Illusionary because if you actually study the effect of gun ownership on personal safety (remember, your personal anecdotes do not data make) it does not make you safer:

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/30/opinion/frum-guns-safer/index.html
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/12/17/guns-dont-make-you-safer

Also from spending the last few days on various US centric forums, it has become entirely clear to me that Americans are not actually interested in having a fact based discussion on this. The same places on the internet that will happily eviscerate the American right for its anti-scientific, fact ignoring stance on Global warming downvote/downmod comments that do little more than point out the facts on gun ownership.

No. There was one in Germany which was perpetrated by an illegally acquired gun. There was one in China recently with a knife. 22 injured, no one died.

The US has about 3.2 homicides by firearm per year and per 100.000 people, out of 4.8 homicides total.
Germany has about 0.2 homicides by firearm per year and per 100.000 people, out of 0.8 homicides total.

So the US has "only" about 2.7 times as many non-gun homicides as Germany, while it has about 16 times as many gun homicides.

If you want to argue that the freedom to have guns as a hobby, or for the illusionary purpose of self defence, is worth this many deads, feel free to argue as such. But don't hide from the facts.

Guns make killing a hell of a lot easier. And if you make it easier to get guns, you end up with more killing.

While we're at it, I also find it abhorrent that I'm not allowed to own a tank. I'm a law abiding citizen! And that I'm not allowed to cross red traffic lights! Crossing red traffic lights doesn't kill people, irresponsible drivers do! And don't get me started on the fact that the government makes me obtain a license and mandates me to buy insurance from a private company in order to drive around! Fucking socialist commie liberals.

Well, these massacres are truly different from everyday gun control and require a different response. The response they require is basically Ban assault weapons. This will not prevent crazy people from snapping, but it will turn massacres such as the one we're dealing with into something more akin to this: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/12/22-kids-slashed-in-china-elementary-school-knife-attack/

Terrible, but a world apart from the carnage these weapons cause.

If you want to do something about gun violence in general though, then go after hand guns, as you point out. New York City is now 136th on the list of 100.000+ people cities in terms of violent crime in the US. Gun control, combined with better policing, and intelligent social policies (legalisation of abortion), worked.

Form wikipedia: "While crime rates have stopped decreasing for a decade in the rest of the United States, in New York the murder rate for 2009 is at an all time low of 466, more than a 10% decline from the previous year, and the lowest count during the period that crime statistics have been recorded."

Plus support. Plus driver development (which flows upstream though, so you benefit from it whether you paid for it or not).

This is actually easily possible because, if you read the Ars article, Dell is actually supplying all its modifications and additions for free (as in beer), in a PPA.

Still 50$ isn't too much either on a 1500$ machine. And you get one year of support, which you wouldn't get if you put Ubuntu on the Windows version yourself.

Are there cases where running stuff through the government is inefficient? No doubt. Let's look at one of your examples though, ISPs. Do you know what is the grand unifying theme of all the countries with better internet access? The government got much MORE involved, not less.

Same with public transport and infrastructure in general. It's horribly inefficient to let this stuff be driven by the free market (see the UK rail system). Government is inefficient if it is structurally underfunded, or if ideologues prevent it from operating properly due to the blanket believe that the free market is always superior (rather than making efficient use of markets, for example in carbon trading schemes).

Let's look at one more example where every modern nation has either a heavily regulated or completely government run scheme while the US relies on a vast private market:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Life_expectancy_vs_healthcare_spending.jpg

How's that working out for you?

Is it really necessary to have a snide remark at supposed government inefficiency there? Can't we bury this ideological attacks that are not really supported by facts or data, add nothing to the point and are in fact grossly misleading?

This is a hard mathematical problem. Ordinary research papers in mathematics often spend a year or more in peer review in order to verify their correctness. If you're building a key component of security infrastructure a couple of years of review is not at all unreasonable.

Lot's of professional mathematicians. If you sit in the back row of a conference a third of the laptop screens have wikipedia open to get a good quick first idea. Often enough so to be able to work with it afterwards.

It's difficult to assess, but above a certain point it seems inevitably to be bad:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming

This is soooo not insightful. The reason people complain about Gnome Shell (justifieably) have nothing to do with eye candy. They have to do with design decisions that were intended to make it easier for users to **get work done fast**, but broke existing behaviours and habits to such an extend that no graceful migration was possible.

Rather than allowing both designs to coexist and convince people of the quality of the new way to get things done, they forced it on people and alienated them en mass. That doesn't mean their way is bad (see other comentators who find it to be very effective), nor that they went for eye candy over usability. It means simply that: They broke existing patterns and habits to an extreme extend. And that's just bad design.

More so, it's hard to leave. People are invested in the infrastructure. It carries their data, their pictures and activities, and a lot of metadata about their pictures and activities (like tags in the pictures).

There is no reason why we shouldn't all start referring to "tables" as "papgualas", but it still will never happen. Facebook just needs to not be significantly worse. G+ was IMO significantly better than facebook when it launched. But I still couldn't switch because I would have needed to convince everybody I want to coordinate with using that infrastructure to switch with me.

At the level of pop culture maybe it's not news. On the level of science it was not known 10-15 years ago. It was known that Andromeda was approaching the Milky way but there was no information on whether it would actually hit or whether we'd sling shot past each other and (potentially) go into orbit. A detail often glossed over in pop science books, and even some science books.

The trade off is different, you accept no graphics for more CPU vs Bobcat, and pay significantly more for it. Last I checked Bobcat was 30% cheaper. AMD has had absolutely zero problems selling its chips.

The only time I check Google+ is when I read a story how nobody uses it. Then again, the only time I check facebook is if I've been told I've been invited to something and should check the details on facebook.