A _reasonable_ child safety mechanism for new guns (not some complicated and awkward crap that makes the gun nearly useless to the actual owner nor one that requires expensive advanced technology that drives costs through the roof and may not even be reliable). Something as simple as a mechanism that requires a larger had or more strength than a young child's. Say, to take the safety off you just have to firmly hold the grip in order to unlock it, an action that's fairly quick and natural.
How about "don't leave a round in the chamber" ?
I don't know a whole lot of two year olds that can rack the action on an automatic pistol. Revolvers are another story, obviously.
I would assume, at the very least, that a charge of criminal negligence, negligent homicide, or manslaughter would be forthcoming.
I'm pretty sure that even the most hardcore gun rights advocate can get behind the idea that you shouldn't leave your guns loaded, chambered, and freely sliding around in the back seat of a car where a two year old can pick it up.
This isn't a gun rights issue - this is yet another stupid people do incredibly stupid things issue.
Sorry, you don't get to re-interpret the Constitution or it's amendments for the other 320M+ people that live under it. Which, by the way, you should be really glad that individuals don't hold that power.
Because if you could repeal the 2nd Amendment by fiat, what amendments do you care about that someone else could take away at the wave of a hand?
The system was set up this way on purpose, because the Founding Fathers knew that they, nor anyone else in the future, were not infallible.
I'm glad that it makes sense to people outside the citizenry of the United States, because there's about 100M people that are Citizens that can't comprehend that simple statement written almost 250 years ago.
I don't see this as a Second Amendment issue, as it's likely that the result of the incident of which you speak will be a felony conviction, in which case they cannot possess a firearm.
We already have a legal structure in place that allows for what you're suggesting. What we need is for people to not be fucking dumbasses leaving their loaded, chambered handgun rattling around in the back of the car next to the child seat.
Assuming there actually was a proper child seat - nothing else in this situation tells me they are a responsible parent, so the child seat is probably a reach too.
Patents don't work that way. You can't patent a "smartphone" any more than you can patent the "automobile."
Individual technologies and features can be patented; more accurately, the method of carrying out those technologies and features can be patented. If someone can come up with a way to do something the same by means of a different route, that's completely fair game.
The US Senate still operates on a form of parliamentary procedure, but the standing rules carry over at the beginning of each Congress, but can be amended through a vote. The last time they changed was in 2000 with something about earmarks, if I remember correctly.
This all stems from Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution that states that each house may determine their rules of proceedings.
Unfortunately, that article has nothing of substance. Yes, companies do competitive research, but we already know that VW figured out how to detect when they were on a dyno (where other car manufacturers would also test) and turn on the lean NOx trap. If they tore it apart, they would find a lean NOx trap.
Other manufacturers of diesel engines just sucked it up and licensed the Daimler urea-injection thing, and don't have these problems. VW was going to do that, and then decided not to. I guess they just preferred to cheat, do severe brand damage, lose billions of dollars worth of market cap, open themselves to class-action lawsuits from purchasers, and make themselves liable to billions more in fines.
Because VW is the only company that makes diesel engines.
No, they are just the only ones that can't pass the CARB and EPA testing without cheating. Even if you just restrict to German manufacturers, BMW and Mercedes pass without issue, and without cheating.
The difference is that with a diesel-electric, as in trains, you can tune the engine / generator to run at optimum RPM at all times for fuel efficiency, and then vary the voltage going to the motors as a throttle. When using mechanical power from the engine to direct-drive wheels, you'll be changing the RPM and may not be as efficient on fuel.
There's a lot of different variables that go into this kind of stuff, and the guys that make really big fucking diesel engines decided long ago that running the diesel at a constant, efficient RPM to generate electricity is a better way. Has that changed recently? I have no idea.
Don't forget their awesome TDI engines from before this mess that tended to shear crank shafts, destroying the valves and contaminating the entire engine with metal shards; and their flywheels that would crack and explode taking half the gearbox with it.
The VWs of the last decade are nowhere near the quality of those that came before.
Well, usually the AC compressor is belt-driven right off the mechanical spinning bits of the engine. You'd have to redesign the mechanical clutch that already exists for on / off to also take input from your electrical motor optionally, in addition to adding the electric motor and the increased battery capacity to run the thing, knowing that you're not always going to have a brand new battery under the hood. Complexity also means initial expense and more expensive repairs over time.
I'm pretty sure that 'trust' isn't a US only issue.
Car manufacturers makes sales based on trust. If I don't trust that this $30k+ thing I'm about to buy is going to do what it's supposed to, safely, and for a long time if maintained, I'm not going to buy it and I'll go across the street to that Honda dealer to buy a car that does essentially the same stuff, but is built by a company I do trust.
Apple had always claimed that they were not offered "the usual RAND terms" because the SEP licenses they were offered always had cross-license terms that other licensees didn't have to agree too.
Which, by the way, contradicts the label "RAND" because that's discriminatory by definition. Whether they were correct in that assessment or not, I don't know. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't have copies of all the agreements in front of me. But that was the issue in those cases - Apple wanted to license those technologies under the terms everyone else licensed them with, but the patent holders weren't playing by the rules they agreed to when they were included in the standards.
I don't believe that Intel added branch prediction on anything until the pipelining got ridiculously long back in the days of the Mhz wars (Pentium 4).
They were also sued over this patent, and settled out of court.
It should be as if I invent something while on the clock at work - the workplace owns the invention and any patent-able tech, because they provided the resources for me to do that work.
In this case, it's the State of Wisconsin as a proxy for the taxpayers. The invention was a result of research, funded by the public, so the public should own the patent. It should be under an MIT or BSD-style license in the public domain.
The difference is that all of those smartphones had major flaws, shit operating systems that treated a handheld the same as a desktop computer, terrible web browsers, crap media playback, crap battery life.
Raise your hand if you've used a Windows Mobile device for any time at all, and didn't have to find the task manager to shut down runaway processes that were eating memory and battery. Look, no hands raised. There was a reason why even in 2006 that Blackberry was dropping the hammer on everyone - they'd at least gotten email and messaging to work properly.
Apple and Google got into this business because everyone else was fucking the dog. No, they didn't 'invent' smartphones - they just created smartphones that people actually want to use and don't hate.
USB still sucks compared to other connection protocols, because it's CPU bound. Want to have fun? Get a Windows USB3 laptop and a few USB3 disks, and do some massive file copies concurrently from the internal SSD to those disks. The last time I did that, you could barely move the mouse because it was CPU locked.
FireWire had it's own controller, so it could (mostly) pump that speed regardless of whatever else the computer is doing; this is why it was chosen to be the early connectivity standard for digital video devices. Also, FireWire had a higher voltage included for self-powered devices (12v versus 5v), so a battery would charge much faster than anything on USB.
They needed time for USB2 to actually make it's way into PCs. Transferring your library of music over USB 1.1 was horrible, and they weren't going to subject users to that. Thus, they used FireWire for the first few generations, and then removed it as an option once USB2 was ubiquitous.
Yeah, because accidentally dropping a bomb on an embassy in the middle of a war zone is exactly the same as breaching the gate, shooting guards, kicking in doors, in order to extract a foreign national.
Slashdot Mirror
So in your mind, the only reason for gun ownership is because people are afraid of the government?
You should re-examine the world we live in.
A _reasonable_ child safety mechanism for new guns (not some complicated and awkward crap that makes the gun nearly useless to the actual owner nor one that requires expensive advanced technology that drives costs through the roof and may not even be reliable). Something as simple as a mechanism that requires a larger had or more strength than a young child's. Say, to take the safety off you just have to firmly hold the grip in order to unlock it, an action that's fairly quick and natural.
How about "don't leave a round in the chamber" ?
I don't know a whole lot of two year olds that can rack the action on an automatic pistol. Revolvers are another story, obviously.
I would assume, at the very least, that a charge of criminal negligence, negligent homicide, or manslaughter would be forthcoming.
I'm pretty sure that even the most hardcore gun rights advocate can get behind the idea that you shouldn't leave your guns loaded, chambered, and freely sliding around in the back seat of a car where a two year old can pick it up.
This isn't a gun rights issue - this is yet another stupid people do incredibly stupid things issue.
Sorry, you don't get to re-interpret the Constitution or it's amendments for the other 320M+ people that live under it. Which, by the way, you should be really glad that individuals don't hold that power.
Because if you could repeal the 2nd Amendment by fiat, what amendments do you care about that someone else could take away at the wave of a hand?
The system was set up this way on purpose, because the Founding Fathers knew that they, nor anyone else in the future, were not infallible.
I'm glad that it makes sense to people outside the citizenry of the United States, because there's about 100M people that are Citizens that can't comprehend that simple statement written almost 250 years ago.
Many of them happen to be in government work.
I don't see this as a Second Amendment issue, as it's likely that the result of the incident of which you speak will be a felony conviction, in which case they cannot possess a firearm.
We already have a legal structure in place that allows for what you're suggesting. What we need is for people to not be fucking dumbasses leaving their loaded, chambered handgun rattling around in the back of the car next to the child seat.
Assuming there actually was a proper child seat - nothing else in this situation tells me they are a responsible parent, so the child seat is probably a reach too.
Wait, personal responsibility?
Nah, that would never work.
Signed,
A owner of firearms, who knows exactly where each and every one of them is, and who has access to them at all times.
Patents don't work that way. You can't patent a "smartphone" any more than you can patent the "automobile."
Individual technologies and features can be patented; more accurately, the method of carrying out those technologies and features can be patented. If someone can come up with a way to do something the same by means of a different route, that's completely fair game.
Even though it is entitled Manual of Parliamentary Practice for the Use of the Senate of the United States, the US House of Representatives adopted the procedure into their rules in 1837 and continue to regularly reprint an abridged version of the book, and still operate by that procedure today.
The US Senate still operates on a form of parliamentary procedure, but the standing rules carry over at the beginning of each Congress, but can be amended through a vote. The last time they changed was in 2000 with something about earmarks, if I remember correctly.
This all stems from Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution that states that each house may determine their rules of proceedings.
Unfortunately, that article has nothing of substance. Yes, companies do competitive research, but we already know that VW figured out how to detect when they were on a dyno (where other car manufacturers would also test) and turn on the lean NOx trap. If they tore it apart, they would find a lean NOx trap.
Other manufacturers of diesel engines just sucked it up and licensed the Daimler urea-injection thing, and don't have these problems. VW was going to do that, and then decided not to. I guess they just preferred to cheat, do severe brand damage, lose billions of dollars worth of market cap, open themselves to class-action lawsuits from purchasers, and make themselves liable to billions more in fines.
Because VW is the only company that makes diesel engines.
No, they are just the only ones that can't pass the CARB and EPA testing without cheating. Even if you just restrict to German manufacturers, BMW and Mercedes pass without issue, and without cheating.
The difference is that with a diesel-electric, as in trains, you can tune the engine / generator to run at optimum RPM at all times for fuel efficiency, and then vary the voltage going to the motors as a throttle. When using mechanical power from the engine to direct-drive wheels, you'll be changing the RPM and may not be as efficient on fuel.
There's a lot of different variables that go into this kind of stuff, and the guys that make really big fucking diesel engines decided long ago that running the diesel at a constant, efficient RPM to generate electricity is a better way. Has that changed recently? I have no idea.
Don't forget their awesome TDI engines from before this mess that tended to shear crank shafts, destroying the valves and contaminating the entire engine with metal shards; and their flywheels that would crack and explode taking half the gearbox with it.
The VWs of the last decade are nowhere near the quality of those that came before.
What, you don't want a cryogenic fuel system in every car on the road? What could possibly go wrong?
Well, usually the AC compressor is belt-driven right off the mechanical spinning bits of the engine. You'd have to redesign the mechanical clutch that already exists for on / off to also take input from your electrical motor optionally, in addition to adding the electric motor and the increased battery capacity to run the thing, knowing that you're not always going to have a brand new battery under the hood. Complexity also means initial expense and more expensive repairs over time.
It's never as simple as it seems.
That's an interesting idea, but there's something wrong with your post.
I-80 is lined with 300+ miles of corn through Nebraska, not wheat. That's ethanol country. =)
I'm pretty sure that 'trust' isn't a US only issue.
Car manufacturers makes sales based on trust. If I don't trust that this $30k+ thing I'm about to buy is going to do what it's supposed to, safely, and for a long time if maintained, I'm not going to buy it and I'll go across the street to that Honda dealer to buy a car that does essentially the same stuff, but is built by a company I do trust.
That's the problem VW will ultimately deal with.
Apple had always claimed that they were not offered "the usual RAND terms" because the SEP licenses they were offered always had cross-license terms that other licensees didn't have to agree too.
Which, by the way, contradicts the label "RAND" because that's discriminatory by definition. Whether they were correct in that assessment or not, I don't know. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't have copies of all the agreements in front of me. But that was the issue in those cases - Apple wanted to license those technologies under the terms everyone else licensed them with, but the patent holders weren't playing by the rules they agreed to when they were included in the standards.
Allegedly.
I don't believe that Intel added branch prediction on anything until the pipelining got ridiculously long back in the days of the Mhz wars (Pentium 4).
They were also sued over this patent, and settled out of court.
It should be as if I invent something while on the clock at work - the workplace owns the invention and any patent-able tech, because they provided the resources for me to do that work.
In this case, it's the State of Wisconsin as a proxy for the taxpayers. The invention was a result of research, funded by the public, so the public should own the patent. It should be under an MIT or BSD-style license in the public domain.
The difference is that all of those smartphones had major flaws, shit operating systems that treated a handheld the same as a desktop computer, terrible web browsers, crap media playback, crap battery life.
Raise your hand if you've used a Windows Mobile device for any time at all, and didn't have to find the task manager to shut down runaway processes that were eating memory and battery. Look, no hands raised. There was a reason why even in 2006 that Blackberry was dropping the hammer on everyone - they'd at least gotten email and messaging to work properly.
Apple and Google got into this business because everyone else was fucking the dog. No, they didn't 'invent' smartphones - they just created smartphones that people actually want to use and don't hate.
Yeah, but in 2001 everything needed to have a Wi-Fi logo on it whether it made sense or not, or else it was deemed trash by the Slashdot Think Tank.
USB still sucks compared to other connection protocols, because it's CPU bound. Want to have fun? Get a Windows USB3 laptop and a few USB3 disks, and do some massive file copies concurrently from the internal SSD to those disks. The last time I did that, you could barely move the mouse because it was CPU locked.
FireWire had it's own controller, so it could (mostly) pump that speed regardless of whatever else the computer is doing; this is why it was chosen to be the early connectivity standard for digital video devices. Also, FireWire had a higher voltage included for self-powered devices (12v versus 5v), so a battery would charge much faster than anything on USB.
Alas, the better standard rarely wins.
They needed time for USB2 to actually make it's way into PCs. Transferring your library of music over USB 1.1 was horrible, and they weren't going to subject users to that. Thus, they used FireWire for the first few generations, and then removed it as an option once USB2 was ubiquitous.
Yeah, because accidentally dropping a bomb on an embassy in the middle of a war zone is exactly the same as breaching the gate, shooting guards, kicking in doors, in order to extract a foreign national.