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Toronto to Become One Huge Hotspot
8127972 writes "The Toronto Star is reporting that Toronto Hydro is about to announce plans to make all of Toronto Canada a huge wireless hotspot. The project could go live as early as this fall and hopes to bring low cost Internet access to millions of Toronto citizens. In the process it will challenge the Canadian telcos for a share of the $8 billion (CDN) a year wireless market."
This is sooo not off-topic.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
"Bowling for Columbine" tried to make a point like that, but is it valid?
I'm not convined that there are "more guns than people in Canada." The population of Canada is 32 million. The number of guns is difficult to determine, but is in the range of 7 to 11 million (corroborated here, and numbers of 7-16 million are used in some official canadian government rhetoric). That's alot of guns... but not more guns that people. It's 0.28 guns per person, on average.
The population of the US is about 295 million. The number of guns in the US (also hard to estimate) is, according to one estimatem, around 200 million (corroborated here, although that includes estimates of undeclared guns; a different site indicates at least 60 million declared guns). That's 0.68 guns per person, on average.
Those stats are debatable, of course. Estimating such things is hard. I also fully acknowledge that the websites I pointed to are not especially trustworthy sources (some are about gun-control, hence they will typically use the biggest stat for number of guns to make their point). However, the take-home message is that, indeed, there are lots of guns both in Canada and in the United States, yet the number of gun-related deaths (per person) in the US seems worse than in Canada. This is the point that "Bowling for Columbine" was trying to make... however it is a great exagerration to say that there are "more guns than people" in Canada.
No, the 7 million canadian guns figure is total estimate (the declared # is lower, but I don't know what it is). So you have to compare registered-to-registered, or compare total-estimate to total-estimate (I did the latter). This page indicates 0.25 guns per capita in Canada and 0.82 guns per capita in the US (one would hope they used fair and equivalent numbers to come up with those figures... but who knows).
But that wasn't my point anyway. The number of guns per capita in Canada and the US may very well be exactly the same. That would not suprise me much at all. If anyone has links to hard stats, I'd be interested in reading them. However, in all cases the number of guns per capita (from what I can see) is less than 1.000, and that was my point. To suggest that there are "more guns than people" is sensationalist.
I went to pains to point out that the numbers I quote are subject to varying interpretations. Please double check them yourself. In any case, my post was not a gun-control rant... it was a "I dislike sensationalist statements" rant... nothing more.
Hey! We're violent too! Have you even seen a Toronto newspaper lately?
Urban gangs, bitter about failing math in middle school, are trying deparately make thier mark in statistics by raising our violent crime rate!
I'd like to see a survey of just hand-guns as opposed to all guns including hunting rifles. I bet the U.S. rate is way higher. And very few people are murdered with rifles compared to hand-guns.
Here (Greater Vancouver area) the radio is constantly airing Telus ads about their high speed wireless. Highest speed ever, 5 times faster then Rogers, at least according to the ads
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism