Maybe. But not banning guns will affect gun crime never.

Imagine if the 'Patrick Purdy' incident referenced in the GP caused a gun ban to be enacted on everything but single-shot long guns. That was two decades ago.

Got to start sometime. Plus, if you do a total ban on certain weapons, you have the moral authority to hike up punishment on gun crimes with those weapons, right away. There is no excuse for a crime-of-passion, as you are already knowingly breaking the law by possessing a banned weapon.

and from your second at 22:55 GMT:

Did business pick up rather abruptly at 22:00 GMT?

There is a pile of material at the bottom of the pool, and a blue glow of Cherenkov radiation in the water around it.

> TAKE PILE

You cannot take that item.

> INVENTORY

You have:

• a rope
• a watch
• non-radiation-resisting clothes

> GO NORTH

You cannot go that way.

> JUMP IN POOL

Sorry, I don't know what you mean.

> ENTER POOL

You have jumped into the pool.

You have died from radiation poisoning.

> NO.

How does this fit?

Not very well.

Or, if I applied your cited "Law" to your own comment title:

How does this fit?

NO.

...

The best way for me to protect myself with biometrics...is to keep the details of my biometrics out of any government or private company's database, thank you very much.

Are custom-made prosthetics for the disabled not 'noble' enough for you?

Ok. Here's something to make housing more affordable.

What else were you complaining about? Oh, yes. Humanity's presence in the solar system. Well, they've printed airplanes, so with a modicum of imagination, you can imagine printing space shuttles.

I'll leave examples of "reducing the environmental footprint" as an exercise for the reader.

I didn't dig completely into your site, but was just wondering if groups are doing work on speech recognition algorithms on your compressed bitstream? Is this an active area of research?

Of course, individuals from crowds can make false and erroneous claims. However, the beauty of crowdsourcing is that if a claim is indeed true, a large number of people would repeat and validate it, which would give the claim prominence and credibility. Social news sites like Digg, with their “up-vote” and “down-vote” system, use a similar concept.

Not to stroke Slashdot's ego, but I think a meta-moderation system is a better model. A financial institution may remain honest but piss off a lot of vindictive people who can click "Digg this". Whereas a small set of competent savvy number-crunchers may dispassionately find the clues needed to identify a fraud, with far more reliability. I believe they may underestimate the amount of noise that will come from investors who lose a lot of money from a perfectly honest, if incompetent, financial advisor.

There's also no mention in the article of financial compensation models for the crowd - except for the word "volunteer" halfway down the article. I'm not sure if this system would be better with cash rewards or not.

Really? Perhaps in a perfect world where the government prints money and circulates it to small businesses via noble banks, you might be correct.

Except you probably wouldn't be. The government does whatever it can to maximise unofficial inflation at the expense of official inflation. This allows them to pay off their debts while so-called "inflation-indexed" social security obligations are reduced. It's a zero-sum game, where the rich stock-invested people gain at the benefit of the poorer fixed-income people, such as the elderly.

So, no, inflation doesn't "lose" value...it transfers it from the poor to the rich.

And that's still in the "perfect world" scenario of printing money. In reality, what's happening today is that the Federal Reserve is printing large sums of money, loaning it to banks at 0% interest, who turn around and buy Treasuries with a 3% risk, and pocket the profits from the difference. They're not investing in "businesses" - that would be (gasp!) risky! This is why Goldman Sachs just had three whole months without a single day of trading losses. So this money is explicitly going into investment bankers' bonuses, Warren Buffett's 10% yield bonds, and other Goldman investors. This isn't a conspiracy theory - it's in the press releases!

So, yes, those of us who see the value of the gold standard don't necessarily do so to reduce volatility - we do so to reduce the bias towards the transfer of wealth to the rich and the well-connected.

Right...so the answer is to reduce political power. By smaller government. Less spending. Less taxes. You can complain all you want about the venality of politicians, but it's been a problem since Greek democracy and it's not changing now. All you can do is reduce their influence, and their ability to cause trouble and reroute public funds to their friends.

And in a true free market system, the banks would have failed. But they wouldn't, really. Because they knew there would be no bailout backstop, so they wouldn't have taken their stupid risks to begin with.

The free market hasn't failed. It hasn't even been tried.

It's the BIG OL' BAT'RY. You bunch of citified nerds. Have some respect for the Good-Old Boys.

You want nations that don't cheat on diplomacy?

If we're going to abandon reality, why don't we just add wizard units and inter-dimensional portals too?

Unfortunately, after a long period of thrusting its way into new markets, it sadly shrivelled into a limp entity that was incapable of further market penetration.