You can be a B student and still be a genius. Einstein did very poorly in several subjects, most notably because he was board and didn't apply himself.
The way the grading system is setup doesn't favor critical thinking and practical application, it favors memorization and regurgitation, which for many is boring and leads to easy distraction, in-turn leading to poor grades. You can take a lot of those people any give them self study projects and they'll excel, but the school system favors people who are better at taking test and following directions.
While it is true that he's supporting his argument with anecdotal observations, and he is a bit heavy handed, I'd say it's a pretty common observation.
I've noted pretty much the same thing going through school. My older sister and I were in the same Chem class at one point and were lab partners. I did the work, she got the A I got the B. It was very clear comparing our tests and labs, where we had extremely similar answers, that the teacher preferred her work to mine even though her work was mine with nicer hand writing. The end result is I finished university, got married and have a great job and she's a college drop out and depends on her boyfriend to support her, despite her perfect GPA being double mine all through school.
I'm not saying men in general are smarter than women, it just strikes me that in the general sense maybe we have different strengths. Grading in the school system favors the strengths of women and practical application favors the strengths of men.
I've also observed is several cases teachers, epically male ones, are more likely to provide help to female students as opposed to male students. This could have some affected on why girls seem to do better in a controlled environment where regurgitation of knowledge and complying with a superiors is more valued over practical application and challenging authority.
Of course it doesn't really matter, there could be thousands/. posters that identify the same thing and it'll always be anecdotal, sexist and untrue.
You're confusing buying games super cheap through a service that makes no previsions for reselling to buying a physical copy of a game. If I buy Civ V new for $60 for PC on disk, I expect to be able to resell that disk. If I buy Civ V on Steam Sale for $5 I don't care about reselling it.
Bringing up the same argument that multiple people have said, "We don't care about that" and continuing to parrot the same argument isn't going to get whatever point you're trying to make across.
Getting away with what?
Selling games on steam super cheap?
Allowing me to play those games on any machine I can install Steam on, now including Linux?
Sticking to the distribution plan they originally developed, honoring their customers?
I know what I'm getting when I buy a game on Steam and from the beginning they made no question about how they were operating. Sony, on the other hand, is deciding, and has several times decided, to change the rules in the middle of the game, which is unacceptable, pardon the pun.
Of course I don't care what Sony is doing, what I care about is how it will affect the broader culture. If they get away with it everyone else will try as well, which isn't good for any of us, including you.
Problem is this isn't exclusive to Sony. Possibly they'll be the first to implements something "evilzor", but others will follow suit if one can get away with it.
I've been around long enough to know:
#1 - when it boils down to making money it has been repeatedly observed Sony will lie, cheat, steal. The conclusion it will be tied to a machine is a more likely scenario IMHO. If we do nothing now, then we really can't complain later if the worst case does happen and if nothing comes of it then no harm was done by collectively saying "We don't want this"
#2 - being complacent and saying nothing usually results in the worst situation. If Sony does it and gets away with it, others will too. The most resent situation I can think of is the no class actions in a TOS agreement. We're all sure if challenged it won't stand up, but it didn't stop Microsoft and then many others from following suite.
#3 - The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Voicing disperser over potential situations may result in a company rethinking a particularly smiley decision. I can't count how many times where the public response to a companies "we're going to" situation turned it into a "We'd never think of" situation.
#4 - waiting until a situation occurs to complain results in very little if anything being done. Often companies will at that point will take an even stronger stance to try and convince their shareholders they made the right decision, backtracking on a decision after action has been taken makes them look weak and loses money.
My point was under the proposed system Sony would be selling physical media, but handicapping it. Typically one of the advantages of physical media is I can loan it out or trade it, which would not longer be possible. I wouldn't even be able to play the game on a new console if my old one broke down. While on Steam, I CAN load my steam account on any machine and play a game from my account.
If I was paying $60 a pop for games on steam then I would expect to resell, but I'm not so that doesn't matter to me. I buy steam games so cheap I don't care about reselling them. If my account was lost and I lost all my games I might be peeved since I have quite a few and over time I've spent quite a bit, but typically if it's a game I really like I buy a physical copy so I can keep it in the event that Steam was to shutdown or my account was to be deleted.
Also with Steam, I'm not locked to a specific machine. I can load my steam account on my Wife's PC or my Brothers laptop or one of my three other computers. Sony wants to lock the disk to a specific machine, which are normally not very portable.
Of course I already avoid all Sony products including any subsidiaries I know about.
It might be a problem if one of the astronauts forgets where they are and opens the airlock to the living space and the outside. Of course I'd hope the airlock would be designed so that couldn't happen, but the fact remains someone who is confused or forgets what's going on could be a real danger to the rest of the people around them.
That said, if you go to Mars you know there are risks involved. That might also include someone who snaps without warning or a psycho who's managed to lie their way through a psychological profile and is purposely trying to kill everyone going to or already on Mars.
Things are harder to find using Metro tiles than in the start menu. It's too distracting with not enough information to quickly identify the program you want to run. This was discussed by Brian Boyko in the animated video posted a week ago. You can jump to the 19:20 time period to see the section where Brian talks about context and the difficulty in quickly identifying tiles. It could possibly be even harder since metro tiles are updated with live information.
I remember what it was like trying to help my late grandfather using windows XP every little thing was distracting and needed explanation. Over the phone you wouldn't know what is on screen in order to be able describe where the tile to be clicked is located. It's much easier to say "Click the start button, go to programs, accessories, games, solitaire" than to try and describe the images on the surroundings tiles.
I also see the tiles as becoming an advertising platform. Marketers will be able to update them constantly as can be done with the live info tiles. Flashing ads every few minutes is not something I want to see when I'm trying to find and start an application.
I'd like to continue, but it's late here and I have family visiting from Ontario and from South Carolina so I'll be busy right up until the new year and probably won't have time to continue.
I'm curious - did you leave those examples out intentionally
1) I can't provide referances to everything on the internet, there's just too much.
2) I didn't know about those incidents until you pointed them out
3) Actually they kind of prove my point. Sure they stabbed and killed quite a few, but note how many actually survived wounded. Had the attacker had a gun there would have been many more dead
If an 8-year-old in a third world nation can do it, anyone can.
1) I'd like a citation for that
2) There are also 8-year-olds that can play piano at very advance skill level, doesn't mean it's easy and everyone in the world can do it.
the guns used in both incidents were acquired illegally
For Columbine:
"In the months prior to the attacks, Harris and Klebold acquired two 9 mm firearms and two 12-gauge shotguns. Their friend Robyn Anderson bought a rifle and the two shotguns at the Tanner Gun Show in December 1998.[18] Through Robert Duran, another friend, Harris and Klebold later bought a handgun from Mark Manes for $500."
For Newtown shooters they were bought and owned by the shooters mother. (I trust you could find a ton of info right now supporting this on any news site so I'm not going to provide a citation.)
In both cases the guns were legally owned weapons taken by the shooters when it wasn't legal for them to have them, but the guns were easily accessible through legal means as I stated.
and regarding Columbine, there were several pipe bombs placed around the school, which would have increased the casualty rate enormously had they detonated (it's pure chance they didn't).
Possibly because bomb making isn't very straight forward and, thankfully, the attackers screwed it up.
You're making really good points here. Thank you for a civil discussion there usually isn't enough of that around here.
I disagree, while we as technical users know about alt-tab and keyboard short cuts others may not. I admit shortcut keys are not my first method of interaction, you have to know about the shortcut before you can use it and I've often just developed a habit of creating a "my computer" shortcut on my taskbar or shortcuts to the most commonly used folders. Point being because I've created other work arounds I don't always learn the shortcut keys so I don't always know them off the top of my head.
For non-technical users, I can use my wife, mother-in-law and Father-in-law as examples. They've all been using computers since the windows 3.1 days. The start menu was introduced in 95, as the video points out, which means there has been 15+ years of training to use a "start" button of sorts. My wife couldn't figure out the Win8 laptop we were looking at at Staples, but was easily able to figure out Linux Mint with the MATE desktop because it has all the same elements that have been in windows since 95. Similarly, I gave my father-in-law an old broken widows vista laptop which I installed Ubuntu on with all the default settings. He was able to start using it right away with no questions, even with the unity interface. My mother-in-law saw how fast it was running and asked if I would put Ubuntu on their XP desktop as well, which had been suffering from performance issues. I did and I haven't heard from them in a months where I was getting weekly calls from them before to help sort out issues they were having. I saw them last week and asked how things were going. No issues at all, they're happy.
Maybe after a few years of the Metro interface people will just get use to it, but my feeling is there's going to be so much push back that MS will remove it for PC in windows 9 or at least make win9 boot to a desktop mode, which will be fixed with no hidden menus, and allow the user to go to the Metro interface only when they want to, not force them there when the machine starts. I'm sure MS choose this approach on purpose because given the choice people will actively avoid Metro so they'll never get use to it, similarly with how they forced the ribbon interface. Everyone complained, I still don't like it, but after months of using it eventually figured out where everything was and were able to make due. One of the improvements between Office 2007 and Office 2010 was they got rid of the round windows 7 style start button and replaced it with a green "File" option, that in itself made the interface ten times better, for me at least.
22 stabbed in China vs. 27 shot in the states. similar because it was one person attacking a school of children in similar age rage, differences being China vs. US and knife vs. gun. If there had been a recent mass knife attack in a US school I'd use that, but it seems that since guns are so easily accessible, knives so ineffective and bombs so hard to make, guns tend to be the choice. limiting variables makes the situations easy to compare. Plane hijacking is a completely different situation with too many different variables (more than one attacker, different weapons, different groups of people)
Sky Marshals have been around since 1968, renamed Federal Air Marshal Service 1985. Having them on more planes since 9/11 hasn't had much affect on people trying to hijack/blow-up planes. As far as I can find 9/11 was the only instance of this method of attack being successful. There have been attempts on planes since; The shoe bomber comes to mind, which is why you have to take off your shoes when going through security. It's also interesting how someone hijacked a plane and we now have the TSA and completely evasive screening to get on a plane, Which is also completely ineffective (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3yaqq9Jjb4), but there have been several mass shootings in the last few years and still lax regulations on guns.
Yes you can kill people with just about anything. Guns are one of the few tools that are designed for this purpose and maximize the effect. With the exception of bombs, which from what I've been told are hard to make and risk blowing up an inexperienced maker in the process, I'd look it up, but then the TSA/NSA/FBI/CIA and a bunch of other initials would all be at my door, also an effect of 9/11. Other tools are useful in other ways and serve other purposes we can't remove them from society because then there wouldn't be a society and then having a gun would be useful especially for hunting food. I'm still of the opinion that we can't trust people to drive responsibly, which is pretty necessary in this day and age, but we're going to give them guns and expect they'll be responsible with them.
It's very clear that had legally own guns not been readily available to the Newtown or Columbine shooters they would not have been able to kill as many people as effectively, or at all. I'm not saying "ban guns" I'm saying gun owners need to be responsible with their guns, store them properly and not have them accessible to people that shouldn't have them. Gun enthusiast also need to stop making excuses for irresponsible owners and start holding them accountable, I doubt anything makes the public feel more unconformable with people owning guns than when the people with the guns are defending the people shooting and killing other people.
That's a great argument. I am aware of issues surrounding voting, we've heard a lot about voting machines that had some odd thousand votes before poles even opened in the last ?3? US elections at least. And in Canada right now there's a discussion around "robo-calls" that were made to people appearing on the Liberal voter list directing them to false or incorrect voting stations.
Provided that we assume a government legitimately won an election and a population is willing and able to take up arms against a government the question becomes how do you know they're really being mistreated or just feel that because things didn't go their way it's time for an uprising?
I'm a Canadian and prefer not to get involved in US issues, like Obama-care, etc... I understand it's really non of my business what's going on in the states and how the American people chose to deal with it. The gun control thing is very much creeping up here and becoming a major issue for us, we already have pretty strict gun laws and I don't think we need more. I don't own a gun, but have thought about taking up hunting with my uncles who have told me unless I'm really willing to get into it not to bother because it'd take me over a year to get a gun and license and probably just as long to get the hunting license.
Unfortunately it's next to impossible not to hear/read about American issues. From an outside prescriptive I see things like the Tea Party and Glenbeck at rallies talking about American rights and values and how the world is going to hell in a hand basket and think to myself, "Wow these people are one bad speech away from storming the White House and shooting everyone in sight."
Although I'm pretty sure the Tea Party is a rather small group, they could still reek a lot of havoc if they did that and it would affect the rest of us outside the states pretty badly.
That's a straw man argument. It's a different situation because it's a different situation, not because of the nationality of the attackers or the tools involved.
It's still better than parroting "Guns don't kill people" when quite clearly being shot in the head by one would most likely result in dead with little chance to disarm an attacker form a distance or run away.
I'm not disputing that people kill in other ways. Guns are a tool that make it easier, like how a hammer and nails make it easier for a carpenter to build a house. I wouldn't take a hammer away from a carpenter, but I wouldn't let my kid run around smashing things with it either.
I really feel that an uprising would be very hypocritical.
> 50% of the population voted in a government
< 50% dislikes the government so they decided to take it down by force
= not very democratic.
That being said, I think some people also forget that being in the military and being a citizen aren't mutually exclusive. I'm sure there would be a share of military personal that would jump ship and use their training to help citizens fight the government if it really did something bad enough to warrant an uprising.
I hope you get a +5 informative. This is the kind of response I expect to get from someone I trust to own a gun.
As a non-gun person myself, that supports the use of guns for hunting and sporting activities, this was an extremely useful description as opposed to the normal, "It's not an assault rifle" that's typically thrown out with no further explanation.
I'm positive I'll be modded into oblivion for this and really don't want this to come off as I'm 100% dead set against guns, my uncles are hunters and I very much enjoy deer stake.
22 people attacked with a knife wielding nut in China, everyone survives
27 people attacked with a semi-automatic rifle with 30 bullet magazines, no one survives
please find a better argument that "Guns to kill people, people kill people". It's aggravating, tired and no one except gun enthusiast buy it. It's not winning you any points from the gun opposition people. I'm only saying this because from the recent numbers I've seen about 55% of the US population is now opposed to gun ownership, pretty soon there'll be enough that the politicians will ban or heavily restrict guns. You don't need to convince me that people like to collect guns as much as others like to collect cars and they're perfectly safe when taken care of and used responsibly.
While I agree that a gun is just a tool, it's a tool used to shoot and kill things, which is fine if you're a hunter or a responsible gun owner, but if we can't even trust people to drive cars responsibly, something our society can do without, how can we trust people to own guns responsibly? how many times has a kid brought their parents gun to school? Guns in most of the mass shootings since Columbine were legally owned, but made accessible to people who shouldn't have had them.
When I lived in North Carolina one of my friends fathers was a big gun enthusiast. On one occasion my friend was showing me some of his dad's hand guns. He pointed one at me and pulled the trigger and said "bang your dead". At the time it was funny because we were dumb teens that didn't know any better. Although I'd think my friend should have seeing as how his dad was so big into the hobby. In retrospect his dad's guns should have been locked up and none of his kids should have had access to them. One of his kids was ADHD and continuously did stupid things and was always getting hurt. He's the kind of kid that would have brought one to school and shot someone else.
I don't want to paint all gun owners with the same brush because I understand it's the same as with driving; some drivers are just irresponsible and that shouldn't be projected onto the rest of us. Guns however are intended to kill things, if you're going to own one be responsible with it and stop making excuses and standing up for the people that are irresponsible. If society saw gun owners holding other gun owners responsible for their stupidity then I doubt you'd take as much guff as you do, but instead gun owners excuse the actions of a few with the "Guns don't kill people..." attitude.
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You can be a B student and still be a genius. Einstein did very poorly in several subjects, most notably because he was board and didn't apply himself.
The way the grading system is setup doesn't favor critical thinking and practical application, it favors memorization and regurgitation, which for many is boring and leads to easy distraction, in-turn leading to poor grades. You can take a lot of those people any give them self study projects and they'll excel, but the school system favors people who are better at taking test and following directions.
While it is true that he's supporting his argument with anecdotal observations, and he is a bit heavy handed, I'd say it's a pretty common observation.
/. posters that identify the same thing and it'll always be anecdotal, sexist and untrue.
I've noted pretty much the same thing going through school. My older sister and I were in the same Chem class at one point and were lab partners. I did the work, she got the A I got the B. It was very clear comparing our tests and labs, where we had extremely similar answers, that the teacher preferred her work to mine even though her work was mine with nicer hand writing. The end result is I finished university, got married and have a great job and she's a college drop out and depends on her boyfriend to support her, despite her perfect GPA being double mine all through school.
I'm not saying men in general are smarter than women, it just strikes me that in the general sense maybe we have different strengths. Grading in the school system favors the strengths of women and practical application favors the strengths of men.
I've also observed is several cases teachers, epically male ones, are more likely to provide help to female students as opposed to male students. This could have some affected on why girls seem to do better in a controlled environment where regurgitation of knowledge and complying with a superiors is more valued over practical application and challenging authority.
Of course it doesn't really matter, there could be thousands
Way to see the tree but miss the forest.
Enjoy being lost there's no help coming.
You're confusing buying games super cheap through a service that makes no previsions for reselling to buying a physical copy of a game. If I buy Civ V new for $60 for PC on disk, I expect to be able to resell that disk. If I buy Civ V on Steam Sale for $5 I don't care about reselling it.
Bringing up the same argument that multiple people have said, "We don't care about that" and continuing to parrot the same argument isn't going to get whatever point you're trying to make across.
That behavior has certainly made Steam popular, so maybe it's your behavior that's abnormal.
Getting away with what?
Selling games on steam super cheap?
Allowing me to play those games on any machine I can install Steam on, now including Linux?
Sticking to the distribution plan they originally developed, honoring their customers?
I know what I'm getting when I buy a game on Steam and from the beginning they made no question about how they were operating. Sony, on the other hand, is deciding, and has several times decided, to change the rules in the middle of the game, which is unacceptable, pardon the pun.
Of course I don't care what Sony is doing, what I care about is how it will affect the broader culture. If they get away with it everyone else will try as well, which isn't good for any of us, including you.
Problem is this isn't exclusive to Sony. Possibly they'll be the first to implements something "evilzor", but others will follow suit if one can get away with it.
I've been around long enough to know:
#1 - when it boils down to making money it has been repeatedly observed Sony will lie, cheat, steal. The conclusion it will be tied to a machine is a more likely scenario IMHO. If we do nothing now, then we really can't complain later if the worst case does happen and if nothing comes of it then no harm was done by collectively saying "We don't want this"
#2 - being complacent and saying nothing usually results in the worst situation. If Sony does it and gets away with it, others will too. The most resent situation I can think of is the no class actions in a TOS agreement. We're all sure if challenged it won't stand up, but it didn't stop Microsoft and then many others from following suite.
#3 - The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Voicing disperser over potential situations may result in a company rethinking a particularly smiley decision. I can't count how many times where the public response to a companies "we're going to" situation turned it into a "We'd never think of" situation.
#4 - waiting until a situation occurs to complain results in very little if anything being done. Often companies will at that point will take an even stronger stance to try and convince their shareholders they made the right decision, backtracking on a decision after action has been taken makes them look weak and loses money.
My point was under the proposed system Sony would be selling physical media, but handicapping it. Typically one of the advantages of physical media is I can loan it out or trade it, which would not longer be possible. I wouldn't even be able to play the game on a new console if my old one broke down. While on Steam, I CAN load my steam account on any machine and play a game from my account.
If I was paying $60 a pop for games on steam then I would expect to resell, but I'm not so that doesn't matter to me. I buy steam games so cheap I don't care about reselling them. If my account was lost and I lost all my games I might be peeved since I have quite a few and over time I've spent quite a bit, but typically if it's a game I really like I buy a physical copy so I can keep it in the event that Steam was to shutdown or my account was to be deleted.
Also with Steam, I'm not locked to a specific machine. I can load my steam account on my Wife's PC or my Brothers laptop or one of my three other computers. Sony wants to lock the disk to a specific machine, which are normally not very portable.
Of course I already avoid all Sony products including any subsidiaries I know about.
It might be a problem if one of the astronauts forgets where they are and opens the airlock to the living space and the outside. Of course I'd hope the airlock would be designed so that couldn't happen, but the fact remains someone who is confused or forgets what's going on could be a real danger to the rest of the people around them.
That said, if you go to Mars you know there are risks involved. That might also include someone who snaps without warning or a psycho who's managed to lie their way through a psychological profile and is purposely trying to kill everyone going to or already on Mars.
Things are harder to find using Metro tiles than in the start menu. It's too distracting with not enough information to quickly identify the program you want to run. This was discussed by Brian Boyko in the animated video posted a week ago. You can jump to the 19:20 time period to see the section where Brian talks about context and the difficulty in quickly identifying tiles. It could possibly be even harder since metro tiles are updated with live information.
I remember what it was like trying to help my late grandfather using windows XP every little thing was distracting and needed explanation. Over the phone you wouldn't know what is on screen in order to be able describe where the tile to be clicked is located. It's much easier to say "Click the start button, go to programs, accessories, games, solitaire" than to try and describe the images on the surroundings tiles.
I also see the tiles as becoming an advertising platform. Marketers will be able to update them constantly as can be done with the live info tiles. Flashing ads every few minutes is not something I want to see when I'm trying to find and start an application.
Ok, I'll concede
I'd like to continue, but it's late here and I have family visiting from Ontario and from South Carolina so I'll be busy right up until the new year and probably won't have time to continue.
Have a merry Christmas.
Why are you against personal responsibility?
Why are you against holding people personally responsible?
I'm curious - did you leave those examples out intentionally
1) I can't provide referances to everything on the internet, there's just too much.
2) I didn't know about those incidents until you pointed them out
3) Actually they kind of prove my point. Sure they stabbed and killed quite a few, but note how many actually survived wounded. Had the attacker had a gun there would have been many more dead
If an 8-year-old in a third world nation can do it, anyone can.
1) I'd like a citation for that
2) There are also 8-year-olds that can play piano at very advance skill level, doesn't mean it's easy and everyone in the world can do it.
the guns used in both incidents were acquired illegally
For Columbine:
"In the months prior to the attacks, Harris and Klebold acquired two 9 mm firearms and two 12-gauge shotguns. Their friend Robyn Anderson bought a rifle and the two shotguns at the Tanner Gun Show in December 1998.[18] Through Robert Duran, another friend, Harris and Klebold later bought a handgun from Mark Manes for $500."
For Newtown shooters they were bought and owned by the shooters mother. (I trust you could find a ton of info right now supporting this on any news site so I'm not going to provide a citation.)
In both cases the guns were legally owned weapons taken by the shooters when it wasn't legal for them to have them, but the guns were easily accessible through legal means as I stated.
and regarding Columbine, there were several pipe bombs placed around the school, which would have increased the casualty rate enormously had they detonated (it's pure chance they didn't).
Possibly because bomb making isn't very straight forward and, thankfully, the attackers screwed it up.
You're making really good points here. Thank you for a civil discussion there usually isn't enough of that around here.
I disagree, while we as technical users know about alt-tab and keyboard short cuts others may not. I admit shortcut keys are not my first method of interaction, you have to know about the shortcut before you can use it and I've often just developed a habit of creating a "my computer" shortcut on my taskbar or shortcuts to the most commonly used folders. Point being because I've created other work arounds I don't always learn the shortcut keys so I don't always know them off the top of my head.
For non-technical users, I can use my wife, mother-in-law and Father-in-law as examples. They've all been using computers since the windows 3.1 days. The start menu was introduced in 95, as the video points out, which means there has been 15+ years of training to use a "start" button of sorts. My wife couldn't figure out the Win8 laptop we were looking at at Staples, but was easily able to figure out Linux Mint with the MATE desktop because it has all the same elements that have been in windows since 95. Similarly, I gave my father-in-law an old broken widows vista laptop which I installed Ubuntu on with all the default settings. He was able to start using it right away with no questions, even with the unity interface. My mother-in-law saw how fast it was running and asked if I would put Ubuntu on their XP desktop as well, which had been suffering from performance issues. I did and I haven't heard from them in a months where I was getting weekly calls from them before to help sort out issues they were having. I saw them last week and asked how things were going. No issues at all, they're happy.
Maybe after a few years of the Metro interface people will just get use to it, but my feeling is there's going to be so much push back that MS will remove it for PC in windows 9 or at least make win9 boot to a desktop mode, which will be fixed with no hidden menus, and allow the user to go to the Metro interface only when they want to, not force them there when the machine starts. I'm sure MS choose this approach on purpose because given the choice people will actively avoid Metro so they'll never get use to it, similarly with how they forced the ribbon interface. Everyone complained, I still don't like it, but after months of using it eventually figured out where everything was and were able to make due. One of the improvements between Office 2007 and Office 2010 was they got rid of the round windows 7 style start button and replaced it with a green "File" option, that in itself made the interface ten times better, for me at least.
22 stabbed in China vs. 27 shot in the states. similar because it was one person attacking a school of children in similar age rage, differences being China vs. US and knife vs. gun. If there had been a recent mass knife attack in a US school I'd use that, but it seems that since guns are so easily accessible, knives so ineffective and bombs so hard to make, guns tend to be the choice. limiting variables makes the situations easy to compare. Plane hijacking is a completely different situation with too many different variables (more than one attacker, different weapons, different groups of people)
Sky Marshals have been around since 1968, renamed Federal Air Marshal Service 1985. Having them on more planes since 9/11 hasn't had much affect on people trying to hijack/blow-up planes. As far as I can find 9/11 was the only instance of this method of attack being successful. There have been attempts on planes since; The shoe bomber comes to mind, which is why you have to take off your shoes when going through security. It's also interesting how someone hijacked a plane and we now have the TSA and completely evasive screening to get on a plane, Which is also completely ineffective (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3yaqq9Jjb4), but there have been several mass shootings in the last few years and still lax regulations on guns.
Yes you can kill people with just about anything. Guns are one of the few tools that are designed for this purpose and maximize the effect. With the exception of bombs, which from what I've been told are hard to make and risk blowing up an inexperienced maker in the process, I'd look it up, but then the TSA/NSA/FBI/CIA and a bunch of other initials would all be at my door, also an effect of 9/11. Other tools are useful in other ways and serve other purposes we can't remove them from society because then there wouldn't be a society and then having a gun would be useful especially for hunting food. I'm still of the opinion that we can't trust people to drive responsibly, which is pretty necessary in this day and age, but we're going to give them guns and expect they'll be responsible with them.
It's very clear that had legally own guns not been readily available to the Newtown or Columbine shooters they would not have been able to kill as many people as effectively, or at all. I'm not saying "ban guns" I'm saying gun owners need to be responsible with their guns, store them properly and not have them accessible to people that shouldn't have them. Gun enthusiast also need to stop making excuses for irresponsible owners and start holding them accountable, I doubt anything makes the public feel more unconformable with people owning guns than when the people with the guns are defending the people shooting and killing other people.
That's a great argument. I am aware of issues surrounding voting, we've heard a lot about voting machines that had some odd thousand votes before poles even opened in the last ?3? US elections at least. And in Canada right now there's a discussion around "robo-calls" that were made to people appearing on the Liberal voter list directing them to false or incorrect voting stations.
Provided that we assume a government legitimately won an election and a population is willing and able to take up arms against a government the question becomes how do you know they're really being mistreated or just feel that because things didn't go their way it's time for an uprising?
I'm a Canadian and prefer not to get involved in US issues, like Obama-care, etc... I understand it's really non of my business what's going on in the states and how the American people chose to deal with it. The gun control thing is very much creeping up here and becoming a major issue for us, we already have pretty strict gun laws and I don't think we need more. I don't own a gun, but have thought about taking up hunting with my uncles who have told me unless I'm really willing to get into it not to bother because it'd take me over a year to get a gun and license and probably just as long to get the hunting license.
Unfortunately it's next to impossible not to hear/read about American issues. From an outside prescriptive I see things like the Tea Party and Glenbeck at rallies talking about American rights and values and how the world is going to hell in a hand basket and think to myself, "Wow these people are one bad speech away from storming the White House and shooting everyone in sight."
Although I'm pretty sure the Tea Party is a rather small group, they could still reek a lot of havoc if they did that and it would affect the rest of us outside the states pretty badly.
That's a straw man argument. It's a different situation because it's a different situation, not because of the nationality of the attackers or the tools involved.
It's still better than parroting "Guns don't kill people" when quite clearly being shot in the head by one would most likely result in dead with little chance to disarm an attacker form a distance or run away.
I'm not disputing that people kill in other ways. Guns are a tool that make it easier, like how a hammer and nails make it easier for a carpenter to build a house. I wouldn't take a hammer away from a carpenter, but I wouldn't let my kid run around smashing things with it either.
I really feel that an uprising would be very hypocritical.
> 50% of the population voted in a government
< 50% dislikes the government so they decided to take it down by force
= not very democratic.
That being said, I think some people also forget that being in the military and being a citizen aren't mutually exclusive. I'm sure there would be a share of military personal that would jump ship and use their training to help citizens fight the government if it really did something bad enough to warrant an uprising.
I find that rather sad.
I hope you get a +5 informative. This is the kind of response I expect to get from someone I trust to own a gun.
As a non-gun person myself, that supports the use of guns for hunting and sporting activities, this was an extremely useful description as opposed to the normal, "It's not an assault rifle" that's typically thrown out with no further explanation.
Thank you
There were several things misspelled in that post that were fine when I read the preview before submitting it.
I like this statement, but don't understand "will-have".
If you mean it the way I'm thinking than just about every first world nation has become a "will-have" society.
I'm positive I'll be modded into oblivion for this and really don't want this to come off as I'm 100% dead set against guns, my uncles are hunters and I very much enjoy deer stake.
22 people attacked with a knife wielding nut in China, everyone survives
27 people attacked with a semi-automatic rifle with 30 bullet magazines, no one survives
please find a better argument that "Guns to kill people, people kill people". It's aggravating, tired and no one except gun enthusiast buy it. It's not winning you any points from the gun opposition people. I'm only saying this because from the recent numbers I've seen about 55% of the US population is now opposed to gun ownership, pretty soon there'll be enough that the politicians will ban or heavily restrict guns. You don't need to convince me that people like to collect guns as much as others like to collect cars and they're perfectly safe when taken care of and used responsibly.
While I agree that a gun is just a tool, it's a tool used to shoot and kill things, which is fine if you're a hunter or a responsible gun owner, but if we can't even trust people to drive cars responsibly, something our society can do without, how can we trust people to own guns responsibly? how many times has a kid brought their parents gun to school? Guns in most of the mass shootings since Columbine were legally owned, but made accessible to people who shouldn't have had them.
When I lived in North Carolina one of my friends fathers was a big gun enthusiast. On one occasion my friend was showing me some of his dad's hand guns. He pointed one at me and pulled the trigger and said "bang your dead". At the time it was funny because we were dumb teens that didn't know any better. Although I'd think my friend should have seeing as how his dad was so big into the hobby. In retrospect his dad's guns should have been locked up and none of his kids should have had access to them. One of his kids was ADHD and continuously did stupid things and was always getting hurt. He's the kind of kid that would have brought one to school and shot someone else.
I don't want to paint all gun owners with the same brush because I understand it's the same as with driving; some drivers are just irresponsible and that shouldn't be projected onto the rest of us. Guns however are intended to kill things, if you're going to own one be responsible with it and stop making excuses and standing up for the people that are irresponsible. If society saw gun owners holding other gun owners responsible for their stupidity then I doubt you'd take as much guff as you do, but instead gun owners excuse the actions of a few with the "Guns don't kill people..." attitude.