I've heard estimates that as many as 1/3 of users don't have flash installed.
And of those of us who do have it installed, some have it disabled 99% of the time. Flash (and most uses of every other active page technology, frankly) = really, really annoying.
The good news is that the really high quality browsers - like OmniWeb - allow you to globally filter out all such crapola, making exceptions on a per-site basis as you feel appropriate, or vice-versa. So you never have to be stuck looking at some menu-infested, roll-over ridden, animated advertising nightmare.
And as for scripting - I'll be the one who determines if a website is allowed to use my CPU.
For pistol use, 6 weeks to qualify, 5 nights a week, 2 hours per class. Re-qualification once a year; qual and requal to include static and popup courses with appropriate and inappropriate targets and written test. Qual to include training on legal underpinnings of self defense and crowd defense, how to carry (on safe, safety, loaded or not, holstering etc), how to draw, storage, ammunition age and viability, cleaning, what different types of loads do both in terms of stopping power and to various target areas, an entire subcourse on lines of sight, weapons capability (accuracy correlation with barrel length, caliber, capacity and clips, types of mechanisms such as revolver and clipfed semis, identifying the threat, disarming procedure, when to clear the area (retreat), basic first aid for gunshots. This is not an exclusive list.
Perhaps. But imagine - you see a guy walking down the hall with a bullet proof jacket and a gun. Is it a shooter, or a cop? What if you're wrong?
Again, training. You don't shoot people for carrying. You don't shoot people for drawing. You shoot people for shooting. You should probably ask some questions. If the response to your questions is a gunshot, now you - or the others near you - have a reason to respond.
I've never been in a situation where people were firing weapons, so I don't know.
I have. I have not been shot by my comrades, nor have I ever shot a comrade. It can happen, but it is very rare. On the other hand, I have shot people who were shooting at my comrades and myself, and I have seen people shot by my comrades who were shooting directly at us, which I consider to be an action that is certainly on my behalf. Training. It's all about training. That's precisely what I've been advocating.
But, as gratifying as it would have been to have this guy blown away sooner rather than later, I don't know how many untrained people could have made the proper judgement - no matter how good a shot they were.
I have not advocated letting untrained people carry weapons. You should not do so either.
Face it, the time it takes to go buy a gun is usually long enough to cool off any normal "hothead".
However, it only takes 30 seconds to buy a gun off the tailgate of a vehicle carrying contraband, and it always will be about that fast, if not faster. The guy who is willing to kill isn't worried about breaking the "you aren't allowed to own and/or carry a gun" laws. The guy who is an organized and methodical killer, as this one seems to have been, really isn't worried about it. He will, just as you say, probably already have one or more weapons in his possession.
The bottom line is always the same: We know there are killers out there. The argument about whether they got their guns legally or not, or should be able to legally or not, doesn't change the fact that they are killers, nor does it in any way prevent them from obtaining a gun. All these rules do is make the generally compliant population into victims.
what makes you think that anyone *won* the cold war?
You mean, besides the fact that the Soviet Union's naval assets rusted to trash at the piers? You mean, besides the fact that the Soviet Union no longer is pointing thousands of nuclear-tipped missiles at us? You mean, besides the fact that Russia is now struggling to rise above communism? You mean, besides the fact that the individual nations that used to be Soviet controlled regions are now pursuing their own destinies, sans control from Moscow? You mean, besides the fact that we not only retained a fair amount of the weapons systems we developed, we also benefitted directly from the technologies that underlie them? You mean besides the fact that our country is still here and relative to the Soviets, thriving? Gee, I guess I just don't know. What was I thinking?
Quote from Monty Python:
Reg:
All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?
Xerxes:
Brought peace! Reg:
What!? Oh... Peace, yes... shut up!
Do you trust that everyone else has that same mentality?
I work under the assumption that people who are properly trained, as I advocated, will act correctly due to that training. Generally, that's a good assumption. That's why everyone in the army and the police force doesn't go shooting each other left and right. Just the way my martial arts students don't go firing off kicks and punches at other people in public. So yes, I can extend that level of trust without thinking about it. No problem. Could I be wrong? Yes. But the odds favor my being correct. The existing armed and trained groups make my point very well.
What happens if you see someone with a gun shoot someone else with a gun, then turn and point their gun at another guy with a gun?
As I said, you shoot the fellow you know started the show, or who is shooting at you. If you don't know who that is, you don't shoot. End of evaluation. That's what training is for. I do not advocate arming people without training them. So stop trying to validate situations that involve untrained, armed people. If you can't understand what competent weapons use is, you're not competent to argue weapons use at all.
Given the extremely rare circumstances when one would be shot at by a random stranger on a college campus?
Well, I'll tell you what. Why don't you go tell these kid's parents and friends that it was ok, because it was rare. Go ahead. I'll wait here for you. With a first aid kit. Hopefully, that'll be sufficient.
For someone who was out to shoot people, armed students would've been obvious targets, not a guaranteed end to the situation.
Agreed. No guarantees. However, at least they would have had a chance, one that improved in direct proportion to the number of armed and trained people in the group. As it was, however, they had none, because the rules required them to be defenseless. Now they're dead, and we're not talking about "chance", are we? No. because we're certain they're dead, and we're certain they had no way to defend themselves.
Of course not. Nor are all armed cops. Nor are all soldiers. Are you arguing that this means no cops and no soldiers should be armed and trained to use them? Doesn't someone have to shoot back when some lunatic begins shooting at people? Wouldn't it be best if the shooting back began as early as possible, instead of after 30+ people have been mowed down at the lunatic's convenience?
Please don't tell me that defending yourself or others in this situation is not a trying endeavor.
I didn't. In return, please don't attempt to put your words in my mouth. I didn't suggest that having your car run into wasn't trying either, did you notice?
What I will tell you is that defending yourself when you have training and armament to fall back on is a good deal more effective than the empty set of options you have to fall back on that leave you to just stand there, doing no more than serving as a demonstration dummy for the effects of bullets on human anatomy. Trying? Certainly. Is that a reason to not defend yourself? Hardly.
In 2001/02 there were no "seriously injured" or killed Police officers by guns (on a scale of slight, serious & fatal), only 10 counted as slight.
And how about Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent fellow in the subway your armed plainclothes cops murdered? Too bad he couldn't defend himself, eh? But the only people with weapons are the cops, and so the people are just victims. Good job, great system, yessir. As if injured cops were a metric that mattered.
But lets ignore the gun-crime stats for a second. The most serious UK school murder was the Dunblane Massacre (which was handgun based) in 1996. This was the deadliest attack on children in the UK killing 16 kids and 1 adult.
Yes, there's another case where the adult should have been armed, as being responsible for the lives of 16 children certainly is an adequate reason. But the adult wasn't, they all died without possibility of resistance, and you're happy with the outcome. That, by my lights, makes you bewildered. Or worse.
We'll see how it plays out when the facts are known, instead of presuming anything. In the meantime, the fact is, if those students had been armed, the ability of the assailant to mow them down without resistance would have been removed.
As for your bad grades argument, the current situation [forbidden to carry] still allows for an angry student, willing to break the law, to shoot the prof. So you're really not arguing for anything other than taking guns away from the students who aren't threats. Which will leave them defenseless in the face of something like this. Your lockdown idea is good, as far as it goes, but of course doesn't account for a shooting that isn't split into two diverse locations and times. Nothing can substitute for the ability to defend yourself and those around you. Nothing. Leaving your fate in the hands of people who arrive later - no matter how full of good will they are towards you - is a good formula to steer that fate into the endless dark.
An honest question: should people be able to carry on a plane?
Certainly. Mind you, planes should be designed with this in mind. You'd need to armor the cockpit
bulkhead(s) and remove the door in favor of an exterior door for the use of the cockpit crew, and route the flight controls via an armored core. The only communications between the cabin and the cockpit would be a pair of buttons signalling the cockpit of "medical emergency, please land immediately" and "last instruction complied with." The cabin would need over-pressure blow out panels with safety screens.
Of course, this is how they should have been designed in the first place. If they had, the WTC events could never have happened as we were told they happened. And there would be no "no-fly" lists. And there would be no hijackings. And there would be no particular waits getting onto an aircraft. And you wouldn't be stripped before boarding. Oh, and we wouldn't have the USAPATRIOT act and its rights-trampling obscenities. Um, and we wouldn't be torturing people, and holding them without bail, access to a lawyer, etc.
And Bush's excuses for tapping your phones wouldn't sound so plausible to the gullible.
Maybe you shouldn't say anything until you know where he got his gun.
No, it doesn't matter in the least where he got his gun. What matters is how he employed it. Guns aren't going to go away. You're completely in fairyland if you think so; there is no reason on earth that could lead you to that conclusion. Even if there were no guns, you can make one with basic machine tools; they were building decent guns a hundred years ago in shops no more sophisticated than one you could set up from any hardware store today. They're simple objects, or at least, they can be. They can also be ridiculously complex, but criminals aren't likely to opt for that over functionality. Tool users tend to like things that always work, regardless of what the tool is.
As for the rest, you're just hand-waving and I decline to participate.
It does sound like he was skilled and operating in an organized and effective manner. Still, no one can shoot thirty people at the same time, especially before they line up and become an organized set of targets. The moment the guy made his intentions known, either by firing or speaking, no matter how good he was, someone on the other side of the room would probably have time to drop him. Especially if they were good, which is exactly what I advocate. Guns aren't toys, and there is no such thing as too much practice.
The solution to school shootings is *more* guns in the classrooms?
Hey, I have an idea for you. Take all the guns away from your armed forces. After all, isn't it HORRIFYING to think that the solution to people shooting at you might be to SHOOT BACK?
That kind of escalation strategy is what kept the cold war going for so many decades, have you learned nothing?
That kind of escalation (a) kept the Soviets from ever attacking us and (b) won the cold war and destroyed them without firing a shot. So your point was... oh, I'm sorry, you didn't have a point.
When you leave, please pick up your frontal lobes at the hat check stand. Thanks for posting.
England is a different type of society - you can't make that kind of comparison. There are differences that go both ways. Your country experiences a lot more sports related violence; yet your cameras only help place blame, they aren't preventative. I'd also like to remind you that our armed populace kicked your ancestors back across the ocean. Please stay there. We didn't like your system then, and we don't like it any better now. And we're still armed, or at least, enough of us are.
You pull out your gun and see 15 other people with guns. Who do you shoot?
I don't shoot anyone for holding a gun. I only shoot if I see someone shooting unarmed students.
If someone runs into your car in a parking lot, who do you blame? Everyone with a car? Of course not. Only the person you know hit your car. Stop trying to caricature armed citizens as twitching bundles of indiscriminate reflexes. We can think as well as you can, and about the same things.
Look, whatever. The issue at hand isn't terminology. It's the murders.
If the students were armed, as provided for by the 2nd amendment, someone could have dropped that guy early on and saved 30 or more people. Chalk up another bunch of deaths to the pussification of American citizens by the mommy government. There will be no correction, though; instead of people going "well duh, I should be armed in case some crazy bastard shows up in my face somewhere", they'll just take a bunch more of your civil rights away at the schools - restrict your movements, require papers, stick RFID tags to you earlobes, x-ray your colons... and a year or so from now, some crazy will do the same thing again, perhaps slightly more cleverly.
Ah, it's so frustrating to hear news like this. All those people did not have to die. Learn to defend yourselves, and be willing to. Seriously. The government cannot protect you from crazies; you have to do it yourself. The government always arrives after these events - only you can stop them as they happen. Get licensed. Practice. Carry. Be a protector instead of a victim. When the government says you can't carry here or there, fight like wildcats to reject this weakening of your ability to defend yourself and those you care about. The government is not your friend.
The top 5% of taxpayers pay over 50% of the taxes. I think taxes are progressive enoug
If that is the case - I don't have numbers that confirm your assertion - then, since we know that the top bracket is 35%, we can double the taxes of that top 5% to 70%, they will then be paying 100% of the taxes, and the rest of us can do trivial little things like be able to afford medical care. Of every million dollars earned by those top 5%, they'd still get to keep 300,000.00, which is about 5 to 10 times what your average citizen makes.
Ah. Those kinds of issues. Well, I think that the waiter is the very much wrong person to ask, and the restaurant entirely the wrong venue to ask in.
If you simply ask someone out to dinner, you should presume that you are paying the check, unless you specifically say otherwise at the time you ask. Regardless of what sex you are. The optimum form is "I would very much enjoy the opportunity to take you to dinner", translated as required for your comfort level from good English. With such a traditional proposition, the person asking should 100% expect to both pay all costs, including transport, even lodging as required for more complicated invitations, and certainly also provide for any and all appropriate gratuities.
You could, if you were so inclined, say "I'd love to ask you out to dinner, however, my finances are presently, and unfortunately, insufficient to the task, so instead I [picked this flower for you | got these chocolates for you | etc.] and I hope you will consider the wish, the deed." You might be rewarded by a "we could do dutch", though I wouldn't count on it. Financial ability usually does matter, despite all rumors to the contrary. If you'd like to be really direct (presumably because you think you can get away with it), you can say "Would you care to share dinner over a split tab? I'm sorry to make such a poor offer, but the fact is, my lack of funds hasn't managed to overwhelm my interest in you." Again, translated into whatever slang or ebonics you care to use. Manners and consideration transcend all style, in my opinion.
I think if you you stick to those approaches, find a way to honestly, but not gushingly, express pleasure at initially meeting up ("you certainly look lovely/handsome", or if you think they dressed poorly, you can always say "good to see you - I've been looking forward to this all day" and so on), make sure your presentation - the manner of your dress, your clean car, grooming, your manicured and/or sparking clean nails. etc. - says that you care what your date thinks, don't make an ass or a fool of yourself and most particularly limit your intake of intoxicants to considerably less than you can handle, listen to your date instead of talking about yourself unless specifically asked (and then, keep it honest, concise and interesting), make sure you have more than enough funds to cover the implied festivities, exercise your sense of humor in a restrained manner unless specifically encouraged otherwise, and be reasonable to, and considerate of, those service providers who manage the details of your date... and your chances for extending the experience on any number of levels will rise considerably.
And of course it rarely hurts to go overboard. Inviting someone you meet in Des Moines to a fine dinner - in Paris - is likely to get, and keep, someone's attention. Even if they decline, as many would. Alas, such an invitation is not often an option.:-) Still, if you can make that first date memorable and at least somewhat over the top by nature - a trip on a dinner boat, an actual dinner theater, perhaps engage a limo for the evening and see to it that you move about a bit between interesting places - your date cannot fail to notice that you have gone to some effort on their behalf. The key to it is when they ask "do you always do this?", you should answer "You are the reason I did this." They'll either warm right up to you, or run away (figuratively) screaming. Depends on the person, but I've found it works out considerably more often than it fails.
Finally, never pretend to like, enjoy, or even tolerate something you actually don't. You'll just end up getting more of it, be it a particular style of clothing, a genre of music, religion, politics, a food dish, or pantyhose. Relationships built on false pretenses are the very weakest ones. Be polite, even respectful, about another person's interests and preferences, but don't claim them as your own unless they are your own. Time invested in pursui
You can't say that the newer law is ineffective, because that runs contrary to the intent of the legislator to legislate.
I can't believe I missed responding to that. I plead having been overwhelmed by the level of needle-threading in the rest of your post.
Look, the whole point of the constitution is to limit the ability of the legislator to legislate both by virtue of enumerating the powers they are permitted to exercise, and by forbidding or handing off other powers entirely. I mean, really... as a lawyer, while I'm not quite ready to follow the advice of Shakespeare's character Dick the Butcher, I expect you to cheerfully play the sophist, but the presumption that because a "legislator has an intent to legislate", a law or constitutional amendment must have an effect is entirely too much for even another lawyer to swallow, isn't it? You do recall those inconsequential little bits of drivel called the 10th amendment, as well as article 1, sections 9 and 10, do you not? You do know why the bill of rights was even added on, right? It was because they knew that attempts would be made by the unscrupulous to legislate matters that the authors of the constitution, in no uncertain terms which are in fact the bill of rights, were not willing to allow. That is why, for instance, when your cronies have "intent to shut down free speech", their intent is absolutely irrelevant. We can say that unconstitutional law is irrelevant, and the only criteria for doing so is that it isn't within the authority of the government to enact or enforce such a law, regardless of the "legislator's intent."
You write as if "the legislator" was god's own infallible right hand. Legislators, going strictly by the evidence mind you, at best appear only to be those people who have by and large no understanding whatsoever of what it is they are authorized by the constitution to do, but by god, they're going to do something anyway.
If you're so smart, then please feel free to quote the portion of Article V which supports your claim.
The entire thing supports my claim. Section 5 describes the procedure we are required to follow to (a) change its previous meaning, in which case any reasonable person would expect the change(s) to be described (and indeed, this is precisely what we find in those places where the changes were competent) or (b) add new meaning, in which case any reasonable person would expect no effect upon, and be unwilling to presume effects upon, other parts of the constitution. Things would be fine if either one of those was what they did, but that's not the case here: They did something else entirely: they added contradictory text. Which makes it nonsensical, not somehow magically valid because it is dependent upon non-intuitive parsing rules that aren't even in the document. No one can possibly interpret section 5 as authority to add random text to the constitution. If added text doesn't comply with the mechanism described in the constitution to precisely delineate a change, or to create an addition of new, non-interfering concepts, then it must be meaningless. "Changes" that don't describe what they change are the work of incompetents. In the case of this very important constituting authority, we the people have every reason and authority to ignore such works of imprecision and unreason, just as we have every reason to ignore laws that have no authority underlying them, and take remedial action against those who would attempt impose such laws upon us.
It didn't have to. It was just a convenient way of returning to the status quo ante Prohibition.
Such an approach would also be a "convenient" (cough) way to indicate which portions of other declarations no longer apply. Documents that contain no directions as to how to parse contradictory material, and contradictory material, are well along the road to becoming meaningless. You, as a lawyer, may indeed be aware of some method of parsing them that can twist them around to make sense to you, but each level of invisible implication that a law or the constitution requires to be meaningful degenerates its usefulness as a tool that a citizen can be made to understand without knowing the hoops and pitfalls that legal tacticians use to turn black into white and night into day. That is part of what is wrong with the entire legal system today, and to use it to argue that the 16th is "right" is purest drivel.
For example, I've watched your peer group try for literally years to argue based on similar external invisible implications only they could imagine that the prefatory clause of the 2nd amendment somehow limited the operative clause; it was all sophist nonsense, of course, but it took until this decision before someone actually pointed out in detail what anyone with any sense already knew - the language of the document itself - the constitution - is more important than any "implicit" hoop jumping lawyers are wont to do by their very natures.
note how the 12th and 17th Amendments totally rewrite how the President, Vice-President, and Senators are elected, yet don't even bother to refer to, much less repeal, the portions of the Constitution that they replace.
That simply makes them illegitimate, it doesn't magically make them sensible. This is no surprise; the government routinely ignores those parts of the constitution that it hasn't bothered to cause to be contradictory (commerce clause, inconvenient portions of the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th 10th, and 14th amendments, ex post facto punishment, etc.) - why should it be any news that it is being unforgivably and incomprehensibly sloppy about how it attempts to implement changes? You see, you argue from the premise that the laws and the mechanisms in place ar
... You think that if you put a bee in a microwave (2.3 GHz) it won't cook?
I think that the amount of energy in a microwave oven is of a density that makes your idea inapplicable; bees are exposed to such low energies by comparison as to guarantee there is no such problem. RF energies typically fall off by square law as you remove yourself from the source of the energies unless they are maintained in a resonant or semi-resonant cavity, such as a microwave oven. I also think that cellphones, at 800-900 MHz or so, aren't going to affect water molecules the same way as microwave oven generations are, and unless you can arrange for a similar power density and frequency around the bee, then no, I don't think there's enough energy to kill it. Which is what I said. I then went on to say that the bee's perceptions might still be affected, the implication being that despite not killing an individual bee, I thought it was conceivable that it could still affect it. I also mentioned that the hive was larger, and the reason that I did so is because the lower frequencies of cell phones might coincidentally find the hive forming a resonant or semi-resonant cavity, which in turn might somehow make the hive untenable.
Perhaps you are unaware that microwave ovens use a frequency chosen to affect water; if they aren't pretty much right at that particular frequency (which is not a frequency used by cellphones), the heating effect falls off dramatically - and it is the heating that is affects objects in the oven. Other frequencies typically don't behave the same way, unless they are precisely related sub-harmonically and the object contains structures that will resonate, which in turn means of precise and unlikely lengths.
For example, you can stand extremely close to an FM tower transmitting 100 kilowatts, 100 times what a microwave oven typically generates, and feel no warming effect at all - because your water molecules aren't efficiently heated by RF at frequencies near 100 MHz. You can keep getting closer right up until the energies involved re-route en masse because you're a better path to ground than anything else available to them, and then you still won't cook from heat first, you'll get electrocuted or really badly shocked well before that happens.
lower frequencies, i.e. longer wavelengths, are very unlikely to affect bees.
Agreed; the wavelength is not short enough to set up enough energy in a bee's body to kill it. However, there are several other possibilities. Perhaps signals could be confusing the bees by interfering with their perceptions; if they can't find the hive, they will die. Another possibility is that the signal is setting up some kind of adverse condition in the hive, which is much larger than any particular bee.
While I absolutely agree that the jury is still out, we can't discount cell phone RF as a culprit yet. My gut feeling is that it will turn out to be something else, but in the meantime, there will be a great deal of frenzy. If it is cell phones, we'd better figure it out, and quickly - bees aren't something the world can do without, and microwaves aren't by any means the only way cell-phone functionality can be implemented.
Slashdot Mirror
And of those of us who do have it installed, some have it disabled 99% of the time. Flash (and most uses of every other active page technology, frankly) = really, really annoying.
The good news is that the really high quality browsers - like OmniWeb - allow you to globally filter out all such crapola, making exceptions on a per-site basis as you feel appropriate, or vice-versa. So you never have to be stuck looking at some menu-infested, roll-over ridden, animated advertising nightmare.
And as for scripting - I'll be the one who determines if a website is allowed to use my CPU.
For pistol use, 6 weeks to qualify, 5 nights a week, 2 hours per class. Re-qualification once a year; qual and requal to include static and popup courses with appropriate and inappropriate targets and written test. Qual to include training on legal underpinnings of self defense and crowd defense, how to carry (on safe, safety, loaded or not, holstering etc), how to draw, storage, ammunition age and viability, cleaning, what different types of loads do both in terms of stopping power and to various target areas, an entire subcourse on lines of sight, weapons capability (accuracy correlation with barrel length, caliber, capacity and clips, types of mechanisms such as revolver and clipfed semis, identifying the threat, disarming procedure, when to clear the area (retreat), basic first aid for gunshots. This is not an exclusive list.
Again, training. You don't shoot people for carrying. You don't shoot people for drawing. You shoot people for shooting. You should probably ask some questions. If the response to your questions is a gunshot, now you - or the others near you - have a reason to respond.
I have. I have not been shot by my comrades, nor have I ever shot a comrade. It can happen, but it is very rare. On the other hand, I have shot people who were shooting at my comrades and myself, and I have seen people shot by my comrades who were shooting directly at us, which I consider to be an action that is certainly on my behalf. Training. It's all about training. That's precisely what I've been advocating.
I have not advocated letting untrained people carry weapons. You should not do so either.
However, it only takes 30 seconds to buy a gun off the tailgate of a vehicle carrying contraband, and it always will be about that fast, if not faster. The guy who is willing to kill isn't worried about breaking the "you aren't allowed to own and/or carry a gun" laws. The guy who is an organized and methodical killer, as this one seems to have been, really isn't worried about it. He will, just as you say, probably already have one or more weapons in his possession.
The bottom line is always the same: We know there are killers out there. The argument about whether they got their guns legally or not, or should be able to legally or not, doesn't change the fact that they are killers, nor does it in any way prevent them from obtaining a gun. All these rules do is make the generally compliant population into victims.
You mean, besides the fact that the Soviet Union's naval assets rusted to trash at the piers? You mean, besides the fact that the Soviet Union no longer is pointing thousands of nuclear-tipped missiles at us? You mean, besides the fact that Russia is now struggling to rise above communism? You mean, besides the fact that the individual nations that used to be Soviet controlled regions are now pursuing their own destinies, sans control from Moscow? You mean, besides the fact that we not only retained a fair amount of the weapons systems we developed, we also benefitted directly from the technologies that underlie them? You mean besides the fact that our country is still here and relative to the Soviets, thriving? Gee, I guess I just don't know. What was I thinking?
Quote from Monty Python:
I work under the assumption that people who are properly trained, as I advocated, will act correctly due to that training. Generally, that's a good assumption. That's why everyone in the army and the police force doesn't go shooting each other left and right. Just the way my martial arts students don't go firing off kicks and punches at other people in public. So yes, I can extend that level of trust without thinking about it. No problem. Could I be wrong? Yes. But the odds favor my being correct. The existing armed and trained groups make my point very well.
As I said, you shoot the fellow you know started the show, or who is shooting at you. If you don't know who that is, you don't shoot. End of evaluation. That's what training is for. I do not advocate arming people without training them. So stop trying to validate situations that involve untrained, armed people. If you can't understand what competent weapons use is, you're not competent to argue weapons use at all.
Well, I'll tell you what. Why don't you go tell these kid's parents and friends that it was ok, because it was rare. Go ahead. I'll wait here for you. With a first aid kit. Hopefully, that'll be sufficient.
Agreed. No guarantees. However, at least they would have had a chance, one that improved in direct proportion to the number of armed and trained people in the group. As it was, however, they had none, because the rules required them to be defenseless. Now they're dead, and we're not talking about "chance", are we? No. because we're certain they're dead, and we're certain they had no way to defend themselves.
Of course not. Nor are all armed cops. Nor are all soldiers. Are you arguing that this means no cops and no soldiers should be armed and trained to use them? Doesn't someone have to shoot back when some lunatic begins shooting at people? Wouldn't it be best if the shooting back began as early as possible, instead of after 30+ people have been mowed down at the lunatic's convenience?
I didn't. In return, please don't attempt to put your words in my mouth. I didn't suggest that having your car run into wasn't trying either, did you notice?
What I will tell you is that defending yourself when you have training and armament to fall back on is a good deal more effective than the empty set of options you have to fall back on that leave you to just stand there, doing no more than serving as a demonstration dummy for the effects of bullets on human anatomy. Trying? Certainly. Is that a reason to not defend yourself? Hardly.
And how about Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent fellow in the subway your armed plainclothes cops murdered? Too bad he couldn't defend himself, eh? But the only people with weapons are the cops, and so the people are just victims. Good job, great system, yessir. As if injured cops were a metric that mattered.
Yes, there's another case where the adult should have been armed, as being responsible for the lives of 16 children certainly is an adequate reason. But the adult wasn't, they all died without possibility of resistance, and you're happy with the outcome. That, by my lights, makes you bewildered. Or worse.
We'll see how it plays out when the facts are known, instead of presuming anything. In the meantime, the fact is, if those students had been armed, the ability of the assailant to mow them down without resistance would have been removed.
As for your bad grades argument, the current situation [forbidden to carry] still allows for an angry student, willing to break the law, to shoot the prof. So you're really not arguing for anything other than taking guns away from the students who aren't threats. Which will leave them defenseless in the face of something like this. Your lockdown idea is good, as far as it goes, but of course doesn't account for a shooting that isn't split into two diverse locations and times. Nothing can substitute for the ability to defend yourself and those around you. Nothing. Leaving your fate in the hands of people who arrive later - no matter how full of good will they are towards you - is a good formula to steer that fate into the endless dark.
Certainly. Mind you, planes should be designed with this in mind. You'd need to armor the cockpit bulkhead(s) and remove the door in favor of an exterior door for the use of the cockpit crew, and route the flight controls via an armored core. The only communications between the cabin and the cockpit would be a pair of buttons signalling the cockpit of "medical emergency, please land immediately" and "last instruction complied with." The cabin would need over-pressure blow out panels with safety screens.
Of course, this is how they should have been designed in the first place. If they had, the WTC events could never have happened as we were told they happened. And there would be no "no-fly" lists. And there would be no hijackings. And there would be no particular waits getting onto an aircraft. And you wouldn't be stripped before boarding. Oh, and we wouldn't have the USAPATRIOT act and its rights-trampling obscenities. Um, and we wouldn't be torturing people, and holding them without bail, access to a lawyer, etc. And Bush's excuses for tapping your phones wouldn't sound so plausible to the gullible.
No, it doesn't matter in the least where he got his gun. What matters is how he employed it. Guns aren't going to go away. You're completely in fairyland if you think so; there is no reason on earth that could lead you to that conclusion. Even if there were no guns, you can make one with basic machine tools; they were building decent guns a hundred years ago in shops no more sophisticated than one you could set up from any hardware store today. They're simple objects, or at least, they can be. They can also be ridiculously complex, but criminals aren't likely to opt for that over functionality. Tool users tend to like things that always work, regardless of what the tool is.
As for the rest, you're just hand-waving and I decline to participate.
And there you have it. These rules ensured that there was no one able to take down the assailant in this situation.
It does sound like he was skilled and operating in an organized and effective manner. Still, no one can shoot thirty people at the same time, especially before they line up and become an organized set of targets. The moment the guy made his intentions known, either by firing or speaking, no matter how good he was, someone on the other side of the room would probably have time to drop him. Especially if they were good, which is exactly what I advocate. Guns aren't toys, and there is no such thing as too much practice.
Hey, I have an idea for you. Take all the guns away from your armed forces. After all, isn't it HORRIFYING to think that the solution to people shooting at you might be to SHOOT BACK?
That kind of escalation (a) kept the Soviets from ever attacking us and (b) won the cold war and destroyed them without firing a shot. So your point was... oh, I'm sorry, you didn't have a point.
When you leave, please pick up your frontal lobes at the hat check stand. Thanks for posting.
England is a different type of society - you can't make that kind of comparison. There are differences that go both ways. Your country experiences a lot more sports related violence; yet your cameras only help place blame, they aren't preventative. I'd also like to remind you that our armed populace kicked your ancestors back across the ocean. Please stay there. We didn't like your system then, and we don't like it any better now. And we're still armed, or at least, enough of us are.
I don't shoot anyone for holding a gun. I only shoot if I see someone shooting unarmed students.
If someone runs into your car in a parking lot, who do you blame? Everyone with a car? Of course not. Only the person you know hit your car. Stop trying to caricature armed citizens as twitching bundles of indiscriminate reflexes. We can think as well as you can, and about the same things.
Look, whatever. The issue at hand isn't terminology. It's the murders.
If the students were armed, as provided for by the 2nd amendment, someone could have dropped that guy early on and saved 30 or more people. Chalk up another bunch of deaths to the pussification of American citizens by the mommy government. There will be no correction, though; instead of people going "well duh, I should be armed in case some crazy bastard shows up in my face somewhere", they'll just take a bunch more of your civil rights away at the schools - restrict your movements, require papers, stick RFID tags to you earlobes, x-ray your colons... and a year or so from now, some crazy will do the same thing again, perhaps slightly more cleverly.
Ah, it's so frustrating to hear news like this. All those people did not have to die. Learn to defend yourselves, and be willing to. Seriously. The government cannot protect you from crazies; you have to do it yourself. The government always arrives after these events - only you can stop them as they happen. Get licensed. Practice. Carry. Be a protector instead of a victim. When the government says you can't carry here or there, fight like wildcats to reject this weakening of your ability to defend yourself and those you care about. The government is not your friend.
If that is the case - I don't have numbers that confirm your assertion - then, since we know that the top bracket is 35%, we can double the taxes of that top 5% to 70%, they will then be paying 100% of the taxes, and the rest of us can do trivial little things like be able to afford medical care. Of every million dollars earned by those top 5%, they'd still get to keep 300,000.00, which is about 5 to 10 times what your average citizen makes.
Sounds perfect to me.
Ah. Those kinds of issues. Well, I think that the waiter is the very much wrong person to ask, and the restaurant entirely the wrong venue to ask in.
If you simply ask someone out to dinner, you should presume that you are paying the check, unless you specifically say otherwise at the time you ask. Regardless of what sex you are. The optimum form is "I would very much enjoy the opportunity to take you to dinner", translated as required for your comfort level from good English. With such a traditional proposition, the person asking should 100% expect to both pay all costs, including transport, even lodging as required for more complicated invitations, and certainly also provide for any and all appropriate gratuities.
You could, if you were so inclined, say "I'd love to ask you out to dinner, however, my finances are presently, and unfortunately, insufficient to the task, so instead I [picked this flower for you | got these chocolates for you | etc.] and I hope you will consider the wish, the deed." You might be rewarded by a "we could do dutch", though I wouldn't count on it. Financial ability usually does matter, despite all rumors to the contrary. If you'd like to be really direct (presumably because you think you can get away with it), you can say "Would you care to share dinner over a split tab? I'm sorry to make such a poor offer, but the fact is, my lack of funds hasn't managed to overwhelm my interest in you." Again, translated into whatever slang or ebonics you care to use. Manners and consideration transcend all style, in my opinion.
I think if you you stick to those approaches, find a way to honestly, but not gushingly, express pleasure at initially meeting up ("you certainly look lovely/handsome", or if you think they dressed poorly, you can always say "good to see you - I've been looking forward to this all day" and so on), make sure your presentation - the manner of your dress, your clean car, grooming, your manicured and/or sparking clean nails. etc. - says that you care what your date thinks, don't make an ass or a fool of yourself and most particularly limit your intake of intoxicants to considerably less than you can handle, listen to your date instead of talking about yourself unless specifically asked (and then, keep it honest, concise and interesting), make sure you have more than enough funds to cover the implied festivities, exercise your sense of humor in a restrained manner unless specifically encouraged otherwise, and be reasonable to, and considerate of, those service providers who manage the details of your date... and your chances for extending the experience on any number of levels will rise considerably.
And of course it rarely hurts to go overboard. Inviting someone you meet in Des Moines to a fine dinner - in Paris - is likely to get, and keep, someone's attention. Even if they decline, as many would. Alas, such an invitation is not often an option. :-) Still, if you can make that first date memorable and at least somewhat over the top by nature - a trip on a dinner boat, an actual dinner theater, perhaps engage a limo for the evening and see to it that you move about a bit between interesting places - your date cannot fail to notice that you have gone to some effort on their behalf. The key to it is when they ask "do you always do this?", you should answer "You are the reason I did this." They'll either warm right up to you, or run away (figuratively) screaming. Depends on the person, but I've found it works out considerably more often than it fails.
Finally, never pretend to like, enjoy, or even tolerate something you actually don't. You'll just end up getting more of it, be it a particular style of clothing, a genre of music, religion, politics, a food dish, or pantyhose. Relationships built on false pretenses are the very weakest ones. Be polite, even respectful, about another person's interests and preferences, but don't claim them as your own unless they are your own. Time invested in pursui
I can't believe I missed responding to that. I plead having been overwhelmed by the level of needle-threading in the rest of your post.
Look, the whole point of the constitution is to limit the ability of the legislator to legislate both by virtue of enumerating the powers they are permitted to exercise, and by forbidding or handing off other powers entirely. I mean, really... as a lawyer, while I'm not quite ready to follow the advice of Shakespeare's character Dick the Butcher, I expect you to cheerfully play the sophist, but the presumption that because a "legislator has an intent to legislate", a law or constitutional amendment must have an effect is entirely too much for even another lawyer to swallow, isn't it? You do recall those inconsequential little bits of drivel called the 10th amendment, as well as article 1, sections 9 and 10, do you not? You do know why the bill of rights was even added on, right? It was because they knew that attempts would be made by the unscrupulous to legislate matters that the authors of the constitution, in no uncertain terms which are in fact the bill of rights, were not willing to allow. That is why, for instance, when your cronies have "intent to shut down free speech", their intent is absolutely irrelevant. We can say that unconstitutional law is irrelevant, and the only criteria for doing so is that it isn't within the authority of the government to enact or enforce such a law, regardless of the "legislator's intent."
You write as if "the legislator" was god's own infallible right hand. Legislators, going strictly by the evidence mind you, at best appear only to be those people who have by and large no understanding whatsoever of what it is they are authorized by the constitution to do, but by god, they're going to do something anyway.
The entire thing supports my claim. Section 5 describes the procedure we are required to follow to (a) change its previous meaning, in which case any reasonable person would expect the change(s) to be described (and indeed, this is precisely what we find in those places where the changes were competent) or (b) add new meaning, in which case any reasonable person would expect no effect upon, and be unwilling to presume effects upon, other parts of the constitution. Things would be fine if either one of those was what they did, but that's not the case here: They did something else entirely: they added contradictory text. Which makes it nonsensical, not somehow magically valid because it is dependent upon non-intuitive parsing rules that aren't even in the document. No one can possibly interpret section 5 as authority to add random text to the constitution. If added text doesn't comply with the mechanism described in the constitution to precisely delineate a change, or to create an addition of new, non-interfering concepts, then it must be meaningless. "Changes" that don't describe what they change are the work of incompetents. In the case of this very important constituting authority, we the people have every reason and authority to ignore such works of imprecision and unreason, just as we have every reason to ignore laws that have no authority underlying them, and take remedial action against those who would attempt impose such laws upon us.
Such an approach would also be a "convenient" (cough) way to indicate which portions of other declarations no longer apply. Documents that contain no directions as to how to parse contradictory material, and contradictory material, are well along the road to becoming meaningless. You, as a lawyer, may indeed be aware of some method of parsing them that can twist them around to make sense to you, but each level of invisible implication that a law or the constitution requires to be meaningful degenerates its usefulness as a tool that a citizen can be made to understand without knowing the hoops and pitfalls that legal tacticians use to turn black into white and night into day. That is part of what is wrong with the entire legal system today, and to use it to argue that the 16th is "right" is purest drivel.
For example, I've watched your peer group try for literally years to argue based on similar external invisible implications only they could imagine that the prefatory clause of the 2nd amendment somehow limited the operative clause; it was all sophist nonsense, of course, but it took until this decision before someone actually pointed out in detail what anyone with any sense already knew - the language of the document itself - the constitution - is more important than any "implicit" hoop jumping lawyers are wont to do by their very natures.
That simply makes them illegitimate, it doesn't magically make them sensible. This is no surprise; the government routinely ignores those parts of the constitution that it hasn't bothered to cause to be contradictory (commerce clause, inconvenient portions of the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th 10th, and 14th amendments, ex post facto punishment, etc.) - why should it be any news that it is being unforgivably and incomprehensibly sloppy about how it attempts to implement changes? You see, you argue from the premise that the laws and the mechanisms in place ar
I think that the amount of energy in a microwave oven is of a density that makes your idea inapplicable; bees are exposed to such low energies by comparison as to guarantee there is no such problem. RF energies typically fall off by square law as you remove yourself from the source of the energies unless they are maintained in a resonant or semi-resonant cavity, such as a microwave oven. I also think that cellphones, at 800-900 MHz or so, aren't going to affect water molecules the same way as microwave oven generations are, and unless you can arrange for a similar power density and frequency around the bee, then no, I don't think there's enough energy to kill it. Which is what I said. I then went on to say that the bee's perceptions might still be affected, the implication being that despite not killing an individual bee, I thought it was conceivable that it could still affect it. I also mentioned that the hive was larger, and the reason that I did so is because the lower frequencies of cell phones might coincidentally find the hive forming a resonant or semi-resonant cavity, which in turn might somehow make the hive untenable.
Perhaps you are unaware that microwave ovens use a frequency chosen to affect water; if they aren't pretty much right at that particular frequency (which is not a frequency used by cellphones), the heating effect falls off dramatically - and it is the heating that is affects objects in the oven. Other frequencies typically don't behave the same way, unless they are precisely related sub-harmonically and the object contains structures that will resonate, which in turn means of precise and unlikely lengths.
For example, you can stand extremely close to an FM tower transmitting 100 kilowatts, 100 times what a microwave oven typically generates, and feel no warming effect at all - because your water molecules aren't efficiently heated by RF at frequencies near 100 MHz. You can keep getting closer right up until the energies involved re-route en masse because you're a better path to ground than anything else available to them, and then you still won't cook from heat first, you'll get electrocuted or really badly shocked well before that happens.
Agreed; the wavelength is not short enough to set up enough energy in a bee's body to kill it. However, there are several other possibilities. Perhaps signals could be confusing the bees by interfering with their perceptions; if they can't find the hive, they will die. Another possibility is that the signal is setting up some kind of adverse condition in the hive, which is much larger than any particular bee.
While I absolutely agree that the jury is still out, we can't discount cell phone RF as a culprit yet. My gut feeling is that it will turn out to be something else, but in the meantime, there will be a great deal of frenzy. If it is cell phones, we'd better figure it out, and quickly - bees aren't something the world can do without, and microwaves aren't by any means the only way cell-phone functionality can be implemented.