He didn't have full auto, he used a bump fire stock.
Full auto fires around 20hz. Well practiced bump firing is around 10hz. Well practiced semi auto pull is around 6hz.

Bump firing also sprays so bad it's not aimable beyond a few feet distance. The gun community is even more surprised than other people, most considered the bump stock as a joke doo dad for making noise and wasting money.





All vendors, even at a gun show, must do background checks.

All private sellers, regardless of where (at home, gun show, on the street, wherever), are not required to do checks - but are in practice held liable for subsequent gun crimes if they can't prove they had no idea the buyer was shady.

There is absolutely nothing special about gun shows. The gun show loophole is an entirely imaginary issue (I explained this earlier).




A traceable gun is just as capable of shooting a person as an untraceable gun.



Yes, anyone can put together that arsenal.
Especially anyone with a squeaky clean record who qualifies to be a gun owner no matter what the restriction - like the Vegas shooter.

Hence why *nothing proposed* would have had *any impact* on the Vegas events, short of confiscation raids nation wide and capital punishment for possession.





The reply was to : "You are more likely to be killed by a criminal if you have a gun than if you don't."

I have two interpretations of that chart

1) (my initial thought)
Assault understood as the legal meaning (brandishing, threatening, not necessarily killing).
Discharge understood as firing.
This is what the original math was based on.
But yes, it seems senseless because how can you die to brandishing?

You are correct regarding the "per year".
The original math does include the mistake of thinking it was cause of death, not per year chance of death.
That alters the result from 350'000 lifetimes for a 50/50 chance, down to 350'000 years for a 50/50 chance. AKA 4600 lifetimes worth of years for a 50/50 chance in the next year.

2) (your [likely correct] thought)
Assault understood as being fired upon.
Discharge understood as accidental (what else could it mean?)
This variant is computed below.
However, this challenges conventional assertion, because the common assertion is that accidents kill more than intentional. Maybe that assertion is crap.

1/24974 as caused by assault
That's a 99.995995835669095859694081845119% chance of dying by a cause OTHER than firearms.
Which requires around 17'000 trials for the chance of the next death to be 50% by firearm.
I.E. 99.995995835669095859694081845119% ^ 17'000 = 50.625%, or about 50/50.
AKA 226 lifetimes worth of years to have a 50/50 chance of death by firearm in the next year.

Referring to the study I linked earlier :
http://service.prerender.io/http://polstats.com/?_escaped_fragment_=/life#!/life
#2 version has a similar death chance to the polstats link, so the #2 variant is likely the appropriate understanding (not my initial understanding).

-schehearzade

There are a lot of parallels between advertising and copyright. Buy wholeheartedly in to either, and you end up sort of failing to accept the reality of their flaws.

Advertisers think they have a big problem whenever someone circumvents their ads. They panicked when VCRs came around and allowed people to record shows and fast-forward through ads. They panicked when DVRs came out and let people digitally skip through ads. And they are panicking now, with more and more people getting fed up and putting ad-blocking software on their computers or devices.

Copyright holders think they have a big problem when someone tries to circumvent their system, too. They worried about libraries giving people free access to books; but at least a physical book is pretty much limited to one person at a time. They freaked out about cassette tapes being easily copied with a dual cassette deck. They freaked out about people sharing MP3 music over the internet. They freaked out when DVDs came out with CSS protection which was circumvented almost immediately. They continue to freak out by pushing for ever more and more drastic DRM schemes, that are generally circumvented quite rapidly.

The general theme in both advertising and copyright is escalation; a sort of arms race. The problem is that that solution doesn't actually improve things for anyone, in either case. Ads get more and more offensive and annoying, more and more people block/skip them. Copyright gets more and more locked-down, more and more people circumvent it. In both cases, as the "legitimate" side squeezes harder, it ends up making the user experience better for those who circumvent it "illegitimately". See, for example, this good old comic from The Oatmeal:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

The web with adblock software is a massively better experience than the web without it. A pirated 1080p movie or TV show lets you skip the previews/commercials that are often unskippable on a DVD. And on and on.

This arms race doesn't have a good future. Creators and distributors must start wracking their brains to come up with whole new ideas, or at least variants of the old ones, that break that cycle and ensure that "illegitimate" users/viewers don't have a better experience than legitimate ones. I'm sure not holding my breath though.

I continue to be amused by the long lines of "inventors" of new gadgets, gizmos and things that go bing that are very simply re-discovering items that already exist. Case in point, the button hook, the button loop, the fastener loop or other names as it was known being rediscovered here. The original button hook, serving the same purpose as this device, was patented in 1851, with many variants following. Give yourself a pat on the back kids, and don't forget to pick up your trophy.

I think a lot of people are down on American cheese based on its worst, cheapest variants. *Good* American cheese is, hands down, the best cheese for a cheeseburger. I mean, there's no debate there. It has a mild -- but not overwhelming -- cheesy flavour, and it has the perfect gooey consistency that melds with the beef in the best way possible.

http://www.seriouseats.com/2016/07/whats-really-in-american-cheese.html

I love Snopes. Of course, the devil is in the details:

"The editor of the biographical text about Barack Obama which was included in the booklet maintained that the mention of Kenya was an error on her part and was not based on any information provided to her by Obama himself:

"Miriam Goderich edited the text of the bio; she is now a partner at the Dystel & Goderich agency, which lists Obama as one of its current clients.

"'You're undoubtedly aware of the brouhaha stirred up by Breitbart about the erroneous statement in a client list Acton & Dystel published in 1991 (for circulation within the publishing industry only) that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me — an agency assistant at the time," Goderich wrote. "There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more.'

"A New York Times article about Barack Obama published in 1990, a year before the Acton & Dystel promotional booklet was issued, correctly identified his birthplace as Hawaii.

"A variant of this item paired the image shown above with the statement "Big Oops! Harvard Law Review did not cleanse its 1991 yearbook which states he was born in Kenya." As noted above, the biographical sketch pictured above was put out by a literacy agency; it was not part of any yearbook published by Harvard."

Form.A sounds a lot like the Stoner virus, I'm assuming one of those was a variant of the other. Some OEM's were unknowingly sending out floppies with that virus on them with peripherals for a while which really helped them spread.

I always thought the Michelangelo virus was a pretty serious one for pre-internet days.

Post internet, the Code Red virus was especially hard to get rid of. It never touched the disk so most scanners had a hard time with it.

I suppose it is hard for any pre-internet virus to compare in terms of damage to these 5, but one that stands out in my mind:

Form (circa 1990 or so), and its variants like Form.A would infect the boot sector of your hard drive, and from there could infect any floppy disk that you used on the computer. Most PCs at the time would try to boot from a floppy disk left in the drive, which would spread the infection.

I guess that many variants didn't really do much of anything particularly bad, but I got Form.A one time and it nuked the Master Boot Record (like virus #5 in the video) of my PC. Since DOS / Windows (3.1 at the time I think) wouldn't boot, I (mistakenly) assumed that it had formatted my hard drive, and then lost all of my data by reformatting.

I remember a span of about a year where any 3.5 inch floppy disk being passed around offices or schools in my home town had a roughly 80% chance of being infected with Form.A. So that seems like a pretty impressive infection and spread rate, without advantage of being able to spread through the internet!

I have decided on the more subtle variant---not necessarily less depressing---

What matters is what you can do for who knows you...

OK, so this is supposed to be convincing us that the plane works?...but they do admit that it can take numerous seconds between rudder input and response by the plane....my RC glider is more responsive than that.

<10% delivery, and only one variant = fail.
Most expensive plane ever=fail.
Past it's expected lifespan before it's deployed=fail.
'The same technology, but a little bit more advanced' is hardly worth the country bankrupting cost=fail

It sure seems like they're admitting that a minor systems upgrade to an F-22 would have ended up with a much better plane with the same tech for <1/10 the cost and time.
This plane seems designed to fight directly against technologically advanced adversaries....which means Russia and/or China. We are NEVER going to be in direct air to air combat with either of those nations. We avoid that like the plague, because it's all too easy to escalate to nuclear war. The enemies we are actually likely to engage don't have 1/10 the technological capabilities needed to take on an F-22.
The entire reason for this plane to exist at all is a fraud.

I've repeatedly discounted your comments, but I simply can't seem to make headway.

The F4E ICE was a modified German version of the F4E. It had much better engines than any other version of the craft, a dedicated WSO, and it still only barely outperformed the F16. The other F4 variants absolutely did not turn better or have a higher rate of climb than the F16.

Dogfighting hasn't been around since WW1? Are you crazy? What would you call the numerous dogfighting techniques developed during WWII? Admittedly there was a drop off in dogfighting during the Korean War, but that was because we were shifting to jets as our primary fighters and people didn't have the speeds worked out. When we went to Vietnam, we found that many times the planes were so fast they were closing into gun range before they could get a missile solution. Hence the creation of the Fighter Weapons School (aka TopGun).

The Air Force couldn't believe it was a skill issue and decided to go a different way, loading more sensors and different cannon onto the airplanes. They still relied on missiles primarily, assuming that dogfighting was DEAD. Well, after some time passed, Navy kill to loss ratios went from 3.7-1 to 13-1 and (SURPRISE) Air Force kill to loss ratios got even worse.

After this, the Air Force quietly created their own DACT program, unwilling to be vocal about how wrong they were. Now, if you primarily play video games about air sorties, you might get the idea that you get a lock a couple of miles before you even see the enemy, confirm the engagement, click a button, and then fly back home. Actual pilots will be glad to set you straight on that, since you might have to get close to the intruding craft and follow them, waiting. What happens when you get close? Dogfights happen.

As far as the capability of the plane, of course it is going to fail tests. But the problem is that, like in the case of the Marine's test, so much money has been invested in this plane that people are ignoring the failures because they are scared the program is going to get shut down. Realistically, that just is going to increase the time this plane takes to get ready for service, increase the costs, and it isn't going to fix the underlying problems in the design of the craft.

I don't know what else I can say. The plane is going to turn out to be a much more expensive version of the F22 and it will most likely quietly be cancelled later down the line like the F22 was. The bad thing is, the government will immediately jump to the next jack of all trades plane and once again we will find it is a master of none.

Quite a lot of nations have old soviet Shilka's which do those supercomputer calculations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-UnealTR-Y
You get within 1.5 miles of this thing, and it chews up anything that isn't jinking.
There are also variants of this thing which have missiles, and they can even shoot down other missiles to protect itself.
For those it's better to fire helicopter missiles from a low angle. Or bomb them from up very high.

Helicopters are less vulnerable because often they can fire without revealing their position. Modern missiles can be fired from as around 8km away. And they'll fire them while hovering low enough that their radar signatures can't be distinguished from the ground and surroundings. And since they are always facing the enemy their heat signature from the engines is facing away as well. (unlike a warthog that will show it's engines to the enemy as it flies up and away after an attack). Most attack helicopters have some kind of armour as well. At least in the pilot and critical sections.
Oh yes, and something really cool - the new Apache Longbow's can fire missiles that go around terrain to hit their targets! Super cool

They absolutely have disadvantages, but any decent pilot will fly their aircraft to it's advantages

It's worth noting though that in Europe the word Gypsy, or variants of Zigane / Zigeuner, is a racial slur and used in modern times in actual, horrifying violence against minorities. I mean to the point where it's used by the same people who paint swastikas on walls before they raze tent villages.

http://www.newstatesman.com/human-rights/2014/04/why-europe-failing-protect-its-roma-population-hate-crimes

In the US this is obviously not a thing, and it still doesn't make sense to me to start writing G*p*y (I just see 'guppy' when I read that) but there is a history of racism against the Romani going back centuries, as well as a modern culture of extreme marginalization and exclusion.

I don't want Europeans to go around casually using the N-word and thinking that that's only a disgusting term when it's used in the US, so I guess I wouldn't want Americans going around casually saying Gypsy either, if it can be avoided?

3 things, I may have mixed them a bit.

1 - past experience specifically with muslim migrants (some may have been refugees) in Europe - overall not great, mostly they consider our social system and political correctness as signs of weakness. They consider themselves superior, the first generation may be grateful for a better life than back home but the second and third generations feel superior to non-muslims (especially jews and atheists, but also christians) and entitled to benefits while hating the secular state. Will the current and future waves accomodate better? This has nothing to do with our imperative to help those in need, it is a practical problem. Also not racist - although I do admit racism and xenophobia are a major problem in many parts of Europe and trouble me very much in my own country. More so than the Vietnamese or Ukrainians or people from the Balkans "these people" organize in clans and tribes and will try to impose their view of the world on us, who organise in tiny families and on facebook. Albanian thugs are well organised but they dont hold the view that everyone else should be an Albanian thug too.

2 - current wave of migrants and refugees - lets assume we are talking only about real Syrians boarding boats in Turkey trying to reach Greek islands and not people from all over north africa trying to reach Italy or anyone else trying to reach the EU (possibly pretending to be Syrian). So we have this exemplary Syrian family which has run away from a war to Turkey. They are safe there, only they have to either stay for a couple of years in a refugee camp before they can try to find work or they have to survive in a grey economy sort of like Mexicans in the USA. They know that if they dont apply for asylum in Turkey and manage to set foot on EU soil they can ask for asylum there and be treated better than in Turkey. So these boat people are actually not running from war to asylum but rather from one asylum to another. They make sure not to stop in Greece or Croatia or Austria or Hungary but head for Germany or Sweden. Mostly I believe they have no idea of political geography but they have mobile phones and friends who have already made the journey and know how to milk the local system. So for purposes of compassion they are refugees and totally need our help but from a clinically economic (yes, materialistic) point of view they are very much migrants. Migrants we feel obliged to help because they are sort of refugees too.

3 - the mass and speed of the exodus means we are stretched to accomodate them and they will later start to passionately hate us because Europe will not be the heaven they expected it to be.
A few thousand refugees every year are no big deal even for a small EU state. Hundreds of thousands will be very difficult to take care of in the entire union. Inviting more is just irresponsible.

The good news is that the real Syrian refugees who make it to Europe will probably be the more resourceful, better educated part of the current wave of incoming people and will be able to take care of themselves fairly quickly by my estimate. Also they are mostly variants of Shia - the less orthodox branch of muslims. I am worried more about future waves than the current one.

Maybe we have messed up a bit but we need to learn from our mistakes, and even Germany is now guarding its borders. It would be better if we were able to guard the Shengen perimeter.
Then if we wanted to save more refugees we could send trains or planes to pick them up in Turkey or Jemen. You know, set up an EU consulate there so they could directly apply for asylum in the EU country of their picking. But we have to make a conscious decision first - how many people from the desolate and failing parts of the world do we want to save over a given time period so that we dont fail ourselves. Are we failing? Ask the jewish families who used to live in Malmo until recently.

absolutely nailed it, this is all anyone needs to know about nutrition to get their diet about 95% right. As he says, just choose your variant - i.e. the porkchop variant for @dag