>It's difficult to sell software when everyone has the source code and can make one minor tweak and sell it as their own. So use the GPL - if you use BSD licenses then you CHOSE to allow that. >Support contracts? What general consumer will buy a support contract? They aren't even widely needed if your software is of high enough quality. Not all software is business software nor should it be.
Just because many Linux companies couldn't make business sense doesn't mean nobody can. There are far better models out there, followed by many of them. One of them I used to follow. For many years I developed the most widely used cybercafe management software for Linux on the market (these days cybercafe's are dying out because of the proliferation of mobile so I don't see any fun in that any more but back then it was a major piece of code). I became quite wealthy off it, even though it was a GPL program and freely downloadable, and even though most of it's users were third-world small businesses who had just been founded and were only interested in it because it cost nothing. So how did I make money then you ask ? Easy. I made the program freely available, but I offered a very useful service. Some companies weren't so small - they were doing things like franchise cybercafe systems - they wanted extra custom features (like paid-for-page-printing going onto your cybercafe bill for example) I developed those features for them - at a steep hourly rate. Of course somebody else could have done it cheaper - but nobody knew the software as well as I did and nobody else could do it as well, and as fast as I could. I had a LOT of business. Then they had a choice - I could add their component to the publicly available GPL version for everybody to benefit from (as they benefited from features others had paid for) or they could have exclusivity - their version folded into a new fork licensed only for their exclusive use. If they chose the latter - I doubled the hourly rate (since I would have to repeat the work later from scratch if somebody else wanted that feature and possibly be forced to hire somebody to do a clean-room version) and of course, I charged to maintain the fork - so if they wanted any features from the next release it cost them extra. Only one large franchisee ever chose the latter option - they felt exclusivity of their version was that important to them - interestingly, they were the only one who didn't do very well and become highly profitable... not saying that was their only mistake - but I can say their exclusivity didn't save them. No - there are many ways to make money out of free software and a lot of people have gotten quite rich that way. Support is just one way - it's just silly that so many people have thought it's the only (or for most software even a GOOD) way.
As for your second paragraph - I never said "always" - I said "almost always". However, now you are once again blaming Linux for a third-party developer. It's not the distro or OS developers who wrote Cabal - if it didn't meet your needs, you could have contributed back to the project, or at least filed bug reports and helped it to become so. I am listed in the Help|About of the Lazarus project for exactly that reason - I was using it to develop an educational typing tutor a few years ago and it was lacking a number of features I desperately needed, I didn't complain about it, I took the source code for lazarus - ADDED the features I was missing and contributed it back to them. Best thing - now I didn't' have to maintain those features, the whole community could benefit from them - and improve them, in fact by the next official release they were significantly better than the versions I'd written. If you're a developer of all things complaining about the features of free software then you don't DESERVE to have those features. If you didn't think YOUR time was worth contributing it to something that cost you NOTHING why should somebody ELSE have contributed THEIRS ? Why do you get to complain because they didn't ? In t
>If you restrict yourself to just the packages in, say, ubuntu, then you are working with a platform that is a million times more restrictive than OS X or Windows.
That's just plain false, Ubuntu's repos are the single largest software repository in the world, not to mention - getting to work as a repo based package is spectacularly easy.
>Even iOS is more "open" than Ubuntu's official package manager.
>Anybody with a hundred bucks can get their product deployed on iOS. Getting your app into Ubuntu's package system is far more difficult.
It took me all of an hour to get a PPA for my current project running - now Ubuntu is building and providing packages to their users (and their downstream distro's like Mint) containing my packages. Oh and it didn't cost me a hundred bucks - and nobody got to tell me; "We refuse to include your package because we don't like what it's thematically about" - while Jobs was raging over keeping iphone porn-free, Ubuntu had Gnaughty in it's repo's for years (it was only removed because it was unmaintained).
>My experience is I always quickly find something I want to do that is impossible if I stick to the official packages. I can install third party software on my mac without causing any issues, why isn't the same thing possible on Linux?
Did I say "official" ? I just said "repos" - there are very few times I've ever needed to do something that isn't in the official repos, and there has never been a time when I couldn't find what I want in a third-party repo. Granted third-party repos are somewhat more risky (but if you're careful about which ones you add they are STILL less risky than random third-party providers on other platforms) - and you get all the advanced benefits of the apt system (or equivalents like yum) - including automatic dependency resolution. Of course if you define "do something" as "use the same program" then you may get trouble - if you are prepared to consider alternatives - there are very, very few apps that don't have a native Linux equal - which is usually superior.
>It's not hard, I just unzip the downloaded file, double click the app icon it spits out, and I've got the third party software installed. Drag the app icon to the trash and it's properly and cleanly uninstalled. Why can't linux achieve the same thing? Because of fragmentation. Fragmentation is holding linux back.
No - Linux doesn't WANT to achieve the same thing because it's a horrible, horrible, horrible and stupid design. Sure it's convenient as all hell but it's terribly insecure and massively bloated. The only way to make apps do that is to basically refuse any third-party dependencies or alternatively to hard-link any such dependencies in - that means making every app about a hundred times bigger, all of it space that could have been shared in a single library for every app that needs it - getting dependencies automatically resolved is far better. More-over, it means that either all apps are limited to a single user (which basically means you're screwed in multi-user desktop environments - which many of us actually USE - or need to reinstall every app for every user) or you give the users full root access to install - which is incredibly stupid. That is exactly why viruses for Linux are nearly impossible to write but are common on windows and rapidly growing more common on Mac. Because people use repositories to install software on Linux - the software get vetted before it is available - by third-party professionals, normal users aren't expected to be able to tell trustworthy software from malware. More-over the software code is audited by third-parties with no commercial interest in it, It's very rare that something goes bad in that system (which is why, when it does go bad, it's big news). Mind you - if that system is so perfect, why did apple themselves abandon it for IOS and go for a repository based system (the app store) - they don't even allow third-party repositories ! No if anything the proliferation of commercia
>My guess is that in this case this is an Ableton Libe problem and not an OS X problem.
Hey if Linux can get blamed for the misbehaviour of proprietory apps, and indeed if proprietory app-makers can complain that they cannot build for every linux system (when NO free software developer ever has that problem - it comes from not playing by the rules, if you give us the source, you never have to build for ANYTHING - each distro will build it for itself and you need not know how ANY of them does it) then blaming apple for the behaviour of an application sold for apple is simply tit for tat.
Linux people always hear Linux being blamed for the faillures of third parties. But oddly, software in the repo almost always "just works" - the problems almost always comes in from stuff that are't in the repos and are not in fact maintainable by the community whom you are blaming for it's failure. People have tried and failed to solve this for years (the gaming companies almost all went for self-extracting archivesin uuencoded shell scripts for example). A user's experience of working on a platform is determined just as much by the platform and those who develop well for it, as by those who develop badly for it. This is utterly unfair and irrational but it's nevertheless true. How much better would some of the GP's have rated the linux desktop if they limited themselves to ONLY the stuff in the repos (and that's without getting into a free software only argument - which I personally DO believe in and stick to). People actually feel their linux experience is harmed because skype on linux is so inferior to skype on windows - but that is not only skype (or now microsoft)'s fault, it's not something linux developers CAN do anything about whatsoever. The best we could do is offer ekiga - but that has so little market-share that it doesn't solve the problem.
So tit for tat I say. That all said - whenever I have to use any windows platform it irritates the living daylights out of me, which is why I stick to mint+KDE. I tried a Mac a while ago... yuerch... it just didn't want to work the way *I* want to work. Nobody tells me how my desktop should function, that's MY decision, because I am most productive in a system set up and customized to my particular workflows. The only desktop that actually respects that is KDE.
Agreed, I didn't say Canonical matured it, I said it matured - but I am well aware it's the upstream guys who matured it. Canonicals mistake wasn't so much going pulse - as going pulse way before it was really ready.
I must admit - I was a pulse hater for years, it never worked nice on ANY of my computers. Dozens of apps would just be a nightmare to support, and with wine it was even worse (well wine still doesn't have official support for it but at least there's a ppa with the pulse-patch available).
I still think Canonical made a big mistake at pushing it so hard so long before it was ready. Many cards wouldn't work, many apps wouldn't work - and a lot of users had real issues - users for whom ALSA at that point had been working perfectly. What's worse, not only did they make it a nightmare to disable - every release they went and hacked away whatever work-around those who couldn't use it had been doing to disable it. We disable it by removing the packages - suddenly the next release X won't run if you remove them. So we find a way to disable the startup script... next release, the startup script is gone entirely and now it starts in some mysterious manner...
If your card didn't play nice with the first few years of ultra-buggy and incomplete pulse releases, well Ubuntu would do their damndest to make sure you had NO sound at all.
Many of us moved away from Ubuntu at the time (I ended up in Mint via Slackware) at least in part because of pulse.
That all said, I'll admit that pulse has stabilised and completed over the past few years, been running with it on in Mint since Lisa and I'm quite happy with it (then again, I also replaced all my PC's in the meantime so it may be just as broken for those who still have ca2001 Soundblaster Live cards).
>For someone who loves choice so much you're pretty hard set on X fanaticism. In any other arena X would be described as a monopoly.
On what basis ? X was originally created by MIT in the early 80's since then there has a been litterally dozens of implementations,every single Unix shipped it's own (usually proprietary since the MIT license allows proprietary forks) X implementation. Even in the Linux world there are TWO X versions - XFree86 was the one of choice for distro's for a decade and a half, before a fork - x.org largely motivated by a change in the XFree86 license became the new preferred one in around 2005.
>Should Canonical not be allowed the freedom to compete? Or should your zealotry force their roadmap? >We have competing window managers, competing graphical toolkits, competing desktop environments, X even has competing methods of rendering, a competing display server will make things interesting and looks like it's paving the way for easier cross platform application development.
Compete ? Sure, but cooperate is better. Every other "competing" item on your list cooperates with the others, gnome and KDE has agreed on a standard for dozens of things, hence we have dbus, the.desktop file standard etc. etc. etc. The word that used to be popular to describe how we do things was coopetition - we cooperated AND compete, because we aren't trying to win, we're just trying to inspire each other to do better.
>Chances are Mir will be an open source, open spec standard under a nicey nice GPLish license allowing freedom of choice to distributions, application developers and end users alike.
You don't think you should verify something that important before betting on it ? I didn't either - but I'm not going to assume until I know. Canonical has done non-free stuff before after all.
>Linux has been a fractured splintered platform for well over a decade, this doesn't really make that much of a difference. I'd go one further, history is filled with things wanting to outdo X out of this perception that X has some kind of heavy network overhead (it doesn't - X uses no networking at all locally - it uses IPC - using a communications model between windows and windowing system is actually a brilliant idea that almost EVERY post-X graphical environment COPIED - they all do it. Windows didn't for a long time, but we aren't competing with Win9x anymore now are we ?)
Fact is - I agree with your basic precept - if Canonical wants to try this, that's their right. I think it's incredibly stupid of them but if I'm proven wrong, that's fine too. However, a valid conclusion does not mean your premisses aren't based on made up and incorrect facts - so now, you know better:D
Since you do not have the freedom to kill people, owning the means to do so does not give you any greater freedom.
Now if you are arguing for hunting and the like - well frankly then there is absolutely NO reason to believe your argument should extend to weaponry which applies SOLELY to the purpose of killing HUMANS with. These weapons aren't even very useful for self-defense. Frankly NOBODY actually has any NEED for them EXCEPT for murderers or wannabe murderers.
Your freedom ends where mine begins - and mine includes the right to NOT be around that kind of weapons, in the same way it includes the right to ask you to NOT smoke in my vicinity.
All the things you can legally do with a gun, are best achieved with guns which are essentially unaffected by gun control laws.
The only people who benefit from fighting it are gun-manufacturers.
Consumer level... honestly - wikipedia is about the best resource you'll find for consumer level discussion on all of the above. But for specifically socialist libertarianism - among the best today is Noam Chomsky's work (all the books that are NOT about linguistics I mean).
There are more than one kind of libertarian, until Ayn Rand the word would NEVER have been applied to capitalists for example. Libertarianism is a political philosophy which is NOT in fact distinct from anarchism. Some libertarians will ACCEPT minarchism but only as a pragmatic compromise for full anarchism. In fact the word libertarian was coined specifically to be able to write anarchist philosophy without contravening Napoleon's law forbidding anarchist propaganda. What most American's today call "libertarian" is a recent redefinition of an idea dating back hundreds of years which is quite at odds to the real philosophy in many ways. Socialist libertarians would indeed include Bill Maher (and interestingly Bill O'Reily knows and recognizes this even though you do not), Noam Chomsky is a socialist libertarian, the philosophy of participatory democracy is a socialist-libertarian philosophy.
You see libertarianism doesn't actually have anything to DO with economics. It's a POLITICAL philosophy - a form of anarchism. Capitalist libertarians had to water down the anarchism because their ideas of economics cannot work without authority-systems, both in business and in the form of government as an arbitrator. Socialist libertarians have no government at all (so they are also quite distinct from state-based socialism), and propose a form of socialism based entirely on voluntary participation with laws made by the people who have to live under them themselves through consensus voting systems - in most versions the votes are weighed so the more impact a law has on your personal life, the more votes you have on it - thus preventing a tyranny of the majority problem.
Socialist libertarians mostly reject the idea of a money-based economy entirely and entirely reject all forms of authority - including in business (the only business form socialist libertarians would legally allow to exist are worker-owned cooperations).
I find it hilarious everytime Americans think they know what "libertarian" means and have never actually read anything about it's history, or the major division between left and right libertarians (and which one has actually once been the government of a very successful state - which would survived for 20 years in the 20th century despite being simultaneously invaded by capitalists AND communists - socialist libertarians don't get along with either but also proved that you can have a successful military that can fend of invasions by two LARGER armies for two decades without any formal system of command authority).
No my friend - you are committing the no-true-Scotsman fallacy and I am being kind enough to assume it was out of ignorance - now you know better.
1) Slaves were free to quit. 2) Working hours are X to Y != "autonomy over your time" 3) "If you work for NOBODY and don't have capital and skill to run a business you starve" != free to quit.
Voluntarily being subjected to number 2 doesn't make it NOT slavery in the same way that a slave who chose to serve another 7 years was STILL a slave.
Yes, I know that, I gave free software examples knowing they were later because I actually know their names. That doesn't mean there weren't expat engineers working for IBM and DEC in the age of PDPs, I know for a fact there was.
>Slaves are not paid. If you are paid and free to leave for a better job, you are not a slave. Possibly an idiot but not in any way a slave.
False: definition of slavery: "One who does not have sole autonomy over how he spends his time" - as per Plato. By that definition - nearly all wage-earners ARE in fact slaves. The definition says nothing about income (slaves DID get paid - even in the modern age - they just did not get paid in MONEY but instead in board and food). Neither does it say anything about being able to leave: ancient laws actually GUARANTEED a slave's right to freedom. The specifics varied by nation but NOBODY in the ancient world was a slave for life - and their definition of a slave was exactly the same as our definition of an employee. The only difference is that employees get cash and (usually) don't get free housing and food.
The concept of working hours didn't even exist until the Industrial revolution, when it was instituted as a substitute for the recently abolished slavery. Part of why slavery got abolished by people whose religion actively endorsed it is because they had to acknowledge that nobody was actually following the RULES their religion had about how to do it. Rules that included: guaranteed rights to LEAVE a position of slavery and become free. In the Hebrew system for example slavery ended automatically after 7 years, at which time a slave could CHOOSE to serve for another 7 but such a choice had to be privately repeated to the high-priest (to give an impartial third-party a chance to ensure it wasn't coerced). Greek slaves were required to be freed after less time than that, and could be freed earlier by mutual agreement with their masters. Wait the dissolution of a slaves state of slavery was simply an agreed dissolution of a contract ? Just like "I wish to resign my job".
No my friend, I think you'll find we're ALL slaves, in a world that has very, very few free men left. They live like kings, because they no longer have a slave or three, they have thousands.
>Don't believe me? Visit Somalia or somewhere else they simply don't exist. They know what poor is, you don't have a fucking clue.
Most of us would say that Somalia is proof of what happens when the GOVERNMENT is not good.
Business indeed can only function when government and society provides an environment that allows it to do so - in the absence of strong government, there is no business at all - result: Somalia, where you can't buy a fridge (and your life is worthless to boot).
What you say about the Non-FOX networks is true, and yes, bad. But FOX really IS worse. The other networks at least don't just blatantly make stuff up and then call that news !
Fox actually went to the supreme court, fought and somehow WON a case that you can air something which is a completely made-up story with NO basis whatsoever in any facts or sources at all (in other words: pure, unadulterated fiction) and still get to call it "News". That's called OPINION. Calling opinion pieces NEWS is outright consumer fraud and it says everything you need to know about the American justice system that it managed to not only fail to prosecute that fraud, but actually RUBBER STAMP it in a precedent !
"You hereby have the permission of the United States supreme court to use the term 'news' widely understood to mean 'a story based on credible sources or actual events and facts' to describe a purely fictional account of a made up event with no basis in anything but the editor's imagination and NOT be accused of fraud".
You know, preventing fraudulent claims is actually a LEGITIMATE restriction on free speech, but apparently the supreme court doesn't think this is true if a big enough company is doing the speaking.
No other company in the history of the world have ever even TRIED to do that. Yes sometimes they lied as news, but only FOX would actually fight to get doing so LEGALIZED ! No, don't even TRY to tell me any other news organisation is that terrible.
PS. I'm going to guess you're not a Bill Maher style left libertarian.
PPS. The best news channels around these days are Al Jazeera and France24
Just because you cannot understand it, doesn't mean it's not logical. I also know my history better than most, I'm from a culture where guns are a major part of our history - and for some reason the people holding them were always doing bad things (depending which history books you read - the ones I was given in school called them heroes, but I don't think slaughtering ten-thousand people in a battle so one-sided that nobody on the other side died at all is a GOOD thing).
Either way - history is full of war, war is an exception to the rule. What is being debated is not history but day-to-day civilian life.
As for "real" statistics, you seem to define "real" as "can be interpreted to support my preconceived ideas". Ironically I already showed that the SAME statistics you use can ALSO support the OPPOSITE view, and I had the intellectual honesty you lack to admit that some of the statistics which favour my position could be interpreted as favoring yours.
Statistics on crime are less than useless in this discussion but luckily we don't need them because crime is not that big of a deal as you make it (and guns had nothing to do with it since crime rates have been dropping world wide for a century regardless of gun laws). The risk of a car accident is much higher than of being a crime victim for most people - and indeed here's a real and USEFUL statistics: criminals almost NEVER target people randomly, indeed they hardly EVER target individuals or households. Businesses yes, but not households.
Household crime is almost ALWAYS committed by somebody you know - and that person is almost always a member of your OWN household.
So the person who is your BIGGEST threat to you crime wise, has access to your gun and since these things are hardly ever planned, will get to it before you can.
Even if you can prove beyond any dispute that owning a gun makes you safer from attacks by strangers (which are BY FAR the most UNCOMMON form of crime in the world and has been for a hundred years) you wouldn't win because that's not the point. I can concede that guns mitigate some risk there with ease. But owning a gun INTRODUCES risks as well - and it's very easy to show that the risk you GAIN from owning a gun is far larger than the risks you mitigate. For starters, a statistic from my government: gun owners are 6 times more likely to the targets of housebreakings and robberies. Sound surprising ? Why would criminals CHOOSE to target armed people ? Because they know responsible gun owners have their guns and ammo stored separately - and are thus not likely to be able to respond with them anyway, but they have guns - which are an incredibly valuable resource to steal. They steal guns, to sell to other criminals or to use for robbing businesses (where there is MONEY).
Own a gun - and you increase your risk of being robbed, because criminals want to steal your gun, they also know you are armed so the risk of them being prepared to KILL you to get what they want escalates massively as well.
Then add the risk escalation in domestic violence and the death rate escalation in suicide cases on top. Sure, a gun could protect you if you are attacked, but you probably never will be. On the other hand, having a gun massively increases the risk you'll be shot for or by your own gun.
I have qualms about all types of guns being legal (because by that logic why can't civilians own nuclear weapons then ?) but even if I ignore those - the maths just don't add up. Owning a gun is a much bigger risk than the risk of being attacked by criminals (and owning one increases that risk) - so why would I want to ?
And I don't hate guns, I'm a former national team shot and my sister shot in the Olympics. I am very good with guns, I was raised with one in a culture even more gun-loving than yours. But I can add up - and my sports guns are stored at the gun-club, never ever in my house.
Actually - quite a few of them were involved with those systems (though mostly they were expats living the USA by then). By the time the free software movement started taking hold quite a few of the pioneers were from South Africa. One of the first was Paul Sheer - who wrote mcedit (the text editor bundled with midnight commander) for example. Another South African born engineer Theo De Raadt wrote OpenBSD.
Sshhh don't tell him but third world South Africa was running it's social welfare program with a database on a mainframe back in the 1960s. Punch-cards and all.
I actually met the guy who was the chief operator/programmer on it once (in the late 90's), he declared in conversation that "I wrote code to manage a database of millions of entries on a computer with 64Kb of RAM that filled an entire floor in our building. The commodore 64 had the same memory and three times the CPU power in 1980 and you could carry it in a briefcase. That was good, the downside is: programmers nowadays don't know how to write efficient software anymore".
Many of the great computer companies of the past were NOT American, and even the ones that were exported widely. I had a comodore 64 in the early 1980's and I used it's manual to learn to program a few years later using Microsoft BASIC on a 286. A few years after that I was learning Turbo Pascal - and this was all before I went to high-school.
We in the rest of the world did in fact have access to many of the same technologies the US did, and when we did not - we generally DID know about it, and of course South Africa was probably the LEAST exposed to such technologies because until 1989 we were under export sanctions so companies in the US weren't ALLOWED to sell us stuff.
Not that this stopped most of them - all they did was create a wholy-owned company registered INSIDE South Africa that manufactured the goods locally. If anything sanctions created a great deal of employment for South Africans and actually postponed the end of apartheid. It had some weird consequences too: Pepsi refused to use the loophole (claiming they supported the anti-appartheid movement), Coca-Cola had no such qualms and built a bottling plant in South Africa. As a result: to this day, Coca-Cola remains the preferred soft drink here (even among black people) and pepsi hardly sells in the few stores that bother to stock it at all because two generations of South Africans grew up in a world where Pepsi didn't exist but Coca-Cola did.
And the best choice in gun for a woman is a revolver, because they hardly ever jam. For genuine self-defense purposes, a pocket-sized revolver is by far the most effective weapon you can have. At the short range (which is the only range in which you can claim self-defense) it's almost impossible to miss with, it is almost impossible to jam and you do not NEED a high rate of fire - indeed every study shows that the advantage of firing your second shot quicker is completely eradicated by the risk of a gun-jam.
This makes pistols a bad idea for self defense, let alone assault weapons. Such weapons are useful in wars, used by trained soldiers who maintain them almost religiously. For home or personal defence they are less than useless. On the other hand - for shooting up a school they work all too well.
So... since they aren't actually useful for the job you are using to defend gun-rights, why do you care if gun-rights include them ? If you want to start handing out revolvers to college girls on the other hand, I would support your right to do so - provided you require they take a proficiency and gun-safety test before taking delivery. Having the government require is really not the great evil you make it out to be. South Africa (where I live) has had mandatory universal gun registration and gun-ownership licensing for decades. Automatic weapons cannot be legally owned by civilians (though some former soldiers have licenses for them) - and we have one of the highest gun-ownership rates in the world. The licensing has done nothing to reduce gun ownership. The regulations have only altered what type of guns people own.
We have the highest gun-crime rate in the world by the way - 18000 a year (that's 7000 more than you)... so all those guns clearly didn't do much to stop crime (which fits my theory that there are so many other factors involved in crime rates that gun statistics are less than useless) but we've never HAD a school shooting (well not since the years of the political revolt against apartheid and those were politically motivated drive-by's). Not once has a crazy person walked into a school with an automatic rifle and shot a lot of people dead. Our culture and history are a very close parallel to America's - but that just doesn't happen here. Maybe, it's because around here - almost nobody actually OWNS an automatic rifle ?
>Or statistics like: people defend themselves from violent crime with guns 20 or more times for every crime actually committed with a gun?
You do realize that what you just said is logically and mathematically impossible right ? Even if it was true - it wouldn't explain the statistic, but the alternate statistic you cite would be well known (be sure the NRA would market it widely).
>And quite frankly, I don't give the slightest damn about the suicide figures. In places where guns are not available (Japan is one example) people commit suicide by other means. To use your own argument: show me cause-and-effect.
That claim is proven false by the second part of the statistic I DID give. Guns don't change the suicide attempt rate, but they definitely DO increase the suicide rate. Men use guns more often than women, and as a result suicide attempts among men are much higher - indeed, men are 4 times more likely to die from suicide than women are as I said - and this is DESPITE the suicide attempt rate actually being somewhat HIGHER among women.
As for your points on crime there - they aren't actually all that meaningful - because there are several BETTER explanations for dropping crime rates. More importantly while day-to-day type gun crime have gone down, large-scale gun MASSACRES have gone UP! The USA has the highest rate of gun-death in the Western World - over 11000 people every year die from guns. Canada shows that gun-ownership is not the issue, but then most liberals have never asked to ban guns. The liberal point was that gun massacres (and indeed most other gun crime) tend to use specific high-powered weaponry that can kill a great many people in a short spate of time. Nobody needs THAT for self-defense. The only possible USE of a gun like that is to kill a lot of people very fast and there is absolutely NO legal situation where that is an acceptable action.
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>It's difficult to sell software when everyone has the source code and can make one minor tweak and sell it as their own.
So use the GPL - if you use BSD licenses then you CHOSE to allow that.
>Support contracts? What general consumer will buy a support contract? They aren't even widely needed if your software is of high enough quality. Not all software is business software nor should it be.
Just because many Linux companies couldn't make business sense doesn't mean nobody can. There are far better models out there, followed by many of them. One of them I used to follow. For many years I developed the most widely used cybercafe management software for Linux on the market (these days cybercafe's are dying out because of the proliferation of mobile so I don't see any fun in that any more but back then it was a major piece of code). I became quite wealthy off it, even though it was a GPL program and freely downloadable, and even though most of it's users were third-world small businesses who had just been founded and were only interested in it because it cost nothing.
So how did I make money then you ask ? Easy. I made the program freely available, but I offered a very useful service. Some companies weren't so small - they were doing things like franchise cybercafe systems - they wanted extra custom features (like paid-for-page-printing going onto your cybercafe bill for example) I developed those features for them - at a steep hourly rate. Of course somebody else could have done it cheaper - but nobody knew the software as well as I did and nobody else could do it as well, and as fast as I could. I had a LOT of business. Then they had a choice - I could add their component to the publicly available GPL version for everybody to benefit from (as they benefited from features others had paid for) or they could have exclusivity - their version folded into a new fork licensed only for their exclusive use. If they chose the latter - I doubled the hourly rate (since I would have to repeat the work later from scratch if somebody else wanted that feature and possibly be forced to hire somebody to do a clean-room version) and of course, I charged to maintain the fork - so if they wanted any features from the next release it cost them extra.
Only one large franchisee ever chose the latter option - they felt exclusivity of their version was that important to them - interestingly, they were the only one who didn't do very well and become highly profitable... not saying that was their only mistake - but I can say their exclusivity didn't save them.
No - there are many ways to make money out of free software and a lot of people have gotten quite rich that way. Support is just one way - it's just silly that so many people have thought it's the only (or for most software even a GOOD) way.
As for your second paragraph - I never said "always" - I said "almost always". However, now you are once again blaming Linux for a third-party developer. It's not the distro or OS developers who wrote Cabal - if it didn't meet your needs, you could have contributed back to the project, or at least filed bug reports and helped it to become so. I am listed in the Help|About of the Lazarus project for exactly that reason - I was using it to develop an educational typing tutor a few years ago and it was lacking a number of features I desperately needed, I didn't complain about it, I took the source code for lazarus - ADDED the features I was missing and contributed it back to them. Best thing - now I didn't' have to maintain those features, the whole community could benefit from them - and improve them, in fact by the next official release they were significantly better than the versions I'd written. If you're a developer of all things complaining about the features of free software then you don't DESERVE to have those features. If you didn't think YOUR time was worth contributing it to something that cost you NOTHING why should somebody ELSE have contributed THEIRS ? Why do you get to complain because they didn't ?
In t
>If you restrict yourself to just the packages in, say, ubuntu, then you are working with a platform that is a million times more restrictive than OS X or Windows.
That's just plain false, Ubuntu's repos are the single largest software repository in the world, not to mention - getting to work as a repo based package is spectacularly easy.
>Even iOS is more "open" than Ubuntu's official package manager.
>Anybody with a hundred bucks can get their product deployed on iOS. Getting your app into Ubuntu's package system is far more difficult.
It took me all of an hour to get a PPA for my current project running - now Ubuntu is building and providing packages to their users (and their downstream distro's like Mint) containing my packages. Oh and it didn't cost me a hundred bucks - and nobody got to tell me; "We refuse to include your package because we don't like what it's thematically about" - while Jobs was raging over keeping iphone porn-free, Ubuntu had Gnaughty in it's repo's for years (it was only removed because it was unmaintained).
>My experience is I always quickly find something I want to do that is impossible if I stick to the official packages. I can install third party software on my mac without causing any issues, why isn't the same thing possible on Linux?
Did I say "official" ? I just said "repos" - there are very few times I've ever needed to do something that isn't in the official repos, and there has never been a time when I couldn't find what I want in a third-party repo. Granted third-party repos are somewhat more risky (but if you're careful about which ones you add they are STILL less risky than random third-party providers on other platforms) - and you get all the advanced benefits of the apt system (or equivalents like yum) - including automatic dependency resolution.
Of course if you define "do something" as "use the same program" then you may get trouble - if you are prepared to consider alternatives - there are very, very few apps that don't have a native Linux equal - which is usually superior.
>It's not hard, I just unzip the downloaded file, double click the app icon it spits out, and I've got the third party software installed. Drag the app icon to the trash and it's properly and cleanly uninstalled. Why can't linux achieve the same thing? Because of fragmentation. Fragmentation is holding linux back.
No - Linux doesn't WANT to achieve the same thing because it's a horrible, horrible, horrible and stupid design. Sure it's convenient as all hell but it's terribly insecure and massively bloated. The only way to make apps do that is to basically refuse any third-party dependencies or alternatively to hard-link any such dependencies in - that means making every app about a hundred times bigger, all of it space that could have been shared in a single library for every app that needs it - getting dependencies automatically resolved is far better. More-over, it means that either all apps are limited to a single user (which basically means you're screwed in multi-user desktop environments - which many of us actually USE - or need to reinstall every app for every user) or you give the users full root access to install - which is incredibly stupid.
That is exactly why viruses for Linux are nearly impossible to write but are common on windows and rapidly growing more common on Mac. Because people use repositories to install software on Linux - the software get vetted before it is available - by third-party professionals, normal users aren't expected to be able to tell trustworthy software from malware. More-over the software code is audited by third-parties with no commercial interest in it, It's very rare that something goes bad in that system (which is why, when it does go bad, it's big news).
Mind you - if that system is so perfect, why did apple themselves abandon it for IOS and go for a repository based system (the app store) - they don't even allow third-party repositories ! No if anything the proliferation of commercia
There would be...
On the other hand, that would mean using Unity.
I mean homosexuality is one thing but that's just perverted !
>Unless de Icaza's awful UI philosophy pervades the entire Gnome team...
I suspect his UI philosophy is indistinguishable from the one at Apple, so I hope he will finally be happy - and preferably, no longer newsworthy.
At least the man command on linux isn't just a quick-search for gayporn.
On the other hand, Linux is somewhat lacking in terms of a quick-search for gayporn so I guess it evens out... although nepomuk is getting there..
>My guess is that in this case this is an Ableton Libe problem and not an OS X problem.
Hey if Linux can get blamed for the misbehaviour of proprietory apps, and indeed if proprietory app-makers can complain that they cannot build for every linux system (when NO free software developer ever has that problem - it comes from not playing by the rules, if you give us the source, you never have to build for ANYTHING - each distro will build it for itself and you need not know how ANY of them does it) then blaming apple for the behaviour of an application sold for apple is simply tit for tat.
Linux people always hear Linux being blamed for the faillures of third parties. But oddly, software in the repo almost always "just works" - the problems almost always comes in from stuff that are't in the repos and are not in fact maintainable by the community whom you are blaming for it's failure. People have tried and failed to solve this for years (the gaming companies almost all went for self-extracting archivesin uuencoded shell scripts for example).
A user's experience of working on a platform is determined just as much by the platform and those who develop well for it, as by those who develop badly for it. This is utterly unfair and irrational but it's nevertheless true.
How much better would some of the GP's have rated the linux desktop if they limited themselves to ONLY the stuff in the repos (and that's without getting into a free software only argument - which I personally DO believe in and stick to).
People actually feel their linux experience is harmed because skype on linux is so inferior to skype on windows - but that is not only skype (or now microsoft)'s fault, it's not something linux developers CAN do anything about whatsoever. The best we could do is offer ekiga - but that has so little market-share that it doesn't solve the problem.
So tit for tat I say.
That all said - whenever I have to use any windows platform it irritates the living daylights out of me, which is why I stick to mint+KDE. I tried a Mac a while ago... yuerch... it just didn't want to work the way *I* want to work.
Nobody tells me how my desktop should function, that's MY decision, because I am most productive in a system set up and customized to my particular workflows. The only desktop that actually respects that is KDE.
Agreed, I didn't say Canonical matured it, I said it matured - but I am well aware it's the upstream guys who matured it.
Canonicals mistake wasn't so much going pulse - as going pulse way before it was really ready.
I must admit - I was a pulse hater for years, it never worked nice on ANY of my computers. Dozens of apps would just be a nightmare to support, and with wine it was even worse (well wine still doesn't have official support for it but at least there's a ppa with the pulse-patch available).
I still think Canonical made a big mistake at pushing it so hard so long before it was ready. Many cards wouldn't work, many apps wouldn't work - and a lot of users had real issues - users for whom ALSA at that point had been working perfectly.
What's worse, not only did they make it a nightmare to disable - every release they went and hacked away whatever work-around those who couldn't use it had been doing to disable it. We disable it by removing the packages - suddenly the next release X won't run if you remove them. So we find a way to disable the startup script... next release, the startup script is gone entirely and now it starts in some mysterious manner...
If your card didn't play nice with the first few years of ultra-buggy and incomplete pulse releases, well Ubuntu would do their damndest to make sure you had NO sound at all.
Many of us moved away from Ubuntu at the time (I ended up in Mint via Slackware) at least in part because of pulse.
That all said, I'll admit that pulse has stabilised and completed over the past few years, been running with it on in Mint since Lisa and I'm quite happy with it (then again, I also replaced all my PC's in the meantime so it may be just as broken for those who still have ca2001 Soundblaster Live cards).
>For someone who loves choice so much you're pretty hard set on X fanaticism. In any other arena X would be described as a monopoly.
On what basis ? X was originally created by MIT in the early 80's since then there has a been litterally dozens of implementations ,every single Unix shipped it's own (usually proprietary since the MIT license allows proprietary forks) X implementation. Even in the Linux world there are TWO X versions - XFree86 was the one of choice for distro's for a decade and a half, before a fork - x.org largely motivated by a change in the XFree86 license became the new preferred one in around 2005.
>Should Canonical not be allowed the freedom to compete? Or should your zealotry force their roadmap?
>We have competing window managers, competing graphical toolkits, competing desktop environments, X even has competing methods of rendering, a competing display server will make things interesting and looks like it's paving the way for easier cross platform application development.
Compete ? Sure, but cooperate is better. Every other "competing" item on your list cooperates with the others, gnome and KDE has agreed on a standard for dozens of things, hence we have dbus, the .desktop file standard etc. etc. etc.
The word that used to be popular to describe how we do things was coopetition - we cooperated AND compete, because we aren't trying to win, we're just trying to inspire each other to do better.
>Chances are Mir will be an open source, open spec standard under a nicey nice GPLish license allowing freedom of choice to distributions, application developers and end users alike.
You don't think you should verify something that important before betting on it ? I didn't either - but I'm not going to assume until I know. Canonical has done non-free stuff before after all.
>Linux has been a fractured splintered platform for well over a decade, this doesn't really make that much of a difference.
I'd go one further, history is filled with things wanting to outdo X out of this perception that X has some kind of heavy network overhead (it doesn't - X uses no networking at all locally - it uses IPC - using a communications model between windows and windowing system is actually a brilliant idea that almost EVERY post-X graphical environment COPIED - they all do it. Windows didn't for a long time, but we aren't competing with Win9x anymore now are we ?)
Fact is - I agree with your basic precept - if Canonical wants to try this, that's their right. I think it's incredibly stupid of them but if I'm proven wrong, that's fine too. However, a valid conclusion does not mean your premisses aren't based on made up and incorrect facts - so now, you know better :D
Since you do not have the freedom to kill people, owning the means to do so does not give you any greater freedom.
Now if you are arguing for hunting and the like - well frankly then there is absolutely NO reason to believe your argument should extend to weaponry which applies SOLELY to the purpose of killing HUMANS with. These weapons aren't even very useful for self-defense.
Frankly NOBODY actually has any NEED for them EXCEPT for murderers or wannabe murderers.
Your freedom ends where mine begins - and mine includes the right to NOT be around that kind of weapons, in the same way it includes the right to ask you to NOT smoke in my vicinity.
All the things you can legally do with a gun, are best achieved with guns which are essentially unaffected by gun control laws.
The only people who benefit from fighting it are gun-manufacturers.
Consumer level... honestly - wikipedia is about the best resource you'll find for consumer level discussion on all of the above.
But for specifically socialist libertarianism - among the best today is Noam Chomsky's work (all the books that are NOT about linguistics I mean).
There are more than one kind of libertarian, until Ayn Rand the word would NEVER have been applied to capitalists for example. Libertarianism is a political philosophy which is NOT in fact distinct from anarchism. Some libertarians will ACCEPT minarchism but only as a pragmatic compromise for full anarchism.
In fact the word libertarian was coined specifically to be able to write anarchist philosophy without contravening Napoleon's law forbidding anarchist propaganda.
What most American's today call "libertarian" is a recent redefinition of an idea dating back hundreds of years which is quite at odds to the real philosophy in many ways.
Socialist libertarians would indeed include Bill Maher (and interestingly Bill O'Reily knows and recognizes this even though you do not), Noam Chomsky is a socialist libertarian, the philosophy of participatory democracy is a socialist-libertarian philosophy.
You see libertarianism doesn't actually have anything to DO with economics. It's a POLITICAL philosophy - a form of anarchism. Capitalist libertarians had to water down the anarchism because their ideas of economics cannot work without authority-systems, both in business and in the form of government as an arbitrator. Socialist libertarians have no government at all (so they are also quite distinct from state-based socialism), and propose a form of socialism based entirely on voluntary participation with laws made by the people who have to live under them themselves through consensus voting systems - in most versions the votes are weighed so the more impact a law has on your personal life, the more votes you have on it - thus preventing a tyranny of the majority problem.
Socialist libertarians mostly reject the idea of a money-based economy entirely and entirely reject all forms of authority - including in business (the only business form socialist libertarians would legally allow to exist are worker-owned cooperations).
I find it hilarious everytime Americans think they know what "libertarian" means and have never actually read anything about it's history, or the major division between left and right libertarians (and which one has actually once been the government of a very successful state - which would survived for 20 years in the 20th century despite being simultaneously invaded by capitalists AND communists - socialist libertarians don't get along with either but also proved that you can have a successful military that can fend of invasions by two LARGER armies for two decades without any formal system of command authority).
No my friend - you are committing the no-true-Scotsman fallacy and I am being kind enough to assume it was out of ignorance - now you know better.
PS. I am a socialist libertarian myself.
1) Slaves were free to quit.
2) Working hours are X to Y != "autonomy over your time"
3) "If you work for NOBODY and don't have capital and skill to run a business you starve" != free to quit.
Voluntarily being subjected to number 2 doesn't make it NOT slavery in the same way that a slave who chose to serve another 7 years was STILL a slave.
Yes, I know that, I gave free software examples knowing they were later because I actually know their names.
That doesn't mean there weren't expat engineers working for IBM and DEC in the age of PDPs, I know for a fact there was.
>Slaves are not paid. If you are paid and free to leave for a better job, you are not a slave. Possibly an idiot but not in any way a slave.
False: definition of slavery: "One who does not have sole autonomy over how he spends his time" - as per Plato.
By that definition - nearly all wage-earners ARE in fact slaves. The definition says nothing about income (slaves DID get paid - even in the modern age - they just did not get paid in MONEY but instead in board and food). Neither does it say anything about being able to leave: ancient laws actually GUARANTEED a slave's right to freedom. The specifics varied by nation but NOBODY in the ancient world was a slave for life - and their definition of a slave was exactly the same as our definition of an employee. The only difference is that employees get cash and (usually) don't get free housing and food.
The concept of working hours didn't even exist until the Industrial revolution, when it was instituted as a substitute for the recently abolished slavery. Part of why slavery got abolished by people whose religion actively endorsed it is because they had to acknowledge that nobody was actually following the RULES their religion had about how to do it. Rules that included: guaranteed rights to LEAVE a position of slavery and become free.
In the Hebrew system for example slavery ended automatically after 7 years, at which time a slave could CHOOSE to serve for another 7 but such a choice had to be privately repeated to the high-priest (to give an impartial third-party a chance to ensure it wasn't coerced). Greek slaves were required to be freed after less time than that, and could be freed earlier by mutual agreement with their masters.
Wait the dissolution of a slaves state of slavery was simply an agreed dissolution of a contract ? Just like "I wish to resign my job".
No my friend, I think you'll find we're ALL slaves, in a world that has very, very few free men left. They live like kings, because they no longer have a slave or three, they have thousands.
>Don't believe me? Visit Somalia or somewhere else they simply don't exist. They know what poor is, you don't have a fucking clue.
Most of us would say that Somalia is proof of what happens when the GOVERNMENT is not good.
Business indeed can only function when government and society provides an environment that allows it to do so - in the absence of strong government, there is no business at all - result: Somalia, where you can't buy a fridge (and your life is worthless to boot).
What you say about the Non-FOX networks is true, and yes, bad. But FOX really IS worse.
The other networks at least don't just blatantly make stuff up and then call that news !
Fox actually went to the supreme court, fought and somehow WON a case that you can air something which is a completely made-up story with NO basis whatsoever in any facts or sources at all (in other words: pure, unadulterated fiction) and still get to call it "News".
That's called OPINION.
Calling opinion pieces NEWS is outright consumer fraud and it says everything you need to know about the American justice system that it managed to not only fail to prosecute that fraud, but actually RUBBER STAMP it in a precedent !
"You hereby have the permission of the United States supreme court to use the term 'news' widely understood to mean 'a story based on credible sources or actual events and facts' to describe a purely fictional account of a made up event with no basis in anything but the editor's imagination and NOT be accused of fraud".
You know, preventing fraudulent claims is actually a LEGITIMATE restriction on free speech, but apparently the supreme court doesn't think this is true if a big enough company is doing the speaking.
No other company in the history of the world have ever even TRIED to do that. Yes sometimes they lied as news, but only FOX would actually fight to get doing so LEGALIZED !
No, don't even TRY to tell me any other news organisation is that terrible.
PS. I'm going to guess you're not a Bill Maher style left libertarian.
PPS. The best news channels around these days are Al Jazeera and France24
Just because you cannot understand it, doesn't mean it's not logical.
I also know my history better than most, I'm from a culture where guns are a major part of our history - and for some reason the people holding them were always doing bad things (depending which history books you read - the ones I was given in school called them heroes, but I don't think slaughtering ten-thousand people in a battle so one-sided that nobody on the other side died at all is a GOOD thing).
Either way - history is full of war, war is an exception to the rule.
What is being debated is not history but day-to-day civilian life.
As for "real" statistics, you seem to define "real" as "can be interpreted to support my preconceived ideas". Ironically I already showed that the SAME statistics you use can ALSO support the OPPOSITE view, and I had the intellectual honesty you lack to admit that some of the statistics which favour my position could be interpreted as favoring yours.
Statistics on crime are less than useless in this discussion but luckily we don't need them because crime is not that big of a deal as you make it (and guns had nothing to do with it since crime rates have been dropping world wide for a century regardless of gun laws).
The risk of a car accident is much higher than of being a crime victim for most people - and indeed here's a real and USEFUL statistics: criminals almost NEVER target people randomly, indeed they hardly EVER target individuals or households. Businesses yes, but not households.
Household crime is almost ALWAYS committed by somebody you know - and that person is almost always a member of your OWN household.
So the person who is your BIGGEST threat to you crime wise, has access to your gun and since these things are hardly ever planned, will get to it before you can.
Even if you can prove beyond any dispute that owning a gun makes you safer from attacks by strangers (which are BY FAR the most UNCOMMON form of crime in the world and has been for a hundred years) you wouldn't win because that's not the point. I can concede that guns mitigate some risk there with ease. But owning a gun INTRODUCES risks as well - and it's very easy to show that the risk you GAIN from owning a gun is far larger than the risks you mitigate. For starters, a statistic from my government: gun owners are 6 times more likely to the targets of housebreakings and robberies.
Sound surprising ? Why would criminals CHOOSE to target armed people ? Because they know responsible gun owners have their guns and ammo stored separately - and are thus not likely to be able to respond with them anyway, but they have guns - which are an incredibly valuable resource to steal.
They steal guns, to sell to other criminals or to use for robbing businesses (where there is MONEY).
Own a gun - and you increase your risk of being robbed, because criminals want to steal your gun, they also know you are armed so the risk of them being prepared to KILL you to get what they want escalates massively as well.
Then add the risk escalation in domestic violence and the death rate escalation in suicide cases on top.
Sure, a gun could protect you if you are attacked, but you probably never will be. On the other hand, having a gun massively increases the risk you'll be shot for or by your own gun.
I have qualms about all types of guns being legal (because by that logic why can't civilians own nuclear weapons then ?) but even if I ignore those - the maths just don't add up. Owning a gun is a much bigger risk than the risk of being attacked by criminals (and owning one increases that risk) - so why would I want to ?
And I don't hate guns, I'm a former national team shot and my sister shot in the Olympics. I am very good with guns, I was raised with one in a culture even more gun-loving than yours.
But I can add up - and my sports guns are stored at the gun-club, never ever in my house.
Actually - quite a few of them were involved with those systems (though mostly they were expats living the USA by then).
By the time the free software movement started taking hold quite a few of the pioneers were from South Africa. One of the first was Paul Sheer - who wrote mcedit (the text editor bundled with midnight commander) for example.
Another South African born engineer Theo De Raadt wrote OpenBSD.
Wait... you consider your 4chan profile a "personal website" ?
Sshhh don't tell him but third world South Africa was running it's social welfare program with a database on a mainframe back in the 1960s. Punch-cards and all.
I actually met the guy who was the chief operator/programmer on it once (in the late 90's), he declared in conversation that "I wrote code to manage a database of millions of entries on a computer with 64Kb of RAM that filled an entire floor in our building. The commodore 64 had the same memory and three times the CPU power in 1980 and you could carry it in a briefcase. That was good, the downside is: programmers nowadays don't know how to write efficient software anymore".
Many of the great computer companies of the past were NOT American, and even the ones that were exported widely. I had a comodore 64 in the early 1980's and I used it's manual to learn to program a few years later using Microsoft BASIC on a 286. A few years after that I was learning Turbo Pascal - and this was all before I went to high-school.
We in the rest of the world did in fact have access to many of the same technologies the US did, and when we did not - we generally DID know about it, and of course South Africa was probably the LEAST exposed to such technologies because until 1989 we were under export sanctions so companies in the US weren't ALLOWED to sell us stuff.
Not that this stopped most of them - all they did was create a wholy-owned company registered INSIDE South Africa that manufactured the goods locally. If anything sanctions created a great deal of employment for South Africans and actually postponed the end of apartheid. It had some weird consequences too: Pepsi refused to use the loophole (claiming they supported the anti-appartheid movement), Coca-Cola had no such qualms and built a bottling plant in South Africa. As a result: to this day, Coca-Cola remains the preferred soft drink here (even among black people) and pepsi hardly sells in the few stores that bother to stock it at all because two generations of South Africans grew up in a world where Pepsi didn't exist but Coca-Cola did.
And the best choice in gun for a woman is a revolver, because they hardly ever jam.
For genuine self-defense purposes, a pocket-sized revolver is by far the most effective weapon you can have. At the short range (which is the only range in which you can claim self-defense) it's almost impossible to miss with, it is almost impossible to jam and you do not NEED a high rate of fire - indeed every study shows that the advantage of firing your second shot quicker is completely eradicated by the risk of a gun-jam.
This makes pistols a bad idea for self defense, let alone assault weapons.
Such weapons are useful in wars, used by trained soldiers who maintain them almost religiously. For home or personal defence they are less than useless.
On the other hand - for shooting up a school they work all too well.
So... since they aren't actually useful for the job you are using to defend gun-rights, why do you care if gun-rights include them ?
If you want to start handing out revolvers to college girls on the other hand, I would support your right to do so - provided you require they take a proficiency and gun-safety test before taking delivery.
Having the government require is really not the great evil you make it out to be. South Africa (where I live) has had mandatory universal gun registration and gun-ownership licensing for decades. Automatic weapons cannot be legally owned by civilians (though some former soldiers have licenses for them) - and we have one of the highest gun-ownership rates in the world. The licensing has done nothing to reduce gun ownership. The regulations have only altered what type of guns people own.
We have the highest gun-crime rate in the world by the way - 18000 a year (that's 7000 more than you)... so all those guns clearly didn't do much to stop crime (which fits my theory that there are so many other factors involved in crime rates that gun statistics are less than useless) but we've never HAD a school shooting (well not since the years of the political revolt against apartheid and those were politically motivated drive-by's).
Not once has a crazy person walked into a school with an automatic rifle and shot a lot of people dead. Our culture and history are a very close parallel to America's - but that just doesn't happen here.
Maybe, it's because around here - almost nobody actually OWNS an automatic rifle ?
>Or statistics like: people defend themselves from violent crime with guns 20 or more times for every crime actually committed with a gun?
You do realize that what you just said is logically and mathematically impossible right ? Even if it was true - it wouldn't explain the statistic, but the alternate statistic you cite would be well known (be sure the NRA would market it widely).
>And quite frankly, I don't give the slightest damn about the suicide figures. In places where guns are not available (Japan is one example) people commit suicide by other means. To use your own argument: show me cause-and-effect.
That claim is proven false by the second part of the statistic I DID give. Guns don't change the suicide attempt rate, but they definitely DO increase the suicide rate. Men use guns more often than women, and as a result suicide attempts among men are much higher - indeed, men are 4 times more likely to die from suicide than women are as I said - and this is DESPITE the suicide attempt rate actually being somewhat HIGHER among women.
As for your points on crime there - they aren't actually all that meaningful - because there are several BETTER explanations for dropping crime rates. More importantly while day-to-day type gun crime have gone down, large-scale gun MASSACRES have gone UP! The USA has the highest rate of gun-death in the Western World - over 11000 people every year die from guns. Canada shows that gun-ownership is not the issue, but then most liberals have never asked to ban guns.
The liberal point was that gun massacres (and indeed most other gun crime) tend to use specific high-powered weaponry that can kill a great many people in a short spate of time.
Nobody needs THAT for self-defense. The only possible USE of a gun like that is to kill a lot of people very fast and there is absolutely NO legal situation where that is an acceptable action.
I was making a joke, but good on you. If I was American, I'd have voted for her too.
I believe all 4 of them voted for Jill Stein last November.