Maybe that it can already run a wealth of Android software, but isn't locked down by the telcos? That, and the built-in support for gaming input devices.
However, I hope they signed up some good talent for the flagship games -- that's what Nintendo has always needed to do to shift their hardware.
Why would anyone pay for a text editor when there are extremely powerful free alternatives? And regarding jEdit... you really need an entire java environment just to edit text?
Personally, I can't imagine needing more than Vim offers. What compelling features do other editors offer?
Well, if you use EMACS, you can run an entire operating system in your text editor, play Pong, compile and run your LISP code, run Vim, etc.
Honestly though, I've used TextMate, BBEdit, Smultron, jEdit, XCode, EMACS, ed on the terminal, etc. and usually end up coming back to OS X Vim. The only ones I've liked better were one that was designed for LaTeX (can't remember its name atm) and a python-based editor I used for a number of years (it had excellent context-aware tab completion and superior syntax highlighting, neither of which I've been able to get quite right in Vim after all these years).
How many of you use the problem solving skills that were developed in math class? I may not use math everyday, but I certainly solve complex problems that I'm sure others with less math education would struggle to solve.
I would also add that solving and understanding difficult math problems helps you exercise perseverance which really helps on the non-trivial challenges in life.
I'll add that learning to show all your work and keep a log book also comes in handy, no matter what desk job you end up with.
Once I had to program a cursor to move diagonally across a window. While unchallenging, it was probably the pinnacle of my mathematics programming. Sometimes I have to remember to divide by 1024 instead of 1000. There you have it. Most of my life centers around multiply nested loops peppered with if-then statements plus regular expressions.
I take it you didn't program it with a recursive loop defined in some lambda calculus in a LISP statement... that would have made it much easier.
Of course, with out a solid math background, unerstanding what I just said or what it actually means, beyond lambda constructs and recursive statements being "black boxes" becomes decidedly non-trivial.
Think of it as being a carpenter with one hand saw, one flat-head screwdriver, a bottle of wood glue, some clamps and one hammer. Sure, you can put things together, but you're never going to really create anything new.
Having a full maths education ensures that you have the right tool for the job, whatever area of computing you actually end up going into.
And you can never have enough statistical training. That's often what gets you making significantly more money, and tackling significantly more interesting problems.
1. In other words, calculus is necessary for computer science.
2. For code monkey work, a good linguistics course and some courses on reasoning, logic and algorithms would suffice.
3. For any architectural/analysis work, you need a firm grasp of discrete math and combinatorics (matrices, Big-O notation, etc) and a good foundation in statistical analysis (which itself requires at least a basic grasp of differentiation and integration -- calculus).
So... if you're going to spend your career turning out iPhone apps using pre-existing models and engines, pick #2. If you're going to start as a code monkey with hopes of advancing a career in computer software, choose #3.
If you want to get into actual computer science (the knowledge of electromechanical computing and how it works), you'll need the full shebang, as you'll be working on transforming information between analog (continuous) and digital (discrete) states. You'll also be aiming at a professorship, some research gig, or being woefully underworked and underpaid for your education until you've got enough hours in the trenches to make a good senior analyst or senior architect.
That said, they had us doing engineering calculus and statistics for our CompSci degrees. I've found it great for building load-bearing structures and even for some physics modelling, but totally useless for anything actually computer-related. However, I took a biology statistics course for which I still have the textbook -- it has great statistical modelling methods that I use all the time designing complex computing structures (multiple databases, information I/O, etc). Discrete and combinatoric math I find I don't use regularly, but it shapes the way I think and every once in a while is indispensable.
Mind you that 1/2 the features that Jafiwam mentions above that were banned were in fact safety and ergonomic features:
- barrel shroud, a safety device to prevent burns from hot barrels - adjustable stock, ergonomic feature developed to allow a 6'7" male soldier in the army and a 4'7" female soldier to utilize the same equipment. - rails, ergonomic advancement allowing for quick mounting of scopes, lights, via a universal system - think Universal Serial Bus (USB).
Yeah; many places have bans or strict controls on "silencers" and "suppressors" too -- likely from all the movies we've seen where the gun is truly either silenced or sounds more like someone unzipping a jacket. In reality, a silencer or suppressor only brings the volume down to what is safe for the unprotected ear when fired in the open... similar to a car muffler.
Now it's possible to create a quieter chamber and muffling system in the bore, but that's not the fault of a silencer.
It's trivial to get your hands on doomsday weapons... just difficult to get your hands on *popular* doomsday weapons. Have a little originality and you'll be fine, Mr. Mad Scientist.
1. I haven't ordered guns through the postal system but shouldn't there be a system where the postal system knows what is being shipped? It would have been helpful if a postal worker had noticed that a dangerous semi-automatic rifle was being shipped to a D.C. address and notified police. As an example this guy (http://www.joc.com/government-regulation/con-way-freight-helps-capture-alleged-terrorist) was caught because the shipping company became suspicious and notified the FBI. Why was this gun not detected and intercepted?
Indeed -- to me, THIS is the story here. The government enacted some laws, and then failed to provide any infrastructure to enforce said laws in a sane manner.
2. Where are the quality controls on this? There should be a big difference in the shipping weight and dimensions of a flat-screen TV and a rifle. Amazon must have poor QA/QC if they cannot automatically detect a shipping discrepancy and hold the shipment to be checked. This is not that complicated - stores now have self-checkout lines that check the scanned UPC code against the weight added to the bag. Quite simple, except for Amazon.
The other articles answer this one... Amazon isn't at fault here -- their shipper is. The gun wasn't from Amazon, it just came through the same shipper, who took a lablel destined for/which had been on (articles don't really say which) the TV and slapped it on the gun box, which already had a label. Any reasonable shipper should have flagged this IMMEDIATELY, as the code usually has the dimensions and weight encoded, and these would not match the current package. Since the gun should never have made it to DC, and was destined for PA, that means that the labels weren't switched at the last moment, but had to travel through a processing station in the mislabeled state. That the switch wasn't detected there reflects poor quality control at that processing station.
3. What did the gun store (that was supposed to get that rifle) get? Presumably it was a flat-screen TV, but it considering the poor tracking on this issue by Amazon there could be a whole series of incorrectly shipped items.
More likely, they didn't get anything, but saw their shipment "vanish" in a processing hub. The TV likely ended up with NO shipping label.
4. I didn't know Amazon was in the gun-selling business. However I can't find any high-powered guns on their website (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Sig+Sauer+SIG716). How did this get ordered from Amazon in the first place?
Already answered this one above; the reporting was slipshod. The shipper isn't the only one with a lack of quality control here....
Geez, they're just lucky that they're still alive. That very big gun, capable of mowing down, well...just about anything, could have leapt out that box and killed her unborn child!
I mean, unloaded guns, still in packaging, have killed untold numbers of unsuspecting hipsters.
I can see you've never been around an expectant mom... The risk was to the HUSBAND, not the pregnant wife. I bet she could get that thing out and bludgeon him with it in pretty short order.
You can get an AR-15 platform rifle chambered in larger caliber... not to mention that 5.56mm/.223 can easily take down a good sized mule deer.
I stand by the argument that hunting with a semi-auto is unsportsmanlike. Why not learn to shoot so you don't have to spray lead all over the forest?
I'll take that challenge and raise you one: Why not learn to shoot a long bow (or at least a compound bow) and avoid spraying lead all over the forest?
Or you could even go one step further and hunt with snares, your hands, and a skinning knife.
Most people hunt with a supermarket, which is even more unsportsmanlike than a fully automatic weapon.
Pressed optical discs are pretty permanent; writeable/rewriteable ones tend to have their ink fill the pits or degrade over time. Conversely, I still have magnetic media (tapes, floppies) from 30 years ago that work just fine (although not too many people want to store 400kb of data these days).
The only sane medium for long-term storage of data is rotated backups -- when one storage device fails, you pull it from the backup rotation and replace it with something new. The data doesn't care where it's being stored, after all.
If you want something more permanent, etch the binary representation in quartz with FEC. Make it big enough that some sort of optical scanner (high resolution camera, etc) can read the data back to whatever the current digital media is.
Debian sounds a voice of reason within the community.
I wondered how they would tackle the infamous UI "situation", and this was the outcome I hoped everyone involved would have the guts to go forth with.
Rejoice for a surge of development activity for Xfce - a much more fruitful use of developer time than some other currently available UI sinks.
I fear for XFCE... "development activity" usually doesn't mean fine tuning the system to work better with fewer bugs -- it means new people wanting to add on their own "missed" features -- which would eventually bring XFCE right into the morass they've been avoiding all this time.
Thankfully, I don't think the core devs will allow that to happen. But it's going to be a bit demoralizing for them for a while, as they get increased complaints from users, and the increased developers are all clamouring for commit access, wanting to scratch itches that should have nothing to do with XFCE in the first place.
Freenet cannot be used for archiving data; it is designed specifically to distribute "live" data (data in motion). Freenet only keeps data as long as people are actively using it. If nobody uses a file for a while and something else becomes more popular, the ignored item will be overwritten with the new item.
Torrents, on the other hand, last for as long as there is a seeder available (and assuming perfect distribution, can even survive periods of no seed available, as long as there's at least one client with each of the parts).
The big problem is that Firefox's feature releases, UI changes, bug fixes and security updates all go out in the same constant release cycle... so every time it gets updated, plugins break, new security holes are opened, UI elements change/vanish/are moved around etc.
So for anyone wanting to just get stuff done, Firefox has become a royal pain. For enterprise environments wanting to use it, it just can't be trusted to continuously function as expected anymore. The versions that have the features that work with the enterprise workflow don't have the security patches required to keep it secure.
Um... you do know about things like the Vancouver Riots (mk I and II) right? Canadians might not be as brutally violent as their neighbours to the south, but they tend to be just as physically violent.
Did anybody die, or even get seriously hurt, in the Vancouver riots? Answer: none, as far as I know. It wasn't much of a riot.
Answer: yes. I'm not sure what riot you're thinking of, but the Vancouver riots have always been bloody.
People who have options don't get violent. Not in mass anyway (yes, chemical imbalances will result in the occasional horror story like that Batman shooting). That's why Canadians are so well behaved. They feel secure in their well being thanks to an extensive safety net and healthcare system. Systemic violence is an outgrowth of poverty. The single most enlightening moment of my life was when I realized that every war ever fought was over money in one form or another.
e.g. the American South wasn't fighting to defend slavery, but to defend the right to oppress blacks. Blacks were oppressed not for the economic benefit (immigrants where cheaper and disposable) but because it gave poor white southerns someone to look down on and kept them from asking questions like, how come I barely make it through the winter while that guy sips mint juleps? Don't take my word for it, google Karl Rove and the Southern Strategy.
Um... you do know about things like the Vancouver Riots (mk I and II) right? Canadians might not be as brutally violent as their neighbours to the south, but they tend to be just as physically violent. The difference is that population density in Canada is much lower (except at major sporting events, where, surprise! you end up getting violence).
A better case study would be somewhere like Singapore that has a high population density, but relatively low societal violence.
I think his "50 year" number is a bit odd, as it's based on absolutely no foundation, other than a few loose correlations.
Instead, he should model it like you do for animal patterns: generational trends.
It makes a lot of sense that violence would peak every two generations... which these days, is about every 50 years. If people start having children later, I'd expect that number to get larger... and if people start having children younger, I'd expect it to be shorter.
Added to that, he tossed out war, but war will have an extremely powerful influence on this pattern -- it probably won't distort it too much in the long-term, but it will definitely affect the surrounding periods of incidence.
The muslims in the west are just biding their time until they are strong enough to act like muslims in the middle east.
Heh.
One wonders why the Mayors of Chicago and Boston go off on fundamentalist Christian Chick-Fil-A, which voices opposition to gay marriage, but are silent against fundamentalist Islam extermination of gays themselves.
Probably because the Christians won't kill 'em.
Just ask Theo Van Gogh.
Oh, wait. You can't. Muzzies actually KILLED him.
Wonder if the Piss Christ artist has the balls to do a Shit Koran?
Yeah, we know the answer to that, don't we.
Very true. The thing that gets me is that everyone knows that Islam is evil and violent, they know that they cannot criticism them for opposing gay marriage and so on, but they all pretend that Islam is just fine because they are sheep following the "PC" herd.
Let me rephrase that to make ti a bit more on-topic:
Very true. The thing that gets me is that everyone knows that humans are evil and violent, they know that they cannot criticize them for opposing gay marriage and so on, but they all pretend that humanity is just fine because they are sheep following the "PC" herd.
Point being: people are greedy and violent and abuse power structures. The degree to which this happens in a given society seems to go in cyclic 2-generational waves, and this mathematician has found a way to model it. The rhetoric in this thread ascribing human faults to specific people groups (faith based or ethic based) and pointing out specific failings inside these groups is totally beside the point. If there were no non-white muslims living in the US, there'd be someone else, and the rhetoric would be almost identical. Eventually, the overall level of societal dissatisfaction with the way these issues are resolved by "peaceable" means will come to a head, and people will look to physical solutions. This will carry on until there is a majority formed who share strong core societal values that they then shove down the throats of everyone else, at which point "peace" returns and "everyone" is happy.
They say history repeats itself, and in this case they (and this mathematician) appear to be spot-on.
What these models don't factor in especially well though, is population density. I'd like to see this guy do a slightly more complex model that ties in the affects of density on the level and duration of the violence.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a gamer, but even I saw the potential in this.
I'm a gamer and I don't get how this is any diffrent from a Roku or any other set top box with apps.
Maybe that it can already run a wealth of Android software, but isn't locked down by the telcos? That, and the built-in support for gaming input devices.
However, I hope they signed up some good talent for the flagship games -- that's what Nintendo has always needed to do to shift their hardware.
To me, that lack of power is a VERY good thing because it means the developers will be forced to make their games fun rather than pretty.
Or just like with most third party Wii titles, they'll be both ugly and unfun.
Well, on a positive note, it'll run all the emulators just fine....
Are you going to use OpenStep libraries as the base?
If you do, it'll be a trivial port to Windows as well.
Why would anyone pay for a text editor when there are extremely powerful free alternatives? And regarding jEdit... you really need an entire java environment just to edit text?
Personally, I can't imagine needing more than Vim offers. What compelling features do other editors offer?
Well, if you use EMACS, you can run an entire operating system in your text editor, play Pong, compile and run your LISP code, run Vim, etc.
Honestly though, I've used TextMate, BBEdit, Smultron, jEdit, XCode, EMACS, ed on the terminal, etc. and usually end up coming back to OS X Vim. The only ones I've liked better were one that was designed for LaTeX (can't remember its name atm) and a python-based editor I used for a number of years (it had excellent context-aware tab completion and superior syntax highlighting, neither of which I've been able to get quite right in Vim after all these years).
How many of you use the problem solving skills that were developed in math class? I may not use math everyday, but I certainly solve complex problems that I'm sure others with less math education would struggle to solve.
I would also add that solving and understanding difficult math problems helps you exercise perseverance which really helps on the non-trivial challenges in life.
I'll add that learning to show all your work and keep a log book also comes in handy, no matter what desk job you end up with.
Once I had to program a cursor to move diagonally across a window. While unchallenging, it was probably the pinnacle of my mathematics programming. Sometimes I have to remember to divide by 1024 instead of 1000. There you have it. Most of my life centers around multiply nested loops peppered with if-then statements plus regular expressions.
I take it you didn't program it with a recursive loop defined in some lambda calculus in a LISP statement... that would have made it much easier.
Of course, with out a solid math background, unerstanding what I just said or what it actually means, beyond lambda constructs and recursive statements being "black boxes" becomes decidedly non-trivial.
And of course, everyone uses C instead of LISP ;)
Think of it as being a carpenter with one hand saw, one flat-head screwdriver, a bottle of wood glue, some clamps and one hammer. Sure, you can put things together, but you're never going to really create anything new.
Having a full maths education ensures that you have the right tool for the job, whatever area of computing you actually end up going into.
And you can never have enough statistical training. That's often what gets you making significantly more money, and tackling significantly more interesting problems.
1. In other words, calculus is necessary for computer science.
2. For code monkey work, a good linguistics course and some courses on reasoning, logic and algorithms would suffice.
3. For any architectural/analysis work, you need a firm grasp of discrete math and combinatorics (matrices, Big-O notation, etc) and a good foundation in statistical analysis (which itself requires at least a basic grasp of differentiation and integration -- calculus).
So... if you're going to spend your career turning out iPhone apps using pre-existing models and engines, pick #2. If you're going to start as a code monkey with hopes of advancing a career in computer software, choose #3.
If you want to get into actual computer science (the knowledge of electromechanical computing and how it works), you'll need the full shebang, as you'll be working on transforming information between analog (continuous) and digital (discrete) states. You'll also be aiming at a professorship, some research gig, or being woefully underworked and underpaid for your education until you've got enough hours in the trenches to make a good senior analyst or senior architect.
That said, they had us doing engineering calculus and statistics for our CompSci degrees. I've found it great for building load-bearing structures and even for some physics modelling, but totally useless for anything actually computer-related. However, I took a biology statistics course for which I still have the textbook -- it has great statistical modelling methods that I use all the time designing complex computing structures (multiple databases, information I/O, etc). Discrete and combinatoric math I find I don't use regularly, but it shapes the way I think and every once in a while is indispensable.
Mind you that 1/2 the features that Jafiwam mentions above that were banned were in fact safety and ergonomic features:
- barrel shroud, a safety device to prevent burns from hot barrels
- adjustable stock, ergonomic feature developed to allow a 6'7" male soldier in the army and a 4'7" female soldier to utilize the same equipment.
- rails, ergonomic advancement allowing for quick mounting of scopes, lights, via a universal system - think Universal Serial Bus (USB).
Yeah; many places have bans or strict controls on "silencers" and "suppressors" too -- likely from all the movies we've seen where the gun is truly either silenced or sounds more like someone unzipping a jacket. In reality, a silencer or suppressor only brings the volume down to what is safe for the unprotected ear when fired in the open... similar to a car muffler.
Now it's possible to create a quieter chamber and muffling system in the bore, but that's not the fault of a silencer.
It's trivial to get your hands on doomsday weapons... just difficult to get your hands on *popular* doomsday weapons. Have a little originality and you'll be fine, Mr. Mad Scientist.
1. I haven't ordered guns through the postal system but shouldn't there be a system where the postal system knows what is being shipped? It would have been helpful if a postal worker had noticed that a dangerous semi-automatic rifle was being shipped to a D.C. address and notified police. As an example this guy (http://www.joc.com/government-regulation/con-way-freight-helps-capture-alleged-terrorist) was caught because the shipping company became suspicious and notified the FBI. Why was this gun not detected and intercepted?
Indeed -- to me, THIS is the story here. The government enacted some laws, and then failed to provide any infrastructure to enforce said laws in a sane manner.
2. Where are the quality controls on this? There should be a big difference in the shipping weight and dimensions of a flat-screen TV and a rifle. Amazon must have poor QA/QC if they cannot automatically detect a shipping discrepancy and hold the shipment to be checked. This is not that complicated - stores now have self-checkout lines that check the scanned UPC code against the weight added to the bag. Quite simple, except for Amazon.
The other articles answer this one... Amazon isn't at fault here -- their shipper is. The gun wasn't from Amazon, it just came through the same shipper, who took a lablel destined for/which had been on (articles don't really say which) the TV and slapped it on the gun box, which already had a label. Any reasonable shipper should have flagged this IMMEDIATELY, as the code usually has the dimensions and weight encoded, and these would not match the current package. Since the gun should never have made it to DC, and was destined for PA, that means that the labels weren't switched at the last moment, but had to travel through a processing station in the mislabeled state. That the switch wasn't detected there reflects poor quality control at that processing station.
3. What did the gun store (that was supposed to get that rifle) get? Presumably it was a flat-screen TV, but it considering the poor tracking on this issue by Amazon there could be a whole series of incorrectly shipped items.
More likely, they didn't get anything, but saw their shipment "vanish" in a processing hub. The TV likely ended up with NO shipping label.
4. I didn't know Amazon was in the gun-selling business. However I can't find any high-powered guns on their website (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Sig+Sauer+SIG716). How did this get ordered from Amazon in the first place?
Already answered this one above; the reporting was slipshod. The shipper isn't the only one with a lack of quality control here....
Is that article originally from the Onion?
Geez, they're just lucky that they're still alive. That very big gun, capable of mowing down, well...just about anything, could have leapt out that box and killed her unborn child!
I mean, unloaded guns, still in packaging, have killed untold numbers of unsuspecting hipsters.
I can see you've never been around an expectant mom...
The risk was to the HUSBAND, not the pregnant wife. I bet she could get that thing out and bludgeon him with it in pretty short order.
You can get an AR-15 platform rifle chambered in larger caliber... not to mention that 5.56mm/.223 can easily take down a good sized mule deer.
I stand by the argument that hunting with a semi-auto is unsportsmanlike. Why not learn to shoot so you don't have to spray lead all over the forest?
I'll take that challenge and raise you one: Why not learn to shoot a long bow (or at least a compound bow) and avoid spraying lead all over the forest?
Or you could even go one step further and hunt with snares, your hands, and a skinning knife.
Most people hunt with a supermarket, which is even more unsportsmanlike than a fully automatic weapon.
He missed his chance... the recipient should have been standing at his desk, or at least sitting on a pile of fur.
However, if he kept the gun and they found out he would have problems because guns, shipped via mail, need to be shipped to a FFL licensed dealer.
I can just imagine the look on the face of the dealer when HIS shipment arrived....
Pressed optical discs are pretty permanent; writeable/rewriteable ones tend to have their ink fill the pits or degrade over time. Conversely, I still have magnetic media (tapes, floppies) from 30 years ago that work just fine (although not too many people want to store 400kb of data these days).
The only sane medium for long-term storage of data is rotated backups -- when one storage device fails, you pull it from the backup rotation and replace it with something new. The data doesn't care where it's being stored, after all.
If you want something more permanent, etch the binary representation in quartz with FEC. Make it big enough that some sort of optical scanner (high resolution camera, etc) can read the data back to whatever the current digital media is.
Debian sounds a voice of reason within the community.
I wondered how they would tackle the infamous UI "situation", and this was the outcome I hoped everyone involved would have the guts to go forth with.
Rejoice for a surge of development activity for Xfce - a much more fruitful use of developer time than some other currently available UI sinks.
I fear for XFCE... "development activity" usually doesn't mean fine tuning the system to work better with fewer bugs -- it means new people wanting to add on their own "missed" features -- which would eventually bring XFCE right into the morass they've been avoiding all this time.
Thankfully, I don't think the core devs will allow that to happen. But it's going to be a bit demoralizing for them for a while, as they get increased complaints from users, and the increased developers are all clamouring for commit access, wanting to scratch itches that should have nothing to do with XFCE in the first place.
Freenet cannot be used for archiving data; it is designed specifically to distribute "live" data (data in motion). Freenet only keeps data as long as people are actively using it. If nobody uses a file for a while and something else becomes more popular, the ignored item will be overwritten with the new item.
Torrents, on the other hand, last for as long as there is a seeder available (and assuming perfect distribution, can even survive periods of no seed available, as long as there's at least one client with each of the parts).
The big problem is that Firefox's feature releases, UI changes, bug fixes and security updates all go out in the same constant release cycle... so every time it gets updated, plugins break, new security holes are opened, UI elements change/vanish/are moved around etc.
So for anyone wanting to just get stuff done, Firefox has become a royal pain. For enterprise environments wanting to use it, it just can't be trusted to continuously function as expected anymore. The versions that have the features that work with the enterprise workflow don't have the security patches required to keep it secure.
Did anybody die, or even get seriously hurt, in the Vancouver riots? Answer: none, as far as I know. It wasn't much of a riot.
Answer: yes. I'm not sure what riot you're thinking of, but the Vancouver riots have always been bloody.
http://www.tsn.ca/nhl/story/?id=369127
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/riot-sparks-busiest-night-in-20-years-at-vancouver-hospital/article583471/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Vancouver_Stanley_Cup_riot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Vancouver_Stanley_Cup_riot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver_anti-Chinese_riots,_1886
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiatic_Exclusion_League
They need to turn back to Steve before it's too late and realize that only through him can they find the correct path.
I just had two Jesus freaks come to my door this Morning sounding just like that.
For some reason they think that there are people in the Western World who have never heard of Jesus.
Believe it or not, there are many people in the western world who have never heard of Jesus -- and a few who haven't even heard of Steve Jobs.
People who have options don't get violent. Not in mass anyway (yes, chemical imbalances will result in the occasional horror story like that Batman shooting). That's why Canadians are so well behaved. They feel secure in their well being thanks to an extensive safety net and healthcare system. Systemic violence is an outgrowth of poverty. The single most enlightening moment of my life was when I realized that every war ever fought was over money in one form or another.
e.g. the American South wasn't fighting to defend slavery, but to defend the right to oppress blacks. Blacks were oppressed not for the economic benefit (immigrants where cheaper and disposable) but because it gave poor white southerns someone to look down on and kept them from asking questions like, how come I barely make it through the winter while that guy sips mint juleps? Don't take my word for it, google Karl Rove and the Southern Strategy.
Um... you do know about things like the Vancouver Riots (mk I and II) right? Canadians might not be as brutally violent as their neighbours to the south, but they tend to be just as physically violent. The difference is that population density in Canada is much lower (except at major sporting events, where, surprise! you end up getting violence).
A better case study would be somewhere like Singapore that has a high population density, but relatively low societal violence.
I think his "50 year" number is a bit odd, as it's based on absolutely no foundation, other than a few loose correlations.
Instead, he should model it like you do for animal patterns: generational trends.
It makes a lot of sense that violence would peak every two generations... which these days, is about every 50 years. If people start having children later, I'd expect that number to get larger... and if people start having children younger, I'd expect it to be shorter.
Added to that, he tossed out war, but war will have an extremely powerful influence on this pattern -- it probably won't distort it too much in the long-term, but it will definitely affect the surrounding periods of incidence.
The muslims in the west are just biding their time until they are strong enough to act like muslims in the middle east.
Heh.
One wonders why the Mayors of Chicago and Boston go off on fundamentalist Christian Chick-Fil-A, which voices opposition to gay marriage, but are silent against fundamentalist Islam extermination of gays themselves.
Probably because the Christians won't kill 'em.
Just ask Theo Van Gogh.
Oh, wait. You can't. Muzzies actually KILLED him.
Wonder if the Piss Christ artist has the balls to do a Shit Koran?
Yeah, we know the answer to that, don't we.
Very true. The thing that gets me is that everyone knows that Islam is evil and violent, they know that they cannot criticism them for opposing gay marriage and so on, but they all pretend that Islam is just fine because they are sheep following the "PC" herd.
Let me rephrase that to make ti a bit more on-topic:
Very true. The thing that gets me is that everyone knows that humans are evil and violent, they know that they cannot criticize them for opposing gay marriage and so on, but they all pretend that humanity is just fine because they are sheep following the "PC" herd.
Point being: people are greedy and violent and abuse power structures. The degree to which this happens in a given society seems to go in cyclic 2-generational waves, and this mathematician has found a way to model it. The rhetoric in this thread ascribing human faults to specific people groups (faith based or ethic based) and pointing out specific failings inside these groups is totally beside the point. If there were no non-white muslims living in the US, there'd be someone else, and the rhetoric would be almost identical. Eventually, the overall level of societal dissatisfaction with the way these issues are resolved by "peaceable" means will come to a head, and people will look to physical solutions. This will carry on until there is a majority formed who share strong core societal values that they then shove down the throats of everyone else, at which point "peace" returns and "everyone" is happy.
They say history repeats itself, and in this case they (and this mathematician) appear to be spot-on.
What these models don't factor in especially well though, is population density. I'd like to see this guy do a slightly more complex model that ties in the affects of density on the level and duration of the violence.
Wait until they post about my beowulf cluster of bitcoin mining raspberry pi made with an arduino-controlled 3d-printer.
Is the cluster controlled by an Android botnet?