This is an area that needs to be free from the constraints of the FDA for awhile.

Let me start by saying I yield the point.

Anyone who has had quality training (formal or informal) is going to have an edge over someone who just bought a gun one day. Of course, as you said, everything is subject to time and luck.

" firepower, terrain, time, strengths, weaknesses, and leverage "

What sort of self defense situations do you think the average joe civilian is likely to find himself in? Unless we are talking about swat (and they are overdramatizing the scenario the majority of the time), military, or a zombie apocalypse in the real world you've got someone trying to murder you (or family), rape, mugging where the crook isn't willing to settle for just the cash, kidnapping, and home invasion. As far as guns are concerned Joe needs to know how to hold the weapon correctly in a tight grip with a solid stance, aim for center mass, and to only shoot if he or someone else is going to die otherwise.

If Joe civilian has the time to sit and formally categorize and assess the tactical position he's got to be the bad guy, in some less likely than a lightning strike situation (terrorists, mass shooting), or he's lost it and is going vigilante. It's not a movie, Joe shouldn't be running around taking out the armed gang that's robbing the bank.

I see I replied in a thread specifically about shooting and your comments were targeted there. I'd missed that in my quick scan down the board. I was really talking about segregated competitions across the board and the wasting lives remarks geared toward sports people are trying to make a living at.

With regard to shooting, being accurate doesn't hurt but it isn't like you are going to be doing more than a quick panicked point and shoot in a gun fight anyway. Precision shooting is great but lets not pretend it is about being deadly rather than a fun sport built around a tool that happens to be deadly.

There is a reason an AK variant remains the most effective combat small arm for anyone but a sniper... and I'd like to think anyone farther away than the kill accurate range of an AK would run away from a dangerous situation rather than shooting.

+1 - This

I can't think of any reason to segregate by gender. If the males can't compete they SHOULD be discouraged by the lack of male champions and if the girls can't compete they should have said discouragement. We shouldn't artificially be generating encouragement for people to waste their lives trying to be something they have a snowballs chance in hell of being.

If gender isn't a factor that will come through in time. If it is, that will come through. More males will flock toward things where males are better equipped and females flock toward things where they are better equipped and the only people who will be upset about it are those who are trying to assert that such differences don't exist. And since they'd be wrong in that case, they too should be discouraged.

Basically, everyone should have to take a dose of reality and be encouraged or discouraged in proportion to how things actually are.

"of course there will be a few exceptionally talented black swans that show up from time to time. these are exceptions to the rule."

AKA Champions. If you aren't an exceptionally talented black swan you aren't a champion and shouldn't be called one. First, if you can't win the game on a level playing field with all genders and weight classes, you aren't really a champion. Second, assuming girls could never do this is highly sexist. Third, if you genuinely believe girls can't do this, then propping them up artificially to have a higher number encouraged to compete seems counterproductive. If they can't win, they shouldn't be wasting their lives trying to perform tasks they aren't very well equipped to do but instead shown champions in areas where males tend to fall down in a fair, even, and not segregated competition.

How is it any less sexist if they retain "all-women" competitions?

Well, if you've already trusted your national defence, university education, ideological belief system, and popular cultural to the homeland of said foreign company, entrusting your national telecoms infrastructure is a relatively small step.

What about the Cloud? The great workaround to constitution in the digital age?

"Rationally, I have to think that when one service provider represents 10% or more of the traffic on a given network they should be doing something to address it, and the responsibility really falls on their shoulders and not the ISP."

I disagree. The reason being that the 10% has been paid for by the people watching those streams. What difference should it make to my ISP how I use my bandwidth. I paid for it.

"Second, how does that support your restaurant analogy? Bandwidth is finite. How do you define "artificially slow down delivery" in a world of finite bandwidth and complex and continually changing network topologies? So Hulu and Netflix have to have the same performance to every customer? No matter what the physical network layout is between server and user?"

That isn't what is going on here though. There is a big difference between the connection coincidently only be so fast between point A and B and an ISP saying, oh a competing video service is at A, so no, don't follow our normal procedure and upgrade the infrastructure at that point. Or even worse, a competitor is at A, so reduce memory or misconfigure the router leading to them. Or still worse, lets install something to actively detect traffic going to our competitor and slow it down.

Netflix pays for it's bandwidth. I pay for my bandwidth. My common carrier better be prioritizing everything I want to access via MY connection equally. Threatening to invisibly slow down Netflix to first create the illusion that Netflix isn't paying for their bandwidth and second raise the costs of a competitors service is unethical and should be illegal and in a REAL free market we would have 20 places to take our business to go around it.

At the very least if companies aren't required to obey net neutrality regulations they should lose all common carrier protections since they aren't offering a content neutral pipe anymore.

It's not actually the government asshatry that concerns me. I mean it's not cool but it isn't going away... ever. But a government needs a healthy fear of it's citizens and a government that isn't afraid of the rabble is a terrible and frightening thing indeed. So yes, I for one do welcome a return to the government hiding in shadows doing illicit things when opposed to one that feels its citizens are powerless and it can openly do illicit things.

It's people who don't understand that government must fear the common man who support measures to disarm the people.

Reading between the lines here, it seems fairly probable that Truecrypt has either

a) Very serious security bugs, or
b) Had backdoors introduced by the NSA.(Does Truecrypt use elliptic curve cryptography?)

In either event the code is basically tainted and shouldn't be used for any future projects.

The vague and sometimes bizzare nature of the statements from the Truecrypt dev team, including this one, lead me to believe that they have been placed under a standard NSA gagging order and have decided to burn Truecrypt rather than see it be turned against its users. Comments like "Forking is Impossibe" appear to be an open code for communicating that they are essentially unable to communicate, but that Truecrypt is no longer a trustworthy piece of software.

Reading though the Lavabit case, it's clear that those placed under NSA gagging orders have very, very little room for legal/media maneuver, but nevertheless still retain the freedom to walk away from their projects and tell others not to use them. Such actions appear to be the last defense of cryptographers in the US, and I think that is what we're seeing with Truecrypt.

P.S. The whole hoarding bitcoins thing is a myth. Deflationary economies work the same way inflationary economies work the pressure is just in another place. Deflation is a built in wage increase for workers. Everyone's money being worth more is more temptation to spend it because prices get lower and lower. But while prices get lower and lower companies have to continue to pay workers the same amount.

This is partially offset by their cost for materials going down but bottom line is that companies will need to increase sales to keep up. Luckily for companies, everyone makes more than before because their salary of 1 BTC/week is worth more so they can afford more, so consumption goes up.

The confusion comes from people who have bought into the idea that the economy is driven by investors. Never believe this, it's nonsense used to justify people who do nothing but add interest, increase prices, and/or reduce the quality (aka cost of production) of goods and services to "realize value" and thus make money without contributing to the economy but rather by detracting to it. Often these try to take credit for and/or mask their efforts by blending in with actual technology improvements.

The economy is driven by workers (Production) and consumers (Consumption). All value in the economy comes from workers, technology improvements for instance are the work output of engineers and researchers. Consumers purchase goods and services, goods remain part of the economy and have innate value and service availability has an innate value and the output of the service may have a value as well. Consumers generally spend pretty much everything they make.

If you must obsess over middle men (investors, lenders, salesmen, etc) then you should realize that these people want other people's money. Banks don't lend to beat inflation, banks lend to charge an interest rate that is their profit+inflation. With a deflationary system lenders can simply exclude the inflation number since the payback will be in deflated dollars and the interest deflates too. How much interest can they charge? Dunno, but it will be as much as the market will allow and so it should amount to at least the same amount of increased buying power as loans now.

"Sure it is."

No, actually it's not. They screen every donation in the US as well, that's why they have a questionnaire to eliminate high risk groups. I imagine in Canada the people doing those tests are on state salaries and would be sitting around getting paid regardless. In the US the non-profit donation driven organizations collecting blood have to pay third party labs on a per test basis. Generally those organizations run out of money to collect and screen donations before they run out of willing blood donors. It makes absolutely no sense for them to take blood from high risk groups, have more collected donations fail, and therefore have a higher cost per usable pint of blood.