Quite true. Pretty much all of these statistics are incredibly hazy and hard to pin down - I imagine there's some inflation in that number as well ("well, I had a gun! And I totally scared him off with it! I mean I'm certain he would have attacked me or something, and I didn't actually pull the gun on him, actually I think I left it home that day. But man, you shoulda seen me! I was a fucking hero, dude!")
In this case, the number comes (from what I can tell) from a phone survey. Which, at least, doesn't require that anything was reported to the government. But it does bring up a whole series of inaccuracies of its own.
Why do you insist on framing this as "people defending their homes from burglary"? Robberies are not the only crimes that occur.
Also, if you're allowed to multiply the chance of a gun accident by the number of years someone lives, I am allowed to multiply the chance of rape, murder, assault, and so forth. Multiplying by age is a red herring that you're using simply to make the number larger. Stop doing that, it's immaterial to the comparisons.
We're not looking at the raw "bad things" that guns cause. We're looking at the bad things compared to the good things.
You have proven that guns kill people. Congratulations.
Duh.
Of course guns kill people. That's all they're capable of doing. That is what they are designed to do, period. So of course you can find statistics that relatively a large number of people are killed by guns in what is, by far, the largest country with any significant gun ownership. This should be obvious to you.
Your statistics say nothing about how many crimes they stop. Your statistics say nothing about how many people are killed by other things when guns are not available.
Does the good outweigh the bad? I think so. I can't prove it, of course, but I think so.
But even assuming I'm wrong, the fact that 11,344 people are killed by guns in the US every year is not a proof of such. It's barely a data point.
If you want to prove that guns are a problem, you'll have to sit down and figure out exactly what good it is that they provide, quantize that, and compare it to the harm. Also, remember to not include deaths that would have been caused by other means if guns weren't available, appropriately pro-rated by likelihood. Good luck, because you'll need it.
Why do people keep taking what I'm saying out of context? When did I ever say this would have been solved by having a gun? I brought this story up as a counterpoint to raehl's comment:
If a criminal is breaking into your home, and you wake up, that criminal is going to leave. Criminals don't want head-to-head confrontation any more than you do.
I know of at least one case where this was simply not true. That's why I mentioned this. I wasn't attempting to make any other point with it - please stop trying to weave strawman arguments out of what I wrote.
Actually, that wasn't a made up number, though I did forget to link the paper itself. Here it is, direct from the DOJ. Check out the chart on page 9. (2:3:3, not 2:2:3.) Sorry for not making that clearer, though, I should have linked the paper there.
And yes, the 1.5 million number is possibly an overestimation. It's rather impossible to say, unfortunately - a good deal of that aforementioned page 9 discusses the problems involved in getting that number, and why it's probably inaccurate. However, you can't honestly be claiming that it's an overestimation by two orders of magnitude, which is what your original estimate would require.
First off, I was replying the comment before me, which said that for each person who saved their home with a firearm, there were 10 who were hurt by accidental gunfire. I was pointing out that instead of the ratio being 1:10, it was more like 1000:1. I never actually said that this ratio was acceptable.
However, I do believe that it is.
First, you're making up wild numbers to "prove" your case. Gun ownership is estimated around 200 million - given that previous number of 1150 accidents, that implies that there's a one in 170,000 chance that your gun will accidentally kill someone. Also, given the 1.5 million crimes prevented, that's a one in 133 chance that you will prevent a criminal from committing a crime. Not, necessarily, from stealing your TV. Looking at the paper quoted there, this appears to be about a 2:3:3 ratio of rape, assault, and robbery. So out of that 1.5 million crimes, that's about 375 thousand rapes averted.
Is preventing the rape of 300 women worth a single innocent life?
Is preventing the rape of 300 women, plus the assault of 450 people, plus 450 robberies, worth a single innocent life?
(Also, consider the chance that some of those potential rapes would end in murder. Apparently only two percent of rapes end in murder, so that means there's about six murders prevented there as well. Versus a single accidental death. That is a trade I would be willing to take.)
If you can sit there and say "okay, I have looked at the numbers and I still think guns are fundamentally a bad idea", then, okay, you've made a decision, and I'll respect your decision. But as long as your decision is based on wild extrapolation and guesswork, it's not a particularly valuable one.
As a side note: one of my friends was robbed while home a few months ago. The criminals broke in, held them at gunpoint, and discussed raping his girlfriend, which they decided not to do because they didn't want to risk hanging around too long. At least some criminals aren't particularly afraid of head-to-head confrontation.
I agree that we need reasonable, well-thought-out laws on this matter. That reasonable regulation should be based on facts and actual numbers. Please research before inventing numbers and making claims.
Here is a blog where someone's mentioned a lot of the statistics. The number of gun accidents, as he discovered, is somewhere around 1150/year. The number of crimes prevented is apparently somewhere around 1.5 MILLION per year.
So, yes. Citation needed. Your gut feeling that guns are evil is not, in any way, proof.
As for your last point, the land-based receivers are quite obviously much smaller than the equivalent amount of solar panels would be.
As for the first two points, once again I'm not saying that space satellites are necessarily better. I'm just saying they're different. Neither of us knows the exact numbers involved.
For #2, for example, land cost is a recurring cost over time thanks to property and land taxes, while launching a satellite only has to be done once. And launches are getting cheaper, and surface area up there is much cheaper than it is down here while weight is much more expensive than it is down here. Which ends up being cheaper overall? I have no idea.
I've mentioned this in other comments, but space is really really big. I mean, think about it - even if you ignore different orbits, there's more space "surface area" than there is land "surface area". We're a long way away from running out of space up there.
I also mentioned that it would probably be cheaper to launch a small fleet of non-geosynchronous satellites, although again I don't know the numbers and this is basically speculation.
It's a factor because of transmission costs and because of the availability of good land for this. Good land for solar panels tends to be good land for other things as well, unless it's off in the middle of nowhere, in which case you get the giant-cable-maintenance problem again. Trying to build a solar farm next to the Bay Area, for example, would be pretty impractical, while two or three receiving stations would be a lot cheaper.
My position is still that I, and most of the people in this thread, don't actually know enough to determine whether space solar makes sense:)
(I do agree that nuclear is hilariously underused though. Get these damn rabid Greenpeace members out of my energy generation, dammit)
First off, geosynchronous may or may not be a good idea. Geosynchronous orbit is painfully expensive, and in most cases it's far more cost-effective to launch a large number of low-orbit satellites. If receiver stations were placed in various locations, satellites could just lock on to a different receiver as they pass over the globe. (On top of this, it means that a lot of different countries could theoretically buy energy at various times from this - it might even be worth placing receiver stations in third-world countries, since it's not like the power would be doing anything useful if it wasn't getting sold.)
Second, space is really really big. Even with the space junk we have up there already, impacts are spectacularly rare. It's a factor, but it's not a huge factor.
Third, why fix the broken panels? I highly suspect it would turn out to be cheaper to simply launch more satellites, at least until we have some kind of orbital repair bots. As long as the core electronics are reasonably redundant, the thing can stay up there as long as it's got a single working panel.
Wind. Daily drastic temperature shifts. I don't know if the poles snow at all, but if they do, you'll have to rig up a system to clear the snow off. Wipers have moving parts which tend to jam and break, heating coils would massively exacerbate the temperature-shift problem. Getting the power to someplace useful - are you going to run a giant cable to Canada? If so, what kind of maintenance is it going to need? Or are you going to bounce the power off a satellite, doubling transmission losses compared to the satellite-based systems and requiring a satellite launch anyway?
Space has its own set of problems, of course. Radiation, magnetic fields, and if you go into darkness at all, an entire new set of temperature-shift issues. But there's far less atmosphere, and therefore heating the entire spacecraft during "night" to eliminate temperature shift problems is much more feasible. (I don't know if it [i]is[/i] feasible, note. It's just less ridiculous.)
I'm not saying that either of these is better, again. I'm just saying that they involve different sets of challenges, and that without quite a lot of knowledge of the problem (which I certainly don't have) it's hard to say which is actually worse.
I don't know if he's correct, but even a small amount of thought should show you a lot of possible ways.
* No exposure to the elements, thus reduced maintenance cost from wind/weeds/corrosion * No land cost * No clouds, no day/night cycle * Cost is based on weight, not on land, potentially allowing for use of extremely large light cheap panels instead of smaller denser more expensive ones
Does it make up for the difference? I couldn't say. But there's four ways in which space beats land in terms of efficiency.
Republicans believe in lowering taxes and increasing government spending. They also believe in promoting rights that everyone wants (like firearm ownership) and removing rights that nobody cares about (like gay marriage). Democrats believe in increasing government spending and lowering taxes. They also believe in promoting rights that everyone wants (like gay marriage) and removing rights that nobody cares about (like firearm ownership).
That's the fundamental difference. Everything else is pretty much identical.
Actually, yes, you plug in a new monitor on Windows and it just works. I've never had hardware acceleration be disabled. I've never had to install new drivers. I don't even know how "stereo" applies to a monitor, and I've never had mirroring on by default either.
It does take a small amount of extra time to tell it where the monitor is located - that could be made simpler with some kind of a popup window. Similarly, rotating the monitor can take a little bit of effort also, and annoyingly, this is located in a different place from the monitor location.
But for most people, the only slightly difficult problem is realizing that you have to go into the display settings control panel to tell Windows where it is. None of the other items even need to be worried about.
My ISP has an optional firewall with quite a few settings, including "block outgoing port 25 to any system besides our mail servers". The option can be changed easily through the user control panel, and defaults to one of the more secure settings.
From what I hear, the American entrepreneurial spirit is still almost exclusive to this country. Obviously there are entrepreneurs in other countries as well, but it's not as ingrained into the culture as it is here.
You can't throw a rock without hitting someone trying to start a company around here, and so there's [i]plenty[/i] of things to fund. EU labor laws apparently make Europeans significantly more conservative, both due to how safe people's jobs are (keeping people from wanting to leave their jobs and start a company) and due to how hard it often is to fire people (making hiring people a much bigger risk than it is here).
America's philosophy of firing people with no notice means that self-employment is significantly more attractive, and hiring people is significantly less risky. Whatever else you may say about it, it's very good conditions to start a business in.
[i]DirectX 10 isn't doing as well as DirectX9 because of its exclusivity on a platform thats user base is shrinking. DX 11 will be no better. The fact that OpenGL is and always has been technologically superior might soon become apparent.[/i]
I have to disagree with this one. OpenGL is simpler at the things OpenGL natively supports, but OpenGL's weakness has been that it really doesn't natively support the newest features for quite a while. The latest DirectX always has support for features that the majority of cards haven't even touched yet, but OpenGL tends to lag a few notches behind . . . well . . . everything.
(For example, just now I'm trying to figure out how to do triple-buffering in OpenGL. As near as I can tell, the answer is "you can't".)
The reason DirectX became dominant was, partially, because it's just [i]easier[/i] to deal with the unified DirectX documentation than it is to troll through eight thousand unrelated card-specific extensions. Apparently some of this is going to be fixed with OGL 3.0, and I'm looking forward to that, but OGL 3.0 ain't here yet.
[i]Something like timing between keystrokes clearly doesn't fit the bill(depends on age, sex etc.)[/i]
You're not processing it correctly.
Yes, you can definitely find a correlation between typing speed and age. Can't really question that. But if you're using keystrokes as a random number source, you don't use the high bits. You use the low bits. If there's an even number of microseconds between keystrokes, it's a 0. If there's an odd number of microseconds between keystrokes, it's a 1.
I would find it extremely unlikely that [i]that[/i] particular number is biased based on age, sex, etc.
Obviously the same things can be used for network latency and mouse movement timing.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite true. Pretty much all of these statistics are incredibly hazy and hard to pin down - I imagine there's some inflation in that number as well ("well, I had a gun! And I totally scared him off with it! I mean I'm certain he would have attacked me or something, and I didn't actually pull the gun on him, actually I think I left it home that day. But man, you shoulda seen me! I was a fucking hero, dude!")
In this case, the number comes (from what I can tell) from a phone survey. Which, at least, doesn't require that anything was reported to the government. But it does bring up a whole series of inaccuracies of its own.
Why do you insist on framing this as "people defending their homes from burglary"? Robberies are not the only crimes that occur.
Also, if you're allowed to multiply the chance of a gun accident by the number of years someone lives, I am allowed to multiply the chance of rape, murder, assault, and so forth. Multiplying by age is a red herring that you're using simply to make the number larger. Stop doing that, it's immaterial to the comparisons.
We're not looking at the raw "bad things" that guns cause. We're looking at the bad things compared to the good things.
You have proven that guns kill people. Congratulations.
Duh.
Of course guns kill people. That's all they're capable of doing. That is what they are designed to do, period. So of course you can find statistics that relatively a large number of people are killed by guns in what is, by far, the largest country with any significant gun ownership. This should be obvious to you.
Your statistics say nothing about how many crimes they stop. Your statistics say nothing about how many people are killed by other things when guns are not available.
Does the good outweigh the bad? I think so. I can't prove it, of course, but I think so.
But even assuming I'm wrong, the fact that 11,344 people are killed by guns in the US every year is not a proof of such. It's barely a data point.
48 thousand people were killed in car accidents in 2004 (page 33). Let's ban cars!
If you want to prove that guns are a problem, you'll have to sit down and figure out exactly what good it is that they provide, quantize that, and compare it to the harm. Also, remember to not include deaths that would have been caused by other means if guns weren't available, appropriately pro-rated by likelihood. Good luck, because you'll need it.
[citation needed]
(I can do this all day if I have to, at least I found some evidence such as DOJ reports.)
And if you read this branch of comments, you'd find that I mention that.
Why do people keep taking what I'm saying out of context? When did I ever say this would have been solved by having a gun? I brought this story up as a counterpoint to raehl's comment:
If a criminal is breaking into your home, and you wake up, that criminal is going to leave. Criminals don't want head-to-head confrontation any more than you do.
I know of at least one case where this was simply not true. That's why I mentioned this. I wasn't attempting to make any other point with it - please stop trying to weave strawman arguments out of what I wrote.
Actually, that wasn't a made up number, though I did forget to link the paper itself. Here it is, direct from the DOJ. Check out the chart on page 9. (2:3:3, not 2:2:3.) Sorry for not making that clearer, though, I should have linked the paper there.
And yes, the 1.5 million number is possibly an overestimation. It's rather impossible to say, unfortunately - a good deal of that aforementioned page 9 discusses the problems involved in getting that number, and why it's probably inaccurate. However, you can't honestly be claiming that it's an overestimation by two orders of magnitude, which is what your original estimate would require.
First off, I was replying the comment before me, which said that for each person who saved their home with a firearm, there were 10 who were hurt by accidental gunfire. I was pointing out that instead of the ratio being 1:10, it was more like 1000:1. I never actually said that this ratio was acceptable.
However, I do believe that it is.
First, you're making up wild numbers to "prove" your case. Gun ownership is estimated around 200 million - given that previous number of 1150 accidents, that implies that there's a one in 170,000 chance that your gun will accidentally kill someone. Also, given the 1.5 million crimes prevented, that's a one in 133 chance that you will prevent a criminal from committing a crime. Not, necessarily, from stealing your TV. Looking at the paper quoted there, this appears to be about a 2:3:3 ratio of rape, assault, and robbery. So out of that 1.5 million crimes, that's about 375 thousand rapes averted.
Is preventing the rape of 300 women worth a single innocent life?
Is preventing the rape of 300 women, plus the assault of 450 people, plus 450 robberies, worth a single innocent life?
(Also, consider the chance that some of those potential rapes would end in murder. Apparently only two percent of rapes end in murder, so that means there's about six murders prevented there as well. Versus a single accidental death. That is a trade I would be willing to take.)
If you can sit there and say "okay, I have looked at the numbers and I still think guns are fundamentally a bad idea", then, okay, you've made a decision, and I'll respect your decision. But as long as your decision is based on wild extrapolation and guesswork, it's not a particularly valuable one.
As a side note: one of my friends was robbed while home a few months ago. The criminals broke in, held them at gunpoint, and discussed raping his girlfriend, which they decided not to do because they didn't want to risk hanging around too long. At least some criminals aren't particularly afraid of head-to-head confrontation.
I agree that we need reasonable, well-thought-out laws on this matter. That reasonable regulation should be based on facts and actual numbers. Please research before inventing numbers and making claims.
No, really. Citation needed.
Here is a blog where someone's mentioned a lot of the statistics. The number of gun accidents, as he discovered, is somewhere around 1150/year. The number of crimes prevented is apparently somewhere around 1.5 MILLION per year.
So, yes. Citation needed. Your gut feeling that guns are evil is not, in any way, proof.
As for your last point, the land-based receivers are quite obviously much smaller than the equivalent amount of solar panels would be.
As for the first two points, once again I'm not saying that space satellites are necessarily better. I'm just saying they're different. Neither of us knows the exact numbers involved.
For #2, for example, land cost is a recurring cost over time thanks to property and land taxes, while launching a satellite only has to be done once. And launches are getting cheaper, and surface area up there is much cheaper than it is down here while weight is much more expensive than it is down here. Which ends up being cheaper overall? I have no idea.
I've mentioned this in other comments, but space is really really big. I mean, think about it - even if you ignore different orbits, there's more space "surface area" than there is land "surface area". We're a long way away from running out of space up there.
I also mentioned that it would probably be cheaper to launch a small fleet of non-geosynchronous satellites, although again I don't know the numbers and this is basically speculation.
"For now".
I highly suspect this translates as "until we think people have forgotten about this". Why fix the problem when we can just pretend it's gone away?
It's a factor because of transmission costs and because of the availability of good land for this. Good land for solar panels tends to be good land for other things as well, unless it's off in the middle of nowhere, in which case you get the giant-cable-maintenance problem again. Trying to build a solar farm next to the Bay Area, for example, would be pretty impractical, while two or three receiving stations would be a lot cheaper.
:)
My position is still that I, and most of the people in this thread, don't actually know enough to determine whether space solar makes sense
(I do agree that nuclear is hilariously underused though. Get these damn rabid Greenpeace members out of my energy generation, dammit)
Three points. :)
First off, geosynchronous may or may not be a good idea. Geosynchronous orbit is painfully expensive, and in most cases it's far more cost-effective to launch a large number of low-orbit satellites. If receiver stations were placed in various locations, satellites could just lock on to a different receiver as they pass over the globe. (On top of this, it means that a lot of different countries could theoretically buy energy at various times from this - it might even be worth placing receiver stations in third-world countries, since it's not like the power would be doing anything useful if it wasn't getting sold.)
Second, space is really really big. Even with the space junk we have up there already, impacts are spectacularly rare. It's a factor, but it's not a huge factor.
Third, why fix the broken panels? I highly suspect it would turn out to be cheaper to simply launch more satellites, at least until we have some kind of orbital repair bots. As long as the core electronics are reasonably redundant, the thing can stay up there as long as it's got a single working panel.
Wind. Daily drastic temperature shifts. I don't know if the poles snow at all, but if they do, you'll have to rig up a system to clear the snow off. Wipers have moving parts which tend to jam and break, heating coils would massively exacerbate the temperature-shift problem. Getting the power to someplace useful - are you going to run a giant cable to Canada? If so, what kind of maintenance is it going to need? Or are you going to bounce the power off a satellite, doubling transmission losses compared to the satellite-based systems and requiring a satellite launch anyway?
Space has its own set of problems, of course. Radiation, magnetic fields, and if you go into darkness at all, an entire new set of temperature-shift issues. But there's far less atmosphere, and therefore heating the entire spacecraft during "night" to eliminate temperature shift problems is much more feasible. (I don't know if it [i]is[/i] feasible, note. It's just less ridiculous.)
I'm not saying that either of these is better, again. I'm just saying that they involve different sets of challenges, and that without quite a lot of knowledge of the problem (which I certainly don't have) it's hard to say which is actually worse.
I don't know if he's correct, but even a small amount of thought should show you a lot of possible ways.
* No exposure to the elements, thus reduced maintenance cost from wind/weeds/corrosion
* No land cost
* No clouds, no day/night cycle
* Cost is based on weight, not on land, potentially allowing for use of extremely large light cheap panels instead of smaller denser more expensive ones
Does it make up for the difference? I couldn't say. But there's four ways in which space beats land in terms of efficiency.
Quite simple!
Republicans believe in lowering taxes and increasing government spending. They also believe in promoting rights that everyone wants (like firearm ownership) and removing rights that nobody cares about (like gay marriage).
Democrats believe in increasing government spending and lowering taxes. They also believe in promoting rights that everyone wants (like gay marriage) and removing rights that nobody cares about (like firearm ownership).
That's the fundamental difference. Everything else is pretty much identical.
Actually, yes, you plug in a new monitor on Windows and it just works. I've never had hardware acceleration be disabled. I've never had to install new drivers. I don't even know how "stereo" applies to a monitor, and I've never had mirroring on by default either.
It does take a small amount of extra time to tell it where the monitor is located - that could be made simpler with some kind of a popup window. Similarly, rotating the monitor can take a little bit of effort also, and annoyingly, this is located in a different place from the monitor location.
But for most people, the only slightly difficult problem is realizing that you have to go into the display settings control panel to tell Windows where it is. None of the other items even need to be worried about.
My ISP has an optional firewall with quite a few settings, including "block outgoing port 25 to any system besides our mail servers". The option can be changed easily through the user control panel, and defaults to one of the more secure settings.
Best way of doing it that I've seen yet.
From what I hear, the American entrepreneurial spirit is still almost exclusive to this country. Obviously there are entrepreneurs in other countries as well, but it's not as ingrained into the culture as it is here.
You can't throw a rock without hitting someone trying to start a company around here, and so there's [i]plenty[/i] of things to fund. EU labor laws apparently make Europeans significantly more conservative, both due to how safe people's jobs are (keeping people from wanting to leave their jobs and start a company) and due to how hard it often is to fire people (making hiring people a much bigger risk than it is here).
America's philosophy of firing people with no notice means that self-employment is significantly more attractive, and hiring people is significantly less risky. Whatever else you may say about it, it's very good conditions to start a business in.
[i]DirectX 10 isn't doing as well as DirectX9 because of its exclusivity on a platform thats user base is shrinking. DX 11 will be no better. The fact that OpenGL is and always has been technologically superior might soon become apparent.[/i]
I have to disagree with this one. OpenGL is simpler at the things OpenGL natively supports, but OpenGL's weakness has been that it really doesn't natively support the newest features for quite a while. The latest DirectX always has support for features that the majority of cards haven't even touched yet, but OpenGL tends to lag a few notches behind . . . well . . . everything.
(For example, just now I'm trying to figure out how to do triple-buffering in OpenGL. As near as I can tell, the answer is "you can't".)
The reason DirectX became dominant was, partially, because it's just [i]easier[/i] to deal with the unified DirectX documentation than it is to troll through eight thousand unrelated card-specific extensions. Apparently some of this is going to be fixed with OGL 3.0, and I'm looking forward to that, but OGL 3.0 ain't here yet.
And, for that matter, quantum random number generators.
And how many of those are realistically ever going to require DirectX 11?
DirectX 9 is here for a very long time, unless MS gets off their ass and implements DX10/DX11 for XP.
[i]Something like timing between keystrokes clearly doesn't fit the bill(depends on age, sex etc.)[/i]
You're not processing it correctly.
Yes, you can definitely find a correlation between typing speed and age. Can't really question that. But if you're using keystrokes as a random number source, you don't use the high bits. You use the low bits. If there's an even number of microseconds between keystrokes, it's a 0. If there's an odd number of microseconds between keystrokes, it's a 1.
I would find it extremely unlikely that [i]that[/i] particular number is biased based on age, sex, etc.
Obviously the same things can be used for network latency and mouse movement timing.
A lot of urban highways include lights on the side, and frequently also between the two directions.