Rape is a horrible, horrible crime. But for all of that, the victim, can live a full and normal life after the fact. A Murder victim, by definition, can not. There are however some good reasons for studying murder rates specifically. Many crimes are reported very differently from one jurisdiction to the next, making comparison extremely difficult, rape is actually very difficult that way because in many of the worst places for it the reporting would show almost no cases due to lack of reportjng, or in some cases lack of an actual crime in that jurisdiction's system of laws. murder is much less prone to this issue. The same problem shows up for "violent crime" some places consider the mere possession of a weapon during a crime to make it "violent" others require the use of the weapon, others require an actual injury, others will only classify one or two specific crimes in the category at all.
Using murder rate as a proxy for violence in general has it's flaws, but it is still quite enlightening to look at.

Most of the places where this is a problem are the less developed countries, ones where the data is already suspect for different reasons anyway, and where the numbers are often already high. The really enlightening bits are comparing the first world countries, all of whom have a very similar definition of murder (this is actually much better than generic"violent crime" stats where definitions do vary largely)
What really stands out is that most of the first world countries fall in a range of 1-2 murders per 100000 people per year, except the USA which is more than double that. Always amazing to see how different the USA is than other countries that should be so similar (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, even England) and how the public opinion in the USA is so against any efforts at improving the situation (better education. Health care for all, less inequality, gun control, all the things that have proven to work in the rest of the western world)

While I am a fan of micro USB in general, I don't see why"axial connectors don't work" it's only 4 pins. Not that hard to do on an axial connector. In fact the other common connector on phones (headset) has the same number of pins and doesn't require any orientation.

Speaking of power, those wall outlets supplying mains voltage also require orienting them correctly, as do ethernet cords, even fibre optic cords are designed to require proper orientation (though that one has always struck me as odd) people seem to manage all of these in their daily lives without issues, yet as soon as you put it on a phone it confounds them.

Or you know, you could look at what Tesla actually does...

It's a combination of the fact that Teslas require only a minute fraction of the service of a normal internal combustion engine car, and that Tesla already provides better service than any dealership in existence. They have service centres all over the place (who cares if it's in the same place as the store if it's no further away) and you don't even have to go to the service centre because they will either send a mechanic to your doorstep, or pick up the car from your home or office for you (and replace it with a loaner if service will take longer than you can wait)

So why would I want to force their stores (best located in high foot traffic areas like malls) to be co-located with their service centres (best located in low rent areas like industrial parks) when it doesn't do anything to help me as a consumer? The only thing that it would do is either increase costs (paid in the end by the consumer) or decrease convenience (again at the expense of the consumer)

This law doesn't look at what the most advantageous model is for the consumer, it looks at what the existing business model is of the dealerships and forces everyone in to that mould effectively prohibiting any improvement to it.

This is my thought too. I had the hood ornament torn off my car once, and the radio antenna another time. Do I think the idiots did it because they hated diesel cars for political reasons? No. I thought they were probably immature jerks who thought it was fun to destroy other people's property.

If they were willing to change their networks to accommodate things then the proposed solution wouldn't be needed in the first place.

They should actually be grateful it all comes from one source, it's an incredible opportunity for them to buy local caching from netflix to save on bandwidth. if the same volume came from 1000 sources they'd actually have to upgrade their outgoing links which could prove to be much more expensive.

Or they could act like every other abusive monopoly and try to double dip and get paid twice for the same service... which of course is the option they chose...

I have no problem with my ISP "overselling" as long as it doesn't impact the end users. They know that if they have 10,000 customers with 100mbps connections, that doesn't mean they need to be able to provide 1tbps of bandwidth, but just because they used to be able to get away with only having a total of 1gbps and they now need 10gbps to handle the same load is just a cost of doing business. (numbers made up on the spot, and probably not accurate, but the principle still applies) They should be thankful that they don't actually need to provide the 1tbps that would actually be required if people were filling the pipes they sold them.

I would say the ISP has three choices.
1) Admit they can't provide the bandwidth they're selling, and stop selling that level of bandwidth.
2) Realize they can't provide the bandwidth they're selling, and upgrade the network until they can handle the average spikes in said load.
3) Beg netflix to give them a local cache to save them on having to do either 1 or 2
What they should not be doing is getting paid twice for the same bandwidth.

Which is why you already pay more for a 100mbps connection than you do for a 10mbps connection than you do for a 1mbps connection. If all you do is read plaintext slashdot, you only need the 1mbps connection to do just fine, if you stream HD movies you'll need probably the 10mbps connection, if you want multiple 4KHD streams pay for the 100mbps connection.
Sure the ISPs pay their own upstream costs in terms of what bandwidth they need, but you pay them in a very similar way.

What SHOULD be happening is that the ISPs should be crawling to Netflix hat in hand begging for a local cache to save them on upstream bandwidth, not trying to extort extra money for something they've already been paid for!

And your average home connection, which is quite asymmetrical, would suddenly drop from being able to stream multiple HD streams at once, to not even being able to stream a single SD stream without issues.

Interesting, my 1983 300sd had the throttle jam open on me once too, wasn't grease though, the pedal broke off the metal lever and jammed against it. It's a good thing I was able to think fast and turn off the ignition and stand on the brake because it chose to do this at a very inopportune moment entering a small and very crowded parking lot.
Of course that was back in the days when you had the option to shut off the ignition without using an unintuitive interface to ask permission from the same computer that may be misbehaving while you try to do so...
The brake pedal should include a physical disconnect for the throttle, not implemented in software.

By default android takes an all or nothing approach, it tells you what permissions the app wants, and you decide if you want to install it or not. There are however 3rd party solutions for rooted phones which allow you to deny specific permissions and these work well (for example I told my weather app that it didn't need permission to vibrate the phone, I'm capable of deciding when I want to look at the weather). The problem here is two fold though:
1) you can allow or deny, but you can't fake, which means if an app decides not to run without reading your contact list to show you the weather, you can't show it a blank contact list to trick it in to running, I think you should.
2) and this one is more important. Accessing arbitrary files all over the internal file system (such as what VAC is doing in this case) is not considered a permission, it's allowed by default, and is not one of the things you can block, or even see if the app needs.

This is ridiculous. I could deny every permission in android, and a program like VAC could still read my DNS cache. Now I could stop it from contacting the internet, but obviously that's something I want an online game to be able to do. So even the most "advanced" OSs we have today in this area, STILL don't stop apps from accessing random files that they have no business accessing. This is a major security concern.

Sure it does, it just doesn't do it using the browser. it checks what DNS lookups you've made, and assumes that it's the same thing (which it pretty much is for this purpose)
The problem is, it shouldn't have access to read that file. Only your DNS resolver should. Security on modern OSs is a big problem, the fact that none of them take it seriously, and all of them allow every piece of software to do whatever it likes on your computer is what needs to change.

I think you misunderstand me, I'm actually not complaining about what VAC does, I'm complaining about what our modern OSs allow EVERY app to do. Not using this app doesn't fix the underlying security concern that every app on my computer has the same access and can do whatever it wants with the information.
This is what we need to fix. Our computers need to stop blindly trusting every app.