>I don't think capital punishment is appropriate for property crimes.

See now, you're exactly the kind of person who should be armed. I agree.

>Unfortunately the track record of citizens stopping crime with guns is poor.

It's actually quite excellent, but the path to that determination is extremely complicated. I do not fault someone who starts with your beliefs for coming to opposite conclusion based on the available evidence.

The problem isn't you, and I don't think it's a flaw with my grasp of stats. either. It is very hard for anyone to measure the number of problems prevented by any factor unless they turn that factor on and off and measure the results in both states, in the same place. Fire is a good example. Fire extinguishers prevent almost zero fires every year. Since they are only generally applied to existing fires, the fires are not prevented. A judgement call is made by the humans that the fire extinguisher made a postitive difference in the situation, and in nearly all the cases where a personal fire extinguisher put out the flame, the fire goes unreported. This plays HELL with any fire statistics gathering. Now imagine if fire extinguishers could occasionally be abused to start fires. Given our poor inputs on how many fires that extinguishers "keep from getting worse" how could we measure that scientifically against how many they start to see if they are a net benefit?

Given the above I would state: It is hard to solve the macro scale math that would determine the appropriate level of firearms distribution for maximum positive effect.

You can solve this problem on the micro scale though. You can take a couple local policemen to lunch (btw: steaks work better than donuts) ask them about the local crime, and then go to a defensive-weapons trainer and ask him about the tools that are effective against those classes of crime. It might be there aren't any and guns are just useless where you live (e.g. Maui); might be that you're a fool to step outside unarmed (Seven Mile Rd., 3:00 a.m. Detroit).

I've helped a non-statistically valid sample of people in the triple digits with this problem. The overwhelmingly popular solution: Pepper spray. Not any; the good shit, found here:
http://www.kimberamerica.com/p...

Dominating reason: Nice people hesitate to shoot bad people. It's just not something they learn to do easily. (Weird, eh?) But considerably less hesitation comes with a non-permanent solution. And less hesitation means substantially more effectiveness.

Be safe.

And that's the problem, your belief system. You asked the right question: Why own one? So you may not be married to that system. But then you discount the best reason and the most frequently occuring application.

If you were asking your question honestly, then you probably have no attraction to violence, and are enormously likely to be a good person. Therefore, you can probably say with certainty that you'd never shoot school children with your gun. But you'd probably be willing to shoot someone trying to shoot school children with a gun.

It's you I want to arm. Seriously. It's people like you, with no attraction to violence that should lug around: a paramedic kit, a fire extinguisher, and a firearm for just those emergencies where seconds make the difference. In any other case, you would leave the problem to the ambulance crew, the fire crew or the police, but countless lives are saved every year by people who had the skills and tools to step into one of these varieties of tragedy and stop innocent people from being hurt. You can too.

If people being paid for their skills are assumed to be the only ones that have them, there would be no Linux.

To defend the civil liberties of my fellow humans at any personal cost.

Why don't you own a gun?

...what happens when they can detect which genes make you more likely to be a Republican.

From time I spent playing with kids and miniature plastic dinosaurs, I imagine the popularity of your chickenosaurus project would be enormous. If you succeed, do you have a plan to fund future genetic research by marketing the animals as pets?

Kepler figured out he had it all wrong after a career spent trying to prove bad theories (Platonic model of the universe? Really?) ... and arguably launched the age of the scientific enlightenment.

I'm anxious read Mr. Lynas' coming works.

between "person who blogged about Olmert's overly aggressive war against Lebannon" and "Subversive Hezbollah sympathizer," that line needs to be in clear public view. It is a symbol of a country's bravery in times of fear. Ex-parte, non-disclosed proceedings will make it impossible for people to know the "why" and the balance the court has placed on fighting crime vs. sacrificing free speech. Without that visibility, there is zero chance that the line will be held in place, uninfluenced by politics.

Of all the people that I assumed would be on guard for the State taking powers that could easily be abused to silence the minority, I thought it would be them.

Thank you MozeeToby. I thought the difference in these solutions was more confined to the delivery mechanism, but they appear to be more distinct. Yes, it's the "selective tissue killer virus" version that seems far more problem-ready to me too.

If the only place the T-cells get modified is in a test tube, and the only modified T-cells the patient gets are from the doctor, and the patients are not the test-tube in which this combining takes place.... Then I find it much less forboding.

A fair point. There is a very real price to be paid, in the lives of innocent kids, by not boldly exploring this terrain.

My primary worry is that people are so desperate for this cure, so desperate to focus on something hopeful, that it will become a primary technique before it's long term consequences are well understood. Thalidomide is a great drug for a very narrow range of problems. When applied to morning sickness an estimated 10,000 children in 46 countries got to live with deformities.

My hope is that the companies who stand to profit from this test very thoroughly on a large batch of patients for many years. It's not like it won't pay for itself, most of us will end up fighting some kinds of cancers in our final years. I'd like to know if I'm trading ear-cancer for nose-rot. I prefer to wear a hat to a hockey mask.

Really; it sounds wonderful, but if Murphy and Pandora had a child, his/her favorite toy would be using lethal viruses to help us combat lethal cancers.

Using nuclear weapons to plug oil gushers, using attack polar bears to guard your bunny farm, using a scalpel to pick your nose... these ideas will go right some of the time too.

A link with more detail:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9508895/A-virus-that-kills-cancer-the-cure-thats-waiting-in-the-coldc.html

I guess you may be looking for "fully" open in the mathematical sense, which is generally unachievable.

You can go over to OpenCores right now and download the spiffy OR1200 OpenRisc design and run it on the OpenRISC development board, but that board uses Altera FPGAs. Which themselves aren't open. Opencores.org had a failed kickstarter that they ran themselves (probably should have used Kickstarter), which raised about half the money needed to make a comminity sponsored chip of it.

http://opencores.org/or1k/OR1200_OpenRISC_Processor

Since that was not successful, you're stuck buying someone's processor, for which they'll have some ownership. Once you accept that and realize there are enormous numbers of processors out there (not really a lock in), then the question of open is about your ability to redesign the board and exert complete control of all the peripheral chips.

The A13 will let you do that. At release time the RPi would not, due to some documentation restrictions and video binaries, but they are making progress in this vein.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/all-code-on-raspberry-pis-arm-chip-now-open-source/

So if you want fully open, (and I certainly do), we need to convince the OpenCores people to run a kickstarter for the remaining funds needed, and contribute. Until then the A13 is as close as we get.