My guess is that you have causation confused on this one. Presumably if those people were that depressed and they hadn't had a firearm, they still would have committed suicide using some other means.
As I noted elsewhere, we don't actually know if this is true or not, but there is one data point: the overall suicide rate in Australia went down immediately after the gun buyback.
One data point does not a trend make, and even if it was a causal relationship, this doesn't imply that the same would be true in the US. Australia has a real public health system, remember. So yes, we're both presuming. More data is needed.
If only we had the technology to be able to search the available research for specific items of interest, so we wouldn't have to rely upon poorly-written study titles and could narrow down the available research to the items that apply to our own narrow subject of interest.
Ironically, I used to do research in this very area. It's a little easier in the biomedical field because most papers are tagged in ontologies like MeSH and ICD, but if you're trying to find the latest research on algorithms to solve a problem that you have, you're pretty much screwed.
In case it wasn't clear, let me rephrase: It's an axiom of modern policing that the best time to stop a crime is before it happens, and the best way to do that is to prevent someone from ever becoming a criminal in the first place.
Violent psychopaths are not the norm. The majority of people become criminals (and I'm referring to actual crime here, not non-violent drug offences or all the other crap that the US seems to think is worth locking people up for) because of poverty, because they grew up in a highly dysfunctional family, because they get in with the wrong crowd, and any number of other things.
Your fault? No. Society's fault? Not exactly, but it's nonetheless true that if society gave a crap, most people who are at risk for becoming criminals could be diverted away from that early, before anyone is hurt, and at a fraction of the cost.
But it won't happen, because making a crime never happen doesn't make headlines and doesn't justify budgets.
The US is in a war against the freedom and basic rights of its citizens.
If you're saying that the US, as it is now, can't be trusted with the power of capital punishment, then I think this is something that everyone can agree on.
This is very much a digression, but I've never found the argument "we should execute people because our prison system sucks" convincing. This can be found in various forms, such "prisons don't rehabilitate people" or "they could escape and kill someone else", but it's essentially the same argument.
You do realise that these are the exception and not the rule, right? There's an argument to be made in the case of these psychopathic serial killers, but they are remarkable precisely because they are rare.
Just to be clear, the choice isn't between execution and parole. The choice is between execution and life without possibility of parole. Restitution is possible in the latter case, should it turn out that someone was wrongly convicted.
Those who voted it "Flamebait" should consider that there's a rather good sub-discussion to be had here over McVeigh. Those who say he "deserved" it should not forget that he wanted it.
"I knew I wanted this before it happened. I knew my objective was state-assisted suicide and when it happens, it's in your face. You just did something you're trying to say should be illegal for medical personnel."
Moreover, in McVeigh's mind, he was exacting retribution against the US Government for murdering 76 innocent citizens in cold blood two years earlier. Comparisons between that and "retribution"-type arguments for capital punishment are entirely appropriate.
I don't think there's a need to feel remorse for ridding society of someone about whom otherwise never give another thought, [...]/
Given that not giving people "another thought" is one of the reasons why people become murderers in the first place, I would think that remorse is entirely appropriate.
Violent psychopaths are far more rare than people seem to think. Besides, affluent and educated psychopaths become CEOs and are lauded by society.
The reason, not excuse, to execute someone is simple, they've executed someone else themselves.
Imagine if we applied the same reasoning to rapists. Except, of course, that we kind of do, we're just not honest about it.
Anyone who deserves execution does not deserve a quick, painless termination, they deserve to suffer as much as possible. The only way to make it better is to make them suffer like their victims, and their victims are NOT JUST THE PEOPLE THEY KILLED, but also all the people left behind.
I'm sorry that you're so simple-minded that you seriously think that this makes anything "better".
This is revenge, not justice. The whole reason why we give the government a monopoly on dealing with criminals is precisely to take the revenge aspect out of the equation; remember, the point was to replace blood feuds.
So making it harder to get your hands on a firearm solves, or at least lessens, suicide ?
I didn't say that, and I don't know if that's true in general. The only data point that I have is that the overall suicide rate did decrease in Australia after the gun buyback.
I don't know where you saw those statistics, but it's not true. The gun buyback programme started in October 1996. The suicide rate in Australia peaked in 1997 (before the programme was complete) and has been steadily decreasing since.
Oh, and one more thing. As the number of guns in private hands in the US has increased, the number of criminal deaths has indeed skyrocketed... in Mexico.
Yet the number of deaths (accidental or criminal) has plummeted, and the number of shootings (accidental or criminal) has plummeted as well.
Not to contradict your point, but there is one kind of firearm-related death which is neither accidental nor criminal, and that is suicide. Homicides by firearm are down, but suicides by firearm are steady, and have increased slightly in the last few years. The rate of firearm suicide in the US is higher than pretty much everywhere else in the developed world.
So it's correct to say that easier access to guns means more gun deaths, even if it doesn't mean more accidents or more crime.
No they won't. Oh, they might try, but that code will never pass review. (Admittedly, it might end up in some crappy open source project that nobody will use...)
I think this is exactly backwards. I've been using C++ for 20 years, and in my experience, it's the inclusion of Simula-style classes which was the clear mistake in retrospect. Almost every well-written C++ program uses the class system as a module system, and limits inheritance to abstract base classes only.
The STL is one of the few things that makes C++ worth using. The template syntax sucks, but that's explainable by all the good syntax already being taken.
C++ has many, many problems, but almost exactly none of the significant problems with the language were identified or enunciated by Linus Torvalds. All of his rants on the subject read like "Al Capone is a horrible person, because he cheated on his taxes".
The STL is a case in point. It is, by far, one of the best parts of C++. The word "virtual" doesn't appear anywhere in its source code. Yes, the error messages are verbose; that's a compiler issue. Its only significant weakness is the allocator abstraction.
Sather (and Eiffel and Smalltalk etc) are less broken than Simula, I'll grant you that.
I do come at this from the point of view both as an engineer working in the high-performance computing area, and as a programming language theorist. People like Stepanov, Knuth, Dijkstra, Luca Cardelli, Alan Kay, Benjamin Pierce, and many others have written and spoken (sometimes at length) on the problems with implementation inheritance. And the fact that most OO proponents consistently tell you to avoid it ("prefer composition over inheritance") is telling.
However, I would say that the claim of "broken concept" is based not on one single argument, but on independent converging lines of evidence.
Here's another one, which again is not convincing by itself, but adds to the picture: the Curry-Howard isomorphism. One of the signs that you know you've found something interesting is that it turns out to be formally equivalent to something else that's interesting. (Think of the isomorphism between regular languages and DFAs, for example.)
Programming language theorists have found many such isomorphisms over the last few decades, and what's interesting is that programming language features seem to be equivalent to interesting objects in logic and category theory. For example, Scheme-style continuations are actually Pierce's Law in logic. Call-by-value and call-by-name turn out to be dual in the programming language which is isomorphic to Gentzen's classical sequent calculus.
Subtype relationships are pretty well-understood, and interface inheritance has a straightforward interpretation (e.g. see Haskell's typeclasses). However, despite searching for decades, nobody has found any such connections with implementation inheritance.
The industry desperately needs the style of OO that everyone uses to be on a sound theoretical footing, because it makes program analysis and compilers better. Lots of smart people have tried. The fact that we haven't found it by now strongly suggests that it's not theoretically sound.
It's bloated and unreadable due to C++'s template syntax.
I'm with you on the syntax issue. The greatest weakness of C++ is also its greatest strength: it retains something very close to backwards-compatibility with C. That inevitably means that all the good syntax is taken.
However, "bloated" is a puzzling claim. The whole point of the STL is that you can do things like type "sort" and it chooses the best sort algorithm for the data structure (e.g. merge sort for lists, quick/heap sort for vectors) automatically at compile time. Or you can create an array of 1000 elements, and it will initialise it with object construction or memset depending on the type, and this is all handled for you automatically at compile-time. You do not pay a cost to do this at run-time.
Your homegrown lib can't do that.
[...] but when I have to choose some publicly available software, I pick Boost over STL.
Boost and the STL don't compete. In fact, most of Boost (e.g. Algorithm, Array, Circular Buffer, Container and of course Iterator, among many others) are designed with STL in mind.
For the rest: Objective-C is not a great language. It has some cute features, but they are primarily useful for GUI programming and don't really contribute to better software development.
I've said some slightly uncomplimentary things about Objective-C in this thread, but I do have to admit that it's one of the best compromises between "dynamic"/scripty languages and "static"/low-level languages that has yet been developed.
It's just a shame that it's also based on Simula's broken object model.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that you have causation confused on this one. Presumably if those people were that depressed and they hadn't had a firearm, they still would have committed suicide using some other means.
As I noted elsewhere, we don't actually know if this is true or not, but there is one data point: the overall suicide rate in Australia went down immediately after the gun buyback.
One data point does not a trend make, and even if it was a causal relationship, this doesn't imply that the same would be true in the US. Australia has a real public health system, remember. So yes, we're both presuming. More data is needed.
Author has apparently never heard of Strunk & White.
Postel's Law.
If only we had the technology to be able to search the available research for specific items of interest, so we wouldn't have to rely upon poorly-written study titles and could narrow down the available research to the items that apply to our own narrow subject of interest.
Ironically, I used to do research in this very area. It's a little easier in the biomedical field because most papers are tagged in ontologies like MeSH and ICD, but if you're trying to find the latest research on algorithms to solve a problem that you have, you're pretty much screwed.
Nice putting words in my mouth!
In case it wasn't clear, let me rephrase: It's an axiom of modern policing that the best time to stop a crime is before it happens, and the best way to do that is to prevent someone from ever becoming a criminal in the first place.
Violent psychopaths are not the norm. The majority of people become criminals (and I'm referring to actual crime here, not non-violent drug offences or all the other crap that the US seems to think is worth locking people up for) because of poverty, because they grew up in a highly dysfunctional family, because they get in with the wrong crowd, and any number of other things.
Your fault? No. Society's fault? Not exactly, but it's nonetheless true that if society gave a crap, most people who are at risk for becoming criminals could be diverted away from that early, before anyone is hurt, and at a fraction of the cost.
But it won't happen, because making a crime never happen doesn't make headlines and doesn't justify budgets.
ISIS recruits idiots who grew up with Call of Duty and modern zombie movies (rather than say, Doom and Counterstrike 1.x).
I think that is the scariest "get the hell off my lawn" I've ever seen.
The US is in a war against the freedom and basic rights of its citizens.
If you're saying that the US, as it is now, can't be trusted with the power of capital punishment, then I think this is something that everyone can agree on.
This is very much a digression, but I've never found the argument "we should execute people because our prison system sucks" convincing. This can be found in various forms, such "prisons don't rehabilitate people" or "they could escape and kill someone else", but it's essentially the same argument.
You do realise that these are the exception and not the rule, right? There's an argument to be made in the case of these psychopathic serial killers, but they are remarkable precisely because they are rare.
Yeah, because Rudolf Hess was totally set free in 1971.
Just to be clear, the choice isn't between execution and parole. The choice is between execution and life without possibility of parole. Restitution is possible in the latter case, should it turn out that someone was wrongly convicted.
Those who voted it "Flamebait" should consider that there's a rather good sub-discussion to be had here over McVeigh. Those who say he "deserved" it should not forget that he wanted it.
Moreover, in McVeigh's mind, he was exacting retribution against the US Government for murdering 76 innocent citizens in cold blood two years earlier. Comparisons between that and "retribution"-type arguments for capital punishment are entirely appropriate.
I don't think there's a need to feel remorse for ridding society of someone about whom otherwise never give another thought, [...]/
Given that not giving people "another thought" is one of the reasons why people become murderers in the first place, I would think that remorse is entirely appropriate.
Violent psychopaths are far more rare than people seem to think. Besides, affluent and educated psychopaths become CEOs and are lauded by society.
The reason, not excuse, to execute someone is simple, they've executed someone else themselves.
Imagine if we applied the same reasoning to rapists. Except, of course, that we kind of do, we're just not honest about it.
Anyone who deserves execution does not deserve a quick, painless termination, they deserve to suffer as much as possible. The only way to make it better is to make them suffer like their victims, and their victims are NOT JUST THE PEOPLE THEY KILLED, but also all the people left behind.
I'm sorry that you're so simple-minded that you seriously think that this makes anything "better".
This is revenge, not justice. The whole reason why we give the government a monopoly on dealing with criminals is precisely to take the revenge aspect out of the equation; remember, the point was to replace blood feuds.
So making it harder to get your hands on a firearm solves, or at least lessens, suicide ?
I didn't say that, and I don't know if that's true in general. The only data point that I have is that the overall suicide rate did decrease in Australia after the gun buyback.
I don't know where you saw those statistics, but it's not true. The gun buyback programme started in October 1996. The suicide rate in Australia peaked in 1997 (before the programme was complete) and has been steadily decreasing since.
Yeah, you say that now, but you just wait until you start moving at relativistic speeds.
Oh, and one more thing. As the number of guns in private hands in the US has increased, the number of criminal deaths has indeed skyrocketed... in Mexico.
Yet the number of deaths (accidental or criminal) has plummeted, and the number of shootings (accidental or criminal) has plummeted as well.
Not to contradict your point, but there is one kind of firearm-related death which is neither accidental nor criminal, and that is suicide. Homicides by firearm are down, but suicides by firearm are steady, and have increased slightly in the last few years. The rate of firearm suicide in the US is higher than pretty much everywhere else in the developed world.
So it's correct to say that easier access to guns means more gun deaths, even if it doesn't mean more accidents or more crime.
No they won't. Oh, they might try, but that code will never pass review. (Admittedly, it might end up in some crappy open source project that nobody will use...)
I think this is exactly backwards. I've been using C++ for 20 years, and in my experience, it's the inclusion of Simula-style classes which was the clear mistake in retrospect. Almost every well-written C++ program uses the class system as a module system, and limits inheritance to abstract base classes only.
The STL is one of the few things that makes C++ worth using. The template syntax sucks, but that's explainable by all the good syntax already being taken.
Symbian, BlackBerry OS, Wii U System Software, OKL4.
I'm sure I left some out.
C++ has many, many problems, but almost exactly none of the significant problems with the language were identified or enunciated by Linus Torvalds. All of his rants on the subject read like "Al Capone is a horrible person, because he cheated on his taxes".
The STL is a case in point. It is, by far, one of the best parts of C++. The word "virtual" doesn't appear anywhere in its source code. Yes, the error messages are verbose; that's a compiler issue. Its only significant weakness is the allocator abstraction.
Sather (and Eiffel and Smalltalk etc) are less broken than Simula, I'll grant you that.
I do come at this from the point of view both as an engineer working in the high-performance computing area, and as a programming language theorist. People like Stepanov, Knuth, Dijkstra, Luca Cardelli, Alan Kay, Benjamin Pierce, and many others have written and spoken (sometimes at length) on the problems with implementation inheritance. And the fact that most OO proponents consistently tell you to avoid it ("prefer composition over inheritance") is telling.
However, I would say that the claim of "broken concept" is based not on one single argument, but on independent converging lines of evidence.
Here's another one, which again is not convincing by itself, but adds to the picture: the Curry-Howard isomorphism. One of the signs that you know you've found something interesting is that it turns out to be formally equivalent to something else that's interesting. (Think of the isomorphism between regular languages and DFAs, for example.)
Programming language theorists have found many such isomorphisms over the last few decades, and what's interesting is that programming language features seem to be equivalent to interesting objects in logic and category theory. For example, Scheme-style continuations are actually Pierce's Law in logic. Call-by-value and call-by-name turn out to be dual in the programming language which is isomorphic to Gentzen's classical sequent calculus.
Subtype relationships are pretty well-understood, and interface inheritance has a straightforward interpretation (e.g. see Haskell's typeclasses). However, despite searching for decades, nobody has found any such connections with implementation inheritance.
The industry desperately needs the style of OO that everyone uses to be on a sound theoretical footing, because it makes program analysis and compilers better. Lots of smart people have tried. The fact that we haven't found it by now strongly suggests that it's not theoretically sound.
It's bloated and unreadable due to C++'s template syntax.
I'm with you on the syntax issue. The greatest weakness of C++ is also its greatest strength: it retains something very close to backwards-compatibility with C. That inevitably means that all the good syntax is taken.
However, "bloated" is a puzzling claim. The whole point of the STL is that you can do things like type "sort" and it chooses the best sort algorithm for the data structure (e.g. merge sort for lists, quick/heap sort for vectors) automatically at compile time. Or you can create an array of 1000 elements, and it will initialise it with object construction or memset depending on the type, and this is all handled for you automatically at compile-time. You do not pay a cost to do this at run-time.
Your homegrown lib can't do that.
[...] but when I have to choose some publicly available software, I pick Boost over STL.
Boost and the STL don't compete. In fact, most of Boost (e.g. Algorithm, Array, Circular Buffer, Container and of course Iterator, among many others) are designed with STL in mind.
For the rest: Objective-C is not a great language. It has some cute features, but they are primarily useful for GUI programming and don't really contribute to better software development.
I've said some slightly uncomplimentary things about Objective-C in this thread, but I do have to admit that it's one of the best compromises between "dynamic"/scripty languages and "static"/low-level languages that has yet been developed.
It's just a shame that it's also based on Simula's broken object model.