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Comment How is this going to stop someone? (Score 1) 550

How will this deter someone intent on trying to sneak something onboard a flight? Answer: it won't. Just like gun free zones prevent people from becoming victims. Someone intent on doing harm will ignore this law like they ignore the others. This law is a movie law, it dates back to Die Hard and the "invisible" glock. Schumer is a moron who thinks he knows what is best for you.

Comment Re:Oh no, they didn't! (Score 1) 289

It's violence. Tighter gun laws disarm people who would only use a gun to save their lives. Some of the tightest "gun laws" in the US are in Chicago. I hear it's pretty save to walk the streets there. :) Thinking that outlawing something is going to get rid of it is foolish. I didn't work for alcohol, it's not working for drugs, and it won't work for guns. All it does is disarms law biding citizens. The last time I checked, law biding citizens weren't commiting these crimes. If you want the real stats, go here: http://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/gun-violence/welcome.htm . This article talks about an AR15, which is almost never used in a crime. In fact rifles in general account for something like only 2% of firearms homicides. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10tbl20.xls

So please, before the feel good "more gun laws == less gun violence" take a look at some numbers.
The problem is crime, not guns, and that's a human problem. Victim disarmament does nothing to prevent the crime, other than skewing the odds greatly in favor of the criminal.

Comment Re:NEWS FLASH!! (Score 1) 289

The pipe/nail is called a zipgun and is "illegal" in some states. If you google, you'll find John Moses Brownings workshop. It's pretty basic and he developed the 1911 from scratch there. With CNC's it's not hard to make a real firearm and with the AR, the only thing with "paper" or background check is the lower receiver. I know tons of people who have "rolled' their own, and have done it legally. Heck, an AK47 can be made with hand tools and a hydraulic press.

Comment Score 1 for parents in California... (Score 1) 458

As a non-native Californian living in the PRK. I'm still amazed at the rights the state takes away from parents in the name of "It's for the children." Work permit from the school?!? As a parent of 3 teens, I'm the work permit, grades slip, work stops. Done. Just because some parents are slackers, the state tries to impose the "proper" way to raise children with rules and regulations often written by bureaucrats and legislators that have no children. My kids know the rules and know what's allowed, I do not need the STATE telling me how to raise them. This is a great ruling, the legislator here needs to get back to the basics and get off their social agenda. 60 cents a gallon gas tax and you need an offroad vehicle to drive down most major roads here. :)

The Almighty Buck

NY Times To Charge For Online Content 488

Hugh Pickens writes "New York Magazine reports that the NY Times appears close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations. After a year of debate inside the paper, the choice has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system. The decision to go paid is monumental for the Times, and culminates a yearlong debate that grew contentious, people close to the talks say. Hanging over the deliberations is the fact that the Times' last experience with pay walls, TimesSelect, was deeply unsatisfying and exposed a rift between Sulzberger and his roster of A-list columnists, particularly Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, who grew frustrated at their dramatic fall-off in online readership. The argument for remaining free was based on the belief that nytimes.com is growing into an English-language global newspaper of record, with a vast audience — 20 million unique readers — that would prove lucrative as web advertising matured. But with the painful declines in advertising brought on by last year's financial crisis, the argument that online advertising might never grow big enough to sustain the paper's high-cost, ambitious journalism — gained more weight."

Comment It'll never happen. (Score 0, Flamebait) 130

Oh, what a glorious way to waste tax dollars. First design a system, then require everyone to get on board with it. Price it through the roof and have a single vendor for all the gear. So some volunteer fire dept in Iowa that is on a shoestring budget has to spend thousands to upgrade radios. It will take years if it ever gets off the ground. This is _WHY_ amateur radio works, government has too many silos and too many important people that will push their system. Been there seen that, still paying the price. :(

Comment Re:Please ban them (Score 2, Interesting) 486

Thank you for a sensible post. I agree that the only real solution has to be some abstraction or alternate mode for memory access that prevents the problem outright. C and C++ not only make it possible, but extremely easy to trash memory.

The people claiming that the problem is programmers who are incompetent or stupid and believing that they are superhuman genius programmers who are somehow immune from errors are living under a delusion. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. We are all human and imperfect. I have seen many intelligent and competent programmers write incorrect code. I have personally written code with errors. We need to move beyond unproductive blame assigning mentalities to achieve real solutions or we will never be able to advance the state of software. Realistically, the prima donnas will continue on and other people will actually do something.

memcpy_s is not a step forward for numerous reasons already mentioned. strncpy provides functionality that strcpy does not, namely a bound on its region of effect. memcpy was already bounded and neither memcpy_s or strncpy can prevent bad parameters from causing memory corruption. Hardware support like the NX/ED bits to mark pages as not executable are a good advancement on the security front, but still do not prevent data corruption. Complete removal of memory access like many languages do solves the problem with a high performance cost. Emerging techniques like STM may be able to incorporate data safety while maintaining hardware efficiency.

The Courts

Conviction of Sen. Ted Stevens Is Thrown Out 440

A federal judge has thrown out the conviction of the senator who educated us all about the true nature of the Internet. Ted Stevens had been convicted last fall of lying about free home renovations that he received from an oil contractor, 8 days before he lost his Senate re-election bid. The judge blasted the US Department of Justice prosecutors for mishandling the case in ways that might rise to the level of criminality. "In 25 years on the bench, I have never seen anything approach the mishandling and misconduct in this case," Judge Emmet G. Sullivan said. He called the allegations "shocking and disturbing." According to the article, "Several jurors have told The Washington Post that the evidence against Stevens was overwhelming during a month-long trial that ended in October."
The Internet

ICANN Responds To gTLD Plan Comments 119

angry tapir writes "ICANN has delayed its plans to sell new generic top-level domains while responding to public comments about the controversial proposal. The organization has released a 154-page document detailing and analyzing the hundreds of comments (PDF) it has received about its gTLD plan. In response to several concerns brought up by the public and companies in the Internet industry, ICANN has moved out the projected timeline for taking applications for new gTLDs from September to December."

Comment San Diego Busted in 2001 (Score 2, Interesting) 353

I think the crooks running the city of San Diego originated this. They had the redlight cameras shut down in 2001 for doing it. They put them at intersections where there was a high percentage of people that would pay the tickets and not at "Dangerous" intersections. Then they tweaked the timing on the lights and started raking in the dough. Read about it here.

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