This last season wasn't very good. Maybe it was just because they looked at reality and said, "Well how are we supposed to satirize this?"
I don't know about Veep, but I've seen interviews with Alec Baldwin (plays Trump on Saturday Night Live, if anyone didn't know that) and Robin Wright (plays Claire Underwood on House of Cards) and both commented that Trump has been a challenge for their writers, because it can be hard to find something to do that is more extreme and crazier than what the actual POTUS has really done.
You still, even after I pointed out, ignore the first country to leave the EU and how it has benefited that country greatly.
I assume you're talking about Greenland, though technically the first country to leave the EU was Algeria. It's not at all clear that leaving the EU was a good choice for Greenland, and there have been a lot of calls recently in Greenland for re-entry. Mainly to promote some economic diversity, because the current almost single-product economy is very shaky.
Greenland is also a very different case from the UK, which has a large and diverse economy much of which depends on supply chains that are tightly integrated with the EU. Greenland's fishing industry doesn't need much in the way of raw materials from other countries, and what it does need it gets from Denmark. And Greenland has an "in" to the EU marketplace through Denmark as well, since it's part of Denmark and Denmark is part of the EU.
Greenland's situation is nothing at all like the UK's, and it's not clear that leaving the EU has been unambiguously good for Greenland.
Leaving is going to be a disaster for the UK. It took a bit longer than expected for their economy to begin to tank, but it's happening now and it's just going to get worse from here. So far growth has slowed significantly, and contraction is around the corner. The harder the divorce the worse it's going to be, too.
But given that Apple's already invested $5 billion into this new campus, complete with iPhone-influenced custom-built toilets for the space, it's hard to believe this decision was about penny-pinching. The other possible argument for skipping private offices would be if a company didn't know that's what its workers would prefer.
Or the 3rd choice: They don't really care what their employees prefer.
Actually, it's a fourth: They believe that open plan offices promote creative interaction while closed offices promote focused productivity, and they choose to favor the former over the latter. There's also an element of flexibility. The theory is that it's easier for people in open-plan offices to use noise-cancelling headphones to focus when they need to be productive than it is for employees to walk out of their office and into a colleague's office when they need to collaborate.
I'm not saying that money never enters into it. But clearly for the likes of tech companies sitting on enormous cash reserves, money isn't the primary consideration. Competitiveness is. Staying ahead of the rapidly-changing technology world is. And they believe that open plan office spaces, with lots of additional space for ad-hoc collaboration in meeting rooms, lounge areas, volleyball courts, etc., is the best way to do that.
I'm not willing to say that they're unequivocally right, but they're certainly not completely wrong, either.
And what are those problems it causes? (Assuming a highly reliable and effective implementation. Which is very, very hard.)
Making assumptions causes problems. Those problems are caused because there are no highly reliable and effective implementations of this technology, and there aren't going to be as long as firearms work the way they work now. Maybe someday we'll go to electrically triggered firearms, or flechette throwers, and then the mechanisms will change sufficiently for such a safety lockout to be meaningful.
The preferred response (the one I teach in my gun classes) is to gather your family in a room with only one entrance, cover the door with your gun, and call 911.
If I had a panic room I might consider it, but that's quite expensive and I'm not going to trap myself and the ones I love in a room that could become a crematorium if someone drops a cigarette on the carpet. When seconds count, the police are over ten minutes away in the best case, and my road is paved! Plenty of people who live within shootin' distance of me live on dirt.
If a room in your house is likely to be a crematorium in the event of a fire, you have another problem. Every room where people live should have windows that enable escape (building codes have required this for decades), and if they're too high you should keep a fire escape ladder handy (e.g. this).
Also, obviously, if you smell smoke it's time to get out and if that means shooting the intruders, so be it.
We need to send a few more people with your attitude to prison, IMO. I'm all in favor of legitimate self defense, and I fully support giving the homeowner the benefit of the doubt, but your attitude fails the basic test of civilization.
Can you please go over to Lorenzo and slap him for us, then say "Android bug 32621", and walk away. Thank you.
I think you got that bug number wrong, since I can't find any such bug. As for Lorenzo, slapping him would require a long overseas flight, so probably not:-)
Raise their hands, turn around slowly and leave the house the way they came? Fine. I'll do my best to give the police an excellent description.
Uh, no. Get down on their knees and wait until the police come as you keep them under control, yes. You are simply allowing them to go on the the next house, making you a passive accomplice in the next crime.
Utter nonsense.
Oh, I have no problem with holding the intruder for the police if I can do so in safety... but that's a really tough thing to do. Not only might the intruder be able to do something, but more than one homeowner has been holding a gun on a perp, and been shot to death by the police when they arrived.
In one example, from a few years ago, the guy sent his family into the yard and his wife called 911. She told the dispatcher that her husband had the intruder at gunpoint, and described in detail their location, clothing, etc. The dispatcher passed all of that along to the police officers responding. When the police arrived, the wife reiterated all of this information to them directly before they went in. But when they walked in and saw a man holding a gun, they shot him, putting six bullets into him before he could hit the ground. Oops.
Nope, unless it's absolutely certain that I can hold the perp and turn him over to the police safely, I want him to run away. And I'm a former police officer, who actually received training in how to safely disarm and secure a prisoner.
The problem is that it's very difficult to know what the burglar's intentions are.
Then start a dialog.
If I can be certain that he's unarmed, I definitely will. If I can't be certain of that, speaking may well make me a target.
There are no hard-and-fast rules in situations like this. It's always a matter of doing the best you can based on what you know and what options you have. The preferred response (the one I teach in my gun classes) is to gather your family in a room with only one entrance, cover the door with your gun, and call 911. Let the police come deal with the intruder. But if that's not possible, you have to do what you have to do. Shooting another human being should always be the last resort... but it's better than allowing you or a family member to be killed.
If someone breaks into my house at night, I don't think I want to rely on it being "very rare" that he has violent intentions. This is why burglary is classified as a violent felony (many states use the term "forcible felony").
In most European countries you have to use reasonable force. If they are unarmed, if they try to leave when discovered, you can't try to kill them.
This is the case in the US as well, mostly. Even Castle Doctrine laws don't give you carte blanche to kill; all they do is say that if someone breaks into your home, your actions are presumed to be reasonable. That means that in order to convict you of murder, the prosecution would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that no reasonable man would have done what you did, in addition to proving the other elements of the crime.
In practice, attempts to prosecute homeowners' use of deadly force in their homes against intruders are extremely rare in Castle Doctrine states. Mostly homeowners are only prosecuted when they do something egregious, like shoot the burglar in the back as he's running across the lawn away from the house.
You can't even attack them, you have to let them go, even if they are carrying your stuff.
Every state in the US would allow you to use non-lethal force to keep them from stealing your stuff. Only Texas allows the use of lethal force.
I find it ironic that Google invests so heavily in online education programs, but only hires people who have gone through the higher education song and dance.
Disclaimer: I work for Google, and interview people for software engineering positions at Google, but what I'm going to say represents only my own perspective and is in no way an official company statement.
The irony you see doesn't actually exist. Outside of research positions (of which there are quite a few, and those really do require research credentials), Google does not care about your degrees or lack thereof. Many of my co-workers do have PhDs. A majority have master's degrees. But there are plenty (like me) with nothing beyond a BS, and I have one colleague who has an associate's degree, a couple more who took some classes in college but have no degree, and one who never graduated from high school. He did earn a GED at age 29.
The Google interview and hiring process (for software engineers, at least) pays no attention whatsoever to academic credentials. It's all about how you perform in the interviews. That said, performing well in the interviews requires a pretty solid education in computer science. In a decent CS program, you'll acquire the knowledge you'll need by the end of your junior year, but unless you're really exceptional, odds are that you'll need some more time and practice for it to become sufficiently "second nature" that you don't have to think about the CS and can focus on the problems you're being asked to solve. From there, it's all about whether or not you have the problem solving ability.
So, a degree is in no way required, but most self-taught programmers never get the education in CS fundamentals that's needed in the interview process. This is not because the purpose of the interview is to verify knowledge of CS. The purpose of the interview is to test problem solving ability, but data structures and algorithms are the language of the conversation, and if you don't speak the language you can't participate effectively.
There is one other thing that a degree does for you, though: Get you the interview. Google recruiters, like recruiters everywhere, are inundated with resumes and they have to figure out how to filter them down. If your resume doesn't have an appropriate degree on it, it had better contain ample job experience that shows that it's worth taking an hour out of a working engineer's day to interview you on the phone.
Since most of the interviews I do are that first "phone screen" I can tell you that Google recruiters aren't too selective, because I get all sorts of people who can't think or code their way out of a paper bag.
For example, yesterday I interviewed a guy with an MSCS (allegedly), who couldn't figure out how many 16-bit numbers there are. That wasn't my actual question, of course, but I was trying to gently guide him through the process of analyzing the tradeoffs between several implementation options, one of which would have required creating and initializing an array to hold a histogram of the values from an input stream. Clearly, the array needs to have a cell to hold the count of each value that might occur, and the values were 16 bits in size. I wanted him to think about the time and space cost of creating and initializing that array, to compare it with another option. He had no clue how to figure out how large the array might need to be. Even after I told him the answer (2**16, which he oh-so-helpfully plugged into his calculator, and informed me was 65,536), he still seemed to have no clue about why it was the answer.
Tip for anyone considering interviewing at Google: Get this book and work through all of the problems in it. You should find them challenging, but not terribly difficult, and be able to solve most problems (including coding your solution) in under an hour.
Too many Republicans believe that you have the right to shoot an intruder.
I'm not a Republican, but I believe I have the right to shoot anyone who threatens my life or my family's lives. Do you honestly disagree with that? The right of self-defense is the most natural of natural rights.
I'll grant that an intruder may not intend harm, but I'm pretty certain he doesn't intend kindness. He's already demonstrated the willingness to commit a violent felony against me, and if I wait too long to see what he's going to do, I may lose the opportunity to stop him.
Who cares? This tech will protect home owners from escalating the level of violence against a burglar.
You mean "protect burglars from home owners", of course. And, obviously, burglars already have a sure-fire way to protect themselves: not breaking into homes. And note that smart guns that work correctly won't protect burglars from homeowners.
Simply breaking into a place shouldn't be a death sentence.
I actually agree with this. The problem is that it's very difficult to know what the burglar's intentions are. If I could be certain that all the guy wanted was my TV, and that if he got it no one would get hurt, I'd help him carry it out. My TV isn't worth anyone's life, and anyway, I have insurance.
But if someone breaks into my house in the middle of the night, I can't know what they intend, other than that it's very unlikely that they intend to be nice to me or my family. So unless they can convince me pretty quickly that they don't intend to do my family any harm, I will be aiming a gun at them. Whether or not I pull the trigger will depend on what they do next. Raise their hands, turn around slowly and leave the house the way they came? Fine. I'll do my best to give the police an excellent description. Make any move that seems aggressive or threatening? I'm shooting first and dealing with the outcome -- which will probably include a lifetime of regret -- later.
A 15 year-old kid was shot in my neighborhood a few years ago after walking through an unlocked sliding glass door. No thinking person would ever believe that he deserved to be executed for that.
Deserved? Absolutely not. Even if he intended to rob the place. But neither does the homeowner deserve to be in fear for his life and that of his family... none of them did anything wrong at all! As for the young burglar, it's a tragedy, but the tragedy is not just that he got shot, it's also that he chose to commit a violent felony. He didn't deserve to die, but he made the choice to place his life in serious jeopardy, by threatening the lives of others. Or appearing to, at least, which is the same thing in the eyes of the law.
I'm assuming that it was deliberate here, and not some sort of accident, of course. If it was an accident, that's also a tragedy, but it's way, way down the list of the ways that 15 year olds accidentally die.
In theory, both are great ideas... in reality, no one can ever seem to get it right.
I don't think smart guns are impossible (unlike successful large-scale communism by average humans). I do think that ensuring the smart locking system does not reduce the reliability of a possibly life-saving tool is really, really hard.
Personally, I trust the police to validate the reliability of their firearms quite well, so I'll be happy to buy and use smart guns as soon as I see all of the police departments switch to using them. Police officers are not infrequently shot with their own guns, so they should be anxious to switch... as soon as they're sufficiently reliable.
Which, as I said, is a very hard problem to solve.
Amazing what happens when time, money, and effort is spent on actual improvements instead of simply extracting and hoarding as much money as possible.
An interesting question is why it took a private, for-profit company to do it, given the tremendous amounts of money that we've poured into NASA. Granted that much of what got SpaceX off the ground was NASA funding, but it was relatively small amounts compared to NASA's budget. It seems that a profit motive is useful, though perhaps not necessary, or sufficient.
And the net result will be that good papers naturally float to the top through citations
That would be awesome, but I'm not so sure. People rely on journals to curate the content because their time is limited, and papers that don't get found don't get cited.
Slashdot Mirror
This last season wasn't very good. Maybe it was just because they looked at reality and said, "Well how are we supposed to satirize this?"
I don't know about Veep, but I've seen interviews with Alec Baldwin (plays Trump on Saturday Night Live, if anyone didn't know that) and Robin Wright (plays Claire Underwood on House of Cards) and both commented that Trump has been a challenge for their writers, because it can be hard to find something to do that is more extreme and crazier than what the actual POTUS has really done.
Does anyone in an open-plan setting really collaborate by yelling to a colleague on the other side of the room
No, the idea is to co-locate teams. So it's a matter of turning your chair around, not yelling across the room.
You still, even after I pointed out, ignore the first country to leave the EU and how it has benefited that country greatly.
I assume you're talking about Greenland, though technically the first country to leave the EU was Algeria. It's not at all clear that leaving the EU was a good choice for Greenland, and there have been a lot of calls recently in Greenland for re-entry. Mainly to promote some economic diversity, because the current almost single-product economy is very shaky.
Greenland is also a very different case from the UK, which has a large and diverse economy much of which depends on supply chains that are tightly integrated with the EU. Greenland's fishing industry doesn't need much in the way of raw materials from other countries, and what it does need it gets from Denmark. And Greenland has an "in" to the EU marketplace through Denmark as well, since it's part of Denmark and Denmark is part of the EU.
Greenland's situation is nothing at all like the UK's, and it's not clear that leaving the EU has been unambiguously good for Greenland.
Leaving is going to be a disaster for the UK. It took a bit longer than expected for their economy to begin to tank, but it's happening now and it's just going to get worse from here. So far growth has slowed significantly, and contraction is around the corner. The harder the divorce the worse it's going to be, too.
But given that Apple's already invested $5 billion into this new campus, complete with iPhone-influenced custom-built toilets for the space, it's hard to believe this decision was about penny-pinching. The other possible argument for skipping private offices would be if a company didn't know that's what its workers would prefer.
Or the 3rd choice: They don't really care what their employees prefer.
Actually, it's a fourth: They believe that open plan offices promote creative interaction while closed offices promote focused productivity, and they choose to favor the former over the latter. There's also an element of flexibility. The theory is that it's easier for people in open-plan offices to use noise-cancelling headphones to focus when they need to be productive than it is for employees to walk out of their office and into a colleague's office when they need to collaborate.
I'm not saying that money never enters into it. But clearly for the likes of tech companies sitting on enormous cash reserves, money isn't the primary consideration. Competitiveness is. Staying ahead of the rapidly-changing technology world is. And they believe that open plan office spaces, with lots of additional space for ad-hoc collaboration in meeting rooms, lounge areas, volleyball courts, etc., is the best way to do that.
I'm not willing to say that they're unequivocally right, but they're certainly not completely wrong, either.
Hi Gayle!
I'm not Gayle, don't know her, and don't have any interest in helping her. But it's a very good book.
And what are those problems it causes? (Assuming a highly reliable and effective implementation. Which is very, very hard.)
Making assumptions causes problems. Those problems are caused because there are no highly reliable and effective implementations of this technology, and there aren't going to be as long as firearms work the way they work now. Maybe someday we'll go to electrically triggered firearms, or flechette throwers, and then the mechanisms will change sufficiently for such a safety lockout to be meaningful.
Nicely dodged.
The preferred response (the one I teach in my gun classes) is to gather your family in a room with only one entrance, cover the door with your gun, and call 911.
If I had a panic room I might consider it, but that's quite expensive and I'm not going to trap myself and the ones I love in a room that could become a crematorium if someone drops a cigarette on the carpet. When seconds count, the police are over ten minutes away in the best case, and my road is paved! Plenty of people who live within shootin' distance of me live on dirt.
If a room in your house is likely to be a crematorium in the event of a fire, you have another problem. Every room where people live should have windows that enable escape (building codes have required this for decades), and if they're too high you should keep a fire escape ladder handy (e.g. this).
Also, obviously, if you smell smoke it's time to get out and if that means shooting the intruders, so be it.
To be clear, I'm not saying you should be imprisoned for having your attitude or speaking about it, but for killing when it's clearly unnecessary.
We need to send a few more people with your attitude to prison, IMO. I'm all in favor of legitimate self defense, and I fully support giving the homeowner the benefit of the doubt, but your attitude fails the basic test of civilization.
You're pretending that the entire world is full of scheming drug-addled monsters
Nonsense. Clearly the world is not full of scheming drug-addled monsters. Criminals are rare. That doesn't mean they don't exist, though.
Disclaimer: I work for Google
Can you please go over to Lorenzo and slap him for us, then say "Android bug 32621", and walk away. Thank you.
I think you got that bug number wrong, since I can't find any such bug. As for Lorenzo, slapping him would require a long overseas flight, so probably not :-)
You read about the cases where it's bad. That doesn't mean it's bad overall.
and I wish you'd drop the issue. We here on the left have.
Some of you have. Many have not. Bernie isn't a good example because he's from rural NH and has always been soft on gun control.
Bernie f'in Sanders got an A from the NRA.
This is flatly untrue. He has never gotten an A from the NRA. The NRA's grades for Sanders have been:
1992 - D
1994 - F
1996 - F
1998 - F
2000 - F
2002 - F
2004 - D+
2006 - C-
2012 - D-
He didn't get a 2016 grade, but during the 2016 presidential election he was touting his D-.
Yep..and really at that point, what's the point of having the 'smart' feature?
Keeping it locked when you don't have a need to pass it around, obviously.
This smart feature causes more problems that it solves IMHO.
And what are those problems it causes? (Assuming a highly reliable and effective implementation. Which is very, very hard.)
Uh, no. Get down on their knees and wait until the police come as you keep them under control, yes. You are simply allowing them to go on the the next house, making you a passive accomplice in the next crime.
Utter nonsense.
Oh, I have no problem with holding the intruder for the police if I can do so in safety... but that's a really tough thing to do. Not only might the intruder be able to do something, but more than one homeowner has been holding a gun on a perp, and been shot to death by the police when they arrived.
In one example, from a few years ago, the guy sent his family into the yard and his wife called 911. She told the dispatcher that her husband had the intruder at gunpoint, and described in detail their location, clothing, etc. The dispatcher passed all of that along to the police officers responding. When the police arrived, the wife reiterated all of this information to them directly before they went in. But when they walked in and saw a man holding a gun, they shot him, putting six bullets into him before he could hit the ground. Oops.
Nope, unless it's absolutely certain that I can hold the perp and turn him over to the police safely, I want him to run away. And I'm a former police officer, who actually received training in how to safely disarm and secure a prisoner.
The problem is that it's very difficult to know what the burglar's intentions are.
Then start a dialog.
If I can be certain that he's unarmed, I definitely will. If I can't be certain of that, speaking may well make me a target.
There are no hard-and-fast rules in situations like this. It's always a matter of doing the best you can based on what you know and what options you have. The preferred response (the one I teach in my gun classes) is to gather your family in a room with only one entrance, cover the door with your gun, and call 911. Let the police come deal with the intruder. But if that's not possible, you have to do what you have to do. Shooting another human being should always be the last resort... but it's better than allowing you or a family member to be killed.
If someone breaks into my house at night, I don't think I want to rely on it being "very rare" that he has violent intentions. This is why burglary is classified as a violent felony (many states use the term "forcible felony").
In most European countries you have to use reasonable force. If they are unarmed, if they try to leave when discovered, you can't try to kill them.
This is the case in the US as well, mostly. Even Castle Doctrine laws don't give you carte blanche to kill; all they do is say that if someone breaks into your home, your actions are presumed to be reasonable. That means that in order to convict you of murder, the prosecution would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that no reasonable man would have done what you did, in addition to proving the other elements of the crime.
In practice, attempts to prosecute homeowners' use of deadly force in their homes against intruders are extremely rare in Castle Doctrine states. Mostly homeowners are only prosecuted when they do something egregious, like shoot the burglar in the back as he's running across the lawn away from the house.
You can't even attack them, you have to let them go, even if they are carrying your stuff.
Every state in the US would allow you to use non-lethal force to keep them from stealing your stuff. Only Texas allows the use of lethal force.
I find it ironic that Google invests so heavily in online education programs, but only hires people who have gone through the higher education song and dance.
Disclaimer: I work for Google, and interview people for software engineering positions at Google, but what I'm going to say represents only my own perspective and is in no way an official company statement.
The irony you see doesn't actually exist. Outside of research positions (of which there are quite a few, and those really do require research credentials), Google does not care about your degrees or lack thereof. Many of my co-workers do have PhDs. A majority have master's degrees. But there are plenty (like me) with nothing beyond a BS, and I have one colleague who has an associate's degree, a couple more who took some classes in college but have no degree, and one who never graduated from high school. He did earn a GED at age 29.
The Google interview and hiring process (for software engineers, at least) pays no attention whatsoever to academic credentials. It's all about how you perform in the interviews. That said, performing well in the interviews requires a pretty solid education in computer science. In a decent CS program, you'll acquire the knowledge you'll need by the end of your junior year, but unless you're really exceptional, odds are that you'll need some more time and practice for it to become sufficiently "second nature" that you don't have to think about the CS and can focus on the problems you're being asked to solve. From there, it's all about whether or not you have the problem solving ability.
So, a degree is in no way required, but most self-taught programmers never get the education in CS fundamentals that's needed in the interview process. This is not because the purpose of the interview is to verify knowledge of CS. The purpose of the interview is to test problem solving ability, but data structures and algorithms are the language of the conversation, and if you don't speak the language you can't participate effectively.
There is one other thing that a degree does for you, though: Get you the interview. Google recruiters, like recruiters everywhere, are inundated with resumes and they have to figure out how to filter them down. If your resume doesn't have an appropriate degree on it, it had better contain ample job experience that shows that it's worth taking an hour out of a working engineer's day to interview you on the phone.
Since most of the interviews I do are that first "phone screen" I can tell you that Google recruiters aren't too selective, because I get all sorts of people who can't think or code their way out of a paper bag.
For example, yesterday I interviewed a guy with an MSCS (allegedly), who couldn't figure out how many 16-bit numbers there are. That wasn't my actual question, of course, but I was trying to gently guide him through the process of analyzing the tradeoffs between several implementation options, one of which would have required creating and initializing an array to hold a histogram of the values from an input stream. Clearly, the array needs to have a cell to hold the count of each value that might occur, and the values were 16 bits in size. I wanted him to think about the time and space cost of creating and initializing that array, to compare it with another option. He had no clue how to figure out how large the array might need to be. Even after I told him the answer (2**16, which he oh-so-helpfully plugged into his calculator, and informed me was 65,536), he still seemed to have no clue about why it was the answer.
Tip for anyone considering interviewing at Google: Get this book and work through all of the problems in it. You should find them challenging, but not terribly difficult, and be able to solve most problems (including coding your solution) in under an hour.
Hmm..just thinking about this...how easy would it be to let someone else shoot the gun? Can it be set for multiple people to be authorized?
There's no reason it couldn't. But so far we don't have any smart guns that work reliably for one user.
what about at the gun range when you and friends or other folks there, want to swap guns to try out which I do all the time...?
Yeah, you'd probably want to be able to disable the locking feature.
Too many Republicans believe that you have the right to shoot an intruder.
I'm not a Republican, but I believe I have the right to shoot anyone who threatens my life or my family's lives. Do you honestly disagree with that? The right of self-defense is the most natural of natural rights.
I'll grant that an intruder may not intend harm, but I'm pretty certain he doesn't intend kindness. He's already demonstrated the willingness to commit a violent felony against me, and if I wait too long to see what he's going to do, I may lose the opportunity to stop him.
Who cares? This tech will protect home owners from escalating the level of violence against a burglar.
You mean "protect burglars from home owners", of course. And, obviously, burglars already have a sure-fire way to protect themselves: not breaking into homes. And note that smart guns that work correctly won't protect burglars from homeowners.
Simply breaking into a place shouldn't be a death sentence.
I actually agree with this. The problem is that it's very difficult to know what the burglar's intentions are. If I could be certain that all the guy wanted was my TV, and that if he got it no one would get hurt, I'd help him carry it out. My TV isn't worth anyone's life, and anyway, I have insurance.
But if someone breaks into my house in the middle of the night, I can't know what they intend, other than that it's very unlikely that they intend to be nice to me or my family. So unless they can convince me pretty quickly that they don't intend to do my family any harm, I will be aiming a gun at them. Whether or not I pull the trigger will depend on what they do next. Raise their hands, turn around slowly and leave the house the way they came? Fine. I'll do my best to give the police an excellent description. Make any move that seems aggressive or threatening? I'm shooting first and dealing with the outcome -- which will probably include a lifetime of regret -- later.
A 15 year-old kid was shot in my neighborhood a few years ago after walking through an unlocked sliding glass door. No thinking person would ever believe that he deserved to be executed for that.
Deserved? Absolutely not. Even if he intended to rob the place. But neither does the homeowner deserve to be in fear for his life and that of his family... none of them did anything wrong at all! As for the young burglar, it's a tragedy, but the tragedy is not just that he got shot, it's also that he chose to commit a violent felony. He didn't deserve to die, but he made the choice to place his life in serious jeopardy, by threatening the lives of others. Or appearing to, at least, which is the same thing in the eyes of the law.
I'm assuming that it was deliberate here, and not some sort of accident, of course. If it was an accident, that's also a tragedy, but it's way, way down the list of the ways that 15 year olds accidentally die.
In theory, both are great ideas... in reality, no one can ever seem to get it right.
I don't think smart guns are impossible (unlike successful large-scale communism by average humans). I do think that ensuring the smart locking system does not reduce the reliability of a possibly life-saving tool is really, really hard.
Personally, I trust the police to validate the reliability of their firearms quite well, so I'll be happy to buy and use smart guns as soon as I see all of the police departments switch to using them. Police officers are not infrequently shot with their own guns, so they should be anxious to switch... as soon as they're sufficiently reliable.
Which, as I said, is a very hard problem to solve.
Amazing what happens when time, money, and effort is spent on actual improvements instead of simply extracting and hoarding as much money as possible.
An interesting question is why it took a private, for-profit company to do it, given the tremendous amounts of money that we've poured into NASA. Granted that much of what got SpaceX off the ground was NASA funding, but it was relatively small amounts compared to NASA's budget. It seems that a profit motive is useful, though perhaps not necessary, or sufficient.
And the net result will be that good papers naturally float to the top through citations
That would be awesome, but I'm not so sure. People rely on journals to curate the content because their time is limited, and papers that don't get found don't get cited.