One thing that I've heard about antidepressants is that they tend to increase motivation. In 99/100 cases that might cause you to finally get out of bed, take a chance on making friends, and get your life straightened out (maybe even to the point that you don't need the pills any more). Maybe in another 1/100 cases it motivates you to get out of bed and kill yourself.
The issue is that the motivation-enhancing effect and the antidepressant effect have slightly different time constants. If someone suddenly stops taking the medication, he might slip back into depression while still being motivated enough to kill himself.
Yeah, that's really been the experience here in Europe
The guy in Berlin managed to stab about thirty people. That no one died was only due to one single thing: He was drunk out of mind and didn't really want to kill anyone, so he used a small pocket knife and didn't stab people repeatedly.
Well I would like to think that if you are classified as having severe mental problems you should not be allowed to own a gun, just like having certain mental problems can suspend your drivers license.
And this leads to people who suspect they have mental disorders hiding them as long as possible instead of seeking treatment early.
Limiting guns to sane and responsible people would not help?
OOP mentioned checking for "criminal background", not for sanity or responsibility (both are not trivial to check, and it's almost impossible to monitor them in near-real time).
Or that states with high gun ownership have about the same rate of non-gun murders, but more than twice as many gun murders?
I can only look at some of the neighboring countries from my perspective, and the ones with much less restrictive gun laws have about the same murder rate as the very restrictive country I live in. That's fairly factual. Less restrictive gun laws don't turn people into murderous loonies. It must be something else. Attitude? Culture?
You have to be aware that stabbing people to death isn't easy.
Easy enough, if I look at murder statistics.
That it's intimate,
If you don't really want people dead, maybe you shouldn't try to kill them?
requires physical struggle
Only if you're attacking an alert, aware victim.
requires proximity,
Not an issue if the intended victim is unaware.
a good knowledge how to deliver deadly blows.
Knowing to stab repeatedly is enough for starters, and the upper torso is good enough as far as targeting goes. Knife murder is not a sport and there aren't any points for style.
People can run away,
If they're aware and alert. Read some accounts of stabbing sprees - in some, the attacker had stabbed one or two dozens of people and people around him weren't aware of that (nice example: Berlin, Germany. The guy was drunk and didn't really want to kill anyone, and still stabbed thirty-something people).
Do you believe the things you're saying?
I can only repeat it: Read some accounts of stabbing sprees. They don't get as much publicity as shooting sprees, but they're scary as hell. In most cases, the death count is only low because of incompetence of the attacker.
In scenario 1, man #1 has a gun, how much good will running away do man #2?
Depends on how good a shot the armed guy is, and how far the nearest chance to break line of sight is. (And no, guns, especially handguns, are not death rays). Of course, if the attacker is smart enough to use the advantage of iniative, the victim has no chance.
In scenario 2, man #1 has a knife, how much good will running away do man #2?
He has a 50% chance of being caught and stabbed - if the attacker is dumb enough to show the knife before attacking. Otherwise, the first thing the victim will notice is that he's bleeding like a stuck pig, and then the victim will die.
However, there's one big difference between a shooting spree and a stabbing spree - after the first shot, everyone in the general vicinity will be alerted. With a knife, people often didn't even realize that there was some guy going around stabbing people.
If knives are just as dangerous as guns, why do people bother to use guns anyway?
Media coverage. You only make national, or even international, news if you use a gun. If you stab 20 people to death, you get nothing, but if you just wave a gun around at a school, instant headline.
Why do cops have guns and not knives?
Because cops usually need to use their weapons against armed, aggressive opponents, and usually don't get into situations where they just want to kill as many helpless, unprepared victims as possible.
As we've seen from knife attacks in schools (notable in China), knife attacks are far less lethal,
They're only less lethal because attackers haven't bothered to learn how to stab people to death properly.
Barriers to firearm access(which isn't the same as ownership) would curtail these kinds of shootings.
It would turn them into stabbings instead. And once the perpetrators read up a bit on how to stab people properly (so they have no chance of survival), death counts will be indistinguishable from your average school shooting.
This system will give the student practical insights into the meaning of sensitivity and specificity.
What percentage of gunshots will it detect? What is the rate of false detections? Can you trigger the detection by slapping the flat side of a ruler against the table?
Why should they "admit" something that they barely understand in the first place?
The average user doesn't know how malware works, how to recognize it, how it gets on their machines, why it's bad to have it on your machine, etc. And the average user also doesn't possess the technical expertise to understand a thorough explanation.
And building a separate processor for each of the nearly inifinite number of possible tasks out there isn't?
Especially when it comes to integrated circuits, mass production of one product is what makes the production process cheap and efficient.
Also, at some point, you need to say "good enough/fullfills our requirements". Yes, you might save a bit of power by coming up with your own chip design, but designing an ASIC is not a trivial task and in the end your product might be three times as expensive and half a year late.
Think of it this way: These contests exist so that clever programmers can expose flaws in our tools.
Or in our knowledge. Some entries are based on the fact that the compiler doesn't know what the program is supposed to do, and the person looking at it may not know all the subtleties of the language's syntax. The compiler sees perfectly innocent code, but the code doesn't do what the person reading it thinks it does.
It would be nice if the scoring criteria were better defined, e.g. "this bug will be detected if syntax coloring is on/compiler warning level is set to max/linker warning level is set to max/MISRA rules are applied to the code/etc.".
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The issue is that the motivation-enhancing effect and the antidepressant effect have slightly different time constants. If someone suddenly stops taking the medication, he might slip back into depression while still being motivated enough to kill himself.
The guy in Berlin managed to stab about thirty people. That no one died was only due to one single thing: He was drunk out of mind and didn't really want to kill anyone, so he used a small pocket knife and didn't stab people repeatedly.
And this leads to people who suspect they have mental disorders hiding them as long as possible instead of seeking treatment early.
OOP mentioned checking for "criminal background", not for sanity or responsibility (both are not trivial to check, and it's almost impossible to monitor them in near-real time).
How about the shooter setting someone else on fire?
I can only look at some of the neighboring countries from my perspective, and the ones with much less restrictive gun laws have about the same murder rate as the very restrictive country I live in. That's fairly factual. Less restrictive gun laws don't turn people into murderous loonies. It must be something else. Attitude? Culture?
You're wrong in a constitutionally protected way,
Not my constitution.
Easy enough, if I look at murder statistics.
That it's intimate,
If you don't really want people dead, maybe you shouldn't try to kill them?
requires physical struggle
Only if you're attacking an alert, aware victim.
requires proximity,
Not an issue if the intended victim is unaware.
a good knowledge how to deliver deadly blows.
Knowing to stab repeatedly is enough for starters, and the upper torso is good enough as far as targeting goes. Knife murder is not a sport and there aren't any points for style.
People can run away,
If they're aware and alert. Read some accounts of stabbing sprees - in some, the attacker had stabbed one or two dozens of people and people around him weren't aware of that (nice example: Berlin, Germany. The guy was drunk and didn't really want to kill anyone, and still stabbed thirty-something people).
Do you believe the things you're saying?
I can only repeat it: Read some accounts of stabbing sprees. They don't get as much publicity as shooting sprees, but they're scary as hell. In most cases, the death count is only low because of incompetence of the attacker.
Depends on how good a shot the armed guy is, and how far the nearest chance to break line of sight is. (And no, guns, especially handguns, are not death rays). Of course, if the attacker is smart enough to use the advantage of iniative, the victim has no chance.
In scenario 2, man #1 has a knife, how much good will running away do man #2?
He has a 50% chance of being caught and stabbed - if the attacker is dumb enough to show the knife before attacking. Otherwise, the first thing the victim will notice is that he's bleeding like a stuck pig, and then the victim will die.
However, there's one big difference between a shooting spree and a stabbing spree - after the first shot, everyone in the general vicinity will be alerted. With a knife, people often didn't even realize that there was some guy going around stabbing people.
Brilliant idea. This will scare anyone who suspects that they are mentally ill away from seeking professional treatment.
Depends on who you want to kill. Against unarmed, unaware victms, knives work perfectly fine.
There's a reason we give soldiers rifles instead.
Because they're usually fighting enemies that have rifles, too.
I hope you're not suggesting that the main job of soldiers is murdering unarmed, unprepared kids in schools?
Media coverage. You only make national, or even international, news if you use a gun. If you stab 20 people to death, you get nothing, but if you just wave a gun around at a school, instant headline.
Why do cops have guns and not knives?
Because cops usually need to use their weapons against armed, aggressive opponents, and usually don't get into situations where they just want to kill as many helpless, unprepared victims as possible.
As we've seen from knife attacks in schools (notable in China), knife attacks are far less lethal,
They're only less lethal because attackers haven't bothered to learn how to stab people to death properly.
From the perspective of the dead victim, they are.
Guns weren't invented because they made killing harder.
They were invented for exactly this reason. It's much harder to kill someone with a sword if that someone has a gun.
It would turn them into stabbings instead. And once the perpetrators read up a bit on how to stab people properly (so they have no chance of survival), death counts will be indistinguishable from your average school shooting.
Oddly enough, Europe isn't a warzone. Even the countries in Europe where firearms are comparatively readily available aren't.
If it was all about gun availability, Austria would be a place to stay away from. Quite obviously, it's not.
Unless, god forbid, the shooter is also an arsonist.
Unless it's a subsonic bullet.
The muzzle blast from a gun does create a sound that loud.
Unless your shooter brings a .22 lr, which does an adequate job when shooting helpless victims.
Call me when a system like that is allowed by the local fire safety code.
There is some. The shooters usually want posthumous publicity. And the media are usually all too happy to oblige.
The school shooting from 5 years ago is still in the news around here. The shooter probably got more than he wished for.
What percentage of gunshots will it detect? What is the rate of false detections? Can you trigger the detection by slapping the flat side of a ruler against the table?
Why should they "admit" something that they barely understand in the first place?
The average user doesn't know how malware works, how to recognize it, how it gets on their machines, why it's bad to have it on your machine, etc. And the average user also doesn't possess the technical expertise to understand a thorough explanation.
You don't. You tell them it's a huge financial risk for the company.
And building a separate processor for each of the nearly inifinite number of possible tasks out there isn't?
Especially when it comes to integrated circuits, mass production of one product is what makes the production process cheap and efficient.
Also, at some point, you need to say "good enough/fullfills our requirements". Yes, you might save a bit of power by coming up with your own chip design, but designing an ASIC is not a trivial task and in the end your product might be three times as expensive and half a year late.
And turn it into an expanding cloud of plasma a few picoseconds later.
Or in our knowledge. Some entries are based on the fact that the compiler doesn't know what the program is supposed to do, and the person looking at it may not know all the subtleties of the language's syntax. The compiler sees perfectly innocent code, but the code doesn't do what the person reading it thinks it does.
It would be nice if the scoring criteria were better defined, e.g. "this bug will be detected if syntax coloring is on/compiler warning level is set to max/linker warning level is set to max/MISRA rules are applied to the code/etc.".
The last contest only ended a few weeks ago!