Free Republic

If you hit "Search" at the top of the page (in latest posts) and type in "lubbock", you will get all kinds of articles about the Lubbock incident.

The 11 year old boy was Alberto Sepulveda. A Google search will give you all sorts of information on that one.

The Santa Clarita incident involved a fellow by the name of James Beck. Type "James Beck" into the FR search and, again, you will get all sorts of articles.

Not sure about the Florida sniper, can't find anything on that one.

This might help.

What's more interesting is the trail formations which occur when the flight and atmospheric conditons don't change, but all of the sudden the trails start and stop.

When the flight and atmospheric conditions don't seem to change, actually. Even in a section of clear air, there can be definite areas of greater or lesser moisture, temperature, and airflow. Air masses where the conditions for contrails are better or worse, sometimes by a change in humidity of only 1 or 2 percent, or a change in temperature of only a degree or two, or a combination of them all. Thus, the contrails do stop and/or start.

Thankee Ma'am. Another great Vin piece.

I would have to go with Wilson, too. All for the reasons you mentioned. The income tax is what allowed FDR to fund his New Deal programs as well as all the socialist programs since.

There is no such thing as an accidental discharge. It is negligent discharge, and it caused by inattention, stupidity, lack of training, or horseplay.

I wish people would stop calling them accidental. They aren't!

Microsoft memo to staff: Clobber Linux

Trying to clobber Linux would be like trying to clobber fog. Who do you go after?

That would be a pretty safe bet. Sadly.

Hiya Xenalyte,

I play a few games, but haven't lately because I have been too busy with a new consulting project.

I am presently playing Dark Age of Camelot, but have played Everquest, Ultima I-IX and Online, Unreal, Quake II and III, Half Life and several of their mods, my favorite being Counterstrike. I was in beta for both Anarchy Online and Asheron's Call, but never played public because they sucked. :^) I did beta for DAoC, too, but stuck around because it's pretty nice.

I played Diablo I when it first came out, but for some reason I just can't get into DII. I haven't played Age of Empires in a long time, probably 2 years ago or so. I got burned out on RTS games for the most part, primarily on AoE.

It's nice to see some gamers here on FR. Nice to know I am not alone. :^)

Yeah, I know, but I gotta try.

Once more and I will do something I have never done before and hit that abuse button. I did hit it, but backed off, now you back off.

So, WILL THIS END THE BITCHING? Eh?

In a word.. NO, it wont.. It will quiet the Libs who want to be safe in their homes.. but it DEFINATELY WILL NOT quiet the drug abusing Libertarians..

Drug abusing Libertarians, eh? I am just about sick and tired of being accused of being a "druggie" or "drug abusing libertarian" or any other abusive name you drug warriors want to use in order to divert attention from the fact that nowhere in the Constitution of the United States of America does it give the government the power to prohibit any single thing. Nowhere! I am against drugs, I haven't done drugs since I was about 21 years old, except for nicotine, caffine, and beer and wine about 5 or 6 times a month at most.

So piss off, I am not a druggie.

Ya see? We know that once you allow the government to decide on what substances people put in their bodies, one day it will decide it has the power to force someone to take a substance it has deemed to help "society." (Ritalin anybody?) Once you have allowed government (which is nothing but force, plain and simple) to prohibit a thing, it will decide on its own that it has the power to prohibit other things. And, one day, you will wake up and find that something you cherish has been prohibited.

Just take a look at what has happened. During Prohibition I, the gangsters were blowing each other away (not innocent people except as collateral damage) with machine guns with such regularity that they decided to prohibit machine guns. Well, they at least had the honesty to admit they didn't have the power to do that, so they conceived a tax measure. A tax measure that added a $200 tax on a machine gun that could be bought out of a Sears catalog for about $30. Or a "silencer" that was really nothing more than a lawn mower muffler costing about a buck. And this was all done quite awhile after Prohibition I was over and gangsters hadn't blown up anyone since. They even were able to convince a supreme court that it was not a prohibitive measure, but a revenue measure.

Now we (peon civilians) can't even look at a new machine gun because in 1986 they stopped accepting applications to pay the tax and dropped any pretense of what their true purposes were. Then they went and told us that we didn't need any of those ugly weapsons, you know, the ones that look like military weapons but were functionally no different from any auto-loading hunting rifle.

If we don't stop the government from prohibiting things without the constitutional amendment to allow them the power to do so, you will find one day that even things such as FR or the Bible banned. Along with even your single shot .22.

On that day, I (or my children or their children) will point out to the drug warriors where they advocated prohibition and say, "See, I told ya so!"

LOL!!

I appreciate someone looking for an alternative to no-knock, full on military assaults on people who enjoy a substance that the fed.gov has deemed the possesion of said substance to be a crime right up there with murder, rape, robbery, assault, etc.

However, before we look for any alternatives (which screening their sewage for traces of said substance without a warrant, and maybe even with a warrant, would be right up there with said no-knock full on military raid with abusing at least one of the first ten amendments to the Constitution) how about lets look at the the legality (from a constitutional viewpoint) of the government doing anything to said person who would enjoy said substance.

:^)

In plain language, what makes straining their sewage any more constitutional than just knocking down their door? It would be like forcing you to pee in a cup. Ok, it might be less abusive of them physically, but certainly no less constitutionally.

There was a network that was started by DARPA, but there was much private, or actually university development of what eventually came to be the internet. UC Berkeley was one of the primary developers of network technology, but there were others as well.

Anything that has made the internet actually useful by the majority of the users was done by private interprise.

However, the Constitution clearly leaves it to Congress to regulate interstate commerce.

Ah, that old commerce clause. The bane of lovers of freedom everywhere. The impetus behind so much that is unconstitutional.

The commerce clause was put into place for one reason, and one reason only. To make sure that when one state shipped products to another state that it would not be taxed in any state it happened to pass through on it's journey. This was to ensure two things. That their power to regulate foreign commerce could not be abrogated by simply shipping foreign products to a more favorable state, and to "ensure the domestic tranquality" by ensuring that trade between states was fairly taxed. Read the debates of the Constitutional Congress and the Federalist papers, especially Federalist #42.

Fortunately, lately the USSC has seen fit to start throwing out laws passed under the auspices of the commerce clause. But they clearly don't go far enough as they still allow the federal government to regulate how much it costs to ship a product from state to state, and many other things which would have been anathema to the founders. In addition, they regulate anything that even remotely might pass in interstate commerce, clearly not what the founders had in mind when they included this as a power in the Constitution.

This is the problem with people reading things into the Constitution that is clearly not there. Two words that are very important in reading the Constitution, limited and enumerated. Especially enumerated. If it's not enumerated by a simple reading of the Constitution, it's not allowed. If you want it to be a power that the government has, then get an amendment passed and ratified. Otherwise, they can't do it.

You would think people had never heard of Underwriters Laboratories or Factory Mutual

Bump that one!

Thanks tberry, you beat me to it. :^)

We may agree on more than you think.

No doubt about it. Your irony was not lost on me.