Guns in society

People have been talking about relaxing gun laws in Australia since the recent Sydney Siege.

What do you think?  Is easing the right to have guns for the public good for the society or not?

In favour for having guns, people are saying that perhaps people could have defended themselves against the gunman.

Against the idea is the realisation that the USA have lesser gun controls, and massacres in schools happen once in a while.  People accidentally shooting each other, or killing another and then regretting it.

I remember Australia taking a tough stand against carrying knives, when policemen were stabbed many years ago.  The law changed such that one may carry a knife as part of one's work, but not for self-defense or for willfully wanting to hurt anyone.  And the knife should not be concealed if it is larger than a certain size.

If this logic prevails about knives, how much more would it apply to guns?

What do you think?  How should people defend themselves if they were to be denied weapons?  How can we prevent people from using weapons in harmful or threatening ways if they were allowed these?

The gunman of the Sydney siege was not licensed to have a gun, but yet, he had one.  How can we prevent people even from breaking the law in this regard?

Facebook unethical?

Facebook has hit the news again.

Anna Lemind wrote about the hidden psychological experiments they conduct.  Without informing their users, they have been gathering statistics about the positive and negative emotions expressed by the users through keywords and emoticons.

Violet Blue said that Facebook "tampered with the emotional well-being of 689,003 users" as its experiments sought to find ways of spreading, or avoiding the spread of, emotions en masse.

Peter Aziz reckons that Facebook's mobile app gives the company too much information about us.  The app tells Facebook where we are, who our contacts are, what their contact details are, what we photograph and text to each other.

What do you think?

Are these guys unnecessarily cautious?  Is Facebook unethical in the way it handles the information it carries on its servers?  Are they not allowed to perform data mining on the information that sits on their hardware?

Or are they fine to do what they want with data that we have given them?  We did, after all, agree to give them that data when we signed up to use their app and their platform, didn't we?

Has the company overstepped its boundaries, or are they fine?