The argument of the paper is *NOT* that there is a genetic driver to culture. The argument is that genetics is a useful *proxy* for culture, and one on which there is much clearer data. Most culture is strongly influenced by your family, who also happen to be your genetic influences. If you can track genetics you can also track culture.

For example - immigrants from Sweden to the US are going to have similar genetics to people who remained in Sweden. But they are also going to bring their culture with them as well, which is going to continue to influence their lifestyles significantly.

It is very hard to get data on how many people in the US have similar cultural influences to Sweden, but it is much less hard to find the people who have a genetic link to it, and therefore have an increased probability of having similar cultural influence.

You don't have to make any claim at all about genetic influences over cultural ones for this to be a useful line of study.

Exactly - don't ban lasers, prosecute these attacks for what they are. Attempted murder, reckless endangerment, whatever. Essentially the same as someone firing a pistol at the plane. It's not likely to kill someone, but it's definitely endangering people for no good reason.

We don't have a rash of people taking pot shots at landing planes, do we? The issue is that the laser is not seen as dangerous, but as a toy, when it is really a tool that must be used carefully.

I believe you mean "like every successful organism we have encountered so far."

Those who do not believe in growth tend to be beaten out by those who do.

I'd definitely say the first one. I get a new call from a headhunter at least every week. My female coworkers get them practically daily. And none of us are anything that special - ~5 years of dev experience in java/C++/web stuff.

The thing is, most "qualified" programmers suck. When I was in college I would trust maybe 1/4 of the people in the class to work with me on a group project. Programming is hard, and good software engineering (which is a separate problem) is even harder.

Combine that with the fact that almost no one who is competent *wants* to write your boring as hell enterprise web application (they'd rather go work for some neat startup doing the latest and greatest in social networking, or work for a bank who can pay them a bigger salary), and hiring can get really annoying. Because you can't just hire *somebody* or you'll lose productivity babysitting them the entire time.

Any person who makes death threats can drive five minutes to the nearest gas station, fill up a 5-gallon tank, and already have a weapon capable of ten times the death and destruction of a handgun. Don't delude yourself thinking that guns are a special case of dangerous.

A person who makes death threats *while holding a gun* is a problem of great severity. A person who makes death threats while owning guns is no more a problem than someone making death threats while owning a car, a gas tank, or a chainsaw.

A 22 LR is a wimpy little cartridge, but it actually has a fairly high max pressure to it.

A 38 special or 44 special round has significantly lower maximum rated pressure, and pushes a bullet that is useful for more than pest control. Shotgun shells require even less strength in your chamber.

But I don't really see the point when anyone can build a working single-shot muzzle loader out of a length of pipe you can get at any hardware store.

The most mistaken part of this story is the implication that you can just buy this gun on the internet *anywhere* and have it shipped to you. All firearms purchases across state lines must be done through a license firearms dealer, who will complete a federal background check. So yes, you can buy guns on the internet - but they get shipped to your local gun store, who charges you a fee to do the background check. NOT to your front door, unless you, too, happen to be a license firearms dealer.

But now someone needs to start doing this for predictions.

Every time someone comes on and says X will help the economy, or our schools will collapse without Y, or that we'll all die to terrorists if we don't do Z... no one ever comes back in five years and calls them on it.

I want to know which politicians and pundits are making up horrible scenarios to help their own power, and which ones are making honest assessments of what is likely to happen.

I don't want to take economic advice from the guy who said that home prices could never go down. I don't want to hear about gun control from someone who said things would turn into the wild west if we passed concealed carry. I don't want to hear about lowering the cost of something from people whose budget estimates were off by a factor of 10.

I want a prediction-checker. It's still pretty easy to lie with facts if you don't ever have to check whether you picked the right facts or not.

Moreover, most criminals are young and reasonably fit. A lead pipe, baseball bat, machete, or butcher knife is a perfectly functional weapon for such a person. It's less useful for slight women or older people, or people who are alone.

You see exactly this in the patterns of crime in the UK.

The fact of the matter is that there are dozens of functional offensive weapons, that can be used when the perpetrator chooses their victim, their time, and their place. There are far fewer effective defensive weapons that can be used by a victim who chooses none of these things.

Pretty sure lightning strikes out-rank terrorists, as well.

If your children are capable of getting into one of these safes, they are capable of being taught not to mess with daddy's guns.

There are ~ 50 million households with guns in them. Accidental gun deaths by children (most of whom were not educated on guns by their parents, and found access to completely unlocked guns) are in the range of 200-300 a year. ie, not even appearing on the top list of accidental causes of child death.

In short, teach your children, and get a quick open safe that requires some strong intent to open. This is almost entirely a non-issue with basic precautions.

Just FYI - the first google search you will make for children killed by gunshots will come up with a much higher number, because the Brady campaign defines "children" as anyone up to 19. Including teenage gang members shot while running drugs. While their deaths are also a tragedy, they are not relevant to whether your 3-year-old is going to try to sneak into your gun safe to play.

The infamous "Gun Show Loophole" is complete nonsense.

Every commercial seller at a gun show is *already* required to do a background check on all guns sold.

The only thing that closing the "gunshow loophole" can do is make it illegal for me to sell my gun to my dad without taking the gun to a store and paying them to a run a background check first.

Which will be *completely* unenforceable without a universal firearms registry, which is both not going to happen and a horrible idea.

There is still a *lot* of empty space. Also, if we managed to convert even a fraction of the developing world to the level of output that US farms have, we have plenty of food. Mostly the issue is water and sanitation.

But even then... the real issue is energy. We can deal with getting water to where it is needed if energy is cheap enough.

It used to be that the start menu had a direct click to program files, which had a nice list of shortcuts to what you had installed.

Then installer crammed a million things into it, making it an unusably long list.

So they change it to be a scrolling window, that required multiple clicks to do exactly the same thing. Which makes it generally kind of a huge waste of time compared to windows button + start typing.

I used to use the start menu all the time, but they made it slower to use, so I don't any more.

That is the most important lesson of wikipedia - not that wikipedia is unreliable, but that all sources are unreliable to some degree. Research should never stop at a single source.

It's amazing how many teachers miss that.