Yeah, only steam engines aren't small enough to sneak up on your, slip into your bloodstream, and hack your cells to death.
But... if you've already got benign nanites in your bloodstream, then they can fend off the hostile ones. With self replicating nano, you could be injected at birth and be 'immunized'. And if someone releases something that can defeat the defenses, then you could get an 'update' to be protected against the latest bug. Remember, the technology for mass scale destruction has been around for quite a while, nukes, gasses, etc. Nano is just one more thing, I would be more worried about some terrorist using conventional technology, there's plenty of it on the market.
It makes decisions based on programming. So let's say that it cuts too close to another car for whatever reason, and in the collision the driver of the other car dies. Is the programmer liable?
No. If Windows 2000 crashes, causing a company thousands of dollars in downtime etc, do they call up microsoft and sue the specific programer who caused the bug?
After all, he is the one who effectively made the decision to cut that close to the other car.
How? Cutting to close to the car could be a bug, you dont say that a programmer decided to crash the system when they write something with a bug in it.
This quote is slightly off-topic, but its a good example. (The paper itself is not really relevant to the topic, but you can find it here.)
It may be difficult to get used to dealing with a volatile distributed
entity. Suppose your robot made some really stupid mistake. You are mad at
it. The robot explains that the action was caused by a temporary condition
in the experimental semantic subnetwork and suggests to present to you a
hundred-terabyte volume of incremental archives, memory snapshots and audit
trails from numerous servers involved in the making of the unfortunate
decision, containing a partial description of the state of the relevant
parts of the system at the time. If you can even find the culprit, it's
non-material, distributed, and long gone.
Now, what do you kick ?
Structures of any type do not survive any signifigant length of time without maintenance.
What about pyramids? Some of them have survived ages without maintenance. Sure they have some wear, but they are still as functional as they were when they were built ages ago, with little technology. Why? Because they used stone, and it was a good way to build large, maintenance free structures that last. If all they wanted was a large pyramid that would only last a short time, they could have used materials suited to that task. If you want to build something to really last, you can, it just takes much more resources.
From what I remember, the speed of the collapse doesnt have anything to do with it becoming a black hole, what determines if it will become a black hole is its mass. If its mass is greater than 1.4(hopefully this is the right number, and I'm not totally mixing them up) solar masses it will become a black hole. (Please correct me if I am wrong)
Black holes, wormholes and time machines, by Jim Al-Khalili
As the name suggests, this isnt strictly black holes, but it is interesting and very readable. A good way to learn more about this is to go the library and look at what they have, they should have a good enough selection that you can find something interesting, just make sure the book isnt loaded with equations if you dont know much about it.
IIRC, Hawking radiation deals more with the evaporation of very small black holes. This explains why there are no microscopic black holes, as they should have been formed in the Big Bang, but we dont detect any because they have 'evaporated' over billions of years. Hawking radiation does not appreciably affect the mass of black holes formed by collapsing stars, which is how most black holes are formed.
Slashdot Mirror
But... if you've already got benign nanites in your bloodstream, then they can fend off the hostile ones. With self replicating nano, you could be injected at birth and be 'immunized'. And if someone releases something that can defeat the defenses, then you could get an 'update' to be protected against the latest bug. Remember, the technology for mass scale destruction has been around for quite a while, nukes, gasses, etc. Nano is just one more thing, I would be more worried about some terrorist using conventional technology, there's plenty of it on the market.
No. If Windows 2000 crashes, causing a company thousands of dollars in downtime etc, do they call up microsoft and sue the specific programer who caused the bug?
How? Cutting to close to the car could be a bug, you dont say that a programmer decided to crash the system when they write something with a bug in it.
This quote is slightly off-topic, but its a good example. (The paper itself is not really relevant to the topic, but you can find it here.)
Structures of any type do not survive any signifigant length of time without maintenance.
What about pyramids? Some of them have survived ages without maintenance. Sure they have some wear, but they are still as functional as they were when they were built ages ago, with little technology. Why? Because they used stone, and it was a good way to build large, maintenance free structures that last. If all they wanted was a large pyramid that would only last a short time, they could have used materials suited to that task. If you want to build something to really last, you can, it just takes much more resources.
From what I remember, the speed of the collapse doesnt have anything to do with it becoming a black hole, what determines if it will become a black hole is its mass. If its mass is greater than 1.4(hopefully this is the right number, and I'm not totally mixing them up) solar masses it will become a black hole. (Please correct me if I am wrong)
Black holes, wormholes and time machines, by Jim Al-Khalili
As the name suggests, this isnt strictly black holes, but it is interesting and very readable. A good way to learn more about this is to go the library and look at what they have, they should have a good enough selection that you can find something interesting, just make sure the book isnt loaded with equations if you dont know much about it.
IIRC, Hawking radiation deals more with the evaporation of very small black holes. This explains why there are no microscopic black holes, as they should have been formed in the Big Bang, but we dont detect any because they have 'evaporated' over billions of years. Hawking radiation does not appreciably affect the mass of black holes formed by collapsing stars, which is how most black holes are formed.
IANAAP (Astro-Physicist)