To be fair, a firearm probably is the best home defense weapon on hand; it's just that a home invasion is rare.
Home invasions are rare because of the 2nd Amendment. Look up the "hot burglary" (burglaries when people are in the structure) numbers for the United Kingdom sometime. People are disinclined to rob an occupied structure in the United States because they know the laws of all 50 States permit the occupiers to shoot them dead as soon as they come inside.
I'm not bringing a liability to a fight. For a firearm to do me any good, I need to be able to take you with my bare hands first so I can get to the damn thing without having it taken from me. If I can do that, I'll just beat the shit out of you in the first place, and if you bring out your own firearm I'll take that and shoot you with it.
The firearm is for disparity of force scenarios, meaning you're attacked by someone stronger, or by multiple aggressors, or you're injured and can no longer effectively defend yourself. I would never say that you have to carry one, it's a personal decision, I just take issue with the people (not you, at least not in this post) that try to make that decision for me by telling me I can't carry.
I carry virtually everywhere it's legal to do so. The firearm is not the only tool in my toolbox, I've also got OC spray and unarmed training. I will run away if the option is available to me, before I use the firearm. The firearm is for a true kill or be killed scenario, which I sincerely hope to never find myself in.
Incidentally.....:
You're grappling on the ground, you reach to pull out a gun...
If you're grappling on the ground you've probably already lost. I know that looks awesome when you see it in "Ultimate Fighting" on TV, but in the real world ground fighting is something you truly want to avoid.
The Constitution guarantees the right for citizens to keep and bear arms for the purposes of having a militia.
The Supreme Court disagrees with that interpretation and says that the prefatory clause is not a limiting clause. This was the proper decision, given the context of "the people" in the 2nd Amendment, and for that matter every other mention of "the people" in the document and its amendments.
but want to give some governments the position of monarchies
He was convicted and sentenced by a jury, the sentence was confirmed by a judge, the trial was reviewed by other judges, at multiple levels, all happening before the Governor decided to proceed with the execution. There's no monarchy here, and you can disagree with the death penalty without resorting to false comparisons.
Related opinion that's sure to make me popular: End the lethal injection nonsense and just shoot condemned criminals. It worked for Utah. It requires no medical personal to take part and violate their oath. It requires no sourcing of components from overseas trading partners that are anti death penalty. Being shot with a rifle is a damn near instant death and is a lot more humane than experimenting with drugs.
That's crazy talk. We live in an era of virtual machines, separate browser instances, deep freeze, noscript, Linux..... there's absolutely no compelling reason to give up porn in the name of security.
Fail. Took two seconds with Google to find a site listing the GPS coordinates of every single Minuteman silo. It's a fascinating read for any defense geeks, I've stumbled across it before.
They could also have taken Netflix up on their standing offer to provide cache servers.
Also known as co-location, another service that ISPs have traditionally provided for a fee, fees that Netflix is attempting not to pay by throwing its weight around. It's not Comcast's job to subsidize Netflix's business model. That's what it is, a subsidy, because those "free" servers take up rack space, electricity, man-hours, and bandwidth.
Balanced traffic in peering was originally a concern when the peering includes transit services.
There's still plenty of transit going on. Comcast owns a nation wide backbone. Netflix isn't dumping this content into Comcast's network one or two hops removed from my house. Comcast still has to get it from Point A to Point B.
Of course, we're all kind of overlooking the bigger problem: The Internet was never designed to be a point to point video delivery system. You can't deliver video in such a fashion as cheaply as point to multipoint systems (i.e., Cable television, satellite, and OTA) can. The economics of residential internet connections were geared towards occasional bursts of use, not sustained multi-megabit (double megabit with super HD or houses with multiple TVs) transfers for the entire 5.11 hours per day that the typical American watches TV.
Money is required to fund the infrastructure improvements to continue to deliver video in this inefficient fashion. That money is going to come from all parties, the content-providers and the end-users, not just one of them. And yes, the ISPs will probably try and use it to increase revenue, because (shock) they're for-profit companies and that's what they do.
I have no lost love for the likes of Comcast or (in my area) Time Warner Cable. I'm just disinclined to allow my disgust with them on issues far and wide to blind me to the fact that they may have an element of justification in their displeasure of Netflix dumping huge amounts of traffic onto them for pennies on the dollar.
My career in IT started in the ISP business, working for a small dial up ISP that was first-to-market in our area with internet service. Later we were first-to-market with broadband, deploying wireless services a full six months before Time Warner had DOCSIS and nearly a year before Frontier had ADSL. I can tell you that mainstream internet video services would have killed our business. As it was, the rise of P2P services (Napster and especially Kazaa/Limewire) nearly killed us, though at least those were only being used by a fraction of our users and we could throttle them without much complaint. Heck, no complaint really, since the user of these services was invariably the child of a paying customer, not the paying customer themselves.
Sites like Netflix never would have gotten off the ground without net neutrality.
And yet Netflix is one of the biggest abusers ever of the structure that built the internet. They've abused peering relationships to dump their traffic onto other providers while paying a fraction of what you or I would pay for similar traffic levels. They're currently pushing the absurd theory that they should get settlement free peering even though such agreements have traditionally been limited to connections with a roughly equal balance of traffic.
The internet was built on the notion that providers get paid for delivering bits from point A to point B. You want me to get your traffic closer to its final destination? Pay me, or take a similar amount of traffic off my hands. That's how it has worked since the internet went private. The network neutrality advocates are well intentioned but ill informed regarding the economics of peering and the history of the internet. If you want to change the ecosystem you're going to need a convincing argument for why we need to regulate something that only took off because it was largely free of regulation. You'll need more to win me over than "What if" arguments and AT&T's CEO opening mouth and inserting foot.
unless they think the price is worth it to suppress upstart competition
Ding ding ding, we have a winner!
People in favor of "regulation" because of the evils of "big business" need to familiarize themselves with the concept of regulatory capture. Big business loves regulation, because they've got legions of lawyers and compliance officers at their disposal, resources unavailable to any would-be start up. George Will writes about this topic frequently, in industries ranging from undertakers to electricians to nail salons.
My question, which nobody in the mainstream asks, since the powers-that-be in each party are apparently in favor of some sort of amnesty provision: What do you tell the hundreds of thousands in line who are going through the process legally? Tough luck, you should have sneaked across the border/overstayed your visa and waited a few years?
I know people who have immigrated to the United States from Canada, the EU, Georgia, and Australia. It took most of them more than ten years to become naturalized citizens. Some are still waiting. Ask them what they think about the current "reform" debate that's exclusively centered on people who broke the law to get/stay here.
Setting the precedent that you can flaunt Federal Court Orders with threats of violence will cause far more bloodshed than enforcing this order in the here and now.
and then contrast that against Harry Reid calling in snipers to try to push Cliven Bundy off his ranch.
They aren't trying to push him off his ranch, they're trying to enforce a valid court order that says he can't graze his cattle on BLM managed lands without paying the appropriate fees. Whatever else you think about Federal land management policy (I think it's absurd Uncle Sam owns >80% of Nevada, but that's another discussion) you can't allow someone to so brazenly flaunt lawful judicial orders.
Armed citizens interfering with the enforcement of court orders, in a matter regarding the collection of monies owed to the Federal Government that have been confirmed by multiple courts of contempt jurisdiction after the debtor received due process of law? That's completely unacceptable. Do they really want to play the game by 18th Century rules? Uncle Sam should call their bluff and send in a Federalized militia to enforce the lawful orders of the Federal Judiciary.
if they could create a 2D printer that wasn't a crotchety piece of shit
There are dozens of different quality printers on the market today. They just cost more than the $30 people are willing to pay for an inkjet printer from Wally World.
The path forward as I see it for home 3D printing is:
You forgot the part where people find a way to use it for sexual gratification. New technology meets yesterday's primal urges. Same story, different day.
From Wikipedia: At 11:01, a last-minute break in the clouds over Nagasaki allowed Bockscar's bombardier, Captain Kermit Beahan, to visually sight the target as ordered. The Fat Man weapon, containing a core of about 6.4 kg (14 lb) of plutonium, was dropped over the city's industrial valley at 32.77372N 129.86325E. It exploded 47 seconds later at 1,650 ft (503 m), ± 33 ft (10 m), above a tennis court halfway between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works in the south and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works (Torpedo Works) in the north. This was nearly 3 km (1.9 mi) northwest of the planned hypocenter; the blast was confined to the Urakami Valley and a major portion of the city was protected by the intervening hills.
Little Boy clocked in at ~15 kilotons, not 45 kilotons per TFS. Fat Man was ~21kilotons, though it was dropped off target and ended up doing less damage than Little Boy.
You do tend to get a little annoyed when some drunken asshat (I won't say who, but his Slashdot username starts with an 'S' and ends with an 'i') decides to annoy his equally drunk friends by singing God Save the Queen on Irish Night.;)
how is it that Asians are any less disadvantaged than Blacks or Latinos?
There are less broken homes in the Asian community, and studies have consistently shown that children raised in two parent households have an advantage over children raised in single parent households, even after external factors like wealth are corrected for.
This is another classic example of the marketing department working against the engineering department, with the %$#@! marketeers winning, again, sadly.
I would attribute it more to economy of scale: It's cheaper to produce one speedometer that will work across your entire product line than to produce one tailored to the maximum speed of each model you sell.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, a firearm probably is the best home defense weapon on hand; it's just that a home invasion is rare.
Home invasions are rare because of the 2nd Amendment. Look up the "hot burglary" (burglaries when people are in the structure) numbers for the United Kingdom sometime. People are disinclined to rob an occupied structure in the United States because they know the laws of all 50 States permit the occupiers to shoot them dead as soon as they come inside.
I'm not bringing a liability to a fight. For a firearm to do me any good, I need to be able to take you with my bare hands first so I can get to the damn thing without having it taken from me. If I can do that, I'll just beat the shit out of you in the first place, and if you bring out your own firearm I'll take that and shoot you with it.
The firearm is for disparity of force scenarios, meaning you're attacked by someone stronger, or by multiple aggressors, or you're injured and can no longer effectively defend yourself. I would never say that you have to carry one, it's a personal decision, I just take issue with the people (not you, at least not in this post) that try to make that decision for me by telling me I can't carry.
I carry virtually everywhere it's legal to do so. The firearm is not the only tool in my toolbox, I've also got OC spray and unarmed training. I will run away if the option is available to me, before I use the firearm. The firearm is for a true kill or be killed scenario, which I sincerely hope to never find myself in.
Incidentally.....:
You're grappling on the ground, you reach to pull out a gun...
If you're grappling on the ground you've probably already lost. I know that looks awesome when you see it in "Ultimate Fighting" on TV, but in the real world ground fighting is something you truly want to avoid.
The Constitution guarantees the right for citizens to keep and bear arms for the purposes of having a militia.
The Supreme Court disagrees with that interpretation and says that the prefatory clause is not a limiting clause. This was the proper decision, given the context of "the people" in the 2nd Amendment, and for that matter every other mention of "the people" in the document and its amendments.
but want to give some governments the position of monarchies
He was convicted and sentenced by a jury, the sentence was confirmed by a judge, the trial was reviewed by other judges, at multiple levels, all happening before the Governor decided to proceed with the execution. There's no monarchy here, and you can disagree with the death penalty without resorting to false comparisons.
Related opinion that's sure to make me popular: End the lethal injection nonsense and just shoot condemned criminals. It worked for Utah. It requires no medical personal to take part and violate their oath. It requires no sourcing of components from overseas trading partners that are anti death penalty. Being shot with a rifle is a damn near instant death and is a lot more humane than experimenting with drugs.
Quit surfing pron sites now.
That's crazy talk. We live in an era of virtual machines, separate browser instances, deep freeze, noscript, Linux..... there's absolutely no compelling reason to give up porn in the name of security.
No common knowledge of location
Fail. Took two seconds with Google to find a site listing the GPS coordinates of every single Minuteman silo. It's a fascinating read for any defense geeks, I've stumbled across it before.
you don't have to do nearly as much legwork to acquire flash drives and blank optical media.
Intelligence agencies do nothing but "legwork", 24/7/365, with a staff of thousands (small countries) to hundreds of thousands (Great Powers).....
Harry Reid is an asshole. That's hardly news to me. What does it have to do with the price of tea in China though?
They could also have taken Netflix up on their standing offer to provide cache servers.
Also known as co-location, another service that ISPs have traditionally provided for a fee, fees that Netflix is attempting not to pay by throwing its weight around. It's not Comcast's job to subsidize Netflix's business model. That's what it is, a subsidy, because those "free" servers take up rack space, electricity, man-hours, and bandwidth.
Seriously, I don't understand why Netflix comes off as the golden boy in these discussions, or even why people are such fans of them. What other company can double prices during a recession, delay new content, and fail to pro-rate refunds, yet still have such a loyal following?
Balanced traffic in peering was originally a concern when the peering includes transit services.
There's still plenty of transit going on. Comcast owns a nation wide backbone. Netflix isn't dumping this content into Comcast's network one or two hops removed from my house. Comcast still has to get it from Point A to Point B.
Of course, we're all kind of overlooking the bigger problem: The Internet was never designed to be a point to point video delivery system. You can't deliver video in such a fashion as cheaply as point to multipoint systems (i.e., Cable television, satellite, and OTA) can. The economics of residential internet connections were geared towards occasional bursts of use, not sustained multi-megabit (double megabit with super HD or houses with multiple TVs) transfers for the entire 5.11 hours per day that the typical American watches TV.
Money is required to fund the infrastructure improvements to continue to deliver video in this inefficient fashion. That money is going to come from all parties, the content-providers and the end-users, not just one of them. And yes, the ISPs will probably try and use it to increase revenue, because (shock) they're for-profit companies and that's what they do.
I have no lost love for the likes of Comcast or (in my area) Time Warner Cable. I'm just disinclined to allow my disgust with them on issues far and wide to blind me to the fact that they may have an element of justification in their displeasure of Netflix dumping huge amounts of traffic onto them for pennies on the dollar.
My career in IT started in the ISP business, working for a small dial up ISP that was first-to-market in our area with internet service. Later we were first-to-market with broadband, deploying wireless services a full six months before Time Warner had DOCSIS and nearly a year before Frontier had ADSL. I can tell you that mainstream internet video services would have killed our business. As it was, the rise of P2P services (Napster and especially Kazaa/Limewire) nearly killed us, though at least those were only being used by a fraction of our users and we could throttle them without much complaint. Heck, no complaint really, since the user of these services was invariably the child of a paying customer, not the paying customer themselves.
Sites like Netflix never would have gotten off the ground without net neutrality.
And yet Netflix is one of the biggest abusers ever of the structure that built the internet. They've abused peering relationships to dump their traffic onto other providers while paying a fraction of what you or I would pay for similar traffic levels. They're currently pushing the absurd theory that they should get settlement free peering even though such agreements have traditionally been limited to connections with a roughly equal balance of traffic.
The internet was built on the notion that providers get paid for delivering bits from point A to point B. You want me to get your traffic closer to its final destination? Pay me, or take a similar amount of traffic off my hands. That's how it has worked since the internet went private. The network neutrality advocates are well intentioned but ill informed regarding the economics of peering and the history of the internet. If you want to change the ecosystem you're going to need a convincing argument for why we need to regulate something that only took off because it was largely free of regulation. You'll need more to win me over than "What if" arguments and AT&T's CEO opening mouth and inserting foot.
unless they think the price is worth it to suppress upstart competition
Ding ding ding, we have a winner!
People in favor of "regulation" because of the evils of "big business" need to familiarize themselves with the concept of regulatory capture. Big business loves regulation, because they've got legions of lawyers and compliance officers at their disposal, resources unavailable to any would-be start up. George Will writes about this topic frequently, in industries ranging from undertakers to electricians to nail salons.
My question, which nobody in the mainstream asks, since the powers-that-be in each party are apparently in favor of some sort of amnesty provision: What do you tell the hundreds of thousands in line who are going through the process legally? Tough luck, you should have sneaked across the border/overstayed your visa and waited a few years?
I know people who have immigrated to the United States from Canada, the EU, Georgia, and Australia. It took most of them more than ten years to become naturalized citizens. Some are still waiting. Ask them what they think about the current "reform" debate that's exclusively centered on people who broke the law to get/stay here.
Setting the precedent that you can flaunt Federal Court Orders with threats of violence will cause far more bloodshed than enforcing this order in the here and now.
and then contrast that against Harry Reid calling in snipers to try to push Cliven Bundy off his ranch.
They aren't trying to push him off his ranch, they're trying to enforce a valid court order that says he can't graze his cattle on BLM managed lands without paying the appropriate fees. Whatever else you think about Federal land management policy (I think it's absurd Uncle Sam owns >80% of Nevada, but that's another discussion) you can't allow someone to so brazenly flaunt lawful judicial orders.
Armed citizens interfering with the enforcement of court orders, in a matter regarding the collection of monies owed to the Federal Government that have been confirmed by multiple courts of contempt jurisdiction after the debtor received due process of law? That's completely unacceptable. Do they really want to play the game by 18th Century rules? Uncle Sam should call their bluff and send in a Federalized militia to enforce the lawful orders of the Federal Judiciary.
if they could create a 2D printer that wasn't a crotchety piece of shit
There are dozens of different quality printers on the market today. They just cost more than the $30 people are willing to pay for an inkjet printer from Wally World.
The path forward as I see it for home 3D printing is:
You forgot the part where people find a way to use it for sexual gratification. New technology meets yesterday's primal urges. Same story, different day.
Really dude? You're going to adopt a smug superior attitude regarding Wikipedia while providing no sources whatsoever to validate your own claim?
Here's a non-Wikipedia source if that makes you feel better. Feel free to refute my claim with actual facts instead of smug superiority.
From Wikipedia: At 11:01, a last-minute break in the clouds over Nagasaki allowed Bockscar's bombardier, Captain Kermit Beahan, to visually sight the target as ordered. The Fat Man weapon, containing a core of about 6.4 kg (14 lb) of plutonium, was dropped over the city's industrial valley at 32.77372N 129.86325E. It exploded 47 seconds later at 1,650 ft (503 m), ± 33 ft (10 m), above a tennis court halfway between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works in the south and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works (Torpedo Works) in the north. This was nearly 3 km (1.9 mi) northwest of the planned hypocenter; the blast was confined to the Urakami Valley and a major portion of the city was protected by the intervening hills.
Little Boy clocked in at ~15 kilotons, not 45 kilotons per TFS. Fat Man was ~21kilotons, though it was dropped off target and ended up doing less damage than Little Boy.
You do tend to get a little annoyed when some drunken asshat (I won't say who, but his Slashdot username starts with an 'S' and ends with an 'i') decides to annoy his equally drunk friends by singing God Save the Queen on Irish Night. ;)
Hell we stil lget called drunks and no one bats an eye to that stereotype
Name seven Irish holidays that involve drinking: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday......
Sorry, it was there. I'm off to drink some Guinness now!
how is it that Asians are any less disadvantaged than Blacks or Latinos?
There are less broken homes in the Asian community, and studies have consistently shown that children raised in two parent households have an advantage over children raised in single parent households, even after external factors like wealth are corrected for.
Of course, if you point this fact out, you're called a racist. It doesn't matter if you're a stodgy old white guy or a famous African-American comedian.
This is another classic example of the marketing department working against the engineering department, with the %$#@! marketeers winning, again, sadly.
I would attribute it more to economy of scale: It's cheaper to produce one speedometer that will work across your entire product line than to produce one tailored to the maximum speed of each model you sell.
The Soviet Army's logistical apparatus would have fallen apart without Lend Lease, so again, you're welcome.