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User: alsta

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  1. Re:Now all we need... on Smart Guns are Coming · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yes, indeed it would be better to try to reason with a burglar and at the same time call the authorities than to be able to defend one self. Perhaps during the time one waits for the cops, one can ask that the criminal doesn't rape the wife too terribly hard.

    Less guns in the hands of law abiding, responsible people will obviously lead to the criminals turing their guns in. Oh wait...

  2. Re:And what if on Robbers Scared by GTA · · Score: 1

    Well, it's a Good Thing that the home owner was disarmed and helpless at least. That way she could have reasoned with the criminals and called on the authorities to resolve the situation.

    After all, aren't those thieves just victims of society? Clearly they need that old woman's belongings much more than she does or they wouldn't have attempted to steal them, presuming that is what 'burglarize' meant in this case.

    I realise that the story didn't say either way about her gun ownership, or lack thereof. This is rather a hypothetic rant if you will.

  3. Re:FAIR? on Kyoto Treaty to Enter Into Force · · Score: 1

    So your point is that Americans can't drive?

  4. Re:FAIR? on Kyoto Treaty to Enter Into Force · · Score: 1

    If you are crashing your car every year you are raising the GDP. If you produce weaponry and dispose it one way or another, you are raising the GDP. It is no measure of benefit to humankind.


    I thought GDP was a measure of benefit and wealth?

  5. Re:Consequences? on Kyoto Treaty to Enter Into Force · · Score: 1
    Last I heard, Kofi is in deep doodoo.

  6. Re:WE ARE FUCKED on Kerry Concedes Election To Bush · · Score: 1

    No voter disenfrenchfriesment?

  7. Re:Sad sad day on Kerry Concedes Election To Bush · · Score: 1

    Actually it is possible to register to vote in our election if you live in a different country. You just have to move here for a while, pay taxes and promise to not blow shit up.

  8. Re:Sad sad day on Kerry Concedes Election To Bush · · Score: 1

    According to my calculations it is not a sad day for the remaining 50%.

  9. Re:Full transcript of bin Laden's video on Pre-Election Discussion · · Score: 1

    Perhaps the mainstream media is trying to find 'balance' in Osama's endorsement for John Kerry?

  10. Re:Kerry trainee not as good as 2x speak as master on Kerry's Record On Electronic And Civil Rights · · Score: 1

    The latest I hear on the NAACP is that they are being audited by the IRS. This because they have endorsed political parties and candidates. But of course, this must be happening because evil Republicans are pulling strings, rather than the fact that the NAACP has violated the tax laws that govern their tax-exempt status.

    And are you one of those people who feel that Bush somehow hasn't served four years as Commander-in-Chief?

    How could he receive an Honorable Discharge without at minimum, fulfilling his commitment to the ANG?

  11. Re:Gun nuts get a F on Constitutional Law on Kerry's Record On Electronic And Civil Rights · · Score: 1
    Oh dear.

    From your link;

    1. To transgress or exceed the limits of; violate: infringe a contract; infringe a patent.

    2. Obsolete. To defeat; invalidate.

    How do you surmise that 'transgress', 'exceed the limits of' or 'violate' implicitly has some sort of built-in clause for limitations? That's conjecture at the very least.

    If you have a contract that states a set of rules, and you violate those rules, that's an infringement. The clause for infringement in the Second Amendment, is 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms'. That may not be infringed upon.

    Furthermore, the Second Amendment has NOTHING to do with duck hunting. It has everything to do with the security and freedom of the land.

    The Miller case did not ban sawn-off shotguns. Congress did that, by way of the Treasury. The Supreme Court decided that such firearms have no apparent value for militia use and therefore such firearms are not protected under the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court surmised that the qualifier for the right of the people to keep and bear arms, was authoritative. That is all.

    Interesting enough, the Miller case has by way of the BATFE been deemed to include rifles OTHER than shotguns with short barrels. Yes, there is a transfer tax as well as rigorous background checks and pleading to various government agencies, to own a rifle with a barrel shorter than 16". Nothing was mentioned in the Miller case about rifles or barrel lengths. This is an action of an unelected body which has limited accountability to the public by way of a board vote.

    Onwards to nukes. No those are not considered arms. Arms are by definition a portable weapon which can be carried by one person. In other words, pistols, rifles, knives, swords etc. However, a 105mm Howizer or an MX missile are considered ordnance. Curiously, the BATFE has placed restrictions on explosives, munitions and other conventional arms such as hand grenades and dynamite.

    Now, you argue that rights are by definition limited. I agree. The word 'right' however, does not imply a limitation, but the contract which draws up the framework for the right, does. For instance, I give you the right to breathe while visiting my house. That means, I can't question your right to breathe. That does not mean however, that you have such a right in my neighbors' house.

    Alas, the First Amendment does not give you the right to Abortion-on-Demand(tm), nor does it give you the right to incite a stampede in a privately held motion picture establishment. To cite a First Amendment protection in such a case would be to cite the Second Amendment in a fatal shooting.

    To ban certain types of firearms because they _may_ be dangerous in the wrong hands is tantamount to legislating that you can't say "Fire!". Because it may be dangerous to say that word in case you have malicious intent. IT IS ALREADY ILLEGAL TO SHOOT PEOPLE!

    In the name of public safety, I propose that all freeways be capped at 15mph and that violators be put in jail and that anybody who wants a driver's license be subjected to cavity searches and background checks. Won't happen. Know why? Because it's unpopular. But it sure would stop a whole lot of deaths in this nation. Come to think of it, I would ban smoking, drinking alcohol ... wait, they tried that once. Didn't work very well.

    Disregarding the constitutionality [sic] of the issue of gun control, it isn't pragmatic because the premise is false. The assumption is that criminals will cease to get their hands on guns if the supply is starved off.

    First, the people who will obide by such restrictions and legislation are people who are honest in the first place. If you are a criminal, I find it highly unlikely that you will lawfully go through a background check and purchase at retail a firearm for use in a robbery.

    Second, there is already an abundence of firearms in circulation. In order to starve off the supply, one would have to confiscate

  12. Re:Gun nuts get a F on Constitutional Law on Kerry's Record On Electronic And Civil Rights · · Score: 1

    "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

    Where in there does it say that my right to "effectively be part of a well regulated militia" shall not be infringed upon? Nowhere.

    Qualifier;

    "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,"

    Declaration;

    "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

    The qualifier merely describes the intent of the right, not the right itself.

    Now, I consider "shall not be infringed" to mean nothing else but what it says. Specifically, that means "without limitation". It means that the Congress shall not infringe on that right.

    If the liberals defended the Second Amendment the way they do the First Amendment, we'd all have the right to own and stash nukes, so I guess I am glad they don't.

    The NRA realises, and rightfully so, that fighting gun control in the courts is tantamount to a lottery. It's a waste of money and time and if the case is heard by a liberal judge, it's all over. Really, it isn't the criminal's fault that he shot little Sally, but rather the big bad NRA and the gun manufacturers. Need I suggest to you that the 9th Circuit deemed the Second Amendment to be a collective right for a State?

    Congress on the other hand is the body that emits these egregious laws, stifling our civil rights. Why not pick the apple from the tree?

  13. Re:Gun nuts get a F on Constitutional Law on Kerry's Record On Electronic And Civil Rights · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Kerry is a hunter? I also suppose "everybody got one" means four guys come out of the woods with three geese? Please allow me to respectfully disagree.

    Now down to the Constitution. In no other place in the Constitution, will you find any qualifiers for an enumerated right. Only in the preamble of the Constitution will you find that. The reason is obvious. It describes exactly WHY the people shall have the right to keep and bear arms. It is because a well regulated militia is necessary for a free state. In other words, the qualifier is a description of why I may keep and bear arms. And furthermore that this right shall not be infringed upon. Gun control is infringement on that right.

    If you were to ponder that the word 'regulated' means that the Federal government can legislate negatively on that right, it not only becomes unconstitutional (based on Amendment X, another popularly ignored amendment) but it also doesn't make sense. Because a right is unequivocal. A right can also never belong to a group of people because outside the military, groups are arbitrary in size and scope. At what point does a community become a village or a town? If you still need some sort of convincing, I refer you to Federalist 26 which covers the Militia. In fact, it is so that the Founding Fathers wanted to have inspectors to ensure that all citizens were armed and in good standing. Hence 'regulated'.

    Now, why is Kerry dangerous as POTUS? Because he will be able to appoint at least one, probably more SCOTUS justices. These, he has already mentioned will have to pass a test to match some of his liberal ideals. One of these would likely be gun control measures. The last case the SCOTUS ruled on in terms of the Second Amendment, was United States vs Miller in 1939. The outcome was that the particular firearm used by Miller, a sawn-off shotgun, did not qualify as a military rifle and thus served no obvious purpose in the militia and that such a firearm is therefor NOT protected by the Second Amendment.

    In other words, an AK47 or an M16 would be quite appropriate and protected under the Second Amendment. Wheras a deer rifle is not protected.

  14. Re:Why all the concern? on Surveillance Cameras in Britain Not Effective? · · Score: 1

    The PATRIOT Act is anything from a modest adjustment of policies applied to drug cartels, to be applied to terrorist organizations trying to murder innocent people by the thousands. Or it could be the most messed up thing in the history of this country. The truth probably lies in between somewhere. But your mention of this law without reference to impeding sections or provisions, yields an instant disqualification of that argument.

    What internment camps? Are you speaking of Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay? Have you forgotten what happened on September 11th, 2001? If the tables were turned, our soldiers would be tortured, maimed and slaughtered. Please don't forget what these people did.

    Not having a constitution is more rational because laws can be undone more easily? Exactly WHAT provisions can be undone more easily? Freedom of speech? Right to keep and bear arms? Protection against unreasonable searches and seizures? Oh, those are provisions upheld in the Bill of Rights, conversely rights that have been revoked from British citizens. Yeah, not having a constitution is really good.

  15. Re:gibberish... Solution: Spellcheckers on Filter-foiling Gibberish Becoming A Spam Staple · · Score: 1

    No that's not good enough. According to RFC 2045, the multi-part e-mail should contain a body part and an alternative 7bit ASCII part.

    Theoretically, if the e-mail is legit, the bare contents of the the body should match the contents of the 7bit ASCII part. Problem is with multi-byte content in the body part. How does that compare to 7bit ASCII? So the comparison would have to be fuzzy to some degree.

  16. Re:Yeah sure on Extinctions Due to Global Warming Predicted · · Score: 1

    Would you care to enlighten me as to how my country is in "the shitter"?

  17. Re:Yeah sure on Extinctions Due to Global Warming Predicted · · Score: 1

    Cute. It would seem that you're not a resident of the United States, since you append the '$' after the amount and because you are unfamiliar with the gallon unit, so I am less than convinced that you know what the domestic problems are in the U.S.

  18. Re:What a terrible thing on U.S. Begins Digital Fingerprinting In Airports · · Score: 1

    Are you suggesting that since the threat level was raised and nothing happened, that we should just forget about the whole thing?

    You indicate that these measures have done nothing and will do nothing to increase our security. I wish to see what evidence you have to base this on. But furthermore I would like to know exactly what you propose we do instead to increase border security.

    It appears to me that the gist of your rhetoric is thus centered around speculation and assumptions. Primarily that our President is evil and has some sort of perversion that would make him wish to oppress us, but also that terrorists have up and decided to just _stop_ being mean to us..?

    In case you didn't know, one of the President's primary duties is to protect Americans.

  19. dictionary words in bare mime part on Security Predictions of 2004 · · Score: 2, Informative

    The far most nefarious spam I've seen so far is the kind that has a bunch of dictionary words in the bare 7-bit part of a MIME encoded message. It's common to see this stuff if you have a mail client that doesn't render the multi-media portion of the e-mail by default. You'll see something like;

    conduit horse house press lingo technical gelatin overlord brown uniform

    In the muli-media portion you'll see spam like never before.

    How to stop these? You can't train a bayes database with dictionary words as it would eventually defang the whole method. Your only option I suppose would be to compare the contents of the multi-media portion with the 7-bit ASCII portion and see if they match. Problem here is to make the comparison fuzzy enough to allow for multi-byte characters and stuff like that.

    The words thing about this type of spam is that at best your bayes database is circumvented, but at worst it is trained to see good words as bad or bad words as good and is rendered useless.

    With SpamAssassin it is easy to set when to auto-train your bayes backend and when not to. I have my required_hits option set to '4.0' so I would use the following settings;

    use_bayes 1
    auto_learn 1
    auto_learn_threshold_spam 7
    auto_learn_threshold_nonspam -5.5

    With this I am reasonably confident that I am not training my bayes database with good words as bad unless it really is found to be spam impirically, and inverse unless I am sure it's a good e-mail, typically by means of AWL or whitelist_from.

    If anybody has solved this, I would be very grateful to hear what you did and how you did it.

  20. Re:carp is a freshwater fish on Australia To Use GM To Control Carp · · Score: 2, Interesting

    OK, you're for genetic manipulation and for cleansing waters of non-indigenous carp. In fact you're for this in US waters, but somehow Australians shouldn't be allowed to because it would be unfair to South East Asia?

    I am oversimplifying to get your attention. However there are a few facts we need to establish here for the sake of the argument.

    This procedure affects one species of carp. I don't know how many known species of carp there are, but I would venture to guess that it is in the least hundreds (probably thousands, but I am being purposely conservative) in the world. This affected carp species will have to, provided that it is properly shipped and that it adapts to the environment where it is introduced well and in large enough numbers, be predatory enough in its mating habits and inter-breed in order to take other species out as well.

    Australia will have government ensuring that the male-only gene is spread, whereas we'll have say 10 guys successfully spending thousands of dollars to ship live genetically modified male carp from Australia to the US?

    Again, COULD there be a problem? Yes, there could be. We could also be struck by meteorites. This species has to be erradicated by some means. Short of killing everything, what do you suggest is better than genetic manipulation, which you're in favor of elsewhere in the world?

  21. Re:carp is a freshwater fish on Australia To Use GM To Control Carp · · Score: 1

    This is a very much reversible procedure. Once the carp is extinct, it can be re-introduced.

    Remember, the carp in Australia is NOT indigenous and it competes with other species about food and room. Since the carp breeds much faster and grows faster (due to abundence of food since it is a bottom feeder) than the indigenous species it crowds everything else out. The carp doesn't belong there and has to go, so there is no need to reverse this in the first place.

  22. Re:In theory no.... on Australia To Use GM To Control Carp · · Score: 1

    "You meant: people are way too optimistic about its benefits and all but ignorant about the threats. Yup, sounds about right..."

    So atomic bomb shelters and the whole nuclear scare thing was just a hoax? This I do not understand.

  23. Re:Well I worry about this one on Australia To Use GM To Control Carp · · Score: 1

    Overfishing is very effective in reducing or extinguishing a stock, I agree. Man kind is bad news wherever it spreads, but we can have that discussion some other time.

    In this case, cod in the North Sea is an indigenous species. The carp in Australias freshwater isn't. Making the carp extinct in Australia is simply returning the balance in the eco-system to what it was set out to be by nature.

    It can be argued that man is part of nature, but in this case we can (i hope) all agree that the carp doesn't belong in Australia.

  24. Re:carp is a freshwater fish on Australia To Use GM To Control Carp · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So where did carp come from if it isn't indigenous anywhere? The fact of the matter is that it doesn't belong in Australia and short of this, there is no way one can cleanse the waters of the carp without killing every other living being in those waters.

    The risk that somebody "smuggles" this species to Asian countries appears very small and for that to have serious effect, the carp would have to inter-breed with other species to knock whole stocks out.

    COULD there be a risk? Of course. Is this option safer and more humane than others? I would like to think so. However you twist and turn this issue, the carp is killing off every other species in those waters. Australians DON'T want the carp. Since it has to go, what else do you propose that doesn't indiscriminately kill off everything else in those waters?

  25. Re:In theory no.... on Australia To Use GM To Control Carp · · Score: 1

    Yes, very far fetched.

    It seems as if the word "genetic" has the same effect today as "atomic" did in the 50's.

    Of all the available options to get rid of the pest, this seems like the far most humane and effective way.