I once lived in a part of Los Angeles that at one point I heard at least two gun shootings per week for about a year. Fortunately every year since about 7 years ago shootings in that area gradually declined.
I've used windows 8 for a few days and I would say its not THAT bad once you get accustomed to it. So far I haven't seen any reasons to switch to Windows 8 on my main computer yet.
Here's some numbers for what has effectively become a civil war in Mexico: ~55,000 total deaths (16,000 in 2011 alone); nearly 60 journalists killed, over a thousand police and prosecutors killed, nearl a hundred politicians assassinated. Drug revenue in the tens of billions of dollars and somewhere around 100,000 soldiers fighting for the cartels (compared to about 250,000 total soldiers in the Mexican armed forces).
It's an unusual war because the cartels don't care about actually controlling territory too much, they just need to be able to operate, so there are rarely large scale battles between cartel and government soldiers, if the government moves in to some area in force the cartel can just melt away and then hit the government forces opportunistically. Although typically the cartels don't even do that, instead they kill civilians, police, children, and politicians in order to maintain a state of terror and get people to keep their heads down and ignore cartel activity.
Yeah. That's true I know they're big and have a huge effect locally, but scheming to influence lawmaking in another country is pretty big thinking. It's also forward thinking, worrying about your profits 5 years from now.
