Except for the gays, though, right? Boy howdy, all that stuff in Leviticus about unnatural sex sure does still apply!
You hardly need to do that - the New Testament is not at all ambiguous on the subject - just of fthe top of my head, try reading Romans Chapter 1, from about verse 18 right through to the end of the chapter, IIRC...
There are many other places where it's quite clear in the NT that homosexuality is unacceptable - there are a good many NT verses that make it very clear that "gay is not OK..." To claim that homosexuality is only mentioned and prohibited in the OT is just flat ignorant and wrong. Read before you spout off...
the dissenting viewpoints aren't based in science. In fact, they're based on the very opposite of science - assuming something to be true first and then making the information fit.
Actually, this description is at least as applicable to the evolutionists as it is the ID folks. A good article in this month's Science Against Evolution (which is an unbiased, science-only look at why evolution is not scientifically credible) makes the point: recent discoveries of non-decayed, non-fossilized organic tissue, including blood and blood vessels from T-Rex bones found in Montana, show the lengths scientists must go to to avoid the reasonable and logical question of the fossil's age, given the extreme unliklihood of blood surviving for 65 million years. The best and most reasonable explanation is that they're not that old, but that that's heresy to the church of evolutionary "science", and cannot not be tolerated, because that truth would threaten not science, but dogma.
The pursuit of the truth must be made even-handedly and without bias. The simple fact is that neither Creation nor Evolution can be scientifically proven. Both theories seem to have a great deal of trouble with certain parts of the evidence, and reactionaries on both sides are way too quick to toss evidence that doesn't support thier view. In the end, though, the real evidence (not necessarily the prevailing interpretation of that evidence) is what reflects truth and reality, not wishful thinking.
If it really was meant to be "Thou shalt not murder" you'd think it would have been corrected at least by the KJV..
I'm told by friends who are Hebrew scolars (I'm not one), that the language is fairly clearly a prohibition of murder, not simply killing. It's also quite clear that the death penalty was acceptable and in fact requird in some ciscumstances under Mosaic law.
The KJV is a great work, and quite possibly one of the finest peices of English writing and translation ever produced (particularly in its effectiveness at preserving the poetic aspects of the original languages through the transition to English), but it is not inerrant - although Christians believe the original autographs are inerrant. In fact, this was clearly recognized at the time - if you really want to understand how the Bible was and should be interpreted, I'd suggest getting a copy of the Westminster Confession of Faith (one with all the scripture references printed out save a whole lot of lookup!) This confession was assembled by what was quite possibly the greatest assemblage of human minds ever convened anywher, at any time in human history. It's not perfect either (no human endeavour is), but it's exceptionally well-reasoned. There is a discussion of this very issue in their discussion of the Ten Commandments:
If you actually want to attempt to understand Christian thinking and thought processes, this is a great starting point. It is quite prescient in many ways, and since it was a reaction to the brokenness of the Roman Catholic church at the time, the wording and phraseology is unbelieveably precise, in an attempt to avoid every potential point of misunderstanding. The wording from the early 1600's clearly defines marriage:
Marriage is to be between one man and one woman: neither is it lawful for any man to have more than one wife, nor for any woman to have more than one husband, at the same time
This shows there really is nothing new under the sun (another Biblical phrase, this time from Ecclesiates) - if you were to entirely eliminate biblical allusions from your speech, you'd have a hard time communicating...
Really, why, in North America, are we so fixated on the automobile for personal transport?
There are just two problems with mass transit. Nobody uses it, and it costs like hell. Only 4% of Americans take public transportation to work. Even in cities they don't do it. Less than 25% of commuters in the New York metropolitan area use public transportation. Elsewhere it's far less--9.5% in San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, 1.8% in Dallas-Fort Worth. As for total travel in urban parts of America--all the comings and goings for work, school, shopping, etc.--1.7 % of those trips are made on mass transit.
Then there is the cost, which is--obviously--$52 billion. Less obviously, there's all the money spent locally keeping local mass transit systems operating. The Heritage Foundation says, "There isn't a single light rail transit system in America in which fares paid by the passengers cover the cost of their own rides." Heritage cites the Minneapolis "Hiawatha" light rail line, soon to be completed with $107 million from the transportation bill. Heritage estimates that the total expense for each ride on the Hiawatha will be $19. Commuting to work will cost $8,550 a year. If the commuter is earning minimum wage, this leaves about $1,000 a year for food, shelter and clothing. Or, if the city picks up the tab, it could have leased a BMW X-5 SUV for the commuter at about the same price.Those are really pretty good reasons. Mass transit makes no sense. No one uses it unless they're forced to, and they never will. As *free* people, Americans reject the tyranny of forced busing - or forced train rides, for that matter. Either way, it's worth your life to deal with the roving gangs of street thugs that can't be cleared out for fear of "racial profiling". (I wonder if the figures above count the policeman per train car that has proven to be necessary because of this exact problem in several cities I've visited.) It is hard to think of an idea that makes less sense than Mass Transit - abondoning rails in favor of roads was one of the greatest sources of progress in the 20th Century.
This would be a better question if Linux weren't getting to be every bit as piggy and bloated as XP, but without the ability to run most of the world's really useful apps.
It's enough to make one run screaming to NetBSD - somthing I'm thinking about looking at again, but will probably just buy a Mac because it's way easier and still runs enough useful software...
Not to mention, customization is extremely difficult because for tens of thousands of dollars, you don't get the source code, just the right to be a beta tester when the company hasn't had time or care to beta test their own work.
It's this attitude that makes commercial software a sure win over any open source alternative - know-it-all programmer wannabees that are stuck being admins (which is really just a glorified script kiddie doing something actually useful - I know, I was one once). And worse, they always have somethign to *prove*: that they can hack up the standard distributed source code to be unrecognizable and totally unsupportable by anyone else. They think this is "job security", then they get a real attitude, and decide to leave for another company where they don't have to put up with such inferior morons, leaving a trail of fetid, rotting code in their slimy wake. I've seen it *way* too many times...
For 99.999% of users of open source, they should never even *think* about looking at the source code. I've seen far more bad than good come of source tweaking, a lot of it from people that should have know better, but wanted to "scratch an itch" without regard for what it will cost to re-scratch that itch in the future, especially as the code of the underlying app changes and makes moving forward difficult or impossible. Commercial software is far from perfect, but it's can have some real advantages in the real world, where people actually have to pay for stuff, including maintaining thier wannabees' source hacks...
Which population is biggest: those who've read source from the Solaris kernel, those who've read source from the Windows kernel, or those who've read source from the Linux kernel?
I'd make a large bet it's Linux. It has the addition of professors and students browsing it. It also had more hardware vendors (e.g. mobile devices) and software veldors looking at it and modifying it.
Are you arguing for or against Linux? Because it seems to me that if those people are really doing anything, Linux ought to be *way* better than it is, and actually be gaining new ground instead of aping features from MS and Apple after a 3-5 year delay... (For instance, by the time mono is done,.NET will be irrelevant. Also, see my recent post on/. about Mozilla bugs that have garnered the most votes ever for fixing, but have been ignored by the developers since 1999 (and no, it's not anything hard or dangerous like Active X support, either - it's just asking for Mozilla (and now Firefox) to support functionality that was present and working in Netscape 4.x!)
See, wasn't that easy? And if you don't like the command line, there's aptitude (ncurses) or synaptic (GTK).
And unless you happen to be a ordinary non-technical computer user who happens to be stumbling around on/. to read your comment, just how are they supposed to *know* that?
Sorry, but Linux on the desktop is *way* too painful unless you're trying to make a political statement. I speak as a 20-year Unix veteran who has spent thousands of dollars over the years trying to get a properly functioning Linux environment. I tried fro the last time about a year ago, and AFAICT, it's still not possible for Linux and OSS apps to replace more than about 75% of what you can get in the Windows and Mac worlds. I for one am tired of waiting. Why bother? It's now easy to add full Unix/Linux capabilities to Windows, but almost impossible the other way around, so I'm a moderately happy Windows desktop user that gets to have his cake and eat it too...
I've run networks of literally thousands of the first two (I'll agree NCs never really took off, as they were neither fish nor fowl - running limited applications locally, but without enough power to do it well...)
XTerms and Diskless workstations (to a lesser degree) are by far the most effective, consistent, cost-effective, and easy-to-manage computing environment I've ever run across. (And I have worked for a company that had only a dozen or so Unix Administrators supporting several thousand users in a business unit that generated a billion dollars on the bottom line. Over half of those users were on high-performance NCD or Tektronix X-terms.)
The concept has a LOT of merit. There's really no question that it's the optimal way to set things up from a minimal managment point of view. (I've also been on the corporate staff of the world's largest vendor of remote managment solutions, and no, there's no managment tool or framework on the planet that can achieve the same leverage you can get through a well-designed X-Term deployment.)
I'm convinced that if MIT hadn't abandoned X, but continued to develop it for multimedia support, Windows XP might never have gotten where it is. To a sad but somewhat true degree, it may have been the lack of MP3 playing ability that doomed the X-term approach...
I'm not sure off the bat where there are actual Starbuck stores on opposing corners in Austin, but if you count Seattle's Best (which was bought by Starbucks a couple of years ago) there's a pair staring at each other across 5th and Lamar.
Sadly, the Seattle's Best there was one of the late and lamented (by many of us, anyway) CiCi's Coffee shops, which were owned by Louisiana's Community Coffee, and were great for those times when you needed a real cajun-strength caffiene butt-kick to get going...
Sorry, mea culpa. It's worse that I thought - the Mozilla team never fixed the bug at all.
In reality, this bug has been open and unfixed since October 22, 1999. It has been marked a duplicate of bugs filed years later, and at least twice marked as RESOLVED or FIXED in ways that would be intellectually dishonest enough to get one thrown out of school. I know several people who have been very interested in seeing this bug fixed over the years. Many of them are hackers far more capable than myself (not too hard...) So far as I know, no one has this working, though.
This whole thing has left a very bad taste in my mouth about the ability of open source to actually deliver on the needs of end users. The people I really feel sorry for are those like my friend David who actually ponied up hard, cold cash years ago to go toward the fixing of this bug, then had their money stolen as the bug was marked fixed when it wasn't. Nice to know the community polices itself well enough to ensure integrity and fair play - NOT!
Here's a short excerpt from the comments from bug 124029, which this morped into before vaninshing without a trace...
It is tremendously disappointing for me to have paid $100 bounty on this bug
nearly three years ago and still have nothing I can use. To see this bug marked "RESOLVED/FIXED" is just insulting.... (In reply to comment #249) > It is tremendously disappointing for me to have paid $100 bounty on this bug > nearly three years ago and still have nothing I can use. ---- Why can't you use it? Just download Mozilla 1.8.x and set up your roaming profile on an FTP server. It most definitely works, I can tell you that.
> To see this bug marked "RESOLVED/FIXED" is just insulting.
Well, it is FIXED. If you have any additional requests/suggestion, you should file a new bug. ---- > > > To see this bug marked "RESOLVED/FIXED" is just insulting. > > Well, it is FIXED. If you have any additional requests/suggestion, you should > file a new bug.
It certainly is NOT fixed. In the status this is in, it is never going to be in the release versions. Even in the 1.8 versions, it is only in the nightly builds, not in the officials alphas (unless they put it in a4, which I haven't used.)
Sadly, this is now my primary point of reference as to the integrity of the Mozilla/Firefox developemtn process. I'm not impressed.
Maybe not any more, but the bug was reported 2 years ago; I doubt the mozilla foundation would like a joke along the lines of "how do you fix a mozilla bug? Wait until the platform is obsolete, then ignore it!"...
So true, so true... And now, by trying to force us all into the "Lite" version (which is lighter in capablity than resource utilization), it's even worse:
There are years-old bugs relating to significant functionality that was present in the 4.x series that has *never* mad eit back into Mozilla, despite being even more useful in today's networked world than ever. Here are just two examples, both from the realm of bookmarks, an area where Mozilla has taken a huge step back from Netscape, and Firefox has stepped almost back to IE...
1) Remote storage and synchronization of bookmarks (Roaming Profiles): This was possible in 4.x, and it worked extremely well. Nearly instant, totally transparent storage of your bookmarks and synchronization with the local copy made it trivially easy to always have your latest bookmarks available in the office, at home, on your laptop on the road, etc. This was originally filed as bug 17048 in 1999! Non-responsiveness to the desires of the users is the achilles heel of open source development: for literally *years*, this was the most-requested feature/fix in Bugzilla. I stopped tracking it around 2002, when it beacame obvious that the Mozilla team never planned on addressing it no matter how many votes it had - they kept dodging the issue by marking it as a duplicate of more recent bug numbers so that the truth of the matter - that it was by far the oldest Mozilla bug, would not be known - it was eventually closed and marked as "fixed" on this basis, even though it was no where near fixed. This is just flat dishonest CYA action to avoid accountabilty to the community. A quick check shows that it *may* have finally been fixed in just this month, but won't make it into either 1.7.7 or the badly needed 1.8. (Sorry, but Firefox just sucks in comaprison to the real Mozilla suite. Firfox and T-Bird: Half the capability, with twice the difficulty in configuring it to do what you want. But it's better. Trust us. What a load of BS.)
2) Bookmark searching: Another feature that was present in 4.x that's never been fixed in Mozilla: The ability to actually tell *where* a found bookmark resides in the heirarchy. One of the biggest reasons ever for preferring Netscape/Mozilla over IE as a browser is that Netscape/Moz lets you organize your bookmarks in folders, so you have some prayer of being able to find them again. Since Mozilla, though, searching for a bookmark returns it in a list, but there is *NO* way to tell where it was filed, something you want to know if you're trying to add another similar bookmark in a seldom-used category. This lack of contextual information is just flat wrong, and it's compounded by the fact that Netscape got it right in the first place. (This is an area where Google Desktop could kick some butt - indexing not only the titles and labels assigned by the users, but also the content of the pages - the more I think about it, the more I think Google should just take over from the Mozilla team and build a browser that really works right. The synchronization/store your bookmarks thing seems like it'd be right up thier alley, too.)
These are just a couple of reasons I miss Netscape. Now, these bugs, and mny hundreds more, will be marked "irrelevant", since Firefox/T-Bird are the future. And don't even get me started on the huge benefits of having one of the world's best e-mail programs and a decent little HTML page editor integrated in one place.
Sure, if you're a computer guy and don't mind spending several hours (that's after acquiring a detailed understanding of the rather bizarre operations of Mozilla's profile system, including the completely useless "salted name" security by obscurity debacle), you can set up Firefox, Thunderbird, N-Vu, and a whole bunch of bu
I'd like to suggest that you build and distribute fish for the Windows environment as well. I suggest U/Win as the base environment, although you could use the vastly inferior cygwin if you have to.
Seriously, there are a whole lot of us that find it's infinitely easier to add Unix tools to our Windows environments than to try to make Unix or Linux do a poor imitation of Windows. In today's world, you really need both. I'm interested in fish, but niotice that there are no binaries availble for Windows. (Yes I *can* compile things, but I refuse to - I plan to live the rest of my life and never again use a compiler. I do write a great many scripts though - in fact, the reason people choose scripts in the first place is that they want something that's way easier and more powerful than dealing with low-level languages and thier compilers!)
Heck, in general we are running shells on bitmap displays, but we don't really take advantage of that.
Don't feel bad, I'm a lot older than that, and it's frustrated the heck out of me for years that no one's ever really done much in the way of mouse/shell integration in ways that make the most of both GUI and command line environments. Here's one thing I've wanted for years, just because it's so intuitive: In your terminal window, don't just color-code the listing, make it live (via HTML rendering or whatever), so that double-clicking on a filename (after displaying it with "ls -l" or whatever) will open it in a reasonable, default way (according to extension, type/creator, MIME type, or registry settings, depending on the underlying OS). This combines the best of the command line with the best of a GUI file manager, especially when integrated with a powerful shell environment and a suitably flexible and graphic history mechanism. After doing that directory listing, why shouldn't I be able to drag a filename into a directory just like in a GUI file manager?
But if most of the world sticks to GPLv2, the less free GPLv3 stuff will die out.
And by extension, we'll see a resurgence in interest in using truly free licenses like BSD/X/MIT/etc. as a more acceptable alternative to the GPL. I'll argure we've been seeing this happen already for the past few years.
I belive your fundamental premise is correct - the "free-est" option will win, and since the GPL places restrictions on use that truly free licenses aren't encumbered with, they will win in the end. With any luck we'll see the gPL self-destruct in a next few years and the open source community can get on with actually doing something rather than arguing over the communist purity of the GPL...
Yes, it is possible to take out everything GNU and replace it and have a working OS. When you do that, feel free to not call it GNU.
Sorry to break the news to you, but this has already been done. It's actually called BSD, it was the original source and inspiration for the largely inferior (IMHO) GNU tools, and it's offered under a license that's truly free.
Most importantly, it'a truly free of the lunatic ravings of a "madman" (so-called by his supporters here in this thread!) who will do anything and everything in his power to prevent anyone ever making a living on software - right up to advising programmers to get jobs as waiters so they can give their software away under the GPL.
Go BSD/MIT/X and you really don't have to worry about Stallman's increasingly asinine rantings...
so, just how do they get pre-imaged? They're certainly not being shipped from the manufacturer (hard drive) that way!
Actually, in the case of vendors that use a standard image, they are. Sun used to buy disks from Seagate that were pre-imaged with SPARC Solaris - It was way easier for Seagate to do this than Sun, and it saved a *bunch* or production time. I know for sure this was done by many PC manufacturers in the Win 9x days. I suspect the unique SIDs in NT/2K/XP make this harder, but my guess is that the disk-makers are happy to jump through those hoops to ring up a sale for a few hundred thousand drives...
So as far as the whole 1980's AI winter, it was inevitable. The computing power and storage requirements for any sufficiently advanced AI just wasn't possible. It's only until very recently that it's possible to achieve fairly complex AI.
Funny, that's the same thing they said back in the 80's. And the 70's. And the 90's.
Sorry, but I don't buy it. Neural nets are not a panacea - I'm a robotics guy by training, and they've been the supposed magic pixie dust technology that was going to give us human-like robot motion in the 1980's. Funny, but the hard problems that need real AI, like voice recognition, handwriting recognition, unled learning, etc. are just as far off today as they were 20-30 years ago.
Faster computers have definitely not been terribly beneficial. As an example, modern speech and voice recognition systems are significantly but not dramatically "better" than they were 20 years ago (perhaps a 10-20x improvement, max) in spite of the fact that computers are roughly a million times faster: ~6 MHz vs. ~4 GHz for high-end desktop PCs. (Not to mention available RAM that's larger than the disk storage in entire mainframe data centers back then...)
Procedural AI has proven itself to be a miserable failure for nearly a half century now, and neural nets have shown that they are anything but self-organizing. Like so many other efforts to copy or explain life, it appears that having the raw materials is simply not enough - life is *different* - it's really, really hard to imitate even poorly, no matter how hard we apply our own intelligent design to the problem.
I sincerely doubt that I will live to see "baby bootstrap" systems, and I'm not all that old. I suspect that only true hardware neural nets hold any hope of mimicking life to any minimally useful degree, but the problems are very, very, hard here, and ther reality is that we know next to nothing with any certainty about how even the simplest brains really function...
Careful. The drive in the mini is not rated for continuous use. It's a notebook drive, so you should run it as little as possible. (It's rated for many sleep/wake cycles, but not continuous use).
Horseapples! Where are you getting this stuff? Notebook drives are tougher in every way than their desktop counterparts - they have to be. I suppose that some super-cheap notebook drives that aren't rated for continuous use may exist, but I'm not aware of any, and that certainly doesn't apply to the reputable brands. I've got several tiny little servers that have been running laptop drives for years with no problems. (One's an Epson "cash register" 486, another's a Toshiba Libretto 50J, and others are even stranger.)
And although hard disks aren't my specialty, I know more than a little about them, having been a program manager for both Latitude and Inspiron at Dell, and spinning up a company to build high performance storage-over-IP solutions based on high-end commodity RAID controllers a few years ago. The only real downside to Notebook disks is their relatively slow transfer speeds, since the disk mfrs for unfathomable reasons don't put serious controllers on the notbook mechanisms for a year or two. In many cases (especially if you're RAIDING them) this is more than made up for by their lower seek times - the heads don't have to move very far, and because they're smaller and less massive, they respond quicker.
I'm looking at building a custom small, low-power, super reliable RAID array for a client right now, and I'm actually looking even smaller - at the 1.8" mechanisms like the ones in a lot of the new MP3 players. The result will be *far* more reliable than any desktop drive could ever be - I could not possibly neet this customer's requirements with desktop drive hardware...
Now that Corel owns PSP, I fear 9 will be the last version. Which is a pity.
Oh, sure, they paid all that money for Jasc just so they could buy the product and kill it... That makes a lot of sense... NOT.
Seriously, Corel looks to be doing some good work with PSP - and in reality, although PSP is easier than Photoshop, it could still stand to learn a thing or three in the UI dept.
In case you haven't looked lately, Corel has some of the best UIs currently available - If they took the impressive backend of PSP, and combined it with the best features of Corel's own PhotoPaint and especially CorelDraw, (which has what may be the best drawing interface available today), they would have a real winner.
I hope this is what's in store, and I'm curious to see what the next release of CorelDraw will look like, and whether it will be bundled with PSP, as R12 bundled PhotoPaint.
Corel hasn't said much about where they're headed with these products (at lezst not that I've seen), but I think PSP has a brighter future possible with Corel than with any other software development oraganization I can think of. (Of course, marketing is another deal entirely, but they also seem to be getting a bit better in that department, too. I just wish they'd go back to supporting CorelDraw on non-windows platforms. It's the lack of a decent drawing program that has kept me from ever using Linux on the desktop for more than a few days at a time before the general PITA level and ability to do needed work drives me back to Windows. At this point, I'd be far more interested in them reactivating the Mac port than doing anything for Linux - remember Corel tried betting the farm on Linux (like Novell is doing now) and they lost big.
It's definitely been done before - the little vinyl sheet 45's bound into computer hobbyist magazines were once even relatively popular as a mass software distribution medium. All you needed was a record player and an interface for your computer that could take "Kansas City Standard" audio (which was pretty much just 300 baud Bell 103 modem tones, IIRC) as input.
I threw away a bunch of that stuff I wish I'd kept, but I still have a copy of "Interface Age" magazine, and one reason that particular issue made the cut was that it contained "The Floppy ROM", a BASIC interpreter that you could use with a ROM burner to create a BASIC ROM. (You weren't a serious hacker then until you could get a high-level language interpreter running on your box with a TTY or video display, after all, *anybody* could do low-level programming, sometimes even by flipping front-panel switches.) REading the ads alone shows how much more innovative and vibrant the hacker community was then than it is today. IIRC, there were several ads for companies selling *voice recognition systems* for S100-based systems. I'm not sure of the date, since it's in a box in the garage, but it was around 1975 or 1976, when I first got seriously interested in computers.
I just couldn't bear to part with something as goofy and quaint as a vinyl-based software distro. If I ever get around to building my blog, I'll scan the article and make an MP3 of the Floppy ROM disc. It can go right next to the official US Government booklet on how to make a real homemade missile published by the US Army's White Sands Missile Range around 1960...
Lack of GigE was the first thing that brought me back to reality - it doesn't mean I still won't buy one (or more) but I put my Visa back in the wallet for now.
For heaven's sake, why? Just a couple of years ago, I was designing cutting edge storage over IP systems. I'm telling you, a gigabit is really, really, fast. There are *very* few computers with i/o architectures and protocol stacks that can even begin to approach gigabit speeds.
Don't fall for the marktdroid hype - GigE on a MiniMac will never be missed - even the big Macs and Powerbooks that come with GigE have no prayer of actually being able to use it. It's a bit like a nice Pontiac V-6 (the rest of the computer) powering a Ferrari look-alike (the GigE NIC)- it's just not going to be able to live up to the promise - don't be fooled, it's still a Fiero GT under the skin.
In real life, unless you're building a storage backbone in a data center, or are doing *serious* workstation-type work on huge datasets (like terabyte CFD simulations or siesmic processing), you will NOT be able to use much more than 100 Mbps anyway, since the bottlenecks will be in your i/o paths and disk controllers. You need *very* serious RAID controllers to keep a gigabit wire full. I know: The system we built was 3x faster than IBM's high-end Shark storage server, and it took a year of hard work optimizing, tuning, and even waiting for Syskonnect to build a GigE card that could really deliver gigabit performance before we could fill that pipe. There are many more bottlenecks there than you would expect.
Granted, hardware has gotten faster in the last two years, but unless you're doing the sort of stuff mentioned above (and are using high-$$$ network controllers, RAID adapters, etc.), you'll never miss it if you don't have gigabit.
See my post above... The key phrase: the Atty General found "extensive reasons to conclude that the Second Amendment secures an individual right..."
In reality, there is no valid reason to read the second amendment as anything other than an individual right. Only those that insist on imposing thier will on others (that's called tyranny, by the way) insist on the interpretation that revokes rather than grants rights. (If nothing else, if you argue against an individual right to keep and bear arms, you'll have to explain why it's the only place in the Constitution where an individual right is even implicitly denied or even curtailed.)
What we need is to get this law overturned and reclaim our rights that were guaranteed under the 2nd amendment.
Fortunately, there are a few bright spots. The US Attorney General recently (20040824) released the following in a memorandum of opinion:
"For the foregoing reasons, we conclude that the Second Amendment secures an
individual right to keep and to bear arms. [O]ur examination of the original meaning of the Amendment provides extensive reasons to conclude that the Second Amendment secures an individual right, and no persuasive basis for either the collective-right or quasi-collective-right views. [T]he broader history of the Anglo-American right of individuals to have and use arms, from England's Revolution of 1688-1689 to the ratification of the Second Amendment a hundred years later, leads to the same conclusion. Finally, the first hundred years of interpretations of the Amendment, and especially the commentaries and case law in the pre-Civil War period closest to the Amendment's ratification, confirm what the text and history of the Second Amendment require."
I'm certainly not saying you shouldn't have a gun, but think about this, even a smart gun just doesn't have that many parts to go wrong with it.
I call BS. There would be a great many things to go wrong, since any such system is almost by definition quite complex and reliant on several things (sensors, batteries, pattern recognition engines, etc.) that must function perfectly in a life-or-death situation.
The one that scares the heck out of me is batteries: Even the best battery technologies are notoriously finicky and unreliable, especially when shelved for long periods of time. IMO, there is NO adequate rechargeable battery technology, and even expensive lithium (not lithium-ion) cells have a lifespan that is no more than several years. Add to that the problems of galvanic corrosion, etc., and even a really well-designed "smart gun" system will be thousands of times less reliable than your ordinary garden variety automatic pistol, and as for revolver reliability levels, well, forget it.
Could there be anything dumber than the idea of a smart gun?
BTW, my car only has a billion moving parts if you count the molecules as individual parts.:-)
Also, keep in mind that a handgun is like an airbag or other life preserver in a life-or-death situation - if you need it at all, you need it bad. Perhaps we should require "smart lifevest storage lockers" on boats to keep rogue PFD's out of the wrong hands...
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Except for the gays, though, right? Boy howdy, all that stuff in Leviticus about unnatural sex sure does still apply!
You hardly need to do that - the New Testament is not at all ambiguous on the subject - just of fthe top of my head, try reading Romans Chapter 1, from about verse 18 right through to the end of the chapter, IIRC...
There are many other places where it's quite clear in the NT that homosexuality is unacceptable - there are a good many NT verses that make it very clear that "gay is not OK..." To claim that homosexuality is only mentioned and prohibited in the OT is just flat ignorant and wrong. Read before you spout off...
the dissenting viewpoints aren't based in science. In fact, they're based on the very opposite of science - assuming something to be true first and then making the information fit.
Actually, this description is at least as applicable to the evolutionists as it is the ID folks. A good article in this month's Science Against Evolution (which is an unbiased, science-only look at why evolution is not scientifically credible) makes the point: recent discoveries of non-decayed, non-fossilized organic tissue, including blood and blood vessels from T-Rex bones found in Montana, show the lengths scientists must go to to avoid the reasonable and logical question of the fossil's age, given the extreme unliklihood of blood surviving for 65 million years. The best and most reasonable explanation is that they're not that old, but that that's heresy to the church of evolutionary "science", and cannot not be tolerated, because that truth would threaten not science, but dogma.
The pursuit of the truth must be made even-handedly and without bias. The simple fact is that neither Creation nor Evolution can be scientifically proven. Both theories seem to have a great deal of trouble with certain parts of the evidence, and reactionaries on both sides are way too quick to toss evidence that doesn't support thier view. In the end, though, the real evidence (not necessarily the prevailing interpretation of that evidence) is what reflects truth and reality, not wishful thinking.
I'm told by friends who are Hebrew scolars (I'm not one), that the language is fairly clearly a prohibition of murder, not simply killing. It's also quite clear that the death penalty was acceptable and in fact requird in some ciscumstances under Mosaic law.
The KJV is a great work, and quite possibly one of the finest peices of English writing and translation ever produced (particularly in its effectiveness at preserving the poetic aspects of the original languages through the transition to English), but it is not inerrant - although Christians believe the original autographs are inerrant. In fact, this was clearly recognized at the time - if you really want to understand how the Bible was and should be interpreted, I'd suggest getting a copy of the Westminster Confession of Faith (one with all the scripture references printed out save a whole lot of lookup!) This confession was assembled by what was quite possibly the greatest assemblage of human minds ever convened anywher, at any time in human history. It's not perfect either (no human endeavour is), but it's exceptionally well-reasoned. There is a discussion of this very issue in their discussion of the Ten Commandments:
If you actually want to attempt to understand Christian thinking and thought processes, this is a great starting point. It is quite prescient in many ways, and since it was a reaction to the brokenness of the Roman Catholic church at the time, the wording and phraseology is unbelieveably precise, in an attempt to avoid every potential point of misunderstanding. The wording from the early 1600's clearly defines marriage: This shows there really is nothing new under the sun (another Biblical phrase, this time from Ecclesiates) - if you were to entirely eliminate biblical allusions from your speech, you'd have a hard time communicating...
From a recent P.J. O'Rourke column, where he also noted this:
When does bloatware reach the critical mass ?
This would be a better question if Linux weren't getting to be every bit as piggy and bloated as XP, but without the ability to run most of the world's really useful apps.
It's enough to make one run screaming to NetBSD - somthing I'm thinking about looking at again, but will probably just buy a Mac because it's way easier and still runs enough useful software...
Not to mention, customization is extremely difficult because for tens of thousands of dollars, you don't get the source code, just the right to be a beta tester when the company hasn't had time or care to beta test their own work.
It's this attitude that makes commercial software a sure win over any open source alternative - know-it-all programmer wannabees that are stuck being admins (which is really just a glorified script kiddie doing something actually useful - I know, I was one once). And worse, they always have somethign to *prove*: that they can hack up the standard distributed source code to be unrecognizable and totally unsupportable by anyone else. They think this is "job security", then they get a real attitude, and decide to leave for another company where they don't have to put up with such inferior morons, leaving a trail of fetid, rotting code in their slimy wake. I've seen it *way* too many times...
For 99.999% of users of open source, they should never even *think* about looking at the source code. I've seen far more bad than good come of source tweaking, a lot of it from people that should have know better, but wanted to "scratch an itch" without regard for what it will cost to re-scratch that itch in the future, especially as the code of the underlying app changes and makes moving forward difficult or impossible. Commercial software is far from perfect, but it's can have some real advantages in the real world, where people actually have to pay for stuff, including maintaining thier wannabees' source hacks...
Which population is biggest: those who've read source from the Solaris kernel, those who've read source from the Windows kernel, or those who've read source from the Linux kernel?
.NET will be irrelevant. Also, see my recent post on /. about Mozilla bugs that have garnered the most votes ever for fixing, but have been ignored by the developers since 1999 (and no, it's not anything hard or dangerous like Active X support, either - it's just asking for Mozilla (and now Firefox) to support functionality that was present and working in Netscape 4.x!)
I'd make a large bet it's Linux. It has the addition of professors and students browsing it. It also had more hardware vendors (e.g. mobile devices) and software veldors looking at it and modifying it.
Are you arguing for or against Linux? Because it seems to me that if those people are really doing anything, Linux ought to be *way* better than it is, and actually be gaining new ground instead of aping features from MS and Apple after a 3-5 year delay... (For instance, by the time mono is done,
See, wasn't that easy? And if you don't like the command line, there's aptitude (ncurses) or synaptic (GTK).
/. to read your comment, just how are they supposed to *know* that?
And unless you happen to be a ordinary non-technical computer user who happens to be stumbling around on
Sorry, but Linux on the desktop is *way* too painful unless you're trying to make a political statement. I speak as a 20-year Unix veteran who has spent thousands of dollars over the years trying to get a properly functioning Linux environment. I tried fro the last time about a year ago, and AFAICT, it's still not possible for Linux and OSS apps to replace more than about 75% of what you can get in the Windows and Mac worlds. I for one am tired of waiting. Why bother? It's now easy to add full Unix/Linux capabilities to Windows, but almost impossible the other way around, so I'm a moderately happy Windows desktop user that gets to have his cake and eat it too...
How many times must hitory repeat itself?
1 - Diskless Workstations
2 - X-terminals
3 - Network Computers
None ever saw widespread popularity.
I've run networks of literally thousands of the first two (I'll agree NCs never really took off, as they were neither fish nor fowl - running limited applications locally, but without enough power to do it well...)
XTerms and Diskless workstations (to a lesser degree) are by far the most effective, consistent, cost-effective, and easy-to-manage computing environment I've ever run across. (And I have worked for a company that had only a dozen or so Unix Administrators supporting several thousand users in a business unit that generated a billion dollars on the bottom line. Over half of those users were on high-performance NCD or Tektronix X-terms.)
The concept has a LOT of merit. There's really no question that it's the optimal way to set things up from a minimal managment point of view. (I've also been on the corporate staff of the world's largest vendor of remote managment solutions, and no, there's no managment tool or framework on the planet that can achieve the same leverage you can get through a well-designed X-Term deployment.)
I'm convinced that if MIT hadn't abandoned X, but continued to develop it for multimedia support, Windows XP might never have gotten where it is. To a sad but somewhat true degree, it may have been the lack of MP3 playing ability that doomed the X-term approach...
I'm not sure off the bat where there are actual Starbuck stores on opposing corners in Austin, but if you count Seattle's Best (which was bought by Starbucks a couple of years ago) there's a pair staring at each other across 5th and Lamar.
Sadly, the Seattle's Best there was one of the late and lamented (by many of us, anyway) CiCi's Coffee shops, which were owned by Louisiana's Community Coffee, and were great for those times when you needed a real cajun-strength caffiene butt-kick to get going...
In reality, this bug has been open and unfixed since October 22, 1999. It has been marked a duplicate of bugs filed years later, and at least twice marked as RESOLVED or FIXED in ways that would be intellectually dishonest enough to get one thrown out of school. I know several people who have been very interested in seeing this bug fixed over the years. Many of them are hackers far more capable than myself (not too hard...) So far as I know, no one has this working, though.
This whole thing has left a very bad taste in my mouth about the ability of open source to actually deliver on the needs of end users. The people I really feel sorry for are those like my friend David who actually ponied up hard, cold cash years ago to go toward the fixing of this bug, then had their money stolen as the bug was marked fixed when it wasn't. Nice to know the community polices itself well enough to ensure integrity and fair play - NOT!
Here's a short excerpt from the comments from bug 124029, which this morped into before vaninshing without a trace...
Sadly, this is now my primary point of reference as to the integrity of the Mozilla/Firefox developemtn process. I'm not impressed.
Maybe not any more, but the bug was reported 2 years ago; I doubt the mozilla foundation would like a joke along the lines of "how do you fix a mozilla bug? Wait until the platform is obsolete, then ignore it!"...
So true, so true... And now, by trying to force us all into the "Lite" version (which is lighter in capablity than resource utilization), it's even worse:
There are years-old bugs relating to significant functionality that was present in the 4.x series that has *never* mad eit back into Mozilla, despite being even more useful in today's networked world than ever. Here are just two examples, both from the realm of bookmarks, an area where Mozilla has taken a huge step back from Netscape, and Firefox has stepped almost back to IE...
1) Remote storage and synchronization of bookmarks (Roaming Profiles): This was possible in 4.x, and it worked extremely well. Nearly instant, totally transparent storage of your bookmarks and synchronization with the local copy made it trivially easy to always have your latest bookmarks available in the office, at home, on your laptop on the road, etc. This was originally filed as bug 17048 in 1999! Non-responsiveness to the desires of the users is the achilles heel of open source development: for literally *years*, this was the most-requested feature/fix in Bugzilla. I stopped tracking it around 2002, when it beacame obvious that the Mozilla team never planned on addressing it no matter how many votes it had - they kept dodging the issue by marking it as a duplicate of more recent bug numbers so that the truth of the matter - that it was by far the oldest Mozilla bug, would not be known - it was eventually closed and marked as "fixed" on this basis, even though it was no where near fixed. This is just flat dishonest CYA action to avoid accountabilty to the community. A quick check shows that it *may* have finally been fixed in just this month, but won't make it into either 1.7.7 or the badly needed 1.8. (Sorry, but Firefox just sucks in comaprison to the real Mozilla suite. Firfox and T-Bird: Half the capability, with twice the difficulty in configuring it to do what you want. But it's better. Trust us. What a load of BS.)
2) Bookmark searching: Another feature that was present in 4.x that's never been fixed in Mozilla: The ability to actually tell *where* a found bookmark resides in the heirarchy. One of the biggest reasons ever for preferring Netscape/Mozilla over IE as a browser is that Netscape/Moz lets you organize your bookmarks in folders, so you have some prayer of being able to find them again. Since Mozilla, though, searching for a bookmark returns it in a list, but there is *NO* way to tell where it was filed, something you want to know if you're trying to add another similar bookmark in a seldom-used category. This lack of contextual information is just flat wrong, and it's compounded by the fact that Netscape got it right in the first place. (This is an area where Google Desktop could kick some butt - indexing not only the titles and labels assigned by the users, but also the content of the pages - the more I think about it, the more I think Google should just take over from the Mozilla team and build a browser that really works right. The synchronization/store your bookmarks thing seems like it'd be right up thier alley, too.)
These are just a couple of reasons I miss Netscape. Now, these bugs, and mny hundreds more, will be marked "irrelevant", since Firefox/T-Bird are the future. And don't even get me started on the huge benefits of having one of the world's best e-mail programs and a decent little HTML page editor integrated in one place.
Sure, if you're a computer guy and don't mind spending several hours (that's after acquiring a detailed understanding of the rather bizarre operations of Mozilla's profile system, including the completely useless "salted name" security by obscurity debacle), you can set up Firefox, Thunderbird, N-Vu, and a whole bunch of bu
I'd like to suggest that you build and distribute fish for the Windows environment as well. I suggest U/Win as the base environment, although you could use the vastly inferior cygwin if you have to.
Seriously, there are a whole lot of us that find it's infinitely easier to add Unix tools to our Windows environments than to try to make Unix or Linux do a poor imitation of Windows. In today's world, you really need both. I'm interested in fish, but niotice that there are no binaries availble for Windows. (Yes I *can* compile things, but I refuse to - I plan to live the rest of my life and never again use a compiler. I do write a great many scripts though - in fact, the reason people choose scripts in the first place is that they want something that's way easier and more powerful than dealing with low-level languages and thier compilers!)
Heck, in general we are running shells on bitmap displays, but we don't really take advantage of that.
Don't feel bad, I'm a lot older than that, and it's frustrated the heck out of me for years that no one's ever really done much in the way of mouse/shell integration in ways that make the most of both GUI and command line environments. Here's one thing I've wanted for years, just because it's so intuitive: In your terminal window, don't just color-code the listing, make it live (via HTML rendering or whatever), so that double-clicking on a filename (after displaying it with "ls -l" or whatever) will open it in a reasonable, default way (according to extension, type/creator, MIME type, or registry settings, depending on the underlying OS). This combines the best of the command line with the best of a GUI file manager, especially when integrated with a powerful shell environment and a suitably flexible and graphic history mechanism. After doing that directory listing, why shouldn't I be able to drag a filename into a directory just like in a GUI file manager?
But if most of the world sticks to GPLv2, the less free GPLv3 stuff will die out.
And by extension, we'll see a resurgence in interest in using truly free licenses like BSD/X/MIT/etc. as a more acceptable alternative to the GPL. I'll argure we've been seeing this happen already for the past few years.
I belive your fundamental premise is correct - the "free-est" option will win, and since the GPL places restrictions on use that truly free licenses aren't encumbered with, they will win in the end. With any luck we'll see the gPL self-destruct in a next few years and the open source community can get on with actually doing something rather than arguing over the communist purity of the GPL...
Yes, it is possible to take out everything GNU and replace it and have a working OS. When you do that, feel free to not call it GNU.
Sorry to break the news to you, but this has already been done. It's actually called BSD, it was the original source and inspiration for the largely inferior (IMHO) GNU tools, and it's offered under a license that's truly free.
Most importantly, it'a truly free of the lunatic ravings of a "madman" (so-called by his supporters here in this thread!) who will do anything and everything in his power to prevent anyone ever making a living on software - right up to advising programmers to get jobs as waiters so they can give their software away under the GPL.
Go BSD/MIT/X and you really don't have to worry about Stallman's increasingly asinine rantings...
so, just how do they get pre-imaged? They're certainly not being shipped from the manufacturer (hard drive) that way!
Actually, in the case of vendors that use a standard image, they are. Sun used to buy disks from Seagate that were pre-imaged with SPARC Solaris - It was way easier for Seagate to do this than Sun, and it saved a *bunch* or production time. I know for sure this was done by many PC manufacturers in the Win 9x days. I suspect the unique SIDs in NT/2K/XP make this harder, but my guess is that the disk-makers are happy to jump through those hoops to ring up a sale for a few hundred thousand drives...
So as far as the whole 1980's AI winter, it was inevitable. The computing power and storage requirements for any sufficiently advanced AI just wasn't possible. It's only until very recently that it's possible to achieve fairly complex AI.
Funny, that's the same thing they said back in the 80's. And the 70's. And the 90's.
Sorry, but I don't buy it. Neural nets are not a panacea - I'm a robotics guy by training, and they've been the supposed magic pixie dust technology that was going to give us human-like robot motion in the 1980's. Funny, but the hard problems that need real AI, like voice recognition, handwriting recognition, unled learning, etc. are just as far off today as they were 20-30 years ago.
Faster computers have definitely not been terribly beneficial. As an example, modern speech and voice recognition systems are significantly but not dramatically "better" than they were 20 years ago (perhaps a 10-20x improvement, max) in spite of the fact that computers are roughly a million times faster: ~6 MHz vs. ~4 GHz for high-end desktop PCs. (Not to mention available RAM that's larger than the disk storage in entire mainframe data centers back then...)
Procedural AI has proven itself to be a miserable failure for nearly a half century now, and neural nets have shown that they are anything but self-organizing. Like so many other efforts to copy or explain life, it appears that having the raw materials is simply not enough - life is *different* - it's really, really hard to imitate even poorly, no matter how hard we apply our own intelligent design to the problem.
I sincerely doubt that I will live to see "baby bootstrap" systems, and I'm not all that old. I suspect that only true hardware neural nets hold any hope of mimicking life to any minimally useful degree, but the problems are very, very, hard here, and ther reality is that we know next to nothing with any certainty about how even the simplest brains really function...
Careful. The drive in the mini is not rated for continuous use. It's a notebook drive, so you should run it as little as possible. (It's rated for many sleep/wake cycles, but not continuous use).
Horseapples! Where are you getting this stuff? Notebook drives are tougher in every way than their desktop counterparts - they have to be. I suppose that some super-cheap notebook drives that aren't rated for continuous use may exist, but I'm not aware of any, and that certainly doesn't apply to the reputable brands. I've got several tiny little servers that have been running laptop drives for years with no problems. (One's an Epson "cash register" 486, another's a Toshiba Libretto 50J, and others are even stranger.)
And although hard disks aren't my specialty, I know more than a little about them, having been a program manager for both Latitude and Inspiron at Dell, and spinning up a company to build high performance storage-over-IP solutions based on high-end commodity RAID controllers a few years ago. The only real downside to Notebook disks is their relatively slow transfer speeds, since the disk mfrs for unfathomable reasons don't put serious controllers on the notbook mechanisms for a year or two. In many cases (especially if you're RAIDING them) this is more than made up for by their lower seek times - the heads don't have to move very far, and because they're smaller and less massive, they respond quicker.
I'm looking at building a custom small, low-power, super reliable RAID array for a client right now, and I'm actually looking even smaller - at the 1.8" mechanisms like the ones in a lot of the new MP3 players. The result will be *far* more reliable than any desktop drive could ever be - I could not possibly neet this customer's requirements with desktop drive hardware...
Now that Corel owns PSP, I fear 9 will be the last version. Which is a pity.
Oh, sure, they paid all that money for Jasc just so they could buy the product and kill it... That makes a lot of sense... NOT.
Seriously, Corel looks to be doing some good work with PSP - and in reality, although PSP is easier than Photoshop, it could still stand to learn a thing or three in the UI dept.
In case you haven't looked lately, Corel has some of the best UIs currently available - If they took the impressive backend of PSP, and combined it with the best features of Corel's own PhotoPaint and especially CorelDraw, (which has what may be the best drawing interface available today), they would have a real winner.
I hope this is what's in store, and I'm curious to see what the next release of CorelDraw will look like, and whether it will be bundled with PSP, as R12 bundled PhotoPaint.
Corel hasn't said much about where they're headed with these products (at lezst not that I've seen), but I think PSP has a brighter future possible with Corel than with any other software development oraganization I can think of. (Of course, marketing is another deal entirely, but they also seem to be getting a bit better in that department, too. I just wish they'd go back to supporting CorelDraw on non-windows platforms. It's the lack of a decent drawing program that has kept me from ever using Linux on the desktop for more than a few days at a time before the general PITA level and ability to do needed work drives me back to Windows. At this point, I'd be far more interested in them reactivating the Mac port than doing anything for Linux - remember Corel tried betting the farm on Linux (like Novell is doing now) and they lost big.
It's definitely been done before - the little vinyl sheet 45's bound into computer hobbyist magazines were once even relatively popular as a mass software distribution medium. All you needed was a record player and an interface for your computer that could take "Kansas City Standard" audio (which was pretty much just 300 baud Bell 103 modem tones, IIRC) as input.
I threw away a bunch of that stuff I wish I'd kept, but I still have a copy of "Interface Age" magazine, and one reason that particular issue made the cut was that it contained "The Floppy ROM", a BASIC interpreter that you could use with a ROM burner to create a BASIC ROM. (You weren't a serious hacker then until you could get a high-level language interpreter running on your box with a TTY or video display, after all, *anybody* could do low-level programming, sometimes even by flipping front-panel switches.) REading the ads alone shows how much more innovative and vibrant the hacker community was then than it is today. IIRC, there were several ads for companies selling *voice recognition systems* for S100-based systems. I'm not sure of the date, since it's in a box in the garage, but it was around 1975 or 1976, when I first got seriously interested in computers.
I just couldn't bear to part with something as goofy and quaint as a vinyl-based software distro. If I ever get around to building my blog, I'll scan the article and make an MP3 of the Floppy ROM disc. It can go right next to the official US Government booklet on how to make a real homemade missile published by the US Army's White Sands Missile Range around 1960...
Lack of GigE was the first thing that brought me back to reality - it doesn't mean I still won't buy one (or more) but I put my Visa back in the wallet for now.
For heaven's sake, why? Just a couple of years ago, I was designing cutting edge storage over IP systems. I'm telling you, a gigabit is really, really, fast. There are *very* few computers with i/o architectures and protocol stacks that can even begin to approach gigabit speeds.
Don't fall for the marktdroid hype - GigE on a MiniMac will never be missed - even the big Macs and Powerbooks that come with GigE have no prayer of actually being able to use it. It's a bit like a nice Pontiac V-6 (the rest of the computer) powering a Ferrari look-alike (the GigE NIC)- it's just not going to be able to live up to the promise - don't be fooled, it's still a Fiero GT under the skin.
In real life, unless you're building a storage backbone in a data center, or are doing *serious* workstation-type work on huge datasets (like terabyte CFD simulations or siesmic processing), you will NOT be able to use much more than 100 Mbps anyway, since the bottlenecks will be in your i/o paths and disk controllers. You need *very* serious RAID controllers to keep a gigabit wire full. I know: The system we built was 3x faster than IBM's high-end Shark storage server, and it took a year of hard work optimizing, tuning, and even waiting for Syskonnect to build a GigE card that could really deliver gigabit performance before we could fill that pipe. There are many more bottlenecks there than you would expect.
Granted, hardware has gotten faster in the last two years, but unless you're doing the sort of stuff mentioned above (and are using high-$$$ network controllers, RAID adapters, etc.), you'll never miss it if you don't have gigabit.
See my post above... The key phrase: the Atty General found "extensive reasons to conclude that the Second Amendment secures an individual right..."
In reality, there is no valid reason to read the second amendment as anything other than an individual right. Only those that insist on imposing thier will on others (that's called tyranny, by the way) insist on the interpretation that revokes rather than grants rights. (If nothing else, if you argue against an individual right to keep and bear arms, you'll have to explain why it's the only place in the Constitution where an individual right is even implicitly denied or even curtailed.)
Fortunately, there are a few bright spots. The US Attorney General recently (20040824) released the following in a memorandum of opinion:It's about time!
I'm certainly not saying you shouldn't have a gun, but think about this, even a smart gun just doesn't have that many parts to go wrong with it.
:-)
I call BS. There would be a great many things to go wrong, since any such system is almost by definition quite complex and reliant on several things (sensors, batteries, pattern recognition engines, etc.) that must function perfectly in a life-or-death situation.
The one that scares the heck out of me is batteries: Even the best battery technologies are notoriously finicky and unreliable, especially when shelved for long periods of time. IMO, there is NO adequate rechargeable battery technology, and even expensive lithium (not lithium-ion) cells have a lifespan that is no more than several years. Add to that the problems of galvanic corrosion, etc., and even a really well-designed "smart gun" system will be thousands of times less reliable than your ordinary garden variety automatic pistol, and as for revolver reliability levels, well, forget it.
Could there be anything dumber than the idea of a smart gun?
BTW, my car only has a billion moving parts if you count the molecules as individual parts.
Also, keep in mind that a handgun is like an airbag or other life preserver in a life-or-death situation - if you need it at all, you need it bad. Perhaps we should require "smart lifevest storage lockers" on boats to keep rogue PFD's out of the wrong hands...