You know when gun deaths were really low? Before guns were invented. The homicide rate, however, was about an order of magnitude higher than it is now.

Your statement is true, but utterly irrelevant to the question of where the safest places to live are. Does it matter what weapon is used to kill you? Or rob you or, rape you, or... Of course it doesn't. You have fallen victim to (or else are disingenuously pushing, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're foolish, not malicious) to a very clever stratagem pushed by advocates of gun control: Focusing only on gun crime and ignoring other crime.

The statistic that matters isn't the number of gun deaths, it's the number of homicides, assaults, rapes, robberies, etc., total. And on any one of those scales, those states with strict gun laws don't do particularly well. To make them look good you have to do exactly what you did: arbitrarily exclude much of the violence.

I'll never know. The very first thing I do when I get a new Thinkpad is to disable the touchpad on it completely. The trackpoint is greatly superior to any touchpad, even an Apple touchpad.

It works because slashdot recognised the URL, and automatically made it clickable, rather than because of any design. You need to use html to get it a link to work correctly.

No, not really. In the UK at least, a car that's done over 100,000 miles is considered basically worthless. They sell for £3-500 each, because their engine and transmission is likely to be on its last legs.

Um, the main point of the post *is* that the US DoD is involved. I quote the GGGGP:

Man On Pink Corner said the DoD's influence was the issue, essentially that the DoD is brainwashing kids through Call of Duty, and that he'd address that point with his kids.

But there is no evidence that the DoD had anything whatsoever to do with Call of Duty.

Not really, in fact, 125,000 miles is a pretty long way after you'd expect to see major issues with most of the seals on the engine, and quite possibly complete failure on some cars.

Why do people assume that any disease that they can't physically see the scars of isn't actually a disease at all?

But what is the connection with the US DoD?

Sometimes, but not always. It really depends on the post.

I think real names do help, but only some. I think you can divide the population into three groups:

1. The people who will be civil, at least most of the time, regardless of anonymity.

2. The people who will be civil if they have to attach a name they care about (which may be a pseudonym).

3. The people who just don't care. Most, if not all, of these are asses in real life, too. We all know some.

I think the majority of people fall into group 1. Group 2 is a minority. Group 3 is a tiny minority... but on the Internet the relevant population of even a moderate-size site is enormous, so a tiny minority can do enormous damage.

Well, it's possible that there are some unknown laws of physics that are relevant as well.

I listened to a talk by Google HR a while ago about this. They found that within Google women were being promoted at a much lower rate than men. Looking closer, they realized that among men and women who self-nominated for promotion (the Google promotion process is one of self-nomination rather than manager nomination), the promotion rates were statistically indistinguishable, but that women self-nominated at a lower rate than men. HR's solution was to direct managers to specifically seek out women they felt were ready for promotion and encourage them to self-nominate. They did not issue any instructions to the promotion committees to favor the promotion of women, and instead reaffirmed the commitment to purely merit-based promotion (or as close to it as could be achieved).

But as it turned out there was no need to tell the committees to favor women, because merely getting managers to encourage women to self-nominate immediately equalized the promotion rates. Of course, there are still far fewer women promoted because there are far fewer women.

I've heard some criticize Google HR's actions on the grounds that it shows favoritism toward women. I don't think that's true. I think it shows recognition of and adaptation to gender differences. Whether the differences are ultimately biological or cultural in origin, they clearly exist, and not adjusting for them is a bias in favor of men. If a system evolved in a context where one predominates, then the system will have evolved to best fit the culture and characteristics of that group. De-biasing such a system requires making intelligent adjustments to account for the differences with other groups. I think Google's solution to their promotion imbalance was spectacular -- minimal intervention, precisely on target and without lowering the standard at all.