Indeed, that's a valid example. But because so many people were involved, I doubt arming the populace would have reduced the killing in that case. I had been thinking more of "western" nations, however.

Whah? Are you trolling, or was that meant to make sense? (If it's a troll, fair enough, Whoosh.)
How could someone ever simultaneously both own and not own a gun?

So how many cases do you hear about where a guy kills a whole class of kids with a cigarette lighter, or even a knife?

In all circumstances? Seriously? I disagree.

I disagree vehemently. It is moral to attempt to end tyranny, provided that you know what you're doing, and aren't just gonna make things worse. (See e.g. US involvement in Afghanistan.) Surely shooting someone because you disagree with them is also tyranny?

Alas, the USA is one of the few countries where the trial by 12 can have you sentenced to being carried by 6. Kinda makes it seem like less of a binary choice.

Indeed they don't, but there's usually a certain minimum living standard required for you to feel happy & content. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

*Shrug* fair enough. I can agree enough with your last paragraph that I'm happy to let the rest of it slide.

In other words:
If X is defined as Y, then Z looks like it would be a good measure of X.

So you disagree with my definition of fairness. That's not circular argument on my part. You can either agree with the definition or not. If you don't agree with the definition, the measure won't be valid, but that doesn't make it circular. It's conditional.

But anyway, yeah have you a better definition of fairness and method to measure it?

Well if "fair" is distributing "stuff" equally among the masses, then the difference between top and bottom seems to me to be a good measure of overall "fairness."

And if you look at the difference between the highest standards (excluding the top 0.1%, which I guess its hard to measure meaningfully) and the lowest ... they've never been further apart. As such, by certain measures, that makes modern society considerably less fair than pretty much any that preceded it.

So you'd have us not prepare for the worst, because it's conceivable that we might invent a way around the problem? That sounds overly optimistic. You see, we're kind of in an all-our-eggs-in-one-basket situation. Not everyone's happy with the idea of gambling the fate of the world on your optimism.

You missed out the rather important per year part from that sentence.

Uhh, what??

It's 404ing, for now. http://live.leapmotion.com/developer-kit-application

Indeed, the interface looks nice, but can I do anything with it? I search for fish, it suggests venezuelan fish-eating owl. I search for fox, it only offers my flying foxes.

Unless I'm doing it all wrong, then you'd need to know the scientific name of every animal that can be found where you live, in order to search in the first place. You'd be much better off just going outside for a look.