...and video is about more than just 3d acceleration.
TV tuner cards, for instance, can be hours, days, or even weeks of fun. In fact, they can be a gift that keeps on giving. I spent hours researching which one that was available in my local stores should work under Linux. Then I started installing. Around 30 hours of work later I got it up and running. In the meantime I had learned how to enumerate devices, compile drivers, and load kernel modules. All of which is knowledge which I am not interested in. Of course this required getting both audio and video to work. Getting one to work at a time was much easier than getting both up at the same time. Well, a few weeks later the kernel was updated. Rinse, repeat. Except this time the same settings could not be used, so another 5 hours or so were used to figure that out. I quickly learned to hold off on kernel updates until I had time to mess around with that bloody driver.
I now keep that TV tuner card in my spare parts box because I can't be bothered with that crap.
For comparison, that same card worked under windows XP without any messing about (of course through a proprietary driver). A TV tuner on my Mac laptop works by plugging it into a USB port. Plug in, watch TV. The Mac is more expensive to purchase, but involves almost no time on maintenance or figuring out setup issues. WinXP requires a bit more maintenance. Linux requires at least one nerd in the home.
I still run two Linux computers at home (and one Mac laptop) so my experience isn't all bad. In fact, I find problems like these on Linux LESS frustrating than the regular maintenance required by WinXP, but most people don't. This one issue is enough to drive hoards away.
....and, dear sir, that is exactly what I've spent. I've also installed a new hard drive (which I installed at the same time as 10.6) and a new battery. Not bad for four and a half years of ownership. I will also buy Lion, just because upgrades have been worth the admission price up until now.
(I only own one mac, my other computers are Linux (Ubuntu on one and a test rig on another which gets any flavour I want to try out)
Truth be told, I'm just happy that the GNOME team is bold enough to experiment and try other methods of interaction. Without some bold moves then they risk being uninspiring and dull. There is an obvious risk with bravery, but it has to be worth it.
As a usability and interaction designer I will play with Gnome 3 as soon as I have the time.
the 16 bit CDs today tend to use very little of that dynamic range (at least in the case of the most mass marketed music). If we take extremes like Linkin Park then we're talking about 8bits probably being enough to convey the entirety of their album Meteora. 24 bits won't help the end product at all in those cases. In the case of more subtle music, however, this might be nice. Even so, I have professional grade audio equipment (including monitor speakers) connected to my computer and sound interface, and my non-golden ears can hear a difference between bad MP3s and good MP3s, but when you go over 224kbps then then the gains seem to be very, very small.
I may just be extremely limited, but a good 320kbps encoding doesn't seem to give any worse sound than lossless (good encoding being needed, though. Stereo separation is worse on bad encodings and some minor artifacts may remain). 128kbps mp3s should just be deleted immediately....
I've recently worked with extremely clever and young programmers/software engineers. They are much more aware of the need for real UI development, and that not everything is done to make the programming simpler, but they still have a hard time understanding that the UI drives the requirements for the programming, that UI development should start at the same time (or even before) the code gets written, and that UI design is NOT the same as graphic design. The older programmers I've worked with tend t think of proper UI development as something good to have on board to tell the client that they have one. They then seem to tend to go their own way, sometimes with less than stellar results. Good and clever people, but somewhat blinded by their own field. Heck, I sometimes think I understand graphic design and know some coding. That usually ends badly.
I just don't think UI engineers are the solution. Take a well known UI expert, Jakob Nielsen. Visit his website. YES it is in many ways quite usable. NO it's not pretty and would never sell as a product. (I personally don't agree with his UI choices, but I understand his rationale)
You need leaders with a vision, you need engineers of the various sub-specialisations who are willing to listen to each other (mmhmmm...) and you need marketing people who actually understand what the engineers are saying and can buy into the leaders vision. Not an easy balance to achieve.
Seriously, Nokia was an engineer driven company, which worked fine when all the issues were about new functionality and such, but when it came to fine polishing and figuring out non-engineering based problems they just stumbled around.
Software engineers suffer from the same basic issue. They tend to be so extremely technology oriented that they get completely lost in all the features that should be included, all the bells and whistles, and seem to regard an interface as something you paste on afterwards (inter-face, something which is the area where the user rubs against the technology), when the interface is the personification of the whole system, as well as the public face of the program and the company itself.
Palm got this for a while, so did RIM, so does Apple (at the moment) and so does that Shuttleworth fellow (Ubuntu). Microsoft has never got this, and giving the engineers more power is not likely to fix the problem. Each specialised class of people is likely to view most problems as being solvable by their particular brand of hammer, and one of Microsoft's problems has been too much engineering/marketing against too little understanding of what the user actually needs to do. Use the engineering hammer to solve this problem and it is likely to get even worse.
life IS too short. That's exactly the reason I try to keep the really worthwhile pictures (to me. Not necessarily the best pictures, rather the ones that have most sentimental value) separate so that I can look at them without trawling through masses of other stuff.
We agree on the core (life's too short to spend time on boring crap) but see the solution a little differently. I am willing to do the boring stuff ONCE (which does take some time) but you opt to do something which takes less time each time, but does mean that you have to trawl through a lot of crap to get to the good bits each time.
equivalent |ikwivlnt| adjective equal in value, amount, function, meaning, etc. : one unit is equivalent to one glass of wine. See note at same .
[ predic. ] ( equivalent to) having the same or a similar effect as.
The function which the screwed FASTENERS are for is.... wait for it.... FASTENING the device together.
Their function is not "to allow hobbyists or owners to disassemble the device". That's just not part of the purpose of the fasteners. I don't particularly want these pentalobed screws on my own devices (at least not until I have a driver for them) but bitching about functional equivalence while neither understanding the word equivalence NOR understanding which function it is that should be matched is just called whining.
..And that is why I definitely did not say "don't take ANY pictures". It's just the scale that is ludicrous. Thousands of pictures from a vacation is the kind of number that professional photographers used to take on assignment. Then they select the 10 that best portray what was actually going on. The ones that capture the FEELING of the event, and can be used to convey that. Storing a slideshow of 50 pictures in sequence of that really cool statue we saw from the boatride... well.... you get my drift. A sane amount of pics of your family, those are actually pics you tend to care about. Even so, I've taken many, many thousand pictures of my kids. The hundred or so of the best really convey everything; the rest are just what was required to take to capture the good ones.
And equating pictures=memories doesn't work. Your memory may not recall the exact facial details or very detailed event info, but you probably remember little things that matter much more.
Remember, the picture memories don't tell you how you actually felt about that event (and may even cause interference with that memory, thus destroying the most "real" part of your memory. I'm not making that up, BTW).
Just think, you would like more pictures of when you were a child. Would you like an endless stream of mostly uninteresting pictures (50 thousand pictures) or would you like the ones that the picture takers actually thought were worth saving? And curating in this way also makes your pictures so much more likely to survive. Better for backups, better for printing, better for viewing. Just.. at a sane scale.
oh yes, they sure are distorted. Childhood memories are very weak/vague, and most people remember nothing (or close to nothing) before (approximately) the age of 5. That's probably because our memory storage and retrieval systems haven't settled on a storage and retrieval strategy before that, so although the memories are stored it ends up like trying to retrieve data from a BetaMax video by using a DVD player;)
But your 30-40 pictures is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. Possibly even fewer. Re-creating an event from pictures has been shown to be wildly inaccurate so I wouldn't put any faith in that (just like regular memories, we really are funny creatures)
I'm not really advocating against taking pictures, just that the picture taking (and subsequent sorting and storage) should take a backseat to experiencing life. Watch that link I posted, it's interesting. My background is in cognitive science, so I take a particular interest in this, as well as your memory loss issues.
Seriously, are all those thousands of vacation pictures worth storing? Or could the feeling of the vacation be summarised by less than a hundred pictures? What about less than fifty? Less than 30? 20?
We really are behaving like mad magpies, hoarding this data as if it really were the memories of the event (well, if one takes multiple thousands of pictures then one may actually have spent the whole vacation behind the camera instead of enjoying the experience. See "experiencing self vs remembering self" http://sheshtawy.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/experience-self-vs-remembering-self-experience-vs-memory/ )
I've recently taken to culling my selection of pictures which I actively back up; selecting only a dozen or so images from each month. That still results in less than 150 images a year. This selection gets backed up both on multiple media here at home as well as backed up online. The other thousands of pictures are saved only at home, on an external drive (external USB drive connected to an Airport Extreme) an on my laptop's internal drive. These extra images just don't require the safety of an off-site backup. They're just not that important! And nobody will care about the 500 pictures of an Aztec pyramid in a couple of years. Even if you and a loved one are in the pictures it will end up that there are two or three pics which are great, the rest serve only to bore housegests senseless when subjected to the torture of a thousand picture slideshow of places they haven't been and people they don't know...
When I think to my childhood I actually remember large parts of it, especially extremely good or bad events. This is independent of whether pictures exist from that event. Where pictures exist, they tend to colour my memory, and in many cases change it (events which I KNOW weren't fully positive, but the single picture from the event shows something enjoyable happening and everyone smiling). Pictures LIE, and they change how you remember. Taking them also changes how you experience life. Live a little.
I can also imagine that all testing of the iPhone in the wild must have been done with a camouflaging case of some sort which minimizes the problem. The data issue.. well, aren't US users on more restrictive dataplans? I have a cheap contract and have unlimited data (unlimited probably being limited to a few dozen GB, haven't read the fine print. It's enough to stream music and video all day long, anyway). But the issue itself could be due to third party applications, so I am willing to give MS the benefit of the doubt. They do make mistakes but this coming from them would be surprising.
And I REALLY want to play with one of those phones as I was impressed how they had the guts to actually design their own interaction instead of copying it (like Android did). OTOH, iPhone has gone through a few generations and has improved massively, MS needs that too.
Guns are generally designed to be effective against a certain mass of target, with a certain thickness of hide, using specific mass of bullet coupled with a specific size of load. All for a certain range.
A 9mm Glock, a.38 special and a.45 all work best for a target with relatively thin skin, at a range of not more than 20 metres (accuracy under pressure) and a target mass of less between 50 and 150 kg. That's a pretty good description of a human in an urban environment, not a good description of a rabbit, grizzly or a deer (although the deer may match in weight it has thicker skin and is generally at a longer range. If you would manage to hit it properly you might kill it. IF you hit it..)
a 9mm (or even a.45) mostly irritates a grizzly unless you are an excellent marksman.
Carry a rifle in bear country.
Handguns are designed for killing people. That's their design, that's their marketing (MAXIMUM STOPPING POWER! Feel safer with the Smith and W.... etc.)
Sure, it is possible to kill animals with a handgun. A small calibre rifle is pretty much always better. For fitting in a backpack? Just stick the rifle on the outside so you don't have to go through your lunch and your underwear when that wolf/grizzly attacks.
No, It is the design purpose of a handgun to kill a person.
Ok, murder... blahh... maybe a little melodramatic, I admit.
But a 9mm Glock is not all that good for hunting or fishing, now is it? That's not what the designers design it for, OR what it is generally marketed for.
Handgun advertising tends to be in terms of accuracy, stopping power (against a person), how well it secures you, etc.
Bombs are generally illegal, unwieldy and dangerous to the person using it as well as to others. Killing with a knife isn't easy. I think back to a knife murder that happened a few months ago in the country I am originally from. A guy snuck into another guy's room at night and stabbed him in bed. The stabbed guy got up after a few stabs, and a fight broke out. A total of 17 stabs (if I recall correctly) were needed. Not the same as a gun. Stabbing someone in public? Not so easy. Not likely that you kill a bunch of extra people "just because". Nope. One target, and you'll probably fail. Baseball bat? Even less successful as a murder weapon. Yes, people can die from brain hemorrhaging, or general blunt force trauma, but this is a major act of violence which requires determined intent. It's not a "hey you there, BANG" type of action.
This is about the handgun being a device that is designed from the beginning to kill people, and nothing else. Bombs are mostly used in construction and demolition. Knives mostly for cutting food, carpets and whatever else. Baseball bats are generally found... well.. in baseball. Handguns are mostly found where you want to be able to kill someone (even if the idea is to limit it to self defense).
The "genie back in the bottle" comment is the one that I can buy. The problem has already been created, and fixing it is no joke.
well, the main demographic which has been shown to directly influence violent crime actually isn't race, but rather living standard (basically income/class). Middle class people leading fat comfortable lives (like me, and probably you) are unlikely to get into lives of crime. We are unlikely to join gangs because we had piano lessons at the time of the initiation rites (and our moms wouldn't let us go).
Where you create a slum, with low income, bad healthcare, and no future, you tend to get crime.
For some (not so strange reason) blacks haven't really received the same chances for education or jobs since Rosa Parks and the great "integration" of the races. They've had just over one generation to go from not being treated as humans to... well... having the same rights by law, yet not receiving the same. So you get an imbalance.
THAT is what the graph showed.
I could go off on a rant about you being a racist, but I won't. Being misled by spurious statistics and illustrations designed to push an agenda happens to everyone. Luckily, examining statistics from social sciences is one of the things I do all day, and I see the flaws immediately.
The graph didn't LIE. Not as such. But it doesn't tell the truth either.
Not as such. That is not enough data to draw conclusions.
The wide gap between rich and poor has been blamed for some of this (the famous American capitalistic system). When large areas of low income are created, and large groups of disenfranchised groups live therein then elevated crime is a foregone conclusion. Don't give those people any way out (bad health care, low living standard etc.) and the problem gets worse.
Add a plentiful supply of weapons and the problem turns from awful to truly horrendous.
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DVORAK on a Mac?
Not generally.
Adding a "command/Apple" button doesn't change a keyboard into Dvorak layout...
...and video is about more than just 3d acceleration.
TV tuner cards, for instance, can be hours, days, or even weeks of fun. In fact, they can be a gift that keeps on giving.
I spent hours researching which one that was available in my local stores should work under Linux. Then I started installing. Around 30 hours of work later I got it up and running. In the meantime I had learned how to enumerate devices, compile drivers, and load kernel modules. All of which is knowledge which I am not interested in. Of course this required getting both audio and video to work. Getting one to work at a time was much easier than getting both up at the same time.
Well, a few weeks later the kernel was updated. Rinse, repeat.
Except this time the same settings could not be used, so another 5 hours or so were used to figure that out. I quickly learned to hold off on kernel updates until I had time to mess around with that bloody driver.
I now keep that TV tuner card in my spare parts box because I can't be bothered with that crap.
For comparison, that same card worked under windows XP without any messing about (of course through a proprietary driver). A TV tuner on my Mac laptop works by plugging it into a USB port. Plug in, watch TV. The Mac is more expensive to purchase, but involves almost no time on maintenance or figuring out setup issues. WinXP requires a bit more maintenance. Linux requires at least one nerd in the home.
I still run two Linux computers at home (and one Mac laptop) so my experience isn't all bad. In fact, I find problems like these on Linux LESS frustrating than the regular maintenance required by WinXP, but most people don't. This one issue is enough to drive hoards away.
....and, dear sir, that is exactly what I've spent.
I've also installed a new hard drive (which I installed at the same time as 10.6) and a new battery. Not bad for four and a half years of ownership.
I will also buy Lion, just because upgrades have been worth the admission price up until now.
(I only own one mac, my other computers are Linux (Ubuntu on one and a test rig on another which gets any flavour I want to try out)
Truth be told, I'm just happy that the GNOME team is bold enough to experiment and try other methods of interaction. Without some bold moves then they risk being uninspiring and dull. There is an obvious risk with bravery, but it has to be worth it.
As a usability and interaction designer I will play with Gnome 3 as soon as I have the time.
the 16 bit CDs today tend to use very little of that dynamic range (at least in the case of the most mass marketed music). If we take extremes like Linkin Park then we're talking about 8bits probably being enough to convey the entirety of their album Meteora.
24 bits won't help the end product at all in those cases. In the case of more subtle music, however, this might be nice.
Even so, I have professional grade audio equipment (including monitor speakers) connected to my computer and sound interface, and my non-golden ears can hear a difference between bad MP3s and good MP3s, but when you go over 224kbps then then the gains seem to be very, very small.
I may just be extremely limited, but a good 320kbps encoding doesn't seem to give any worse sound than lossless (good encoding being needed, though. Stereo separation is worse on bad encodings and some minor artifacts may remain). 128kbps mp3s should just be deleted immediately....
I've recently worked with extremely clever and young programmers/software engineers. They are much more aware of the need for real UI development, and that not everything is done to make the programming simpler, but they still have a hard time understanding that the UI drives the requirements for the programming, that UI development should start at the same time (or even before) the code gets written, and that UI design is NOT the same as graphic design.
The older programmers I've worked with tend t think of proper UI development as something good to have on board to tell the client that they have one. They then seem to tend to go their own way, sometimes with less than stellar results.
Good and clever people, but somewhat blinded by their own field.
Heck, I sometimes think I understand graphic design and know some coding. That usually ends badly.
I just don't think UI engineers are the solution.
Take a well known UI expert, Jakob Nielsen. Visit his website. YES it is in many ways quite usable. NO it's not pretty and would never sell as a product. (I personally don't agree with his UI choices, but I understand his rationale)
You need leaders with a vision, you need engineers of the various sub-specialisations who are willing to listen to each other (mmhmmm...) and you need marketing people who actually understand what the engineers are saying and can buy into the leaders vision.
Not an easy balance to achieve.
Engineers making decisions?
Because that worked so well for Nokia....
Seriously, Nokia was an engineer driven company, which worked fine when all the issues were about new functionality and such, but when it came to fine polishing and figuring out non-engineering based problems they just stumbled around.
Software engineers suffer from the same basic issue. They tend to be so extremely technology oriented that they get completely lost in all the features that should be included, all the bells and whistles, and seem to regard an interface as something you paste on afterwards (inter-face, something which is the area where the user rubs against the technology), when the interface is the personification of the whole system, as well as the public face of the program and the company itself.
Palm got this for a while, so did RIM, so does Apple (at the moment) and so does that Shuttleworth fellow (Ubuntu). Microsoft has never got this, and giving the engineers more power is not likely to fix the problem. Each specialised class of people is likely to view most problems as being solvable by their particular brand of hammer, and one of Microsoft's problems has been too much engineering/marketing against too little understanding of what the user actually needs to do. Use the engineering hammer to solve this problem and it is likely to get even worse.
Just my 2 cents.
life IS too short.
That's exactly the reason I try to keep the really worthwhile pictures (to me. Not necessarily the best pictures, rather the ones that have most sentimental value) separate so that I can look at them without trawling through masses of other stuff.
We agree on the core (life's too short to spend time on boring crap) but see the solution a little differently. I am willing to do the boring stuff ONCE (which does take some time) but you opt to do something which takes less time each time, but does mean that you have to trawl through a lot of crap to get to the good bits each time.
equivalent |ikwivlnt|
adjective
equal in value, amount, function, meaning, etc. : one unit is equivalent to one glass of wine. See note at same .
[ predic. ] ( equivalent to) having the same or a similar effect as.
The function which the screwed FASTENERS are for is.... wait for it.... FASTENING the device together.
Their function is not "to allow hobbyists or owners to disassemble the device". That's just not part of the purpose of the fasteners.
I don't particularly want these pentalobed screws on my own devices (at least not until I have a driver for them) but bitching about functional equivalence while neither understanding the word equivalence NOR understanding which function it is that should be matched is just called whining.
..And that is why I definitely did not say "don't take ANY pictures".
It's just the scale that is ludicrous. Thousands of pictures from a vacation is the kind of number that professional photographers used to take on assignment. Then they select the 10 that best portray what was actually going on. The ones that capture the FEELING of the event, and can be used to convey that. Storing a slideshow of 50 pictures in sequence of that really cool statue we saw from the boatride... well.... you get my drift.
A sane amount of pics of your family, those are actually pics you tend to care about. Even so, I've taken many, many thousand pictures of my kids. The hundred or so of the best really convey everything; the rest are just what was required to take to capture the good ones.
And equating pictures=memories doesn't work.
Your memory may not recall the exact facial details or very detailed event info, but you probably remember little things that matter much more.
Remember, the picture memories don't tell you how you actually felt about that event (and may even cause interference with that memory, thus destroying the most "real" part of your memory. I'm not making that up, BTW).
Just think, you would like more pictures of when you were a child. Would you like an endless stream of mostly uninteresting pictures (50 thousand pictures) or would you like the ones that the picture takers actually thought were worth saving?
And curating in this way also makes your pictures so much more likely to survive. Better for backups, better for printing, better for viewing. Just.. at a sane scale.
oh yes, they sure are distorted. ;)
Childhood memories are very weak/vague, and most people remember nothing (or close to nothing) before (approximately) the age of 5. That's probably because our memory storage and retrieval systems haven't settled on a storage and retrieval strategy before that, so although the memories are stored it ends up like trying to retrieve data from a BetaMax video by using a DVD player
that's pretty rough!
But your 30-40 pictures is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. Possibly even fewer. Re-creating an event from pictures has been shown to be wildly inaccurate so I wouldn't put any faith in that (just like regular memories, we really are funny creatures)
I'm not really advocating against taking pictures, just that the picture taking (and subsequent sorting and storage) should take a backseat to experiencing life. Watch that link I posted, it's interesting. My background is in cognitive science, so I take a particular interest in this, as well as your memory loss issues.
lol
Seriously, are all those thousands of vacation pictures worth storing?
Or could the feeling of the vacation be summarised by less than a hundred pictures? What about less than fifty? Less than 30? 20?
We really are behaving like mad magpies, hoarding this data as if it really were the memories of the event (well, if one takes multiple thousands of pictures then one may actually have spent the whole vacation behind the camera instead of enjoying the experience. See "experiencing self vs remembering self" http://sheshtawy.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/experience-self-vs-remembering-self-experience-vs-memory/ )
I've recently taken to culling my selection of pictures which I actively back up; selecting only a dozen or so images from each month. That still results in less than 150 images a year. This selection gets backed up both on multiple media here at home as well as backed up online. The other thousands of pictures are saved only at home, on an external drive (external USB drive connected to an Airport Extreme) an on my laptop's internal drive. These extra images just don't require the safety of an off-site backup. They're just not that important!
And nobody will care about the 500 pictures of an Aztec pyramid in a couple of years. Even if you and a loved one are in the pictures it will end up that there are two or three pics which are great, the rest serve only to bore housegests senseless when subjected to the torture of a thousand picture slideshow of places they haven't been and people they don't know...
When I think to my childhood I actually remember large parts of it, especially extremely good or bad events. This is independent of whether pictures exist from that event. Where pictures exist, they tend to colour my memory, and in many cases change it (events which I KNOW weren't fully positive, but the single picture from the event shows something enjoyable happening and everyone smiling).
Pictures LIE, and they change how you remember. Taking them also changes how you experience life. Live a little.
duhhh.... he's counting his own summary with it....
I can also imagine that all testing of the iPhone in the wild must have been done with a camouflaging case of some sort which minimizes the problem.
The data issue.. well, aren't US users on more restrictive dataplans? I have a cheap contract and have unlimited data (unlimited probably being limited to a few dozen GB, haven't read the fine print. It's enough to stream music and video all day long, anyway).
But the issue itself could be due to third party applications, so I am willing to give MS the benefit of the doubt. They do make mistakes but this coming from them would be surprising.
And I REALLY want to play with one of those phones as I was impressed how they had the guts to actually design their own interaction instead of copying it (like Android did). OTOH, iPhone has gone through a few generations and has improved massively, MS needs that too.
yes, it's the fat.
And fat from grass/moss fed animals is way, way better tasting than from grain/feed fed animals.
The fat absorbs a lot of the taste of what the animal eats. Do Americans then taste of french fries and McDonald's?
Guns are generally designed to be effective against a certain mass of target, with a certain thickness of hide, using specific mass of bullet coupled with a specific size of load. All for a certain range.
A 9mm Glock, a .38 special and a .45 all work best for a target with relatively thin skin, at a range of not more than 20 metres (accuracy under pressure) and a target mass of less between 50 and 150 kg.
That's a pretty good description of a human in an urban environment, not a good description of a rabbit, grizzly or a deer (although the deer may match in weight it has thicker skin and is generally at a longer range. If you would manage to hit it properly you might kill it. IF you hit it..)
a 9mm (or even a .45) mostly irritates a grizzly unless you are an excellent marksman.
Carry a rifle in bear country.
Handguns are designed for killing people. That's their design, that's their marketing (MAXIMUM STOPPING POWER! Feel safer with the Smith and W.... etc.)
Sure, it is possible to kill animals with a handgun. A small calibre rifle is pretty much always better.
For fitting in a backpack?
Just stick the rifle on the outside so you don't have to go through your lunch and your underwear when that wolf/grizzly attacks.
No, It is the design purpose of a handgun to kill a person.
Ok, murder... blahh... maybe a little melodramatic, I admit.
But a 9mm Glock is not all that good for hunting or fishing, now is it?
That's not what the designers design it for, OR what it is generally marketed for.
Handgun advertising tends to be in terms of accuracy, stopping power (against a person), how well it secures you, etc.
Bombs are generally illegal, unwieldy and dangerous to the person using it as well as to others. Killing with a knife isn't easy. I think back to a knife murder that happened a few months ago in the country I am originally from. A guy snuck into another guy's room at night and stabbed him in bed. The stabbed guy got up after a few stabs, and a fight broke out. A total of 17 stabs (if I recall correctly) were needed.
Not the same as a gun.
Stabbing someone in public? Not so easy. Not likely that you kill a bunch of extra people "just because". Nope. One target, and you'll probably fail.
Baseball bat? Even less successful as a murder weapon. Yes, people can die from brain hemorrhaging, or general blunt force trauma, but this is a major act of violence which requires determined intent. It's not a "hey you there, BANG" type of action.
This is about the handgun being a device that is designed from the beginning to kill people, and nothing else. Bombs are mostly used in construction and demolition. Knives mostly for cutting food, carpets and whatever else. Baseball bats are generally found... well.. in baseball. Handguns are mostly found where you want to be able to kill someone (even if the idea is to limit it to self defense).
The "genie back in the bottle" comment is the one that I can buy.
The problem has already been created, and fixing it is no joke.
well, the main demographic which has been shown to directly influence violent crime actually isn't race, but rather living standard (basically income/class).
Middle class people leading fat comfortable lives (like me, and probably you) are unlikely to get into lives of crime. We are unlikely to join gangs because we had piano lessons at the time of the initiation rites (and our moms wouldn't let us go).
Where you create a slum, with low income, bad healthcare, and no future, you tend to get crime.
For some (not so strange reason) blacks haven't really received the same chances for education or jobs since Rosa Parks and the great "integration" of the races. They've had just over one generation to go from not being treated as humans to... well... having the same rights by law, yet not receiving the same.
So you get an imbalance.
THAT is what the graph showed.
I could go off on a rant about you being a racist, but I won't. Being misled by spurious statistics and illustrations designed to push an agenda happens to everyone. Luckily, examining statistics from social sciences is one of the things I do all day, and I see the flaws immediately.
The graph didn't LIE. Not as such. But it doesn't tell the truth either.
Yeah! ;)
Science. It works, bitches
Not as such. That is not enough data to draw conclusions.
The wide gap between rich and poor has been blamed for some of this (the famous American capitalistic system). When large areas of low income are created, and large groups of disenfranchised groups live therein then elevated crime is a foregone conclusion. Don't give those people any way out (bad health care, low living standard etc.) and the problem gets worse.
Add a plentiful supply of weapons and the problem turns from awful to truly horrendous.
samma här
Same here.