The difference is that the ethnic diversity in Europe looks different than it does in the US: in Europe, it's because of immigration. Folks generally don't cross an ocean to then shit on the society they've come to join. Sure enough there's really not that much violence in most immigrant communities in the US. I used to live in the slums of Baltimore, and finally moved to a new apartment in DC. I got to the laundry room and saw a lady in there speaking Spanish to her daughter, and thought "Alrighty, if the immigrants have come here, this is a decent place." I was right.

But the highest crime rate in the US is in the black enclaves in the inner cities. That population was never an immigrant community; it's the descendants of former slaves. We (the American whites) did horrible things to them, and then after emancipation continued to do horrible things to them in part of the country while not really doing enough to facilitate the integration of the liberated slaves and their descendants into society. By the time we passed the Civil Rights Act there were endemic social problems in the US black community, to the point that there's a long and very respectful Department of Labor study into them (the Moynihan Report).

So now in the US those black enclaves have a sky-high murder rate, and the rest of the country has a pretty low one (broadly similar to Europe's). Why? A whole constellation of historical and cultural reasons, many of them traceable back to horrid racism years ago. Should we still blame whitey for the problems? Is it slavery's fault that kids in the ghetto kill each other for silly reasons and don't want to learn to read and write? I dunno.

But saying simply "Europe has diversity too" misses the point: the non-white folks in Europe are there because they came there and wanted to be European, for the most part. (This is pretty similar to Asian-Americans, a group with a low crime rate.) That has vastly different cultural effects than hauling people's ancestors over in chains and wrecking their society.

The US is not a first-world country, nor is it a third-world country. It's a first-world country with pockets of third-world society in it: the inner cities of Detroit, New Orleans, Baltimore, Chicago, and the like. Grandparent's odds of being killed, assuming he lives outside of these places, are rather similar to what they would be in Europe. (I used to live in inner-city Baltimore -- not the worst part of the city, but a pretty bad one, the sort where you have to shoo the junkies out of your car so you can use it sometime. Actually, it was my roommate who had to shoo the junkie out of her car. I had to shoo a crackhead out of mine in Washington DC, though.)

Americans, for better or for worse, have come to accept crime in those places. Y'know the horrible Newtown school shooting? That many people get killed every few weeks in Baltimore and it doesn't make the news. The US is a very pluralistic country; we have lots of mini-cultures and mini-societies embedded in it with very different demographics and crime statistics.

So grandparent is probably perfectly fine with his odds, since they're similar to yours.

Mod +1, inconvenient but true.

In the US, there is very little correlation between gun ownership and murder rate. Many states like New Hampshire and Utah have very liberal (=loose) gun laws and not much murder. Others like Mississippi have loose gun laws and lots of murder; still others like Washington DC have very restrictive gun laws and lots of murder.

True story:

I needed to buy a laptop once, and wandered into a Best Buy and started poking at one of the machines. I hadn't seen Win8 before; all of my machines run some linux or other, or Win7 with the classic UI.

I'm curious about the system specs of one machine, so I want to go to Control Panel->System and see. I call over one of the Best Buy reps:

"How do I get out of whatever tonka-toys demo software this is and back to the OS? I want to check the specs."

The guy answers: "Uh, that *is* the OS. Don't like Win8 either, eh?"

Same with Windows.

With Windows, it takes a ton of time for people to get stuff done.
With Linux, it takes a little time from one person who really knows what she's doing to get stuff done.

It's your choice between "drag and drop ALL the things" or "one-liner regex magic" to organize files, for instance.

But Linux these days lets you do things the GUI way, too, so it's not really a problem. I gave an old laptop to a friend of mine who is completely tech-naive, and threw Lubuntu on it with some shortcuts on the desktop, and showed her how to use the package manager. She has no complaints and is able to do her stuff.

The Titan was a clever thing from Nvidia: a product marketed to gamers that the budget supercomputing crowd is buying. This means that they don't have to provide professional-level support for the things, but can sell them at semi-professional-level prices. They give top-end performance and are (as far as we can tell -- we have a few dozen of the things) as stable as anything else.

An Nvidia K20X costs many thousands of dollars and is actually slower than a $1K Titan (by about 10%, according to lattice QCD benchmarks). My research group recently bought 32 Titans (for $32K) and used them to upgrade an older cluster; we get better performance per GPU than the top-end supercomputer across campus that uses K20's. Both computers have two GPU's per node, but the top-end supercomputer cost somewhere around $20K/node.

I should qualify: by "low-ish end" I mean "low end compared to what we put in supercomputers". I don't mean Intel integrated graphics here; I mean things like an Nvidia 760 GTX or something -- cards that budget conscious gamers use.

Even a low-ish end GPU is many times faster than the fastest CPU.

CPU's are optimized to make single threads go fast; GPU's are essentially massively parallel processors (hundreds of "cores") optimized to make a collection of threads doing similar things go very, very fast.

The conventional wisdom in my field of computational physics is that one GPU = 30 or 40 CPU cores.

Cabbies no doubt occasionally hurt people too -- the question is whether or not you're substantially more likely to get hurt taking an Uber than driving yourself. I imagine Uber is safer -- any Uber driver likely knows the roads and how to drive on them in whatever urban hell you're in better than you do.

They probably let Dick Cheney drive, so you don't even need a heartbeat. (He's also prone to shoot people in the face, too.)

The real question is: does anything go badly wrong if things like Uber and Lyft are *not* regulated?

Turns out: not really. There isn't a plague of Uber drivers hauling passengers off to the boonies and robbing them. In my experience they're a lot friendlier and saner than the local cabbies.

... handles of League of Legends players in the LCS (highest-profile US and Europe tournaments):

(Spaces added to evade filter)

Crumbzz
Goldenglue
Imaqtpie (best name ever)
Kiwikid
Cruzer the bruzer
Dyrus
TheOddOne
Reginald
Bjergsen
Wild Turtle
Xpecial
Balls
Meteos
Hai
Sneaky
LemonNation
Nien tonsoh
Dexter
Link

Doublelift

Aphromoo

They don't seem too overbearing to me...

Are these the sort of moron roundabouts that have traffic lights too, combining the worst features of both, or are they normal ones with no red lights?

We've got the red-light moron-roundabouts in DC, and they are a pain in the ass. (They also have lanes that merge and split unpredictably, so people get confused about what lane goes where. And, since people are jockeying for position in traffic, they tend to not see bikes...)

As someone who recently switched from Olympus to Nikon: every damn thing goes backwards. The focus rings go backwards, the zoom ring goes backwards, and the bayonets go backwards.

The optics are good and the images are nice, of course. But I wonder who decided stuff should go backwards at Nikon just for the sake of being different.