First, do please define "sensible gun regulation".

Second, are you aware of how much 'gun regulation' already exists today both in federal, state & local statutes?

You are hard pressed to find a legal consumer good which is more regulated than firearms with regards to it's manufacture, sale, transport and use.

Look what happened to the British Empire.

Nine out of ten mes agree!

my 3rd-grader is doing the khan academy CS course. he's learning processing.js, and he loves it.

FDA...? Do they consider mosquitos food or drugs?

The government, of course.

#insert observations/law/drferris.h

(preprocessed for your convenience)

"Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted â" and you create a nation of law-breakers â" and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.â

A funny idea I had once was that after the revolution, the new government gets a 100 page blank notebook to write the laws in.

Once they fill up the last page, all of them are executed.

The next group of guys gets a 100 page blank book.

Have you tried using Windows XP on a touch device?

You know, you're right. Nobody should ever try anything new with voice interaction. We should leave that shit off because its buggy or only knows how to do web searches based on bad guesses.

We shouldn't spend any time putting this stuff in front of users and learning what works well, what doesn't work, what people like, what they don't like. God forbid we try and see if there are ways to integrate it with how people currently use computers.

Instead, what we should do is wait until the 23rd century, when we have starships. Even though we've done no incremental work between now and then, in the distant future, voice recognition and natural language processing is just going to be really, really good, because The Future. It's just going to build itself, and when we are bald and say "COMPUTER" to our starship, its going to listen and then do exactly the right thing, and nobody is going to ask why the bridge has so many buttons and levers and consoles and shit if there is a ship-wide computer with unlimited power and perfect human voice recognition. And we're going to gloss right over how a near-Ai level of natural language understanding still needs us to say COMPUTER first before it figure out who we're talking to, as if anyone else on the bridge could execute the command we're asking when we're staring off into nowhere instead of at another human in the same room...

Anyway, I'm running 9926 on two machines - neither of which are touch-enabled. I've never talked to the thing yet. It appears to run faster than 8.0/8.1. The start menu behavior is better, and you can flip back and forth between little-menu-on-desktop or "big screen of metro" with a simple gesture.

The UI feels positively snappy. The paradigm has been reversed entirely from 8 - now, metro apps run on your desktop - instead of your desktop is some weird bad neighborhood nobody wants you to go to.

I think a lot of people will like Windows 10.

GRBs clearly haven't prevented life in *our* galaxy, so the Fermi Paradox still stands.

The caluculations probably rule out life in the core of our galaxy, but systems further out would be exposed even less often than ours is. And even though GRBs can periodically sterilize a planet, their directionality means that one burst would not likely sterilize all the planets in an intercellar civilization simultaneously.

So, to modify what someone said above, we can add another term to the Drake equation, but this doesn't do much to answer Fermi.

what with the rabble's concerns boiling over and impinging on the fringes of their attention.

Sorry... I was going for the joke and didn't pitch it very well. My actual views are more like yours.

As for the reality of the subject matter, I would borrow the concept of "probably approximately correct" from machine learning, and give it a 90-95% chance of being ~80% correct. (The 80% is lower to allow room for some more big discoveries like inflation.)

Unfortunately, people will be (hopefully) studying this for thousands of years on top of the <100 we have so far, and none of us will live to see how it turns out in the long term.

And I'm guessing that the publishers who use region codes cry like babies whenever governments impose artificial barriers to free trade.

I always heard it as: "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

And of course, the word of choice usually wasn't "fool".

(Is this really a regional saying?)