This is not anything negative about Bur.st who have provided fine free web hosting, unfortunately Bur.st seems to be having some issues recently as an organisation, and I felt that it was time to stop using charity hosting. Also NearlyFreeSpeach.NET has excellent reviews, and pricing scheme seems is very cheap for a site the size of mine. I'll probably write a review of them after I've been with them for a couple of months.

The site at bur.st/~timp will not be updated anymore, so please update your links.

Of course this 40-50% is based on the somewhat odd assumption that buying a brand new plasma when you've already got a perfectly fine TV is somehow not wasting money. Where do you suppose that the money spent on a new TV goes? It's made in China, so there's probably a decent chunk there, and then the rest of it will go to big business. For sure a lot of that money that goes to big business will eventually trickle done to employees and the such, but why not just cut the company tax rate?

1. Can you imagine a doctor injecting blood into a patient the same way the government injects money into the economy? "This patient needs a blood transfusion now! Quick extract some blood from his left arm so we can inject it back into his right arm!"

2. Now for sure I've got no problem with people spending their own money on alcohol and tobacco, and to a lesser extent gambling and some illegal drugs, but this isn't there own money, this is other peoples money which they are wasting.

There are essentially four possibilities as to who Jesus was based on these documents: Legend, or these account are heavily if not entirely fictionalized; Liar, or Jesus was a masterful Charlatan, perhaps with some form of demonic or magical power; Lunatic, Jesus was insane; or Lord, Jesus is the rightful Lord and ruler of your life. Essentially Jesus of Nazareth must be one of these four things, or some combination thereof. Now lets examine each of these in order:

Legend

Now this one is the most popular and consists of two main variants. First, Jesus did not exist at all, which doesn't make sense from a historic perspective, the shear quantity of documentation about him proves, as near as can be done with any historic figure, that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Now of course the more popular form is almost definitely that Jesus did exist, but that is no more reliable most scholars place the original authorship of the New Testament within the life span of the people who actually met Jesus. Just imagine if a bunch of Martin Luther King's supporters started to make those sort of claims about him today. It doesn't make sense.

Liar

Basically this requires Jesus to have been such an expert liar that he actually managed to convince a large number of people that he rose people from the dead, several times, and even feed thousands of people magically, again several times. Managing to trick people into believing in these miracles is a miracle in and of itself. And then of course there's the little question of how many liars are willing to die for their lies?

Lunatic

Of course he might still be crazy, except of course that the thousands of people who met him in his life appear not to have thought so, after all they where apparently quite impressed with him, so much so that leaders in society came to him for help on several occasions. Also crazy doesn't grant the power to perform miracles as far as I know.

Lord

And that leaves our third and final possibility. So, who do you think Jesus was?

I've now got the perfect explanation for geeks as to why I don't trust the "history" Dan Brown includes in the Da Vinci Code: Digital Fortress

This is interesting: "Crucifix Next Generation", but the write up is just weird. I think the best is the line that says "... believers will see a marked improvement in the security of their devices ..." I'm here to tell you as both a technology, and Bible geek that there is no Biblical or technological reason why this would in any way improve your computer's security.

Then there's this interesting tutorial on "Asynchronous XHTML and HTTP (aka AXAH)", which could be a useful stepping stone on the way to AJAX. Also the Godbit project as a whole is kind of interesting.

ScrappleFace, "News Fairly Unbalanced. We Report. You Decipher." Scott Ott writes good-quality, Conservative satire, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who wants to have a laugh.

I've also added a blog to my links, Observations of an Old Cop, and two new new comics pages, Girl Genius and RHJunior Webcomics (actually a site with 7 separate comics).

This first table provides a number that is deliberately way too high. Essentially I made three assumptions (all wrong) that raised the numbers as high as I could without producing numbers that are blatantly fraudulent. (Incredibly stupid, but not fraudulent) These three assumptions are:

1. That all homicides with firearms are committed with legally licensed firearms. Actual numbers are around 10%, though of course some percentage of the none licensed firearms would have originally been stolen.
2. That everyone that commits suicide with a firearm would, if they didn't have access to a firearm, simple give up on the idea of suicide. Given that the majority of people who commit suicide just want to die, and aren't overly concerned with the method, this is simply retarded.
3. This table also radically exaggerates the number of accidental deaths caused by firearms, because the statistics I used did not specifically list accidental deaths by firearms, but instead grouped them together with several other types of accidental deaths. Historical data suggests that actual numbers where probably around a sixth of the value show here.

Result: 13.28 firearm deaths per 100,000 registered firearms. This number is well and truly excessive, but is listed here for comparison purposes.

The numbers provided in this second table are possibly low. It corrects the three broken assumptions from the first table, but it may perhaps have gone to far the other way. Firstly I don't take into account murders committed with stolen firearms, and secondly I assume here that all suicides committed with firearms would still be successful by other means.

Result: 1.16 firearm deaths per 100,000 registered firearms. While a reasoned argument could be made for the results in this table, I will, for the sake of argument, assume that this value is too low.

The numbers in this third table correct the faults listed for the second table, by assuming that 75% of all murders are committed with either a legally licensed firearm or a stolen firearm, and that 20% of people who commit suicide with a firearm would simply give up or fail if they didn't have access to a firearm.

Result: 3.57 firearm deaths per 100,000 registered firearms. I tend to think this is a little higher than the actual numbers, but we'll pretend it's accurate for the comparison with motor vehicles.

Here we show deaths by motor vehicle. There's really not much to say about this one except the results: 10.64 motor vehicle deaths per 100,000 registered motor vehicles, and 23.45 motorbike deaths per 100,000 registered motorbikes.

The results are in. Motorbikes and cars combined are nearly three times as dangerous firearms (as measured by deaths per 100,000 register vehicles/firearms). While motorbikes alone are over six times as likely to kill someone as firearms. So the next time someone suggests banning firearms, ask them what they think about banning motorbikes.