One of the joys of kickstarter is that lame ideas like this will just go way.

You'll just piss off both sides by being reasonable. A lot of this info exists, but isn't correlated or understood. As poster after poster has pointed out the discussion about guns has become about being right, not about doing anything. As far as I can see there has to be a rough agreement on the bounds of regulation before anything else will be done.

I haven't read every post but there is another elephant in the room. Race. The vast majority of gun rights advocates are white, the vast majority of victims and criminals are people of color. The discussion becomes for the whites: you shouldn't take our guns because they (people of color) can't control themselves, and we need our guns to protect us from them. As for the violence: well, it's just a form of natural population control.

  When I was told this by an old cop I know, I was stunned. I said I didn't agree, but didn't try of convince him otherwise. I just wondered how to go around him.

Oh, as for the massacre of children, it was a random aberration and can't be controlled. This conversation occurred around the time of Columbine.

Amen

As a moderate, the short version of my point is that I don't believe that crime is a relevant point in gun laws. So if we discount crime as a reason what do we have left: politics and Liberty. Neither of which provide a reason for heavily regulating gun ownership. So if we don't have a reason to regulate guns, we shouldn't.

On the other hand a reasonable low level of regulation to keep weapons out of the hands of the actively insane and to provide a minimum level of competence seems fine to me. As a young person in the late '70s going on my first of several unsuccessful hunting trips in Upper NY State I was required to attend an all day NRA sponsored class. We learned how to handle a rifle, and a pistol, safely, if not accurately, and how to clean and store the weapons we had. How to travel cross country safely with a rifle. What weapons were appropriate for hunting what. A .30-.06 is not good for squirrel. A .22 pistol is fine, if you like a challenge. I tried and didn't get any squirrel, but did bag 3 oaks and a good size pine. And, I don't care what anyone says, those tress kept ducking.

As for the statistics, I don't think they prove anything. We don't know why crime went up in the mid 20th century and we don't know why if fell in the late 20th century and has kept falling. Yes, crime fell in States with very open gun control laws, it also fell by the same amounts in States with very tight gun control laws. It has varied across counties and cities and neighborhoods. As the OP noted, there are very safe neighborhoods in Newark. I'm in NYC, the drop in crime here has been stunning. Happy, but still stunning.

Conservatives who want to overturn gun laws because guns stop crime are wrong; conservative who want to overturn gun laws because they never worked in the first place are right.

The second amendment is to ensure that The People maintain the means to protect their Liberties. It was purely political.

This article also disproves your point. There are lots of guns in Newark - that doesn't make it safe. There are lots of guns in Virginia, that doesn't make it unsafe. So stopping crime doesn't seem to work as a reason to allow or encourage gun ownership.

This leaves the political reason. I don't need guns to protect me from criminals, I need them to protect me from my elected officials. And, Verizon - but that is a different thread.

The point of the article is that no matter why it exists murder follows the same pattern in space and time as a disease. So an outbreak of murder and an outbreak of cholera look the same when mapped. A pebble and a raindrop are very different things, but the ripples they leave look the same in a pond.

I need to point out that the order of events in the OP may be backwards. Consider: since they (as noted in the OP) are all using the same basic technologies to achieve the same basic results (wealth, power, etc,) they will tend to come to the same sort of solutions. After that they will simply copy or steal the more successful of the detailed solutions. No central authority yet, same result, we are pushed into the Cloud. Once enough serfs are in the cloud then the Central Authority will arise.

This would tend to lead to the conclusion that control of the Cloud is very important. Hence the idea of regulation seems to make sense again.

This begs the question of who The Cloud belongs to. If it belongs to them, then we shouldn't trust it. If it belongs to us, then they shouldn't be able to control it.

ROTFLOL

You're kidding, right? I hope this is sarcasm and irony. It is the techie answer referred to in: The problem is techies don't want to, and can't think of how to make their software easy and safe for non techies to use.

And yes, the engineers who made Dropbox may not be techies, if techies are the ones who whine on /. instead of solving the problem.

I agree with the concerns that Apple is getting Big Brotherish, but, to me this looks like a case of Apple getting used as much as anyone else. If someone else owns a Copyright then Apple is required to enforce it. So complaints should be focused on Ravensburger and the German IP laws.

This is just another version of screaming "NAZI".

The differences between secure booting a computer and stoping the Axis powers should be perfectly clear. The Axis didn't need to "Listen", they needed to be stopped regardless of the sacrifice.

What is confusing is what if the troll did build the bridge. The term, as I read it in Wikipedia, has a more nefarious meaning then just being a landlord. A 'Rent-Seeking" troll would bribe people to block other bridges rather then try to make his better.

If you think I've misread this let me know.

Many thanks

There is a Post Hoc Fallacy error in your reasoning. As just one example, that was also when the social and political effects of WWII in Asia were finally being swamped by other factors. Japan was rising as a world, not just regional, power. Singling out Monetary Policy out of all of that noise doesn't have the explanatory power that is needed.

Mocking Rep. Paul and his beliefs reminds me of history. Just because an idea isn't popular doesn't mean it is wrong.

Hey circletimessquare & John Jorsett, Are you guys using the term "Rent Seeking" the same way? Since a lot of us are not economists and pay rent to keep a roof over our heads this is a confusing terminology. I know you guys didn't invent it, but could you link to a definition?

Capitalists don't want a pure fair marketplace, they want *Wealth* and to *Win*. Winning fairly isn't important, Winning is. Look at people from Lance Armstrong to Pete Rose to Joe Paterno for the relative importance of fairness to *Winning* and *Wealth*.