Oh no, if I had to use it I would. I just hope I never have to. Maybe I would cry like a girl and hand the gun to my wife. That sounds like a good plan actually!
How long must I put up with the unholy sound of your gun?
I do karate and I'm ok at it, I could probably hurt someone quite a bit if I kicked them inna face, or to the side of the knee, and like you, if I had to use it, I would, but it seems so out of my nature to want to inflict harm like that to another person. I guess you can't tell how you'd react until you're ever in that situation, and I hope it never happens too.
I think you could probably make some of those Bruce Lee noises and scare people without even having to use any moves. Do you have a belt color? eh, um colour?
How long must I put up with the unholy sound of your gun?
During the fighting bit of my Police training, the first thing we were taught to do was the schoolyard trick of going for a dead leg. But I think that was only because we were supposed to treat easily-damaged areas like joints, groin and skull as last resort targets.
Fair enough, but wouldn't say the skull was easy to damage (at least with bare fists, a police baton might be a different story), it's a huge piece of bone that's not very easy on the knuckle - obviously there's soft spots, but some people have very large foreheads:
"The next few years" is probably optimistic (or pessimistic if you think they're going to kill us all). The computational and storage potential of the human brain is still something scientists don't fully understand, but it certainly doesn't seem to be something that can be accurately expressed in terms of petaflops and exabytes. In particular, the capacity for abstract thought in the absence of external stimulus is a mystery, and that's the sort of thing an artificial intelligence would need to do in order to be considered remotely "alive".
Funny, I just watched a documentary on Wilson the other day. Hearing them explain how hard it is for a computer to understand the little nuances of speech was interesting. They said at one point humans who were on Jeopardy usually answered the questions correctly 90–95% of the time. Wilson was getting 10–15% correct. I guess it's something I would have figured a computer would kill a person at. But obviously there is much more involved.
I would love to work on projects like that. I think working on something cutting edge or something really hard would be very rewarding. You wouldn't have any constraints as long as you could find a way to get the computer to cooperate.
And something that I think about a lot is binary. How a computer only speaks in on or off and is able to do what it does is flat out unbelievable.
bastard by name