Hrm. I never thought about the whitespace requirements in python from an accessibility perspective.
I know that Python's approach to whitespace is very...polarizing; but I've always wondered how much it would cause trouble either for people who really loath it, or for specialized situations that tend to crop up under 'accessibility' (where the path from text file to user is likely going through one or more atypical transformations, anywhere from simple contrast bumps up through text to speech or the like).
Given that the whitespace has to have an unambiguous meaning to the python interpreter, your editor could presumably convert, in either direction, any notation you desire, so long as it covers the same possible meanings (and, ideally, doesn't clash with characters python uses to mean something else, since then it'd have to convert those as well, potentially sending you chasing down the road to something that looks utterly different).
It's not as though what you see on the screen bears much resemblance to the actual underlying sequence of bits.
Given that these languages are (primarily, obviously anything Turing-complete can be turned to the same purposes as anything else, if somebody feels like it) used for statistics work, I'd be inclined to wonder whether that is the easiest or best way to go about it:
If something is already implemented in R, and you want to more or less blindly feed it a new target, or re-run it to see how it works, R was apparently not broken enough to stop it, because it's already done.
If you want to implement some, currently unsupported, aspect of statistics in Julia, with API or binary compatibility with R not a consideration, you could potentially end up in a situation where being reasonably sure that your translated version works, does what it is supposed to, and is vaguely human readable might take longer or be more difficult, or both, than starting with the math you wish to implement and building something non-broken from scratch.
I'd like to see a double-blind study on the chef claim, too.
I'm pretty sure that food, like music, has a fringe of...enthusiasts...who would tell you that double-blind studies just ineffably blunt the terroir in some more or less mystical way (which is of course the real reason why they have trouble performing above chance), rather than let base materialism and the plebian theory that functionally identical outcomes can be produced by a variety of means sully the transcendent subtlety of their experience.
Be honest, if Apple were the one who had stolen physical designs and software innovations from Android, you nerds would ask nothing less than nuking Apple from orbit.
Eh. Their new ring-HQ-thing would make an attractive target from high altitude I suppose; but I don't think I'd be as worked up as you give me credit for:
As with so many things patent-and-tech-related, whatever ends up being the killer app always looks simultaneously brilliantly innovative and obvious in hindsight; but attempts to actually put your finger on precisely what is patentably special about it frequently run into trouble on some mixture of university research projects that just got shelved after somebody finished his PhD, stuff IBM did in 1980 but charged approximately a zillion dollars a month to lease and hid behind an interface designed to sell you consulting services through sheer pain, or assorted bits and pieces identifiably but unhelpfully introduced in prior products that were dragged down by mediocrity in other areas.
That's what I find most unsympathetic about Apple's protracted litigation on what are basically broad look-and-feel grounds. Were they the first ones to use a capacitive touchscreen to make a smartphone that doesn't suck? Sure, no problem. And look at the giant pile of first mover advantage and cash that they got for it. Does this entitle them to a monopoly on rectangular touch sensitive objects for two decades? Less impressive case to be made. And, much to their chagrin, less impressive legal payout. As much as Apple might prefer otherwise, nailing the execution is not a patentable achievement, and a great many elegant executions break down into a lot of substantially nonpatentable, or already commonplace, bits and pieces put together correctly.
They really didn't do too much to the traditional projector market (rear-projection displays were pretty badly brutalized by the increasingly low cost of panels that aren't of nearly CRT thickness). Only a fairly small venue would have ever been targeting a projector for anything under a 60 inch image, most larger, sometimes considerably.
Now, what's kind of baffling about this little device is that cheap LCDs did (more or less preemptively, since they came before most projectors of this type) brutalize the market, if one ever existed, for 'painfully low resolution and dim images in the sub-60 inch range'. Given that the output of this device is worse than basically anything you could buy, even if you tried to fail, by wandering into Best Buy's TV section and looking lost and vulnerable, I'm unsure of what the point is. Proper projectors still have a lot of room to retreat into, unless the ghastly 'display wall 'o giant bezels' style is considered acceptable.
In fairness to this device, the ~75 lumens, 864x480, "projector" is just a member of an entire class of world's worst projectors. Those specs are the ones that you happen to hit if you combine TI's cheapest (sorry, did I say 'cheapest'? I meant 'most compact, versatile, and value-oriented') DLP module with an LED lamp that will last a reasonably long time, require no particularly exotic cooling, and is available in quantity outside of the lab.
I'm unclear on why this class exists; but the setup Gigabyte is using should be pretty much identical to a large number of other 'micro projector' things. As examples of how far LEDs have come since the days of dim red indicator lamps, they are pretty impressive. By the standards of projectors, they rank somewhere between 'crime against humanity' and 'downright painful'.
In this case 'more humane' basically just means 'doesn't make the audience as squeamish'. As it turns out, this is a very poor indicator. Especially since the usual injection cocktail contains Pancuronium, or another curare-like muscle relaxant. Not an anaesthetic, or toxic in itself; but causes nice, peaceful-looking flaccid paralysis. Unless one of the other ingredients fully sedates you, or kills you, you just suffocate; but no unseemly twitching or spasms, no grimacing, gasping, any of that ugly stuff; because with the complete loss of muscle control, how could you?
The 'barbaric' methods, by contrast, don't look all nice and clean and medical; but they also don't involve deputy Cletus playing amateur phlebotomist with a dodgy, failure-prone, three-step injection process (compare to, say, how we put domestic animals to sleep, if you want to see somebody who knows their stuff handle a lethal injection...), they involve a lot of gore; potentially some peripheral nervous activity causing creepy corpse twitch; but they depend either on simple mechanical principles(as with the guillotine) or skills that prison staff likely have in more than adequate amounts (as with firing squads).
Personally, I'm not against the notion of capital punishment in principle; but the way we do it in the US is like a grimly parodic example of what not to do, and how not to do it. Despite the availability of trivially better procedures, we insist on using a variety of ass-backwards Mad-Libs protocols with a history of unreliability and no obvious merits. Our irrational, emotionally misguided, approach carries over to the selection of victims as well: (even aside from the documented cases where the whole trial was a frame-up, with gross prosecutorial, judicial, and sometimes even defense attorney, misconduct) we execute largely on the basis of emotional salience, rather than actual danger. Kill somebody, up close and personal, nice and gruesome? Potential death penalty in jurisdictions that conduct it. Kill a large number of people, by some polite, white-collar, epidemiological chicanery? Probably just a civil matter, you might even get to settle without admitting wrongdoing.
Nobody likes violent criminals, and they are notably unsympathetic characters; but (precisely for those reasons) their influence tends to be self-limiting. The really dangerous ones are smart enough to make it to a position of power and influence, where the rewards are better and the penalties oh so much smaller. If we were serious about rationally applying capital punishment, it'd be a lot easier to be taken out and shot for various flavors of fraud and corruption, rather than effectively impossible, as now.
There's also the (convenient in the right hands, a total mess if handled less delicately) that people who learn best independently can often be addressed by benign neglect, with some strategic overlooking of sitting in the back of the class and reading and the like, while people who do learn best from others; but are being fed e-learning modules, are more or less screwed.
This is not to say that there aren't people who unwisely attempt to force the issue when they should just leave well enough alone; but the problem is, at least, easier in principle than somehow sneaking in facetime for the portion of the class that needs it.
Ask anyone who has done IT or technical work in a school district. Technology is the coolest buzzword for driving a pedagogy of student idea synthesis or somesuch fucking bullshit. The real deal is all the grant money is in tech, and teachers LOVE another break.
Yes and no, in my experience: Yes, 21st-century-skills-computer-something-something-digital-natives-media-literacy-differentiated-instruction-etc. is a Thing, and nontrivial amounts of money are spent on hardware, software, support, curriculum development, and so on, in order to chase it.
However, it isn't exactly lost on teachers (who tend to be pretty good observers of student behavior, and, since the internet isn't really new anymore, may have been screwing around on it when they were in school) that an internet connected computer is one of the most potent distractions not under DEA jurisdiction, and it's not as though keeping students focused is something other than a bit of a battle anyway.
This tends to temper the enthusiasm of even the most enthusiastic followers of fads, as does the reality that (especially if that grant covered the purchase and setup; but not an extra IT minion for years 2-5) computers have a very nasty habit of throwing up reliability issues that can easily eat 10-20 minutes of a 50 minute period if you get even modestly unlucky.
I'd want a proper, large scale, suitably controlled, etc. psych study before venturing a position on what effect, if any, exposure (of various types and in various quantities) to computers in childhood has on focus, attention, executive function, and so on even when there aren't any in the room right now; but I'd treat it as a near certainty that nothing else will have a classroom screwing around the second you turn your back more efficiently. I'd also say that this is lost on basically nobody, which tends to force even the enthusiasts into a downright defensive style of classroom management when the computers come out.
It's going to take a very compelling 'smart' feature to make applying the protocol currently used for the blinding-eyeburner-superbright blue LEDs that manufacturers insist on sticking everywhere to the hypothetical screens that will be displaying ads everywhere.
Between electrical tape, spraypaint, and maybe a bit of glass etching (when more polite flavors of disconnecting or firmware modification don't suffice) I see no reason for anything that doesn't need a screen to remain equipped with one.
Terms of use for physical product changed after purchase in such a way as to cripple said product? That's called "bait and switch."
Ho ho ho! Silly consumer! Does the physical product you purchased look at all crippled to you? Every pixel and transistor and unecessarily ugly bezel is exactly as it should be! It's only the software, which is licensed, not sold, and subject to the terms and conditions of the EULA, modifiable at any time by us, without notice, that has changed!
(And this is why the 'licensed not sold' bullshit with software is ultimately so dangerous. If it just applied to stuff you bought on floppy disks and shoved into a computer, it'd be mostly a nuisance with occasional abuses. The fact that the same legal reasoning can be extended to cover firmware, which is just as much software; but also more or less entirely critical to the operation of a very large, and increasing, percentage of the 'hardware' devices you 'own', is where it really shows its teeth. Nearly anything of nontrivial complexity probably has some firmware in it somewhere, without which it isn't much good, and for which your replacement options are limited, sometimes by obscurity, sometimes by crypto bootloaders, which rather undermines the 'ownership' you might hope to have.)
You basically have no way of knowing what they are doing with any data they obtain; but putting a passive tap on the wire between the TV and the world and watching closely should at least tell you what they know. If they bother to encrypt it properly, of course, you may need to actually break into the embedded OS, or grovel through the firmware, which is considerably more challenging; but even knowing how much flows upstream is better than nothing.
A minority are opposed to the FCC's proposal to turn the internet into cable TV. The remainder are unhappy that the FCC's proposal doesn't directly sell everybody into indentured servitude to their local monopoly ISP.
Unfortunately, the graduated from the state level and now infests congress(a fairly prime senate seat, no less). I'd be delighted to see her relegated to the little league, ideally some horrid little municipality in the ass end of nowhere; but such is not to be.
Exactly. By disagreeing with the majority, he has no rights. Too bad we can't do the same to the rest of the Republicans in the rest of this country. They always stand against freedom by fighting for the right to dissent.
Nice strawman; but by asserting nobody has any useful 4th amendment rights, I'd argue that it becomes just to assert that he doesn't. Slightly different.
It isn't a matter of how many voted for or against; but what they voted for or against.
District Attorneys are the highest level prosecutors in a given jurisdiction. This doesn't mean that they are ignorant of the law; but their professional imperatives are in line with easy and efficient prosecution, rather than pesky procedural inconveniences.
They may be right in this case; but I'd want to see some solid argument that 'too vague' actually means 'too vague' rather than 'has the potential to step on my toes'.
Even if you did believe in strong AI, half the AIs in science fiction are either psychotic, murderous, or going off the rails for some reason, and we all know (and some of us are) natural intelligences that don't exactly inspire confidence in the competence of intelligences in general.
I haven't reread them in a while; but didn't Asimov write a bunch of stories that played with various 'failure modes' of the three laws, even in the hands of robots not hobbled by competence issues? My impression was always that Asimov was under no illusions that those rules were any less prone to ambiguity and assorted hairy exceptions than anything in moral philosophy(which is absolutely rife with attempts at proposing a maxim, followed by people sniping at it with clever situations that stress it to absurdity and beyond).
Does anyone who has to deal with software(even as a user, not even as some hardcore code guru) believe in robotic competence?
A robot is nothing more than a (probably commodity) computer, which we know are unreliable junk, running a whole heap of software(which we know is terrifyingly bad in all but the most carefully controlled and rigorously validated situations), with a bunch of moving parts grafted on that probably haven't seen maintenance within the vendor's recommended window.
That is...not...the stuff of which 'hyper-competence' (much less infallibility) is made.
I don't know how well the two sample sets overlap; but there have definitely been experiments in earth orbit on the effects of zero gravity, radiation, and hard vacuum, in various combinations. Some organisms do surprisingly well.
There's also the (sadly ignored in our delightful era of clickwrap contracts that you agree to in the process of opening them up to read them...) fact that contract law is intended to be a codification of agreement between parties, not some sort of magic ritual. Even if you are contracting about something entirely banal and otherwise permissible, the rule isn't "a signature's a signature, regardless of how I befuddle you into getting it". It's not...exactly news... that people don't read the zillion pages of 2 point flyspeck sans legalese before clicking "I agree", so the state could simply be asserting that, for anything not commonly understood to be part of the purchase process, the fact that you put it on page 37 and the user clicked the button simply isn't relevant to the actual agreement you came to, and that anything of importance is going to have to be a lot more visible.
My (layman's) understanding is that a lot of the details of what make a contract a valid agreement are caselaw, judged in part on the specifics of the situation(clickwrap contract to buy $10 widget, probably minimal respect for the 'agreement', your lawyers sitting down with their lawyers and hashing it out line by line, probably greater deference to the result); but that doesn't preclude the state from clarifying a point it considers salient.
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Hrm. I never thought about the whitespace requirements in python from an accessibility perspective.
I know that Python's approach to whitespace is very...polarizing; but I've always wondered how much it would cause trouble either for people who really loath it, or for specialized situations that tend to crop up under 'accessibility' (where the path from text file to user is likely going through one or more atypical transformations, anywhere from simple contrast bumps up through text to speech or the like).
Given that the whitespace has to have an unambiguous meaning to the python interpreter, your editor could presumably convert, in either direction, any notation you desire, so long as it covers the same possible meanings (and, ideally, doesn't clash with characters python uses to mean something else, since then it'd have to convert those as well, potentially sending you chasing down the road to something that looks utterly different).
It's not as though what you see on the screen bears much resemblance to the actual underlying sequence of bits.
Given that these languages are (primarily, obviously anything Turing-complete can be turned to the same purposes as anything else, if somebody feels like it) used for statistics work, I'd be inclined to wonder whether that is the easiest or best way to go about it:
If something is already implemented in R, and you want to more or less blindly feed it a new target, or re-run it to see how it works, R was apparently not broken enough to stop it, because it's already done.
If you want to implement some, currently unsupported, aspect of statistics in Julia, with API or binary compatibility with R not a consideration, you could potentially end up in a situation where being reasonably sure that your translated version works, does what it is supposed to, and is vaguely human readable might take longer or be more difficult, or both, than starting with the math you wish to implement and building something non-broken from scratch.
I'd like to see a double-blind study on the chef claim, too.
I'm pretty sure that food, like music, has a fringe of...enthusiasts...who would tell you that double-blind studies just ineffably blunt the terroir in some more or less mystical way (which is of course the real reason why they have trouble performing above chance), rather than let base materialism and the plebian theory that functionally identical outcomes can be produced by a variety of means sully the transcendent subtlety of their experience.
Be honest, if Apple were the one who had stolen physical designs and software innovations from Android, you nerds would ask nothing less than nuking Apple from orbit.
Eh. Their new ring-HQ-thing would make an attractive target from high altitude I suppose; but I don't think I'd be as worked up as you give me credit for:
As with so many things patent-and-tech-related, whatever ends up being the killer app always looks simultaneously brilliantly innovative and obvious in hindsight; but attempts to actually put your finger on precisely what is patentably special about it frequently run into trouble on some mixture of university research projects that just got shelved after somebody finished his PhD, stuff IBM did in 1980 but charged approximately a zillion dollars a month to lease and hid behind an interface designed to sell you consulting services through sheer pain, or assorted bits and pieces identifiably but unhelpfully introduced in prior products that were dragged down by mediocrity in other areas.
That's what I find most unsympathetic about Apple's protracted litigation on what are basically broad look-and-feel grounds. Were they the first ones to use a capacitive touchscreen to make a smartphone that doesn't suck? Sure, no problem. And look at the giant pile of first mover advantage and cash that they got for it. Does this entitle them to a monopoly on rectangular touch sensitive objects for two decades? Less impressive case to be made. And, much to their chagrin, less impressive legal payout. As much as Apple might prefer otherwise, nailing the execution is not a patentable achievement, and a great many elegant executions break down into a lot of substantially nonpatentable, or already commonplace, bits and pieces put together correctly.
They really didn't do too much to the traditional projector market (rear-projection displays were pretty badly brutalized by the increasingly low cost of panels that aren't of nearly CRT thickness). Only a fairly small venue would have ever been targeting a projector for anything under a 60 inch image, most larger, sometimes considerably.
Now, what's kind of baffling about this little device is that cheap LCDs did (more or less preemptively, since they came before most projectors of this type) brutalize the market, if one ever existed, for 'painfully low resolution and dim images in the sub-60 inch range'. Given that the output of this device is worse than basically anything you could buy, even if you tried to fail, by wandering into Best Buy's TV section and looking lost and vulnerable, I'm unsure of what the point is. Proper projectors still have a lot of room to retreat into, unless the ghastly 'display wall 'o giant bezels' style is considered acceptable.
In fairness to this device, the ~75 lumens, 864x480, "projector" is just a member of an entire class of world's worst projectors. Those specs are the ones that you happen to hit if you combine TI's cheapest (sorry, did I say 'cheapest'? I meant 'most compact, versatile, and value-oriented') DLP module with an LED lamp that will last a reasonably long time, require no particularly exotic cooling, and is available in quantity outside of the lab.
I'm unclear on why this class exists; but the setup Gigabyte is using should be pretty much identical to a large number of other 'micro projector' things. As examples of how far LEDs have come since the days of dim red indicator lamps, they are pretty impressive. By the standards of projectors, they rank somewhere between 'crime against humanity' and 'downright painful'.
In this case 'more humane' basically just means 'doesn't make the audience as squeamish'. As it turns out, this is a very poor indicator. Especially since the usual injection cocktail contains Pancuronium, or another curare-like muscle relaxant. Not an anaesthetic, or toxic in itself; but causes nice, peaceful-looking flaccid paralysis. Unless one of the other ingredients fully sedates you, or kills you, you just suffocate; but no unseemly twitching or spasms, no grimacing, gasping, any of that ugly stuff; because with the complete loss of muscle control, how could you?
The 'barbaric' methods, by contrast, don't look all nice and clean and medical; but they also don't involve deputy Cletus playing amateur phlebotomist with a dodgy, failure-prone, three-step injection process (compare to, say, how we put domestic animals to sleep, if you want to see somebody who knows their stuff handle a lethal injection...), they involve a lot of gore; potentially some peripheral nervous activity causing creepy corpse twitch; but they depend either on simple mechanical principles(as with the guillotine) or skills that prison staff likely have in more than adequate amounts (as with firing squads).
Personally, I'm not against the notion of capital punishment in principle; but the way we do it in the US is like a grimly parodic example of what not to do, and how not to do it. Despite the availability of trivially better procedures, we insist on using a variety of ass-backwards Mad-Libs protocols with a history of unreliability and no obvious merits. Our irrational, emotionally misguided, approach carries over to the selection of victims as well: (even aside from the documented cases where the whole trial was a frame-up, with gross prosecutorial, judicial, and sometimes even defense attorney, misconduct) we execute largely on the basis of emotional salience, rather than actual danger. Kill somebody, up close and personal, nice and gruesome? Potential death penalty in jurisdictions that conduct it. Kill a large number of people, by some polite, white-collar, epidemiological chicanery? Probably just a civil matter, you might even get to settle without admitting wrongdoing.
Nobody likes violent criminals, and they are notably unsympathetic characters; but (precisely for those reasons) their influence tends to be self-limiting. The really dangerous ones are smart enough to make it to a position of power and influence, where the rewards are better and the penalties oh so much smaller. If we were serious about rationally applying capital punishment, it'd be a lot easier to be taken out and shot for various flavors of fraud and corruption, rather than effectively impossible, as now.
There's also the (convenient in the right hands, a total mess if handled less delicately) that people who learn best independently can often be addressed by benign neglect, with some strategic overlooking of sitting in the back of the class and reading and the like, while people who do learn best from others; but are being fed e-learning modules, are more or less screwed.
This is not to say that there aren't people who unwisely attempt to force the issue when they should just leave well enough alone; but the problem is, at least, easier in principle than somehow sneaking in facetime for the portion of the class that needs it.
Ask anyone who has done IT or technical work in a school district. Technology is the coolest buzzword for driving a pedagogy of student idea synthesis or somesuch fucking bullshit. The real deal is all the grant money is in tech, and teachers LOVE another break.
Yes and no, in my experience: Yes, 21st-century-skills-computer-something-something-digital-natives-media-literacy-differentiated-instruction-etc. is a Thing, and nontrivial amounts of money are spent on hardware, software, support, curriculum development, and so on, in order to chase it.
However, it isn't exactly lost on teachers (who tend to be pretty good observers of student behavior, and, since the internet isn't really new anymore, may have been screwing around on it when they were in school) that an internet connected computer is one of the most potent distractions not under DEA jurisdiction, and it's not as though keeping students focused is something other than a bit of a battle anyway.
This tends to temper the enthusiasm of even the most enthusiastic followers of fads, as does the reality that (especially if that grant covered the purchase and setup; but not an extra IT minion for years 2-5) computers have a very nasty habit of throwing up reliability issues that can easily eat 10-20 minutes of a 50 minute period if you get even modestly unlucky.
I'd want a proper, large scale, suitably controlled, etc. psych study before venturing a position on what effect, if any, exposure (of various types and in various quantities) to computers in childhood has on focus, attention, executive function, and so on even when there aren't any in the room right now; but I'd treat it as a near certainty that nothing else will have a classroom screwing around the second you turn your back more efficiently. I'd also say that this is lost on basically nobody, which tends to force even the enthusiasts into a downright defensive style of classroom management when the computers come out.
It's going to take a very compelling 'smart' feature to make applying the protocol currently used for the blinding-eyeburner-superbright blue LEDs that manufacturers insist on sticking everywhere to the hypothetical screens that will be displaying ads everywhere.
Between electrical tape, spraypaint, and maybe a bit of glass etching (when more polite flavors of disconnecting or firmware modification don't suffice) I see no reason for anything that doesn't need a screen to remain equipped with one.
Terms of use for physical product changed after purchase in such a way as to cripple said product? That's called "bait and switch."
Ho ho ho! Silly consumer! Does the physical product you purchased look at all crippled to you? Every pixel and transistor and unecessarily ugly bezel is exactly as it should be! It's only the software, which is licensed, not sold, and subject to the terms and conditions of the EULA, modifiable at any time by us, without notice, that has changed!
(And this is why the 'licensed not sold' bullshit with software is ultimately so dangerous. If it just applied to stuff you bought on floppy disks and shoved into a computer, it'd be mostly a nuisance with occasional abuses. The fact that the same legal reasoning can be extended to cover firmware, which is just as much software; but also more or less entirely critical to the operation of a very large, and increasing, percentage of the 'hardware' devices you 'own', is where it really shows its teeth. Nearly anything of nontrivial complexity probably has some firmware in it somewhere, without which it isn't much good, and for which your replacement options are limited, sometimes by obscurity, sometimes by crypto bootloaders, which rather undermines the 'ownership' you might hope to have.)
You basically have no way of knowing what they are doing with any data they obtain; but putting a passive tap on the wire between the TV and the world and watching closely should at least tell you what they know. If they bother to encrypt it properly, of course, you may need to actually break into the embedded OS, or grovel through the firmware, which is considerably more challenging; but even knowing how much flows upstream is better than nothing.
A minority are opposed to the FCC's proposal to turn the internet into cable TV. The remainder are unhappy that the FCC's proposal doesn't directly sell everybody into indentured servitude to their local monopoly ISP.
Unfortunately, the graduated from the state level and now infests congress(a fairly prime senate seat, no less). I'd be delighted to see her relegated to the little league, ideally some horrid little municipality in the ass end of nowhere; but such is not to be.
Exactly. By disagreeing with the majority, he has no rights. Too bad we can't do the same to the rest of the Republicans in the rest of this country. They always stand against freedom by fighting for the right to dissent.
Nice strawman; but by asserting nobody has any useful 4th amendment rights, I'd argue that it becomes just to assert that he doesn't. Slightly different.
It isn't a matter of how many voted for or against; but what they voted for or against.
District Attorneys are the highest level prosecutors in a given jurisdiction. This doesn't mean that they are ignorant of the law; but their professional imperatives are in line with easy and efficient prosecution, rather than pesky procedural inconveniences.
They may be right in this case; but I'd want to see some solid argument that 'too vague' actually means 'too vague' rather than 'has the potential to step on my toes'.
Who's up for 24/7 full documentation of the every move, utterance, and action, of the asshole who voted against it?
Even if you did believe in strong AI, half the AIs in science fiction are either psychotic, murderous, or going off the rails for some reason, and we all know (and some of us are) natural intelligences that don't exactly inspire confidence in the competence of intelligences in general.
"Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you it will."
I haven't reread them in a while; but didn't Asimov write a bunch of stories that played with various 'failure modes' of the three laws, even in the hands of robots not hobbled by competence issues? My impression was always that Asimov was under no illusions that those rules were any less prone to ambiguity and assorted hairy exceptions than anything in moral philosophy(which is absolutely rife with attempts at proposing a maxim, followed by people sniping at it with clever situations that stress it to absurdity and beyond).
Does anyone who has to deal with software(even as a user, not even as some hardcore code guru) believe in robotic competence?
A robot is nothing more than a (probably commodity) computer, which we know are unreliable junk, running a whole heap of software(which we know is terrifyingly bad in all but the most carefully controlled and rigorously validated situations), with a bunch of moving parts grafted on that probably haven't seen maintenance within the vendor's recommended window.
That is...not...the stuff of which 'hyper-competence' (much less infallibility) is made.
What's he going to do, turn his back on his best customers?
Do the staff refer to this policy as "The Prime Directive" informally?
I don't know how well the two sample sets overlap; but there have definitely been experiments in earth orbit on the effects of zero gravity, radiation, and hard vacuum, in various combinations. Some organisms do surprisingly well.
There's also the (sadly ignored in our delightful era of clickwrap contracts that you agree to in the process of opening them up to read them...) fact that contract law is intended to be a codification of agreement between parties, not some sort of magic ritual. Even if you are contracting about something entirely banal and otherwise permissible, the rule isn't "a signature's a signature, regardless of how I befuddle you into getting it". It's not...exactly news... that people don't read the zillion pages of 2 point flyspeck sans legalese before clicking "I agree", so the state could simply be asserting that, for anything not commonly understood to be part of the purchase process, the fact that you put it on page 37 and the user clicked the button simply isn't relevant to the actual agreement you came to, and that anything of importance is going to have to be a lot more visible.
My (layman's) understanding is that a lot of the details of what make a contract a valid agreement are caselaw, judged in part on the specifics of the situation(clickwrap contract to buy $10 widget, probably minimal respect for the 'agreement', your lawyers sitting down with their lawyers and hashing it out line by line, probably greater deference to the result); but that doesn't preclude the state from clarifying a point it considers salient.