So inside a retail store are thousands and thousands of tiny little cost centers? Does that mean that the retail store is also thousands and thousands of tiny little profit centers?

Or would a rational person perhaps look at the store as a profit center because it makes money, despite having overhead costs like ... the screws that hold the front door to its hinges? Or is each of those screws a cost center, in your view?

How about the display cases that hold the jewelry in the store?

How about the cash registers?

How about the front door?

Is every last bit of overhead inside a profit center a tiny, microscopic cost center?

So, a company's money-making, walk-up retail storefront isn't a profit center?

So, all VPNs are "the internet?"

It wasn't "out there." It was "in there." They had the compromised credentials for a top-level system admin, and spent months on the internal network collecting goodies before laying waste to the system.

Nonsense. It only doesn't sit well with the fictional, cartoon-grade MBA types that IT people like to conjure up as straw men. Security IS a profit center, because it's part and parcel of actually doing everything that generates profit. Without it, the profitable activity is impossible, and so it is part of the profit-making activity. Period. Saying it's no is like saying the director of a Sony movie isn't part of their profitable activity of making movies because he has to be paid.

No, I'm focused DIRECTLY on your comment. Which is peppered with the pretentious and (in this context) meaningless word "externalities" - in an attempt to make it sound like you're constructing an argument, when you're actually not. When you're not saying anything, the only thing to focus on IS the blather and the blatherer.

So, again, the only time the knife becomes dangerous is when YOU pick it up, or someone else does. Only human action makes it dangerous. It's not inherently dangerous, it's human action that is dangerous. Otherwise the knife is inert, sitting there, and unable in any way to hurt you or someone else. Unless it's highly radioactive or something - but I'm guessing that's not what you're getting at.

No, men who can't make up cartoon-quality villains they like to complain about. You know, sort of like you just did. Badly. So, I guess that makes you a man who can't, right?

So what you're taking great pains to say is that guns aren't inherently dangerous, people are. Because they kill themselves and each other all the time through careless acts. You've done nothing to show inherent danger in that hunk of metal, but you have shown an odd desire to absolve people of their own stupidity, shifting the blame to inanimate objects than cannot, by themselves, hurt you. It's a fundamentally irrational view of reality. Or, more likely, it's a thinly veiled agenda trying to hide behind a bit of fear mongering.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

But it sure does make you sound like an eager moral relativist.

How? Be specific. If I put a gun on a table in front of you, it will sit there for a thousand years without hurting either one of us. Are you concerned it will spontaneously explode, or grow some sort of nerve tentacles that will intrude into your brain and make you do something awful? Why aren't you worried about kitchen knives, or hammers? More people are killed in the US with pipes and baseball bats than with any kind of rifle (semi-auto or otherwise) - are all cylindrical club-like objects inherently dangerous? How so?

Yes, it's a good habit to treat every gun as if it might go off when you handle it. So you always handle them as if they will, and control that muzzle's direction at all times. Just like you always have to think about where you're swinging an axe, or pointing the front end of a moving car.

Really? His nice, lazy, all-afternoon hunting down of young people on that island couldn't have ended with fewer deaths if someone on that island had shot him down in self defense before he committed such methodical, unopposed slaughter?

Ah, another person who never went to school, or certainly wasn't paying attention.

Your rights are not defined in the constitution. The constitution exists to limit the government's power to interfere with your liberty. Some of those liberties are so important that they are also mentioned by name (the right to liberty that by definition includes the right to speak, assemble, protect yourself, etc). Only leftist idiots think that it's the government that grants you your rights. That's 100% Nanny State backwards. Please do not vote.

Yeah, just like a brick thrown from an overpass or a 40th-floor window - and that costs a fraction of the price of a single UAV battery. Why aren't you in favor of banning bricks? Or would you be happy with simply registering, with photo ID and fingerprints on file, the ownership of all objects that have enough mass to be dangerous?