Various commodities valuable in a post-apocalyptic scenario. Ammo, tools, clothes, seeds for plants (no bottle caps!)

If a smart gun worked 99.5% of the time, go try to market such a device to a law enforcement agency or even the military. Go on. I'll wait.

Now that you've become the laughing-stock of gun salespersons to those groups, what did you learn? You need to vastly boost the reliability of such devices before even thinking of trying to sell them to serious buyers. Once the device failure rate improves by a few orders of magnitude, then try again. The actual number the military is looking for is of far higher reliability than a 0.5% error rate.

'Tis far better to gun-proof your children than child-proof your gun. What's the best way to dissuade a child from playing with a gun? Take the magic out of it. One very clever method I heard of was from a CCW instructor who made a ritual with his son every time he wanted to play with the gun. He'd pull out his snub nose revolver, empty the bullets out, show the kid the empty chambers, make the kid count both the bullets and the empty chamber, then give the (still empty) gun to his son to play with to his heart's content. What happened? After a few minutes of dry-firing, the kid got bored with it. As he got older, actual firearms safety & experience were layered in.

Not very. Different services, same business model, same shafting (pun intended) of the actual workers.

{cough} Aerotek {cough}

Ditto. I worked through Aerotek for a year (which is related to TekSystems). The company I worked for paid $55/hour for me, and I only got $25/hr from Aerotek.

0.00001% * 320 million people = 32 people. Methinks there are a few orders of magnitude more than your proposed count.

Varying degrees of focus are required for various procedures. Think of brushing your teeth. Are you 100% focused on the action of brushing your teeth? Probably not. Now turn around and hand-solder some surface mount SOT-23 chips. More focused? You betcha. He specifically stated that he chose a very simple and straightforward procedure to test the setup with. He wasn't performing an organ transplant or anything of touchy nature. I doubt the surgeon was actively fiddling with the Google Glass and the HO setup throughout the procedure. Set it up, hit play, come back when the surgery is done.

So, if the NSA is working so hard to fight terrorism by violating our rights, why couldn't the government work just as hard on something that saves more lives in the long run? Vehicles kill tens of thousands of people per year. If the government is going to trash my civil liberties, at least save more lives in the process.

I worked in the medical device field for a while. The level of paperwork and documentation required for validation activities is staggering, plus the medical field in general doesn't have as good a handle on fulfilling government requirements as well as, say, the aviation industry. The path to take a device from concept to validated, sellable product is a long one. Adding cybersecurity (while a worthy endeavor) will only exacerbate the arduous and hair-tearing experience of developing a product.

I don't get why internships were ever unpaid in the first place. In the course of training someone to do the job they are interning for, they end up providing some form of valuable work, even if it is at a lower level of effectiveness/efficiency than a highly-skilled employee. As an engineer, I have the good fortune of being in a field where internships are almost universally paid, and paid well for that matter. (Many engineering internships run from double to triple minimum wage.) Even my most basic intern experience (which is barely considered "engineering" by my standards) paid over double minimum wage (back in 2006). I can't fathom a sort of situation where an intern provides absolutely no useful work. Can anyone provide an example?

The military doesn't have to recruit robots, it just builds them. Robots don't get tired, don't complain, perform better & more consistently than humans, don't get PTSD, and don't cause public uproar when they're destroyed (vs. bodybags).

Oops, bad math. 30 a minute

Would you then have to apply such penalties to wide-sweeping automated systems that monitor for piracy and other violations? (Kind of like "If an automated car commits a traffic violation, who do you send the ticket to?")

If a piece of software flags & sends notices about 300 items a minute and even 10% of them are false, that's 4320 false claims a day. If it is a $500 fine per false claim that's on the order of 2 million dollars lost a day. Hmmm...this is sounding better and better all the time...

I hope the Barbara Streisand effect snowballs this from here.