People were less likely to die from gunshot wounds on the western frontier in the 1800s than they are in modern-day Detroit, Chicago, or Washington DC (all cities with idiotic and unconstitutional victim-disarmament statutes).
You're going to have to support this with some references, because I'm finding contradictory information that appears to be more credible than your assertions:
“Carrying of guns within the city limits of a frontier town was generally prohibited. Laws barring people from carrying weapons were commonplace, from Dodge City to Tombstone,” said Adam Winkler, a professor at UCLA’s School of Law and author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. “When Dodge City residents first formed their municipal government, one of the very first laws enacted was a ban on concealed carry. The ban was soon after expanded to open carry, too.”
The result was that, by contemporary standards, gun homicides were relatively rare. In cattle towns such as Tombstone or Dodge City, the average number of homicides was only 1.5 or 2 a year, according to path-breaking research by Robert R. Dykstra of SUNY-Albany. The murder rate was much higher in mining towns, such as Bodie, Calif. During its boom years, the town had 29 murders a year...
White noted that the violence was restricted to narrow social milieus, such as armed and drunk young men. “The towns such as the cattle towns that disarmed young men lowered the rates of personal violence considerably,” White wrote. “Those towns such as Bodie and Aurora that did not disarm men tended to bury significantly more of them.”
For instance, the adult residents of Dodge City faced a homicide rate of at least 165 per 100,000 adults per year...
This is interesting, because Dodge City, with its very strict gun control according to the previous article, had an incredibly high homicide rate. And yet... the towns without gun control were apparently even more violent, also according to the previous article.
Freeman Dyson doesn't believe human activity is causing global climate change...
This is incorrect. Here's Wikipedia summary, but here are some choice quotes
'One of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas.' (Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society, by Freeman Dyson)
'In 2008, he endorsed the now common usage of "global warming" as synonymous with global anthropogenic climate change, referring to "measurements that transformed global warming from a vague theoretical speculation into a precise observational science.' (from the above linked Wikipedia article)
If Freeman Dyson says your maths are rubbish -- They are.
He doesn't appear to be making any claims about the math.
My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have. I think that’s what upsets me. (Freeman Dyson Takes on the Climate Establishment)
...they had documented terrorism involvement prior to this...
I've heard it claimed that they openly expressed support for ISIS, but I also know that was refuted by the FBI. I haven't followed this closely, but I've not heard of any other claims directly linking them to a particular terrorist group or terrorist activity, and I can't find any such claims that haven't already been refuted.
Perhaps you forget the actual idea behind free speech.
The idea that you can say whatever you want, and that no one can stop you; is not the idea behind free speech. Free Speech merely means the government cannot imprison or bring up criminal charges for speech they do not like.
Some people use "free speech" in essentially the same way as "free market": let the masses decide how worthy your ideas are. If you can convince a large number of people that forcing an entire group of people out of your country is the right way to go, kudos to you!
Truly free speech has, in my opinion, the very same problems as a truly free market. Both require a highly informed populace. Unfortunately, that's unlikely to happen. Both ideologies are open to abuse by people who are skillful at convincing large numbers of people of the merit of their ideas, regardless of the actual merit of those ideas. And it's unlikely that the masses will be aware anything's gone wrong until damage has already been done.
It's not actually very different from the regulation that people advocating for truly free speech/market rail against. Both paths result in a small number of people "in control".
...it just goes straight up my ass, the thought of paying someone for doing nothing more than processing oxygen after being born.
I mean, I don't mind safety nets for the infirmed, or the elderly that cannot work and support themselves, but I just cannot wrap my head around paying people for doing nothing more than existing.
The consequence of this attitude is that people, who have had no say in their being brought into the world, must earn their own existence. There's absolutely nothing wrong with working to pay your bills, but... I didn't ask to be here. But now I'm being asked to prove to the world that I'm of some value to them; that my birth was "worth it".
And if I'm unable (or even just unwilling) to do so, well... what then? Should I have my existence revoked? Should my parents be forced to support my existence, since they're responsible for it? What if the financial burden is too much for them and, instead of one life in jeopardy, there are now three?
Seriously - you do realize that the military, is made of people, most of whom care deeply about the Constitution. You must hold these men and women in utter contempt if think that they will automatically follow orders to gun down their brothers, fathers, children and cousins.
They might be "brothers, fathers, children and cousins", but they'll also be "terrorists".
We're not talking about a scenario where The Government will wake up tomorrow and just decide to ruthlessly subjugate its citizens. If the time comes when The Government feels that it needs to use force on its own citizens, you can be absolutely certain that there will be a non-trivial number of people willing to fight on the side of that government. They may not entirely agree with the actions of that government, but they will rationalize them with things like, "desperate times call for desperate measures".
Why don't we turn the "NASA faked the moon landings" conspiracy theory on it's head and convince the tinfoil-hat community NASA has secretly sent astronauts to Mars?
Yeah, that debunking has been well-debunked too... violent crime has been decreasing in all first world countries, and using other countries as a control shows that Australia's violent crime is higher than it should be.
If a wizard suddenly made it impossible for guns to exist in America; they could not pass across any border, the ones inside the country simply turned into nothingness, do you think the rates of assault and murder would instantly go down?
Yes, I do think that getting rid of the easiest at-a-distance point-and-click method of murder would result in lower murder rates.
Call me crazy...
Or do you think someone can commit mass murder on this scale with knives and baseball bats?
(You're forgetting that this hypothetical world contains one or more people capable of wielding reality-bending magic.)
The NMA (National Magic Association) was right all along; the banning of magic for self defense was just the beginning. People resorted to using guns and murder is still an issue. And now people like you want to ban guns, too? When will this madness end?!
The only thing that can stop a bad guy who memorized Fireball is a good guy who memorized Fireball.
It'd be more accurate to say that there are climate change deniers who are scientists. But then that's still not a very convincing argument, since "scientist" covers quite a lot of topics, many of which aren't directly related to climate.
I sense a great disturbance in the Force, as though millions of independent-minded correct-thinking Slashdotters crying out in confusion about what opinion they're supposed to have about Donald Trump...
It's not difficult to argue that, even if you agree that something needs to be done, Trump's support for action doesn't make up for his deficiencies in... every other regard. I'm not going to hire someone to get rid of cockroaches in my building if it sounds like he's going to burn down the building in the process.
I just looked back at digg.com for the first time in a couple years from when it flamed out heroically on it's 2.0 launch. It's not horrible now, there doesn't appear to be too much drama on their front page. Looks like delicio.us Just a abc/cbs style repost of yesterdays "hot web news"
I'm being nitpicky, but it was actually their v4 release that drove everyone away. It was sold two years later for a mere $500k.
Not from The Onion, but there's Literally Unbelievable. It's a bit more focused, though, posting funny examples of people on Facebook mistaking Onion articles for real news.
OK, so... it seems there was something broken about my Firefox profile. I realized I was able to play videos on my laptop install of Firefox. After renaming the profile directory on my desktop and letting Firefox recreate it, I was able to watch YouTube videos again.
Yepper. The only thing that wasn't enabled by default was WebM, which I did enable.
I wondered if maybe AdBlock Plus and/or Ghostery were causing a problem so I disabled both of them (through the Add-on Manager), but Firefox still wouldn't play anything else...
I enabled MSE in Firefox in the previous version, and the HTML5 YT videos seemed to work fine except 1080/60p videos, which stuttered a lot. As of v37, that seems to have also been fixed. YMMV, but it's A-OK for me.
Doesn't seem to work for me. Sort of.
The "introductory" video on Achievement Hunter's Let's Play YouTube channel plays using the the HTML5 player, but nothing else seems to work.
Like I said in a previous post, infra-red imaging of the inner planets in our solar system shows them heating up at a rate similar to Earth. But, say that out loud and people like you friggin flip out.
Poke it into a VM. I've got old hardware that doesn't have drivers supported on the host machine, but work fine through the VM. Should you not want to be tied to a particular machine this is an option you may want to look into.
I'm not so sure this will work with Windows XP, at least not as "easily" as described in your link. Windows XP likes to BSoD on boot if you restore an image from one set of hardware onto another set of hardware; something to do with XP blindly loading the installed motherboard drivers I think.
No we don't. We hand out harsher penalties to people convicted of a crime that was determined to be motivated by bias against the victim's race, religion, sexual orientation, etc., but we don't charge people simply for saying hateful things about those groups.
OR let me ask it this way. Name one Islamic Nation where Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Atheists or anyone else is actually FREE to practice their religion (or lack thereof).
Slashdot Mirror
People were less likely to die from gunshot wounds on the western frontier in the 1800s than they are in modern-day Detroit, Chicago, or Washington DC (all cities with idiotic and unconstitutional victim-disarmament statutes).
You're going to have to support this with some references, because I'm finding contradictory information that appears to be more credible than your assertions:
Rick Santorum’s misguided view of gun control in the Wild West
“Carrying of guns within the city limits of a frontier town was generally prohibited. Laws barring people from carrying weapons were commonplace, from Dodge City to Tombstone,” said Adam Winkler, a professor at UCLA’s School of Law and author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. “When Dodge City residents first formed their municipal government, one of the very first laws enacted was a ban on concealed carry. The ban was soon after expanded to open carry, too.”
The result was that, by contemporary standards, gun homicides were relatively rare. In cattle towns such as Tombstone or Dodge City, the average number of homicides was only 1.5 or 2 a year, according to path-breaking research by Robert R. Dykstra of SUNY-Albany. The murder rate was much higher in mining towns, such as Bodie, Calif. During its boom years, the town had 29 murders a year...
White noted that the violence was restricted to narrow social milieus, such as armed and drunk young men. “The towns such as the cattle towns that disarmed young men lowered the rates of personal violence considerably,” White wrote. “Those towns such as Bodie and Aurora that did not disarm men tended to bury significantly more of them.”
Homicide Rates in the American West
For instance, the adult residents of Dodge City faced a homicide rate of at least 165 per 100,000 adults per year...
This is interesting, because Dodge City, with its very strict gun control according to the previous article, had an incredibly high homicide rate. And yet... the towns without gun control were apparently even more violent, also according to the previous article.
Freeman Dyson doesn't believe human activity is causing global climate change...
This is incorrect. Here's Wikipedia summary, but here are some choice quotes
'One of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas.' (Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society, by Freeman Dyson)
'In 2008, he endorsed the now common usage of "global warming" as synonymous with global anthropogenic climate change, referring to "measurements that transformed global warming from a vague theoretical speculation into a precise observational science.' (from the above linked Wikipedia article)
If Freeman Dyson says your maths are rubbish -- They are.
He doesn't appear to be making any claims about the math.
My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have. I think that’s what upsets me. (Freeman Dyson Takes on the Climate Establishment)
...they had documented terrorism involvement prior to this...
I've heard it claimed that they openly expressed support for ISIS, but I also know that was refuted by the FBI. I haven't followed this closely, but I've not heard of any other claims directly linking them to a particular terrorist group or terrorist activity, and I can't find any such claims that haven't already been refuted.
Do you have a source for the above claim?
Perhaps you forget the actual idea behind free speech.
The idea that you can say whatever you want, and that no one can stop you; is not the idea behind free speech. Free Speech merely means the government cannot imprison or bring up criminal charges for speech they do not like.
Some people use "free speech" in essentially the same way as "free market": let the masses decide how worthy your ideas are. If you can convince a large number of people that forcing an entire group of people out of your country is the right way to go, kudos to you!
Truly free speech has, in my opinion, the very same problems as a truly free market. Both require a highly informed populace. Unfortunately, that's unlikely to happen. Both ideologies are open to abuse by people who are skillful at convincing large numbers of people of the merit of their ideas, regardless of the actual merit of those ideas. And it's unlikely that the masses will be aware anything's gone wrong until damage has already been done.
It's not actually very different from the regulation that people advocating for truly free speech/market rail against. Both paths result in a small number of people "in control".
Tough call...
...it just goes straight up my ass, the thought of paying someone for doing nothing more than processing oxygen after being born.
I mean, I don't mind safety nets for the infirmed, or the elderly that cannot work and support themselves, but I just cannot wrap my head around paying people for doing nothing more than existing.
The consequence of this attitude is that people, who have had no say in their being brought into the world, must earn their own existence. There's absolutely nothing wrong with working to pay your bills, but... I didn't ask to be here. But now I'm being asked to prove to the world that I'm of some value to them; that my birth was "worth it".
And if I'm unable (or even just unwilling) to do so, well... what then? Should I have my existence revoked? Should my parents be forced to support my existence, since they're responsible for it? What if the financial burden is too much for them and, instead of one life in jeopardy, there are now three?
when the batteries run out of juice and you need to use the "smart gun".
If you survive, you get criticized for not properly maintaining your weapon.
Seriously - you do realize that the military, is made of people, most of whom care deeply about the Constitution. You must hold these men and women in utter contempt if think that they will automatically follow orders to gun down their brothers, fathers, children and cousins.
They might be "brothers, fathers, children and cousins", but they'll also be "terrorists".
We're not talking about a scenario where The Government will wake up tomorrow and just decide to ruthlessly subjugate its citizens. If the time comes when The Government feels that it needs to use force on its own citizens, you can be absolutely certain that there will be a non-trivial number of people willing to fight on the side of that government. They may not entirely agree with the actions of that government, but they will rationalize them with things like, "desperate times call for desperate measures".
Long gone are the days when the worst you would see was a Happy Meal and some action figures.
I see the effort to purge the Star Wars Holiday Special from our cultural memory is coming along nicely.
Why don't we turn the "NASA faked the moon landings" conspiracy theory on it's head and convince the tinfoil-hat community NASA has secretly sent astronauts to Mars?
Too late.
Yeah, that debunking has been well-debunked too... violent crime has been decreasing in all first world countries, and using other countries as a control shows that Australia's violent crime is higher than it should be.
[Citation needed]
If a wizard suddenly made it impossible for guns to exist in America; they could not pass across any border, the ones inside the country simply turned into nothingness, do you think the rates of assault and murder would instantly go down?
Yes, I do think that getting rid of the easiest at-a-distance point-and-click method of murder would result in lower murder rates.
Call me crazy...
Or do you think someone can commit mass murder on this scale with knives and baseball bats?
(You're forgetting that this hypothetical world contains one or more people capable of wielding reality-bending magic.)
The NMA (National Magic Association) was right all along; the banning of magic for self defense was just the beginning. People resorted to using guns and murder is still an issue. And now people like you want to ban guns, too? When will this madness end?!
The only thing that can stop a bad guy who memorized Fireball is a good guy who memorized Fireball.
Remember "Hide the Decline"? That's when bona fide "scientists" came across an inconvenient truth.
Actually... Clearing up misconceptions regarding 'hide the decline'. I've linked to the "Basic" explanation, but there Intermediate and Advanced explanations that go into more detail.
Climate change deniers are scientists too.
It'd be more accurate to say that there are climate change deniers who are scientists. But then that's still not a very convincing argument, since "scientist" covers quite a lot of topics, many of which aren't directly related to climate.
You are ignoring how other countries have benefitted from our pollution.
So, wait... In your world, it's OK for the cable guy to shit all over your carpet simply because he's hooking you up that service you ordered?
I sense a great disturbance in the Force, as though millions of independent-minded correct-thinking Slashdotters crying out in confusion about what opinion they're supposed to have about Donald Trump...
It's not difficult to argue that, even if you agree that something needs to be done, Trump's support for action doesn't make up for his deficiencies in... every other regard. I'm not going to hire someone to get rid of cockroaches in my building if it sounds like he's going to burn down the building in the process.
I just looked back at digg.com for the first time in a couple years from when it flamed out heroically on it's 2.0 launch. It's not horrible now, there doesn't appear to be too much drama on their front page. Looks like delicio.us Just a abc/cbs style repost of yesterdays "hot web news"
I'm being nitpicky, but it was actually their v4 release that drove everyone away. It was sold two years later for a mere $500k.
Not from The Onion, but there's Literally Unbelievable. It's a bit more focused, though, posting funny examples of people on Facebook mistaking Onion articles for real news.
OK, so... it seems there was something broken about my Firefox profile. I realized I was able to play videos on my laptop install of Firefox. After renaming the profile directory on my desktop and letting Firefox recreate it, I was able to watch YouTube videos again.
What OS are you using? I'm using it on Windows.
Windows 7 64-bit.
You enabled MSE via the about:config page, yes?
Yepper. The only thing that wasn't enabled by default was WebM, which I did enable.
I wondered if maybe AdBlock Plus and/or Ghostery were causing a problem so I disabled both of them (through the Add-on Manager), but Firefox still wouldn't play anything else...
I enabled MSE in Firefox in the previous version, and the HTML5 YT videos seemed to work fine except 1080/60p videos, which stuttered a lot. As of v37, that seems to have also been fixed. YMMV, but it's A-OK for me.
Doesn't seem to work for me. Sort of.
The "introductory" video on Achievement Hunter's Let's Play YouTube channel plays using the the HTML5 player, but nothing else seems to work.
Like I said in a previous post, infra-red imaging of the inner planets in our solar system shows them heating up at a rate similar to Earth. But, say that out loud and people like you friggin flip out.
Probably because it's not actually true.
And you never did say where you got that interesting bit of information, anyway...
Poke it into a VM. I've got old hardware that doesn't have drivers supported on the host machine, but work fine through the VM. Should you not want to be tied to a particular machine this is an option you may want to look into.
I'm not so sure this will work with Windows XP, at least not as "easily" as described in your link. Windows XP likes to BSoD on boot if you restore an image from one set of hardware onto another set of hardware; something to do with XP blindly loading the installed motherboard drivers I think.
They should allow downvotes.
6000 downvotes might not make you happy, but it's better than personal threats.
Meh. Then you get 6000 downvotes and personal threats.
We even have laws against hate speech in the USA.
No we don't. We hand out harsher penalties to people convicted of a crime that was determined to be motivated by bias against the victim's race, religion, sexual orientation, etc., but we don't charge people simply for saying hateful things about those groups.
OR let me ask it this way. Name one Islamic Nation where Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Atheists or anyone else is actually FREE to practice their religion (or lack thereof).
I can't off the top of my head, but you still occasionally get things like this: Pakistani Muslims Form Human Chain To Protect Christians During Mass