IMO, the main problem is that you are giving contract programmers an incentive to do the wrong thing.
If I am reading your submission correctly, you are paying programmers hourly only for time spent writing code before handing it over to you. If issues are found after handoff, you expect them to fix the issues without being paid anything additional.
If I were your subcontractor, the first thing I would do is hire a subcontractor of my own to do QA. And I would bill you for his hours plus mine. As things stand, your subcontractors have a strong incentive to take as much time as they need / bill you for as many hours as they want in order to ensure they give you perfect code.
If you want to keep a similar arrangement in place and improve code quality, you need to add a positive inducement rather than just pushing them to fix bugs without being paid. At present, you are asking them to take all the financial risk related to bugs while you get all of the potential reward from finishing quickly. Look for a way to flip that around, perhaps with a fixed dollar amount budget for bug fixes. If they spend fewer hours than expected fixing bugs, they get the bonus of a higher than expected hourly rate. If they have more bugs than you forecasted, they get paid a lower hourly rate but they still get paid something.
Seriously. That's where I see the most viable commercial opportunity for light field cameras. Today, casinos use a heaping ton of individual cameras in order to be able to focus on a lot of people / tables / cards at once. Replace that same quantity of cameras with light field cameras, and suddenly the video footage could be reviewed with the focus on a different player.
Top executives can be prosecuted and jailed if anyone in the company causes fraudulent financial information to be reported to the SEC. Generally accepted accounting principles now require change control and independent audits of any IT infrastructure related to financial records or reports.
The firewall that protects financial systems is generally considered "in scope." So is the LDAP database that controls who has access.
In a publicly traded company, giving executive babysitters free reign to fly fast and loose without change control very well could incur civil liability and lead to criminal charges. That is improbable, true, but not impossible.
What is far more likely, though, is that the auditors would report some important things in their findings. First, there are failures related to separation of duties. Rather than the network security team being the only people with access to make firewall changes, there is a separate group with that same ability. Rather than the IT sysadmins who participate in the hiring and firing process making all changes to the LDAP database, a separate group has that ability, too. Beyond merely having the ability to make changes, the separate group of babysitters has, in fact, made changes to those systems. The change control procedures were violated in that none of the babysitter group's changes were approved in advance or made during change windows. Combined, it becomes clear that the babysitter team has sufficient access to make changes that materially affect the security or fidelity of the financial record keeping systems, and that no one is overseeing them sufficiently closely to ensure that fraud does not occur.
As a result, the financial audit report could very well report that, although no evidence shows that actual fraud has occurred, the audit team is unable to say with confidence that fraud has definitively not occurred. As such, there is are material weaknesses in the company's ability to guarantee the accuracy of their SEC filings.
That could get IT executives fired and probably cause the company's stock price to drop.
First, find a local VAR who knows everything there is to know about Juniper Networks switches, routers, firewalls, VPNs, etc. Juniper's gear is rock solid. Definitely not cheap, but solid.
Second, find a competing VAR who knows everything about a competing brand. The obvious choice for most people is Cisco, but they will overcharge you up front on hardware and every year on support contracts. For a small business, I would instead look at HP ProCurve or SonicWALL.
Have the resellers figure out what might be wrong with your existing network and recommend upgrade paths. Assuming they actually know what they're talking about, buy the gear from them and have them help install and troubleshoot.
Do not try to do it all solo without professional assistance.
AC, you yourself do not know what you are talking about.
Huck still referred to Jim as a nigger in the final chapter. That's the only term that would be believable in the thoughts and speech of a youth with his upbringing. He wasn't rich/educated enough to conceive of Jim as "colored" and "black" wasn't part of the common parlance.
"The use of the word 'nigger' is central to the book's meaning..."
I completely disagree. If that's true, then Huck would have stopped using the term nigger to refer to Jim by the end of the book. He never does, despite having found respect and admiration for Jim and becoming his friend. The people of Twain's time (and many decades afterward) simply didn't routinely use other terms to refer to black people. The use of any other word by Huck would have made the dialog sound artificial.
At the time I first read the book, in the 1970's, many whites in Connecticut near where Twain lived routinely referred to black people as niggers. Many still do to this day.Because of my own context, I didn't see the term as being immensely racially charged. And I'm quite confident that Twain didn't, either.
I can tell you that the mindset of white folk in the 1970's in the vicinity of where Twain wrote Huck Finn was that people with black skin were niggers. Most didn't use other words, except perhaps negro. They weren't aiming to be especially harmful or shocking. That's just the word they used all day every day. It was part of the normal dialect, just as "African American" is today.
Is there any published evidence? Certainly. You can tour Twain's house and that of his neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe, to learn about their efforts to promote racial and gender equality. They thought that all human beings should have equal rights. Yet I'm not aware of any cases of Twain trying to change the nation's vocabulary to remove the word nigger from common usage.
On top of that, Huck is still referring to Jim in the last chapter, despite having become his friend. Huck doesn't switch to some other term in an effort to spare Jim's feelings because the term didn't have the connotations of being a deliberately harmful insult the way it does today.
"Removing [one word] from it removes the entire point of it having ever been written or read."
You seriously believe that Twain's point in writing the book hinged on his use of the word nigger? Wow. I guess you would be content to read a six-letter abbreviated version of the book.
Regardless, you must have grown up in a different part of the country than I did. My home town had a population of about 6,000. Of those, only a dozen or so were not white.
Even in the 70's, many locals still used the term nigger to routinely refer to black people, as in "a nigger came into the store today." It was a common part of the local dialect. The usage of the word was certainly insensitive, but it wasn't meant to be malicious. Perhaps you find that hard to believe, but it's true. That's just what life was like in that part of the country not long ago.
Because of that, I don't believe that Twain's repeated use of the term nigger was intended to be harmful. That's simply the term that Huck would have naturally used given his upbringing. Anything else would have made the dialog sound artificial. If you go back and read the book, Huck is still calling Jim a nigger even in the last chapter. Despite being friends and having respect for Jim, he doesn't change to using some other term. How, then, do you back up the conclusion that Twain intended for the word to be viewed as intentionally injurious?
The book was absolutely meant to highlight the belief that everyone, even non-whites, should be free. But Twain wasn't trying to change anyone's vocabulary. And I don't believe he would care overly much about the use or avoidance of any specific words in his book other than free and freedom.
And before you go saying my hometown had nothing in common with the world Twain lived in, it was only 20 miles from where Twain was living in Hartford when he wrote the book. The people living there are exactly like the audience he was trying to reach when he wrote the story.
Meanwhile, try this experiment. Head to the nearest major metropolitan area. At night, go to the projects. Find a group of young black men. Go up to the biggest one and say, "Yo, nigger. Wassup?"
Let me know how he feels about hearing you say it.
Whether you want to believe it or not, words can have vastly different connotations depending on the context.
Have you ever been on the receiving end of blatant discrimination?
I'm white. I've been in the midst of a very poor, very non-white neighborhood with people walking up to me and demanding to know, "What are you doing here, white boy?"
That helped me relate to how black people feel about the n-word.
And I have a godson with cerebral palsy. Trust me, that radically changed the way I feel about the word "retard." It's not a term I want used around me or my family.
Emotionally charged words have power way beyond merely being a series of letters.
You might try empathizing with people who are upset rather than rushing to judgment.
"Removing [one word] from it removes the entire point of it having ever been written or read."
You really believe that? There's no value to Huck Finn beyond the repeated use of that word? I beg to differ. Among other things, there is still quite a bit about people becoming friends despite racial and other differences.
The issue here is that there needs to be an edition that can be used to teach children of all races and all ages.The original edition uses words that many people don't want to read and don't want their children to read. Twain was promoting racial equality, not racism. He wouldn't want his work to emotionally harm non-white children for generations.
Adults are more than welcome to make their own choice regarding whether or not to read the original. In the meantime, school-aged children shouldn't be forced schools to read words they find personally abhorrent.
Additionally, children are quite fond of repeatedly using new words that they have just learned. I can easily picture elementary school children tormenting classmates with the n-word after hearing it repeated over 200 times in class. That sort of behavior would get adults in the workplace fired. IMO, it makes sense to try to avoid that risk until high school when children can be more readily held accountable for their own actions.
It's reasonable to think that parents can work with their own children one-on-one to teach them not to use such words. It's not reasonable to think a teacher with 20+ students can get their entire class to behave acceptably. It only takes one threatened lawsuit "My Sally is being harassed ever since the class started reading that horrible book" to get it banned from a school. The edited version has potential to reach students who would otherwise never be given the chance to read the book and discuss it in class. That's important, because elementary school kids are not going to be able to guess at the larger context of the book or understand just how important it was simply by reading the original on their own.
I would expect many teachers to be allowed to teach the book using the edited text who are currently barred from using the original. There are many, many parents who want to protect their children from exposure to the n-word. The issue really isn't a question so much of whether kids should be taught using the original or the new edition. Far too many school systems simply won't allow the original to be taught. So the choice for many is to teach using a watered-down version or avoid it altogether. Given that choice, watered down is better than nothing at all.
I honestly don't see what the uproar is about. There are many, many editions of Huck Finn out there with the author's original choice of words faithfully reproduced. IMO, the new edition is an attempt to convey the author's intent rather than being fixated on verbatim wording.
Mark Twain was white. His intended audience was white. There weren't a whole lot of educated non-whites in America in 1884. Yes, Mr. Twain was hoping to help move the country toward racial equality, but he was aiming his message at white people. For his target audience, the words nigger and injun were commonplace. They weren't personally hurtful. In today's language, he could just as easily have used the phrase "non-white person" and conveyed nearly the same meaning.
IMO, creating an edition of Twain's work with less emotionally-charged wording is helpful, not harmful. The abundance of literal editions isn't going to evaporate, and the new one will be far easier for schools to use for teaching without having to get embroiled in lawsuits or other forms of parental outrage.
I took the time to download the FCC reports. One has clear statistics and charts of connection types by speed category.
As of June 2009, there were 36 million households with download speeds of 6 Mbps or higher. Of those, only 3% were using DSL.Over 88% were using cable.
The traditional telco providers in the US aren't providing broadband connections over 6 Mbps to any significant percentage of the population.
The design spec calls for the trains to be capable of at least 250 mph. However, maximum speed in densely populated areas such as between San Francisco and San Jose will require the speed to be capped at 125 mph.
Much of the planned route is covered with foothills. The hills either require extensive demolition or lots of twists and turns in the track. Integrating a new light rail system with existing rail or road rights of way requires a lot of turns, too. Turns limit potential maximum speeds.
When you also factor in the time spent slowing down, stopping at stations, and speeding back up again, a 4 hour trip really is a best case scenario. The marketing talks about 2 hours from San Francisco to Los Angeles, but that's unrealistic.
Is there enough of a market for the software to support your current employer and a new competitor? Maybe your employer's software is less than stellar because that's what they can afford to produce based on what the market is willing to pay.
Are any of your friends sales and marketing experts? Even if you make the most wonderful product in the world, you still need to get customers interested and close deals.
Can you and your friends afford to self-fund a startup for two years? If not, you'll need to find investors, and investors will generally want you to hand over most of the potential profits in exchange for them floating you the cash.
You could end up working for two years with limited income, no job security, and only a small chance of turning a profit.
However, statistics clearly indicate (I am aware that statistics do not prove anything) that when restrictive firearms legislation is passed, violent crime is not reduced, and in fact has generally tended to increase. To avoid misunderstanding, I will point out that I am referring to per capita figures.
There's a world of difference between saying that violent crime rates continue to rise in the wake of tougher gun control laws and your earlier claim that tougher gun laws cause violent crime rates to rise. There are at least seven states where the statistics don't even show a correlation, let alone an implied causation.
As for the Texas thing: one state over a few years does not compare statistically to an entire nation over decades.
You're amusing. You went off for five paragraphs about how the Brady Campaign spreads lies. Yet you didn't refute the one item I quoted from them, that Texas has loose gun control laws. Instead you went off on a huge tangent.
You said that DOJ statistics prove that strong gun control laws and states with high violent crime rates go hand in hand. I looked at the DOJ statistics for 2005, and they don't support your conclusion. Now you want to suggest that we all ignore the data for Texas.
Fine. Let's consider other states. New Jersey has tougher than average gun control laws, but a lower than average violent crime rate. Michigan, like Texas, has liberal gun control laws and a higher than average crime rate. The same goes for Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, and South Carolina. That makes at least seven states that don't fit your hypothesis, and my patience has run out.
The statistics make one thing clear - gun control laws have little impact on violent crime rates.
How can any company with a shred of ethics or morality excuse the sale of their filtering product?
I'll assume you meant in general, not just the sale to Burma.
Filtering software continues to sell because companies don't want to risk sexual harassment lawsuits from people who've accidentally seen someone else surfing porn. Or from someone who has seen one jpeg spam too many and decides to try to hit the lawsuit jackpot. If you want to get rid of filtering software, you'll need to get rid of the lawsuit-friendly environments that make filtering software a reasonable investment for companies seeking to limit their exposure.
In the case of filtering software sold to Burma, that's what resellers are for -- plausible deniability. Avoiding responsibility for a sale made by a third party is pretty easy. The reseller has it pretty easy, too. After all, they're just the middleman. They didn't create the software and have no influence on how it gets used. People are great at rationalizing just about anything to make themselves feel okay.
Is there much of a difference between selling "censorware" and guns to a foreign government? Probably not, other than the specific words likely to be used by the permanently hyperbolic press to describe the sales.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, the main problem is that you are giving contract programmers an incentive to do the wrong thing.
If I am reading your submission correctly, you are paying programmers hourly only for time spent writing code before handing it over to you. If issues are found after handoff, you expect them to fix the issues without being paid anything additional.
If I were your subcontractor, the first thing I would do is hire a subcontractor of my own to do QA. And I would bill you for his hours plus mine. As things stand, your subcontractors have a strong incentive to take as much time as they need / bill you for as many hours as they want in order to ensure they give you perfect code.
If you want to keep a similar arrangement in place and improve code quality, you need to add a positive inducement rather than just pushing them to fix bugs without being paid. At present, you are asking them to take all the financial risk related to bugs while you get all of the potential reward from finishing quickly. Look for a way to flip that around, perhaps with a fixed dollar amount budget for bug fixes. If they spend fewer hours than expected fixing bugs, they get the bonus of a higher than expected hourly rate. If they have more bugs than you forecasted, they get paid a lower hourly rate but they still get paid something.
Seriously. That's where I see the most viable commercial opportunity for light field cameras. Today, casinos use a heaping ton of individual cameras in order to be able to focus on a lot of people / tables / cards at once. Replace that same quantity of cameras with light field cameras, and suddenly the video footage could be reviewed with the focus on a different player.
You are only half-right.
Top executives can be prosecuted and jailed if anyone in the company causes fraudulent financial information to be reported to the SEC. Generally accepted accounting principles now require change control and independent audits of any IT infrastructure related to financial records or reports.
The firewall that protects financial systems is generally considered "in scope." So is the LDAP database that controls who has access.
In a publicly traded company, giving executive babysitters free reign to fly fast and loose without change control very well could incur civil liability and lead to criminal charges. That is improbable, true, but not impossible.
What is far more likely, though, is that the auditors would report some important things in their findings. First, there are failures related to separation of duties. Rather than the network security team being the only people with access to make firewall changes, there is a separate group with that same ability. Rather than the IT sysadmins who participate in the hiring and firing process making all changes to the LDAP database, a separate group has that ability, too. Beyond merely having the ability to make changes, the separate group of babysitters has, in fact, made changes to those systems. The change control procedures were violated in that none of the babysitter group's changes were approved in advance or made during change windows. Combined, it becomes clear that the babysitter team has sufficient access to make changes that materially affect the security or fidelity of the financial record keeping systems, and that no one is overseeing them sufficiently closely to ensure that fraud does not occur.
As a result, the financial audit report could very well report that, although no evidence shows that actual fraud has occurred, the audit team is unable to say with confidence that fraud has definitively not occurred. As such, there is are material weaknesses in the company's ability to guarantee the accuracy of their SEC filings.
That could get IT executives fired and probably cause the company's stock price to drop.
I like your revisions.
Get input from others on your code. Have opportunities to review and comment on theirs. Both will grow your skills quickly.
Actually, rent one. Two, preferably.
First, find a local VAR who knows everything there is to know about Juniper Networks switches, routers, firewalls, VPNs, etc. Juniper's gear is rock solid. Definitely not cheap, but solid.
Second, find a competing VAR who knows everything about a competing brand. The obvious choice for most people is Cisco, but they will overcharge you up front on hardware and every year on support contracts. For a small business, I would instead look at HP ProCurve or SonicWALL.
Have the resellers figure out what might be wrong with your existing network and recommend upgrade paths. Assuming they actually know what they're talking about, buy the gear from them and have them help install and troubleshoot.
Do not try to do it all solo without professional assistance.
AC, you yourself do not know what you are talking about.
Huck still referred to Jim as a nigger in the final chapter. That's the only term that would be believable in the thoughts and speech of a youth with his upbringing. He wasn't rich/educated enough to conceive of Jim as "colored" and "black" wasn't part of the common parlance.
"The use of the word 'nigger' is central to the book's meaning..."
I completely disagree. If that's true, then Huck would have stopped using the term nigger to refer to Jim by the end of the book. He never does, despite having found respect and admiration for Jim and becoming his friend. The people of Twain's time (and many decades afterward) simply didn't routinely use other terms to refer to black people. The use of any other word by Huck would have made the dialog sound artificial.
At the time I first read the book, in the 1970's, many whites in Connecticut near where Twain lived routinely referred to black people as niggers. Many still do to this day.Because of my own context, I didn't see the term as being immensely racially charged. And I'm quite confident that Twain didn't, either.
I can tell you that the mindset of white folk in the 1970's in the vicinity of where Twain wrote Huck Finn was that people with black skin were niggers. Most didn't use other words, except perhaps negro. They weren't aiming to be especially harmful or shocking. That's just the word they used all day every day. It was part of the normal dialect, just as "African American" is today.
Is there any published evidence? Certainly. You can tour Twain's house and that of his neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe, to learn about their efforts to promote racial and gender equality. They thought that all human beings should have equal rights. Yet I'm not aware of any cases of Twain trying to change the nation's vocabulary to remove the word nigger from common usage.
On top of that, Huck is still referring to Jim in the last chapter, despite having become his friend. Huck doesn't switch to some other term in an effort to spare Jim's feelings because the term didn't have the connotations of being a deliberately harmful insult the way it does today.
"Removing [one word] from it removes the entire point of it having ever been written or read."
You seriously believe that Twain's point in writing the book hinged on his use of the word nigger? Wow. I guess you would be content to read a six-letter abbreviated version of the book.
Insults don't help you make your case.
Regardless, you must have grown up in a different part of the country than I did. My home town had a population of about 6,000. Of those, only a dozen or so were not white.
Even in the 70's, many locals still used the term nigger to routinely refer to black people, as in "a nigger came into the store today." It was a common part of the local dialect. The usage of the word was certainly insensitive, but it wasn't meant to be malicious. Perhaps you find that hard to believe, but it's true. That's just what life was like in that part of the country not long ago.
Because of that, I don't believe that Twain's repeated use of the term nigger was intended to be harmful. That's simply the term that Huck would have naturally used given his upbringing. Anything else would have made the dialog sound artificial. If you go back and read the book, Huck is still calling Jim a nigger even in the last chapter. Despite being friends and having respect for Jim, he doesn't change to using some other term. How, then, do you back up the conclusion that Twain intended for the word to be viewed as intentionally injurious?
The book was absolutely meant to highlight the belief that everyone, even non-whites, should be free. But Twain wasn't trying to change anyone's vocabulary. And I don't believe he would care overly much about the use or avoidance of any specific words in his book other than free and freedom.
And before you go saying my hometown had nothing in common with the world Twain lived in, it was only 20 miles from where Twain was living in Hartford when he wrote the book. The people living there are exactly like the audience he was trying to reach when he wrote the story.
Perhaps I'll do that.
Meanwhile, try this experiment. Head to the nearest major metropolitan area. At night, go to the projects. Find a group of young black men. Go up to the biggest one and say, "Yo, nigger. Wassup?"
Let me know how he feels about hearing you say it.
Whether you want to believe it or not, words can have vastly different connotations depending on the context.
Have you ever been on the receiving end of blatant discrimination?
I'm white. I've been in the midst of a very poor, very non-white neighborhood with people walking up to me and demanding to know, "What are you doing here, white boy?"
That helped me relate to how black people feel about the n-word.
And I have a godson with cerebral palsy. Trust me, that radically changed the way I feel about the word "retard." It's not a term I want used around me or my family.
Emotionally charged words have power way beyond merely being a series of letters.
You might try empathizing with people who are upset rather than rushing to judgment.
"Removing [one word] from it removes the entire point of it having ever been written or read."
You really believe that? There's no value to Huck Finn beyond the repeated use of that word? I beg to differ. Among other things, there is still quite a bit about people becoming friends despite racial and other differences.
Hardly.
The issue here is that there needs to be an edition that can be used to teach children of all races and all ages.The original edition uses words that many people don't want to read and don't want their children to read. Twain was promoting racial equality, not racism. He wouldn't want his work to emotionally harm non-white children for generations.
Adults are more than welcome to make their own choice regarding whether or not to read the original. In the meantime, school-aged children shouldn't be forced schools to read words they find personally abhorrent.
Additionally, children are quite fond of repeatedly using new words that they have just learned. I can easily picture elementary school children tormenting classmates with the n-word after hearing it repeated over 200 times in class. That sort of behavior would get adults in the workplace fired. IMO, it makes sense to try to avoid that risk until high school when children can be more readily held accountable for their own actions.
It's reasonable to think that parents can work with their own children one-on-one to teach them not to use such words. It's not reasonable to think a teacher with 20+ students can get their entire class to behave acceptably. It only takes one threatened lawsuit "My Sally is being harassed ever since the class started reading that horrible book" to get it banned from a school. The edited version has potential to reach students who would otherwise never be given the chance to read the book and discuss it in class. That's important, because elementary school kids are not going to be able to guess at the larger context of the book or understand just how important it was simply by reading the original on their own.
I would expect many teachers to be allowed to teach the book using the edited text who are currently barred from using the original. There are many, many parents who want to protect their children from exposure to the n-word. The issue really isn't a question so much of whether kids should be taught using the original or the new edition. Far too many school systems simply won't allow the original to be taught. So the choice for many is to teach using a watered-down version or avoid it altogether. Given that choice, watered down is better than nothing at all.
I honestly don't see what the uproar is about. There are many, many editions of Huck Finn out there with the author's original choice of words faithfully reproduced. IMO, the new edition is an attempt to convey the author's intent rather than being fixated on verbatim wording.
Mark Twain was white. His intended audience was white. There weren't a whole lot of educated non-whites in America in 1884. Yes, Mr. Twain was hoping to help move the country toward racial equality, but he was aiming his message at white people. For his target audience, the words nigger and injun were commonplace. They weren't personally hurtful. In today's language, he could just as easily have used the phrase "non-white person" and conveyed nearly the same meaning.
IMO, creating an edition of Twain's work with less emotionally-charged wording is helpful, not harmful. The abundance of literal editions isn't going to evaporate, and the new one will be far easier for schools to use for teaching without having to get embroiled in lawsuits or other forms of parental outrage.
I took the time to download the FCC reports. One has clear statistics and charts of connection types by speed category.
As of June 2009, there were 36 million households with download speeds of 6 Mbps or higher. Of those, only 3% were using DSL.Over 88% were using cable.
The traditional telco providers in the US aren't providing broadband connections over 6 Mbps to any significant percentage of the population.
The design spec calls for the trains to be capable of at least 250 mph. However, maximum speed in densely populated areas such as between San Francisco and San Jose will require the speed to be capped at 125 mph.
Much of the planned route is covered with foothills. The hills either require extensive demolition or lots of twists and turns in the track. Integrating a new light rail system with existing rail or road rights of way requires a lot of turns, too. Turns limit potential maximum speeds.
When you also factor in the time spent slowing down, stopping at stations, and speeding back up again, a 4 hour trip really is a best case scenario. The marketing talks about 2 hours from San Francisco to Los Angeles, but that's unrealistic.
Is there enough of a market for the software to support your current employer and a new competitor? Maybe your employer's software is less than stellar because that's what they can afford to produce based on what the market is willing to pay.
Are any of your friends sales and marketing experts? Even if you make the most wonderful product in the world, you still need to get customers interested and close deals.
Can you and your friends afford to self-fund a startup for two years? If not, you'll need to find investors, and investors will generally want you to hand over most of the potential profits in exchange for them floating you the cash.
You could end up working for two years with limited income, no job security, and only a small chance of turning a profit.
However, statistics clearly indicate (I am aware that statistics do not prove anything) that when restrictive firearms legislation is passed, violent crime is not reduced, and in fact has generally tended to increase. To avoid misunderstanding, I will point out that I am referring to per capita figures.
There's a world of difference between saying that violent crime rates continue to rise in the wake of tougher gun control laws and your earlier claim that tougher gun laws cause violent crime rates to rise. There are at least seven states where the statistics don't even show a correlation, let alone an implied causation.
As for the Texas thing: one state over a few years does not compare statistically to an entire nation over decades.
You're amusing. You went off for five paragraphs about how the Brady Campaign spreads lies. Yet you didn't refute the one item I quoted from them, that Texas has loose gun control laws. Instead you went off on a huge tangent.
You said that DOJ statistics prove that strong gun control laws and states with high violent crime rates go hand in hand. I looked at the DOJ statistics for 2005, and they don't support your conclusion. Now you want to suggest that we all ignore the data for Texas.
Fine. Let's consider other states. New Jersey has tougher than average gun control laws, but a lower than average violent crime rate. Michigan, like Texas, has liberal gun control laws and a higher than average crime rate. The same goes for Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, and South Carolina. That makes at least seven states that don't fit your hypothesis, and my patience has run out.
The statistics make one thing clear - gun control laws have little impact on violent crime rates.
How can any company with a shred of ethics or morality excuse the sale of their filtering product?
I'll assume you meant in general, not just the sale to Burma.
Filtering software continues to sell because companies don't want to risk sexual harassment lawsuits from people who've accidentally seen someone else surfing porn. Or from someone who has seen one jpeg spam too many and decides to try to hit the lawsuit jackpot. If you want to get rid of filtering software, you'll need to get rid of the lawsuit-friendly environments that make filtering software a reasonable investment for companies seeking to limit their exposure.
In the case of filtering software sold to Burma, that's what resellers are for -- plausible deniability. Avoiding responsibility for a sale made by a third party is pretty easy. The reseller has it pretty easy, too. After all, they're just the middleman. They didn't create the software and have no influence on how it gets used. People are great at rationalizing just about anything to make themselves feel okay.
Should you be able to sell arms to Burma?
Yes. I'm a capitalist.
Is there much of a difference between selling "censorware" and guns to a foreign government? Probably not, other than the specific words likely to be used by the permanently hyperbolic press to describe the sales.
I guess the Burmese government hasn't heard of open source software.