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Comment Re:it tells you one thing, at least (Score 4, Insightful) 1719

Firearms account for approximately 18,000 suicides annually in the US and approximately 10,000 homicides.

So, even if we lump in homicides with your suicides AND assume homicides are committed by legal gun owners (which most times they are not): 28,000 is 0.035% of 80 million gun owners in the US, which means it is NOT the "primary purpose of owning a gun". It in fact accounts for a MINISCULE use of firearms.

The primary purposes for owning a gun - BY FAR - NOT EVEN CLOSE - are self defense and sport (including competitive shooting, recreational shooting and hunting).

Also, I suspect that you are misinformed on what an "assault rifle" is which is not your fault since the media spreads so much hysteria and disinformation...

An assault rifle is a marketing term. These rifles function EXACTLY THE SAME as semiautomatic hunting rifles. The only differences are: they look more menacing, have accessory rails and a different grip. You can buy a wooden rifle - not considered an "assault rifle" - which fires the EXACT same caliber bullets, at EXACTLY the same rate with EXACTLY the same capacity.

Also, while you did not mention it here, let me also bring up "high capacity magazines" since a lot of "anti-gun wackos" (as I'll call them) bring these up for argument. The difference between shooting a 30 round magazine and three 10 round magazines is about 4 seconds. With just a small amount of practice, anyone can reload in under 2 seconds.

Comment Sweet 16 vs MMSE (Score 4, Interesting) 116

According to the article, an alternative test called Sweet 16 was produced and was subsequently killed by the MMSE copyright owners' legal action. It sounded like the Sweet 16 used completely new copy but similar logic. Can you copyright logic if all the words are completely different? I'd love to see a comparison of those two tests.

On a side note, I hope no one owns the copyright on the eye chart. I like getting my eyes checked every year or two.

Comment Netflix won't be killing discs anytime soon. (Score 1) 345

  • First, their streaming selection is pitiful at best
  • Second, ISP bandwidth caps
  • Third, bandwidth is still not even close to transmitting DTS-HD audio with high quality HD video at 40Mbps like some Blu-rays. There will always be people, such as myself, who want high quality and can tell the difference,

I'm actually dropping the streaming portion of my subscription and keeping the discs.

Idle

Submission + - Keys Can Be Copied From Pictures Taken 200ft Away (singularityhub.com) 1

kkleiner writes: "A group of computer scientists at UC San Diego have developed software, called Sneakey, that can copy keys using digital images taken from large distances, and from almost any angle. In one demonstration they duplicated a key using an image captured on a cell phone camera. In another demonstration, with the help of a telephoto lens they were able to duplicate keys sitting on a café table almost 200 feet away. Incredibly, all of the copies worked when tested out on the relevant locks."

Comment Re:Again? (Score 1) 204

There have been many unbiased studies done which have concluded that having a large differential in speeds between vehicles is far more dangerous and responsible for far more accidents than the actual speed itself. Also, studies have found that increasing the speed limit does not cause drivers to exceed the new limit and in fact sometimes actually reduced the average speed of drivers.

Unfortunately, legislators set rules and regulation based upon unfounded hysteria, gut feelings and revenue purposes instead of facts and figures.

If you are interested, there are many resources at motorists.org.

Android

Submission + - Android Spanks Iphone 4 in web browsing (bloomberg.com)

bongey writes: In a series of measuring real world web load speeds on the Android base Nexus S phone spanked the iPhone 4. The android phone and Iphone 4 median load times were 2.144s and 3.254s respectively. The sample size was 45,000 page loads, across 1000 web sites. It also follows rumors that Apple is intentionally slowing down web apps to make there native apps more favorable. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/app-store-html5-slowdown/

Comment What are they searching for? (Score 3, Insightful) 175

The article is not clear what search terms produced 22% malicious URLs. That seems like a high number to me. If you search for "photoshop crack" or "keygen" you're going to get WAY more malware than searching for "fuzzy bunnies".

While I agree that more spam and malware sites have gotten into Google listings, I don't think the problem is quite as dire as the article makes it seem for the typical Google user.

Comment Re:Depends on the Discs (Score 1) 202

I just ripped my music collection a few months ago and discovered approximately 50% of my CD-Rs over 7 years old were garbage. Lost a good chunk of my live music collection. Most of the ones that survived were the deep-blue colored CD-Rs. I lost about 100 discs in total and physically all were pristine (no scratches, smudges, etc).

I had always heard that they didn't last too long but I never expected less than 10 years. Funny that technology from decades ago (cassette) and a century ago (vinyl) still work, yet stuff made in 2003 is garbage.

Comment Re:Hmm (Score 1) 547

I agree. I've always said the same thing about hardware and software... no matter how fast the hardware gets, the software progresses too and always calls for a little more power to run it. So, even though my hardware may be 10x faster and 10x more powerful than few years ago, it still takes almost as long to launch and run today's application as it did to launch 3 releases previous on the old hardware.

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