Your interpretation of the Second Amendment is based on a very contorted reading of it. It doesn't say "right of the militia". It doesn't say "right of the well-trained people". It does say "right of the people", with no further qualifications (a rationale is not a qualification).
This doesn't preclude background checks and many other things. But it almost certainly does preclude your suggested regulatory scheme. If you still want it, you can always advocate for a constitutional amendment - that procedure is there for a reason.
Oh, and please, leave the bullshit "judicial activism" whining for the right-wingers. It has been diluted so much that by now it simply means "I don't like the decision the court has made".
Looking at gun homicides alone doesn't really tell you anything meaningful. In particular, it doesn't tell you how many of those homicides would still be homicides done with something else, if a gun were not available.
No law-abiding citizen may have access to an M-16 for entertainment purposes. Now there are certain organizations that may have access to an M-16 for business purposes, but no citizen may own one.
You can own an M-16 just fine as a civilian, if you find a pre-86 one on sale, and are willing to pay somewhere around $20K for the privilege plus $200 in federal transfer tax. There are no laws on federal level that prohibit civilians from owning full auto firearms; only importation and manufacture for civilian market is prohibited, but everything that is already there can be resold with a tax stamp. Some states specifically ban full autos, but there are enough that do not.
The ones who need this format are the users. But they won't actually get it because none of the mainstream browsers will use a GPLv3 library. And until at least one popular browser has it, others don't really have any incentive to implement it.
So, in effect, the project is stillborn, entirely due to the licensing decision of the authors. Which is exactly the point.
If that's a victory for freedom, then, I suppose... yay?
I want either a true free market with competition (i.e. the one where I'm not required to go shopping), or else a properly regulated market. Anything in between is unacceptable, because it is forcing me to buy a product from a private party without limiting how much the party can charge me; in such a market, the natural strategy for the providers is to collude on prices.
I am required to buy auto insurance, since I insist on driving on public roads. I can shop by price, and change insurance companies to save money. It works essentially the same way.
Yes, and it's equally ridiculous. In BC, for example, the auto insurance company is run by the state, allowing it to control prices, so mandating it makes sense.
The public option plan existed also (and indeed, was the preferred one). It was scuttled.
It's debatable whether ACA is actually better than what was before it long term. It does force you to buy insurance without putting any meaningful price controls in place on the cost of said insurance.
This is pretty much the intended role of those things. It was actually noted a while ago that in asymmetrical conflicts, modern airplanes are simply not cost effective - you have a machine designed for dogfights against its equal and/or to penetrate strong air defenses, and you use it to basically blow up camels in a desert. It comes with an astronomical price tag to begin with, it's very costly to run and maintain, has high standards for airfields it can be used from, and if god forbid it gets damaged (which in CAS is a matter of "when", not "if"), is also costly to repair. In contrast, a lightweight turboprop focused solely on CAS can easily be cheaper by orders of magnitude, is very reliable and cost effective, and is just as resilient (if not more) in fact of threats that it'd actually face on the battlefield.
I believe the first time this point was made, and actually implemented, was the MiniCOIN during the Biafra War, and it was quite successful - and that wasn't even a plane purpose-built for the role, but rather minimally adapted to it.
U-turn, perhaps. Embarrassing? More like long overdue. Good engineering is about using the best fit for the task at hand, not about shoving balls into square holes for the sake of politics.
Let me show you something. This is a Microsoft product that runs on Linux (IPython/Jupyter notebooks specifically, that is). It's not even a customized distro, just plain Ubuntu running in Docker containers. And it's not something that runs under the hood, because in notebooks you can run shell commands and access the file system, so it's very much visible that it's Linux. You can literally just do "!uname -a" in the notebook and see for yourself.
So why is it Linux? First, because this is built on top of containers, which have been a Linux feature for quite a while now and had time to mature and stabilize, but is a brand spanking new feature in Windows. And second, because people - data scientists and statisticians - who actually use those notebooks expect a Unix-like system; they have shell scripts and such that they use on their Macs, and they expect all this stuff to more or less just work.
Russian has plenty of homonyms, but most of them are not readily obvious to native speakers of the language. They're produced by consonant changes at the end of the word that is peculiar to Russian - e.g. when the word "lez" (a verb meaning "[he] climbed") is actually pronounced "les", which is the same as the actual word "les" which means "forest". For another example, "kod" (code) is pronounced as "kot", which is the same as the actual word "kot" = cat.
All voiced consonants that have a voiceless counterpart undergo such change at the end of the word in Russian - "b" to "p", "g" to "k", "d" to "t" etc. This creates a huge number of homonym pairs that differ in spelling. To a native speaker they're usually not prominent because various inflections and other variations of the word (which don't have the consonant in the final position) will retain the voiced pronunciation - e.g. "kody" (codes) is not pronounced as "koty". And, of course, context helps. When these produce amusing pairings, they're often consciously used for puns. But to someone learning the language, this can actually be a fairly big problem.
In this particular case, the comparison between letters doesn't really make sense, because, despite their modern identical appearance, they are derived from two very different letters of the Greek alphabet. Specifically, Cyrillic (which, to remind, derives directly from Greek) "C" is simply lowercase word-final sigma that had lost its hook. In Latin alphabet, on the other hand, the hook has grown to become as large as the remainder, thereby producing "S". Consequently, both letters are used to represent the "s" sound, same as they did in Greek.
OTOH, the Latin letter "C" is actually derived from the Greek gamma (which is why it's so similar to "G"). When Etruscans adopted it, they started writing the main stem tilted as well, resulting in a kind of an angle, and eventually smoothing it into a reverse-C shape. Because Etruscan didn't have the sound "g", they repurposed it to mean "k". Romans then took it from Etruscans and reversed the shape, yielding "C", but retaining the "k" sound for it. Ironically, because they had a need for "g", they have started to use "C" for that purpose also, and then at some point to avoid confusion they added a stroke to distinguish the two, producing "G". Much later, languages that derived from Latin or used the alphabet have undergone a change in pronunciation in places where "C" was used, producing the "s" sound before some vowels in English (and other sounds in other languages; so basically in almost every Romance language "c" can be "k" as inherited from Latin, or it can be something else that varies from language to language, like "ts" or "ch" or "th").
The way I see it, the key part here is whether we're talking about plain disagreement, or fraud. My initial reaction to TFA was "no fucking way", even though I do think that AGW denial is dangerous bullshit. Free speech is important, even if it's the kind that I don't like. But on a second thought, I think I understand their point now.
Imagine that there's some company that's in the oil business with a name beginning with, say, E. And that company maintains the public position that AGW is not happening, funds research to support that, and spends a lot of money on propaganda to that effect. So far, so good - all of this is under free speech.
Now suppose we have a scientist working for that company testify under oath that the research that was funded actually showed evidence of AGW, but it was not published, specifically because it contradicted the public message. A court issues a warrant to go digging in the company's emails and other records, and finds that the testimony was correct: company officials effectively made public claims that they knew were false because their own research has shown otherwise - and they suppressed that research. At this point, do you still think it's free speech? When the people are saying things publicly that they know to be false (and we have evidence that they do know, or at least should have reasonably known), to make other people misinformed for the sake of their own personal agenda and profit? For me, this would clearly be in the fraud territory.
If even that is not sufficient for you, let's extend the hypothetical further: the emails not only show the existence of the research, and the knowledge of it by the executives making decisions to suppress it and make contrary claims in their propaganda campaign, but they also show those same executives explicitly acknowledging that the research is valid, and its conclusions are objectively true - and then saying that it should be suppressed for the sake of the company's bottom line. In other words, not only we have evidence, but we have direct admission that they were knowingly lying. At this point, would you still defend it as free speech?
To answer your question, the same would be applicable in reverse - i.e. if lying to convince the public that there's no AGW is fraud even when you know that the reverse is true, then so is knowingly lying to convince the public that there is AGW even when you know that there actually isn't. I would be fine with such a standard set on both sides. Again, the key word here is "knowingly", and I'd want a very solid proof of that.
Suppose I start selling bottled water that has a sticker on it that says "Tested to be safe for your health". Except that I actually put cyanide in every bottle.
Do you think this should be legal, on account of being a free speech issue? I mean, it's just a bunch of words on the bottle.
To clarify. It's fraud when people who disseminate false information know that it is false, but still do it because it results in personal gain for them. The only problem is that you have to very reliably prove that they have known it to be false. If this is something that requires "beyond a reasonable doubt" level of proof, then I suppose it would be a valid application.
It's a nice label you've come up with, "politiscientists". I would guess that's anyone who happens to not agree with you on AGW.
Too bad that's, what, 97% of the people who possess enough knowledge to even make an educated assessment of the claim?
As for the deniers, it's more like, "Smoke? what smoke? I don't see any smoke. *cough* That's not smoke, that's just fog. Or if it's smoke, it's from cigarettes. Yeah, just a lot of cigarettes. And anyway, the smoke is actually good for you. Also, did you know, I went to a movie theater yesterday and there was no smoke at all, so clearly it's just a transient thing."
Yes. The right wing is pushing for "zero tolerance" policies, three strike laws, and mandatory sentencing. The more extreme right wing is also quite fond of racial and religious profiling.
You are, actually. The junkie will find his fix anyway, and you'll be subsidizing his addiction in various other ways. For example, if he needs to rob someone to get it, then you may well be subsidizing it with your own wallet; or if you're not the victim, you'll be subsidizing it through police, court and prison budgets. Or maybe he has the money, but only for the cheapest, dirty stuff, and then you'll be subsidizing his trip to ER.
Again, the only reason why what the kid did was even perceived as a bomb hoax (despite him doing everything to convince people otherwise) is because people like you have created the culture of paranoia and fear around all things Muslim.
Yes, I'm perfectly fine with that. The overhead that the existing system has is so high that if we replace it with UBI, we can spend the remainder to help way more heroine junkies (etc).
I agree that it is not a new thing per se, but I feel that the balance is getting tilted more towards it simply because of all the progress in communication tech. These things are ridiculously easy to organize and amplify now (in fact, quite a few are outright spontaneous). So the sheer number of them, and the amount of time people spend involved in them, is much larger.
What specific actions would free humanity from the threat of nuclear catastrophe? 1) nuclear disarmament is a start.
That's like saying, in response to a question on how to solve world hunger, that "coming up with a magical device that just produces free food for everyone is a start". I mean, yes, it technically is, but you haven't made anything clearer.
2) advancing our nuclear technology to use thorium would eat up nuclear waste and not produce plutonium.
That's one valid point. Of course, it doesn't really solve the problem that states want to produce plutonium, because they want to have nukes. Until you address that part, the rest is immaterial.
nuclear disarmament has been going on for a LONG time!
Yes, except that it, for the most part, hasn't been unilateral (in cases where some countries did unilaterally dispose of their nuclear programs and/or arsenals, there was always an implicit assumption that they have a bigger ally who'll step in for them for MAD purposes).
Furthermore, that process, despite going for a long time, has not really resulted in disarmament. There has been a significant reduction of stocks compared to the height of Cold War, but it basically went down to the level that's necessary for MAD and then stopped. If you want full disarmament, past experience is not necessarily helpful. And it's not even a given that the present configuration is stable, in light of the recent developments in world politics...
it will take time and money to fully develop and the public has been conditioned to be terrified of nuclear anything.
How much time? How much money? Where do we get those resources from? How do we recondition the public?
politics
Politics is one of the major factors in the development of human society - indeed, any coherent plan you might have for making things better is by definition also "politics". The question you should be asking is, how to rally people [who make decisions] behind your politics. If they aren't there already, it's either because they don't know about it (in which case, how can you make them be aware?), or because they perceive it to be conflicting with some of their other interests (in which case, how can you make it not conflict, or convince them that this is more important?), or because they don't think the plan will work (in which case, is it perhaps because there are some objective flaws in the plan, and how to address them?).
* How would unilateral nuclear reductions enhance our security? It would ensure that these dangerous weapons are not used on humans.
Yes. A unilateral nuclear disarmament (especially complete) would indeed ensure that these dangerous weapons won't be used on humans. It will be some other dangerous weapons, of a country that did not disarm, that will be sued.
Slashdot Mirror
Your interpretation of the Second Amendment is based on a very contorted reading of it. It doesn't say "right of the militia". It doesn't say "right of the well-trained people". It does say "right of the people", with no further qualifications (a rationale is not a qualification).
This doesn't preclude background checks and many other things. But it almost certainly does preclude your suggested regulatory scheme. If you still want it, you can always advocate for a constitutional amendment - that procedure is there for a reason.
Oh, and please, leave the bullshit "judicial activism" whining for the right-wingers. It has been diluted so much that by now it simply means "I don't like the decision the court has made".
Looking at gun homicides alone doesn't really tell you anything meaningful. In particular, it doesn't tell you how many of those homicides would still be homicides done with something else, if a gun were not available.
No law-abiding citizen may have access to an M-16 for entertainment purposes. Now there are certain organizations that may have access to an M-16 for business purposes, but no citizen may own one.
You can own an M-16 just fine as a civilian, if you find a pre-86 one on sale, and are willing to pay somewhere around $20K for the privilege plus $200 in federal transfer tax. There are no laws on federal level that prohibit civilians from owning full auto firearms; only importation and manufacture for civilian market is prohibited, but everything that is already there can be resold with a tax stamp. Some states specifically ban full autos, but there are enough that do not.
Which most programs aren't, and their authors don't want them to be.
No mainstream browser today is under GPLv3. I don't think there's even any under GPLv2.
The ones who need this format are the users. But they won't actually get it because none of the mainstream browsers will use a GPLv3 library. And until at least one popular browser has it, others don't really have any incentive to implement it.
So, in effect, the project is stillborn, entirely due to the licensing decision of the authors. Which is exactly the point.
If that's a victory for freedom, then, I suppose... yay?
I want either a true free market with competition (i.e. the one where I'm not required to go shopping), or else a properly regulated market. Anything in between is unacceptable, because it is forcing me to buy a product from a private party without limiting how much the party can charge me; in such a market, the natural strategy for the providers is to collude on prices.
The price control is called "competition".
Yeah, right.
I am required to buy auto insurance, since I insist on driving on public roads. I can shop by price, and change insurance companies to save money. It works essentially the same way.
Yes, and it's equally ridiculous. In BC, for example, the auto insurance company is run by the state, allowing it to control prices, so mandating it makes sense.
RINO = moderate Republican.
Heck, Reagan was a RINO by modern metrics.
The public option plan existed also (and indeed, was the preferred one). It was scuttled.
It's debatable whether ACA is actually better than what was before it long term. It does force you to buy insurance without putting any meaningful price controls in place on the cost of said insurance.
This is pretty much the intended role of those things. It was actually noted a while ago that in asymmetrical conflicts, modern airplanes are simply not cost effective - you have a machine designed for dogfights against its equal and/or to penetrate strong air defenses, and you use it to basically blow up camels in a desert. It comes with an astronomical price tag to begin with, it's very costly to run and maintain, has high standards for airfields it can be used from, and if god forbid it gets damaged (which in CAS is a matter of "when", not "if"), is also costly to repair. In contrast, a lightweight turboprop focused solely on CAS can easily be cheaper by orders of magnitude, is very reliable and cost effective, and is just as resilient (if not more) in fact of threats that it'd actually face on the battlefield.
I believe the first time this point was made, and actually implemented, was the MiniCOIN during the Biafra War, and it was quite successful - and that wasn't even a plane purpose-built for the role, but rather minimally adapted to it.
U-turn, perhaps. Embarrassing? More like long overdue. Good engineering is about using the best fit for the task at hand, not about shoving balls into square holes for the sake of politics.
Let me show you something. This is a Microsoft product that runs on Linux (IPython/Jupyter notebooks specifically, that is). It's not even a customized distro, just plain Ubuntu running in Docker containers. And it's not something that runs under the hood, because in notebooks you can run shell commands and access the file system, so it's very much visible that it's Linux. You can literally just do "!uname -a" in the notebook and see for yourself.
So why is it Linux? First, because this is built on top of containers, which have been a Linux feature for quite a while now and had time to mature and stabilize, but is a brand spanking new feature in Windows. And second, because people - data scientists and statisticians - who actually use those notebooks expect a Unix-like system; they have shell scripts and such that they use on their Macs, and they expect all this stuff to more or less just work.
Can you present an alternative number, and provide source for the same?
Russian has plenty of homonyms, but most of them are not readily obvious to native speakers of the language. They're produced by consonant changes at the end of the word that is peculiar to Russian - e.g. when the word "lez" (a verb meaning "[he] climbed") is actually pronounced "les", which is the same as the actual word "les" which means "forest". For another example, "kod" (code) is pronounced as "kot", which is the same as the actual word "kot" = cat.
All voiced consonants that have a voiceless counterpart undergo such change at the end of the word in Russian - "b" to "p", "g" to "k", "d" to "t" etc. This creates a huge number of homonym pairs that differ in spelling. To a native speaker they're usually not prominent because various inflections and other variations of the word (which don't have the consonant in the final position) will retain the voiced pronunciation - e.g. "kody" (codes) is not pronounced as "koty". And, of course, context helps. When these produce amusing pairings, they're often consciously used for puns. But to someone learning the language, this can actually be a fairly big problem.
In this particular case, the comparison between letters doesn't really make sense, because, despite their modern identical appearance, they are derived from two very different letters of the Greek alphabet. Specifically, Cyrillic (which, to remind, derives directly from Greek) "C" is simply lowercase word-final sigma that had lost its hook. In Latin alphabet, on the other hand, the hook has grown to become as large as the remainder, thereby producing "S". Consequently, both letters are used to represent the "s" sound, same as they did in Greek.
OTOH, the Latin letter "C" is actually derived from the Greek gamma (which is why it's so similar to "G"). When Etruscans adopted it, they started writing the main stem tilted as well, resulting in a kind of an angle, and eventually smoothing it into a reverse-C shape. Because Etruscan didn't have the sound "g", they repurposed it to mean "k". Romans then took it from Etruscans and reversed the shape, yielding "C", but retaining the "k" sound for it. Ironically, because they had a need for "g", they have started to use "C" for that purpose also, and then at some point to avoid confusion they added a stroke to distinguish the two, producing "G". Much later, languages that derived from Latin or used the alphabet have undergone a change in pronunciation in places where "C" was used, producing the "s" sound before some vowels in English (and other sounds in other languages; so basically in almost every Romance language "c" can be "k" as inherited from Latin, or it can be something else that varies from language to language, like "ts" or "ch" or "th").
The way I see it, the key part here is whether we're talking about plain disagreement, or fraud. My initial reaction to TFA was "no fucking way", even though I do think that AGW denial is dangerous bullshit. Free speech is important, even if it's the kind that I don't like. But on a second thought, I think I understand their point now.
Imagine that there's some company that's in the oil business with a name beginning with, say, E. And that company maintains the public position that AGW is not happening, funds research to support that, and spends a lot of money on propaganda to that effect. So far, so good - all of this is under free speech.
Now suppose we have a scientist working for that company testify under oath that the research that was funded actually showed evidence of AGW, but it was not published, specifically because it contradicted the public message. A court issues a warrant to go digging in the company's emails and other records, and finds that the testimony was correct: company officials effectively made public claims that they knew were false because their own research has shown otherwise - and they suppressed that research. At this point, do you still think it's free speech? When the people are saying things publicly that they know to be false (and we have evidence that they do know, or at least should have reasonably known), to make other people misinformed for the sake of their own personal agenda and profit? For me, this would clearly be in the fraud territory.
If even that is not sufficient for you, let's extend the hypothetical further: the emails not only show the existence of the research, and the knowledge of it by the executives making decisions to suppress it and make contrary claims in their propaganda campaign, but they also show those same executives explicitly acknowledging that the research is valid, and its conclusions are objectively true - and then saying that it should be suppressed for the sake of the company's bottom line. In other words, not only we have evidence, but we have direct admission that they were knowingly lying. At this point, would you still defend it as free speech?
To answer your question, the same would be applicable in reverse - i.e. if lying to convince the public that there's no AGW is fraud even when you know that the reverse is true, then so is knowingly lying to convince the public that there is AGW even when you know that there actually isn't. I would be fine with such a standard set on both sides. Again, the key word here is "knowingly", and I'd want a very solid proof of that.
Suppose I start selling bottled water that has a sticker on it that says "Tested to be safe for your health". Except that I actually put cyanide in every bottle.
Do you think this should be legal, on account of being a free speech issue? I mean, it's just a bunch of words on the bottle.
To clarify. It's fraud when people who disseminate false information know that it is false, but still do it because it results in personal gain for them. The only problem is that you have to very reliably prove that they have known it to be false. If this is something that requires "beyond a reasonable doubt" level of proof, then I suppose it would be a valid application.
It's a nice label you've come up with, "politiscientists". I would guess that's anyone who happens to not agree with you on AGW.
Too bad that's, what, 97% of the people who possess enough knowledge to even make an educated assessment of the claim?
As for the deniers, it's more like, "Smoke? what smoke? I don't see any smoke. *cough* That's not smoke, that's just fog. Or if it's smoke, it's from cigarettes. Yeah, just a lot of cigarettes. And anyway, the smoke is actually good for you. Also, did you know, I went to a movie theater yesterday and there was no smoke at all, so clearly it's just a transient thing."
Yes. The right wing is pushing for "zero tolerance" policies, three strike laws, and mandatory sentencing. The more extreme right wing is also quite fond of racial and religious profiling.
You are, actually. The junkie will find his fix anyway, and you'll be subsidizing his addiction in various other ways. For example, if he needs to rob someone to get it, then you may well be subsidizing it with your own wallet; or if you're not the victim, you'll be subsidizing it through police, court and prison budgets. Or maybe he has the money, but only for the cheapest, dirty stuff, and then you'll be subsidizing his trip to ER.
Again, the only reason why what the kid did was even perceived as a bomb hoax (despite him doing everything to convince people otherwise) is because people like you have created the culture of paranoia and fear around all things Muslim.
Yes, I'm perfectly fine with that. The overhead that the existing system has is so high that if we replace it with UBI, we can spend the remainder to help way more heroine junkies (etc).
I agree that it is not a new thing per se, but I feel that the balance is getting tilted more towards it simply because of all the progress in communication tech. These things are ridiculously easy to organize and amplify now (in fact, quite a few are outright spontaneous). So the sheer number of them, and the amount of time people spend involved in them, is much larger.
Have you ever been to OWS and such? Meatspace is very much about hashtag activism these days, unfortunately.
What specific actions would free humanity from the threat of nuclear catastrophe?
1) nuclear disarmament is a start.
That's like saying, in response to a question on how to solve world hunger, that "coming up with a magical device that just produces free food for everyone is a start". I mean, yes, it technically is, but you haven't made anything clearer.
2) advancing our nuclear technology to use thorium would eat up nuclear waste and not produce plutonium.
That's one valid point. Of course, it doesn't really solve the problem that states want to produce plutonium, because they want to have nukes. Until you address that part, the rest is immaterial.
nuclear disarmament has been going on for a LONG time!
Yes, except that it, for the most part, hasn't been unilateral (in cases where some countries did unilaterally dispose of their nuclear programs and/or arsenals, there was always an implicit assumption that they have a bigger ally who'll step in for them for MAD purposes).
Furthermore, that process, despite going for a long time, has not really resulted in disarmament. There has been a significant reduction of stocks compared to the height of Cold War, but it basically went down to the level that's necessary for MAD and then stopped. If you want full disarmament, past experience is not necessarily helpful. And it's not even a given that the present configuration is stable, in light of the recent developments in world politics...
it will take time and money to fully develop and the public has been conditioned to be terrified of nuclear anything.
How much time? How much money? Where do we get those resources from? How do we recondition the public?
politics
Politics is one of the major factors in the development of human society - indeed, any coherent plan you might have for making things better is by definition also "politics". The question you should be asking is, how to rally people [who make decisions] behind your politics. If they aren't there already, it's either because they don't know about it (in which case, how can you make them be aware?), or because they perceive it to be conflicting with some of their other interests (in which case, how can you make it not conflict, or convince them that this is more important?), or because they don't think the plan will work (in which case, is it perhaps because there are some objective flaws in the plan, and how to address them?).
* How would unilateral nuclear reductions enhance our security?
It would ensure that these dangerous weapons are not used on humans.
Yes. A unilateral nuclear disarmament (especially complete) would indeed ensure that these dangerous weapons won't be used on humans. It will be some other dangerous weapons, of a country that did not disarm, that will be sued.
So... can we do those
Who is "we"?