nirvana

Do you really believe that if all guns disappeared tomorow, those who want to kill themselves would not find another way?

Because thats what most "gun related deaths" are-- suicides.

But it pads the statistics to make people who aren't paying close attention more fearful to talk about "gun related deaths" than "murders with guns", and it also helps avoid the fact that the murder rate in countries where guns have been banned is much higher-- even if they have to use knives to do it. (how often have you seen the murder rate in Britain brought up vs. the number of "gun related deaths" brought up there in this debate?)

Compare that number to the 1,500,000 times a year, according to the DoJ, that guns are used defensively by intended victims to stop violent crime. Constantly talking about how many people have been killed while ignoring how many have been saved is profoundly dishonest.

The rate of violent crime in the USA is around 640 per 100,000 while in the UK it is closer to 2,500 per 100k.

Clearly banning guns doesn't lower violent crime. In fact, in the UK, after they banned guns, violent gun crime skyrocketed.... because the criminals knew that their victims were disarmed.

" it's the job of any state to regulate actions that cause serious harm to people."

Shooting someone is already a crime and always has been.

Posessing a magazine with more than 7 rounds is not an action at all, and does not harm anyone.

The reason the parent used the word "nanny state" is because he's describing laws that prohibit things for which there is no victim.

Possessing a magazine does not cause harm to anyone. There are already laws against causing harm to people.

FWIW "High Capacity Magazine" is a loaded term. The AR system was issued with 30 round magazines so, these are normal capacity. But calling them "high capacity" is what people who want to ban them do to pretend like there's something unusual about them.

For anyone whose wondered why "gun nuts" want these "high capacity" magazines, the answer is very simple: Loading a mag is often a pain in the butt. It's a lot more fun to go to the range with a bunch of loaded magazines, shoot for several hours and then go home, rather than be loading magazines every 5 minutes. It's that simple. (Though of course there are cases where people have needed the higher capacity, like the recent news story about the shop-keeper who defended his store and customers with a pistol with 17 rounds.)

"Assault Weapon" is another made up term to make guns sound scary. Most people seem to think there are people running around with full auto machine guns out there.

In the 1990s the ban on "assault weapons" prohibited cosmetic and safety items, not anything that made guns more lethal. (EG: flash suppressor lets you not get blinded when shooting at night, "grenade launchers" are just tubes on WWII era weapons, grenades themselves long being made illegal, but the media loves to talk about the police discovering "grenade launchers", pistol grips and collapsable butt stocks are just ergonomics, the former promoting better form.)

Lately the popular term is "assault rifle" which have been effectively banned since 1934, and their manufacture totally banned since the mid 1980s. Plus if we're strictly speaking that term only applies to a particular rifle produced in germany in WWII.

The reason for this dishonest use of political terms is really easy: There's effectively no difference between an AK-47 and a hunting rifle, except that the AK has been demonized.

Previously demonized weapons: The "sawed off shotgun" which was a modification made by italian shop owners who wanted to be able to defend themselves against the mafia shaking them down, but didn't want to penetrate the wall and hit innocent bystanders. Thus shortening the barrel, which produces a wider spread and less collatoral damage. The mafia couldn't have that, so they got their politicans to demonize and then ban them. Racist gun control.

The "saturday night special" was nothing special at all, just the more popular firearm for poor black people living in dangerous areas to defend themselves. They couldn't afford more expensive firearms and they had a real need to defend themselves from the criminal elements, but we couldn't have that, could we? It's not a coincidence that the ghettos have become overrun with violence since the "saturday night special" was criminalized.

I could go on, the entire gun control political movement is based on misrepresentation (eg: "glocks are all plastic and undetectable by airport scanners!" which has never been true) and the ignorance of the general public.

Guns kill people like spoons make people fat. It's non-sensical, and proof positive that politicians don't have your best interests at heart when they say "oh, little girl, you should just get raped, rather than defend yourself with a pistol", which is what they're doing here.

Apple is far more efficient than companies like Google or Microsoft when it comes to reasearch. In the last 15 years, they have produced the iPod, iPhone, iPad, radically different computer designs, OS X, Final Cut, and quite a few other products.

Over the same period, google has produced PageRank. Microsoft has produced nothing innovative.

Apple pays less of its revenue in R&D, but that's because its revenue is so big.

Apple's spending $10B this year in CapEx. Some of that is for datacenters and some of that is for the new headquarters and stores.

That's $2B more, or about %25 more of the total than last year. If you just look at the expenditures on production (Eg: buying the equipment used to make their products) it seems to have grown ~%33 in the past year.)

It could easily be the case that Apple spends %10-%20 of its cash each year on these efforts, as it needs to scale its business at double digit rates.

Having 10X your annual CapEx spending in the bank doesn't seem exactly irresponsible. Quite the opposite.

You seem to be operating without a deep understanding of how the economics of companies and stocks work. Each dollar in cash adds a dollar to the value of the stock, assuming no multiple. So, someone paying an additional dollar for that stock is not overpaying, and thus is not considered a "fool".

Companies are valued by people like Buffett on their return on cash, or return on equity, and other such measures. Do the analysis for Apple and see what those figures are and then compare them to other companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google.

I think you'll find Apple is being well managed financially, and the value delivered to investors by these current strategies is quite good, as represented by these standard metrics (that require more research than the average journalist or investor will likely do, but that value and growth investors regularly do.)

Thus you invocation of the "greater fool" theory is not supported, and I challenge would be completely undermined if you calculated these metrics.

True, but that's not what's happening here.

If a majority of shareholders wanted this proposal, or some other proposal, they could get it in the proxy statement and then get it passed.

What's happening here is a lawsuit to try and do an endrun around the process by which the shareholders exercise their rights.

Hell, shareholders vote for the members of the board of directors.... shareholders could choose to nominate and vote for board members that support the idea if they wanted.

Debate the magic of Steve Jobs if you want, but I don't think anyone can deny that one of Apple's strengths is in avoiding conventional wisdom and finding a more profitable path.

Imagine if people sued Apple to try and make them license their OS to others![1]

This is the worst kind of back seat driving.

[1] I do think that Apple licensing iOS to companies like HTC, Samsung, etc. with a strict quality control program would make good business sense, but despite being long Apple, I realize it's not my place and there are probably many factors that I'm not aware of. The problem of not being able to meet demand, and needing to compete at the lower end of the price spectrum would be solved by my proposal, but Apple likely has other plans to solve this problem. At the end of the day, it's up to the Management Team and the Board to address these issues, not minority shareholders!

Can I sue politicians for lying? Why is it that this is only a one way street?

Hell, frankly, I think that heads should roll for the bailout. It is not authorized under the constitution, and it is the largest financial heist in history.

A bunch of politicians can simply steal american money and give it to banks, and get away with it? Really? And people are upset, but they blame the banks only?

And then forgive the "debt" they created and pretend like it was "paid back".

It's still going on too.

Right now, every month, they are handing out $40B a month buying "distressed assets".

You know how to get rich? Be well connected, make a loan to someone who then turns around and defaults (he got the loan money, so he's well paid) then get the politicians to write you a check!

There's no oversight now, the Federal Reserve-- a private bank owned by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, probably Rothchild family, et. al. is the one spending the money. No legislation is needed to make it legal.

It's stealing more money every month than all the organized crime has stolen in this countries entire history!

And it's not even worth a mention in the local papers.

That's messed up!

It's true.

One of the reasons I left Amazon was that I was given the job to deploy code regularly (about weekly) at 1am or so, and one evening, there was a problem due to work of another team, so it escalated and we spent 6 hours dealing with it. We rolled the change back right away, but for contractual reasons their code had to be fixed and deployed and there was an interdependency. Fortunately, it wasn't my team's mistake, but I had to be there to help test it, etc.) So, it's finally working at 7am, and I stuck around for 30 minutes to make sure it kept working before going to sleep around 7:45AM.

I emailed my boss about it, and of course he was getting emails the whole while as the tickets status was changing.

Still, the fact that I showed up at 10:15 for the 10AM meeting that morning was "unacceptable" and I got chewed out. (~2 hours sleep!)

I made the mistake of thinking that my HR rep might be someone to talk to about this, because I wasn't sure how to make it clear to him that it was kinda unreasonable (Especially since I told him I'd be late for the meeting)... and that's when I found out that everything I told her was written up in an email & sent to him.... resulting in getting chewed out yet again for going to HR!

The lesson: as a programmer, never work for a boss who can't program, or at least, be very wary of it!

I can't compare to other web properties, but when I worked at Amazon, the store going down was a regular event. Something broke almost daily, though it was rare for the whole store to go down. (EG: You might not be able to search, or checkout might be down, etc.)

The store went thru periods of relative stability, and relative lack of stability, and in the periods where it was not doing so well, it (or a major piece of functionality) would go down in some key area at least once a week, sometimes multiple times a week during the holidays.

While it's been several years and I'm sure they've improved reliability, the sheer mass of the store made it very slow to evolve. And as an ex-amazonian sometimes I go and check for bugs that were issues back in the day- several of them have come back over the years, which is not surprising given that the entire group that was working on the parts I was working on disbanded because so many people were driven off by bad management. (A one-two punch in that case, a bad manager backed by another bad manager, neither of which had any technical knowledge.)

At the time I worked there, large swaths of code in the store had no team who was responsible because the team had been disbanded in one of the regular shuffles of employees. Amazon had a tendency to get a team together to do a feature, launch it, get the PR and the stock bump, then disband the team and put them on other projects. Of course some of these things stuck around if they were successful, but there was a lot of cruft from past efforts like: Local restaurant menus, the movie times system, various "social shopping features" (a perennial favorite to try again and again.) Hell, they used to have catalogs for mail order merchants- scanned paper catalogs!

At the time, they were claiming that "AWS is what we built the amazon store on!" (which was totally false, S3 was engineered completely separately from the store, and to its credit, as obidos and gurupa were crap. The only thing the store shared with AWS for at least the first several years was being hosted in some of the same datacenters.)

At least at the time I worked there, I'd call it a mess held together by the code equivalents of duct tape and bailing wire.

One of the things Amazon excels at is customer service, so when these problems would impact the customer, their bacon was often saved by customer support fixing the problem manually (eg: messed up orders, etc.)

Granted, operating at Amazon's scale is not trivial matter. But Amazon is a retailer and stock marketing company (Eg: one of their primary products is Amazon stock), more than an engineering company.

I'm kinda amazed that people perceive them as a "tech giant" along with Google, Facebook and Amazon. Shows the power of a good (actually, GREAT) side business like AWS. They get the credit for building something good and scalable with AWS, but of course it was a separate team lead by a senior executive with enough political clout to shelter that team.

Can someone whose used both compare this to Unity3D for me? I know Unity is closed source, but it's the one I've used in the past (and found it really nice.)

How much harder is Torque3D to develop for (or is it easier?)

I've just been made aware that there is evidence that someone has been trying to steal property worth more than $1M!

We need a prosecutor to draw up charges...oh, wait.

Who prosecutes the prosecutors?

"Startup" used to mean a "business that is starting up"... somehow it became a very narrow definition meaning "businesses that get venture funding".

I guess a "startup visa" under the narrow definition is an improvement, but it isn't really what countries should be doing.

Frankly, there's nothing any country has that is going to be lost by letting immigrants in. Every country benefits from immigrants.

But if you're going to encourage entrepreneur immigrants, you should be open to anyone with a business plan, and enough experience and minimal personal assets necessary to make the business a success.

Since this is difficult to determine, don't try to determine it. Let people just apply and take them.

If, a year later, they've gotten in trouble with the law then send them packing... but otherwise, that's what a real "startup visa" would look like, in my opinion.

Fortunately there are countries who take this kind of approach.

Chile wants you to be able to support yourself and have a clean record with the local police.

Panama wants you to form a corporation and put $5,000 in the bank.

For americans, the Netherlands wants you to form a corporation and put $11,000-$15,000 into the bank. (via the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty)

I'm sure other countries have similar programs. For instance, Equador is reasonably open to americans who want to live there.

I don't see Chile, Panama or the Netherlands being overrun with problematic immigrants.

Despite the quarter being a week shorter, YoY growth on the iPhone and iPad unit sales was around %30.

So, even if that's what Wall Street expected it seems ... off... to be down so much.

I think the reality is, some people expected %50 growth, and Wall Street doesn't like the fact that the margins are smaller.

The margins being smaller, however, goes hand in hand with what it takes to produce the massive growth... and the margins will improve.

Which is why markets aren't perfectly efficient... and people have an opportunity to profit from this kind of nonsense.

CapEx going forward is $10B vs. $8B in the past. That doesn't account for all of it (lower margin due to the mini is part of it) but apple is a manufacturing machine and spends a lot of money in early product cycles to get supply brought on line.

This impacts GM in the short term, with profitability increasing over several quarters.

It appears that this was due to supply issues for the new iMac. A bad situation- they've announced the new product, so the old product is less desirable, yet they can't supply the new product during Christmas.

They kinda osborned themselves.

While the large PC industry is declining (according to Tim on the conference call) and Macs are generally doing better- growing or declining less, depending on the quarter- I don't think Apple's Mac business is destined to become a hobby.

Speaking of hobbies, the AppleTV device is selling more every year.... pretty soon it may not be a hobby at all.

I don't know. I'm new to the language, and after doing the "crash course for erlang developers" and reading the release notes about a month ago, I believe I read that there wasn't full coverage, and that it was expected in 8.0 (or maybe 7.4?)

You probably have forgotten more than I know about this language, so I'm just going to assume I'm mistaken (or was reading something out of date.)

Yes, there's one reason not to use Elixir that I know of: [Edit: It appears I might be wrong on this.]

It doesn't fully cover the erlang syntax. There are a few things you can do in erlang that you can't in elixir.

As I understand it, this will be resolved relatively soon, in an upcoming release, possibly only in a matter of months.

Elixir and erlang can be mixed pretty easily, so there's no harm in trying a module in elixir just to see how you like it. Underneath, it's "erlang all the way down", so you're unlikely to run into problems.

USA v. $124,700 shows that the coruption extends all the way up the ranks. The 8th circuit is corrupt. (and the supreme court has upheld this as well, I'm sure, making it corrupt.)

For the record, nowhere in the constitution is the government given the power to seize property, without a warrant describing its evidentiary nature in advance.

Asset Forfeiture is nothing more than theft.

And every prosecutor, cop, or judge who engages in it or allows it is a criminal.

They want toughness on violent crime, not government agents perpetrating crimes for their own benefit.

These agents profit from destroying people's lives, and they Break the law when they do so.

The problem is, who is going to prosecute the prosecutors? Whose going to collect evidence? The police who enjoy protection by prosecutors? The judges who work for the same employer?

It does fall under criminal law because they are stealing his hotel.

Theft is a crime.

Of course, whose going to prosecute the prosecutors?

Police operate using violence. Markets operate with free exchange. Thus you posit a contradiction.

Did you vote libertarian? Are you going to now?

Because both major parties are all in favor of this. Biden was the architect of the drug war that was the excuse for giving the police the power to steal property, and Reagan was the president who signed it into law.

In the past 30 years, thru administrations of both parties, nobody has repealed this law.

The abuse of that law started immediately, and has gone from highway robbery (cops simply pulling over people who look rich and taking their money, never charging them) to a massive $6M heist perpetrated by the FBI where they stole massive amounts of platinum and gold in a "daring" morning raid.

Did you vote for this? IF you really are just now finding out about it, then bully for you and please, consider voting for liberty next time around.

Personally, I've been astounded at the frequency of personal attacks and snotty responses.

The signal to noise on HN is something like 1:100.

It's sad. I don't comment here anymore simply because there is no point when you never get comments from people who even bothered to read what you wrote or will honestly disagree.

Worse there are people who go out on personal vendettas, engage in nothing more than harassment and a form of stalking, and those people are not punished, but dare to post scientific information that disagrees with global warming and you get hellbanned.

That's the cause- the moderation is done by unaccountable people who moderate for political correctness at least as much for politeness. Certainly people who cant' muster anything more than personal attacks are allowed to get away with it, while those being attacked are often censored.

The people who are the cause of the problem like the situation because their egos are getting stroked, so they see no need to change it.

I've solved it for myself-- I just never bother to read the comments these days (for many months at a time.)

If there's nothing intelligent said on hacker news comments, why bother with them?

Suggestion: Put comments on your blog. You might get better feedback that way. There are many people who have given up on hacker news but still use it to find links. (I mean how many times do you want to put up some cogent information only to have it mindlessly attacked by idiots? Either its the fashion of the time, or hacker news is overrun with narrow minded anti-intellectuals.)

It's a shame you chose to ignore my point and make a response that is this dishonest.

An iPod touch is a great device for editing documents, watching videos, or even creating videos.

You're not even trying to understand my point, are you? I never the shuffle was anything like brave new world. I pointed out that it was an exercise in low cost mass manufacturing.

Do you hate apple so much that you're going to claim that the walkman proves that they aren't innovative with the shuffle, when that isn't even the point of discussion?

It's a shame that you chose to ignore the point I was making, and instead post this snide, narrow minded response. Alas, this is typical of the anti-intellectualism that pervades hacker news these days.

Of course the reason you did this is that you know what I say is true. You just are an apple hater and can't even admit that this is what they're doing.

Also typical of hacker news: Burying comments that point out that others have got nothing but personal attacks, while upvoting personal attacks. Everyone who engages in this is, by definition, anti-intellectual.

So, go ahead and downvote me, it just proves to me that you are not worth wasting time on, and that this site is full of narrow minded anti-intllectual bigots.

Make a counter argument, and I can respect that. But you don't. Probably because you can't, right?

I can't speak to the other companies, though I know google want's "all the worlds info at your fingertips" which is a reasonably high ideal... I can speak to what Apple is doing as someone whose followed the company closely for a couple decades.

Apple doesn't care whether you buy the 3.5", 4.0", 7.85", or 9.8" screen.

Apple is bringing the personal computer to the 6 billion other people who weren't able to get in on the PC revolution.

Their slogan in the 1980s used to be "The Computer for the Rest Of Us." While it isn't used for marketing, the mission hasn't really changed.

There were two key issues that prevented those people from participating in the PC revolution.

The first was that you had to be trained how to use a computer. You had to be at least literate, and you had to spend the time to overcome the significant usability hurdle that even Mac OS X presents to the random person. (Eg: your grandmother.)

iOS has revolutionized computer usability such that your grandmother can use it, even if she never made it to high school (bless her heart.)

The second is price/distribution. PCs were for the relatively rich. And while Apple never seemed to compete on the lowest end, that's simply because most people who think Apple makes expensive products think about $300 laptop as "affordable". Instead, Apple put a $50 computer in peoples hands- the iPod shuffle. Sure, it might not be as full featured as a laptop, but you have to walk before you can run.

Lets also not forget that there's a big difference between a PC that draws serious amps and thus needs a house wired for electricity... and a mobile that runs on batteries and can be charged with solar power.

Apple is toiling away building the greatest development/ design/ manufacturing/ distribution machine in history. Of course they have some key partners in this- foxconn and their suppliers.

That iPod shuffle has been replaced with the inexpensive iPod touch, which really is a PC. And of course there is the iPad mini, also a new entry on the low end pc market.

Just because they didn't choose to make zero margin crap that nobody can use (Eg: windows running netbooks), doesn't mean they aren't working their tails off to address this under filled market. They are coming in from the high end, which makes sense given that they can't make the devices fast enough. Hence scaling the company across all those axis I mentioned.

I'm sure this sounds like a radical idea, because "everyone knows" that Apple is only interested in selling "shiny things to rich people". Just keep thinking that!

Whether android ultimately beats them to it, or not, their mission is pretty damn noble, as far as I'm concerned.

The post-PC era they created is going to empower a massive number of people.