I literally just close the page. It isn't worth my time trying to temporarily allow these websites one by one to see which one actually ends up serving me the content I originally requested.
The USA's gun death rate is far far far higher than places like Canada, France, UK, etc.
I just want to requote this part here, because it's a perfect example of the duplicitousness of the anti-gun rhetoric I see. If you look this fact up, you'll see it is absolutely true - here is an example showing a correlation between gun ownership rates and gun death rates.
But examine the actual words being used, and you quickly see the deceit: Gun death rate. Not homicide rate. Not violent crime rate. Not suicide rate. Not rape or anything else. Gun death.
What, exactly, is a "gun death"? It's anyone killed by a gun, for any reason - suicide, homicide, justified homicide, accident. It is the equivalent of saying that greater access to guns leads to more deaths by gun, in much the same way that greater access to anything would result in more deaths by that thing. Whether it is swimming pools, cars, kitchen knives - if you have them, someone will eventually die as a result of them, and so you can show and correlate kitchen knives with the kitchen knife death rate quite clearly.
But that doesn't mean kitchen knives are turning people into criminals and murderers.
So what do the statistics look like when you look at something more relevant, like overall homicide, suicide, rape, etc. vs gun ownership? Like this
There is no correlation. That's why the anti-gun rhetoric focuses on deceiving you with the "gun death rate"; the actual statistics do not back them up on ANY of it.
The spree shootings make up ~0.003% of the total homicide rate. Gun ownership doesn't correlate with homicide, violent crime, rape, or suicide. Rifles are used in less than 5% of overall firearm homicides, with by far the majority coming from handguns. Almost all the firearm homicide is a result of inner city gangs shooting each other in densely populated urban centers; over 60% (in some places more than 80%) of the victims already have a criminal record!
The more I look into all the data I can find, the more I find that guns have absolutely nothing to do with any of the problems the US faces.
What is stunningly stupid are people who don't know the first thing about guns attempting to regulate and ban them. Why, it'd be like people who don't know the first thing about computers, or networks, attempting to regulate and ban them.
Nobody who knows a thing or two about guns has anything but contempt for a congressional district representative who starts describing "shoulder things that go up" or a state senator who talks about "ghost guns with 30 caliber clips".
The few anti-gun laws that DO get passed, are full of nonsense like this. These laws are created by clueless morons who quite frankly hurt the entire anti-gun position far more than they have ever helped it.
And for those who still wonder about the actual effects of firearm ownership on violent crime, homicide, suicide and so forth, I invite you to read through the following: https://imgur.com/a/b7HSM
The RCMP reclassified some firearms after they had been classified and legally sold in Canada. Overnight they made many thousands of Canadians into criminals through no fault of the citizens. Literally their firearms were legal to own one day, then illegal to own the next. Even worse, the criminal codes in Canada demand minimum sentencing (I believe, 3-5 years) if indicted for gun-related crimes, like owning a prohibited weapon. So even if the judge took pity on the citizens involved, they would have been facing jail time no matter what. Thankfully the RCMP and government didn't actually go after anyone.
After this happened, the Conservatives passed some legislation taking away the ability of the RCMP to reclassify firearms like this. In addition to some smaller things like integrating the ATT (Authorization to transport form) from being a separate piece of paper to being a part of your firearms license, and allowing your guns to be taken away if you're ever accused of domestic abuse.
Speaking of the RCMP and government going after people - We had a short-lived firearm registry, it didn't help solve any crimes, it cost a lot of money, and it ultimately got scrapped. But that didn't stop the RCMP from keeping the list of registered firearms in their database anyways, nor did it stop them from using that list to illegally confiscate firearms during flooding in Alberta a few years ago.
Anyone who says that gun registration preceeds gun confiscation is 100% correct. The actions of the Canadian government and RCMP have proven it.
You go off about sexism, racism, bigotry and so forth as the primary points of discrimination.
I've found that it's none of those in practice. Instead it's who you've networked with and how much money you have.
Funny how the social justice warriors never focus on the real inequalities in our society. Maybe the fact that most of them come from well-off families has a part to play in that.
Notice how "evidence" and "courts" aren't words used anywhere in this.
Write a script to automatically file rape claims against every male in the school. It gets held by the escrow service, so the university can't even see the fact that everyone has a rape claim against them, at least, not until they've asked for the data during an investigation.
Someone eventually escalates some situation or another and the university pulls the data on the person and - Woah, 33 pre-existing rape claims! You're expelled buddy! And then this gets shared with every other university, and you make newspaper headlines, so all google searches of your name turn up rape accusations and, well, good luck ever getting a job or college education for the rest of your life.
And all this, without a single court getting involved.
"Social Justice"? More like modern Salem witch trials.
Can you explain to me why a "fringe" scientist (err... controversial person...?) shouldn't be allowed to speak on Arxiv? I just find it really curious that you immediately imply it's okay to censor a certain kind of speech you don't personally like. I mean, you're pretty much using the No True Scotsman fallacy right here; if the OP comes up with a name you can just declare him to not be a "real" scientist and you'll never be proven wrong.
You either have an open forum and the idiots that come with that, or you don't. Arxiv would, frankly, do better with natural meritocratic filtering options - like science is meant to be based upon! - than to allow petty bureaucrats to control what is and is not considered science. We already HAVE methods to discard junk science: It's fundamental to how the scientific method works. Censoring people just because they present "controversial" ideas - that isn't science. That isn't just not science, that is pretty much the exact opposite of how science is supposed to work.
To me, it just seems like Microsoft wants to look like they're trying to protect data from the US government's snooping, rather than actually working to protect data from US government snooping.
Germany is one of the last places I'd go to escape US intelligence agencies. Microsoft would've been more believable if they'd partnered up with relatively neutral parties like Iceland or Switzerland.
Funny how the UK police have enough time and resources to create entire new departments for the express purpose of policing the internet - ostensibly to protect the children - and yet they've got such a backlog on actual child abuse investigations that they can't get around to them for years.
I have to wonder if the muzzling will begin again, once the scientists start disagreeing with a liberal party policy? If, for example, it turns out that gun control doesn't actually do anything to stop crime - and that enforcement of it, much like with drugs, is basically wasted money - will the liberal party go, "Oh... I guess we were wrong about that"?
It's all sunshine and roses right now, but the scientists aren't actually saying anything that goes against the liberal party ideology at the moment. The real test of them putting their money where their mouth is, would be when they continue to support open discourse and dialogue even when it disagrees with what the party believes.
Well, whatever affiliation this group ever had with 4chan has been dead for at least three years.
Take "The allowance of rape culture and lack of any real justice in our courtrooms." as an example from a post further up. This isn't 4chan culture, it's tumblr/SJW culture. And if you don't believe me, feel free to visit 4chan any time and try to argue for that statement/position. You'll be lucky if you don't get a 400 post thread full of people calling you a cuck.
Whoever is organizing this "hacktivist" (ugh) group, it sure as fuck isn't anyone who has anything to do with 4chan.
Perhaps I am mistaken, but doesn't the Canadian Charter include a stipulation in it that essentially says, "The government can ignore any of these rights if they so choose"?
They're doing this because they're worried about the dangers - not from commercial aviation - but from drones being used as assassination tools.
Slap some explosives and shrapnel on a drone, fly it into a press conference, like: This and this. Maybe use a gun, like this.
Why make it easy and effectively untraceable for someone to do this when you can regulate it? Won't stop someone dedicated, who can learn and make their own drone - but it sure as hell raises the bar on them if they want to stay anonymous.
I think there's a lot of politicians and bigwigs scared shitless over the possibility of citizens circumventing their massive security apparatus with such a simple device. They certainly know damned well just how unpopular they and their policies are, and their existing security just doesn't have any good way of stopping these things - though they're certainly working on it.
We can't have a society based on just morality, because when you arrest someone for doing something morally wrong, they're going to say, "Who says what I did was wrong? Whose authority? I don't think what I did was wrong!"; How do you argue with that without essentially stating, "I'm right because I'm right and can enforce my will through violence"? While that threat of violence still rings true, when you argue from this point, you invite rebellion, constantly. We eventually (thousands of years ago) settled on a fairly basic solution to this:
We developed a framework of laws WITH the agreement and acceptance of the society as a whole. By living in that society, you agree to follow its laws and conduct yourself in an appropriate manner.
Tyranny within a society appears when the laws everyone agrees with, suddenly become laws that they, by and large, do not agree with. This is what we are seeing today. The laws being created, and the laws presently existing, have not kept up with the general concepts of morality that the citizens of the state agree with. People see these laws as unjust because they do not see the benefit to the society as a whole - in fact, it has become very obvious that these laws only benefit a select few.
Make no mistake - the TTP and TTIP treaties are tyrannical. They are kept secret from the citizens and passed without citizen input. The citizens are even ignored when they complain about the laws.
This is strong evidence that the US government, and the governments of the nations attending to these treaties, are dysfunctional. They no longer represent the will of their citizenry and have begun a slide into despotism.
For some nations, this can be handled and controlled by a totalitarian state - however, the US is unique in this respect: The citizenry is armed. The military chock full of individuals who are more loyal to their fellow citizen and the constitution than to the central government authority. The geopolitical enemies across the world many and varied - Russia would gladly support and arm texan revolutionaries. The infrastructure of the states is extremely vulnerable to sabotage. The cities most likely to stay loyal to the government are separated by vast distances and massive geographical boundaries like major mountain ranges or rivers.
What I'm getting at here is that I'm utterly flabbergasted at what the US government is doing, both at home and abroad. It's like US leadership has gone completely insane, they aren't just shooting themselves in the foot, they're tying the ropes around their own necks. I don't know what exactly the US leadership expects to accomplish with such one-sided pro-corporate, anti-citizen legislation like this, other than securing the eventual collapse of the US government as it loses the popular support of its domestic population.
The bottled water usually tastes much better than the tap water that's often highly chlorinated, and it's convenient - not just in the sense that it's easy to carry around, but also in that it's easy to find and get access to, because you can buy it pretty much anywhere you go, anytime you want.
If I'm visiting the city, or even out on a beach, I will not be usually be able to find any freely available drinking fountains. Usually the only place I see any at all are gyms, schools, and older parks. If I didn't pack any water with me? Well, too bad for me.
People have more than a few very valid reasons for buying bottled water - if they didn't, they wouldn't buy it. You want to change that, start looking at why people buy it in the first place and start tackling and solving those problems/demands that corporate america saw, exploited, and fixed.
You've just compared *all* homicides between two countries, as opposed to *gun* homicides to attempt to explain how it's a *gun* problem in one of those countries. I'll leave it to you to work out the flaws in that argument.
Actually, perhaps you should be the one to ponder on that a moment?
If there are no swimming pools, there cannot be any swimming pool deaths. But people will still die. If you get rid of guns, you'll reduce the number of firearm homicides, but you won't magically reduce the homicide rate.
There is a reason so many anti-gun statistics start with something like "*Gun-related homicides; *includes suicides, lawful homicide, accidents". It's because they have an agenda to run and don't actually want the facts to get in the way. What effect do guns actually have on the overall homicide rate? No effect. There's no correlation whether you look at gun ownership in US states or the entire world. You find the same thing with violent crime rate and firearm ownership rates.
You know what DOES correlate? Education and socioeconomic levels have a small correlation. Race has a high correlation. And firearm ownership has no correlation.
I bought Elite Dangerous early on in its development, and much to my chagrin I witnessed it go through beta to full release with nary an inkling of the content I was actually expecting from the advertisements and discussions on the forums.
It is categorically one of the worst games I've ever had the misfortune of purchasing. Made even more unpleasant by the exorbitant price tag I paid for early access. It's the biggest reason I've sworn off ever pre-purchasing or pre-ordering any games in the future. It wasn't the first game I got burned on, but it was the biggest and will be the last.
Frontier Developments is a UK company. How do I get a refund from them without paying 30x as much for the lawyers as I did for the 'game'?
The fear of all gun transfers being "background checked" and thus having documentation is that sooner or later the US Government will pull an Australia and seize guns, and having records will make that much easier. Right or wrong, that is the fear from gun freedom groups.
It's not misplaced. Every "compromise" on guns has just been taking more rights away from gun owners. None of them want any more "compromises" because everyone is well aware what is actually wanted isn't "sensible gun control laws" but the removal of guns from society entirely. People stopped believing the "sensible gun control" rhetoric soon after we had senators like Dianne Feinstein outright say things like,
"If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them . . . Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in, I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren't here."
Which is quite an impasse, because gun owners believe the right to self defense is absolute. Guns are necessary for this, in the future it could be something else, but the principle remains the same. A monopoly on violence by the state and private institution is absolutely unacceptable to them, yet that is what those in favor of gun control want: Guns for the state, guns for the rich and powerful, but no guns for the rest of us schmucks unless we want to be criminals.
This covers most of what you'd want to know and look at regarding firearms statistics, both in the US and worldwide. Homicide vs gun ownership, gun assaults vs gun ownership, violent crime vs gun ownership; it compares the states within the US, all the OECD countries, and all countries. It shows what weapon is killing the most people and which people are the ones being killed. It even looks at mass shootings, including per capita rates, and overall number of deaths from mass shootings as a percentage of overall homicides.
Citations are included in most of everything, and numbers are usually taken from government bodies such as the FBI or CDC.
Here's a basic summary of this guy and the events around 2ch:
2014 2ch takeover incident -In 2012 the rights to 2ch were given to Jim at Racequeen Inc. Hiroyuki announces he is no longer the admin of 2ch, but still remains the defacto admin behind the curtains . -2ch ran a service where anons payed approx 35 US dollars so they could post on 2ch if they were banned or couldn’t post because of their ISP (similar to the 4chan pass) -this service helped pay for the server fees -August 2013, the service gets hacked. Those who registered to the service had their names, address, credit card numbers/security codes leaked. comment info was also leaked, people were able to search the 2ch archives and find out who posted what using the leaked comment info. -It was also discovered that Hiroyuki was sending other personal info of posters to companies outside of 2ch.net -After the hacking incident Hiroyuki is unable to pay for the server fees because the 2ch pass service was shutdown. -On April Fools day Hiroyuki announces that 2ch is being taken over. -The leader of the coup Jim fires the janitors, sizes down operations, upgrade the servers, and improve other things to accommodate the anons who were neglected under the Hiryoku administration. -Jim becomes the new admin of 2ch.net
-Hiroyuki retaliates by creating a new anonymous message board 2ch.sc. 2ch.sc is just a clone of 2ch.net. It literally copies and pastes all the posts on 2ch.net to its message boards.
2ch.sc allows thread simulator blogging (copy paste blogs) which have been a problem in the past and were outlawed on 2ch.net
Why did hiroyuki create 2ch.sc ?
Hiroyuki (Mirai Kensaku Brazil) had signed a contract with a data mining company named Hotlink and sold them the personal data / user comments from 2ch.net. -After the server take over by Jim, and the fact that Hiroyuki no longer had the rights to 2ch.net, he was no longer able to give the data mining company the data, so he created the clone 2ch.sc to fulfill Hotlinks contract. -Since it wasn’t a contract with Racequeen (Jim) , Jim stops the servers from sending the user comment data and other personal info to hotlinks servers. He also prevents hiroyuki’s 2ch.sc from copying comments by blocking its requests. -Anons of 2ch discovers that Hiroyuki also had money ties with the thread simulator bloggers who were racking thousands from PPC ads and advertising by laundering comments from 2ch
Hiroyuki didn't just sell user information, he encouraged janitors to ban posters so they would purchase more passes to get around the bans, and he had certain political viewpoints censored and banned after being paid to do so.
I can't imagine/pol/ existing for very long under Hiroyuki, and the already rampant viral/guerilla marketing taking place on/v/,/vg/, and/g/ is probably only going to get worse.
Am I the only one who gets annoyed with past future tense used like,
Microsoft would attribute the higher price tag to the included Kinect camera
I see this tense a lot, especially in online RP and it just feels off, every time I read something like this. Why not just "Microsoft attributed the higher price tag to the included kinect camera..."
I'm no englishologist, I just know when it feels wrong, and that feels wrong. Saying, "I knew microsoft would..." works out, but not "Microsoft would attribute..."
Slashdot Mirror
I run with no-script on, and whitelist websites that I find myself frequently visiting and trust.
Whenever I see a website with a list like
wired.com, optimizely.com, disquscdn.com, amazon-adsystem.com, ajax.googleapis.com, pinterest.com, adobedtm.com, scorecardresearch.com, mookie1.com, omtrdc.net, yldbt.com, demdex.net, dff7tx5c2qbxc.cloudfront.net, disqus.com, dy48bnzanqw0v.cloudfront.net, condenastdigital.com, facebook.com, outbrain.com, googlsyndication.com, googleadservices.com, polarmobile.com, twitter.com, mediavoice.com, doubleclick.net, zqtk.net, parsely.com, chartbeat.com, tiqcdn.com, typekit.net, googletagservices.com, moatads.com, mediaplex.com, twimg.com, adsafeprotected.com, dotomi.com, google-analytics.com
I literally just close the page. It isn't worth my time trying to temporarily allow these websites one by one to see which one actually ends up serving me the content I originally requested.
Fuck'em. Even the porn sites are better.
mdsolar is nothing but a troll
I almost can't believe this submission was accepted, but I guess clickbait sells.
I don't think you realize that you're actually supporting his statement.
The USA's gun death rate is far far far higher than places like Canada, France, UK, etc.
I just want to requote this part here, because it's a perfect example of the duplicitousness of the anti-gun rhetoric I see. If you look this fact up, you'll see it is absolutely true - here is an example showing a correlation between gun ownership rates and gun death rates.
But examine the actual words being used, and you quickly see the deceit: Gun death rate.
Not homicide rate. Not violent crime rate. Not suicide rate. Not rape or anything else. Gun death.
What, exactly, is a "gun death"?
It's anyone killed by a gun, for any reason - suicide, homicide, justified homicide, accident. It is the equivalent of saying that greater access to guns leads to more deaths by gun, in much the same way that greater access to anything would result in more deaths by that thing. Whether it is swimming pools, cars, kitchen knives - if you have them, someone will eventually die as a result of them, and so you can show and correlate kitchen knives with the kitchen knife death rate quite clearly.
But that doesn't mean kitchen knives are turning people into criminals and murderers.
So what do the statistics look like when you look at something more relevant, like overall homicide, suicide, rape, etc. vs gun ownership?
Like this
There is no correlation. That's why the anti-gun rhetoric focuses on deceiving you with the "gun death rate"; the actual statistics do not back them up on ANY of it.
The spree shootings make up ~0.003% of the total homicide rate. Gun ownership doesn't correlate with homicide, violent crime, rape, or suicide. Rifles are used in less than 5% of overall firearm homicides, with by far the majority coming from handguns. Almost all the firearm homicide is a result of inner city gangs shooting each other in densely populated urban centers; over 60% (in some places more than 80%) of the victims already have a criminal record!
The more I look into all the data I can find, the more I find that guns have absolutely nothing to do with any of the problems the US faces.
What is stunningly stupid are people who don't know the first thing about guns attempting to regulate and ban them.
Why, it'd be like people who don't know the first thing about computers, or networks, attempting to regulate and ban them.
Nobody who knows a thing or two about guns has anything but contempt for a congressional district representative who starts describing "shoulder things that go up" or a state senator who talks about "ghost guns with 30 caliber clips".
The few anti-gun laws that DO get passed, are full of nonsense like this. These laws are created by clueless morons who quite frankly hurt the entire anti-gun position far more than they have ever helped it.
And for those who still wonder about the actual effects of firearm ownership on violent crime, homicide, suicide and so forth, I invite you to read through the following: https://imgur.com/a/b7HSM
This also happened in Canada, sans SWAT teams.
The RCMP reclassified some firearms after they had been classified and legally sold in Canada. Overnight they made many thousands of Canadians into criminals through no fault of the citizens. Literally their firearms were legal to own one day, then illegal to own the next. Even worse, the criminal codes in Canada demand minimum sentencing (I believe, 3-5 years) if indicted for gun-related crimes, like owning a prohibited weapon. So even if the judge took pity on the citizens involved, they would have been facing jail time no matter what. Thankfully the RCMP and government didn't actually go after anyone.
After this happened, the Conservatives passed some legislation taking away the ability of the RCMP to reclassify firearms like this. In addition to some smaller things like integrating the ATT (Authorization to transport form) from being a separate piece of paper to being a part of your firearms license, and allowing your guns to be taken away if you're ever accused of domestic abuse.
Speaking of the RCMP and government going after people - We had a short-lived firearm registry, it didn't help solve any crimes, it cost a lot of money, and it ultimately got scrapped. But that didn't stop the RCMP from keeping the list of registered firearms in their database anyways, nor did it stop them from using that list to illegally confiscate firearms during flooding in Alberta a few years ago.
Anyone who says that gun registration preceeds gun confiscation is 100% correct. The actions of the Canadian government and RCMP have proven it.
You go off about sexism, racism, bigotry and so forth as the primary points of discrimination.
I've found that it's none of those in practice. Instead it's who you've networked with and how much money you have.
Funny how the social justice warriors never focus on the real inequalities in our society. Maybe the fact that most of them come from well-off families has a part to play in that.
Notice how "evidence" and "courts" aren't words used anywhere in this.
Write a script to automatically file rape claims against every male in the school. It gets held by the escrow service, so the university can't even see the fact that everyone has a rape claim against them, at least, not until they've asked for the data during an investigation.
Someone eventually escalates some situation or another and the university pulls the data on the person and - Woah, 33 pre-existing rape claims! You're expelled buddy! And then this gets shared with every other university, and you make newspaper headlines, so all google searches of your name turn up rape accusations and, well, good luck ever getting a job or college education for the rest of your life.
And all this, without a single court getting involved.
"Social Justice"? More like modern Salem witch trials.
Can you explain to me why a "fringe" scientist (err... controversial person...?) shouldn't be allowed to speak on Arxiv? I just find it really curious that you immediately imply it's okay to censor a certain kind of speech you don't personally like. I mean, you're pretty much using the No True Scotsman fallacy right here; if the OP comes up with a name you can just declare him to not be a "real" scientist and you'll never be proven wrong.
You either have an open forum and the idiots that come with that, or you don't. Arxiv would, frankly, do better with natural meritocratic filtering options - like science is meant to be based upon! - than to allow petty bureaucrats to control what is and is not considered science. We already HAVE methods to discard junk science: It's fundamental to how the scientific method works. Censoring people just because they present "controversial" ideas - that isn't science. That isn't just not science, that is pretty much the exact opposite of how science is supposed to work.
To me, it just seems like Microsoft wants to look like they're trying to protect data from the US government's snooping, rather than actually working to protect data from US government snooping.
Germany is one of the last places I'd go to escape US intelligence agencies. Microsoft would've been more believable if they'd partnered up with relatively neutral parties like Iceland or Switzerland.
Funny how the UK police have enough time and resources to create entire new departments for the express purpose of policing the internet - ostensibly to protect the children - and yet they've got such a backlog on actual child abuse investigations that they can't get around to them for years.
I have to wonder if the muzzling will begin again, once the scientists start disagreeing with a liberal party policy? If, for example, it turns out that gun control doesn't actually do anything to stop crime - and that enforcement of it, much like with drugs, is basically wasted money - will the liberal party go, "Oh... I guess we were wrong about that"?
It's all sunshine and roses right now, but the scientists aren't actually saying anything that goes against the liberal party ideology at the moment. The real test of them putting their money where their mouth is, would be when they continue to support open discourse and dialogue even when it disagrees with what the party believes.
I certainly don't disagree with you with respect to conservatives, particularly in the US.
But if you think the liberal parties haven't been doing the exact same thing, particularly in the US, you are out of your mind.
Well, whatever affiliation this group ever had with 4chan has been dead for at least three years.
Take "The allowance of rape culture and lack of any real justice in our courtrooms." as an example from a post further up. This isn't 4chan culture, it's tumblr/SJW culture. And if you don't believe me, feel free to visit 4chan any time and try to argue for that statement/position. You'll be lucky if you don't get a 400 post thread full of people calling you a cuck.
Whoever is organizing this "hacktivist" (ugh) group, it sure as fuck isn't anyone who has anything to do with 4chan.
Perhaps I am mistaken, but doesn't the Canadian Charter include a stipulation in it that essentially says, "The government can ignore any of these rights if they so choose"?
They're doing this because they're worried about the dangers - not from commercial aviation - but from drones being used as assassination tools.
Slap some explosives and shrapnel on a drone, fly it into a press conference, like: This and this. Maybe use a gun, like this.
Why make it easy and effectively untraceable for someone to do this when you can regulate it?
Won't stop someone dedicated, who can learn and make their own drone - but it sure as hell raises the bar on them if they want to stay anonymous.
I think there's a lot of politicians and bigwigs scared shitless over the possibility of citizens circumventing their massive security apparatus with such a simple device. They certainly know damned well just how unpopular they and their policies are, and their existing security just doesn't have any good way of stopping these things - though they're certainly working on it.
Think about what laws and morals even mean:
We can't have a society based on just morality, because when you arrest someone for doing something morally wrong, they're going to say, "Who says what I did was wrong? Whose authority? I don't think what I did was wrong!"; How do you argue with that without essentially stating, "I'm right because I'm right and can enforce my will through violence"? While that threat of violence still rings true, when you argue from this point, you invite rebellion, constantly. We eventually (thousands of years ago) settled on a fairly basic solution to this:
We developed a framework of laws WITH the agreement and acceptance of the society as a whole. By living in that society, you agree to follow its laws and conduct yourself in an appropriate manner.
Tyranny within a society appears when the laws everyone agrees with, suddenly become laws that they, by and large, do not agree with. This is what we are seeing today. The laws being created, and the laws presently existing, have not kept up with the general concepts of morality that the citizens of the state agree with. People see these laws as unjust because they do not see the benefit to the society as a whole - in fact, it has become very obvious that these laws only benefit a select few.
Make no mistake - the TTP and TTIP treaties are tyrannical. They are kept secret from the citizens and passed without citizen input. The citizens are even ignored when they complain about the laws.
This is strong evidence that the US government, and the governments of the nations attending to these treaties, are dysfunctional. They no longer represent the will of their citizenry and have begun a slide into despotism.
For some nations, this can be handled and controlled by a totalitarian state - however, the US is unique in this respect: The citizenry is armed. The military chock full of individuals who are more loyal to their fellow citizen and the constitution than to the central government authority. The geopolitical enemies across the world many and varied - Russia would gladly support and arm texan revolutionaries. The infrastructure of the states is extremely vulnerable to sabotage. The cities most likely to stay loyal to the government are separated by vast distances and massive geographical boundaries like major mountain ranges or rivers.
What I'm getting at here is that I'm utterly flabbergasted at what the US government is doing, both at home and abroad. It's like US leadership has gone completely insane, they aren't just shooting themselves in the foot, they're tying the ropes around their own necks. I don't know what exactly the US leadership expects to accomplish with such one-sided pro-corporate, anti-citizen legislation like this, other than securing the eventual collapse of the US government as it loses the popular support of its domestic population.
That's not true though.
The bottled water usually tastes much better than the tap water that's often highly chlorinated, and it's convenient - not just in the sense that it's easy to carry around, but also in that it's easy to find and get access to, because you can buy it pretty much anywhere you go, anytime you want.
If I'm visiting the city, or even out on a beach, I will not be usually be able to find any freely available drinking fountains. Usually the only place I see any at all are gyms, schools, and older parks. If I didn't pack any water with me? Well, too bad for me.
People have more than a few very valid reasons for buying bottled water - if they didn't, they wouldn't buy it. You want to change that, start looking at why people buy it in the first place and start tackling and solving those problems/demands that corporate america saw, exploited, and fixed.
You've just compared *all* homicides between two countries, as opposed to *gun* homicides to attempt to explain how it's a *gun* problem in one of those countries. I'll leave it to you to work out the flaws in that argument.
Actually, perhaps you should be the one to ponder on that a moment?
If there are no swimming pools, there cannot be any swimming pool deaths. But people will still die.
If you get rid of guns, you'll reduce the number of firearm homicides, but you won't magically reduce the homicide rate.
There is a reason so many anti-gun statistics start with something like "*Gun-related homicides; *includes suicides, lawful homicide, accidents". It's because they have an agenda to run and don't actually want the facts to get in the way. What effect do guns actually have on the overall homicide rate? No effect. There's no correlation whether you look at gun ownership in US states or the entire world. You find the same thing with violent crime rate and firearm ownership rates.
You know what DOES correlate? Education and socioeconomic levels have a small correlation. Race has a high correlation.
And firearm ownership has no correlation.
I bought Elite Dangerous early on in its development, and much to my chagrin I witnessed it go through beta to full release with nary an inkling of the content I was actually expecting from the advertisements and discussions on the forums.
It is categorically one of the worst games I've ever had the misfortune of purchasing. Made even more unpleasant by the exorbitant price tag I paid for early access. It's the biggest reason I've sworn off ever pre-purchasing or pre-ordering any games in the future. It wasn't the first game I got burned on, but it was the biggest and will be the last.
Frontier Developments is a UK company. How do I get a refund from them without paying 30x as much for the lawyers as I did for the 'game'?
The fear of all gun transfers being "background checked" and thus having documentation is that sooner or later the US Government will pull an Australia and seize guns, and having records will make that much easier. Right or wrong, that is the fear from gun freedom groups.
It's not misplaced. Every "compromise" on guns has just been taking more rights away from gun owners. None of them want any more "compromises" because everyone is well aware what is actually wanted isn't "sensible gun control laws" but the removal of guns from society entirely. People stopped believing the "sensible gun control" rhetoric soon after we had senators like Dianne Feinstein outright say things like,
"If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them . . . Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in, I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren't here."
Which is quite an impasse, because gun owners believe the right to self defense is absolute. Guns are necessary for this, in the future it could be something else, but the principle remains the same. A monopoly on violence by the state and private institution is absolutely unacceptable to them, yet that is what those in favor of gun control want: Guns for the state, guns for the rich and powerful, but no guns for the rest of us schmucks unless we want to be criminals.
https://imgur.com/gallery/CLOx...
This covers most of what you'd want to know and look at regarding firearms statistics, both in the US and worldwide. Homicide vs gun ownership, gun assaults vs gun ownership, violent crime vs gun ownership; it compares the states within the US, all the OECD countries, and all countries. It shows what weapon is killing the most people and which people are the ones being killed. It even looks at mass shootings, including per capita rates, and overall number of deaths from mass shootings as a percentage of overall homicides.
Citations are included in most of everything, and numbers are usually taken from government bodies such as the FBI or CDC.
America does however lead the world in mass shootings
But, not per-capita.
Here's a basic summary of this guy and the events around 2ch:
2014 2ch takeover incident
-In 2012 the rights to 2ch were given to Jim at Racequeen Inc. Hiroyuki announces he is no longer the admin of 2ch, but still remains the defacto admin behind the curtains .
-2ch ran a service where anons payed approx 35 US dollars so they could post on 2ch if they were banned or couldn’t post because of their ISP (similar to the 4chan pass)
-this service helped pay for the server fees
-August 2013, the service gets hacked. Those who registered to the service had their names, address, credit card numbers/security codes leaked. comment info was also leaked, people were able to search the 2ch archives and find out who posted what using the leaked comment info.
-It was also discovered that Hiroyuki was sending other personal info of posters to companies outside of 2ch.net
-After the hacking incident Hiroyuki is unable to pay for the server fees because the 2ch pass service was shutdown.
-On April Fools day Hiroyuki announces that 2ch is being taken over.
-The leader of the coup Jim fires the janitors, sizes down operations, upgrade the servers, and improve other things to accommodate the anons who were neglected under the Hiryoku administration.
-Jim becomes the new admin of 2ch.net
-Hiroyuki retaliates by creating a new anonymous message board 2ch.sc. 2ch.sc is just a clone of 2ch.net. It literally copies and pastes all the posts on 2ch.net to its message boards.
2ch.sc allows thread simulator blogging (copy paste blogs) which have been a problem in the past and were outlawed on 2ch.net
Why did hiroyuki create 2ch.sc ?
Hiroyuki (Mirai Kensaku Brazil) had signed a contract with a data mining company named Hotlink and sold them the personal data / user comments from 2ch.net.
-After the server take over by Jim, and the fact that Hiroyuki no longer had the rights to 2ch.net, he was no longer able to give the data mining company the data, so he created the clone 2ch.sc to fulfill Hotlinks contract.
-Since it wasn’t a contract with Racequeen (Jim) , Jim stops the servers from sending the user comment data and other personal info to hotlinks servers. He also prevents hiroyuki’s 2ch.sc from copying comments by blocking its requests.
-Anons of 2ch discovers that Hiroyuki also had money ties with the thread simulator bloggers who were racking thousands from PPC ads and advertising by laundering comments from 2ch
Hiroyuki didn't just sell user information, he encouraged janitors to ban posters so they would purchase more passes to get around the bans, and he had certain political viewpoints censored and banned after being paid to do so.
I can't imagine /pol/ existing for very long under Hiroyuki, and the already rampant viral/guerilla marketing taking place on /v/, /vg/, and /g/ is probably only going to get worse.
Am I the only one who gets annoyed with past future tense used like,
Microsoft would attribute the higher price tag to the included Kinect camera
I see this tense a lot, especially in online RP and it just feels off, every time I read something like this. Why not just "Microsoft attributed the higher price tag to the included kinect camera..."
I'm no englishologist, I just know when it feels wrong, and that feels wrong. Saying, "I knew microsoft would..." works out, but not "Microsoft would attribute..."