Of course the numbers are relevant. A one in ten thousand chance a gun might fail to fire creates no incentive to attack the user. According to Wikipedia, "Between 1987 and 1990, McDowall found that guns were used in defense during a crime incident 64,615 times annually", "In 28% of incidents where a gun was used for self-defense, victims fired the gun at the offender.", so a gun fired in self defense would fail about once per eight months. I dare say few of these cases would be fatal. In contrast, one child dies in gun accident every three days. How is that acceptable?

LIfe and death situations are rare. Given that a gun in the home is more likely to kill a family member accidentally than an intruder on purpose, a 90% effective smart gun would save more than nine lives for every one it wastes. The only reliability numbers I found with a quick search were for BIOMAC that claims a goal of 99.99%. This would save more than 10 000 lives for every one wasted.

I called a friend who was testing some 7" tablet as a phone. I couldn't understand why he kept giggling until I met him and he told me he felt stupid talking into something that size in public. It's kinda funny how people worry less about how comfortable it is to use than what others will think.

Whether a phone will fit in one hand is up to its width. The 5 inch Galaxy S4 is 69,8mm wide, the 6,3 inch Galaxy Mega is 88mm. The iPad Mini has an aspect ratio of 4:3 instead of 16:9 so it's 134mm wide although it's only 0,7 inches larger in screen diagonal.

Back around the time the Nokia E90 was launched, I predicted a good smartphone would eventually be around 20x9cm with a slide-out keyboard and a large touchscreen; mainly based on the fact that I wanted something that would fit in a normal inner jacket pocket, thought the keyboard was needed and the idea of two screens (on the E90) was stupid.

I hope we'll be moving past 16:9 aspect ratio to 2:1 or something similar in the near future. The keyboard/cover on the MS Surface seems like a better idea than what I could imagine at the time. Maybe a 2014 smartphone will finally be what I wanted back in 2007.

From the Huffington Post

I do a decent amount of gambling myself. You generally need to do some explicit calculations to evaluate whether your bankroll is large enough for a given risk. Most people just go on intuition when evaluating risk while a gambler is pretty much forced to do the math. (Also deals with simple enough systems that the math is easy) This, along with the money they had, gave the MIT team a very good background for going into business.

If you've actually done these things instead of just knowing they're necessary, you're probably more likely to start a business than the average Joe. The point isn't necessarily that they were successful, just that they chose to go into business.

Yeah, what the hell does that server do that makes it not run with a single client and those specs?

Yeah, I pulled that number out of my ass, but it's probably not far from the truth. A web giant like Google implementing this on all their sites would probably make an MW worth of profit ($50 an hour?) and waste a GW of electricity worldwide.

Laptops also have reliability needs and there are quite modern laptop HDDs that have been used in millions of laptops for months. Also, the car industry's lack of standardization is irrelevant as the form factors of HDDs have been standardized for ages. Thirdly, (you did mention flash) SSDs have none of the problems of moving parts and cost little compared to a car.

The only problem I can think of is temperature. Don't know what temperature ranges an USB stick can handle and what's normally used for outdoors storage.

So, we should not patch a hole in a sinking boat? That's so absurd only Congress would fall for it. WTF are you proposing we do, swim?

You have a point here. For really small transactions, the trouble of paying for something is more than the cost of the money. For a page view of a magazine or something, running your CPU for a few minutes could be a good deal. For stuff like in-game purchases, it could feel like a good deal, but be terribly inefficient in the long run.

According to NASA it will still last just three years.

"The instrument utilizes a multi-stage cooling system that will maintain the ultra-low temperature of the calorimeter array for more than 3 years in space."

In Bend Her, Bender was transsexual. Bender is dishonest and a sexual deviant. QED.

One guy tried to run along three sides of a square and realized he wouldn't make it. He turned back to the second corner from where he started, but that was occupied by some other guy who had come running after him. It looked like both of them were out of the game, but due to an obscure ruling he had the option of moving to the first corner.

I know nothing about baseball either, but I think that's the main idea.