A less accurate weapon is obviously going to have an influence on bullets fired; however, the majority of the difference will be because the vast majority of bullets fired in standard infantry combat will be suppressing or speculative shots. Taking 3 shots to hit someone you're targetting instead of 2 doesn't waste a whole lot of bullets. Firing a couple of clips near them to keep the suppressed will. One assumes to get a figure like 250k bullets a kill they are also including things like weapons fired at field ranges etc.

or 0.17% of the worlds oceans.

It's a bit like saying who cares if 0.2% of the worlds land area was heavily irradiated when you don't know whether that 0.2% is in a desert where only a couple of camels would notice, or the locations of the 25 largest cities in the world leading to hundreds of millions dead and displaced.

Maybe meat would be more expensive

Meat would be significantly more expensive, when you blur the lines on something that definitive by saying it "maybe" it diminishes the rest of your point. That's not to say meat shouldn't be considerably more expensive.

I think we can all agree that reducing gentle knocks hugely while bring in a few more multi-fatality crashes isn't progress, so can we assume that other people have the intelligence to also be making the same assumption that crashes need to be of roughly equal magnitude to make a straight trade off?

You'd probably think I was being pedantic if I said your point depended on what was 'serious' and what was 'minor' after all.

I spend ~£300 a year on insurance, and would happily pay that and another £500 a year not to have to drive my car. Over 10 years that's an £8k premium. If the car is safer than the average driver then there should be a considerable financial incentive to solve the liability issue.

Not so much missing, as not relevant to the point he was making. The fact you missed his point: I don't think "because drivers keep hitting them" ever came up as a reason. and also missed it when he said: By and large, while it's never going to be economical or appropriate everywhere, you don't want trees close to major roads. and decided to make up a disagreement doesn't reflect well on your understanding of the conversation.

Since we're in bad analogies, how about buying a bus pass and then having to wait for the next bus because the first one is full.

I know you said bad analogies, but there's bad and false. In this case the bus isn't 'full' they're stopping you getting on the bus, which has spaces, so that they can ensure there is space for other bus pass holders that have used their pass less in the last few days.

A little pointless pedantry don't you think? If a bus company sold unlimited passes and did what you described they'd still be facing a class action lawsuit in short order.

anyways, the problem with penalizing the top 10% is that next month top 10% will have smaller use and the next month 10% is smaller and the next 10% is smaller... ending up with 100mbytes getting you into the top 10% users before long. what kind of "unlimited" is that?

I agree. Better to have the cut off as a certain multiple (say 10x) average use. That way the limit would increase naturally with average use, and only those way out of line with the average would be capped.

It seems to me that Verison's problem is on the marketing side. Their technical implementation is correct.

Pretty much, although it is a little more than 'marketting' when a company sells you 'unlimited internet' but doesn't provide that. The issue pretty much boils down to the fact that for 99%+ of users 100GB a month would be plenty, but those users want the security of knowing that their policy is 'unlimited' so they won't a surprise charge if they use more than normal. 'Unllimited' is the wrong word to use for a clearly limited service even if for most users it's the same as unlimited, but the problem is that there's no clearly understood term for 'effectively unlimited for the vast majority of customers'.

Personally, I think the best option would be to accept that the word unlimited is misused, and create a level of service that is required to be allowed to call it 'unlimited'. That limit could be, for example, 10x the average usage calculated each year based on the previous year, with the consequence for breaching the limit being restricted to removing service to people who repeatedly exceed it. That way when the vast majority of users buy an 'unlimited' package they are getting what they want and expect (all they need with no risk of fines) and the very small group of high bandwidth users can pay for a premium package.

How is this any different from you going to the police right now and saying you watched your neighbour murder someone?

It depends, did I set up hundreds of cameras that are triggered by suspicious behaviour to alert me of the murder and if so is that appropriate? How is your example different from schools indoctrinating children to expose their parents for un-patriotic actions? Generally, the answer would be by degrees rather then inherently unrelated.

The argument of "if you don't like it, then encrypt it" is pretty naive. How is it better that we establish a norm of companies searching your communications for evidence of government mandated crimes when the measure is so easy for remotely competent child abusers to avoid? Personally, I see 'civilised society' meaning that if we did business and you passed me a pile of documents and asked me to give it to someone I was meeting later that day I wouldn't go searching through them to see if they contained evidence of a crime.

That assumes you start from the premise that it is wrong for the law to ever compel something be removed from the internet. There are many who think that it should be possible to force certain things off the internet. If that is your position then relying on asking a foriegn body nicely to stop isn't going to seem like a viable solution. Ultimately I don't think the internet should magically change how things are treated. If I could require a UK based site to remove/amend content via the courts, then I should be able to ask foriegn sites to do the same and if they refuse then the UK court should be able to block it. However that is a process clearly based on a court of law, not a company deciding what should/shouldn't be seen, and is restricted to things that would be covered by UK law already not a pretty vague notion of being out of date.

Except, in this case, the call was not anonymous. Furthermore, the police used the email as evidence to get a warrant to search his devices, and found other images. So, he is not being charged based on just one email.

One of the issues with many in the anti-'think of the children' camp is that sometime what is going on seems reasonable in those circumstances. They should be willing to say "Yes I can see why people would be glad that this happened but..." and then point out that having private companies searching through your mail and reporting anything they like to law enforcement isn't a good precedent. Do they really want Google telling the government who owns guns, who visits anti-government websites, what they say on their hangouts about campaigning against the president etc? Sometimes the price we need to pay for keeping a healthy distance from totalitarianism is to not do certain things that might let us catch a few more bad people in the short term.

This is a stupid regulation. If someone doesn't want to have their story "out there" , they should just approach the publisher directly.

It is stupid regulation, but your alternative solution is also pretty stupid. Firstly, it makes no sense for publishers to put any effort into deciding if they need to remove content or not without a potential legal consequence, and secondly the majority of web content is outside UK jurisdiction. They are going after search engines because trying to get a website hosted in Buenos Aires to take down a misleading and outdated article related to the Falklands war isn't viable for example.

Now the reason the law is stupid, isn't because it targets search engines but because it expects private corporations to make judgements on what should or shouldn't be forgotten.

If that was true, then ad blocking tools would not be very popular. They are, so this isn't true.

That's a pretty big logical fail. Firstly he said 'almost everyone' is happy and installation figures for adblock software back that up. Secondly, he is making the point that most people prefer free sites with ads over pay sites, which again is pretty obvious given the lack of pay sites for most content. The fact that a small subset of people are willing to ignore the wishes of the people producing the content they consume by blocking their revenue mechanic just shows that self-entitlement is alive and well.