It might help to cite "real" evidence that actually supports your case.
If you want to know what Kleck thinks about the efficacy of gun control,./ers can read about it here and decide for themselves if this guy's quote is in proper context (when he mentions the 7 types of crime that are improved but leaves out the 90 that are not impacted or aggravated by gun control). The Chapeldine & Maurice paper (full abstract) isn't an empirical study at all (nor does it claim to be scholarly research of any sort), but a description of the policy position of a Quebecois bureaucracy. Not everything published in a journal is scholarly research; some things may be of interest to the audience for other reasons.
And to keep this more on-topic: Perhaps consumer-priced locks can be made more resistant to bumping by using stiffer springs on the shorter pins (if you used stiffer springs everywhere you wouldn't be able to insert the key, right?), and perhaps a throw weight that locks down an extra pin when the lock is bumped (much like the mechanism that grabs your seat belt when the high g's come). That would re-instate the requirement to have modicum of skill at least, without having to blow $100's per lock.
And moderators, please check the poster's facts before you mod informative. How long does it take to follow links and google keywords for chrissake?
Worse yet, my wife bought a dress and didn't find the inktag on it until a few weeks later. Where did we buy it? Where's the reciept? Fortuneately the tags are fairly easy to defeat...the flat end has an ink vial but the pointy half has a spring clutch. The store removes the tag by magnetically pulling the mechanism down against the spring force. To defeat it, hacksaw off the pointy tip and the spring will pop out, releasing the clutch.
I have used this NT password blanker floppy, & it works like an ace. The main drawback is it can't change the syskey-style password, you either have to (a) disable syskey and live with insecurely short LANMAN style passwords until the next OS reinstall, or (b) get a one-time shot at logging in as admin and then change your passwords again in the control panel.
My workplace does that lockout after short time-out...it doesn't do much when you have to tape the password on the monitor. It also makes it impossible to gracefully shut down the machine when someone else is logged in. I think the practice is a result of somebody reading Sarbanes-Oxley and freaking out. Can't blame 'em too much; if I had to read SarBox I probably would freak out too.
On sytems that don't put boneheaded limits on password length, you can strengthen the password at, in terms of human memory, no cost by simply typing the whole thing, and if you don't bother with caps or punctuation, it is not much longer or error prone to type. In your example: usetheinitialsofaprhasethatseasytoremember. Not as much entropy of the same number of random characters, but more than utioaptetr, which could also be underlinetheinitialsofaphrasethatseasytorealize.
I don't see that much reason to downgrade to 9.0...you have to download about 100 security updates separately and don't really save any bloat that you couldn't save by running xfce on the latest Slack. This laptop is PIII-500 and runs Slack 10/KDE just fine with 256 MB of RAM. When I had 128 MB I usually ran xfce. Now, if you are running a really old laptop you might have to go back to Slack 7.1 for the/x packages; the later versions dropped support for framebuffer chipsets found on 486/Pentium 1 laptops (in which case your best bet is fvwm rather than xfce). But everything else can be from the latest Slack. Why run an old kernel and no Firefox?
By the way, forget Openoffice or even Abiword on really old hardware. The best you can do is Ted, an RTF editor, but it does allow you to interoperate with MSWord and Win PC's a little bit.
Sales on the gun auction sites (of actual firearms at least) are generally restricted to FFL holders (that's a Federal Firearm License) and ship only to the address on record for the FFL. Getting an FFL isn't all that hard: you gotta pay a few hundred bucks for a background check and some more each year to keep it active, oh, and not be a convicted felon or any of that. Some sites have a helpful link to find an FFL near you who can recieve shipments on your behalf, and then give it to you once you flash your ID and pass the Brady Bill check. I'm too lazy to look it up but I think there are over 10,000 FFL's out there. A while ago the Clinton administration wanted to bump up the fee drastically as a sort of back-door gun control measure, but that sounded like a tax hike on small business (plus there really isn't a popular consensus clamoring for gun control in the US anymore) and the idea died out.
Where it gets complicated is state and local ordinances. If Joe Schmoe lives in Vermont, he can buy a gun from anyone else in VT without having to drive more than a couple hours, to appear in person and flash his ID (if he's buying from an FFL holder...if he's buying from some other Joe who sells less than 3 guns a year I don't think he needs to do even that), but he can't buy a gun in DC at all. And everywhere else at all places in-between. Not insurmountable (I believe the NRA keeps a current data base on what laws are where), and an auction site isn't really responsible for the finer points of local laws not in the site's local jurisdiction anyhow.
Ebay could list firearms legally, but they don't either because they would then have to guard their deep pockets against dumb-ass vicarious liability lawsuits (this is why you can't list an OEM disk of Windows), or they think it would be too much bad PR (as is the case with soiled underwear). Or maybe they don't want to offend national governments that ban personal firearms (much like the case with Nazi stuff). Yahoo & Overstock won't list firearms either.
Another example of a niche-market opening for auction competitors: guns, guns, and more guns. And yep, Brit Guns. The firearm auction scene has developed very rapidly over the past year or so, consolidating from a rag-tag of primitive sites to a handful of featureful well-trafficked sites (some of them virtual clones of ebay).
It's a perfect situation: the nature of the merchandise (lots of used stuff that is still valuable) lends itself to bidding, and big-ticket auctions are limited to FFL holders, so regular schmoes have to bid through a local gun shop, helping to mitigate trust issues.
For those not picking up the inside joke, the reference is to Army of Darkness, where the oh-so-regular-guy played by Bruce Campbell is a manager at S-Mart and is transported back to a Swords & Sorcery style adventure. Good thing he kept a chainsaw in the trunk of his Chevy.
I think you also have to factor in how population is distributed. Everywhere in Europe I have been, even the rural population tends to be clustered in small towns whereas American cities tend to gradually thin out from city to burb to exurb.
Whether this has driven infrastructure policy (not just power but also mass transit, inter-city train, and mobile phone) or the other way around is hard to say though.
Point: Europeans' affinity for land use regulation made the cities grow outward very regularly, maintaining distinct edges.
Counterpoint: Lowered standards of living brought about by the destruction of WW2 delayed the popularity of the auto and outsized McMansions, keeping the cities compact. Or language barriers made the population less mobile, slowing new house construction and slowing migration to the city edges.
Point: American Cold War policy of drilling interstate highways straight into city centers (to facilitate evacuation in case of nuclear attack) acclerated population flight to the suburbs.
Counterpoint: Maybe the American ideal of rugged individualism contributed more.
And conditions in Iowa do affect how infrastructure is built in Boston. The cost of developing technology, equipment, and standards was spread over a smaller market. That makes the cost differential more. Maybe not with the global market we have today, but the global market for this sort of equipment is new compared to the average age of power line installations.
FWIW, I removed a perfectly functional 40-yr old arial from my house last year and replaced it with buried cable. A previous owner had installed a pool under it, violating code. It costed more than a re-routed arial, but I think it was worth is for aesthetic reasons. The house-to-house is still arial but that is not so bad when the wires are behind the houses.
Speaking of things missing, where is the corpse of MS Bob? More seriously (though still not all that serious) where is OpenDOC vs. MSOffice? Earlier maps showed some lateral movements, like Corel joining up with Linux, liberated territory, and Apple being doubly enveloped by $150 million & MSOffice, making for a more interesting-looking map.
Oh, I sure you're right. I coughed up the extra for a 2.5 incher myself. Maybe the motherboard hack I'm thinking of was to accommodate hard-coded references to DF0:. I booted up my 1200 a couple days ago to retrieve an old photo...still use her occasionally since I never bothered setting up a fax/modem, or have room for a floppy drive, on my Linux box.
Heh, I put 9 paritions on my hard drive, so each is small enough to be backed up to a Zip disk. 100 MB for the OS install is plenty. Imagine my dismay when installing Linux on a PC for the first time. Only four partitions without resorting to a hack?
To give an historical perspective on this, the Amiga 1200 had room for only a 2.5" drive inside its wedgie keyboard/case. Hacks to put in a 3.5" drive (bumping out the internal floppy drive) were quite common. You had the choice of losing the ability to boot from floppy without cracking open the case, or hacking the motherboard (with an exacto-knife and jumper wires, if I remember correctly) to boot from an external floppy.
That is why the size of the capital is limited to "10 miles square". The founders expected DC to be something like a military base, self-contained and disconnected from the local politics. They didn't anticipate the colossal size of today's federal gov't; in fact they wanted to prevent it. The seat of gov't today is now spread out all over MD and northern VA, while most of DC is a colony of urban blight. The locigal solution (to me) is to reduce the size of DC to just the capitol, white house, and federal gov't buildings between. The rest of DC would revert back to MD like Arlington county in the 1860's.
But I would guess MD doesn't want it back. Maybe a $10 billion dowry is called for.
Most of the states I've filed in (they would all be eastern/midwest states) seem to have bilateral agreemtments with bordering states. It didn't help me when I earned income in two non-bordering states; the usual solution there was to compute your tax and then pro-rate for the fraction earned in each state, but I don't remember these rules always being consistent. The gov't of NY has probably decided that they would lose out on these agreements (though perhaps wrongly in the long term...witness the flight of financial firms to NJ & New England).
Man, you think regular income tax is bad, try filing 3 or 4 state returns, where the rules for filing and accounting for which income goes where (or whether you have to file or not) are vague. Arrgh!
Not quite so simple...should airline employees and truck drivers file 48 state tax returns every year? I spent 7 weeks last year in China, but I don't get a pro-rated tax.
Having said all that, NY truly is notorious for taxing income based on the slimmest legal nexus. California is bad about taxing overseas earnings of multinational corporations. US ex-patriates have a hard time escaping federal income tax (compared to Europeans at least...but that may be more a result of Europe's multi-state political landscape, making the ex-patriate situation more common & therefore more logically addressed). Income tax and cross-border commuting are too new for common-law principles to have been worked out for these situations.
No need for the commerce clause, this is more directly an expression of Article 4, Section 1
Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.
It is naturally a federal power to prescribe under which state's jurisdiction income is earned.
Of course they could use the commerce clause anyway, since under current precedent the commerce clause authorizes just about anything.
But is it really fair to write-off Mach's problems as implementation? After all, we we could write-off Windows' poor security as implementation, insofar as each security hole can be attributed to a buffer overflow, too much trust of user data, or some such. I would say the the lesson from Windows is that it is unrealistic to expect the required level of code quality, even from legions of top-notch talent, if the architecture is as bad as Windows'.
In a similar vein, maybe a divinely inspired programmer can spec out the perfect message passaging schema from God, but until mere mortal CS PhD's actually do it, the rest of us are doubting Thomases.
At the risk of overworking my Christian metaphors, perhaps microkernels are an example of creationism. How do you spec out the required message passing until you have experience with the implentation? How do you revise the message passing to fix problems without breaking the implementation?
I seem to find this microkernel vs. monolithic argument a bit a of a false dichotomy. Micorkernels are just at one end of a modularity vs. $other_goal trade-off. There are a thousand steps in-between. So we see implementations (like the Amiga for example) that are almost microkernels, at which the purists shout objections (the Amiga permits interrupt handlers that bypass the OS-supplied services, for example). We also see utter kludges (Windows for example) improve their modularity as backwards compatibility and monopolizing marketing tactics permit (not much, but you have to say things have improved since Win3.1).
When viewed as a Platonic Ideal, a microkernel architechture is a useful way to think about an OS, but most real-world applications will have to make compromises for compatibility, performance, quirky hardware, schedule, marketing glitz, and so on. That's just the way it is.
In other words, I'd rather have a microkernel than a monolithic kernel, but I would rather have a monolithic kernel that does what I need (runs my software, runs on my hardware, runs fast) that a micokernel that sits in a lab. It is more realistic to ask for a kernel that is more microkernel-like, but still does what I need.
Band-O, now there's a word I haven't encountered in a while. For those not familiar with drum corps slang, the term refers to the naive attitudes that new D&B recruits bring with them from their high school marching bands.
There is a bit of a niche market where pagers will live on for some time. And the killer feature not available anywhere else is the fact that it works in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. I speak, of course, of satellite pager service.
Palms also do cyrillic quite well. Cyrillic isn't too bad on a full-size keyboard, but having 33 letters means some punctuation marks are re-purposed as letters. But those keys are missing from the thumb boards. My Russian translator's keyboard is just fine though. I can't imagine a graceful way to make a cyrillic thumb board without adding just a few more keys or re-arranging the placement.
The point is: Graffiti-like input can be software-optimized, while thumb-boards are hardware-optimized for a certain language. So Japanese key-driven gizmos (for example) don't work well in other languages, but the same Palm hardware can be sold worldwide.
Well, we has this one, that permitted execution of shell commands. Basically, FF behaved like it had ActiveX, which, in the Linux world, is considered a bug, not a feature. Found in the wild? Proof-of-concept exploit? I doubt it.
http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/mfsa2005- 59.html
You get to a point of diminishing returns with that sort of stuff. By piling on safety regulations on the installed wiring, you make installed outlets more expensive, & that creates an incentive to use more extension cords , power strips, and outlet multipliers. I would think it is exceedingly rare for in-house wiring built, to code, even by the standards of the 1970's to start a fire. It's out-of-code modifications by the residents, and all those extension cords, and yes, superannuated appliances, that start all the fires.
If you look at changes to the NEC in the last 30 years, there are a lot of changes that make unsafe mods more difficult (requiring conduit or ground bonding for example) or make it less likely for a DIY'er to make common mistakes (more user-friendly terminal types).
And higher mains voltage is a double-edged sword. It reduces the fire hazard but increases the shock hazard. Pick your poinson...
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If you want to know what Kleck thinks about the efficacy of gun control, ./ers can read about it here and decide for themselves if this guy's quote is in proper context (when he mentions the 7 types of crime that are improved but leaves out the 90 that are not impacted or aggravated by gun control). The Chapeldine & Maurice paper (full abstract) isn't an empirical study at all (nor does it claim to be scholarly research of any sort), but a description of the policy position of a Quebecois bureaucracy. Not everything published in a journal is scholarly research; some things may be of interest to the audience for other reasons.
And to keep this more on-topic: Perhaps consumer-priced locks can be made more resistant to bumping by using stiffer springs on the shorter pins (if you used stiffer springs everywhere you wouldn't be able to insert the key, right?), and perhaps a throw weight that locks down an extra pin when the lock is bumped (much like the mechanism that grabs your seat belt when the high g's come). That would re-instate the requirement to have modicum of skill at least, without having to blow $100's per lock.
And moderators, please check the poster's facts before you mod informative. How long does it take to follow links and google keywords for chrissake?
Worse yet, my wife bought a dress and didn't find the inktag on it until a few weeks later. Where did we buy it? Where's the reciept? Fortuneately the tags are fairly easy to defeat...the flat end has an ink vial but the pointy half has a spring clutch. The store removes the tag by magnetically pulling the mechanism down against the spring force. To defeat it, hacksaw off the pointy tip and the spring will pop out, releasing the clutch.
I have used this NT password blanker floppy, & it works like an ace. The main drawback is it can't change the syskey-style password, you either have to (a) disable syskey and live with insecurely short LANMAN style passwords until the next OS reinstall, or (b) get a one-time shot at logging in as admin and then change your passwords again in the control panel.
My workplace does that lockout after short time-out...it doesn't do much when you have to tape the password on the monitor. It also makes it impossible to gracefully shut down the machine when someone else is logged in. I think the practice is a result of somebody reading Sarbanes-Oxley and freaking out. Can't blame 'em too much; if I had to read SarBox I probably would freak out too.
On sytems that don't put boneheaded limits on password length, you can strengthen the password at, in terms of human memory, no cost by simply typing the whole thing, and if you don't bother with caps or punctuation, it is not much longer or error prone to type. In your example: usetheinitialsofaprhasethatseasytoremember. Not as much entropy of the same number of random characters, but more than utioaptetr, which could also be underlinetheinitialsofaphrasethatseasytorealize.
By the way, forget Openoffice or even Abiword on really old hardware. The best you can do is Ted, an RTF editor, but it does allow you to interoperate with MSWord and Win PC's a little bit.
Where it gets complicated is state and local ordinances. If Joe Schmoe lives in Vermont, he can buy a gun from anyone else in VT without having to drive more than a couple hours, to appear in person and flash his ID (if he's buying from an FFL holder...if he's buying from some other Joe who sells less than 3 guns a year I don't think he needs to do even that), but he can't buy a gun in DC at all. And everywhere else at all places in-between. Not insurmountable (I believe the NRA keeps a current data base on what laws are where), and an auction site isn't really responsible for the finer points of local laws not in the site's local jurisdiction anyhow.
Ebay could list firearms legally, but they don't either because they would then have to guard their deep pockets against dumb-ass vicarious liability lawsuits (this is why you can't list an OEM disk of Windows), or they think it would be too much bad PR (as is the case with soiled underwear). Or maybe they don't want to offend national governments that ban personal firearms (much like the case with Nazi stuff). Yahoo & Overstock won't list firearms either.
It's a perfect situation: the nature of the merchandise (lots of used stuff that is still valuable) lends itself to bidding, and big-ticket auctions are limited to FFL holders, so regular schmoes have to bid through a local gun shop, helping to mitigate trust issues.
Ebay refuses to list firearms.
For those not picking up the inside joke, the reference is to Army of Darkness, where the oh-so-regular-guy played by Bruce Campbell is a manager at S-Mart and is transported back to a Swords & Sorcery style adventure. Good thing he kept a chainsaw in the trunk of his Chevy.
Whether this has driven infrastructure policy (not just power but also mass transit, inter-city train, and mobile phone) or the other way around is hard to say though.
And conditions in Iowa do affect how infrastructure is built in Boston. The cost of developing technology, equipment, and standards was spread over a smaller market. That makes the cost differential more. Maybe not with the global market we have today, but the global market for this sort of equipment is new compared to the average age of power line installations.
FWIW, I removed a perfectly functional 40-yr old arial from my house last year and replaced it with buried cable. A previous owner had installed a pool under it, violating code. It costed more than a re-routed arial, but I think it was worth is for aesthetic reasons. The house-to-house is still arial but that is not so bad when the wires are behind the houses.
Maybe it will be updated in time for the dupe.
Heh, I put 9 paritions on my hard drive, so each is small enough to be backed up to a Zip disk. 100 MB for the OS install is plenty. Imagine my dismay when installing Linux on a PC for the first time. Only four partitions without resorting to a hack?
To give an historical perspective on this, the Amiga 1200 had room for only a 2.5" drive inside its wedgie keyboard/case. Hacks to put in a 3.5" drive (bumping out the internal floppy drive) were quite common. You had the choice of losing the ability to boot from floppy without cracking open the case, or hacking the motherboard (with an exacto-knife and jumper wires, if I remember correctly) to boot from an external floppy.
Next time, do what I do whenever I'm in Chicago: order an inch-thick pizza. That might ease your mind.
But I would guess MD doesn't want it back. Maybe a $10 billion dowry is called for.
Man, you think regular income tax is bad, try filing 3 or 4 state returns, where the rules for filing and accounting for which income goes where (or whether you have to file or not) are vague. Arrgh!
Having said all that, NY truly is notorious for taxing income based on the slimmest legal nexus. California is bad about taxing overseas earnings of multinational corporations. US ex-patriates have a hard time escaping federal income tax (compared to Europeans at least...but that may be more a result of Europe's multi-state political landscape, making the ex-patriate situation more common & therefore more logically addressed). Income tax and cross-border commuting are too new for common-law principles to have been worked out for these situations.
Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.
It is naturally a federal power to prescribe under which state's jurisdiction income is earned. Of course they could use the commerce clause anyway, since under current precedent the commerce clause authorizes just about anything.
In a similar vein, maybe a divinely inspired programmer can spec out the perfect message passaging schema from God, but until mere mortal CS PhD's actually do it, the rest of us are doubting Thomases.
At the risk of overworking my Christian metaphors, perhaps microkernels are an example of creationism. How do you spec out the required message passing until you have experience with the implentation? How do you revise the message passing to fix problems without breaking the implementation?
When viewed as a Platonic Ideal, a microkernel architechture is a useful way to think about an OS, but most real-world applications will have to make compromises for compatibility, performance, quirky hardware, schedule, marketing glitz, and so on. That's just the way it is.
In other words, I'd rather have a microkernel than a monolithic kernel, but I would rather have a monolithic kernel that does what I need (runs my software, runs on my hardware, runs fast) that a micokernel that sits in a lab. It is more realistic to ask for a kernel that is more microkernel-like, but still does what I need.
Band-O, now there's a word I haven't encountered in a while. For those not familiar with drum corps slang, the term refers to the naive attitudes that new D&B recruits bring with them from their high school marching bands.
There is a bit of a niche market where pagers will live on for some time. And the killer feature not available anywhere else is the fact that it works in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. I speak, of course, of satellite pager service.
The point is: Graffiti-like input can be software-optimized, while thumb-boards are hardware-optimized for a certain language. So Japanese key-driven gizmos (for example) don't work well in other languages, but the same Palm hardware can be sold worldwide.
Well, we has this one, that permitted execution of shell commands. Basically, FF behaved like it had ActiveX, which, in the Linux world, is considered a bug, not a feature. Found in the wild? Proof-of-concept exploit? I doubt it. http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/mfsa2005- 59.html
If you look at changes to the NEC in the last 30 years, there are a lot of changes that make unsafe mods more difficult (requiring conduit or ground bonding for example) or make it less likely for a DIY'er to make common mistakes (more user-friendly terminal types).
And higher mains voltage is a double-edged sword. It reduces the fire hazard but increases the shock hazard. Pick your poinson...