That's the funniest thing about all this and how Schiff went to such great lengths to not identify the Whistleblower. Nowhere in the Whistleblowers Protection Act does it require their identity to be kept secret. It prohibits any negative employment or assignment repercussions, but nowhere does it sanctify the identity. If anything identifying a Whistleblower makes it harder to punish a whistleblower as it's easy to fire someone for a BS reason if you can say you didn't know they were the whistleblower.

So by Schiff and others refusing to let his name even be stated (and YouTube trying to play the government thug here in doing the same) they actually left Eric at risk of being fired or shuffled off to a menial position with no access or authority. The Whitehouse staff can honestly say that he was not identified as a whistleblower and thus has no such protections.

The Second amendment was tested and lost? Who made up the majority of troops on both sides. The US had a small standing army and could not have begun to field the forces that marched in that war. Rather the states called on their militia, note that the units of the War are mostly referred to by their home State. "2nd Maine", in this case the government often did provide weapons but the personnel who fought on both sides were mostly local militias organized into companies, which then banned together by county and then state into Battalions, and Regiments.

The Well regulated Militias stood on both sides of that conflict. If anything the better equipped but often poorly led Northern militia won the conflict for the industrialized North, while the less capably equipped but admirably led Southern militia lost it for the agrarian South.

This, Also the Dick act of 1903 specified that there were two components to the Militia. The National Guard formed the smaller, organized militia which was to be run under state control but funded and equipped as a component of the standing federal army and could be called into federal service at any time. The people made up the much larger unorganized militia. This militia is not equipped by either level of government but is self equipped and does not answer to the Government but rather the Government answers to the people who make up this militia.

That's different. The courts have always agreed that when one is convicted of committing a crime, the punishment will result in the limiting or removal of certain rights, either for a time or permanently. Those rights are not stripped randomly or without cause but only on conviction of a crime. If we could not strip rights in these situations, we could not arrest, jail, try and imprison those elements of society who cannot follow the rules of society. And then we would have anarchy and far greater need of personally owned and carried weapons.

If I can safely use the weapon, to feed my family or for sport when not defending against tyranny sure, why not.

If I could take my Nuke down to the local public nuke range sure.

Ah but there is the difference between WMD and conventional arms. You can't control the effects of WMD's. Nukes have a huge blast radius and radioactive fallout. Chemical weapons spread on the air currents and can be quite persistent. Biological weapons are also uncontrollable. Even when we've tried to be careful in government testing of such weapons, others outside the secured testing ranges have been affected.

Now take the hyperbole of WMD out of the equation and yes, we should be able to own it. At the time the Bill of Rights was written it was not uncommon for a citizen to own a cannon or even what could be considered a warship.

Private ownership of weapons is not the problem. It's criminal misuse that is the problem. And criminals by their nature don't care about what the law prohibits. If Nukes and other WMD were easy to build we'd probably see an occasional gang-war result in the use of one. But they are not simple to effectively make and are very difficult to use safely.

You mean the Statesman who just a few years later as our third President, equipped the Lewis and Clark expedition with two of the Girandoni Air rifles. Not an automatic but a repeater with a 20 round ammo tube and 30 shots per detachable air reservoir. A weapon that was not new in 1805 having been designed in 1779 and serving in the Austrian army from 1780 until around 1815.

He was also likely aware of the Pucklegun an early gatling style gun.

And then there is the fact that he also could not have imagined Radio, TV, modern printing presses or the internet. So thus by your logic the 1st amendment does not extend to those mediums of speech, just quill pens, hand cranked single sheet printing presses, and oration in the public square..

You are obviously unaware of the procedures DC had in place for gun ownership prior to Heller. I suggest the book Emily Gets her Gun by Emily Miller. Yes she's a right wing journalist and yes she spends a portion of the book bashing the Obama administration, but read the parts about what DC required to be able to "Own" a firearm. It was an onerous 17 step process that cost as much if not more as your average quality firearm to complete, and they could still turn you down, leaving you out several hundred dollars and the cost of the firearm you could not receive from the District's one authorized firearms dealer if you were rejected. From firearm safety classes you had to take, that could not be taught in DC, to range qualifications that again you could not do anywhere in DC. You had to qualify with the weapon type you were wanting to own. So if you already owned it you had to keep it in VA or MD until you got your permission slip. You had to justify your purpose for owning a firearm, specifically you had to lay out a clear threat that the firearm was intended to meet. And then the anti-gun Police Chief had to approve your request.

In Emily's case she had never owned or wanted to own a firearm until she experienced a burglary where she came home to find someone in the house, he immediately took off but she realized that as a rather petite single woman, she was at risk. Not to mention the occasional left wing nut-job threatening her life due to some article she wrote. So she decided she wanted to get a handgun for self defense. She inquired as to the requirements and in shock at the lengthy and expensive process that was outlined to her she mentioned it to her editor at the Washington Times, he suggested she document the process and she did over the next few months in a lengthy series of columns that later became the basis for the book.

And she you jumped through all 17 hoops and got her permission slip and her firearm. She had to keep it locked up and disassembled. Which made it useless for the defensive purpose she'd used to justify needing the firearm.

Through that very painful and expensive set of steps, DC did have restrictions on ownership, oh theoretically they did not, but in practice they did. Unless a resident was a Senator who could get him/herself sworn in as a US Marshall, there was effectively no right to keep let alone bear arms in the District.

An armed populace will never subject itself to a dictatorship of any type. Left, right or otherwise. The fact that we are armed prevents the establishment of any form of dictatorship. A dictatorship requires complete control over the people or it will not long stand. An armed populace is not controlled by the government.

If you disarm the people, or limit them to weapons of lesser capability than potential invaders or the government, how are they an effective militia?

The militia clause is a prefatory clause, in that it introduces one reason for the Amendment. But it is not the meat of the amendment and that clause is grammatically disposable, the objective clause is where the actual right of the people is stated. With or without the first clause the Amendment still says that "the right of the PEOPLE (not the militia) to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

We the people are the militia. The National Guard is not the militia, As per the Dick Act they are a part of it and are considered the Organized militia, but they are not the majority of the militia, we the people who make up the unorganized militia are the majority. Disarm us and you disarm the militia. And unarmed militia is just a mob and is no threat to any tyrannical government or foreign invader.

And as to these files. Those states can sue all they want. The files never went offline. They are available at many locations including the Pirate Bay and other torrent sites. And should those be taken down the files will still be available on and offline.

The US systems usually ask you to choose too, but most of those will detect you inserting the card or tapping it on the NFC reader and will proceed with the card payment system.

Just put the item back in your cart and hit the "Item in Cart" button and move on. It's not hard to do, the wording of the button may change but every system I've used had the option appear when the scale started complaining about too much or too little weight.

Unless I have a cart packed with stuff I will always choose the self checkout over a checker. I don't want them pushing the store credit card, or making comments about what I'm buying. Or asking if I found everything. And I don't get stuck behind a lady with a cart packed to overflowing and a coupon for every single item in the cart.

I go to the self check out, I scan my items. If it complains about something not on the scale I hit the "Item in cart" button and move on. See I'm smarter than the self scanners, I figured out how they worked years ago. Also Who carries cash, let alone uses it anymore?

Same at McDonalds, the order Kiosks don't get my order wrong, don't miscalculate change if I do use cache, and don't have a language barrier adding to the likelihood of getting the order wrong. I punch in the order, I verify everything is exactly what I meant to order, and I've yet to have an order delivered to the counter incorrectly assembled.

As to my local Walmart, they recently tripled the number of self checkout lines and cut the assisted lines down to just a few, though at least two are always manned the times that I've been there. Meanwhile they haven't laid people off, but rather they have moved those people from mindlessly swiping merch across a scanner, to roaming the aisles filling online pick-up orders.

The replacement cartridges are the subscription device. He stopped paying so he should have stopped getting replacements. Not had the cartridge he already had in his printer disabled. Stopping cartridge replacement when the subscription is stopped, fair game. Disabling the cartridge with the ink he had already paid for (he had been a subscriber, paying the monthly fee for a year.) is slimy.

But they shouldn't be disabling the cartridge, just not sending any replacements.

And that's a problem, he'd paid for that cartridge over time. His ending the subscription should only result in his not getting a replacement when the current cartridge runs dry.