Why branding? Probably because a substantial portion of the Dell and other mass market PC buyers out there (i.e. the ones who refer to the blue "E" as "Internet" and couldn't tell you what browser they are using or even what a browser is) will believe whatever their vendors tell them about the PC they purchased. They might believe that "the Internet" as they know it is only available with Dell. That is what other vendors are up against and that is why branding matters.
if you think that any president no matter his political beliefs is going to destroy it while that's true is fooling themselves.
Its too late to avoid that destruction now. Indian and other foreign drug companies rip off our new drugs, the Chinese and more than half of everyone else around the world uses proprietary American software without paying, and the music business is sliding down an ice covered slope at terminal velocity. The least that Obama could do on the copyright front is to reign in Biden's RIAA friends at the DOJ before they bring in the legal equivalent of the tactical nuke with federal government involvement in more spamigation and new felony copyright infringement lawsuits against ordinary people who are already reeling from the down economy. If Obama lets this one simmer on the back burner it could explode into the worst PR mess he has seen yet when the RIAA and the DOJ start tag-teaming the working class American family.
Gold (aside from some industrial uses for which it is well suited) has no more intrinsic value than paper money or bits in a computer memory.
Except that it is all too easy to alter the bits in the computer or print more paper, whereas mining more gold is difficult and convincing counterfeits are easily spotted and impossible to produce with materials of lesser value. Almost since the beginning of the market, gold has quickly risen to the top as a money commodity because it has very distinct and advantageous properties when used as money. The value in gold is mostly in its desirable monetary properties and not so much in alternative uses (although it has found many more uses in modern times than was previously the case in centuries past) and since the concept of money is such an inescapably useful one in any economy of reasonable size; gold, where available in sufficient quantity to serve as money, has historically been the first choice among competing monetary commodities. It is almost second nature for people to knock gold whenever the topic of gold as money comes up now because our modern education system, our current governments (which hoard gold btw), and our politicians always attempt to discourage us from questioning their fiat money system which serves them so well and us so poorly.
You are basically describing what the Federal Reserve tries to do right now, but as we can all see this is not an exact science and prone to bungling by central bankers and manipulation by political opportunists. As long as people and by extension the market feels that money allows them to express, with enough granularity, the relative difference in value between alternative goods and services then there really is no reason why prices cannot remain stable or even decline slightly every year as the GDP grows in relation to the supply of money which may not grow as much year to year, but never declines. I agree that the gold standard has drawbacks, and that theoretically a well run fiat monetary system would be superior, but where are the philosopher kings we would need to run it? The problem is that humans are imperfect and if we don't expect central planning by the "smartest guys in the room" to work for other commodities, such as coffee or oil, then why should we expect it to work for money?
I wonder if that angry guy who worked at McDonald's for the last 4 years got a pay raise or a better job; perhaps Obama offered him a job in his Administration? I don't know him of course, but after seeing him speak for 30 seconds on national television in that town hall meeting it was fairly obvious to me why he has been working a McJob for the past 4 years. There are many people out there who need more job training and better education, and investing in them would be more worthy than many other measures in that economic stimulus bill, but we cannot simply give the guy working at McDonalds a non-merit pay raise without giving everyone else the same type of raise and even if we did the guy working at McDonalds would eventually be hurt the most by the resulting inflation. Everyone wants more income and better jobs, but few are actually willing to do what is necessary and improve themselves in order to earn that better job or additional income. There is no free lunch after all.
The result is a debasing of the currency which makes it very hard for people to save. And we end up in a habit of lending / borrowing.
YES, thank you. I have been saying that for years and so have other Libertarians, but neither the right nor the left (each for their own different reasons) wants to hear it. I am becoming convinced that despite its drawbacks, a return to the gold standard is the only viable alternative. Governments have proven themselves time and again to be either untrustworthy or bunglers when it comes to managing fiat currencies.
I am going by the reactions that I saw in the town hall meetings, including the recent one in Fort Myers, were people were asking him to pay their bills, get them a job, and generally solve all of their problems. You are correct that this is not "everybody" who voted for Obama, but there certainly was a lot of "irrational exuberance" IMHO, displayed in the media reporting of the party conventions and town hall meetings. I suppose I was just frustrated with all of the apologists out there.
Today, they broke compatibility and they've failed to offer enough to justify it.
I disagree. The UHF spectrum was simply to valuable for society to continue to allow a few analog TV holdouts to continue squatting on some of the most valuable parts of the EM spectrum for free or minimal cost. Part of the reason why wireless services in the United States are so behind Europe, Japan, and even China is because there are lots of legacy squatters occupying prime pieces of EM spectrum real estate for peanut change. The EM spectrum rights should go to whomever is willing to pay the public the most for them, and nowadays that is wireless telecom companies such as Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint/Nextel not grandma with her Philco black and white analog TV that she has not upgraded since 1964. if the remaining analog TV users wanted to continue using the UHF spectrum, preventing the rest of us who are willing to pay from getting next gen wireless services, then they should have bid against the telecoms in the auction. Analog TV lost because other uses are worth more to more people, plain and simple.
He's made some very good pledges about openness and anti-corruption measures, so now's the time for him to live up to them.
Yes he did, but as we all know the President of the United States is only one man; the demands upon his time and attention are formidable. There are bound to be issues that he delegates to subordinates who don't always act in ways promised by the boss. One might say that it was disingenuous to represent otherwise to the people during the election, but did anyone honestly believe that Obama would or even could keep all of his promises? Let this be a lesson to the blind faith Obama supporters out there; political promises are made to be broken.
Poor people don't have the wherewithal to purchase things on the internet. So taxing goods purchased irl while not taxing cyperspace transactions becomes a very regressive tax.
News flash: unsophisticated people pay more taxes than those who manage their financial affairs better and garbage men earn less than brain surgeons, film at 11.
It's an erosion of rights thorugh corporate lobbying that leads to this sort of behavior
But as you yourself said, the gun control activists blazed the legal trail on this one with their lawsuits against the gun manufacturers. When people are willing to cause damage to the system of laws under which we live, damage which could have wide ranging effects and consequences, merely to win a narrow minded victory in the present then they do all of us a diservice, no matter how noble their cause may seem to some.
It has nothing to do with the importance of mathematics. It's all about supply and demand, not about importance or what's fair.
Hene the reason why just about every sane person should support the end of copyrights, we would be no worse off salary wise and it is not at all clear to me that the "culture" presently being generated under copyright (i.e. top 40 crap and bullshit Hollywood films) would even really be missed. The problem with copyright is that they have removed all reasonable incentives for many average people to continue playing by the rules. The public domain is a joke these days, it might as well not even be there because almost nothing of cultural significance has gone into it in the past century. I won't live long enough to see anything I enjoyed in my youth enter the public domain, that is how bad it is.
so we don't have to pay the full cost of our medically necessary drugs.
That is true, but certain drugs are simply not available in the UK at any price unless you are on the completely private plan (you opted-out of NHS) which is rare. There was a case recently, cannot recall the details but you could google it, where a woman was threatned with being cutt off NHS chemo and presented with a massive bill because she had gone outside the system and purchased a certain cancer drug, which the NHS had denied, with her own money (a big no-no on NHS, no private supplementation allowed). You may not have to pay the full cost of your medically necessary drugs, provided that you can get them, but the NHS ensures that everyone is equal in death when treatments are denied. The NHS is not the panacea that people make it out to be.
Drug patents are a legally sanctioned and enforced monopoly and monopolies always engage in price discrimination or charging the maximum amount that each individual consumer is able and willing to pay because that is the pricing strategy that maximizes profits. They charge the person in Africa $2 because that is all that he has or his government is willing to pay for his treatment and dead people don't pay anything ($2 is better than $0 after all) whereas the person in the United States is charged $2000 because they will find a way to pay that if it saves their life. Why do drug company monopolies exist? Because the governments of the world allow them to and enforce their exclusivity. In the absence of government interference such chicanery would not be possible.
the Cuban model which doesn't rely on US drug companies and still manages to get pretty good results.
Either your standard for pretty good is very low or you are talking about the health care that Communist Party elites and foreigners with hard currency receive and NOT the health care received by ordinary Cubans.
That is the problem. These kids aren't really thinking about much of anything. It does not yet occur to many high school students that pictures of them passed out at drunken parties could effect their college admissions or future employment prospects. I use false identification and information wherever possible, especially on the Internet, and with all of the marketing research and data mining going onto today any other reasonable citizen conerned about their privacy would do the same.
In a strictly amoral sense that may be true, but it does not help the anti-DRM cause to allow the content producers to point to us non-consumers and say, "See, the reason sales are down is because they are all pirating the game and playing it anyway", as the music industry tried to do. I do not wish to simply deprive them of revenue, I want them the know exactly why there was NOT a sale. This connection would be lost in the rebuttals of the content producers if many non-sale users followed up their decision not to buy with the acquisition of a pirated copy.
We need effective police, and more importantly, we need social policies that eliminate the bitter poverty related to a lot of gun-related crime.
I too would like to see more effective police and less poverty, but I do not and have never subscribed to the notion that banning private ownership of firearms is somehow the answer to these problems.
Criminals will have guns regardless. Conversely, most people will not bother to own guns, regardless. That means that gun ownership is also not a solution to crime.
Yes, yes, and yes. There will always be crime and criminals, even if many people chose to exercise their right to be armed. Crime is not so much a problem to be solved as it is a condition to be contained and mitigated. However, I do maintain that the number of violent crimes in which individual citizens are directly confronted by armed criminals, in robbery for example, would probably decrease. If criminals are going to risk their lives then they won't being doing it in a thrill seeker liquor store holdup that nets them $30 dollars and a six-pack or a home invasion to steal your DVD player and digital television.
If you release harmless prisoners, increase welfare, legalize marijuana, provide higher education for all and good jobs for everyone, you will see a decrease in gun-related violence. Happy people don't go on shooting sprees.
As a libertarian I would like to see regulated legalization of most drugs, as alcohol and tobacco are regulated today, and the release of non-violent drug offenders from our overcrowded prisons. Naturally, I do not support an increase in welfare (ala the indefinite "such sums" clause in the economic stimulus bill) and would prefer that private charity and community faith based programs step in to fill those needs. It is true that happy people don't generally go on shooting sprees, but I am sure that Mr. Madoff was quite happy before he was caught, so even happy people can commit crimes.
Since then there have been NO gunrelated mass murders
When people are denied access to firearms then they will find other ways. So banning guns will not eliminate violence or mass murders. The human race was violent before firearms became available and they are violent still. Nothing will change that, unfortunately.
Yeh, sure more guns are the answer, so the criminals get bigger guns
Bigger is not always better. To suggest that criminals having "bigger" guns will somehow negate our firearms simply displays your ignorance of guns. Have you ever even held a gun or fired one? It was people like you who pushed the "assault weapons" bans simply because they looked scary and had large magazines without even realizing that such features made them no more effective than non "assault weapons" firing the same standard calibers.
In civilized countries, one does not "need" to own a gun at all. If no one had guns, those who do would be much more easily indentified and the guns removed.
which will make you even more vulnerable to street toughs and other criminals who can already easily overpower the average citizen in a "strong arm" crime. Guns are the great equalizer, they prevent the physically strong from always taking what they want from the weaker members of our society. Look at how the world was before the invention of firearms. Lords and nobles controlled everything with strong sword arms and groups of tough men at arms and everyone who wasn't was a serf laborer on the lands of the local lord or part of the Church that convinced the serf to "accept their lot in life".
When you make seeing someone carrying a gun out of the ordinary, then you will make progress.
If you were a criminal and you were sure that nobody had guns who would you target? The wealthiest enclave of disarmed citizens that you could find. I think that you will find that many of the areas with the highest murder and crime rates in the country (DC, New York, etc) have the strictest anti-gun laws.
I have never seen a gun in public other than attached to a policemans belt, and I would like to keep it that way.
I wouldn't. I would prefer that everyone who wished to exercised their right to carry a firearm and was trained in its proper use. The violent crime rate would dwindle to insignifigance because few criminals would be willing to stake their lives on a petty crime that involved a direct confrontation with an armed citizen. Remember also that the police are NOT responsible for protecting you personally. You cannot sue them for damages because they failed to get there in time and someone beat you within an inch of your life or stole your car. They don't care unless you were killed and then what difference does it make to you? If you are looking to the police to always be there to protect you then you may be in for a nasty surprise one day.
Now of course, the micro dick gun nuts who inhabit this site will mod me down, but I have enough karma to see that lot off many many times.
The right to own a gun is paramount in our Constitution. It is second only to speech and the supreme court has said that owning a gun is an individual right. That is pretty much the end of the discussion as far as I am concerned. You name calling liberals are all the same, no respect for the traditions and institutions that made this country great and kept it going for the past two centuries.
Phage therapy has shown itself to be a viable treatment option, especially in Russia and other former Soviet countries where research and development costs were sunk and paid for long ago by the communists. However, there are many drawbacks to phage therapy which can make their use difficult (and particularly so inside the body). First, phages are uniquely in tune with the bacteria they attack, meaning that each phage has to be selected based upon the type of bacteria that they target in the infection. Second, mainting large populations of viable phages on hand requires corresponding large quantities of active bacteria in order to breed more phages for needed treatments, both of which require large factory like digesters and other equipment which is costly and doesn't scale as well as synthetic chemical antibiotics. Third, when infections enter the body the phages will be attacked just like every other invader by the immune system of our bodies, helping the bacteria to continue the infection. Phage therapy is not popular in the west because it is less practical, not because it isn't effective.
Slashdot Mirror
Why branding? Probably because a substantial portion of the Dell and other mass market PC buyers out there (i.e. the ones who refer to the blue "E" as "Internet" and couldn't tell you what browser they are using or even what a browser is) will believe whatever their vendors tell them about the PC they purchased. They might believe that "the Internet" as they know it is only available with Dell. That is what other vendors are up against and that is why branding matters.
if you think that any president no matter his political beliefs is going to destroy it while that's true is fooling themselves.
Its too late to avoid that destruction now. Indian and other foreign drug companies rip off our new drugs, the Chinese and more than half of everyone else around the world uses proprietary American software without paying, and the music business is sliding down an ice covered slope at terminal velocity. The least that Obama could do on the copyright front is to reign in Biden's RIAA friends at the DOJ before they bring in the legal equivalent of the tactical nuke with federal government involvement in more spamigation and new felony copyright infringement lawsuits against ordinary people who are already reeling from the down economy. If Obama lets this one simmer on the back burner it could explode into the worst PR mess he has seen yet when the RIAA and the DOJ start tag-teaming the working class American family.
Gold (aside from some industrial uses for which it is well suited) has no more intrinsic value than paper money or bits in a computer memory.
Except that it is all too easy to alter the bits in the computer or print more paper, whereas mining more gold is difficult and convincing counterfeits are easily spotted and impossible to produce with materials of lesser value. Almost since the beginning of the market, gold has quickly risen to the top as a money commodity because it has very distinct and advantageous properties when used as money. The value in gold is mostly in its desirable monetary properties and not so much in alternative uses (although it has found many more uses in modern times than was previously the case in centuries past) and since the concept of money is such an inescapably useful one in any economy of reasonable size; gold, where available in sufficient quantity to serve as money, has historically been the first choice among competing monetary commodities. It is almost second nature for people to knock gold whenever the topic of gold as money comes up now because our modern education system, our current governments (which hoard gold btw), and our politicians always attempt to discourage us from questioning their fiat money system which serves them so well and us so poorly.
You are basically describing what the Federal Reserve tries to do right now, but as we can all see this is not an exact science and prone to bungling by central bankers and manipulation by political opportunists. As long as people and by extension the market feels that money allows them to express, with enough granularity, the relative difference in value between alternative goods and services then there really is no reason why prices cannot remain stable or even decline slightly every year as the GDP grows in relation to the supply of money which may not grow as much year to year, but never declines. I agree that the gold standard has drawbacks, and that theoretically a well run fiat monetary system would be superior, but where are the philosopher kings we would need to run it? The problem is that humans are imperfect and if we don't expect central planning by the "smartest guys in the room" to work for other commodities, such as coffee or oil, then why should we expect it to work for money?
I wonder if that angry guy who worked at McDonald's for the last 4 years got a pay raise or a better job; perhaps Obama offered him a job in his Administration? I don't know him of course, but after seeing him speak for 30 seconds on national television in that town hall meeting it was fairly obvious to me why he has been working a McJob for the past 4 years. There are many people out there who need more job training and better education, and investing in them would be more worthy than many other measures in that economic stimulus bill, but we cannot simply give the guy working at McDonalds a non-merit pay raise without giving everyone else the same type of raise and even if we did the guy working at McDonalds would eventually be hurt the most by the resulting inflation. Everyone wants more income and better jobs, but few are actually willing to do what is necessary and improve themselves in order to earn that better job or additional income. There is no free lunch after all.
The result is a debasing of the currency which makes it very hard for people to save. And we end up in a habit of lending / borrowing.
YES, thank you. I have been saying that for years and so have other Libertarians, but neither the right nor the left (each for their own different reasons) wants to hear it. I am becoming convinced that despite its drawbacks, a return to the gold standard is the only viable alternative. Governments have proven themselves time and again to be either untrustworthy or bunglers when it comes to managing fiat currencies.
I am going by the reactions that I saw in the town hall meetings, including the recent one in Fort Myers, were people were asking him to pay their bills, get them a job, and generally solve all of their problems. You are correct that this is not "everybody" who voted for Obama, but there certainly was a lot of "irrational exuberance" IMHO, displayed in the media reporting of the party conventions and town hall meetings. I suppose I was just frustrated with all of the apologists out there.
Today, they broke compatibility and they've failed to offer enough to justify it.
I disagree. The UHF spectrum was simply to valuable for society to continue to allow a few analog TV holdouts to continue squatting on some of the most valuable parts of the EM spectrum for free or minimal cost. Part of the reason why wireless services in the United States are so behind Europe, Japan, and even China is because there are lots of legacy squatters occupying prime pieces of EM spectrum real estate for peanut change. The EM spectrum rights should go to whomever is willing to pay the public the most for them, and nowadays that is wireless telecom companies such as Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint/Nextel not grandma with her Philco black and white analog TV that she has not upgraded since 1964. if the remaining analog TV users wanted to continue using the UHF spectrum, preventing the rest of us who are willing to pay from getting next gen wireless services, then they should have bid against the telecoms in the auction. Analog TV lost because other uses are worth more to more people, plain and simple.
He's made some very good pledges about openness and anti-corruption measures, so now's the time for him to live up to them.
Yes he did, but as we all know the President of the United States is only one man; the demands upon his time and attention are formidable. There are bound to be issues that he delegates to subordinates who don't always act in ways promised by the boss. One might say that it was disingenuous to represent otherwise to the people during the election, but did anyone honestly believe that Obama would or even could keep all of his promises? Let this be a lesson to the blind faith Obama supporters out there; political promises are made to be broken.
How dare you suddenly pretend to be a persecuted minority.
How dare you, sir.
Poor people don't have the wherewithal to purchase things on the internet. So taxing goods purchased irl while not taxing cyperspace transactions becomes a very regressive tax.
News flash: unsophisticated people pay more taxes than those who manage their financial affairs better and garbage men earn less than brain surgeons, film at 11.
It's an erosion of rights thorugh corporate lobbying that leads to this sort of behavior
But as you yourself said, the gun control activists blazed the legal trail on this one with their lawsuits against the gun manufacturers. When people are willing to cause damage to the system of laws under which we live, damage which could have wide ranging effects and consequences, merely to win a narrow minded victory in the present then they do all of us a diservice, no matter how noble their cause may seem to some.
It has nothing to do with the importance of mathematics. It's all about supply and demand, not about importance or what's fair.
Hene the reason why just about every sane person should support the end of copyrights, we would be no worse off salary wise and it is not at all clear to me that the "culture" presently being generated under copyright (i.e. top 40 crap and bullshit Hollywood films) would even really be missed. The problem with copyright is that they have removed all reasonable incentives for many average people to continue playing by the rules. The public domain is a joke these days, it might as well not even be there because almost nothing of cultural significance has gone into it in the past century. I won't live long enough to see anything I enjoyed in my youth enter the public domain, that is how bad it is.
Get yourself an open source ERP solution. Why be held hostage by a vendor for critical business functions?
or you could select an "free software" product with open source and avoid either eventuality.
Why would any major company agree to such arrangements?
Does anyone in your organization actually read End User License Agreements (EULA) before clicking "I Agree"? Do you personally know anyone who does?
so we don't have to pay the full cost of our medically necessary drugs.
That is true, but certain drugs are simply not available in the UK at any price unless you are on the completely private plan (you opted-out of NHS) which is rare. There was a case recently, cannot recall the details but you could google it, where a woman was threatned with being cutt off NHS chemo and presented with a massive bill because she had gone outside the system and purchased a certain cancer drug, which the NHS had denied, with her own money (a big no-no on NHS, no private supplementation allowed). You may not have to pay the full cost of your medically necessary drugs, provided that you can get them, but the NHS ensures that everyone is equal in death when treatments are denied. The NHS is not the panacea that people make it out to be.
That's not social justice. It's social prejudice.
Drug patents are a legally sanctioned and enforced monopoly and monopolies always engage in price discrimination or charging the maximum amount that each individual consumer is able and willing to pay because that is the pricing strategy that maximizes profits. They charge the person in Africa $2 because that is all that he has or his government is willing to pay for his treatment and dead people don't pay anything ($2 is better than $0 after all) whereas the person in the United States is charged $2000 because they will find a way to pay that if it saves their life. Why do drug company monopolies exist? Because the governments of the world allow them to and enforce their exclusivity. In the absence of government interference such chicanery would not be possible.
the Cuban model which doesn't rely on US drug companies and still manages to get pretty good results.
Either your standard for pretty good is very low or you are talking about the health care that Communist Party elites and foreigners with hard currency receive and NOT the health care received by ordinary Cubans.
What did you think they were going to do with it?
That is the problem. These kids aren't really thinking about much of anything. It does not yet occur to many high school students that pictures of them passed out at drunken parties could effect their college admissions or future employment prospects. I use false identification and information wherever possible, especially on the Internet, and with all of the marketing research and data mining going onto today any other reasonable citizen conerned about their privacy would do the same.
In a strictly amoral sense that may be true, but it does not help the anti-DRM cause to allow the content producers to point to us non-consumers and say, "See, the reason sales are down is because they are all pirating the game and playing it anyway", as the music industry tried to do. I do not wish to simply deprive them of revenue, I want them the know exactly why there was NOT a sale. This connection would be lost in the rebuttals of the content producers if many non-sale users followed up their decision not to buy with the acquisition of a pirated copy.
We need effective police, and more importantly, we need social policies that eliminate the bitter poverty related to a lot of gun-related crime.
I too would like to see more effective police and less poverty, but I do not and have never subscribed to the notion that banning private ownership of firearms is somehow the answer to these problems.
Criminals will have guns regardless. Conversely, most people will not bother to own guns, regardless. That means that gun ownership is also not a solution to crime.
Yes, yes, and yes. There will always be crime and criminals, even if many people chose to exercise their right to be armed. Crime is not so much a problem to be solved as it is a condition to be contained and mitigated. However, I do maintain that the number of violent crimes in which individual citizens are directly confronted by armed criminals, in robbery for example, would probably decrease. If criminals are going to risk their lives then they won't being doing it in a thrill seeker liquor store holdup that nets them $30 dollars and a six-pack or a home invasion to steal your DVD player and digital television.
If you release harmless prisoners, increase welfare, legalize marijuana, provide higher education for all and good jobs for everyone, you will see a decrease in gun-related violence. Happy people don't go on shooting sprees.
As a libertarian I would like to see regulated legalization of most drugs, as alcohol and tobacco are regulated today, and the release of non-violent drug offenders from our overcrowded prisons. Naturally, I do not support an increase in welfare (ala the indefinite "such sums" clause in the economic stimulus bill) and would prefer that private charity and community faith based programs step in to fill those needs. It is true that happy people don't generally go on shooting sprees, but I am sure that Mr. Madoff was quite happy before he was caught, so even happy people can commit crimes.
Since then there have been NO gunrelated mass murders
When people are denied access to firearms then they will find other ways. So banning guns will not eliminate violence or mass murders. The human race was violent before firearms became available and they are violent still. Nothing will change that, unfortunately.
Yeh, sure more guns are the answer, so the criminals get bigger guns
Bigger is not always better. To suggest that criminals having "bigger" guns will somehow negate our firearms simply displays your ignorance of guns. Have you ever even held a gun or fired one? It was people like you who pushed the "assault weapons" bans simply because they looked scary and had large magazines without even realizing that such features made them no more effective than non "assault weapons" firing the same standard calibers.
In civilized countries, one does not "need" to own a gun at all. If no one had guns, those who do would be much more easily indentified and the guns removed.
which will make you even more vulnerable to street toughs and other criminals who can already easily overpower the average citizen in a "strong arm" crime. Guns are the great equalizer, they prevent the physically strong from always taking what they want from the weaker members of our society. Look at how the world was before the invention of firearms. Lords and nobles controlled everything with strong sword arms and groups of tough men at arms and everyone who wasn't was a serf laborer on the lands of the local lord or part of the Church that convinced the serf to "accept their lot in life".
When you make seeing someone carrying a gun out of the ordinary, then you will make progress.
If you were a criminal and you were sure that nobody had guns who would you target? The wealthiest enclave of disarmed citizens that you could find. I think that you will find that many of the areas with the highest murder and crime rates in the country (DC, New York, etc) have the strictest anti-gun laws.
I have never seen a gun in public other than attached to a policemans belt, and I would like to keep it that way.
I wouldn't. I would prefer that everyone who wished to exercised their right to carry a firearm and was trained in its proper use. The violent crime rate would dwindle to insignifigance because few criminals would be willing to stake their lives on a petty crime that involved a direct confrontation with an armed citizen. Remember also that the police are NOT responsible for protecting you personally. You cannot sue them for damages because they failed to get there in time and someone beat you within an inch of your life or stole your car. They don't care unless you were killed and then what difference does it make to you? If you are looking to the police to always be there to protect you then you may be in for a nasty surprise one day.
Now of course, the micro dick gun nuts who inhabit this site will mod me down, but I have enough karma to see that lot off many many times.
The right to own a gun is paramount in our Constitution. It is second only to speech and the supreme court has said that owning a gun is an individual right. That is pretty much the end of the discussion as far as I am concerned. You name calling liberals are all the same, no respect for the traditions and institutions that made this country great and kept it going for the past two centuries.
Phage therapy has shown itself to be a viable treatment option, especially in Russia and other former Soviet countries where research and development costs were sunk and paid for long ago by the communists. However, there are many drawbacks to phage therapy which can make their use difficult (and particularly so inside the body). First, phages are uniquely in tune with the bacteria they attack, meaning that each phage has to be selected based upon the type of bacteria that they target in the infection. Second, mainting large populations of viable phages on hand requires corresponding large quantities of active bacteria in order to breed more phages for needed treatments, both of which require large factory like digesters and other equipment which is costly and doesn't scale as well as synthetic chemical antibiotics. Third, when infections enter the body the phages will be attacked just like every other invader by the immune system of our bodies, helping the bacteria to continue the infection. Phage therapy is not popular in the west because it is less practical, not because it isn't effective.