The national guard and reserve are part-time professional soldiers, as opposed to the army who are full-time professional soldiers. The 'militia' refered to in the second amendment is nothing more than the common people (not just the citizens) who happen to grab their guns and come when needed, whether called by the government or decide on their own that they are needed. This is basiclly what the militias of the time were.
your other points have already been adequately addressed.
"Ayyway, it doesn't matter, as the 2nd amendment clearly gives a individual rather than collective right to the people to own guns."
I am going to quibble over this statement. The second amendment does not give anybody any rights, nor does any of the other amendments in the bill of rights. All rights are vested in the people, independant of and preexisting the government.
This is exactally the problem that most of those arguing against the bill of rights saw. They were afraid that by listing the rights that the people retained, (those that the people did not grant to the government) they might inadvertantly miss one or two important ones. And that by failing to list them people would then assume that they were not retained by the poeple.
As far as it goes though, you are dead right. The rights to keep and bear arms listed in the second amendment are distinctly individual, not collective rights. The term Madison used in the first draft of the second amendment was 'country' not state. It is mere concidence that the term state is also used to refer to the 50 States.
Well said. Some of your points are what I would have said myself. Some opinions you may want to consider.
Israel/Palestine: IIRC all of the land that Israel currently ocupies (except the golan heights) was part of the original land Great Brittian gave them when it created Israel in 1949(?), so I do not believe it holds any land illegaly. More to the point though, I seriously doubt that giving up those lands would make peace. Peace will come to the area when a) all the arabs die or leave, b) all the jews die or leave, or c) all the arabs quit hating Israel and to a lesser extent the jews in Israel stop hating the arabs. I am not holding my breath.
The Iraqi millitants: It is my opinion that the Iraqi people, and to a large extent the arab world views the war to oust Hussien long over. The current fighting is a totally different war. They are simply trying to govern themselvs the way they know how, and we are in the way. That we are 'infedels' just makes it easier. Our culture has been developing around democratic and representative government ideas since before the greeks built Athens, the arabs have not. Our efforts to 'bring democracy to Iraq' are viewed as us imposing democracy on them, and it is appreciated about as much as we would appreciate Islam being imposed on us. It won't work. Also, Iraq's current borders were created by british decree, with no thought to the people living there. It should be split into 3 pieces, Kurds, Sunni and Shi'i, and be mostly left alone after that.
"But good old fashioned party politics will make sure it goes there slower."
But, you see, fast or slow, it will still get worse, not better, and eventually there will be no freedom at all. Revololution will be the only option then. What we need to look for is some way of turning around. Support some third party.
If you live in a swing state, maby your course of action has some merit. I live in Utah. It's electoral votes will go to Bush, regardless how I vote. Voting for Kerry would throw my vote away just as as voting for Bush would. I will vote for someone else. This is the only way my vote could have any impact at all.
"I think parents should be held responsible for their kids behavior."
I agree with this, I just think that the best way to do this is . . . Send the kid home. Don't let him come back. (ie. make the parent responsible for the kids education in the first place, and merely provide a school if the parent wishes to use it. Scrap the mandatory education laws.)
Oh, and make the parent take care of the kid instead of the welfare. That should provide more than sufficient motivation to the parent! (only half serious on the last part . ..)
" I don't think it helps for you to think of yourself as normal."
Thinking of myself as normal is nothing but trouble.
"You should feel lucky that your appetites led you to "play" with abstract ideas, visualizations, and relationships between things. It's disturbing how few people really have that appetite.
Disturbing? not sure that is the right term. You are right, it is rare, less than 10%. I think the world would be a better place if there were more. It sounds to me like you regularly deal with a few people who do have that appitite, and are surprised when you deal wiht other people. This isn't an unknown, Psycologists have done a lot of work in this area. google for Jung - Myer-Briggs personality stuff
"For most kids, if you give them a choice between an engaging, well-written book on meteorology or Greek history, or some teen-oriented high-school drama (are they still writing "Sweet Valley High" books?), they'll either take the fiction or kick you in the shins and demand to know where you've hidden Harry Potter.
Or throw the book at you and leave to play video games. Some people can't learn from books, even if the book is about something that they want badly to learn about, or even the Harry Potter books, dispite liking them. "I think there are a lot of different natural appetites." Yes, and sometimes so different that others can't understand them at all, and have to have it shoved in their face before they can recognise it. This 'can't learn from books' is my youngest brother.* If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it.
"If there were some way to really get across the importance of math and science, I think it would help. But some people don't naturally gravitate towards those things."
Actually, I think that they would, in their own way (which is not the way we think! I am looking at my siblings here, and how they have developed) if they were allowed to gravitate at all. But they usually are not. They are taught math from a text, written by a math professor, who views math as an end in itself, not the tool of hard science it is. This is the wrong way to teach math, even for those interested in the hard sciences, let alone for an accountant, or secretary or . . . My family was home schooled, so we had the option. While my specific example was not normal, they all (7 of us, one is still high-school age) mannaged to gravitate to stuff that they had appetites for, and learned the necessary subjects for them. It does work. (better than public school at least)
Last thought, do you think that teaching people to hate math and science (by cramming it down their throats when they are not ready/understand the need for it) is a good way to teach people the importance of them? Let them explore their areas of interest, learn for themselvs how math and science affect the stuff that they are interested in, and then come asking to be taught those parts they need?
*He is becomming a competent computer geek, records and compresses TV shows, and is getting quite good at it. Another couple of years and he will be a better PC tech than I am if I do not get busy. He already knows windoze far better than I (I run slackware, working on LFS...)
What??? I learned far more 'playing' with books than I ever did learn from any teacher.
People DO have to relearn everything each generation, because each generation starts by knowing NOTHING. We can just learn it from observation, or by asking the previous generation, as they already know it, an advantage that the first generation to learn it did not have.
As for your argument takling about the fuzzy math, I thought math was stupid and useless through most of high school. I saw no point in factoring all those dumb equations, or learning specialised ways to multiply equations and such. Useless and pointless. Then I tried AP calc. I liked. I saw a point. I could see how to actually use this stuff for something real. Then I found out what all that stupid math from previous years was for. Tools. Tools that let you get the equations into the form you need to get the calc stuff to work. A screwdriver is pretty useless-looking if you have never seen a screw.
My point here is that if someone had shown me from the start what you could do with calculus, at the same time I was 'playing' with the science books, (calc was created by physicists for physics. Isaac Newton no less) I would have learned both much better, and possibly faster. And I would not have wasted time on that stupid math stuff. But, of course my math scores would have plummeted. Math tests would be particularly badly suited for measuring this style of learning, and I would have started doing stuff way out of order. My guess is that the fuzzy math programs are flawed too, but not for the reasons you think.
How about I tell you that you have to learn something but not tell you what and let you choose (and give lots of choices) and tell you to start now but not give a darn when, or if you ever finish, as long as you are doing something, and let you quit and move on to something else when you decide that you are done, I think that learning would cease to be a chore.
Your core point of course is correct, the modern method of teaching sucks.
Actually there is an easy solution. Send the kid home, do not let him come back. Problem solved.
The reason that this is not used is all of our stupid mandatory education laws. Get rid of these and you get all of the kids who do not want to learn, and those kids that are better suited to an apprentice style education out of the classroom. That would have stunning effects on the quality of education for the rest of the kids in school.
My parents had one of these lemons. It got 80MPG just before we scrapped it. Oh yea, that was 80 miles per gallon of OIL, not fuel. (drive 80 miles, put in 4 quarts of oil, wipe layer of oily grime off the back of the car . . ) It went through 4 engines in a summer once, and at least one other engine another year.
per email, yes. form letters will not have the same impact that personalised letters will.
But, don't you think bringing some congressman's email servers to their knees with legitimate form letters* wouldn't have some impact?? quantity over quality here.
*If all the/. crowd had to do was click a link or two to send it, and half as many did as normally read the article, this is what would happen.
I went to school at Utah State University. The Physics department had a green laser that they used for atmosperic research. It doesn't heat the air to do it, but it is certainly visible.
Read that as 'a bill that would make it impossible for photographer unions and associations to lock people up before they break our copyrights, or even before they have the tools to do it, and make the photographers go after the infringers themselvs one at a time in court'
or possibly as 'a bill that would make it impossible for photographers to protect their work without taking any real effort.'
"Progress will stop. No company will be able to justify the R&D expense."
No, both of these statements are wrong, because they are oversimplified. First off I am assuming that you are both talking about what would happen if both patents and copyrights were gone.
Progress would not stop. there would still be some bennifit to R&D. Even if it is gaurenteed that your competitors will copy your researsh fast enough to deny you any market advantage, both of you would still bennifit from, say, 50% cheaper CPU's, as the overall market would expand 'cause more people and applications can afford them. However the bennifit of R&D in this case is a lot less than it would be with patents, as you lose advantages over competitors. So here progress would slow, not speed up.
For other things progress would speed up, if for no other reason than that you could fire all your lawyers and hire 3x more engineers for the same price, and save a few forests (less paperwork) in the bargin.
The real result here would be that progress would be different. I think given our current technological situation that progress would net a fair gain, but some areas would slow drastically.
Anybody want to code up a solution to this dilema? Sure it would be a form letter, but click link, put in name and state, send . . should be easy enough, and it would let Congress know just how big the/. crowd is and how they feel.
might be interesting to see Congresses reaction too.
Correction to my post, word was country, not nation. Nation was on an intermediate draft.
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country; but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person."
Can't be his first, he missed the content of your post. May I elaborate?
...all men are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among these are life...
If you have a right to own your car, but are denied the means to prevent anyone else from taking it away, do you really have the right to own it? No. If you have a right to your life, but are denied the means to defend it, do you have the right to your life? No. Hence, the right to keep and bear arms, a right as individual as the right to life, is granted to you by your creator, (whoever that may be) not the second amendment, or anything else. And the ACLU, for whatever reason, has failed to protect that right, mostly because they listened to modern liberals instead of the 18th century ones* who are more than clear on what the second amendment was for.
*In the political jargon of the day, our founding fathers were radical liberals
The concept of the National Guard as it exists today didn't even exist.
Not true, the concept did exist then. It was called a select militia (see here see the second quote by richard henry lee) What you are correct about is the fact that this is not what was meant by 'militia' in the second amendment.
Slashdot Mirror
The national guard and reserve are part-time professional soldiers, as opposed to the army who are full-time professional soldiers. The 'militia' refered to in the second amendment is nothing more than the common people (not just the citizens) who happen to grab their guns and come when needed, whether called by the government or decide on their own that they are needed. This is basiclly what the militias of the time were.
your other points have already been adequately addressed.
I am going to quibble over this statement. The second amendment does not give anybody any rights, nor does any of the other amendments in the bill of rights. All rights are vested in the people, independant of and preexisting the government.
This is exactally the problem that most of those arguing against the bill of rights saw. They were afraid that by listing the rights that the people retained, (those that the people did not grant to the government) they might inadvertantly miss one or two important ones. And that by failing to list them people would then assume that they were not retained by the poeple.
As far as it goes though, you are dead right. The rights to keep and bear arms listed in the second amendment are distinctly individual, not collective rights. The term Madison used in the first draft of the second amendment was 'country' not state. It is mere concidence that the term state is also used to refer to the 50 States.
Israel/Palestine: IIRC all of the land that Israel currently ocupies (except the golan heights) was part of the original land Great Brittian gave them when it created Israel in 1949(?), so I do not believe it holds any land illegaly. More to the point though, I seriously doubt that giving up those lands would make peace. Peace will come to the area when a) all the arabs die or leave, b) all the jews die or leave, or c) all the arabs quit hating Israel and to a lesser extent the jews in Israel stop hating the arabs. I am not holding my breath.
The Iraqi millitants: It is my opinion that the Iraqi people, and to a large extent the arab world views the war to oust Hussien long over. The current fighting is a totally different war. They are simply trying to govern themselvs the way they know how, and we are in the way. That we are 'infedels' just makes it easier. Our culture has been developing around democratic and representative government ideas since before the greeks built Athens, the arabs have not. Our efforts to 'bring democracy to Iraq' are viewed as us imposing democracy on them, and it is appreciated about as much as we would appreciate Islam being imposed on us. It won't work. Also, Iraq's current borders were created by british decree, with no thought to the people living there. It should be split into 3 pieces, Kurds, Sunni and Shi'i, and be mostly left alone after that.
But, you see, fast or slow, it will still get worse, not better, and eventually there will be no freedom at all. Revololution will be the only option then. What we need to look for is some way of turning around. Support some third party.
If you live in a swing state, maby your course of action has some merit. I live in Utah. It's electoral votes will go to Bush, regardless how I vote. Voting for Kerry would throw my vote away just as as voting for Bush would. I will vote for someone else. This is the only way my vote could have any impact at all.
I agree with this, I just think that the best way to do this is . . . Send the kid home. Don't let him come back. (ie. make the parent responsible for the kids education in the first place, and merely provide a school if the parent wishes to use it. Scrap the mandatory education laws.)
Oh, and make the parent take care of the kid instead of the welfare. That should provide more than sufficient motivation to the parent! (only half serious on the last part . . .)
Thinking of myself as normal is nothing but trouble.
"You should feel lucky that your appetites led you to "play" with abstract ideas, visualizations, and relationships between things. It's disturbing how few people really have that appetite.
Disturbing? not sure that is the right term. You are right, it is rare, less than 10%. I think the world would be a better place if there were more. It sounds to me like you regularly deal with a few people who do have that appitite, and are surprised when you deal wiht other people. This isn't an unknown, Psycologists have done a lot of work in this area. google for Jung - Myer-Briggs personality stuff
"For most kids, if you give them a choice between an engaging, well-written book on meteorology or Greek history, or some teen-oriented high-school drama (are they still writing "Sweet Valley High" books?), they'll either take the fiction or kick you in the shins and demand to know where you've hidden Harry Potter.
Or throw the book at you and leave to play video games. Some people can't learn from books, even if the book is about something that they want badly to learn about, or even the Harry Potter books, dispite liking them. "I think there are a lot of different natural appetites." Yes, and sometimes so different that others can't understand them at all, and have to have it shoved in their face before they can recognise it. This 'can't learn from books' is my youngest brother.* If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it.
"If there were some way to really get across the importance of math and science, I think it would help. But some people don't naturally gravitate towards those things."
Actually, I think that they would, in their own way (which is not the way we think! I am looking at my siblings here, and how they have developed) if they were allowed to gravitate at all. But they usually are not. They are taught math from a text, written by a math professor, who views math as an end in itself, not the tool of hard science it is. This is the wrong way to teach math, even for those interested in the hard sciences, let alone for an accountant, or secretary or . . . My family was home schooled, so we had the option. While my specific example was not normal, they all (7 of us, one is still high-school age) mannaged to gravitate to stuff that they had appetites for, and learned the necessary subjects for them. It does work. (better than public school at least)
Last thought, do you think that teaching people to hate math and science (by cramming it down their throats when they are not ready/understand the need for it) is a good way to teach people the importance of them? Let them explore their areas of interest, learn for themselvs how math and science affect the stuff that they are interested in, and then come asking to be taught those parts they need?
*He is becomming a competent computer geek, records and compresses TV shows, and is getting quite good at it. Another couple of years and he will be a better PC tech than I am if I do not get busy. He already knows windoze far better than I (I run slackware, working on LFS...)
I do not trust unemployment numbers too much. Ever looked into how they are figured? At least in the US, they do not mean much.
People DO have to relearn everything each generation, because each generation starts by knowing NOTHING. We can just learn it from observation, or by asking the previous generation, as they already know it, an advantage that the first generation to learn it did not have.
As for your argument takling about the fuzzy math, I thought math was stupid and useless through most of high school. I saw no point in factoring all those dumb equations, or learning specialised ways to multiply equations and such. Useless and pointless. Then I tried AP calc. I liked. I saw a point. I could see how to actually use this stuff for something real. Then I found out what all that stupid math from previous years was for. Tools. Tools that let you get the equations into the form you need to get the calc stuff to work. A screwdriver is pretty useless-looking if you have never seen a screw.
My point here is that if someone had shown me from the start what you could do with calculus, at the same time I was 'playing' with the science books, (calc was created by physicists for physics. Isaac Newton no less) I would have learned both much better, and possibly faster. And I would not have wasted time on that stupid math stuff. But, of course my math scores would have plummeted. Math tests would be particularly badly suited for measuring this style of learning, and I would have started doing stuff way out of order. My guess is that the fuzzy math programs are flawed too, but not for the reasons you think.
Your core point of course is correct, the modern method of teaching sucks.
The reason that this is not used is all of our stupid mandatory education laws. Get rid of these and you get all of the kids who do not want to learn, and those kids that are better suited to an apprentice style education out of the classroom. That would have stunning effects on the quality of education for the rest of the kids in school.
No wonder diesels did not catch on.
But, don't you think bringing some congressman's email servers to their knees with legitimate form letters* wouldn't have some impact?? quantity over quality here.
*If all the /. crowd had to do was click a link or two to send it, and half as many did as normally read the article, this is what would happen.
I went to school at Utah State University. The Physics department had a green laser that they used for atmosperic research. It doesn't heat the air to do it, but it is certainly visible.
someone linked to that farther down the page, I just hadn't seen it yet. I sent my email. ;-)
or possibly as 'a bill that would make it impossible for photographers to protect their work without taking any real effort.'
"Progress will stop. No company will be able to justify the R&D expense."
No, both of these statements are wrong, because they are oversimplified. First off I am assuming that you are both talking about what would happen if both patents and copyrights were gone.
Progress would not stop. there would still be some bennifit to R&D. Even if it is gaurenteed that your competitors will copy your researsh fast enough to deny you any market advantage, both of you would still bennifit from, say, 50% cheaper CPU's, as the overall market would expand 'cause more people and applications can afford them. However the bennifit of R&D in this case is a lot less than it would be with patents, as you lose advantages over competitors. So here progress would slow, not speed up.
For other things progress would speed up, if for no other reason than that you could fire all your lawyers and hire 3x more engineers for the same price, and save a few forests (less paperwork) in the bargin.
The real result here would be that progress would be different. I think given our current technological situation that progress would net a fair gain, but some areas would slow drastically.
might be interesting to see Congresses reaction too.
You had it right in the first place.
On the other hand, anyone know if plexiglass is opaque to microwave frequencies?
Like, say, copyright does not apply to copy-protected works? I think that would work.
And they will probably get what they deserve!!
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country; but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person."
quote from here These are James Madison's words.
If you have a right to own your car, but are denied the means to prevent anyone else from taking it away, do you really have the right to own it? No. If you have a right to your life, but are denied the means to defend it, do you have the right to your life? No. Hence, the right to keep and bear arms, a right as individual as the right to life, is granted to you by your creator, (whoever that may be) not the second amendment, or anything else. And the ACLU, for whatever reason, has failed to protect that right, mostly because they listened to modern liberals instead of the 18th century ones* who are more than clear on what the second amendment was for.
*In the political jargon of the day, our founding fathers were radical liberals
The original version of the second amendment proposed to the first congress used the word 'nation' instead of 'state'. That is the correct definition.
Not true, the concept did exist then. It was called a select militia (see here see the second quote by richard henry lee) What you are correct about is the fact that this is not what was meant by 'militia' in the second amendment.