I never said bludgeoning a person was easy.

. I said that someone who can and will disarm a person with a gun probably has the skills to then beat the crap out of you with your gun if it for some reason does not fire.

Although it is not "easy" to bludgeon someone to death, it only takes the right kind of strike to knock a person unconscious, at which point the perpetrator can take their time pistol whipping the limp body.

If you are defending yourself with your smart gun and the person takes it away from you, I'm pretty sure that if they can't shoot you with it that they will still be able to beat you to death with it. And if they are the kind of person who can and will disarm someone then they probably can beat you up, too. Either way, I'll take my chances that someone else might get my gun over my gun not firing when I really need it to. I can train to deal with misfires, not with electronic malfunctions.

I hope they don't drop support for the Adventure Construction Kit. That is the greatest game of all time.

I wasn't responding directly to the details of this patent application; rather, the notion that such a thing can be patented (and yes, I did read the claims). Presumably, if one can patent the white sheet with a specific lighting pattern, then previously one would have been able to patent just the white sheet, and that is ridiculous.

Consider it another way: I am a photographer using a white sheet as a backdrop. As I take a series of photos, thanks to digital photography I can immediately look at the results and move my lights around to remove shadows. At some point I happen to hit Amazon's patented light configuration, and I am now violating their patent. Dumb. Maybe they should also patent looking at the digital output and adjusting lighting? After all, that is part of the process for which they applied for the patent currently in question.

Don't forget, "or taking Cialis and dying from (complications due to) a 6 hour erection."

Last I checked, the Slashdot community was more likely to be on the side of supporting a ban. Regardless, how enforceable is such a ban? We can look for signs that a country is developing nuclear capability because of the unique nature of the technology involved. Autonomous, lethal robots, however, are made up of relatively benign or not suspicious parts, so we would have to rely on direct observation to determine if a country were developing such technology.

Right, because that stops people from using them. Oh wait, no it doesn't. And "Gun Free Zone" stops people from bringing guns into them. Nope.

Amazon patented blockquotes with #FFFFFF.

I don't care if no one in history prior to know has taken a photo of someone with a white sheet behind them. Is that really worthy of a patent?

How much did we (humans) make the Sahara Desert expand? Could it be that our planet is slowly dying on its own? Either way, I don't care. I believe we should be good stewards of the planet. I believe in conservation. But I don't believe in government doing things on our behalf. (And I also don't believe in the benevolence or objectivity of scientists. They aren't. I know plenty.)

We'll never make a truly human computer (or maybe "natural computer" is a better term) because we can't make it first and foremost desire self-preservation. We can build a robot that plays catch, but we can't make it want to play catch. Do we even know why we want to play catch (deep down I think it is motivated by the desire to procreate)? And thank FSM we can't build and evolving machines, because computers are logical and not forgetful, and would very likely enslave us first change they got.

A passenger jet is a relatively finite system compared to a climate model which purports to accurately predict what will happen in 100 years based on (let's assume) reliable measurements over the last 200 years and data based on not directly testable phenomenon over the last 10000 to millions of years. My faith in that modeling will increase when I can get an accurate weather forecast more than 24 hours in advance. Hell, at this point I'd take 12 hours.

Perhaps, but the important thing to understand is that when we use science for "good" we know that it can't possibly be bad for the environment. Only Big Corporations can do stuff that is bad for the environment.

Thousands of years is "pretty soon" at the geologic time scale.

Firstly, who cares what a cheeseburger-wielding clown thinks? Secondly, places like Chicago and Manhattan, while not able to make it explicitly illegal to own a handgun, have made it practically near-impossible.