Lots of folks need guns badly to defend themselves without going out and looking for trouble.

That's because you're generalizing improperly. Any gun that does not infallibly go bang whenever you pull the trigger is useless. That one gun is broken does not make all guns broken.

The problem is that the mere existence and sale of such a gun will force every gun sold in New Jersey to have it...so whether it's designed to become mandatory or not, it will be.

Electronics don't fail just because of loss of power, you know...

And if gun ban advocates truly want safety, they'd work to repeal that NJ law. As things stand, ti's nothing less than a back-door gun ban, and unconstitutional.

All what accidental deaths? The number is tiny - less than 100 a year. That number is also dropping monotonically every year, and has done so since the 1930s.

If you want to end kids' accidental deaths, get rid of bathtubs and swimming pools. They kill far more.

Accidental use of guns causes fewer deaths than just about any other accident you can name. The number is small, and has been dropping monotonically since the 1930s.

Unauthorized use of guns is not going to be significantly impacted by something like this. There are far too many out there without it, and those will never be retrofitted.

Perhaps it's a user interface limitation, instead of a storage limitation?

It must not be simply reliable. It must be infallible: it must work instantly, every time. Otherwise, any gun with the technology is useless.

You never need a gun until you need it badly - and if it fails, you're worse off than if you did not have it to begin with.

I think that the world described in the three stories in David Drake's Lacey and His Friends might be a better analogy -- a world where everyone is under constant surveillance from multiple angles and by different organizations, where buying 'privacy' pays for a room with only the single mandatory government camera, and the ability of the police to roll back surveillance footage to track the movements of a criminal result in the overwhelming majority of criminals captured within hours of their crime. I think it better describes the extreme end result of the expansion of technology allows capturing more and more actions and communications until, by law, everything anyone does must be recorded.

"Also some of the science and tech courses are very demanding but the teachers don't simplify it leading to many whooshing sounds for the student throughout the courses. Such courses could benefit from a simplified overview of the course material."

How many employers would like to hire people that can't understand the actual content and need "simplified overview" to get a grade? If you really don't grasp it to the point where you can actually apply the math for new, novel problems, then you don't actually know it, do you?

MOOCs have a serious credibility problem already. The very last thing they need is to dumb things down. If it becomes common knowledge that, say, an engineering MOOC graduate can't even handle a system of differential equations in an intelligent manner, or don't understand the implication of Green's function, then the credits will become truly worthless.

It does depend on the size of the field as well, though, as well as the funding. I can well imagine astronomy having major problems; everybody has heard of astronomy, and lots of people dream of being astronomers.

A friend of mine is working in paleogeology. As you might imagine there's not a huge amount of money in the field. On the other hand, few people have heard of it either, and there aren't that many people dreaming of working there. There's no movies starring daring paleogeogists with hat and bullwhip in hand ducking poison arrows and swinging across pits of snakes in order to determine the local sea bed temperature during the cambrian. The end result is that funding is pretty stable and dependable. People that are qualified and willing find funding. I bet there's a fair amount of other obscure fields in a similar situation.

You could write an open source application in C++ rather than the much less mainstream R language and you'd have lots of people ready skilled to maintain it.

You may be right in general. But R is not a general-purpose language. It's a programmable tool for statistical computing; you'd have to spend a lot of time to reimplement a set of high-quality statistical libraries to do the same. Doing that correctly is very non-trivial and not quick. Very similar to saying you can replace Matlab with your own C++ code.
 

Look online (ebay, etc). Vendors are refurbing ipods just this way. 250 gig refurb gen5's are going Buy-it-now for $400. Smaller ones with prices on down to $150.

I would think it obvious I did not mean that.

How much video are you streaming? I've found very little if any issue with 10mbps on my home line, and I find that every once in a while that I'm streaming to my living room, the basement play room, a 2DS, and 2-3 computers simultaneously. I might not be streaming 1080p to every device, Heck, 1080p is over rated. Give me 480p or 720p as long as it's 16:9. The only time I notice a significant issue is when someone logs on with their un-synced phone, and steal all the upload bandwidth sending all their photos to Google.