All the Supreme Court hearings I've heard Sotomayor take part that have been broadcasted on C-SPAN have shown that she does just what someone in her position should do: stick to the law.
I thought that they were supposed to stick to the Constitution.
From your link, in which it is attempting to reconcile Kagan's seemingly lax respect for the First Amendment.
In her defense: The New York Times reported, "There are indications... that [Kagan's] views on government regulation of speech were closer to the Supreme Court's more conservative justices, like Antonin Scalia, than to Justice John Paul Stevens."
Is that a good thing?
I read through your link, and it isn't just from a left-leaning watchdog, it reads as if it is from the campaign page of a politician running for office. (IE: it only 'corrects' negatives, and doesn't address any myths and falsehoods that exist which may appear to be positive for her).
that doesn't mean we should make early abortions illegal or make murdering newborns legal. what it means is that life is complicated, there are grey areas, and simply because grey areas exist and are complicated, you are not excused from making tough choices
And it apparently doesn't exempt you from declaring J and P as the boundaries and declaring anyone who says A-I or Q-Z is an idiot. Logical fallacies don't apply to politics, since the discussion is hardly rational or logical.
But again, it's easy to say that grey exists and that's not a problem when you get to arbitrarily decide how narrow grey is. (also convenient when the point you wish to push is right in the middle that you say we have to choose.)
have you completely missed every reference to the lawlessness of the net?
there is no central authority to do what you so glibly suggest is the problem of the "Police"
When people like AV security suite have storefronts which collect and charge credit cards one would think that it's not that hard to track.
Am I being glib? It might be complicated, but this isn't exactly a difficult thing to track and given the ubiquity of Windows, isn't just harming people in a single nation.
I see Antivirus 2010 on half the computers I come across, it must be a good product since everyone has it!;)
Is that one of those fake anti-virus hostage programs like AV Security Suite? I've gone at least 5-8 years running Windows XP Pro and haven't had an issue with a virus during that time. In the last 3 days I've had issues with AV Security Suite getting onto my systems. How the hell isn't that company or whomever is running the scam websites not getting slapped down by the police?
I'm guessing that whoever is behind it likely was banking on the Flash vulnerability and served it through infected advertisements. Family members came to me in droves due to this bastard program. Normally auto-update is fast enough to patch before they get hit, but not this time. Never before have I wanted to physically harm the writer of a virus so much. Cleaning it out of a system was a pain in the ass. For the most part I just gave up and just reimaged the machines.
Sorry for the rant, but going 5 years without any major incidents really made this one bug me. (that and as far as I can tell, it came from ads served on reputable sites)
I appreciate your explanation, but I read recently here on Slashdot that, on the average, AT&T actually has the best data coverage across the entire US. Too lazy to find it, maybe somebody else recalls?
I live in Austin. It is indeed a sweet spot. Everyone is moving here;-)
It all comes down to how you slice and name the data.
AT&T has coverage, but what is coverage? Does it have to meet a certain standard of uptime, speed, etc? ie: if I get 3kbps in an area, does that count? (In terms of marketing, it usually does) Is it measured by population? If I stuck up some towers in the top 30 metropolitan areas I could service over 30% of the US population. And 30 metropolitan areas isn't that big of an area to wrap up that much of a chunk of the population.
Not being snarky, but AT&T has been sneaky with their counter-ads where they showed maps for voice coverage to confuse the issue where Verizon was rightfully attacking them for their lack of 3g coverage.
I've heard Austin is nice, but it is still in Texas:/ I'm holding out for a major defense contractor to open up shop in Vermont...
And the article is written by a journalist that wants to generate pageviews. As a result, a journalist's take on the implications of a Supreme Court decision shouldn't be taken as gospel.
It's dealing specifically with a conviction and a post-trial attempt to request additional evidence. It is NOT saying you don't have a constitutional right to DNA testing during your trial. In fact, you DO. See what happens to DNA evidence in which the defence is denied the right to perform their own testing if the sample is large enough, or an independent analysis of the procedures and equipment.
This ruling is much more akin to the following situation:
Someone is convicted of a crime, and later realizes that if their attorney had asked a witness a few additional questions, they might have provided exculpatory testimony. However their attorney did not ask those questions. That isn't grounds for a retrial later because there isn't new evidence.
You can have your DNA tests, but you have to ask for them before you are convicted. This isn't as if new DNA evidence became available. The defense knew it existed, and chose not to use it in their defense.
True, but neither should you assume that the trials are independent. Often they are not, and one must either take pains to ensure that they are, or modify the proposal to account for the dependency.
Understood. I was just trying to show that you can't take the concept of logical fallacies directly from the mathematical and formal structured debate world and treat them as universal truths.
The theory is that if the person that actually committed the crime has a DNA sample in the system already then you will never be convicted in the first place
How about this one: A crime is committed, DNA is found. The NYC police get a match for some guy in Queens. They go and setup an investigation (hopefully) but likely will just roll down and pick him up and arrest him there. He will be charged, and potentially convicted, or at the very least spend a great deal of money on his defense if he is found not guilty. Even if he isn't charged, a smart person will acquire a lawyer bill right away (Who would talk to the police without a lawyer present?)
How much time/money is spent checking out the DNA match? It proves nothing but that the guy's DNA was there. The real person might be living in New Jersey for all we know.
I know, I know, the police should be also doing an investigation the old fashioned way, but look at it from these points.
1. The DNA would be the only indicator for why you would investigate that person if a database is in use. And the person WILL be investigated if it turns up a match. Since each DNA match MUST be investigated (What, you think they won't investigate a DNA match?, there will be a lot of CYA and no one will take the risk to NOT investigate). So any amount of false positive will have a direct and immediate negative impact on police work and resources. The time spent investigating a false lead is time spent NOT investigating the crime.
2. DNA matches are useless without a corresponding investigation and additional evidence. Thus a traditional investigation must be conducted anyway. So you don't save any money there.
The idea that something might not be a constitutional right has little to do with state law. SCOTUS did not rule that the subject did not have a right under the law to DNA testing. It merely ruled (properly or improperly) that this is not a Constitutional right. People really should learn to distinguish the difference
I don't think that's what they ruled at all. They ruled that you can't reject a DNA test and then ask for one later. (At least, what I gleaned from the article)
In a way, they affirmed that you do have a right to the test, but in this case he waived that right when they declined to have the sample tested.
(orthagonal to the issue of what you were discussing regarding state law and constitutional rights.)
PC pretty much means non-mac at this point, and certainly doesn't help your point. Developing for the iPhone, you HAVE to buy a Mac, and that developer's license thing ($99?)
int main()
{
printf("Hello, world. Except you iPhone. Not yours.");
return 0;
}
Essentially, for everything except the iPhone, you don't need to purchase any particular brand of OS to run programs. If you typed this message, you can write programs for a non-Mac PC.
The amusing thing is that you could easily type up a program on your iPhone and send it to a Mac to be compiled for a PC.
I suppose that's still a reality. I live in the 15th largest city in America, so it really isn't an issue 100 miles in any direction.
I've lived in Upstate NY, Philadelphia PA, and currently Washington DC. In all three of those areas I've found that Verizon was hands down better than AT&T. I know this because I personally own an iPhone, but use Verizon for business.
You must be living in a sweet spot if you get equal reception between carriers in an 100 mile area because the technologies behave differently based on terrestrial conditions (Urban/Rural, Flat/hilly, etc)
CDMA and GSM have different performance characteristics and often carrier choice preferences align with this performance. GSM carriers must outperform CDMA carriers in non technical areas because if all things were equal CDMA typically outperforms GSM from a technical perspective (Link margin, dropped calls, etc)
The thing is, "slippery slope", per se, is not a fallacy. The so-called "slippery slope fallacy" refers to calling something a slippery slope when it isn't. It has nothing to do with the existence of real slippery slopes.
When discussing formal logical proofs, you shouldn't assume that one independentant trial has an influence on another independent trial.
When attempting to understand human behavior, you should ALWAYS assume that the person wants and thinks they can get more from you than what the initial impression of their request suggests.
Slippery slopes with respect to human behavior aren't a logical fallacy, they are a proven effective method for achieving a goal.
It's generally to balance things out. Consider NYCs political gravitational pull, and having it halfway up the state (close to the rest of New England and not a foreign country) makes sense from a traditional trade perspective.
Of course, having the capitol in Ithaca might not be so bad considering so many damned NYC residents have no freaking clue what exists 40 miles north of their current location. I spent a few years in Upstate NY (which illustrates just how much of a joke that term is when I only lived 4 miles from the PA border.)
Take a look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:New_York_District_22_109th_US_Congress.png (or any other map of the congressional districts for NY) I LOVE district 22. Nothing like a district that stretches from Poughkeepsie to Ithaca. Until 1983 it included the Bronx! It then started snaking up the border.
If you were to take a tour of the district and hit the most distant points and stay within the bounds of the district, it would be 256 miles and take you 4.5 hours due to it's unusual shape.
To put this into perspective, to create a congressional district of such a convoluted shape in PA, you could have it stretch from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and only add 30 minutes drive.
Seriously though, that is the deal with these big companies seemingly all turning evil as of late? I mean they've never been particularly nice, and they've always been inscrutable and faceless but lately they seem to be turning more and more evil.
Because if it works, they continue. It's called testing the waters, and there are two groups that could reasonably push back.
1. Consumers 2. Politicians.
The consumers aren't educated enough to know what is going on. They generally call US up and ask us to hook up their TV, or tell them why the DVD isn't working. However, they ARE starting to notice as my mother recently asked me why my DVD player didn't force us to watch 10 minutes of previews before playing the movie.
The politicians are not educated enough, AND aren't on our side. So I expect no help from them. It is simply not possible to run for election in the US and not accept huge amounts of money from 'interests' for all practical purposes. Perhaps the only way you could do it is to run for congress, and lay low for 16 years until you build up seniority. You might not get the other party angry enough to boot you out by outspending you in advertisments before you become a household name.
But of course, you won't be fixing anything during that time.
That's why I don't block ads for sites like Slashdot. In general, I keep adblock up all the time, but turn it off for certain sites. And Slashdot is even giving me the option to turn off advertising (probably because I only troll half the time). I don't take that option, because well, I like free things and I know advertising helps keep it that way.
Other than their associated stores, I don't know how websites could keep themselves afloat. Bandwidth costs are still too high for most sites to exist on handouts.
Corporate/Product words fall outside of normal English rules. You will often have words created which include letters from other alphabets, intentional misspellings, even numbers. An easy way to break it down is to treat trademarked names as adjectives attached to common nouns.
Pontiac Cars instead of Pontiacs. Blackberry Phones instead of blackberries.
In a way, it provides a very crude metric for determining when these words fall into the vernacular. When people begin to treat the words as common nouns on their own (by not treating them as adjectives), it's a good sign that the brand is losing it's protection.
Q-tips Bandaids iPods
All pluralized and thus become a category, rather than an individual product description.
My own personal rule of thumb, is to slow to within 15 MPH of what the sign says BEFORE getting to the curve, then adjust as I see fit as I actually enter the curve.
I can respect that. My personal rule of thumb is to take the curve at the speed suggested at least once, then adjust for any future passes.
Backroads of PA are either 200 year old cowpaths or logging trails. I've even come across roads in which one lane was washed out and the road was collapsing. It stayed that way for 4 years before they fixed it. It's also not uncommon to come across dirt roads within 30 miles of Philadelphia.
Since i have zero control on what a "content provider" logs right now, I assume that they are logging all this information right now. How exactly can we assume that a web site *isn't* logging your details when posting/uploading content?
They can only log what they see, or what you give them. There are lots of ways to disguise the source of your data.
Throw away email account accessed from a computer that you use for nothing else on a public wifi terminal can create plenty of anonymity.
None of these would prevent law-abiding citizens from owning guns.
Well if you banned them except for people who paid a $10,000 tax it wouldn't prevent law-abiding citizens from owning them either.
What's a waiting period do for what you consider straw purchases? Just purchase a week in advance.
The other issues you are discussing won't do anything meaningful to address the problem, which is why most of us are against them.
Address the root causes as to why there are situations in which people are driven to the point of murdering each other.
Do you think a lack of guns has done anything to prevent the genocide in some African nations? They just use Machetes.
I just don't see firearms as that big of a problem. I've been mugged before, and it was a knife every time. I HAVE defended myself with a firearm before. But most of this issue with the guns is just something cooked up by the media and the politicians to get you to be angry about something so that they can count on your vote.
Does X make you angry? It should, X does horrible things. I'm against X, vote for me and I'll do all I can to stop X.
Media: Is X killing your child? Tune in after the commercial.
Slashdot Mirror
All the Supreme Court hearings I've heard Sotomayor take part that have been broadcasted on C-SPAN have shown that she does just what someone in her position should do: stick to the law.
I thought that they were supposed to stick to the Constitution.
From your link, in which it is attempting to reconcile Kagan's seemingly lax respect for the First Amendment.
In her defense: The New York Times reported, "There are indications ... that [Kagan's] views on government regulation of speech were closer to the Supreme Court's more conservative justices, like Antonin Scalia, than to Justice John Paul Stevens."
Is that a good thing?
I read through your link, and it isn't just from a left-leaning watchdog, it reads as if it is from the campaign page of a politician running for office. (IE: it only 'corrects' negatives, and doesn't address any myths and falsehoods that exist which may appear to be positive for her).
that doesn't mean we should make early abortions illegal or make murdering newborns legal. what it means is that life is complicated, there are grey areas, and simply because grey areas exist and are complicated, you are not excused from making tough choices
And it apparently doesn't exempt you from declaring J and P as the boundaries and declaring anyone who says A-I or Q-Z is an idiot. Logical fallacies don't apply to politics, since the discussion is hardly rational or logical.
But again, it's easy to say that grey exists and that's not a problem when you get to arbitrarily decide how narrow grey is. (also convenient when the point you wish to push is right in the middle that you say we have to choose.)
Which police department is exactly responsible?
have you completely missed every reference to the lawlessness of the net?
there is no central authority to do what you so glibly suggest is the problem of the "Police"
When people like AV security suite have storefronts which collect and charge credit cards one would think that it's not that hard to track.
Am I being glib? It might be complicated, but this isn't exactly a difficult thing to track and given the ubiquity of Windows, isn't just harming people in a single nation.
I see Antivirus 2010 on half the computers I come across, it must be a good product since everyone has it! ;)
Is that one of those fake anti-virus hostage programs like AV Security Suite? I've gone at least 5-8 years running Windows XP Pro and haven't had an issue with a virus during that time. In the last 3 days I've had issues with AV Security Suite getting onto my systems. How the hell isn't that company or whomever is running the scam websites not getting slapped down by the police?
I'm guessing that whoever is behind it likely was banking on the Flash vulnerability and served it through infected advertisements. Family members came to me in droves due to this bastard program. Normally auto-update is fast enough to patch before they get hit, but not this time. Never before have I wanted to physically harm the writer of a virus so much. Cleaning it out of a system was a pain in the ass. For the most part I just gave up and just reimaged the machines.
Sorry for the rant, but going 5 years without any major incidents really made this one bug me. (that and as far as I can tell, it came from ads served on reputable sites)
I appreciate your explanation, but I read recently here on Slashdot that, on the average, AT&T actually has the best data coverage across the entire US. Too lazy to find it, maybe somebody else recalls?
I live in Austin. It is indeed a sweet spot. Everyone is moving here ;-)
It all comes down to how you slice and name the data.
AT&T has coverage, but what is coverage? Does it have to meet a certain standard of uptime, speed, etc? ie: if I get 3kbps in an area, does that count? (In terms of marketing, it usually does) Is it measured by population? If I stuck up some towers in the top 30 metropolitan areas I could service over 30% of the US population. And 30 metropolitan areas isn't that big of an area to wrap up that much of a chunk of the population.
Not being snarky, but AT&T has been sneaky with their counter-ads where they showed maps for voice coverage to confuse the issue where Verizon was rightfully attacking them for their lack of 3g coverage.
I've heard Austin is nice, but it is still in Texas :/ I'm holding out for a major defense contractor to open up shop in Vermont...
I need cold weather.
It's the very first sentence in the article!
And the article is written by a journalist that wants to generate pageviews. As a result, a journalist's take on the implications of a Supreme Court decision shouldn't be taken as gospel.
It's dealing specifically with a conviction and a post-trial attempt to request additional evidence. It is NOT saying you don't have a constitutional right to DNA testing during your trial. In fact, you DO. See what happens to DNA evidence in which the defence is denied the right to perform their own testing if the sample is large enough, or an independent analysis of the procedures and equipment.
This ruling is much more akin to the following situation:
Someone is convicted of a crime, and later realizes that if their attorney had asked a witness a few additional questions, they might have provided exculpatory testimony. However their attorney did not ask those questions. That isn't grounds for a retrial later because there isn't new evidence.
You can have your DNA tests, but you have to ask for them before you are convicted. This isn't as if new DNA evidence became available. The defense knew it existed, and chose not to use it in their defense.
True, but neither should you assume that the trials are independent. Often they are not, and one must either take pains to ensure that they are, or modify the proposal to account for the dependency.
Understood. I was just trying to show that you can't take the concept of logical fallacies directly from the mathematical and formal structured debate world and treat them as universal truths.
The theory is that if the person that actually committed the crime has a DNA sample in the system already then you will never be convicted in the first place
How about this one:
A crime is committed, DNA is found.
The NYC police get a match for some guy in Queens. They go and setup an investigation (hopefully) but likely will just roll down and pick him up and arrest him there. He will be charged, and potentially convicted, or at the very least spend a great deal of money on his defense if he is found not guilty. Even if he isn't charged, a smart person will acquire a lawyer bill right away (Who would talk to the police without a lawyer present?)
How much time/money is spent checking out the DNA match? It proves nothing but that the guy's DNA was there. The real person might be living in New Jersey for all we know.
I know, I know, the police should be also doing an investigation the old fashioned way, but look at it from these points.
1. The DNA would be the only indicator for why you would investigate that person if a database is in use. And the person WILL be investigated if it turns up a match. Since each DNA match MUST be investigated (What, you think they won't investigate a DNA match?, there will be a lot of CYA and no one will take the risk to NOT investigate). So any amount of false positive will have a direct and immediate negative impact on police work and resources. The time spent investigating a false lead is time spent NOT investigating the crime.
2. DNA matches are useless without a corresponding investigation and additional evidence. Thus a traditional investigation must be conducted anyway. So you don't save any money there.
The idea that something might not be a constitutional right has little to do with state law. SCOTUS did not rule that the subject did not have a right under the law to DNA testing. It merely ruled (properly or improperly) that this is not a Constitutional right. People really should learn to distinguish the difference
I don't think that's what they ruled at all. They ruled that you can't reject a DNA test and then ask for one later. (At least, what I gleaned from the article)
In a way, they affirmed that you do have a right to the test, but in this case he waived that right when they declined to have the sample tested.
(orthagonal to the issue of what you were discussing regarding state law and constitutional rights.)
As opposed to that free PC you use to develop on?
PC pretty much means non-mac at this point, and certainly doesn't help your point. Developing for the iPhone, you HAVE to buy a Mac, and that developer's license thing ($99?)
int main()
{
printf("Hello, world. Except you iPhone. Not yours.");
return 0;
}
Essentially, for everything except the iPhone, you don't need to purchase any particular brand of OS to run programs. If you typed this message, you can write programs for a non-Mac PC.
The amusing thing is that you could easily type up a program on your iPhone and send it to a Mac to be compiled for a PC.
I suppose that's still a reality. I live in the 15th largest city in America, so it really isn't an issue 100 miles in any direction.
I've lived in Upstate NY, Philadelphia PA, and currently Washington DC. In all three of those areas I've found that Verizon was hands down better than AT&T. I know this because I personally own an iPhone, but use Verizon for business.
You must be living in a sweet spot if you get equal reception between carriers in an 100 mile area because the technologies behave differently based on terrestrial conditions (Urban/Rural, Flat/hilly, etc)
CDMA and GSM have different performance characteristics and often carrier choice preferences align with this performance. GSM carriers must outperform CDMA carriers in non technical areas because if all things were equal CDMA typically outperforms GSM from a technical perspective (Link margin, dropped calls, etc)
What application is it that you're desperate to use that has been barred from the app store? I'm just curious
Debating over the length of the leash always seemed odd to me when the existence of the leash itself is unacceptable.
The thing is, "slippery slope", per se, is not a fallacy. The so-called "slippery slope fallacy" refers to calling something a slippery slope when it isn't. It has nothing to do with the existence of real slippery slopes.
When discussing formal logical proofs, you shouldn't assume that one independentant trial has an influence on another independent trial.
When attempting to understand human behavior, you should ALWAYS assume that the person wants and thinks they can get more from you than what the initial impression of their request suggests.
Slippery slopes with respect to human behavior aren't a logical fallacy, they are a proven effective method for achieving a goal.
Only problem is try living on a 420 dollar a month unemployment check when you live in NYC and its rated for the state!!
Try paying $5,000/yr in property taxes for a god damned log cabin in upstate NY.
As a New Yorker, I've never quite understood why Albany is the capital and not NYC.
Or Washington, DC, for that matter.
It used to be Philadelphia. And if you ever get a chance to visit, a tour of Independence Hall is definitely worth it.
It also puts into perspective just how our government has grown from its incredibly humble beginings.
It's generally to balance things out. Consider NYCs political gravitational pull, and having it halfway up the state (close to the rest of New England and not a foreign country) makes sense from a traditional trade perspective.
Of course, having the capitol in Ithaca might not be so bad considering so many damned NYC residents have no freaking clue what exists 40 miles north of their current location. I spent a few years in Upstate NY (which illustrates just how much of a joke that term is when I only lived 4 miles from the PA border.)
Take a look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:New_York_District_22_109th_US_Congress.png (or any other map of the congressional districts for NY) I LOVE district 22. Nothing like a district that stretches from Poughkeepsie to Ithaca. Until 1983 it included the Bronx! It then started snaking up the border.
If you were to take a tour of the district and hit the most distant points and stay within the bounds of the district, it would be 256 miles and take you 4.5 hours due to it's unusual shape.
To put this into perspective, to create a congressional district of such a convoluted shape in PA, you could have it stretch from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and only add 30 minutes drive.
Seriously though, that is the deal with these big companies seemingly all turning evil as of late? I mean they've never been particularly nice, and they've always been inscrutable and faceless but lately they seem to be turning more and more evil.
Because if it works, they continue. It's called testing the waters, and there are two groups that could reasonably push back.
1. Consumers
2. Politicians.
The consumers aren't educated enough to know what is going on. They generally call US up and ask us to hook up their TV, or tell them why the DVD isn't working. However, they ARE starting to notice as my mother recently asked me why my DVD player didn't force us to watch 10 minutes of previews before playing the movie.
The politicians are not educated enough, AND aren't on our side. So I expect no help from them. It is simply not possible to run for election in the US and not accept huge amounts of money from 'interests' for all practical purposes. Perhaps the only way you could do it is to run for congress, and lay low for 16 years until you build up seniority. You might not get the other party angry enough to boot you out by outspending you in advertisments before you become a household name.
But of course, you won't be fixing anything during that time.
That's why I don't block ads for sites like Slashdot. In general, I keep adblock up all the time, but turn it off for certain sites. And Slashdot is even giving me the option to turn off advertising (probably because I only troll half the time). I don't take that option, because well, I like free things and I know advertising helps keep it that way.
Other than their associated stores, I don't know how websites could keep themselves afloat. Bandwidth costs are still too high for most sites to exist on handouts.
Blackberrys (Blackberries?)
Corporate/Product words fall outside of normal English rules. You will often have words created which include letters from other alphabets, intentional misspellings, even numbers. An easy way to break it down is to treat trademarked names as adjectives attached to common nouns.
Pontiac Cars instead of Pontiacs.
Blackberry Phones instead of blackberries.
In a way, it provides a very crude metric for determining when these words fall into the vernacular. When people begin to treat the words as common nouns on their own (by not treating them as adjectives), it's a good sign that the brand is losing it's protection.
Q-tips
Bandaids
iPods
All pluralized and thus become a category, rather than an individual product description.
They repeatedly offered to settle for a reasonable amount. She repeatedly refused.
What were these 'reasonable' amounts? $3000 is what I've heard for pretrial settlements, and THAT is way beyond reasonable to me.
My own personal rule of thumb, is to slow to within 15 MPH of what the sign says BEFORE getting to the curve, then adjust as I see fit as I actually enter the curve.
I can respect that. My personal rule of thumb is to take the curve at the speed suggested at least once, then adjust for any future passes.
Backroads of PA are either 200 year old cowpaths or logging trails. I've even come across roads in which one lane was washed out and the road was collapsing. It stayed that way for 4 years before they fixed it. It's also not uncommon to come across dirt roads within 30 miles of Philadelphia.
so it's almost a criminal/thug version of mutually assured destruction?
If you assume that the person being mugged is a criminal/thug.
Since i have zero control on what a "content provider" logs right now, I assume that they are logging all this information right now. How exactly can we assume that a web site *isn't* logging your details when posting/uploading content?
They can only log what they see, or what you give them. There are lots of ways to disguise the source of your data.
Throw away email account accessed from a computer that you use for nothing else on a public wifi terminal can create plenty of anonymity.
None of these would prevent law-abiding citizens from owning guns.
Well if you banned them except for people who paid a $10,000 tax it wouldn't prevent law-abiding citizens from owning them either.
What's a waiting period do for what you consider straw purchases? Just purchase a week in advance.
The other issues you are discussing won't do anything meaningful to address the problem, which is why most of us are against them.
Address the root causes as to why there are situations in which people are driven to the point of murdering each other.
Do you think a lack of guns has done anything to prevent the genocide in some African nations? They just use Machetes.
I just don't see firearms as that big of a problem. I've been mugged before, and it was a knife every time. I HAVE defended myself with a firearm before. But most of this issue with the guns is just something cooked up by the media and the politicians to get you to be angry about something so that they can count on your vote.
Does X make you angry? It should, X does horrible things. I'm against X, vote for me and I'll do all I can to stop X.
Media: Is X killing your child? Tune in after the commercial.