Wikipedia's list of defensive gun uses. Granted, I didn't double-check the info with other sources. I chose those two specific incidents because I remember having heard about them at the time.
Crazy people? Tell it to the person in Milwaukee who, on November 21, used his carry weapon to defend himself in a hair salon. Two men knocked, were let in by a customer, then one of the men pulled a gun and aimed it at the customer, who knocked it away and then used his own gun to kill his attacker and wound the attacker's accomplice. Or tell it to the 12 year old Oklahoma girl a couple of months ago, who used the family handgun to defend herself against a home intruder whose history included kidnapping a girl.
What qualifies as actually needing them, though? Most people who use guns in self defense are not expecting to need them at the time that they do. Such regulations as you propose simply make it too hard to defend one's self and one's family/property. In particular, such regulations tend to lead to armed politicians (Dianne Feinstein has a CCW, for instance, from a place that grants almost none of those) and unarmed subjects.
My understanding is that Lanza's rifle was left in the car. He only used pistols in the shooting. So in what way does banning semi-automatic rifles help prevent such acts, even presuming it could be successfully done and the existing semi-automatic rifles removed from circulation, which is doubtful?
Well, since any firearm can be used to shoot people dead, let's just talk about how easy it is to buy any firearm. For most firearms for most people in most places, fairly easy. For any firearms for any person with a criminal background or mental illness (to a much lesser extent, as this is usually not reported), pretty difficult to get one legally, but no more difficult to get one illegally than anywhere else. For certain types of firearms (automatic weapons, for example, or crew served weapons), it ranges from very difficult to impossible (legally) for anyone. For certain places, such as Chicago, NYC or Washington DC, it's pretty hard for anyone to get any weapon. Of course, those are also the places with the highest gun violence rates. Odd, that.
Of course, much of that additional time and expense is regulatory and environmental, and of that, much of it is unnecessary from a safety standpoint. In other words, making cheap (relatively), safe nuclear plants is more of a policy problem than a technology or resources problem.
I think you have to separate device and application. If a single device could contain the necessary sensors for all of those things, without a cost premium over, say, an iPhone or top-of-the-line Android phone from today, then why not? The whole reason that current cell phones are so powerful is not the processor, but the array of sensors they contain. It is those sensors that enable things like overlaying data on the world around you, and measuring (approximately) objects at a distance, and acting as a decibel meter, and acting as a level, and all kinds of other things. Is an iPhone going to be the best level for professional work? No, of course not, but it's good enough if I want to check if my new stove is adjusted correctly. Is it going to be a good enough theodolite for precision surveying? No, of course not, but it's good enough to let me figure out how much wood I need to get to build a fence without walking the whole border of the area being fenced.
Today, we already have all but two of the sensors that would be required for the applications you posit. (We lack thermometers and chemical analysis sensors.) As far as reducing false alarms to zero, that is of course impossible without introducing a lot of error in the other direction. (Google type 1 and type 2 errors.) And the sensitivity of the sensors is of course subject to the same problem. (Heartbeats are very, very, very low signals and would be lost in the noise from any distance, so getting those would introduce a lot of false positives.) And writing the apps to do all the things you want, even with real-world accuracy, is not going to be trivial. On the other hand, once the sensors are there, someone will undoubtedly try it.
In other words, your pie-in-the-sky set of examples is really not that far out from what is already possible, modulo the problem of balancing false negatives against false positives.
China is an interesting problem, and I don't just mean geopolitically. On the one hand, China indisputably has been making incredible strides on applied science and engineering in space and in military matters, as well as economic progress and progress in controlling diseases. On the other hand, they've also lied through their teeth about each of these things, and so it's very hard to trust Chinese assertions without independent verification. Thinking about how far China has come since beginning liberalization just a scant couple of decades ago, the potential is enormous, and overall likely quite positive for mankind as a whole. In order to get there, though, China's self-confidence will have to improve to allow them to admit mistakes, and to get over some of the racial tics they have. I think, too, that it's likely that somewhere in the next thirty years, the Communist Party will lose its monopoly on power. That has to happen as they transition to a relatively free market, which is a path they are already on. In essence, I see China now as basically S. Korea in the 1970s, in political and socio-economic terms. Once they get to where S. Korea was in the 1990s, it's going to be amazing to see what China can do.
Who wouldn't want to carry around a miniature chemical analysis lab? On the other hand, if the phone starts transmitting smell, that would be bad. Just think about the applications for goatse alone.
All of that web stuff is still available. What we really have lost is a lot of the feature set that existed pre-web. Things like killfiles and distributed discussions from NNTP have no ready equivalent today.
Especially if you already know nothing about history, and are uninclined to learn. People's History is certainly great for stroking those who basically accept the Marxist view of the world, but otherwise is useless. Effectively, it's like Zinn spent the week picking every particle of black sand off the beach and putting it in a jar, then showed you the jar of sand and said, "See: the beach is black."
Actually, you're quite wrong. Patents do not exist to "ensure reimbursement for teh person who actually makes the invention work." They exist to ensure monopoly control and profits (for a limited time) to the entity that patents the invention. They don't have to make it work to have the rights; they just have to have the idea. The point of the GP, and the grounds on which the USPO should be denying a lot of these patents, is that the people doing the patenting did not in fact have the idea. Many electronics/software patents are fundamentally nothing more than cobbling together things that have been done together before, that are already generalized, but finding niche cases where they haven't been done. For example, this patent on the camera in a handheld device sending pictures over a cellular network is more specific than (but not a different idea than) a camera in a device sending pictures over a network. The extension forward would be to, say, patent doing the exact same thing in a tablet or an e-book reader. The idea hasn't changed, the extension is obvious, and the patent would nonetheless almost certainly be granted.
Moreover, inventions are exactly ideas. It is not the physical thing which is patented, but the idea behind it. Most patents are granted before (often long before) a device implementing that patent is ever created.
And one of the ironies of our disfunctional civics is that it is the Republicans arguing that we should close these loopholes, and the Democrats (who decry the loopholes) fighting to maintain and expand them. A little honesty (from all sides) would be nice, but I doubt I'll see political honesty in my lifetime.
Let's give you these uses of public money. Now let's talk about Federal inspectors for rabbits used by stage magicians, or portraits costing tens of thousands of dollars given to retiring civil servants, or lavish Vegas parties for the regulators, or prostitutes-as-a-business-expense or some of the other fun uses of public money.
Straw man. I don't know anyone who's angry at the recipients of such programs, but I know plenty of people (and I'm one of them) who would argue that we have structured our social welfare and safety net programs really badly, funded them worse, and if we don't reform them they will destroy our economy.
And look how much credit that got him. If the choice is to overpay taxes or face moral indignation, or overpay taxes and face moral indignation, which way do you think people will choose?
Well, I'd be VERY curious to know how government is subsidizing home schooling in the US, because I've been home schooling my kids for about a dozen years now, and not only have I never gotten anything from government to subsidize that, I've had to comply with various paperwork requirements (spending my time) and have had to pay for my kids to take standardized tests. In addition, I buy all their books and other school materials myself, and also pay the costs of any classes they take outside the home, all their extracurricular activities, field trips and the like. While doing all of this, I also have paid property taxes used to send others' kids to public schools, and also income taxes that are redistributed via both states and the Federal government to schools. So far as I can see, I'm subsidizing government schools, but the government is in no way subsidizing my home schooling. So please, oh enlightened one, tell me how to get in on this "Home Schooling is subsidized by the government" thing.
Absolutely a win for consumers. We now have two vector-based maps apps with turn by turn directions and really clean interfaces, where before we had none. Google's data seems a little better, Apple's maps a little prettier. I suspect that both will improve over time: competition is good.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you know what a free market is. The bandwidth market in the US is heavily, heavily government regulated.
Wikipedia's list of defensive gun uses. Granted, I didn't double-check the info with other sources. I chose those two specific incidents because I remember having heard about them at the time.
Crazy people? Tell it to the person in Milwaukee who, on November 21, used his carry weapon to defend himself in a hair salon. Two men knocked, were let in by a customer, then one of the men pulled a gun and aimed it at the customer, who knocked it away and then used his own gun to kill his attacker and wound the attacker's accomplice. Or tell it to the 12 year old Oklahoma girl a couple of months ago, who used the family handgun to defend herself against a home intruder whose history included kidnapping a girl.
What qualifies as actually needing them, though? Most people who use guns in self defense are not expecting to need them at the time that they do. Such regulations as you propose simply make it too hard to defend one's self and one's family/property. In particular, such regulations tend to lead to armed politicians (Dianne Feinstein has a CCW, for instance, from a place that grants almost none of those) and unarmed subjects.
My understanding is that Lanza's rifle was left in the car. He only used pistols in the shooting. So in what way does banning semi-automatic rifles help prevent such acts, even presuming it could be successfully done and the existing semi-automatic rifles removed from circulation, which is doubtful?
Well, since any firearm can be used to shoot people dead, let's just talk about how easy it is to buy any firearm. For most firearms for most people in most places, fairly easy. For any firearms for any person with a criminal background or mental illness (to a much lesser extent, as this is usually not reported), pretty difficult to get one legally, but no more difficult to get one illegally than anywhere else. For certain types of firearms (automatic weapons, for example, or crew served weapons), it ranges from very difficult to impossible (legally) for anyone. For certain places, such as Chicago, NYC or Washington DC, it's pretty hard for anyone to get any weapon. Of course, those are also the places with the highest gun violence rates. Odd, that.
Of course, much of that additional time and expense is regulatory and environmental, and of that, much of it is unnecessary from a safety standpoint. In other words, making cheap (relatively), safe nuclear plants is more of a policy problem than a technology or resources problem.
Today, we already have all but two of the sensors that would be required for the applications you posit. (We lack thermometers and chemical analysis sensors.) As far as reducing false alarms to zero, that is of course impossible without introducing a lot of error in the other direction. (Google type 1 and type 2 errors.) And the sensitivity of the sensors is of course subject to the same problem. (Heartbeats are very, very, very low signals and would be lost in the noise from any distance, so getting those would introduce a lot of false positives.) And writing the apps to do all the things you want, even with real-world accuracy, is not going to be trivial. On the other hand, once the sensors are there, someone will undoubtedly try it.
In other words, your pie-in-the-sky set of examples is really not that far out from what is already possible, modulo the problem of balancing false negatives against false positives.
South Korea in the 1970s was an oppressive capitalist dictatorship (specifically, a right-wing, military one).
A long line of court cases disagree with you, and for very good reasons. (Including, for example, the ability to legally enter binding contracts.)
China is an interesting problem, and I don't just mean geopolitically. On the one hand, China indisputably has been making incredible strides on applied science and engineering in space and in military matters, as well as economic progress and progress in controlling diseases. On the other hand, they've also lied through their teeth about each of these things, and so it's very hard to trust Chinese assertions without independent verification. Thinking about how far China has come since beginning liberalization just a scant couple of decades ago, the potential is enormous, and overall likely quite positive for mankind as a whole. In order to get there, though, China's self-confidence will have to improve to allow them to admit mistakes, and to get over some of the racial tics they have. I think, too, that it's likely that somewhere in the next thirty years, the Communist Party will lose its monopoly on power. That has to happen as they transition to a relatively free market, which is a path they are already on. In essence, I see China now as basically S. Korea in the 1970s, in political and socio-economic terms. Once they get to where S. Korea was in the 1990s, it's going to be amazing to see what China can do.
Who wouldn't want to carry around a miniature chemical analysis lab? On the other hand, if the phone starts transmitting smell, that would be bad. Just think about the applications for goatse alone.
All of that web stuff is still available. What we really have lost is a lot of the feature set that existed pre-web. Things like killfiles and distributed discussions from NNTP have no ready equivalent today.
Yes, you are.
Those are not "food stamps, medicaid, unemployment insurance, social security, medicare".
Especially if you already know nothing about history, and are uninclined to learn. People's History is certainly great for stroking those who basically accept the Marxist view of the world, but otherwise is useless. Effectively, it's like Zinn spent the week picking every particle of black sand off the beach and putting it in a jar, then showed you the jar of sand and said, "See: the beach is black."
Moreover, inventions are exactly ideas. It is not the physical thing which is patented, but the idea behind it. Most patents are granted before (often long before) a device implementing that patent is ever created.
Don't give them ideas. "Imputed income" is already a thing.
And one of the ironies of our disfunctional civics is that it is the Republicans arguing that we should close these loopholes, and the Democrats (who decry the loopholes) fighting to maintain and expand them. A little honesty (from all sides) would be nice, but I doubt I'll see political honesty in my lifetime.
Let's give you these uses of public money. Now let's talk about Federal inspectors for rabbits used by stage magicians, or portraits costing tens of thousands of dollars given to retiring civil servants, or lavish Vegas parties for the regulators, or prostitutes-as-a-business-expense or some of the other fun uses of public money.
Straw man. I don't know anyone who's angry at the recipients of such programs, but I know plenty of people (and I'm one of them) who would argue that we have structured our social welfare and safety net programs really badly, funded them worse, and if we don't reform them they will destroy our economy.
And look how much credit that got him. If the choice is to overpay taxes or face moral indignation, or overpay taxes and face moral indignation, which way do you think people will choose?
Well, I'd be VERY curious to know how government is subsidizing home schooling in the US, because I've been home schooling my kids for about a dozen years now, and not only have I never gotten anything from government to subsidize that, I've had to comply with various paperwork requirements (spending my time) and have had to pay for my kids to take standardized tests. In addition, I buy all their books and other school materials myself, and also pay the costs of any classes they take outside the home, all their extracurricular activities, field trips and the like. While doing all of this, I also have paid property taxes used to send others' kids to public schools, and also income taxes that are redistributed via both states and the Federal government to schools. So far as I can see, I'm subsidizing government schools, but the government is in no way subsidizing my home schooling. So please, oh enlightened one, tell me how to get in on this "Home Schooling is subsidized by the government" thing.
Absolutely a win for consumers. We now have two vector-based maps apps with turn by turn directions and really clean interfaces, where before we had none. Google's data seems a little better, Apple's maps a little prettier. I suspect that both will improve over time: competition is good.
Mostly, they taxed Intel-based hardware. But ask Lotus about what MS did to software.