That system go shut down by the Church of Scientology. The powers that be fear a populous they can not spy on.

No, it did not say that other species practiced infanticide. It said that infanticide was much more detrimental to us (and what had evolved into us) due to the extended period of helplessness during infancy. Infanticide was much too expensive for us than it is for lions and such.

Certainly there's many sexual behaviours which are entirely legal in the UK between consenting adults, which might *look* like rape if you took a photo, would that be rape porn?

I can see where they're coming from, but you run into the same problems as defining if an image (or video etc.) is pornographic or not.

Unfortunately cracking down on actual rape wouldn't make as many headlines as promising to band internet porn.

By the time they've finished doing that, you'll probably have worked out what was causing the slowdown, and either fixed it, or allowed it to fix it's self.

Cancel that. It just started working again sometime in the last twenty minutes.

My domain is completely fubar and has been for two days. Luckily it's just an old-fashioned vanity web page, so it's not a big deal.

You may have a point... as I said in the original post, I don't doubt that the ease of which guns can be used to kill, and the relative ease of availability of them, probably does have some impact on some murders being committed or not... get rid of guns entirely and I'd agree that at least SOME lives will be outright saved... not all gun deaths would suddenly become knife deaths, that seems obvious... So I think there's logic in your statement.

However, I have to disagree with the last sentence... we live in a violent society... whatever the underlying reasons, it's a true statement... yes, most of us frankly never encounter violence, thankfully, but it's there and all around us... given no other societal changes, would removing guns make confrontations less likely? I don't see how, in fact, it seems to me they'd be MORE likely... if I'm sure that guy I beat to the parking space at the grocery store doesn't have a gun then it seems I'd be MORE likely to do it and risk pissing him off because the worst that happens is a fist fight.

More importantly though, even if your assessment is correct, I'd suggest that you'd be putting lives at risk... it's undeniable that guns are pretty frequently used to save lives (it's a shame the biased media won't report on those incidents)... I'm not going to sit here and say that happens MORE than murder with a gun does, but it does happen, and even if it's only some fraction of murders with a gun, are those lives somehow less important? If I save my own life via self-defense with a gun, does that life saved somehow matter less than the guy around the block that had a fist fight and didn't die because the other guy didn't have a gun to shoot him with?

On balance, given an inherently violent society, and given the inherent right (responsibility, really) of every living being who wishes to remain living to defend themselves, I think having guns is better than not, although I'm totally willing to acknowledge that having guns sometimes is a contributing factor to bad things happening. They're a necessary evil, if you will.

You're right that suicides are usually lumped in with "gun crimes" because it makes the problem look much worse for those who have that agenda... but in this case, you're mistaken: table 20 is dealing with murders only... at least, that's what I take the column header that specifically says "murders" to mean. I 100% agree with your point, but in this case it's not a factor.

Would it surprise you to know that, well, you're wrong?

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-20

I'll save you time: while you would be correct to say that firearms are responsible for more murders than any other cause, the number of non-firearms murders is very nearly half that of firearms... roughly 8k to roughly 4k.

The point being: yes, granted, guns are used more often in murders... but it seems like those without guns are managing just fine without them too. Besides, I'm pretty sure those getting killed with fists and feet don't feel any better about it than those shot with a gun.

Now, a little thought experiment: if there were no guns, what do you think would happen? Would the TOTAL number of murders go down by roughly 8k? Or, would the number of murders not using guns GO UP? I hope you wouldn't try and say the former because if so, sir, you're retarded. Would non-firearms murders go up 8k? No, I very much doubt it... but the number WOULD go up.

And why is that? Simple: violent people are violent people. Yes, guns might make it easier for them to kill... but a good percentage of them are going to murder WITHOUT a gun just the same... and hey, to use the anti-gun argument against them: isn't ONE murder with a boxcutter too much? Better ban them! If we can save just ONE LIFE by banning baseball bats, shouldn't we?

I'm not saying that if we removed guns from the equation that we wouldn't save a few lives. I think we would. There's no doubt some murders that wouldn't occur at all if there were no guns. The problem is that guns UNDENIABLY save lives, nearly every day. Are those lives saved somehow less important than those saved if there were no guns? I'm not even claiming the number of lives saved by guns is greater than those taken by murder with guns (although I believe that's the case, but I don't have a reference so I won't claim it)... I'm just saying if it's all about saving lives (hint: IT'S NOT) then a life saved with a gun is just as valuable as one taken with a gun.

People who want to kill will, by and large, find a way. That's the bottom line and that's the fundamental problem in our society, the fact that people WANT to kill (putting self-defense aside of course). The fact that guns might make it easier is tangential to the root cause and while banning guns might save a few lives, the impact won't be nearly as large as you want to think it might be and we'll be talking about banning the NEXT inanimate object quickly. Stop trying to attack something that's a proximal cause AT BEST and get to the root of the problem. That's the way we might actually make a difference in this country. We don't have a "gun violence" problem, we have a VIOLENCE problem. Any time you see "gun violence", that just shows there's an agenda at play and that person actually cares very little for saving lives and is more interesting in exerting and extending control (Oh, did our president say that? Hmm, point proven!)

I too am a game developer... no, not professional as you are, but I've written almost a dozen games on a number of platforms over nearly 20 years, sold most of them and even had two nominated for some awards years ago. I won't put myself on the same level as you, but I do have some relevant experience.

I would agree if you said the "never" statement is hyperbole... but you wouldn't argue the underlying gist of it, would you? Certainly it's true that a game programmer will seek to MINIMIZE object allocations and deallocations as much as possible within the performance-critical sections of code, right? I think that was what he was getting at, even if he didn't say it very well. Yes, I'd agree, what he LITERALLY wrote is false... but I suspect it was just a case of being overzealous with word choice... get him in a quiet room and I bet he says "yeah, I didn't actually meant NEVER there".

Bottom line: just because you're using a GC'd language and you CAN ignore memory management, doesn't mean you SHOULD. That goes for JS, Java or any other GC'd language in existence.

I hate to go off on a tangent... but that won't stop me from doing so, because I think it's actually the core of the issue and is entirely non-technical:

This all goes back to the abysmal state of many (most?) "modern" developers.

If you grew you with computers at the time I did, the late 70's/early 80's, and you learned to program those early 8-bit home computers, you kinda take this stuff for granted (memory management I mean). You just inherently think differently than "modern" developers do. You see things at a much lower level... even when you're working at a high level of abstraction, your mind automatically goes lower... instantiating an object in Java? You're mind at some level is thinking about how memory is being allocated, how the object reference is being stored, etc. Hell, you even start to think about the messages the OS is passing around, how those messages must map to C functions, and how those functions ultimately resolve down to assembly.

I'm NOT saying you KNOW all those details... not really... you just know the concepts... and I'm certainly not saying such details are relevant most of the time because they're not... I'm just saying that's the way our brains work... we can "see" all the levels below the one we're actually working on in our minds' eye, if only in a conceptual sense, and it happens without trying.

I's because we generally started learning at those low levels and everything over the years has built up logically from there. Most of us started with BASIC but quickly jump to Assembly because that was the only way to achieve what we really wanted to (games, mostly). Once you're at that level, it's an entirely different mindset. Those of us that also had an electronics background go a step further because we even go below the Assembly level sometimes (and that wasn't all that uncommon back then... of course, the electronics were considerably simpler and easier to understand than they are now).

That's a VERY different evolution than the kid that STARTS with Java or JavaScript or whatever now, then goes to school and learns more high-level stuff. And it shows in daily work life all the time! I see people constantly in my career who aren't really bad developers, but they are, somehow, lacking... it usually shows when things aren't working as expected. They have a difficult time breaking things down and figuring out what's going on. Oh, they can Google an answer as well as anyone, and hey, probably 9 times out of 10 that's sufficient. But they're just stumped beyond belief that one time... they just can't get into the details and work the problem at a fundamental level. They don't REALLY understand how these machines, these operating systems, work. And that's a really bad state of affairs.

(to be fair, some of us that learned in the "ground-up" way sometimes have difficulty STAYING at a high level... we sometimes trip over discussions that are too abstract because our brains are searching for the details that aren't there, and really aren't even relevant... that's a whole other discussion, but it's a true phenomenon).

All of this... to try and pull it back to topic relevance... means that relatively simple things like designing your code to minimize object allocation and deallocation seems mysterious to a lot of modern developers... they don't always get why it's important, and it seems like some black art or something even when they do... to us old-schoolers, I guess that's what we are now, it's actually quite natural to think that way. Even in JavaScript, where I've done considerable work, and highly complex work, GC has never presented a big issue for me, primarily because I've ALWAYS thought about it and know how to avoid it at the right times. The language itself isn't flawed, modern developers' ability to use it effectively is.

We're probably past the point of making developers better by and large... the time of kids starting close to "bare metal" and building from there is long gone in most cases... hell, how many modern developers have EVER done Assembly in their lives, outside of perhaps one class in school? So I guess the only real choice is we have to come up with a technological solution somehow, and we'll continue to have articles like this.

I'm 5'9" and I wear almost nothing but jeans and jean shorts most days. I don't wear skin-tight jeans, but neither am I wearing "fat guy" jeans... they fit "right" in my eyes: no struggle to button, but they're far from cargo pants territory.

My Nexus 7 TABLET fits in the BACK POCKET of my pants without struggling to get it in and out. It's actually comfortable there (aside from the weight, which is a bit much and tries to pull my pants down). Now, yes, that's only true if I'm standing up... sitting ain't happening... this "phone" (phablet I guess is the term they invented?) should fit just as well as it's smaller.

Now, me personally, I don't want a phone this big. I have an S4 and I think it's just about perfect... I considered the Note II and I could see possibly going to that size, but that's the upper limit for me I think. To me, this phone is just too big to be carrying around all the time. But to say it doesn't fit in "regular" pants I just don't think is accurate. You most definitely do not need a fanny pack or anything like that.

I think modern developers have a very fuzzy idea of what "business logic" means. I model business logic all the time in my databases, completely without the use of stored procedures (or even custom functions for the most part). Just the fact that you use a foreign key constraint happens to be business logic, and it *absolutely* belongs in the database.

This idea that a database is just an adjunct to the application only works for startup companies or lightweight web applications. Once you have a mature company doing anything of any real complexity, you will end up with such problems as

a. databases being accessed by more than one application.
b. databases that outlive application (or several applications)
c. enough tragic "oops" moments from the application team that the company finally hires a real DBA and/or data architect to make sure that no matter what, the data has trustworthy characteristics and integrity on its own.

Yes, data IS more important to a company than your application. Get over it. Just like the money in the bank (and who it belongs to) is more important to the bank than its tellers. It's just a fact of life.

At least Ixquick is not a U.S. company: https://ixquick.com/eng/prism-program-revealed.html

While their searches aren't as fast as Google's, I have found them to be pretty good quality-wise.