Windows runs on much, much bigger systems than any version of OS X does and has been doing it for a lot longer. That alone, suggests it is more mature at utilising hardware resources and scaling to them.
Well, if you've never read a book about logic, maybe it does.
Can't say I've ever experienced it, but then again I rarely draw lines with the mouse. Nor do most graphics professionals I've ever met, either, they use graphics tablets.
It applies to all cursor controls I've used mice, tablets, trackballs, pads, joysticks, even. If you haven't run into this, I can't imagine you've ever done graphics work.
Mac users have been complaining about Windows's mouse tracking for a couple of decades now. Personally, I think it's just the different methods in mouse acceleration rather than any real problem.
Yeah everyone is making it up because we're all part of a conspiracy... that's it. Anyone who has done graphics work on a Windows box and on Mac OS has probably run into this. A lot of Windows users get shoved in front of a mac, use it for a while, and then realize the problem they learned to live with was not an inherent flaw in all devices but a Windows bug that has never been fixed. Or it's all some form of mass hallucination, you pick the more likely one.
What cross-platform benchmark measures UI responsiveness ?
I didn't know you were referring specifically to UI responsiveness, but actually I remember seeing something (at arstechnica I think) a while back that did just that on a macbook running Windows then OS X.
Er, no. Task switching in OS X via the keyboard is demonstrably slower because it requires multiple key combinations to do so. You're either using Cmd+` to move between two windows in the same application (same as Windows) or you have to use Cmd+Tab to move to the right application, then potentially Cmd+` to move to the right window. In Windows, it's a single key combination.
Hahahaha! That is why it is better for power users. You see for larger numbers of windows, picking the application then the windows results in many fewer key presses and UI interactions. Think 10 applications each with 10 windows. To get from app 1 window 1, to app 5 window 5, with windows you have 50 key presses. To get there in OS X you have 10 key presses (5 to get to the right app, then 5 to get to the right window). This only applies to larger numbers of windows and has a lower learnability than the Windows version. For power users who do it a lot, changing the key you press is not really any slower but pushing it an addition 40 times is.
It's also designed to be easily and efficiently (and completely) usable from the keyboard.
This is sadly, not true. Because of the default setup of two button mice, it is common to find Windows applications that only have functionality within a contextual menu, not within the regular menus. As a result, those functions are unavailable to keyboard only users, and often to people using other input devices, like braille boards, styluses, etc. I know of only one application on OS X that has functions only in a contextual menu, and that application is a pro-grade ray tracing suite that is probably impossible to use without a mouse and fine motor control.
Windows fell behind in this battle years ago.
I find that difficult - nay, impossible - to believe. My standard desktop is two 21" LCDs @ 1600x1200, an environment in which I've used OS X fairly frequently, and I find it gets cluttered and difficult at 20 - 30 windows.
Have you considered a decent amount of RAM? Today I only have 46 windows open, still no problem with expose handling them smoothly.
It's got nothing to do with resolution independence in the OS, it's the fact that Macs traditionally have *physical display devices* only capable of relatively low resolutions, due to their past presence in publishing and a fixation on 72 dpi.
The "plausible argument" I was referring to includes both reasons of how it might be a positive and reasons why it would not negative (e.g., kids shooting themselves). Regardless, the point is the same. We don't, nor should we, go about are daily lives only if there is an absolute ironclad argument or overwhelming "proof".
No one said we needed absolute proof of the results before we try something, but we do need some reasonable, facts. You can't just assume one case will outweigh the other, especially when there is data you're ignoring.
We must exercise a certain degree of intuition in our daily lives and in our laws.
Intuition is just another way of saying, decision making that disregards the facts. Our laws should be based upon the scientific method, not some quasi-mystical intuition about whether a given measure will be beneficial or detrimental.
The suggestion, however, that we do nothing because there in some uncertainty is absurdity.
I never suggested we do nothing when we have no data. I suggested we don't take an action when the best data we have indicates it will have an overall negative effect. Ignoring that data in favor of intuition is unreasonable, by definition.
I disagree. No two countries are exactly the same and it's virtually impossible to "compare" a policy all things being equal. If crime goes down after a gun control law is passed, someone can almost always identify something else that changed and assert that that is the real reason. So the arguments will almost always boil down to just that: reasoned arguments.
Maybe you're a little fuzzy on the scientific method. We're not talking about looking at one data point and using it to infer some relationship. We're talking about looking at all available data points from hundreds of different countries, normalized as much as possible to make the most likely prediction of a result. A reasonable person looks at the data and uses that to make a prediction. An unreasonable person decides a gun control measure is good or bad, and then tries to find data to support their illogical opinion. Look at the data around the world and you'll see all levels of gun control with little or no correlation to the level of violent crime. Why then, would a reasonable person, think that gun control is likely to result in decreased crime, especially when their are logical cause and effect relationships by which such legislation can both positively and negatively effect violence? "Intuition" is a pretty lousy answer to that.
You can argue that Columbine would have still happened without guns, but this requires: A) More Planning B) Better Execution C) Obtaining something that is not readily available to most people (certainly not in the back of their truck normally), i.e., explosives, gas, and/or poison.
First, Columbine is not reflective of overall violence in the US. If your goal is only to prevent a situation similar to Columbine you can just get rid of schools and the problem is solved. Like getting rid of "gun violence" or "redhair violence" defining the problem as "school shootings like Columbine" is a logical misstatement of the problem and will lead you to the incorrect conclusions. Second, it was the reliance upon guns, not lack of planning or poor execution, that made the Columbine attack so much less effective than they intended. Third, poisonous gas can be made from household bleach. Explosives can be made from so many substances it is ridiculous. You can learn how from the local library, the internet, or your chemistry teacher in high school. Claiming they are unavailable or even harder than learning to use firearms well is very misguided.
don't think it is any accident that the US has experienced several similar incidents and Europe, which generally has significantly tigher controls around guns, with fairly similar groups of people, and a larger overall population has also experienced far fewer incidents.
You description of the French resistance is more than a bit beside the point. It does nothing to refute the principal I presented. The Allies provided them with one shot pistols and the loosely chambered guns I mentioned were the submachine guns you reference. The point was, an armed resistance with weaponry inferior to those of the people they are fighting, can make a difference. You've basically provided zero evidence that small arms like handguns are ineffective in a civil insurrection. Until you do so, you have done nothing to support your opinion. Not that it matters as it is only one, minor point. They might be useful. There is no proof to the contrary, so lacking other reasons, why should they be banned?
I, for one, think that the argument for civil defense is virtually worthless without training, coordination, and the ownership of military style weapons.
Okay and your inexpert opinion without any data to back it up is a valuable one why?
You can't just look at one rule or expectation in isolation any more than you could, say, the right to own and drive your car without the corresponding demands to follow certain rules, receive adequate training, drive a safe car, etc.
Who argued that there should not be training and licensing requirements? This is a strawman.
Which "jewish lobby" exactly?
I was thinking of the JPFO and the orthodox council lobbying groups. They objected strongly to certain laws in particular since they were almost direct translations from the German. Again, this is only an interesting sidenote and not really important to the arguments at hand.
That may be your position, but there is not much research to backup this position. If you were to argue that, say, poverty or sustained unemployment correlated strongly with violent crime, I'd tend to agree with you.
How do you define "poverty?" Usually it is a measure of wealth disparity within a country or locality. A person below the poverty level in the US has a higher quality of living and a great deal more wealth than a fairly wealthy person in other parts of the world.
However, I reject the assertion that, say, a nation with a real median income of 200K that is fully employed (not the case today obviously) with, say, triple the economic disparity found today (top %1 networth barrier at 50 million) would have higher crime rate all other things being equal.
So you're arguing that employment rates correlate more strongly with violent crime levels than wealth disparity does? I've never seen any study that supported this fact and I've read several that disagree. In any case, you're creating a hypothetical that ignores the interrelation of factors. Unemployment and wealth disparity are related in our current society. Arguing that in some hypothetical situation where unknown factors changed that interrelation may be a fun intellectual exercise, but it is pretty useless for predicting the affects of a given measure on violence. The relationships are always going to be too complex for us to understand all the logical, cause and effect between these factors. Luckily it is not needed, since we can see the effect of different solutions as applied elsewhere and develop good predictions based upon the correlative data.
Huh? This is a total non sequitur. The government can fleece ~2M dollars, but not ~1M dollars without running the risk of concentration of power?? How is it not a "moral judgement" at less than 1M and a benefit to society at more than 1M?
The statements you make are your own, created by you entirely. I never said anything about any situation other than one example. Where you get the second monetary situation is from your own imaginings. Also, trying to view these in terms of your own morality is all you. I never said anything about the "right" or "wrong" of the situation, only about practical effects upon reducing violence. I never even claimed reducing violence was the correct or moral action.
You seem to have missed the entire point of this thread, so let me cut to the chase and bring things back on topic. We were discussing the fallacy of using "gun violence" as a useful problem definition. Most of the topics you bring up completely miss this point. It doesn't matter whether you're proposing gun bans, increased gun ownership, or increased penalties for using guns if you look at the probable results of those remedies only in relation to "gun violence."
What if giving a five-year old a loaded handgun would reduce his likelyhood of getting abducted by sexual predators? We don't need to look at every statistic when there isn't a plausible argument to support it and many solid intuitive reasons to not to.
What if it does? This again, does not matter, not because there is no "plausible argument" to support it, but because stopping abduction by sexual predators to the exclusion of all other violent crimes is not the problem we are trying to solve. It's entirely possible giving 5-year olds guns would reduce abductions, but greatly increase accidental shootings of themselves and others. The fallacy I was pointing out, is only looking at one subset of the problem, when the remedy affects more than one part of the problem. You need to look at the overall results of the action on violent crime, not on "gun crime" which can serve only to mislead.
My argument is largely based on my perceptions of the probability of different outcomes and on society right to choose NOT to have crimes committed against them (and thus vary the penalties depending on the circumstances).
Once again, by looking at the statistics for overall violent crime in relation to various factors, we don't have to understand the mechanics of the causality. Do increased penalties for crimes with guns make criminals less likely to carry them and reduce the amount of "accidental" murders? Do they make criminals who are robbers more likely to kill their victims, since getting caught is so much worse for them and doing so reduces the chance of getting caught and they will spend life in jail anyway? We don't know, but if we look at what has happened in places that have implemented that solution in terms of overall violent crime statistics, we can get a reasonable prediction for what is likely to happen if we introduce it somewhere. If, however, we look at the statistics only for crimes committed with guns we could be missing an effect of that solution on the problem.
I think you're misconstruing what I'm arguing here. I'm not saying increased penalties for crimes committed with guns is beneficial or detrimental, only that you can't tell if you are looking at "gun crime" statistics since that is not the relevant problem.
If nothing else, the presence of a gun-wielding criminal may be sufficiently traumatizing so as to merit increased penalties.
I reject this argument. How is a gun wielding criminal more traumatizing than one with an axe, or who is committing crimes armed with a severed limb or a vial of acid? I don't think it is reasonable to assume one tool is more traumatizing than any other.
That said, I do think it can make a real difference in the types of crimes that are committed themselves. For instance, without guns you're not going to see drive by shootings, at the very least, and far fewer bystanders are apt to die as a result. You're not going to see a Columbine-type attack... and so on.
Again, you are just speculating. Drive by attacks in places with lower gun ownership tend to be worse, not better. In south america there is a high rate of drive by pipe bomb and Molotov cocktail attacks that hit more people at once and are more likely to hit lots of innocent bystanders. Columbine could have been much, much worse if instead of guns they mixed up a batch of poisonous gas or blocked the exits and lit the place on fire. Demonizing guns is an emotional reaction. As such, it hinders rather than helps in rational and correct decision making. The simplifica
The problem is that, even if you can't contend with the military: Your kids can still hurt themselves, even if you think you locked stuff up enough.
I see, so you believe I'm so incompetent I can't lock something up well enough that my kids won't accidentally kill themselves with it. You further believe that I can't properly teach my kids not to do something and have them understand and obey.
You can still shoot your spouse after a domestic altercation
Or I can punch her in the throat, stab her with a kitchen knife, shove her out a window, run her over with my car, incinerate her with my plasma experiment, drown her in the toilet, poison her drink with household cleaners, etc., etc.
You can kill a person "in self-defence" and yet have it turn out that he was no harm at all, you just overreacted and now you're going away from a long time.
You sir are prejudiced. You prejudge me and have decided I'm not competent to make decisions, so it is appropriate for the state to make decisions for me. You claim that since I'm so unstable, I'd better be physically restrained from operating a device lest I do so incorrectly.
Well, I'm not prejudging you. Based upon your statements, you can die in a fire. You anti-freedom people who want everyone to be controlled by thousands of laws just in case they might make the wrong decision, make me sick. Grow up and take some personal responsibility. Let others do the same.
Hammers and swimming pools aren't purchased with the intent to use them to injure people or animals.
You can't pass laws based upon the presumed intent of the buyer or manufacturer of an item because that is not known. How do you know for what purpose I bought a hammer? Does it matter if I buy a hammer with the intent to kill someone? It is the murder that should be illegal, not buying whatever.
If guns really protected people, then America would be safe, given the sheer number of them knocking about.
Why? More people drown in California than in Utah. People in California are more likely to have lifejackets than people in Utah. Therefor (according to your logic) lifejackets don't protect people. Do you see the flaw in your logic?
So if you're looking to solve a problem like violence, a reasonable person looks at what is different in countries that have lots of violence and countries that have little violence. You don't pick one arbitrary aspect of one country and then try to justify it as the problem without statistics comparing it to other situations with those same criteria. Guess what? Several countries have nearly the same gun ownership rate as the US, but vastly lower rates of crime. Guess what? Numerous countries have very restrictive firearm ownership rates an violent crime rates on par with the US. What does this suggest to someone objectively looking at data instead of trying to find support for an opinion they already made?
If you want to stop violence look to decriminalizing recreational drugs. Look to providing socialized health care. Look to providing free drug rehab facilities and addiction management programs. Look to reducing wealth disparity. These are the factors that statistically correlate very strongly with violence. If, however, you're just interested in trying to construct illogical arguments to support a decision you made based upon emotion rather than reason, just continue as you have been.
i agree completely. just the other day my handgun made it "easier and more convenient" for my kid to shoot himself.
Thanks for helping to weed the gene pool a bit. Stupid people who leave guns lying around where their kids can get them should not be passing on their genetic material lest stupidity become a dominant trait.
ven though I support increased gun-control* and disagree strongly with their 2nd Amendment arguments, I fail to see the contradiction with the issues you point out. For instance, a local public school with mandated prayer actually does not run directly afoul of the 1st amendment. The relevant portion reads "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;". This is restriction of the Federal governments' ability to establish or prevent the practice of religion--it says NOTHING of the state or local governments rights to establish a religion, let alone do anything that can even be remotely construed as encouraging it (e.g., opposing vouchers being used by individuals to send their kids to parochial schools, kids forming prayer groups at school, etc).
And just as soon as I can decide to have back the portion of my federal taxes that go to federal funding for those schools, I'll agree with you. If my federal tax dollars are funding it, however, then it is a federal institution and needs to be treated as such.
In fact, state governments at the time had and maintained for a long time official state religions and many other laws which regulated religious practice. It is only with a rather tortured legal reasoning that this has been Constitutionally applied to states and any other government entity. Whether you agree or disagree with this reasoning, one can logically support all of the bill of rights, yet still reject the ACLU's often over aggressive stance on school prayer of any sort.
Perhaps you missed the history class where they mentioned that states rights have been completely gutted and the federal government now collects almost all the taxes which it then gives back to the states bit by bit in exchange for acting as a subservient body to the feds?
I single out gun crime, in this instance, because it is the availability of guns that is under discussion.
I contend that that is a useless distinction and only serves to mislead the gullible. While it is the availability of guns under consideration, it should be their affect upon violent crime that that is discussed not their affect upon "gun crime" or "redhair crime." Narrowing the scope of the problem to be solved only leads to irrelevant conclusions.
I state - without quoting proof - that reduction in the availability of guns reduces the number of crimes committed with guns.
From my reading the statistics support this assertion. This is irrelevant to the problem.
I state - again without proof - that this also reduces the abolute number of victims of violent crime.
From my reading of the statistics, this is not supported. In fact, from the numbers I've seen gun bans correlate to a slight increase in violent crime, although it is only barely within the range of statistical significance.
I will, if you wish, Google for references to the statistical analyses upon which these statements are based - not my mere opinions, but concrete observations of the real world.
I'd like to see that. The thing is in all the discussions so far in this article, all of the people claiming to have real numbers on the latter, provided only numbers to support the former. This is how this misstatement of the problem is dangerous. It misleads people into thinking the latter because they saw numbers on the former.
So, I single out gun crime (in this discussion) because that is what this discussion is about;
You're just wrong on this. The discussion is about gun bans, not gun crime. The relevance of gun bans is in how they affect violent crime (the problem). Discussing "gun crime" only clouds the issue and allows for people to be misled.
I state that I have training in mathematical logic because (I hope) it is exactly that that I am applying here. This sometimes results in discussions that are non-intuitive: in this instance, for example, I am trying to discuss only the reduction in overall violent crime by the reduction of gun crime....
A^2+B^2=C^2.
Applying mathematical logic to the problem of what C^2 is, can you have a meaningful discussion by only discussing your calculation of A^2? If you restate the problem as A^2 is a subset of the problem and we know A^2 is 25 can we then assume that C is about 7? That is pretty much what you are doing. Gun crime is a subset of the problem, but by itself provides no actionable results. If you wrote a paper about how the result was likely 7 and thus we should take some action based upon just that data, no mathematician in the world would find you credible. Sure you can say A=5 all you want, but it doesn't matter. And because people infer from that that it might matter, you're not clarifying the issue, but only creating more data that misleads others into thinking they have the answer.
f the statistical observations to which I have appealed (but not quoted) are in fact incorrect (or inapplicable) then I have made a factual error, and (of course) my conclusions could not be sustained on those grounds. A factual error, not a logic error.
Defining the problem incorrectly is a logical error. Defining the problem as "gun crime" in the first place is where you made your logical error, just as if you defined the problem of how to find C^2 as "2A^2."
And I disagree with you about lack of violence. I am of the opinion that cooperation is always better than conflict, though there are some situations in which a violent reaction is the correct reaction.
Widespread socialism does not work better than widespread capitalism. Cooperation results in lack of motivation. When we're talking about people, that is what you really need to consider. Sometimes the end result of an adversarial relationship is better than a situation where most pe
Are you kidding me? The two arguments are completely different. It is reasonable to believe that a person committing the same crime with a gun (e.g., burglarly) is likely to be more aggressive if confronted and that that person is also more likely to kill the victim or a bystander if they panic. There is no good reason why we should want criminals to be carrying guns during the commission of their crimes.
It's equally reasonable to believe criminals are more likely to violently attack and kill others if laws prevent those others from having guns. That is why it is important to look at the overall result of gun bans on violent crime, not the number of crimes with guns under the unsupported assumption that one factor outweighs another.
There is no good reason why we should want criminals to be carrying guns during the commission of their crimes.
What if criminals having guns means people physically resist less often and as a result there is less overall death due to violence? The point is, we need to look at the relevant data, not a subset of the data that does not address the problem we're trying to solve.
Yes, the criminal may find another weapon or even use his fists, but that is much less likely to result in fatal or permanent injury to the victim (and even moreso for bystanders); You cannot reasonably argue against this and also simultaneously assert that guns are useful or necessary for upstanding members of society to defend themselves.
I certainly can rationally argue that the availability of guns legally to people not known to be criminals reduces violent crime and death because that is exactly what the statistics imply. Your assumption that not using a gun will result in less death is not a useful fact because even if fewer incidents result in death, there are more overall incidents due to the easier targets. Whatever the mechanism, gun bans in general statistically do not decrease violent crime, which is the reasonable stated goal.
As for...Red hair crimes? Pfft. Most reasonable people understand that victims of crime with red hair are probably not being chosen because they have redhair on their heads.
Yup, and most criminals don't commit a violent crime because they have a gun at their disposal. What part of this analogy are you failing to grasp?
The only way you might argue that case is if, say, you really believe that there are bands of serial killers, robbers, or what have you out there that will exclusively or preferentially attack people with redhair (or if red hair on someone's head causes them to behave in a way that would increase their exposure to crime)... not plausible and no evidence to support it.
It's an analogy. The purpose is to demonstrate why the principal is flawed by applying that same principal to a different subject. Apparently you fail to understand the concept. Banning red hair or guns is only useful if doing so results in a net decrease in violent crime, not if it result in a decrease in one subset of violent crime and a net increase in another. The previous poster asserted that decreasing "gun crime" was a good thing, without addressing whether or not the measure that caused that decrease resulted in a net increase or decrease in the number we're really interested in, which is violent crime as a whole. This is a logical misstatement of the problem and thus the conclusion is also flawed.
One, I find it unlikely that an untrained and disorganized bunch of citizens is going to stop a modern, highly trained, and highly equipped army from imposing their will. Two, if you truly believe this, then citizens should also own machines guns, tanks, high-explosives, landmines, RF communications gear, and other weapons that are an essential part of the evolution of modern conflict. Three, if civil defence is the aim, then all people should have mandatory military training. Four, civil defense does not require anyone to keep a concealed weapon on them--the weapon could be required to be stored in the house at all times (and it could be sealed and inspected).
One, you are obviously not a student of history. In a civil conflict, some portion of said military will be on the side of the rebels. More importantly, within a civil engagement, you only need a weapon good enough to allow you to acquire a better weapon. The French resistance in WW2 were given one shot pistols and machine guns chambered to fire a huge array of bullets, very inaccurately. They may well have changed the course of that war.
Two, I do believe some modern weapons should be restricted in ownership, but most should be available to private citizens. That, however, is not necessary for the points I made above.
Three, mandatory training would be of a benefit to this goal, but I'm unconvinced the benefit of that training outweighs the restriction on people's freedom to run their own lives that it would entail.
Four, if someone knows where the weapons are, they can take them. That is why gun registration laws are so heavily opposed by the Jewish lobby. It was one of the Nazi party's first acts once they took power. Some people learn from history. More importantly, however, this is supposed to be a free country. You need to have real justification for removing freedoms, not for allowing people to keep them.
Still at this eh? Besides the reasons I've already listed for the absurdity of this idea...
Let's skip this issue for now. I assert that wealth disparity is the single strongest correlation with violent crime, but it is not really relevant to a discussion about what correlation gun bans have with violent crime. It was merely an example.
Oh, wait, you don't seem to make any other points with regard to gun control or address any of the the points I made beyond this. Okay, I'll bite and address your concerns briefly.
Why 1 million dollars? Why not 10 dollars? If it is "wrong" for children to benefit from most of their parents hard work, then why should the less wealthy be able to pass on so disproprionately more of their wealth?
1 million dollars was a simplified example, that is why. As for it being "right" or "wrong" that is a matter of morality and is entirely subjective. The government has no place in legislating morality, only in working to the benefit of society. I think ideally it would be the most fair thing if every child was provided all the same opportunities and the same amount of money when they were born, don't you? I don't, however, think the government can properly manage such a system and attempts to do so would motivate dangerous concentration of power. The same result for society, however, can be had from not a perfectly equal situation for each child, but a roughly equal one. Moving to a system that is "more fair" while not dangerous in terms of government abuse seems sensible.
Why is the mid-level sales guy that makes 100K/year and saves just 5% of his income exempt for any estate tax, but the guy that goes into business for himself, that forgoes a handsome salary at a big corp, that plows most of his life savings into his business, that works his ass off every day for decades, and plows profits right back into the company, subject to an effective tax rate of 75% on a 6 million dollar business?
I'm not sure what you meant to say, but is a bit garbled. Neither of those people is taxed one cent by an inheritance tax. Their est
I trust I am rational, and I care about gun crime. I care about all crime.
That is not the point. You single out "gun crime" as a category to address. Why not crime by people with red hair? Or violent crime that damages the abdomen? Why is crime with guns a useful subcategory of crime to address instead of addressing violent crime as a whole? Shaving the heads of all people with red hair would entirely eliminate most redhair crimes. Does this make it useful in some way? If we can do this and stop all redhair crimes, while increasing crime in general since red haired people are pissed off and feel discriminated against should we do it?
Of course, human beings can be violent and nasty without guns, but we can at least help our societies.
But you haven't demonstrated that reducing "gun crime" via gun control measures helps society, any more than stopping redhair crimes via forced head shaving does. If the problem is violent crime, we need to address measures that reduce violent crime, not ones that reduce one category of violent crime while resulting in a net increase or no change to violent crime at all.
So what sort of rational person cares about gun crime? Sixty-one year old English systems designers with training in mathematical logic, computing, philosophy and music, who care about Christian values, that's who.
Interesting categorizations for yourself. You specify an interest in "mathematical logic" as a self assigned label for yourself. But you are not applying logic to this issue. Define the problem to be solved in meaningful terms, then look for solutions that apply to the overall problem. This isn't that different from mathematical logic. Your other interest "christian values" is somewhat suspect as well, as christianity is, by definition, a rejection of logic in one instance. I don't object to that, but it does raise the possibility that you are not logically approaching this issue either.
...every act or decision that moves this world, or any part of this world, away from violence towards tolerance is (IMHO) a welcome act or decision.
I disagree in principal because I don't think a lack of violence is a reasonable ultimate goal for society. Sterilizing the entire planet would result in a net decrease in violence. Even ignoring that, you have not demonstrated that the proposed gun ban that reduces gun crime produces an overall decrease in violence. Until you can demonstrate that it does, you're taking actions to increase violent crime, not decrease it. By willfully ignoring the big picture you've managed to lose sight of even the goal you yourself stated. Reducing gun crime is not, necessarily beneficial if your goal is to reduce crime and your assertion that it is a failure of logic.
In Windows, this type of application tends to be either run in a service, minimise to a tray icon or simply display a small window (and is extremely uncommon, in any event).
Services are no good if there is user interaction. I'm talking about applications. Tray icons are a hack and confuse most users to no end. They don't behave as users expect and don't have any way to provide the normal menus. Small windows are the common hack used to get around this problem. I've seen plenty of programs that have small, useless windows that take up space but are otherwise useless. So yeah, there are ways to work around the problem, but they are just nasty UI hacks.
IME Windows multitasks much better than OS X does.
I wish that were the case, but it just isn't so. I've seen numbers that indicate it might handle CPU sharing as well or better, but in the real world with disk and memory and other bottlenecks I've never seen Windows win in a head-to-head competition. One of the reasons macs are so popular among graphic professionals is if you're drawing a line on an OS X system it is unlikely that a background application will ever take enough resources to make the mouse input be ignored by the system or not displayed with the cursor. This is a common occurrence on Windows systems. Maybe this will be fixed with Vista as I have not tested it extensively yet, but for WinXP, Win2K and earlier this is certainly the case.
Firstly because OS X is so sluggish to begin with - and adding more running apps just makes it worse - that interacting with multiple tasks is discouraged, and secondly because the task-switching UI - particularly historically - isn't as good.
Your first statement is not supported by the benchmarks I've seen. Both OS X and Windows are faster at different tasks with different applications. Now that both run on the same hardware, this is even more apparent. As for switching applications, it is better right now on OS X than it is on WinXP and historically, it has been a draw depending upon your workflow and experience. For people using the mouse as their switching mechanism, OS X is a clear win. For people using the keyboard, OS X was behind up until a couple of years ago when they extended the keyboarding and now, it is maybe a bit behind for novices and a bit ahead for power users.
Expose certainly added a dramatic improvement on previous versions (and cleverly hides some of the sluggishness with flashy graphics), but it becomes difficult to use with numbers of windows in the double digits, especially if they are similar (eg: terminals) or screen resolution is relatively low (a problem with most Macs).
It works fine for me with 68 windows open right now on a 17" CRT and a 13" laptop display. My terminals are color coded to make picking them out child's play. As for screen resolutions, I don't even generally use the highest available on my displays and I don't think most people with normal vision do. In any case, since the soon to be released Leopard version of OS X is resolution independent you can stop bitching about that one.
Interestingly (with regards to your comment) while Microsoft was doing UI research for Vista, they found that Windows users tend to "multitask" - that is, run more stuff at once - more than Mac users did.
That is interesting, but given the UI's that come out of MS I'm not sure they are a credible source of info, especially in regard to their largest "competitor."
...it's because Windows simply handles multitasking better and has done so for much longer...
Nice assertion. How many programs do you have open right now? I have 12, one of which being an entire Windows install running in a VM and an entire Linux install also running in a VM. And yet, I don't notice any slowdown in using resource intensive Adobe applications. How come every time I go to a LAN party all the Windows users quit all their other programs before gaming? How come they always look sho
f you watch a computer novice use a Mac, or just anyone who is not used to the Mac - you'll notice that the vast majority of them have lots of application open without realizing it, as they think when they can't see the application, that it must be gone.
The same is true on any OS. The question is do you remove functionality under the assumption they don't know what they're doing, or leave the functionality and design the system to teach them.
They then wonder why their computer is running so slow.
I take it you don't use a Mac regularly. I have 14 applications open right now, including three that are enormous resource hogs (Photoshop and Parallels). Even with a full version of Windows running in a VM, sitting in the background, my programs are responsive because OS X has pretty reasonable multitasking for the desktop. I don't even bother to quit my big applications when I go to LAN parties, something that always astounds the Windows only players.
And Windows does allow for applications to not take up space on the task bar, and to stay open when the last window is closed. They can sit in the system tray too, which is intended mostly for applications that are to be running all the time.
The system tray has always been a hack. Basically some programs that are open all the time took up too much space in the taskbar, so those applications were given smaller icons that behave differently. It is a UI disaster. So what about programs you don't want to run all the time, but that don't need any Windows to function? We all know how this is commonly handled, by creating a useless Window to get around the limitation. It also is used as a hack to avoid the problem of users who want to close a document and then open a new one in the same application. In fact, Windows tends to keep programs loaded in memory as another hack under the assumption that people do this, rather than fixing the problem. Others train themselves to always open a second document before closing the first one, resulting in systems needing more memory so they don't bog down when this is done for large files.
Yes I am sure that as my wife is sitting down reading or in the kitchen that as the "bad guy" busts through the door, he will hold still when she says "just a minute, I have to get my gun from my bedroom".
If you have a good door, it might take some time to break down. Presumably there are parts of your house that she might be that are closer to your bedroom than the attacker would be and from which she could run to the firearm before he ran to her?
Man I must have posted during red neck hour.
This sort of ad hominem attack against imaginary stereotypes instead of actual arguments does nothing to bolster either your case or your credibility.
I guess the way I see it is the danger a gun brings into the house outweighs the extremely unlikely possibility of stopping a criminal with it.
It is entirely possible you are correct, based upon the risks of your locality and the competence of the people involved. It is also, sometimes, a failure of personal responsibility. I have little sympathy for those that would rather plead incompetence as an excuse for what happened, rather than empower themselves before something happens. If you can't learn to safely store and operate a firearm and are so unstable you can't be trusted with one, then by all means don't get one.
The majority of people I know cant understand why anyone would want to own a gun.
This is the logical fallacy commonly referred to as "appeal to the mob." What most people think has no bearing on what is correct.
If guns are great for stopping criminals, wouldn't shoulder fired missiles even be better?
This is the logical fallacy commonly called a "strawman argument" combined with the "slippery slope" fallacy. No one argued that a missile or land mines would be better for self defense for obvious reasons. Shotguns are popular in cities among responsible people because they have very low penetration rates and are unlikely to endanger someone you are not aiming at. Weapons that are likely to hit multiple targets are poor choices for home defense.
This isn't the Wild Wild west anymore, grow up, we live in a civilized society and are continually striving to improve it, I don't see a redneck state where everyone has a gun (yeehaw) as the direction we should be moving.
It never was the wild wild west outside of hollywood. Your emotive argument that you don't like guns is not a logical reason for society or any individual to get rid of them.
In truth, I don't care one whit if you own a gun or not. Just so long as you support the freedom of every person to make their own choices, do as you please. What I don't support, however, are people who don't know about guns and haven't objectively looked at the risks and rewards posed by firearm ownership trying to pass laws to force others to make the same choice they have out of some irrational fear. Those people are worse than the person who buys a gun out of some irrational fear of being attacked, because the latter person's choice is still allowing for everyone to have freedom, while the former is not only irrational, but intent on making choices for others. In short, have any opinion you want, but don't try to legislate away freedom.
At least the police and military have gone through some kind of background check and training. If you don't trust the police any more than the average person do you pull over when a police man is signalling you to?
Having known a lot of people in both the police and military I can say I trust them a lot less than the average person on the street. I have never met a police officer that did not have a "funny" story about abusing their power. I've never met one that did not outright admit to regularly breaking the law because they felt it did not apply to them. Of the military people I know, four a I know stole explosives for their own person use, one was arrested for spying on women with his night vision equipment, and one intentionally shot two unarmed people.
Because the police and military are put in positions of power and authority they should accorded less trust than the average person since they can do more damage when they violate that trust.
I would prefer to look at Canada (a MUCH closer comparison) Canada has very strict gun control laws and there murder rate is about 1/3 of the United States'
Canada also has more snow than the US, are you sure that is not the cause of the lower murder rate? Perhaps snow stops murders? Or maybe you are now seeing the flaw in your logic? You have to look at multiple situations and look for common correlations. Sure Canada has lower crime rates. They also have socialized medicine which looking at the world in general correlates much more strongly than gun control with violent crime rates. They also have decriminalized many recreational drugs which, coincidentally, also correlates strongly with less violent crime. They also have lower wealth disparity which, coincidentally, correlates most strongly of all with violent crime rates around the world. The surprise would be if Canada did not have lower crime rates, not because of their stricter gun laws, but because of these other factors. There are numerous countries in norther Europe, South America, and Africa with similar gun ownership rates to the US, but which have orders of magnitude less violent crime. Coincidentally, they also are way ahead of the US in the three factors I mention above.
You keep comparing the US to (more or less) 3rd world countries, can you not see the difference between South Africa, Vietnam and the U.S. Bush has our Country in the worst shape it has been in in my life, but a comparison with those countries is still ridiculous.
That's a great assertion, now tell me how the US is qualitatively different from Vietnam in a way that would make small arms a less effective tool for civil war or revolution. What is it about the US that would make small arms less effective within its borders?
I see it as "the vast majority of murders in the US are committed with guns." Which suggests to me that guns are probably the easiest way to kill someone. Which further suggests that if there were fewer guns, people would have to try harder to kill other people. Which suggests that there would be fewer people killed.
I agree with your logic so far, however, guns are used in non-lethal self defense in the US more often than they are used in murders. So, while the number of deaths might increase (all other factors held constant somehow) the number of people killed and injured that would otherwise have successfully defended themselves. As a result, the number of deaths would go up.
Now, I'm not sure if the stats for "numbers of homicides" means individual deaths... I think you'll find that statistically there are a *lot* more deaths per "incident" when guns are involved.
Each death is listed as one homicide, so not his is not the case.
Here are the facts. Guns are one safeguard against a totalitarian government that will cause disproportionate pain, suffering, and death. As such they are quite possibly valuable as a strategic move. By default, there is no reason to ban people from doing having anything without reasonable evidence that so doing will benefit society. Most studies around the world to date suggest that gun bans tend to decrease gun deaths and gun violence, but slightly increase murder rates and violent crimes overall, since it lessens criminal's fear of death for their actions. As such you need to provide some pretty convincing numbers from numerous other, normalized locations to convince me that banning guns would be a benefit.
One of the things that really gets me is that the case for guns is so close. Some places show a small benefit while others show a small increase in crime, all close to the low end of statistical significance. Other factors, however, show enormous significance and very, very strong correlation with violent crime, but no one bothers to suggest them. This is because very few people really cares about the numbers, except as a way to justify their opinions. If you're looking for a way to decrease murders and violent crime no rational person who looks at the numbers would single out guns as a likely way to effect change. So here are some new points for you to consider. Decrease crime by:
Instituting a 90% inheritance tax on all assets inherited by an individual that total more than 1 million dollars.
Decriminalize recreational drug use and stop imprisoning people for their possession, use, sale, or transport. Implement fines for unlicensed sale and transport of large quantities and license legal venues for these drugs.
Reduce spending on the military, police, and prison system. Increase spending on socialized health care, drug clinics, communication channels, and education
So take a look at the numbers from other countries and tell me, do you think the above changes would have about two orders of magnitude more positive affect upon violent crime than gun control even in a best case scenario? If so, why are you arguing about gun control instead of these topics? If not, why not and what numbers are you looking at?
American kids are 16 times more likely to be murdered with a gun, 11 times more likely to commit suicide with a gun, and nine times more likely to die from a firearm accident than children in 25 other industrialized countries combined. (Centers for Disease Control)
I don't even understand this mentality. How can someone cite this as though it were worse than other places. Guess what, I bet people in Japan are more likely to die by choking on fish than those in the US. Who cares? The mechanism is not important. Are kids in the US more likely to commit suicide or be murdered than other countries and does this statistic correlate across countries that have more handgun availability? The answer, for anyone who bothers to look, is "no." So if we make guns harder to obtain more people will kill themselves with poison and more people will die from drive by pipe bombs. How is this beneficial if you don't have some sort of psychological aversion to guns that does not extend to these other instruments?
Gun bans don't prevent violence and most studies show they slightly increase it. If you're interested in stopping violence why not look to the phenomenon that do strongly correlate with violence and look to passing laws regarding those?
You can probably get away with it during Halloween...
Actually, last halloween I needed a quick costume so an asian hat, kimono, and katana made for a quick one. I ended up downtown going to a showing of the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" where they were searching everyone on the way in. I was trashed but figured I wait and see If I had to go ditch the sword at my truck. They frisked me for rice, squirt guns, etc. but made no comment about the sword. It is a strange world sometimes.
"Document" in this case just means "application state".
I don't understand. The idea is that you always want your applications to be in some given state or the last state it was in? So if I have an image viewer I can't leave it open without any open images? If I quit it with open images it has those images open the next time I open it? Plenty of programs already do that. So what exactly is this concept? I searched Google but found nothing relevant.
You're forgetting one important point. A steak knife is manufactured to cut a steak though it can also be used to murder someone. On the other hand, a 9mil has no other purpose but to take a life, certainly not cut steak. Handguns are created to fulfill a single purpose (except those who find them useful for hunting).
Anyone who supports the passage of a law based upon the presumed intent of another has made a fundamental error. How do you know the manufacturer of the steak knife is not creating it with the intent of capturing the murderer market? How do you know that the pistol manufacturer is not targeting the competition shooting market? Even when a pistol manufacturer has stated they are targeting the people killing market, what's the problem? It is legal and in my opinion laudable to kill people in certain circumstances. I just don't buy that banning tools often used for a given purpose works. People will find other tools, or if they plan to break the law they will ignore the other law too. Make murder illegal and there is no reason to make guns illegal. If you want to act proactively to stop crimes like this, target the motivation for the crimes, not the tools often used. (P.S. strangulation is the most common method of murder, go ahead and extrapolate what tool should be banned to stop those.)
9th Amendment: Too vague to be meaningful. Surely "the people" don't have every conceivable right (e.g. they don't have the right to murder). There is no way to know what set of rights this amendment refers to.
I think you're misconstruing this. Your example of "the people" and a right to commit murder is flawed because this speaks to what rights the government has. Laws against murder, for example, are mitigating a conflict of rights between individuals citizens (the people). The people (as opposed to the state) absolutely do have a right to commit murder, it just so happens that that right conflicts with other citizens' rights to not be murdered and thus the courts pass laws to clearly define where one person's rights end and another person's rights begin. Your error is in thinking this amendment is giving citizen's carte blanch to walk over the rights of other citizens, when in fact it is saying that the government can't do that except in specific ways.
As far as I can tell, an "activity" is just a fusion of application+document. It means you don't have weird states like an application that's running but can't be used because it has no document loaded, or a document you can't open because you don't have the application.
What if I want to run an application that does not open documents? What if I want to view metadata about a document in a proprietary format that I can't decode? Maybe I'm just not understanding this revolutionary new concept, or maybe it is just a piss poor concept.
The problem is, even though you clicked on the red circle on tool bar, it may not have closed the app you were working with. So even though all you see is your word processor, the tool bar is still from the app you meant to close.
This is wholly a matter of workflow. Windows users have this problem because on Windows closing a window is the same thing as quitting an application. The two have been tied. To me, that is a design flaw and I'll tell you why. I regularly run applications that have no Window and don't need one. They are only menus and a dock icon. On Windows, this type of application would confuse the crap out of people. Further, I often want to close all the documents in use by an application, but not quit the application. The reason for this is also simple, I don't want to wait for it to load again multitasking us good enough that having it open does not slow down other applications. I think this has also been an issue related to Windows since on Windows users have trained themselves to quit applications not in use, since the multitasking does not handle programs sitting idle in the background very well. It pisses me off when I'm on a Windows box and I close a file only to have reopen the program that just quit because I want to open another file using that same program. This is a common task that Windows application developers hack their way around by creating managing Windows that just sit around as placeholders with nothing in them, or useless features in them that only duplicate functionality of the menus.
In summary, the "correct" behavior is simply a matter of perspective, but I certainly find the Mac way a lot more useful to me than the Windows way. I prefer separate granular operations rather than tying one behavior to another unrelated task.
You'd be surprised to know how many could not grasp the fact that the red circle may not close an application and just because you can only see one window does not mean that the top tool bar is the tool bar from that particular application.
Here's my Win2K counter-anecdote. My father is computer illiterate. He only knows how to get to documents that the application lists as the most recently used ones. He only know how to quit programs by clicking the "X" button. His computer used to regularly slow down until it was unusable and he had to reboot. The reason was not spyware, but hearts. Clicking the "X" closed the game window, but did not quit the application. Windows, however, had no way to easily get to the program again (a bug prevented cmd-tabbing). So I'd stop by and he'd regularly have 10 or more copies of hearts running on his laptop. Teaching him to use the menus proved harder than finding a better hearts game.
of course, this was back when we were using system 9, but I don't see any difference with OSX
There is one difference and that is the dock. If you close a window the user will notice the program is still running pretty quickly, since the dock icon remains and is marked as running. Most novice mac users use the dock to start and stop applications. It makes a lot more logical sense, in my opinion, than tying the action to having open windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows runs on much, much bigger systems than any version of OS X does and has been doing it for a lot longer. That alone, suggests it is more mature at utilising hardware resources and scaling to them.
Well, if you've never read a book about logic, maybe it does.
Can't say I've ever experienced it, but then again I rarely draw lines with the mouse. Nor do most graphics professionals I've ever met, either, they use graphics tablets.
It applies to all cursor controls I've used mice, tablets, trackballs, pads, joysticks, even. If you haven't run into this, I can't imagine you've ever done graphics work.
Mac users have been complaining about Windows's mouse tracking for a couple of decades now. Personally, I think it's just the different methods in mouse acceleration rather than any real problem.
Yeah everyone is making it up because we're all part of a conspiracy... that's it. Anyone who has done graphics work on a Windows box and on Mac OS has probably run into this. A lot of Windows users get shoved in front of a mac, use it for a while, and then realize the problem they learned to live with was not an inherent flaw in all devices but a Windows bug that has never been fixed. Or it's all some form of mass hallucination, you pick the more likely one.
What cross-platform benchmark measures UI responsiveness ?
I didn't know you were referring specifically to UI responsiveness, but actually I remember seeing something (at arstechnica I think) a while back that did just that on a macbook running Windows then OS X.
Er, no. Task switching in OS X via the keyboard is demonstrably slower because it requires multiple key combinations to do so. You're either using Cmd+` to move between two windows in the same application (same as Windows) or you have to use Cmd+Tab to move to the right application, then potentially Cmd+` to move to the right window. In Windows, it's a single key combination.
Hahahaha! That is why it is better for power users. You see for larger numbers of windows, picking the application then the windows results in many fewer key presses and UI interactions. Think 10 applications each with 10 windows. To get from app 1 window 1, to app 5 window 5, with windows you have 50 key presses. To get there in OS X you have 10 key presses (5 to get to the right app, then 5 to get to the right window). This only applies to larger numbers of windows and has a lower learnability than the Windows version. For power users who do it a lot, changing the key you press is not really any slower but pushing it an addition 40 times is.
It's also designed to be easily and efficiently (and completely) usable from the keyboard.
This is sadly, not true. Because of the default setup of two button mice, it is common to find Windows applications that only have functionality within a contextual menu, not within the regular menus. As a result, those functions are unavailable to keyboard only users, and often to people using other input devices, like braille boards, styluses, etc. I know of only one application on OS X that has functions only in a contextual menu, and that application is a pro-grade ray tracing suite that is probably impossible to use without a mouse and fine motor control.
Windows fell behind in this battle years ago.
I find that difficult - nay, impossible - to believe. My standard desktop is two 21" LCDs @ 1600x1200, an environment in which I've used OS X fairly frequently, and I find it gets cluttered and difficult at 20 - 30 windows.
Have you considered a decent amount of RAM? Today I only have 46 windows open, still no problem with expose handling them smoothly.
It's got nothing to do with resolution independence in the OS, it's the fact that Macs traditionally have *physical display devices* only capable of relatively low resolutions, due to their past presence in publishing and a fixation on 72 dpi.
I see. Let me help you. You plug the same moni
The "plausible argument" I was referring to includes both reasons of how it might be a positive and reasons why it would not negative (e.g., kids shooting themselves). Regardless, the point is the same. We don't, nor should we, go about are daily lives only if there is an absolute ironclad argument or overwhelming "proof".
No one said we needed absolute proof of the results before we try something, but we do need some reasonable, facts. You can't just assume one case will outweigh the other, especially when there is data you're ignoring.
We must exercise a certain degree of intuition in our daily lives and in our laws.
Intuition is just another way of saying, decision making that disregards the facts. Our laws should be based upon the scientific method, not some quasi-mystical intuition about whether a given measure will be beneficial or detrimental.
The suggestion, however, that we do nothing because there in some uncertainty is absurdity.
I never suggested we do nothing when we have no data. I suggested we don't take an action when the best data we have indicates it will have an overall negative effect. Ignoring that data in favor of intuition is unreasonable, by definition.
I disagree. No two countries are exactly the same and it's virtually impossible to "compare" a policy all things being equal. If crime goes down after a gun control law is passed, someone can almost always identify something else that changed and assert that that is the real reason. So the arguments will almost always boil down to just that: reasoned arguments.
Maybe you're a little fuzzy on the scientific method. We're not talking about looking at one data point and using it to infer some relationship. We're talking about looking at all available data points from hundreds of different countries, normalized as much as possible to make the most likely prediction of a result. A reasonable person looks at the data and uses that to make a prediction. An unreasonable person decides a gun control measure is good or bad, and then tries to find data to support their illogical opinion. Look at the data around the world and you'll see all levels of gun control with little or no correlation to the level of violent crime. Why then, would a reasonable person, think that gun control is likely to result in decreased crime, especially when their are logical cause and effect relationships by which such legislation can both positively and negatively effect violence? "Intuition" is a pretty lousy answer to that.
You can argue that Columbine would have still happened without guns, but this requires: A) More Planning B) Better Execution C) Obtaining something that is not readily available to most people (certainly not in the back of their truck normally), i.e., explosives, gas, and/or poison.
First, Columbine is not reflective of overall violence in the US. If your goal is only to prevent a situation similar to Columbine you can just get rid of schools and the problem is solved. Like getting rid of "gun violence" or "redhair violence" defining the problem as "school shootings like Columbine" is a logical misstatement of the problem and will lead you to the incorrect conclusions. Second, it was the reliance upon guns, not lack of planning or poor execution, that made the Columbine attack so much less effective than they intended. Third, poisonous gas can be made from household bleach. Explosives can be made from so many substances it is ridiculous. You can learn how from the local library, the internet, or your chemistry teacher in high school. Claiming they are unavailable or even harder than learning to use firearms well is very misguided.
don't think it is any accident that the US has experienced several similar incidents and Europe, which generally has significantly tigher controls around guns, with fairly similar groups of people, and a larger overall population has also experienced far fewer incidents.
In this statement you have im
You description of the French resistance is more than a bit beside the point. It does nothing to refute the principal I presented. The Allies provided them with one shot pistols and the loosely chambered guns I mentioned were the submachine guns you reference. The point was, an armed resistance with weaponry inferior to those of the people they are fighting, can make a difference. You've basically provided zero evidence that small arms like handguns are ineffective in a civil insurrection. Until you do so, you have done nothing to support your opinion. Not that it matters as it is only one, minor point. They might be useful. There is no proof to the contrary, so lacking other reasons, why should they be banned?
I, for one, think that the argument for civil defense is virtually worthless without training, coordination, and the ownership of military style weapons.
Okay and your inexpert opinion without any data to back it up is a valuable one why?
You can't just look at one rule or expectation in isolation any more than you could, say, the right to own and drive your car without the corresponding demands to follow certain rules, receive adequate training, drive a safe car, etc.
Who argued that there should not be training and licensing requirements? This is a strawman.
Which "jewish lobby" exactly?
I was thinking of the JPFO and the orthodox council lobbying groups. They objected strongly to certain laws in particular since they were almost direct translations from the German. Again, this is only an interesting sidenote and not really important to the arguments at hand.
That may be your position, but there is not much research to backup this position. If you were to argue that, say, poverty or sustained unemployment correlated strongly with violent crime, I'd tend to agree with you.
How do you define "poverty?" Usually it is a measure of wealth disparity within a country or locality. A person below the poverty level in the US has a higher quality of living and a great deal more wealth than a fairly wealthy person in other parts of the world.
However, I reject the assertion that, say, a nation with a real median income of 200K that is fully employed (not the case today obviously) with, say, triple the economic disparity found today (top %1 networth barrier at 50 million) would have higher crime rate all other things being equal.
So you're arguing that employment rates correlate more strongly with violent crime levels than wealth disparity does? I've never seen any study that supported this fact and I've read several that disagree. In any case, you're creating a hypothetical that ignores the interrelation of factors. Unemployment and wealth disparity are related in our current society. Arguing that in some hypothetical situation where unknown factors changed that interrelation may be a fun intellectual exercise, but it is pretty useless for predicting the affects of a given measure on violence. The relationships are always going to be too complex for us to understand all the logical, cause and effect between these factors. Luckily it is not needed, since we can see the effect of different solutions as applied elsewhere and develop good predictions based upon the correlative data.
Huh? This is a total non sequitur. The government can fleece ~2M dollars, but not ~1M dollars without running the risk of concentration of power?? How is it not a "moral judgement" at less than 1M and a benefit to society at more than 1M?
The statements you make are your own, created by you entirely. I never said anything about any situation other than one example. Where you get the second monetary situation is from your own imaginings. Also, trying to view these in terms of your own morality is all you. I never said anything about the "right" or "wrong" of the situation, only about practical effects upon reducing violence. I never even claimed reducing violence was the correct or moral action.
If
You seem to have missed the entire point of this thread, so let me cut to the chase and bring things back on topic. We were discussing the fallacy of using "gun violence" as a useful problem definition. Most of the topics you bring up completely miss this point. It doesn't matter whether you're proposing gun bans, increased gun ownership, or increased penalties for using guns if you look at the probable results of those remedies only in relation to "gun violence."
What if giving a five-year old a loaded handgun would reduce his likelyhood of getting abducted by sexual predators? We don't need to look at every statistic when there isn't a plausible argument to support it and many solid intuitive reasons to not to.
What if it does? This again, does not matter, not because there is no "plausible argument" to support it, but because stopping abduction by sexual predators to the exclusion of all other violent crimes is not the problem we are trying to solve. It's entirely possible giving 5-year olds guns would reduce abductions, but greatly increase accidental shootings of themselves and others. The fallacy I was pointing out, is only looking at one subset of the problem, when the remedy affects more than one part of the problem. You need to look at the overall results of the action on violent crime, not on "gun crime" which can serve only to mislead.
My argument is largely based on my perceptions of the probability of different outcomes and on society right to choose NOT to have crimes committed against them (and thus vary the penalties depending on the circumstances).
Once again, by looking at the statistics for overall violent crime in relation to various factors, we don't have to understand the mechanics of the causality. Do increased penalties for crimes with guns make criminals less likely to carry them and reduce the amount of "accidental" murders? Do they make criminals who are robbers more likely to kill their victims, since getting caught is so much worse for them and doing so reduces the chance of getting caught and they will spend life in jail anyway? We don't know, but if we look at what has happened in places that have implemented that solution in terms of overall violent crime statistics, we can get a reasonable prediction for what is likely to happen if we introduce it somewhere. If, however, we look at the statistics only for crimes committed with guns we could be missing an effect of that solution on the problem.
I think you're misconstruing what I'm arguing here. I'm not saying increased penalties for crimes committed with guns is beneficial or detrimental, only that you can't tell if you are looking at "gun crime" statistics since that is not the relevant problem.
If nothing else, the presence of a gun-wielding criminal may be sufficiently traumatizing so as to merit increased penalties.
I reject this argument. How is a gun wielding criminal more traumatizing than one with an axe, or who is committing crimes armed with a severed limb or a vial of acid? I don't think it is reasonable to assume one tool is more traumatizing than any other.
That said, I do think it can make a real difference in the types of crimes that are committed themselves. For instance, without guns you're not going to see drive by shootings, at the very least, and far fewer bystanders are apt to die as a result. You're not going to see a Columbine-type attack... and so on.
Again, you are just speculating. Drive by attacks in places with lower gun ownership tend to be worse, not better. In south america there is a high rate of drive by pipe bomb and Molotov cocktail attacks that hit more people at once and are more likely to hit lots of innocent bystanders. Columbine could have been much, much worse if instead of guns they mixed up a batch of poisonous gas or blocked the exits and lit the place on fire. Demonizing guns is an emotional reaction. As such, it hinders rather than helps in rational and correct decision making. The simplifica
The problem is that, even if you can't contend with the military: Your kids can still hurt themselves, even if you think you locked stuff up enough.
I see, so you believe I'm so incompetent I can't lock something up well enough that my kids won't accidentally kill themselves with it. You further believe that I can't properly teach my kids not to do something and have them understand and obey.
You can still shoot your spouse after a domestic altercation
Or I can punch her in the throat, stab her with a kitchen knife, shove her out a window, run her over with my car, incinerate her with my plasma experiment, drown her in the toilet, poison her drink with household cleaners, etc., etc.
You can kill a person "in self-defence" and yet have it turn out that he was no harm at all, you just overreacted and now you're going away from a long time.
You sir are prejudiced. You prejudge me and have decided I'm not competent to make decisions, so it is appropriate for the state to make decisions for me. You claim that since I'm so unstable, I'd better be physically restrained from operating a device lest I do so incorrectly.
Well, I'm not prejudging you. Based upon your statements, you can die in a fire. You anti-freedom people who want everyone to be controlled by thousands of laws just in case they might make the wrong decision, make me sick. Grow up and take some personal responsibility. Let others do the same.
Hammers and swimming pools aren't purchased with the intent to use them to injure people or animals.
You can't pass laws based upon the presumed intent of the buyer or manufacturer of an item because that is not known. How do you know for what purpose I bought a hammer? Does it matter if I buy a hammer with the intent to kill someone? It is the murder that should be illegal, not buying whatever.
If guns really protected people, then America would be safe, given the sheer number of them knocking about.
Why? More people drown in California than in Utah. People in California are more likely to have lifejackets than people in Utah. Therefor (according to your logic) lifejackets don't protect people. Do you see the flaw in your logic?
So if you're looking to solve a problem like violence, a reasonable person looks at what is different in countries that have lots of violence and countries that have little violence. You don't pick one arbitrary aspect of one country and then try to justify it as the problem without statistics comparing it to other situations with those same criteria. Guess what? Several countries have nearly the same gun ownership rate as the US, but vastly lower rates of crime. Guess what? Numerous countries have very restrictive firearm ownership rates an violent crime rates on par with the US. What does this suggest to someone objectively looking at data instead of trying to find support for an opinion they already made?
If you want to stop violence look to decriminalizing recreational drugs. Look to providing socialized health care. Look to providing free drug rehab facilities and addiction management programs. Look to reducing wealth disparity. These are the factors that statistically correlate very strongly with violence. If, however, you're just interested in trying to construct illogical arguments to support a decision you made based upon emotion rather than reason, just continue as you have been.
i agree completely. just the other day my handgun made it "easier and more convenient" for my kid to shoot himself.
Thanks for helping to weed the gene pool a bit. Stupid people who leave guns lying around where their kids can get them should not be passing on their genetic material lest stupidity become a dominant trait.
ven though I support increased gun-control* and disagree strongly with their 2nd Amendment arguments, I fail to see the contradiction with the issues you point out. For instance, a local public school with mandated prayer actually does not run directly afoul of the 1st amendment. The relevant portion reads "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;". This is restriction of the Federal governments' ability to establish or prevent the practice of religion--it says NOTHING of the state or local governments rights to establish a religion, let alone do anything that can even be remotely construed as encouraging it (e.g., opposing vouchers being used by individuals to send their kids to parochial schools, kids forming prayer groups at school, etc).
And just as soon as I can decide to have back the portion of my federal taxes that go to federal funding for those schools, I'll agree with you. If my federal tax dollars are funding it, however, then it is a federal institution and needs to be treated as such.
In fact, state governments at the time had and maintained for a long time official state religions and many other laws which regulated religious practice. It is only with a rather tortured legal reasoning that this has been Constitutionally applied to states and any other government entity. Whether you agree or disagree with this reasoning, one can logically support all of the bill of rights, yet still reject the ACLU's often over aggressive stance on school prayer of any sort.
Perhaps you missed the history class where they mentioned that states rights have been completely gutted and the federal government now collects almost all the taxes which it then gives back to the states bit by bit in exchange for acting as a subservient body to the feds?
I single out gun crime, in this instance, because it is the availability of guns that is under discussion.
I contend that that is a useless distinction and only serves to mislead the gullible. While it is the availability of guns under consideration, it should be their affect upon violent crime that that is discussed not their affect upon "gun crime" or "redhair crime." Narrowing the scope of the problem to be solved only leads to irrelevant conclusions.
I state - without quoting proof - that reduction in the availability of guns reduces the number of crimes committed with guns.
From my reading the statistics support this assertion. This is irrelevant to the problem.
I state - again without proof - that this also reduces the abolute number of victims of violent crime.
From my reading of the statistics, this is not supported. In fact, from the numbers I've seen gun bans correlate to a slight increase in violent crime, although it is only barely within the range of statistical significance.
I will, if you wish, Google for references to the statistical analyses upon which these statements are based - not my mere opinions, but concrete observations of the real world.
I'd like to see that. The thing is in all the discussions so far in this article, all of the people claiming to have real numbers on the latter, provided only numbers to support the former. This is how this misstatement of the problem is dangerous. It misleads people into thinking the latter because they saw numbers on the former.
So, I single out gun crime (in this discussion) because that is what this discussion is about;
You're just wrong on this. The discussion is about gun bans, not gun crime. The relevance of gun bans is in how they affect violent crime (the problem). Discussing "gun crime" only clouds the issue and allows for people to be misled.
I state that I have training in mathematical logic because (I hope) it is exactly that that I am applying here. This sometimes results in discussions that are non-intuitive: in this instance, for example, I am trying to discuss only the reduction in overall violent crime by the reduction of gun crime....
A^2+B^2=C^2.
Applying mathematical logic to the problem of what C^2 is, can you have a meaningful discussion by only discussing your calculation of A^2? If you restate the problem as A^2 is a subset of the problem and we know A^2 is 25 can we then assume that C is about 7? That is pretty much what you are doing. Gun crime is a subset of the problem, but by itself provides no actionable results. If you wrote a paper about how the result was likely 7 and thus we should take some action based upon just that data, no mathematician in the world would find you credible. Sure you can say A=5 all you want, but it doesn't matter. And because people infer from that that it might matter, you're not clarifying the issue, but only creating more data that misleads others into thinking they have the answer.
f the statistical observations to which I have appealed (but not quoted) are in fact incorrect (or inapplicable) then I have made a factual error, and (of course) my conclusions could not be sustained on those grounds. A factual error, not a logic error.
Defining the problem incorrectly is a logical error. Defining the problem as "gun crime" in the first place is where you made your logical error, just as if you defined the problem of how to find C^2 as "2A^2."
And I disagree with you about lack of violence. I am of the opinion that cooperation is always better than conflict, though there are some situations in which a violent reaction is the correct reaction.
Widespread socialism does not work better than widespread capitalism. Cooperation results in lack of motivation. When we're talking about people, that is what you really need to consider. Sometimes the end result of an adversarial relationship is better than a situation where most pe
Are you kidding me? The two arguments are completely different. It is reasonable to believe that a person committing the same crime with a gun (e.g., burglarly) is likely to be more aggressive if confronted and that that person is also more likely to kill the victim or a bystander if they panic. There is no good reason why we should want criminals to be carrying guns during the commission of their crimes.
It's equally reasonable to believe criminals are more likely to violently attack and kill others if laws prevent those others from having guns. That is why it is important to look at the overall result of gun bans on violent crime, not the number of crimes with guns under the unsupported assumption that one factor outweighs another.
There is no good reason why we should want criminals to be carrying guns during the commission of their crimes.
What if criminals having guns means people physically resist less often and as a result there is less overall death due to violence? The point is, we need to look at the relevant data, not a subset of the data that does not address the problem we're trying to solve.
Yes, the criminal may find another weapon or even use his fists, but that is much less likely to result in fatal or permanent injury to the victim (and even moreso for bystanders); You cannot reasonably argue against this and also simultaneously assert that guns are useful or necessary for upstanding members of society to defend themselves.
I certainly can rationally argue that the availability of guns legally to people not known to be criminals reduces violent crime and death because that is exactly what the statistics imply. Your assumption that not using a gun will result in less death is not a useful fact because even if fewer incidents result in death, there are more overall incidents due to the easier targets. Whatever the mechanism, gun bans in general statistically do not decrease violent crime, which is the reasonable stated goal.
As for...Red hair crimes? Pfft. Most reasonable people understand that victims of crime with red hair are probably not being chosen because they have redhair on their heads.
Yup, and most criminals don't commit a violent crime because they have a gun at their disposal. What part of this analogy are you failing to grasp?
The only way you might argue that case is if, say, you really believe that there are bands of serial killers, robbers, or what have you out there that will exclusively or preferentially attack people with redhair (or if red hair on someone's head causes them to behave in a way that would increase their exposure to crime)... not plausible and no evidence to support it.
It's an analogy. The purpose is to demonstrate why the principal is flawed by applying that same principal to a different subject. Apparently you fail to understand the concept. Banning red hair or guns is only useful if doing so results in a net decrease in violent crime, not if it result in a decrease in one subset of violent crime and a net increase in another. The previous poster asserted that decreasing "gun crime" was a good thing, without addressing whether or not the measure that caused that decrease resulted in a net increase or decrease in the number we're really interested in, which is violent crime as a whole. This is a logical misstatement of the problem and thus the conclusion is also flawed.
One, I find it unlikely that an untrained and disorganized bunch of citizens is going to stop a modern, highly trained, and highly equipped army from imposing their will. Two, if you truly believe this, then citizens should also own machines guns, tanks, high-explosives, landmines, RF communications gear, and other weapons that are an essential part of the evolution of modern conflict. Three, if civil defence is the aim, then all people should have mandatory military training. Four, civil defense does not require anyone to keep a concealed weapon on them--the weapon could be required to be stored in the house at all times (and it could be sealed and inspected).
One, you are obviously not a student of history. In a civil conflict, some portion of said military will be on the side of the rebels. More importantly, within a civil engagement, you only need a weapon good enough to allow you to acquire a better weapon. The French resistance in WW2 were given one shot pistols and machine guns chambered to fire a huge array of bullets, very inaccurately. They may well have changed the course of that war.
Two, I do believe some modern weapons should be restricted in ownership, but most should be available to private citizens. That, however, is not necessary for the points I made above.
Three, mandatory training would be of a benefit to this goal, but I'm unconvinced the benefit of that training outweighs the restriction on people's freedom to run their own lives that it would entail.
Four, if someone knows where the weapons are, they can take them. That is why gun registration laws are so heavily opposed by the Jewish lobby. It was one of the Nazi party's first acts once they took power. Some people learn from history. More importantly, however, this is supposed to be a free country. You need to have real justification for removing freedoms, not for allowing people to keep them.
Still at this eh? Besides the reasons I've already listed for the absurdity of this idea...
Let's skip this issue for now. I assert that wealth disparity is the single strongest correlation with violent crime, but it is not really relevant to a discussion about what correlation gun bans have with violent crime. It was merely an example.
Oh, wait, you don't seem to make any other points with regard to gun control or address any of the the points I made beyond this. Okay, I'll bite and address your concerns briefly.
Why 1 million dollars? Why not 10 dollars? If it is "wrong" for children to benefit from most of their parents hard work, then why should the less wealthy be able to pass on so disproprionately more of their wealth?
1 million dollars was a simplified example, that is why. As for it being "right" or "wrong" that is a matter of morality and is entirely subjective. The government has no place in legislating morality, only in working to the benefit of society. I think ideally it would be the most fair thing if every child was provided all the same opportunities and the same amount of money when they were born, don't you? I don't, however, think the government can properly manage such a system and attempts to do so would motivate dangerous concentration of power. The same result for society, however, can be had from not a perfectly equal situation for each child, but a roughly equal one. Moving to a system that is "more fair" while not dangerous in terms of government abuse seems sensible.
Why is the mid-level sales guy that makes 100K/year and saves just 5% of his income exempt for any estate tax, but the guy that goes into business for himself, that forgoes a handsome salary at a big corp, that plows most of his life savings into his business, that works his ass off every day for decades, and plows profits right back into the company, subject to an effective tax rate of 75% on a 6 million dollar business?
I'm not sure what you meant to say, but is a bit garbled. Neither of those people is taxed one cent by an inheritance tax. Their est
I trust I am rational, and I care about gun crime. I care about all crime.
That is not the point. You single out "gun crime" as a category to address. Why not crime by people with red hair? Or violent crime that damages the abdomen? Why is crime with guns a useful subcategory of crime to address instead of addressing violent crime as a whole? Shaving the heads of all people with red hair would entirely eliminate most redhair crimes. Does this make it useful in some way? If we can do this and stop all redhair crimes, while increasing crime in general since red haired people are pissed off and feel discriminated against should we do it?
Of course, human beings can be violent and nasty without guns, but we can at least help our societies.
But you haven't demonstrated that reducing "gun crime" via gun control measures helps society, any more than stopping redhair crimes via forced head shaving does. If the problem is violent crime, we need to address measures that reduce violent crime, not ones that reduce one category of violent crime while resulting in a net increase or no change to violent crime at all.
So what sort of rational person cares about gun crime? Sixty-one year old English systems designers with training in mathematical logic, computing, philosophy and music, who care about Christian values, that's who.
Interesting categorizations for yourself. You specify an interest in "mathematical logic" as a self assigned label for yourself. But you are not applying logic to this issue. Define the problem to be solved in meaningful terms, then look for solutions that apply to the overall problem. This isn't that different from mathematical logic. Your other interest "christian values" is somewhat suspect as well, as christianity is, by definition, a rejection of logic in one instance. I don't object to that, but it does raise the possibility that you are not logically approaching this issue either.
I disagree in principal because I don't think a lack of violence is a reasonable ultimate goal for society. Sterilizing the entire planet would result in a net decrease in violence. Even ignoring that, you have not demonstrated that the proposed gun ban that reduces gun crime produces an overall decrease in violence. Until you can demonstrate that it does, you're taking actions to increase violent crime, not decrease it. By willfully ignoring the big picture you've managed to lose sight of even the goal you yourself stated. Reducing gun crime is not, necessarily beneficial if your goal is to reduce crime and your assertion that it is a failure of logic.
In Windows, this type of application tends to be either run in a service, minimise to a tray icon or simply display a small window (and is extremely uncommon, in any event).
Services are no good if there is user interaction. I'm talking about applications. Tray icons are a hack and confuse most users to no end. They don't behave as users expect and don't have any way to provide the normal menus. Small windows are the common hack used to get around this problem. I've seen plenty of programs that have small, useless windows that take up space but are otherwise useless. So yeah, there are ways to work around the problem, but they are just nasty UI hacks.
IME Windows multitasks much better than OS X does.
I wish that were the case, but it just isn't so. I've seen numbers that indicate it might handle CPU sharing as well or better, but in the real world with disk and memory and other bottlenecks I've never seen Windows win in a head-to-head competition. One of the reasons macs are so popular among graphic professionals is if you're drawing a line on an OS X system it is unlikely that a background application will ever take enough resources to make the mouse input be ignored by the system or not displayed with the cursor. This is a common occurrence on Windows systems. Maybe this will be fixed with Vista as I have not tested it extensively yet, but for WinXP, Win2K and earlier this is certainly the case.
Firstly because OS X is so sluggish to begin with - and adding more running apps just makes it worse - that interacting with multiple tasks is discouraged, and secondly because the task-switching UI - particularly historically - isn't as good.
Your first statement is not supported by the benchmarks I've seen. Both OS X and Windows are faster at different tasks with different applications. Now that both run on the same hardware, this is even more apparent. As for switching applications, it is better right now on OS X than it is on WinXP and historically, it has been a draw depending upon your workflow and experience. For people using the mouse as their switching mechanism, OS X is a clear win. For people using the keyboard, OS X was behind up until a couple of years ago when they extended the keyboarding and now, it is maybe a bit behind for novices and a bit ahead for power users.
Expose certainly added a dramatic improvement on previous versions (and cleverly hides some of the sluggishness with flashy graphics), but it becomes difficult to use with numbers of windows in the double digits, especially if they are similar (eg: terminals) or screen resolution is relatively low (a problem with most Macs).
It works fine for me with 68 windows open right now on a 17" CRT and a 13" laptop display. My terminals are color coded to make picking them out child's play. As for screen resolutions, I don't even generally use the highest available on my displays and I don't think most people with normal vision do. In any case, since the soon to be released Leopard version of OS X is resolution independent you can stop bitching about that one.
Interestingly (with regards to your comment) while Microsoft was doing UI research for Vista, they found that Windows users tend to "multitask" - that is, run more stuff at once - more than Mac users did.
That is interesting, but given the UI's that come out of MS I'm not sure they are a credible source of info, especially in regard to their largest "competitor."
Nice assertion. How many programs do you have open right now? I have 12, one of which being an entire Windows install running in a VM and an entire Linux install also running in a VM. And yet, I don't notice any slowdown in using resource intensive Adobe applications. How come every time I go to a LAN party all the Windows users quit all their other programs before gaming? How come they always look sho
f you watch a computer novice use a Mac, or just anyone who is not used to the Mac - you'll notice that the vast majority of them have lots of application open without realizing it, as they think when they can't see the application, that it must be gone.
The same is true on any OS. The question is do you remove functionality under the assumption they don't know what they're doing, or leave the functionality and design the system to teach them.
They then wonder why their computer is running so slow.
I take it you don't use a Mac regularly. I have 14 applications open right now, including three that are enormous resource hogs (Photoshop and Parallels). Even with a full version of Windows running in a VM, sitting in the background, my programs are responsive because OS X has pretty reasonable multitasking for the desktop. I don't even bother to quit my big applications when I go to LAN parties, something that always astounds the Windows only players.
And Windows does allow for applications to not take up space on the task bar, and to stay open when the last window is closed. They can sit in the system tray too, which is intended mostly for applications that are to be running all the time.
The system tray has always been a hack. Basically some programs that are open all the time took up too much space in the taskbar, so those applications were given smaller icons that behave differently. It is a UI disaster. So what about programs you don't want to run all the time, but that don't need any Windows to function? We all know how this is commonly handled, by creating a useless Window to get around the limitation. It also is used as a hack to avoid the problem of users who want to close a document and then open a new one in the same application. In fact, Windows tends to keep programs loaded in memory as another hack under the assumption that people do this, rather than fixing the problem. Others train themselves to always open a second document before closing the first one, resulting in systems needing more memory so they don't bog down when this is done for large files.
Yes I am sure that as my wife is sitting down reading or in the kitchen that as the "bad guy" busts through the door, he will hold still when she says "just a minute, I have to get my gun from my bedroom".
If you have a good door, it might take some time to break down. Presumably there are parts of your house that she might be that are closer to your bedroom than the attacker would be and from which she could run to the firearm before he ran to her?
Man I must have posted during red neck hour.
This sort of ad hominem attack against imaginary stereotypes instead of actual arguments does nothing to bolster either your case or your credibility.
I guess the way I see it is the danger a gun brings into the house outweighs the extremely unlikely possibility of stopping a criminal with it.
It is entirely possible you are correct, based upon the risks of your locality and the competence of the people involved. It is also, sometimes, a failure of personal responsibility. I have little sympathy for those that would rather plead incompetence as an excuse for what happened, rather than empower themselves before something happens. If you can't learn to safely store and operate a firearm and are so unstable you can't be trusted with one, then by all means don't get one.
The majority of people I know cant understand why anyone would want to own a gun.
This is the logical fallacy commonly referred to as "appeal to the mob." What most people think has no bearing on what is correct.
If guns are great for stopping criminals, wouldn't shoulder fired missiles even be better?
This is the logical fallacy commonly called a "strawman argument" combined with the "slippery slope" fallacy. No one argued that a missile or land mines would be better for self defense for obvious reasons. Shotguns are popular in cities among responsible people because they have very low penetration rates and are unlikely to endanger someone you are not aiming at. Weapons that are likely to hit multiple targets are poor choices for home defense.
This isn't the Wild Wild west anymore, grow up, we live in a civilized society and are continually striving to improve it, I don't see a redneck state where everyone has a gun (yeehaw) as the direction we should be moving.
It never was the wild wild west outside of hollywood. Your emotive argument that you don't like guns is not a logical reason for society or any individual to get rid of them.
In truth, I don't care one whit if you own a gun or not. Just so long as you support the freedom of every person to make their own choices, do as you please. What I don't support, however, are people who don't know about guns and haven't objectively looked at the risks and rewards posed by firearm ownership trying to pass laws to force others to make the same choice they have out of some irrational fear. Those people are worse than the person who buys a gun out of some irrational fear of being attacked, because the latter person's choice is still allowing for everyone to have freedom, while the former is not only irrational, but intent on making choices for others. In short, have any opinion you want, but don't try to legislate away freedom.
At least the police and military have gone through some kind of background check and training. If you don't trust the police any more than the average person do you pull over when a police man is signalling you to?
Having known a lot of people in both the police and military I can say I trust them a lot less than the average person on the street. I have never met a police officer that did not have a "funny" story about abusing their power. I've never met one that did not outright admit to regularly breaking the law because they felt it did not apply to them. Of the military people I know, four a I know stole explosives for their own person use, one was arrested for spying on women with his night vision equipment, and one intentionally shot two unarmed people.
Because the police and military are put in positions of power and authority they should accorded less trust than the average person since they can do more damage when they violate that trust.
I would prefer to look at Canada (a MUCH closer comparison) Canada has very strict gun control laws and there murder rate is about 1/3 of the United States'
Canada also has more snow than the US, are you sure that is not the cause of the lower murder rate? Perhaps snow stops murders? Or maybe you are now seeing the flaw in your logic? You have to look at multiple situations and look for common correlations. Sure Canada has lower crime rates. They also have socialized medicine which looking at the world in general correlates much more strongly than gun control with violent crime rates. They also have decriminalized many recreational drugs which, coincidentally, also correlates strongly with less violent crime. They also have lower wealth disparity which, coincidentally, correlates most strongly of all with violent crime rates around the world. The surprise would be if Canada did not have lower crime rates, not because of their stricter gun laws, but because of these other factors. There are numerous countries in norther Europe, South America, and Africa with similar gun ownership rates to the US, but which have orders of magnitude less violent crime. Coincidentally, they also are way ahead of the US in the three factors I mention above.
You keep comparing the US to (more or less) 3rd world countries, can you not see the difference between South Africa, Vietnam and the U.S. Bush has our Country in the worst shape it has been in in my life, but a comparison with those countries is still ridiculous.
That's a great assertion, now tell me how the US is qualitatively different from Vietnam in a way that would make small arms a less effective tool for civil war or revolution. What is it about the US that would make small arms less effective within its borders?
I see it as "the vast majority of murders in the US are committed with guns." Which suggests to me that guns are probably the easiest way to kill someone. Which further suggests that if there were fewer guns, people would have to try harder to kill other people. Which suggests that there would be fewer people killed.
I agree with your logic so far, however, guns are used in non-lethal self defense in the US more often than they are used in murders. So, while the number of deaths might increase (all other factors held constant somehow) the number of people killed and injured that would otherwise have successfully defended themselves. As a result, the number of deaths would go up.
Now, I'm not sure if the stats for "numbers of homicides" means individual deaths... I think you'll find that statistically there are a *lot* more deaths per "incident" when guns are involved.
Each death is listed as one homicide, so not his is not the case.
Here are the facts. Guns are one safeguard against a totalitarian government that will cause disproportionate pain, suffering, and death. As such they are quite possibly valuable as a strategic move. By default, there is no reason to ban people from doing having anything without reasonable evidence that so doing will benefit society. Most studies around the world to date suggest that gun bans tend to decrease gun deaths and gun violence, but slightly increase murder rates and violent crimes overall, since it lessens criminal's fear of death for their actions. As such you need to provide some pretty convincing numbers from numerous other, normalized locations to convince me that banning guns would be a benefit.
One of the things that really gets me is that the case for guns is so close. Some places show a small benefit while others show a small increase in crime, all close to the low end of statistical significance. Other factors, however, show enormous significance and very, very strong correlation with violent crime, but no one bothers to suggest them. This is because very few people really cares about the numbers, except as a way to justify their opinions. If you're looking for a way to decrease murders and violent crime no rational person who looks at the numbers would single out guns as a likely way to effect change. So here are some new points for you to consider. Decrease crime by:
So take a look at the numbers from other countries and tell me, do you think the above changes would have about two orders of magnitude more positive affect upon violent crime than gun control even in a best case scenario? If so, why are you arguing about gun control instead of these topics? If not, why not and what numbers are you looking at?
American kids are 16 times more likely to be murdered with a gun, 11 times more likely to commit suicide with a gun, and nine times more likely to die from a firearm accident than children in 25 other industrialized countries combined. (Centers for Disease Control)
I don't even understand this mentality. How can someone cite this as though it were worse than other places. Guess what, I bet people in Japan are more likely to die by choking on fish than those in the US. Who cares? The mechanism is not important. Are kids in the US more likely to commit suicide or be murdered than other countries and does this statistic correlate across countries that have more handgun availability? The answer, for anyone who bothers to look, is "no." So if we make guns harder to obtain more people will kill themselves with poison and more people will die from drive by pipe bombs. How is this beneficial if you don't have some sort of psychological aversion to guns that does not extend to these other instruments?
Gun bans don't prevent violence and most studies show they slightly increase it. If you're interested in stopping violence why not look to the phenomenon that do strongly correlate with violence and look to passing laws regarding those?
You can probably get away with it during Halloween...
Actually, last halloween I needed a quick costume so an asian hat, kimono, and katana made for a quick one. I ended up downtown going to a showing of the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" where they were searching everyone on the way in. I was trashed but figured I wait and see If I had to go ditch the sword at my truck. They frisked me for rice, squirt guns, etc. but made no comment about the sword. It is a strange world sometimes.
"Document" in this case just means "application state".
I don't understand. The idea is that you always want your applications to be in some given state or the last state it was in? So if I have an image viewer I can't leave it open without any open images? If I quit it with open images it has those images open the next time I open it? Plenty of programs already do that. So what exactly is this concept? I searched Google but found nothing relevant.
You're forgetting one important point. A steak knife is manufactured to cut a steak though it can also be used to murder someone. On the other hand, a 9mil has no other purpose but to take a life, certainly not cut steak. Handguns are created to fulfill a single purpose (except those who find them useful for hunting).
Anyone who supports the passage of a law based upon the presumed intent of another has made a fundamental error. How do you know the manufacturer of the steak knife is not creating it with the intent of capturing the murderer market? How do you know that the pistol manufacturer is not targeting the competition shooting market? Even when a pistol manufacturer has stated they are targeting the people killing market, what's the problem? It is legal and in my opinion laudable to kill people in certain circumstances. I just don't buy that banning tools often used for a given purpose works. People will find other tools, or if they plan to break the law they will ignore the other law too. Make murder illegal and there is no reason to make guns illegal. If you want to act proactively to stop crimes like this, target the motivation for the crimes, not the tools often used. (P.S. strangulation is the most common method of murder, go ahead and extrapolate what tool should be banned to stop those.)
There would be no shootings without guns.
Allow me to introduce you to the sling, bow, catapult, and a host of other devices that shoot, but are not guns.
9th Amendment: Too vague to be meaningful. Surely "the people" don't have every conceivable right (e.g. they don't have the right to murder). There is no way to know what set of rights this amendment refers to.
I think you're misconstruing this. Your example of "the people" and a right to commit murder is flawed because this speaks to what rights the government has. Laws against murder, for example, are mitigating a conflict of rights between individuals citizens (the people). The people (as opposed to the state) absolutely do have a right to commit murder, it just so happens that that right conflicts with other citizens' rights to not be murdered and thus the courts pass laws to clearly define where one person's rights end and another person's rights begin. Your error is in thinking this amendment is giving citizen's carte blanch to walk over the rights of other citizens, when in fact it is saying that the government can't do that except in specific ways.
As far as I can tell, an "activity" is just a fusion of application+document. It means you don't have weird states like an application that's running but can't be used because it has no document loaded, or a document you can't open because you don't have the application.
What if I want to run an application that does not open documents? What if I want to view metadata about a document in a proprietary format that I can't decode? Maybe I'm just not understanding this revolutionary new concept, or maybe it is just a piss poor concept.
The problem is, even though you clicked on the red circle on tool bar, it may not have closed the app you were working with. So even though all you see is your word processor, the tool bar is still from the app you meant to close.
This is wholly a matter of workflow. Windows users have this problem because on Windows closing a window is the same thing as quitting an application. The two have been tied. To me, that is a design flaw and I'll tell you why. I regularly run applications that have no Window and don't need one. They are only menus and a dock icon. On Windows, this type of application would confuse the crap out of people. Further, I often want to close all the documents in use by an application, but not quit the application. The reason for this is also simple, I don't want to wait for it to load again multitasking us good enough that having it open does not slow down other applications. I think this has also been an issue related to Windows since on Windows users have trained themselves to quit applications not in use, since the multitasking does not handle programs sitting idle in the background very well. It pisses me off when I'm on a Windows box and I close a file only to have reopen the program that just quit because I want to open another file using that same program. This is a common task that Windows application developers hack their way around by creating managing Windows that just sit around as placeholders with nothing in them, or useless features in them that only duplicate functionality of the menus.
In summary, the "correct" behavior is simply a matter of perspective, but I certainly find the Mac way a lot more useful to me than the Windows way. I prefer separate granular operations rather than tying one behavior to another unrelated task.
You'd be surprised to know how many could not grasp the fact that the red circle may not close an application and just because you can only see one window does not mean that the top tool bar is the tool bar from that particular application.
Here's my Win2K counter-anecdote. My father is computer illiterate. He only knows how to get to documents that the application lists as the most recently used ones. He only know how to quit programs by clicking the "X" button. His computer used to regularly slow down until it was unusable and he had to reboot. The reason was not spyware, but hearts. Clicking the "X" closed the game window, but did not quit the application. Windows, however, had no way to easily get to the program again (a bug prevented cmd-tabbing). So I'd stop by and he'd regularly have 10 or more copies of hearts running on his laptop. Teaching him to use the menus proved harder than finding a better hearts game.
of course, this was back when we were using system 9, but I don't see any difference with OSX
There is one difference and that is the dock. If you close a window the user will notice the program is still running pretty quickly, since the dock icon remains and is marked as running. Most novice mac users use the dock to start and stop applications. It makes a lot more logical sense, in my opinion, than tying the action to having open windows.