Well, I just went to Wikipedia for five minutes, but it's not really helping you. The "crime in canada" article says:

"The number of murders dropped to 594 in 2007, 12 fewer than the previous year. One-third of the 2007 murders were stabbings and another third were by firearm. In 2007, there were 190 stabbings and 188 shootings. Handguns were used in two-thirds of all firearm murders."

So, really hard to say if "blunt force trauma" is most of the remaining third, but probably is, along with strangling and eye-poking and whatnot. So it's basically one-third each to clubs/hands, knives, and guns.

OK, so how do Americans bump each other off? Googling "by weapon" got me: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004888.html

For that same 2007, it says 10,086 by gun, 1796 by cutting and stabbing, 647 by blunt object, 854 by hand, 130 arson, 1016 all other reasons.

Dividing by ten to get those numbers in Canadian proportions, your 1797 stabbings become 180, about our 190 stabbings; your blunt-object+hand becomes about 150, same neck of the woods, anyway.

Only the gun numbers are really proportionally higher. Over FIVE TIMES higher.

Not my area of expertise, or a political topic I care much about, but simple stats are easy to look up. They say that while you may denigrate the source of this statistical analysis as a "cartoon", the information appears to be quite correct and your "the same murder rate just shifts to other weapons" thesis is not supported.

The Rodney King beating was taped with a video camera you could not have fit in a shoebox. Now, of course, you can do decent video with a camera you can hide in your hand.

There are certain minima to the light-collecting-spot enforced by the laws of optics, of course, but it seems clear that the police will soon not be able to tell whether they are being video'd or just watched. Glasses? They'll look like shirt buttons. And folks who know in advance the location of the police action (say, protestors) will be able to carpet an area with cameras that are very hard to spot.

A lot of cameras will just be running all the time, pointing in four directions from every bicycle helmet and car, for use in accident investigations. Anything that happens in front of any place of business will be on the private anti-theft video cameras of the business - this is all already true, but in a decade or so, it won't be a few businesses, a few cars, a few cyclists, it'll routinely be everybody.

A certain amount of the "war on photography" is about police pushing back against people *visibly* trying to intimidate them by sticking cameras in their faces; police do NOT like to be in any position but domineering control of a volatile situation - a big part of their training - so they push back hard when pushed, challenged, mocked in any way. Obeying the law is secondary to Controlling The Situation. (I have some sympathy there; it's basic human psychology that this keeps them safer; never back down before a crowd.) But people invisibly photographing them - well, what are they going to do, arrest everybody in sight of any stop-and-frisk and demand they all be subjected to some kind of wanding that will find all six cameras about their person? Police routinely get away with high-handed, illegal behaviour with one or two people who get in their face, but there are limits.

Nope, I think its a lost cause. Anything that happens in public sight will presumably be recorded, multiple times, more or less *automatically*, in a matter of years.

Everybody regards a different kind of problem as your "busted shitter" though. Proprietary software companies regard problems that won't affect sales by much to be such. There are bugs in Excel VBA 2010 that were identified in Excel 97. Microsoft just can't be bothered; nobody is going to stop the whole corporation automatically buying MS-Office because a few VBA macro fans in accounting and engineering have to do awkward workarounds. So despite having all those piles of cash to pay people do dig in to that hard, dirty thicket of code, they don't.

There's some truth in your thesis, but mostly it is disproved by the amount of large, complex, and good FLOSS projects out there. Since they are large and complex, it is utterly certain that they contained a number of your "busted shitters" on the long road from Line 1 to being PostGIS or GIMP or Drupal. And here they are. Even that fact that some or all examples have *current* "busted shitters" proves nothing as long as there are some fixed ones in the project history.

Oh, and the old FLOSS/communism association - actually FLOSS is *worse* than communism from the point of view of somebody who imagines work-organization systems to be proof of moral value or failure. It's not "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs", it's worse. From each according to his ability to write code that others agree to commit, to everybody, everything. We'll just dump mountains of free stuff on you that you didn't even ask for and *don't* need. Talk about moral hazard that disinclines you to the virtue of doing your own work! Truly, we are horrible people.

What about the guys who can shoot people legally? Now that American citizens have officially been declared "fair game", the rest of us foreigners, (who already lived only by continued forbearance), thought you'd finally get concerned...

I wasn't tops in physics, but the lecture on Faraday cages really stuck with me - no ifs ands, or buts about how it completely separates the inside from outside electromagnetic worlds. So rather than running around pulling out batteries or modifying your phone, what's so hard about a metal phone case?

You may not need a tinfoil hat, but a tinfoil pouch may not be paranoid...

The 1541 was a *serial* communicator, which kind of wasted the possible data-transfer rates off a floppy disk itself.

I recall a review of the C64 as a machine for your kid, which offered in the unkind review comment: "For both game-playing and educational software, the slow floppy disk may test the patience of most children. In fact, it would be possible for some smaller children to actually grow up while waiting for their game to start".

"...become targets of threats, harassment and abuse..."

God God, is somebody dragging them into police stations, questioning them for hours, threatening them with 30 years in jail?

Because those actions would be threats, harassment, and abuse indeed.

...about 50 countries are estimated to have it. Sometimes called "Latent", but I prefer the "Threshold" term, it has the right connotation of stepping right up to the line and voluntarily stopping.

Nation that CAN build a bomb in months flat = Nation not to stage a major invasion of. (By the time Russia, Pakistan, or the US could marshal up forces to take on a nation of 70 million, the first bombs are coming off the line).

Nation that HAS built a bomb = target

And Iran knows it.

Understanding that doesn't involve liking or trusting them. Meanwhile this has to be the ninth time in a dozen-odd years that the "Attack Iran" nuts (after their Iraq debacle, "nuts" is the only appropriate word) have played Lucy and the Football with gullible US conservatives. The big windup, then no bomb.

That issue, in turn, has far more to do with who is allowed and who is not allowed to designate a particular location as an "Al Qaeda camp".

Q: Why are they Enemies Of The State?
A: Because they live in an Enemies Of The State location.
Q: Why is it such a location?
A: Because Enemies Of The State live there.

It never fails to amaze me how many people imagine this is some cut-and-dried obvious bit of detection, presumably with rows of tents and stacked rifles. People saw a couple of videos like that from the 90's and imagine there are still these "Al Qaeda camps" out in the desert. Currently, most drone-strike locations are somebody's family house in a village full of same. They are decreed to be targets because of the people observed going in and out.

The selection is completely unrestrained by the knowledge that any career or legal trouble will befall those who accidentally blow up the bakery.

There's a decent Wikipedia article on it. Accusing your management of allowing one of the now-classic dysfunctional management failures to grow could get some discussion going.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baikonur_Cosmodrome

  Note how the first sentence ends in "world's first and largest operational space launch facility".

Water is actually of very little help if you hit at more than 100 MPH. Ask the Challenger seven.

Except for 20,000 ft having weather issues of its own, your dream spaceport would be the top of Mt. Chimborazo in Ecuador, 2 deg S of the equator and your first four miles up is free. Or as wikipedia puts it, the top is the furthest point on Earth from the planet's centre. I concede the thick covering of glaciers remain a technical challenge. And the status of eco-tourism mecca, a slight political one.

...like hurricanes and moistly corrosive air.

He didn't threaten to cut anything, but to make people pay by usage. Flat rates blind the market to resource consumption, usage-based fees open the market's eyes.

I'm sure Ghengis Khan had to do a lot of wrestling and so forth as a kid, but Julius Caesar, a patrician from birth, probably never had to touch one of the lowlife brutes he commanded, much less beat one up with his fists to establish his leadership.