Whoa whoa whoa - that's a little bait and switch you're doing there.
It's convenient to just say Che was a "revolutionary" and since the US was borne of revolutionaries, it's the same thing. The clear and concise difference is the Che and the communists actively murdered and suppressed citizens just for being....not them. Che specifically had the job of executing people deemed "not revolutionary enough". Not soldiers. Not tyrannical politicians. Just dirt-poor people who happened to disagree with his point of view. No comparison.
I've heard people try and use this same dumb argument that the US revolutionaries were just 'terrorists', right? Guys with rifles killing people in their land - just like Palestinians! Of course, this is bogus too. If the Palestinians just targeted Israeli soldiers and politicians this would be an entirely different issue. Instead, the blow up school buses full of children. Samuel Adams never sawed random people's heads off because he really disliked England.
As for Che still being a big hero in South America - fuck those who understand what he was and feel that way. If you worship Che out of ignorance, ok, I'll buy that. Everyone needs a hero. If you honestly know what he represented (the world's most efficient and prolific meat grinder of all time) and did for a living, then yes, fuck you, you murderous bastard:)
At "fresh out of college" age, it can be almost charming to work in a pressure cooker scenario, particularly if you're on a team full of people passionate about getting this game done. This is fun once or twice.
But after a few runs at this, it gets old. Real real old.
Oh wait, I was talking about 1998. Fast forward to 2006.
It's not even fun once now. Where I work, we currently have a project with a 90+ person team (monstrous) where a significant portion of the team has been working 80 hour weeks for a year. A percentage of that has been mandatory. I'll pause for a moment to let that sink in. That's like going to work twice every day for a full year. With a healthy helping of weekends. I'm not on this project, but I'm watching it as an outsider. We've got a lot of young guys these days - many first timers. And now, these first timers already have the 1000 yard stare. The bitterness and sarcasm you normally reserve for the established 30+ people is present in the 22 year olds.
Yes, this particular project is fubar and riddled with mistakes, but I view that as more of a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. The problem : AAA games are monstrous affairs with budgets in the $20million+ range, horribly overscoped on increasingly complex hardware.
Traditionally, I've been a low-level kind of guy. In that much sought after "tech guru" position. Optimizing things, building renderers, leading major architecture projects. I'm supposed to love the hard stuff. I once did. But now...pff...I find myself at the keyboard every day wondering why we can't just do Gameboy games. The hard fact is, I don't make games anymore. I am aimed at atrociously hard, ill defined problems. Games, ha. No programmer on a 90 person team feels like they're part of a game. I am 30. It should seem ridiculous that a 30 year old should be so shorn of passion.
If you absolutely must get into games, by all means do so. It's not a dead end. Just go in with your eyes open. Not every place is an EA-like meat grinder. But many are, so go with a healthy dose of cautious optimism.
The best advice I can give you is : it is better to play games than to make them.
1) The compiler and Dev tools can take care of DMA for you.
No, they won't. At all. Sony does provide intricate DMA libraries and have several methodologies they "suggest". But this will not automate the development of code or execution of code in any way. However, they don't even support so much as OpenMP (which wouldn't be sufficient).
2) This generation, even more than the last, will see less developers building their own engines and they will instead be licensing them, such as the very popular Unreal Engine 3.
This is partially correct. "Engines", or at least middleware is a pretty big deal these days. However, approximately 95% of games out there aren't first person shooters, and there aren't many viable engines which aren't fps engines. But the bigger issue here is that the "engine" code traditionally is only a small volume of the overall code. And those bits and pieces are the ones which will actually be fairly straightforward to move to the individual units (character deformation, misc vertex operations, physics). The real problem however, is that the vast vast proportion of the code is custom and non-parallelizable friendly.
Do you know something we don't?
Probably:) Regardless it's a reasonable assumption that the two will be pretty same - they're from the Big Two. In fact, I would go so far as to say if one or the other had, say, 2x-4x times the pixel throughput, that would still be considered comparable, in terms of realizable performance.
Here's my take on the Cell. Individually, each Cell processor is indeed a big workhorse of a vector processor. Burns through math like no ones business. 100% predictable memory access performance. They even provide a C++ compiler so you can write your Cell microprograms in a high level language instead of grovelling around like on the PS2's vector units. And there's (as many as) 8 of them. If you summed the theoretical throughputs of each of them, yes, it's FPU performance blows the 360 away (and the 360 is no slouch in the math area).
But ah, there's a problem.
Game code, especially these days is BIG. Million line codebases are commonplace. Of those hypothetical million lines, perhaps 10-15% is real nitty gritty hand tweaked, down-to-the-metal stuff (maybe a tad higher with the heavyweight 3rd party physics engines like Havok). But the reality is, in volume the vast vast majority of game code is random access, ordinary-programmer written, spaghetti-like stuff. It is engineered to really hammer the heck out of the gobs of available ram on modern hardware (256+). It is, in fact, exactly the kind of thing that the Pentium excels at.
Here's the rub. These vaunted Cell processors only have 256k (that's kilobytes, friends) of ram accessible to them. No sharing of main ram, or ram between the Cells. You gotta go to DMA (very fancy on the PS3) to do that. That 256k, incidentally, is shared between code and data.
If you can tell me how you're going to cram 800,000 lines of random access code into convenient 256k bundles at a time, using (armies of) "normal" programmers and non-infinite amounts of time, well....you da man. The difficulty of doing this (forget about reverse engineering existing codebases onto the thing) cannot be understated. Most houses simply aren't going to be able to do this. The classic example is AI code. Imagine writing your little A* search on a modern pathfinding graph. You're talking megabytes of data. How you gonna do this in 256k at a time? Well, you probably can, but instead of the 15 minutes it would take you to do it normally, it's going to take you days (not including training on the darn hardware) to do this. Multiply that by the 5,000 other marginally complex bits of code in the game.
Simply put, Cell architecture of the PS3 is going to artificially impose huge additional complexity and overhead for programmers who are working on systems that are already becoming too hard.
Modern AAA titles are mega hard, $20 million dollar, 3 year affairs. Many many companies are incapable of pulling them off properly on "normal" hardware. The PS2 threw people for loops for several years until the general knowledge base was large.
So what's going to happen? Well, the same thing as with the PS2. People are going to compile their code to run on the main processor (a weakish Mips processor, of which the 360 has 3), drop in the "obvious" Cell code (graphics, physics) and then hand port little morsels of the rest of the code to the Cell processors as they can. This will result in pathetic speedups, and the gigantic horsepower hidden within the Cell units will remain unused. Because such a disproportionate amount of processing power is in the Cell processors, the overall utilization of your average PS3 game is going to be pathetic. Compare the PS2 games at launch to now (where "now" == totally optimized) - huge difference right? Well, the "worst" PS3 code is going to be proportionally far far worse.
Not a few people have wondered if Sony chose this direction because it would force developers who want to make top flight games to write their code
Yes, there will be the whiz-bang amazing games. But not many. There will be kickass studios that can really nail the hardware. But not many. Consequently, a box which at least on paper has a comparable graphics card, and FAR more processing power will lose bigtime to the 360 because at least the 360 is approachable.
Absolutely not. The attitude of "it should go to who is most productive" is the complete antithesis of individual liberty. Whether I choose to keep my plot of land completely sedentary or turn it into a giant widget factory is beside the point. It is -mine- and that fundamental right of property ownership is the quintessence of individual freedom.
Your attitude of "it should go to who is most productive" is just code for "redistribution of wealth". Once YOU (ostensibly, the government) get to decide who these magical "best" people are, you've just laid the groundwork for every tyranny your fevered little mind can imagine.
Ditto. It is difficult to describe how furious this situation makes me. There's about a jillion things that get my blood boiling and make my thoughts wander towards "revolution".
But this....this is the real deal. My throat catches every time I consider what is happening here.
You are a foul, foul individual. The stench of Communism - that great meat grinder (to the tune of 100 million) of the last century emanates from your every word. May you live to see the day your evil wishes come true and feel the horror.
And for the record, these people were not given "a million dollars". There was 1.7 million budgeted TOTAL for all the houses. That's pennies on the dollar for their lives.
Reality check, buddy. Read up on the average eminent domain case. People routinely get pennies on the dollar for their property. In this case, they had budgeted 1.6 million for ALL the houses. You can't tell me that 100k-120k is even close to the actual value these people had in equity.
Essentially, people are being evicted and having their life savings clobbered simultaneously. People who have worked and saved and generally lived the American dream their entire lives are getting the Ultimate Shafting.
Every hunting rifle (and there are ~80 million of them in the US) is a sniper rifle, pure and simple. There is no practical difference.
It doesn't require a foolish stand against 100 SWAT guys. It doesn't require a shooting rampage on innocent employees of Walmart.
All it requires is loads of dead city councilmen and other assorted politicians across the country from long range rifle fire. Make the tyrants who decided to take your life away from you pay for it with theirs. This is the basis of Jefferson's "Tree of Liberty". Attack the fuckers who've decided to throw your life away. Not the cops sent to enforce things, or the construction workers - they're just guys doing their job. No - it's the bastards making the decisions that should receive our wrath.
Read this VERY VERY carefully. You cannot tyrannize a populace armed with rifles. Rifles. So help me God, if you so-called "intelligent" liberal nerds do not see the clear importance of the 2nd amendment after this fiasco, you frigging deserve your fate.
I personally am 100% shocked at how universal "they'll have to take me fighting" sentiment across all groups I've seen react to this ruling. Conservatives, liberals. Nerds on Slashdot. Everyone is clearly thinking the same thing.
Sadly, this decision will cause people to lose their lives. Most people will not fight because losing their own lives impacts their loved ones. But there are going to be plenty of people out there who have nothing to lose. They will be killed - but not before the message is clearly sent : "don't fuck with us".
As has been pointed out multiple times on this thread : make note of the liberal philosophies clearly on display here. "International Law", "the common good", "collectivism" - all that socialist jazz. What it all boils down to in the end is : the government running roughshod over you at gunpoint. Gunpoint. When that nice municipal worker with the gun at his side shows up at your doorstep and politely tells you that you no longer own your home, you're gonna have to make a choice.
The logical extreme of this technology is that legislators will want to mandate it in all newly manufactured cars, and make it illegal to disable.
So then you have gloves - circumvention. So what then, they make the things so the car won't operate at all without human skin contact (via capacitance check or something)? What about in the winter?
It seems to me what we can really expect from this is either "reduced" insurance rates if you have one (which really means, those who don't have them have their rates increased).
On the other hand, several states have gone through the legislative motions (NY, New Mexico) to try and mandate the breathe-to-start thing for all vehicles and they've all gone down in flames.
I had the oppurtunity to try one of these out from a 4" S&W a couple weeks ago. Yowza. I have a touch of recoil junky in me, but that thing is just a little too overwhelming to be a "fun" shooter.
Magnum Research (makers of the Desert Eagle) also make a revolver called the "BFR" which is even more ridiculous - it's basically chambered for various large rifle rounds, like.45-70 govt,.480 ruger and.444 Marlin (it blows my mind that anyone would even consider touching one of those off:) ).
Great CD restoration home remedy :
Take a Kleenex and put a dab of toothpaste on it. Rub vigorously on major scratch on a CD. Wash off and test. Repeat until done. You'd be shocked how bad of a scratch can be fixed just by levelling out the plastic with this method.
Technical note : While their technically is a.45 magnum cartridge (.45 Winchester Magnum), it is an exceedingly rare/exotic cartridge.
You're probably thinking of the venerable.44 magnum which is the gold standard "hand cannon" round. It was also Dirty Harry's cartridge of choice (fired from a S&W model 29).
Also, the common ".45" is the.45 ACP cartridge, which while hugely popular in the shooting community, is significantly less powerful than the.44 magnum (roughly 50% the muzzle energy).
Nobody knows what they would think about issues today, and no one should care.
You had my interest until here. We shouldn't care what they think, eh? Well, that sure sets the tone for shredding the bits of the Constitution you don't like.
How's this for starters: I propose a law which specfically makes it illegal to criticize the Pope, or to cast dispersions upon the name of Jesus - on the Internet. In fact, let's make it a felony. I mean after all, the FF's couldn't have possibly known about the ultra rapid flow of information - so what right should you have to spread a message of hate so rapidly and widely?
What's that you say? First amendment not such a bad idea after all?
If you want to play semantic games and say that "red really meant green back then", that's fine. By today's definitions, they were around 50% conservative, 50% libertarian (depending on which FF you're considering).
Their primary qualities were
- anti-government
- religious
- pro-individual freedom, anti collective-freedom (probably the hugest way in which they were decidedly not liberal by our standards)
- Wildly pro-gun.
- Anti-tax (admittedly, it's tough to call that a "republican" value these days, although it's still a strong conservative ideal at the grassroots level).
If you can show me how this aligns with liberal doctrine, implied or explicit, I'd be surprised. You might be able to make a case that the Federalist Hamilton had liberal leanings, but that would be quite a stretch.
Excellent post. I'll throw in a few more revolutionary (and other) zingers:
"Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
- William Pitt
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." -Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-B.
"To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them..." -Richard Henry Lee writing in Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republic (1787-1788).
"The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms." -Samuel Adams, debates & Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87.
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -Thomas Jefferson, Proposal Virginia Constitution, 1 T. Jefferson Papers, 334 (C.J. Boyd, Ed., 1950).
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." -Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria.
"Arms in the hands of citizens (may) be used at individual
discretion... in private self defense..." -John Adams, A defense of the
Constitutions of the Government of the USA, 471 (1788).
I mean, the list just goes on. Paired with the plain-English wording of the 2nd Amendment, only the most blind of idiots can see what the Founding Fathers favored.
Sadly, yes. People are absolutely indoctrinated to ignore the fact that the US was founded by gun wielding rebels, who by the way, happened to be highly religious. They fall into all the "bad" categories of people (white, gun owning, religious, militant, and probably a few others) that the liberals would like to demonize. And yet those same bad bad people managed to set up exactly the government which allows everyone to enjoy unprecedented civil rights.
You're making a common mistake. The point isn't some wacky, hopeless stand against a immeasurably superior armed forces.
The point, is that every deer rifle out there is a sniper rifle. And if you have 80 million pissed off riflemen, that should put the fear of God into the politicians for their own lives.
At the risk of showing up on Carnivore : The 2nd amendment is about hunting - it's about hunting tyrants.
There are a bajillion quotes from the Founding Fathers backing this assertion up.
He just ranted about how he hates lesbians, and objects to them speaking on campus
He absolutely did not say any such thing . What the hell is wrong with you lefties - are you incapable of comprehending English? He simply said a bunch of guys setup a silly counter-protest to a bunch of radical lesbians. How exactly is this him censoring anyone? I see all kinds of protests I "object to". But I don't try to stop them - I have no right to do so. Doesn't mean I can't stage a "you're a fucking idiot" counter-protest for the very same reasons they staged a protest in the first place.
Realize : your right to free speech does not preclude my right to free speech. If you can go ahead and spout off stuff I disagree with, I can darn well go ahead and spout off that you're an idiot.
He claims to be in favor of free speech - yet wants to stop the lesbians he doesn't like from speaking.
Nowhere in his post does he say this. Nowhere. Read it again. In fact, not only did he not say this, he simply pointed out a case where a bunch of guys simply counter-protested in a sarcastic way, and they were the ones who got shut down. Not just shut down, but threatened with having their entire frat shut down. That's a huge huge huge infraction of their right to say whatever the hell they want.
Again, I point out your selective recall of what was actually said. He said absolutely nothing to the effect of "those darn lesbians should STFU, and I will see to it that they will through official channels!". No, instead he showed a bunch of guys who counter-protested in their own way. But you - you cry censorship where none exists. And you do it in the face of a guy who's saying "look, here's some guys who were shutdown in X, Y, Z manner!".
Frankly, your ability to spin things is nothing short of astonishing.
Finally, let's examine your analysis of the original poster. Yes, he made some crude comments about the lesbians, based on his likely limited understanding of things. But lo and behold! You come back with your analysis of him with basically the exact same level of credibility. He's "bitter" and it's his "failures in life" which caused him to say such things. My friend, this is absolute brilliant hypocrisy.
And let me just say, I'm saving the entire contents of this thread - it is a beautiful example of liberal doublethink. Un-frickin-real.
Your response to his post is extremely telling. Yes, he did in fact take a cheap shot at lesbians. However, this was about 4% of the content of his overall post.
If you read through the post (go ahead, do it) you'll find that not only did he "give any specifics", but he logically demonstrated a clearcut case of absurd censorship in the name of political correctness.
I might add, that you sir did nothing but reply with the usual fruit basket of PC indignation. Oh dear me - he insulted obnoxious, openly anti-male lesbians!
I'll say it again, just to be clear - you 100% dodged the actual point of his argument, and decided to fixate on his very un-PC comments in order to discredit. Goebbels would be proud.
Slashdot Mirror
It's convenient to just say Che was a "revolutionary" and since the US was borne of revolutionaries, it's the same thing. The clear and concise difference is the Che and the communists actively murdered and suppressed citizens just for being....not them. Che specifically had the job of executing people deemed "not revolutionary enough". Not soldiers. Not tyrannical politicians. Just dirt-poor people who happened to disagree with his point of view. No comparison.
I've heard people try and use this same dumb argument that the US revolutionaries were just 'terrorists', right? Guys with rifles killing people in their land - just like Palestinians! Of course, this is bogus too. If the Palestinians just targeted Israeli soldiers and politicians this would be an entirely different issue. Instead, the blow up school buses full of children. Samuel Adams never sawed random people's heads off because he really disliked England.
As for Che still being a big hero in South America - fuck those who understand what he was and feel that way. If you worship Che out of ignorance, ok, I'll buy that. Everyone needs a hero. If you honestly know what he represented (the world's most efficient and prolific meat grinder of all time) and did for a living, then yes, fuck you, you murderous bastard :)
At "fresh out of college" age, it can be almost charming to work in a pressure cooker scenario, particularly if you're on a team full of people passionate about getting this game done. This is fun once or twice.
But after a few runs at this, it gets old. Real real old.
Oh wait, I was talking about 1998. Fast forward to 2006.
It's not even fun once now. Where I work, we currently have a project with a 90+ person team (monstrous) where a significant portion of the team has been working 80 hour weeks for a year. A percentage of that has been mandatory. I'll pause for a moment to let that sink in. That's like going to work twice every day for a full year. With a healthy helping of weekends. I'm not on this project, but I'm watching it as an outsider. We've got a lot of young guys these days - many first timers. And now, these first timers already have the 1000 yard stare. The bitterness and sarcasm you normally reserve for the established 30+ people is present in the 22 year olds.
Yes, this particular project is fubar and riddled with mistakes, but I view that as more of a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. The problem : AAA games are monstrous affairs with budgets in the $20million+ range, horribly overscoped on increasingly complex hardware.
Traditionally, I've been a low-level kind of guy. In that much sought after "tech guru" position. Optimizing things, building renderers, leading major architecture projects. I'm supposed to love the hard stuff. I once did. But now...pff...I find myself at the keyboard every day wondering why we can't just do Gameboy games. The hard fact is, I don't make games anymore. I am aimed at atrociously hard, ill defined problems. Games, ha. No programmer on a 90 person team feels like they're part of a game. I am 30. It should seem ridiculous that a 30 year old should be so shorn of passion.
If you absolutely must get into games, by all means do so. It's not a dead end. Just go in with your eyes open. Not every place is an EA-like meat grinder. But many are, so go with a healthy dose of cautious optimism.
The best advice I can give you is : it is better to play games than to make them.
Oh momma. Please excuse my errant non-previewed submission, riddled with grammatical errors. WTF?
1) The compiler and Dev tools can take care of DMA for you. No, they won't. At all. Sony does provide intricate DMA libraries and have several methodologies they "suggest". But this will not automate the development of code or execution of code in any way. However, they don't even support so much as OpenMP (which wouldn't be sufficient). 2) This generation, even more than the last, will see less developers building their own engines and they will instead be licensing them, such as the very popular Unreal Engine 3. This is partially correct. "Engines", or at least middleware is a pretty big deal these days. However, approximately 95% of games out there aren't first person shooters, and there aren't many viable engines which aren't fps engines. But the bigger issue here is that the "engine" code traditionally is only a small volume of the overall code. And those bits and pieces are the ones which will actually be fairly straightforward to move to the individual units (character deformation, misc vertex operations, physics). The real problem however, is that the vast vast proportion of the code is custom and non-parallelizable friendly. Do you know something we don't? Probably :) Regardless it's a reasonable assumption that the two will be pretty same - they're from the Big Two. In fact, I would go so far as to say if one or the other had, say, 2x-4x times the pixel throughput, that would still be considered comparable, in terms of realizable performance.
But ah, there's a problem.
Game code, especially these days is BIG. Million line codebases are commonplace. Of those hypothetical million lines, perhaps 10-15% is real nitty gritty hand tweaked, down-to-the-metal stuff (maybe a tad higher with the heavyweight 3rd party physics engines like Havok). But the reality is, in volume the vast vast majority of game code is random access, ordinary-programmer written, spaghetti-like stuff. It is engineered to really hammer the heck out of the gobs of available ram on modern hardware (256+). It is, in fact, exactly the kind of thing that the Pentium excels at.
Here's the rub. These vaunted Cell processors only have 256k (that's kilobytes, friends) of ram accessible to them. No sharing of main ram, or ram between the Cells. You gotta go to DMA (very fancy on the PS3) to do that. That 256k, incidentally, is shared between code and data.
If you can tell me how you're going to cram 800,000 lines of random access code into convenient 256k bundles at a time, using (armies of) "normal" programmers and non-infinite amounts of time, well....you da man. The difficulty of doing this (forget about reverse engineering existing codebases onto the thing) cannot be understated. Most houses simply aren't going to be able to do this. The classic example is AI code. Imagine writing your little A* search on a modern pathfinding graph. You're talking megabytes of data. How you gonna do this in 256k at a time? Well, you probably can, but instead of the 15 minutes it would take you to do it normally, it's going to take you days (not including training on the darn hardware) to do this. Multiply that by the 5,000 other marginally complex bits of code in the game.
Simply put, Cell architecture of the PS3 is going to artificially impose huge additional complexity and overhead for programmers who are working on systems that are already becoming too hard.
Modern AAA titles are mega hard, $20 million dollar, 3 year affairs. Many many companies are incapable of pulling them off properly on "normal" hardware. The PS2 threw people for loops for several years until the general knowledge base was large.
So what's going to happen? Well, the same thing as with the PS2. People are going to compile their code to run on the main processor (a weakish Mips processor, of which the 360 has 3), drop in the "obvious" Cell code (graphics, physics) and then hand port little morsels of the rest of the code to the Cell processors as they can. This will result in pathetic speedups, and the gigantic horsepower hidden within the Cell units will remain unused. Because such a disproportionate amount of processing power is in the Cell processors, the overall utilization of your average PS3 game is going to be pathetic. Compare the PS2 games at launch to now (where "now" == totally optimized) - huge difference right? Well, the "worst" PS3 code is going to be proportionally far far worse.
Not a few people have wondered if Sony chose this direction because it would force developers who want to make top flight games to write their code
Yes, there will be the whiz-bang amazing games. But not many. There will be kickass studios that can really nail the hardware. But not many. Consequently, a box which at least on paper has a comparable graphics card, and FAR more processing power will lose bigtime to the 360 because at least the 360 is approachable.
It's really, really nasty.
Senior developer, central Illinois. Just crossed the $100k mark this year, after 8 years at the same place.
Your attitude of "it should go to who is most productive" is just code for "redistribution of wealth". Once YOU (ostensibly, the government) get to decide who these magical "best" people are, you've just laid the groundwork for every tyranny your fevered little mind can imagine.
But this....this is the real deal. My throat catches every time I consider what is happening here.
And for the record, these people were not given "a million dollars". There was 1.7 million budgeted TOTAL for all the houses. That's pennies on the dollar for their lives.
In final closing - fuck you and die.
Essentially, people are being evicted and having their life savings clobbered simultaneously. People who have worked and saved and generally lived the American dream their entire lives are getting the Ultimate Shafting.
I'm sorry, but this is how a shooting war starts.
Every hunting rifle (and there are ~80 million of them in the US) is a sniper rifle, pure and simple. There is no practical difference.
It doesn't require a foolish stand against 100 SWAT guys. It doesn't require a shooting rampage on innocent employees of Walmart.
All it requires is loads of dead city councilmen and other assorted politicians across the country from long range rifle fire. Make the tyrants who decided to take your life away from you pay for it with theirs. This is the basis of Jefferson's "Tree of Liberty". Attack the fuckers who've decided to throw your life away. Not the cops sent to enforce things, or the construction workers - they're just guys doing their job. No - it's the bastards making the decisions that should receive our wrath.
Read this VERY VERY carefully. You cannot tyrannize a populace armed with rifles. Rifles. So help me God, if you so-called "intelligent" liberal nerds do not see the clear importance of the 2nd amendment after this fiasco, you frigging deserve your fate.
I personally am 100% shocked at how universal "they'll have to take me fighting" sentiment across all groups I've seen react to this ruling. Conservatives, liberals. Nerds on Slashdot. Everyone is clearly thinking the same thing.
Sadly, this decision will cause people to lose their lives. Most people will not fight because losing their own lives impacts their loved ones. But there are going to be plenty of people out there who have nothing to lose. They will be killed - but not before the message is clearly sent : "don't fuck with us".
As has been pointed out multiple times on this thread : make note of the liberal philosophies clearly on display here. "International Law", "the common good", "collectivism" - all that socialist jazz. What it all boils down to in the end is : the government running roughshod over you at gunpoint. Gunpoint. When that nice municipal worker with the gun at his side shows up at your doorstep and politely tells you that you no longer own your home, you're gonna have to make a choice.
This is a black, black, black, black day.
The logical extreme of this technology is that legislators will want to mandate it in all newly manufactured cars, and make it illegal to disable.
So then you have gloves - circumvention. So what then, they make the things so the car won't operate at all without human skin contact (via capacitance check or something)? What about in the winter?
It seems to me what we can really expect from this is either "reduced" insurance rates if you have one (which really means, those who don't have them have their rates increased).
On the other hand, several states have gone through the legislative motions (NY, New Mexico) to try and mandate the breathe-to-start thing for all vehicles and they've all gone down in flames.
We'll see.
Gloves.
http://tinyurl.com/bj8tl
I had the oppurtunity to try one of these out from a 4" S&W a couple weeks ago. Yowza. I have a touch of recoil junky in me, but that thing is just a little too overwhelming to be a "fun" shooter.
Magnum Research (makers of the Desert Eagle) also make a revolver called the "BFR" which is even more ridiculous - it's basically chambered for various large rifle rounds, like .45-70 govt, .480 ruger and .444 Marlin (it blows my mind that anyone would even consider touching one of those off :) ).
http://www.magnumresearch.com/
Great CD restoration home remedy : Take a Kleenex and put a dab of toothpaste on it. Rub vigorously on major scratch on a CD. Wash off and test. Repeat until done. You'd be shocked how bad of a scratch can be fixed just by levelling out the plastic with this method.
You're probably thinking of the venerable .44 magnum which is the gold standard "hand cannon" round. It was also Dirty Harry's cartridge of choice (fired from a S&W model 29).
Also, the common ".45" is the .45 ACP cartridge, which while hugely popular in the shooting community, is significantly less powerful than the .44 magnum (roughly 50% the muzzle energy).
You had my interest until here. We shouldn't care what they think, eh? Well, that sure sets the tone for shredding the bits of the Constitution you don't like.
How's this for starters: I propose a law which specfically makes it illegal to criticize the Pope, or to cast dispersions upon the name of Jesus - on the Internet. In fact, let's make it a felony. I mean after all, the FF's couldn't have possibly known about the ultra rapid flow of information - so what right should you have to spread a message of hate so rapidly and widely?
What's that you say? First amendment not such a bad idea after all?
Their primary qualities were
- anti-government
- religious
- pro-individual freedom, anti collective-freedom (probably the hugest way in which they were decidedly not liberal by our standards)
- Wildly pro-gun.
- Anti-tax (admittedly, it's tough to call that a "republican" value these days, although it's still a strong conservative ideal at the grassroots level).
If you can show me how this aligns with liberal doctrine, implied or explicit, I'd be surprised. You might be able to make a case that the Federalist Hamilton had liberal leanings, but that would be quite a stretch.
Oop. That should read "fail to see", of course.
"Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." - William Pitt
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." -Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-B.
"To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them..." -Richard Henry Lee writing in Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republic (1787-1788).
"The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms." -Samuel Adams, debates & Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87.
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -Thomas Jefferson, Proposal Virginia Constitution, 1 T. Jefferson Papers, 334 (C.J. Boyd, Ed., 1950).
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." -Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria.
"Arms in the hands of citizens (may) be used at individual discretion... in private self defense..." -John Adams, A defense of the Constitutions of the Government of the USA, 471 (1788).
I mean, the list just goes on. Paired with the plain-English wording of the 2nd Amendment, only the most blind of idiots can see what the Founding Fathers favored.
Funny, that.
The point, is that every deer rifle out there is a sniper rifle. And if you have 80 million pissed off riflemen, that should put the fear of God into the politicians for their own lives.
At the risk of showing up on Carnivore : The 2nd amendment is about hunting - it's about hunting tyrants.
There are a bajillion quotes from the Founding Fathers backing this assertion up.
He absolutely did not say any such thing . What the hell is wrong with you lefties - are you incapable of comprehending English? He simply said a bunch of guys setup a silly counter-protest to a bunch of radical lesbians. How exactly is this him censoring anyone? I see all kinds of protests I "object to". But I don't try to stop them - I have no right to do so. Doesn't mean I can't stage a "you're a fucking idiot" counter-protest for the very same reasons they staged a protest in the first place.
Realize : your right to free speech does not preclude my right to free speech. If you can go ahead and spout off stuff I disagree with, I can darn well go ahead and spout off that you're an idiot.
Nowhere in his post does he say this. Nowhere . Read it again. In fact, not only did he not say this, he simply pointed out a case where a bunch of guys simply counter-protested in a sarcastic way, and they were the ones who got shut down. Not just shut down, but threatened with having their entire frat shut down. That's a huge huge huge infraction of their right to say whatever the hell they want.
Again, I point out your selective recall of what was actually said. He said absolutely nothing to the effect of "those darn lesbians should STFU, and I will see to it that they will through official channels!". No, instead he showed a bunch of guys who counter-protested in their own way. But you - you cry censorship where none exists. And you do it in the face of a guy who's saying "look, here's some guys who were shutdown in X, Y, Z manner!".
Frankly, your ability to spin things is nothing short of astonishing.
Finally, let's examine your analysis of the original poster. Yes, he made some crude comments about the lesbians, based on his likely limited understanding of things. But lo and behold! You come back with your analysis of him with basically the exact same level of credibility. He's "bitter" and it's his "failures in life" which caused him to say such things. My friend, this is absolute brilliant hypocrisy.
And let me just say, I'm saving the entire contents of this thread - it is a beautiful example of liberal doublethink. Un-frickin-real.
If you read through the post (go ahead, do it) you'll find that not only did he "give any specifics", but he logically demonstrated a clearcut case of absurd censorship in the name of political correctness.
I might add, that you sir did nothing but reply with the usual fruit basket of PC indignation. Oh dear me - he insulted obnoxious, openly anti-male lesbians!I'll say it again, just to be clear - you 100% dodged the actual point of his argument, and decided to fixate on his very un-PC comments in order to discredit. Goebbels would be proud.