Apparently it's actually insightful, which adds weight to my hypothesis that people are idiots.

That's 1% of w3schools.com viewers which isn't representative of the wider internet. It basically says that web developers don't use ie which is pretty obvious and also kind of useless (and misleading).

Reductio ad absurdum. Substitute a relatively normal well adjusted teenage girl for a mental patient being held against their will. Guns don't kill people: Angry people with guns kill people, Crazy people with guns kill people, Scared people with guns kill people, Ignorant people with guns kill people, etc, etc.

Insulting you isn't making an emotional argument. The argument was completely separate. You're trying to make a technical argument where 1 ~= 3 without any regard to what those numbers represent. Which is absolutely wrong. If the error is +/- 10 then fine 1 and 3 are the same. If the error is 0.001 (which is what we are actually talking about here) then they are not the same at all. Also, if we were talking about some subjective thing like "satisfaction with job" then 1 vs 3 may not be a big deal. When talking about thousands of deaths, a factor of 3 is significant. Please by all means point out where my argument is wrong.

Guns are a major cause of premature death. Cars, which also cause a lot of premature death, have extremely strict regulations that get stricter all the time. A lot of money is spent making them safer. Guns just continue to kill lots of people, because that is what they are for.

The purpose of a car is to get a person from point A to B. Death due to misuse is an unfortunate side affect. The purpose of a gun is to kill (normally humans). Not causing death is misuse. Big difference. The fact guns are sometimes used for other things isn't really relevant. A car can be a weapon too. That's not it's primary purpose. Thinking that guns and death have some coincidental relationship is absolute stupidity.

So... you are comparing 3000 dead people to 3000 grains of sand. Fair comparison. For an illogical gun toting moron. We're not talking about orders of magnitude of dead people. We're talking about 3 times as many dead people. Only a psychopath would argue that's not significant.

Wrong. http://www.youtube.com/fpsrussia Countries with strict gun laws don't allow random civilians to compile military arsenals. Perhaps all the gun murdering has something to do with the fact that both countries manufacture insane amounts of guns.

Do you think that a person with a gun is more likely to shoot someone than a person without a gun? Hint: a person without a gun can't actually shoot anyone!

No they aren't. 4.8 is approximately 3 times as many dead people. If you compare a random selection of yearly figures from small populations, you could say it's roughly the same. But if you're comparing annual sets of millions, and one is always 3 times the other, it's not the same number at all. Which means you're wrong.

actually in civilised countries it's made of plastic :)

That would certainly explain the USA!

You're assuming the rate of population growth exceeds the rate of gold growth (mining). That may or may not be a sound assumption. Also economic output is not linear with population growth.

I normally agree with most of your posts but this one is completely without substance. His suggestion seems reasonable to me. On what grounds do you disagree?

actually... yes. DNT - default and DNT - user choice is a valid distinction. Still the whole thing is stupid because it relies on third parties "doing the right thing" which is foolish. Just build and use browsers/plugins that actively disrupt the tracking process - then you don't need to trust anyone (well except the author of the browser/plugin). I think this approach is also superior to enacting laws - outlawing something that can be solved with good design is a sub-optimal solution.