I can see that smart guns are not for everyone, but for many owners they may be just the thing. What a smart gun can do is put the owner is control of who can use the gun or who it can be transferred to. I could easily see the military and police, as organizations, being very interested in them even if individual members find them an extra hassle. Basically it proves accountability, no "the guns were stolen/misplaced", now you can prove and track authorization and transfer. So sure a beat cop may view it as a annoyance, but the police chief may view it as valuable feature. The locking system can probably be hacked, but it still makes the gun less valuable to the black market because it requires extra effort and no legitimate gun shop will deal with at afterwards.

Here I what I experienced. After college I had a live-in Japanese girlfriend, which basically meant I was eating a Japanese diet, along with a job that required some amount of walking. I lost weight below my college weight with NO effort or thought on my part, and I wasn't that heavy in college. Today, years latter and many pounds fatter, I am again able to lose weight but to do so I have to count every calorie on my FitBit and typically walk around hungry all the time, to the point where I have even sat around not eating during extended family meals, and of course I have to dutifully record everything I eat very carefully. So manually overriding my bodies food desires is possible, but the healthy diet choice simpler but not in my case easier. Nuts do seem to help some. This seems to match other research that has shown exposure to US food products result in obesity in nearly identical population along the U.S.-Mexico boarder.

No, it wouldn't. We would only be able to discover civilizations at a similar level of development at a distance of less than 1 light year I understand. That is the core of my point, we know we are using a technology that won't work right now. The whole SETI program is kind of based on the assumption aliens will know we are using inferior technology and go out of their way to use their advance technology to broadcast a signal we can discover (e.g. the planet sized alien signal detector and transmitter in Carl Sagan's book First Contact). The Fermi Paradox is interesting in terms of why aren't aliens walking around on earth right now, maybe there is a great filter preventing that, but means very little in terms long term fate of intelligent life.

I have to add another point, on the time scale for a cross galaxy trip we have VERY strong evidence to suspect that a space faring race would evolve in some way to live in space (either natural evolution or as artificial machine based life), basic evolutionary theory demands it. So why would they come down planet side at all? I just think we have too many unknowns to really take the paradox seriously.

??? What are we looking for exactly? What effects on the galaxy do you mean? Why would they harvest our planet, to take the materials where exactly and at what cost? This is my point, we don't event understand what we are looking for.

The basic problem with the Fermi Paradox is this, we don't really have a technology we ourselves would reliably use to communicate between stars, thus the fact that we can't find alien civilizations using a technology we wouldn't use proves nothing. Arguably the whole radio search is a waste of time since we have no reason to believe we will find anything, indeed we have one reason to believe we won't! For all we know, there could be lots of miniature alien probes all over our solar system right now, or maybe they communicate with wormholes, or it is impractical to communicate long distances, or who knows? Basically, we really don't even know what we are looking for in the first place, so the Paradox falls on it's face for lack of information.

Once upon a time, gold money may have been wealth in itself, but today that quaint method of business is long gone. Money, holes, facilitates the movement of wealth, but is not wealth itself. Frankly the last thing any rich person wants is a big pile of money sitting around doing nothing. To a large degree our fascination with money has caused us to lose sight of the wealth it really represents. Money today is just a measuring stick of wealth, and an elastic one at that. Had more people looked not at the loans, but at the real property and wealth it represented, the real-estate bubble could have been avoided. Indeed most bubbles could deflate if people better understood what they really had bought.

The fairness doctrine, at the time is was implemented was specifically ruled as constitutional. Technologically at the time, bandwidth was severely limited and so those leasing publicly shared airwaves had multiple obligations to insure the majority of the public had an opportunity to use them, or at least have their opinion represented on them. Today they serve little purpose of course, well other than as rallying cries for paranoid conservatives.

-Aesop Russia has been far too ham fisted and has massively overreacted, however valid their concerns.

I wonder how much the coins can really be sold for? How much has actually been paid for Bitcoins over the years, sure someone somewhere paid $40 for a Bitcoin, but for the most part people paid much less for the coins they have, if they paid anything at all and didn't mine them. The market seems small enough that you could pump coin price with a bunch of bogus transactions between parties in cahoots, then dump your coins.

To me the resolution to the apparent paradox is more information not less, in this case more oversight and transparency in government agencies. J. Edgar got away with the total BS he did because he himself was not being monitored. If we openly know and discuss how policing is done in our country, at least we have a chance to talk about if we like it or not.

The real issue with immigrants has little to do with culture, immigrants by their very nature have self-selected to be more ambitious. If good enough is good enough then you stay in your home country, immigrating to another country is a great deal of work. I wouldn't look at the culture but rather of the qualities of the individuals themselves. Of course people come to the U.S. for all kinds of reasons, so the nature of how they came matters. Where culture does matter is in expectations. When you look for something, once you find it you tend to stop looking. At the end of the day your culture doesn’t accept good enough, then you won’t either. Of course high expectations and cultural pressure has a personal cost also and can lead to unethical behavior.

Well, to be clear I don't deny addiction can be real (as I mentioned in my post), but on the face of it this program seems more like a feel good "get tough" kind of solution than a real one based in science. Indeed the one size fits all kind of approach doesn’t sound like treating underlying issues to me.

Really, the parents can's just take away the kid's computer and money for accounts? I don't think I would trust this place with my kids. While I am sure some kids have a real problem, unlike most drugs computer games have no physically addictive properties. This sounds like overkill to me, whipping up parents fears against reason. I have two kids, two full time plus working parents and we have enought control to at least cut the kids off when we need to. I can't see how this kind of nonsense is needed.

There are many different systems throughout the world, but there is one thing every country with good schools has in common. Teaching is a highly respected job. Not always the highest paid, but always desirable. This should be a big DUH moment if you think about it, a teacher skills and talents really matter, and the more desirable a job the more candidates you have to select from. If you care about schools, attracting the best teachers is the first step always.