Doesn't matter. What matters is why the officers understand they've been dispatched to the scene, and what they believe they're seeing when they arrive.

Obviously you're able to tell a real gun from a replica at a distance while someone waving it around, but most people can't, including cops, until they have it in hand, personally. You might be comfortable risking other people's lives by making them assume that all guns are toys until they've been shot at, but people who actually do have, as a feature of their daily job, other people assaulting and trying to kill them, probably wouldn't want you armchairing on their behalf.

The solution? Actual thinking parents not sending their kid out into public to act stupid with a replica gun. To teach a kid that when they see a cop car rolling up, to perhaps consider not looking crazy and waiving said replica gun around. This is a 100% lapse on the part of parents and a completely crappy position for the cops to have been put in. I know that you would be safe, because you would omnipotent and know, from a distance, that the replica gun wasn't real, and that if it was real, the universe's special karma system would protect you from the laws of physics because you are A Better Person Than Cops Are, and bullets wouldn't be able to hurt you.

This was a lot of years ago. Things weren't as tightly controlled back then. '386 days...

If you're that unable to grasp the difference between the possibility that someone might be carrying a weapon (say, in a violin case), and cops responding to someone's alarmed call about a guy brandishing a gun in public, and having that gun waved at them as they arrive on the scene, then you are completely out of touch with reality. Cops get killed, more often than you seem to know (or perhaps not as often as you'd like?) for misjudging the risk to their lives as they come upon such scenes or make a traffic stop. If you did that all day, every day, and some of your colleagues died doing what you have to do for your job, you might look at it a little differently. You're probably thinking that the police should have just hidden behind their magic bullet-proof cruiser doors like in the movies, right? Yeah. That kid shouldn't be dead. I blame his parents, 100%.

I think you underestimate how much of the design is actually done by computers and auto-routing/placement algorithms.

I've yet to meet a Buddhist who was anything like you describe. Don't confuse Buddhism with Californicatin' "New Age" hipsters. The latter only claim to be Buddhists, and only pick and choose a few select pieces of their scripture that goes with their crystal-worshipping nonsense.

A buddy's brother works (or worked, who knows now) for Intel, and used to bring along demos of the latest and greatest lab technology when he came for visits. Some of the stuff he had was up to 10-15 years ahead of actual release cycles in terms of performance and capability. I'm sure some of the ideas got scrapped, but a lot of them probably made it into production in the chips we use today.

Wild stuff. Both brothers were major hardware geeks.

I'd love to see what kind of technology he's showing his brother from the labs over Christmas and Easter holidays nowadays. :D

Right, because he was already waving a gun around when they showed up.

What kills all console games eventually is the difficulty of working with their development kits, and the paucity of documentation about how to wring maximum performance out of those development kits.

Write a game using OpenGL or DirectX, and you have millions of potential buyers. Write a game using Android or iOS APIs, and you have millions of portable buyers.

Consoles? Not so much. Your only market with those devices are dedicated gamers willing to spend money just to play games. It's a smaller market share by a huge margin.

Somebody beat me to it. :)

No matter what you do in life, you are going to die. There is no escaping that.

So live a life of wonder, mystery, and enjoyment, rather than spending it fretting about exactly what might be the thing that kills you. Eat a bacon sandwich. Put cream in your coffee. Have a steak once in a while. Have a doughnut once a month. And by all means, have a glass of wine with your meal and spark a bowl of cannabis afterwards.

No one ever said it was a documentary. It's a movie meant to entertain, not inform.

Apparently the issue depends on where you live, because while I used to see such wankers in Regina, Saskatchewan, I've never had the problem in the smaller community of Yorkton. Not only will people both walk through the snowbank on the side of the tromped-down path here, they'll actually say "Hi" to you while you're passing them.

they should be able to expect that junior can sit at the computer and look up something for school and not get links to goatz or tubgirl or whatever

That is absolute nonsense. I have never had Google nor Bing bring up porn when I was searching for terms that didn't involve pornography. This whole concept of "drive by porning" is nothing more than fear, uncertainty, and doubt spread by the "think of the children" namby-pambies who want to block adult sites from anyone accessing them on the internet.

If your kids are finding porn on the internet, it's because they're looking for it. Stop blaming the internet, and start blaming your horny or curious kid.

The best trick is for parents to actually supervise their children.

I hate all you lazy buggers who just "plug the kids in" and leave them for hours a day unsupervised. Do your damned job as parents!

Which has what to do with Islamist groups that seek out and destroy schools and educators because they are schools and educators? If your point is that they can't help themselves because they are ignorant, then you're indirectly also saying that they must be forced to overcome that ignorance (since they act, aggressively, to destroy the institutions that would gladly educate them if they showed up wanting an education). And forcing them to be educated means ... using force. It means physically protecting schools, teachers, and students with rough men willing to use violence to beat back the school destroying people and organizations.

In the meantime, other cultures seem to have nicely figured out how to avoid embracing medieval sensibilities. They used to be anti-education theocracies, too. But they're not, now. What changed? Why can't these Islamist groups and their millions of Muslim apologists and funding sources do the same?

That "powerful AI" thinking is done by designers and analysts, not programmers. The vast majority of "programmers" merely translate the business models and logic specifications into code. What I'm saying is that we're not far off at all from capturing that information in the business models and diagrams themselves, and translating it directly into code without the intervention of "grunt coders" (the people you hire for $20/hr from sweat shops or through overseas companies.)

Those few who are also business analysts and designers will be working with those new tools instead of UML diagrams. They'll push a button, and bam, out comes most of the code for implementing the system.

User interface programming and report specifications are the only aspect of "programming" that I see as being retained by the human coders in the long run, and even the report specifications could prove subject to analysis algorithms that allow a report designer to simply highlight the model attributes they want to present, drop-down-select group-by functions over those attributes, and do a little bit of layout specification to produce the report. For all I know, there are already tools that let you do that.

You only need "strong AI" if you expect the system to be designed by the system. I'm not expecting any such thing -- I'm merely expecting the automation of grunt work and IDE point-and-click operations by rule-based systems.

If you want a crude example of the kind of technology I'm talking about, check out my pet project, MSS Code Factory. From an XML business application model, it produces the database schema scripts, stored procedures, JDBC layers, object implementations and interfaces, and XML messaging layers. I keep adding to it and extending it, but it does more than enough to prove my point: you can automate an awful lot of the grunt code of a system.

Now if I can automate that much of the coding process by myself, imagine what a team of serious computer scientists with a real budget could do in the bowels of an IBM, Microsoft, or Apple R&D department.