For-profit ecosystems spring up around many charities; everything from environmentalism to religions spawn such commercial activities around them.

The issue that should be at the heart of the matter is whether some person or company specifically and exclusively stands to profit from the charities work. As long as anyone who wants to can engage in commercial activities related to the work, such as commercial sales of religious texts and figures, sell eco friendly products, use charity relations in branding and marketing, use the open source software etc, I don't think the reasoning is valid.

It's not particularly hard anyway, it's just that the other high efficiency methods like trains, jumps and correctly done automotive suicide tend to cause more collateral damage. Guns are simply the considerate and responsible way to expedite a rescheduled exit. Hardly something to complain about.

Yes, there are of course a few appropriate ways to use it. Anything you could do the equivalent of unobtrusively positioning at that bar table, such as brand display would work as well as anywhere else. A few other things that are also appropriate would have some success rate; social calendar style things like events related to preferences, etc.

It's not completely pointless, it's just much more limited and less efficient for most marketing than many already available methods. And I really despise the attempts to sell person profiling as a magic marketing bullet when it's inherently worse than content profiling.

Social media advertisement is the sales guy sitting down at your table in the bar and trying to sell you a new refrigerator when you're hanging with friends because he saw you looking at refrigerators two weeks ago in a shop.

Search or content related advertising is the sales guy trying to sell you a new refrigerator when you're looking at refrigerators.

One of those has a chance to make a sale and might even be appreciated. The other is just irrelevant.

For sales, it's pointless to know what a customer is interested in if you don't know when they're interested in it, which means you're always better off targeting content over people because content has both temporal targeting as well as interest targeting implicitly right, while person profiling and social media presentation only gets a generic long term interest profile and implicitly targets people doing something other than being interested in products.

Remember when we had a Debian system on the biosciences mission? They scrubbed the whole mission after they were already in space due to a fuel-cell issue that I think turned out to be a faulty sensor, and flew the entire mission a second time.

Then you need better eyes. Unless you can actually get cybernetic implants you're stuck with the choice of fine detail or large quantities of information at the same time.

Even the GP is overestimating the capabilities, because the 20/20 resolution itself is limited to a very narrow field of view; the human eyes capability of even resolving text at all is pretty much nonexistent outside a 6 degree arc.

Now, if we could get monitors where you'd have to look away from an image of the sun because it's too bright, that would actually be something I'd be interested in. Because with contrast we're nowhere near the physical capabilities of perception and that would make some difference.

Consider yourself lucky, then, and pray that it lasts. The people around you are not made of such strong stuff, and I can't be sure that you are either.

It actually is a bit different for the Republicans, in that they are caught in an internal party schism of a scale we've not seen on either side since desegregation, if even then. It's difficult for the less right to look good to the more right, undirected pushing against the Democrats is one of the few ways they have to do it.

Do not forget that ObamaCare was rammed through without a single Republican vote in the House or Senate.

It's the unfortunate case that Republicans don't generally support Democratic bills. Witness the recent student loan bill. There is not much question that a better educated populance means a better economy and a stronger nation. It's a truism that we could just pay for college education in a number of fields and reap economic benefits of many times the spending. Indeed, we used to do more of that and the country was stronger when we did.

You meant "you wouldn't approve" rather than "you wouldn't understand".

Positioned correctly, it isn't all that socially reprehensible to state the sentiment that you don't believe you should pay for people who drive their motorcycle without helmets, people who self-administer addictive and destructive drugs, people who engage in unprotected sex with prostitutes or unprotected casual sex with strangers, and people who go climbing without using all of the safety equipment they could.

You don't really even need to get into whether you hold human life sacred, etc., to get that argument across. It's mostly just an economic argument, you believe yourself to be sensible and don't want to pay for people who aren't.

The ironic thing about this is that it translates to "I don't want to pay for the self-inflicted downfall of the people who exercise the libertarian rights I deeply believe they should have."

OK, not a bad position as far as it goes. Now, tell me how we should judge each case, once these people present themselves for medical care, and what we should do if they don't meet the standard.

Citation needed.

I just looked for a minute and found This NIMH study. If you look at the percentages per year they are astonishingly high. 9% of people in any particular year just for mood disorders, and that's just the first on the list. Then they go down the list of other disorders. The implication is that everyone suffers some incident of mental illness in their lives. And given the number of psychiatrists, psychologists, and lay practitioners in practice, it seems like much of the population try to get help at times, if only from their priest or school guidance counselor.

You are not a rock. Can you honestly tell me that you haven't ever suffeed a moment of irrationality?

I'm curious what his stance is on most martial arts practitioners.

I've never heard of one invading a school and karate-chopping a dozen young kids to death. Have you?

Yes, seeing a doctor really is a human right.

Does that mean we should bear the burden of your bad lifestyle choices? Well, we do today. Either those folks are in our emergency rooms, or they are lying on our streets. Either way, we all pay a cost.

It's not clear to me what you propose to do with them. Perhaps you should explain that a bit more clearly.

Hi AC

One would hope that a real scientific study would shed light on the situation. Unfortunately, this isn't it. It's a paper published by a Harvard student club and written by a gun industry lobbyist and a gun enthusiast. No balanced perspective that could lead to a real scientific paper here. The first refutation I found of the paper is certainly not peer reviewed and published in a scientific journal either, but makes a pretty good case that the statistics are cooked. It's here.

Please find a real scientific paper from a researcher without bias and then we can discuss it. This one doesn't quite meet the standard.

I'm sort of surprised at the amount of vitriol toward Eric that comes up unprompted (at least by me) just because I'm interviewed on Slashdot. I'm going to take the high road and not participate in it.