But your facilities insurance will want more money because you can have exercise-related injuries :)

Any trigger lock which doesn't put something behind/through the trigger itself is definitely garbage. Luckily, there's a number of them on the market with configurable pin holes that let you configure them for a variety of weapons. They're better than nothing! But sure, a crappy lock is the worst. In any case, a revolver can reasonably be locked with a cheap cable lock.

...gun won't register her fingerprint, and the man is enraged by the firearm and clubs her across the head with a blunt instrument. Thankfully, the trauma kills her almost instantly, and she suffers very little.

And neither of us have done any research into which of these outcomes is more likely.

It's still going to be easy to steal and use the weapon. Why? Because the system will, by definition, be easy to defeat. Why? Because the firearm must, by nature, by easy to break down and clean or repair. Nobody will buy a gun they can't strip down and repair unless perhaps they're literally not allowed to do that, and I don't see anyone proposing that yet. Safeties or mechanisms always boil down to something very simple and that means they will be very simple to defeat. Short form, you should assume that even if every firearm has a different system, there will be a defeat procedure in the wild for every firearm's safety, and probably available on whatever passes for the internet by the time a law like this actually passes. More likely you'll see an outright ban before you see a law like this.

Nah. Lots of weapons have had another safety added after their initial design, this is just yet another safety. But all your other points are dead on.

I would worry since that stuff is all around me, but I know from experience that there's no dirt in our soil, just a whole shitload of rocks.

That's not a problem with most of /.ers like me. ;)

"Are Irish spuds as highly radioactive as Idaho spuds?"

What do you mean? Russet or Yukon Gold?

If it left you crippled instead of dead, yes. However sane governments just have enough taxes to deal with the consequences of natural diasters instead of having "asteroid insurance", "crazy guy with a gun insurance", "tiger insurance", etc.

You're completely guessing about a very small number of actual cases, and extrapolating to the whole of the problem. Good luck with reality.

There's a third possibility: doctors and contractors are just acting independently in their own interest. Most of them harm and overcharge you while firmly believing that they are helping you.

That's fine, that's what's called a hypothesis. It's an internally-consistent account of what's going on, but we don't accept hypothesis as fact, you actually have to go out and prove that climate scientists are misrepresenting the truth, either by omission or commission.

• - Systematically. En masse.
• - For at least the last thirty years, though fifty years would be more likely. Thousands of scientists have literally gone to their deathbed without spilling the beans.
• - Across every country of the first and second world.
• - Graduating from universities throughout the developed world, receiving grants from innumerable governmental and private benefactors.
• - Publishing in dozens of journals, in as many again languages, distributed throughout the educated world.
• - And for all this, only making a college professor's salary in compensation, while they could make twice their going rate with the paychecks any number of "Clean Coal" think tanks would pay them.

I humbly submit that if such a level of false consciousness was possible, it would call into question the reliability of objective knowledge and the very cause of human civilization. I mean even if we took extreme cases like the Nazis or Stalin, they kept secrets, some big, but none SO big and for SO long, even when they were in power, and they had utter supremacy over the intellectual life of their respective countries.

Interestingly enough, they (liberals) count suicide as a "gun crime", or "gun violence" or whatever, so they can vastly inflate the numbers of actual gun crimes. Some 60% of all gun deaths are suicide. Another interesting fact, suicides in the US, per capita, is very similar (statistical blip) to countries with strict gun controls, which only prove that suicidal people will kill themselves, regardless of method.

All of this doesn't matter, because "guns are scary" (tm)

Voting third party works for me. Can't blame me for the mess we're in with the (D) and (R) people. My conscience is clear, and I can sleep at night. How does voting for the same thing over and over again expecting different results working out for you?

Of course, they do! They just pay everything to their executives.

In general, the idea of "profit" as something objective and measureable is completely idiotic for most of the modern companies, because a sizeable chunk of what is expense for the company, is income for the people who are in control of it.

To be honest, I'm buying an Ouya, and I'm going to use it to play emulators, run XBMC, and play whichever of my Android games can be coaxed to run on it without too many expensive additional apps. I expect I will cough up the five or six bucks to get some software to emulate touches from a game controller, which might even end up being a PS3 controller.

I am not even considering giving Microsoft or Sony my money in this generation. Ironically given how long I've hated them, Microsoft could have a chance at it eventually (when the device has had its price reductions, down the line) if only they would make Xbox Live multiplayer free. Or if this Azure linking actually paid off and they really provided something for your low low fee (and Live can be had for truly little money once or twice a year) and you got low lag servers running on their cloud computing service rather than getting to pay for shitty multiplayer matching and then getting to host the game over your consumer-grade internet connection as well, I might actually consider paying for Live.