[geeks] What desk toy or "tchotchke" says "geek" to you?

[Mike Meredith]

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006 23:39:17 -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Wed, 29 Mar 2006 @ 06:37 +0000, Mike Meredith said:
> 
> > Oh and I'd like a little evidence to demonstrate that data published
> > in Europe is of a lower quality than US data ... and 'it doesn't
> > demonstrate what I want' isn't evidence.

I note you still haven't come up with any *evidence* that European
governments lie about crime stats. I'm specifically irritated by that
... not whatever HCI comes up with.

> Yeah, there are some idiots, but cops in various European and UK
> cesspools would beg to differ with the rosy impressions some of their
> governments like to leave you with.

I prefer hard numbers to anecdotal evidence which is inherently biased.
The police aren't lying about their experiences but they're not in the
best position to see the overall picture. After all 'it's boring,
nothing much happens around here' isn't much of a story is it ?

To put it another way, I don't trust myself to be able to say whether
the amount of spam being blocked by my mail servers is higher now than
it used to be 2 years ago. That's why I measure it so I've got some
numbers.

As to whether the numbers themselves are 'cooked' ... well it seems a
bit unlikely. Not only are UK violent crime rising, but if they were
cooked, there would be a huge scandal about it. The UK government is
notoriously 'leaky' and out of the thousands of statisticians involved,
some would surely whistle blow about the numbers being cooked.

Governments of course spin the results to make them look good, but you
can always look at the raw figured to see the real story.

> give, and the absolutely idiotic idea they push forward that criminals
> will magically obey gun control laws.

Note that I'm not interested in gun control in the US ... I just think
your argument is a great deal weaker if you wade in with 'other
governments lie so ignore their figures' and 'somebody told me it's bad
in Europe so it must be so'.

It's not as if quoting crime stats from different countries (or
different US states) tells you much about the effects of gun control
anyway.

>