Because many people prefer the risk of it being stolen or being disarmed in the middle of a scuffle, than to have those risks, plus the additional risk of the weapon refusing to fire due to some hard to resolve technical issue.

Right, because I'm sure the engineers at Toyota haven't thought about this kind of stuff.

There is a non-zero probability of someone dying due to the presence of pretty much anything. That doesn't automatically make it "pretty serious"

While that is true for many, it is not true for all, otherwise there would be no fruits with thorns or toxins, There are many fruits that are dangerous to eat, which don't "want" to be eaten.

It's also known as Survivorship Bias. Old stuff seems like it was better built because all the crappy stuff already made it into the dumpster and subsequently forgotten long ago.

One of the main obstacles between 3D printers and consumers has been clunky, unintuitive software

More like the fact that CAD software packages cost many thousands of dollars, and no good free alternatives exist.

Or that the printers themselves for commercial grade machines also cost many thousands of dollars.

Or that mechanical design is inherently challenging and is an expensive skill to develop.

But nope, just have some big buttons on a touch screen and everything will be groovy.

This is completely false. Patents were never about the "little guy". Their purpose is to benefit society by providing an advantage to disclosing the secrets of invention so society can learn. Prior to patents, technology was often a closely guarded secret, belonging to individuals or trade guilds, secrets that were often lost with the deaths of the people involved. By making disclosure a more attractive option than secrecy, society could benefit by learning from the details of the inventions.

That is the idea of the patent system. "Little guy" doesn't mean shit, all that matters is having useful knowledge disclosed to society, whether its individuals or mega-corps.

I believe you are talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking

In the US, more than 1/10th of traffic fatalities are pedestrians. Clearly, helmets should be mandatory for walking then, too.

*their

Also, not all failures are caused by "not doing there job right", especially when venturing into new territory. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a classic example of a disastrous engineering project, pushed the envelope and collapsed, but not because the engineers didn't do their job right. There hadn't been a bridge of that size with that design before, and aerodynamic concerns weren't taken into account. If that bridge hadn't collapsed and taught the lesson, some other bridge would have.

You can never remove all risk. You may call that 'passing the buck', but blaming all failures, regardless of cause, as "not doing there job right", forces a stone-age technological capability.

Right, there are very few productive people that drink alcohol in the US. Very small group indeed.

I vaguely recall an article years ago on something like TheDailyWtf where some idiot webmaster wrote a web application with links instead of buttons to perform tasks, and was confused why his site and data was getting trashed repeatedly, until he figured out it was the crawling bots.

This is nothing new: unskilled developers using the wrong methods and getting burned.

The 50s and 60s need to be erased from memory concerning policy decisions, because the prosperity at that time is heavily biased by the fact that Europe and Japan were destroyed, and the United States was the only shop in town.

The United states does not have a criminal justice system. It has a criminal legal system.

It is an important distinction to make.

Map is disappointing. Whomever decided that color scheme should be slapped.

I was expecting something like this: http://map.itoworld.com/road-casualties-usa but for all countries.

The map linked has every traffic fatality in the United States, and the age, sex, and classification of each death.