People in my neck of the woods talk about fire arms the way I talk about video games or TV shows. They sound like recreation rather than self defense. I don’t know if knowledge is the only factor; a sense of seriousness about firearms seems to be lacking.
I can’t recall why, but I was tired of 3DFX. I think they had a monopoly on 3D acceleration or something, and at the time OpenGL seemed like the way to go. An unknown company called Nvidia released a card called the Riva TNT and it contributed to OpenGL becoming widely supported as well as ending 3DFX’s once deserved dominance.
Nvidia kept hitting it out of the park, creating iterations of cards that made it worthwhile to upgrade every several years. I think the competition from ATI (now AMD) may have kept them from falling into the same rut as 3DFX, and as gamers we’ve enjoyed the result of that relationship with good cards from both.
Today…Nvidia has grown into something that had shed its reason for being. It’s crazy to see their logo in business news top stories. What they’re doing, contributing to a tech development that is so far out front of government oversight that could protect people from the consequences, I see them more as a threat to society than anything else. It’s crazy.
Law enforcement varies on the consequences the result from its practice. An ordinary person with no political power beside voting and protesting compared to a head of state with the backing of an advanced military naturally results in a different application. It’s not fair, but it’s life.