Since when does "disarm everybody" work that well on crime?

Austalia had a great "gun-ban" and their homicide rate DID go down (it wend down MORE here is the USA during the same period, but why bother with facts). Let's look at one of the consequences:

http://www.aic.gov.au/dataTool...

Choose Homicide, 1995 and Homicide, 2012. The number of gun homicides, by percentage, looks almost EXACTLY the same. Firearm usage in murder dropped from 18.38% to17.5% Wow. WHAT A SLAM DUNK! There might be a LOT of reasons for the decrease in homicide rate, but apparently less than 1% can be attributed to banning guns. Wow, that makes a difference, huh?

I know, Australia is also cracking down on knife crime too, and cops can hassle a person for carrying a Leatherman -- nice freedom over there guys.

With gar marriage, while some may disagree with it, at least there are no victims. With abortions, there ARE victims.

With guns, each year, only one out of every 30,000 guns claims a victim ( about 8,000 gun homicides per year, 270,000,000 guns in the USA).

Hmmm.... where on the planet exactly does increasing the numbers of people carrying weapons make for a safer society?

Here is a challenge for you: Go to this page (Gun violence in the United States by state):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

Copy and paste the entire table into your spreadsheet of choice. Next, delete all columns except for the state name, gun ownership, and homicides per 100,000. Make an "X-Y" scatter plot. Looks pretty random, right?

Next, make a linear trend line for the data. CONGRATULATIONS! The trend is more guns -=> less murder. Washington DC really skews the data. Remove that row. Wow, the trend still exists! Less pronounced, but it still exists.

You have just PROVEN that having a higher gun ownership rate is correlated to less murder, using raw data from an unbiased source.

Wow. DC already HAS, by far, the highest murder rate of ANY state (yes, DC is not a state, whatever). I don't see how this could possibly make things any worse.

Simple. It is called a "wife." The "wife" program is not just an entertainment application, but rather an OS upgrade that limits what I can do. ;-)

My wife loves the convenience of instant coffee. I wanted to stick with a regular drip maker, but she did not like the mess involved in cleaning it up nor how long it took to make a pot. I don't like the expense and the waste of K-Cups, but the wife always wins in these sort of disagreements.

I must admit that the new Keurig makers are nicer than the old ones as they seem to have changed the pumping mechanism. That was always a weak spot with the old ones, especially if you had non-optimal water. Well water could kill an old K-cup machine in just a hundred cups or so.

We moved so no more well water, but I hope that this maker lasts a lot longer. We were also bitten by the DRM. We have some old "genuine K-Cup" pods laying around without the new ink, and they don't work -- at least until I get the time to dig up a very sharp craft knife to do the plastic surgery.

No. No chance of security problems other than possibly having malware pre-loaded in a file on the drive. If you have auto-play turned off and format the card, it should be just fine.

Now, it is still likely that it is a fake. It might be very small, very slow, or die a very early death, but that would only endanger your data on there and not your computer itself.

You may be asking "Why is this the case?" The reason is that the "U" in "USB" stands for "Universal" A USB device could easily present itself as a hub with an Ethernet adapter, keyboard, mouse, and storage all rolled into one. Hell, it could even throw in a virtual MIDI keyboard, scanner, printer, and joystick if it wanted to. From what I understand, this is the crux of the security problems with USB.

An SD card, on the other hand, is strictly for storage. It uses an interface similar to SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface), and is, in fact, really SPI on some of the slower modes. There is no way for a SD card to pretend to be anything else besides an SD card. People have actually wedged WiFi interfaces into an SD form-factor, but you need drivers for those, which means that you need to either install the driver yourself, or the bad guys have to get the driver into Windows Update -- not likely in either case.

Curtailing access to them means that some people cannot get them. That may be a problem...

People talk about keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill. Great in theory, but is MUCH more problematic in practice. Mental illness is not binary -- it comes in various degrees and kinds.

Should a person who hears voices telling him to kill people be denied a gun? Probably.
Should a person who compulsively washes his hands be denied a gun? Probably not.

If a person is on anti-depressants be denied a gun? What if they stopped taking them (this could be good or bad)? What if they stopped taking them last week against their doctor's orders? What if they stopped taking them 20 years ago?

Suppose a person is dangerous enough to require having their rights to arms removed... Who makes that determination? Does it just take one psychologist? Should it take a board of 3 or 7 doctors? Should a judge be involved?

If the person gets better, how are their rights restored? Once again, who makes this determination? What are the criteria?

And suppose a person already HAS guns. Maybe they are a hunter, and love hunting. Because they are afraid of loosing their favorite recreation, they AVOID seeking mental help. Is that a great idea?

Suppose a woman has some mental health issues and is denied a gun. However, her ex has a criminal record for violent offenses and has threatened death against the woman. Should the then be allowed to own a gun to protect herself? If so, who makes this decision? How long would it take for this issue to go through the courts? Would she even live that long?

Seriously. just focusing on the guns is ignorant. Just saying "don't give them to lunatics" is easy to say, but much harder to do in practice. When there IS a school shooting, what is the first thing to happen? People show up to help, with guns.

Amen. A much better way to reduce school shootings is to identify WHY kids want to shoot people. Maybe invest money in training for teachers to identify bullying? Maybe hire another counselor to talk to troubled children?

Given the rare nature of school shootings, you average kid has an approximately equal chance to be struck by lightning.

School shootings are tragic, but they are also rare. If you want to save a child's life, there are MANY better places where the money could be spent.

You say that like stabbings and shootings are the same.
Guns weren't invented because they made killing harder.

So, if guns are banned, then the next step is to ban all knives, because school stabbings also kill people. OK. Knives banned, but people are still beaten to death. Time to ban baseball bats and golf clubs.

Seriously, for every gun used in a murder, there are over THIRTY THOUSAND that are NOT used in a homicide. Also, guns are used to PREVENT crime nearly a million times a year (about 800,000 by the middle-of-the-road estimates).

Grow up. Guns are not evil -- they are tools. If guns are inherently evil, then why do we give them to police and soldiers?

then we just reschedule the exams for another day.

And another evening (or two) to study.

Tell that to Obamacare.
MDs and institutions now get less money when they take care of sicker patients whose socioeconomic status causes them to be less compliant and have more adverse outcomes. Congratulations, now no one wants those patients doubly. Oh, and they still can't pay for health insurance.

That's just patently wrong. Having antibodies to Ebola doesn't mean you had the disease, it means you were exposed to the virus. There was a study in 2000 Lancet which looked at seroconversion in close contacts of individuals ill with ebola, which showed that 11/24 people seroconverted in the absence of symptoms. However, the scientists were unable to isolate virus from these patients. This suggests that there are people who have either a defect in the ability of Ebola to infect them, or their innate immune response is able to deal with Ebola. There is no evidence from the last 30 years that there any asymptomatic individual acts as a carrier.

That's not insightful.

If you cannot isolate infectious virus or amplify its genetic material from someone's bodily fluids, they are not infectious.

Making assertions based on panic is not reasonable. Maybe if the nurse wasn't treated like a criminal leper on coming home, she wouldn't be lashing out and would stay home.