apart from the ice which is currently stored on dry land, and that would, if melted, run into the ocean, you're right. If FLOATING ice melts, the water-level does not change.
But if ice on say Greenland, melts and runs into the sea, it does affect things. But yes, termal expansion is going to matter more.
True, it's trust-wrecking, but it's much too strong to call it "stealing".
When you lend money to a company, it's perfectly well-known by everyone involved in the deal that the company promise to *try* to fulfill its obligations - but that it's possible they'll go bankrupt and be unable to pay of all creditors.
You knew of this risk when lending the money - and you factored the risk in when deciding on what interest-rate the company got. If you considered the risk higher, you asked for a higher interest, or refused to give the loan at all.
Stealing, doesn't fit this situation at all. There's a tendency to call everything which results in a loss for someone, somehow, "stealing", but that just muddles the waters, please don't.
I know that, he didn't get the most votes. And the president isn't elected directly anyway. (Supposedly, simply electing as president the guy with the most votes, would be too simple or something)
But he *did* get an awful lot of votes. I would suggest that giving someone like Bush 47% of the votes, is aproximately as embarassing as giving him 53% would be.
In either case, a huge fraction of Americans voted for him. No, it wasn't a majority (though close), but it was MANY.
Don't restrict, but instead log exactly who does what change when and why, and make it trivial to undo any change.
For example, for/etc use revision-control, and require that all changes be comitted.
That way, yes, the one doing something may screw up, but you can easily undo it. And when the customer calls and goes "why doesn't that work, it worked last thursday!" you can trivially get a list of all changes since then.
As an added bonus looking at logs and commit-diffs give a new admin an excellent way of seeing how a task is typically done, and so has benefits in training.
Certainly. I relentlessly enter into risks when the odds are on my side. I do it as often as I can, with the single exception that I don't do it when I can't afford to lose.
I buy stock. I cut insurance on both of our cars. I love. I refuse insurance and "extended warranties". I trust. I buy vacations early and get significant discounts.
All of which carries risk. The stock could go bankrupt. I could crash the cars. I could be betrayed. I could drop the mobile phone and break it. I could be taken advantage of. I could be prevented from traveling and lose part of the vacation-cost.
But, and that's the key. All of these gambles have the odds stacked in my favor. Insurance, for example, isn't charity, thus it always costs -more- than it's mathematically speaking worth. If there's 1% chance the company must pay you $50K, they'll charge you 2% of $50K for the insurance. Stock, generally speaking, over time tend to outperform inflation. Love is betrayed regularily, but people who don't dare to love, still overall tend to be the loosers.
It depends. It always does. I don't think I can think of even a single case where someone *has* been convicted on such grounds, can you ?
Offcourse there'll often be traces, in webserver-logs or web-browser-histories and caches. But absent other evidence, I think it'd be hard to prove beyond reasonable doubt that this could not have happened by accident. Seems likely to me that links exist on the internet that lead to material that is illegal, but where that fact isn't immediately obvious.
There's a lot of porn with *young* people, and most of it is totally legal, yet it'd not surprise me if for example, a person searching for such porn, could end up visiting a site containing illegal porn too, without intending to.
humidity is a non-problem in a strongly heated space. Because relative humidity drops rapidly with increasing temperature.
If you take in cool-and-wet air into a datacenter, the air ends up as warm-and-dry. The air still contains the same amount of water offcourse, but the *relative* humidity is much lower because the saturation-point of water-vapor in air rises rapidly with temperature.
Sure, the combination of search-history *AND* illegal material, will in sum be reasonably strong indication that the material was deliberately sought, and not just accidentally stumbled upon, but that's actually in most cases quite reasonable.
Exactly. Nobody will get a murder-conviction from search-history.
But combine a dead wife with a motive, no alibi, access to the poision used to kill her, search-history indicating interest in the same poision from which she died and other clues, and the sum total, may add up to a conviction.
Or, if there was enough evidence for a conviction already, search-history such as this, could help prove that the murder was pre-planned and not a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing.
The fundamental problem of non-directional RF is that it's shared. Which means that it sucks in places and situations where a lot of people need a lot of bandwith at the same time, i.e. it sucks in Manhattan.
It's true that smaller cells help mitigate this to some degree, but it's a tricky balance: small weak cells, tend to leave black holes with no connectivity at all, whereas bigger stronger cells, decrease available capacity by being noise to eachothers.
Physical cables have their place. As do RF. The trick is to find the right *balance* between them.
Indeed. You impose a value-judgement, while claiming not to be. You single-out one specific kind of content that you, somehow, find needs to be segregated, then you claim you're not doing what you just did. A big lie.
I personally find the world of Disney more objectionable than the world of Cupido (local semi-pornographic magazine), yet one of these would be fine under.com while the other needs to go hide in the corner.
I indirectly refer to my sexuality at work all the time, like every time I refer to my wife as in, "Yeah, no problem I can stay until 5 today, my wife is getting the kids today."
Being required to keep your sexuality hidden, basically amounts to a ban on talking of, even indirectly, your private life.
Are heterosexual soldiers required to completely refrain from making any statement that tags them as heterosexual ? Are they allowed mentioning the wife ?
It's blatant discrimination to require silence from homosexuals, on topics heterosexuals are free to discuss.
Indeed, the key ingredient, is low unemployment. If most competent workers can leave, and the worker has an easier time finding a new job, than the employer has finding a new worker, then you don't really even need very strong worker-protection laws.
This is, the case here, and it's been the case for atleast a decade. When both my boss and I *know* that he needs me more than I need him, it puts very strict limits on what bullshit he can get away with. And since he's aware of that, he typically does not even try it.
(and leaders who -do- try tricks which cause the most-competent-half of the company they lead to jump ship, tends to either learn, or end up not having a company to lead anymore)
Unemployment, 3%, or about average for the period 1970-2010, peaks at 5-6%, lows of 1%. long-term (6 month+) unemployment: 0.8%.
I'd say, most leaders here either are not sociopaths, or IF they are, they've learnt how to hide it well. They must, because the alternative is to have nobody competent to lead.
The thing with explosions, is that distance helps a lot. No really, it helps an *awful* lot. Even if the distance isn't that huge. And yes, they will evacuate the surrounding for the actual burn.
It takes hardly any explosive at all, to kill a unprotected human being who is holding it.
It takes slightly more, but still a tiny amount, to kill a human in bomb-squad-gear who is handling it.
It takes a lot for an explosive inside a house, to blow up in such a way that neighbouring-houses that are typically hundred feet away or more, and behind a protective fence, suffers significant damage.
To explode in such a way that people who have been evacuated to 1000 feet and who are in cover, die, takes a modern bomb, and not a tiny one either, a Mk-82 with 200 pounds of tritonal levels *one* house very well. It does nothing at all to people who are 1000 feet away and under even very modest cover, it *might* break some glass at that distance I suppose, but not much more.
This is *the* most excellent point in this entire debate. How many wars, how many bombs, how many "interventions", how many invasions, how many lies - does it take to guarantee funding and a steady flow of new "recruits" to the various terror-organizations of the world ? Does wars over non-existing "weapons of mass destruction" reduce or increase recruitment to terrorism ? There are *how* many US military bases all over the world ? How many of the operations can fairly be labeled "defence" ?
You cannot possibly protect all the soft juicy targets, without introducing a totalitarian police-state, in which case you've just given up the very thing you're trying to protect. So it seems to me, that some thought should be given to how to reduce the actual problem. Terror, as such, is just a symptom. The actual *problem* is that religious fundamentalist extremists have sufficient support in money and personel that they're able to execute attacks.
When foreign policy is so bad that even *reasonable* people who are *friends* of USA, can agree that some actions are entirely undefendable - is it then really a surprise that people who dislike USA to begin with, find that such actions increase their support hundredfold ?
Guantanamo is as harmful to the safety of American civilians as Bin Laden is.
To be fair, Kruzweil isn't that dumb. He's not suggesting that mereley doing the same thing, on a much faster computer, suddenly magically turns into a different thing. Infact the opposite is likely to be true: throwing more power at a problem tends to yield diminishing returns.
But one of the things we use our tools for, is to make better tools. One of the tasks where computers currently help out, is with building better computers. And one of the tasks where software-tools help, is in making better software-tools. The argument is that this is an exponential process. And some of that, is accurate.
There are, infact, many problems which are solvable in much less time and/or much better because of better tools. Tossing up a reasonably good BLOG using Django and a modern lamp-stack on modern hardware, does infact yield quicker results than coding the same thing using the best available tools of 1990 (including the hardware of 1990!)
But it's incremental improvement, and I do think Kurzweil overestimates the impact. Brooks in the mythical man month, argues that there has been, and will be, no silver bullet. That is, that improvements to software-development though real, will be incremental and limited, and we will not get new methodologies or tools that radically change the picture overnight.
People have a built-in tendency to overestimate the spectacular but rare event over the mundane but common event. That is, people tend to be afraid of terrorists while seldom worrying much about diabetes. Allthough aproximately 15% of every adult (20-69) who died last year died from diabetes or complications arising from it.
The same tendency for good events, explain why people play lotteries, but don't buy index-funds. The rare-but-spectacular win is overestimated in value, compared to the common-but-mundane win.
It's the average, normal, unspectacular things which are most likely to kill you. It's the average boring unspectacular things which are going to make you rich - or more accurately, if you put your hopes in the rare-but-spectacular, odds are hopes are everything you'll ever have.
I stick $20.000/year into a well-diversified portfolio of low-cost investments. It's not like winning the lotto, in two ways. First it's not spectacular. Second, it *works* for most people doing it, which can't be said about lotto.
And in case I give a different impression, the system here is FAR from perfect, not even halfway-decent, we share the MUCH too long protection-times, for example. But there's a couple of bugs in the system that don't exist here, such as these two:
1) Running a computer-program typically starts with making an in-ram copy of the on-disk program, in some (buggy!) jurisdiction this copying violates copyright, thus you need a permission to run a program, even if you legally bought your copy. Here, there's a specific exception for incidental copies that arise as a result of using the artifact.
2) Printing a million copies of Avatar and selling these for profit, is a different act from letting your sister have a copy of a mp3 she likes. The law should recognize that the correct word for the latter is "normal" and not "criminal".
Your numbers are sligthly off -- check em up, using wrong numbers risk offtracking the discussion, which would be a pity because your general point is very much valid.
There's 2 more reasons people have lost respect for copyright. One is that copying is today frequently a *private* act. It's one thing to ban copying of books and music, at a time when really, only people owning printing-presses are practically capable of copying a book anyway. The general public isn't giving up much, because giving up the right to do something you cannot practically do anyway, is a small sacrifice.
Today, however, giving your sister/friend/boyfriend/grandmother a copy of a song you like, is a trivial, routine, straigthforward act. Thus today the same rule directly interferes with peoples private lives. Some jurisdictions (Norway where I live for example) has recognized this as bollocks, and have made specific exceptions. Limited copying for private use is not a copyright-violation here. ("limited" is somewhat fuzzy offcourse, but a low number for close friends/relatives would certainly qualify)
That's one.
The second is that I am regularily being lied to. I dislike being lied to. I do not tend to respect people who regularily lie to me.
I respect it even less when the reason they're lying, is because they HOPE that I will believe it, essentially they're trying to trick me into believing I've got less rights than I do.
When a new DVD says "Any use outside the private home is illegal", that's a lie. When software claims I need a/license/ to run it, that's a lie. (in my jurisdiction it is!) When a game claims that lending or resale is illegal, that's a blatant lie - I break no law whatsoever by letting a friend borrow a game.
If someone wants my respect. Lying to me, is not a good first move.
The wealthy skews the curve in USA too, so I'm not sure it's so huge a problem for this comparison. I wasn't able to find Barbados or the Seychelles in the statistics, they're tiny places afterall, so comparing them to USA as a whole, has problems.
But if you look at, to take one of your examples, Russia, then the GINI-index for Russia and USA is pretty much identical, that is, the income-inequality is as high in USA as it is in Russia.
Infact that, I think, is one of the main reasons why USA score so poorly in stuff like homicide-rates or teenage-pregnancies compared to other countries of similar wealth. You've got a HUGE income-inequality, the super-rich on the top get a larger and larger fraction of the sum total. Thus much of USA is significantly poorer than the GDP/person average would seem to indicate.
I do think gun-ownership plays some role in homicide-rates, but I agree with you that it's not the primary reason. There's very high gun-ownership in Norway, for example, but extremely low homicide-rates. The main reason, I think, is that there's very very few poor people here.
If you looked at GPD, you'd say Norway has $78K/year and USA has $45K/year, so the difference in income is less than a factor of 2.
But for homicide-rates, it's more interesting to compare how many are poor.
In short, while the average Norwegian ain't even twice as rich as the average American, the average bottom-quartile Norwegian is probably 4 times as rich as the average bottom-quartile American. This, (not gun-ownership) I think, is the main explanation for scoring poorly on many social indicators, despite a fairly high GDP/person.
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apart from the ice which is currently stored on dry land, and that would, if melted, run into the ocean, you're right. If FLOATING ice melts, the water-level does not change.
But if ice on say Greenland, melts and runs into the sea, it does affect things. But yes, termal expansion is going to matter more.
True, it's trust-wrecking, but it's much too strong to call it "stealing".
When you lend money to a company, it's perfectly well-known by everyone involved in the deal that the company promise to *try* to fulfill its obligations - but that it's possible they'll go bankrupt and be unable to pay of all creditors.
You knew of this risk when lending the money - and you factored the risk in when deciding on what interest-rate the company got. If you considered the risk higher, you asked for a higher interest, or refused to give the loan at all.
Stealing, doesn't fit this situation at all. There's a tendency to call everything which results in a loss for someone, somehow, "stealing", but that just muddles the waters, please don't.
I know that, he didn't get the most votes. And the president isn't elected directly anyway. (Supposedly, simply electing as president the guy with the most votes, would be too simple or something)
But he *did* get an awful lot of votes. I would suggest that giving someone like Bush 47% of the votes, is aproximately as embarassing as giving him 53% would be.
In either case, a huge fraction of Americans voted for him. No, it wasn't a majority (though close), but it was MANY.
I think the language thing is bad, but not on the top-2 list of stuff that sucks.
How about electing Bush, and how about having the highest fraction of poor people of any comparably rich nation ?
Totally in agreement with you on the bigotry and hatred of groups like gays.
Use the wikipedia-approach:
Don't restrict, but instead log exactly who does what change when and why, and make it trivial to undo any change.
For example, for /etc use revision-control, and require that all changes be comitted.
That way, yes, the one doing something may screw up, but you can easily undo it. And when the customer calls and goes "why doesn't that work, it worked last thursday!" you can trivially get a list of all changes since then.
As an added bonus looking at logs and commit-diffs give a new admin an excellent way of seeing how a task is typically done, and so has benefits in training.
Certainly. I relentlessly enter into risks when the odds are on my side. I do it as often as I can, with the single exception that I don't do it when I can't afford to lose.
I buy stock. I cut insurance on both of our cars. I love. I refuse insurance and "extended warranties". I trust. I buy vacations early and get significant discounts.
All of which carries risk. The stock could go bankrupt. I could crash the cars. I could be betrayed. I could drop the mobile phone and break it. I could be taken advantage of. I could be prevented from traveling and lose part of the vacation-cost.
But, and that's the key. All of these gambles have the odds stacked in my favor. Insurance, for example, isn't charity, thus it always costs -more- than it's mathematically speaking worth. If there's 1% chance the company must pay you $50K, they'll charge you 2% of $50K for the insurance. Stock, generally speaking, over time tend to outperform inflation. Love is betrayed regularily, but people who don't dare to love, still overall tend to be the loosers.
It depends. It always does. I don't think I can think of even a single case where someone *has* been convicted on such grounds, can you ?
Offcourse there'll often be traces, in webserver-logs or web-browser-histories and caches. But absent other evidence, I think it'd be hard to prove beyond reasonable doubt that this could not have happened by accident. Seems likely to me that links exist on the internet that lead to material that is illegal, but where that fact isn't immediately obvious.
There's a lot of porn with *young* people, and most of it is totally legal, yet it'd not surprise me if for example, a person searching for such porn, could end up visiting a site containing illegal porn too, without intending to.
humidity is a non-problem in a strongly heated space. Because relative humidity drops rapidly with increasing temperature.
If you take in cool-and-wet air into a datacenter, the air ends up as warm-and-dry. The air still contains the same amount of water offcourse, but the *relative* humidity is much lower because the saturation-point of water-vapor in air rises rapidly with temperature.
Unlikely. Not -just- search-history.
Sure, the combination of search-history *AND* illegal material, will in sum be reasonably strong indication that the material was deliberately sought, and not just accidentally stumbled upon, but that's actually in most cases quite reasonable.
Exactly. Nobody will get a murder-conviction from search-history.
But combine a dead wife with a motive, no alibi, access to the poision used to kill her, search-history indicating interest in the same poision from which she died and other clues, and the sum total, may add up to a conviction.
Or, if there was enough evidence for a conviction already, search-history such as this, could help prove that the murder was pre-planned and not a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing.
The fundamental problem of non-directional RF is that it's shared. Which means that it sucks in places and situations where a lot of people need a lot of bandwith at the same time, i.e. it sucks in Manhattan.
It's true that smaller cells help mitigate this to some degree, but it's a tricky balance: small weak cells, tend to leave black holes with no connectivity at all, whereas bigger stronger cells, decrease available capacity by being noise to eachothers.
Physical cables have their place. As do RF. The trick is to find the right *balance* between them.
Indeed. You impose a value-judgement, while claiming not to be. You single-out one specific kind of content that you, somehow, find needs to be segregated, then you claim you're not doing what you just did. A big lie.
I personally find the world of Disney more objectionable than the world of Cupido (local semi-pornographic magazine), yet one of these would be fine under .com while the other needs to go hide in the corner.
I indirectly refer to my sexuality at work all the time, like every time I refer to my wife as in, "Yeah, no problem I can stay until 5 today, my wife is getting the kids today."
Being required to keep your sexuality hidden, basically amounts to a ban on talking of, even indirectly, your private life.
Are heterosexual soldiers required to completely refrain from making any statement that tags them as heterosexual ? Are they allowed mentioning the wife ?
It's blatant discrimination to require silence from homosexuals, on topics heterosexuals are free to discuss.
It's not a "quote", it's a fact. But go ahead, hold your breath if you like. There's no law against being gullible.
Don't hold your breath, that's a cranky non-physical machine that does not, and can not do, the things it claims to do.
No. But I don't give a shit about "my software", it's all trivially replacable, and most of it at zero cost.
All of my *data* are however, backed up on atleast 3 separate disks, one of which lives on a separate continent.
Indeed, the key ingredient, is low unemployment. If most competent workers can leave, and the worker has an easier time finding a new job, than the employer has finding a new worker, then you don't really even need very strong worker-protection laws.
This is, the case here, and it's been the case for atleast a decade. When both my boss and I *know* that he needs me more than I need him, it puts very strict limits on what bullshit he can get away with. And since he's aware of that, he typically does not even try it.
(and leaders who -do- try tricks which cause the most-competent-half of the company they lead to jump ship, tends to either learn, or end up not having a company to lead anymore)
Unemployment, 3%, or about average for the period 1970-2010, peaks at 5-6%, lows of 1%. long-term (6 month+) unemployment: 0.8%.
I'd say, most leaders here either are not sociopaths, or IF they are, they've learnt how to hide it well. They must, because the alternative is to have nobody competent to lead.
The thing with explosions, is that distance helps a lot. No really, it helps an *awful* lot. Even if the distance isn't that huge. And yes, they will evacuate the surrounding for the actual burn.
It takes hardly any explosive at all, to kill a unprotected human being who is holding it.
It takes slightly more, but still a tiny amount, to kill a human in bomb-squad-gear who is handling it.
It takes a lot for an explosive inside a house, to blow up in such a way that neighbouring-houses that are typically hundred feet away or more, and behind a protective fence, suffers significant damage.
To explode in such a way that people who have been evacuated to 1000 feet and who are in cover, die, takes a modern bomb, and not a tiny one either, a Mk-82 with 200 pounds of tritonal levels *one* house very well. It does nothing at all to people who are 1000 feet away and under even very modest cover, it *might* break some glass at that distance I suppose, but not much more.
This is *the* most excellent point in this entire debate. How many wars, how many bombs, how many "interventions", how many invasions, how many lies - does it take to guarantee funding and a steady flow of new "recruits" to the various terror-organizations of the world ? Does wars over non-existing "weapons of mass destruction" reduce or increase recruitment to terrorism ? There are *how* many US military bases all over the world ? How many of the operations can fairly be labeled "defence" ?
You cannot possibly protect all the soft juicy targets, without introducing a totalitarian police-state, in which case you've just given up the very thing you're trying to protect. So it seems to me, that some thought should be given to how to reduce the actual problem. Terror, as such, is just a symptom. The actual *problem* is that religious fundamentalist extremists have sufficient support in money and personel that they're able to execute attacks.
When foreign policy is so bad that even *reasonable* people who are *friends* of USA, can agree that some actions are entirely undefendable - is it then really a surprise that people who dislike USA to begin with, find that such actions increase their support hundredfold ?
Guantanamo is as harmful to the safety of American civilians as Bin Laden is.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
To be fair, Kruzweil isn't that dumb. He's not suggesting that mereley doing the same thing, on a much faster computer, suddenly magically turns into a different thing. Infact the opposite is likely to be true: throwing more power at a problem tends to yield diminishing returns.
But one of the things we use our tools for, is to make better tools. One of the tasks where computers currently help out, is with building better computers. And one of the tasks where software-tools help, is in making better software-tools. The argument is that this is an exponential process. And some of that, is accurate.
There are, infact, many problems which are solvable in much less time and/or much better because of better tools. Tossing up a reasonably good BLOG using Django and a modern lamp-stack on modern hardware, does infact yield quicker results than coding the same thing using the best available tools of 1990 (including the hardware of 1990!)
But it's incremental improvement, and I do think Kurzweil overestimates the impact. Brooks in the mythical man month, argues that there has been, and will be, no silver bullet. That is, that improvements to software-development though real, will be incremental and limited, and we will not get new methodologies or tools that radically change the picture overnight.
People have a built-in tendency to overestimate the spectacular but rare event over the mundane but common event. That is, people tend to be afraid of terrorists while seldom worrying much about diabetes. Allthough aproximately 15% of every adult (20-69) who died last year died from diabetes or complications arising from it.
The same tendency for good events, explain why people play lotteries, but don't buy index-funds. The rare-but-spectacular win is overestimated in value, compared to the common-but-mundane win.
It's the average, normal, unspectacular things which are most likely to kill you. It's the average boring unspectacular things which are going to make you rich - or more accurately, if you put your hopes in the rare-but-spectacular, odds are hopes are everything you'll ever have.
I stick $20.000/year into a well-diversified portfolio of low-cost investments. It's not like winning the lotto, in two ways. First it's not spectacular. Second, it *works* for most people doing it, which can't be said about lotto.
Norway.
And in case I give a different impression, the system here is FAR from perfect, not even halfway-decent, we share the MUCH too long protection-times, for example. But there's a couple of bugs in the system that don't exist here, such as these two:
1) Running a computer-program typically starts with making an in-ram copy of the on-disk program, in some (buggy!) jurisdiction this copying violates copyright, thus you need a permission to run a program, even if you legally bought your copy. Here, there's a specific exception for incidental copies that arise as a result of using the artifact.
2) Printing a million copies of Avatar and selling these for profit, is a different act from letting your sister have a copy of a mp3 she likes. The law should recognize that the correct word for the latter is "normal" and not "criminal".
Your numbers are sligthly off -- check em up, using wrong numbers risk offtracking the discussion, which would be a pity because your general point is very much valid.
There's 2 more reasons people have lost respect for copyright. One is that copying is today frequently a *private* act. It's one thing to ban copying of books and music, at a time when really, only people owning printing-presses are practically capable of copying a book anyway. The general public isn't giving up much, because giving up the right to do something you cannot practically do anyway, is a small sacrifice.
Today, however, giving your sister/friend/boyfriend/grandmother a copy of a song you like, is a trivial, routine, straigthforward act. Thus today the same rule directly interferes with peoples private lives. Some jurisdictions (Norway where I live for example) has recognized this as bollocks, and have made specific exceptions. Limited copying for private use is not a copyright-violation here. ("limited" is somewhat fuzzy offcourse, but a low number for close friends/relatives would certainly qualify)
That's one.
The second is that I am regularily being lied to. I dislike being lied to. I do not tend to respect people who regularily lie to me.
I respect it even less when the reason they're lying, is because they HOPE that I will believe it, essentially they're trying to trick me into believing I've got less rights than I do.
When a new DVD says "Any use outside the private home is illegal", that's a lie. When software claims I need a /license/ to run it, that's a lie. (in my jurisdiction it is!) When a game claims that lending or resale is illegal, that's a blatant lie - I break no law whatsoever by letting a friend borrow a game.
If someone wants my respect. Lying to me, is not a good first move.
The wealthy skews the curve in USA too, so I'm not sure it's so huge a problem for this comparison. I wasn't able to find Barbados or the Seychelles in the statistics, they're tiny places afterall, so comparing them to USA as a whole, has problems.
But if you look at, to take one of your examples, Russia, then the GINI-index for Russia and USA is pretty much identical, that is, the income-inequality is as high in USA as it is in Russia.
Infact that, I think, is one of the main reasons why USA score so poorly in stuff like homicide-rates or teenage-pregnancies compared to other countries of similar wealth. You've got a HUGE income-inequality, the super-rich on the top get a larger and larger fraction of the sum total. Thus much of USA is significantly poorer than the GDP/person average would seem to indicate.
How well does this map correspond with homicide-rates ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_CIA_Report_2009.svg
I do think gun-ownership plays some role in homicide-rates, but I agree with you that it's not the primary reason. There's very high gun-ownership in Norway, for example, but extremely low homicide-rates. The main reason, I think, is that there's very very few poor people here.
If you looked at GPD, you'd say Norway has $78K/year and USA has $45K/year, so the difference in income is less than a factor of 2.
But for homicide-rates, it's more interesting to compare how many are poor.
In short, while the average Norwegian ain't even twice as rich as the average American, the average bottom-quartile Norwegian is probably 4 times as rich as the average bottom-quartile American. This, (not gun-ownership) I think, is the main explanation for scoring poorly on many social indicators, despite a fairly high GDP/person.