The climate is already changing, the goal is to reduce the amount of change.

The problem is the effort is not to reduce the amount, the effort is to send change, however slightly, in a VERY BAD direction.

We already know the Earth will enter a glacial period again. It may even be tending to do so now, we really don't have the understanding of climate to say for sure.

What we do know is that entering a glacial period is something we would vastly rather avoid over any of the climate warming models to date (now that we know runaway warming is simply not going to happen as the doomsayers predicted). Glacial periods will mean mass extinctions all over, and a huge shortage of arable land unlike the greatly expanded land that can be used for agriculture in a warmer Earth scenario.

It's fine to come up with ideas that promote the reduction of things that in theory increase warming, but it's extremely dangerous (or at least stupid) for life on Earth to do anything on a large scale that promotes global cooling of the atmosphere.

I have an Asus ZenWatch. Below should be able to be done on any Android Wear device. In no particular order I use it for the following:

Check New Email
Check SMS
Check Caller ID
Check Weather
Check Calendar and Agenda
Check Google Now Cards (includes traffic card for my route home)
Check Other phone notifications
Dictate Notes
Check steps walked
Check Heart rate
Set Reminders
and Check the Time

Some Android Watches have a speaker in addition to the microphone so you answer and talk through your watch for phone calls. My watch can store music on the watch itself and play back through a paired BT headphones without my phone present. One could play games, but I do not see any point.
I am down to about 40% by Midnight most days. I do not see much issue with recharging it every day as I take it off every night and sticking in the charging cradle just means it is easy to find in the morning.

Android wear becomes really useful over other options if you enable Google Now. The latest generation of Android Wear watches actually look like a watch (Moto360, LG G Watch R, Asus ZenWatch). If those things do not matter, then get a Pebble or one of the high end Fitbits like a Charge or Surge, or a Nevo Watch ( http://igg.me/at/nevo/x/813785... ). The Nevo is a real watch, with basically a Fitbit Flex built in, and add in colored led notification lights. You will not be able to read an SMS or email on your Nevo, but you can tell the difference when your watch vibrates from a new notification.

So, the NJ State Senate Majority Leader admits that New Jersey's law, which would make smart guns mandatory within three years of the first commercially-available smart gun being sold anywhere in the United States, can be reversed... if only the NRA will agree to stop obstructing the sale of smart guns within the United States, which they do specifically because of the New Jersey law?

I don't see the problem. The NRA is obstructing a law that goes against their stated interests, and New Jersey is promising to reverse that law if only the NRA will stop obstructing what that law regulates?

For the NRA's stated position, see here. Particularly:

NRA does not oppose new technological developments in firearms; however, we are opposed to government mandates that require the use of expensive, unreliable features, such as rigging a firearm so that it could not fire unless it received an electronic signal from an electronic bracelet worn by the firearm's lawful owner (as was brought up in Holder's recent testimony).

That's their stated policy, right there.

Not quite. Courts have been willing to hold businesses liable for damages due to foreseeable criminal acts, yes, but so far no court has been willing to hold businesses liable for damages due to acts of war levied by a foreign state.

That's a pretty big jump to make, incidentally.

The risk is not that the courts might hold the theater chain responsible -- the courts wouldn't, on the grounds that the theater chain isn't responsible for protecting their clientele against acts of war from a foreign nation-state. The risk is that the lawsuit would be filed and it would cost the theater $20 million or more just to get the courts to dismiss all charges.

That $20 million is probably considerably more than they would make from screening The Interview, so the logical business case is to not screen it.

It's sad, but ... the real problem is not that the courts might hold the theater liable: it's that in our current system, getting sued is, in itself, its own punishment.

The NRA does not object to smart gun technologies, and believes that people who wish to be allowed to buy them should be allowed to buy them.

The NRA objects to smart guns becoming mandatory, because the technology for smart guns is nowhere near mature.

The number one desired trait in a firearm, moreso than caliber or capacity or anything else, is reliability. The reason why Glocks are so popular isn't because of caliber, capacity, or aesthetics -- all of which other firearms do better. It's because a Glock is as reliable as gravity. If you chamber a round and pull the trigger, it goes boom. If you don't pull the trigger, it won't.

I have personally seen a Glock get thrown into a bucket of wet, goopy mud and left there for fifteen minutes just so the mud had the opportunity to permeate the whole of the firearm. At the end of the fifteen minutes the owner pulled the Glock out, shook it precisely three times to dislodge mud from the barrel, and fired one hundred seventy rounds through it in the space of about five minutes, just one magazine after another after another... just to prove the weapon was reliable.

Do you believe the current crop of smart gun technologies are equally reliable? The ones I've had the chance to play around with definitely aren't. They can't even agree on whether they need to fail safe or fail deadly.

Economically speaking, this would mean that valve is selling games at 1 millionth of the usual price, but still profiting off them. Profiting so much, that they are willing to make custom software changes rather than just change the price. That's surprising math to me. Sometimes I wonder why companies, especially companies selling digital goods, don't just set the price in one particular currency then let it somewhat auto-fluctuate in the other currencies according to the market. Wouldn't that be simpler for them?

Politically speaking, Russia's currency lost value because they invaded a nearby nation and they are under sanctions. It is interesting that Valve is willing to go through effort to continue to offer them games at a price they can afford.

Excellent questions. There are a few reasons, but they are indirect.

1) Because Azure will be the default place to deploy .NET servers, which makes them money.
2) Because .NET developers will tend to use Visual Studio, which makes them money.
3) Because Windows phone and Windows 8 and the Windows store will be the default place to deploy those apps, which makes them money.

Also, note that there have been free and cross-platform imlpementations of .NET for >10 years. It has done very little to dilute Microsoft's business.

FUD.

What patents? The stuff they are open sourcing is dependent on DirectX or even Windows. It runs on Linux and Mac.

What has changed is that open-source is no longer a threat to Microsoft. It was a threat when Windows competed against Linux for the desktop and for the server. But today, Microsoft doesn't care about Windows and has re-invented itself: Microsoft lays its hopes on Azure.

All this open-sourcing of .NET is to entice people to use .NET and thus use Windows Azure. By eliminating the stigma of being closed and proprietary, they eliminate the #1 objection to using .NET. This openness goes both ways: not only is .NET opening, but Azure is supporting other stacks: node and LAMP for example. They don't care what tools you use anymore, they just want your hosting business.

Microsoft's new competitors are OpenStack, Amazon, and other cloud service providers. They will compete with those providers by trying to have the cloud platform that supports the most tools and the easiest process to get stuff into the cloud.

To be fair we are bombing ISIS territories and various Arab nations (via drones) and killing a crapload of non-military forces.

I'm not going to defend the drone strikes, but I will point out that every one is absolutely an attempt to strike some military target, the question is what percentage they get wrong...

There is no chance that taking over a coffee shop is going to be a strike at a military target.

If you're a religious fanatic in the Middle East and want to kill Christians you become a terrorist. ...

Or, you can join ISIS (the army killing and/or enslaving/raping everyone including Christians).

So there's an equal choice to be had, yet some are choosing to capture and harm non-military forces - those people doing so have been wholly Muslim.

When there's a dark layer of soil on top of sand it's usually a macrobiotic crust, that has taken a few hundred years to do its thing - that is what they crushed as they walked. There's not much worse you can do as far as lasting ecological damage except for sawing down trees a few hundred years old...

They did also harm the aesthetics of the lines themselves.

Facebook is doing some interesting research. Is it even possible to determine, from a picture, if someone is drunk? Do you start with face recognition algorithms, and look at the face? Can the algorithm learn body language? I am skeptical on this.

Identifying one's face is not barely even AI any more. The fingerprint is based on the distance between the facial features. Yes, neural networks and things are good at finding those features, so AI is involved to some degree. Identifying some vague concept like drunkenness based on a facial recognition algorithm seems like a big step. I'll be impressed if they can do this with any reliability. I bet you could do better looking at the GPS coordinates of the picture, proximity to bars, the people in the picture, and the time of day. Maybe that is more like what they are doing, than actually judging the image itself.

P.S. This is supposed to be a tech blog. How sad is it that a story about deep learning AI yields nothing but a series of jokes about drunkenness?