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Comment: Re:Outed? (Score 1) 192

You can easily put the gun somewhere safe.

Ah, but if the gun is somewhere safe, you're unlikely to be able to get to it quickly. For a gun to be viable for self defense, you need to be able to get it and load it in a very short period of time. Otherwise, you might as well invest in a squirt gun. If you put the gun somewhere that's actually safe from a child, you're also making it considerably harder for you to get access to the weapon quickly. Those critical seconds could mean the difference between life and death.

In any case, if I was going to use an electronic lock, I would much rather use a RFID lock over a fingerprint lock. There would be a much smaller chance for error.

That seems like a perfectly reasonable alternative. I certainly don't think laws need to mandate a specific technology, just a minimum certification level or some such, which different weapons could achieve in different ways.

Also, if you have children in the house, they should be taught gun safety and that if they even touch any gun without your permission, there will be hell to pay.

I completely agree with you about teaching your kids gun safety, and even though I don't intend to have guns in my house, when I eventually have kids, they will learn how to properly unload a firearm. The problem with having guns in houses with kids comes when they invite other kids over. Chances are, your kids' friends haven't been taught about guns, and they may not know not to touch them, or worse, might think that they're toy guns. That's why particularly in households with kids, having some form of electronic safety is a really, really good idea.

Comment: Re:Outed? (Score 1) 192

Now put that same firearm in a household with kids. Do you really want a gun that might fire because somebody got curious? You shouldn't be required to use the digital lock, but it should be required to be present on the firearm as a mandatory safety feature, just like you can disable the air bags in your car, but by default, they come enabled.

Comment: Re:Outed? (Score 2, Interesting) 192

I'm pretty liberal and fairly progressive, but I'm not 100% anti-gun, so your statement is certainly not broadly generalizable outside of conversations in the media, in my experience. I voted against a gun law just a few months ago, though it passed anyway. I wanted to vote for it, because the requirement that weapons be stored securely (either in a safe or with a trigger lock) was good, and the requirement for timely reporting of stolen firearms was good, but I couldn't vote for it because it also contained a ban on large magazines, which violates the fourth amendment by depriving people of property without due process—in other words, eminent domain all over again.

We do, IMO, need to mandate some changes, like gun safety classes for anyone purchasing a firearm for the first time, electronic fingerprint safeties on all new firearms, etc. And I wouldn't personally want to have a firearm in my house because I think the safety risk exceeds the safety benefit, at least in my neighborhood, but that doesn't mean I think that my opinion should be forced on everyone else. That's part of being a true liberal. Anyone who believes otherwise is a progressive authoritarian, not a progressive liberal.

Comment: Re:Mischaracterization of problem (Score 2) 231

by dgatwood (#46402465) Attached to: Teaching Calculus To 5-Year-Olds

You're assuming that the speed at which the problems are solved is positively correlated with fundamental understanding of the concepts. For problems like multiplication, this isn't really the case.

Not only is it not the case, in highly intelligent people, for large problem sets, it is often reverse-correlated. When I was a kid, if you gave me 50 math problems, I'd take longer to solve them than the folks who were making Fs in the class—not because I was struggling, but because after the first five or ten problems, I was so bored that I'd spend a few seconds working on a problem, followed by fifteen minutes daydreaming about anything else but the subject at hand.

Comment: Re:I saw faster screening at Orlando (Score 1) 163

by dgatwood (#46326903) Attached to: Speedier Screening May Be Coming To an Airport Near You

Well, as a matter of fact, the process you propose has been in use for over a year ...

No, it hasn't. My parents have gone through security as "TSA Pre" travelers. There's remarkably little difference between that and normal travel, from what I've seen, and at most, no more difference than the difference between buying a first-class ticket and a coach ticket (separate line). Yes, in theory, you have to do a few less things, but you still get in line, stick your bag on a belt, walk through a magnetometer or a porn scanner, then wait for your bag.

What I was proposing is a separate line in which you hand them a card, they swipe it, verify your face against the data from their database, and you walk straight through security and out the other side. No putting bags on a belt, no magnetometer, no porn scanner. Just walk through.

Comment: Re:I saw faster screening at Orlando (Score 2) 163

by dgatwood (#46324479) Attached to: Speedier Screening May Be Coming To an Airport Near You

The true answer is to allow people to get through a full background check in exchange for skipping the screening process entirely. Frequent travelers (the majority) would do so, and this would cut the number of people waiting in line to almost nothing.

But they won't do that, because the TSA is primarily a jobs program, not a security screening service.

Comment: Re:Lets see how far back... (Score 2, Interesting) 140

by dgatwood (#46313231) Attached to: Apple SSL Bug In iOS Also Affects OS X



Comment: Re:Only (Score 2) 130

by dgatwood (#46214141) Attached to: Boom Or Bust: The Lowdown On Code Academies

My version of "Hacker boot camp" wouldn't focus on "how to code" or "how to look up & hook up a library function that does an optimal sort" - you're going to need to figure that out for yourself when Java/Python becomes the next latest and greatest thing. It would focus on best practices, communicating with your customers and coworkers, documentation, source control, and transparency.

This. This. For the love of all that is good and holy, this.

Learning to code is the easy part. Learning to design good software borders on a lifetime learning campaign by comparison.

Comment: Re: Let me be the first to say... (Score 1) 175

by dgatwood (#46193249) Attached to: How Adobe Got Rid of Traditional Stack-Ranking Performance Reviews

I actually entertained doing exactly one month of Creative Cloud to get a full copy of Acrobat so that I could have tools for visualizing which parts of my cover art exceeded a preset ink coverage limit. But then I thought about it some more, and realized that even though I can't figure out how to get a CMYK representation out of a PDF file using NSImage, I *can* successfully open CMYK TIFF files and access the raw CMYK data. And, of course, in Photoshop CS6, if I save a CMYK Photoshop project as a TIFF file, it produces a CMYK TIFF.

In short, I realized that I'd rather reimplement the wheel and spend an hour or two writing some really hackish GUI code than pay Adobe one more cent. So I did.

Comment: Re:Alleged Apple patents on Android (Score 1) 249

by dgatwood (#46183407) Attached to: Wozniak To Apple: Consider Building an Android Phone

Apple's rich enough to duke it out with the other Big Boys over patents. But they don't want to dilute their high end hardware brand.

It would do more than just dilute the brand. It would be an entirely incompatible ecosystem that they'd have to somehow graft in support for, which would mean huge engineering overhead. It isn't like BMW building a copy of a Ford. It's more like living in a world in which there's a network of overhead tracks that run above all the roads, and BMW deciding to build a second version of their cars that hangs from those tracks and has to be driven by pushbuttons and a trackball instead of a steering wheel, so drivers have to relearn how to drive. And they would somehow have to modify all of their existing cars to add brake lights near the roof so that drivers of the new hanging cars could see them and wouldn't crash into people's rear windshields.

Comment: Re: Network segmentation (Score 1) 232

by dgatwood (#46179137) Attached to: Target's Data Breach Started With an HVAC Account

But a Target store doesn't get its network rewired very often, and doesn't get the HVAC cables rewired ever (for some multi-year definition of "ever"). There's really no good reason for those to not be on their own separate physical switch, but if you're going to use a shared switch, it still isn't that hard. You just lock those ports to a nonstandard VLAN, disable tagged VLAN access for those ports, and leave all the other ports on the default VLAN, and you're done. Oh, and label the cables, and stick a piece of tape with the words "HVAC ports" above those few ports so that nobody will yank the cables later, try to plug something else in, and wonder why it doesn't work, or try to plug one of those cables into a different port.

Better yet, color-code your jumper cables: blue for HVAC, red for registers, and white for general use. Do not let any color route to any other color, and ensure that whoever is wiring up a new device understands that the color in the back room should be the same as the cable that's semipermanently attached to the device on the other end, and always plugs red cables into red ports, blue into blue, and white into white.

This really isn't rocket science.

You're already carrying the sphere!