The deterrant effect of an armed populace isn't just from the fact that they can fight back. The deterrant also comes from the fact that your police and armed forces that would be called on to defend the government against an armed uprising would have to make the choice to take on their own friends and family, their own fellow citizens.
It's not necessarily a sheild against police abuse, but it's a lot harder to shoot at your own people, no matter how you're trained.
No matter how nastily a government labels its dissenters, the police and other security forces will have to look at and decide whether or not to shoot at a human face. And that fact can often protect you as much as anything else.
'Give me six lines penned by the hand of an innocent man, and I will find in them somethign to have him hanged.'
We all do, say, buy, or otherwise involve ourselves in things that might not put us on everyone's best person of the year list. If you have access to enough information about somebody, simply through selective presentation one can create a danmning image of an otherwise innocent and decent indivual.
"And I see you bought drain cleaner, fertilizer, and firecrackers sir, clearly you are trying to build a bomb"
This is definately a serious potential for massive abuse.
I actually feel vaguely qualified to comment on this, as someone who is learning disabled and worked extensively with the Office for Disability Services at my university (think really big and in ohio).
I freely admit I'm a technical and open source moron, but I do know that when we worked with the adaptive software vendors they told us the programs we purchased were designed to work with pretty much any format of document and almost any program. Most of the reps really took pains to make sure that their software was compatible with the widest possible array of formats and programs, cause a lot of the standard office programs have to be dumped in favor of other solutions that are more friendly to the physically impaired students.
I'm having an rather enormous amount of trouble seeing how and open source standard is going to hurt access for the disabled.
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The deterrant effect of an armed populace isn't just from the fact that they can fight back. The deterrant also comes from the fact that your police and armed forces that would be called on to defend the government against an armed uprising would have to make the choice to take on their own friends and family, their own fellow citizens.
It's not necessarily a sheild against police abuse, but it's a lot harder to shoot at your own people, no matter how you're trained.
No matter how nastily a government labels its dissenters, the police and other security forces will have to look at and decide whether or not to shoot at a human face. And that fact can often protect you as much as anything else.
'Give me six lines penned by the hand of an innocent man, and I will find in them somethign to have him hanged.'
We all do, say, buy, or otherwise involve ourselves in things that might not put us on everyone's best person of the year list. If you have access to enough information about somebody, simply through selective presentation one can create a danmning image of an otherwise innocent and decent indivual.
"And I see you bought drain cleaner, fertilizer, and firecrackers sir, clearly you are trying to build a bomb"
This is definately a serious potential for massive abuse.
I actually feel vaguely qualified to comment on this, as someone who is learning disabled and worked extensively with the Office for Disability Services at my university (think really big and in ohio). I freely admit I'm a technical and open source moron, but I do know that when we worked with the adaptive software vendors they told us the programs we purchased were designed to work with pretty much any format of document and almost any program. Most of the reps really took pains to make sure that their software was compatible with the widest possible array of formats and programs, cause a lot of the standard office programs have to be dumped in favor of other solutions that are more friendly to the physically impaired students. I'm having an rather enormous amount of trouble seeing how and open source standard is going to hurt access for the disabled.
this rather sounds like a particularly inept attempt to rehash an argument I've heard before from... somebody...
http://www.internetofthefuture.org/
mmm... pipes... tubes... somebody used a crib sheet and still failed the quiz.