Also, your stats are completely wrong. In 2013, there were more gun deaths due to suicide (21,175) than homicide (11,208). Here's the source.
Furthermore, yes, assholes will not obey gun laws. But if obtaining a gun is hard and guns are scarce, low-resource assholes will have to obey them. The United States is awash with guns that are easy to obtain. If that were not the case, criminals would certainly be no more likely to obey gun laws... but they'd have a harder time getting guns in the first place.
In my opinion, private citizens should not be able to own guns, period, unless they can prove a compelling reason. I know that's heresy in the United States, but I don't give a fuck. Specifically, the AR-15 should certainly be banned because it's capable of firing dozens of rounds per minute.
You went from "glass bottle or knife" to "firebomb". Interesting.
How many people were killed in the United States by guns last year? And how many by firebombs?
The answer is about 13,000 people by firearms in 2015. I couldn't even find statistics for bombing attacks, but I bet it was fewer than 100.
Also, easy access to deadly weapons greatly increases the chances of spur-of-the-moment attacks or suicides, exactly as reported in that Australian study.
drug laws really work great, that's why there is no illegal drug use in this country,
Are you seriously suggesting that if we repealed drug laws, use of dangerous drugs like crack and heroin would not increase?
They exist to provide punishment and revenue, like almost any law. And to stop people from breaking that law again, by locking them up.
Oh, so they do work, at least to some extent?
Tell me, do you refrain from murdering people because it's wrong, or because there's a law against it?
Both. But I'm not everyone. I'm sure there are people out there who are deterred from murdering because of laws. And I'm sure there are people who have murdered who have been prevented from murdering again because of laws.
Second reply: Yes, a determined killer will kill. But easy access to guns makes it much more likely that an unhinged person will take down a whole bunch of others. It's exceedingly unlikely that a guy with a glass bottle or a knife would kill 49 people before being stopped.
Look at Australia's experience with gun control. In the 18 years prior to 1996, they had 13 mass shootings (defined as 4 or more victims.) Since 1996 when they brought in draconian gun laws, they have had zero mass shootings. Zero.
Not only have mass shootings been drastically reduced, but the firearm homicide rate fell by 59 percent and the firearm suicide rate by 65 percent without a parallel increase in non-firearm homicides and suicides. That's because a lot of homicides and suicides are not planned, but occur in the heat of the moment, and are much likely to take place if there's easy access to deadly weapons. Here's the reference (PDF).
Where I do agree, though, is that gun control probably will not work in the US. You have way too many guns in circulation, and you're poisoned by 200+ years of the Second Amendment. Fixing that is well-nigh impossible, but just ignoring the problem is not going to help.
Why have laws against theft? Criminals aren't gonna obey them.
Why have laws against murder? It won't generally deter criminals.
Do you see how utterly fucking ridiculous those statements are? And yet the gun lobby parrots them in regards to gun control in all seriousness and with a straight face.
This is so typical. We are unwilling or unable to make the hard societal changes, so let's look for a magic solution, a technological quick fix.
No, there is no technological solution. There's probably not even any solution at this point. The US is so flooded with guns and the NRA is so powerful that gun control is essentially impossible and would be useless to try to enforce.
Welcome to "unintended side effects" of your Second Amendment. Basically, your society is fucked.
I use randomly-generate passwords that are at least 20 characters long and generated from reading /dev/random. Any scheme other than using a cryptographically-secure random number generator will be weaker.
Not all motors use permanent magnets. And yes, I suppose you could say an AC induction motor doesn't use magnets; it has a stator coil and an iron-cage rotor that only magnetizes when power is applied. But rare-earth permanent magent motors let generate a lot of torque in a relatively small motor.
Manufacturing provides about 11% of Canadian GDP; mining and oil or gas extraction provides about 8% of the Canadian GDP. The only sector of Canada's economy that's bigger than manufacturing is real estate and rental and leasing at about 12.3%.
I would say a pipeline would be more expensive to operate. You have to check it for integrity and make absolutely sure there are no leaks. An HVDC line could be inspected much more easily and while the economic consequences of a failure would be pretty bad, the environmental consequences would be negligible compared to a pipeline failure.
I don't know that a lack of elecricity capacity is the biggest bottleneck in EV deployment. Practical EVs use motors with rare-earth permanent magnets and until we have practical and inexpensive replacements for the rare-earth magnets, that's going to be a problem.
Well, no, it's certainly possible to transmit electricity very long distance without unacceptable losses. But it's not cheap. The state-of-the-art for long-distance transmission is high-voltage DC (HVDC) transmission that can transmit GW of power at hundreds of kV.
Most of the relatively-easily accessible sources of hydroelectricity in Canada have already been developed. And hydro is really inconvenient because the good sources of energy tend to be far away from population centres that want to consume the energy.
And while Quebec has plenty of hydroelectric resources, that's not true in other provinces. In Ontario, nuclear energy accounts for more than 46% of our electricity, and hydro about 28.4%.
I do agree that in the medium- to long-term, we have to get ourselves off the huge fossil-fuel habit. But not sure it will be so easy.
tech will never flourish in such backwater places like that, no matter what the press is paid to advertise
This. High-tech centres of excellence in North America (at least, non-military ones) are all pretty strongly correlated with areas that have relatively liberal politics.
So guys show pettiness by downvoting women's shows, and women don't give a crap about downvoting guy's shows. OMG, say it ain't so! Who would EVER have predicted that???
Sure, but hybridized seeds are not patented, so they're not under exclusive control of anyone and therefore fetch more reasonable market prices. And furthermore, if GMO is just more-or-less more efficient hybridization, then people who claim that it's safe are weakening their arguments by saying it's dangerous for GMO crops to produce viable seeds.
I don't doubt that GM crops are safe. But what about the dirty tricks companies play, such as patenting a gene sequence? Or writing contracts that forbid farmers from harvesting seed, forcing them to buy new seed each time? Or deliberately modifying the genome so the plants are fine with respect to food, but don't produce viable seeds?
As an experiment, I tried reading a romance novel a few weeks ago. I had to abandon it after 30 pages. It was the worst, bar none, published writing I've ever read.
I have no doubt that your friends are successful if you measure that as "financially successful". But the romance genre, as a whole, is overwhelmingly filled with awful writing, cliched plots and ridiculous characters. Nevertheless, it must take skill to be able to churn these things out, and I do have some admiration for romance novel authors, akin to my admiration for marketers who understand their targets' psychology and know exactly what to sell them.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, so gang-related gun deaths are just fine?
Also, your stats are completely wrong. In 2013, there were more gun deaths due to suicide (21,175) than homicide (11,208). Here's the source.
Furthermore, yes, assholes will not obey gun laws. But if obtaining a gun is hard and guns are scarce, low-resource assholes will have to obey them. The United States is awash with guns that are easy to obtain. If that were not the case, criminals would certainly be no more likely to obey gun laws... but they'd have a harder time getting guns in the first place.
Right, nitpick. That's the way to solve things.
In my opinion, private citizens should not be able to own guns, period, unless they can prove a compelling reason. I know that's heresy in the United States, but I don't give a fuck. Specifically, the AR-15 should certainly be banned because it's capable of firing dozens of rounds per minute.
You went from "glass bottle or knife" to "firebomb". Interesting.
How many people were killed in the United States by guns last year? And how many by firebombs?
The answer is about 13,000 people by firearms in 2015. I couldn't even find statistics for bombing attacks, but I bet it was fewer than 100.
Also, easy access to deadly weapons greatly increases the chances of spur-of-the-moment attacks or suicides, exactly as reported in that Australian study.
drug laws really work great, that's why there is no illegal drug use in this country,
Are you seriously suggesting that if we repealed drug laws, use of dangerous drugs like crack and heroin would not increase?
They exist to provide punishment and revenue, like almost any law. And to stop people from breaking that law again, by locking them up.
Oh, so they do work, at least to some extent?
Tell me, do you refrain from murdering people because it's wrong, or because there's a law against it?
Both. But I'm not everyone. I'm sure there are people out there who are deterred from murdering because of laws. And I'm sure there are people who have murdered who have been prevented from murdering again because of laws.
Second reply: Yes, a determined killer will kill. But easy access to guns makes it much more likely that an unhinged person will take down a whole bunch of others. It's exceedingly unlikely that a guy with a glass bottle or a knife would kill 49 people before being stopped.
Look at Australia's experience with gun control. In the 18 years prior to 1996, they had 13 mass shootings (defined as 4 or more victims.) Since 1996 when they brought in draconian gun laws, they have had zero mass shootings. Zero.
Not only have mass shootings been drastically reduced, but the firearm homicide rate fell by 59 percent and the firearm suicide rate by 65 percent without a parallel increase in non-firearm homicides and suicides. That's because a lot of homicides and suicides are not planned, but occur in the heat of the moment, and are much likely to take place if there's easy access to deadly weapons. Here's the reference (PDF).
Where I do agree, though, is that gun control probably will not work in the US. You have way too many guns in circulation, and you're poisoned by 200+ years of the Second Amendment. Fixing that is well-nigh impossible, but just ignoring the problem is not going to help.
So, laws don't generally deter criminals?
Then why have drug laws? They don't work.
Why have laws against theft? Criminals aren't gonna obey them.
Why have laws against murder? It won't generally deter criminals.
Do you see how utterly fucking ridiculous those statements are? And yet the gun lobby parrots them in regards to gun control in all seriousness and with a straight face.
Sure, let's do everything except what will actually help, which is to restrict assault rifles.
They're like fucking Nero. I am so totally disgusted by the state of politics in the United States it makes me sick.
Nice try, but the date is wrong for un poisson d'avril.
This is so typical. We are unwilling or unable to make the hard societal changes, so let's look for a magic solution, a technological quick fix.
No, there is no technological solution. There's probably not even any solution at this point. The US is so flooded with guns and the NRA is so powerful that gun control is essentially impossible and would be useless to try to enforce.
Welcome to "unintended side effects" of your Second Amendment. Basically, your society is fucked.
I don't think there's any secret. Apple's evil, anti-environmental behavior has been well-known for years.
Passing a password through SHA256 does not increase the entropy one iota. A weak password is not strengthened by doing this.
I use randomly-generate passwords that are at least 20 characters long and generated from reading /dev/random . Any scheme other than using a cryptographically-secure random number generator will be weaker.
My company is not a startup, but back in 2000 when it was, I had a really simple three-word description of what we did:
We stop spam.
And I'm convinced that having a clear understanding of what we were doing and a clear way to communicate it was a factor in our success.
Not all motors use permanent magnets. And yes, I suppose you could say an AC induction motor doesn't use magnets; it has a stator coil and an iron-cage rotor that only magnetizes when power is applied. But rare-earth permanent magent motors let generate a lot of torque in a relatively small motor.
Manufacturing provides about 11% of Canadian GDP; mining and oil or gas extraction provides about 8% of the Canadian GDP. The only sector of Canada's economy that's bigger than manufacturing is real estate and rental and leasing at about 12.3%.
It's so easy to find this information that I wonder why people don't bother checking before posting.
I would say a pipeline would be more expensive to operate. You have to check it for integrity and make absolutely sure there are no leaks. An HVDC line could be inspected much more easily and while the economic consequences of a failure would be pretty bad, the environmental consequences would be negligible compared to a pipeline failure.
I don't know that a lack of elecricity capacity is the biggest bottleneck in EV deployment. Practical EVs use motors with rare-earth permanent magnets and until we have practical and inexpensive replacements for the rare-earth magnets, that's going to be a problem.
Well, no, it's certainly possible to transmit electricity very long distance without unacceptable losses. But it's not cheap. The state-of-the-art for long-distance transmission is high-voltage DC (HVDC) transmission that can transmit GW of power at hundreds of kV.
Most of the relatively-easily accessible sources of hydroelectricity in Canada have already been developed. And hydro is really inconvenient because the good sources of energy tend to be far away from population centres that want to consume the energy.
And while Quebec has plenty of hydroelectric resources, that's not true in other provinces. In Ontario, nuclear energy accounts for more than 46% of our electricity, and hydro about 28.4%.
I do agree that in the medium- to long-term, we have to get ourselves off the huge fossil-fuel habit. But not sure it will be so easy.
tech will never flourish in such backwater places like that, no matter what the press is paid to advertise
This. High-tech centres of excellence in North America (at least, non-military ones) are all pretty strongly correlated with areas that have relatively liberal politics.
So guys show pettiness by downvoting women's shows, and women don't give a crap about downvoting guy's shows. OMG, say it ain't so! Who would EVER have predicted that???
Why is that a "dirty trick"? If the gene sequence is novel, or used in a novel way, then how is that different than patenting anything else?
A gene sequence is essentially software, and I'm against software patents on principle.
Sure, but hybridized seeds are not patented, so they're not under exclusive control of anyone and therefore fetch more reasonable market prices. And furthermore, if GMO is just more-or-less more efficient hybridization, then people who claim that it's safe are weakening their arguments by saying it's dangerous for GMO crops to produce viable seeds.
I don't doubt that GM crops are safe. But what about the dirty tricks companies play, such as patenting a gene sequence? Or writing contracts that forbid farmers from harvesting seed, forcing them to buy new seed each time? Or deliberately modifying the genome so the plants are fine with respect to food, but don't produce viable seeds?
Are those things really in society's interest?
As an experiment, I tried reading a romance novel a few weeks ago. I had to abandon it after 30 pages. It was the worst, bar none, published writing I've ever read.
I have no doubt that your friends are successful if you measure that as "financially successful". But the romance genre, as a whole, is overwhelmingly filled with awful writing, cliched plots and ridiculous characters. Nevertheless, it must take skill to be able to churn these things out, and I do have some admiration for romance novel authors, akin to my admiration for marketers who understand their targets' psychology and know exactly what to sell them.