Is a nuclear weapon an armament? If you answer "No" to either of the first two, I'm usually confused.
No. In the context of "arms" as defined in the constitution, the word "bear" hold meaning to me. "Keep or bear" would mean "own or carry" to me. So I take the arms in question to be ones that can be carried. If you can't carry it, then why would you be explicitly given the right to carry something you are incapable of carrying?
So I'd consider "arms" in this context to be man-portable ones only.
Congress may not prevent you from carrying a battle ship. Of course they won't prevent it. Physics prevents it.
I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't a legal definition, but it makes sense from the context that the arms are relating personal arms. I know many cannons were privately owned around the time the Constitution was written.
But then, I also think it was more establishing the National Guard than about private ownership of firearms. We should have followed every other war after WWII and disbanded the military. We'd have 30% lower taxes (not having to pay interest on the debt) and a balanced budget, plus a more productive nation. Let the states constitute the military through National Guard, with everyone being members, owning their military weapons, and being held responsible for their care and use. Lower cost, more weapons, and a violation of what both the conservatives and liberals say the 2nd means.
Living in fear? Really? Could have fooled me. Perception is not reality. Violent crime rates in the US have been falling for a generation now, and yet, every year people are polled they claim to believe the trend is exactly the opposite....every year.
Read your statement again.
People perceive crime to be getting worse all the time (despite it going down), seems to support the idea that people fear it.
Quite simply, guns did not create our gang problem, that was done by a mix of poverty, the drug war, and general boneheaded inability to admit a policy is bad and rather unchecked fetish for conflict escalation amongst policy makers.
If there were no guns, what would the gangs look like?
To a lot of Americans, it's significant that the government has to check itself and it's actions for fear of causing a shooting war with it's own citizens. That alone is worth whatever number of kids and other people die in gun violence.
Yes, your wet dream of an armed revolt is worth thousands of dead every year from guns.
Bullshit. The worst paper system always wins over the best electronic system for one simple reason: macroscopic evidence of voter intent.
So a big, unguarded box in the middle of town square where people write their vote on paper and drop it in, then the previous mayor counts the votes in private and declares the winner is a better system than any electronic voting system you can conceive of?
You think too much of yourself. Nobody can be bothered arguing with you.
Ah, you are just supremely proud of your ignorance. You aren't capable of thinking of a good system, so that's proof it doesn't exist.
Oh, and another thing -- the polling place volunteers are checking off names as people vote. It should be pretty easy to get a count of votes cast and compare it to ballots.
There have been cases where the votes in the box and voters wasn't even close. They still counted all the votes in the box.
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
This constrains the US Government. It does NOT constrain Stripe.
So you have no rights at all. They are protections from the government, but not actual rights. You don't have the right to bear arms. Everyone can take away those rights, so long as they aren't paid by the government to take away those rights.
That's the pure Libertarian ideal. Property has rights, but not people.
So, you're supporting the idea that certain rights are for certain people are more important than other rights for everyone.
That's *always* true, under all conceived frameworks. Can you mow your lawn at 2 a.m.? You are putting someone's right to be a jackass against someone else's right to the pursuit of happiness (sleeping, at a reasonable time). Any framework someone comes up with will have the capacity for rights to conflict.
I am sorry, but I do not see anything in Article III which says that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of what the Constitution says.
"The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court,"
There is One supreme Court for being the final arbiter of legal challenges regarding the United States. That you refuse to accept clear facts that challenge your opinions doesn't change the facts.
A direct corollary of that would be that would be that Presidents are obligated to not sign unconstitutional laws and members of Congress (either House) are obligated to vote against unconstitutional laws. Yet, we frequently have laws come before the Supreme Court which are ruled unconstitutional.
Yes, More than one president (from both parties) has signed laws, knowing they (or parts therein) were unconstitutional. They should be impeached for perjury, for violating their oath of office. That the government doesn't police itself well isn't proof the courts don't have jurisdiction. All three branches should challenge anything unconstitutional. That 2 of the 3 refuse to exercise that power doesn't mean the 3rd loses that power.
So you are saying that your family places no pressure on you to vote like them? I've never known a family like that.
You are also asserting that if your boss ordered you to vote in a specific manner, you wouldn't call the authorities on him?
The USA was founded on open voting, following the Greek traditions. It only fails in times of trouble, so the secret ballots were temporarily introduced for the Civil War turmoil. But the parties in power loved the ease with which you could tamper with secret votes, so it's been that way ever since.
How do you "observe" ballot-box stuffing if the system is electronic? The answer is simple: you can't.
So there are no counters, no safeguards of any kind?
As I said, when you compare the ideal (non-realistic) paper with the worst electronic systems, you'll find paper win every time. The ideal of each leaves electronic in the lead. But nobody will ever take me up on that challenge, and will only presume the worst possible electronic systems.
That makes me think that all the people that hate electronic hate it for other reasons, but don't want to reveal them.
Ballot stuffing is actually pretty easy to protect against, and the method of voting doesn't do anything to change that equation.
Sure, it's easy to do right. But when it's done wrong, is it detectable? I've never seen a paper system in the US that makes it detectable. You either count all the votes in a box or none. It's impossible to have a semi-spoiled box have the valid votes counted and the invalid ones spoiled.
When I've voted absentee, I've had to fill out a form for every election saying that I will be voting absentee and where to mail the ballot to. Sure, there's no verification on that, but the attack isn't a simple mail merge, you need a separate address for every one of those forged ballots, such that it won't raise suspicions with the person manually handling those requests (it's a paper form).
You presume more confidence than I have in the government that 1,000,000 absentee voters a the same address will be noticed as an irregularity. That, and it's likely that if you got a ballot and filled them out without having pre-registered as absentee, so long as you don't vote in person, your absentee will be counted. That's how it worked in the two states I've lived in and looked into the absentee system.
touchscreen isn't the only e-voting possibility. And a "blind" person can read. At least in most cases. Completely blind (everything black) is pretty rare. I know "lots" of blind people that can read. They just need each letter to be 6" high, or thereabouts. Easier on a screen than printing out papers of variable size.
How is this an improvement over a paper ballot with fixed braille next to each option?
I've never seen a braille ballot. Where are you where those are available? http://www.accessiblesociety.o... Though theoretically required, 20,000 polling places are violating the law by not having them available.
And the improvement is when the electronic ballot will read the names so that they can clearly select from the choices, and have them read back. https://www.google.com/search?... I couldn't even find a single example of a braille ballot used in the USA. Can you point me to a search that shows more of them?
Ballots must be anonymous to guarantee an uncompromised election.
So every election before the Civil War was compromised? Vote fraud increased, not decreased after secret ballots were started. Reality proves you wrong. Yes, I understand that in unstable places, secret ballots are required. That's why they were good during open war, and reconstruction after. But with a stable society, open voting gives a less compromised result. If you can't verify the election, then it's compromised. Every secret ballot is compromised. Open ballots are less compromised than secret ballots for all stable societies. That's why the US was founded on open voting, and so were all the ancient experiments in democracy.
Preventions against stuffing the ballot box is a local check and balance.
Again, reality proves you wrong. There are plenty of places where the box, opened in the central counting area, didn't have the same number of ballots as recorded as going in. Often wildly different.
That implies there's a "right" number of kids sticking with science. Does the submitter mean that we need more eternal post-docs who can't get real funding?
False dichotomy. Physics is good because it has lots of applications. When getting my pilot license, the other student pilots that didn't do science couldn't pass the aerodynmaics tests. Those of us who loved science took science as electives didn't have trouble. Cg of a helicopter? That's standard force balancing. Fuel range? Easy math, sometimes with some unit conversion. People who "hate" science end up needing it, and not having enough. It's not about people going into science as their primary profession, but being able to use it in different areas.
I don't have any cites. I got a psychology degree years ago, during the "praise everything" movement. And it was known at the time that it didn't work. "You are so smart" said to a child is heard as "everything should be easy because you are already good at it." This was known at the time. The correction is "You are such a good problem solver" where the child hears that they can solve every problem, but must work at it. This has an effect closer to the intended "you are so smart" praise.
This was known 20 years ago, but it's take 20 years for the change to make it to public knowledge.
And only open voting takes care of outright fraud (other than coercion, which is trivial with today's systems anyway, but almost unheard of). You can run reports on voters/votes after the elections and find the dead people/ineligible voters after the election, and remove just their votes. You also get a feature impossible today. It's possible to have a spoiled ballot not caught by the tabulating machine. How is that handled on a recount? With open voting the voter can correct a cast vote that's counted incorrectly. Today you can never know how your vote is counted.
That comparison is caused by everyone comparing what they actually experience and deal with to any paper experience.
That's because they don't experience the paper fraud. It's been going on for the past 150 years, even since we moved from open voting to secret ballots, so there's been a lot of polishing of the fraud machines from the tow parties.
Ever wonder why there were so many parties (3, not as many as places with transferable votes) when we had open voting, and the same two since secret voting was used? The solid fraud locked in the two main players.
But the stuffing and such is hidden and can't be seen. Electronic voting is at least better in that we can now discuss fraud without being accused of being a conspiracy theorist.
The League of Women Voters mailed out an impartial run-down of all the candidates that was sent to the students at the university I attended. It was pretty good, and a template for what you should know before voting. I don't know if anyone read it.
The answer I get is that they are matched 1:1 with elligible voters. And if a person votes in person on the day, the absentee is destroyed. Thus, you would never have an absentee counted for a non-voter or in-person voter.
But there's no problem printing out fraudulent absentee ballots, one per registered voter. And duplicates are discarded, but with 20% voter turnout, you'd get a 80% win. There hasn't been that level of abuse yet, but there's little to keep someone from finding out the "real" results, and stuffing the absentee to make sure their candidate wins by 100 votes.
Slashdot Mirror
Is a nuclear weapon an armament?
If you answer "No" to either of the first two, I'm usually confused.
No. In the context of "arms" as defined in the constitution, the word "bear" hold meaning to me. "Keep or bear" would mean "own or carry" to me. So I take the arms in question to be ones that can be carried. If you can't carry it, then why would you be explicitly given the right to carry something you are incapable of carrying?
So I'd consider "arms" in this context to be man-portable ones only.
Congress may not prevent you from carrying a battle ship. Of course they won't prevent it. Physics prevents it.
I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't a legal definition, but it makes sense from the context that the arms are relating personal arms. I know many cannons were privately owned around the time the Constitution was written.
But then, I also think it was more establishing the National Guard than about private ownership of firearms. We should have followed every other war after WWII and disbanded the military. We'd have 30% lower taxes (not having to pay interest on the debt) and a balanced budget, plus a more productive nation. Let the states constitute the military through National Guard, with everyone being members, owning their military weapons, and being held responsible for their care and use. Lower cost, more weapons, and a violation of what both the conservatives and liberals say the 2nd means.
Living in fear? Really? Could have fooled me. Perception is not reality. Violent crime rates in the US have been falling for a generation now, and yet, every year people are polled they claim to believe the trend is exactly the opposite....every year.
Read your statement again.
People perceive crime to be getting worse all the time (despite it going down), seems to support the idea that people fear it.
Quite simply, guns did not create our gang problem, that was done by a mix of poverty, the drug war, and general boneheaded inability to admit a policy is bad and rather unchecked fetish for conflict escalation amongst policy makers.
If there were no guns, what would the gangs look like?
To a lot of Americans, it's significant that the government has to check itself and it's actions for fear of causing a shooting war with it's own citizens. That alone is worth whatever number of kids and other people die in gun violence.
Yes, your wet dream of an armed revolt is worth thousands of dead every year from guns.
Bullshit. The worst paper system always wins over the best electronic system for one simple reason: macroscopic evidence of voter intent.
So a big, unguarded box in the middle of town square where people write their vote on paper and drop it in, then the previous mayor counts the votes in private and declares the winner is a better system than any electronic voting system you can conceive of?
You think too much of yourself. Nobody can be bothered arguing with you.
Ah, you are just supremely proud of your ignorance. You aren't capable of thinking of a good system, so that's proof it doesn't exist.
Oh, and another thing -- the polling place volunteers are checking off names as people vote. It should be pretty easy to get a count of votes cast and compare it to ballots.
There have been cases where the votes in the box and voters wasn't even close. They still counted all the votes in the box.
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
This constrains the US Government. It does NOT constrain Stripe.
So you have no rights at all. They are protections from the government, but not actual rights. You don't have the right to bear arms. Everyone can take away those rights, so long as they aren't paid by the government to take away those rights.
That's the pure Libertarian ideal. Property has rights, but not people.
You must be between 18 and 55 (or is it 65?) to be protected. Elderly and children can be legally discriminated against.
So, you're supporting the idea that certain rights are for certain people are more important than other rights for everyone.
That's *always* true, under all conceived frameworks. Can you mow your lawn at 2 a.m.? You are putting someone's right to be a jackass against someone else's right to the pursuit of happiness (sleeping, at a reasonable time). Any framework someone comes up with will have the capacity for rights to conflict.
I am sorry, but I do not see anything in Article III which says that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of what the Constitution says.
"The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court,"
There is One supreme Court for being the final arbiter of legal challenges regarding the United States. That you refuse to accept clear facts that challenge your opinions doesn't change the facts.
A direct corollary of that would be that would be that Presidents are obligated to not sign unconstitutional laws and members of Congress (either House) are obligated to vote against unconstitutional laws. Yet, we frequently have laws come before the Supreme Court which are ruled unconstitutional.
Yes, More than one president (from both parties) has signed laws, knowing they (or parts therein) were unconstitutional. They should be impeached for perjury, for violating their oath of office. That the government doesn't police itself well isn't proof the courts don't have jurisdiction. All three branches should challenge anything unconstitutional. That 2 of the 3 refuse to exercise that power doesn't mean the 3rd loses that power.
Your logic doesn't work.
I thought "people" was a protected class.
Only with secret voting and no authentication of any kind.
So you are saying that your family places no pressure on you to vote like them? I've never known a family like that.
You are also asserting that if your boss ordered you to vote in a specific manner, you wouldn't call the authorities on him?
The USA was founded on open voting, following the Greek traditions. It only fails in times of trouble, so the secret ballots were temporarily introduced for the Civil War turmoil. But the parties in power loved the ease with which you could tamper with secret votes, so it's been that way ever since.
How do you "observe" ballot-box stuffing if the system is electronic? The answer is simple: you can't.
So there are no counters, no safeguards of any kind?
As I said, when you compare the ideal (non-realistic) paper with the worst electronic systems, you'll find paper win every time. The ideal of each leaves electronic in the lead. But nobody will ever take me up on that challenge, and will only presume the worst possible electronic systems.
That makes me think that all the people that hate electronic hate it for other reasons, but don't want to reveal them.
Ballot stuffing is actually pretty easy to protect against, and the method of voting doesn't do anything to change that equation.
Sure, it's easy to do right. But when it's done wrong, is it detectable? I've never seen a paper system in the US that makes it detectable. You either count all the votes in a box or none. It's impossible to have a semi-spoiled box have the valid votes counted and the invalid ones spoiled.
When I've voted absentee, I've had to fill out a form for every election saying that I will be voting absentee and where to mail the ballot to. Sure, there's no verification on that, but the attack isn't a simple mail merge, you need a separate address for every one of those forged ballots, such that it won't raise suspicions with the person manually handling those requests (it's a paper form).
You presume more confidence than I have in the government that 1,000,000 absentee voters a the same address will be noticed as an irregularity. That, and it's likely that if you got a ballot and filled them out without having pre-registered as absentee, so long as you don't vote in person, your absentee will be counted. That's how it worked in the two states I've lived in and looked into the absentee system.
How does a blind person see the touchscreen?
touchscreen isn't the only e-voting possibility. And a "blind" person can read. At least in most cases. Completely blind (everything black) is pretty rare. I know "lots" of blind people that can read. They just need each letter to be 6" high, or thereabouts. Easier on a screen than printing out papers of variable size.
How is this an improvement over a paper ballot with fixed braille next to each option?
I've never seen a braille ballot. Where are you where those are available? http://www.accessiblesociety.o... Though theoretically required, 20,000 polling places are violating the law by not having them available.
And the improvement is when the electronic ballot will read the names so that they can clearly select from the choices, and have them read back. https://www.google.com/search?... I couldn't even find a single example of a braille ballot used in the USA. Can you point me to a search that shows more of them?
Ballots must be anonymous to guarantee an uncompromised election.
So every election before the Civil War was compromised? Vote fraud increased, not decreased after secret ballots were started. Reality proves you wrong. Yes, I understand that in unstable places, secret ballots are required. That's why they were good during open war, and reconstruction after. But with a stable society, open voting gives a less compromised result. If you can't verify the election, then it's compromised. Every secret ballot is compromised. Open ballots are less compromised than secret ballots for all stable societies. That's why the US was founded on open voting, and so were all the ancient experiments in democracy.
Preventions against stuffing the ballot box is a local check and balance.
Again, reality proves you wrong. There are plenty of places where the box, opened in the central counting area, didn't have the same number of ballots as recorded as going in. Often wildly different.
Falsifying open voting is nearly impossible, regardless of whether it's done electronically or on paper.
That implies there's a "right" number of kids sticking with science. Does the submitter mean that we need more eternal post-docs who can't get real funding?
False dichotomy. Physics is good because it has lots of applications. When getting my pilot license, the other student pilots that didn't do science couldn't pass the aerodynmaics tests. Those of us who loved science took science as electives didn't have trouble. Cg of a helicopter? That's standard force balancing. Fuel range? Easy math, sometimes with some unit conversion. People who "hate" science end up needing it, and not having enough. It's not about people going into science as their primary profession, but being able to use it in different areas.
I don't have any cites. I got a psychology degree years ago, during the "praise everything" movement. And it was known at the time that it didn't work. "You are so smart" said to a child is heard as "everything should be easy because you are already good at it." This was known at the time. The correction is "You are such a good problem solver" where the child hears that they can solve every problem, but must work at it. This has an effect closer to the intended "you are so smart" praise.
This was known 20 years ago, but it's take 20 years for the change to make it to public knowledge.
And only open voting takes care of outright fraud (other than coercion, which is trivial with today's systems anyway, but almost unheard of). You can run reports on voters/votes after the elections and find the dead people/ineligible voters after the election, and remove just their votes. You also get a feature impossible today. It's possible to have a spoiled ballot not caught by the tabulating machine. How is that handled on a recount? With open voting the voter can correct a cast vote that's counted incorrectly. Today you can never know how your vote is counted.
That comparison is caused by everyone comparing what they actually experience and deal with to any paper experience.
That's because they don't experience the paper fraud. It's been going on for the past 150 years, even since we moved from open voting to secret ballots, so there's been a lot of polishing of the fraud machines from the tow parties.
Ever wonder why there were so many parties (3, not as many as places with transferable votes) when we had open voting, and the same two since secret voting was used? The solid fraud locked in the two main players.
But the stuffing and such is hidden and can't be seen. Electronic voting is at least better in that we can now discuss fraud without being accused of being a conspiracy theorist.
The League of Women Voters mailed out an impartial run-down of all the candidates that was sent to the students at the university I attended. It was pretty good, and a template for what you should know before voting. I don't know if anyone read it.
The answer I get is that they are matched 1:1 with elligible voters. And if a person votes in person on the day, the absentee is destroyed. Thus, you would never have an absentee counted for a non-voter or in-person voter.
But there's no problem printing out fraudulent absentee ballots, one per registered voter. And duplicates are discarded, but with 20% voter turnout, you'd get a 80% win. There hasn't been that level of abuse yet, but there's little to keep someone from finding out the "real" results, and stuffing the absentee to make sure their candidate wins by 100 votes.
The theory is sound. The theory if electronic voting is that it's "better" than paper. But the reality for both is different.