If Apple;s marketshare culd top out around 10%, it'd be prefect. Large enough that software developers would be hesitant to ignore the market, but small enough so Apple could keep up the pace of improving the OS's foundation rather than focusing as much on backward compatibility as Microsoft.
Or, they could innovate a way to retain backwards compatibility while still providing innovation for those who want to move forward. I'd be happy if they grabbed about 30% of the market. While Windows dropped to about the same. That would guarantee everyone competed and innovated and customers would win.
It's like there is an underlying bitterness that Vista is coming together...
I've never had any doubts that Vista would "come together" and become the most popular version of Windows. I just don't like it. There are two things really. First, there is little or nothing new, and by new I mean that is not an implementation of something others have already brought to market. I'd really like to see some innovation from MS, but am almost always disappointed. Second, half the new "features" are just bundling an MS version of some existing product, rather than implementing an open standard or releasing stand alone software in competition with existing players. This is not only illegal, but it takes a big dump on innovation in those industries. MS pisses on them and they rust to a halt. As someone who is very vested in computer technology this makes me angry and sad.
OS X will continue to fade into market-share irrelevance
An amusing thing to post while another Slashdot article tells us Apple has grabbed 12% of the laptop market.
What is with you Slashdot leeches? You guys drive me nuts. You sit in the wings, waiting for someone to open up a perceived weakness, and then swoop in like vultures... for what?
Wait, am I a leech or a vulture?
The joy of dishonestly attacking arguments?
Dishonest? What a foolish thing to write. You sir are prejudiced. You don't know me or what I think, but you've decided that without any information you'll declare that I'm dishonest. And you think this will make me or anyone else more likely to take your arguments seriously?
Your post is a perfect example of pissing on an argument in unhelpful ways.
Allow me to translate. "You demonstrated all of the logical and factual errors I made, thus demonstrating that I'm clueless and wrong."
I don't think I'll bother to finish reading your comments.
The BBC's recent reports disagree. I think the figures are 10,000 crimes with firearms a year and going up (although not as much as recent news reports claim).
Nope. Here in the UK we don't have special rules for the wealthy. They are restricted on guns as much as everyone else.
So you're saying Tony Blair has no armed guards around him? I thought not. I know that one of Putin's relations who visited the UK had armed guards because there were news reports about them getting in a fist fight then pulling guns.
When did they "ban guns"?
Laws were enacted in 1957 and in 1996 I believe.
I suspect the source you are getting your "facts" from counts every bar fight as "violent crime". Just how many people are killed in this "violent crime"?
The UK officially reports about 1000 homicides a year, (they report england and wales separate from scotland so the numbers are harder to compile than many places.) The homicide rate has been increasing, not decreasing. Violent crimes reported by the police (not the PR violent crime numbers the issue that exclude all crimes with firearms, replicas, and during the course of another crime) have also been going up steadily. Crimes with knives have gone from 4% of violent crime to nearly 25%. If the purpose of laws is to stop violent crime, it is obviously not working.
Now I'm not going to dredge up old studies that have been rehashed again and again. You'll assume anything I cite is from a biased source anyway. I implore you, however, to go and take an objective look at the numbers you can find and see what is actually happening.
When a gun is present in a conflict, someone is going to die.
Really? Where I live guns are common. For all crimes where a gun is involved, it is actually fired in 4% of cases. Someone dies in less than 1% of cases.
Conversely, deaths in the UK are really low. So, if you get robbed, you live.
There is another cultural difference I was discussing with a Brit last night. Americans are a lot more willing to risk death for freedom. Being subject to robbery all the time, with no way to defend yourself is not being free, it is being oppressed by lawbreakers. In any case, I have never seen any statistics to show that firearms increase the chance of death during a robbery. In fact, I'd guess they probably reduce the chances since fewer people struggle and are accidentally killed. Do you have any numbers to back up your belief?
Murders are pretty much always commited by someone you know over here.
The same is true in the US, and almost everywhere else. It has nothing to do with guns.
So what? We've elimiated gun crime and the murder rate is a fraction of yours in an almost identical society.
Almost identical society? Are you kidding? The US is more racially and culturally varied, leading to more clashes and ingrained racism going back hundreds of years. We have more extreme religious movements. How many UK citizens were killed by car bombs at abortion clinics last year? We have much more extreme poverty and less socialism. We don't have socialized healthcare. We have criminalized drugs to the point where four times as many people spend time in prison as in the UK. When we release them, they have no money, often no home, and we have little in the way of programs to actually rehabilitate them. Our educational system is in shambles, with all the wealthy in populous areas opting for private education and leaving the poorer half of society with a system that does as much harm as good. We have longer work hours, fewer days off, higher stress and less interaction of parents and children. Because of the size of the country contact with extended families are much less common. Most people let their children be raised by the television. It is a giant violent crime factory.
Take a look at crime rates in various countries, as well as poverty rates, gun c
The point that I was making that it isn't about -being- safer. It's about -feeling- safer.
That is true for all safety measures. People stop smoking as a safety measure because they feel like it is going to improve their health. The belief (based on facts or not) that either giving up smoking or carrying a gun might result in you living longer is why people have that feeling.
Many people who carry guns, supposedly for their safety, could better protect themselves if they, like stated above, simply gave up smoking and ate better.
...or if they wore a helmet all the time or if they never went outside or if they denied themselves all pleasures in life... These are independent measures unrelated to one another.
They carry the gun because it gives them a good feeling, not because they are actually in great danger of attack.
They gave up smoking because it gives them a good feeling when they tell their family, not because a person in their dangerous profession is going to live long enough to die of lung cancer.
Perhaps you don't understand the concept of points within an argument. I take it then, that you are conceding the motivation point as a general trend.
while interesting, is not held to the same academic standard as a paper submitted to a scientific journal.
But you can't seem to find any scientific studies that show differing results or any problems with the methodology. So you're assuming your own opinion based on nothing is more credible than this. Gee, that sounds logical.
the "rhetorical method" for one, which does not exist as a proper noun..
Hahahaha! Whew, funny. If you can't find a dozen books on rhetorical method, well you need to go to a real library, amazon, or google.
Your grasp of philosophy is tenuous, (responsible for everything or responsible for nothing is not a claim made by any philosopher I know of)
Read Marcus Aurelius's essays on the nature of responsibility. I think it is in "Meditations." It is also discussed by Socrates and Goethe at least.
Honestly, I don't see this discussion going anywhere.
I agree. Every time I counter one of your absurd suppositions or assumptions, you say, "but, but but..." and then try to claim it no longer has bearing on the start of the discussion. I've poked a hundred holes in your arguments, but you don't seem to understand that that has something to do with the fact that your basic assumptions are wrong. You've provided not one link, not one study, not one logical argument that follows from the original, and does not present a classic fallacy. At best, you completely fail to present a logical argument, at worst you simply draw illogical conclusions out of your ass and try to support them by claiming the burden of proof is on me for some reason. Good day, I hope you eventually read some good books and learn how to formulate logical thought and make decisions rationally.
...Titan Quest is the BEST RPG for your friends since Diablo 2...
Half my friends have macs. I guess I'll be waiting for Diablo 3 instead... and that is fine with me. I never like buying different copies of a game for my PC and my Mac and I trust Blizzard to come out with something good, because they almost always do.
Okay, first of all, let's establish something: the burden of proof is on you, not me.
How do you figure? You made an assertion. I said your assertion was wrong. Then I cited a study to prove it. What exactly about this do you feel removes from you the burden of having to prove you initial assertion?
Show me articles that prove these things that you claim are patently true, and we'll go from there.
...Check out Levitt and Dubner, 2005 for a very popular, recent, and well regarded study...
Explain to me how this is logically obvious. If theft were an actual way of mitigating poverty, then those who stole would no longer be poor.
Poverty is a lack of money and goods. Stealing is a way to directly obtain money and goods. It is probably not a good long term solution, but we're talking about motivation here. If you can't follow it, you have a problem.
First, this doesn't make any sense. And I mean that literally: I have absolutely no idea what you are trying to say here.
Which of the big words confuses you?
Claiming on one hand that people are ultimately responsible for their crimes, and then on the other that if you're subjected to (overly) extreme circumstances that your method of decision-making will be altered...
I said the decision would be altered, not the process of making it.
All you've shown is yes, there is a point when someone's character is no longer the sole determining factor in how they act.
No I haven't. People's character is never the sole factor that determines how they make their decision. It is always a combination of circumstance, understanding, and ethics. The point which you completely missed was to demonstrate the nature of decision making in extreme enough of an example so that even you could see it.
What is in question is how many criminals are actually at that point, and how many commit crimes for other reasons?
That point went right on by you huh?
...how effective will "reducing poverty" actually be in reducing theft?
Just look at countries who have done it and you can get a pretty good idea. It makes a large difference there and likely will here.
They were immigrants from Iran...blah blah blah.
Did your father have his faces burned away by acid? No? Oh, you mean it could have been worse? Just concede the point already.
Poverty is not a f*cking carte blanche to start stealing. Stop acting like it is.
Who ever said it was? I certainly never did.
Someone cannot be held responsible for something they do not know about and cannot affect. If he knew beforehand the piano had a good chance of falling on him--if he even had any foreknowledge--then the situation would be different.
There is no logical way to determine what will happen in the future. Certainly anyone knows there is a chance something will fall on them at any given time. Certainly they know walking past tall buildings, cliffs, etc. makes that more likely. Just because the risk was considered negligible does not mean the person was not responsible for taking that risk. You are fundamentally in error.
Those circumstances play a heavy hand in how the person decides, but someone who decides to murder someone in cold blood--regardless of the circumstances that induced him/her to it--has committed murder, period.
Do show me where I ever claimed otherwise.
To classify someone as a "victim," by definition, means they have no way of affecting the outcome.
No it doesn't. Buy a dictionary.
So the two are mutually exclusive.
Since the previous argument was not in any way true, it follows neither is your conclusion based upon it.
If your child was starving and someone was throwing away tons of food, sure, steal their food. You are clearly desperate, and the act of stealing is much less evil than allowing your child
Actually hitting something ten feet away is easy... But if you have difficulty hitting a human sized target in the center of mass at ten feet, guns aren't for you.
Unless you have real training, it is not at all uncommon to miss a person at ten feet with a pistol. Given the high stress, adrenaline rush situation, things become a lot harder than target practice. When the cops train a lot of the time they will run a few miles, do a load of pushups and then quickly try to accurately hit a target, while they are still all shaky and exhausted. There have been instances of police officers emptying their weapon at ranges as close as that without hitting their target. I'd like to think that I'd never miss at that range, but I've never been in that situation. Have you?
Isn't it paranoia to think that you are going to be raped or attacked with a knife when you walk out of your house?
Probably, but it is not paranoia to think that you might be attacked when you walk out of youre house, especially if you live somewhere where that happens regularly.
There are a lot of things that you (and you family) should fear before that.
This is the classic, "at least we're not as bad as China" argument. Sure we should all give up smoking and eat better. Why does that indicate we shouldn't carry a gun to defend ourselves?
Well, size isn't everything, but if you are 5'5" 140lb, then yes, you probably are a pussy. You need to either learn how to fight (martial arts?), or learn how to avoid fighting.
Written like someone without a clue. I've trained in Kun-tow, Karate, Judo, Tae Kwon Do, boxing, and several styles of Kung-fu. My best instructor once said, "the bigger they are, the harder they hit." He's right of course. Body mass, strength, and the length of arms and legs makes a huge difference in a fight. My technique is much more sophisticated and practiced than some people who can probably wipe the floor with me because they have 60 pounds on me. The best fighter I ever sparred with was over seven feet tall and big into thai boxing. Getting close enough to hit him without being killed was almost impossible.
The average person will not be able to win a fight against the average violent criminal. Most are men within a certain age range. Most have some familiarity with violence. Most people won't even be able to successfully run away from them. My father has a bad back these days. He will not win a fight or successfully run away from many people. My mother is an a wheelchair. By giving them each a firearm you make the average criminal too afraid to attack them, or even neighbors who may or may not have guns. Sorry, but learning to avoid being victimized is not an option for most people without access to appropriate weapons.
This is the type of naive thinking indicative of your overall approach to arguing. First of all, poverty IS a long-term phenomena.
Yes I know, I said so, didn't I?
If you go into a store to buy lunch today and realize you left your wallet at home, are you in a state of poverty until you go back and get the wallet? I would hope you agree that that is silly.
Yes, at least in terms of our argument. We were discussing what motivates theft. I think a lack of money obviously motivates theft. While it may not be a long-term solution that is not necessary as I pointed out, since we're talking about motivations of people who don't necessarily consider theft as a long term solution, but only an immediate one.
You only took this point to be obvious based on your extremely superficial and naive definition of poverty as meaning "lack of immediately available funds".
Which is the only part of it that we need to consider as motivation for theft.
Your writings indicate that you are not really familiar at all with the philosophical free-will discussion.
No, it is just that they are not useful for solving this problem.
It would be a very strange philosophy indeed that would hold a person responsible for having a piano fall on them.
Apparently in your exhaustive research into free will philosophies you somehow missed Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Goethe, etc. If you take the risk and go outside and walk past a music store, you're responsible for the consequences. The risk may be very small, but you're choosing to take it.
In your example your brother would be responsible for walking under the piano but NOT for the piano falling on him.
You must not have scored very well in philosophy. We are all responsible for everything that happens to us or we are responsible for nothing. You can't draw an arbitrary line at what a person should have foreseen.
You just can't seem to get your head around Spec's use of the word "responsible" to mean what it means and not to mean "guilty".
You don't understand, since he used that argument to rebut any attempt to show any criteria which could be used to remove motivation for stealing. By his definition because you are responsible for theft, no other factors can influence it or have importance.
The only one here who quotes evidence and then fails to show it is you. Spec hasn't made any claims about "this is the way it is". You continue to claim things are "proven", "documented" or (best of all) so obvious they don't need proving.
Because you'll be hard pressed to pick up any scientific study on the subject that does not support it. Check out Levitt and Dubner, 2005 for a very popular, recent, and well regarded study to that affect.
This is true. And the consequence of this fact is that it is imperative to make sure that the punitive system is ethically consistent.
Sigh. It does not matter. Ethics that don't match up with the laws will be ignored, just as pro-lifers feel it is fine to slash tires of doctors at clinics. You can't make laws consistent with everyone's ethics all the time and since it is the ethics not the law doing most of the motivating, it is not likely to have much effect.
The problem is that by claiming that poor people have no responsibility
I double-dog dare you to find one comment of mine that says poor people have no responsibility. This is just completely made up.
Cite sources please.
Actually, the previous study works for this to. The sample was office workers in Washington DC and petty theft.
It's very tricky to prove why someone does not committ a crime. The evidence is not nearly as strong as you think it is. This is another example of where you get into trouble as a direct result of your inability to understand statistics (same old error too: selection bias).
It is, however, easy to find correlations that are pro
On the last, I think that that would be a better scenario as it is harder to harm people with those types of weapons.
Is it harder for a criminal to harm people when he has a club and the typical person has nothing or when both the criminal and the potential victim have a gun? Studies have shown again and again that criminals believe the latter and are less likely to risk attacking someone who may have a gun, even if they do too, than they are likely to attack someone they have a reasonable certainty doesn't have a gun. If you look at the number of knifings, beatings, etc. in the UK since they banned guns you'll see the result of ignoring this.
You also have to option to run, or get help from from someone.
If you're faster then they are, which given the fact that most violent criminals are men between the ages of 15 and 35 means most people will not be able to. And if you do run they can throw a knife or brick at you. Just for some practical advice, running from an assailant with a firearm is likely to make them either no longer attack or miss you anyway.
Also, in the original examples that I posted, seems unlikely that any of the weapons that you mention would cause the same amount of harm to bystanders.
In some countries where guns are very rare, drive by attacks often use pipe bombs and molotov cocktails, both of which have a much larger area of effect and are more likely to hit bystanders than a gun.
I would hope at least that in north america we aren't at the stage where people would use firebombs in a large crowd or busy area.
I seriously doubt it. The weight of evidence here falls in favor of an armed populace for reducing violent crime. It may be counterintuitive to some, but it is true nonetheless.
...I'm going to introduce you to the concept of "natural conclusion." If the discussion at hand is about iPod theft...
Yes, the discussion in general began with that, but the point he was addressing specifically with this was about crime a societal trend, as was specifically pointed out. It was not about the theft of an iPod. It is reasonable to believe that theft of an iPod may be related to theft in general, but it is not logical to conclude that it has to be a direct, causal relationship as was implied by this post, as it pertains to the specific topic being rebutted.
Really? Prove it. Show me one study that shows that poverty is "mitigated" by theft, or even that "stressful situations" can be so mitigated. Because I think you're making that up.
I made two assertions here. One was that poverty correlates to theft. I think there is plenty of evidence to support that, but if you really can't find any, let me know. The second was that theft mitigates poverty. I doubt anyone has bothered to perform such a study as it is logically obvious. Poverty is lack of money and goods. Theft is a means of acquiring money or goods. Thus, theft directly mitigates poverty, even if not on a long-term basis. But people don't necessarily think in the long-term and since we were talking about motivation it is the thought that counts.
How is this in any way relevant? Not only are you stacking much more extreme circumstances...
It was a qualitative argument, not quantitative. In principal the concept is wrong as demonstrated by my example. After that it is merely relative levels of stressors which are relative to individuals and situations, none of which is within the scope of the general argument. I take it you did not bother to learn the rhetorical method?
That's a wonderful story, despite the fact that it's patently false. People are not the victims of their circumstances, and the fact that you continue to operate under the assumption that they are means that you missed Stormin's point entirely.
People are victims of circumstances. If a piano falls on my brother, he was a victim of circumstance. That does not mean he was not responsible for walking by the music store and taking the risk of all those instrument related injuries, but that was not my point. Your implication that someone cannot be both responsible for their actions and a victim of circumstance is a false dichotomy.
They were as desperate as it could ever get.
You have no conception. They had food to eat and a job. They were not penniless, hated, hunted by the police, and suffering horrible physical and mental pain as the result of withdrawal from a drug. It can always be a lot worse.
So I am taking personal offense to your presumption that acts of theft can be noble in nature.
Your ethics are too inflexible and dogmatic for me. If my child was starving to death while someone else lived in luxury and threw out hundreds of pounds of food a day and refused to help, I'd have no ethical issues in stealing from them. If a man had a device that he planned to use to destroy the earth, then I'd have no ethical issues with stealing it from him to prevent this. I can respect your beliefs if you disagree, but don't try to hold me or anyone else to your belief system.
You make a conscious decision whether or not to stick to your principles, period. If you decide to steal, it can be justified, but to then try and assume that most acts of theft by the poor are such is grossly naive.
Who made such an assumption? I certainly never did. I'm not judging the motivations and ethics of others since I can't know their motivations or ethics and it would be unethical for me to judge them in any case. Rather, I discuss speculative cause and effect and documented correlation for possible remedies. Some of us are a lot less interested in judging and punishing others than we are in solving the problem.
In this case they are flooding across the border from Detroit. The point is, no authority can ban guns worldwide. No country will do so, due to military necessity. In many countries, most illegal guns are bought or stolen from the police and military in that country. How exactly do you think laws will prevent this, or do you think the police and military should disarm? Yeah, that is going to happen any time now. All the countries of the world will give up all weapons and live in brotherhood and harmony or something. Get real.
Are you trying to say that they fall from the sky into the hands of criminals?
Yes. They come from the magical gun fairy. Any more absurd questions?
If you could keep this from happening, then guns for self protection would probably work a lot better as a deterrent.
You can't keep this from happening. The truth is people will get guns even if they have to build zip-guns using parts from the hardware store. The most you can hope for is to greatly reduce availability to criminals and citizens at the same time. When this happens, gun crimes decrease, but other violent crimes, with knives, clubs, poison, molotov cocktails, and bare hands increase. Guns and weapons in general are tools and you can't ban tools used for a purpose, because most tools can be applied to many purposes. If you want to stop violent crime you should attack the things that motivate it, not the tools used to enact it. This makes logical sense and is supported by mountains of statistical evidence from around the world.
They would not work in the UK, that much is undebatable. We have practially no guns in the country and getting a license for one is pretty much impossible.
No, you have guns in the UK. They are just either placed where they are unlikely to be used to stop crime, owned by a very few wealthy people's bodyguards, or are in the hands of criminals. Gun crimes are on the rise in the UK. Violent crimes are on the rise. Violent crimes are higher than they were before the UK banned guns.
Living in a gun free country is awesome. Worst comes to the worst, I can run away from any assailant and get out of the situation alive. Try that when either of you has a gun.
Assuming you are young and a faster runner than your assailant. Is the average victim in better shape than their assailant? Can your grandmother run away? Can the average woman outrun the average rapist? What about when the assailant has a knife and can throw it? What if they have a brick? What if they have an illegal gun? What if they have a slingshot?
Passing laws cannot stop criminals from having weapons or just being bigger and more violent than you. You can make a crude gun using $40 in parts from the hardware store. Laws telling criminals not to break the law are pointless as a preventative.
I've seen a lot of crime. I've been involved with some really nasty people. I've done enough to probably put me in jail for twenty years. Yet not once in this country have I heard of anyone I know having a gun or even access to one. It just doesn't happen except in a couple of small isolated groups.
It could be you don't hang out in the right circles. Or maybe the UK's gun ban actually has greatly reduced access to them. So what? More crimes are committed with knives now and you're thinking of banning them. Next will be hatchets and table legs and bits of rope and anything heavy. It does not work as demonstrated by the recorded violent crime levels both in the UK and in many, many other places.
Ease of access to weapons, especially weapons that operate independent of the user's physical strength even the odds for the elderly and women and people who didn't spend the last five years exercising in prison. This deters violent crime. Sorry, but those are the facts whether you like them or not.
The UK is a country with a culture of lesser personal responsibility than the US. It makes laws accordingly. In the instance of their socialism and drug policies this works well to reduce crime. In the instance of gun bans it increases violent crime. What does this tell us? The culture is more important than the effectiveness of the measures and most decisions will be made based upon considerations other than the facts. Even if it has been shown clearly as not the case, people will believe gun bans reduce crime because that is what they want to believe and that is what one politician is telling them. At least it is still better than the US where ridiculous drug laws, healthcare laws, and economics all lead to devastating amounts of violent crime, and people believe that they are doing exaclty the opposite.
Americans, look at all these solutions for decreasing crime. Europeans, get off your high horse and realize that gun bans don't decrease crime and America's crime is due to their inability to deal with all these other factors
You're definitely fitting the bill for liberal by my personal standards thanks to obviously bleeding heart statements like these: However poverty breeds desperation, and desperate people do desperate things. Would you really typify the avg London street thug as "desperate"?
You're dangerously close to making personal attacks here. How either you or the previous poster "classify" one another is irrelevant. As for the real issue, you're making a logical error. Poverty leads to crime does not mean stealing an iPod is the direct result of poverty. Later you call out the fact that correlation is not causation, yet you base your argument upon that assumption here.
Because if I was desperte to get out of poverty - that's the route I'd be taking.
Poverty correlates with lack of education and stressful situations that can be mitigated by theft. It also correlates with participation an a culture and association with individuals that are more likely to be criminals. Those that commit a crime correlate strongly with those who have previously committed a crime. So assuming you are poor and poorly educated and have few prospects and contacts that might get you a good job and your uncle is a carjacker and he has told you since you were young stealing from the rich is not wrong and you need money to pay the rent so your mother is not evicted you're a lot more likely to rob a store to get that money. Having done this, when you're trying to finance your trip to France to learn to weld, you're a lot more likely to steal some rich kid's iPod to d get there.
This in no way mitigates your personal responsibility for your act, but lawmakers should be interested in results more than assigning blame. If you could stop every murderer in the world from killing by giving a million dollars of taxpayer's dollars to some undeserving bastard, don't you think that should be done? This isn't about justice, it is about reducing violent crime.
Leaving aside my own beliefs about morality...
This is another mistake. Ethical/moral motivations are the strongest ones here. Ignoring that aspect is not likely to result in accurate predictions or models.
Being invested in society provides me with a lot of incentive not to get caught.
Most criminals do not believe they will be caught, thus this incentive has much less weight.
The only FACT we have is that high poverty correlates to high crime... skip straight from the poverty/crime correlation to some explanation of stealing iPods as desperate cry for help.
Except that there is a documented correlation between desperation and crime regardless of income level.
So your whole post is rife with these unjustified assumptions. That iPod thieves are desperate...
That is your assumption, not the pervious poster's I read his (or her) post and they never made such a claim.
Are you saying that if you were poor you would somehow no longer have the ability to make decisions?
Are you saying that if you were stripped of all your possessions, beaten, starved, and anally raped daily you would not steal a loaf of bread to survive? Don't put words into the mouths of others. It is foolish to believe that you cannot effect crime rates and make the world a better place by changing aspects of society that correlate strongly with crime rates. This has nothing to do with assigning responsibility for crimes.
What you are in essence saying (though I'm sure you will protest) is that poor people are sub-human.
Why would you even write this tripe? I know you don't believe this but I'm going to claim that you do anyway. How is this useful or constructive? I know you won't agree with this but I'm going to assert that you hate all people and want mankind to suffer. Idiocy.
You see poor people not as independent agents, but as cogs who driven to act by societal forces.
Is holy water a sacred sacrament or a common chemical compound? Is a gun
Convince me that this would have occurred if no guns were involved.
Why, does that address a valid point in some way? Were the guns involved in this legally obtained and owned? If not, laws would not have stopped this crime anyway. Even assuming you can somehow magically destroy all guns in an area and they are hard to come by, as they are in some places, these gang members would have thrown molatov cocktails at one another, resulting in even more killing of innocents and painful burns and scarring. All of this has been tried before and banning guns statistically does not reduce violent crime.
Every week or so there is another report of some elderly person shooting a criminal who breaks into their house with a weapon of some sort. Do you expect all those people to survive by defending themselves with a club, while suffering from the infirmities of age?
The number of guns (and related crime) in the UK is steadily increasing year on year, however thankfully the numbers are still small.
I don't think "gun crime" makes much sense as a value based category. What is more important stopping murders or stopping murders with guns? If the latter decreases while the former increases because of some change, is that change a good thing? In the UK violent assaults and murders have gone up compared to the UK before guns were taken away from citizens. It's true that shootings have gone down since then, but stabbings, poisonings, and beatings have all gone up. This correlation is common across many countries that have tried similar solutions.
I think these laws represent a cultural element more than anything else. The UK has less violent crime because the culture is less prone to result in it. Sensible treatment of drug issues is a lot more likely to result in decreased crime. Fewer desperate people due to a slightly more socialist economy and healthcare removes the motivation for much violent crime. All of these laws are part of a cultural trend towards a lack of personal responsibility. If you go broke, the government will keep you alive. If you're hooked on drugs, well the medical system will take care of you (rather than locking you in a cell to be ass raped). If you are threatened with violence, the police will protect you.
All three are part of the same cultural element, but only the former two reduce violent crime. Overall, I think these factors reduce violent crime, but that does not mean individually they do.
In the US (I'm not sure about the UK) the police cannot and will not protect you from violent crime. A huge part of the population is engaged in serious illegal activity because a significant portion of the population is involved in drugs or is desperate due to medical or financial issues. The police are not legally obligated to protect citizens or even enforce the law in any given case. In a landmark trial the police were ruled fully within their rights to not only not respond to the repeated telephone calls from three women who were raped and beaten repeatedly over the course of two days, but they were able to lie to the victims on the phone and say they were coming when in truth they were ignoring them. In the US, when someone calls 911 (the emergency number) and there is actually a violent crime involved, the police respond in time to do something in less than 1% of cases. To rely upon them for personal defense is moronic as almost all police officers will tell you. They can't protect you and they won't. Banning citizens from having the means to protect themselves, therefore, is a gross violation of basic human rights.
Yeah, because as a resident of Michigan, that has allows allowing you to carry concealed weapons, crime rates in cities like Detroit and Flint have dropped so much since those laws passed and citizens started carrying concealed weapons...
Umm, violent crimes did drop after the concealed carry laws were passed in MI, but not enough to counterbalance the country-wide increase when the federal aid for law enforcement budgets was slashed leaving the highest crime areas with the lowest budgets, like Flint and Detroit, badly undermanned.
...this is just one example I found...
You didn't do to well in your statistics class did you? Anecdotal evidence is useless for determining causality or even correlation. In Michigan no person with a concealed carry permit has ever been convicted of a violent crime except police officers. Only two people have ever had their permits revoked, neither for improper use of the firearm. Dozens of people every year report successfully stopping crimes directly by defending themselves with their concealed pistol (usually just by brandishing it, not actually shooting anyone).
Given this information I wonder how anyone can logically or statistically conclude that concealed carry laws do not help.
Wow, he can differentiate a semi-automatic from a nonautomatic from an automatic, just based on how it presses against the back of his head.
Here's my guess. Someone held something vaguely rectangular and hard against the back of the person's head. It may or may not have been a pistol. The police, upon questioning, decided it was something that felt like an automatic since almost all revolvers and machine pistols (and many semi-automatics) have a round, protruding barrel. Sure, maybe it was a autofire Glock or some other, useless setup but those are rare by comparison.
Note how the Slashdot summary changes things...
Agreed. I don't know if the editors did not notice or if they enjoy it when the summarizer changes the facts because it generates a hundred more comments like yours, but it is annoying.
This is one of the most ridiculous statements I've ever read. How is the problem supposed to be fixed if the vendor is never told what the problem is, and so what if it's proprietary?
I believe the answer is, you hire a consulting group who just happens to be buddies with the department in question. After paying them a pile of money, they get whatever agency to "certify" your software in some ridiculous and meaningless way. It is just the normal price of doing business in the sector.
One piece of software can be an industry standard, open source, heavily reviewed, and nearly bulletproof. The other can be closed source, complete crap who outsourced everything to unnamed parties in China. If the company that sells the latter pays the right consulting group their product will be "certified" even if the testing only proves that it exists, not that it works or is secure, and proves they have the right documentation written in the right style. This latter software may be the only option for a government agency to use due to policies that require certification. It is dumb, but that is what happens in bureaucracies.
Seriously, with all the crappy movies out there and so little time, why bother.
For me NetFlix serves two purposes. First, I know I'm going to want the TV on occasionally while I'm working on something else, or cooking dinner, or just feel like doing nothing else. Since that is the case, I might as well watch a good show, in the right order, rather than a random episode of whatever happens to be on cable.
Second, Sometimes after a hard night at the bar or just when a few dozen rowdy bikers show up it is great to throw in an old classic most people have never seen, or a terrible old sci-fi flick. Nothing in the world is more entertaining than a few computer geeks and a few bikers and a few punks drunkenly, yet wittily lambasting (MST3K style) the movies. It is worth it to hold onto "Night of the Lepus" for a few weeks.
Slashdot Mirror
If Apple;s marketshare culd top out around 10%, it'd be prefect. Large enough that software developers would be hesitant to ignore the market, but small enough so Apple could keep up the pace of improving the OS's foundation rather than focusing as much on backward compatibility as Microsoft.
Or, they could innovate a way to retain backwards compatibility while still providing innovation for those who want to move forward. I'd be happy if they grabbed about 30% of the market. While Windows dropped to about the same. That would guarantee everyone competed and innovated and customers would win.
Then again, thats just me and why I dual boot Linux and Windows. (actually virualize these days)
"Virualize eh? Yeah, that sounds like something Windows does :)
It's like there is an underlying bitterness that Vista is coming together...
I've never had any doubts that Vista would "come together" and become the most popular version of Windows. I just don't like it. There are two things really. First, there is little or nothing new, and by new I mean that is not an implementation of something others have already brought to market. I'd really like to see some innovation from MS, but am almost always disappointed. Second, half the new "features" are just bundling an MS version of some existing product, rather than implementing an open standard or releasing stand alone software in competition with existing players. This is not only illegal, but it takes a big dump on innovation in those industries. MS pisses on them and they rust to a halt. As someone who is very vested in computer technology this makes me angry and sad.
OS X will continue to fade into market-share irrelevance
An amusing thing to post while another Slashdot article tells us Apple has grabbed 12% of the laptop market.
What is with you Slashdot leeches? You guys drive me nuts. You sit in the wings, waiting for someone to open up a perceived weakness, and then swoop in like vultures... for what?
Wait, am I a leech or a vulture?
The joy of dishonestly attacking arguments?
Dishonest? What a foolish thing to write. You sir are prejudiced. You don't know me or what I think, but you've decided that without any information you'll declare that I'm dishonest. And you think this will make me or anyone else more likely to take your arguments seriously?
Your post is a perfect example of pissing on an argument in unhelpful ways.
Allow me to translate. "You demonstrated all of the logical and factual errors I made, thus demonstrating that I'm clueless and wrong."
I don't think I'll bother to finish reading your comments.
Believe me, gun crime IS NOT AN ISSUE HERE.
The BBC's recent reports disagree. I think the figures are 10,000 crimes with firearms a year and going up (although not as much as recent news reports claim).
Nope. Here in the UK we don't have special rules for the wealthy. They are restricted on guns as much as everyone else.
So you're saying Tony Blair has no armed guards around him? I thought not. I know that one of Putin's relations who visited the UK had armed guards because there were news reports about them getting in a fist fight then pulling guns.
When did they "ban guns"?
Laws were enacted in 1957 and in 1996 I believe.
I suspect the source you are getting your "facts" from counts every bar fight as "violent crime". Just how many people are killed in this "violent crime"?
The UK officially reports about 1000 homicides a year, (they report england and wales separate from scotland so the numbers are harder to compile than many places.) The homicide rate has been increasing, not decreasing. Violent crimes reported by the police (not the PR violent crime numbers the issue that exclude all crimes with firearms, replicas, and during the course of another crime) have also been going up steadily. Crimes with knives have gone from 4% of violent crime to nearly 25%. If the purpose of laws is to stop violent crime, it is obviously not working.
Now I'm not going to dredge up old studies that have been rehashed again and again. You'll assume anything I cite is from a biased source anyway. I implore you, however, to go and take an objective look at the numbers you can find and see what is actually happening.
When a gun is present in a conflict, someone is going to die.
Really? Where I live guns are common. For all crimes where a gun is involved, it is actually fired in 4% of cases. Someone dies in less than 1% of cases.
Conversely, deaths in the UK are really low. So, if you get robbed, you live.
There is another cultural difference I was discussing with a Brit last night. Americans are a lot more willing to risk death for freedom. Being subject to robbery all the time, with no way to defend yourself is not being free, it is being oppressed by lawbreakers. In any case, I have never seen any statistics to show that firearms increase the chance of death during a robbery. In fact, I'd guess they probably reduce the chances since fewer people struggle and are accidentally killed. Do you have any numbers to back up your belief?
Murders are pretty much always commited by someone you know over here.
The same is true in the US, and almost everywhere else. It has nothing to do with guns.
So what? We've elimiated gun crime and the murder rate is a fraction of yours in an almost identical society.
Almost identical society? Are you kidding? The US is more racially and culturally varied, leading to more clashes and ingrained racism going back hundreds of years. We have more extreme religious movements. How many UK citizens were killed by car bombs at abortion clinics last year? We have much more extreme poverty and less socialism. We don't have socialized healthcare. We have criminalized drugs to the point where four times as many people spend time in prison as in the UK. When we release them, they have no money, often no home, and we have little in the way of programs to actually rehabilitate them. Our educational system is in shambles, with all the wealthy in populous areas opting for private education and leaving the poorer half of society with a system that does as much harm as good. We have longer work hours, fewer days off, higher stress and less interaction of parents and children. Because of the size of the country contact with extended families are much less common. Most people let their children be raised by the television. It is a giant violent crime factory.
Take a look at crime rates in various countries, as well as poverty rates, gun c
The point that I was making that it isn't about -being- safer. It's about -feeling- safer.
That is true for all safety measures. People stop smoking as a safety measure because they feel like it is going to improve their health. The belief (based on facts or not) that either giving up smoking or carrying a gun might result in you living longer is why people have that feeling.
Many people who carry guns, supposedly for their safety, could better protect themselves if they, like stated above, simply gave up smoking and ate better.
...or if they wore a helmet all the time or if they never went outside or if they denied themselves all pleasures in life... These are independent measures unrelated to one another.
They carry the gun because it gives them a good feeling, not because they are actually in great danger of attack.
They gave up smoking because it gives them a good feeling when they tell their family, not because a person in their dangerous profession is going to live long enough to die of lung cancer.
Ah yes, the very definition of desperation.
Perhaps you don't understand the concept of points within an argument. I take it then, that you are conceding the motivation point as a general trend.
while interesting, is not held to the same academic standard as a paper submitted to a scientific journal.
But you can't seem to find any scientific studies that show differing results or any problems with the methodology. So you're assuming your own opinion based on nothing is more credible than this. Gee, that sounds logical.
the "rhetorical method" for one, which does not exist as a proper noun..
Hahahaha! Whew, funny. If you can't find a dozen books on rhetorical method, well you need to go to a real library, amazon, or google.
Your grasp of philosophy is tenuous, (responsible for everything or responsible for nothing is not a claim made by any philosopher I know of)
Read Marcus Aurelius's essays on the nature of responsibility. I think it is in "Meditations." It is also discussed by Socrates and Goethe at least.
Honestly, I don't see this discussion going anywhere.
I agree. Every time I counter one of your absurd suppositions or assumptions, you say, "but, but but..." and then try to claim it no longer has bearing on the start of the discussion. I've poked a hundred holes in your arguments, but you don't seem to understand that that has something to do with the fact that your basic assumptions are wrong. You've provided not one link, not one study, not one logical argument that follows from the original, and does not present a classic fallacy. At best, you completely fail to present a logical argument, at worst you simply draw illogical conclusions out of your ass and try to support them by claiming the burden of proof is on me for some reason. Good day, I hope you eventually read some good books and learn how to formulate logical thought and make decisions rationally.
Half my friends have macs. I guess I'll be waiting for Diablo 3 instead... and that is fine with me. I never like buying different copies of a game for my PC and my Mac and I trust Blizzard to come out with something good, because they almost always do.
Okay, first of all, let's establish something: the burden of proof is on you, not me.
How do you figure? You made an assertion. I said your assertion was wrong. Then I cited a study to prove it. What exactly about this do you feel removes from you the burden of having to prove you initial assertion?
Show me articles that prove these things that you claim are patently true, and we'll go from there.
...Check out Levitt and Dubner, 2005 for a very popular, recent, and well regarded study...
Explain to me how this is logically obvious. If theft were an actual way of mitigating poverty, then those who stole would no longer be poor.
Poverty is a lack of money and goods. Stealing is a way to directly obtain money and goods. It is probably not a good long term solution, but we're talking about motivation here. If you can't follow it, you have a problem.
First, this doesn't make any sense. And I mean that literally: I have absolutely no idea what you are trying to say here.
Which of the big words confuses you?
Claiming on one hand that people are ultimately responsible for their crimes, and then on the other that if you're subjected to (overly) extreme circumstances that your method of decision-making will be altered...
I said the decision would be altered, not the process of making it.
All you've shown is yes, there is a point when someone's character is no longer the sole determining factor in how they act.
No I haven't. People's character is never the sole factor that determines how they make their decision. It is always a combination of circumstance, understanding, and ethics. The point which you completely missed was to demonstrate the nature of decision making in extreme enough of an example so that even you could see it.
What is in question is how many criminals are actually at that point, and how many commit crimes for other reasons?
That point went right on by you huh?
Just look at countries who have done it and you can get a pretty good idea. It makes a large difference there and likely will here.
They were immigrants from Iran...blah blah blah.
Did your father have his faces burned away by acid? No? Oh, you mean it could have been worse? Just concede the point already.
Poverty is not a f*cking carte blanche to start stealing. Stop acting like it is.
Who ever said it was? I certainly never did.
Someone cannot be held responsible for something they do not know about and cannot affect. If he knew beforehand the piano had a good chance of falling on him--if he even had any foreknowledge--then the situation would be different.
There is no logical way to determine what will happen in the future. Certainly anyone knows there is a chance something will fall on them at any given time. Certainly they know walking past tall buildings, cliffs, etc. makes that more likely. Just because the risk was considered negligible does not mean the person was not responsible for taking that risk. You are fundamentally in error.
Those circumstances play a heavy hand in how the person decides, but someone who decides to murder someone in cold blood--regardless of the circumstances that induced him/her to it--has committed murder, period.
Do show me where I ever claimed otherwise.
To classify someone as a "victim," by definition, means they have no way of affecting the outcome.
No it doesn't. Buy a dictionary.
So the two are mutually exclusive.
Since the previous argument was not in any way true, it follows neither is your conclusion based upon it.
If your child was starving and someone was throwing away tons of food, sure, steal their food. You are clearly desperate, and the act of stealing is much less evil than allowing your child
Actually hitting something ten feet away is easy... But if you have difficulty hitting a human sized target in the center of mass at ten feet, guns aren't for you.
Unless you have real training, it is not at all uncommon to miss a person at ten feet with a pistol. Given the high stress, adrenaline rush situation, things become a lot harder than target practice. When the cops train a lot of the time they will run a few miles, do a load of pushups and then quickly try to accurately hit a target, while they are still all shaky and exhausted. There have been instances of police officers emptying their weapon at ranges as close as that without hitting their target. I'd like to think that I'd never miss at that range, but I've never been in that situation. Have you?
Isn't it paranoia to think that you are going to be raped or attacked with a knife when you walk out of your house?
Probably, but it is not paranoia to think that you might be attacked when you walk out of youre house, especially if you live somewhere where that happens regularly.
There are a lot of things that you (and you family) should fear before that.
This is the classic, "at least we're not as bad as China" argument. Sure we should all give up smoking and eat better. Why does that indicate we shouldn't carry a gun to defend ourselves?
Well, size isn't everything, but if you are 5'5" 140lb, then yes, you probably are a pussy. You need to either learn how to fight (martial arts?), or learn how to avoid fighting.
Written like someone without a clue. I've trained in Kun-tow, Karate, Judo, Tae Kwon Do, boxing, and several styles of Kung-fu. My best instructor once said, "the bigger they are, the harder they hit." He's right of course. Body mass, strength, and the length of arms and legs makes a huge difference in a fight. My technique is much more sophisticated and practiced than some people who can probably wipe the floor with me because they have 60 pounds on me. The best fighter I ever sparred with was over seven feet tall and big into thai boxing. Getting close enough to hit him without being killed was almost impossible.
The average person will not be able to win a fight against the average violent criminal. Most are men within a certain age range. Most have some familiarity with violence. Most people won't even be able to successfully run away from them. My father has a bad back these days. He will not win a fight or successfully run away from many people. My mother is an a wheelchair. By giving them each a firearm you make the average criminal too afraid to attack them, or even neighbors who may or may not have guns. Sorry, but learning to avoid being victimized is not an option for most people without access to appropriate weapons.
This is the type of naive thinking indicative of your overall approach to arguing. First of all, poverty IS a long-term phenomena.
Yes I know, I said so, didn't I?
If you go into a store to buy lunch today and realize you left your wallet at home, are you in a state of poverty until you go back and get the wallet? I would hope you agree that that is silly.
Yes, at least in terms of our argument. We were discussing what motivates theft. I think a lack of money obviously motivates theft. While it may not be a long-term solution that is not necessary as I pointed out, since we're talking about motivations of people who don't necessarily consider theft as a long term solution, but only an immediate one.
You only took this point to be obvious based on your extremely superficial and naive definition of poverty as meaning "lack of immediately available funds".
Which is the only part of it that we need to consider as motivation for theft.
Your writings indicate that you are not really familiar at all with the philosophical free-will discussion.
No, it is just that they are not useful for solving this problem.
It would be a very strange philosophy indeed that would hold a person responsible for having a piano fall on them.
Apparently in your exhaustive research into free will philosophies you somehow missed Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Goethe, etc. If you take the risk and go outside and walk past a music store, you're responsible for the consequences. The risk may be very small, but you're choosing to take it.
In your example your brother would be responsible for walking under the piano but NOT for the piano falling on him.
You must not have scored very well in philosophy. We are all responsible for everything that happens to us or we are responsible for nothing. You can't draw an arbitrary line at what a person should have foreseen.
You just can't seem to get your head around Spec's use of the word "responsible" to mean what it means and not to mean "guilty".
You don't understand, since he used that argument to rebut any attempt to show any criteria which could be used to remove motivation for stealing. By his definition because you are responsible for theft, no other factors can influence it or have importance.
The only one here who quotes evidence and then fails to show it is you. Spec hasn't made any claims about "this is the way it is". You continue to claim things are "proven", "documented" or (best of all) so obvious they don't need proving.
Because you'll be hard pressed to pick up any scientific study on the subject that does not support it. Check out Levitt and Dubner, 2005 for a very popular, recent, and well regarded study to that affect.
This is true. And the consequence of this fact is that it is imperative to make sure that the punitive system is ethically consistent.
Sigh. It does not matter. Ethics that don't match up with the laws will be ignored, just as pro-lifers feel it is fine to slash tires of doctors at clinics. You can't make laws consistent with everyone's ethics all the time and since it is the ethics not the law doing most of the motivating, it is not likely to have much effect.
The problem is that by claiming that poor people have no responsibility
I double-dog dare you to find one comment of mine that says poor people have no responsibility. This is just completely made up.
Cite sources please.
Actually, the previous study works for this to. The sample was office workers in Washington DC and petty theft.
It's very tricky to prove why someone does not committ a crime. The evidence is not nearly as strong as you think it is. This is another example of where you get into trouble as a direct result of your inability to understand statistics (same old error too: selection bias).
It is, however, easy to find correlations that are pro
On the last, I think that that would be a better scenario as it is harder to harm people with those types of weapons.
Is it harder for a criminal to harm people when he has a club and the typical person has nothing or when both the criminal and the potential victim have a gun? Studies have shown again and again that criminals believe the latter and are less likely to risk attacking someone who may have a gun, even if they do too, than they are likely to attack someone they have a reasonable certainty doesn't have a gun. If you look at the number of knifings, beatings, etc. in the UK since they banned guns you'll see the result of ignoring this.
You also have to option to run, or get help from from someone.
If you're faster then they are, which given the fact that most violent criminals are men between the ages of 15 and 35 means most people will not be able to. And if you do run they can throw a knife or brick at you. Just for some practical advice, running from an assailant with a firearm is likely to make them either no longer attack or miss you anyway.
Also, in the original examples that I posted, seems unlikely that any of the weapons that you mention would cause the same amount of harm to bystanders.
In some countries where guns are very rare, drive by attacks often use pipe bombs and molotov cocktails, both of which have a much larger area of effect and are more likely to hit bystanders than a gun.
I would hope at least that in north america we aren't at the stage where people would use firebombs in a large crowd or busy area.
I seriously doubt it. The weight of evidence here falls in favor of an armed populace for reducing violent crime. It may be counterintuitive to some, but it is true nonetheless.
Yes, the discussion in general began with that, but the point he was addressing specifically with this was about crime a societal trend, as was specifically pointed out. It was not about the theft of an iPod. It is reasonable to believe that theft of an iPod may be related to theft in general, but it is not logical to conclude that it has to be a direct, causal relationship as was implied by this post, as it pertains to the specific topic being rebutted.
Really? Prove it. Show me one study that shows that poverty is "mitigated" by theft, or even that "stressful situations" can be so mitigated. Because I think you're making that up.
I made two assertions here. One was that poverty correlates to theft. I think there is plenty of evidence to support that, but if you really can't find any, let me know. The second was that theft mitigates poverty. I doubt anyone has bothered to perform such a study as it is logically obvious. Poverty is lack of money and goods. Theft is a means of acquiring money or goods. Thus, theft directly mitigates poverty, even if not on a long-term basis. But people don't necessarily think in the long-term and since we were talking about motivation it is the thought that counts.
How is this in any way relevant? Not only are you stacking much more extreme circumstances...
It was a qualitative argument, not quantitative. In principal the concept is wrong as demonstrated by my example. After that it is merely relative levels of stressors which are relative to individuals and situations, none of which is within the scope of the general argument. I take it you did not bother to learn the rhetorical method?
That's a wonderful story, despite the fact that it's patently false. People are not the victims of their circumstances, and the fact that you continue to operate under the assumption that they are means that you missed Stormin's point entirely.
People are victims of circumstances. If a piano falls on my brother, he was a victim of circumstance. That does not mean he was not responsible for walking by the music store and taking the risk of all those instrument related injuries, but that was not my point. Your implication that someone cannot be both responsible for their actions and a victim of circumstance is a false dichotomy.
They were as desperate as it could ever get.
You have no conception. They had food to eat and a job. They were not penniless, hated, hunted by the police, and suffering horrible physical and mental pain as the result of withdrawal from a drug. It can always be a lot worse.
So I am taking personal offense to your presumption that acts of theft can be noble in nature.
Your ethics are too inflexible and dogmatic for me. If my child was starving to death while someone else lived in luxury and threw out hundreds of pounds of food a day and refused to help, I'd have no ethical issues in stealing from them. If a man had a device that he planned to use to destroy the earth, then I'd have no ethical issues with stealing it from him to prevent this. I can respect your beliefs if you disagree, but don't try to hold me or anyone else to your belief system.
You make a conscious decision whether or not to stick to your principles, period. If you decide to steal, it can be justified, but to then try and assume that most acts of theft by the poor are such is grossly naive.
Who made such an assumption? I certainly never did. I'm not judging the motivations and ethics of others since I can't know their motivations or ethics and it would be unethical for me to judge them in any case. Rather, I discuss speculative cause and effect and documented correlation for possible remedies. Some of us are a lot less interested in judging and punishing others than we are in solving the problem.
Wrong.
And where do illegal guns come from?
In this case they are flooding across the border from Detroit. The point is, no authority can ban guns worldwide. No country will do so, due to military necessity. In many countries, most illegal guns are bought or stolen from the police and military in that country. How exactly do you think laws will prevent this, or do you think the police and military should disarm? Yeah, that is going to happen any time now. All the countries of the world will give up all weapons and live in brotherhood and harmony or something. Get real.
Are you trying to say that they fall from the sky into the hands of criminals?
Yes. They come from the magical gun fairy. Any more absurd questions?
If you could keep this from happening, then guns for self protection would probably work a lot better as a deterrent.
You can't keep this from happening. The truth is people will get guns even if they have to build zip-guns using parts from the hardware store. The most you can hope for is to greatly reduce availability to criminals and citizens at the same time. When this happens, gun crimes decrease, but other violent crimes, with knives, clubs, poison, molotov cocktails, and bare hands increase. Guns and weapons in general are tools and you can't ban tools used for a purpose, because most tools can be applied to many purposes. If you want to stop violent crime you should attack the things that motivate it, not the tools used to enact it. This makes logical sense and is supported by mountains of statistical evidence from around the world.
They would not work in the UK, that much is undebatable. We have practially no guns in the country and getting a license for one is pretty much impossible.
No, you have guns in the UK. They are just either placed where they are unlikely to be used to stop crime, owned by a very few wealthy people's bodyguards, or are in the hands of criminals. Gun crimes are on the rise in the UK. Violent crimes are on the rise. Violent crimes are higher than they were before the UK banned guns.
Living in a gun free country is awesome. Worst comes to the worst, I can run away from any assailant and get out of the situation alive. Try that when either of you has a gun.
Assuming you are young and a faster runner than your assailant. Is the average victim in better shape than their assailant? Can your grandmother run away? Can the average woman outrun the average rapist? What about when the assailant has a knife and can throw it? What if they have a brick? What if they have an illegal gun? What if they have a slingshot?
Passing laws cannot stop criminals from having weapons or just being bigger and more violent than you. You can make a crude gun using $40 in parts from the hardware store. Laws telling criminals not to break the law are pointless as a preventative.
I've seen a lot of crime. I've been involved with some really nasty people. I've done enough to probably put me in jail for twenty years. Yet not once in this country have I heard of anyone I know having a gun or even access to one. It just doesn't happen except in a couple of small isolated groups.
It could be you don't hang out in the right circles. Or maybe the UK's gun ban actually has greatly reduced access to them. So what? More crimes are committed with knives now and you're thinking of banning them. Next will be hatchets and table legs and bits of rope and anything heavy. It does not work as demonstrated by the recorded violent crime levels both in the UK and in many, many other places.
Ease of access to weapons, especially weapons that operate independent of the user's physical strength even the odds for the elderly and women and people who didn't spend the last five years exercising in prison. This deters violent crime. Sorry, but those are the facts whether you like them or not.
The UK is a country with a culture of lesser personal responsibility than the US. It makes laws accordingly. In the instance of their socialism and drug policies this works well to reduce crime. In the instance of gun bans it increases violent crime. What does this tell us? The culture is more important than the effectiveness of the measures and most decisions will be made based upon considerations other than the facts. Even if it has been shown clearly as not the case, people will believe gun bans reduce crime because that is what they want to believe and that is what one politician is telling them. At least it is still better than the US where ridiculous drug laws, healthcare laws, and economics all lead to devastating amounts of violent crime, and people believe that they are doing exaclty the opposite.
Yeah, because letting people run around with guns really solved the USA's violent crime problem, didn't it?
Okay, for those who don't want to bother educating themselves, here's how the breakdown correlates:
Americans, look at all these solutions for decreasing crime. Europeans, get off your high horse and realize that gun bans don't decrease crime and America's crime is due to their inability to deal with all these other factors
You're definitely fitting the bill for liberal by my personal standards thanks to obviously bleeding heart statements like these: However poverty breeds desperation, and desperate people do desperate things. Would you really typify the avg London street thug as "desperate"?
You're dangerously close to making personal attacks here. How either you or the previous poster "classify" one another is irrelevant. As for the real issue, you're making a logical error. Poverty leads to crime does not mean stealing an iPod is the direct result of poverty. Later you call out the fact that correlation is not causation, yet you base your argument upon that assumption here.
Because if I was desperte to get out of poverty - that's the route I'd be taking.
Poverty correlates with lack of education and stressful situations that can be mitigated by theft. It also correlates with participation an a culture and association with individuals that are more likely to be criminals. Those that commit a crime correlate strongly with those who have previously committed a crime. So assuming you are poor and poorly educated and have few prospects and contacts that might get you a good job and your uncle is a carjacker and he has told you since you were young stealing from the rich is not wrong and you need money to pay the rent so your mother is not evicted you're a lot more likely to rob a store to get that money. Having done this, when you're trying to finance your trip to France to learn to weld, you're a lot more likely to steal some rich kid's iPod to d get there.
This in no way mitigates your personal responsibility for your act, but lawmakers should be interested in results more than assigning blame. If you could stop every murderer in the world from killing by giving a million dollars of taxpayer's dollars to some undeserving bastard, don't you think that should be done? This isn't about justice, it is about reducing violent crime.
Leaving aside my own beliefs about morality...
This is another mistake. Ethical/moral motivations are the strongest ones here. Ignoring that aspect is not likely to result in accurate predictions or models.
Being invested in society provides me with a lot of incentive not to get caught.
Most criminals do not believe they will be caught, thus this incentive has much less weight.
The only FACT we have is that high poverty correlates to high crime... skip straight from the poverty/crime correlation to some explanation of stealing iPods as desperate cry for help.
Except that there is a documented correlation between desperation and crime regardless of income level.
So your whole post is rife with these unjustified assumptions. That iPod thieves are desperate...
That is your assumption, not the pervious poster's I read his (or her) post and they never made such a claim.
Are you saying that if you were poor you would somehow no longer have the ability to make decisions?
Are you saying that if you were stripped of all your possessions, beaten, starved, and anally raped daily you would not steal a loaf of bread to survive? Don't put words into the mouths of others. It is foolish to believe that you cannot effect crime rates and make the world a better place by changing aspects of society that correlate strongly with crime rates. This has nothing to do with assigning responsibility for crimes.
What you are in essence saying (though I'm sure you will protest) is that poor people are sub-human.
Why would you even write this tripe? I know you don't believe this but I'm going to claim that you do anyway. How is this useful or constructive? I know you won't agree with this but I'm going to assert that you hate all people and want mankind to suffer. Idiocy.
You see poor people not as independent agents, but as cogs who driven to act by societal forces.
Is holy water a sacred sacrament or a common chemical compound? Is a gun
Convince me that this would have occurred if no guns were involved.
Why, does that address a valid point in some way? Were the guns involved in this legally obtained and owned? If not, laws would not have stopped this crime anyway. Even assuming you can somehow magically destroy all guns in an area and they are hard to come by, as they are in some places, these gang members would have thrown molatov cocktails at one another, resulting in even more killing of innocents and painful burns and scarring. All of this has been tried before and banning guns statistically does not reduce violent crime.
Every week or so there is another report of some elderly person shooting a criminal who breaks into their house with a weapon of some sort. Do you expect all those people to survive by defending themselves with a club, while suffering from the infirmities of age?
The number of guns (and related crime) in the UK is steadily increasing year on year, however thankfully the numbers are still small.
I don't think "gun crime" makes much sense as a value based category. What is more important stopping murders or stopping murders with guns? If the latter decreases while the former increases because of some change, is that change a good thing? In the UK violent assaults and murders have gone up compared to the UK before guns were taken away from citizens. It's true that shootings have gone down since then, but stabbings, poisonings, and beatings have all gone up. This correlation is common across many countries that have tried similar solutions.
I think these laws represent a cultural element more than anything else. The UK has less violent crime because the culture is less prone to result in it. Sensible treatment of drug issues is a lot more likely to result in decreased crime. Fewer desperate people due to a slightly more socialist economy and healthcare removes the motivation for much violent crime. All of these laws are part of a cultural trend towards a lack of personal responsibility. If you go broke, the government will keep you alive. If you're hooked on drugs, well the medical system will take care of you (rather than locking you in a cell to be ass raped). If you are threatened with violence, the police will protect you.
All three are part of the same cultural element, but only the former two reduce violent crime. Overall, I think these factors reduce violent crime, but that does not mean individually they do.
In the US (I'm not sure about the UK) the police cannot and will not protect you from violent crime. A huge part of the population is engaged in serious illegal activity because a significant portion of the population is involved in drugs or is desperate due to medical or financial issues. The police are not legally obligated to protect citizens or even enforce the law in any given case. In a landmark trial the police were ruled fully within their rights to not only not respond to the repeated telephone calls from three women who were raped and beaten repeatedly over the course of two days, but they were able to lie to the victims on the phone and say they were coming when in truth they were ignoring them. In the US, when someone calls 911 (the emergency number) and there is actually a violent crime involved, the police respond in time to do something in less than 1% of cases. To rely upon them for personal defense is moronic as almost all police officers will tell you. They can't protect you and they won't. Banning citizens from having the means to protect themselves, therefore, is a gross violation of basic human rights.
Yeah, because as a resident of Michigan, that has allows allowing you to carry concealed weapons, crime rates in cities like Detroit and Flint have dropped so much since those laws passed and citizens started carrying concealed weapons...
Umm, violent crimes did drop after the concealed carry laws were passed in MI, but not enough to counterbalance the country-wide increase when the federal aid for law enforcement budgets was slashed leaving the highest crime areas with the lowest budgets, like Flint and Detroit, badly undermanned.
You didn't do to well in your statistics class did you? Anecdotal evidence is useless for determining causality or even correlation. In Michigan no person with a concealed carry permit has ever been convicted of a violent crime except police officers. Only two people have ever had their permits revoked, neither for improper use of the firearm. Dozens of people every year report successfully stopping crimes directly by defending themselves with their concealed pistol (usually just by brandishing it, not actually shooting anyone).
Given this information I wonder how anyone can logically or statistically conclude that concealed carry laws do not help.
Wow, he can differentiate a semi-automatic from a nonautomatic from an automatic, just based on how it presses against the back of his head.
Here's my guess. Someone held something vaguely rectangular and hard against the back of the person's head. It may or may not have been a pistol. The police, upon questioning, decided it was something that felt like an automatic since almost all revolvers and machine pistols (and many semi-automatics) have a round, protruding barrel. Sure, maybe it was a autofire Glock or some other, useless setup but those are rare by comparison.
Note how the Slashdot summary changes things...
Agreed. I don't know if the editors did not notice or if they enjoy it when the summarizer changes the facts because it generates a hundred more comments like yours, but it is annoying.
This is one of the most ridiculous statements I've ever read. How is the problem supposed to be fixed if the vendor is never told what the problem is, and so what if it's proprietary?
I believe the answer is, you hire a consulting group who just happens to be buddies with the department in question. After paying them a pile of money, they get whatever agency to "certify" your software in some ridiculous and meaningless way. It is just the normal price of doing business in the sector.
One piece of software can be an industry standard, open source, heavily reviewed, and nearly bulletproof. The other can be closed source, complete crap who outsourced everything to unnamed parties in China. If the company that sells the latter pays the right consulting group their product will be "certified" even if the testing only proves that it exists, not that it works or is secure, and proves they have the right documentation written in the right style. This latter software may be the only option for a government agency to use due to policies that require certification. It is dumb, but that is what happens in bureaucracies.
Seriously, with all the crappy movies out there and so little time, why bother.
For me NetFlix serves two purposes. First, I know I'm going to want the TV on occasionally while I'm working on something else, or cooking dinner, or just feel like doing nothing else. Since that is the case, I might as well watch a good show, in the right order, rather than a random episode of whatever happens to be on cable.
Second, Sometimes after a hard night at the bar or just when a few dozen rowdy bikers show up it is great to throw in an old classic most people have never seen, or a terrible old sci-fi flick. Nothing in the world is more entertaining than a few computer geeks and a few bikers and a few punks drunkenly, yet wittily lambasting (MST3K style) the movies. It is worth it to hold onto "Night of the Lepus" for a few weeks.