Depending on the gun, those might stop it from functioning anyway! (sometimes catastrophically)

You've a non-zero chance of being impaled with a sword falling from the sky (one could fall out of an aircraft that has one in it's cargo, or fall from a highrise) - but I'd think saying "yet" here would sound incredibly silly.

It doesn't, but it would (presuming it functions) prevent them from shooting up the place with it.

That man was stupid at several levels.

Even if it was unloaded, you can still cause injury - what does he think the cap is, a unicorn fart?

The fun part of #3 would be keeping it clean enough to function reliably.

Use the wrong extinguisher on a stovetop oil fire, or an electrical fire, and get back to us when (if) you get out of the hospital, and tell us how not dangerous using an extinguisher incorrectly can be.

Proper locks prevent that already. Mine encloses the trigger and pins prevent the trigger from being moved - what's neat about this is you don't have to disassemble anything to put it on / take it off.

You could even store it loaded and locked if you wanted to only be semi-stupid - the lock won't work if it's chambered (trigger sits forward more when cocked, and the pins would prevent that - you'd shoot it by trying). Unlocking is fast - insert key, twist, pull.

It literally takes me longer to unzip the bag, remove the rifle, and open the scope covers.

Indeed, having the right to own something doesn't remove your responsibility should your stupid use of the right kill someone or break something.

I'm not sure I understand how someone who crams a pistol in their waistband is a "responsible gun owner."

A "responsible gun owner" is going to have a proper holster for the purpose - which would prevent accidental discharges by preventing access to the trigger (by fingers, or snagging on stuff).

I already do that because it's the most convenient place to put it... whoops!

Somehow I manage to avoid the temptation to text, surf the web, or watch youtube while I drive, though. I guess that makes me the special one?

The smartphone crowd assumes they own the user's eyeballs. They don't. What's needed is better voice integration. You should be able to call, receive calls, text, and receive texts via a Bluetooth headset with the phone in your pocket.

Android sucks at this. My Samsung flip-phone had better voice dialing than my Android phone. Wildfire, which is from 1997, did this quite well. But it was really expensive to do back then, and was priced as high as $250/month. Then Microsoft bought Wildfire and abandoned the product.

Business used to have a completely secular moral compass. Rotary International has their The Four-Way Test, a "nonpartisan and nonsectarian ethical guide for Rotarians to use for their personal and professional relationships." Rotarians recite it at club meetings.

Of the things we think, say or do

• Is it the TRUTH?
• Is it FAIR to all concerned?
• Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
• Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?

This is a morality for business. That's a concept that sounds archaic today. It was mainstream from about 1940 to 1975. Many small business owners used to belong to Rotary, especially in small towns. What went wrong? That's a long story, and has to do with the decline in the political power of small business.

Anyway, that's a completely non-religious moral system which is still around and once was mainstream.

Not at all useless. Simply decode all possible sequences and rank them, ranking the most self-consistent interpretation highest. You may also have other sources of data to help correlate the interpretation (there was an article earlier this year about measuring sound using the video footage of a mylar potato chip bag's vibrations.) Even if the room is crowded, it might be possible to identify a few isolated words from the audio recording of the conversation.

The next thing you do is throw away those conversations that you're not interested in. Regardless of whether the conversation resulted in "You punched a fish" or "You munched a dish", neither is going to have value when you're searching for criminal activity. But if your streams could be "I bought the ammo so we can rob the bank" or "I mopped the jam up sorry can you mop the tank?" one of those could be valuable.

99.999% of conversations are inane drivel. If this technology is applied, the number of false positives is going to rapidly overwhelm a system. More discrimination and correlation is going to be needed to actually produce intelligence from this data. But never think that data is worthless or unusable.

Records of human civilization go back over 3000 years. Industrial civilization goes back less than 200. A good starting point is the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, the first non-demo steam passenger railway. There were earlier locomotives, but this is the moment the industrial revolution got out of beta and started changing people's lives.

Only in the last 80 years or so has human exploitation of natural resources been able to significantly deplete them. Prior to WWII, human efforts just couldn't make a big dent in the planet. Things have picked up since then.

There are lots of arguments over when we start running out of key resource. But the arguments are over decades, not centuries or millenia. The USGS issues mineral commodity summaries. There are decades of resources left for most minerals, but a lot of things run out within 200 years. Mining lower and lower grade ores requires more and more effort and energy. For many minerals, that's already happened. People once found gold nuggets on the surface of the earth. The deepest gold mine is now 4 miles deep.

For many minerals, the easy to extract ores were used up long ago. Industrial civilization got going based on copper, lead, iron, and coal found in high concentrations on or near the surface. All those resources were mined first, and are gone. You only get one chance at industrial civilization per planet.

Civilization can go on, but it will have to be more bio-based than mining-based. Energy isn't the problem; there are renewable sources of energy. Metals can be recycled, but you lose some every round. It's not clear what this planet will look like in a thousand years. It's clear that a lot of things will be scarcer.

(And no, asteroid mining probably won't help much.)

Right. Especially since, when you're looking at your smartphone, it's looking back at you.

This would be valuable for vehicle driver speech input, which has to reject a lot of noise.