The government cannot, even if it was an efficient machine protect you with any reliability, it is immoral to take from you the right to try and do it yourself.
Reminds me of this truism: "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away"
Well regulated, in the parlance of the times, meant that they would show up with x amount of shot, powder, a weapon to use same, change of socks, etc. It was used the same way "regulator" is used as a clock trademark. It didn't mean bossed around; it meant consistently supplied and prepared. This is explicitly laid out in legislation from the time. The point of the 2nd being made was that people required the freedom to keep an bear arms if they were to form up in a well prepared and supplied manner.
We're still pretty well regulated in that sense. A very large number of US citizens could show up with a rifle and cartridges for same if called upon to do so. Be quite a few handguns, too, and a wide assortment of other weapons that aren't classed as firearms at all. But that's the 2nd for you: arms. Not just firearms, but arms.
It's because we don't have the intent (or the political will, if it came to that) to actually "win" in the classic sense. That's not why we're there, and you will never, ever see it happen in Afghanistan, which is a resource rich state we are trying very hard to subvert for the obvious reasons.
Back to arms in the US, same thing applies: Come (the very unlikely event of) an armed revolt, do you *really* think the government has the political will to try to crush those people with heavy weapons in general use? I highly, sincerely doubt it. Furthermore, I doubt that the soldiers tasked with such a thing would be very happy about it at all, and suspect this would cause more trouble than the actual revolt. "Bomb Allentown? MY FUCKING SISTER/(kid's teacher, dog's vet, preacher, wife's brother, etc.) LIVES IN ALLENTOWN!" And so forth. My conclusion is you'd have more of a sniper / brush war than anything else, and those are messy enough. It's very, very difficult to suppress combatants that are distributed and know the territory better than you do and you really can't use heavy weapons. When there's less than 3.5 million government fighters (that counts all US military branches, and all reservists, and all police forces) and about 200 million or so (leaving out toddlers) potential revolutionaries, and you really can't bomb your own infrastructure and supply lines into debris... well, you have a very serious set of tactical and strategic problems. There's unlikely to be a path to an easy win no matter what a brilliant leader in the field you might have on tap. Jets and tanks? Pretty much useless. It'd be all about infantry, and I have to say, some pretty damned unhappy infantry at that.
The whole "gummint got da big guns" and so revolt is impossible meme is the product of extremely simplistic analysis (if you can even call it analysis.)
It was a stupid argument then, and it's a stupid argument now. The 2nd refers specifically to the militia, who armed themselves, and while the "well regulated" bit does imply that a basic standard of weapons is really best at a minimum, if a militia member showed up with a couple donkeys or horses pulling a cannon, or tied a small, well-armed (cannons, etc.) vessel up to the nearest river pier, likely they'd be given a joyous welcome at the time.
The 2nd doesn't specify "guns", it says arms. Arms, at the time the 2nd was written, included (among other things): all manner of pistols, rifles, muskets, cannons, explosive and solid cannonballs, cannonballs filled with shards, frigates with multiple decks of cannon, wagons with explosives and multiple guns rigged to fire in unison, chain shot, flaming missiles soaked with pitch and other inflammable, easily spread and hard to extinguish compounds, swords, knives, bayonets, fighting canes, brass knuckles, battering rams, catapults, siege towers, glass bottles, garrotes, whips, chains, both fused and mechanically triggered explosives, striking weapons like sticks and poles and quarterstaffs and maces and war-hammers, spears, bows, axes, arrows and crossbows... I could go on for quite some time. All of these things were in common use in warfare and self-defense at the time. Yet, knowing all these things, all they put in the 2nd amendment was “arms.” So clearly, that’s what they meant. Arms of any kind. They didn’t say “muskets and pistols.” They said arms.
Miller vs. US is a prime example of people who have very little knowledge or skill trying to alter the intent of the framers. Unfortunately, the judge wasn't any better informed, and congress has been creating legislation in a highly unconstitutional manner ever since.
Actually, the vast majority of the time, when a firearm is involved in a killing, it's the bullets that kill people. Excepting the occasional bludgeoning with the firearm itself.
That may be so, but what this amounts to is closing a door we just managed to open for small operations. Here we go again, only ops with access to big business resources will typically be able to meet these proposed criteria. If you had doubt that big business interests drive our legislation, this should help resolve those doubts. Small operations can pose a huge threat because they are, at times, considerably quicker off the mark than your average corporation with its bean counters, lawyers, middle management, reviews, and HR making sure you only get the most mediocre employees possible.
This is mommy government at its typical get-in-the-way pursuits. The problem is, aside from complaining in fora like this one, there isn't much we can do about it unless some interested party's got deeper pockets than the corporations. Not too likely, seems to me.
Get back to me in 20 years and compare notes, shall we?
Why would I do that? I didn't set a 20 year horizon. You did. (Other than the joke about fusion.... you got that, right? LOL and all? Fusion is always 20 years out) So go meet yourself and have a self-congrats fest with your strawman. It'd be meaningless to me.
Cloning isn't viable over the long term, even if you made it so, that implies a stagnant society.
Let's make some different, very likely, assumptions. Today's nascent cloning technology is unlikely to even slightly resemble that of the future; today's human (and pet) genome, with all of its flaws, is unlikely to resemble that of the future; We'll no longer be farming animals for food, perhaps not even vegetables; AI will be here, as will robotics without AI (service class machinery); planets orbiting stars will not be the only viable human environment; technology in general will be almost unrecognizable in its power and efficacy; a system of more than enough for everyone will replace a labor based economy; overall, just with those few changes, no prediction based on today's extant situation is likely to come even close. Life spans may be quite extended. And that's not even counting the unpredictable changes -- for instance, in 1900, even later, no one had any idea what silicon electronics would do for us. Near term major change tech includes ultracaps, fusion (20 years out, no doubt at all, lol), driverless vehicles, significantly better building materials, the erosion of superstition and the rise of generations focused on objective reality instead of imaginary friends.
if you're super wealthy and going to space are you going to take all the scumbags hanging out on the street with you?
Wealth only has meaning in an economy of scarcity. I strongly suspect that the latter is going away, which in turn will eliminate the former. It's just going to be a very rocky transition. For my part, I live far better than my parents did, expect to live longer, am healthier, and have far more cool stuff. And that's within a wealth-based economy. And the funny thing? My parents had considerably more money.:)
As for "scumbags", if people have enough resources, and the genome is cleaned up to eliminate stupidity, ugliness, weak critical thinking skills and greed, why would there be any?
Postulate: Innocent kid is about to get run over by a bus. You can easily save her -- no more effort than lifting a finger. You don't. That makes you an evil, low,useless fuck, worthy only of hanging by the neck until dead.
Get it now? If you are able, but not willing, you are malevolent.
My (free) SDR [Software Defined Radio] software has, rather than a command line interface (since it isn't invoke to process, but invoke and continue to run to process), a network interface. Open a port, ask it for status and/or data, send it commands, etc.
I've interfaced it with other SDRs, remotely tunable antennas, and full on transceivers via this network interface. Commands are essentially text, other than you send them through the port.
Another thing is that regardless of which platform the SDR software is running on, you can talk to it from any other platform, because it's just a network connection. It's easily driven from any scripting language with network facilities, for instance Python interfacing is a doddle.
I love the idea of command line tools, because those are things I can use to leverage this kind of interface. Talk to a mapping application? Just feed the guy's callsign to a ham radio db, get the coordinates back, feed them to the mapping app, bingo, map. Etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_Jesus [given as example of contemporaneous witness]
Non-contemporaneous. Josephus, AKA Yosef Ben Matityahu A.D. (37 ~100+). Not at all contemporaneous with the time Christ was reported (by the bible) to have lived. There's no overlap at all. Christ would have died before Josephus was even born. So he won't do -- he's in the exact same position of someone born after the Heaven's Gate UFO cult had come and gone, attesting to the reality of the UFO itself, even though he never could have seen it himself, even to the extent that the UFO probably never existed at all, just as there is no actual evidence for Christ -- so far -- except the existence of the cult itself.
Of course religion can be misused by evil men, there is nothing in the world that can't be.
Agreed. However, my point is that the vast majority of religion, and particularly Christianity, is inherently evil. Christianity espouses (and worse, imposes) many harmful ideas in the name of a constipated, selfish morality. I have said many times, and will repeat here for the benefit of this conversation, that if Christians kept their craziness out of the legal system and out of government, I'd have no particular objection to any adult practicing/believing. Or, if they eschewed the craziness entirely and simply quietly worshipped with no attempts to enforce those ideas on others. However, that's not the case. From blue laws to sex to words we can or can't say to bibles in the courtroom and 6000-year old planet myths as (supposedly) science in schools, Christianity is highly active as an invasive, harmful force. It is in that role that I object to it most strongly. It has a terrible, dark history of interfering with other people's lives; I take that as a strong cautionary note, one that can be seen still echoing and taking root in modern society.
For those interested in photography though, check [Google+] out. It is worth it.
Better than flickr? How? Aside from the fact that Google's history is rife with services they've set up and then discontinued, and the whole Real Name thing...
flickr's got some shortcomings too -- inability to really curate groups or favorites, and the limits of galleries, for instance -- but I've not yet heard of anyone really addressing those issues elsewhere. Perhaps Google+ has?
your comment is not only barely on-topic (you only used the topic to bash religion)
The summary made a strong point of putting religion up as a significant part of the story. I responded to that, and to its inappropriate mixing with a major scientific and technological achievement. If you think that's "off-topic", then you don't know a topic when you see one. What I posted was on-topic, highly relevant temporally, and served as a fine conversation starter, which, you may recall, is what this place is all about. Controversial? Sure. Christians hate having their religion dragged out in the daylight, and I don't blame them -- it's really a mess. Also, don't blame me for your incoherent, ad homonym ridden failure to make a cogent response thus far. That's on you.
What is wrong with a religious scientist using religion to celebrate a scientific achievement that caused him (and many others) to have a religious experience?
What's wrong with it??? Religion is a horrible thing. Look at what it's done to our legal system; look at the crusades, the inquisitions, exorcisms, "witch" burnings, blood libel, repression of women, vilification of sexuality, promotion of slavery, invasion of the educational system with utter nonsense like creationism, utter tripe like can't eat shellfish, wear mixed fibers, have sex with someone of your own gender, flights into buildings, clinic bombings, usurpation (and narrow-minded restriction) of the very idea of marriage... I could go on and on. If it were just that religion is bunk, that'd be bad enough. But religion is toxic. That's what's really wrong with it. It's not just another easter bunny story -- the easter bunny is not a force for evil, very much unlike religion in general.
Your troll is especially offensive being posted on Christians' most holy day
Most holy day, eh? Christ, if he existed (there's no evidence for that), wasn't born on the 25th -- or even in December, according to the most authoritative Christian estimates. This date, Dec 25th, is arbitrary, except in that had the benefit (to Christians) in that it usurped other, already extant festivals. Santa isn't a Christian symbol. The tree isn't a Christian symbol. Commercialism and gift giving isn't a Christian symbol. All Christmas is, is a massive implosion of identity confusion among the deluded. The vast majority of Christians (including you, obviously) don't even know what day should be "most holy", because their little book of mythology is a compendium of copies of magical stories made hundreds of years after the initial birth of the cult, contradicts itself repeatedly, lacks validation by even one direct, contemporaneous witness, and contains almost no information about the magic man at the center of the story from his purported youth. It's no wonder Christians had to make something up.
Finally, I will say this: I will stop complaining about Christianity when they get their greasy little fingers out of United States legislation. What's that? They have every right to meddle with our laws? Well, that's (highly) debatable, but let's go with the assumption that it is so: I have every right as well to speak my mind, and that's not debatable. I don't hide behind political correctness, I don't pretend something is ok when it appears to me by every indicator to be toxic, and I certainly am not going to support some nonsense where attempts are made to mix objective facts with superstitious balderdash in the name of science.
Are you going to say the Holocaust didn't happen this coming passover? It's the same damned thing, asshole.
Aside from the blatantly transparent attempt to put words in my mouth and the superfluous name-calling, no. Hitler's backing faith was Christianity, mixed liberally with other random superstitions -- this is well documented. His pacts with the
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of this truism: "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away"
Well regulated, in the parlance of the times, meant that they would show up with x amount of shot, powder, a weapon to use same, change of socks, etc. It was used the same way "regulator" is used as a clock trademark. It didn't mean bossed around; it meant consistently supplied and prepared. This is explicitly laid out in legislation from the time. The point of the 2nd being made was that people required the freedom to keep an bear arms if they were to form up in a well prepared and supplied manner.
We're still pretty well regulated in that sense. A very large number of US citizens could show up with a rifle and cartridges for same if called upon to do so. Be quite a few handguns, too, and a wide assortment of other weapons that aren't classed as firearms at all. But that's the 2nd for you: arms. Not just firearms, but arms.
It's because we don't have the intent (or the political will, if it came to that) to actually "win" in the classic sense. That's not why we're there, and you will never, ever see it happen in Afghanistan, which is a resource rich state we are trying very hard to subvert for the obvious reasons.
Back to arms in the US, same thing applies: Come (the very unlikely event of) an armed revolt, do you *really* think the government has the political will to try to crush those people with heavy weapons in general use? I highly, sincerely doubt it. Furthermore, I doubt that the soldiers tasked with such a thing would be very happy about it at all, and suspect this would cause more trouble than the actual revolt. "Bomb Allentown? MY FUCKING SISTER/(kid's teacher, dog's vet, preacher, wife's brother, etc.) LIVES IN ALLENTOWN!" And so forth. My conclusion is you'd have more of a sniper / brush war than anything else, and those are messy enough. It's very, very difficult to suppress combatants that are distributed and know the territory better than you do and you really can't use heavy weapons. When there's less than 3.5 million government fighters (that counts all US military branches, and all reservists, and all police forces) and about 200 million or so (leaving out toddlers) potential revolutionaries, and you really can't bomb your own infrastructure and supply lines into debris... well, you have a very serious set of tactical and strategic problems. There's unlikely to be a path to an easy win no matter what a brilliant leader in the field you might have on tap. Jets and tanks? Pretty much useless. It'd be all about infantry, and I have to say, some pretty damned unhappy infantry at that.
The whole "gummint got da big guns" and so revolt is impossible meme is the product of extremely simplistic analysis (if you can even call it analysis.)
It was a stupid argument then, and it's a stupid argument now. The 2nd refers specifically to the militia, who armed themselves, and while the "well regulated" bit does imply that a basic standard of weapons is really best at a minimum, if a militia member showed up with a couple donkeys or horses pulling a cannon, or tied a small, well-armed (cannons, etc.) vessel up to the nearest river pier, likely they'd be given a joyous welcome at the time.
The 2nd doesn't specify "guns", it says arms. Arms, at the time the 2nd was written, included (among other things): all manner of pistols, rifles, muskets, cannons, explosive and solid cannonballs, cannonballs filled with shards, frigates with multiple decks of cannon, wagons with explosives and multiple guns rigged to fire in unison, chain shot, flaming missiles soaked with pitch and other inflammable, easily spread and hard to extinguish compounds, swords, knives, bayonets, fighting canes, brass knuckles, battering rams, catapults, siege towers, glass bottles, garrotes, whips, chains, both fused and mechanically triggered explosives, striking weapons like sticks and poles and quarterstaffs and maces and war-hammers, spears, bows, axes, arrows and crossbows... I could go on for quite some time. All of these things were in common use in warfare and self-defense at the time. Yet, knowing all these things, all they put in the 2nd amendment was “arms.” So clearly, that’s what they meant. Arms of any kind. They didn’t say “muskets and pistols.” They said arms.
Miller vs. US is a prime example of people who have very little knowledge or skill trying to alter the intent of the framers. Unfortunately, the judge wasn't any better informed, and congress has been creating legislation in a highly unconstitutional manner ever since.
Actually, the vast majority of the time, when a firearm is involved in a killing, it's the bullets that kill people. Excepting the occasional bludgeoning with the firearm itself.
They'll probably never give you mod points again, but thanks anyway, appreciate it. :)
That may be so, but what this amounts to is closing a door we just managed to open for small operations. Here we go again, only ops with access to big business resources will typically be able to meet these proposed criteria. If you had doubt that big business interests drive our legislation, this should help resolve those doubts. Small operations can pose a huge threat because they are, at times, considerably quicker off the mark than your average corporation with its bean counters, lawyers, middle management, reviews, and HR making sure you only get the most mediocre employees possible.
This is mommy government at its typical get-in-the-way pursuits. The problem is, aside from complaining in fora like this one, there isn't much we can do about it unless some interested party's got deeper pockets than the corporations. Not too likely, seems to me.
ah, slashdots most fun thing: moderators on crack.
Hi modz!
Why would I do that? I didn't set a 20 year horizon. You did. (Other than the joke about fusion.... you got that, right? LOL and all? Fusion is always 20 years out) So go meet yourself and have a self-congrats fest with your strawman. It'd be meaningless to me.
If you think yanking, for instance, Alzheimer’s, from the genome is "genocide", you have failed to engage your brain.
Some genes are bad. The whole meme that the genome is, or should be, untouchable is utter horseshit. Politically correct dung.
Does it need to be done with care? Of course. No one has suggested otherwise.
Let's make some different, very likely, assumptions. Today's nascent cloning technology is unlikely to even slightly resemble that of the future; today's human (and pet) genome, with all of its flaws, is unlikely to resemble that of the future; We'll no longer be farming animals for food, perhaps not even vegetables; AI will be here, as will robotics without AI (service class machinery); planets orbiting stars will not be the only viable human environment; technology in general will be almost unrecognizable in its power and efficacy; a system of more than enough for everyone will replace a labor based economy; overall, just with those few changes, no prediction based on today's extant situation is likely to come even close. Life spans may be quite extended. And that's not even counting the unpredictable changes -- for instance, in 1900, even later, no one had any idea what silicon electronics would do for us. Near term major change tech includes ultracaps, fusion (20 years out, no doubt at all, lol), driverless vehicles, significantly better building materials, the erosion of superstition and the rise of generations focused on objective reality instead of imaginary friends.
Wealth only has meaning in an economy of scarcity. I strongly suspect that the latter is going away, which in turn will eliminate the former. It's just going to be a very rocky transition. For my part, I live far better than my parents did, expect to live longer, am healthier, and have far more cool stuff. And that's within a wealth-based economy. And the funny thing? My parents had considerably more money. :)
As for "scumbags", if people have enough resources, and the genome is cleaned up to eliminate stupidity, ugliness, weak critical thinking skills and greed, why would there be any?
Postulate: Innocent kid is about to get run over by a bus. You can easily save her -- no more effort than lifting a finger. You don't. That makes you an evil, low,useless fuck, worthy only of hanging by the neck until dead.
Get it now? If you are able, but not willing, you are malevolent.
Now replace "you" with "god"
My (free) SDR [Software Defined Radio] software has, rather than a command line interface (since it isn't invoke to process, but invoke and continue to run to process), a network interface. Open a port, ask it for status and/or data, send it commands, etc.
I've interfaced it with other SDRs, remotely tunable antennas, and full on transceivers via this network interface. Commands are essentially text, other than you send them through the port.
Another thing is that regardless of which platform the SDR software is running on, you can talk to it from any other platform, because it's just a network connection. It's easily driven from any scripting language with network facilities, for instance Python interfacing is a doddle.
I love the idea of command line tools, because those are things I can use to leverage this kind of interface. Talk to a mapping application? Just feed the guy's callsign to a ham radio db, get the coordinates back, feed them to the mapping app, bingo, map. Etc.
I don't just find it disagreeable. I find it unjust, stupid and shortsighted. Having said that, it's exactly what I expect of our current government.
The US has about 5% of the world's population. We also have about 25% of the world's prisoners.
Land of the incarcerated, home of the feeble. Britain is our staunchest ally. Perhaps they're looking to us for incarceration performance, eh?
No, they don't.
Sure
Non-contemporaneous. Josephus, AKA Yosef Ben Matityahu A.D. (37 ~100+). Not at all contemporaneous with the time Christ was reported (by the bible) to have lived. There's no overlap at all. Christ would have died before Josephus was even born. So he won't do -- he's in the exact same position of someone born after the Heaven's Gate UFO cult had come and gone, attesting to the reality of the UFO itself, even though he never could have seen it himself, even to the extent that the UFO probably never existed at all, just as there is no actual evidence for Christ -- so far -- except the existence of the cult itself.
Agreed. However, my point is that the vast majority of religion, and particularly Christianity, is inherently evil. Christianity espouses (and worse, imposes) many harmful ideas in the name of a constipated, selfish morality. I have said many times, and will repeat here for the benefit of this conversation, that if Christians kept their craziness out of the legal system and out of government, I'd have no particular objection to any adult practicing/believing. Or, if they eschewed the craziness entirely and simply quietly worshipped with no attempts to enforce those ideas on others. However, that's not the case. From blue laws to sex to words we can or can't say to bibles in the courtroom and 6000-year old planet myths as (supposedly) science in schools, Christianity is highly active as an invasive, harmful force. It is in that role that I object to it most strongly. It has a terrible, dark history of interfering with other people's lives; I take that as a strong cautionary note, one that can be seen still echoing and taking root in modern society.
Better than flickr? How? Aside from the fact that Google's history is rife with services they've set up and then discontinued, and the whole Real Name thing...
flickr's got some shortcomings too -- inability to really curate groups or favorites, and the limits of galleries, for instance -- but I've not yet heard of anyone really addressing those issues elsewhere. Perhaps Google+ has?
Well, one difference is that prostitution is respectable. Marketing, of course, is not.
And then you have to litter your desk with wall warts and external systems because the thing has only the internal drive.
I just went out and bought some previous gen mac pros. This new one isn't for me. I really don't know what they were thinking.
I *do* have a small hope that they will, someday, come with a mid tower. A very small hope.
Whoosh!
-
Nah, see, he's just learned Python and has had an epiphany about the incredible damage that has been done to our economy by Perl.
Not if we don't see to it that they are fed and housed, we won't.
The summary made a strong point of putting religion up as a significant part of the story. I responded to that, and to its inappropriate mixing with a major scientific and technological achievement. If you think that's "off-topic", then you don't know a topic when you see one. What I posted was on-topic, highly relevant temporally, and served as a fine conversation starter, which, you may recall, is what this place is all about. Controversial? Sure. Christians hate having their religion dragged out in the daylight, and I don't blame them -- it's really a mess. Also, don't blame me for your incoherent, ad homonym ridden failure to make a cogent response thus far. That's on you.
What's wrong with it??? Religion is a horrible thing. Look at what it's done to our legal system; look at the crusades, the inquisitions, exorcisms, "witch" burnings, blood libel, repression of women, vilification of sexuality, promotion of slavery, invasion of the educational system with utter nonsense like creationism, utter tripe like can't eat shellfish, wear mixed fibers, have sex with someone of your own gender, flights into buildings, clinic bombings, usurpation (and narrow-minded restriction) of the very idea of marriage... I could go on and on. If it were just that religion is bunk, that'd be bad enough. But religion is toxic. That's what's really wrong with it. It's not just another easter bunny story -- the easter bunny is not a force for evil, very much unlike religion in general.
Most holy day, eh? Christ, if he existed (there's no evidence for that), wasn't born on the 25th -- or even in December, according to the most authoritative Christian estimates. This date, Dec 25th, is arbitrary, except in that had the benefit (to Christians) in that it usurped other, already extant festivals. Santa isn't a Christian symbol. The tree isn't a Christian symbol. Commercialism and gift giving isn't a Christian symbol. All Christmas is, is a massive implosion of identity confusion among the deluded. The vast majority of Christians (including you, obviously) don't even know what day should be "most holy", because their little book of mythology is a compendium of copies of magical stories made hundreds of years after the initial birth of the cult, contradicts itself repeatedly, lacks validation by even one direct, contemporaneous witness, and contains almost no information about the magic man at the center of the story from his purported youth. It's no wonder Christians had to make something up.
Finally, I will say this: I will stop complaining about Christianity when they get their greasy little fingers out of United States legislation. What's that? They have every right to meddle with our laws? Well, that's (highly) debatable, but let's go with the assumption that it is so: I have every right as well to speak my mind, and that's not debatable. I don't hide behind political correctness, I don't pretend something is ok when it appears to me by every indicator to be toxic, and I certainly am not going to support some nonsense where attempts are made to mix objective facts with superstitious balderdash in the name of science.
Aside from the blatantly transparent attempt to put words in my mouth and the superfluous name-calling, no. Hitler's backing faith was Christianity, mixed liberally with other random superstitions -- this is well documented. His pacts with the
Look, the energy costs to manufacture any bulb are included, plus profit, in the cost of the bulb. It's not a factor you need to figure in again.
My lightbulb went off in my thirties, and hasn't come back on since then anyway, except maybe just to flicker once or twice.