I first read that as firearm weighs too much to steal without special equipment. In that case I could seriously see why you wouldn't have problems.
Sorry, no field pieces until AFTER I move to NV as my permanent residence. No good places to shoot 'em in Silicon Valley. And the antiterrorist folks would get upset even if I was just using them for lawn ornaments. B-)
Something special was happening here - it sounds as if the potential victims were being approached in order to identify targets.
You're getting two different incidents confused:
- In Palo Alto a bunch of burglars was working the street. They skipped our house (and the ex-cop's).
- In our current town (which I will not name) there are a couple (recently moved-in) gang houses a few blocks away. This being a well-established neighborhood near the town's Jr High and elementary schools, when something goes down the cops get called. So the gangsters are trying to establish themselves as someone whose activities should not be reported - by intimidating the locals. Bumper stickers alone weren't enough to repell them. (Probably thought they were on MY car, and that the wifey would be an easy, and undefended, mark. B-) ) But they got out-psyched by my wife the personal-protection instructor.
A lot could be gleaned from a brief conversation - body languages and nuances in your reply would often expose weaknesses - sort-out the easy pickings. The fact that the answer was a credible "you won't get away with that" - "attack me and that is likely the last attack you make" probably made you appear a less desirable target. I'd wager that you wouldn't need to own any weapons in order to achieve the same effect. I suspect that you avoided trouble by old-fashioned confidence...
I, on the other hand, wouldn't expect a bluff to be as effective as a pat hand. The crooks who specialize in intimidation are often very good at reading body language, and other signs of real participation in the gun culture (like vocabulary, word choice, attitude, catchphrases, etc.). Also: Range time makes you respond to stress by calming down and steadying (to the point that your usual gun hand(s) become rock-steady and your breathing slows), rather than becoming excited and shaking. This is VERY visible to somebody who's trying to "read" you.
You MIGHT be able to get away with a bluff. But I wouldn't expect it to work. More likely it would lead to escalation, as your bluff is called.
Confidence comes from KNOWING you're capable. Crooks deal with pretenders all the time, and learn to sort out who's for real and who's not.
I might even go so far as to suggest that attempting to use a gun would likely have increased your personal risk... but all is fair during the initial bluff eh?
Huh?
You do NOT pull out a gun in such a situation. We're not talking the knife in the hand or the fist in the face here. We're talking a set of careful, calm, "questions" by the intimidator - designed to be plausibly deniable as mere curiosity rather than an intimidation attempt.
Actually showing a gun is strictly for a situation where the bad guy has made it clear (to any "reasonable and prudent" person) that he's in the process of an actual attack, the attackee is in IMMEDIATE fear for his/her life-or-limb, and that the attackee WILL shoot if ONE MORE MOVE is made.
Actually showing the gun in such an initial-contact by a gangsta just shows you DON'T know what you're doing (and that you have a gun to steal, which will probably be improperly secured later.)
I don't think it's the bumperstickers, man. I think it's the carparts on the lawn and the lack of valuables, besides beer and NASCAR tapes. The fact you're a half-cracked redneck with a safeload of shotties doesn't change much if you've got nothing to take.
Your biggotry is showing, dude.
At the time we were dotcom millionaires in one of the better neighborhoods of Palo Alto. B-)
But I'll tell you a little secret: The bad guys figure everybody's got SOMETHING worth stealing. Drugs. TV. Booze. Money under the bed. That old beater might be full of parts that are hard to get on the used market. You never know.
When they're doing a systematic down-the-street series they'll only skip the houses where they KNOW they'll have trouble.
I take issue with shooting to injure, though. If at all possible to disable without taking life, one should try.
Rule is "shoot to stop the attack". Once the attack stops you have to stop shooting. (Again: In most jurisdictions.)
Humans are very tough. Stopping an attack in progress will do serious damage. Can't be helped.
Aiming "to disable" is VERY HARD. Doing it when you're actually being attacked, and SUCCEEDING in hitting what you're aiming at, is virtually impossible. The "stop" targets are large and move almost in a straight line. The "disable" targets are small and rapidly moving in varying directions. You'll miss. Count on it. And if you miss you are very likely to be injured or killed, IF the guy was really attacking. So it's not someting you attempt when you're being attacked and really ARE in fear of life-or-limb. That's why shooting to disable is, in many places, considered evidence that the shoot was premeditated assault rather than self-defense.
"If you had the leisure and presence of mind to aim to disable, why were you shooting at all?" Shoot to disable and you'd better have a good answer for that question when it's asked, first by the police, then by the prosecuting attorney.
When you're sleeping, those aren't particularly effective.;-)
But the NRA and CRPA bumper stickers (and the "I'd rather be hunting" license plate frame) on the car in the driveway IS. B-)
In particular, the burglars that were working their way down our street a few years back skipped two houses - the retired cop two doors up (whose son had similar stickers) and ours.
Current neighborhood has a couple gangs trying to move in. They've intimidated witnesses - with both minor and major vandalism - elsewhere on our block. They have NOT done that to OUR place. B-)
Closest they came is when their spokesthug came buy and asked the wife (an NRA-certified fireams / personal-protection instructor B-) who smokes on the front porch and watches neighborhood goings-on) whether she was worried about attacks or breakins. She said, no, she'd just shoot anybody who tried to attack her. But wasn't she worried about her guns being stolen while she was gone? No, because the firesafe weighs too much to steal without special equipment.
Better to get 10 in the pen, than to be carried by 6....
The more common form of that is "Better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6."
It works even if your state has the death penalty, anti-self-defense prosecutors, and a jury pool full of sheep.
If in doubt shoot first.
Depends on what you're in doubt about. If you are sure you're reasonably in fear for your life, don't wait for him to pull his trigger just to be SURE he was willing to do it.
You don't "kill someone because of tresspassing"
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Killing someone because of trespassing? Someone that's almost surely unarmed!? That's the last solution I would've chosen, if at all.
"Because of tresspassing". Not even "because he tresspassed". Already your bending the language to avoid putting the responsibility where it belongs - on the person who chose to "tresspass", almost certainly as the first step of committing a more serious crime - like car theft, vandalism, rape, burglary, etc.
But you DON'T shoot somebody who's just tresspassing. You warn them off (or in some jusisdictions, if you have evidence of a lot more than tresspass, demand they stay put with their hands where you can see them until the police arrive to sort it all out.)
If you'd actually TAKEN the course recommended by the original poster, you'd know that.
As for "unarmed":
If you point a gun at somebody and demand that he leave, and he comes at you instead, either he's armed or plumb crazy and thinks he's strong enough to take you DESPITE the gun. Either way a "reasonable and prudent person" would believe that he's about to take "serious bodily harm" unless he does something.
THAT's the legal standard for firing.
But not for KILLING. You fire to STOP THE ATTACK. Maybe one in four he dies. His tough luck.
If you're a 120-pound skinny (or 250-pound fat) nerd and he's a 280-pound muscle-bound felon who spent two years pumping iron in stir until they let him out last week, he doesn't NEED a weapon to take you. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have one. Him coming at you after you point a gun at him and tell him to leave is a VERY strong hint.
Fortunately, most crooks are smart enough to realize that if you've got the gun pointed at them it's time to leave now. So you almost NEVER have to shoot.
But (like seatbelts, fire extinguishers, and armies) you have to be READY and WILLING to use them when they're needed or there's no point in having them in the first place. And some human predators are good enough at reading your resolve that they'll know if you're NOT willing to shoot - so you have to be willing.
Rifles, shotguns, pistols, etc. for home defense.
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I tend to agree with you but how is a rifle which fires a more powerfull cartredge offer a greater opportunity not to kill?
Compared to a shotgun? It's the difference between one small hole and a saucer-sized circle of nine big ones (or one saucer-sized hole, depending on the shotgun load).
But it is hard to generalize, since rifles and their ammunition come in a wide variety of calibers, energies, and bullet expansion characteriesics. Just remember that the shotgun shoots more bullets at once, propelling them with more total powder, to get the general idea. One shotgun blast is like emptying the magazine of a rifle.
Downside to both rifles and shotguns: They're long (even the "short" ones). If the bad guy gets within arms-reach (which he can do from across the room in under a second) he can get behind the muzzle and you're toast. A pistol MIGHT be usable even while he's wrestling with you or knifing you.
That time issue, though, is why, as part of your training, you learn a two-sided coin:
Heads: You NEVER point a gun at anything you aren't willing to destroy.
Tails: If you are pointing a gun at the bad guy, you ALREADY DECIDED that you're justified if you use it and you're going to pull the trigger if he makes ONE MORE MOVE toward you.
Once the gun is pointed you don't have time to wrestle with your conscience if it turns out you have to use it. So get that over with (and the safety off) BEFORE you point it.
Don't try to wing him, either. Not only is it a bad idea self-defense wise (it's hard enough hitting him near the center of the torso in a stressful situation), it's also evidence that you didn't think deadly force was necessary (so why did you use it?) This can turn a justifiable homicide into assault with a deadly weapon once it gets to court.
Either you fear for life-and-limb (of yourself or someone properly under your protection, like a family member or guest) or you don't. If you do, you are justified in using deadly force - and the bad guy gets to take his chances (about one in four) of dying as a result of his criminal decisions. If you don't, you're not justified in shooting, or pointing, at all. (At least in most jurisdictions. Some, like Texas, let you defend your home, car, etc. Others still have a "fleeing felon" rule - or a judicial interpretation (Oregon) that you might fear the crook is running out to his car to get some firepower or reenforcements. Still others (like MA) require you to flee if you physically can, even at home, abandoning the baby and risking a shot in the back.)
For myself:
Home defense at the townhouse: 12 guage shotgun with #40 birdshot. Quite as effective as 00 buck at in-house distances, but passing through a copule layers of drywall will slow it down enough that it won't kill the neighbors.
Ditto at the country house: 12 guage w/00 buck. (Closest houses are over 1/10th mile away and the siding is wood over wood, shots where a good guy is behind the bad guy and an interior wall virtually impossible.)
Personal carry: 38 special airweight for cities, 45 ACP backup for country hikes (where I might have to deal with a coyote, mountain lion, bobcat, or bear). Will probably switch to 357 magnum now that NV alows more than two on the license, since slide-actions are more often problematic in a pinch. Both only where it's legal, of course. (I.e. in NV but not CA.)
And of course the personal carry pistol can be used for home defense if you happen to have it handy - like when you've just arrived, are unloading the luggage, and haven't pulled the shotgun out of the safe yet. A likely time for a bad guy to come at you, when things are open and you're distracted.
God knows NOT A SINGLE PERSON in the US innovates or starts a new company or attempts to advance technology anymore. Pfft. Way to troll!
Unfortunately, there's more to starting a new company than innovating. To go from a garage shop to the next Juniper Networks (or whatever) in the hardware arena requires several rounds of funding. Even to get things prototpyed typically takes a seed round and a "series A". Then B for full-blown development of a manufacturable product and C for product introduction and initial production ramp-up. A software product might get by with maybe one or even two rounds less. But given the need to set up a support and marketing organization - and to eat while burning the midnight oil - it's still not going to happen without serious money input.
So if you're not personally rich you must go to someone else for your miney. Maybe an "angel" for your seed, but for sure the venture capitalists for your funding rounds.
So what happens to innovation and startup ventures in, say, silicon valley, when the Vultures of Sand Hill Road are all flying off in a flock after the latest fad, putting over 90% of the dollar value of their investments into companies that promise to do the bulk of their engineering in India and demanding a major engineering outsourcing strategy in any business plan before they'll even consider it?
Yes you can still innovate - if you're one of the three-or-so founders forming the core archetectural and business team. But the people who would become the high-skill early hires, the mid-to-high-skill line engineers, and the "dedicated support staff" get to keep flipping burgers. Those positions will only be filled outside the US. Not because that would make real business sense. But because if you don't build your company that way you don't get the money you need to build it at all.
And it will continue in this vein until enough vultures get burned in India (or wherever) that they all flock somewhere else. And after three or so tries, it will dawn on some of those who still have some funds left that maybe the US workers really ARE a good price-performance tradeoff.
It's starting to happen in India. SO many outsourcing operations have been directed there by the herd-mentality pointy-hairs that the good, and the mediocre, engineering talent has all been snapped up (and bid up), leaving newcomers with a choice between taking the new grads and dregs or paying near-US-level prices to hire talent away from other operations. But you KNOW the vultures will try it again in a couple other places before the light finally dawns.
Incidentally: A database of prior art will also help show that a particular "software invention", though novel, is also obvious "to someone versed in the art".
This should help kill off such things as straightforward automation of well-known techniques and business practices.
The problem isn't that patents are bad, or that people are taking advantage of the system, it's that the system is currently misbalanced:
Agree.
1. Patents last too long. This is a general problem with IP law these days.
Agree when it comes to patents on things computer related - especially software. The pace of that industry is such that protection is only needed for a few years at most. (Product life cycles are about 6 years long - four of development, two of marketability before obsolescence.)
In particluar, it appears that software in particular doesn't require patent protection at all. By the time it can be reverse-engineered and cloned, the original product (if it was worthwhile at all) has typically made back its development costs and made a massive profit to more than adequately reward the developers and investors for their hard work and risk-taking. Further, at that point the originator is the dominant player in the self-created market, and it takes a major technological leap to displace him.
2. Patents are too easy to get. That is a particular problem with software. The nature of software in particular is such that any non-trivial program involves thousands of processes, any of which can be patented, and it's more-or-less impossible for a developer to even know if he's infringing when people can patent things like using the "tab" key to move between fields in a form.
An even bigger problem is that the prior art in software is not well known (especially to patent examiners, given that it wasn't patentable until recently so little of it is recorded as previous patents.) The Software Patent Institute is trying to solve that, by creating a searchable database of software prior art.
Federal law gives me the right to put up a Dish antenna on my home, even if I live in a neighborhood with covenants restricting said antenna. Federal does not give you (the tenant) the right to put a Dish antenna on my property (that you lease) without my permission.
As a matter of fact, it DOES. In exactly the FCC regulation in question.
When you rent out an apartment (whether you're a private landlord or a university), you are explicitly trading "quiet enjoyment" of the property for money. You can TRY to make limits on what constitutes "quiet enjoyment" of your particular property. But both your state and the federal government can override your claimed limits in the tennent's favor. The tennent gets to do what he wants and as a landlord you're S.O.L. Your lease provision is unenforcable and the rest of the lease still holds.
Mounting antennas (including satellite dish, TV, WiFi, and other "licensed or unlicensed spectrum" antennas {provided they're under a meter, except on a designated historic structure, not to replace a TV antenna and distribution system provided by the landlord, yadda yadda}) happens to be one of those federal overrides. Operating in the unlicensed spectrum (even if it interferes with other users of it) happens to be another.
Well, check your room contract. You'll almost certainly find that most university regulations don't give you anything close to that stake in your dorm room.
You missed the very first paragraph of the FCC's notice, where they defined colleges and universities as being explicitly included in the set of multi tennant environments where the ruling applied.
The college has a perfect right to restrict the use of those devices on their property.
The FCC has the exclusive power to regulate such devices. It has exercised this power to explicitly override the regents (and any other landlords) on this issue. This regulation voids such lease terms, without voiding the rest of the lease, EVEN IF the lease is signed AFTER the regulation was issued. (The boilerplate in the lease becomes unenforcable noise.)
Students in student housing are explicitly mentioned as a case where the FCC has chosen to exercise this power.
Even the federal antiterrorist operations can't ban radio use by terrorists without going through the FCC.
No, it's called a lease agreement, with a change clause. Use the spectrum all you want, they are prohibiting a device, just like they can prohibit hotplates. If you don't like it, feel free to move out.
State law trumps (and voids) any lease agreement terms that the state has prohibited. (Example: lease terms that prohibit having a visitor of a particular race.) Voiding the term does not void the rest of the lease.
Federal laws and regulations trump state law, via the "supremacy clause" of the US constitution.
Federal law gives the FCC the exclusive authority to regulate the use of the RF spectrum, and the FCC has used this authority to write regulations that explicitly permit anyone to use the unlicensed spectrum (AND mount antennas no larger than one meter) despite any lower-level law, regulation, or contract to the contrary (such as zoning laws or landowner covenants forbidding external antennas). Students in student housing are EXPLICITLY mentioned in the cited FCC memo clarifying the regulation.
The FCC says the students can use the unlicensed spectrum. The FCC has the power to issue that regulation and override the university's Board of Regents on this issue. The Board of Regents or their agents can not penalize the students in any way for violating the voided regulation and exercising their privileges under the FCC ruling (because doing so would mean the regulation was not voided).
Looking for more about Bernie I happened to notice that he's the current president of the Software Patent Institute.
The SPI (which has both pro- and anti- software patent members) is attempting to solve the bogus software patent problem by making available a searchable database of software prior art.
This database, incidentally, is also a useful for anybody who wants to avoid having to reinvent a software wheel and to keep software breakthroughs from getting lost.
The earliest item I ever saw that made an explicit call for open source software and against software as proprietary / for-profit / trade secret / etc. was a letter from Bernie Galler. It's in the same issue of CACM as Djikstra's "Goto Considered Harmful" letter which started the whole structured programming flap.
In it, Bernie noted that the authors of some particular set of subroutines were, though distributing them, charging a round-number price significantly higher than the cost of making and shipping a copy of the card deck. From this he predicted the potential for the rise of software-as-product, the demise of the then-current free exchange and reuse of software (in both the academic and commercial community), vast duplication of effort, increases of software costs, proprietary claims, etc. And he argued against the adoption of that model as being a far greater loss than gain.
Bernie's own contributions to open software (in that era BEFORE closed software and afterward), personal, organizational, and educational, are far to numerous to go into here. But IMHO he's the very first spokesman to explicitly, in a widely-read public forum, argue for free software (as in both speech AND beer).
This would only prohibit the release of data that is already prohibited from sale to customers other than the US Government.
As it currently stands, commerical imagery operators are prohibited from selling certain data to anyone but the government. Third parties cannot buy this data. However, there is nothing to prohibit someone from filing a Freedom of Information request once the government buys it. This would close that loophole.
And open another one - for the government to use to slam the door on FOIA requests, not just for the imagery, but for anything "derived from it".
Which means that the government could include a gratuitous satellite picture in any report they wanted to make exempt from the FOIA.
Just as the California legislature includes a couple school busses in nearly any appropriation bill, to bypass the voter-initiated constitutional requirement that appropriations bills requre a supermajority but lowers the bar on school funding bills. (A loophole that has led to the near bankruptcy of the state.)
Allow my to put on my tinfoil hat and ask, what the hell is corrupt about motor-voter?
OK.
Step 1: Pick up a stack of registration forms at any of a number of government agencies. (They will give you BOXES of them if you ask. Just say you're running a registration drive. It helps to look like you're in the same party they are - which for low-level bureaucrats in the DMV means sloppy clothes and long hair, not a neat haircut and a snappy business suit.)
Step 2: Fill out a bunch of them for imaginary people and mail them in.
Step 3: When the election papers come, check the box for permanent absentee status on each one and mail it back. (I think you can now combine that with Step 2 but I haven't checked lately.)
Steps 4-N: At each election from then on, vote your batch of fake voter ballots for whomever and/or whatever propositions you want.
They don't check. If nobody happens to be looking at the rolls closely you don't even have to invent a few thousand apartment numbers for your house. B-)
(Somebody DID notice, though, that one address in Berkeley had several thousand voters. Last I heard they were still voting, too. B-( )
And you're ignorant if you think that only Democrats do underhanded tactics like this. Allowing felons to vote might be illegal, but so was the Florida trick of listing people as felons who weren't, to keep them from being allowed to vote.
The law REQUIRED the rolls be purged. The purging process, as with any process operated by a human bureaucracy, made errors. The process also gave those improperly excluded plenty of notice and time to correct the matter before the election.
Until you can provide some solid evidence that there was more to this than the normal level of error of such a program, I will continue to interpret such griping as sour grapes from a pack of losers.
In other news, all public election officials are being rounded up by the Bush campaign and taken to New York for a week.
I have never met Bev Harris. But I know Jim March personally. I can assure you he is NOT a Democrat trying to protect us from The Vast Republican Vote-rigging Conspiracy.
But please DO continue to propagate the idea that it's the Republicans that are rigging the elections. While my impression is that the Democrats are the big offenders in this business, like Jim (and most right-thinking, left-thinking, or just plain thinking people) I believe that honest elections are a must.
If it takes the spectre of the Republicans making all their other vote-rigging schemes moot to get the Democrats off the dime and pushing for auditible electronic vote-counting, that's just fine.
Once we have the basic counting mechanism fixed we can go after the other ways to cheat: Graveyard votes, motor-voter & permanent absentee fake voter mills, illegal voters (aliens, incarcerated felons, non-residents), multiple registrations (often massive), "assistance" for handicapped, blind, or elderly voters, intercepted absentee ballots, and polling-place commuting, just to name a few of the larger scams.
Public officials: If you are in a county that uses GEMS 1.18.18, GEMS 1.18.19, or GEMS 1.18.23, your secretary or state may not have told you about this. You're the one who'll be blamed if your election is tampered with. Find out for yourself if you have this problem: Black Box Voting will be happy to walk you through a diagnostic procedure over the phone. [Contact information here.]
Public officials: If you have these versions of the software, the votes can be tampered with by this simple procedure. Black box voting will be happy to give you a short course in how to rig your election.
Reminds me of the official corruption in Daily's Chicago - which was the "City that Works" largely because ANYBODY could bribe the officials equally.
By exposing this flaw and showing every election clerk who asks how to cheat, Black Box Voting is insuring that the vulnerable software WILL be used to cheat, and that elections WILL be rigged until the audit trails are installed and used.
I can think of nothing that will create a bigger push for audit trails on electronic voting than showing every election official in the US how to stuff the ballot boxes at this wholesale, vote-tabulation level. B-)
May be they are using a GiE switch with a 10G bit uplink port? It is a matter of using what's available.
That makes sense.
Another issue is power: 10 GiE takes more than 1 GiE. Silicon area goes up, too.
If you don't need 10G of comm per processor, why pay a penalty - and another in the hub - to get it. And how much computing are you going to get done if your processor is spending a bunch of time wrapping 10G of comm? You'd need hardware TCP/IP accelleration, which means MORE silicon and power, in a situation where heating budgets are your limit. 1G per processor sounds good to me. (Should let you have even interprocessor comm intensive computations proceeding with reasonable efficiency.)
But a single 10G link offboard, using a relatively cheap commodity switch chip, makes sense, too. Your cluster becomes nearly symmetrical, rather than having a significant intra-board bandwidth advantage making it lumpy and making your algorithm partitioning problem more difficult.
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I first read that as firearm weighs too much to steal without special equipment. In that case I could seriously see why you wouldn't have problems.
Sorry, no field pieces until AFTER I move to NV as my permanent residence. No good places to shoot 'em in Silicon Valley. And the antiterrorist folks would get upset even if I was just using them for lawn ornaments. B-)
Something special was happening here - it sounds as if the potential victims were being approached in order to identify targets.
You're getting two different incidents confused:
- In Palo Alto a bunch of burglars was working the street. They skipped our house (and the ex-cop's).
- In our current town (which I will not name) there are a couple (recently moved-in) gang houses a few blocks away. This being a well-established neighborhood near the town's Jr High and elementary schools, when something goes down the cops get called. So the gangsters are trying to establish themselves as someone whose activities should not be reported - by intimidating the locals. Bumper stickers alone weren't enough to repell them. (Probably thought they were on MY car, and that the wifey would be an easy, and undefended, mark. B-) ) But they got out-psyched by my wife the personal-protection instructor.
A lot could be gleaned from a brief conversation - body languages and nuances in your reply would often expose weaknesses - sort-out the easy pickings. The fact that the answer was a credible "you won't get away with that" - "attack me and that is likely the last attack you make" probably made you appear a less desirable target. I'd wager that you wouldn't need to own any weapons in order to achieve the same effect. I suspect that you avoided trouble by old-fashioned confidence...
I, on the other hand, wouldn't expect a bluff to be as effective as a pat hand. The crooks who specialize in intimidation are often very good at reading body language, and other signs of real participation in the gun culture (like vocabulary, word choice, attitude, catchphrases, etc.). Also: Range time makes you respond to stress by calming down and steadying (to the point that your usual gun hand(s) become rock-steady and your breathing slows), rather than becoming excited and shaking. This is VERY visible to somebody who's trying to "read" you.
You MIGHT be able to get away with a bluff. But I wouldn't expect it to work. More likely it would lead to escalation, as your bluff is called.
Confidence comes from KNOWING you're capable. Crooks deal with pretenders all the time, and learn to sort out who's for real and who's not.
I might even go so far as to suggest that attempting to use a gun would likely have increased your personal risk... but all is fair during the initial bluff eh?
Huh?
You do NOT pull out a gun in such a situation. We're not talking the knife in the hand or the fist in the face here. We're talking a set of careful, calm, "questions" by the intimidator - designed to be plausibly deniable as mere curiosity rather than an intimidation attempt.
Actually showing a gun is strictly for a situation where the bad guy has made it clear (to any "reasonable and prudent" person) that he's in the process of an actual attack, the attackee is in IMMEDIATE fear for his/her life-or-limb, and that the attackee WILL shoot if ONE MORE MOVE is made.
Actually showing the gun in such an initial-contact by a gangsta just shows you DON'T know what you're doing (and that you have a gun to steal, which will probably be improperly secured later.)
I don't think it's the bumperstickers, man. I think it's the carparts on the lawn and the lack of valuables, besides beer and NASCAR tapes. The fact you're a half-cracked redneck with a safeload of shotties doesn't change much if you've got nothing to take.
Your biggotry is showing, dude.
At the time we were dotcom millionaires in one of the better neighborhoods of Palo Alto. B-)
But I'll tell you a little secret: The bad guys figure everybody's got SOMETHING worth stealing. Drugs. TV. Booze. Money under the bed. That old beater might be full of parts that are hard to get on the used market. You never know.
When they're doing a systematic down-the-street series they'll only skip the houses where they KNOW they'll have trouble.
I take issue with shooting to injure, though. If at all possible to disable without taking life, one should try.
Rule is "shoot to stop the attack". Once the attack stops you have to stop shooting. (Again: In most jurisdictions.)
Humans are very tough. Stopping an attack in progress will do serious damage. Can't be helped.
Aiming "to disable" is VERY HARD. Doing it when you're actually being attacked, and SUCCEEDING in hitting what you're aiming at, is virtually impossible. The "stop" targets are large and move almost in a straight line. The "disable" targets are small and rapidly moving in varying directions. You'll miss. Count on it. And if you miss you are very likely to be injured or killed, IF the guy was really attacking. So it's not someting you attempt when you're being attacked and really ARE in fear of life-or-limb. That's why shooting to disable is, in many places, considered evidence that the shoot was premeditated assault rather than self-defense.
"If you had the leisure and presence of mind to aim to disable, why were you shooting at all?" Shoot to disable and you'd better have a good answer for that question when it's asked, first by the police, then by the prosecuting attorney.
When you're sleeping, those aren't particularly effective. ;-)
But the NRA and CRPA bumper stickers (and the "I'd rather be hunting" license plate frame) on the car in the driveway IS. B-)
In particular, the burglars that were working their way down our street a few years back skipped two houses - the retired cop two doors up (whose son had similar stickers) and ours.
Current neighborhood has a couple gangs trying to move in. They've intimidated witnesses - with both minor and major vandalism - elsewhere on our block. They have NOT done that to OUR place. B-)
Closest they came is when their spokesthug came buy and asked the wife (an NRA-certified fireams / personal-protection instructor B-) who smokes on the front porch and watches neighborhood goings-on) whether she was worried about attacks or breakins. She said, no, she'd just shoot anybody who tried to attack her. But wasn't she worried about her guns being stolen while she was gone? No, because the firesafe weighs too much to steal without special equipment.
Been here over 5 years, no problems so far. B-)
Better to get 10 in the pen, than to be carried by 6....
The more common form of that is "Better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6."
It works even if your state has the death penalty, anti-self-defense prosecutors, and a jury pool full of sheep.
If in doubt shoot first.
Depends on what you're in doubt about. If you are sure you're reasonably in fear for your life, don't wait for him to pull his trigger just to be SURE he was willing to do it.
Killing someone because of trespassing? Someone that's almost surely unarmed!? That's the last solution I would've chosen, if at all.
"Because of tresspassing". Not even "because he tresspassed". Already your bending the language to avoid putting the responsibility where it belongs - on the person who chose to "tresspass", almost certainly as the first step of committing a more serious crime - like car theft, vandalism, rape, burglary, etc.
But you DON'T shoot somebody who's just tresspassing. You warn them off (or in some jusisdictions, if you have evidence of a lot more than tresspass, demand they stay put with their hands where you can see them until the police arrive to sort it all out.)
If you'd actually TAKEN the course recommended by the original poster, you'd know that.
As for "unarmed":
If you point a gun at somebody and demand that he leave, and he comes at you instead, either he's armed or plumb crazy and thinks he's strong enough to take you DESPITE the gun. Either way a "reasonable and prudent person" would believe that he's about to take "serious bodily harm" unless he does something.
THAT's the legal standard for firing.
But not for KILLING. You fire to STOP THE ATTACK. Maybe one in four he dies. His tough luck.
If you're a 120-pound skinny (or 250-pound fat) nerd and he's a 280-pound muscle-bound felon who spent two years pumping iron in stir until they let him out last week, he doesn't NEED a weapon to take you. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have one. Him coming at you after you point a gun at him and tell him to leave is a VERY strong hint.
Fortunately, most crooks are smart enough to realize that if you've got the gun pointed at them it's time to leave now. So you almost NEVER have to shoot.
But (like seatbelts, fire extinguishers, and armies) you have to be READY and WILLING to use them when they're needed or there's no point in having them in the first place. And some human predators are good enough at reading your resolve that they'll know if you're NOT willing to shoot - so you have to be willing.
I tend to agree with you but how is a rifle which fires a more powerfull cartredge offer a greater opportunity not to kill?
Compared to a shotgun? It's the difference between one small hole and a saucer-sized circle of nine big ones (or one saucer-sized hole, depending on the shotgun load).
But it is hard to generalize, since rifles and their ammunition come in a wide variety of calibers, energies, and bullet expansion characteriesics. Just remember that the shotgun shoots more bullets at once, propelling them with more total powder, to get the general idea. One shotgun blast is like emptying the magazine of a rifle.
Downside to both rifles and shotguns: They're long (even the "short" ones). If the bad guy gets within arms-reach (which he can do from across the room in under a second) he can get behind the muzzle and you're toast. A pistol MIGHT be usable even while he's wrestling with you or knifing you.
That time issue, though, is why, as part of your training, you learn a two-sided coin:
Heads: You NEVER point a gun at anything you aren't willing to destroy.
Tails: If you are pointing a gun at the bad guy, you ALREADY DECIDED that you're justified if you use it and you're going to pull the trigger if he makes ONE MORE MOVE toward you.
Once the gun is pointed you don't have time to wrestle with your conscience if it turns out you have to use it. So get that over with (and the safety off) BEFORE you point it.
Don't try to wing him, either. Not only is it a bad idea self-defense wise (it's hard enough hitting him near the center of the torso in a stressful situation), it's also evidence that you didn't think deadly force was necessary (so why did you use it?) This can turn a justifiable homicide into assault with a deadly weapon once it gets to court.
Either you fear for life-and-limb (of yourself or someone properly under your protection, like a family member or guest) or you don't. If you do, you are justified in using deadly force - and the bad guy gets to take his chances (about one in four) of dying as a result of his criminal decisions. If you don't, you're not justified in shooting, or pointing, at all. (At least in most jurisdictions. Some, like Texas, let you defend your home, car, etc. Others still have a "fleeing felon" rule - or a judicial interpretation (Oregon) that you might fear the crook is running out to his car to get some firepower or reenforcements. Still others (like MA) require you to flee if you physically can, even at home, abandoning the baby and risking a shot in the back.)
For myself:
Home defense at the townhouse: 12 guage shotgun with #40 birdshot. Quite as effective as 00 buck at in-house distances, but passing through a copule layers of drywall will slow it down enough that it won't kill the neighbors.
Ditto at the country house: 12 guage w/00 buck. (Closest houses are over 1/10th mile away and the siding is wood over wood, shots where a good guy is behind the bad guy and an interior wall virtually impossible.)
Personal carry: 38 special airweight for cities, 45 ACP backup for country hikes (where I might have to deal with a coyote, mountain lion, bobcat, or bear). Will probably switch to 357 magnum now that NV alows more than two on the license, since slide-actions are more often problematic in a pinch. Both only where it's legal, of course. (I.e. in NV but not CA.)
And of course the personal carry pistol can be used for home defense if you happen to have it handy - like when you've just arrived, are unloading the luggage, and haven't pulled the shotgun out of the safe yet. A likely time for a bad guy to come at you, when things are open and you're distracted.
God knows NOT A SINGLE PERSON in the US innovates or starts a new company or attempts to advance technology anymore. Pfft. Way to troll!
Unfortunately, there's more to starting a new company than innovating. To go from a garage shop to the next Juniper Networks (or whatever) in the hardware arena requires several rounds of funding. Even to get things prototpyed typically takes a seed round and a "series A". Then B for full-blown development of a manufacturable product and C for product introduction and initial production ramp-up. A software product might get by with maybe one or even two rounds less. But given the need to set up a support and marketing organization - and to eat while burning the midnight oil - it's still not going to happen without serious money input.
So if you're not personally rich you must go to someone else for your miney. Maybe an "angel" for your seed, but for sure the venture capitalists for your funding rounds.
So what happens to innovation and startup ventures in, say, silicon valley, when the Vultures of Sand Hill Road are all flying off in a flock after the latest fad, putting over 90% of the dollar value of their investments into companies that promise to do the bulk of their engineering in India and demanding a major engineering outsourcing strategy in any business plan before they'll even consider it?
Yes you can still innovate - if you're one of the three-or-so founders forming the core archetectural and business team. But the people who would become the high-skill early hires, the mid-to-high-skill line engineers, and the "dedicated support staff" get to keep flipping burgers. Those positions will only be filled outside the US. Not because that would make real business sense. But because if you don't build your company that way you don't get the money you need to build it at all.
And it will continue in this vein until enough vultures get burned in India (or wherever) that they all flock somewhere else. And after three or so tries, it will dawn on some of those who still have some funds left that maybe the US workers really ARE a good price-performance tradeoff.
It's starting to happen in India. SO many outsourcing operations have been directed there by the herd-mentality pointy-hairs that the good, and the mediocre, engineering talent has all been snapped up (and bid up), leaving newcomers with a choice between taking the new grads and dregs or paying near-US-level prices to hire talent away from other operations. But you KNOW the vultures will try it again in a couple other places before the light finally dawns.
Incidentally: A database of prior art will also help show that a particular "software invention", though novel, is also obvious "to someone versed in the art".
This should help kill off such things as straightforward automation of well-known techniques and business practices.
The problem isn't that patents are bad, or that people are taking advantage of the system, it's that the system is currently misbalanced:
Agree.
1. Patents last too long. This is a general problem with IP law these days.
Agree when it comes to patents on things computer related - especially software. The pace of that industry is such that protection is only needed for a few years at most. (Product life cycles are about 6 years long - four of development, two of marketability before obsolescence.)
In particluar, it appears that software in particular doesn't require patent protection at all. By the time it can be reverse-engineered and cloned, the original product (if it was worthwhile at all) has typically made back its development costs and made a massive profit to more than adequately reward the developers and investors for their hard work and risk-taking. Further, at that point the originator is the dominant player in the self-created market, and it takes a major technological leap to displace him.
2. Patents are too easy to get. That is a particular problem with software. The nature of software in particular is such that any non-trivial program involves thousands of processes, any of which can be patented, and it's more-or-less impossible for a developer to even know if he's infringing when people can patent things like using the "tab" key to move between fields in a form.
An even bigger problem is that the prior art in software is not well known (especially to patent examiners, given that it wasn't patentable until recently so little of it is recorded as previous patents.) The Software Patent Institute is trying to solve that, by creating a searchable database of software prior art.
Federal law gives me the right to put up a Dish antenna on my home, even if I live in a neighborhood with covenants restricting said antenna. Federal does not give you (the tenant) the right to put a Dish antenna on my property (that you lease) without my permission.
As a matter of fact, it DOES. In exactly the FCC regulation in question.
When you rent out an apartment (whether you're a private landlord or a university), you are explicitly trading "quiet enjoyment" of the property for money. You can TRY to make limits on what constitutes "quiet enjoyment" of your particular property. But both your state and the federal government can override your claimed limits in the tennent's favor. The tennent gets to do what he wants and as a landlord you're S.O.L. Your lease provision is unenforcable and the rest of the lease still holds.
Mounting antennas (including satellite dish, TV, WiFi, and other "licensed or unlicensed spectrum" antennas {provided they're under a meter, except on a designated historic structure, not to replace a TV antenna and distribution system provided by the landlord, yadda yadda}) happens to be one of those federal overrides. Operating in the unlicensed spectrum (even if it interferes with other users of it) happens to be another.
The students win.
Unless the campus decides they can no longer maintain a viable wifi network in such an environment. In which case the students lose.
Right.
Like Santa Anna at the Alamo, the students win the battle and lose the war.
Well, check your room contract. You'll almost certainly find that most university regulations don't give you anything close to that stake in your dorm room.
You missed the very first paragraph of the FCC's notice, where they defined colleges and universities as being explicitly included in the set of multi tennant environments where the ruling applied.
The college has a perfect right to restrict the use of those devices on their property.
The FCC has the exclusive power to regulate such devices. It has exercised this power to explicitly override the regents (and any other landlords) on this issue. This regulation voids such lease terms, without voiding the rest of the lease, EVEN IF the lease is signed AFTER the regulation was issued. (The boilerplate in the lease becomes unenforcable noise.)
Students in student housing are explicitly mentioned as a case where the FCC has chosen to exercise this power.
Even the federal antiterrorist operations can't ban radio use by terrorists without going through the FCC.
No, it's called a lease agreement, with a change clause. Use the spectrum all you want, they are prohibiting a device, just like they can prohibit hotplates. If you don't like it, feel free to move out.
State law trumps (and voids) any lease agreement terms that the state has prohibited. (Example: lease terms that prohibit having a visitor of a particular race.) Voiding the term does not void the rest of the lease.
Federal laws and regulations trump state law, via the "supremacy clause" of the US constitution.
Federal law gives the FCC the exclusive authority to regulate the use of the RF spectrum, and the FCC has used this authority to write regulations that explicitly permit anyone to use the unlicensed spectrum (AND mount antennas no larger than one meter) despite any lower-level law, regulation, or contract to the contrary (such as zoning laws or landowner covenants forbidding external antennas). Students in student housing are EXPLICITLY mentioned in the cited FCC memo clarifying the regulation.
The FCC says the students can use the unlicensed spectrum. The FCC has the power to issue that regulation and override the university's Board of Regents on this issue. The Board of Regents or their agents can not penalize the students in any way for violating the voided regulation and exercising their privileges under the FCC ruling (because doing so would mean the regulation was not voided).
The students win.
Looking for more about Bernie I happened to notice that he's the current president of the Software Patent Institute.
The SPI (which has both pro- and anti- software patent members) is attempting to solve the bogus software patent problem by making available a searchable database of software prior art.
This database, incidentally, is also a useful for anybody who wants to avoid having to reinvent a software wheel and to keep software breakthroughs from getting lost.
The earliest item I ever saw that made an explicit call for open source software and against software as proprietary / for-profit / trade secret / etc. was a letter from Bernie Galler. It's in the same issue of CACM as Djikstra's "Goto Considered Harmful" letter which started the whole structured programming flap.
In it, Bernie noted that the authors of some particular set of subroutines were, though distributing them, charging a round-number price significantly higher than the cost of making and shipping a copy of the card deck. From this he predicted the potential for the rise of software-as-product, the demise of the then-current free exchange and reuse of software (in both the academic and commercial community), vast duplication of effort, increases of software costs, proprietary claims, etc. And he argued against the adoption of that model as being a far greater loss than gain.
Bernie's own contributions to open software (in that era BEFORE closed software and afterward), personal, organizational, and educational, are far to numerous to go into here. But IMHO he's the very first spokesman to explicitly, in a widely-read public forum, argue for free software (as in both speech AND beer).
Capitol Hill, too.
How long before the terrorists look for targets by looking for blurs in the terraserver database?
This would only prohibit the release of data that is already prohibited from sale to customers other than the US Government.
As it currently stands, commerical imagery operators are prohibited from selling certain data to anyone but the government. Third parties cannot buy this data. However, there is nothing to prohibit someone from filing a Freedom of Information request once the government buys it. This would close that loophole.
And open another one - for the government to use to slam the door on FOIA requests, not just for the imagery, but for anything "derived from it".
Which means that the government could include a gratuitous satellite picture in any report they wanted to make exempt from the FOIA.
Just as the California legislature includes a couple school busses in nearly any appropriation bill, to bypass the voter-initiated constitutional requirement that appropriations bills requre a supermajority but lowers the bar on school funding bills. (A loophole that has led to the near bankruptcy of the state.)
Allow my to put on my tinfoil hat and ask, what the hell is corrupt about motor-voter?
OK.
Step 1: Pick up a stack of registration forms at any of a number of government agencies. (They will give you BOXES of them if you ask. Just say you're running a registration drive. It helps to look like you're in the same party they are - which for low-level bureaucrats in the DMV means sloppy clothes and long hair, not a neat haircut and a snappy business suit.)
Step 2: Fill out a bunch of them for imaginary people and mail them in.
Step 3: When the election papers come, check the box for permanent absentee status on each one and mail it back. (I think you can now combine that with Step 2 but I haven't checked lately.)
Steps 4-N: At each election from then on, vote your batch of fake voter ballots for whomever and/or whatever propositions you want.
They don't check. If nobody happens to be looking at the rolls closely you don't even have to invent a few thousand apartment numbers for your house. B-)
(Somebody DID notice, though, that one address in Berkeley had several thousand voters. Last I heard they were still voting, too. B-( )
And you're ignorant if you think that only Democrats do underhanded tactics like this. Allowing felons to vote might be illegal, but so was the Florida trick of listing people as felons who weren't, to keep them from being allowed to vote.
The law REQUIRED the rolls be purged. The purging process, as with any process operated by a human bureaucracy, made errors. The process also gave those improperly excluded plenty of notice and time to correct the matter before the election.
Until you can provide some solid evidence that there was more to this than the normal level of error of such a program, I will continue to interpret such griping as sour grapes from a pack of losers.
In other news, all public election officials are being rounded up by the Bush campaign and taken to New York for a week.
I have never met Bev Harris. But I know Jim March personally. I can assure you he is NOT a Democrat trying to protect us from The Vast Republican Vote-rigging Conspiracy.
But please DO continue to propagate the idea that it's the Republicans that are rigging the elections. While my impression is that the Democrats are the big offenders in this business, like Jim (and most right-thinking, left-thinking, or just plain thinking people) I believe that honest elections are a must.
If it takes the spectre of the Republicans making all their other vote-rigging schemes moot to get the Democrats off the dime and pushing for auditible electronic vote-counting, that's just fine.
Once we have the basic counting mechanism fixed we can go after the other ways to cheat: Graveyard votes, motor-voter & permanent absentee fake voter mills, illegal voters (aliens, incarcerated felons, non-residents), multiple registrations (often massive), "assistance" for handicapped, blind, or elderly voters, intercepted absentee ballots, and polling-place commuting, just to name a few of the larger scams.
Public officials: If you are in a county that uses GEMS 1.18.18, GEMS 1.18.19, or GEMS 1.18.23, your secretary or state may not have told you about this. You're the one who'll be blamed if your election is tampered with. Find out for yourself if you have this problem: Black Box Voting will be happy to walk you through a diagnostic procedure over the phone. [Contact information here.]
Public officials: If you have these versions of the software, the votes can be tampered with by this simple procedure. Black box voting will be happy to give you a short course in how to rig your election.
Reminds me of the official corruption in Daily's Chicago - which was the "City that Works" largely because ANYBODY could bribe the officials equally.
By exposing this flaw and showing every election clerk who asks how to cheat, Black Box Voting is insuring that the vulnerable software WILL be used to cheat, and that elections WILL be rigged until the audit trails are installed and used.
I can think of nothing that will create a bigger push for audit trails on electronic voting than showing every election official in the US how to stuff the ballot boxes at this wholesale, vote-tabulation level. B-)
May be they are using a GiE switch with a 10G bit uplink port? It is a matter of using what's available.
That makes sense.
Another issue is power: 10 GiE takes more than 1 GiE. Silicon area goes up, too.
If you don't need 10G of comm per processor, why pay a penalty - and another in the hub - to get it. And how much computing are you going to get done if your processor is spending a bunch of time wrapping 10G of comm? You'd need hardware TCP/IP accelleration, which means MORE silicon and power, in a situation where heating budgets are your limit. 1G per processor sounds good to me. (Should let you have even interprocessor comm intensive computations proceeding with reasonable efficiency.)
But a single 10G link offboard, using a relatively cheap commodity switch chip, makes sense, too. Your cluster becomes nearly symmetrical, rather than having a significant intra-board bandwidth advantage making it lumpy and making your algorithm partitioning problem more difficult.
Some of the wind power people use the magnets from the disk drive head actuators for making magnetos or converting motors to magnetos.
Sometimes they use the disk bearings for small mills, too.