That all said, words have been appearing spontaneously in English, AND getting added as loanwords from other languages since before it was called English... just read the OED, you will see First Attested Usages from all centuries since the beginning. Whenever you see a word with a first attestation date before 1950, and either Origin Unkown or Origin Uncertain, or Origin Disputed, you will know you have found one and have been proven wrong, and I doubt very much you will have to search far. Prolly you will not even make it out of the As.
Bad news, bro. You dont need one. You have a computer and that is enough. If you think you can hide behind being an AC, again, bad news, bro. When you browse slash dot not only are there MAC and IP addresses, and cookies and persistent cookies and macromedia hidden super cookies, but the browser likely records not only what you typed, but a log of every keystroke and WHEN you made it, which may as well be a fingerprint for your typing style, what in ham radio I have read somewhere what they called a FIST, which is the distinctive style of how long the operator took to depress and release the key that sent the pulses, how long they waited from one pulse to the next, one word to the next, etc. Also, even without a smartphone, video of you walking can be correlated with sound recordings to get detailed info on your musculoskeletal system in fine detail, which is of course unique to you... there is no hiding from the telescreens, Winston. Also... we know you have a smartphone.
Doubt it. Religious wackos insisting that anything that MUST be carried is the MARK OF THE BEAST will be enough to ensure their representatives never force this on them. Religious insanity it turns out, is not ALL bad.
No, someone will just come up with phone movement randomizers. You know how people with more money than sense buy wristwatches that have to be worn to keep time, automatic or self-winding models, but they own a bunch and only have one pair of wrists, so they buy winders that use WAY more power than batteries to slowly turn them end over end? Theyâ(TM)ll have that but for phones, that randomly jiggle and bounce them around inside a case to randomize movement to defeat this system, and as for how people hold them... when you want to dial a number and have your privacy, just set the phone down on a flat surface, I.e., a tabletop or the ground, and dial there. Use a wand instead of a finger, and try to get everyone else to do the same and use the same kind of wand so that fingertip pressure is randomized too... we can beat this...
Or...or...or... maybe different people and different organizations have different ideas and goals for metadata collection and use-cases and insisting any one is somehow true and correct is like arguing about what a given formation of clouds most resembles, especially when the people arguing are from different cultures, viewing the clouds from different locations, seeing them from different angles, and maybe even looking at them on different days. On different planets. I suspect the best we can do is a agree to disagree on this point.
Google is rich enough that laws don't apply to it. This is not how it should be, but in a country where bribery has been legalized provided you maintain the fiction that it's just a "campaign donation," and there's no clearly identifiable quid being promised in consideration of a proposed specific quo, with enough money you can do whatever you want.
The republic is dead, and I for one welcome our corporate oligarch overlords, and you would too if you were smart... because we simply have no alternative.
So a star managed to get to this size after only two billion years of universe time, and by that time, (billions of years ago,) got to be an ultra-massive black hole? I'm not astrophysicist but SOMETHING doesn't add up here. (This strikes me as being rather like hearing a businessman insist his company's business model is sound, even though he loses money on every deal, because he "makes it up on volume," and then realizing he's not joking. Either someone doesn't understand what "loses" means, what "money" means, what "every" means, or what "deal" means... or someone has cooked the hell out of the books. Personally, it seems to me that the error here is that from the observation that everything seems to be moving away from everything else, cosmologists concluded that this implies that decreasing density as a function of time necessitates that all prior times exhibited the characteristic of HIGHER density, but this is never observed, for obvious reasons, (no one has a time machine AND a telescope; instead they act as if their telescopes ARE time machines, and while it may LOOK that way from one perspective, that's very much NOT true from others. That is, pretending the telescope IS a time machine does NOT yield results that are identical to those you'd get if you had an ACTUAL time machine, AND a telescope. Then things would be very different.
TL;DR: I don't buy this. Cosmologists and astrophysicists are making cauldrons of stew with one thing that may or may not ever have been an oyster.
The "three laws" are a sci-fi trope, nothing more. This is not an assertion of mere opinion, it's demonstrable fact. The notion (basically) is that in Asimov's made-up world(s) in his books, all robots are required to be programmed to follow these three basic rules. Let's just stop right there. If a robot is programmed and is unable to violate this programming, then it's not sentient, and the idea of requiring robots to weigh their actions' possible effects against a rule or several rules is absurd on its face. When someone pulls the trigger on a gun, does the gun consider whether the situation is appropriate, and the use of deadly force is justified before allowing the striker or firing pin to contact the primer of the chambered bullet? Does the cartridge pause to consider whether sending the bullet down the barrel at a given moment or not is just? Fair? Proportional? Appropriate? NO. Without actual free will, the cartridge, the gun, and even a robot HOLDING the gun, being unable to defy their programming, are just tools, and discussion of ethics that could apply to any of them are laughable.
Now, suppose the robot in question is sophisticated enough that programming can only inform and guide it. Suppose you have a very human-like robot, capable of complex, rational thought, abstraction, predicting effects from causes, understanding emotion, reason, inference, rationalization, exhibiting, in short, mentation indistinguishable from a human being. Trying to place some simple bit of code ON TOP OF THAT, that inhibits some action if it, for example, harms a human being, is as absurd a notion as imagining that you could apply that to A HUMAN BEING. We actually DO have laws, in real life, actually, that say much to the effect what Asimov's say. A human is not allowed to cause harm to another human, in general. DEFINITELY in most jurisdictions where people live, it is illegal, for example, to take a blunt object and repeatedly smash it against a person's living body, causing structural damage, (aka "injury") or catastrophic traumatic multiple-organ-system failure, (aka "death"). DOES THAT STOP THEM? Some, sure. But not all. Now imagine you have a robot capable of understanding everything you do. Basically, it's just like you, except it's electronic. It finds itself in a situation where a human is apparently trying to abduct another human. Let us say it's holding a gun. Does it shoot the would-be kidnapper? Well, a better question would be, what would you have to do to make it NOT shoot the kidnapper? Have a second electronic brain, and independent machine consciousness capable of reasoning identically with the robot's, but whose purpose is to INHIBIT; basically, that robot's super-ego. Suppose it decides shooting a suspected kidnapper, with what info is available would be wrong, and the risk of hitting the putative victim is too high. (It's windy, and the gun's ability to fire straight is unknown to the robot.) So the super-ego consciousness would have to have the ability to lock the trigger-finger control circuits out to PREVENT the principle consciousness from firing. But then who governs THAT? You'd need another layer, just in case THAT, the super-ego, might agree with the ego, that shooting is appropriate.
It boils down to this. If you're going to have artificially intelligent beings, robots, AI, whatever you want to call them, and grant them the autonomy to decide who should live and who should, by contrast, die, at SOME point you are going to have to turn over, to the AI being, imbued as it is by its design with the capability of understanding as we do, the AGENCY to make the decision, and having some... THING, somehow sitting on top of it telling it what it can and can't do according to Asimov's stupid "three laws" is simply not tenable. If AI is capable of sufficiently complex and abstract thought to NEED the "three laws," it would need to NOT have them, and if its behavior is simplistic enough that they could be applied, they're not smart enough to be responsible for
When I get a call and realize there isn't a real, live, ACTUAL person on the other end, I simply hang up. I am paying for the airtime, and reserve the right not to waste it talking to an electronic lackey. I don't suffer fools gladly even when they are living and breathing, and the same species as I am; I am NOT going to tolerate someone essentially calling me, then putting me on hold to wait around to talk to them, which is what would inevitably end up happening, since Google's AI is nowhere near good enough to hold a rational conversation with an intelligent person... as demonstrated by the fact that the demo was all faked. If it were that good, they wouldn't have to have faked it. They want to convince us that no human intervention would be required, but that's obviously bullshit.
You kinda forgot an important detail for your readers:
IS THIS A REMOTE EXPLOIT? Can someone use this to hack into a computer without physical access to it? If the attacker has to be in the same room with the computer, it is a very different story from "attacker needs no access to terminal, and all internet-connected machines are susceptible and as of this writing, are unpatched."
Because in the first case, "oh, that's interesting, I hope they fix that soon..." and in the second, "HOLY FUCK! UNPLUG EVERYTHING FROM THE INTERWEBZ NAOW!!!
So... which is it? Should I be mildly concerned, or should I break the glass, and punch the big red button that trips the circuit-breaker that kills all my internet-linked equipment? Or did it already mention which and I just missed it somehow?
These developers gain no leverage by forming a union. They remove their apps from the store forever, Apple doesn't care. There is no power to be gained except maybe in media coverage.
You say that as if it's not worth anything... media coverage, I mean. But as far as forming a union goes, aren't there already unions for such people? Why reinvent the wheel? They're authors, in a sense, so... isn't there a union that covers authors? Or artists, in as much as if the app they design has an interface you can SEE, they are unavoidably visual artists, too... and if the app makes sounds that they created, (and I know this is under most circumstances a bit of a stretch,) couldn't they be considered musicians, after a fashion? I wish them well, but it's hard to imagine how this will work. There's no shop you could bar people from, to prevent them coding for Apple's app store or platforms; I doubt very much that anyone will have much success threatening people (or suing them) for coding for Apple (directly or indirectly, as an app dev,) and NOT joining the union... really it sounds more like they're forming a club, or perhaps a support group. They may NEED a union, but I don't see how it will work. OH! How about IBEW? I mean, they make instructions that make electronic devices, (powered by electricity,) do stuff, doesn't that KINDA make them electrical workers, in a sense?
Actually, that does make me wonder, are Apple's own employees unionized? If not, could they, and then let anyone who makes stuff that works with or on Apple products join? Would you have to make your app Apple-exclusive to be eligible to join? Like, what if you make an app but make it on multiple platforms? Okay, now I'm just rambling so I'll stop, but I think this raises interesting questions, and I am looking forward to seeing where this goes.
It's "Finnegans Wake" by programmer James Joyce. The software is so sophisticated that most people misinterpret it as a stream-of-consciousness novel, but actually it's a program that draws fractal math versions of images of a guy named Finnegan, waking up from a nap... hence the name.
As I understand it, the compiler needed to take the source code and convert it into executable code on the first platform to be able to run it has still not yet been completed... in fact, as far as I know, it hasn't even been begun. THAT'S how sophisticated THAT piece of software is.
This is basically where I was going to go. I wasn't going to name specific models, I was just going to point out that the only way a handheld model could be made safe is if it were designed to stop the bit abruptly if either hand were removed from either handle. (Some people think they can safely handle one one-handed, but those people are idiots, given the thing has a blade on it spinning at like, what is it, 30,000 rpm? Something like that?) I've never seen a router with this safety feature, come to think of it, but they should all have it. Only able to run with both hands holding the handles on either side. This is because the bit is spinning very rapidly and also they're quite torquey, if I recall correctly. It's been a while since I've handled one.
Neutron stars are, it turns out, pussies. Every one of my protons says so.
This begs the question though, what kind of pressure exists within a neutron, and is that pressure higher with the weight of a neutron star sitting on top of it?
For all the bravado I've just exhibited over the relative pressure inside my protons compared to that within a neutron star, I probably would not want to get into a fight with one though.
Absolutely unenforceable. They sell you the computer. No terms can be added after the sale is complete.
If that were true, everything in the EULA would be unenforceable too, since all the restrictions against de-compiling, reverse-engineering, etc., would be likewise considered to be "added" after the sale. So would the prohibition against installing macOS/OS-X/MacOS on non-Apple-branded devices. I take it YANAL. (Neither am I, but...yeah.)
I don't need or want GOOGLE, or ANY private company trying to influence my behavior in order to try to make life easier, more fair, or more pleasant, and I DON'T trust them when they claim to have lofty, ambitious, altruistic goals like ending poverty or homelessness! THOSE are things the GOVERNMENT is supposed to do, and we must all trust, rather than an unelected cartel in charge of a private corporation like Google, rather our unelected leaders, chosen in sham elections because they've demonstrated to super-rich people like the founders and other executives at companies like Google that they're the most corrupt, most willing to sell us out for cash, most ready to do whatever their OWNERS tell them, to strive to make it really look like they're trying to solve problems (while not actually solving anything but the issue of themselves not having enough money to live like kings and laughing at the rest of us for being stupid enough to vote for their kind over and over and over again,) like poverty and homelessness, and OH GOD, I just realized what I'm saying...
Now that the brakes work most of the time we can take the bumpers off the cars? Goofballs.
Good analogy. Bumpers do fuck all to save lives. They are disposable pieces of plastic that don't dampen any crash impact with all of the life saving features of cars having been transferred to the crumple zones in the body.
What? Did your analogy not got the way you wanted it to? Flashing the word "Secure" for www.payipal.com is not good security practice. It's confusing to the users to tell them to not type their password in on pages that say Secure. Instead add a tiny indication showing encryption status, focus the user on Extended Validation credentials, and maybe we can undo the horrible screwup of teaching users shitty security practices we started in the 90s that have exposed so many people to fraud.
Bumpers DO save lives, actually. You're mistaken.
(A crash that ALMOST kills someone but doesn't because the impact in a crash was sufficient to total the car, compress the crumple zones, etc., WOULD have been sufficient to kill the occupants if it had had less energy-absorbing capability, part of which is in fact provided by the bumper, the bumper mounts, etc. Now of course, I realize that MOST crashes don't fall into the Goldilocks Zone of being energetic enough to kill withOUT the bumper, but NOT energetic enough to kill BECAUSE of the presence of the bumper, but SOME do, or I should say statistically, given how many crashes there are, some logically must. Personally, I'm glad they're there, and plan to keep mine. Also let's not forget that not all bumpers are created equal, so even if yours strike you as insubstantial, some are quite beefy, and also if you let SOME people get rid of theirs, many other people will be clamoring to eliminate THEIRS as well, including commercial tractor-trailers "DOT" bumpers, which DO most DEFINITELY save lives, in that they prevent passenger cars and trucks from going UNDER them, and causing the first part of such a vehicle rear-ending one to strike the back of the trailer to be the dashboard, right about at the height of the windshield, resulting in decapitations of front-seat drivers and passengers, or having them take almost the full brunt of the force of their car going into the back of the other vehicle, at or near chest height... either way, not survivable at speed. Just use your preferred search engine to look up images of "car crash semi trailer no DOT bumper" if you'd like to see what happens when either the bumper isn't present, or isn't strong enough, and then imagine being IN one of those at the time of the crash. They are... pretty horrific.) Just saying.
Now that the analogy has been properly torpedoed, the original issue was that removing "secure" is tantamount to taking the bumpers off a car, which is a silly analogy, and would be even if bumpers were fundamentally useless under all circumstances. They are not eliminating the security features, they are simply removing the WORD and leaving the icon. A better analogy would be that in cars dating from the 70s, the words "FASTEN SEAT-BELTS" would appear on the dashboard for the first ten minutes of driving, and by the 1990s or 2000s, they started having cars only show a seat-belt icon for the first few seconds, so you know it actually works, then extinguish unless you take the seat-belt OFF while driving, at which point it immediately lights up RED, and chimes at you until you refasten it. I think it kind of goes without saying that this is the way things should be, given how most people know now, not to drive around without their seat-belts fastened.
In California, businesses post signs warning people that something there could cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm. In Texas, they post signs warning people not to carry concealed handguns on their property.
I assure you BOTH kinds of sign are ignored. The MAXIMUM penalty for carrying a concealed handgun (provided you're licensed to do so,) in Texas is limited to $200, and that's assuming they catch you, that you get prosecuted, and are found guilty. (Unless of course, after they catch you carrying in contravention of an effective TPC Section 30.06 or 30.07 notice, you refuse to leave, at which point it's a different story.) No jail time. None. Basically, the sign is a mere suggestion. You don't even lose your GUN. The actual text of the law reads (in part):
An offense under this section is a Class C misdemeanor punishable by a fine not to exceed $200
The GUN costs more than that! The signs they put up are often meaningless, or legally ineffective. (For example, I passed one today that was printed in letters that couldn't have been more than a half-inch high; the law REQUIRES them to be a minimum of 1 inch high, in contrasting colors, for the notice to be legally effective, and moreover they must be posted conspicuously at principle (or was it EVERY?) building entrance... not on a sign at the edge of a property, not on a bulletin-board in a darkened and disused hallway near the entrance where no one goes, but prominently displayed. The way some are posted, they have no legal effect, though even if the sign does not conform to law, once they realize you're carrying a gun, if they tell you to leave you have to leave, (obviously excluding if you're a cop,) notwithstanding whether the sign is properly posted, and legally effective, making the whole exercise of putting the sign up, kind of pointless, but I digress.
Now what does Texas law regarding concealed carry of weapons have to do with California's requiring stupid, B.S. warnings for chemicals found in COFFEE? The fact that the state government is in BOTH cases requiring the posting of warning signs that people will largely ignore, which ends up being a pointless waste of time and money, and moreover it's to highlight the fact that if you think California's government is run by sub-morons and are alone in making idiotic requirements to post pointless signs... you're mistaken. Texas does it too, and I'll just bet those aren't the only two.
Personally, in the case of Texas, I think they shouldn't permit anyone (i.e., businesses) to 'ban' guns on their property or premises unless they provide armed security personnel on-site to protect you since they're obliging you to be defenseless to be there legally, and that they be required moreover to search each and every single person upon entry to ensure no one sneaks a handgun in, and if they're not willing or able to do BOTH of those things, that they should not be ALLOWED to prohibit a LICENSED individual from carrying concealed, but hey... there are a LOT of things that would be different if I ran the show. Here's another: no city, county, municipality, or any other authority would be allowed to START road construction in more than one area at a time, unless damaged by i.e., a natural disaster, otherwise they'd be required to FINISH working in one area, BEFORE starting work on another, AND I would prohibit the construction of new homes OR businesses, until ALL the roads and sidewalks needed to accommodate the traffic new construction would bring, are FINISHED. (Traffic being snarled for months because they do this shit backwards IS a pet-peeve of mine.)
In the case of California, similarly, the state should have the burden of proof that a business may expose workers or customers to potentially dangerous levels of hazardous chemicals before requiring the posting of a sign, and the state should have to provide all signage at their expense, and the peril should be CLEARLY listed, so as to avoid the situation they have now where the signs are EVERYWHERE and ignored by everyone.
Corollary question: how much power is being used by YouTube with no one in front of the screen while it autoplays video after video? How much power has Angry Birds used? How much power has Amazon.com used? Facebook? Twitter? How much power has the NSA used? The US Navy? The Air Force? How much power did they expend sending all the Apollo missions after the moon landing? How much power did they spend sending that CAR auto the moon to drive around with?
How much power have just the lights used for advertising of Las Vegas, Nevada shops and casinos used, to say nothing of the power all the slot machines use... how much power if you add all the streetlights in that city? How much power does New York City use?
Just a little bit of perspective. Is Bitcoin a waste of money and electricity? Sure. But so is Disneyland. Speaking of which, how much power does the Mainstreet Electrical Parade use? Probably less than Bitcoin, but also probably less than Las Vegas. Actually, does anyone know how many watts that big lamp atop the Luxor Casino uses? How many times the power consumed by the typical Bitcoin mining rig is the one light atop the Luxor, I wonder.
For whatever little this might be worth, the so-called "Democratic" (hahaha) Party has lost my vote, in perpetuity over this. If there is no penalty, there will be no change in behavior, and if there's no negative feedback of any kind, or insufficiently serious response, it will only encourage them and others to misbehave more, similarly, in the future.
As far as I'm concerned, that party is dead to me. When enough other people realize the permanent stain of corruption that wretched, corrupt, useless party has attached to itself, the more will abandon it, in favor of a real, actual progressive party, not a fake one that takes corporate money to back their agenda, betraying their voters, and being generally paid to lose, fail, and take dives. All we have to do is agree on whom to replace them with, to be the vessel of our future hopes, and the organization we can rally behind that will give an ACTUAL fight to the real enemies of the common people of the United States, namely the super-rich, and all their bought-and-paid-for puppets in the mainstream worthless media, in elected and appointed offices at all levels, etc., and the opposition party that loves the fact that their "opponents," have been captured by the same legalized-bribe-making people who own them. Just my fiftieth of a dollar.
Slashdot Mirror
Youve been to Râ(TM)lyeh?!? Lucky....
That all said, words have been appearing spontaneously in English, AND getting added as loanwords from other languages since before it was called English... just read the OED, you will see First Attested Usages from all centuries since the beginning. Whenever you see a word with a first attestation date before 1950, and either Origin Unkown or Origin Uncertain, or Origin Disputed, you will know you have found one and have been proven wrong, and I doubt very much you will have to search far. Prolly you will not even make it out of the As.
Holy shit... you read my MIND! Thatâ(TM)s totally what I was going to post, verbatim, letter. for. letter.
Wait... are YOU from space, maybe?
Yeah. Until you need to make or take a call, away from your precious turntable. Then they GET you.
Bad news, bro. You dont need one. You have a computer and that is enough. If you think you can hide behind being an AC, again, bad news, bro. When you browse slash dot not only are there MAC and IP addresses, and cookies and persistent cookies and macromedia hidden super cookies, but the browser likely records not only what you typed, but a log of every keystroke and WHEN you made it, which may as well be a fingerprint for your typing style, what in ham radio I have read somewhere what they called a FIST, which is the distinctive style of how long the operator took to depress and release the key that sent the pulses, how long they waited from one pulse to the next, one word to the next, etc. Also, even without a smartphone, video of you walking can be correlated with sound recordings to get detailed info on your musculoskeletal system in fine detail, which is of course unique to you... there is no hiding from the telescreens, Winston. Also... we know you have a smartphone.
Doubt it. Religious wackos insisting that anything that MUST be carried is the MARK OF THE BEAST will be enough to ensure their representatives never force this on them. Religious insanity it turns out, is not ALL bad.
No, someone will just come up with phone movement randomizers. You know how people with more money than sense buy wristwatches that have to be worn to keep time, automatic or self-winding models, but they own a bunch and only have one pair of wrists, so they buy winders that use WAY more power than batteries to slowly turn them end over end? Theyâ(TM)ll have that but for phones, that randomly jiggle and bounce them around inside a case to randomize movement to defeat this system, and as for how people hold them... when you want to dial a number and have your privacy, just set the phone down on a flat surface, I.e., a tabletop or the ground, and dial there. Use a wand instead of a finger, and try to get everyone else to do the same and use the same kind of wand so that fingertip pressure is randomized too... we can beat this...
Or...or...or... maybe different people and different organizations have different ideas and goals for metadata collection and use-cases and insisting any one is somehow true and correct is like arguing about what a given formation of clouds most resembles, especially when the people arguing are from different cultures, viewing the clouds from different locations, seeing them from different angles, and maybe even looking at them on different days. On different planets. I suspect the best we can do is a agree to disagree on this point.
Google is rich enough that laws don't apply to it. This is not how it should be, but in a country where bribery has been legalized provided you maintain the fiction that it's just a "campaign donation," and there's no clearly identifiable quid being promised in consideration of a proposed specific quo, with enough money you can do whatever you want.
The republic is dead, and I for one welcome our corporate oligarch overlords, and you would too if you were smart... because we simply have no alternative.
So a star managed to get to this size after only two billion years of universe time, and by that time, (billions of years ago,) got to be an ultra-massive black hole? I'm not astrophysicist but SOMETHING doesn't add up here. (This strikes me as being rather like hearing a businessman insist his company's business model is sound, even though he loses money on every deal, because he "makes it up on volume," and then realizing he's not joking. Either someone doesn't understand what "loses" means, what "money" means, what "every" means, or what "deal" means... or someone has cooked the hell out of the books. Personally, it seems to me that the error here is that from the observation that everything seems to be moving away from everything else, cosmologists concluded that this implies that decreasing density as a function of time necessitates that all prior times exhibited the characteristic of HIGHER density, but this is never observed, for obvious reasons, (no one has a time machine AND a telescope; instead they act as if their telescopes ARE time machines, and while it may LOOK that way from one perspective, that's very much NOT true from others. That is, pretending the telescope IS a time machine does NOT yield results that are identical to those you'd get if you had an ACTUAL time machine, AND a telescope. Then things would be very different.
TL;DR: I don't buy this. Cosmologists and astrophysicists are making cauldrons of stew with one thing that may or may not ever have been an oyster.
The "three laws" are a sci-fi trope, nothing more. This is not an assertion of mere opinion, it's demonstrable fact. The notion (basically) is that in Asimov's made-up world(s) in his books, all robots are required to be programmed to follow these three basic rules. Let's just stop right there. If a robot is programmed and is unable to violate this programming, then it's not sentient, and the idea of requiring robots to weigh their actions' possible effects against a rule or several rules is absurd on its face. When someone pulls the trigger on a gun, does the gun consider whether the situation is appropriate, and the use of deadly force is justified before allowing the striker or firing pin to contact the primer of the chambered bullet? Does the cartridge pause to consider whether sending the bullet down the barrel at a given moment or not is just? Fair? Proportional? Appropriate? NO. Without actual free will, the cartridge, the gun, and even a robot HOLDING the gun, being unable to defy their programming, are just tools, and discussion of ethics that could apply to any of them are laughable.
Now, suppose the robot in question is sophisticated enough that programming can only inform and guide it. Suppose you have a very human-like robot, capable of complex, rational thought, abstraction, predicting effects from causes, understanding emotion, reason, inference, rationalization, exhibiting, in short, mentation indistinguishable from a human being. Trying to place some simple bit of code ON TOP OF THAT, that inhibits some action if it, for example, harms a human being, is as absurd a notion as imagining that you could apply that to A HUMAN BEING. We actually DO have laws, in real life, actually, that say much to the effect what Asimov's say. A human is not allowed to cause harm to another human, in general. DEFINITELY in most jurisdictions where people live, it is illegal, for example, to take a blunt object and repeatedly smash it against a person's living body, causing structural damage, (aka "injury") or catastrophic traumatic multiple-organ-system failure, (aka "death"). DOES THAT STOP THEM? Some, sure. But not all. Now imagine you have a robot capable of understanding everything you do. Basically, it's just like you, except it's electronic. It finds itself in a situation where a human is apparently trying to abduct another human. Let us say it's holding a gun. Does it shoot the would-be kidnapper? Well, a better question would be, what would you have to do to make it NOT shoot the kidnapper? Have a second electronic brain, and independent machine consciousness capable of reasoning identically with the robot's, but whose purpose is to INHIBIT; basically, that robot's super-ego. Suppose it decides shooting a suspected kidnapper, with what info is available would be wrong, and the risk of hitting the putative victim is too high. (It's windy, and the gun's ability to fire straight is unknown to the robot.) So the super-ego consciousness would have to have the ability to lock the trigger-finger control circuits out to PREVENT the principle consciousness from firing. But then who governs THAT? You'd need another layer, just in case THAT, the super-ego, might agree with the ego, that shooting is appropriate.
It boils down to this. If you're going to have artificially intelligent beings, robots, AI, whatever you want to call them, and grant them the autonomy to decide who should live and who should, by contrast, die, at SOME point you are going to have to turn over, to the AI being, imbued as it is by its design with the capability of understanding as we do, the AGENCY to make the decision, and having some... THING, somehow sitting on top of it telling it what it can and can't do according to Asimov's stupid "three laws" is simply not tenable. If AI is capable of sufficiently complex and abstract thought to NEED the "three laws," it would need to NOT have them, and if its behavior is simplistic enough that they could be applied, they're not smart enough to be responsible for
When I get a call and realize there isn't a real, live, ACTUAL person on the other end, I simply hang up. I am paying for the airtime, and reserve the right not to waste it talking to an electronic lackey. I don't suffer fools gladly even when they are living and breathing, and the same species as I am; I am NOT going to tolerate someone essentially calling me, then putting me on hold to wait around to talk to them, which is what would inevitably end up happening, since Google's AI is nowhere near good enough to hold a rational conversation with an intelligent person... as demonstrated by the fact that the demo was all faked. If it were that good, they wouldn't have to have faked it. They want to convince us that no human intervention would be required, but that's obviously bullshit.
You kinda forgot an important detail for your readers:
IS THIS A REMOTE EXPLOIT? Can someone use this to hack into a computer without physical access to it? If the attacker has to be in the same room with the computer, it is a very different story from "attacker needs no access to terminal, and all internet-connected machines are susceptible and as of this writing, are unpatched."
Because in the first case, "oh, that's interesting, I hope they fix that soon..." and in the second, "HOLY FUCK! UNPLUG EVERYTHING FROM THE INTERWEBZ NAOW!!!
So... which is it? Should I be mildly concerned, or should I break the glass, and punch the big red button that trips the circuit-breaker that kills all my internet-linked equipment? Or did it already mention which and I just missed it somehow?
These developers gain no leverage by forming a union. They remove their apps from the store forever, Apple doesn't care. There is no power to be gained except maybe in media coverage.
You say that as if it's not worth anything... media coverage, I mean. But as far as forming a union goes, aren't there already unions for such people? Why reinvent the wheel? They're authors, in a sense, so... isn't there a union that covers authors? Or artists, in as much as if the app they design has an interface you can SEE, they are unavoidably visual artists, too... and if the app makes sounds that they created, (and I know this is under most circumstances a bit of a stretch,) couldn't they be considered musicians, after a fashion? I wish them well, but it's hard to imagine how this will work. There's no shop you could bar people from, to prevent them coding for Apple's app store or platforms; I doubt very much that anyone will have much success threatening people (or suing them) for coding for Apple (directly or indirectly, as an app dev,) and NOT joining the union... really it sounds more like they're forming a club, or perhaps a support group. They may NEED a union, but I don't see how it will work. OH! How about IBEW? I mean, they make instructions that make electronic devices, (powered by electricity,) do stuff, doesn't that KINDA make them electrical workers, in a sense?
Actually, that does make me wonder, are Apple's own employees unionized? If not, could they, and then let anyone who makes stuff that works with or on Apple products join? Would you have to make your app Apple-exclusive to be eligible to join? Like, what if you make an app but make it on multiple platforms? Okay, now I'm just rambling so I'll stop, but I think this raises interesting questions, and I am looking forward to seeing where this goes.
It's "Finnegans Wake" by programmer James Joyce. The software is so sophisticated that most people misinterpret it as a stream-of-consciousness novel, but actually it's a program that draws fractal math versions of images of a guy named Finnegan, waking up from a nap... hence the name.
As I understand it, the compiler needed to take the source code and convert it into executable code on the first platform to be able to run it has still not yet been completed... in fact, as far as I know, it hasn't even been begun. THAT'S how sophisticated THAT piece of software is.
five... four... three...
This is basically where I was going to go. I wasn't going to name specific models, I was just going to point out that the only way a handheld model could be made safe is if it were designed to stop the bit abruptly if either hand were removed from either handle. (Some people think they can safely handle one one-handed, but those people are idiots, given the thing has a blade on it spinning at like, what is it, 30,000 rpm? Something like that?) I've never seen a router with this safety feature, come to think of it, but they should all have it. Only able to run with both hands holding the handles on either side. This is because the bit is spinning very rapidly and also they're quite torquey, if I recall correctly. It's been a while since I've handled one.
Neutron stars are, it turns out, pussies. Every one of my protons says so.
This begs the question though, what kind of pressure exists within a neutron, and is that pressure higher with the weight of a neutron star sitting on top of it?
For all the bravado I've just exhibited over the relative pressure inside my protons compared to that within a neutron star, I probably would not want to get into a fight with one though.
Absolutely unenforceable. They sell you the computer. No terms can be added after the sale is complete.
If that were true, everything in the EULA would be unenforceable too, since all the restrictions against de-compiling, reverse-engineering, etc., would be likewise considered to be "added" after the sale. So would the prohibition against installing macOS/OS-X/MacOS on non-Apple-branded devices. I take it YANAL. (Neither am I, but...yeah.)
"I object!"
"On what grounds?"
"It's devastating to my case!"
"Overruled."
"Good call!"
Google's argument sounds a bit like the one here in Liar Liar, (quoted from memory, forgive me if I've missed something).
I don't need or want GOOGLE, or ANY private company trying to influence my behavior in order to try to make life easier, more fair, or more pleasant, and I DON'T trust them when they claim to have lofty, ambitious, altruistic goals like ending poverty or homelessness! THOSE are things the GOVERNMENT is supposed to do, and we must all trust, rather than an unelected cartel in charge of a private corporation like Google, rather our unelected leaders, chosen in sham elections because they've demonstrated to super-rich people like the founders and other executives at companies like Google that they're the most corrupt, most willing to sell us out for cash, most ready to do whatever their OWNERS tell them, to strive to make it really look like they're trying to solve problems (while not actually solving anything but the issue of themselves not having enough money to live like kings and laughing at the rest of us for being stupid enough to vote for their kind over and over and over again,) like poverty and homelessness, and OH GOD, I just realized what I'm saying...
Now that the brakes work most of the time we can take the bumpers off the cars? Goofballs.
Good analogy. Bumpers do fuck all to save lives. They are disposable pieces of plastic that don't dampen any crash impact with all of the life saving features of cars having been transferred to the crumple zones in the body.
What? Did your analogy not got the way you wanted it to? Flashing the word "Secure" for www.payipal.com is not good security practice. It's confusing to the users to tell them to not type their password in on pages that say Secure. Instead add a tiny indication showing encryption status, focus the user on Extended Validation credentials, and maybe we can undo the horrible screwup of teaching users shitty security practices we started in the 90s that have exposed so many people to fraud.
Bumpers DO save lives, actually. You're mistaken.
(A crash that ALMOST kills someone but doesn't because the impact in a crash was sufficient to total the car, compress the crumple zones, etc., WOULD have been sufficient to kill the occupants if it had had less energy-absorbing capability, part of which is in fact provided by the bumper, the bumper mounts, etc. Now of course, I realize that MOST crashes don't fall into the Goldilocks Zone of being energetic enough to kill withOUT the bumper, but NOT energetic enough to kill BECAUSE of the presence of the bumper, but SOME do, or I should say statistically, given how many crashes there are, some logically must. Personally, I'm glad they're there, and plan to keep mine. Also let's not forget that not all bumpers are created equal, so even if yours strike you as insubstantial, some are quite beefy, and also if you let SOME people get rid of theirs, many other people will be clamoring to eliminate THEIRS as well, including commercial tractor-trailers "DOT" bumpers, which DO most DEFINITELY save lives, in that they prevent passenger cars and trucks from going UNDER them, and causing the first part of such a vehicle rear-ending one to strike the back of the trailer to be the dashboard, right about at the height of the windshield, resulting in decapitations of front-seat drivers and passengers, or having them take almost the full brunt of the force of their car going into the back of the other vehicle, at or near chest height... either way, not survivable at speed. Just use your preferred search engine to look up images of "car crash semi trailer no DOT bumper" if you'd like to see what happens when either the bumper isn't present, or isn't strong enough, and then imagine being IN one of those at the time of the crash. They are... pretty horrific.) Just saying.
Now that the analogy has been properly torpedoed, the original issue was that removing "secure" is tantamount to taking the bumpers off a car, which is a silly analogy, and would be even if bumpers were fundamentally useless under all circumstances. They are not eliminating the security features, they are simply removing the WORD and leaving the icon. A better analogy would be that in cars dating from the 70s, the words "FASTEN SEAT-BELTS" would appear on the dashboard for the first ten minutes of driving, and by the 1990s or 2000s, they started having cars only show a seat-belt icon for the first few seconds, so you know it actually works, then extinguish unless you take the seat-belt OFF while driving, at which point it immediately lights up RED, and chimes at you until you refasten it. I think it kind of goes without saying that this is the way things should be, given how most people know now, not to drive around without their seat-belts fastened.
I assure you BOTH kinds of sign are ignored. The MAXIMUM penalty for carrying a concealed handgun (provided you're licensed to do so,) in Texas is limited to $200, and that's assuming they catch you, that you get prosecuted, and are found guilty. (Unless of course, after they catch you carrying in contravention of an effective TPC Section 30.06 or 30.07 notice, you refuse to leave, at which point it's a different story.) No jail time. None. Basically, the sign is a mere suggestion. You don't even lose your GUN. The actual text of the law reads (in part):
An offense under this section is a Class C misdemeanor punishable by a fine not to exceed $200
The GUN costs more than that! The signs they put up are often meaningless, or legally ineffective. (For example, I passed one today that was printed in letters that couldn't have been more than a half-inch high; the law REQUIRES them to be a minimum of 1 inch high, in contrasting colors, for the notice to be legally effective, and moreover they must be posted conspicuously at principle (or was it EVERY?) building entrance... not on a sign at the edge of a property, not on a bulletin-board in a darkened and disused hallway near the entrance where no one goes, but prominently displayed. The way some are posted, they have no legal effect, though even if the sign does not conform to law, once they realize you're carrying a gun, if they tell you to leave you have to leave, (obviously excluding if you're a cop,) notwithstanding whether the sign is properly posted, and legally effective, making the whole exercise of putting the sign up, kind of pointless, but I digress.
Now what does Texas law regarding concealed carry of weapons have to do with California's requiring stupid, B.S. warnings for chemicals found in COFFEE? The fact that the state government is in BOTH cases requiring the posting of warning signs that people will largely ignore, which ends up being a pointless waste of time and money, and moreover it's to highlight the fact that if you think California's government is run by sub-morons and are alone in making idiotic requirements to post pointless signs... you're mistaken. Texas does it too, and I'll just bet those aren't the only two.
Personally, in the case of Texas, I think they shouldn't permit anyone (i.e., businesses) to 'ban' guns on their property or premises unless they provide armed security personnel on-site to protect you since they're obliging you to be defenseless to be there legally, and that they be required moreover to search each and every single person upon entry to ensure no one sneaks a handgun in, and if they're not willing or able to do BOTH of those things, that they should not be ALLOWED to prohibit a LICENSED individual from carrying concealed, but hey... there are a LOT of things that would be different if I ran the show. Here's another: no city, county, municipality, or any other authority would be allowed to START road construction in more than one area at a time, unless damaged by i.e., a natural disaster, otherwise they'd be required to FINISH working in one area, BEFORE starting work on another, AND I would prohibit the construction of new homes OR businesses, until ALL the roads and sidewalks needed to accommodate the traffic new construction would bring, are FINISHED. (Traffic being snarled for months because they do this shit backwards IS a pet-peeve of mine.)
In the case of California, similarly, the state should have the burden of proof that a business may expose workers or customers to potentially dangerous levels of hazardous chemicals before requiring the posting of a sign, and the state should have to provide all signage at their expense, and the peril should be CLEARLY listed, so as to avoid the situation they have now where the signs are EVERYWHERE and ignored by everyone.
Corollary question: how much power is being used by YouTube with no one in front of the screen while it autoplays video after video? How much power has Angry Birds used? How much power has Amazon.com used? Facebook? Twitter? How much power has the NSA used? The US Navy? The Air Force? How much power did they expend sending all the Apollo missions after the moon landing? How much power did they spend sending that CAR auto the moon to drive around with?
How much power have just the lights used for advertising of Las Vegas, Nevada shops and casinos used, to say nothing of the power all the slot machines use... how much power if you add all the streetlights in that city? How much power does New York City use?
Just a little bit of perspective. Is Bitcoin a waste of money and electricity? Sure. But so is Disneyland. Speaking of which, how much power does the Mainstreet Electrical Parade use? Probably less than Bitcoin, but also probably less than Las Vegas. Actually, does anyone know how many watts that big lamp atop the Luxor Casino uses? How many times the power consumed by the typical Bitcoin mining rig is the one light atop the Luxor, I wonder.
For whatever little this might be worth, the so-called "Democratic" (hahaha) Party has lost my vote, in perpetuity over this. If there is no penalty, there will be no change in behavior, and if there's no negative feedback of any kind, or insufficiently serious response, it will only encourage them and others to misbehave more, similarly, in the future.
As far as I'm concerned, that party is dead to me. When enough other people realize the permanent stain of corruption that wretched, corrupt, useless party has attached to itself, the more will abandon it, in favor of a real, actual progressive party, not a fake one that takes corporate money to back their agenda, betraying their voters, and being generally paid to lose, fail, and take dives. All we have to do is agree on whom to replace them with, to be the vessel of our future hopes, and the organization we can rally behind that will give an ACTUAL fight to the real enemies of the common people of the United States, namely the super-rich, and all their bought-and-paid-for puppets in the mainstream worthless media, in elected and appointed offices at all levels, etc., and the opposition party that loves the fact that their "opponents," have been captured by the same legalized-bribe-making people who own them. Just my fiftieth of a dollar.