It is paranoia if nothing of the sort ever happened. That's the definition of paranoia.
Let's assume, for a second, that you WERE actually right about this. Just because is has NOT happened does not mean that we should not be vigilant...
When I was a kid, I used to have this naive trust of the government. I used to thing "the government would never take away the guns of honest citizens." I would also think "the government would never spy on every phone call and mail message." At the time we used regular mail instead of e-mail, but the concept is the same. I also used to think "we would never open a prison where we torture prisoners for information. We are the good guys." Ever heard of Guantanamo? How about the naive though that all citizens deserve a trial before being executed. Obama's statements about the use of drones crushed that sentiment too. I also believe that crap about needing a warrant before a search. That no longer applies if you are even near the border.
Honestly, if you were to tell me that the government was crushing puppies and kittens to make a youth elixir for the political elite, it would not surprise me. The actions of the government (both parties, mind you) over the last couple of decades have eroded all of my trust in the government.
Simply stated, if you want to keep a right, you have to be prepared to vocally defend it.
It is paranoia if nothing of the sort ever happened. That's the definition of paranoia.
1) Some US senators have actually stated that they would take away all guns if it was within their power.
2) Some cities and states have make it very difficult to own guns, and would make it even harder if the courts had not told them to stop. How can you say that nothing of the sort had ever happened when there are a lot of people trying very hard to make it happen. Just because you don't want to see what some people are trying to do does not mean that it is not happening.
The limiting of magazines after Sandy Hook was suggested not to prevent ALL crimes with guns.
In fact, those laws would prevent almost NO crimes. Similar laws were actually IN EFFECT during the Columbine shooting, which still managed to somehow happen despite these ineffective laws. Most shootings only involve one or two bullets. Magazine limits would have applied to ALL Americans in a futile attempt to lessen damage done by crimes that happen, on average, only about once or twice per year.
Why is it when it comes the 2nd Amendment, you think your gun rights are entirely absolute?
It is NOT absolute. However, if speech were regulated like guns were, the word "fire" would be illegal to say because somebody might yell "fire" in a theater. I would also only be allowed to say 10 words at a time before stopping to take a breath, and to buy a book would require a background check.
I have to get a background check to buy a gun. I have to get a background check, get fingerprinted, and pay over $100 for the privilege on carrying a gun in my pocket. My state has "universal" background checks. We also happen to have a few military bases. So, if a soldier goes overseas, he has to get a background check for his live-in fiancee every month, or they are both criminals -- despite the fact that most dealers will NOT do these checks if no sale is involved. When we had over 200 homes wiped out by a wild fire here a year ago, you can imagine what the "universal background" check did to the people who lost their homes and had no place to store their guns.
Saying that the 2nd amendment is not absolute is completely crazy given how much regulation we ALREADY HAVE on gun ownership in this country. If we had as much regulation on speech as we did on guns, you would yearn for the freedom of speech that they have in China.
Thank you for proving my argument about the gun-proponents stoking fear. They've certainly got you in a tizzy.
Tizzy? No. Concerned? Yes? I explained why my concern is reasonable.
You need some lessons on how to evaluate risk.
No, I do that quite well myself. What evidence do you have that I do not know how to evaluate risk. How nice of you to decide that you are better at deciding MY risk than I am. How presumptuous of you. You do not know me, my neighborhood, or where I live, and yet I suppose that you think that you have more of a right to tell me how I should lead my life than I do. How dare you.
but thanks to Congress banning the CDC from researching gun violence So, is gun-ownership a disease? It is obvious.. being shot is bad for your health. Some people were rightly afraid that tax money was going to support partisan politics, and I agree. Guess what? It is not the ownership of guns that determines the murder rate. I have actually plotted gun ownership vs. murder rate for each state. The resulting graph looked pretty random. Now, there IS a strong correlation between income and murder rate. Why not have the CDC study tax breaks for small businesses, since improving the economy of an area would do MUCH more to stop crime than to ban guns.
I personally would not want to be out with anyone who feels the need to carry a gun, because I don't know what might trigger this person to draw the weapon, and who knows who might eventually get shot.
Yeah, he might do something stupid like stop a criminal from murdering you. If he did that, the average IQ of the world would probably be a little lower.
I live in Colorado, We have had some mass shootings around here. Guess what? All of the successful shootings were in gun-free zones. There was a shooting a New Life church that was stopped by a legal concealed-carry-permit holder. Without this person, many more innocent people would have died. Schools and movie theaters are all "gun-free" zones. I, for one, am quite happy to have responsible people carry guns. You, on the other hand, think that only criminals should carry guns.
We even have restrictions on free speech, even though the 1st Amendment says, "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech...". It seems to me that my right to free speech is being "abridged" in that there's an effective ban on death threats, yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, etc. And yet, I don't really see people going on about the death of the Constitution with respect to this aspect. Of course, I happen to think that death threats should *not* be protected under free speech just as I think gun laws should, in some way, be reformed, but I suppose that's my opinion and all...
OK. Let's treat the 1st amendment the way that a lot of people (apparently including you) want to treat the 2nd amendment.
Some people might hurt others by misusing words. We will define the word "fire" as an "assault word", so it is now completely banned. Do you want to use more innocent words and phrases, such as "Wankel rotary engine?" You need to go through a background check before you can use that phrase. Note that that word may still be banned in New York and Chicago.
We cannot allow people who speak too rapidly. From now on, you are only allowed to say 10 words at a time before stopping to take a breath.
Wait, you want to give your words to somebody else? They need to go through a background check before they can receive your words.
See, the 1st amendment is still safe and sound, but you are now protected from dangerous words by banning them, and you still have free speech, if you follow all the rules!
Of course not, which is why next to nobody does fear everybody that owns a gun. How does it get lost on so many people that saying "I support stricter gun control" doesn't mean "I fear everybody that owns a gun and I want the government to take them all away?"
Well, it either means "I fear everybody" or "I have not actually bothered to check the statistics."
Lots of people hold up Australia. Gun deaths are way down! Too bad deaths from stabbings and beatings are way up. Murders in Australia are down a *little* since they made it very hard to own a gun. However, violent crime overall went up by 40% down there.
It is NOT paranoia if they really are out to get you. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. First, you ban large magazines. Another shooting, Then, you ban all semi-auto firearms. Another shooting. Time to ban them all! This is a slight exaggeration, but my point still stands.
We once tried limiting magazine sizes. Bill Clinton signed the bill into law, and it expired after 10 years. Sandy Hook happened DURING this ban. Did crime suddenly drop after the ban? No. Once the ban expired, did crime suddenly shoot back up? Once again, no. So, if a law had NO real effect, why try to do it again? Give me ONE good reason that can be backed up with statistics.
Another popular item is to try to ban guns based on features. How stupid is that? If somebody is shooting at me, I would worry more about the bullets and less about what shape or color the gun is. Simply stated, all semi-auto guns are designed to shoot as fast as you can pull the trigger. The ONLY thing else that matters is the magazine size. SO, if it is straight and the furniture is make of wood, OK. If it is black and plastic, bad. Tell me how that makes sense. Some people even wanted to ban any gun with an "upper gas tube." Really? During an actual shooting, how is the location of the gas tube supposed to change things?
Another thing that I love is "universal background checks." Sounds like a great idea, right? I live in Colorado, where we had major wild fires about a year ago, and we require "universal background checks." They cost $10, and it is hard to find a dealer who will do a background check without a sale. So, people had their houses burn down, so they took their guns. Could they leave them with a friend? Nope, not without a LOT of trouble. Since a gun safe is pretty big and hard to move when you are evacuating, I guess your only choice it to take the guns with you to the hotel (along with your kids, who now have easier access to your guns), or break the law by leaving them with a trusted friend. Nice job, government.
Now, the VAST MAJORITY of gun crimes only involve a few shots (if I recall correctly, about two shots is the average). Would a magazine limit make much of a difference in those cases? Now, how about mass shootings (which are statistically rare - you are about as likely to be hit by lightning as to be a victim of a mass shooting). Could restricting the rights of EVERY PERSON IN AMERICA make a difference in a statistically rare situation? Well, the Aurora theater shooter had his 100-round magazine jam after about 45 rounds. That is apparently not uncommon. If he had five 20-round magazines, or even ten 10-round magazines, he would have probably done more damage since a jam would be less likely. With practice, it only takes about two seconds to change magazines.
Gun laws often make no sense and might actually harm innovation. The law makes a clear distinction between a handgun and a long-gun. During WW2, it was not uncommon to have pistols with separate detachable shoulder stocks (collectors items from what I understand). If you tried doing that today, you would have a "short barreled rifle" which will get you years in Club Fed. If you put a shoulder stock on a pistol, is it suddenly more dangerous? If so, how? So, how does this law make any sense at all? I have yet to hear a single good reason how this law makes anybody any safer, and it has certainly made certain classes if firearm and accessories illegal, stifling innovation.
Which gun laws do you think will actually be obeyed by criminals. I have done nothing illegal (other than speeding). I am an honest citizen. Please explain to me how restricting my rights makes anybody else any safer..... Please..... I have not heard any good reasons yet. You can pass laws to try to stop criminals, but criminals do not obey laws? The point of a law is to define behavior that is considered bad, and to use to apply punishment to people who break the law. The law is remarkable bad at stopping people from doing
Stoking fear? Right. One of the biggest fears is that the government will outlaw guns. Far-fetched, right? Tell you what. Hop in your time machine to five years ago. Go to Chicago and try to legally buy a gun. Guess what? For the average person five years ago, legally buying a gun was practically impossible. IT is not paranoia if they really ARE out to get you.
Here is a quote from a current US senator:
If I could have banned them all - 'Mr. and Mrs. America turn in your guns' - I would have!
As to the NRA quote, is there anything unfactual out there? Yes, we live in a very safe country. The odds of any bad violence happening to any one person out there is relatively small (of course, this varies GREATLY by zip code). But dangers are out there. How much danger is enough for you to carry a gun? Only YOU can decide that. However, it is up to you, and should not be up to a politician to tell you "no." Simply stated, if something bad DOES happen to you, how long would it take for you to call 911 and expect help to arrive? 5 minutes? 10 minutes? Would that be fast enough?
For the record, I own guns (where I live, it would probably take 20 minutes for a sheriff to show up), but I do not carry one when I am away from home. But I have friends who do, and I respect their decision.
So, most of the "gun deaths" will not be stopped by this technology. I am not saying that the tech is a bad idea -- far from it. I am just saying that the any possible benefit is small, so the tech should be considered optional, not required.
I do agree that the backlash against the company making the product is unjustified. However, the government and the media have tried their best to demonize honest citizens, so many of them are overly-sensitive on the subject.
As I have stated elsewhere, approximately 0.1% of the guns in the US are used in murders. So you want to burden the other 99.9% of them with expensive tech that the owner may not want?
I also like the use of the phrase "gun deaths." So, if a person commits suicide, how would this bracelet stop them if it is their gun. If it is NOT their gun, how would you deny them access to sleeping pills and alcohol, or a car in a closed garage, or even a piece of rope. Maybe we should put neck detectors in all ropes?
Some gun deaths are caused by police shooting a criminal. Do you suppose that those should be stopped? How about legitimate defensive shootings. Do you want to prevent those?
Really, the ONLY statistic that really matters is when a gun is used in a crime. Throwing out a meaningless statistic like "gun death" simply shows a person with an agenda.
Keep in mind the events surrounding the birth of the USA. A bloody war had just be fought where the colonists had just driven off an oppressive government. The purpose of the 2nd Amendment is not just to be the army, it was to be an army that could revolt against the government if needed. The Constitution was, in fact, designed to place hard limits on the powers of the government, and to actually make it hard to accomplish anything (checks and balances).
Fortunately, our government is still fairly functional. Armed revolt is not needed currently, and I suspect that it will not be necessary in my lifetime. I certainly hope that it stays that way, but the fact that the citizens are armed should certainly help prevent the politicians from doing anything too unpopular. The implied thread of armed citizens helps keep the government in check.
Look at "Rancher Bundy." The government sent in guys with guns and lots of citizens showed up with their own guns. In the end, everybody went home and nobody got hurt. I am not saying that the rancher was right. What I am saying is that the government was wrong to send in hummers full of guys with M-16s and body armor. The way to go after this sort of issue is to take it to the courts. If they guy is wrong, make him pay a fine. Most farmers and ranchers get some money from the government (as far as I know, not being a farmer). You can attack those funds and penalize him in the wallet. That is MUCH better than sending a group of armed thugs.
Another stat that gun nuts don't like mentioning is that 30% of current gun owners couldn't pass a pyschactric evaluation.
Proof? Just a little bit of proof?
Another statistic: 99.99% of the guns are never used in any sort of murder. So, the gun-grabbers are trying to restrict the rights of ALL Americans to stop the 0.01% of guns that actually cause the problems. This is a statistic that I can back up, using homicide rate, and estimates of US population and gun ownership.
I also seem to recall a fatal stabbing in a school in the last week. If it had been a shooting, lots of people would have been standing up yelling that we need to do something about guns. Where is the vehemence about knives?
I have no problem with adding hi-tech such as this to guns, but it should be OPTIONAL. However, singe New Jersey already has a law that once this thing goes on sale, every gun must have the same feature. This is the problem... If it remains an option, then fine. If it becomes mandatory, that is problematic.
For homes with children, this may be a great idea. For homes without kids, who needs it.
"Whoops, my gun crashed (or the battery died, watch got dropped and broken, etc). Now my ex-husband can feel free to break his restraining order and kill me." I do no want to hear about this story in the news.
You can throw jobs off to a "screen" instance that can run happily. Then, if you have to VPN in from home, you can grab the screen and pick up where you left off. Combine this with "nohup" and you can have jobs that run even when you log off, and you can regain console control from them at any time.
I agree completely. RTFA. It shows a snipped of Fortran code -- ugly. I cut my teeth on BASIC with a Commodore VIC-20, and, in a way, I still miss it.
Right now I have to bounce around between multiple languages: Verilog, C, TCL, and PERL. I always have trouble remembering exactly how to do a "for" loop in each of these languages. Do you surround the arguments with curly brackets (TCL) or parenthesis (the rest). Do you use commas or semicolons between the arguments? Which languages use "else if" and which ones use "elsif"? Bouncing around between languages sometimes leaves me scrambling to remember exactly how to do something in a particular language.
It has been DECADES since I used BASIC, but I bet that I could still make a pretty good go of making a working program without having to look anything up. The language was simply that easy to learn. Of course, it was not object-oriented and too many "goto"s could kill you. But for simple programs, it could not be beat.
Well, we will just have to agree to disagree. However, at least you are willing to look at evidence without resorting to ad hominem attacks. You know what you believe and are actually willing to discuss it logically. I appreciate that.
To put it bluntly, I respect you, although I disagree.
If you ever find yourself in the Colorado Springs area, shoot me an e-mail. I will buy you a beer. We have some truly great micro-breweries around here.
Regarding Jesus: afaik there's little to no evidence he lived outside of the Bible, which I don't take to be a reliable source.
Well, little to no evidence if you exclude all of the evidence which was enough to convince the scholars. Direct quote from Wikipdedia
Most modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed,[1][2][3] but scholars differ on the historicity of specific episodes described in the Biblical accounts,[4] and the only two events subject to "almost universal assent" are that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by the order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate.[5][6][7]
Feel free to ignore "scholars of antiquity" if you want, but this is their subject of expertise. As to why Jesus "caught on," maybe you should ask yourself why this one "caught on" and not the others. Could it be that there is something to it?
I don't happen to think that eternal torment is a great idea either, but if heaven exists, murderers and child molesters certainly do not belong there. Assuming that souls exist and cannot be destroyed, you could describe the afterlife as "heaven" and "not heaven." God is loving, but another one of his characteristics is justice. Honestly, I am usually a little bit more eloquent, but I have a nasty cold and a rather annoying headache right now, so I will leave it at that.
What is even better, there is a current push to welcome the immigrants who come here illegally. I can broadly classify people who want to come to the US into two categories:
1) people who go to the US embassy in their own country, fill out the forms, and wait patiently to get into the US. They try to do things the legal way.
2) People who do not care about the law or the system, and just smuggle themselves here, making their first act in America breaking the law.
Now, guess which one FWD.us believes should become citizens?
If I had my way, for every person in category 2 above that got deported, I would approve somebody from category 1 to enter the country. The net amount of immigrants stays the same, but we get the ones who actually respect the law.
Oh, a couple of things that I forgot to mention...
Cosmology. Scientists only know about 5% or so of what is actually in the universe. But around 25% of the universe is dark matter, and 70% is dark energy. Nobody has a clue or even a theory about what either one of them are. Well dark energy may be some sort of inflationary field, but fields have particles, and nobody has a clue what this particle is. Dark matter may be what is called a WIMP (weakly-interacting massive particle), but once again, there is not even a theory or a name as to what this particle actually is, and no place in the current theoretical framework to hang it. Another possibility is a lot of brown dwarfs roaming the universe could be the dark matter. Hmmm, if over 80% of all matter is brown dwarfs, I think that we would have seen some evidence so far.
One person to look up is Lee Strobel. Formerly a reporter and an atheist, he decided to investigate Jesus using the same techniques he would to follow any other story... well, as best he could since he is 2000 years removed from the event. He wanted to disprove Christianity, but instead became a Christian. This guy has a law degree from Yale -- not quite an ignorant bumpkin. He wrote some great books.
I figured that I would take some heat from my original post, but I am honesty tired of responding to all of the posts where people are attacking me or questioning me -- especially since the easiest way to respond is by saying "Google it yourself." It is actually nice to see a posting from a person with an open mind.
You do bring up some good points. If I were God, I would do things differently. However, not having the ability to create a universe from nothing, I am rather unqualified for the job.
The "official" response is that we were created perfect, but Adam & Eve screwed it up, so we are ALL screwed. God, however, threw us a life-line. All you have to do to escape is turn from sin and follow Jesus. God's rules, so he can define sin how he wants. Should being gay be a sin? I would tend to exclude that from the list, but it is not my choice.
As to heaven vs. hell, let's look at things differently. If you do assume heaven and hell exist, then who gets to go where? Would you like to think that Hitler is in hell? How about Stallin? Putin? The guy who cut you off in traffic last week? The guy who sold you the broken used hard drive off of CraigsList and told you it was in great shape? Simply stated, if you just judge people on good/evil, where should the dividing line be? What about the person who is just below this imaginary line? How should they feel? To a perfect being, the ONLY line that makes sense is perfection. Nobody lives up to that, so God had to invent an escape plan.
Of course, if there is not God, then this whole argument is stupid. Nobody gets to heaven. So, the first question to ask is "is there a God?" The way that I look at it is that nobody has explained how the universe came into being. For example, there are a lot of things that have to be perfect, from the rate of radioactive decay, the mass of the electron, so the number fo spatial dimensions. Try figuring out gravity in four spatial dimensions -- orbits become impossible. For orbits, the force of gravity has to be proportional to 1/(r^2). If you try 1/(r^3), everything flies apart. In 2D space, 1/r yields everything crashing together immediately.
Some will say that the anthropic principal applies. To me, that does not really make sense. In order for there to be life, you either need to manually fine-tune the universe, or you need an INFINITE number of universes, all with different physical constants, in order to happen upon one that can support life. Are infinite universes possible? Maybe. According to string theory, a big crunch can rebound into a big bang simply by having some of the 11 predicted dimensions expand, while our three spatial dimensions collapse. However, string theory is looking unlikely, as elegant as it is ( http://science.slashdot.org/st... ). I have always wanted to believe that gravity would cause a big crunch that would lead to the next big bang. However, current models predict that the universe will continue to expand forever, eventually even ripping apart atoms as everything expands. Where would the next big bang come from then? There is some speculation (a foam of universes, new universes popping up in ours when the density gets too low, etc.), but none of them seem satisfying, and there is not a shred of evidence for any of them.
Believing in God takes a leap of faith. However, believing in infinite universes also takes a similar leap of faith.
I am much more comfortable with physics and cosmology than I am with biology. However, evolution seems somewhat contrived. I have no doubt that if you took a bunch of kids and killed off every blond and brunette, it would be easy to get a population of only redheads. That, however, is only manipulating the distribution of existing genes. Making new genes is another matter. No manner of this type of selection would result in children with naturally purple hair -- that would take entirely new genet
Well, the ARE right about Sudoku. I can tell you from experience that, sometimes, just looking at a board is not enough. For some configurations of some types of puzzles (sudoku being a great example), you just have to mentally go through the possibilities until you find one that takes you a little further along. If there are 10 possible next steps instead of just one, you only have to search, on average, 1/10 the solution space to get your next move. These results are actually quite obvious once you think about it for a moment.
On the other hand, there are classes of problems where intuition (fuzzy heuristics?) is of some use. In these cases, if you can narrow your search of the state space to get your next move without an exhaustive search, the fact that there is only one next possible move is much less of a handicap.
Huh? The "mothers milk," has to be stretched quite a bit to get to not mixing meat and cheese.
The "man lying with a man" does not have to be stretched at all, unless you assume that people get married so that they can remain celibate... Your arguments are, on the face of it, quite ridiculous -- sort of like when Clinton was trying to define what the word "is" meant. Any further trolling from you will be pleasantly ignored.
As I said, I have nothing against homosexuals. I really don't care what they do. They just have to be told what the Bible says. What they do with that information is their own business.
So, how much have you studied the history of the Bible? You clearly do not know about all of the scholarly work done to translate from the original languages (mostly Greek and Hebrew), the thousand upon thousands of ancient manuscripts, and the care that has been taken to make sure that the modern translations are as accurate as possible. Plus, anybody who wants to can learn Greek and Hebrew and read the originals.
Simply stated, unless you have some evidence that you actually know what you are talking about,, or you can provide links to real sources (not just your own legends and wishful thinking) you have no credibility.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's assume, for a second, that you WERE actually right about this. Just because is has NOT happened does not mean that we should not be vigilant...
When I was a kid, I used to have this naive trust of the government. I used to thing "the government would never take away the guns of honest citizens." I would also think "the government would never spy on every phone call and mail message." At the time we used regular mail instead of e-mail, but the concept is the same. I also used to think "we would never open a prison where we torture prisoners for information. We are the good guys." Ever heard of Guantanamo? How about the naive though that all citizens deserve a trial before being executed. Obama's statements about the use of drones crushed that sentiment too. I also believe that crap about needing a warrant before a search. That no longer applies if you are even near the border.
Honestly, if you were to tell me that the government was crushing puppies and kittens to make a youth elixir for the political elite, it would not surprise me. The actions of the government (both parties, mind you) over the last couple of decades have eroded all of my trust in the government.
Simply stated, if you want to keep a right, you have to be prepared to vocally defend it.
1) Some US senators have actually stated that they would take away all guns if it was within their power.
2) Some cities and states have make it very difficult to own guns, and would make it even harder if the courts had not told them to stop.
How can you say that nothing of the sort had ever happened when there are a lot of people trying very hard to make it happen. Just because you don't want to see what some people are trying to do does not mean that it is not happening.
In fact, those laws would prevent almost NO crimes. Similar laws were actually IN EFFECT during the Columbine shooting, which still managed to somehow happen despite these ineffective laws. Most shootings only involve one or two bullets. Magazine limits would have applied to ALL Americans in a futile attempt to lessen damage done by crimes that happen, on average, only about once or twice per year.
It is NOT absolute. However, if speech were regulated like guns were, the word "fire" would be illegal to say because somebody might yell "fire" in a theater. I would also only be allowed to say 10 words at a time before stopping to take a breath, and to buy a book would require a background check.
I have to get a background check to buy a gun. I have to get a background check, get fingerprinted, and pay over $100 for the privilege on carrying a gun in my pocket. My state has "universal" background checks. We also happen to have a few military bases. So, if a soldier goes overseas, he has to get a background check for his live-in fiancee every month, or they are both criminals -- despite the fact that most dealers will NOT do these checks if no sale is involved. When we had over 200 homes wiped out by a wild fire here a year ago, you can imagine what the "universal background" check did to the people who lost their homes and had no place to store their guns.
Saying that the 2nd amendment is not absolute is completely crazy given how much regulation we ALREADY HAVE on gun ownership in this country. If we had as much regulation on speech as we did on guns, you would yearn for the freedom of speech that they have in China.
Tizzy? No. Concerned? Yes? I explained why my concern is reasonable.
No, I do that quite well myself. What evidence do you have that I do not know how to evaluate risk. How nice of you to decide that you are better at deciding MY risk than I am. How presumptuous of you. You do not know me, my neighborhood, or where I live, and yet I suppose that you think that you have more of a right to tell me how I should lead my life than I do. How dare you.
but thanks to Congress banning the CDC from researching gun violence So, is gun-ownership a disease? It is obvious.. being shot is bad for your health. Some people were rightly afraid that tax money was going to support partisan politics, and I agree. Guess what? It is not the ownership of guns that determines the murder rate. I have actually plotted gun ownership vs. murder rate for each state. The resulting graph looked pretty random. Now, there IS a strong correlation between income and murder rate. Why not have the CDC study tax breaks for small businesses, since improving the economy of an area would do MUCH more to stop crime than to ban guns.
Yeah, he might do something stupid like stop a criminal from murdering you. If he did that, the average IQ of the world would probably be a little lower.
I live in Colorado, We have had some mass shootings around here. Guess what? All of the successful shootings were in gun-free zones. There was a shooting a New Life church that was stopped by a legal concealed-carry-permit holder. Without this person, many more innocent people would have died. Schools and movie theaters are all "gun-free" zones. I, for one, am quite happy to have responsible people carry guns. You, on the other hand, think that only criminals should carry guns.
OK. Let's treat the 1st amendment the way that a lot of people (apparently including you) want to treat the 2nd amendment.
Some people might hurt others by misusing words. We will define the word "fire" as an "assault word", so it is now completely banned. Do you want to use more innocent words and phrases, such as "Wankel rotary engine?" You need to go through a background check before you can use that phrase. Note that that word may still be banned in New York and Chicago.
We cannot allow people who speak too rapidly. From now on, you are only allowed to say 10 words at a time before stopping to take a breath.
Wait, you want to give your words to somebody else? They need to go through a background check before they can receive your words.
See, the 1st amendment is still safe and sound, but you are now protected from dangerous words by banning them, and you still have free speech, if you follow all the rules!
Well, it either means "I fear everybody" or "I have not actually bothered to check the statistics."
Lots of people hold up Australia. Gun deaths are way down! Too bad deaths from stabbings and beatings are way up. Murders in Australia are down a *little* since they made it very hard to own a gun. However, violent crime overall went up by 40% down there.
I see no problem with that. Now the criminals know which houses to stay away from. If you want to steal and/or rape, avoid the houses with guns.
I would expect the lefties to be complaining about this, since they are probably sad that their name is NOT on the list. ;-P
It is NOT paranoia if they really are out to get you. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. First, you ban large magazines. Another shooting, Then, you ban all semi-auto firearms. Another shooting. Time to ban them all! This is a slight exaggeration, but my point still stands.
We once tried limiting magazine sizes. Bill Clinton signed the bill into law, and it expired after 10 years. Sandy Hook happened DURING this ban. Did crime suddenly drop after the ban? No. Once the ban expired, did crime suddenly shoot back up? Once again, no. So, if a law had NO real effect, why try to do it again? Give me ONE good reason that can be backed up with statistics.
Another popular item is to try to ban guns based on features. How stupid is that? If somebody is shooting at me, I would worry more about the bullets and less about what shape or color the gun is. Simply stated, all semi-auto guns are designed to shoot as fast as you can pull the trigger. The ONLY thing else that matters is the magazine size. SO, if it is straight and the furniture is make of wood, OK. If it is black and plastic, bad. Tell me how that makes sense. Some people even wanted to ban any gun with an "upper gas tube." Really? During an actual shooting, how is the location of the gas tube supposed to change things?
Another thing that I love is "universal background checks." Sounds like a great idea, right? I live in Colorado, where we had major wild fires about a year ago, and we require "universal background checks." They cost $10, and it is hard to find a dealer who will do a background check without a sale. So, people had their houses burn down, so they took their guns. Could they leave them with a friend? Nope, not without a LOT of trouble. Since a gun safe is pretty big and hard to move when you are evacuating, I guess your only choice it to take the guns with you to the hotel (along with your kids, who now have easier access to your guns), or break the law by leaving them with a trusted friend. Nice job, government.
Now, the VAST MAJORITY of gun crimes only involve a few shots (if I recall correctly, about two shots is the average). Would a magazine limit make much of a difference in those cases? Now, how about mass shootings (which are statistically rare - you are about as likely to be hit by lightning as to be a victim of a mass shooting). Could restricting the rights of EVERY PERSON IN AMERICA make a difference in a statistically rare situation? Well, the Aurora theater shooter had his 100-round magazine jam after about 45 rounds. That is apparently not uncommon. If he had five 20-round magazines, or even ten 10-round magazines, he would have probably done more damage since a jam would be less likely. With practice, it only takes about two seconds to change magazines.
Gun laws often make no sense and might actually harm innovation. The law makes a clear distinction between a handgun and a long-gun. During WW2, it was not uncommon to have pistols with separate detachable shoulder stocks (collectors items from what I understand). If you tried doing that today, you would have a "short barreled rifle" which will get you years in Club Fed. If you put a shoulder stock on a pistol, is it suddenly more dangerous? If so, how? So, how does this law make any sense at all? I have yet to hear a single good reason how this law makes anybody any safer, and it has certainly made certain classes if firearm and accessories illegal, stifling innovation.
Which gun laws do you think will actually be obeyed by criminals. I have done nothing illegal (other than speeding). I am an honest citizen. Please explain to me how restricting my rights makes anybody else any safer..... Please..... I have not heard any good reasons yet. You can pass laws to try to stop criminals, but criminals do not obey laws? The point of a law is to define behavior that is considered bad, and to use to apply punishment to people who break the law. The law is remarkable bad at stopping people from doing
Stoking fear? Right. One of the biggest fears is that the government will outlaw guns. Far-fetched, right? Tell you what. Hop in your time machine to five years ago. Go to Chicago and try to legally buy a gun. Guess what? For the average person five years ago, legally buying a gun was practically impossible. IT is not paranoia if they really ARE out to get you.
Here is a quote from a current US senator:
As to the NRA quote, is there anything unfactual out there? Yes, we live in a very safe country. The odds of any bad violence happening to any one person out there is relatively small (of course, this varies GREATLY by zip code). But dangers are out there. How much danger is enough for you to carry a gun? Only YOU can decide that. However, it is up to you, and should not be up to a politician to tell you "no." Simply stated, if something bad DOES happen to you, how long would it take for you to call 911 and expect help to arrive? 5 minutes? 10 minutes? Would that be fast enough?
For the record, I own guns (where I live, it would probably take 20 minutes for a sheriff to show up), but I do not carry one when I am away from home. But I have friends who do, and I respect their decision.
So, most of the "gun deaths" will not be stopped by this technology. I am not saying that the tech is a bad idea -- far from it. I am just saying that the any possible benefit is small, so the tech should be considered optional, not required.
I do agree that the backlash against the company making the product is unjustified. However, the government and the media have tried their best to demonize honest citizens, so many of them are overly-sensitive on the subject.
As I have stated elsewhere, approximately 0.1% of the guns in the US are used in murders. So you want to burden the other 99.9% of them with expensive tech that the owner may not want?
I also like the use of the phrase "gun deaths." So, if a person commits suicide, how would this bracelet stop them if it is their gun. If it is NOT their gun, how would you deny them access to sleeping pills and alcohol, or a car in a closed garage, or even a piece of rope. Maybe we should put neck detectors in all ropes?
Some gun deaths are caused by police shooting a criminal. Do you suppose that those should be stopped? How about legitimate defensive shootings. Do you want to prevent those?
Really, the ONLY statistic that really matters is when a gun is used in a crime. Throwing out a meaningless statistic like "gun death" simply shows a person with an agenda.
Keep in mind the events surrounding the birth of the USA. A bloody war had just be fought where the colonists had just driven off an oppressive government. The purpose of the 2nd Amendment is not just to be the army, it was to be an army that could revolt against the government if needed. The Constitution was, in fact, designed to place hard limits on the powers of the government, and to actually make it hard to accomplish anything (checks and balances).
Fortunately, our government is still fairly functional. Armed revolt is not needed currently, and I suspect that it will not be necessary in my lifetime. I certainly hope that it stays that way, but the fact that the citizens are armed should certainly help prevent the politicians from doing anything too unpopular. The implied thread of armed citizens helps keep the government in check.
Look at "Rancher Bundy." The government sent in guys with guns and lots of citizens showed up with their own guns. In the end, everybody went home and nobody got hurt. I am not saying that the rancher was right. What I am saying is that the government was wrong to send in hummers full of guys with M-16s and body armor. The way to go after this sort of issue is to take it to the courts. If they guy is wrong, make him pay a fine. Most farmers and ranchers get some money from the government (as far as I know, not being a farmer). You can attack those funds and penalize him in the wallet. That is MUCH better than sending a group of armed thugs.
Proof? Just a little bit of proof?
Another statistic: 99.99% of the guns are never used in any sort of murder. So, the gun-grabbers are trying to restrict the rights of ALL Americans to stop the 0.01% of guns that actually cause the problems. This is a statistic that I can back up, using homicide rate, and estimates of US population and gun ownership.
I also seem to recall a fatal stabbing in a school in the last week. If it had been a shooting, lots of people would have been standing up yelling that we need to do something about guns. Where is the vehemence about knives?
I have no problem with adding hi-tech such as this to guns, but it should be OPTIONAL. However, singe New Jersey already has a law that once this thing goes on sale, every gun must have the same feature. This is the problem... If it remains an option, then fine. If it becomes mandatory, that is problematic.
For homes with children, this may be a great idea. For homes without kids, who needs it.
"Whoops, my gun crashed (or the battery died, watch got dropped and broken, etc). Now my ex-husband can feel free to break his restraining order and kill me." I do no want to hear about this story in the news.
Screen is actually surprisingly useful.
You can throw jobs off to a "screen" instance that can run happily. Then, if you have to VPN in from home, you can grab the screen and pick up where you left off. Combine this with "nohup" and you can have jobs that run even when you log off, and you can regain console control from them at any time.
In short, it is the "vnc" of the terminal world.
I agree completely. RTFA. It shows a snipped of Fortran code -- ugly. I cut my teeth on BASIC with a Commodore VIC-20, and, in a way, I still miss it.
Right now I have to bounce around between multiple languages: Verilog, C, TCL, and PERL. I always have trouble remembering exactly how to do a "for" loop in each of these languages. Do you surround the arguments with curly brackets (TCL) or parenthesis (the rest). Do you use commas or semicolons between the arguments? Which languages use "else if" and which ones use "elsif"? Bouncing around between languages sometimes leaves me scrambling to remember exactly how to do something in a particular language.
It has been DECADES since I used BASIC, but I bet that I could still make a pretty good go of making a working program without having to look anything up. The language was simply that easy to learn. Of course, it was not object-oriented and too many "goto"s could kill you. But for simple programs, it could not be beat.
So, you won't approve if they dump Rice and get somebody from the Obama administration, right?
Obama was certainly in a position to undo the damage that Bush did, but he took it to the next level.
Well, we will just have to agree to disagree. However, at least you are willing to look at evidence without resorting to ad hominem attacks. You know what you believe and are actually willing to discuss it logically. I appreciate that.
To put it bluntly, I respect you, although I disagree.
If you ever find yourself in the Colorado Springs area, shoot me an e-mail. I will buy you a beer. We have some truly great micro-breweries around here.
Best of luck to you!
Well you said this:
Well, little to no evidence if you exclude all of the evidence which was enough to convince the scholars. Direct quote from Wikipdedia
Feel free to ignore "scholars of antiquity" if you want, but this is their subject of expertise. As to why Jesus "caught on," maybe you should ask yourself why this one "caught on" and not the others. Could it be that there is something to it?
I don't happen to think that eternal torment is a great idea either, but if heaven exists, murderers and child molesters certainly do not belong there. Assuming that souls exist and cannot be destroyed, you could describe the afterlife as "heaven" and "not heaven." God is loving, but another one of his characteristics is justice. Honestly, I am usually a little bit more eloquent, but I have a nasty cold and a rather annoying headache right now, so I will leave it at that.
What is even better, there is a current push to welcome the immigrants who come here illegally. I can broadly classify people who want to come to the US into two categories:
1) people who go to the US embassy in their own country, fill out the forms, and wait patiently to get into the US. They try to do things the legal way.
2) People who do not care about the law or the system, and just smuggle themselves here, making their first act in America breaking the law.
Now, guess which one FWD.us believes should become citizens?
If I had my way, for every person in category 2 above that got deported, I would approve somebody from category 1 to enter the country. The net amount of immigrants stays the same, but we get the ones who actually respect the law.
Oh, a couple of things that I forgot to mention...
Cosmology. Scientists only know about 5% or so of what is actually in the universe. But around 25% of the universe is dark matter, and 70% is dark energy. Nobody has a clue or even a theory about what either one of them are. Well dark energy may be some sort of inflationary field, but fields have particles, and nobody has a clue what this particle is. Dark matter may be what is called a WIMP (weakly-interacting massive particle), but once again, there is not even a theory or a name as to what this particle actually is, and no place in the current theoretical framework to hang it. Another possibility is a lot of brown dwarfs roaming the universe could be the dark matter. Hmmm, if over 80% of all matter is brown dwarfs, I think that we would have seen some evidence so far.
One person to look up is Lee Strobel. Formerly a reporter and an atheist, he decided to investigate Jesus using the same techniques he would to follow any other story... well, as best he could since he is 2000 years removed from the event. He wanted to disprove Christianity, but instead became a Christian. This guy has a law degree from Yale -- not quite an ignorant bumpkin. He wrote some great books.
I figured that I would take some heat from my original post, but I am honesty tired of responding to all of the posts where people are attacking me or questioning me -- especially since the easiest way to respond is by saying "Google it yourself." It is actually nice to see a posting from a person with an open mind.
You do bring up some good points. If I were God, I would do things differently. However, not having the ability to create a universe from nothing, I am rather unqualified for the job.
The "official" response is that we were created perfect, but Adam & Eve screwed it up, so we are ALL screwed. God, however, threw us a life-line. All you have to do to escape is turn from sin and follow Jesus. God's rules, so he can define sin how he wants. Should being gay be a sin? I would tend to exclude that from the list, but it is not my choice.
As to heaven vs. hell, let's look at things differently. If you do assume heaven and hell exist, then who gets to go where? Would you like to think that Hitler is in hell? How about Stallin? Putin? The guy who cut you off in traffic last week? The guy who sold you the broken used hard drive off of CraigsList and told you it was in great shape? Simply stated, if you just judge people on good/evil, where should the dividing line be? What about the person who is just below this imaginary line? How should they feel? To a perfect being, the ONLY line that makes sense is perfection. Nobody lives up to that, so God had to invent an escape plan.
Of course, if there is not God, then this whole argument is stupid. Nobody gets to heaven. So, the first question to ask is "is there a God?" The way that I look at it is that nobody has explained how the universe came into being. For example, there are a lot of things that have to be perfect, from the rate of radioactive decay, the mass of the electron, so the number fo spatial dimensions. Try figuring out gravity in four spatial dimensions -- orbits become impossible. For orbits, the force of gravity has to be proportional to 1/(r^2). If you try 1/(r^3), everything flies apart. In 2D space, 1/r yields everything crashing together immediately.
Some will say that the anthropic principal applies. To me, that does not really make sense. In order for there to be life, you either need to manually fine-tune the universe, or you need an INFINITE number of universes, all with different physical constants, in order to happen upon one that can support life. Are infinite universes possible? Maybe. According to string theory, a big crunch can rebound into a big bang simply by having some of the 11 predicted dimensions expand, while our three spatial dimensions collapse. However, string theory is looking unlikely, as elegant as it is ( http://science.slashdot.org/st... ). I have always wanted to believe that gravity would cause a big crunch that would lead to the next big bang. However, current models predict that the universe will continue to expand forever, eventually even ripping apart atoms as everything expands. Where would the next big bang come from then? There is some speculation (a foam of universes, new universes popping up in ours when the density gets too low, etc.), but none of them seem satisfying, and there is not a shred of evidence for any of them.
Believing in God takes a leap of faith. However, believing in infinite universes also takes a similar leap of faith.
I am much more comfortable with physics and cosmology than I am with biology. However, evolution seems somewhat contrived. I have no doubt that if you took a bunch of kids and killed off every blond and brunette, it would be easy to get a population of only redheads. That, however, is only manipulating the distribution of existing genes. Making new genes is another matter. No manner of this type of selection would result in children with naturally purple hair -- that would take entirely new genet
We do have equal protection. A gay man can marry any woman that will have him just like a straight man...
I kid, I kid. Lighten up....
Well, the ARE right about Sudoku. I can tell you from experience that, sometimes, just looking at a board is not enough. For some configurations of some types of puzzles (sudoku being a great example), you just have to mentally go through the possibilities until you find one that takes you a little further along. If there are 10 possible next steps instead of just one, you only have to search, on average, 1/10 the solution space to get your next move. These results are actually quite obvious once you think about it for a moment.
On the other hand, there are classes of problems where intuition (fuzzy heuristics?) is of some use. In these cases, if you can narrow your search of the state space to get your next move without an exhaustive search, the fact that there is only one next possible move is much less of a handicap.
Huh? The "mothers milk," has to be stretched quite a bit to get to not mixing meat and cheese.
The "man lying with a man" does not have to be stretched at all, unless you assume that people get married so that they can remain celibate... Your arguments are, on the face of it, quite ridiculous -- sort of like when Clinton was trying to define what the word "is" meant. Any further trolling from you will be pleasantly ignored.
As I said, I have nothing against homosexuals. I really don't care what they do. They just have to be told what the Bible says. What they do with that information is their own business.
So, how much have you studied the history of the Bible? You clearly do not know about all of the scholarly work done to translate from the original languages (mostly Greek and Hebrew), the thousand upon thousands of ancient manuscripts, and the care that has been taken to make sure that the modern translations are as accurate as possible. Plus, anybody who wants to can learn Greek and Hebrew and read the originals.
Simply stated, unless you have some evidence that you actually know what you are talking about,, or you can provide links to real sources (not just your own legends and wishful thinking) you have no credibility.