grounds for restricting it, any such restrictions would be completely ineffective due to the nature of the internet. That's sort of the point that the Defense Distributed guys are trying to make.
A typical magazine consists of multiple parts, including spring loading, which cannot be printed. So you need to go on the market for parts and assemble them anyhow.
Actually, there were a few designs on the Defense Distributed site (among others) for magazines that used 3D-printed plastic springs. Perhaps not the best for reliability or longevity, but it can be done and the technology will only improve with time.
Also, what's wrong with buying springs and other parts? It's not like springs are hard to manufacture or restricted in any way (nor would it be remotely feasible to restrict their production or sale).
I was under the impression that money paid to Google was for the advertisements at the top or side of search results, and did not affect the position in the search index.
It's more likely that the shady sides are doing sneaky things like SEO that result in higher listings. Google tends to frown on this and have seriously penalized sites in the past for doing sneaky SEO stuff and it's only a matter of time until they refine things further.
Google has a vested interest in you finding what you're looking for: if you don't find what you're looking for, you're less likely to come back to Google in the future and see their ads.
I've found the autobahns outside of Munich to be comparable to most US Interstates, though I actually preferred the Interstates in regards to maintenance and road quality. The autobahn had a bunch of patches to fill potholes and obviously hadn't been repaved in years, though that may well have been an exception rather than the norm.
I'm not sure about that specific module, but I've found using the Google Authenticator pam module to be really useful. It ties in easily with SSH and allows users to use time-varying OTPs generated using the TOTP standard to authenticate to the system.
It's worth pointing out that although the module is developed by Google, it does not rely on nor communicate with their servers in any way: it's just an implementation of the TOTP standard. One can use their Google Authenticator client for iOS/Android or any other compatible client (I have a J2ME client on my non-smartphone, for example) to generate the relevant codes.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only do they have those employees but they also need to make a profit on them. So it will not be cheaper either.
Google Apps costs $5/user/month (or $50/user/year if prepaid for the year) for a whole bunch of useful services (e.g. mail, calendar, sync+sharing, etc.). There's plenty of other companies that provide similar services at generally similar price points.
I'm not really sure how any reasonable company can provide a comparable service "in house" for less money. Buying physical servers is expensive. Having trained staff configure them in a way that's geographically redundant, fault-tolerant, and scalable is expensive. Operating costs like electricity, connectivity, maintenance, upgrades, etc. are expensive. Spam is annoying for users and can consume staff time and energy, not to mention server resources. Google (or other similar services) has considerably more expertise in building and maintaining such systems than most corporate IT departments. Economies of scale make it more efficient for them to provide service to many business customers than having businesses each setup their own internal mail systems.
By outsourcing relatively common, standard things like email and calendar, business IT departments can focus on more "core" things that relate to their specific business. A university I used to work for outsourced ~35,000 student email accounts to Google Apps, freeing up considerable IT resources which could then be used for more "core" university purposes like high-performance computing for research rather than having to deal with email. For academic institutions Google offers Google Apps at no cost, which is a major perk -- even with the paid services for business there's still a lot of room for cost savings and other advantages.
Are there concerns about letting a third-party host important business infrastructure? Yes, absolutely. Are there benefits to such outsourcing? Yes. Should administrators seriously weigh the pros and cons of such outsourcing? Again, yes.
I'm not surprised.
Of course, there's nothing preventing the company from using commercially-supported distributions (like Red Hat) on critical systems if they really need the support and clones (like CentOS) on other systems.
And here I thought people bought guns to protect themselves against crime. I guess there are many things I still don't understand about guns.
Many people do. However, most people work during the day and are otherwise away from their homes.
It's quite possible that criminals may attempt to break into someone's house and steal their guns while the homeowner is away.
No, not terribly user-unfriendly, I agree... then again, you may not be the best example of an average user, having listed PGP and S/MIME keys on your website :)
Hah! Indeed. :)
I wish they'd allow smartcard/token authentication instead of the calculator though, as that'd likely be a bit faster. Oh well.
I don't think it's inconsistent to argue that all semi-auto guns should be banned. I am personally very opposed to such a ban, but I acknowledge that it's logically consistent.
Same thing with PostFinance in Switzerland.
Not terribly user-unfriendly, IMHO.
You've described just about every semi-automatic gun on the market today.
I can see how those features would make them somewhat more useful in a mass shooting, but I don't see how it makes them any less useful for any of the other perfectly legitimate uses that people use them for. Indeed, those features seem like they would be ideal for a self-defense firearm and would be quite useful in many other situations, like competition.
Also, that doesn't really help distinguish such a gun from any of the other popular semi-auto guns on the market today. The Mini-14, for example, can be reloaded quickly, is of comparable size, is semi-auto, and can accept magazines of arbitrary size yet it wasn't banned during the 1994-2004 ban. The exact same rifle with some different plastic bits, however, would. That doesn't really make any sense as the functionality and lethality of the gun are the same.
The Browning BAR is an extremely common semi-auto rifle marketed to hunters. It's semi-auto, only 3.5 inches longer than an AR, can be reloaded quickly, and can accept magazines of arbitrary size. Is it an assault weapon?
It would be consistent to argue that all semi-auto guns should be banned, or those that can accept detachable magazines. I disagree, but that's a personal opinion. It isn't consistent to argue that some semi-auto guns should be banned as being particularly dangerous while others shouldn't be: there's no functional difference between them.
As I mentioned in another post, it'd be like saying that a Honda Civic with a spoiler, strips, racing stickers, and a stock engine is a "race car" and shouldn't be street-legal while a Honda Civic without those cosmetic features is somehow safer and more appropriate. They're the same car.
I don't really follow. How, exactly, are "assault weapons" only useful in mass shootings? Do they have some sort of distinguishing feature that makes them more lethal or dangerous than other common, semi-automatic rifles like the Browning BAR? If so, I'd love to hear what makes them different from other semi-auto rifles that evidently are not "only useful for mass shootings". Please be specific.
An AR-15 in its default .223 Remington configuration is quite suitable for vermin control, small game hunting, and with soft-point ammo is suitable for hunting deer -- most state hunting laws limit rifles to 5 round magazines, regardless of what type of rifle is used. It can be easily modified to fire other common hunting cartridges like .308 Winchester, .300 Win Mag, etc. It's comparable in accuracy to other common hunting rifles, including semi-auto ones. Indeed, there's several AR-pattern rifles that are marketed specifically for hunting, like the Remington R-25. In short: they're quite good for hunting, actually.
I'm not really sure where you're going with the "useless for self-defense" bit. I think that shotguns are a better choice for a home-defense situation, but a rifle is far from useless.
And restricting such guns would have some sort of meaningful effect on violent crime...how, exactly? (Consider the fact that they're used only very rarely in crime as it is.)
Yes, the Tucson shooter was inconvenienced (and ultimately stopped) because he had to change magazines and he fumbled the reload. Of that there's no doubt. I, for one, am extremely glad that he was stopped and wish that he (like others) were stopped sooner.
However, just because it happened once doesn't mean that it's statistically meaningful or should form the basis of sound public policy. Yes, it's certainly meaningful to the people whose lives were spared because the shooter was stopped when he did, but the government needs to address things from a "big picture" standpoint and take into account more than a single incident: mass shootings are (thankfully!) very rare events but even so, it seems that restricting magazines would not have any sort of meaningful effect on either violent crime as a whole or on mass shooters.
Even if one could legally restrict the sale and production of magazines above a certain capacity, there's still zillions out there. Even if they could somehow be made to disappear, it's not like a box-with-a-spring is hard to make. From a purely practical standpoint, such a law would do little to stop criminals from getting their hands on such things.
Did I say they were meaningless? No. Any violent crime is a tragedy.
You may have misinterpreted my statements to mean that I don't believe that violent crime is a problem simply because I'm opposed to gun restrictions -- that's incorrect.
I support many different proposals that I think will be effective at reducing violent crime: ending the War on Drugs, treating personal drug use like a public health issue rather than a crime, cracking down on gun trafficking, universal healthcare (both for medical and mental health), and improving poverty-stricken communities that are often plagued by drug and gang-related violence. Are those ideas cheap or easy? No, but I think it'd do a heck of a lot more good than restricting certain popular guns that are rarely used in crime. I'm certainly willing to pay the bill, in the form of increased taxes, if it helps improve the lives of more people and reduces violent crime.
I'm simply saying that I think it's an overreaction to ban or seriously restrict the most commonly sold rifle and used in the country simply because it has been misused in a few high-profile crimes.
Firearm-related homicide rates have been decreasing year-over-year for decades and are currently at their lowest level since 1964. The number of guns-per-capita in the country is at an all-time high. Although the media makes it seem like things are getting worse, the average person (read: not involved in drug or gang activity) is safer now than they have been in nearly 50 years. Are the current rates too high? Absolutely. Can we as a society do more to help reduce them and to improve the lives of more people? Yes, certainly. Is banning certain types of guns that look scary going to have any real meaningful effect? Probably not.
As for storing guns at the range, that's an interesting proposal but what would it really accomplish? Would it reduce violent crime? Not in any meaningful way, as criminals wouldn't store their guns there and these types of guns are rarely used in crime -- it's basically a "feel good" measure that really wouldn't do much. If it were a problem, I'd be a lot more open to the idea, but it seems a bit excessive. I prefer more meaningful action that can actually help people.
Did he get a license or permit to transport his gun through the state? If not, he should have done his due diligence of using a licensed professional to transport is equipment.
It doesn't matter: Federal law specifically protects the transport of firearms through areas where a gun is restricted so long as the gun is legal to own at the start and ending points of the journey and that the person transporting the guns keeps them unloaded and not immediately accessible (e.g. in a trunk or locked container) and does not make any extended stops in the area where the guns are restricted (stopping for food or gas is acceptable, though it's unclear if staying overnight at a hotel is acceptable or not).
Automatic weapons have been heavily restricted since 1934 and any machine gun manufactured after 1986 is illegal for private sale. No legally-owned machine guns have been used in crime in decades, as they're almost exclusively owned by wealthy collectors.
The AR-15, while it looks like the M16, is functionally identical to many other civilian-legal firearms in that it only fires one shot per pull of the trigger. It's not very commonly used in massacres of any type, as handguns are much more frequently used in such situations (handguns are also very commonly used for self-defense. Rifles of any kind, including AR-15s, were used in only 3.7% of gun-related homicides in 2011 and have been trending downwards for years.
It's a very common misconception that just because a gun (say the AR-15) looks like a machine gun (say the M16), then it is a machine gun. This is not true, though I don't fault you for being somewhat confused.
ObSlashdotCarAnalogy: A Honda Civic with a spoiler, a stripe, some racing stickers, and a stock engine may look like a race car, but it's functionally no different than a normal Civic or other common cars.
AR-15s are very commonly used for recreational, sport, and competitive shooting (including the National Matches). There's no real pressing or justifiable reason to ban or restrict them.
Gun-related crime rates haven't been this low since 1964.
The background check isn't a huge deal. I'm not particularly opposed to it or in support of it.
As for the magazine requirements, it really wouldn't have made a difference. Nearly everyone, when confronted with a gunman, attempts to flee or hide and offer little resistance to the gunman. Reloading takes, at most, a few seconds for someone with even the most rudimentary of training and its unlikely that the gunman would be the least bit inconvenienced by needing to change magazines.
- The Newtown shooter fired ~100 rounds in ~10 minutes and reloaded frequently. The police say that they found many 30 round magazines where he only fired 15 shots, then changed magazines.
- The Aurora shooter had his 100-round drum magazine jam and had to switch to another weapon. Didn't seem to have any real effect.
- The VT shooter used 10 and 15 round magazines and had tons of them, reloading frequently.
- The Columbine shooters had a mixed-bag of guns, ranging from a double-barrel shotgun to other guns with larger magazines. They reloaded frequently without any opposition.
The only scenario where it may have had some sort of effect was the shooter in Tucson who fumbled a reload and dropped his next magazine and someone grabbed it. This disadvantage could have easily been overcome had he simply stood slightly further away so someone couldn't grab it or if he simply reached for another magazine.
In short: there's no real evidence that magazine capacity limits would have any effect on reducing the effectiveness of mass shooters or even ordinary violent criminals.
"Common sporting and competition guns" like.... the AR15!
Yes, precisely. Such guns are exceptionally common for such purposes at all levels of competition, including the National Matches.
One slight flaw: assault weapons are designed for one purpose - to kill lots of other people quickly. For cars that's only a secondary effect, their primary purpose is transportation. Clothing and luggage are rarely fatal.
Does it really matter what something was designed to do if it's almost never used for that purpose?
I mean, yes, a grenade was designed to explode and kill/injure people nearby. It *can* be used as a baseball, but that's just foolish and stupid and it's never actually used for that.
The vast, overwhelming majority all "assault weapons" like the AR-15 are used for perfectly legitimate purposes, like recreational, sport, and competitive shooting (they're exceedingly common at high-end competitions like the National Matches). Their popularity in hunting is increasing as hunters realize that having a lightweight, durable, rugged, and reliable gun that fires the same ammo as "traditional-looking hunting rifles" can be useful.
They're almost never used in crime: FBI crime stats show that rifles of any kind (including "assault weapons") are used in about 3.7% of all firearm-related homicides and that number has been decreasing year over year for decades.
My M1 has a bayonet mount, as that's just the standard mil-spec part of the gas tube.
It's not clear if "detachable magazine with a capacity greater than 7 rounds" also includes "detachable en-bloc clips with a capacity greater than 7 rounds". It's rather unlikely that the lawmakers gave the bill much thought from a technical perspective.
The weapons you are describing are military derivative firearms and by all rights, SHOULD be banned IMO.
Why? Many guns, including traditional-looking hunting guns, are derivatives of military design. Why does that matter in any way?
I understand saying "Full-auto machine guns are functionally different than semi-auto guns and thus pose a significant danger and should be restricted." -- in general, I agree with that statement. What I don't understand is why saying "Some semi-auto guns are somehow more dangerous than semi-auto guns and should be restricted" even though they are functionally identical and differ only in appearance.
Since AR-15s are used extremely rarely in crime (rifles if any sort, including AR-15s, are only used in about 3.7% of gun-related homicides according to FBI crime stats, and both the rate and absolute numbers have been doing down year-over-year for a long time), why should they be singled out?
Even with all the widely-publicized news stories about gun crime, America today has lower rates of gun-related homicide since 1964 and the downward trend is continuing.
Can things be done to help reduce violent crime even more? Absolutely. Will banning the most popular rifle in the country (which is rarely used in crime) have any meaningful effect on reducing violent crime? No.
The law does contain a lot of really beneficial improvements that may well improve things, but the "one-feature" test for so-called "assault weapons" will apply to a rather large number of common sporting and competition guns, requires that they be registered within the year, and once registered these now-banned guns cannot be sold or transferred to another New Yorker -- they can only be transferred to a licensed gun dealer or to an out of state buyer -- even if the registered owner dies.
Not even legally-transferrable machine guns, what few there are, are so strictly regulated.
De-grandfathering pre-ban magazines with a capacity greater than 10 rounds is asinine (are people supposed to turn them in?), as is banning any newly-produced magazines with a capacity greater than 7 rounds. (You can keep your current 10-round magazines but you can't load more than 7 rounds into them.)
They could have kept such absurd provisions out of the law and people probably would think that it's a reasonable, if somewhat restrictive, law that may do some good stuff...but those extra provisions go way too far.
I'm pretty sure the First Amendment would protect such speech: there's plenty of widely-published dead-tree magazines and books that talk about the production and use of illicit drugs, manufacturing machine guns, silencers, and other legally-restricted or prohibited items.
Restricting something like DeCSS is somewhat plausible because (arguably) the information infringes on someone else's rights. But if the original creator says "Take this information and share it everywhere! It's in the public domain!" then it's unlikely that there's any real legal grounds for restricting it.
Even if there was legal grounds for restricting it, any such restrictions would be completely ineffective due to the nature of the internet. That's sort of the point that the Defense Distributed guys are trying to make.
A typical magazine consists of multiple parts, including spring loading, which cannot be printed. So you need to go on the market for parts and assemble them anyhow.
Actually, there were a few designs on the Defense Distributed site (among others) for magazines that used 3D-printed plastic springs. Perhaps not the best for reliability or longevity, but it can be done and the technology will only improve with time.
Also, what's wrong with buying springs and other parts? It's not like springs are hard to manufacture or restricted in any way (nor would it be remotely feasible to restrict their production or sale).
I was under the impression that money paid to Google was for the advertisements at the top or side of search results, and did not affect the position in the search index.
It's more likely that the shady sides are doing sneaky things like SEO that result in higher listings. Google tends to frown on this and have seriously penalized sites in the past for doing sneaky SEO stuff and it's only a matter of time until they refine things further.
Google has a vested interest in you finding what you're looking for: if you don't find what you're looking for, you're less likely to come back to Google in the future and see their ads.
Hell, I believe it is still a fscking Olympic sport is it not? Don't they even ski and shoot in winter?
Yes. There are several shooting sports in the Olympics, including rifles, pistols, and shotguns.
The Biathlon involves shooting and skiing in winter.
I've found the autobahns outside of Munich to be comparable to most US Interstates, though I actually preferred the Interstates in regards to maintenance and road quality. The autobahn had a bunch of patches to fill potholes and obviously hadn't been repaved in years, though that may well have been an exception rather than the norm.
I'm not sure about that specific module, but I've found using the Google Authenticator pam module to be really useful. It ties in easily with SSH and allows users to use time-varying OTPs generated using the TOTP standard to authenticate to the system.
It's worth pointing out that although the module is developed by Google, it does not rely on nor communicate with their servers in any way: it's just an implementation of the TOTP standard. One can use their Google Authenticator client for iOS/Android or any other compatible client (I have a J2ME client on my non-smartphone, for example) to generate the relevant codes.