You addressed one of the previous poster's points. He summarized the need for gun ownership with "The right to keep and bear arms is a protection against external attacks and a deterrent against internal attacks. " You claim that the ability of a foreign government or group to subjugate the people of the U.S. is not effected by private gun ownership. This implies that you do not believe the U.S. armed forces, or the U.S. government as a whole could be destroyed or controlled by an outside force. I think you are arrogant and wrong on this point, but we shall just have to agree to disagree. You have in no way addressed the second half of the argument. Assuming the U.S. is 100% immune to defeat at the hands of outside parties, how do you address the need of the people to defend their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness against the government itself? Obviously governments can become corrupt, votes can be rigged, politicians can be bribed or coerced. If our current or a later president were to declare an emergency and cancel elections. If they were to declare all non-christians to be evil and order them rounded up, and executed. Without firearms, how could the people resist and fight back effectively?
Hey where I live you can get a concealed weapons permit if you have no felonies of domestic violence convictions. There is an exception for police. It's OK for them to have a permit even if they are convicted of a felony or domestic violence. The reason is that some many police have domestic violence convictions. It really makes one wonder exactly what sort of a person wants to be a cop, and why. It's just another case of cops being above the law.
it's just that I find it ridiculous to have someone say they don't want a feature on their gun that would virtually eliminate accidental killings on the basis that it might malfunction and prevent their gun from working
Yeah, it's so strange that people on Slashdot, with tons of experience with electronics, would not trust them. Oh wait, no it isn't. Last week I pulled out my flashlight to look under the car and the battery was dead. If that had been a electronic gun in an emergency, I might be dead. We don't trust the system because even in lab conditions it has a 10% failure rate. That is worse than Windows 98. Now imagine it in real world conditions, with dirt and grime, neglected batteries, cold weather, warm weather, rain, snow, and users under extreme stress.
It seems like everyone who thinks this is a good idea either a) does not own a gun anyway, or b) does not think people should have guns that work, and thus support making them less reliable; sort of like a really crappy technological gun ban.
There are already a number of technologies and techniques that solve this problem in a more efficient and predictable way. First, teach your kids how to use guns properly and safely. Second, lock up guns. Use a bedside lockbox if you want one handy. Three, there is no three (unless you want to include safeties). Just number 1 has been effective for hundreds of years. The problem here is that people are not applying these techniques because they are uneducated, or just don't care. People who don't already use guns safely, are not likely to start because you put a lock on the gun. If you do that, some idiot will assume it is safe and just leave it on the couch. Their kid will accidentally shoot themselves when the safety fails, or when they put it in the oven to see what happens. You can't legislate people to not be idiots.
If you're scared the police aren't good enough to protect you, then get the police better funding.
The police cannot defend you, even with five orders of magnitude more money. It is not their job. Their job is to find and arrest the guy who beat, raped, stabbed, killed, etc you. Fewer than 5% of 911 calls are answered in time to prevent a crime. There are a number of precedent setting cases where citizens called the police for help, often with as much as an hour of notice, and the police refused to respond for some reason. In all cases the police were not held liable. These cases include rapes, beatings, and murders. Straight form the law books "a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen."
You may be happy to place responsibility for your own life, and that of your loved ones in the hands of the government, because you are afraid that you are too unstable to own a weapon. Do not try to make that choice for the rest of us. Some of us still believe in personal responsibility.
It would be just like the army, when they mandated.9mm automatics for the standard sidearm. All the people with rank still carried.45's, some of them still do.
A 32mb Radeon 9200 fine for everything? What world are you living on? It's not even a DX9 card (not that DX matters for opengl but the hardware features do). That card will barely run UT2004 at 640x480.
I have never ran a Radeon 9200, but my Geforce 5200 with 32 mb or ran, runs UT2004 just fine. Is there a big performance difference? Why even mention DX for a mac? DX is Microsoft proprietary, Windows only technology.
I just glanced at the Windows benchmarks and it looks like the 9200 runs at about 10-20% slower, mostly due to it's lack of DX support for a number of features. I can't imagine most people have any problem playing UT2004 on it. Heck, it even runs acceptably on my old 16 mb video card in my server. Maybe you need to look into more RAM or something.
I am not at all surprised. Similar statistics exist for my state, with only one CCW license ever revoked for improper use of a handgun (brandishing). More telling I think is that Florida passed another law, making rental cars have the same license plates as other cars. This is because so many tourists were being car-jacked and robbed. Criminals knew that people coming into the airport and leaving in a rental car were the only people guaranteed not to be carrying, and so targeted them to a ridiculous degree.
a) that gun cannot be fired by anyone else (dongle, sensor, magic word, whatever)
Or better yet, why don't we just make guns that only shoot people that deserve it, and then only shoot them in the leg to disable them, unless they have a gun, then they should shoot their hand and make them drop it. Oh, and it should emit a pleasant, vanilla scent instead of that gunpowder smell. Oh, and it would be nice if it also fed all the hungry in the world.
Get real. There is no reliable technological method for ensuring the identity of a gun's owner, without greatly decreasing the reliability of the firearm. 10% failure is not acceptable. 1% failure is not acceptable when it is really needed and there are better options.
b) if that gun is fired, the bullet will be easily traceable back to the gun and its owner. (perhaps making all bullets have serial numbers and making people register themselves to the bullets when purchasing)
Oh and lets make guns that detect any counterfeit money and automatically shoot the counterfeiters, that will stop counterfeiting too. So you are proposing requiring expensive new technologies that will remove guns from the hands of everyone but the wealthy and criminals. And you expect that criminals won't be able to work around it. And you expect that the system will not be taken at face value, and innocent people will not be framed when someone works out how to spoof the system, or just hack the database. I mean do you know how hard it is to make a bullet? It's a freaking chunk of lead. I can't think of many people who can't make them.
Until that's happening, then 2nd amendment is outdated, dangerous garbage. It will take time yes, to get the old crappy guns off the street. But it will happen over time.
No it won't. New guns will appear just as quickly as the old, and that is a good thing. Maybe you want to give away your responsibilities and rights, and trust other people to protect you (people who have neither the resources nor the will to do so and who have no obligation to do so legally). I do not. I will protect myself, and will make sure I have the means to do so. The second amendment was put there for a very good reason. Governments tend toward totalitarianism. People who become government employees, do so often because they want power. They will take as much as anyone will give up without too much of a fight. The right to bear arms is there to ensure that when (not if but when) the government becomes too oppressive, the people have a way to take back their rights.
Cowards like you may think that giving up your rights will keep you safe. You are wrong. You may think that banning guns from the hands of citizens will protect people and save lives. You are again wrong. It will empower criminals over non-criminals and promote violent crime. It will allow the government to become more oppressive, and cause great suffering. It may start another civil war. I am completely serious. Grow a backbone or at least a brain.
This is working in Canada who has more guns per capita than us here in the US. They have more guns per person and yet they have very little violent crime.
I think the reasons for violence and violent crime in the United States are largely social and economic. People commit crime out of desperation, or because they are greedy and lacking in ethics. Violence is sensationalized by American culture, more than most others, but at the same time ethics are rarely taught. I suspect the lack of violence in Canada has more to do with culture than the number of guns they own.
You won't be using this mini-Mac for gaming, but for internet/digital photos/word processing its an awesome setup.
Are you referring to the lack of games on the mac platform, or that you think this machine is underpowered for gaming? The former certainly has some truth to it. Many games never make it to the mac, although most of the good ones do and there are a few mac only gems that Windows users will never know. As far being underpowered, what games are on the market with requirements above the mac mini? I can't think of anything except maybe Doom3, and I bet even it will be acceptable. It's minimum requirements are almost exactly the mac mini (it wants 1.5 Ghz vs. the mac mini's 1.25 or 1.42). And Doom3 is still a month away from release on the mac. The graphics card is fine for pretty much everything.
I suppose it is not ideal for gaming, and I imagine that there will soon be games that require more resources. Still, it seems like it will be just fine for most people for gaming as well as everything else.
In fact, if he's holding the gun sideways ("gangsta style"), I'd personally cut that down to ten feet. We got temporary special dispensation from the range officer (who was as curious as we were), and tried it. Even for an experienced shooter, it's goddamn near fucking impossible to hit jack shit that way, even if you take time to aim (which - if you're running away - the bad guy won't have time to do).
I've tried this out of curiosity. I did not think it was actually any harder to aim, just very unfamiliar. I've often wondered if it became "fashionable" because of really badly made automatics that had problems ejecting spent rounds, sort of the way the "gangsta walk" developed as an imitation of people who were coping with syphilis.
Most illegal weapons used in crimes were stolen from end consumers that had them stolen. If you take all the guns from all legal users, then criminals will have the largest source of their weapons cut off.
That has been tried, and does not work. Not only is violent crime up drastically in the UK after they enacted a ban on firearms, but the commission of crimes with firearms, knives, blunt instruments, and bare hands are all up. Lowering the number of legal guns, does not significantly impact their availability for criminals. And drastically decreases the risks for criminals who are considering committing violent crimes.
Please note, "assault rifles" are very rarely reported used in crimes. The guns most commonly used are very cheap pistols, which is exactly the way we want it. If I have to have someone shoot at me, I'd rather they were using the least powerful, least accurate, most unreliable firearm. (Not that I want anyone shooting at me at all.)
Actually, the previous poster begins his comment by mentioning how there is no good collated data on home invasions, and listing some procedural reasons why. I don't see you presenting any numbers either. In any case, the numbers are not the point. Any good engineer (among many other professions) will tell you to hope for the best, but plan for the worst. You should plan for catastrophic failures so that you can manage worst cases. You validate input to fields, just in case a user enters thousands of characters in an attempt to crack your system.
Home safety is the same thing, with even higher stakes. Owning a handgun and obtaining proper training in its use is just taking responsibility for yourself, empowering yourself, and planning for the worst. I've seen many anti-gun people parrot the phrase, "A firearm in the home is more likely to be used against a person in that home, than against a burglar." That is an example of misleading statistics at its most wretched.
Most murders are committed by people you know. Assuming that they won't do so because they only have a knife or a pipe wrench is just plain stupid.
Whenever I see people trying to limit or take away firearms rights, I see people who want someone else to take responsibility for them. Most of them are under the very mistaken impression that it is the job of the police to protect them. In truth, the police have no legal responsibility to protect, only to investigate afterwards. Any police officer will tell you that they can't keep someone from coming into your home and killing you, and they will tell you it does happen. Not preparing for such a situation is utter foolishness.
I am of of the opinion that following a particular person around constantly, whether in their vehicle or on foot, in my mind constitutes an unreasonable search of their person if there is not a court order. I'm sure large bodies of legal precedent will disagree with me, but I wonder if the founding fathers would. I suspect those who had fought so recently to fight for their freedom against an oppressive government would probably view this as a sickening symptom of just such a government.
Things will have to get much worse before many comfortable Americans get off their butts and actually do something about the situation though. Recent surveys indicate most Americans think politicians are corrupt and dishonest. But no one seems to be willing to do anything about it because there is no one else to vote for. Sad.
Just because all the program's options are visible in a menu and big fancy buttons doesn't mean that it's easy to use. It's just easy to learn.
Microsoft, I hereby credit you with being conniving, greedy, unscrupulous scum, that care only about making money.
Is that what you meant? MS did not cripple the software to make it easier to use, or even to make purchasers later buy more expensive versions. They did it to make it unsuitable for their existing markets, so that no companies will fight to get it sold in the U.S. or in other markets they already dominate through sales. This is an OS to be shipped in countries where the current OS is already windows, just pirated versions thereof. The reason is to stop Linux from gaining a share of those markets. You see the WTO is pushing hard for enforcement of copyrights, and some countries may have to comply to some degree. Right now, the only option is to go with Linux, which has the added benefit of being customizable to a culture and language.
To counter this threat MS creates a new version, that they can sell very cheaply or give away. They won't make much money on it, but with luck they can stop Linux from snowballing. This means if a country does ever become a viable market, then it will already be dominated, and even if it doesn't, it won't become a breeding ground for those darn Linux hippies. It makes perfect business sense, especially for someone who only knows how to be a monopoly.
So yes, I give MS credit. Credit for being smart and ruthless, but not innovative, nor for trying to help people. In the long run, they are just trying to take as much from as many as possible. And that is not going to help humanity, only hurt us.
Just because all the program's options are visible in a menu and big fancy buttons doesn't mean that it's easy to use. It's just easy to learn.
Being easy to learn is a big part of being easy to use. There are certainly other important aspects, such as being able to quickly and consistently perform common tasks. VI is a very useful application, and it is very powerful, but is is not very usable for the majority of people. By the majority of people, I do not mean clueless idiots. I mean people who want to edit text. VI's usability failing is it's failure to be learnable. Professional coders routinely ask on IRC if anyone knows how to quickly do X, coffee mugs are printed listing the most common commands. If a user has to break their workflow and consult a resource (human, online, dead trees, whatever) then the application is failing. If users only have to do this upon a rare occasion, then the program is probably pretty learnable. The thing is, most programs provide a great deal of functionality that is only used in very rare circumstances. Expecting users to research and learn before hand, and then retain in memory how to perform tasks (90% of which they will probably never do) is a huge waste of time, and is completely unreasonable.
Learnability is a large part of usability. Most users only want to learn how to do, what they want to do. Being able to quickly determine how to do an uncommon task is a vital aspect of usability. No one wants to read entire books, before they can perform simple tasks. If you think that is a failing of people, then I think you are very impractical and probably have way too much free time.
Anyone have anything to say about the technical merits, or lack thereof of XP Starter Edition?
Considering that no one has been allowed to play with it yet, and most Slashdotters would not want to waste their money buying crippled MS software, I'm not sure that we will now, or anytime in the near future, be able to have a meaningful discussion about the technical merits of XP starter edition. Please return to your regularly scheduled squabbling.
If a person can learn how to use the multiple buttons that make up what we refer to as a keyboard I've found they usually don't have any problem figuring out how to use more than one button on a mouse.
Wow, that is certainly not my experience. In dealing with complete novices (who are usually elderly or children these days) I have found that user's often click both buttons under the assumption that both will do the same thing, or simply because they do not remember which button to push. Many users get very confused when contextual menus appear, when they are just trying to click on an icon to run the program. I am very surprised that you have not run into this, it seems to be a universal issue for both adult educators and tech support personnel that I have worked with.
I've never been charged with a crime. But in court, as in all other places, I would not be morally responsible. Legally responsible is a completely different matter. Your comment touches on a very sore point, that is the failure of most of our culture to differentiate between law and ethics. It is entirely possible to be ethically in the right, while legally in the wrong, just as it is common for people to be legally in the clear, while still ethically responsible for wrongdoing. The tendency of our society to think that there is nothing wrong with unethical actions, so long as they cannot be prosecuted is a large contributing factor to the failure of many people to accept responsibility for themselves and their affect on the world.
In other words, laws are interpreted and implemented by judge and/or jury. That's the way it's supposed to work in a common law system. Interpretations based on earlier precedents will hold sway over how conflicting statutes will be decided.
Your experience with the legal system must be completely different from mine. From what I have seen, the law is generally used as a weapon to incarcerate or harass those who either the police, government, or wealthy have issues with. I mean have you ever met a public defender? Most of them are either clueless as to what your rights are, or act as though they are grocery clerks. They fill out the paperwork and do what is required, and don't do jack to protect you. I've seen it happen to enough people without any money to hire a lawyer.
The point of my previous post was to make it clear that we are all breaking the law on a regular basis and no one knows what the laws are. At that point law enforcement is restricted to either a subset of the laws, a subset of the population, or a intersection of the two. In my experience laws are applied selectively, and often only invoked because the police or someone influential wants to "get" someone. That is why black people are statistically so much more likely to spend time in jail for drug offenses. That is why the system does not work. If you think it does work, then I think you are very deluded.
Pages' layout features look as if they surpass Word like Keynote surpasses PowerPoint.
It does look promising. If it is clean, fast, extendable, and scales for large documents it might be Adobe and Quark who should be concerned. I can hardly wait to give it a trial, although I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much. I'd really like support for XML import/export and maybe OO and Latex formats. Also, I'll be curious to see how the HTML and.doc compatibility works.
I think we can see the mindset problem when they mention exporting something to PDF to put it on the web instead of HTML.
Except that they did not mention that. They mention using PDF for sharing on the Internet. The Internet is not the Web. The Internet includes e-mail, news groups, RSS, chat, WWW, P2P, etc. I think you are just slightly confused about the terminology, or misread the PR from Apple. By sharing on the internet they might very well mean e-mail or a direct file transfer facilitated by ichat. Given the confusion surrounding "that thar intarweb thing", they could have been more clear, and could have emphasized the HTML capabilities as well. Although until someone tests Pages thoroughly, we will have no idea if it's HTML capabilities are up to snuff, or crappy like Word's.
But now, pressing Apple+click to get context menus seems a bit daft so it only makes sense to move over.
I hope Apple never, ever ships a two button mouse as a default and I'll tell you why. Anyone who has ever taught a complete novice to use a computer can tell you that on button is complex enough, and two, that do different things will completely confuse someone. Software for macs is designed to work with just one button, this makes it simpler to learn and keeps developers from hiding features in a contextual menu. There is nothing preventing apps from using a second mouse button, and many do, but it is nice that they cannot rely upon it being there. They have to keep things simple. Now I know you are thinking that all of us power users can do things faster if we have more buttons, and hence more options. You are right. The difference is, on a OSX system, I get to assign those extra buttons to whatever I want. Currently my middle mouse button activates expose and my super secret fourth button maps to different, very common tasks, in each application I use regularly. If apple ever added a second button as a default, I'd need to buy a mouse with 5 buttons, and that is just getting crazy. 1 button by default makes sense. More buttons make sense, but let us power users assign them rather than application makers.
Want to share your documents online? Please, for crying out loud, write your documents in HTML and make them actually work on the web instead of uploading a bunch of junk in binary file formats.
I think you are mistaking the point. If you want to share your documents online, in general PDF is a great format. For example, if you want to distribute a newsletter via e-mail, PDF is a good way to go. If you want to send out marketing info, PDF is a good way to go. It is standard, exact, and a single file. Doc is not standard, and may or may not be readable on your platform, and implies to people that they need to buy products from MS. Doc files also are extra large and may include way too much information about what is on your hard-drive. HTML is great for hosting a file for the Web (note this is not the same as the internet, it is a subset), but it is a crappy way to e-mail things, and is not easy to print. If you have any images, or multiple pages, you end up with a slew of files for a single document.
In any case, Pages supports export to PDF and HTML so if a person was planning on hosting something as a web page, it should not be hard to make an HTML version. I get a little upset whenever I see the bad reputation PDF has. Every time I open one on a Windows machine, I remember why this is the case. It is because Acrobat reader is a dog-slow piece of crap, that will bring a Windows box to a crawl while trying to load and scroll. On OS X PDFs are great, and finding one in a web page is not annoying. They download in the background, scroll just fine, and do not make your machine go catatonic for 10 minutes while all you want to do is read a few pages.
Apple seems to be moving into some more low-end markets with smaller-cheaper devices. I think they may find some untapped markets with a combination of simple and cheap. It seems like the rumor community was right on this time. I'm actually the most interested, however, in Pages. The specs say it imports Appleworks, Word, text, and rich text formats. I'm very curious about how well it handles the Word format. It exports to PDF, Word, HTML, RTF, and plain text. It also seems to have it's own file format. I don't see any mention of XML or OpenOffice formats, nor for Word Perfect. Hopefully these are either undocumented features, or the architecture supports plug-ins to add support.
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You addressed one of the previous poster's points. He summarized the need for gun ownership with "The right to keep and bear arms is a protection against external attacks and a deterrent against internal attacks. " You claim that the ability of a foreign government or group to subjugate the people of the U.S. is not effected by private gun ownership. This implies that you do not believe the U.S. armed forces, or the U.S. government as a whole could be destroyed or controlled by an outside force. I think you are arrogant and wrong on this point, but we shall just have to agree to disagree. You have in no way addressed the second half of the argument. Assuming the U.S. is 100% immune to defeat at the hands of outside parties, how do you address the need of the people to defend their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness against the government itself? Obviously governments can become corrupt, votes can be rigged, politicians can be bribed or coerced. If our current or a later president were to declare an emergency and cancel elections. If they were to declare all non-christians to be evil and order them rounded up, and executed. Without firearms, how could the people resist and fight back effectively?
why does the law exempt New Jersey Police?
Hey where I live you can get a concealed weapons permit if you have no felonies of domestic violence convictions. There is an exception for police. It's OK for them to have a permit even if they are convicted of a felony or domestic violence. The reason is that some many police have domestic violence convictions. It really makes one wonder exactly what sort of a person wants to be a cop, and why. It's just another case of cops being above the law.
it's just that I find it ridiculous to have someone say they don't want a feature on their gun that would virtually eliminate accidental killings on the basis that it might malfunction and prevent their gun from working
Yeah, it's so strange that people on Slashdot, with tons of experience with electronics, would not trust them. Oh wait, no it isn't. Last week I pulled out my flashlight to look under the car and the battery was dead. If that had been a electronic gun in an emergency, I might be dead. We don't trust the system because even in lab conditions it has a 10% failure rate. That is worse than Windows 98. Now imagine it in real world conditions, with dirt and grime, neglected batteries, cold weather, warm weather, rain, snow, and users under extreme stress.
It seems like everyone who thinks this is a good idea either a) does not own a gun anyway, or b) does not think people should have guns that work, and thus support making them less reliable; sort of like a really crappy technological gun ban.
There are already a number of technologies and techniques that solve this problem in a more efficient and predictable way. First, teach your kids how to use guns properly and safely. Second, lock up guns. Use a bedside lockbox if you want one handy. Three, there is no three (unless you want to include safeties). Just number 1 has been effective for hundreds of years. The problem here is that people are not applying these techniques because they are uneducated, or just don't care. People who don't already use guns safely, are not likely to start because you put a lock on the gun. If you do that, some idiot will assume it is safe and just leave it on the couch. Their kid will accidentally shoot themselves when the safety fails, or when they put it in the oven to see what happens. You can't legislate people to not be idiots.
If you're scared the police aren't good enough to protect you, then get the police better funding.
The police cannot defend you, even with five orders of magnitude more money. It is not their job. Their job is to find and arrest the guy who beat, raped, stabbed, killed, etc you. Fewer than 5% of 911 calls are answered in time to prevent a crime. There are a number of precedent setting cases where citizens called the police for help, often with as much as an hour of notice, and the police refused to respond for some reason. In all cases the police were not held liable. These cases include rapes, beatings, and murders. Straight form the law books "a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen."
You may be happy to place responsibility for your own life, and that of your loved ones in the hands of the government, because you are afraid that you are too unstable to own a weapon. Do not try to make that choice for the rest of us. Some of us still believe in personal responsibility.
What a genius idea, all the enemy has to do is paint his face white and the weapons won't fire at him.
Heck, if they would just paint their faces white and worship Jeebus, there would be no reason to shoot them, right?
say we mandate "smart guns" only for police.
It would be just like the army, when they mandated .9mm automatics for the standard sidearm. All the people with rank still carried .45's, some of them still do.
A 32mb Radeon 9200 fine for everything? What world are you living on? It's not even a DX9 card (not that DX matters for opengl but the hardware features do). That card will barely run UT2004 at 640x480.
I have never ran a Radeon 9200, but my Geforce 5200 with 32 mb or ran, runs UT2004 just fine. Is there a big performance difference? Why even mention DX for a mac? DX is Microsoft proprietary, Windows only technology.
I just glanced at the Windows benchmarks and it looks like the 9200 runs at about 10-20% slower, mostly due to it's lack of DX support for a number of features. I can't imagine most people have any problem playing UT2004 on it. Heck, it even runs acceptably on my old 16 mb video card in my server. Maybe you need to look into more RAM or something.
I am not at all surprised. Similar statistics exist for my state, with only one CCW license ever revoked for improper use of a handgun (brandishing). More telling I think is that Florida passed another law, making rental cars have the same license plates as other cars. This is because so many tourists were being car-jacked and robbed. Criminals knew that people coming into the airport and leaving in a rental car were the only people guaranteed not to be carrying, and so targeted them to a ridiculous degree.
a) that gun cannot be fired by anyone else (dongle, sensor, magic word, whatever)
Or better yet, why don't we just make guns that only shoot people that deserve it, and then only shoot them in the leg to disable them, unless they have a gun, then they should shoot their hand and make them drop it. Oh, and it should emit a pleasant, vanilla scent instead of that gunpowder smell. Oh, and it would be nice if it also fed all the hungry in the world.
Get real. There is no reliable technological method for ensuring the identity of a gun's owner, without greatly decreasing the reliability of the firearm. 10% failure is not acceptable. 1% failure is not acceptable when it is really needed and there are better options.
b) if that gun is fired, the bullet will be easily traceable back to the gun and its owner. (perhaps making all bullets have serial numbers and making people register themselves to the bullets when purchasing)
Oh and lets make guns that detect any counterfeit money and automatically shoot the counterfeiters, that will stop counterfeiting too. So you are proposing requiring expensive new technologies that will remove guns from the hands of everyone but the wealthy and criminals. And you expect that criminals won't be able to work around it. And you expect that the system will not be taken at face value, and innocent people will not be framed when someone works out how to spoof the system, or just hack the database. I mean do you know how hard it is to make a bullet? It's a freaking chunk of lead. I can't think of many people who can't make them.
Until that's happening, then 2nd amendment is outdated, dangerous garbage. It will take time yes, to get the old crappy guns off the street. But it will happen over time.
No it won't. New guns will appear just as quickly as the old, and that is a good thing. Maybe you want to give away your responsibilities and rights, and trust other people to protect you (people who have neither the resources nor the will to do so and who have no obligation to do so legally). I do not. I will protect myself, and will make sure I have the means to do so. The second amendment was put there for a very good reason. Governments tend toward totalitarianism. People who become government employees, do so often because they want power. They will take as much as anyone will give up without too much of a fight. The right to bear arms is there to ensure that when (not if but when) the government becomes too oppressive, the people have a way to take back their rights.
Cowards like you may think that giving up your rights will keep you safe. You are wrong. You may think that banning guns from the hands of citizens will protect people and save lives. You are again wrong. It will empower criminals over non-criminals and promote violent crime. It will allow the government to become more oppressive, and cause great suffering. It may start another civil war. I am completely serious. Grow a backbone or at least a brain.
This is working in Canada who has more guns per capita than us here in the US. They have more guns per person and yet they have very little violent crime.
I think the reasons for violence and violent crime in the United States are largely social and economic. People commit crime out of desperation, or because they are greedy and lacking in ethics. Violence is sensationalized by American culture, more than most others, but at the same time ethics are rarely taught. I suspect the lack of violence in Canada has more to do with culture than the number of guns they own.
You won't be using this mini-Mac for gaming, but for internet/digital photos/word processing its an awesome setup.
Are you referring to the lack of games on the mac platform, or that you think this machine is underpowered for gaming? The former certainly has some truth to it. Many games never make it to the mac, although most of the good ones do and there are a few mac only gems that Windows users will never know. As far being underpowered, what games are on the market with requirements above the mac mini? I can't think of anything except maybe Doom3, and I bet even it will be acceptable. It's minimum requirements are almost exactly the mac mini (it wants 1.5 Ghz vs. the mac mini's 1.25 or 1.42). And Doom3 is still a month away from release on the mac. The graphics card is fine for pretty much everything.
I suppose it is not ideal for gaming, and I imagine that there will soon be games that require more resources. Still, it seems like it will be just fine for most people for gaming as well as everything else.
In fact, if he's holding the gun sideways ("gangsta style"), I'd personally cut that down to ten feet. We got temporary special dispensation from the range officer (who was as curious as we were), and tried it. Even for an experienced shooter, it's goddamn near fucking impossible to hit jack shit that way, even if you take time to aim (which - if you're running away - the bad guy won't have time to do).
I've tried this out of curiosity. I did not think it was actually any harder to aim, just very unfamiliar. I've often wondered if it became "fashionable" because of really badly made automatics that had problems ejecting spent rounds, sort of the way the "gangsta walk" developed as an imitation of people who were coping with syphilis.
Most illegal weapons used in crimes were stolen from end consumers that had them stolen. If you take all the guns from all legal users, then criminals will have the largest source of their weapons cut off.
That has been tried, and does not work. Not only is violent crime up drastically in the UK after they enacted a ban on firearms, but the commission of crimes with firearms, knives, blunt instruments, and bare hands are all up. Lowering the number of legal guns, does not significantly impact their availability for criminals. And drastically decreases the risks for criminals who are considering committing violent crimes.
Please note, "assault rifles" are very rarely reported used in crimes. The guns most commonly used are very cheap pistols, which is exactly the way we want it. If I have to have someone shoot at me, I'd rather they were using the least powerful, least accurate, most unreliable firearm. (Not that I want anyone shooting at me at all.)
And yet you only cite single isolated events.
Actually, the previous poster begins his comment by mentioning how there is no good collated data on home invasions, and listing some procedural reasons why. I don't see you presenting any numbers either. In any case, the numbers are not the point. Any good engineer (among many other professions) will tell you to hope for the best, but plan for the worst. You should plan for catastrophic failures so that you can manage worst cases. You validate input to fields, just in case a user enters thousands of characters in an attempt to crack your system.
Home safety is the same thing, with even higher stakes. Owning a handgun and obtaining proper training in its use is just taking responsibility for yourself, empowering yourself, and planning for the worst. I've seen many anti-gun people parrot the phrase, "A firearm in the home is more likely to be used against a person in that home, than against a burglar." That is an example of misleading statistics at its most wretched.
Most murders are committed by people you know. Assuming that they won't do so because they only have a knife or a pipe wrench is just plain stupid.
Whenever I see people trying to limit or take away firearms rights, I see people who want someone else to take responsibility for them. Most of them are under the very mistaken impression that it is the job of the police to protect them. In truth, the police have no legal responsibility to protect, only to investigate afterwards. Any police officer will tell you that they can't keep someone from coming into your home and killing you, and they will tell you it does happen. Not preparing for such a situation is utter foolishness.
I am of of the opinion that following a particular person around constantly, whether in their vehicle or on foot, in my mind constitutes an unreasonable search of their person if there is not a court order. I'm sure large bodies of legal precedent will disagree with me, but I wonder if the founding fathers would. I suspect those who had fought so recently to fight for their freedom against an oppressive government would probably view this as a sickening symptom of just such a government.
Things will have to get much worse before many comfortable Americans get off their butts and actually do something about the situation though. Recent surveys indicate most Americans think politicians are corrupt and dishonest. But no one seems to be willing to do anything about it because there is no one else to vote for. Sad.
Just because all the program's options are visible in a menu and big fancy buttons doesn't mean that it's easy to use. It's just easy to learn .
Microsoft, I hereby credit you with being conniving, greedy, unscrupulous scum, that care only about making money.
Is that what you meant? MS did not cripple the software to make it easier to use, or even to make purchasers later buy more expensive versions. They did it to make it unsuitable for their existing markets, so that no companies will fight to get it sold in the U.S. or in other markets they already dominate through sales. This is an OS to be shipped in countries where the current OS is already windows, just pirated versions thereof. The reason is to stop Linux from gaining a share of those markets. You see the WTO is pushing hard for enforcement of copyrights, and some countries may have to comply to some degree. Right now, the only option is to go with Linux, which has the added benefit of being customizable to a culture and language.
To counter this threat MS creates a new version, that they can sell very cheaply or give away. They won't make much money on it, but with luck they can stop Linux from snowballing. This means if a country does ever become a viable market, then it will already be dominated, and even if it doesn't, it won't become a breeding ground for those darn Linux hippies. It makes perfect business sense, especially for someone who only knows how to be a monopoly.
So yes, I give MS credit. Credit for being smart and ruthless, but not innovative, nor for trying to help people. In the long run, they are just trying to take as much from as many as possible. And that is not going to help humanity, only hurt us.
Just because all the program's options are visible in a menu and big fancy buttons doesn't mean that it's easy to use. It's just easy to learn .
Being easy to learn is a big part of being easy to use. There are certainly other important aspects, such as being able to quickly and consistently perform common tasks. VI is a very useful application, and it is very powerful, but is is not very usable for the majority of people. By the majority of people, I do not mean clueless idiots. I mean people who want to edit text. VI's usability failing is it's failure to be learnable. Professional coders routinely ask on IRC if anyone knows how to quickly do X, coffee mugs are printed listing the most common commands. If a user has to break their workflow and consult a resource (human, online, dead trees, whatever) then the application is failing. If users only have to do this upon a rare occasion, then the program is probably pretty learnable. The thing is, most programs provide a great deal of functionality that is only used in very rare circumstances. Expecting users to research and learn before hand, and then retain in memory how to perform tasks (90% of which they will probably never do) is a huge waste of time, and is completely unreasonable.
Learnability is a large part of usability. Most users only want to learn how to do, what they want to do. Being able to quickly determine how to do an uncommon task is a vital aspect of usability. No one wants to read entire books, before they can perform simple tasks. If you think that is a failing of people, then I think you are very impractical and probably have way too much free time.
Anyone have anything to say about the technical merits, or lack thereof of XP Starter Edition?
Considering that no one has been allowed to play with it yet, and most Slashdotters would not want to waste their money buying crippled MS software, I'm not sure that we will now, or anytime in the near future, be able to have a meaningful discussion about the technical merits of XP starter edition. Please return to your regularly scheduled squabbling.
If a person can learn how to use the multiple buttons that make up what we refer to as a keyboard I've found they usually don't have any problem figuring out how to use more than one button on a mouse.
Wow, that is certainly not my experience. In dealing with complete novices (who are usually elderly or children these days) I have found that user's often click both buttons under the assumption that both will do the same thing, or simply because they do not remember which button to push. Many users get very confused when contextual menus appear, when they are just trying to click on an icon to run the program. I am very surprised that you have not run into this, it seems to be a universal issue for both adult educators and tech support personnel that I have worked with.
Have you ever tried pulling that in court?
I've never been charged with a crime. But in court, as in all other places, I would not be morally responsible. Legally responsible is a completely different matter. Your comment touches on a very sore point, that is the failure of most of our culture to differentiate between law and ethics. It is entirely possible to be ethically in the right, while legally in the wrong, just as it is common for people to be legally in the clear, while still ethically responsible for wrongdoing. The tendency of our society to think that there is nothing wrong with unethical actions, so long as they cannot be prosecuted is a large contributing factor to the failure of many people to accept responsibility for themselves and their affect on the world.
In other words, laws are interpreted and implemented by judge and/or jury. That's the way it's supposed to work in a common law system. Interpretations based on earlier precedents will hold sway over how conflicting statutes will be decided.
Your experience with the legal system must be completely different from mine. From what I have seen, the law is generally used as a weapon to incarcerate or harass those who either the police, government, or wealthy have issues with. I mean have you ever met a public defender? Most of them are either clueless as to what your rights are, or act as though they are grocery clerks. They fill out the paperwork and do what is required, and don't do jack to protect you. I've seen it happen to enough people without any money to hire a lawyer.
The point of my previous post was to make it clear that we are all breaking the law on a regular basis and no one knows what the laws are. At that point law enforcement is restricted to either a subset of the laws, a subset of the population, or a intersection of the two. In my experience laws are applied selectively, and often only invoked because the police or someone influential wants to "get" someone. That is why black people are statistically so much more likely to spend time in jail for drug offenses. That is why the system does not work. If you think it does work, then I think you are very deluded.
Pages' layout features look as if they surpass Word like Keynote surpasses PowerPoint.
It does look promising. If it is clean, fast, extendable, and scales for large documents it might be Adobe and Quark who should be concerned. I can hardly wait to give it a trial, although I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much. I'd really like support for XML import/export and maybe OO and Latex formats. Also, I'll be curious to see how the HTML and .doc compatibility works.
I think we can see the mindset problem when they mention exporting something to PDF to put it on the web instead of HTML.
Except that they did not mention that. They mention using PDF for sharing on the Internet. The Internet is not the Web. The Internet includes e-mail, news groups, RSS, chat, WWW, P2P, etc. I think you are just slightly confused about the terminology, or misread the PR from Apple. By sharing on the internet they might very well mean e-mail or a direct file transfer facilitated by ichat. Given the confusion surrounding "that thar intarweb thing", they could have been more clear, and could have emphasized the HTML capabilities as well. Although until someone tests Pages thoroughly, we will have no idea if it's HTML capabilities are up to snuff, or crappy like Word's.
But now, pressing Apple+click to get context menus seems a bit daft so it only makes sense to move over.
I hope Apple never, ever ships a two button mouse as a default and I'll tell you why. Anyone who has ever taught a complete novice to use a computer can tell you that on button is complex enough, and two, that do different things will completely confuse someone. Software for macs is designed to work with just one button, this makes it simpler to learn and keeps developers from hiding features in a contextual menu. There is nothing preventing apps from using a second mouse button, and many do, but it is nice that they cannot rely upon it being there. They have to keep things simple. Now I know you are thinking that all of us power users can do things faster if we have more buttons, and hence more options. You are right. The difference is, on a OSX system, I get to assign those extra buttons to whatever I want. Currently my middle mouse button activates expose and my super secret fourth button maps to different, very common tasks, in each application I use regularly. If apple ever added a second button as a default, I'd need to buy a mouse with 5 buttons, and that is just getting crazy. 1 button by default makes sense. More buttons make sense, but let us power users assign them rather than application makers.
Want to share your documents online? Please, for crying out loud, write your documents in HTML and make them actually work on the web instead of uploading a bunch of junk in binary file formats.
I think you are mistaking the point. If you want to share your documents online, in general PDF is a great format. For example, if you want to distribute a newsletter via e-mail, PDF is a good way to go. If you want to send out marketing info, PDF is a good way to go. It is standard, exact, and a single file. Doc is not standard, and may or may not be readable on your platform, and implies to people that they need to buy products from MS. Doc files also are extra large and may include way too much information about what is on your hard-drive. HTML is great for hosting a file for the Web (note this is not the same as the internet, it is a subset), but it is a crappy way to e-mail things, and is not easy to print. If you have any images, or multiple pages, you end up with a slew of files for a single document.
In any case, Pages supports export to PDF and HTML so if a person was planning on hosting something as a web page, it should not be hard to make an HTML version. I get a little upset whenever I see the bad reputation PDF has. Every time I open one on a Windows machine, I remember why this is the case. It is because Acrobat reader is a dog-slow piece of crap, that will bring a Windows box to a crawl while trying to load and scroll. On OS X PDFs are great, and finding one in a web page is not annoying. They download in the background, scroll just fine, and do not make your machine go catatonic for 10 minutes while all you want to do is read a few pages.
Apple seems to be moving into some more low-end markets with smaller-cheaper devices. I think they may find some untapped markets with a combination of simple and cheap. It seems like the rumor community was right on this time. I'm actually the most interested, however, in Pages. The specs say it imports Appleworks, Word, text, and rich text formats. I'm very curious about how well it handles the Word format. It exports to PDF, Word, HTML, RTF, and plain text. It also seems to have it's own file format. I don't see any mention of XML or OpenOffice formats, nor for Word Perfect. Hopefully these are either undocumented features, or the architecture supports plug-ins to add support.