Actually, there have been several mass shootings in Australia since 1996, e.g. Monash. On top of that there have been several bombings and arson attacks on children. There have not really been any studies I've seen indicating their gun control measures were effective in reducing violent crime or violent injury or death. There have been several studies showing that the proportion of crimes committed using firearms went down, which is a victory if your goal is to stop gun crimes, but that's a sort of idiotic goal, isn't it?

Okay, I'm curious. Are you trolling or is your understanding of interstate commerce drawn directly from (and only from) poorly researched libertarian pamphlets?

Can you please support this with some numbers? I've seen the UK numbers which are muddled at best with most attempts to do a before-and-after comparison showing fewer crimes with guns but higher overall violent crime rates including murder but excluding suicide. What countries are you thinking of and what studies?

That might be true but that is not sufficient to determine a causation. Science can give us the information. If we look at global trends it is fairly clear the most dangerous places due to violent crime are those places with the highest wealth disparity. Taking a look at those same global trends there is not really much correlation with rates of gun ownership. E.g. Sweden and the US have similar rates of gun ownership but are on opposite ends of the spectrum for violent crime.

And they will continue to do so because people don't understand math and people want easy solutions handed out by politicians. Politicians are happy to champion easy and ineffective answers because it gets them re-elected. Biden is heading up a new commission to look into a reaction to the recent mass shooting, but it will probably have no real impact. What might have an impact on stopping that particular crime is free mental health services, but that isn't palatable to anyone politically and is not interesting enough to drive votes.

From the Canonical Blog Post on the new feature:

So while I think the privacy concerns with sending data to Canonical when you'e doing searches is significant, so long as the user is aware and has the option, more power to them. I don't think I want to integrate my desktop and network search, but I certainly see a mass market that may want this. Depending upon how easy it is to create and configure these "scopes" to plug into this system it might be a great way to build customized searching without the need for Google to know everything about me.

I think people are too reactionary when it comes to both privacy and commercialism. From the previous posts you'd think this was a mandatory feature and Canonical was selling user data or something. They seem to be responsible players here creating cool tech that some of us may not want. I see nothing for me to get upset about.

Humans are not rational. Have you seen the social studies where you get to divide money between two people, one divides it and the other picks if they both get the money or both get screwed. People always turn down free money just to punish those they think have done wrong. And that is exactly your problem. You're focused on trying to punish those that game the system even at the expense of having an effective system overall.

There is no perfect, un-exploitable system. Deal with it. That doesn't mean we should burn the house down to try to punish someone for not doing the dishes.

I think you're missing the previous poster's point, that the chinese won't be able to buy goods in general because the former workers will be unemployed and have no income.

Health care is not like the other things you list. Want to turn an average person into a criminal, even a murderer? It is easy, just put them or one of their loved ones in the position of a life saving operation being denied because they don't have enough money. Wealth inequality is the best predictor of violent crime. Be Very careful in how you define basic health care and really think about the costs because basic doesn't mean cheap to provide unless you're begging for a violent revolution.

If you can't get a job with a basic education, how does this prevent societal disruption?

Well that and the fact that real income/cost ratios have been going down for decades and wealth inequality has been going up and globalization has made markets less reactive to workers and the progressiveness of taxes is the lowest in many decades.

People do sell similar products cheaper. Apple can still charge higher margins because of brand loyalty and because the market is heavily distorted by the near monopoly on desktop computer operating systems held by Microsoft. Apple had the capital and position to bypass most of that market distortion using extreme vertical integration, but only with very large upfront costs. This barrier to entry then reduces competitive pressure and lets them make larger than normal margins on the high end.

Market forces are not as simplistic as a supply demand diagram from Econ 101.

Pixelmator is a very nice 70% Photoshop replacement that is much, much faster and takes advantage of OS X specific features. That said, it also uses a lot of the graphic libraries that probably are going to be the hardest thing for Darling to get working.

There are already excellent tools for doing just that. You don't get much easier than Cordova or Unity. Darling seems like a fun project and could even be useful some day, but not really a practical solution to cross platform mobile development unless Google were to buy in in a really, really big way.

I understand your point but I don't think I agree. It is easy to try to villify Apple and MS for their choices and to ascribe all sorts of nefarious motives. I think it's bunk. I think they're primarily interested in making money and the App stores are there to make it convenient and easy for users to get apps without getting any malware. It serves the needs of 90% of users and makes things very easy for those users at the expense of power users and those who want a bit more choice.

You ascribe, for example, the ability to impose a toll on developers, but really Apple makes jack from developer licensing and their share of content distribution. They make their money on the hardware and the whole app store thing is just a means to make users happy so they can get there.

I 100% disagree. It is certainly possible to divorce the vetting from the distribution. We just haven't built a system to do it, but there is certainly not a technological barrier, nor is there a financial reason it wouldn't work.

Show them a way to make more money by not being the only option, that also doesn't tarnish their brands and we'll see.

Of course they haven't. For movies the DVD format is locked down with legal nonsense so there is no motivation and for e-books, no one scans them in. This means the DRM is not really costing Apple any sales, so Apple has no motivation to fight them. My point was that Apple will happily and effectively fight for better experiences for users when it will make more money for Apple. I believe that divorcing application distribution and security vetting is just such a situation, where Apple would make more money by selling more devices and at the same time we'd win by getting more freedom.

Funny. Seriously though application formats are not user facing so you can name them "BinaryBlumpers" for all I care. I just wish Linux as a desktop were not quite so castrated by Linux as a server design choices and mentality. Icculus's experiences mirrored my own when trying to discuss ways Linux could borrow from other OS's to make it a better desktop. It's all fine and dandy unless you want to add something fundamental and then a million angry server monkeys appear and throw poo. Unless the culture changes Linux will forever be relegated to server and appliance roles.

Agreed, but Steam is a distribution platform and a store. They add value by handling a lot of the purchasing and with value added integration. They are competing with the App stores for about half of their business model. It is likely not sustainable unless there is some sort of major technological shift.

Well, yes and no. Steam is not a fixed technology. One of the benefits is that across platforms it can link users together to play, chat, share scores, etc. Valve introducing not only their games to Windows Live but also their reputation and ability to audit games to determine which ones are malware or crashy or will otherwise cause users problems is a very real value, especially if MS were to walk away from that service and leave it up to third parties. Xbox, however is the most locked down and least likely of platforms. Phones and desktop OS's on the other hand are a more plausible situation.

So imagine a world where Apple announced they were going to allow absolutely any application to be distributed in the App store... but by default users would only see the ones Apple approved. Imagine, however, that users could add any company/organization they wanted to approve or disapprove of software and provide ratings for it. For example, Symantec could feed information to the Apple store and users that enabled it could (for a fee) have all applications vetted against Symantec's white/black list. Users could add the Catholic Church's whitelist to remove even apps Apple provided that did not align with the beliefs of those adherents. Users could also add Valve and see added to the store any games Valve had approved as options for purchase. Further Valve approved apps (submitted to the store by Valve) all included integration with Steam's network services to add value.

In the example above Steam is a first class citizen as much as any other distributor of software and while Apple might exclude some of their games by default for whatever reason, users could still get those games from the same place as all their other games. This is a survivable situation for Valve so long as they keep producing games and adding value with their network services (like integration with other platforms and authentication on other platforms) and Apple wins because more people can get the apps they want and Apple sells more hardware all without seriously degrading the security benefits of the current App store.

I'm not sure why you think that. Apple makes a crapton of money selling iPhones, iPods, and Macs. They make basically nothing selling software and content. They have a "razors" business model where they sell the content at near cost to motivate purchases of hardware. Their whole software and services division accounts for something like 3% of revenue. The management would have to be idiots to make any decision to try to get profit from those services at the expense of their current, super profitable, hardware business.