Thanks!

I was not attempting to open a debate on abortion, but rather to question how much the perceived improvements in life expectancy world-wide could possibly be affected by the practice.

As for sex education, condoms do absolutely nothing to combat sexually transmitted diseases, so while they may help reduce the number of pregnancies, they also fuel the rise of HIV and AIDS around the world. Abstinence and marital fidelity are the only effective methods that can stop this deadly trend. In fact, in light of the scientific and historical evidence, it is gross negligence bordering on manslaughter to promote "sex education" as a cure when millions suffer from the effects of this "civilised" education.

Your example of the unfertilized ovaries is completely off-base and has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand -- or even the debate about abortion. It is the ultimate straw man argument that ignores the real issues of a truly intellectual debate.

I would be curious to know if/how he took into account two items that could seriously skew the data. When you observe the initial dataset in the 1800s, all childhood deaths were reported including stillborn babies and so forth. With abortion, many of the poorer or unhealthy children are more likely to not enter the world. How much of an impact does this have on these figures? How much lower would the American lifespan be if we included the 1.5 million abortions we have every year?

Also, he calculates the figures in terms of dollars, but define a dollar. In 1910, a dollar was worth far more than it is today. I am assuming that he takes into account inflation, but I would be curious to see how.

All that said, that was a fascinating video. I would love to be able to play with the graph and move it back and forth at my own speed to track the various movements of each country through history and so forth. It be fantastic if they put together an interactive website to do just that.

...this "either/or" mentality. That if Android succeeds, everyone else has failed.

Let's look at computers. Microsoft and OEM's that use Windows have about 90% market-share, while Apple and OS X has a bit under 10%. Does that mean that Apple has "failed"? Not really. They seem to be having highly succesful computer-business, happy users, and lots of profits. Apple earns more money on their computers than HP, the market-leader, does with theirs. yet for some reason some people say that Apple should be like HP and Dell, since licensing OS from someone else is "the way this business works". Even though it seems that the OEM's are not earning that much, while Intel and Microsoft are the companies that reap the profits.

If we look at phones, we can see that Apple is earning lots of money there as well. More than Nokia is earning, even though Apple is a lot smaller. It seems that people are expecting Apple to gain iPod-like dominance in the phone-business, and if/when Android overtakes iOS, people decide that iOS has "failed", since history did not repeat itself. Well, Symbian dwarfs both iOS and Android, yet no-one is calling iOS or Android failures because of that fact. And gaining iPod-like share in a mature market like phones is quite hard, if not impossible. When Nokia was at it's biggest, it had something like 60-70% share of the market. But that was a market that wasn't all that mature yet. and they managed that for only few years.

What if Android gets 50% share in few years? Great! Android is a good OS, and we need more good phones. does that mean that everyone else has failed? I don't think so. It seems that people have this strange idea that there must be a clear winner and a clear loser(s). We got that in computers, when Microsoft ended up dominating the market. So we MUST have something similar elsewhere as well, right? I don't think so. And even in computers the "niche player" is earning quite nice profits. Even though they have single-digits market-share does not seem to be hurting them. You do not need to be big, biggest or dominating in order to have a good business.

The point seemed to be that building nuclear weapons is a black art that few master. Reality is that the knowledge is widespread.

No, you can't make nukes in a cave. But those cave-dwelling islamists could pay someone with proper facilities to do it for them. Those islamists often have quite a bit of money.

My point is that knowledge on how to build nukes is widespread. It's not arcane black art or something like that.

Manhattan Project was a huge undertaking because no-one had done it before. They were breaking new ground and researching things that were not researched before.

Today, things are different. The technology and knowledge required to build a nuclear weapon is literally 70 years old. Just about every modern country could build them if they have the prerequisite fuel for it.

Hell, it was discovered few years ago that SWEDEN had plans for nuclear weapons in the seventies! Their plan was that in case of war against USSR, they could nuke the Red Army while it was still in Finland fighting against Finnish Army (without telling the Finns about it, of course). They had the required knowledge to build the bomb, they lacked the fuel. The plans were eventually scrapped because they were considered stupid.

I'm in Finland, and even here I have a choice of healthcare. I can go and use public healthcare-services if I want, or I can go and use private healthcare-services. So what exactly am I missing out on, when compared to USA?

Such as? Hey, didn't Prez Bush tell doctors that stem-cell research and treatments are not allowed?

You obviously don't know anything about Finland or Finns. And like I said elsewhere, there is no correlation between freedom and amount of guns. Americans have three times as much guns as Finns do. So, is US Government less corrupt than Finnish government? Are Finns less free than Americans? Yemen has the second biggest number of guns in the world, is Yemen more free and less corrupt than Finland? Or Germany? Let's quote Wikipedia:

"The government and its security forces, often considered to suffer from rampant corruption, have been responsible for torture, inhumane treatment and extrajudicial executions. There are arbitrary arrests of citizens, especially in the south, as well as arbitrary searches of homes. Prolonged pretrial detention is a serious problem, and judicial corruption, inefficiency, and executive interference undermine due process. Freedom of speech, the press and religion are all restricted.[67]"

We don't have that kind of problems in Finland, even though we have less guns. Neither does Germany. How does Yemen fit in with your idea that "more guns == more freedom"?

Uh-huh.

No, I don't. Because idea that I need guns in order to "oppose the government" is ludicrous. For starters, I can do that in the ballot-box. And second: guns I would have would do me jack shit in "opposing the government". It might give me a delusion of grandeur, but in reality it would do nothing.

Like someone else already said: just admit that the point of owning guns is that it's nice to shoot at things. there's nothing wrong with that. Trying to make it in to a political statement about "freedom" or something of the sort is dumb at best. Those "freedom-loving" gun-owners are just as much "sheeple" as rest of us are. They might talk about "opposing the government", but they are too busy watching NASCAR to actually do anything.

There is no "cut" if the app is free.

And Apple does not get a cut if you give it away for free in the App Store, so what's your point?

We can make that decision. We can decide not to buy iPhones and buy Androids instead. No-one is being forced to buy iPhones. Every product we buy is a collection of pluses and minuses and compromises. We need to select the product that has such a combination of those that suits us the best. And if that products happens to be iPhone, then so be it.

Hey, what if you want to make the decision of running Skyhook location-service on Android? Whoops, you can't!

[quote]I have an Android phone (HTC Aria)[/quote]

Does it still run Android 2.1? What if you want to make the decision of running 2.2 on it? There are lots of Android-users who are stuck with old versions of the OS because the carrier/OEM has decided that they do not have to be upgraded.

No, they had succesful unarmed uprising against their government.

And because of that we should all carry guns with us at all times?

Isn't that a bit unreasonable response to a slap in the face?

Wrong, as collapse of communistic governments in Europe and USSR demonstrate. Citizens did not have guns, yet they overthrew their corrupt governments.

So I'm being pitied because I live in a country where I don't have to worry about random violence? Um, OK. I think I'll manage.

It should be noted that in all the cases you cited, the fighters were armed with more than just normal guns that are available to civilians. Afgans fighting against USSR were equipped by Stingers for example. And each case you cited was a case of outside force attacking the country (USA in Iraq, USSR if Afganistan etc.). What we are talking about is citizens rising up against corrupt government. That is not what happened in Afganistan, but it IS what happened in the communist regimes in Europe.

If number of guns ensures free and corruption-free government, then number of guns should correlate with lower corruption and god governance. Is that the case? The list is here:

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

So, let's compare USA and Finland. USA has almost three times as many guns per capita as Finland does. So, if guns ensure good governance, freedom from corruption and all sorts of other good things, how do those two countries compare? Since the difference in gun-ownership is so huge, the differences should be obvious. Is US Government less corrupted than the Finnish one? Are Finns less free than Americans are?

Or what if we compare.... Yemen with Germany. Is there more freedom and less corruption in Yemen than there is in Germany, since it has a lot more guns? Wikipedia says this about Yemen:

"The government and its security forces, often considered to suffer from rampant corruption, have been responsible for torture, inhumane treatment and extrajudicial executions. There are arbitrary arrests of citizens, especially in the south, as well as arbitrary searches of homes. Prolonged pretrial detention is a serious problem, and judicial corruption, inefficiency, and executive interference undermine due process. Freedom of speech, the press and religion are all restricted."

How can that be, if guns ensure freedom?

If they managed to do that in Stasi-controlled East-Germany, and in former USSR, it could be done just about everywhere.

And as I showed, there is no correlation between gun-ownership and freedom.