You are correct, and Jesus fucking Christ, why should he have to understand the cluster fuck of a situation this is? Copyright law should be pretty simple.
This is what we get when we let a bunch of fucking lawyers start doing stupid shit like copyrighting code in the first place. Code is math and algorithms, period. You cannot copyright math. Additionally, why don't you have to release source code to secure a copyright? If you don't, then it is a trade secret that you are getting copyright protection for. The whole point of the system is creating something of value (not idiocy like one click purchase, that's the covered by the 'obvious to a professional' part of the deal), and then sharing the details with the public in exchange for a short term monopoly.
If we keep going down this road, more and more really stupid shit like this will happen. Ban ALL software patents and end this madness.
The price of health care in markets where insurance is involved will always be higher than those without, because the money to pay for for a profit insurance industry has to come from somewhere. Go look up the annual revenue generated by insurance, that is coming out of your pocket as someone who consumes healthcare.
Republicans politicians don't hate national healthcare because it is socialism, big government, or even because it is named after our first black president. They are against it because if everything is paid for by taxpayers, the billion dollar insurance industry will not survive. They get a lot money from the health insurance lobby. Call them corrupt, evil, whatever you like, but they aren't dumb.
Visionary? Perhaps. Or perhaps he was just slightly paranoid and obsessive about imagined attempts to control him. The truth is rarely black or white, but nuanced shades of grey. Just look at the quote listed in the summary:
'...bitcoin exchanges that have draconian rules about KYC, AML, passports, freezes on accounts and laws about reporting 'suspicious activity' to the local secret police.'
For those who aren't versed in financial acronyms, KYC is 'Know you customer', AML is 'Anti-money laundering'. While he is decrying financial organizations trying to pry about personal information, and restricting how money is used, those same rules are stopping drug cartels, sex-traffickers, international fraud rings, illicit arms dealers, and a whole slew of other really terrible people from being able to hide their profits from the people who are trying to stop them, the 'local secret police'. His views seem a little short sighted and selfish to me.
Yeah, privacy and freedom are important, but there is a trade off that needs to be made to have a society that functions. Some degree of freedom and privacy needs to be sacrificed in the name of order. The only true freedom is Anarchy, and that only lasts until someone figures out that they can murder anyone who doesn't do what they are told.
I have never gone to Starbucks before, as always though coffee tasted like ass, but now that Starbucks's is going to block all adult content....well, challenge accepted!
Since they are going to go after all these games that prey on people's poor impulse control, are they going to go after CCGs, like Magic the Gathering and Pokimon? You know, the original loot box games that have been played by children for the past twenty years?
Its almost like providers are deliberately trying not to compete or let other player into the markets that might drive prices down. Perhaps someone should investigate that...
Say, wasn't there some sort of big lawsuit a few years back where a big phone company got broken up because they were too big and uncompetative?
They're coming for you and you're not going to be safe in your gated communities. Vote. And Vote for whoever has the best chance of taking down Trump and company. Or the violence is going to get worse. A lot worse.
Well, it was the instability of Germany in the 1920s that allowed the Nazi party to come to power. The communists has just overthrown the Czar in Russia, there was massive inflation and economic instability, mass unemployment, and the fascists were having weekly street riots with the communists. The Nazis stepped in, and offered to mop up the filthy communists, Jews and foreigners who were causing 'problems', and the German people ate it up.
Fascism is about national strength, militarism, xenophobia, and authoritarian solutions. Some of the first attacks Trump made when he came to power were on scientific programs, and he wants to start having military parades. In the 1920s the Nazis had their own newspapers and loved to attack any news that wasn't their own, sometimes go so far as to break into offices and smash other people's presses. The parallels between now and the 1920s are disturbingly similar.
Go read about the early history of the Nazi party, from 1920 to 1933, and think about what is happening now.
1) By being able to operate a vehicle orders of magnitude faster and with far more information than a human, the chance that the car will ever even get into a situation were this decision would have to be made is very, very unlikely.
2) If it gets into this situation where stopping entirely w/o injuring anyone is off the table, then the car will have so little time to react that making a decision to kill one group or the other and acting on it is a pointless exercise.
Also, there are possible new twists that people haven't even considered that will likely make this argument completely moot. Since the cars will have a far better understanding of their immediate vicinity, you can build in external air bags that can fire moments before any impact to further protect occupants and pedestrians. Perhaps you will want cars to be programed to steer directly at unavoidable pedestrians in order to center them in an air bag pillow.
The trolley problem is an interesting exerciser for ethics 101 students, but far to simplistic and contrived to be worth of real debate or consideration.
That's probably what he is afraid of: people still drive horses and carts for fun, but they are relegated to minor roads
Good. Better still ban humans from driving entirely I don't care if you like diving, this is a safety thing. You don't get to choose to enjoy driving when your errors cost people their lives. Once computers can drive better than people (which has happened already or will happen very soon), laws should be passed to force the issue.
An analogy: "I sure like shooting guns in densely packed urban areas. Oh sure, I don't want to actually hurt anyone, and I try hard not to shoot at people. But every now and then an accident happens. Oops."
How long would you put up with nonsense like that?
I wonder what would happen if the Sherman Anti-trust Act was aimed at Ticketmaster. They have a virtual monopoly on their business model.
Nothing. Because they control a large swath of the market, that doesn't make them a monopoly. You can (and many have) started their own ticket selling business. It is only when they use their market dominance to run you out of business that you have a case. Until the start doing something like blacklisting artists that use your service, you got nothing on them legally. There aren't any rules against winning the game, only cheating to win.
These are fine ways to fix the problem, but completely unnecessary. The phone company could fix this problem if they wanted to, but they make money from letting it persist. The one way to fix the problem once and for all, is to make it unprofitable for the phone company to facilitate this behavior. Just slap a 10 million a day fine on the phone company for each day there is a complaint registered, and the problem will 'fix' itself inside a week.
Its the fuckers running things. They don't give a shit about customers if it means they make a few million more each year.
Meh, I am fine with this. My kids will be taught how to address an audience and be forced to confront the minor fears all kids have. And they will turn out to be better rounded people as a result. I fully expect that they will make more money and command more popularity than other kids too, because charismatic people do well in life. If other people don't want to prepare their kids for success, it isn't my problem.
Sure it is. Before religion, was there even a concept of 'evil'? I bet you that religion was what invented the concept of evil when creation myths were being concocted ten thousand years ago.
C is broken. Here is my analogy to prove to you why:
C is a very powerful low level language, that has few guard rails to get in the way of whatever it is you are trying to do. It is like a giant wood chipper, in that it will easily eat up anything you feed into it: Oak trees, 2 x 4's, old couches, anything. It also has no safety mechanisms, like guard rails, kill switches, occasional mechanical inspections, etc. Would you consider ever going near such a device in the real world? Of course not, it would be far too easy to make one mistake and die horribly.
Why would you choose a language that is the virtual equivalent of a huge dangerous tool, when there are better options available, like Rust or Go? Oh, sure, you are a skilled and expert level coder and you would never make rookie mistakes with void pointers or buffer copies, but are you writing all the code at your org yourself? What about all the other bozos that you work with, you trust them not to screw up?
I grew up with C/C++, and it has a special place in my heart, but I also know that much better things have come along in recent years. Just because you grew up driving a 57 Chevy, doesn't mean it is better than a modern car with ABS, Air Bags, Cruse control and 42 mpg.
Well, that is a very thoughtful response to the issue, but the actual amount of carbon that is sequestered is small compared to the amount of energy that is used in extraction and transportation before the crude is even turned into bricks. There is some research I saw that was published online a few years ago (perhaps an academic paper?), where the energy budget of Lego sets were studied. I wish I could find the link for that paper, it was really interesting.
Anyway, the best way to reduce Co2 isn't to dig it up and sequester it, it is to not dig it up in the first place. I think Lego is doing the right thing in trying to reduce the demand to dig up petrochemicals.
Industry loves to be collectively anthropomorphized? Industry isn't a being. It doesn't have feelings. Your line certainly has a 'Hollywood oppressed masses' romance about it, but saying that all Industry (perhaps you mean capitalists?) is just out to exploit workers is like saying all black people are lazy. It is just a sloppy generalization that doesn't hold much water.
Pick out specific bad actors and focus your attention there, ex: "Walmart is an exploitative company that deserves to burn in hell for all its shitty dealings with its workers."
Yes, you are right, we should have invested in hi-tech manufacturing so we could have a few companies here that run on razor thing margins, employ a scant few people at high salaries, and are rapidly replacing every step of the manufacturing process with automated machinery. We would be far better off, indeed.
Look, it doesn't matter what you are manufacturing or what part of the world you are in. Manual labor jobs are 20th century jobs, and its all going away.
...And you should be sorry for what you did. Shame! Shame on your whole family! You should know better!
...than to ship product with a four digit security code. You know how easy that is to break? You are practically giving away passwords with a length of four. My god man, I bet you DIDN'T EVEN SALT YOUR DB.
The principal fallacy that I am rather surprised that nobody calls out when the pro-gun shills start talking about protecting themselves, is that guns are protection. They are not shields, they don't 'protect' you in any way. ballistic vests are protection. Helmets are protection. Guns just give you a chance to engage in retaliatory violence on even footing. (Although even that is really questionable, since most people don't carry the same type of weapons that mass shooters do. I would feel pretty stupid if I got in a gunfight against a guy in level 3 body armor and carrying a fully automatic assault rifle while armed with a short barrel 9mm.)
This was a shitty show, they actors were little more than mean caricatures of nerds and geeks. They were doing the equivalent of wearing 'geek blackface'. If the show was focusing its humor on black people instead of nerds, the studio would be firebombed the day the first episode aired. It was a shitty show, and it belongs in the same category as 'Song of the South' - if not actually truly offensive, pretty tasteless none the less.
But, it is hugely popular in America, because for the past 20 years, we have been going through a profound cultural and economic shift. The nerd has gone from the mocked and outcast spaz of the 80's comedies (Revenge of the Nerds, various John Hughes movies) to ruling every aspect of modern life. (The founders of Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc.) The common blue collar worker has been utterly crushed by nerds and geeks, his work is being threatened by automation and disruptive startups, and he is slowly being gentrified out of house and home as the middle class is crushed by the new class of tech workers made up of these strange spastic twerps that he picked on in high school. This is no less than a dimly veiled mocking of geek culture, and emasculation of their threat to middle class America.
"Oh look, they aren't going to create a new start-up that shuts down the plant and puts me out of work, they are just a bunch of stupid gits that are scared of girls"
It's not a big deal. Just scientists peddling fear for more grant money.
Wow, you are stupid. Lets just consider the motivations of scientists in general. These are generally pretty smart people, who have chosen careers that they know will not make them money the same way that they would were they to go into, say investment banking. A vast majority are going to be motivated by things like curiosity, a passion for the natural environment, discovering truth (regardless of what that truth reveals). None of these things tends to encourage falsifying results, lying to the media, and tricking people into giving them grant money.
Oh sure, there are a few bad apples in every barrel, but they are pretty few and far between. Moreover, other scientists tend to find them pretty quick when they start checking each other's work, because sniffing out the truth is what these people try to do.
I'm not saying they are always right, but only a true idiot doesn't listen carefully to what they have to say.
Because objects have to be pretty big to make it through the atmosphere without exploding. Most meteors don't make it to the ground, because they aren't large enough. It is probably cheaper just to put a MIRV on a sat than it is to build your own faux 15 meter meteor.
You miss the point of space based weapons. Space is big. Really big. You take advantage of that space. You wouldn't put them in LEO. That would be stupid. You would put them way-way out, so that there is little chance you can preemptively eliminate them. This is why we wanted a nuke base on the moon in the 60s. Strategically its the most survivable deterrent.
You are correct, space is big. But LEO or as close to that as you can be is critical. The reason ICBMs were so popular, is the speed that they have, and the lack of reaction time that gives your opponent. If bombers take six hours to get their payload to Moscow, then an ICBM that can get there in twenty minutes is a vast improvement. LEO basically cuts that time in half or more, since there is only the coming down part.
Yeah, the Moon is far out of reach of aircraft launched ASAT weapons, but it is also three days away. Old propeller driven aircraft is faster than that, by twelve times. Days gives your enemy plenty of time to get their anti-missile weapons platform carefully lined up, and perhaps time to even have secondary measures prepared. Entire cities can be evacuated in three days. Sub pens and silos can be emptied, and divisions can be dispersed.
This of course ignores how incredibly fragile nukes and rockets are, and how space is incredibly expensive and dangerous to be in. One solar flare or fleck of paint can reduce your billion dollar weapon platform to junk. Space is a stupid place to put nukes, and LEO is the only place they would be 'fast' enough to be scary.
Want another reason not do space weapons at all? There is zero stealth in space. You cannot hide shit up there. We can see things in thermal really easily against the cold background. Anything man-made will stick out like a sore thumb because of its heat signature. Everyone with a cheap telescope will be able to watch everything you do on your moon base, unless you put it on the far side of the Moon, and that creates a whole new set of problems.
This space force is yet another idea from an inept imbecile who isn't listening to his advisors. We could have put nukes in orbit anytime in the last sixty years, and yet, somehow we chose not to. We had plenty of hawks in the oval office during that time, and yet not one of them even suggested such an idea. Why is that? Old Ronnie was a commie hating hawk, and even he only suggested the Star Wars Defense Initiative as an anti-missile deterrent. Far smarter presidents (from both sides of the aisle) have passed on the idea, for very good reasons.
The Air Force traditionally has been the branch that has had responsibility for space related weapon platforms (ASAT, spy sats, high altitude recon, etc), so why would you create a whole new branch for this? I would wager if I had high enough security clearance, I could find an existing AF officer in charge of super secret space based weapon research projects that are already underway. This is just pointless redundancy in creating a new branch. "Drain the Swamp", indeed!
It would be interesting to try this with a bunch of programmers and tech people who understand what AI actually is, vs a group of technological illiterate people. I think that the techies would have a much lower time to switch off the robot because they aren't fooled into thinking that the robot is in any way alive.
Also motivation is a major consideration. Were people pausing because of compassion for a perceived sentient being, or because they were amused by the silly antics of an inanimate object pretending to be alive? I would personally leave it on longer to see how elaborate of a charade had been coded into the robot. I would want to watch and see how far the 'joke' would go, since I know that it isn't alive or sentient.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't understand their claims. At all.
You are correct, and Jesus fucking Christ, why should he have to understand the cluster fuck of a situation this is? Copyright law should be pretty simple.
This is what we get when we let a bunch of fucking lawyers start doing stupid shit like copyrighting code in the first place. Code is math and algorithms, period. You cannot copyright math. Additionally, why don't you have to release source code to secure a copyright? If you don't, then it is a trade secret that you are getting copyright protection for. The whole point of the system is creating something of value (not idiocy like one click purchase, that's the covered by the 'obvious to a professional' part of the deal), and then sharing the details with the public in exchange for a short term monopoly.
If we keep going down this road, more and more really stupid shit like this will happen. Ban ALL software patents and end this madness.
The price of health care in markets where insurance is involved will always be higher than those without, because the money to pay for for a profit insurance industry has to come from somewhere. Go look up the annual revenue generated by insurance, that is coming out of your pocket as someone who consumes healthcare.
Republicans politicians don't hate national healthcare because it is socialism, big government, or even because it is named after our first black president. They are against it because if everything is paid for by taxpayers, the billion dollar insurance industry will not survive. They get a lot money from the health insurance lobby. Call them corrupt, evil, whatever you like, but they aren't dumb.
Visionary? Perhaps. Or perhaps he was just slightly paranoid and obsessive about imagined attempts to control him. The truth is rarely black or white, but nuanced shades of grey. Just look at the quote listed in the summary:
'...bitcoin exchanges that have draconian rules about KYC, AML, passports, freezes on accounts and laws about reporting 'suspicious activity' to the local secret police.'
For those who aren't versed in financial acronyms, KYC is 'Know you customer', AML is 'Anti-money laundering'. While he is decrying financial organizations trying to pry about personal information, and restricting how money is used, those same rules are stopping drug cartels, sex-traffickers, international fraud rings, illicit arms dealers, and a whole slew of other really terrible people from being able to hide their profits from the people who are trying to stop them, the 'local secret police'. His views seem a little short sighted and selfish to me.
Yeah, privacy and freedom are important, but there is a trade off that needs to be made to have a society that functions. Some degree of freedom and privacy needs to be sacrificed in the name of order. The only true freedom is Anarchy, and that only lasts until someone figures out that they can murder anyone who doesn't do what they are told.
I have never gone to Starbucks before, as always though coffee tasted like ass, but now that Starbucks's is going to block all adult content....well, challenge accepted!
Since they are going to go after all these games that prey on people's poor impulse control, are they going to go after CCGs, like Magic the Gathering and Pokimon? You know, the original loot box games that have been played by children for the past twenty years?
Its almost like providers are deliberately trying not to compete or let other player into the markets that might drive prices down. Perhaps someone should investigate that...
Say, wasn't there some sort of big lawsuit a few years back where a big phone company got broken up because they were too big and uncompetative?
They're coming for you and you're not going to be safe in your gated communities. Vote. And Vote for whoever has the best chance of taking down Trump and company. Or the violence is going to get worse. A lot worse.
Well, it was the instability of Germany in the 1920s that allowed the Nazi party to come to power. The communists has just overthrown the Czar in Russia, there was massive inflation and economic instability, mass unemployment, and the fascists were having weekly street riots with the communists. The Nazis stepped in, and offered to mop up the filthy communists, Jews and foreigners who were causing 'problems', and the German people ate it up.
Fascism is about national strength, militarism, xenophobia, and authoritarian solutions. Some of the first attacks Trump made when he came to power were on scientific programs, and he wants to start having military parades. In the 1920s the Nazis had their own newspapers and loved to attack any news that wasn't their own, sometimes go so far as to break into offices and smash other people's presses. The parallels between now and the 1920s are disturbingly similar.
Go read about the early history of the Nazi party, from 1920 to 1933, and think about what is happening now.
....For 2 reasons.
1) By being able to operate a vehicle orders of magnitude faster and with far more information than a human, the chance that the car will ever even get into a situation were this decision would have to be made is very, very unlikely.
2) If it gets into this situation where stopping entirely w/o injuring anyone is off the table, then the car will have so little time to react that making a decision to kill one group or the other and acting on it is a pointless exercise.
Also, there are possible new twists that people haven't even considered that will likely make this argument completely moot. Since the cars will have a far better understanding of their immediate vicinity, you can build in external air bags that can fire moments before any impact to further protect occupants and pedestrians. Perhaps you will want cars to be programed to steer directly at unavoidable pedestrians in order to center them in an air bag pillow.
The trolley problem is an interesting exerciser for ethics 101 students, but far to simplistic and contrived to be worth of real debate or consideration.
That's probably what he is afraid of: people still drive horses and carts for fun, but they are relegated to minor roads
Good. Better still ban humans from driving entirely I don't care if you like diving, this is a safety thing. You don't get to choose to enjoy driving when your errors cost people their lives. Once computers can drive better than people (which has happened already or will happen very soon), laws should be passed to force the issue.
An analogy: "I sure like shooting guns in densely packed urban areas. Oh sure, I don't want to actually hurt anyone, and I try hard not to shoot at people. But every now and then an accident happens. Oops."
How long would you put up with nonsense like that?
sorry. missed a word:
that doesn't make them an illegal monopoly.
Slashdot, grow the fuck up and add an edit button on posts like every other site on the internet.....
I wonder what would happen if the Sherman Anti-trust Act was aimed at Ticketmaster. They have a virtual monopoly on their business model.
Nothing. Because they control a large swath of the market, that doesn't make them a monopoly. You can (and many have) started their own ticket selling business. It is only when they use their market dominance to run you out of business that you have a case. Until the start doing something like blacklisting artists that use your service, you got nothing on them legally. There aren't any rules against winning the game, only cheating to win.
These are fine ways to fix the problem, but completely unnecessary. The phone company could fix this problem if they wanted to, but they make money from letting it persist. The one way to fix the problem once and for all, is to make it unprofitable for the phone company to facilitate this behavior. Just slap a 10 million a day fine on the phone company for each day there is a complaint registered, and the problem will 'fix' itself inside a week.
Its the fuckers running things. They don't give a shit about customers if it means they make a few million more each year.
Meh, I am fine with this. My kids will be taught how to address an audience and be forced to confront the minor fears all kids have. And they will turn out to be better rounded people as a result. I fully expect that they will make more money and command more popularity than other kids too, because charismatic people do well in life. If other people don't want to prepare their kids for success, it isn't my problem.
Religion is not the root of all evil
Sure it is. Before religion, was there even a concept of 'evil'? I bet you that religion was what invented the concept of evil when creation myths were being concocted ten thousand years ago.
C is broken. Here is my analogy to prove to you why: C is a very powerful low level language, that has few guard rails to get in the way of whatever it is you are trying to do. It is like a giant wood chipper, in that it will easily eat up anything you feed into it: Oak trees, 2 x 4's, old couches, anything. It also has no safety mechanisms, like guard rails, kill switches, occasional mechanical inspections, etc. Would you consider ever going near such a device in the real world? Of course not, it would be far too easy to make one mistake and die horribly.
Why would you choose a language that is the virtual equivalent of a huge dangerous tool, when there are better options available, like Rust or Go? Oh, sure, you are a skilled and expert level coder and you would never make rookie mistakes with void pointers or buffer copies, but are you writing all the code at your org yourself? What about all the other bozos that you work with, you trust them not to screw up?
I grew up with C/C++, and it has a special place in my heart, but I also know that much better things have come along in recent years. Just because you grew up driving a 57 Chevy, doesn't mean it is better than a modern car with ABS, Air Bags, Cruse control and 42 mpg.
Well, that is a very thoughtful response to the issue, but the actual amount of carbon that is sequestered is small compared to the amount of energy that is used in extraction and transportation before the crude is even turned into bricks. There is some research I saw that was published online a few years ago (perhaps an academic paper?), where the energy budget of Lego sets were studied. I wish I could find the link for that paper, it was really interesting.
Anyway, the best way to reduce Co2 isn't to dig it up and sequester it, it is to not dig it up in the first place. I think Lego is doing the right thing in trying to reduce the demand to dig up petrochemicals.
Industry loves to be collectively anthropomorphized? Industry isn't a being. It doesn't have feelings. Your line certainly has a 'Hollywood oppressed masses' romance about it, but saying that all Industry (perhaps you mean capitalists?) is just out to exploit workers is like saying all black people are lazy. It is just a sloppy generalization that doesn't hold much water.
Pick out specific bad actors and focus your attention there, ex: "Walmart is an exploitative company that deserves to burn in hell for all its shitty dealings with its workers."
Yes, you are right, we should have invested in hi-tech manufacturing so we could have a few companies here that run on razor thing margins, employ a scant few people at high salaries, and are rapidly replacing every step of the manufacturing process with automated machinery. We would be far better off, indeed.
Look, it doesn't matter what you are manufacturing or what part of the world you are in. Manual labor jobs are 20th century jobs, and its all going away.
...And you should be sorry for what you did. Shame! Shame on your whole family! You should know better!
...than to ship product with a four digit security code. You know how easy that is to break? You are practically giving away passwords with a length of four. My god man, I bet you DIDN'T EVEN SALT YOUR DB.
I am so very dissapoint.
The principal fallacy that I am rather surprised that nobody calls out when the pro-gun shills start talking about protecting themselves, is that guns are protection. They are not shields, they don't 'protect' you in any way. ballistic vests are protection. Helmets are protection. Guns just give you a chance to engage in retaliatory violence on even footing. (Although even that is really questionable, since most people don't carry the same type of weapons that mass shooters do. I would feel pretty stupid if I got in a gunfight against a guy in level 3 body armor and carrying a fully automatic assault rifle while armed with a short barrel 9mm.)
This was a shitty show, they actors were little more than mean caricatures of nerds and geeks. They were doing the equivalent of wearing 'geek blackface'. If the show was focusing its humor on black people instead of nerds, the studio would be firebombed the day the first episode aired. It was a shitty show, and it belongs in the same category as 'Song of the South' - if not actually truly offensive, pretty tasteless none the less.
But, it is hugely popular in America, because for the past 20 years, we have been going through a profound cultural and economic shift. The nerd has gone from the mocked and outcast spaz of the 80's comedies (Revenge of the Nerds, various John Hughes movies) to ruling every aspect of modern life. (The founders of Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, etc.) The common blue collar worker has been utterly crushed by nerds and geeks, his work is being threatened by automation and disruptive startups, and he is slowly being gentrified out of house and home as the middle class is crushed by the new class of tech workers made up of these strange spastic twerps that he picked on in high school. This is no less than a dimly veiled mocking of geek culture, and emasculation of their threat to middle class America.
"Oh look, they aren't going to create a new start-up that shuts down the plant and puts me out of work, they are just a bunch of stupid gits that are scared of girls"
It's not a big deal. Just scientists peddling fear for more grant money.
Wow, you are stupid. Lets just consider the motivations of scientists in general. These are generally pretty smart people, who have chosen careers that they know will not make them money the same way that they would were they to go into, say investment banking. A vast majority are going to be motivated by things like curiosity, a passion for the natural environment, discovering truth (regardless of what that truth reveals). None of these things tends to encourage falsifying results, lying to the media, and tricking people into giving them grant money.
Oh sure, there are a few bad apples in every barrel, but they are pretty few and far between. Moreover, other scientists tend to find them pretty quick when they start checking each other's work, because sniffing out the truth is what these people try to do.
I'm not saying they are always right, but only a true idiot doesn't listen carefully to what they have to say.
Because objects have to be pretty big to make it through the atmosphere without exploding. Most meteors don't make it to the ground, because they aren't large enough. It is probably cheaper just to put a MIRV on a sat than it is to build your own faux 15 meter meteor.
You miss the point of space based weapons. Space is big. Really big. You take advantage of that space. You wouldn't put them in LEO. That would be stupid. You would put them way-way out, so that there is little chance you can preemptively eliminate them. This is why we wanted a nuke base on the moon in the 60s. Strategically its the most survivable deterrent.
You are correct, space is big. But LEO or as close to that as you can be is critical. The reason ICBMs were so popular, is the speed that they have, and the lack of reaction time that gives your opponent. If bombers take six hours to get their payload to Moscow, then an ICBM that can get there in twenty minutes is a vast improvement. LEO basically cuts that time in half or more, since there is only the coming down part.
Yeah, the Moon is far out of reach of aircraft launched ASAT weapons, but it is also three days away. Old propeller driven aircraft is faster than that, by twelve times. Days gives your enemy plenty of time to get their anti-missile weapons platform carefully lined up, and perhaps time to even have secondary measures prepared. Entire cities can be evacuated in three days. Sub pens and silos can be emptied, and divisions can be dispersed.
This of course ignores how incredibly fragile nukes and rockets are, and how space is incredibly expensive and dangerous to be in. One solar flare or fleck of paint can reduce your billion dollar weapon platform to junk. Space is a stupid place to put nukes, and LEO is the only place they would be 'fast' enough to be scary.
Want another reason not do space weapons at all? There is zero stealth in space. You cannot hide shit up there. We can see things in thermal really easily against the cold background. Anything man-made will stick out like a sore thumb because of its heat signature. Everyone with a cheap telescope will be able to watch everything you do on your moon base, unless you put it on the far side of the Moon, and that creates a whole new set of problems.
This space force is yet another idea from an inept imbecile who isn't listening to his advisors. We could have put nukes in orbit anytime in the last sixty years, and yet, somehow we chose not to. We had plenty of hawks in the oval office during that time, and yet not one of them even suggested such an idea. Why is that? Old Ronnie was a commie hating hawk, and even he only suggested the Star Wars Defense Initiative as an anti-missile deterrent. Far smarter presidents (from both sides of the aisle) have passed on the idea, for very good reasons.
The Air Force traditionally has been the branch that has had responsibility for space related weapon platforms (ASAT, spy sats, high altitude recon, etc), so why would you create a whole new branch for this? I would wager if I had high enough security clearance, I could find an existing AF officer in charge of super secret space based weapon research projects that are already underway. This is just pointless redundancy in creating a new branch. "Drain the Swamp", indeed!
I think the study missed a few control groups.
It would be interesting to try this with a bunch of programmers and tech people who understand what AI actually is, vs a group of technological illiterate people. I think that the techies would have a much lower time to switch off the robot because they aren't fooled into thinking that the robot is in any way alive.
Also motivation is a major consideration. Were people pausing because of compassion for a perceived sentient being, or because they were amused by the silly antics of an inanimate object pretending to be alive? I would personally leave it on longer to see how elaborate of a charade had been coded into the robot. I would want to watch and see how far the 'joke' would go, since I know that it isn't alive or sentient.
Motivation in this test should be considered.