Assuming that you are using the vanilla client, the OS doesn't really affect the blockchain database format so long as the file is named correctly and in the correct folder.  But unless you have some real bandwidth issues, it's probably not worth the risk or the trouble.

Actually, Wikispeed doesn't represent the first company to successfully do this kind of crowdsourcing design & manufacturing in the auto industry, that honor undoubtedly belongs to Local Motors Corporation with the Rally Fighter.

http://rallyfighter.com/

And this is most certainly not vaporware.

Same here.  I understand why they would want to remove the doors and the structures that they require on a car, but the thing has to have a roof of some kind where I live; which is no where near the West Coast.

While this is generally a good piece, your claim that wagers on the future price of gold is equal to that of actually owning gold is false both in fact (obviously) and in practice.  Although this is economicly similar to a futures market, owning physical gold has no counterparty risk, while futures in general and wagers on the gold price most certainly do have counterparty risks involved.

Strangely enough, this little article ranks Louisville as the 62nd 'drunkest' city in the US, but Lexington at #28.  Lexington is barely a whole city by most standards, so that is more than a little weird.

http://www.menshealth.com/mhlists/Americas-Drunkest-Cities/Lexington-KY.php#slidetop

http://www.menshealth.com/mhlists/Americas-Drunkest-Cities/Louisville-KY.php#slidetop

While NYC is, at #93, ranking after the entire state of Ohio and most of California...

http://www.menshealth.com/mhlists/Americas-Drunkest-Cities/New-York-NY.php#slidetop

Considering the differences in the "Deaths in DUI crashes" metric, I'm going to call my claim that a 4 crime per 100K difference to be due to differences in DUI related vehicular manslaughter cases to be a strong win.  That easily makes up for 4 per 100K.

EDIT: And the bar in the photo used is the Bluegrass Brewing Company, a local microbrewery on Frankfort Avenue locally known as "The BBC".  Nice place, kinda pricy.  A single mug of beer can run as high as $6 there, for one of the specialized brews.

BTW, Vampire; how much does a beer cost in NYC?

In his defense, real estate property is largely immune from hyperinflation; but unfortunately not from property tax re-valuations.  By one path or another, every type of investment that is normally measured in currency is subject to the confiscation of value due to hyperinflation of that currency, although some paths to that end result are indirect.

Wow, you really don't understand what we are talking about here, do you?

Is your only access to economic thought Paul Krugman, Vampire?

I don't have access to published stats that I can refer to, no.  Still, saying that guns have no effect on the crime rate is at least as rediculous as saying that CCW made Louisville safer. (actually, I wasn't saying that.  Louisville has long been a relatively low crime city.  CCW certainly didn't make the city less safe, either)  To make that point I can again refer to the high number of cops in NYC, for they all have legitimately possessed firearms.  The stats in that book didn't really make a distinction between legimate guns carried by CC licensees and those carried by state sanctioned policemen.  The effects are not exactly the same, and I would assume that there is a measure of greater effect per policeman than per CCW, but the effects are similar.  Namely that the higher the percentage of persons sanctioned to be armed in public, the higher the personal risks (legal and phyiscal) to the career criminal, and most crimes are indeed commited by prophessional criminals.


Dude, please.  I'm not stupid.  i was comparing to your Toronto reference, not against NYC.

I don't know that it would, but it might by increasing the personal risks to career criminals, see above.  What I am claiming is that there is no reason to assume that a CCW license in NYC would
increase the risk to either the public or the police.  There is much evidence to suggest, if nothing else, that CCW holders are a self-selecting group who are, statistically speaking, a law-abiding lot who commit nominally zero percent of violent crimes; and are also the same kind of people that most police forces draw their recruits from anyway.  So while Louisville benefits from the dispersed protective "herd immunity" effects of a tenth of our adult population carrying firearms for self-defense for no cost to the taxpayer, NYC benefits from the more concentrated effects of trained agents of the state/city who do the same thing as an occupation under a tax funded salary.  The end results being pretty close, with an edge to NYC, granted.

Do you not see the problem with requiring that travelers abandon their personal property in the care of unknown agents of the TSA, some of which might be very valuable?

Oh, no.  I was never one for fads.  I was a hardcore greenie as a teen, my father was quick to make fun of me and my views.  If your father was a wise man, eventually you will start to echo him also.

Correlation isn't causation, but Wikipedia tends to be fairly balanced so they are kinda obligated to include those studies that claim to disprove the book's conclusions.  The thing is that John Lott is no idealogue, he's a scientist who went to great lengths to adjust & include the influences of social & other effects.  I've actually read the book, and it's well done.  It's certainly not all 'rah, rah our side is right!'.  He explictly attempts to address in advance critisisms from other academics.  Even though he is considered a political conservative now, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lott) like many of us he didn't start there. (I was once a Green, then I grew up)  He has publicly stated that when he started gathering data for this study, he didn't expect the conclusions that he found, but as a scientist he couldn't just ignore what the data was telling him.  His methodology was praised by other academics in his field for it's accuracy and derided mostly by academics not in his field, mostly because of ideology.  Ideology doesn't enter into the book at all, nor does the moral argument.  It's purely an statistiacla examination of the results.

Nonesense, as already noted a large reason that Louisville's numbers are worse than NYC's is due to the DUI manslaughter issue, which is a social ill completely unrelated to the presence or lack thereof of weaponry.  If I could seperate that out of both cities stats I would, and I would wager that would result in a lower violent crime rate for louisville.  4 out of 100K is a tiny difference, easily overtaken by the (likely much) higher incidence of alcohol related vehicular mansluaghter around here.  I'm not saying that it's somehow better to die from a drunk driver than from an armed mugger, but the statement above implies that Louisville's crime rate is higher as a result of privately owned guns, which is not the case.

And, ironicly, Louisville is pretty diverse in another way, as it's one of the major refugee relocation cities in America.  (http://www.arcadiacommunitycenter.org/refugeeinfo.html)


So the United Nations (which has it's own police force, which I beleive is independent of NYC cops) and the Federal Reserve (which halso has it's own security force that I know is independent of NYC cops) justifies the massive difference in professional police forces?


Interesting, I didn't know that.  How does the license holder get the gun to the property?  Does he have to pay the NYC cops to carry it for him from the city limits?  I heard on Stossel last night that about 300 people are arrested at Laguardia Airport each year and charged with illegal possesion of a firearm because they were traveling with it in a TSA approved lockbox and transfered through NYC, even though NYC was neither their destination nor origination.  Even the cops admit this is screwed up, but the port authority must abide by the laws of NYC as well, and airport property is not exempt from those anti-private-gun laws.  (Because they certainly aren't anti-gun laws, or the cops would be locking up theirs too)

I should also point out here that the large difference in public police officers in my city than yours also means that there are about as many actual firearms in NYC as there are in my city, per capita.  They just happen to be primarily in the possession of a privileged warrior class.  So the logic of the book mentioned above remains sound, as the number of legitimate firearms in society increases the rate of violent criminal confrontations declines.  It may not matter exactly in what context those weapons are legitimate. 

And the crime rate in Louisville is marginally higher than in NYC, by abut 4 crimes per 100,000 people or so.

And I was just watching a great episode of Stossel that was all over this topic, and particularly the draconian gun laws in NYC.

You have failed to "prove" any such thing, and can't, since such statistics actually do exist.  The largest & most complete study of gun laws and crime stats ever compiled were published under the short but descriptive title of More Guns, Less Crime by John Lott and includes crime data from every county in the United States over a 29 year span.  There actually is a demonstrateable inverse relationship between the number of privately owned firearms in society and the violent crime rate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Guns,_Less_Crime


It could, but is more likely to be related to the fact that Canada is even more of a single culture than even Louisville.  The stats & conclusions presented in the book above may or may not have any direct bearing on Canada, Australia or Britain; but logic would imply that since we have a common cultural background that they probably do.

It's on the main page now.

Those are just toys for the rich.  This wikispeed commuter car does have me interested, though.

So?

when I was taking courses for my Ky CC license, they went to great lengths to drive home the point that every CC holder is still responsible for every round and where it goes.  All guns laws still applied; for example brandishing (i.e. pulling out the weapon without a legitimate cause, as determined by a jury after the fact) is illegal and even once will get your licesnse revoked forever.  Also, even mentioning that you have a weapon, without showing it, can be construed as a threat; which is why I said what I said in the previous post about my buddy from NYC.  The part about not being able to answer the next question.  Yes, NYC is certainly a bystander rich environment, but the greatest effect on crime that CC licensees have is as a credible threat, not an active combatant.  In another study, that I can't find right now, the results suggested (via serveys of long standing CC licensees) that up to 20 times as many crimes are prevented by the mere exposure of the handgun as have been reported.  Even half that would be a huge gain even for relatively safe NYC, and would have a long term effect (I consider positive) on the criminal subcultures in NYC, and you can't honestly tell me that there is no criminal subculture there.  It wouldn't be hard for NYC to be challenging Toronto's crime stats.

Obviously not comparable.  In order for you to jerk off in from of my family, you must either be on my property (where jerking off is prohibited by the property owner, just as you could prohibit my handgun from your property) or doing so in a public venue, where jerking off is prohibited because it's offensive in public, not because it's banned.  Blasting your music all night can cause real damage to neighbors.  Driving is a privilage, not a right.  Notice none of those activities were mentioned in any amendments to the US Constitution, whereas the right to own and bear (as in carry) a firearm is specificly mentioned.

As far as a firearm in public being offensive, this argument was actually used by Cincinnati at one time.  Cincinnati didn't prohibit open carry per se, but considered openly carrying a firearm (whether loaded or not) to be a crime called "inciting panic".  This went to the Ohio Supreme Court which basicly told the entire state that open carry laws were unconstitutional unless the state permitted 'shall issue' concealed carry licenses.  Ohio is now a CC state, and the 'inciting panic' laws in Cincinnati remain effective.  Basicly the court said that there has to be a legal way an average (and unbadged) adult could excercise their second amendment rights, and if there was no practical way to do this, the laws that prevented it were unconsittutional regardless of their actual intent or original applications.

Sure, there are demographic and cultural differences, but that is an argument in favor of concealed carry licenses in NYC.  Cultural differences cause social tensions, and when the criminal element in a particular person takes advantage of such tensions, the other person(s) have a right to defend themselves regardless of their attacker's hard knock backstory.  In Louisville, such tensions are nearly nonexistant, because there is no distinction between the rights of one group over another; whether that is the badged over the badgeless or one demographic over another.  The carry rates of black men in Louisville are negligblely different than white men, because their reasons for wanting to carry one and rights to do so are identical.  Does it not concern you at all that in NYC an employee of the city has very real rights that you do not share?  Sure they have firearm safety training that you lack, but what says that you cannot get the same degree of training without the job?  I've had many hours of firearm safety training, both during and since my military service.

IIRC just under $500 for six months; myself & my wife, two cars, both of us over 25 with spotless 5 year records.

True, but that stat includes manslaughter, which is a weird thing to do here because the vast majority of manslaughter charges are related to vehicular deaths with illegal root causes, such as DUI's.  I'll admit up front that we have way too many drunks driving, that's normal in Kentucky, home of bourbon.  Both Jim Beam & Maker's Mark distilleries are within 20 miles of Louisville.  (http://www.visitbardstown.com/tourism/bourbon.html)

This, of course, has zero to do with gun crimes, or even any kind of deliberate violent crime at all, otherwise it would be called murder, not manslaughter.

EDIT:  Ironicly, even dispite the high rate of DUI's in Louisville, my auto insurance is half what it would be in NYC for completely different reasons.  Mostly because almost all of my premium goes to the insurance company to actually protect against risk, whereas almost half of such premiums in NYC goes to the state or city taxes on insurance.  So what New Yorkers could actually save in real life is more than overdone by what government can get out of it.  Happy paying for all those police salaries & pensions citizen?