World News Thread (Politics,whatever)


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I don't understand support of gun ownership. They have a single purpose. To kill, or at the very least fatally injure.

And as for comparing them with knives or fists, well... knives were developed for hundreds of different practical applications, and well, hands evolved... handily.
 
You curiously used both your time, and failed to provide an argument
No, I provided an argument, it just wasn't the one you were expecting and therefore have no counter for. I've said it before, I've played this game many times and I've never lost.
 
@ClockworkCoder I don't seem to think I chimed in for or against, I find the supposed belief that a ban is effective beyond proof unconvincing. Seeing as you acknowledge the possibility of harm, there is also a chilling effect of being able to inflict it.
Where I come from, and by the people I surround myself with, guns are used for hunting. A gun is no more a murdering instrument more so than a knife is, or fists, or if you will- that the CD-ROM burner engages in "intellectual theft."

@WizardStan An argument is both falsifiable and contains logic, you posted conjecture without content. I expect more from you, but if your view is what it is, you will keep winning in your own mind.
 
An argument is both falsifiable and contains logic, you posted conjecture without content. I expect more from you, but if your view is what it is, you will keep winning in your own mind
Ah, that's the good stuff. You sound so bitter.
 
Where I come from, and by the people I surround myself with, guns are used for hunting.
How often do you or your neighbours go hunting with a pistol or handgun, or any kind of automatic assault rifle? In this country at least, rifles and shotguns are quite commonly found in the country and used for hunting and 'species control', and automatic weapons are only normally carried by the police for special operations. All of the owners are logged by the authorities and required to lock the weapon in a secured cabinet when at home. Semi-automatic pistols are largely limited to the criminal classes, and even then it's only the fairly high up drug gang members who sport them, and thankfully full on automatic assault rifles haven't been picked up by the crims yet - the fact that guns aren't normal here means anyone walking around with one of those would immediately attract attention.
 
@ClockworkCoder
Where I come from, and by the people I surround myself with, guns are used for hunting. A gun is no more a murdering instrument more so than a knife is, or fists, or if you will- that the CD-ROM burner engages in "intellectual theft."

I do understand you point of view, and I feel that you express it well, at least in your latter posts, however, and perhaps this is a cultural difference, I do not agree. That being said, here's a little more from my point of view.

It's not like you go hunting just with a knife or fists. Put simply, guns make it much easier and effective to kill.

You don't often hear about "mass stabbings" or "mass killings by someone's fists". The act of killing by these means, by their nature, are personal and usually deliberate. So while it is true that guns have no connection with an intent to kill, they do make it much easier and in a way that's easier to psychologically disconnect the individual from the reality of the horror of it. I've known individuals who have fought in conflict situations and they don't even know if they killed anyone or not, they pointed in the direction and either looked away at the last minute, closed their eyes or shot blindly.
 
How often do you or your neighbours go hunting with a pistol or handgun,
It happens. Not sure what the distinction is.
or any kind of automatic assault rifle?
There is no such thing. If you flip the question, you will find the object of non-hunting quite covered by most any gun.
In this country at least, rifles and shotguns are quite commonly found in the country and used for hunting and 'species control', and automatic weapons are only normally carried by the police for special operations. All of the owners are logged by the authorities and required to lock the weapon in a secured cabinet when at home. Semi-automatic pistols are largely limited to the criminal classes, and even then it's only the fairly high up drug gang members who sport them, and thankfully full on automatic assault rifles haven't been picked up by the crims yet - the fact that guns aren't normal here means anyone walking around with one of those would immediately attract attention.
Modern pistols are semi-automatic, I take it you mean sub-machineguns, or burst-shot ones? Same situation here, only our cops have pistols by default, up from batons only, if that. That the general level of violence isn't great, doesn't mean the disparity between demographics is not there, as the graphic posted above alluded to, has a component that breaks down to origin of assailant.
 
Please dotnt compare a Fire Weapon whit a Knive:
As a Boyscout i learned to see Knives just as "TOOLS", there are a lot of positive Task you can do whit a Knive (Like cutting of food to make a meal, carving wood to make sculptures, smearing a Honey Bread, Open Gifts, )..
Or just Open your Beer/Cola/Fanta/BIO Trink whit the Bottle Opener of your Swiss Army Knive/Leatherman/Other Multitool..
Thinks you cant doo whit a Fire Arm,

Only for Shooting on a Range is a diverent kind of thing, because i could imagine that this could be fun, but this would also work whit Guns that are owned from the Range..
 
It happens. Not sure what the distinction is.

Between pistols and other guns? Length of the barrel usually, meaning the sights are further apart and increasing aiming accuracy.

Modern pistols are semi-automatic, I take it you mean sub-machineguns, or burst-shot ones?

No, I meant pistols. That they're almost all semi-automatic I didn't know, because I get most of my information about guns from wikipedia. You can accuse me of being tautological, but I wanted to be precise.

That the general level of violence isn't great, doesn't mean the disparity between demographics is not there, as the graphic posted above alluded to, has a component that breaks down to origin of assailant.

I feel you're looking at the image quite differently to the way I saw it. I didn't see anything of the differing upbringing of the kids, just that one had an innocuous looking chocolate and toy and the other had a pretty full on firearm, and the text pointed out the irony that the one that looks deadly is fairly widely available with relatively little background checks, but the other is banned from entry to the entire country, despite being a sweet and child's toy that kids the rest of the world over manage to play with without choking on.

Edit: Deleted spurious connecting word that my brain apparently inserted without alerting me.
 
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Energy consumption of Game of Thrones views is greater that Bitcoin mining, but less than that of begpackers.
Statement invalidaded by quick mafs calculation, see 2 posts further...


I don't understand support of gun ownership. They have a single purpose.
Make money for the gun industry.
I think there is a whole lobby behind it that pushes it like it's iphones... and they stay in fashion, strangely. In the past good for fending off the natives that want their land back. Or making sure your slaves do not flee. And in modern times they add heavy metals to the bullets (nuclear industry waste products) and blam... piercing bullets that coats the ground with fine radioactive particles on impact! (operation desert storm...radioactive storm)
To those I'm totally opposed; however, if you live in Australia, there are so many nopes.. I can see why you need defense. But I think a flamethrower is more effective; and a boomerang cheaper.
For the US&A (happy treason day) it protected them from England retaking the americas. Then kinda lingered on.
In the YURP, we revolted too many times against kings, so they prohibited them.

Back to world news:

FROST in Netherlands, yesterday! -1,6 degrees Celsius (at a height of 10 cm). Just 1 week after a heatwave.

And now for something totally different:

Code:
I don't understand support of ${AAA}. They have a single purpose. To ${BBB}, or at the very least ${CCC}.

AAA=BROOMS
BBB=SWEEP
CCC=Play Quidditch

AAA=CATS
BBB=SLEEP
CCC=lick themselves

 
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Energy consumption of Game of Thrones views is greater that Bitcoin mining, but less than that of begpackers.
Is that true, or just some of your usual hyperbole? I can't find a source for it, but I that could well be down to my search terms; I found a map of westeros ranked by oil revenues and a ranking of characters by dick size apparently, but nothing related to the energy cost used in the data centres that stream it. At the same time I have heard that data centres use a lot of energy, I just can't find any comparable stats for netflix or bitcoin to validate your argument.
 
It could be the same as whit Formula ONE:
The F1 Racers are using lots of Racing Fuel, it’s needs lots of Cerosine to flea around the World, there is even in the Desert in Dubai a F1 Circle,
But why’ll thy Racing, Burn Fuel and makes lots of CO2 , Millions of Peaple at home don’t Burn Fuel as they sit in front of they’re TV ...
 
Is that true, or just some of your usual hyperbole?
Napkin math time! (quick and dirty math). Total runtime is about 3 days (70 hours). 18.6 million viewers on average. Let's say they binge-watch.
Take a single servers to stream GoT, ignoring the streaming/dns/gateway/routers/servers/tablets/phones, just to TV... uh... 150 kwh?
Bitcoin mining is 70 Tw/year. = 70000000000 kw/ 8766 h = 7985398.1291353 [kw/h]

1 tv * viewers = 150kwh * 18.6 million = 150 * 18600000 = 2790000000 [kw/h]

Of course, that is only during the viewing and that's just 3 days.

so, yeah...
 
Neat. I do think you're mixing up your kwh with your kw/h in the second sum there, so you're actually comparing kw/h against kwh where the latter is energy and the former is... average power or something*. So I'm afraid you're only really comparing some numbers, and you'd need to check the units for your bitcoin mining stat and integrate them until they're comparable. 70TW sounds like a lot of power, but then it is bitcoin mininng so I don't know if it's real or actually some TWh stat over a certain timeframe.

*No it's not average power. If you run a 60W bulb for ten hours, the average is still 60W, but the W/h stat is 6W/h. The Wh stat is more useful, in that that bulb used 600Wh during its run, while the W/h stat is just some differential that doesn't seem to have any real world use.
 
Ouch, greatest error is that a tv is 150w (not kw). The conversion to kwh is onthissite Thanks @levi
0.15 kwh actually

kW = kWh / h
Thus:

TV power comsumption is 150w for 1 hour is 0.15 kwh, times 18.6 million viewers:

1 tv * viewers = 0.15 kwh * 18.6 million = 0.15 * 18600000 = 2790000 [kwh]

Bitcoin was 70000000000 [kwh]

now we have apples to apples: And GoT is just 2% of bitcoin consumption.... this invalidates the earlier statement.
 
Yeah, but assuming episodes of GoT are 1 hour long, you still need to multiply by the number of episodes, which for our purposes can probably be assumed to be all of them.

Personally I'd tend to discount the energy used by the TV by the way. People will likely watch something else if they couldn't watch GoT. But the energy used in the data centre probably isn't as small as you suspect; each data centre module probably uses a few kW, and can serve perhaps a good few dozen people watching at the same time. Apparently, episodes normally run for an hour with some time allowed for advertising, so actually 50 minutes if you're paid to stream it, with specials over 80 minutes long. 73 episodes in total apparently, and say 10% of that is specials it means a runtime for most people of (50/60*0.9+82/60*0.1)*73=64.7h.

Here we get into more hand wavy back of a beer mat type numbers. Say these data clusters use 5KW and can serve 100 simultaneous views, that's 5*64.7KWh for any 100 viewers or 324KWh, spread over the actual time they decide to watch the series. Times that by 18.6million viewers divided by the 100 accounted for by each data cluster, and I make that 6.02 GWh.

Now I still make that a fraction of a percent of a 7TWh figure for bitcoin. The difference is in the multiples, a GWh is a KWh preceded by 6 zeroes, while a TWh is a KWh preceded by 9 zeroes, so 1GWh is actually 0.1% of 1TWh. To be fair, I dunno if your figure includes those illegally sharing the video files, and they're probably using less efficient computers to share and view the files, but you'd have to have a lot of them to even get to 10% of what bitcoin uses I reckon.
 
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