As far as I'm aware, most laws are written with a "no less than" and "no more than" clause.
Now, I don't know much about sentencing guidelines, but I imagine that somebody somewhere has to figure out what the punishment should be if it lies somewhere in between. Leaving that entirely up to the prosecutor is probably a bad idea. Jurors themselves also probably need some sort of guide as to what punishment fits the crime, because something tells me that they aren't well versed in whatever subject they are asked to judge. Guidelines are just that, and the jury can take them into account in their decision.
At least, that is my conjecture anyways, I don't know the actual process involved.
Your comment about racism in the US would imply that the US is a racist country, and being non-racist is the exception. Racist compared to who though? Japan is far more racist, so is Europe and Australia. Sexism we're probably near the bottom of the list, homophobia we're probably on the upper end of.
Much in the same, I don't buy the notion that being poor makes you unable to go to school. I've actually observed that having more money tends to make people more complacent than ambitious.
Hmm...let me think. GI bill, about 9 grand I gained from an internship and award from winning a hands on networking contest, $325 per semester for completing honors classes, PTK, and a few other little things here and there.
This is quite true, actually. I have a learning disability that makes me take an inordinately long time to take tests, and thus score poorly on them. Because of that, in middle school I was placed into remedial reading classes due to scoring poorly on a reading test. I did the same thing on simple math tests, which had no reading component. When I was given more time to take the reading test, I passed at a 13th grade reading level while I was in 8th grade. I recently was evaluated as being beyond 18th grade reading and English, in spite of having taken all of one year of English and not a single reading course.
Do these standardized tests take that into account?
BTW, my parents were undergoing bankruptcy when I was 3 years old.
Only some 6% of the wealthy inherited their money, with another 25% gaining wealth with a combination of work and inheritance. Effectively 69% fall into the rags to riches category.
Some half of those with an inheritance say money causes more problems than it solves.
I grew up with more occupants than bedrooms, and mostly ate fast food. I'm a 3.9 average student in college. I have no need to work in college. My parents didn't pay for my schooling. No student loans of any kind either, in fact my scholarships have yielded me a very large cash surplus.
I mainly have a cash surplus because I am accustomed to not spending much
IANAL but I am pretty sure he would need to make an actual threat or statement of intent. For example, he would have to say that he was going to put that bullet there, or that he is encouraging other specific people to put the bullet there, not that the bullet should be there.
As another poster stated, it probably varies by jurisdiction. For "cover your ass" sakes as well as to be able to properly prosecute (for both civil and criminal parties,) they document EVERYTHING everybody says and does where I live. I know because I've seen it. If they don't do this where you live, I imagine they are more likely to have a beef with people recording videos of them because they don't like documentation.
I just realized how stupidly I worded that. What I meant to say is that most of the time, these "emergencies" aren't really that. For example, the false burglar alarms.
It's actually traditionally democrats who want to ban violent video games. A list of notables would include Jack Thompson, Janet Reno, Hillary Clinton, and recently Joe Biden.
On reddit you'll generally read that Rush Limbaugh is the mouthpiece of the republican party (debatable of course) and you'll also read that he has defended violent video games numerous times in the past.
As a direct answer to your question: all the time. I honestly haven't met one who doesn't, violent ones included.
What you're noticing is a situation where somebody who doesn't participate in a particular activity wants to tell others "Thou shall not do that. I don't, and you shouldn't either. You don't need firearms and you don't need video games. They will hurt you." This is a similar situation to the politicians who were trying to push SOPA, a number of whom (on both sides) literally take pride in the fact that they haven't used a computer.
Fringe (or not? depends who you ask) groups run into this all the time. For example, many here are a small minority (myself included) when they want to e.g. watch their blu-rays on XBMC. Incumbent politicians sit in the "I don't do that, so you don't need to" category. Too many people are afraid of that which they don't understand (currently the big one is assault rifles, which in my (professionally trained) opinion are less dangerous than your garden variety pistol.) There's also buckyballs, which apparently are now too dangerous for anybody to be allowed to buy or sell.
These kneejerk bans are bullshit and they need to stop.
Yeah I notice all too often that when somebody says "the rest of the world..." they are almost always referring to just Europe. Often at the same time believe that Americans think they are the center of the world.
I've read elsewhere (don't remember) that it is estimated that 1 in 10 men are incel. I think the stigma on that might be worse than that of homosexuality. Strange set of circumstances how 60 years ago, being sexually active carried a stigma, but now being celibate carries a stigma.
I went on a police ride-along once. Pretty fun job IMO, I would have done it if I didn't have eyesight issues. Anyways, some of the BS they have to put up with is just that: BS.
One incident we went to was some lady who had some Italian man profess his love to her, and they got engaged two days later. He couldn't afford a ring, so she bought the ring, an expensive one too. He says he needs to take it to a jeweler to do some sort of adjustment, and then disappears with it for good. She doesn't know his real name, only what he told her what it was, and a vague description of what he looks like. Not a whole lot of information to go after, but her and the rest of the public expect the police to actually be able to do something about it.
Another incident was an alarm on somebody's home security system. The officer told me that 99% of the time they are false alarms. Nonetheless, him and a few other officers had to go through the regular routine of pistols drawn, slicing the pie, and all of that jazz (since the owner wasn't home - also ever since columbine, regular cops now have to go through at least some SWAT training and engage a potential hostile situation accordingly, whereas before they would dispatch special officers to do that.) Huge waste of time, but it is obligatory anyways.
Resources are finite, and the police are constantly busy. They can't be arsed to take every little issue seriously. Some people wonder why the police will take a long time to show up at the scene of an accident when there is no injury involved, but will show up quickly if there is fighting or if somebody is injured. If it is an emergency, they'll drop something else they are doing (which is every bit as deserving of their attention) to handle the emergency instead.
Here's what I mean by that: Any one incident that the police officer has to deal with that requires any formal documentation requires about an hour worth of paperwork to do, even if the incident itself only lasted about a few minutes. Paperwork being figurative, because it is all done on a computer they have in their car; so you can imagine just how much stuff they have to write and detail. Take that false alarm for example. I used to think that a police car parked at the side of the road was just a cop watching for people speeding. Not so. That is typically a cop sitting there doing his paperwork. You could fly past at 60 and he wouldn't notice you.
I've been pulled over all of four times in my life, and all four times the officers had a perfectly valid reason to give me a ticket but didn't because they really didn't want to deal with the hassle of doing so.
One time I got pulled over for passing over three lanes while making a right turn when I got off work. The officer pulled me over because he thought I might have been robbing the store, until he saw me wearing the uniform (he had this "oh" look on his face when he saw that.) He asked me for my license and registration, and I didn't have my registration (another ticket there.) He told me not to worry about it and sent me on my way. Easily something the state could have made a $300 profit on, but he didn't want to bother. And it's pretty obvious why: when I pulled out, there was no traffic for miles, so it wasn't exactly an unsafe maneuver that he was prepared to split hairs over.
Another officer pulled me over for one of my headlights not working. Again, easy ticket, but chose not to write it up. I told him I was aware of it and was waiting for one of the headlights to arrive via mail (which was true.) He just wanted to make sure I was aware of it and that it was being dealt with.
I had an expired plate and was driving to get something to eat on new years evening. Cop pulled me over and asked where I was going. I gave him my license and registration, he said my plates were invalid (huge fine for that) but let me go because he was looking for drunk drivers, and didn't want to spend the time writing paperwork on me when he could have been looking for drunk drivers. He just told me to
A common misconception is that rifles are more dangerous than handguns, and this is quite simply false. A rifle is difficult to conceal, and isn't exactly inconspicuous. If you do conceal it, at least somebody has ample warning before you use it.
Yet this point goes right over the heads of politicians and the gun control lobby. These same people also believe violent video games lead to homicide. Both of these ideas are equally stupid. Chicago has some of the strictest restrictions on firearms in the US, yet it is also one of the highest for firearms related crimes. The gun control lobby is pretty damn clueless. Further, I've seen semi-automatics made out of plumbing parts; how the hell is banning firearms going to prevent that?
There's also the matter of rewriting things introducing new bugs and getting the "so what good did it do to rewrite it when the new code doesn't work?" element. Worse is when the new bug is difficult to reproduce or troubleshoot.
Sometimes it is just best to let sleeping dogs lie, and do something better with the next product.
Murders are committed about twice as often by unarmed people (e.g. strangulation, kicking, punching) as they are with rifles. Murders are committed with blunt objects (hammers, clubs) about 20% more than they are with rifles. Automobile fatalities occur at a rate of three times that of firearms homicides.
Clearly gun control will solve this problem, right?
The "you're more likely to kill x with a gun" arguments always fall on their face when you take a closer look.
For example, a woman using her weapon against an abusive boyfriend is far more likely to happen than her using it against a robber, mainly because a robber is less likely to attack her than her boyfriend (the robber prefers to wait until nobody is home.) There, she used it against somebody she knew. But is there anything wrong with it? Absolutely not, that scenario goes in FAVOR of owning firearms, but the gun control lobby instead lumps it into a statistic going against owning them.
This would also apply to e.g. a relative or neighbor attempting to abduct one of your kids. Your neighbor is somebody you know. Women and kids are far more likely to be sexually assaulted by somebody they know than a complete stranger. Your house is far more likely to be burglarized by somebody you know than a complete stranger.
Have you ever wondered why that statistic you throw around doesn't say anything about justifiable homicide? It's because the gun control lobby wants people to blindly follow them. Take ALL statistics with a grain of salt because they almost never tell the entire story, they're often thrown out with the sole purpose of persuasion, and therefore are inherently biased.
Even the above statistics I threw up above are biased, because they only include rifles (but to be fair, rifles are what the politicians are trying to ban.)
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I'm aware, most laws are written with a "no less than" and "no more than" clause.
Now, I don't know much about sentencing guidelines, but I imagine that somebody somewhere has to figure out what the punishment should be if it lies somewhere in between. Leaving that entirely up to the prosecutor is probably a bad idea. Jurors themselves also probably need some sort of guide as to what punishment fits the crime, because something tells me that they aren't well versed in whatever subject they are asked to judge. Guidelines are just that, and the jury can take them into account in their decision.
At least, that is my conjecture anyways, I don't know the actual process involved.
Source
I just use the tried and true password 12345 on my luggage.
0%? Since when?
Ireland is a 12.5% flat tax.
Besides, I think it would be somewhat arrogant to march on over to Ireland and forcibly change their tax laws without their say in the matter.
Well what is the exception and what is the rule?
Your comment about racism in the US would imply that the US is a racist country, and being non-racist is the exception. Racist compared to who though? Japan is far more racist, so is Europe and Australia. Sexism we're probably near the bottom of the list, homophobia we're probably on the upper end of.
Much in the same, I don't buy the notion that being poor makes you unable to go to school. I've actually observed that having more money tends to make people more complacent than ambitious.
Hmm...let me think. GI bill, about 9 grand I gained from an internship and award from winning a hands on networking contest, $325 per semester for completing honors classes, PTK, and a few other little things here and there.
How about differential equations? Got an A in that one. Got an A in all of my math classes in fact.
This is quite true, actually. I have a learning disability that makes me take an inordinately long time to take tests, and thus score poorly on them. Because of that, in middle school I was placed into remedial reading classes due to scoring poorly on a reading test. I did the same thing on simple math tests, which had no reading component. When I was given more time to take the reading test, I passed at a 13th grade reading level while I was in 8th grade. I recently was evaluated as being beyond 18th grade reading and English, in spite of having taken all of one year of English and not a single reading course.
Do these standardized tests take that into account?
BTW, my parents were undergoing bankruptcy when I was 3 years old.
Only some 6% of the wealthy inherited their money, with another 25% gaining wealth with a combination of work and inheritance. Effectively 69% fall into the rags to riches category.
Some half of those with an inheritance say money causes more problems than it solves.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/most-affluent-americans-earn-their-wealth-feel-more-secure-during-economic-downturns-pnc-survey-reveals-57351597.html
This would make sense because lottery winners almost never retain their wealth.
I grew up with more occupants than bedrooms, and mostly ate fast food. I'm a 3.9 average student in college. I have no need to work in college. My parents didn't pay for my schooling. No student loans of any kind either, in fact my scholarships have yielded me a very large cash surplus.
I mainly have a cash surplus because I am accustomed to not spending much
The theater shooter booby trapped his apartment with bombs. Mustard gas is also easy enough to make, which he could have used instead of CS.
IANAL but I am pretty sure he would need to make an actual threat or statement of intent. For example, he would have to say that he was going to put that bullet there, or that he is encouraging other specific people to put the bullet there, not that the bullet should be there.
As another poster stated, it probably varies by jurisdiction. For "cover your ass" sakes as well as to be able to properly prosecute (for both civil and criminal parties,) they document EVERYTHING everybody says and does where I live. I know because I've seen it. If they don't do this where you live, I imagine they are more likely to have a beef with people recording videos of them because they don't like documentation.
I just realized how stupidly I worded that. What I meant to say is that most of the time, these "emergencies" aren't really that. For example, the false burglar alarms.
Or that could be destroy the first amendment in order to destroy the second.
Or destroy the second amendment in order to destroy the first.
Depends who you ask, but all are equally viable.
It's actually traditionally democrats who want to ban violent video games. A list of notables would include Jack Thompson, Janet Reno, Hillary Clinton, and recently Joe Biden.
On reddit you'll generally read that Rush Limbaugh is the mouthpiece of the republican party (debatable of course) and you'll also read that he has defended violent video games numerous times in the past.
https://pay.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/150a0t/of_all_people_rush_limbaugh_just_defended_video/
As a direct answer to your question: all the time. I honestly haven't met one who doesn't, violent ones included.
What you're noticing is a situation where somebody who doesn't participate in a particular activity wants to tell others "Thou shall not do that. I don't, and you shouldn't either. You don't need firearms and you don't need video games. They will hurt you." This is a similar situation to the politicians who were trying to push SOPA, a number of whom (on both sides) literally take pride in the fact that they haven't used a computer.
Fringe (or not? depends who you ask) groups run into this all the time. For example, many here are a small minority (myself included) when they want to e.g. watch their blu-rays on XBMC. Incumbent politicians sit in the "I don't do that, so you don't need to" category. Too many people are afraid of that which they don't understand (currently the big one is assault rifles, which in my (professionally trained) opinion are less dangerous than your garden variety pistol.) There's also buckyballs, which apparently are now too dangerous for anybody to be allowed to buy or sell.
These kneejerk bans are bullshit and they need to stop.
Yeah I notice all too often that when somebody says "the rest of the world..." they are almost always referring to just Europe. Often at the same time believe that Americans think they are the center of the world.
Hmm speak of sex drive, I wonder if all of the shooters fit in this category:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involuntary_celibacy
I've read elsewhere (don't remember) that it is estimated that 1 in 10 men are incel. I think the stigma on that might be worse than that of homosexuality. Strange set of circumstances how 60 years ago, being sexually active carried a stigma, but now being celibate carries a stigma.
I went on a police ride-along once. Pretty fun job IMO, I would have done it if I didn't have eyesight issues. Anyways, some of the BS they have to put up with is just that: BS.
One incident we went to was some lady who had some Italian man profess his love to her, and they got engaged two days later. He couldn't afford a ring, so she bought the ring, an expensive one too. He says he needs to take it to a jeweler to do some sort of adjustment, and then disappears with it for good. She doesn't know his real name, only what he told her what it was, and a vague description of what he looks like. Not a whole lot of information to go after, but her and the rest of the public expect the police to actually be able to do something about it.
Another incident was an alarm on somebody's home security system. The officer told me that 99% of the time they are false alarms. Nonetheless, him and a few other officers had to go through the regular routine of pistols drawn, slicing the pie, and all of that jazz (since the owner wasn't home - also ever since columbine, regular cops now have to go through at least some SWAT training and engage a potential hostile situation accordingly, whereas before they would dispatch special officers to do that.) Huge waste of time, but it is obligatory anyways.
Resources are finite, and the police are constantly busy. They can't be arsed to take every little issue seriously. Some people wonder why the police will take a long time to show up at the scene of an accident when there is no injury involved, but will show up quickly if there is fighting or if somebody is injured. If it is an emergency, they'll drop something else they are doing (which is every bit as deserving of their attention) to handle the emergency instead.
Here's what I mean by that: Any one incident that the police officer has to deal with that requires any formal documentation requires about an hour worth of paperwork to do, even if the incident itself only lasted about a few minutes. Paperwork being figurative, because it is all done on a computer they have in their car; so you can imagine just how much stuff they have to write and detail. Take that false alarm for example. I used to think that a police car parked at the side of the road was just a cop watching for people speeding. Not so. That is typically a cop sitting there doing his paperwork. You could fly past at 60 and he wouldn't notice you.
I've been pulled over all of four times in my life, and all four times the officers had a perfectly valid reason to give me a ticket but didn't because they really didn't want to deal with the hassle of doing so.
One time I got pulled over for passing over three lanes while making a right turn when I got off work. The officer pulled me over because he thought I might have been robbing the store, until he saw me wearing the uniform (he had this "oh" look on his face when he saw that.) He asked me for my license and registration, and I didn't have my registration (another ticket there.) He told me not to worry about it and sent me on my way. Easily something the state could have made a $300 profit on, but he didn't want to bother. And it's pretty obvious why: when I pulled out, there was no traffic for miles, so it wasn't exactly an unsafe maneuver that he was prepared to split hairs over.
Another officer pulled me over for one of my headlights not working. Again, easy ticket, but chose not to write it up. I told him I was aware of it and was waiting for one of the headlights to arrive via mail (which was true.) He just wanted to make sure I was aware of it and that it was being dealt with.
I had an expired plate and was driving to get something to eat on new years evening. Cop pulled me over and asked where I was going. I gave him my license and registration, he said my plates were invalid (huge fine for that) but let me go because he was looking for drunk drivers, and didn't want to spend the time writing paperwork on me when he could have been looking for drunk drivers. He just told me to
A common misconception is that rifles are more dangerous than handguns, and this is quite simply false. A rifle is difficult to conceal, and isn't exactly inconspicuous. If you do conceal it, at least somebody has ample warning before you use it.
Yet this point goes right over the heads of politicians and the gun control lobby. These same people also believe violent video games lead to homicide. Both of these ideas are equally stupid. Chicago has some of the strictest restrictions on firearms in the US, yet it is also one of the highest for firearms related crimes. The gun control lobby is pretty damn clueless. Further, I've seen semi-automatics made out of plumbing parts; how the hell is banning firearms going to prevent that?
Reminds me of China's IPv9 announcement.
There's also the matter of rewriting things introducing new bugs and getting the "so what good did it do to rewrite it when the new code doesn't work?" element. Worse is when the new bug is difficult to reproduce or troubleshoot.
Sometimes it is just best to let sleeping dogs lie, and do something better with the next product.
Murders are committed about twice as often by unarmed people (e.g. strangulation, kicking, punching) as they are with rifles. Murders are committed with blunt objects (hammers, clubs) about 20% more than they are with rifles. Automobile fatalities occur at a rate of three times that of firearms homicides.
Clearly gun control will solve this problem, right?
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/01/03/FBI-More-People-Killed-With-Hammers-and-Clubs-Each-Year-Than-With-Rifles
The "you're more likely to kill x with a gun" arguments always fall on their face when you take a closer look.
For example, a woman using her weapon against an abusive boyfriend is far more likely to happen than her using it against a robber, mainly because a robber is less likely to attack her than her boyfriend (the robber prefers to wait until nobody is home.) There, she used it against somebody she knew. But is there anything wrong with it? Absolutely not, that scenario goes in FAVOR of owning firearms, but the gun control lobby instead lumps it into a statistic going against owning them.
This would also apply to e.g. a relative or neighbor attempting to abduct one of your kids. Your neighbor is somebody you know. Women and kids are far more likely to be sexually assaulted by somebody they know than a complete stranger. Your house is far more likely to be burglarized by somebody you know than a complete stranger.
Have you ever wondered why that statistic you throw around doesn't say anything about justifiable homicide? It's because the gun control lobby wants people to blindly follow them. Take ALL statistics with a grain of salt because they almost never tell the entire story, they're often thrown out with the sole purpose of persuasion, and therefore are inherently biased.
Even the above statistics I threw up above are biased, because they only include rifles (but to be fair, rifles are what the politicians are trying to ban.)
CSS and AACS...those lasted for a long time, didn't they?
Well when 1080p was first standardized (which is where 4k is right now) they didn't have the bandwidth for that either.
Granted they mostly only do 720p, you do see 1080p when the content provider releases it as such.