...is the same way we fight spam - filter it.

Seriously, just have a plugin in your browser that censors the words you don't want to see, and *BAM*, we're done. No need to control the troll, just don't look at them.

Lower oil prices mean that the value of subsidies for renewable energy are even more valuable - use a bunch of oil to build solar and wind farms that have a guaranteed price to producers, and profit.

Now, if we were talking about a free market, you'd be right - energy being more expensive would mean we consume *less* of it.

The justice system worked this time. A bunch of racist lynch mob members insisted that someone be wrongfully indicted based on the color of his skin.

A brave grand jury looked at the evidence, and didn't bow to the pressure of the mob. Justice served.

Now, more racist asshats have decided to try to canonize Saint "Thug" Brown, like they did with Saint "Thug" Martin - taking away valuable attention from actual *real* victims of police brutality, private property confiscation, and those wonderful "no-knock" raids.

The direct action here is embarrassing.

I did read the article, which was filled with all of the appropriate doom and apocalyptic visions, but the ultimate conclusion is really rather useless - hope and pray that magic comes along.

"Our society needs to fund scientists and engineers to propose and test new ideas, fail quickly, and share what they learn."

"We’re not trying to predict the winning technology here, but its cost needs to be vastly lower than that of fossil energy systems."

Simply *wanting* a technological innovation doesn't make it happen. Even massively funding all kinds of R&D doesn't necessarily make it happen - not all R&D is created equally, and unless you can discern between useful work, and not useful work, you're looking at huge amounts of waste.

...your workforce is 100% human.

Race is an illusion, an arbitrary social construct with no biological basis - using it as some sort of measure of proper employment ratios is just as useful as trying to get a proper mix of Firefly and Star Wars fans.

Damn. I take it back - I had no idea their "protocol" was so weak:

"that the nurse in question was wearing the recommended personal protective gear for handling an Ebola patient, including a gown, gloves, mask, and eye shield"

I thought these folks were treating this guy with full body suits, not just eyewear, gloves and a dust mask.

Whoever told them this protocol was sufficient should have to treat the next ebola patient with the same protocol.

I bet a dollar the infection didn't come from the patient she was treating, but some other contact in her life who got infected during the period of time "patient zero" was out and about the community.

It's more likely ebola is out in the community than health care professionals who understand the deadliness of the disease walked around with a torn suit or didn't pay attention to protocol.

The question now is, just how many more infected folk are out there in Texas, and how far and fast will it spread to other states while the government assures us there's no reason to panic?

And just why *can't* it be 2.5 million, or 1.25 million? You've got underreporting of crime just by victims, one. Then you add on top of that LEOs who *don't* actually file reports for reported crimes, or downplay them to fudge their statistics. I'll agree, we're speculating on "known unknowns" here, but it's not an unreasonable guess.

Here's some basics: http://www.fbi.gov/news/storie...

1.2 million violent crimes reported, 9 million property crimes reported. Add on top of that the rate of non-reporting by victims. Add on top of that the improper non-reporting by LEOs. 2.5 million passes the smell test at least on orders of magnitude, and you've got no facts to refute that.

But hey, forget that for a second, and think about it - would you hire more cops to reduce crime? Would you put another 10k officers out on the streets to make them safer?

Would you equip these cops with guns? Wouldn't that mean, more guns in the hands of good guys == less crime?

Hardly what I'd call diligent.

A far cry from "proven to make up data and conceals data that doesn't fit his ideology".

Maybe you find this kind of diligence more to your liking? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...

And this is known as lying.

Like using a trick to hide a decline? :) Or maybe identity theft and forgery? http://fakegate.org/

I'll gladly pillory John Lott for sock puppetry if we'll put Peter Gleick and Phil Jones in jail for their sins :)

Ted Goertzel considered multiple regression to be not of much use in proving causal arguments

And there we agree - data diving is notorious for being unable to differentiate correlation and causality (The China Study being a prime example - http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/... - the AGW scam is another).

That being said, John Lott has undoubtedly done a more thorough job than any other researcher in the field on trying to include control variables - for all the critiques that can be laid against him, there's simply nobody else out there doing a better job...and he's even *invited* his naysayers to critique his work, reaching out to them to try and add to the body of knowledge, looking for control variables they might think of that he might not.

Here's an excerpt, regarding Susan Glick:

"However, when the publicity broke on the story with an article in USA Today on August 2, she was among the many people who left telephone messages immediately asking for a copy of the paper. In her case, the media were calling, and she “need[ed] [my] paper to be able to criticize it.” Because of all the commotion that day, I was unable to get back to her right away. ABC National Television News was doing a story on my study for that day, and when at around 3:00 p.m. the ABC reporter doing the story, Barry Serafin, called saying that certain objections had been raised about my paper, he mentioned that one of those who had criticized it was Ms. Glick. After talking to Mr. Serafin, I gave Glick a call to ask her if she still wanted a copy of my paper. She said that she wanted it sent to her right away and wondered if I could fax it to her. I then noted that her request seemed strange because I had just gotten off the telephone with Mr. Serafin at ABC News, who had told me that she had been very critical of the study, saying that it was “flawed.” I asked how she could have said that there were flaws in the paper without even having looked at it yet. At that point Ms. Glick hung up the telephone."

Hardly what I'd call diligent :)

Want to talk about lawlessness in the US?

http://whitegirlbleedalot.com/

The problem is that LEOs regularly refuse to investigate or report crimes that happen, or misclassify them to reduce their severity - http://www.latimes.com/local/l...

It certainly could be as high as 2.5 million, but hey, I'll give you half of those as exaggerations, and we're still talking huge numbers.

More good guys with guns, less crime. A good guy can be an LEO, or a law abiding CCW holder.

Or is it your position that somehow LEOs are superior gun handlers? http://www.indystar.com/story/...

Read your cite, his critics made baseless accusations against him, and had to recant:

"Levitt settled the second defamation claim by admitting in a letter to John McCall that he himself was a peer reviewer in the 2001 issue of the Journal of Law and Economics, that Lott had not engaged in bribery (paying for extra costs of printing and postage for a conference issue is customary), and that he knew that "scholars with varying opinions" (including Levitt himself) had been invited to participate."

Go back to your Creationist land where your brand of "reading comprehension" means something...

Cite, or it didn't happen. John Lott may be annoying, and there's certainly room to question his statistics, but he's done a far better job than all the anti-gun "researchers" out there in actually doing the due diligence of getting as much data as possible and explaining both his analytical methods and any potential weaknesses they might have.

If you haven't actually read his book, you might want to give it a try, so you can actually argue intelligently against his work, rather than just parrot anti-gun talking points about him.

http://www.marshallbrain.com/c...

"Buckets seem so innocent -- how can a bucket kill a child? Unfortunately, about 20 children die in the U.S. every year because they drown in buckets."

If you're worried about one penis shot per year, and are willing to put fingerprint sensors on firearms to stop it, what kind of fingerprint sensor are you going to put on buckets, that *kill* 20 times more people?

Ready to regulate buckets, bitch?

Don't forget dirty hands, bloody hands, the moment when you're wounded and have to switch hands, or even whether or not it works after you've sent 100,000 rounds down range.

The corner case this addresses is the retention issue - what happens when a bad guy takes your gun out of your holster, or out of your hands, and uses it against you. The holster case is already well addressed by various duty holsters with level 3 retention, and the out of your hands case essentially means they're physically overpowering you, and they'll do just as much damage to you up close with the hunk of metal they've just taken from you.

They're addressing a corner case that has even less possibility of happening than 0.01%