4? As in one incident per 750,000 people? Over the course of two years?

How many people do you think died in those four major shootings vs. the number of people killed by faulty pressure release valves on hot water heaters? 30 deaths and 340 injuries in 2007 for the water heaters. Hell, 34 deaths and 3,000 injuries or so are caused by setting the temperature too hot on water heaters (that page also mentions six students and a teacher killed by an over-pressure explosion). Where's the big national campaign to fix water heaters?

Actually a shotgun is a better home defense weapon for most users than a rifle, but not the double-barrel shotgun Biden whinges about. A good, solid semi auto or pump action that holds several rounds can do wonders to an intruder or two without going through several houses like a .30-06 might.

At a certain range, a baseball bat is more deadly than a pistol. A knife is more deadly still. A pistol gives you range, though.

Scenario 1:
Child communicates with friends over an encrypted channel. He or she gets interrupted and lured away by a bad actor breaking that encryption. Then the bad actor encrypts his communications. That encryption then thwarts the government's attempts to find the child despite the government already suspecting he's abducting children.

Scenario 2:
Child communicates with friends in plaintext. Bad actor interjects himself and lures the child away. He then rapes the child, kills the child, and desecrates the child's body. Then his communications even though they are plaintext never get intercepted because he's never been considered a suspect. Bad actor moves on to another child and then another until he's investigated.

Think of the children, indeed.

Perhaps, but wouldn't standardizing breast sizes make life a lot less interesting? ;-)

Whiny law enforcement being forced to actually do their job.... News at a11....

No surprise the broke out the "think of the children" straw man right away though....

The answer, of course, is "money". People will go see this. Or if they don't, it's because they did a bad job of following the formulas. The summer blockbuster formula has worked out pretty well. People like watching stuff blow up, even if they could have predicted what would blow up and what it would look like before they paid $13 for a ticket.

Battleship took in $300,000,000. It cost $200,000,000 to make. That's "why". People recognized the name, and hoped to combine their love of stuff blowing up with their fond memories of a game they used to play. They get a little charge out of the connections. It's worth $13 and two hours of their time.

I could see this doing equally well. I can't say if it's the best use of the studio's quarter-billion-dollar investment, though it should be a reasonable one. It's more likely than some unknown script, which even if people really like it stands a very small chance of making more than $300 million without the extra name recognition.

I probably won't be seeing it. Maybe I will; I saw the Lego movie, and it was pretty good (though I paid no more than my Netflix monthly subscription fee for it). I'd rather see them spend their money on something with a bit more merit, but that's just me.

Those who fail to understand history are doomed to repeat it....even if they have to force it down our throats.

Holder doesn't fail to understand it - he and his ilk are back for Round 2. They will persist until the liberty is removed, however many rounds that takes. Then they will move on to the next liberty that still stands. If they can't win at the Federal level, they will get it done at the State level (e.g. California's back door requirements for cell phones).

That's how government works; I guess your point is well-supported by the history after all.

The shiny side of the foil needs to be on the outside of the hat. The problem here isn't government intervention, rather a lack of same. The problem is corporate sociopathy and lack of standards. The standards should have been set up before anybody started building equipment. Where government fell down was not mandating that. Not a surfeit of regulations but a lack of them.

And had there been a monopoly there would have been no compatibility problems, but would have caused worse problems.

...that it's still cheaper to fly jets like buses for the same kinds of routes a bullet train would cover.

Americans get all excited about this stuff without ever actually experiencing it firsthand. They never see the high prices or how it might be simpler just to rent your own car.

Bullet trains more of a glamour tech item like a Battleship or an Aircraft Carrier. They look good but they aren't nearly as practical as they seem.

If the US wants to act like it's in love with trains again, it would be far better to beef up CARGO capacity. However that's not sexy. No one gets exited about efficient cargo service.

Or the fact that it is a major pile of confusing fail, with moving goalposts and targets. Coupled with Medicare's Meaningful Use criteria (a semi random and, again, constantly changing set of requirements for an EHR) and you have the typical US Government Official Mess.

While Epic hasn't been particularly helpful - think of them as a Microsoft wannabee in terms of hoping to define the criteria and technology used for EHRs - it's really much more complex than simply a recalcitrant vendor. It has little to do with the underlying technolgy / language / data structure - it's just data, mostly text and some simple numerical info. The problem is organizing what data gets sent so the receivers can understand it.

This was supposed to have been solved decades ago with SNOMED, but alas, too many standards, too many cooks and too much potential for making lots of lots of money for some folks.

We're doomed.

It's pretty unusual to have the same product measured in two different units. It's also pretty unusual these days for the grocery store not to have a price-per-unit sticker. Finally, it is unusual not to have metric printed on the same label, right next to the standard units. Milk gallons have 3.78 L printed on them (or stamped into the plastic). If you end up here again, just remember that it's 16 oz to lbs or pints. 2 pints to a quart. 2 quarts to a half-gallon.

I'll admit to breaking out the calculator from time to time, but usually because the amounts are an odd amount (e.g. 333g or 11.75 oz). The price can also be any weird decimal, which can make the mental math difficult.

I was kind of hoping for some sort of creature deciding to try to crawl out onto dry land, finding no actual land, saying "screw it", and crawling back under the ice.

No, 1:16:9. Our entire solar system moved to high-def monoliths shortly after 2001.