It is down to a matter of control. One bullet fired at a particular target versus a continuous beam of laser energy including, potential for reflection, aim vagaries and the threat to civilians, much like using chemical or biological weapons. The preference is to get the enemy army to surrender not to mass main or murder as many soldiers and civilian bystanders as quickly as possible. If that was the case we might as well just let the nukes fly and get it over with. So it is worse because of likely hood of collateral damage. As for law enforcement use, a stern legal reminder needs to be issued to law enforcement that the only legal use of force is the minimum use of force to initiate an arrest. They are blatantly abusing the law when they use chemical, electrical, sonic, percussion or brute force weapons upon citizens with no intent to initiate an arrest.

We can also let 99.9999% of businesses decide it. That is the reality by far and away the majority of businesses will benefit by net neutrality, from cheaper data transmission, to protected from interception traffic and competitor driven censorship. All tech staff need to get out and produce an advisory to management about the extremely damaging impact to business digital communications with the loss of net neutrality and the requirement for management to instruct lobbyists to ensure an absolute tiny minority of companies in the order of 0.0001% of companies can control, limit, censor and intercept business communications. A loss of net neutrality is a real threat to the future of by far the majority of businesses.

However Google is not the original use of the word as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.... So Barney Google and his Googly eyes and this of course led to google eyed and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.... This is where Google management got it's search (visual action) from, just your typical nerdy geek derivative use of language, although they emphatically disingenuously deny it now. Looks like there'll be a right barney http://onlineslangdictionary.c... over the word google yet to come. Sorry guys just because it is old and drifted out of use a little doesn't mean you can steal it and you can just bet the comic is going to get a revival now.

Keep in mind utopian failures are not a societal thing they are a species thing. In all cases human utopian societies are subverted and corrupted by a parasitical sub-species of humanity, psychopaths. Quite simply remove them and a lot of humanities problems will go away with them. Empathy and a full set of human emotions are a functional developmental requirement for a human to effectively fit in and cooperatively support the endeavours of the society that they are a part of. Rather than preying upon it and demanding to have far more than others up to and including to the point of triggering the collapse of that society.

So rather than a dystopian view of breeding and future citizen nurturing licences a positive view is likely in order.

Let's be honest there is quite a bit of difference on a planet with 7 billion people to enact laws making procreation and child rearing a privilege and responsibility only for those appropriate to do so versus you can spit out all the ones you want expecting the rest of society to care for them and take responsibility for them, this versus extermination camps.

Suck it up, despite all the whining about how badly it was done in the past it will not ever stop all of us or future generations from biting the bullet, it is a matter of inevitability or total collapse from the 20 billion idiocracy taking over and an extinct species replacing them.

A whole lot of problems can be safely easily eliminated in a generation or three or we can continue to fail future generations with them.

Ask the Europeans that constantly tell us Americans we are too enslaved to the notion that we all need our own car.

You just made that up. I don't know if you've ever driven around a European city, but car ownership is pretty widespread, at least judging by driving through Rome/London/Paris/etc.

It's funny what some Americans think about Europe. They've got this AM talk radio version of Europe knocking around in their heads. "Yeah, they're all dying in the streets because of socialized medicine and everybody's gay and you can't get a decent hamburger anywhere. And they're a bunch of carpoolers who don't realize that we fought and died so that people could drive their own 4500lb vehicle like God intended." "You betcha, Mack. Next up is Fred from Midland. So, what grinds your gears about Europeans, Fred?"

I guess that would be an answer if nobody ever took the time to show you how to defend yourself with your hands.

I think you have been listening to people, that have gleefully lied to you.

I think you are projecting.

A far cry from "proven to make up data and conceals data that doesn't fit his ideology".

No. Not being able to produce the data that your most important work is based on is not a far cry from making up data and concealing data that doesn't fit his ideology.

If a researcher can't produce his data, his work is not taken seriously. The scientific method includes making your data available so other people can review your work.

They sort of look and feel like apple stores.

I do not want to buy my expensive Tesla from a smelly "genius" walking around with a corporate-logo polo shirt snug around the belly that hangs over his belt, which sports an iPhone holster. I'd rather just order the damn thing on-line and have USPS deliver it to my front door.

You failed to demonstrate that more than one of these many annual nonfatal injuries involves a penis being shot off.

Most US gun owners don't have good enough aim to shoot off their own penises. That's why they need semi-automatic weapons. It raises the odds of being able to actually hit that tiny thing.

Pathology? There is nothing pathological about a person wanting to employ all self-defensive measures to secure life or liberty

Gun ownership in the US has very little to do with "life or liberty". Be honest with yourself. If it was really about protecting your "life or liberty", you wouldn't have clown shows like this.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/blo...

There is nothing invalid about using defensive uses of guns by police and against animals, since if there were no gun available

Yes, there is. No gun control proposal in the US has suggested taking guns away from law enforcement, the military or people who live where there are wildlife attacks. It's completely invalid. The technical term is "red herring". Look it up. Lott's book was about civilian ownership of guns. Kleck's work was designed to support civilian ownership of guns and has been used to attack all gun control laws. What's worse, his sloppy work and broad assumptions were used by the Supreme Court in the Heller decision, which began this entire notion of the Second Amendment being about civilian ownership of guns. Remember, until the '80s, there were no legal scholars who believed in this absolutist notion of the Second Amendment. Even Robert Bork, the sainted patron of the modern conservative, believed the Second Amendment did not apply to a right of every civilian to own (not to mention carry) a gun.

This entire argument is an artifact of Edwin Meese, the NRA and the Reagan Administration. There was a time when the NRA's literature quoted the entire Second Amendment, including the militia clause. Now, the quote above their headquarters door leaves that entire clause out. People who act like this so-called "right" goes back to the founding fathers are dizzy.

Let's assume Lott's figure is in the ball park just for argument sake.

No. Why should we do that when we know it's an imaginary number.

Your assertion that the U.S. may be the most lawless country in the world is ludicrous.

That's not my assertion, it's Lott's. His results imply that many hundreds of thousands of murders should have been occurring when a private gun was not available for protection. Yet guns are rarely carried, less than a third of adult Americans personally own guns, and only 27,000 homicides occurred in 1992. He assumes that there were 2.5 million attempted crimes that were thwarted by gun ownership. If that's true, and without those guns those crimes would have occurred, it would make the United States the most lawless country in the world. Do the math yourself. Assume for a moment that gun ownership is banned. Add 2.5 million to the crime statistics. That would just about triple the crime rate in the US.

Secondly, my neighbor travels to South America regularly and used to live in Argentina.

Do you know what "anecdotal" means? I lived in Sao Paolo when my wife was doing a math fellowship at a university there. The crime statistics in Brasil are about 30% higher than the US. Not double, not triple.

So as far as i'm concerned I'd believe him before believing your generalization.

What generalization? I cited a list of researchers and their studies that have refuted Lott. Are you going to believe your neighbor over published studies, too?

I recently moved and had CC for the previous year I was in my last place. I used a vpn almost all the time and my line stayed up pretty much 100%.

this year when I moved, I transferred CC to my new place and I continue to run a vpn. I now notice, for some reason, that after a few hours, I get a loss of ping to anything. if I stop my vpn, the default router is still unpingable. what 'fixes' it is to reboot the cable modem (and my access pfsense router, which then gets a new dhcp primary addr) and then things are good again for a few hours.

not sure if this is related, but if I don't use a vpn, the line stays up for days and weeks at a time. when I use a vpn, I get a few hours at a time.

might not mean a thing, but then again, it might. I can't quite tell yet. what I am planning on doing is designing/building a reboot/test loop so that my line will stay up even if I'm not home to notice that it went down.

I had to do that kind of thing with pacbell dsl about 10+ yrs ago (their alcatel, aka crash-catel modem was at fault back then; but same thing happened - I'd lose connectivity and only a reboot of the modem would bring it back again).

its not convenient but if this keeps my line alive, sigh, well, this is what I will have to do.