The Robotic Aircraft for Public Safety (RAPS) — will remain unavailable to the public
Unless they've dealt with that (alleged) GPS spoofing issue, the RAPS may also be available to anyone who transmits a series of specially formatted requests from a GPS simulator unit...
Can't be much more than a decade away, at this rate...
The very idea! If you'll remember, Robocop was the internally-disliked less profitable alternative to the dual use ED-209, and was even nominally under the jurisdiction of a civilian police force that he ends up saving from privatization... He even uses nonlethal force once or twice.
I, um, don't think that's exactly the trajectory that our use of attack robots is on.
I don't know whether that article is correct or not; but(if we assume for the sake of argument that it is) the thing that really doesn't make sense to me is what Intel's motivation would be:
He gives the impression that both Intel and Microsoft are working against the part(Intel doesn't want the lousy margins, Microsoft is undermining Win8 x86 tablets with office licensing terms); but that the part is also a 100% hardware-locked MS-only device that they won't even let any other potential customer have a crack at, much less have any genuine enthusiasm for trying to sell it to them.
However, if that is so, why does the part exist at all? If it is so big that it is practically an i3, why would Intel design an entirely different chip rather than just lasering something off their weaker i3s and giving them an inscrutable model number and OEM only distribution? And if Microsoft is shafting Intel on the part, why is Intel making it a Windows exclusive(and on the processor level, not merely with a locked bootloader, which would allow MS OEMs to do their thing and Intel to still sell this to Android vendors, embedded linux appliance vendors, and whoever else)?
That's what I don't understand about the story as presented: plenty of products ship deliberately crippled because somebody prefers them that way(see all DRM systems, for instance); but that crippling isn't free, so it has to be in somebody's apparent interest for it to happen. Here, none of the players seem interested: Intel, allegedly, has a chip that can't compete with their existing products, and isn't a winner on margins. MS has a chip apparently designed just for them, except they would rather ship punchier devices with those existing products. So, who wins here?
I don't know whether it would actually be worth using; but dumping phone-sized applications onto the PC desktop as 'widgets' would be architecturally pretty doable, though the difference in pixel density between most phones and most PCs could make it rather ugly: If you mapped pixels 1:1, the app would end up looking fairly enormous on most monitors; but if you used monitor DPI to display the app at the same size as the phone's screen, bitmap UI elements would not be happy. You'd also run into the bigger question of whether anybody actually wants 'widgets'. I'm pretty sure that I can't remember seeing either OSX Dashboard or the Windows Sidebar thing actually being used by an actual user in forever...
Does anybody know what 'Security Engine' is, and what exactly it is using about 1/3 as much silicon as one of the processor cores to do exactly?
None of the thermal die shots appear to show it actually doing much of anything demanding; but I have to assume that Intel didn't put it there just because they really wanted the processor to be a bit bigger and more power hungry.
I am a trifle surprised that AMD is trying to stage-manage the CPU performance benchmarking(since everybody who cares already has an informed guess based on the last model, and in absence of information pessimists are simply going to assume that the part is bloody dire, so actual benchmarks could hardly make things worse); but it is lovely how it is practically impossible to buy a non-netbook with a CPU too weak for general purposes.
The big killer seems to be disk I/O(well, that and the gigantic bottleneck that is your ISP; but that isn't a computer part). CPUs are hard to go wrong with, GPUs are punchy and fairly cheap, unless you have a very, very high resolution monitor; but the SSD that you really want is still a pretty expensive piece of gear, and there are enough horror stories of firmware issues and mystery death, even among the reputable brands, that it still has a bit of a wild west flavor to it. Not nearly as bad as it was; but SSDs seem to be one of the few areas where an all solid state part(and not even some screaming 100+watt cooling nightmare) has reliability alarmingly similar to its mechanical counterpart(despite the fact that HDDs sound like they shouldn't even work outside of a cleanroom full of engineers, much less slung in my laptop bag and bumped around all day)...
Except that none of the benchmarks actually cover CPU speed, because AMD have put all the reviewers under NDA until the chip is released. That rather suggests they haven't caught up, they're just showing off the better IGP, which no one playing games will use anyway, and that anyone not playing games won't give a shit about.
While I'm not hugely sanguine about AMD's prospects(unfortunately, it isn't going to be pretty if the world is divided between x86s priced like it's still 1995 and weedy ARM lockdown boxes, so it would be nice if AMD could survive and keep Intel in check); but there is one factor that makes IGPs much more of a big deal than they used to be:
Laptops. Back in the day, when laptops were actually expensive, the bog-standard 'family computer from best buy, chosen by idiots and sold by morons on commission' would be a desktop of some flavor. Unless the system was terminally cheap and nasty and entirely lacked an AGP/PCIe slot, it didn't matter what IGP it had, because if little Timmy or Suzy decided they wanted to do some gaming, they'd just buy a graphics card and pop it in.
Now, it's increasingly likely that the family computers will be laptops(or occasionally all-in-ones or other not mini towers) of equally unexciting quality but substantially lower upgradeability. If you want graphics, you either use what you bought or you buy a whole new computer(or just a console).
This makes the fact that some, but not all, IGPs can actually run reasonably contemporary games(especially at the shitty 1366x768 that a cheap laptop will almost certainly be displaying) much more important to some buyers and to the PC market generally.
How does it make sense to push a buggy product out the door before it's ready? It only makes sense if you want the product to tank.
It depends on how buggy the product is, and how big you think that the first mover(or at least not-quite-as-tardy mover) advantage will be for the product in question.
Given that (relatively) seamless online patch delivery is now an expectation, shipping a product in the 'rough but usable' stage can work just fine, no matter how much the purists loath it(and, unfortunately for the purists, that now seems to be the mark of a good launch, with 'overtly broken' being a distinct option).
The thing that strikes me as somewhat insane about MS' Windows 8 push is not so much that it is on an aggressive timescale, they haven't released an OS that was properly baked out of the box in a significant number of versions; but that they seem to be pushing out Windows 8 more or less solely for the sake of 'metro' which really only makes sense on tablets and any other touch-focused quasi-PC oddities.
It would seem totally sensible if they were to rush Windows RT/Metro out the door so as to get Wintablets on the shelves by Christmas(it's not as though iOS or Android started as terribly finished products, and 'ship now, then iterate' seems to have done them minimal serious harm). What seems weird is tying that to a push for Win8 on normal desktops. Rushing out a product where you currently don't have one isn't ideal; but that's how the world goes. Rushing out an unfinished product with negative buzz in the face of a (now reasonably polished) product that your customers mostly like? That's weird.
And this isn't even like the 'XP 4 lyfe contrarians hate Vista/7 because it breaks their shitty software' problem that they had last time. IT departments have, mostly, worked it out and switched or are switching, and Win8 isn't, if you ignore the 'we shipped an entire separate shell because, uh, fuck you, that's why' part, nearly as much of an architectural break. It's just unpolished and offers nothing interesting to current Win7 users. With XP, at least, while the legacy investment was massive, XP legitimately sucked a lot and needed to go; it just wasn't going to be pretty getting there.
Well it just goes to show the lengths some companies will go to in the persuit of profit.
Worse, it demonstrates the incredible toothlessness of the penalties for doing so, as long as you do it correctly(the fact that the victims of sleazy rent-to-own places aren't exactly people who matter or are likely to lawyer up very effectively)...
I suspect that there's a reason why societies that frown on and/or execute usurers have historically been so common.
So, if I understand this correctly, the price of feeding pigs is rising. However, despite their theoretically being a 'market' for pig products and demand for pig products holding steady, it has not been possible for the price of pork products to reflect the cost of producing them, causing pork production to start shutting down, thus setting us up for a price spike in the near future....
Could somebody summon the invisible hand? I have a beating that needs delivering...
I am by no means an expert in this but the question has been asked before here and I agreed with the overall sentiment: Don't break the law.
The Chinese government will ensure that you regret being caught.
Unless a great deal goes on under the radar, team China appears to have minimal interest in interfering with the VPNs of foreign business travelers. They occasionally crack down on somebody as part of a quasi-mercantilist spat between a local company and a foreign competitor, or to inform a news entity that it really should be self-policing a bit harder, and industrial espionage shenanigans can't be ruled out; but such travellers tend not to be politically threatening and so not very interesting.
- While I'm only a tourist, I will still be working freelance for a company back home.
- are censored by the Great Firewall of China
What does Slashdot think?
That you are
1) Breaking immigration laws by working while on a tourist visa.
2) Breaking laws by trying to get around the web censors and doing something not allowed.
Honestly, if you are just going to China to break their laws, why not just stay at home? If you still want to continue then don't break immigration and other laws in the country you are visiting. It's not only illegal but greatly distasteful towards the host country. They are welcoming you as a visitor and yet you are just going to be breaking laws.
I was under the impression that people doing a bit of remote work for the home office while on vacation was an entirely normal and legal state of affairs(if an unfortunate corruption of genuine vacation time...) If he were doing work for a Chinese outfit, or work in China on behalf of home office, that would be a quite different state of affairs...
Not in the slightest. I'm pretty certain that this is the Greek fascists playing a little game of 'one nation, one people, one god' or some similar variant of the assorted sordid little tales of enforced unity that litter human history.
It sounds like a golden opportunity to mass-marketing of tissues from endangered species, to me!
With just a teeny, minimally invasive, sampling step, exotic meats from wildly endangered organisms could be produced in massive vats. Delicious panda burgers! Seal Veal! You could also grow tissues that don't exist in nature, such as racks of crab ribs!
The cattle industry will never throw away animal hides, or any other part of the animal. It all goes into some industrial process, every last scrap.
Given that some current tissue-culture techniques rely on a collagen scaffold to guide the living cells seeded into the structure, it would entirely fail to surprise me if some amount of cow hide ends up being quietly broken down for collagen, which will then be printed into scaffolds on which 'ethical leather' can be grown...
Depending on the production process, there might also be engineering advantages:
Real leather is constrained by the shape and properties of the animal you removed it from. Unless your intended use case is eerily cow shaped, this usually means a bunch of cutting and sewing or other joining needs to happen. If the synthesized stuff is handled by some 'print collagen matrix, seed with cells, immerse in nutrient fluid' type process, you could theoretically produce pieces that are seamless and correctly shaped(possibly even with neat extras like variable thickness/stiffness depending on the mechanical durability required in different areas of the piece) without any cuts or stitches.
Cutting and sewing are relatively cheap, so you wouldn't do that just for the cost savings; but seams can be points of weakness in more demanding designs.
Fully functional skin(ie. with follicles and everything) is a much higher bar to clear than more primitive 'thin-layer-of-epidermal-cells' type stuff that they've been using as burn dressings for years now; but if animals can grow fur, there isn't any obvious objection to a sufficiently advanced tissue-culture process being able to grow skin with fur on it(potentially even in sizes/patterns/textures that aren't available in nature).
Doesn't blasphemy require attacking actual deities or assorted holy objects/texts/persons, rather than mere religious functionaries, however pious?
If anything, isn't it (in the context of an ostensible monotheism, like eastern orthodoxy) verging on blasphemy to assert that satire against a mere man is blasphemous?
Obviously, religious functionaries have the same interest in conflating their own status with the priviliged status accorded to dieties, just as politicians generally do their best to conflate their own persons and administrations with lofty things like 'Nation' and 'The Office of the President'; but, in both cases, it is actually a vital part of the protection of the genuinely venerated things to mock and dissuade the assorted grifters who attempt to parasitize them. Not doing that swiftly turns your religion into a cult or your government into an autocracy...
Edison was a trifle early for the really good stuff; but he was doing his serious work well after the industrial revolution started. Anybody who didn't know that widespread coal burning was at least noxious, if not hazardous, would have had to be fairly clueless by that time.
Now, asking a guy who did some important technical refining of incandescent resistive lighting to have invented LEDs or fluorescent tubes instead is probably deeply unfair...
If your objective is heat production, it's downright difficult to build resistors that don't put in superb efficiency numbers...
For human-comfort purposes, there might be some differences between conduction/convection heating and IR heating depending on the airflow in the room; but turning electricity into heat is pretty much 100% efficient.
I've just found a 'radicalizing' document, clearly a piece of propaganda designed to convince me that Europe is a surveillance state run by some mixture of terrified ninnies and cynical grifters! But I can't find the reporting button to alert the proper authorities and have it taken down, what do I do?
I don't have any more recent numbers on hand; but the 1990 figures suggest that 3.7% of deaths were by violence(defined as homicide, suicide, and war) worldwide that year. Sub-Sarahan Africa was (unshockingly) leading the tables at 6%, with the Middle East at 5.6%.
In absolute terms, that's a fair amount of blood spilled; but relative to the world population and deaths from other causes violence is surprisingly weak sauce, even once the slightly dubious step of factoring in suicide is taken...
Slashdot Mirror
The Robotic Aircraft for Public Safety (RAPS) — will remain unavailable to the public
Unless they've dealt with that (alleged) GPS spoofing issue, the RAPS may also be available to anyone who transmits a series of specially formatted requests from a GPS simulator unit...
Can't be much more than a decade away, at this rate...
The very idea! If you'll remember, Robocop was the internally-disliked less profitable alternative to the dual use ED-209, and was even nominally under the jurisdiction of a civilian police force that he ends up saving from privatization... He even uses nonlethal force once or twice.
I, um, don't think that's exactly the trajectory that our use of attack robots is on.
I don't know whether that article is correct or not; but(if we assume for the sake of argument that it is) the thing that really doesn't make sense to me is what Intel's motivation would be:
He gives the impression that both Intel and Microsoft are working against the part(Intel doesn't want the lousy margins, Microsoft is undermining Win8 x86 tablets with office licensing terms); but that the part is also a 100% hardware-locked MS-only device that they won't even let any other potential customer have a crack at, much less have any genuine enthusiasm for trying to sell it to them.
However, if that is so, why does the part exist at all? If it is so big that it is practically an i3, why would Intel design an entirely different chip rather than just lasering something off their weaker i3s and giving them an inscrutable model number and OEM only distribution? And if Microsoft is shafting Intel on the part, why is Intel making it a Windows exclusive(and on the processor level, not merely with a locked bootloader, which would allow MS OEMs to do their thing and Intel to still sell this to Android vendors, embedded linux appliance vendors, and whoever else)?
That's what I don't understand about the story as presented: plenty of products ship deliberately crippled because somebody prefers them that way(see all DRM systems, for instance); but that crippling isn't free, so it has to be in somebody's apparent interest for it to happen. Here, none of the players seem interested: Intel, allegedly, has a chip that can't compete with their existing products, and isn't a winner on margins. MS has a chip apparently designed just for them, except they would rather ship punchier devices with those existing products. So, who wins here?
I don't know whether it would actually be worth using; but dumping phone-sized applications onto the PC desktop as 'widgets' would be architecturally pretty doable, though the difference in pixel density between most phones and most PCs could make it rather ugly: If you mapped pixels 1:1, the app would end up looking fairly enormous on most monitors; but if you used monitor DPI to display the app at the same size as the phone's screen, bitmap UI elements would not be happy. You'd also run into the bigger question of whether anybody actually wants 'widgets'. I'm pretty sure that I can't remember seeing either OSX Dashboard or the Windows Sidebar thing actually being used by an actual user in forever...
Does anybody know what 'Security Engine' is, and what exactly it is using about 1/3 as much silicon as one of the processor cores to do exactly?
None of the thermal die shots appear to show it actually doing much of anything demanding; but I have to assume that Intel didn't put it there just because they really wanted the processor to be a bit bigger and more power hungry.
I am a trifle surprised that AMD is trying to stage-manage the CPU performance benchmarking(since everybody who cares already has an informed guess based on the last model, and in absence of information pessimists are simply going to assume that the part is bloody dire, so actual benchmarks could hardly make things worse); but it is lovely how it is practically impossible to buy a non-netbook with a CPU too weak for general purposes.
The big killer seems to be disk I/O(well, that and the gigantic bottleneck that is your ISP; but that isn't a computer part). CPUs are hard to go wrong with, GPUs are punchy and fairly cheap, unless you have a very, very high resolution monitor; but the SSD that you really want is still a pretty expensive piece of gear, and there are enough horror stories of firmware issues and mystery death, even among the reputable brands, that it still has a bit of a wild west flavor to it. Not nearly as bad as it was; but SSDs seem to be one of the few areas where an all solid state part(and not even some screaming 100+watt cooling nightmare) has reliability alarmingly similar to its mechanical counterpart(despite the fact that HDDs sound like they shouldn't even work outside of a cleanroom full of engineers, much less slung in my laptop bag and bumped around all day)...
Except that none of the benchmarks actually cover CPU speed, because AMD have put all the reviewers under NDA until the chip is released. That rather suggests they haven't caught up, they're just showing off the better IGP, which no one playing games will use anyway, and that anyone not playing games won't give a shit about.
While I'm not hugely sanguine about AMD's prospects(unfortunately, it isn't going to be pretty if the world is divided between x86s priced like it's still 1995 and weedy ARM lockdown boxes, so it would be nice if AMD could survive and keep Intel in check); but there is one factor that makes IGPs much more of a big deal than they used to be:
Laptops. Back in the day, when laptops were actually expensive, the bog-standard 'family computer from best buy, chosen by idiots and sold by morons on commission' would be a desktop of some flavor. Unless the system was terminally cheap and nasty and entirely lacked an AGP/PCIe slot, it didn't matter what IGP it had, because if little Timmy or Suzy decided they wanted to do some gaming, they'd just buy a graphics card and pop it in.
Now, it's increasingly likely that the family computers will be laptops(or occasionally all-in-ones or other not mini towers) of equally unexciting quality but substantially lower upgradeability. If you want graphics, you either use what you bought or you buy a whole new computer(or just a console).
This makes the fact that some, but not all, IGPs can actually run reasonably contemporary games(especially at the shitty 1366x768 that a cheap laptop will almost certainly be displaying) much more important to some buyers and to the PC market generally.
How does it make sense to push a buggy product out the door before it's ready? It only makes sense if you want the product to tank.
It depends on how buggy the product is, and how big you think that the first mover(or at least not-quite-as-tardy mover) advantage will be for the product in question.
Given that (relatively) seamless online patch delivery is now an expectation, shipping a product in the 'rough but usable' stage can work just fine, no matter how much the purists loath it(and, unfortunately for the purists, that now seems to be the mark of a good launch, with 'overtly broken' being a distinct option).
The thing that strikes me as somewhat insane about MS' Windows 8 push is not so much that it is on an aggressive timescale, they haven't released an OS that was properly baked out of the box in a significant number of versions; but that they seem to be pushing out Windows 8 more or less solely for the sake of 'metro' which really only makes sense on tablets and any other touch-focused quasi-PC oddities.
It would seem totally sensible if they were to rush Windows RT/Metro out the door so as to get Wintablets on the shelves by Christmas(it's not as though iOS or Android started as terribly finished products, and 'ship now, then iterate' seems to have done them minimal serious harm). What seems weird is tying that to a push for Win8 on normal desktops. Rushing out a product where you currently don't have one isn't ideal; but that's how the world goes. Rushing out an unfinished product with negative buzz in the face of a (now reasonably polished) product that your customers mostly like? That's weird.
And this isn't even like the 'XP 4 lyfe contrarians hate Vista/7 because it breaks their shitty software' problem that they had last time. IT departments have, mostly, worked it out and switched or are switching, and Win8 isn't, if you ignore the 'we shipped an entire separate shell because, uh, fuck you, that's why' part, nearly as much of an architectural break. It's just unpolished and offers nothing interesting to current Win7 users. With XP, at least, while the legacy investment was massive, XP legitimately sucked a lot and needed to go; it just wasn't going to be pretty getting there.
In fact, we've never considered them separate continents...
Well it just goes to show the lengths some companies will go to in the persuit of profit.
Worse, it demonstrates the incredible toothlessness of the penalties for doing so, as long as you do it correctly(the fact that the victims of sleazy rent-to-own places aren't exactly people who matter or are likely to lawyer up very effectively)...
I suspect that there's a reason why societies that frown on and/or execute usurers have historically been so common.
So, if I understand this correctly, the price of feeding pigs is rising. However, despite their theoretically being a 'market' for pig products and demand for pig products holding steady, it has not been possible for the price of pork products to reflect the cost of producing them, causing pork production to start shutting down, thus setting us up for a price spike in the near future....
Could somebody summon the invisible hand? I have a beating that needs delivering...
I am by no means an expert in this but the question has been asked before here and I agreed with the overall sentiment: Don't break the law.
The Chinese government will ensure that you regret being caught.
Unless a great deal goes on under the radar, team China appears to have minimal interest in interfering with the VPNs of foreign business travelers. They occasionally crack down on somebody as part of a quasi-mercantilist spat between a local company and a foreign competitor, or to inform a news entity that it really should be self-policing a bit harder, and industrial espionage shenanigans can't be ruled out; but such travellers tend not to be politically threatening and so not very interesting.
- While I'm only a tourist, I will still be working freelance for a company back home.
- are censored by the Great Firewall of China
What does Slashdot think?
That you are
1) Breaking immigration laws by working while on a tourist visa.
2) Breaking laws by trying to get around the web censors and doing something not allowed.
Honestly, if you are just going to China to break their laws, why not just stay at home? If you still want to continue then don't break immigration and other laws in the country you are visiting. It's not only illegal but greatly distasteful towards the host country. They are welcoming you as a visitor and yet you are just going to be breaking laws.
I was under the impression that people doing a bit of remote work for the home office while on vacation was an entirely normal and legal state of affairs(if an unfortunate corruption of genuine vacation time...) If he were doing work for a Chinese outfit, or work in China on behalf of home office, that would be a quite different state of affairs...
Not in the slightest. I'm pretty certain that this is the Greek fascists playing a little game of 'one nation, one people, one god' or some similar variant of the assorted sordid little tales of enforced unity that litter human history.
It sounds like a golden opportunity to mass-marketing of tissues from endangered species, to me!
With just a teeny, minimally invasive, sampling step, exotic meats from wildly endangered organisms could be produced in massive vats. Delicious panda burgers! Seal Veal! You could also grow tissues that don't exist in nature, such as racks of crab ribs!
The cattle industry will never throw away animal hides, or any other part of the animal. It all goes into some industrial process, every last scrap.
Given that some current tissue-culture techniques rely on a collagen scaffold to guide the living cells seeded into the structure, it would entirely fail to surprise me if some amount of cow hide ends up being quietly broken down for collagen, which will then be printed into scaffolds on which 'ethical leather' can be grown...
Depending on the production process, there might also be engineering advantages:
Real leather is constrained by the shape and properties of the animal you removed it from. Unless your intended use case is eerily cow shaped, this usually means a bunch of cutting and sewing or other joining needs to happen. If the synthesized stuff is handled by some 'print collagen matrix, seed with cells, immerse in nutrient fluid' type process, you could theoretically produce pieces that are seamless and correctly shaped(possibly even with neat extras like variable thickness/stiffness depending on the mechanical durability required in different areas of the piece) without any cuts or stitches.
Cutting and sewing are relatively cheap, so you wouldn't do that just for the cost savings; but seams can be points of weakness in more demanding designs.
Fully functional skin(ie. with follicles and everything) is a much higher bar to clear than more primitive 'thin-layer-of-epidermal-cells' type stuff that they've been using as burn dressings for years now; but if animals can grow fur, there isn't any obvious objection to a sufficiently advanced tissue-culture process being able to grow skin with fur on it(potentially even in sizes/patterns/textures that aren't available in nature).
Doesn't blasphemy require attacking actual deities or assorted holy objects/texts/persons, rather than mere religious functionaries, however pious?
If anything, isn't it (in the context of an ostensible monotheism, like eastern orthodoxy) verging on blasphemy to assert that satire against a mere man is blasphemous?
Obviously, religious functionaries have the same interest in conflating their own status with the priviliged status accorded to dieties, just as politicians generally do their best to conflate their own persons and administrations with lofty things like 'Nation' and 'The Office of the President'; but, in both cases, it is actually a vital part of the protection of the genuinely venerated things to mock and dissuade the assorted grifters who attempt to parasitize them. Not doing that swiftly turns your religion into a cult or your government into an autocracy...
Edison was a trifle early for the really good stuff; but he was doing his serious work well after the industrial revolution started. Anybody who didn't know that widespread coal burning was at least noxious, if not hazardous, would have had to be fairly clueless by that time.
Now, asking a guy who did some important technical refining of incandescent resistive lighting to have invented LEDs or fluorescent tubes instead is probably deeply unfair...
If your objective is heat production, it's downright difficult to build resistors that don't put in superb efficiency numbers...
For human-comfort purposes, there might be some differences between conduction/convection heating and IR heating depending on the airflow in the room; but turning electricity into heat is pretty much 100% efficient.
Does this make plaintext password storage an IEEE standard now?
That could save an, er, friend of mine, a lot of work...
Conveniently, converting most of the planet's mass into energy serves as an effective substitute for diplomacy in many situations.
I've just found a 'radicalizing' document, clearly a piece of propaganda designed to convince me that Europe is a surveillance state run by some mixture of terrified ninnies and cynical grifters! But I can't find the reporting button to alert the proper authorities and have it taken down, what do I do?
I don't have any more recent numbers on hand; but the 1990 figures suggest that 3.7% of deaths were by violence(defined as homicide, suicide, and war) worldwide that year. Sub-Sarahan Africa was (unshockingly) leading the tables at 6%, with the Middle East at 5.6%.
In absolute terms, that's a fair amount of blood spilled; but relative to the world population and deaths from other causes violence is surprisingly weak sauce, even once the slightly dubious step of factoring in suicide is taken...