First, let us accept that there is no way to remove all guns from criminal hands. Even if you could round up every gun in the nation, all it takes is one guy with a machine shop to start cranking them out, kinda like people making meth or growing marijuana. It can be made at home, therefore it cannot be eliminated.
Second, numbers suggest that gun control actually increases the percentage of violent crimes, because victims are less likely to be able to defend themselves. Washington DC simultaneously has the strictest gun laws and the most violent crime per capita. Vermont allows any non-felon over the age of 16 the right to carry concealed weapons, and is number 46 on the list.
As you said, intent is key. We have no way of determining actual intent, even after the fact. Is this gentleman buying a 30-06 and a telescopic sight for hunting deer, or is he going to find an elevated position with a clear field of view and go on a shooting spree? The lack of previous convictions states that it's probably for hunting, especially since he's buying his deer license at the same time. Is this gentleman my father, or is he Charles Whitman? I advocate assuming that it's my father, because of the rarity of Whitmans. You advocate assuming that it's Charles Whitman, because they do more damage than my father. This is a personal point, and while I understand your reasoning, I'm going to disagree with you.
I have a hunting rifle. I shoot deer with it. I then eat said deer. I have a shotgun, which I use for fowl. I have a.22 pistol, which is less bulky when I hunt squirrels. To me, this is what guns are meant for. I use them to kill, but I kill nonsentient creatures during approved times, and I eat what I kill.
My grandfather has a handgun that he uses for hunting deer, because his shoulder has gotten worse in recent years, and it causes him great pain to have a rifle recoil against it.
Your rocket launchers, weaponized anthrax, and suitcase nukes all have a few things in common. They do not have use for killing food, they have no use for self defense, and they are much less discriminating than a normal rifle or handgun. You name weapons intended for either military use or mass murder, and compare them to my hunting rifle.
On video games, I agree with you. Video games do not impart violence to the players. It can be argued, however, that they can train your reactions in certain ways. At least two people have posted comments about virtual driving experience saving them in actual driving scenarios. Why is it so hard to imagine that the same kind of training can push someone who carries a handgun for self-defense into a homicide when a threat, actual or perceived, presents itself. Far be it from me to mourn the deaths of a few more attempted rapists and muggers, but accidents do happen.
I am against some forms of gun control, the kind that only affects law abiding citizens, for example. But no citizen needs an RPG, no criminal should have an RPG, and thus, they need to be accounted for. There are very few guns that follow this rule, however, and I think we need to stop focusing on the useful guns.
What happens to history when it's all burnt into a 15 minute game?
You make the game longer. Example: Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego. Fun. Educational. The biggest issue is that this is still trivia, not knowledge. 1969, Neil Armstrong lands on the moon. Nothing about why the Space Race happened. On the other hand, that trivia is exactly what you need for standardized tests. So, while the education may decrease, the test scores will probably do even better.
I am against this move, and not just because I'm appalled at the levels of literacy I run into on a daily basis.
The only supplies you need are quinine and guns. Broken leg? Dope them up, and let endorphins heal them. Ditto for everything else. And morale is impressive too.
Guns are for the food. Turns out no one thought to program gout in, so there's no problem with venison for every meal.
Even better, what if the news outlets decide that this is an easy way to get ratings, reporting on inaccuracies in Wikipedia? Pretty soon they'll just skip to making volatile changes themselves, and be the first to report them. End Wikipedia.
For example, "The content if this website is intended to generate income, it is not free if you intend to archive, copy, print or distribute anything electronically fixed herein." Let's see. Run-on sentence, missing serial comma, misspelled a two-letter word.... Could someone explain to me why someone incapable of writing a very simple English sentence without tons of very basic 2nd grader mistakes is trying to make money on the internet?
Because all the normal ways of making money are a lot of work? Because she looks at the phishing emails she gets and thinks "I could do that." Because she has failed to hold any other job? Because she read it on some other webpage, and thought it was a good idea? Take your pick.
In other news, morons are harmful to children and a threat to national security. Classified information is stored on machines that users can install programs on willy-nilly? I could write better group policies in my sleep.
I've got a degree in Computer Electronics, on my way to one in Computer Networking, taken most of the classes for the Programming program as well. Electronics is the one that cared about memory allocation. Maybe this is just because of the different teachers involved, but CE took us down to the levels where this sort of thing was important. We got to write programs in assembly language with Debug.
We got to analyze FATs, and how they differed from NTFS. Now I'm probably one of two guys in my program who understands why things work the way they do, and the other one went through the CE program same time I did.
My advice for CS graduates is to go through the Computer Electronics program at the local tech college.
Google wants people who are passionate about their work, people who care about what they're doing. They want going to work to be something you want to do, not something that you have to do. This is why you get 20% of your time for personal projects, this is why they have awesome perks. It's all very well and good for you to say 'this won't work on me,' but they don't care if this works on you or not.
So it's your assertion that the Physics teacher is superior to the preschool teacher? I'd like to see a AP Physics teacher dropped into a preschool and given a curriculum. He is used to a world where people are at least mostly reasonable and logical. He is in a world where none of that is true. This isn't like burger flipping, where you could train a monkey to do the job if they made full-body hair nets. This is a demanding and problem-ridden profession that might be even more difficult than the physics, once you consider that the necessary skills are almost impossible to teach. My mother is a kindergarten teacher, and also teaches a class on early education at the university. I've helped out in her classroom on numerous occasions, and have always been struck by her ability to stay calm and in control while to my mind the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Give me the physics, or chemistry, or computers any day of the week.
Funny, I don't really feel like learning how to walk again just so I can do it in a video game. The other Neuromancer stuff you mention is pretty awesome, though, and would probably be a better way of exploiting this technology.
And as long as we're talking about feedback: "I know kung fu."
However, if you're in midair you certainly can't without the mentioned conversion of momentum.
It depends. If you do a Trinity-style jump-straight-up-and-kick-in-mid-air kick, you will bounce too. If you do a flying side kick, where you get a running start, and have forward momentum when you hit them, they will move, and you could easily stop, Newton's Cradle style.
Are you saying that there are acts which are either right or wrong, regardless of your culture, or are you saying that every culture will have taboos and moral values? The first can probably be debunked, given the tendencies of some cultures to kill and eat people, and the second seems obvious, given that that's a component of culture. If you don't have things you aren't supposed to do, whether that's displaying genitalia in public, or showing your teeth when you smile, then you don't have a culture, you have a collection, and a short lived one at that.
Wow. Not the best move by Sony there. Now they look like pansies, and no one else will listen to any of their threats. If you make a threat, be ready to carry through. If you carry through, don't backtrack. Now they've confirmed a source, punished their own PR department, and presented them as people you don't need to worry about offending. Slick.
Well, you certainly have some strong feelings on this subject. I'm going to assume that you still carry a grudge against your group of bullies.
You seem to fail to realize that the major issue here is psychology. Children do not have the ability to empathize with the people around them. They do not feel the pain of others, that's a later development. In this respect, children share some of the major tendencies of adult sociopaths. You advocate treating them like adult sociopaths. That's all fine and dandy, but consider what prison does to people, what it will do to people during the aptly named 'formative years', and the fact that you are punishing them harshly for something that they will not understand the problem with for at least a couple more years, assuming an environment that is conducive to such learning.
You state that bullying is akin to mental torture. Perhaps in your case it was. But in other cases, it's a useful tool for teaching kids that you can't always get what you want. A necessary repression of the id, if you will. Otherwise, you get kids that spend all their life never having been forced towards social norms of any sort. The kid who picks his nose and eats it is getting bullied because of it? Good. Maybe he'll learn to stop before he hits the real world. I'll agree that bullying needs to be monitored to stop things like 'the kid who is vastly smarter than the others is getting bullied because of it,' but in most cases, being bullied is an important learning tool.
'The car has detected that you are attempting to place the key in the ignition. This step has been linked to 99% of car crashes. Would you like to continue?' This will not decrease the number of car crashes. It may increase the number of car crashes as people stop listening when the car tells you something important. It may even increase the amount of road rage, thanks to the new aggravation inherent in changing the radio station. 'The car has detected that you are attempting to decelerate. That caused a bomb to go off in the movie Speed. Are you sure you want to engage the brakes?'
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget mistakes.
"We missed an 'R'! We're supposed to celebrate!"
First, let us accept that there is no way to remove all guns from criminal hands. Even if you could round up every gun in the nation, all it takes is one guy with a machine shop to start cranking them out, kinda like people making meth or growing marijuana. It can be made at home, therefore it cannot be eliminated.
Second, numbers suggest that gun control actually increases the percentage of violent crimes, because victims are less likely to be able to defend themselves. Washington DC simultaneously has the strictest gun laws and the most violent crime per capita. Vermont allows any non-felon over the age of 16 the right to carry concealed weapons, and is number 46 on the list.
As you said, intent is key. We have no way of determining actual intent, even after the fact. Is this gentleman buying a 30-06 and a telescopic sight for hunting deer, or is he going to find an elevated position with a clear field of view and go on a shooting spree? The lack of previous convictions states that it's probably for hunting, especially since he's buying his deer license at the same time. Is this gentleman my father, or is he Charles Whitman? I advocate assuming that it's my father, because of the rarity of Whitmans. You advocate assuming that it's Charles Whitman, because they do more damage than my father. This is a personal point, and while I understand your reasoning, I'm going to disagree with you.
I have a hunting rifle. I shoot deer with it. I then eat said deer. I have a shotgun, which I use for fowl. I have a .22 pistol, which is less bulky when I hunt squirrels. To me, this is what guns are meant for. I use them to kill, but I kill nonsentient creatures during approved times, and I eat what I kill.
My grandfather has a handgun that he uses for hunting deer, because his shoulder has gotten worse in recent years, and it causes him great pain to have a rifle recoil against it.
Your rocket launchers, weaponized anthrax, and suitcase nukes all have a few things in common. They do not have use for killing food, they have no use for self defense, and they are much less discriminating than a normal rifle or handgun. You name weapons intended for either military use or mass murder, and compare them to my hunting rifle.
On video games, I agree with you. Video games do not impart violence to the players. It can be argued, however, that they can train your reactions in certain ways. At least two people have posted comments about virtual driving experience saving them in actual driving scenarios. Why is it so hard to imagine that the same kind of training can push someone who carries a handgun for self-defense into a homicide when a threat, actual or perceived, presents itself. Far be it from me to mourn the deaths of a few more attempted rapists and muggers, but accidents do happen.
I am against some forms of gun control, the kind that only affects law abiding citizens, for example. But no citizen needs an RPG, no criminal should have an RPG, and thus, they need to be accounted for. There are very few guns that follow this rule, however, and I think we need to stop focusing on the useful guns.
Video games don't make you more violent and I'll kill anyone who disagrees with me.
The only supplies you need are quinine and guns. Broken leg? Dope them up, and let endorphins heal them. Ditto for everything else. And morale is impressive too.
Guns are for the food. Turns out no one thought to program gout in, so there's no problem with venison for every meal.
Even better, what if the news outlets decide that this is an easy way to get ratings, reporting on inaccuracies in Wikipedia? Pretty soon they'll just skip to making volatile changes themselves, and be the first to report them. End Wikipedia.
Because all the normal ways of making money are a lot of work? Because she looks at the phishing emails she gets and thinks "I could do that." Because she has failed to hold any other job? Because she read it on some other webpage, and thought it was a good idea? Take your pick.
In other news, morons are harmful to children and a threat to national security. Classified information is stored on machines that users can install programs on willy-nilly? I could write better group policies in my sleep.
I've got a degree in Computer Electronics, on my way to one in Computer Networking, taken most of the classes for the Programming program as well. Electronics is the one that cared about memory allocation. Maybe this is just because of the different teachers involved, but CE took us down to the levels where this sort of thing was important. We got to write programs in assembly language with Debug.
We got to analyze FATs, and how they differed from NTFS. Now I'm probably one of two guys in my program who understands why things work the way they do, and the other one went through the CE program same time I did.
My advice for CS graduates is to go through the Computer Electronics program at the local tech college.
This thing has got all of you beat.
Google doesn't want you.
Google wants people who are passionate about their work, people who care about what they're doing. They want going to work to be something you want to do, not something that you have to do. This is why you get 20% of your time for personal projects, this is why they have awesome perks. It's all very well and good for you to say 'this won't work on me,' but they don't care if this works on you or not.
That is all.
The music industry isn't being fair? Stop the presses!
So it's your assertion that the Physics teacher is superior to the preschool teacher? I'd like to see a AP Physics teacher dropped into a preschool and given a curriculum. He is used to a world where people are at least mostly reasonable and logical. He is in a world where none of that is true. This isn't like burger flipping, where you could train a monkey to do the job if they made full-body hair nets. This is a demanding and problem-ridden profession that might be even more difficult than the physics, once you consider that the necessary skills are almost impossible to teach. My mother is a kindergarten teacher, and also teaches a class on early education at the university. I've helped out in her classroom on numerous occasions, and have always been struck by her ability to stay calm and in control while to my mind the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Give me the physics, or chemistry, or computers any day of the week.
Funny, I don't really feel like learning how to walk again just so I can do it in a video game. The other Neuromancer stuff you mention is pretty awesome, though, and would probably be a better way of exploiting this technology.
And as long as we're talking about feedback:
"I know kung fu."
I've got Celestia
It depends. If you do a Trinity-style jump-straight-up-and-kick-in-mid-air kick, you will bounce too. If you do a flying side kick, where you get a running start, and have forward momentum when you hit them, they will move, and you could easily stop, Newton's Cradle style.
Are you saying that there are acts which are either right or wrong, regardless of your culture, or are you saying that every culture will have taboos and moral values? The first can probably be debunked, given the tendencies of some cultures to kill and eat people, and the second seems obvious, given that that's a component of culture. If you don't have things you aren't supposed to do, whether that's displaying genitalia in public, or showing your teeth when you smile, then you don't have a culture, you have a collection, and a short lived one at that.
Bah, such foolishness. It's been widely accepted that he hates kittens for you masturbating.
So, if I surreptitiously switch the blanks in a movie gun for live rounds, the guy who pulls the trigger on set is the murderer, not me?
Wow. Not the best move by Sony there. Now they look like pansies, and no one else will listen to any of their threats. If you make a threat, be ready to carry through. If you carry through, don't backtrack. Now they've confirmed a source, punished their own PR department, and presented them as people you don't need to worry about offending. Slick.
Well, you certainly have some strong feelings on this subject. I'm going to assume that you still carry a grudge against your group of bullies.
You seem to fail to realize that the major issue here is psychology. Children do not have the ability to empathize with the people around them. They do not feel the pain of others, that's a later development. In this respect, children share some of the major tendencies of adult sociopaths. You advocate treating them like adult sociopaths. That's all fine and dandy, but consider what prison does to people, what it will do to people during the aptly named 'formative years', and the fact that you are punishing them harshly for something that they will not understand the problem with for at least a couple more years, assuming an environment that is conducive to such learning.
You state that bullying is akin to mental torture. Perhaps in your case it was. But in other cases, it's a useful tool for teaching kids that you can't always get what you want. A necessary repression of the id, if you will. Otherwise, you get kids that spend all their life never having been forced towards social norms of any sort. The kid who picks his nose and eats it is getting bullied because of it? Good. Maybe he'll learn to stop before he hits the real world. I'll agree that bullying needs to be monitored to stop things like 'the kid who is vastly smarter than the others is getting bullied because of it,' but in most cases, being bullied is an important learning tool.
Whoo! Car analogy!
'The car has detected that you are attempting to place the key in the ignition. This step has been linked to 99% of car crashes. Would you like to continue?'
This will not decrease the number of car crashes. It may increase the number of car crashes as people stop listening when the car tells you something important. It may even increase the amount of road rage, thanks to the new aggravation inherent in changing the radio station.
'The car has detected that you are attempting to decelerate. That caused a bomb to go off in the movie Speed. Are you sure you want to engage the brakes?'