I agree with the point you're making, in this post and others, but what if the smart gun manufacturers erred on the side of an operational, not disabled, weapon? In other words, if the battery dies or fails, or if it's determined that a fingerprint scan couldn't be gathered successfully (if it's using fingerprints), then default to an enabled state?

This would still put the onus of making the gun safe on the gun's owner, much like making sure a trigger lock is in place, requiring that the battery be checked frequently, and so on.

I realize that there are still other fail cases that would reduce reliability (like, in the case of fingerprints, a scan was successfully gathered but is not correctly identified), but eliminating the power failure, among others, by defaulting to an enabled state would no doubt get much closer to your high reliability target, would it not?
The way I see it, this would likely prevent more accidental shootings while getting closer to that reliability target.

You must be talking about Voodoo Doughnut Maple Bacon Ale by Rogue. I had it a couple of years ago while visiting the brewery near Portland, OR. It's interesting, but a bit too interesting to have more than a pint, IMHO.

I'm sure there are parts of the Brady Bill that should be revised, re-worded, or even taken out, but I'm not going to get into that, or argue about semantics.

However, you may be able to say that a flash suppressor has no affect on the function of the weapon in a literal sense, but I'd argue it completely changes the weapon's intended use. A weapon intended for target practice, sport, or self defense has absolutely no need for a flash suppressor. This type of "feature" is intended for covert use of the weapon, which I'd argue falls under what most would categorize as an assault weapon.

Like the inPulse watch? You know, made by Allerta, who became Pebble?

1,000 peanuts and 70,000 people

;-)

Yeah, I should have added a disclaimer that it, of course, is highly dependent upon the school district and/or individual school. I just thought I'd bring up the possibility that there may have been that caveat when it comes to cancelling schools in the area.

No doubt this false sense of security (and driving talent/experience) comes standard with most 4WD/AWD/4x4 vehicles.
When I had a 4x4 SUV, I even found myself having trouble keeping in mind the fact that I wasn't invincible.

My girlfriend and I were in Illinois a few Christmases ago when we found ourselves having to begin our 5-6 hour drive after 5-6 inches had already fallen. Even in IL, those country roads were not cleared one bit. We were in a Hyundai Sonata (4-door sedan, front-wheel drive), going maybe half the speed limit. We encountered numerous vehicles in the ditch, almost all of which were SUVs. We did end up doing a 180 in the middle of a straight road (presumably hitting some hidden ice under the snow), but we were able to at least make it to a major city in Indiana where we gave up (having gone half our distance in 5-6 hours) and stayed the night.

They do that here in Kentucky, too. I believe it's just streams of highly-salted water, where the water evaporates and leaves those lines of salt, which won't be "brushed" off the road by traffic like normal salt crystals tend to be.

I'm not arguing that it wasn't a disaster, but so far, in the comments I've seen that the NWS changed from a Winter Storm Watch to a Warning sometime around 3 or 3:30am. I'm not sure about Atlanta and surrounding areas, but that's awfully close to the cut-off time where schools can be cancelled. My father was a teacher, and from what I recall, if the call didn't come in that school was cancelled by 3 or 4am, it was on, regardless of what you woke up to.

Yeah, me too, and I would bet that Microsoft moves to incorporate the Windows app store into desktops. The app store could easily be expanded to offer desktop versions of software, in addition to tablet and phone versions. It would be a way for Microsoft to have more control over what gets installed on desktops running their OS... and having more control is definitely what they want.

That's not inheritance. That's a workaround to a lack of support for inheritance.

https://nest.com/ ...and their blog post about being acquired by google: https://nest.com/blog/2014/01/13/welcome-home/

Good quote, but it doesn't apply. Most university courses won't allow you access to reference materials during exams or quizzes.

At the engineering school I attended, during what we affectionally called boot camp (the first 3 semesters where you take Calc 1-3, once a day for an hour, with a test and a quiz every week), we weren't even allowed calculators during exams, much less a text book.

Good suggestion. I have a friend whose wife returned to college in her 30's and had difficulty with testing. I'm not sure what office it is, but they allowed her to take her tests apart from the other students, and on a different time table. I think it has really helped her, at least with the testing part.

Absolutely not, unless you know someone who can give you the hardware for your FreeNAS box. If you have an extra computer laying around, chances are it doesn't have what you'd need for one. I recently looked into what would be required to setup a FreeNAS box, but I don't have the available funds to build a decent one. I have an old computer using rsync to avoid catastrophic hdd failure, but the hardware is all too old for FreeNAS.