If the American people weren't prepared to violently overthrow George W Bush when he illegally invaded Iraq against world opinion and set up Guantanamo Bay, what's it going to take?
The ability to amass a collection of firearms appears to lie at the heart of US notions of freedom, but I somehow I doubt that a moderate proposal to limit the size of magazines (or whatever) is going to provoke a full scale civil war.
The thing was designed to be produced in improvised workshops...
Arguments like that are silly. It is entirely possible with some training to make IEDs. It's not particularly difficult to make a flick knife. That doesn't mean they should be legal.
I'm not from the US. I don't care about who is worse, Bush or Obama. What I do care about is the US Constitution
Why? It's just words written by humans on paper. It's not a magic revelation of divine truth. I don't see how it helps the rest of the world as much as the "liberty, equality, fraternity" basis of the French Revolution, the latter two thirds of which most people are happy to ignore
Of course, much of the US news sources are so beholden to the political New Left point of view
This appears not to be a joke, so I can only assume you have some sort of paranoid cognitive disorder.
Obama is doing *very* much worse than Bush.
Most non-Americans I know care rather more about the US having started two pointless and disastrous (not to mention illegal) wars of occupation in sovereign countries in recent history, following a childish reaction to being confronted with terrorism/mass murder on their own soil instead of safely overseas.
Anyone who thinks that "the government"/Barack Obama/"liberals" in the US are even slightly socialist is so far to the right that they probably think Hitler was a bit soft on the race question.
If you have to fight for your country in the military, they tend to give you free training, including how to fire a gun. It's really not that difficult you know, despite the fetishisation of firearms by people like the NRA.
Anyone can learn how to kill someone with a "standard military firearm" after a small amount of practise. It's not like suddenly having to be able to pilot an F16.
The reason we keep the long guns around is so we can -- and this goes without saying, but god forbid it ever actually happens -- hold out long enough to get the rest of the operation live.
What "operation"?
If you've got an elaborate revolutionary organisation in place (like the Bolsheviks in 1917 Russia) having guns is by far the least important part of what you need. You can always get guns from somewhere later, but you certainly don't want to start off by engaging trained military in large scale battles.
The really important thing is having a sufficient critical mass of people willing to fight and die for your revolution.
"If the Shit hits the fan it won't matter which guns are legal. What'll matter is what people who can make bombs do."
Nope. All it takes is a few well-placed bullets in the head of the leadership, and the rest of the structure will fall. No bombs necessary.
One good sniper with a small bit of ammunition is all it takes.
That theory only works if you are dealing with a genuine dictatorhip. In reality, countries like the US have a whole system of power structures that would not be greatly affected by the deaths of a few individuals.
If revolution should happen, you cannot rely on the Army, the Navy, or the Air Force to remain intact as fighting units, to be used against the people of the United States. Nor can you rely on the government's ability to retain control over all the hardware, command infrastructure, or much of anything else.
It was one of the notable features of the Arab Spring, that once the soldiers started refusing to fire on civilians, the dictators were basically fucked.
Quite what this has to do with ordinary citizens being armed is beyond me. While the army is supporting the government, they have the overwhelming balance of power.
Military counts as armed citizenry (as they are citizens) so yes, they did.
That makes absolutely no sense. No one's saying you couldn't have a military coup against the government if the whole army, navy and air force agreed to do so.
The "armed citizenry" would be people fighting against the military in their role as protecters of the country/government (depending on how you like to look at it).
Because so many Americans are anti-government, they seem to forget that "the government" includes the military, police and so on.
Kent state as I remember it was the national guard, not the US military per se
That is as meaningless a distinction as that between "soldiers" with guns firing on civilians and "cops" with guns firing on civilians..
As a non American, watching the recent Boston coverage, I initially assumed that all the guys in combat gear, body armour and carrying assault rifles were soldiers. The fact that you call them "police" or "FBI" is pretty irrelevant.
I don't know why so many people on slashdot have a romanticised view of a country's military as superior beings above mere politics. There are plenty of examples of the military as explicitly the tools of the government (e.g. Syria, Burma, Argentina and Chile in the 1970s).
Am I missing something? "Less input, less activity" seems incredibly obvious. There is value in confirming even the obvious but this seems a bit too far. Plus, the summary is way off since the tested 'virtual world' was nothing of the sort. The Matrix was a full sensory experience, not just a movie.
What I never understood about the virtual world in the Matrix is why no one noticed that everything was coloured fucking green.
Once someone figures out how to survive in space, there will be thousands hot on their heels.
Why? I really don't see that there are going to be "space miners" hacking out asteroids with picks and shovels. Surely it would be easier (and cheaper) to get robots to do it all?
And apart from harvesting raw materials, who the fuck else would want to live in space for more than a few months until the novelty value wore off?
To paraphrase Samuel Johnson on being in the Navy: no man will live in space who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a spaceship is being in a jail, with the chance of being asphyxiated, dying of radiation poisoning or irreversibly altering your muscles and organs. A man in a jail has more room, better food and commonly better company.
The obvious answer to the Fermi paradox is that the Earth, while not unique, is unfortunately the first place in the whole universe to develop life.
Just because the universe is much older than Earth doesn't mean that life must have developed elsewhere first.
Unfortunately, this means we may never meet any intelligent alien life, escept in some unimaginably distant future (hundreds of millions of years from now) if we even still exist then.
Yep. Some posit the probability of intelligible life as essentially zero -- meaning that Earth is a fluke. Still, such guesses are just that -- guesses -- and though educated, that term is relative, as there is at present no way to know all the factors. Even Drake admits he was only spitballing.
The probability of intelligible (sic) life is NOT "essentially zero". However infinitesimally small the probability, it's not zero, since we know there's life on at least one planet.
However, as someone says above, the problem is that because the probability is so very, very low that any other intelligent life is simply too far away for us to ever contact. If we have to look to another galaxy to find our neighbours, well...short of a stargate-type piece of magic we may never meet them. We might trade millions of years old light speed signals, but that's not really going to help and we're not going to have much of a dialogue.
We can compare it to Carl Sagan's idea that God has left a message in Pi. Should we be teaching in schools that such a message is absolutely impossible? I personally don't believe that God has left a message in Pi, but there is no conclusive evidence either way.
As with anything, it is up to people who believe there is a message from God in Pi to prove it. I can't prove God doesn't exist, but a believer could prove He does really, really easily, as just one unambiguous piece of evidence would do.
So, no, we shouldn't teach things in schools just because they can't be disproven. Because not only would you have to include Creationism and Intelligent Design, you'd also have to chuck in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and Bertrand Russell's teapot orbiting the Earth.
Then again, even when Genesis says all of creation took 7 days, what is a day to an entity that is beyond the boundaries of space and time? Time is relative, just ask Einstein
So why does the Bible spell it out as 7 days, and not just "a period of time about which we humans have no possible knwledge, so it's not even worth mentioning"?
Whatever you may say, Dubya was a fucking idiot hick in the eyes of most of the rest of the world.
Even if Obama just did exactly the same as George W Bush (and again from an outsider's point of view there is precious little to differentiate Republicans and Democrats), he would still at least be a reasonably intelligent and amusing human being, and not a dumb bowl of dull.
Evolution and Atheism are so weak that exposure to any differing ideas must not be risked. Got it.
As an atheist, I actually tend to agree. The more different crackpot religious ideas kids are exposed to, the more likely it is they will realise they're all equally absurd.
As, say, someone brought up in a Christian tradition, once you realise that all those Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus (and Ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Vikings...) are equally convinced they're right you might get an inkling that the One True Faith you've been brought up with might not be so unique after all.
Slashdot Mirror
The ability to amass a collection of firearms appears to lie at the heart of US notions of freedom, but I somehow I doubt that a moderate proposal to limit the size of magazines (or whatever) is going to provoke a full scale civil war.
Are you familiar with the sten?
The thing was designed to be produced in improvised workshops...
Arguments like that are silly. It is entirely possible with some training to make IEDs. It's not particularly difficult to make a flick knife. That doesn't mean they should be legal.
I'm not from the US. I don't care about who is worse, Bush or Obama. What I do care about is the US Constitution
Why? It's just words written by humans on paper. It's not a magic revelation of divine truth. I don't see how it helps the rest of the world as much as the "liberty, equality, fraternity" basis of the French Revolution, the latter two thirds of which most people are happy to ignore
Of course, much of the US news sources are so beholden to the political New Left point of view
This appears not to be a joke, so I can only assume you have some sort of paranoid cognitive disorder.
Obama is doing *very* much worse than Bush.
Most non-Americans I know care rather more about the US having started two pointless and disastrous (not to mention illegal) wars of occupation in sovereign countries in recent history, following a childish reaction to being confronted with terrorism/mass murder on their own soil instead of safely overseas.
Anyone who thinks that "the government"/Barack Obama/"liberals" in the US are even slightly socialist is so far to the right that they probably think Hitler was a bit soft on the race question.
If a sufficient number of people are passionate/desperate enough, you can only defeat them by basically annihilating the whole population.
Anyone can learn how to kill someone with a "standard military firearm" after a small amount of practise. It's not like suddenly having to be able to pilot an F16.
Which is why the government is trying so hard to take away our guns and ammunition. Just remember, slaves don't own guns.
Your gun will not help if you are the only slave with one, and the boss sends round twenty guys with guns to take it off you.
Any revolution requires mass support, not cool hardware.
The reason we keep the long guns around is so we can -- and this goes without saying, but god forbid it ever actually happens -- hold out long enough to get the rest of the operation live.
What "operation"?
If you've got an elaborate revolutionary organisation in place (like the Bolsheviks in 1917 Russia) having guns is by far the least important part of what you need. You can always get guns from somewhere later, but you certainly don't want to start off by engaging trained military in large scale battles.
The really important thing is having a sufficient critical mass of people willing to fight and die for your revolution.
"If the Shit hits the fan it won't matter which guns are legal. What'll matter is what people who can make bombs do."
Nope. All it takes is a few well-placed bullets in the head of the leadership, and the rest of the structure will fall. No bombs necessary.
One good sniper with a small bit of ammunition is all it takes.
That theory only works if you are dealing with a genuine dictatorhip. In reality, countries like the US have a whole system of power structures that would not be greatly affected by the deaths of a few individuals.
If revolution should happen, you cannot rely on the Army, the Navy, or the Air Force to remain intact as fighting units, to be used against the people of the United States. Nor can you rely on the government's ability to retain control over all the hardware, command infrastructure, or much of anything else.
It was one of the notable features of the Arab Spring, that once the soldiers started refusing to fire on civilians, the dictators were basically fucked.
Quite what this has to do with ordinary citizens being armed is beyond me. While the army is supporting the government, they have the overwhelming balance of power.
Military counts as armed citizenry (as they are citizens) so yes, they did.
That makes absolutely no sense. No one's saying you couldn't have a military coup against the government if the whole army, navy and air force agreed to do so.
The "armed citizenry" would be people fighting against the military in their role as protecters of the country/government (depending on how you like to look at it).
Because so many Americans are anti-government, they seem to forget that "the government" includes the military, police and so on.
Kent state as I remember it was the national guard, not the US military per se
That is as meaningless a distinction as that between "soldiers" with guns firing on civilians and "cops" with guns firing on civilians..
As a non American, watching the recent Boston coverage, I initially assumed that all the guys in combat gear, body armour and carrying assault rifles were soldiers. The fact that you call them "police" or "FBI" is pretty irrelevant.
I don't know why so many people on slashdot have a romanticised view of a country's military as superior beings above mere politics. There are plenty of examples of the military as explicitly the tools of the government (e.g. Syria, Burma, Argentina and Chile in the 1970s).
Virtual worlds teach us LOTS of valuable stuff. How else would you learn that life is a series of staged enemy encounters and occasional boss fights?
Plus, you can always re-spawn. That's a pretty damn useful thing to know how to do IRL.
Actually, The Matrix *was* a movie...
I think we know which colour pill you took.
Am I missing something? "Less input, less activity" seems incredibly obvious. There is value in confirming even the obvious but this seems a bit too far. Plus, the summary is way off since the tested 'virtual world' was nothing of the sort. The Matrix was a full sensory experience, not just a movie.
What I never understood about the virtual world in the Matrix is why no one noticed that everything was coloured fucking green.
Once someone figures out how to survive in space, there will be thousands hot on their heels.
Why? I really don't see that there are going to be "space miners" hacking out asteroids with picks and shovels. Surely it would be easier (and cheaper) to get robots to do it all?
And apart from harvesting raw materials, who the fuck else would want to live in space for more than a few months until the novelty value wore off?
To paraphrase Samuel Johnson on being in the Navy: no man will live in space who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a spaceship is being in a jail, with the chance of being asphyxiated, dying of radiation poisoning or irreversibly altering your muscles and organs. A man in a jail has more room, better food and commonly better company.
Just because the universe is much older than Earth doesn't mean that life must have developed elsewhere first.
Unfortunately, this means we may never meet any intelligent alien life, escept in some unimaginably distant future (hundreds of millions of years from now) if we even still exist then.
Yep. Some posit the probability of intelligible life as essentially zero -- meaning that Earth is a fluke. Still, such guesses are just that -- guesses -- and though educated, that term is relative, as there is at present no way to know all the factors. Even Drake admits he was only spitballing.
The probability of intelligible (sic) life is NOT "essentially zero". However infinitesimally small the probability, it's not zero, since we know there's life on at least one planet.
However, as someone says above, the problem is that because the probability is so very, very low that any other intelligent life is simply too far away for us to ever contact. If we have to look to another galaxy to find our neighbours, well...short of a stargate-type piece of magic we may never meet them. We might trade millions of years old light speed signals, but that's not really going to help and we're not going to have much of a dialogue.
I think that the main issue is that people see the TV shows and movies and think that "life" has to look like that.
But those are just theatrics so that human actors can play the parts. Look at the variations of life on Earth. From whales to worms.
Are you telling me that the galaxy isn't full of people who grow lumps of rubber on their heads?
And speak English with an American accent?
The Universe is so large that it cannot possibly be that we are the only life thriving on a planet orbiting a star.
That is emotionally compelling but logically invalid.
We can compare it to Carl Sagan's idea that God has left a message in Pi. Should we be teaching in schools that such a message is absolutely impossible? I personally don't believe that God has left a message in Pi, but there is no conclusive evidence either way.
As with anything, it is up to people who believe there is a message from God in Pi to prove it. I can't prove God doesn't exist, but a believer could prove He does really, really easily, as just one unambiguous piece of evidence would do.
So, no, we shouldn't teach things in schools just because they can't be disproven. Because not only would you have to include Creationism and Intelligent Design, you'd also have to chuck in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and Bertrand Russell's teapot orbiting the Earth.
Then again, even when Genesis says all of creation took 7 days, what is a day to an entity that is beyond the boundaries of space and time? Time is relative, just ask Einstein
So why does the Bible spell it out as 7 days, and not just "a period of time about which we humans have no possible knwledge, so it's not even worth mentioning"?
Even if Obama just did exactly the same as George W Bush (and again from an outsider's point of view there is precious little to differentiate Republicans and Democrats), he would still at least be a reasonably intelligent and amusing human being, and not a dumb bowl of dull.
Evolution and Atheism are so weak that exposure to any differing ideas must not be risked. Got it.
As an atheist, I actually tend to agree. The more different crackpot religious ideas kids are exposed to, the more likely it is they will realise they're all equally absurd.
As, say, someone brought up in a Christian tradition, once you realise that all those Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus (and Ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Vikings...) are equally convinced they're right you might get an inkling that the One True Faith you've been brought up with might not be so unique after all.
Democracy is three frat boys and a sorority girl deciding how to spend their evening.
Yes, and a legal system which means that the three frat boys will be punished if they do anything against her wishes.