That sounds like a strawman, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you misunderstood my post. This has nothing to do with taking from those who have "too much". It has to do with balancing the inherent advantage conferred by inherited wealth to the extent that we have a stable economy instead of one where that advantage results in wealth constantly consolidating into fewer and fewer hands. People who don't contribute to society and just live off the wealth of their forebears are fine, but that should not be a stable aristocracy, rather the wealth should be spent and the next generation should have to actually, gasp, work and do something if they want to live in our society. Trust fund bums are a drain on society and I do not abide the useless and neither should society... especially if they want to have a stable economy and the lower level of violent crime that comes with it.

I'm not advocating for a welfare state, I'm advocating for a meritocracy, and the fairness of a meritocracy leads to less violent crime as many a sociologist can demonstrate.

I think we should measure a net win by how many violent crimes are committed and how many homicides and assaults, not how many people have guns. Sure fewer people have guns in the UK, but a lot more people are beaten in their homes or stabbed, relative to the size of the population. In Brazil, fewer people have guns but a lot more people are hit by shrapnel or fire from drive by bombings and fire-bombings. If half as many people are shot with guns, but twice as many are murdered, by your metric that is a win. I strongly believe you should change your metric.

You're both wrong.

While a mix of different social and cultural norms does correlate (very slightly but significantly) with increased violent crime, it is by no means a large correlation. Gun ownership rates and gun control laws, have little to no correlation with rates of violent crime. Look at some of the high gun ownership rates in northern europe and the very low violent crime rates. Look at the relatively high mix of different races and cultures in places like Anaheim that have very low violent crime compared to the rest of the region.

You know what correlates very, very well with violent crime rates around the world? Wealth disparity. Yup, determining the difference of the real incomes between the top and bottom within a region is an excellent way to predict the rate of violent crime (and often correlates in the US with race as well).

So no, you both lose. It's not "the mixin' of the races" or "the guns." It's about the basic inequalities of our society that drive those without to violent action to try to change their lot in life. Real measures to reduce violent crime, measures that demonstrably have worked elsewhere include: social safety nets like free healthcare; levels of tax progressiveness that balance or more than balance wealth condensation; free education; and programs to encourage new, small business for those without capital. Your pet fears need not apply.

Actually, there have been several mass shootings in Australia since 1996, e.g. Monash. On top of that there have been several bombings and arson attacks on children. There have not really been any studies I've seen indicating their gun control measures were effective in reducing violent crime or violent injury or death. There have been several studies showing that the proportion of crimes committed using firearms went down, which is a victory if your goal is to stop gun crimes, but that's a sort of idiotic goal, isn't it?

Okay, I'm curious. Are you trolling or is your understanding of interstate commerce drawn directly from (and only from) poorly researched libertarian pamphlets?

Can you please support this with some numbers? I've seen the UK numbers which are muddled at best with most attempts to do a before-and-after comparison showing fewer crimes with guns but higher overall violent crime rates including murder but excluding suicide. What countries are you thinking of and what studies?

That might be true but that is not sufficient to determine a causation. Science can give us the information. If we look at global trends it is fairly clear the most dangerous places due to violent crime are those places with the highest wealth disparity. Taking a look at those same global trends there is not really much correlation with rates of gun ownership. E.g. Sweden and the US have similar rates of gun ownership but are on opposite ends of the spectrum for violent crime.

And they will continue to do so because people don't understand math and people want easy solutions handed out by politicians. Politicians are happy to champion easy and ineffective answers because it gets them re-elected. Biden is heading up a new commission to look into a reaction to the recent mass shooting, but it will probably have no real impact. What might have an impact on stopping that particular crime is free mental health services, but that isn't palatable to anyone politically and is not interesting enough to drive votes.

From the Canonical Blog Post on the new feature:

So while I think the privacy concerns with sending data to Canonical when you'e doing searches is significant, so long as the user is aware and has the option, more power to them. I don't think I want to integrate my desktop and network search, but I certainly see a mass market that may want this. Depending upon how easy it is to create and configure these "scopes" to plug into this system it might be a great way to build customized searching without the need for Google to know everything about me.

I think people are too reactionary when it comes to both privacy and commercialism. From the previous posts you'd think this was a mandatory feature and Canonical was selling user data or something. They seem to be responsible players here creating cool tech that some of us may not want. I see nothing for me to get upset about.

Humans are not rational. Have you seen the social studies where you get to divide money between two people, one divides it and the other picks if they both get the money or both get screwed. People always turn down free money just to punish those they think have done wrong. And that is exactly your problem. You're focused on trying to punish those that game the system even at the expense of having an effective system overall.

There is no perfect, un-exploitable system. Deal with it. That doesn't mean we should burn the house down to try to punish someone for not doing the dishes.

I think you're missing the previous poster's point, that the chinese won't be able to buy goods in general because the former workers will be unemployed and have no income.

Health care is not like the other things you list. Want to turn an average person into a criminal, even a murderer? It is easy, just put them or one of their loved ones in the position of a life saving operation being denied because they don't have enough money. Wealth inequality is the best predictor of violent crime. Be Very careful in how you define basic health care and really think about the costs because basic doesn't mean cheap to provide unless you're begging for a violent revolution.

If you can't get a job with a basic education, how does this prevent societal disruption?

Well that and the fact that real income/cost ratios have been going down for decades and wealth inequality has been going up and globalization has made markets less reactive to workers and the progressiveness of taxes is the lowest in many decades.

People do sell similar products cheaper. Apple can still charge higher margins because of brand loyalty and because the market is heavily distorted by the near monopoly on desktop computer operating systems held by Microsoft. Apple had the capital and position to bypass most of that market distortion using extreme vertical integration, but only with very large upfront costs. This barrier to entry then reduces competitive pressure and lets them make larger than normal margins on the high end.

Market forces are not as simplistic as a supply demand diagram from Econ 101.

Pixelmator is a very nice 70% Photoshop replacement that is much, much faster and takes advantage of OS X specific features. That said, it also uses a lot of the graphic libraries that probably are going to be the hardest thing for Darling to get working.

There are already excellent tools for doing just that. You don't get much easier than Cordova or Unity. Darling seems like a fun project and could even be useful some day, but not really a practical solution to cross platform mobile development unless Google were to buy in in a really, really big way.

I understand your point but I don't think I agree. It is easy to try to villify Apple and MS for their choices and to ascribe all sorts of nefarious motives. I think it's bunk. I think they're primarily interested in making money and the App stores are there to make it convenient and easy for users to get apps without getting any malware. It serves the needs of 90% of users and makes things very easy for those users at the expense of power users and those who want a bit more choice.

You ascribe, for example, the ability to impose a toll on developers, but really Apple makes jack from developer licensing and their share of content distribution. They make their money on the hardware and the whole app store thing is just a means to make users happy so they can get there.

I 100% disagree. It is certainly possible to divorce the vetting from the distribution. We just haven't built a system to do it, but there is certainly not a technological barrier, nor is there a financial reason it wouldn't work.

Show them a way to make more money by not being the only option, that also doesn't tarnish their brands and we'll see.

Of course they haven't. For movies the DVD format is locked down with legal nonsense so there is no motivation and for e-books, no one scans them in. This means the DRM is not really costing Apple any sales, so Apple has no motivation to fight them. My point was that Apple will happily and effectively fight for better experiences for users when it will make more money for Apple. I believe that divorcing application distribution and security vetting is just such a situation, where Apple would make more money by selling more devices and at the same time we'd win by getting more freedom.