Indeed, there is nothing we Canadians would like better than to see the Americans safely contained. having it accomplished by their own hardware is just delicious irony icing on the cake! Mind you, the way politics seems to run in the US, they'll never get the funding to buy foreign built hardware, a few trillion dollars to Halliburton to build a big friggin' wall is another story. On that thought, please tell me that in 12 years, we'll be treated to the sight of the Russian president standing on a podium in Niagara Falls saying "Mr President, tear down this wall!"...just how much does a Rochester coyote charge these days anyway?
I think you are both right, your own points of view. 1) It is true that studying the available written works of a culture is properly called History, whereas digging up pot shards and midden heaps is Archeology. However, they are not the clearly defined, non-overlapping disciplines either of you seem to think it is. Both are ultimately the quest to understand a people within a historical frame of reference. They differ mainly in the source material. 2)It is true that we have written records going back thousands of years, but it is also true that archaeologists are sifting through sites barely two hundred years old. There are mainly reasons for this, first and foremost is the fact that not every culture was highly literate. My ancestors on my fathers line kept records through a mix of the oral tradition and pictographs painted on leather. Thanks to the decimations his people suffered in the Colonial period, the oral records are fragmentary at best and suffer from a lack of bilingual translators. Second, scholars of the past are increasingly interested in the details that even the most literate and obsessively record keeping culture never wrote down. Questions like "what was the ratio of flowering plants along the streams of England prior to the digging of the canal systems?" "How many people would be employed in a typical cottage industry weaving occupation?" "Were the native peoples of what is now Florida the source of the scourge of syphilis that swept Europe?" These sort of things are difficult, if not outright impossible to answer based on the records that survive.
A culture never knows everything there is to know about itself.
Most of what a culture knows about itself, it takes for granted.
Most of what a culture takes for granted is never recorded.
Most of what was recorded fails to survive.
The study of History is forced to work with the scraps that remain, archeology is an attempt to fill in some of the blanks.
Several people were kind enough to point out some of the misconceptions in your post, including an actual physician, but from where I sit, they have *all* missed a key point. The most common method of finding out what is going on inside the human body isn't an X-ray, CT scan, MRI or any of those highly technological machines. It seems to me the most common device for finding out what is going on in the human body is the simple stethoscope attached to the ears of a trained person.
Just where are you going to find a piece of land that has all the needed materials? 1) Natural deposits of flint are rare and hard to find in North America, the best deposits I've heard of are in northern Europe.
1a) I'm a SCAdian, with a serious interest in history, I've tried flint knapping. It's one of of those things where, if you have an expert to teach you, you can pick up the basics in an afternoon. If you don't have an expert on hand, you'll spend weeks driving yourself nuts, cutting your hands to ribbons and making an awful lot of useless fragments. Making fire with flint requires a steel, something you apparently have ruled out bringing in with you. 2) I am not a geologist, but it seems to me that finding one tract of land that has both bornite (or cuprite I suppose) and an accessible deposit of magnetite (one of the easier iron ores for laymen to find and separate) *and* a supply of good quality limestone for the millwheel is next to impossible. Finding such a site where the deposits are accessible to one man digging with stone age tools would be even harder. (our ancestors grabbed up a lot of the easily accessible stuff, which is why we are digging so deep today) 3) Again calling on my SCAdian background, I happen to know that making even a simple quern is a major challenge, not all types of limestone have the right "grain" or texture to make a good grinding surface. Some are pretty friable, meaning you get grit in everything you grind in it. Granite is pretty much out of the question, at least for the first few years, since to work stone effectively, you need tools that are at least as hard as the stone you are working on. 4) Starting out with just some flint and presumably the clothes on your back? I hope you are living in SoCal or somewhere else warm, else you could well freeze to death before you get weather proof shelter. Building your own house should not be your last goal, it should be your third! Anyone who has taken any kind of survival training, even a boyscout, could tell you the big three are fire, food and shelter. 5) For one man trying to make his own rope, the obvious recommendation is hemp. But if you do try to grow it, keep your eyes out for DEA choppers;)
For most of human history, the average life span of a male was in the late 30's, lack of medicines accounts for a LOT of that, but not all. Some of it was due to the simple physical demands of living back then. Presumably you are planning to do this in your 50's or 60's since you want to do this after you retire. Are you up to the physical work load?
If I owned a traditonal casino, I would *love* the idea of owning an online betting portal as well. 1) My customer base is VASTLY expanded to include people who can't/prefer not to travel, people who would like to gamble, but would rather not go to a "Sin City" 2) It would save me the costs associated with all those free/cheap shows, meals, drinks etc etc 3) AFAIK, offshore gambling sites are usually not bound by tight laws and regulations regarding odds and payouts, thus I could run a "tight house" keeping more of that lovely money in my hands and not pay out so much to the suckers. (granted, market forces would force me to maintain parity with other sites, but there's no guarantee that the online industry standards will be as generous as real world Vegas/Monte Carlo/Hong Kong odds) 4) my online facility can be more nimble. It's far easier to adjust the odds of getting three of a kind in an online poker game than it is when dealing with a 4 or 7 deck shoe in a real world casino. (I studied magic under a professional stage magician at one point, so I know the card mechanics grip, how to do a whorehouse cut and so on. More importantly, I know how hard it is to get away with such tricks when sitting at a table with serious players.)
If a traditional casino cheats by slipping a mechanic into a game as the dealer, sooner or later the serious players will notice the shift in the odds. This would be more difficult to detect (short term at least) in an online gaming room. Over the long haul, the number crunchers would notice that the actual results don't match the claimed odds and payouts, but that would require a very large sample, since it is easy to dismiss a short term advantage as a streak.
My ethics course dealt with this sort of situation extensively, that is, the morality of a average person versus the morality of a corporation (or government) and the moral case that applies to a person acting on behalf of the corporationand how that person is somewhat immune from the moral consquences of actions carried out on behalf of the company.
Legally and morally a corporation is a limited "person". It can act to serve it's own interests, own property, influence the political environment it inhabits and so on. It is quite possible for a person, acting on behalf of the company, do commit acts that would be abhorent if done for his/her own interests directly, but are quite acceptable when done to benefit the company. The theory is that harming another, or infringing on his/her rights is unacceptable when done for one's own benefit. (I can't steal your money to buy food for me) Harming another, or infringing on his/her rights is usually acceptable when done on behalf of someone else, the greater the number of someones else, the more defensible the act becomes. (It is ok for me to take your money if I am the government taxing you to provide services to all.) The danger lies in that the only benefit for a company is measured in dollars and cents, whereas a government measures value in less tangible ways. To be ethical, an employee of a company must act in ways to maximise the profits of that company. The only ethical or moral judgement the employee can make is whether to accept the job or not.
This is especially true in the case of professionals acting on behalf of a client. Whether it be a doctor deciding on a course of therapy or a lawyer defending a client, the professional must put the interests of the client first. The concept of a lawyer defending a clientto the best of his/her ability, even when the lawyer does not like the client, or believes the client to be guilty is one of the cornerstones of our western justice system. (see the defense of Tom Robinson in "To Kill a Mockingbird")
Thus; when a lawyer, seeking to benefit a corporate client, goes after an individual, he or she is acting ethically. Similarly, when some CEO decides to close a plant or raid the pension fund in order to increase profits for the shareholders he or she is acting ethically. Any blame for the act rests with the one who receives the benefits. Either the legal client or the shareholder. Don't judge the lawyer too harshly, he or she is acting how legal training and education has indoctrinated him/her. The lawyers job is to pursue the RIAA's interests as vigorously as possible. Any choice whether to do so or not ended when he/she accepted the job. Rather, blame the CEO's of the various companies who chose this tactic to maximise profits rather than changing business practices to adapt to changing technology.
I believe that if you truely want to end the **AA approach, what needs to be done is to contact the shareholders directly. Present them with a well reasoned presentation on the shortcomings of the "sue them all and let the courts sort them out" approach. Also provide them with a realistic alternative method of finding talent, creating, promoting and distributing media that takes into account modern technical realities and allows for continued profits equal to or greater than what they currently enjoy.
Your description of work appears to conflict with what I was taught in High School. It further seems to conflict with itself.
The second law of thermodynamics states "There is no process that, operating in cycle, produces no other effect than the subtraction of a positive amount of heat from a reservoir and the production of an equal amount of work." (copied from wikipedia ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermod ynamicsrel=url2html-29159http://en.wikipedia.org/w iki/Laws_of_thermodynamics>
First you state that a processor does not produce work because there are no moving parts, but then you go on to say that some parts (namely the electrons) do move.
I was taught in High School that energy is the potential to do something, work is what happens when that potential becomes realized. The classic example of a rock on a cliff or the more modern example of a charged capacitor are both full of energy. As soon as the rock falls or the cap discharges, work is accomplished. By that reckoning, a magnetic force flipping a bit is accomplishing work as is a transistor or NAND gate when electrons flow through it.
It is the third law that states that 100% efficiency can only be achieved at Absolute Zero, however this is often misunderstood to mean that if we could somehow freeze a system down to 0Kelvin we would have a perfectly efficient machine. As far as i know, any system at 0K is incapable of doing any work. Since the electrons cease their orbit and the nucleus ceases to even vibrate at 0K no movement and hence no work is possible. Further, even if it were possible to somehow perform work with a 0K system, we would not receive any benefit from the efficiencies of that system. It would take more energy, courtesy of the second law, to cool that system down to 0K than we would save by using that system. Finally, thanks to the first law, all that energy we extracted out of the system, along with all the energy used to do that has to go somewhere and it will almost certainly go there in the form of heat. My H.S. science teacher put it this way: "to make your fridge cold, first you take out all the heat inside the box. But! The machine which removes that heat can't be perfect, so it makes heat too, which you also have to remove, generating still more heat in the process. The net result is that all the stuff in the fridge and all the stuff in the room, when added up and averaged, end up warmer than when you started."
or better still, the loudest noisemaker I've ever heard of...
http://www.victorysiren.com/x/index.html
A noisemaker so loud it apparently starts fires! 138Db 100' from the unit!
This is just a wild guess, based largely on what I know of the "whining monitor" and "buzzing ballast" issues. I am one of the minority of people who can hear those high pitched noises from certain types of electronics. (120hz for ballasts in lighting fixtures IIRC)Because I can hear them, I once looked up what was causing those sounds. In the case of the CRT and lighting ballasts, it was very fast current switching. The main electron gun in a CRT switches on and off very fast (a function of the refresh rate) as does the ballast in a florescent ballast. Some components do move slightly in response to the fast switched high potentials. What us users hear is the component vibrating from this effect. I am not an EE*, but it seems to me that any induction loop or high potential capacitor on the mobo that was subject to this fast switching could also make noise. This would explain why not everyone is complaining about it, since most people can't hear these high frequencies and many of those that do only perceive them at a almost subliminal level. It would also explain why replacement boards may also make the same sounds, but to a lesser degree. (different capacitor construction would react differently to the effect)
*any of the EE's out there are more than welcome to correct me on this, I am just a layman in this subject and I am describing something I briefly read about years ago
The NYT article, NYT slideshow and the Christies official page only show "highlights" and already I see several items I'd lust after but could never afford. Nonetheless, there are one or two items I am particularly interested in that are not mentioned. Specifically, the 6 foot and 4 foot long detailed models of the 1701-D built by I.L.M and Greg Jein respectively. Those are the two used in all the close-up, opening sequence and stock shots from ST:TNG. I would also like to see the 1701-D's warp core, if it still exists.
Does anyone know of a link to a complete inventory of what is being auctioned off? Sure, I could cough up the 90U$ (per volume!) for the catalog, but that seems awfully pricy just to satisfy my curiosity.
First off, I have seen photos of women using prop "dynamite" sticks as dildos, I didn't see the point, but it was published, so *somebody* found it sexy. Second, not only can you say that any act, no matter how depraved is going to be fetishized by *someone*, but that the person will not be alone in this. Sometime, somewhere, there will be magazine, website or newsgroup dedicated to it. (how else do you explain insulin porn and syringe porn? There are websites dedicated to the idea of an otherwise normal person who needs daily injections to live and that this is somehow erotic.......)
What I'd like to see is more detail on what exactly constitutes a flaw? OK, so there are 812 flaws for the Windows family (9x/NT/2K/XP) and 2,312 for the UNIX/Linux family (UNIX,BSD,Debian, Ubantu, slackware, red hat etc etc). Seems clear enough. TFA makes clear that a flaw which affects fifty different distros is counted as fifty separate flaws. Also pretty clear. Misleading perhaps, but possibly defensible by the statisticians who compose the numbers.
What is not clear to me is just what is considered a flaw. A bug in package management that corrupts the install of something is clearly a flaw, but not a vulnerability. Similarly, an application that corrupts data if a library dependancy is out of date is also a flaw, but that is not a vulnerability either.
A bug in a web form that allows a vistor to pass arbitrary *executable* data to the underlying systems is clearly a vulnerability. I'd like to see a count of how many of that 812/2,312 breaks down into flaws that allow a stranger to f**k with your system in some fashion.
After all, if you want to pick an OS (or an application for that matter)based on minimizing risk, then the key number is the amount of vulnerabilites. I am not a *nix user (yet!) but it is my understanding any one distro or even the entire family as a whole has fewer vulnerabilities to 3rd party attacks and that proven "in the wild" exploits are even fewer. ( I am totally ignoring insider attacks, no box is completely secure to someone who has physical access to it )
That being the case, the odds of a *nix box being compromised from an outside attack is far, far lower than for a Windows box. OR am I being totally misled here?
I am a Canadian cable broadband subscriber, thankfully not a Shaw customer.
You may be able to get a local area code with Vonage, but at least around here, you can't always get your local exchange prefix. This means I could sign up tomorrow for Vonage and get a number, but when the school calls me to fetch my son, or work calls me in after hours, it's a long distance call for them. This is a major sticking point for me. As near as I can tell, local prefix's are generally only availible in major urban areas like Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and so on. (of course, this being Canada, cover those three cities and throw in Montreal and we're talking about over 80% of the population) Given that all Ont. phone numbers essentially belong to Bell until sold/leased to someone and that Bell is intensely regulated, it may not simply be a matter of being willing to pay what Bell wants for those numbers. I'm sure there are regulations to follow, commitees to placate and "public" hearings to be held before a block of numbers can be transferred. (I put public in quotes because while the process may be open to the public, held in some bland hearing room in City Hall, but when was the last time anyone you know went to one?)
why have I had the same anti-script test word four times in a row?
I believe sir, that you are wrong. Incredibly, frightening, almost nauseatingly wrong. My stomach literally gave a sickening roll to the left when I read your post. two quotes came to mind, both by a man many believe to be the smartest native-born American ever.
"They who can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. "
- Benjamin Franklin
"When Government fears the people, it's liberty. When people fear the Government, it's tyranny."
- Benjamin Franklin
With a very cursory search, I also came up with a few other very apropos quotes:
"A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. "
- John Stuart Mill
"Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say, What should be the reward of such sacrifices? If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude than the animating contest of freedom - go from us in peace. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you."
- Samuel Adams
"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first."
- Thomas Jefferson
"A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government." -- George Washington [The purpose of a written constitution is] to bind up the several branches of government by certain laws, which, when they transgress, their acts shall become nullities; to render unnecessary an appeal to the people, or in other words a rebellion, on every infraction of their rights, on the peril that their acquiescence shall be construed into an intention to surrender those rights." -- Thomas Jefferson
The United States was founded by men who had had their fill of authoritarian government. They had just kicked out the Loyalists(1) and over a lengthy debate, struggled to determine just what form of government they desired. These men were essentially combat vets, determined to make a society worthy of their fallen friends and comrades sacrifice. This was not a system formed in haste, nor by ill-informed men.It was a system designed to be self-correcting, but when self-correction failed, to leave open the chance for popular revolution to occur *again*. Ask yourself this, The US is currently under an authoritarian administration, one which lies to gain sweeping emergency powers, one which then abuses and even exceeds those broad powers and then exerts every effort to sweep those abuses under the rug. When finally confronted and questioned about these excesses, the nations top people claim they have the right to do so. A right which is not listed in the Constituton, nor mentioned in any legislation. Is this what the Founders wanted to buy with the blood they'd just shed?
(1) Disclaimer : I am a Canadian, descended from a mix of Loyalist and First Nation. I have ancestors who fough on both sides. Some as land-owning volunteers, some as British conscripts and one as a Shinnecock scout.
**BTW: there is no such thing as a *right* to speed, though there is a person's duty to obey the law of the land, whn that law is sane, reasonable and justly applied Similarly, a person has a civic duty to disobey, work towards change and when all else fals, revolt when laws are not sane, reasonable or justly applied. What the NYT seems to fear, long with many of us, is that the government is doing things which exceed or even break the law, using public safety as it's excuse. It is the job of government to do what it can to ensure the safety of it's people, but it is the duty of the people to ensure that that same government does so properly.
1) universal coverage : I am listed on 7, count'em seven, different job sites. It is a royal pain having to check each of these every day. I want one site, an aggregator site perhaps, that really does list 95%+ of the jobs in my area. 2)in-depth local coverage : the reason I belong to seven sites is because in my field and at my level, some of the best opportunities never get listed with the national level sites. There are good, industry or region specific websites that list jobs that Monster and the like will never see. 3) BAN the use of "company confidential" in want ads. I want to know who I am applying to. At bare minimum, professional standards suggest that I direct a personalized letter to the HR head honco, highlighting things not covered in the resume, or showing how my skills directly apply to that firm. Obviously, I can't do that if I have no friggin' clue who I am dealing with now can I? 4) Every company must have a blurb/profile of some kind listed on the site in order to post jobs. 5) Potential employees should be allowed to post feedback on these companies. (There is a tech recruiter in Oshawa, Ont. Canada that I would love to post a few harsh words about) E-bay and Amazon manage to do OK with that idea. 6) use industry standardized job descriptions. I believe that both Canadian and American federal gov'ts keep lists of jobs with thumbnail descriptions for just such a reason. Granted; in the tech sector, new jobs and descriptions often pop up very quickly, faster than a gov't agency can keep up with. However, it would be a starting point. For new descriptions, allow companies and registered potential employees to maintain a wiki of job related terms and job descriptions. 7) Allow the use of an *accurate*, relational boolean keyword search. I for one am tired of searching using the key terms network, administration and server and getting a handful of techie jobs buried in a pile of accounting, managerial and other jobs simply because *one* of my words happened to appear. Worse yet, NONE of my words appear anywhere in the ad, yet it gets included in the results anyway. (I'm looking at YOU jobshark.ca) My ex-girlfriends angelfire personal homepage has a Google search in it, why can't yours? 8) actually have a human being *read* support e-mails, not just have a 'bot skim through and send me the form letter du jour based on a few keywords, directing me to the FAQ's/self help pages (I'm *still* looking at you Jobshark!). 9) don't limit resumes to two pages, cover letters to 800 chars. These conventions are based on real people having to wade through real paper. Lets face the fact that the vast majority of companies are using 'bots to skim through the slew of applications a nation-wide posting can generate. These 'bots are comparing my resume to a stored meta-resume. If I get enough checkmarks, my resume gets passed on to a human. Given the wide range of degrees, certifications and so on, it makes sense to let me do a traditional one or two page resume, and then append a couple more pages stuffed full of keywords for the 'bots to flag. If websites can do it to boost their chances, why can't I?
I'll list a RCA or CCNA on the human pages and do the long forms : Red Hat Certified Administrator and Cisco Certified Network Administrator : on the 'bot pages. For that matter, let me post my resume as a.pdf, give them a taste of thier own medicine. (municipal level jobs here are often listed as.pdf since they just use thier document management system to scan in the same piece of paper the tech handed to the HR dept, who in turn listed it on the sites and with the JobBank) 10) while I am dreaming here, gimmie an RSS feed option instead of e-mailed alerts. It would be slightly more useful to me than the e-mails, and to my mind way cooler besides.
Back when I was working tech support for a national ISP, I often was left trying to explain computer concepts to some befuddled blue-haired lady. The problem wasn't that she was stupid, or wasn't listening, but rather that it was so vastly different to anything she had Real World experience with. She was left with no frame of reference, no way to get a handle on the basics. Every acronym I used cut comprehension by 25%.
What I would do is explain the hardware and core functions in terms of monkeys running a library. The CPU is a monkey in the librarians office. That animal is very very fast and good at following simple instructions. S/he only has so much deskspace (L1 and L2 cache) to work with however. Thus, there is a front counter (RAM)staffed by very Rain-man like apes whose job it is to fetch information and recipes from the main library shelves. (HDD)
By extension, I could describe the video card as an artist, the NIC as a loading dock and so on. A virus was then easily explained as a bad recipe planted surruptitiously by a vandal. I found that there were very few concepts I couldn't explain at that level. Using this system, I have successfully taught grannies the concepts of Routers, bandwidth usage, Remote Desktop, SSL, why her email ended up on her daughters computer and hence why she can't read it on her home computer and many other things.
As others have said, the your challenge will be providing the right balance of simple explanations and important concepts. Your question, however, was what concepts I wish my users knew, so here is my list: 1) a computer is like any other machine, it needs maintainence to work at it's best. (removing unneeded apps, regular defrags antivirus and antiscumware scans, vacuuming out the killer dust bunnies from the CPU and power supply fans etc) 2) actually read what the computer tells you. (error messages, those "are you sure" alerts, and of course EULA's, but I know that last one is a forlorn hope) 3) when it comes time to make a purchase, pay more attention to the guy who will be supporting it than the guy who is making a commission on the sale. (do you hear me mother-in-law? I told you you needed a 20$ cable for your camera, not the 2000$+ new camera the sales guy talked you into! me bitter? oh, a bit) 4) RTFM! almost every piece of hardware I have ever seen comes with instructions, most Windows apps come with Help files. Before you call me in the middle of dinner for the 3rd time asking me about the same keyboard shortcut you can't remember, check the manual or Help files. Or for that matter, check the post-it note I left on your monitor the last time I came and showed you hwo to do it. 5) Most problems you can solve yourself using Google, *if* you are willing to try.
Still have the right to bear arms? Try walking down the street with a slung rifle and see if you can make it to the corner store. As for "assault weapons", I think you are refering to "assault rifles". Examples of an assault rifle would be a Galil, an M16, the FNc1 and so on. Full length weapons, with select fire capability, high capacity magazine using a larger rifle round. What most people picture when they hear the term assault weapon is the Uzi, the skorpion or the MAC10. compact, select fire or fully automatic weapons using pistol calibre ammunition. I can assure you that buying any select fire or fully automatic weapon in the US is incredibly difficult. All legally owned fully automatic weapons are registered with the government and could easily be taken away at any time.
I disagree with your statement that the most adamant pro-gun people are also the people most strongly advocating the abrogation of civil rights. I would also argue that while the average American citizen does have the right to bear arms in theory , because of the welter of federal, state and municipal laws, regulations and taxes, that right is difficult to exercise. (my grandfather was a decorated Marine, a veteran of Korea and he battled the system for years to hang onto his war souveniers) Correct me if I am wrong, but haven't several large US cities, Washington, DC among them enacted ordinances that effectively bans the private ownership and carrying of handguns?
Haven't several large cities tried to sue firearms companies for the "crime" of manufacturing firearms and selling them to authorized dealers in accordance with the law of the land, good firearms design and accepted business practices?
The most strident pro-gun people I have heard are the right-wing survivalist types. They are the ones who have been saying for years that the US is on the verge of requiring forcible resistance the current government. The mainstream gun community has been very different. Column after column, article after article, newsletter after newsletter I have been seeing the same basic message in the gun community. "we want the government out of our bedrooms, we want our government out of our access to information, we want to maintain the protections afforded by due process of law, we want the government to do what We the People tell it to do and nothing more To make sure this happens, we need to get out the vote and we need to make sure our right to bear arms is maintained for that future day when force of arms may be needed."
From what I have seen and read, the mainstream gun community is doing everything in it's power to AVOID having to resort to armed struggle. They have been writing letters to Governors, Senators and Congressmen for years. The NRA has been lobbying for gun ownership and related rights (like due process, privacy etc) for decades. Gun owners don't want Big Brother any more than you do.
Slashdot Mirror
which of course is why I am all in favour of firearms possession, everyday I look around at the sheeple and realize it's time to thin the herd....
and the engineering maxim "light, strong, cheap, pick any two..."
Indeed, there is nothing we Canadians would like better than to see the Americans safely contained. having it accomplished by their own hardware is just delicious irony icing on the cake! Mind you, the way politics seems to run in the US, they'll never get the funding to buy foreign built hardware, a few trillion dollars to Halliburton to build a big friggin' wall is another story. On that thought, please tell me that in 12 years, we'll be treated to the sight of the Russian president standing on a podium in Niagara Falls saying "Mr President, tear down this wall!" ...just how much does a Rochester coyote charge these days anyway?
I think you are both right, your own points of view.
1) It is true that studying the available written works of a culture is properly called History, whereas digging up pot shards and midden heaps is Archeology. However, they are not the clearly defined, non-overlapping disciplines either of you seem to think it is. Both are ultimately the quest to understand a people within a historical frame of reference. They differ mainly in the source material.
2)It is true that we have written records going back thousands of years, but it is also true that archaeologists are sifting through sites barely two hundred years old. There are mainly reasons for this, first and foremost is the fact that not every culture was highly literate. My ancestors on my fathers line kept records through a mix of the oral tradition and pictographs painted on leather. Thanks to the decimations his people suffered in the Colonial period, the oral records are fragmentary at best and suffer from a lack of bilingual translators. Second, scholars of the past are increasingly interested in the details that even the most literate and obsessively record keeping culture never wrote down. Questions like "what was the ratio of flowering plants along the streams of England prior to the digging of the canal systems?" "How many people would be employed in a typical cottage industry weaving occupation?" "Were the native peoples of what is now Florida the source of the scourge of syphilis that swept Europe?" These sort of things are difficult, if not outright impossible to answer based on the records that survive.
A culture never knows everything there is to know about itself.
Most of what a culture knows about itself, it takes for granted.
Most of what a culture takes for granted is never recorded.
Most of what was recorded fails to survive.
The study of History is forced to work with the scraps that remain, archeology is an attempt to fill in some of the blanks.
Several people were kind enough to point out some of the misconceptions in your post, including an actual physician, but from where I sit, they have *all* missed a key point.
The most common method of finding out what is going on inside the human body isn't an X-ray, CT scan, MRI or any of those highly technological machines. It seems to me the most common device for finding out what is going on in the human body is the simple stethoscope attached to the ears of a trained person.
Just where are you going to find a piece of land that has all the needed materials? ;)
1) Natural deposits of flint are rare and hard to find in North America, the best deposits I've heard of are in northern Europe.
1a) I'm a SCAdian, with a serious interest in history, I've tried flint knapping. It's one of of those things where, if you have an expert to teach you, you can pick up the basics in an afternoon. If you don't have an expert on hand, you'll spend weeks driving yourself nuts, cutting your hands to ribbons and making an awful lot of useless fragments. Making fire with flint requires a steel, something you apparently have ruled out bringing in with you.
2) I am not a geologist, but it seems to me that finding one tract of land that has both bornite (or cuprite I suppose) and an accessible deposit of magnetite (one of the easier iron ores for laymen to find and separate) *and* a supply of good quality limestone for the millwheel is next to impossible. Finding such a site where the deposits are accessible to one man digging with stone age tools would be even harder. (our ancestors grabbed up a lot of the easily accessible stuff, which is why we are digging so deep today)
3) Again calling on my SCAdian background, I happen to know that making even a simple quern is a major challenge, not all types of limestone have the right "grain" or texture to make a good grinding surface. Some are pretty friable, meaning you get grit in everything you grind in it. Granite is pretty much out of the question, at least for the first few years, since to work stone effectively, you need tools that are at least as hard as the stone you are working on.
4) Starting out with just some flint and presumably the clothes on your back? I hope you are living in SoCal or somewhere else warm, else you could well freeze to death before you get weather proof shelter. Building your own house should not be your last goal, it should be your third! Anyone who has taken any kind of survival training, even a boyscout, could tell you the big three are fire, food and shelter.
5) For one man trying to make his own rope, the obvious recommendation is hemp. But if you do try to grow it, keep your eyes out for DEA choppers
For most of human history, the average life span of a male was in the late 30's, lack of medicines accounts for a LOT of that, but not all. Some of it was due to the simple physical demands of living back then. Presumably you are planning to do this in your 50's or 60's since you want to do this after you retire. Are you up to the physical work load?
If I owned a traditonal casino, I would *love* the idea of owning an online betting portal as well.
1) My customer base is VASTLY expanded to include people who can't/prefer not to travel, people who would like to gamble, but would rather not go to a "Sin City"
2) It would save me the costs associated with all those free/cheap shows, meals, drinks etc etc
3) AFAIK, offshore gambling sites are usually not bound by tight laws and regulations regarding odds and payouts, thus I could run a "tight house" keeping more of that lovely money in my hands and not pay out so much to the suckers. (granted, market forces would force me to maintain parity with other sites, but there's no guarantee that the online industry standards will be as generous as real world Vegas/Monte Carlo/Hong Kong odds)
4) my online facility can be more nimble. It's far easier to adjust the odds of getting three of a kind in an online poker game than it is when dealing with a 4 or 7 deck shoe in a real world casino. (I studied magic under a professional stage magician at one point, so I know the card mechanics grip, how to do a whorehouse cut and so on. More importantly, I know how hard it is to get away with such tricks when sitting at a table with serious players.)
If a traditional casino cheats by slipping a mechanic into a game as the dealer, sooner or later the serious players will notice the shift in the odds. This would be more difficult to detect (short term at least) in an online gaming room. Over the long haul, the number crunchers would notice that the actual results don't match the claimed odds and payouts, but that would require a very large sample, since it is easy to dismiss a short term advantage as a streak.
Legally and morally a corporation is a limited "person". It can act to serve it's own interests, own property, influence the political environment it inhabits and so on. It is quite possible for a person, acting on behalf of the company, do commit acts that would be abhorent if done for his/her own interests directly, but are quite acceptable when done to benefit the company. The theory is that harming another, or infringing on his/her rights is unacceptable when done for one's own benefit. (I can't steal your money to buy food for me) Harming another, or infringing on his/her rights is usually acceptable when done on behalf of someone else, the greater the number of someones else, the more defensible the act becomes. (It is ok for me to take your money if I am the government taxing you to provide services to all.) The danger lies in that the only benefit for a company is measured in dollars and cents, whereas a government measures value in less tangible ways. To be ethical, an employee of a company must act in ways to maximise the profits of that company. The only ethical or moral judgement the employee can make is whether to accept the job or not.
This is especially true in the case of professionals acting on behalf of a client. Whether it be a doctor deciding on a course of therapy or a lawyer defending a client, the professional must put the interests of the client first. The concept of a lawyer defending a clientto the best of his/her ability, even when the lawyer does not like the client, or believes the client to be guilty is one of the cornerstones of our western justice system. (see the defense of Tom Robinson in "To Kill a Mockingbird")
Thus; when a lawyer, seeking to benefit a corporate client, goes after an individual, he or she is acting ethically. Similarly, when some CEO decides to close a plant or raid the pension fund in order to increase profits for the shareholders he or she is acting ethically. Any blame for the act rests with the one who receives the benefits. Either the legal client or the shareholder. Don't judge the lawyer too harshly, he or she is acting how legal training and education has indoctrinated him/her. The lawyers job is to pursue the RIAA's interests as vigorously as possible. Any choice whether to do so or not ended when he/she accepted the job. Rather, blame the CEO's of the various companies who chose this tactic to maximise profits rather than changing business practices to adapt to changing technology.
I believe that if you truely want to end the **AA approach, what needs to be done is to contact the shareholders directly. Present them with a well reasoned presentation on the shortcomings of the "sue them all and let the courts sort them out" approach. Also provide them with a realistic alternative method of finding talent, creating, promoting and distributing media that takes into account modern technical realities and allows for continued profits equal to or greater than what they currently enjoy.
The second law of thermodynamics states "There is no process that, operating in cycle, produces no other effect than the subtraction of a positive amount of heat from a reservoir and the production of an equal amount of work." (copied from wikipedia ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermod ynamicsrel=url2html-29159http://en.wikipedia.org/w iki/Laws_of_thermodynamics>
First you state that a processor does not produce work because there are no moving parts, but then you go on to say that some parts (namely the electrons) do move.
I was taught in High School that energy is the potential to do something, work is what happens when that potential becomes realized. The classic example of a rock on a cliff or the more modern example of a charged capacitor are both full of energy. As soon as the rock falls or the cap discharges, work is accomplished. By that reckoning, a magnetic force flipping a bit is accomplishing work as is a transistor or NAND gate when electrons flow through it.
It is the third law that states that 100% efficiency can only be achieved at Absolute Zero, however this is often misunderstood to mean that if we could somehow freeze a system down to 0Kelvin we would have a perfectly efficient machine. As far as i know, any system at 0K is incapable of doing any work. Since the electrons cease their orbit and the nucleus ceases to even vibrate at 0K no movement and hence no work is possible. Further, even if it were possible to somehow perform work with a 0K system, we would not receive any benefit from the efficiencies of that system. It would take more energy, courtesy of the second law, to cool that system down to 0K than we would save by using that system. Finally, thanks to the first law, all that energy we extracted out of the system, along with all the energy used to do that has to go somewhere and it will almost certainly go there in the form of heat. My H.S. science teacher put it this way: "to make your fridge cold, first you take out all the heat inside the box. But! The machine which removes that heat can't be perfect, so it makes heat too, which you also have to remove, generating still more heat in the process. The net result is that all the stuff in the fridge and all the stuff in the room, when added up and averaged, end up warmer than when you started."yeah, go ahead and slice a 120V AC line! I wanna see that...from a safe distance of course...
or better still, the loudest noisemaker I've ever heard of... http://www.victorysiren.com/x/index.html A noisemaker so loud it apparently starts fires! 138Db 100' from the unit!
This is just a wild guess, based largely on what I know of the "whining monitor" and "buzzing ballast" issues. I am one of the minority of people who can hear those high pitched noises from certain types of electronics. (120hz for ballasts in lighting fixtures IIRC)Because I can hear them, I once looked up what was causing those sounds. In the case of the CRT and lighting ballasts, it was very fast current switching. The main electron gun in a CRT switches on and off very fast (a function of the refresh rate) as does the ballast in a florescent ballast. Some components do move slightly in response to the fast switched high potentials. What us users hear is the component vibrating from this effect. I am not an EE*, but it seems to me that any induction loop or high potential capacitor on the mobo that was subject to this fast switching could also make noise. This would explain why not everyone is complaining about it, since most people can't hear these high frequencies and many of those that do only perceive them at a almost subliminal level. It would also explain why replacement boards may also make the same sounds, but to a lesser degree. (different capacitor construction would react differently to the effect)
*any of the EE's out there are more than welcome to correct me on this, I am just a layman in this subject and I am describing something I briefly read about years ago
The NYT article, NYT slideshow and the Christies official page only show "highlights" and already I see several items I'd lust after but could never afford. Nonetheless, there are one or two items I am particularly interested in that are not mentioned. Specifically, the 6 foot and 4 foot long detailed models of the 1701-D built by I.L.M and Greg Jein respectively. Those are the two used in all the close-up, opening sequence and stock shots from ST:TNG. I would also like to see the 1701-D's warp core, if it still exists.
Does anyone know of a link to a complete inventory of what is being auctioned off? Sure, I could cough up the 90U$ (per volume!) for the catalog, but that seems awfully pricy just to satisfy my curiosity.
First off, I have seen photos of women using prop "dynamite" sticks as dildos, I didn't see the point, but it was published, so *somebody* found it sexy.
Second, not only can you say that any act, no matter how depraved is going to be fetishized by *someone*, but that the person will not be alone in this. Sometime, somewhere, there will be magazine, website or newsgroup dedicated to it. (how else do you explain insulin porn and syringe porn? There are websites dedicated to the idea of an otherwise normal person who needs daily injections to live and that this is somehow erotic.......)
How could anyone offer a full body cavity search service on Craigslist that is cheaper than free?
which of course means that once they have enough of the market back in the palm of their hand, it'll be time to resume squeezing......
Sadly, aside from screen size, those are better specs than the antique I am using to post this with.
(350 OC'd to 401, 128SD-RAM no Flash)
What I'd like to see is more detail on what exactly constitutes a flaw?
OK, so there are 812 flaws for the Windows family (9x/NT/2K/XP) and 2,312 for the UNIX/Linux family (UNIX,BSD,Debian, Ubantu, slackware, red hat etc etc). Seems clear enough. TFA makes clear that a flaw which affects fifty different distros is counted as fifty separate flaws. Also pretty clear. Misleading perhaps, but possibly defensible by the statisticians who compose the numbers.
What is not clear to me is just what is considered a flaw. A bug in package management that corrupts the install of something is clearly a flaw, but not a vulnerability. Similarly, an application that corrupts data if a library dependancy is out of date is also a flaw, but that is not a vulnerability either.
A bug in a web form that allows a vistor to pass arbitrary *executable* data to the underlying systems is clearly a vulnerability. I'd like to see a count of how many of that 812/2,312 breaks down into flaws that allow a stranger to f**k with your system in some fashion.
After all, if you want to pick an OS (or an application for that matter)based on minimizing risk, then the key number is the amount of vulnerabilites. I am not a *nix user (yet!) but it is my understanding any one distro or even the entire family as a whole has fewer vulnerabilities to 3rd party attacks and that proven "in the wild" exploits are even fewer. ( I am totally ignoring insider attacks, no box is completely secure to someone who has physical access to it )
That being the case, the odds of a *nix box being compromised from an outside attack is far, far lower than for a Windows box. OR am I being totally misled here?
I'm in the 613, and only Ottawa/Hull, Orleans and Kanata can get local numbers. Kingston, Belleville, Picton, Trenton etc etc are SOL....
I am a Canadian cable broadband subscriber, thankfully not a Shaw customer.
You may be able to get a local area code with Vonage, but at least around here, you can't always get your local exchange prefix. This means I could sign up tomorrow for Vonage and get a number, but when the school calls me to fetch my son, or work calls me in after hours, it's a long distance call for them. This is a major sticking point for me. As near as I can tell, local prefix's are generally only availible in major urban areas like Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and so on. (of course, this being Canada, cover those three cities and throw in Montreal and we're talking about over 80% of the population) Given that all Ont. phone numbers essentially belong to Bell until sold/leased to someone and that Bell is intensely regulated, it may not simply be a matter of being willing to pay what Bell wants for those numbers. I'm sure there are regulations to follow, commitees to placate and "public" hearings to be held before a block of numbers can be transferred. (I put public in quotes because while the process may be open to the public, held in some bland hearing room in City Hall, but when was the last time anyone you know went to one?)
why have I had the same anti-script test word four times in a row?
I believe sir, that you are wrong. Incredibly, frightening, almost nauseatingly wrong. My stomach literally gave a sickening roll to the left when I read your post.
two quotes came to mind, both by a man many believe to be the smartest native-born American ever.
"They who can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. "
- Benjamin Franklin
"When Government fears the people, it's liberty. When people fear the Government, it's tyranny."
- Benjamin Franklin
With a very cursory search, I also came up with a few other very apropos quotes:
"A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. "
- John Stuart Mill
"Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say, What should be the reward of such sacrifices? If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude than the animating contest of freedom - go from us in peace. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you."
- Samuel Adams
"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first."
- Thomas Jefferson
"A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government."
-- George Washington
[The purpose of a written constitution is] to bind up the several branches of government by certain laws, which, when they transgress, their acts shall become nullities; to render unnecessary an appeal to the people, or in other words a rebellion, on every infraction of their rights, on the peril that their acquiescence shall be construed into an intention to surrender those rights."
-- Thomas Jefferson
The United States was founded by men who had had their fill of authoritarian government. They had just kicked out the Loyalists(1) and over a lengthy debate, struggled to determine just what form of government they desired. These men were essentially combat vets, determined to make a society worthy of their fallen friends and comrades sacrifice. This was not a system formed in haste, nor by ill-informed men.It was a system designed to be self-correcting, but when self-correction failed, to leave open the chance for popular revolution to occur *again*. Ask yourself this, The US is currently under an authoritarian administration, one which lies to gain sweeping emergency powers, one which then abuses and even exceeds those broad powers and then exerts every effort to sweep those abuses under the rug. When finally confronted and questioned about these excesses, the nations top people claim they have the right to do so. A right which is not listed in the Constituton, nor mentioned in any legislation. Is this what the Founders wanted to buy with the blood they'd just shed?
(1) Disclaimer : I am a Canadian, descended from a mix of Loyalist and First Nation. I have ancestors who fough on both sides. Some as land-owning volunteers, some as British conscripts and one as a Shinnecock scout.
**BTW: there is no such thing as a *right* to speed, though there is a person's duty to obey the law of the land, whn that law is sane, reasonable and justly applied Similarly, a person has a civic duty to disobey, work towards change and when all else fals, revolt when laws are not sane, reasonable or justly applied. What the NYT seems to fear, long with many of us, is that the government is doing things which exceed or even break the law, using public safety as it's excuse. It is the job of government to do what it can to ensure the safety of it's people, but it is the duty of the people to ensure that that same government does so properly.
1) universal coverage : I am listed on 7, count'em seven, different job sites. It is a royal pain having to check each of these every day. I want one site, an aggregator site perhaps, that really does list 95%+ of the jobs in my area. .pdf, give them a taste of thier own medicine. (municipal level jobs here are often listed as .pdf since they just use thier document management system to scan in the same piece of paper the tech handed to the HR dept, who in turn listed it on the sites and with the JobBank)
2)in-depth local coverage : the reason I belong to seven sites is because in my field and at my level, some of the best opportunities never get listed with the national level sites. There are good, industry or region specific websites that list jobs that Monster and the like will never see.
3) BAN the use of "company confidential" in want ads. I want to know who I am applying to. At bare minimum, professional standards suggest that I direct a personalized letter to the HR head honco, highlighting things not covered in the resume, or showing how my skills directly apply to that firm. Obviously, I can't do that if I have no friggin' clue who I am dealing with now can I?
4) Every company must have a blurb/profile of some kind listed on the site in order to post jobs.
5) Potential employees should be allowed to post feedback on these companies. (There is a tech recruiter in Oshawa, Ont. Canada that I would love to post a few harsh words about) E-bay and Amazon manage to do OK with that idea.
6) use industry standardized job descriptions. I believe that both Canadian and American federal gov'ts keep lists of jobs with thumbnail descriptions for just such a reason. Granted; in the tech sector, new jobs and descriptions often pop up very quickly, faster than a gov't agency can keep up with. However, it would be a starting point. For new descriptions, allow companies and registered potential employees to maintain a wiki of job related terms and job descriptions.
7) Allow the use of an *accurate*, relational boolean keyword search. I for one am tired of searching using the key terms network, administration and server and getting a handful of techie jobs buried in a pile of accounting, managerial and other jobs simply because *one* of my words happened to appear. Worse yet, NONE of my words appear anywhere in the ad, yet it gets included in the results anyway. (I'm looking at YOU jobshark.ca) My ex-girlfriends angelfire personal homepage has a Google search in it, why can't yours?
8) actually have a human being *read* support e-mails, not just have a 'bot skim through and send me the form letter du jour based on a few keywords, directing me to the FAQ's/self help pages (I'm *still* looking at you Jobshark!).
9) don't limit resumes to two pages, cover letters to 800 chars. These conventions are based on real people having to wade through real paper. Lets face the fact that the vast majority of companies are using 'bots to skim through the slew of applications a nation-wide posting can generate. These 'bots are comparing my resume to a stored meta-resume. If I get enough checkmarks, my resume gets passed on to a human. Given the wide range of degrees, certifications and so on, it makes sense to let me do a traditional one or two page resume, and then append a couple more pages stuffed full of keywords for the 'bots to flag. If websites can do it to boost their chances, why can't I?
I'll list a RCA or CCNA on the human pages and do the long forms : Red Hat Certified Administrator and Cisco Certified Network Administrator : on the 'bot pages. For that matter, let me post my resume as a
10) while I am dreaming here, gimmie an RSS feed option instead of e-mailed alerts. It would be slightly more useful to me than the e-mails, and to my mind way cooler besides.
Obligatory Ninja High School manga reference:
"We professors of steamology must know these things my young friend"
Professor Steamhead
personally, I never graduated from Quagmire High, having failed World Domination 101.......
Back when I was working tech support for a national ISP, I often was left trying to explain computer concepts to some befuddled blue-haired lady. The problem wasn't that she was stupid, or wasn't listening, but rather that it was so vastly different to anything she had Real World experience with. She was left with no frame of reference, no way to get a handle on the basics. Every acronym I used cut comprehension by 25%.
What I would do is explain the hardware and core functions in terms of monkeys running a library. The CPU is a monkey in the librarians office. That animal is very very fast and good at following simple instructions. S/he only has so much deskspace (L1 and L2 cache) to work with however. Thus, there is a front counter (RAM)staffed by very Rain-man like apes whose job it is to fetch information and recipes from the main library shelves. (HDD)
By extension, I could describe the video card as an artist, the NIC as a loading dock and so on. A virus was then easily explained as a bad recipe planted surruptitiously by a vandal. I found that there were very few concepts I couldn't explain at that level. Using this system, I have successfully taught grannies the concepts of Routers, bandwidth usage, Remote Desktop, SSL, why her email ended up on her daughters computer and hence why she can't read it on her home computer and many other things.
As others have said, the your challenge will be providing the right balance of simple explanations and important concepts. Your question, however, was what concepts I wish my users knew, so here is my list:
1) a computer is like any other machine, it needs maintainence to work at it's best. (removing unneeded apps, regular defrags antivirus and antiscumware scans, vacuuming out the killer dust bunnies from the CPU and power supply fans etc)
2) actually read what the computer tells you. (error messages, those "are you sure" alerts, and of course EULA's, but I know that last one is a forlorn hope)
3) when it comes time to make a purchase, pay more attention to the guy who will be supporting it than the guy who is making a commission on the sale. (do you hear me mother-in-law? I told you you needed a 20$ cable for your camera, not the 2000$+ new camera the sales guy talked you into! me bitter? oh, a bit)
4) RTFM! almost every piece of hardware I have ever seen comes with instructions, most Windows apps come with Help files. Before you call me in the middle of dinner for the 3rd time asking me about the same keyboard shortcut you can't remember, check the manual or Help files. Or for that matter, check the post-it note I left on your monitor the last time I came and showed you hwo to do it.
5) Most problems you can solve yourself using Google, *if* you are willing to try.
Still have the right to bear arms? Try walking down the street with a slung rifle and see if you can make it to the corner store. As for "assault weapons", I think you are refering to "assault rifles". Examples of an assault rifle would be a Galil, an M16, the FNc1 and so on. Full length weapons, with select fire capability, high capacity magazine using a larger rifle round. What most people picture when they hear the term assault weapon is the Uzi, the skorpion or the MAC10. compact, select fire or fully automatic weapons using pistol calibre ammunition. I can assure you that buying any select fire or fully automatic weapon in the US is incredibly difficult. All legally owned fully automatic weapons are registered with the government and could easily be taken away at any time. I disagree with your statement that the most adamant pro-gun people are also the people most strongly advocating the abrogation of civil rights. I would also argue that while the average American citizen does have the right to bear arms in theory , because of the welter of federal, state and municipal laws, regulations and taxes, that right is difficult to exercise. (my grandfather was a decorated Marine, a veteran of Korea and he battled the system for years to hang onto his war souveniers) Correct me if I am wrong, but haven't several large US cities, Washington, DC among them enacted ordinances that effectively bans the private ownership and carrying of handguns? Haven't several large cities tried to sue firearms companies for the "crime" of manufacturing firearms and selling them to authorized dealers in accordance with the law of the land, good firearms design and accepted business practices? The most strident pro-gun people I have heard are the right-wing survivalist types. They are the ones who have been saying for years that the US is on the verge of requiring forcible resistance the current government. The mainstream gun community has been very different. Column after column, article after article, newsletter after newsletter I have been seeing the same basic message in the gun community. "we want the government out of our bedrooms, we want our government out of our access to information, we want to maintain the protections afforded by due process of law, we want the government to do what We the People tell it to do and nothing more To make sure this happens, we need to get out the vote and we need to make sure our right to bear arms is maintained for that future day when force of arms may be needed." From what I have seen and read, the mainstream gun community is doing everything in it's power to AVOID having to resort to armed struggle. They have been writing letters to Governors, Senators and Congressmen for years. The NRA has been lobbying for gun ownership and related rights (like due process, privacy etc) for decades. Gun owners don't want Big Brother any more than you do.