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.

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?

Let me know when all the major auto manufacturers voluntarily take the sensor technology used in these "smart guns" and puts it in their emergency brakes to prevent unauthorized passengers from pulling it. And as everyone else has said, let me know when the police and military have this technology in all of their guns. At that point, it'd be worth some consideration. Until then, I think anyone buying one of these things for protection is a fool.

One of the more absurd stretches of the Commerce Clause, to be sure. Also one of the more pathetic examples of the failure of this country's government to secure the rights of its people. Ordering a family to destroy food they've grown for themselves; we ought to be embarrassed.

The Feds have stepped all over states' rights since the founding of this country; moreso in the past few decades. The states have finally begun to take notice and many are working to reclaim those rights. The Feds have only been able to get away with it for so long because the states didn't try to stop them. With that changing, things are going to get more and more interesting. As evidence, there have been many recent proposed amendments to state bills on everything from guns to Marijuana that have directed state police to prevent Federal authorities from enforcing Federal laws contrary to the state laws where the state is given priority in the Constitution or at least to not assist Federal authorities in executing such Federal laws. Some have even called for the arrest of Federal authorities taking such actions. While these have been largely defeated thus far, the idea of proposing them would have been unthinkable just a decade ago. There's been a progression that seems to be leading toward state authorities actively resisting Federal authorities enforcing apparently unconstitutional laws.

Not the first time the Supreme Court has been wrong. The Supreme Court decided "separate but equal" was constitutional. It decided Japanese interment was constitutional. And it was apparently constitutional to fire teachers who were members of "subversive" groups. Well, at least until the Supreme Court reversed itself. That's happened numerous times before and it'll almost certainly happen again.

The Supreme Court can rule that Catholicism is the national religion of the United States and that everyone in the US must convert to and practice it zealously. That doesn't make it correct. It can rule that a Federal law stripping all registered Democrats of the right to vote is constitutional. It isn't. Our system of government is imperfect, as is every other. It's run by imperfect humans who are subject to any number of influences that can impede their objectivity. We the people need to stand up, collectively, when our government gets something wrong and get it fixed; not throw our hands up and declare all hope lost because the Supreme Court issued a ruling. We need to be able to do that without a full blown revolution too, since those tend to be very bloody, expensive, and destructive. The way we seem to be tending toward handling this is through our state governments. I think that's one of the healthier ways to correct Federal mistakes and I hope to see the trend continue. As the states assert an increasing level of sovereignty, we'll see the power and scope of the Federal government diminish. Hopefully, that continues until it no longer has such horrifyingly complete dominion over the citizens of the United States.

The Federal government lacks jurisdiction for intrastate commerce. Thus, unless it's being sold across state lines, Federal law doesn't apply. Doesn't matter that the Supreme Court came up with some convoluted reasoning for making the interstate commerce clause apply; the Constitution says what it says. The state's law has the final say for intrastate commerce, and it isn't illegal in all US states.

Yeah, Elon, quit making cars. Leave that to the people who know what they're doing!

A guy in Mexico drove his Tesla Model S at over 110mph through a concrete wall and into a tree. He stepped out of the vehicle and walked away. A guy in Florida was driving a Tesla Model S on a highway when he got into a head-on collision with a Honda. Both people in the Honda were killed instantly, the Tesla driver pulled over, got out, and called the police.

They don't have a moat. They have a titanium fortress built on a cloud a mile above the ocean. Unless something drastic changes in the next few years, people will be buying Teslas as much for the safety aspect as anything else. Stick your family in a Tesla and suddenly it doesn't matter if some drunk crosses the median and slams into you full speed. Their safety is assured.

What's that piece of mind worth?

Bond trader: "Oh, I see you're making two very good products that work together, have solid demand, and have intellectual property potential. Why not just make one of them instead?"

Incorrect. CPUs are plenty fast and have been for years for doing many common tasks. The fact is that they aren't nearly fast enough (particularly for single-threaded items) and almost certainly won't be for another decade or more. There's a limit to what and how much you can multi-thread, and even then, you're still limited by single-thread performance x number of threads.

So yes, for grandma playing Blackjack on Yahoo, today's CPUs are plenty fast. For me and many others? The fastest stuff available is 100x slower than "fast enough".

I want computers (and servers, especially) which are able to perform their particular function without me having to wait on them. Ever. I want usable speech recognition feeding into a responsive AI that behaves as expected without delay (and God help you if you answer "Siri" to this). I want Eve Online to be able to stick 50,000 ships in one fight with full collision and damage physics modeling with zero lag. I want to be able to transcode, store, tag, and index 20 hours of home movies and a year worth of pictures without waiting. I want to run realtime and faster simulations of complex systems.

Are these common, everyday needs? Moreso than you might think. A lot of the back-end servers struggle to keep up with workloads that either expand or change over time. While much of what's right in front of your eyes seems pretty happy with the CPU that's there today, there's a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes that isn't. This causes server admins and developers to have to spend inordinate amounts of time, money, and cranial energy figuring out how to make it functional, giving the limited computing power available.

A lot of things need very little power, and they should have very little computers with very little CPUs to make them go. Some things - things you don't think about - need tons of power, either serially or just overall. I'd pay good money if Intel and AMD would stick with 4-12 cores and concentrate on making those cores enormously powerful. As it is, they're risking going the route of SPARC, and obviously that isn't working out well for SPARC. Interestingly enough, Oracle's trying to make SPARC more like x86 even as Intel and AMD are trying to make x86 more like SPARC.

I think everyone else is just jealous because they have low voter turnout while Estonia's going to get 3000% in their next election.

The only downside is the overwhelming election of Moot to Prime Minister.