No, but that doesn't negate the point either.

Defensive gun use != a life saved.

Just because you brandish a gun to "defend" yourself, does not mean that you would have died otherwise.

One need only look at statistics in other countries with lesser rates of gun ownership to see this.

Now, you can make the argument that the U.S. is tainted by the flood of guns and that since it is tainted, gun ownership is sensible (similar concept to MAD), but by and large, in the civilized world, you don't need a gun to be safe.

In fact, even in the U.S, if you've got the cash to spare on a gun, you're statistically better off spending the money on an automatic defibrillator.

This isn't to take away for other gun uses. I've fired M-16s at the range and enjoyed myself quite a bit. You like to hunt? Not my thing, but good for you. I just don't buy the defense claim. I've looked into it extensively and I think while possible, you can find a few incidents here and there where a gun clearly saved a life, I think it's wildly overblown.

Maybe your theory will prove true, but I don't think it has in the recent past.

Where are the high DPI Android tablets that came out to keep up with the iPad?

There are a half dozen or so Android and Symbian phones with resolutions higher than the latest iPhone. And many more with lower, but comparable resolutions.

But all I've seen so far on the tablet front is talk. Microsoft says Windows 8 devices will support crazy high resolutions, which is nice, I guess. Samsung shows off a prototype panel. That's about it.

I've met both. I think the biggest factor is motivation behind homeschooling, followed by ability of the folks who will teach them.

Homeschooling seems to attract two extremes of the intellectual spectrum.

Here are ten numbers. Average them.

10
30
60
70
80
80
90
90
100
100

How many of these numbers are below the average? What percent?

How to dress in *total*. According to the person who's post I was replying to, it can be. The thermometer alone only tells you the temperature. It won't tell you if it's raining or not.

Some may prefer a light jacket in the rain even if the temperature would not suggest a jacket would be desirable. In that way, it is helpful, but not the whole picture.

Okay, let's extend the analogy further.

So you've proven that a thermometer provides inadequate data to make the decision on how to plan one's dress for the day.

You've then implied that perhaps IQ tests as measuring tools are similarly faulty.

But surely your solution to this is not to abandon thermometers in favor of other measurements exclusively? Surely the correct thing to do is to use thermometers in concert with the other data they cannot provide. Much as is done in practice in meteorology today.

And if that *is* the correct approach, how does it discredit the use of IQ tests? Would they not continue to be appropriate for use (assuming the analogy is a valid one) in concert with other data that they cannot measure, just as thermometers are?

Does this not support Lev13than's ultimate point that the test may not provide all desirable useful data, but it none the less still provides useful data?

This is the first I'd heard of him. I had no idea he was a well known figure when I posted this.

Since then, I've read some of the comments here about his background and followed some links and poked around his site. He just strikes me as a whiny control freak. The world has to be his way, and if not, he'll cry about it.

That's not so bad in and of itself. I like activism. I support it. But he the fights he picks are... trivial to say the least.

That some kid somewhere might learn what (and where) a clitoris is is kind of the least of my worries. But to him, the world might end.

What should we do about Slashdot's Larry Sanger problem?

In 2012, someone submitted an article to Slashdot whining of an imagined problem on the website Wikipedia. Citing the 'controversial content', he whined about the lack of a filter even weaker than Google's SafeSearch.

Since then, after growing calls to "show us the porn" by some Slashdot users, some users have made it clear that they do not expect this to be able to filter Larry Sanger. Nevertheless, Slashdot continues to host an enormous amount of extremely gross whining and other complaining that most users don't want clogging up the front page. And this content is some of the website's most-accessed. Nevertheless, Sanger remain one of Slashdot's most self-righteous users. Slashdot founder CmdrTaco (blessings and peace be upon him) has recently reiterated his support for a Larry Sanger filter, but no work is being done on it, and the editors have not yet issued any statement about whether they intend to work on it.

They ALL have more than just 9 keys. You misunderstood what I was saying.

0-9 is ten keys. And yes, they all had + - Enter / * etc.

On top of that a friend of mine went through a quest for a "proper" external keypad a few years back.

He went through a half dozen external keypads, and discovered that they all simply emulate the 0-9 keys at the top of the keyboard (same charcode value, but different keycode value).

That's fine if all you want to do is numeric entry into a spreadsheet. But if the software you are using is expecting input from the keypad specifically, or is using the keypad as a kind of cursor control in menus, etc., it will break things.

I don't recall why this was a problem for my friend, but it may have been for use with some kind of poorly coded legacy software (he worked with animal rescues at the time, they're not known for being well funded).

I assume that the niche was small enough that even though there were a bunch of products on the market, they were probably all relying on a logic chip from a single manufacturer, though we never tore them down to verify this.

I am. And I weep for his / her inability to get into those nations. Truly a tragedy.