Comment: Re:Almost no one is killed by "assault weapons" (Score 1) 1862
New Hampshire has a lower murder rate than France.
This is irrelevant because murder rate is not the same statistic as the rate of gun violence. The latter would be a more useful comparison.
And where is the most murder in the US? In the places with the most gun control, like Chicago. Places like New Hampshire prove unequivocally that you can have freedom and low murder rates at the same time.
This demonstrates correlation, not causation. In fact, you confirm this and contradict the premise of your argument (that gun control does not decrease the occurence of gun violence; either that or you changed arguments half way through) in the sentence that follows:
The problem of violence is not one of tools (guns, knives, hammers or plain old hands and feet) but one of economy. The most violence happens in the poorest places, this is UNIVERSALLY true, in every city, state and nation. It doesn't matter if the homicides are gun-induced or not.
What is the rate of poverty in Chicago vs. that in New Hampshire? Not to mention the fact that you're comparing an entire state with a single metropolitan area. If you're going to accuse someone of being disingenuous, at least use a more coherent argument. Gun control alone won't stop people from murdering each other. Reducing the divide between rich and poor would likely be a more effective solution. However, I suspect this idea would be rejected as "socialism" by a large number of the US electorate.
Comment: Re:But Android is open (Score 5, Funny) 535
Comment: Re:So what? (Score 1) 134
Comment: Re:We'll probably still do it (Score 1) 179
Comment: Re:Dawkin's is a piss poor social scientist (Score 1) 862
I would be interested to see more evidence, other than the "god gene", as to the genetic basis for religion. From my understanding, the genetic predisposition has more to do with determining whether or not someone is susceptible to believe in religion, but does not predicate what that belief is. If religious belief was largely predicated on genetics, we would probably see a more random distribution of belief systems.
Most of us do have a genetic predisposition to adopt a sexual orientation, it is possible that social influence is a factor in deciding what that orientation is. However, I believe the body of evidence points to genetics as the determining factor.
Comment: Re:Dawkin's is a piss poor social scientist (Score 2, Insightful) 862
Why is it bigotry to say that homosexuality should be stamped out, yet not bigotry to say religion should be stamped out?
There is one difference between the two: religion is a choice, homosexuality is not.
Comment: Re:Distance remains the same? (Score 1) 182
The Astronomical Unit (AU) is known to most as the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun
The summary omitted the word "mean". The linked article has the correct description.
Comment: Re:Explosive (Score 1) 427
mine the cavity
I can't help but think that this was an appropriate freudian slip. Unless it was done on purpose, in which case: well played sir.
Comment: Re:Valve finds Intel's driver to be great. (Score 1) 159
Comment: Re:news? (Score 1) 133
Comment: Re:Uh (Score 4, Informative) 161
"An attacker who successfully exploited a Gadget vulnerability could run arbitrary code in the context of the current user," company officials said in an advisory issued Tuesday. "If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker could take complete control of the affected system."
Comment: Re:Oblig: TED Talk (Score 1) 372
Drug discovery is hard. Immensely hard. Failures are often and expensive and government is poorly equipped to make entrepreneurial decisions. That's why we currently rely on private companies to make the decisions on who is a good research and who is a bad researcher when a company in total only makes two or three really profitable drugs every decade. We can allow those companies to fail if they can no longer produce. It's a lot harder to let a government program "fail" like that.
I don't think the fact that the private sector is better equipped at making enterpreneurial decisions has been adequately proven by evidence (however, neither has the converse). One big problem with allowing private, for-profit, companies to be the decision makers in matters of public health has one major flaw: medications that yield high profits don't necessarily address real health problems (I'm thinking of Viagra and Cialis here), and medications that address real health problems will not necessarily yield high profits. The private sector has little interest in addressing health problems that are not profitable.
Comment: Re:Well, duh (Score 1) 305
... if I make $1 a year and you make $255,999 a year together we "average" $128,000.
Your example would be more illustrative if you said 4 people make $1/year and one person makes $639,996/year, the average is $128,000 with only a single outlier (Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg subscribes to Linux Journal). The quoted statistic also doesn't account for the potentially more numerous Linux users who are too broke to subscribe to the Linux Journal.