I have a friend who has been in several not so famous bands. We worked together back when napster was still a place people went to get music.
His comment at the time was "if I found out someone had put my bands music up online for people to download, why I would hunt him down and shake his hand".
> For what it's worth, my sect believes that all animals have souls.
Of course but, it was never about the specific belief as much as, the inconsistency of it... they are made of the same stuff as us, with similar organs, similar genetics, even the ability to learn and adapt (to varying degrees)... so this idea that there is some "soul" that we have and they don't just well... it seemed to not be based on anything but somebodies imagination.
If a soul exists, then we should be able to come to some objective agreement about what it is and how to measure it; which doesn't leave much room for both the soul mapping to something real and the existence of so many sects.
Now of course, this is my view after 20ish years later, but even at the time it was pretty obvious that these ideas came from people's imaginations.
However we should give him credit for not using the massively overinflated numbers which include suicides. That is like a breath of fresh air.
As for the statistic, someone else in the discussion posted a link to it. It came from the FBI and properly stated it is indeed blunt objects not hammers that was more than the number of rifle deaths.
> Would be true if you said hammers, clubs, and other blunt objects.
Good point, blunt objects.
> specific to rifles only, making sure you leave out shotguns and other kinds of guns.
I was not aware of any shotguns or "other kinds of guns" that are not rifles which are classified as assault rifles. Please, do educate me.
Why wouldn't I use a narrowly crafted statistic, specific to rifles....when...specifically talking about rifles or a class of rifles as opposed to other guns?
> A law enforcement firm then just has to play crosswords and make some honey pots to get the big > picture.
Maybe, maybe not. Problem is, its not just criminals or criminals according to any one jurisdiction. Yes there likely will be some who get caught this way, I think doing it is a lot easier to describe than to do.
I helped track down some stolen bitcoins, and it wasn't hard. The person had made a stupid error and mixed coins he stole with an address he posted publicly in forums. However, had he not, it would have been a nearly impossible task.
The thing is, each step in the chain now becomes a matter of real police work, and tracking down transactions. It is a much more laborious process to wind back anonymous accounts than it is to go to some large bank who has all the info.
Its not like one person gets one account, every individual has, litterally hundreds or thousands of accounts, pregenerated and ready to use, with no visible relation to eachother. How do you differenciate a transaction that goes from Alice to Bob from one from Alice to Carol? How do you even tell it wasn't from Alice to herself?
Yes you can get glimpses and make inferences, or if you catch someone and get their wallet, can wind back their transactions but... unless you already caught someone or are looking at an operation the size of silk road, I suspect it is far harder to track than existing financial systems. (aside from cash itself).
'But the officers' concerns about privacy illustrate just how revealing GPS technology can be. Departments are going to have to confront the chilling effect this surveillance might have on police behavior.'"
Normally chilling effects are bad, but, I have long felt police behaviour could use a serious chilling effect, maybe even a freezing one.
Except, most cops don't have CIs. Most cops are just sitting around looking to write tickets for minor traffic violations either to make his unofficial quota or to get a bonus in his pay check (varies by jurisdiction).
Frankly, i think I would rather they are off in the back of some parking lot, parked cruisers window to window so they can chat and eat donuts for a few hours than out there "doing their job", because every minute they spend not doing their job, is a minute somebody isn't getting fined for nothing of consequence or arrested for smoking pot while brown.
> I presume three-shot-burst capability means it would count as an assault-weapon in the US legal > definition (i.e. as far as civilian ownership goes).
I am sure someone knows better than me, but, the assault weapon ban was hardly so straightforward. In fact, what defined an "assault rifle" was mostly cosmetic. For example, a firearm would qualify if it had both a pistol grip and a bayonet lug. Neither of which really have any bearing on the real issues.
Back when it was in effect I actually read the law, and instantly lost respect for all of its supporters. I mean, I am normally anti-gun control but, reading what it was that they thought so important removed any illusions about the gun control crowd even knowing what they are talking about.
fact is, more people are murdered with hammers than rifles in total. Guns that were available during the ban were just as deadly as the ones available now. The effective difference between the time of the ban and the time after the ban has been 100% a difference to collectors who are attached to a particular cosmetic style of gun.
That is.... only people who want guns that LOOK LIKE military guns either benefited or were harmed by the assault rifle ban.
Overall, its a stupid issue since, if you prevented every civilian death that was ever the result of another civilian using an assault rifle, you would have done very little indeed, since those are so exceedingly rare as to be worthless as a category of death.
[1] Ref 1989 - Confraternity of Christian Doctrine class - incidentally the very topic that convinced me finally that "they just made all this up", and convinced me, much to my mother's dismay, that I was done with CCD and religion.
Doesn't work like that. Generally these sorts of codes work when the subject matter is already known. For example, I have seen many people talk to their pot dealer about "slices of pizza" or "cookies". With no prior negotiation of language, messages are passed, and usually, the correct ones.
OTOH I have seen people try to extend this sort of metaphor even a bit, and its much more hit or miss. Call the guy you always get pot from, and he can draw on that context to fill in a word mapping on the fly. Try to ask him about mushrooms though, and he needs more obvious/meaningful clues. And he may not even know who your "friend cid" is. (yes, he will take you for a ride in his air ship),
Problem comes when the subject matter strays or is even the least bit ambiguous. Like in this case, we have a context so all your references make sense. If you called me out of the blue, or I read an ad in the paper or on craigslist, these don't really work...and are likely to get more legitimate or confused inquires.
Now if they already have a community where they can talk freely, or they needed to be able to contact eachother in order to be active, that would be one thing. However, stigma and lack of need has them quite fragmented. Or at least, that is my perception, and interpretation of the busts of occasional rings of modest size, a few 10s or hundreds at most. If they did similar busts for drugs, litterally going after every user in the chain they could get their hand son.... busts would involve hundreds to thousands for modest rings.
So overall, they must be quite fragmented if there is any size to their community, but it also seems rather small in comparison too; which, I would predict, is a barrier to building a really useful cant.
If crime rates are going down, then why is my local police getting military grade equipment and gear? Cripes for the last sports event here they had M16 machine guns in the open and wearing full military armor.
These have nothing to do with eachother and everything to do with congress and homeland security money.
The problem is that what politicians like doing is creating big funds that need to be spent. So they hand money to the DHS and the DHS runs programs to distribute that money. The only reason you see the police getting all this new gear is....it costs them nothing. All they have to do is fill out some request forms and the new equipment comes showering in.
Of course it comes as equipment so, it can't be used for training, or salaries, or improving their ability to fight real crime in any way, all they can do is request new toys....so they do.
I mean if someone handed you a credit card, said it can only be used to buy guns and ammo, but you can pretty much use it as much as you want and you don't have to pay the bill.... can you really tell me shooting wont become your new favorite past-time? Would you really not want an APC and some body armor if you didn't even have to pay for the gas? How about some robots? Surely you would take those?
> Rifles are a different animal entirely of course, but they're rarely used in crime and not something > that those outside of the military generally need to concern themselves with.
Yup, last stats I saw on this said more people are killed with hammers than rifles in the US.
I think the problem is that once someone is shot it is already too late. By making it illegal to aim a gun at someone or to carry a (loaded) gun in populated areas it is possible to stop someone before the actual shooting has taken place.
Funny, I can't think of a single time where someone pulled a gun on someone else, was stopped before shooting them, and then was let free because they broke no laws. I can't even think of a single time I heard a cop say "we wanted to take him down before he shot someone, but damn if he hadn't broken a law yet". Not even once.
Frankly I think the problem is people lack any interest in really understanding the causes of violence and instead just pick their favorite scapegoat out of paranoia and overactive imaginations.
Never mind that the only people who could be said to really be shooting at eachother with any regularity in the entire US are gang members, and occasionally, the police (or police and people's dogs maybe, but that conflict is kind of one sided).
But no clearly, guns are the problem and not the bad drug policy that funds the gangs, and had lead to the systematic disenfranchisement of entire swaths of communities. No lets focus on the symptom some more, guns are much easier to solve....in our imaginations.
You do realize, of course, that they would then tout the numbers of bought back guns as evidence of the huge success of the program, causing them to do more of it in more places.
"Liberator"..... as some friends of mine pointed out, takes the name of a gun that was dropped in Nazi occupied germany; and essentially encouraged people to use it...once... to shoot a nazi and aquire a real gun.:)
I think the idea is just that, this obviates the need for manufacturing outside and air dropping in, if any geek with a modest personal investment can make them by the 10s or 100s.
thought his Truck 793 - a big red Kenworth T600 semi â" was being repaired in Houston. Unknown to Craig Patty, the owner of the $90,000 rig, the DEA was using it to transport a load of marijuana in a sting operation.
The DEA had paid Lawrence Chapa, one of Pattyâ(TM)s drivers, to haul a load of marijuana from the Mexican border
So far so good. DEA bribed one of his own drivers to steal the truck from his employer to be used in the operation..... long story short, truck gets shot up, driver killed. Insurance company and DEA both refuse to pay for any damages.
Now this isn't over, I assume there will be court battles but, his case is different. This case involves physical evidence and facts that can't be just denied out of hand....and they are still refusing to do anything and making him sue. This is how they act when caught red handed and unable to deny the facts.... there is no chance of getting anything from a secretive org that can declare the facts national security interests.
> Polygraphs are on a level with dousing and voodoo dolls.
And yet like them, there is always that person who thinks they work.
I was recently in a particular crowd of people I know who are somewhat prone to such beliefs. I mentioned how some guy had been selling essentially dowsing rods to miliary forces in Iraq, claiming that they were bomb detectors (they had no sensor, it was just a plastic handle with a card slot and a telescoping antena on a swivel)
Of course, I said this expecting the meaning to be taken as "the guy was a scam artist" but one of my friends piped up "Well nothing wrong with that, dowsing works if you know how to do it"...... sigh....
Slashdot Mirror
I have a friend who has been in several not so famous bands. We worked together back when napster was still a place people went to get music.
His comment at the time was "if I found out someone had put my bands music up online for people to download, why I would hunt him down and shake his hand".
> For what it's worth, my sect believes that all animals have souls.
Of course but, it was never about the specific belief as much as, the inconsistency of it... they are made of the same stuff as us, with similar organs, similar genetics, even the ability to learn and adapt (to varying degrees)... so this idea that there is some "soul" that we have and they don't just well... it seemed to not be based on anything but somebodies imagination.
If a soul exists, then we should be able to come to some objective agreement about what it is and how to measure it; which doesn't leave much room for both the soul mapping to something real and the existence of so many sects.
Now of course, this is my view after 20ish years later, but even at the time it was pretty obvious that these ideas came from people's imaginations.
However we should give him credit for not using the massively overinflated numbers which include suicides. That is like a breath of fresh air.
As for the statistic, someone else in the discussion posted a link to it. It came from the FBI and properly stated it is indeed blunt objects not hammers that was more than the number of rifle deaths.
We were SPECIFICALLY talking about "assault rifles" which, I generalized out to "rifles". As opposed to "firearms".
Yes you are correct, 8,583 is larger than 496. However, it is NOT the number of people killed by rifles.
Perhaps you might wish to try exercising a little reading comprehension before you accuse people of repeating lies.
And yet....all united under the single fact that they.... just made it all up.
> Would be true if you said hammers, clubs, and other blunt objects.
Good point, blunt objects.
> specific to rifles only, making sure you leave out shotguns and other kinds of guns.
I was not aware of any shotguns or "other kinds of guns" that are not rifles which are classified as assault rifles. Please, do educate me.
Why wouldn't I use a narrowly crafted statistic, specific to rifles....when...specifically talking about rifles or a class of rifles as opposed to other guns?
> And mass-murders, they are extremely rare.
FTFY
> A law enforcement firm then just has to play crosswords and make some honey pots to get the big
> picture.
Maybe, maybe not. Problem is, its not just criminals or criminals according to any one jurisdiction. Yes there likely will be some who get caught this way, I think doing it is a lot easier to describe than to do.
I helped track down some stolen bitcoins, and it wasn't hard. The person had made a stupid error and mixed coins he stole with an address he posted publicly in forums. However, had he not, it would have been a nearly impossible task.
The thing is, each step in the chain now becomes a matter of real police work, and tracking down transactions. It is a much more laborious process to wind back anonymous accounts than it is to go to some large bank who has all the info.
Its not like one person gets one account, every individual has, litterally hundreds or thousands of accounts, pregenerated and ready to use, with no visible relation to eachother. How do you differenciate a transaction that goes from Alice to Bob from one from Alice to Carol? How do you even tell it wasn't from Alice to herself?
Yes you can get glimpses and make inferences, or if you catch someone and get their wallet, can wind back their transactions but... unless you already caught someone or are looking at an operation the size of silk road, I suspect it is far harder to track than existing financial systems. (aside from cash itself).
Hmmm could have sworn Somalia had a government at one point, were things better then?
Normally chilling effects are bad, but, I have long felt police behaviour could use a serious chilling effect, maybe even a freezing one.
However, that was always just my feeling, now that there is some data: http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/body-cameras-revolutionizing-police-accountability-video/
When police know actions are being recorded, a 60% drop in use of force. Amazing how people's actions change when there is a credible witness.
> Do you think they understand the word "irony?"
No, its amazing what you can fail to understand when there is a paycheck involved.
Except, most cops don't have CIs. Most cops are just sitting around looking to write tickets for minor traffic violations either to make his unofficial quota or to get a bonus in his pay check (varies by jurisdiction).
Frankly, i think I would rather they are off in the back of some parking lot, parked cruisers window to window so they can chat and eat donuts for a few hours than out there "doing their job", because every minute they spend not doing their job, is a minute somebody isn't getting fined for nothing of consequence or arrested for smoking pot while brown.
> I presume three-shot-burst capability means it would count as an assault-weapon in the US legal
> definition (i.e. as far as civilian ownership goes).
I am sure someone knows better than me, but, the assault weapon ban was hardly so straightforward. In fact, what defined an "assault rifle" was mostly cosmetic. For example, a firearm would qualify if it had both a pistol grip and a bayonet lug. Neither of which really have any bearing on the real issues.
Back when it was in effect I actually read the law, and instantly lost respect for all of its supporters. I mean, I am normally anti-gun control but, reading what it was that they thought so important removed any illusions about the gun control crowd even knowing what they are talking about.
fact is, more people are murdered with hammers than rifles in total. Guns that were available during the ban were just as deadly as the ones available now. The effective difference between the time of the ban and the time after the ban has been 100% a difference to collectors who are attached to a particular cosmetic style of gun.
That is.... only people who want guns that LOOK LIKE military guns either benefited or were harmed by the assault rifle ban.
Overall, its a stupid issue since, if you prevented every civilian death that was ever the result of another civilian using an assault rifle, you would have done very little indeed, since those are so exceedingly rare as to be worthless as a category of death.
Nuh uh. Animals don't have souls[1]
[1] Ref 1989 - Confraternity of Christian Doctrine class - incidentally the very topic that convinced me finally that "they just made all this up", and convinced me, much to my mother's dismay, that I was done with CCD and religion.
Right no I get that but you see the over all.... um wait that's like almost $200 profit....each?
Suddenly I am coming around on this plan.
Doesn't work like that. Generally these sorts of codes work when the subject matter is already known. For example, I have seen many people talk to their pot dealer about "slices of pizza" or "cookies". With no prior negotiation of language, messages are passed, and usually, the correct ones.
OTOH I have seen people try to extend this sort of metaphor even a bit, and its much more hit or miss. Call the guy you always get pot from, and he can draw on that context to fill in a word mapping on the fly. Try to ask him about mushrooms though, and he needs more obvious/meaningful clues. And he may not even know who your "friend cid" is. (yes, he will take you for a ride in his air ship),
Problem comes when the subject matter strays or is even the least bit ambiguous. Like in this case, we have a context so all your references make sense. If you called me out of the blue, or I read an ad in the paper or on craigslist, these don't really work...and are likely to get more legitimate or confused inquires.
Now if they already have a community where they can talk freely, or they needed to be able to contact eachother in order to be active, that would be one thing. However, stigma and lack of need has them quite fragmented. Or at least, that is my perception, and interpretation of the busts of occasional rings of modest size, a few 10s or hundreds at most. If they did similar busts for drugs, litterally going after every user in the chain they could get their hand son.... busts would involve hundreds to thousands for modest rings.
So overall, they must be quite fragmented if there is any size to their community, but it also seems rather small in comparison too; which, I would predict, is a barrier to building a really useful cant.
These have nothing to do with eachother and everything to do with congress and homeland security money.
The problem is that what politicians like doing is creating big funds that need to be spent. So they hand money to the DHS and the DHS runs programs to distribute that money. The only reason you see the police getting all this new gear is....it costs them nothing. All they have to do is fill out some request forms and the new equipment comes showering in.
Of course it comes as equipment so, it can't be used for training, or salaries, or improving their ability to fight real crime in any way, all they can do is request new toys....so they do.
I mean if someone handed you a credit card, said it can only be used to buy guns and ammo, but you can pretty much use it as much as you want and you don't have to pay the bill.... can you really tell me shooting wont become your new favorite past-time? Would you really not want an APC and some body armor if you didn't even have to pay for the gas? How about some robots? Surely you would take those?
> Rifles are a different animal entirely of course, but they're rarely used in crime and not something
> that those outside of the military generally need to concern themselves with.
Yup, last stats I saw on this said more people are killed with hammers than rifles in the US.
SPLITTER!
Funny, I can't think of a single time where someone pulled a gun on someone else, was stopped before shooting them, and then was let free because they broke no laws. I can't even think of a single time I heard a cop say "we wanted to take him down before he shot someone, but damn if he hadn't broken a law yet". Not even once.
Frankly I think the problem is people lack any interest in really understanding the causes of violence and instead just pick their favorite scapegoat out of paranoia and overactive imaginations.
Never mind that the only people who could be said to really be shooting at eachother with any regularity in the entire US are gang members, and occasionally, the police (or police and people's dogs maybe, but that conflict is kind of one sided).
But no clearly, guns are the problem and not the bad drug policy that funds the gangs, and had lead to the systematic disenfranchisement of entire swaths of communities. No lets focus on the symptom some more, guns are much easier to solve....in our imaginations.
You do realize, of course, that they would then tout the numbers of bought back guns as evidence of the huge success of the program, causing them to do more of it in more places.
"Liberator"..... as some friends of mine pointed out, takes the name of a gun that was dropped in Nazi occupied germany; and essentially encouraged people to use it...once... to shoot a nazi and aquire a real gun. :)
I think the idea is just that, this obviates the need for manufacturing outside and air dropping in, if any geek with a modest personal investment can make them by the 10s or 100s.
Doesn't that just sound like the kind of clause that ends up in the license after a few too many hours after five and a couple of beers?
Funny you would bring that up because, the opposite is actually a great example of the point in question.
http://barkgrowlbite.blogspot.com/2012/07/dea-stole-big-semi-in-sting-operation.html
So far so good. DEA bribed one of his own drivers to steal the truck from his employer to be used in the operation..... long story short, truck gets shot up, driver killed. Insurance company and DEA both refuse to pay for any damages.
Now this isn't over, I assume there will be court battles but, his case is different. This case involves physical evidence and facts that can't be just denied out of hand....and they are still refusing to do anything and making him sue. This is how they act when caught red handed and unable to deny the facts.... there is no chance of getting anything from a secretive org that can declare the facts national security interests.
> Polygraphs are on a level with dousing and voodoo dolls.
And yet like them, there is always that person who thinks they work.
I was recently in a particular crowd of people I know who are somewhat prone to such beliefs. I mentioned how some guy had been selling essentially dowsing rods to miliary forces in Iraq, claiming that they were bomb detectors (they had no sensor, it was just a plastic handle with a card slot and a telescoping antena on a swivel)
Of course, I said this expecting the meaning to be taken as "the guy was a scam artist" but one of my friends piped up "Well nothing wrong with that, dowsing works if you know how to do it"...... sigh....
If so then it is breaking the law, as commercial use of drones is currently banned.