Hi AC

One would hope that a real scientific study would shed light on the situation. Unfortunately, this isn't it. It's a paper published by a Harvard student club and written by a gun industry lobbyist and a gun enthusiast. No balanced perspective that could lead to a real scientific paper here. The first refutation I found of the paper is certainly not peer reviewed and published in a scientific journal either, but makes a pretty good case that the statistics are cooked. It's here.

Please find a real scientific paper from a researcher without bias and then we can discuss it. This one doesn't quite meet the standard.

I'm sort of surprised at the amount of vitriol toward Eric that comes up unprompted (at least by me) just because I'm interviewed on Slashdot. I'm going to take the high road and not participate in it.

Actually, we would have had a much less expensive plan, but we couldn't get it by the conservatives. It's called single-payer, and I've used it in Canada. It has also been available to me in a dozen other countries that I've worked in, but fortunately I never needed it there. It works pretty well. So well indeed that most civilized countries have it.

I'm sorry that you didn't understand my presentation. Or that you understood it and can't accept it. I've thought about it for a very long time and I'm pretty sure of it.

I think you have to look at where the funding comes from for Republican and conservative causes. Don't just look at candidate funding, even election advertising has a lot of funding that isn't straight to the candidate.

Although there might be no shortage of self-employed Republicans, they don't really call the shots for the party. It's the very deep pockets who do.

have a great deal of respect for you

Sorry, I should have made it more obvious that I was writing tongue in cheek about the monarchy. Not about SpaceX though. I'm pretty impressed.

It doesn't work to do this with a democratic government. We need a monarchy :-(

It seems to me that SpaceX is on the path to a solution that might be affordable by a single administration, though.

Indeed; I had intended to put "the earliest I've seen". The point being made was that this is a complaint as old as humanity, so I would certainly not attempt to pick out any specific genesis for it. I just didn't finish typing the whole thought, which was a simple mistake.

While having a remote storage location is iseal for minimizing fallout risks, having an area that is sparsely seen y people can have security risks. It may be prone to terrorist type invasions, looking for dirty bomb material. I'm still not sure why a Nevada military type storage facility at Yucca mountain was blocked. - Guess NIMBY applies, even if your nearest neighbor is 200 miles away.

I'd like to direct you to the following quote:

"That a century of the younger men wished to confer with their elders on the question to which persons they should, by their vote, entrust a high command, should seem to us scarcely credible. This is due to the cheapened and diminished authority even of parents over their children in our day." - Titus Livius (Livy), The History of Rome, Book 26

This was the earliest, but by far not the only example of "kids today and their rock-and-roll music", as you put it. Examples exist throughout the last century, especially around the turn of 1900, where long and boring essays were published on the subject. However, the above excert is from Livy's History of Rome, written around 25BC. So when you say it's trite, that's a bit of an understatement. 2000+ years we've been listening to this shit.

Obviously you've never had your life threatened by someone who means to see you dead. Firearms are used defensively millions of times a year. No doubt you'll try to dispute that, but I'm simply getting info from the CDC:

“Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies,” the CDC study, entitled “Priorities For Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence,”

The Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council released the results of their research through the CDC last month. Researchers compiled data from previous studies in order to guide future research on gun violence, noting that “almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year.”

When someone breaks into your home at 3am and comes after you with a knife/gun/hammer, and your gun doesn't work, I assure you the analogy is spot-on. If the biometric/RFID/whatever works properly, an innocent life is saved. If it doesn't, an innocent life (or lives if you have a wife and kids) is/are lost. It's really quite simple. You're just choosing to pretend to not get it because you don't like the point being made. That's asinine.

I don't know who "most" people are, but I can tell you that of the few people I've met who've had to use a gun defensively (most of the police officers), they were most certainly in danger before they ever reached for their gun.

Well then I'm quite pleased you didn't have a hand in writing our highest laws. When a person's life is at stake at 3am in their own home, what you want really doesn't matter. They have a natural-born/God-given right to defend themselves. And no amount of undue fear on your part can change that.

That said, I do agree that training is a good thing. In fact, I think it should be mandatory in all public schools (and I'd highly recommend it for private schools) for K-College.

You're missing the point. The point of the analogy is that - in either case - if the sensor fails to function as expected in an emergency situation where stress-induced sweat and lack of fine motor control have major effects, the operator it likely a dead man.

And that's the point. If you won't trust this sensor to activate the brakes on your car when you need them, you shouldn't trust it to activate the firing mechanism on the gun when you need it.

No it won't, because it isn't a good analogy. This would be more like a mandate that all new cars have fingerprint sensors to activate the brakes. No sensor match, no brakes.

You buying one of those?