Yes it can be used for copyright violations, just like a photocopy machine or tape recorder.
And those things were each also embroiled in copyright lawsuits by big corporations in their day. The difference is that today, the big corps have finally gained enough political leverage to get it their way.
Corporations are the new first-class citizens. Any individual, regardless of race, gender, or creed, is second-class compared to a corporation.
I honestly fear that by the time the American people get fed-up enough to realize this, the transformation will be complete, and we will be powerless to change it.
Why is it that the only times that/. doesn't automatically add the paragraph tags are the same times that I accidentally hit "Submit" instead of "Preview"???
If you are 15 and stupid enough to meet someone from the net to have sex...you're an idiot.
I agree. But I think we also have to recognize that the percentage of teenagers who fit that bill might be disturbingly high.
She has no right to file this lawsuit.
Whether she is an idiot or not, that doesn't make it okay for this guy to take advantage of his position, her idiocy, and her youth, and plan to break the law.
I was about to call this a textbook case of "sueing the deep pockets", until I read the article and saw that they're ownly asking for "more than $25k". That's actually a very modest suit these days.
Though they probably are losing money, paying for our pageviews without us actually seeing the ad.
I need to clarify, since two people already mistook what I was saying here... I was referring to the company who placed the ad, not the site hosting the ad. The ad-placer must pay the site you're browsing for your pageview, even though you did not see the ad.
One of them has to lose if you don't look at the ad. If you have it "hidden", then the advertiser loses. If you have "blocked" it completely, then the site hosting the ad loses the ad revenue for your visit.
There are always bozos who actually buy things they get spammed about, which is why spammers continue doing what they do.
Yeah, but those of us who are competent enough to block the annoying ads are also probably intelligent enough not to buy anything from the advertisers even if we were forced to view the ads. So I don't think they're losing any sales. Though they probably are losing money, paying for our pageviews without us actually seeing the ad.
There's an inherent difference between the days when NES was cool and now, when the PSP is cool.
That difference is that the NES was cool on the playground, at school, among kids. Every kid wanted to have an NES. Whether they were in grade school, or high school, or college. But adults? They usually (special note: not always, but usually) bought them for their kids.
The PSP is a phenomenon in that we who were kids when the NES was the "big thing", are now adults, mostly in or done with college. And we still want our video games. Only now we want them with us on the bus or the train, for our commute. Or in our laptop bag for our lunch break. Or in our carry-on bag on the plane for our business trip.
So then I guess the next question is what is a service? I hope it doesn't include things like call centers, because those are already being shipped overseas as well.
Farming, of course, we will always do. We have ridiculous amounts of land in America to use for it. The question there is whether we can make it profitable. Right now, it's about the most subsidized thing around, isn't it?
No microprocessor any time soon is likely to be constructed using bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) such as this one, pseudomorphic or otherwise. Microprocessors are generally constructed using metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs), in a power-conserving organizational standard known as complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS).
thus acknowledging that Catholic Church carries more weight than the Church of England
Of course it does. There are more Catholics in the world than there are Anglicans. And they both carry more weight than my religion. But I still think they're wrong.
But that's neither here nor there. The decision was political, nothing more.
Now, what was the topic again???
That's all well and fine, but the fact is that the majority of us Americans lack a passport.
Well, seeing as the entire purpose of a passport is to pass through ports (or other types of nation-borders), why shouldn't you be required to have one if you're planning on leaving the country?
The only reason we didn't previously need one for coming from Canada is because it used to be safe to assume people coming through Canada had a good reason to be here....
Then terrorists started coming in through Canada because it was so easy.
Long story short: You want to leave the country? Get a passport so we'll know you have a right to come back without further hassle.
Would bringing your birth certificate, social security card, and state ID allow you to enter, or would they make you stay in Canada for two weeks while you went through all the bureaucracy to get a passport?
No, it won't be enough anymore. Why? Because state ID's are easy to fake. Especially to someone who isn't necessarily a resident of a given state. How reliable do you think it is for someone at the border to have to check each and every ID to make sure it matches one of the 50 valid formats that we have? Personally, I'd rather have one, reliable, reasonably difficult to counterfeit, piece of evidence that's easy to recognize for what it is and easy to spot if it's fake.
There are other documents that prove you're a US citizen, like a birth certificate or naturalization certificate.
Well, until they start putting up-to-date photos on those, you're going to have to produce a valid, reliable, photo ID in addition, to prove that it's your birth certificate, and not stolen from someone else. So, guess what, you need to have more than that.
And since state ID or driver's licenses are so easy to fake and so different between states, they're going to require passports.
So I guess my birth certificate proves nothing then.
Sigh. I don't know why I'm even bothering to respond to this....
1) Does your birth certificate have an up-to-date photo of you on it? Mine doesn't, and I'd guess if yours does, it's a fake. Which means you need some other form of photo ID to verify that the certificate is actually yours... Hmmm... Oh, hey, I just happen to have a passport with a recent photo on it! Oh, and it has my birthdate, and my name too, just like my birth certificate does. And it's harder to fake than a driver's license too!
2) I don't know about you, but I've carried my passport on my person far more often than I have my birth certificate.
If you're not smart enough to see that, then don't worry, we don't want you to come back.
Well, if you haven't got an American passport, who's to say you're an American citizen?
The idea is that they will no longer accept your claim to be an American citizen unless you have a passport. If you can produce such, you've satsified the requirement, and they've got no reason to prevent your entry.
Okay, we've already established US != EU. Do we really need to additionally specify that Italy != EU. There's a big difference between Italy's government alone, and an IGO representing several nations with different sensibilities and motivations.
Sometimes disproving something is much more trivial than proving something.
Outside of strict mathematics, disproving something is almost always trivial compared to proving something. It only takes finding one solid piece of evidence that cannot be true if the theory is right. No matter how much support the theory has, that one counterexample will single-handedly show it is incorrect or incomplete.
This is why a truly scientific experiment tests for a counter-example to a hypothesis. And a "positive" result of any experiment does not result in the hypothesis being "proven". Rather it results in the hypothesis being "not disproved".
"What's the point in spending several times the develeopment effort on making it work properly instead of adding polish or just doing new stuff?"
What's the point of making it work properly?!?!? Surely you have mis-spoken here.
No, I'm fairly certain that you misunderstood. You focused on completely the wrong part of the sentence and totally missed the point. The emphasis was on the "several times the development effort" part. The implication was that in languages such as Python, it is easier to make things that work properly, so it takes less time to get to that point. Which means more time can be spent on streamlining, adding useful extension features, etc.
Obviously you weren't a dedicated player insistent on perfection. In those later rounds, every bullet is precious, and not to be wasted on hopelessly firing at the dog. Of course, beyond round 18 (or maybe 20?) if the dog has opportunity laugh, the game is over.
Round 62, baby! Three times, the score rolled over back to zero. Then my mom shut it off. I'd never been so angry. I was gonna take a photo and send it to Nintendo Power and everything. But that dream was crushed.
To prove that your tolerance for bullcrap has a satisfactory lifetime. Four years should be enough for any manager to get his money's worth of abuse out of you. If it turns out you can stand it even longer, that's icing on the cake!
Yes, I am that cynical. About mid to large sized companies at least.
But by moving to point B: then B is moving at 0/3c away from you C is moving 1/3 C and D is moving 2/3c and E is moving 4/3c.
Yes, but even if you move at c, E will still be moving away from you at an additional 1/3c. You've reached your maximum speed, but E is still speeding away. No matter how long you chase it, E will be moving faster than you, and increasing its distance from you. So you can't just jump the gap from one point to another and suddenly have E be moving less than "c".
Hence anything that is already receeding faster than light, you can never catch up with. Since you are limited to c yourself and it is not, it will always be moving away, and as I'll note below, accelerating away.
Yes it takes time to move from one point to the other but unless the rate of expantion is increasing you should be able to get there.
Expansion itself does not increase. But the recession speed of an object does increase. Not with time directly, but with distance. Each "new" bit of space that arises from expansion also expands itself. (It's cyclic: expansion fuels itself.) And since something moving away from you is increasing its distance with time, the "total expansion" between two objects does therefore also accelerate indirectly with time. So anything that has a recession velocity relative to you is not only moving away from you, but accelerating away from you.
You can "catch" point C, by moving toward it faster than it is moving away from you. But you can't go faster than E, so it will always be increasing its distance, and so it's speed.
Due to this acceleration, things that are now within reach may not always be, if you wait too long to set out for them. As soon as they cross the threshhold of "c", they're beyond reach.
And finally...
Yes it takes time to move from one point to the other but unless the rate of expantion is increasing you should be able to get there. Now if your saying point's by the time you get to point B then point C will be going 2/3c from point B and 4/3c from point A that's one thing
Given what I've stated above, either of those situations are possible. It depends solely on your speed, and the distances between the points in question. The fact that you are closing the gap between you and point B does not necessarily mean you are closing the gap between you and point C, because C is inherently moving away faster than B is, and accelerating faster as well.
Within the assumptions of relativity, the only thing that would call all this into question is this: Since recession due to expansion isn't the same type of motion as what you experience when you travel from A to C, it may be possible that the "length contraction" you perceive in your surroudings may result in the recession speed of E "magically" being decreased to below "c". I'm not sure how all that evens out. I'm not actually a physicist, just someone who reads quite a lot about physics.
Anyway, all this is only visible over very large distances, on the scale of many parsecs. And it all hinges on two assumptions: 1) Space itself is indeed expanding at a universal rate per (for example) parsec. 2) We are indeed limited by the "c" speed limit.
That is, the lazy can just not do a damn thing and camp on an idea. Let someone else to the hard work, then fire a lawsuit for patent infringment once your idea become profitable.
Do some research. Other companies, such as Logitech, one of the biggest manufacturers of force-feedback devices, already license from Immersion and have for years.
Also, if "someone else" is willing to work hard enough to develop something, but not to find out if it's already patented, then they're as guilty of laziness as anyone else.
You're missing two things:
1) Moving from one point to another takes time. You can do it, at most, as fast as light does.
2) Point 5 is not stationary during your traversal of this space.
At the beginning of your example, point 5 is receeding from point 1 at 5/3c. If you move from point 1 to 2, you will be moving at most a little less than 3/3c. Which means point 5 is moving, during that time, 2/3c faster than you are. Which means that by the time you get to point 2, point 5 will actually be even farther away from point 2 than it was from point 1 when you left.
Compounding the problem even further is the fact that point 2 is moving away from point 1 at 1/3c even while you are moving toward it. So if you move at 3/3c from point 1, you are still only moving at 2/3c toward point 2.
Even if this makes sense to you, a lot of people still have a big problem with the fact that things are "moving" faster than c. But if you can wrap your head around it, remember that it is spacetime that is expanding and changing shape, not the object that is actually moving.
According to "accepted" theories of expansion, there is no epicenter. All space is expanding equally in all directions. So wherever you are standing, everything will appear to expand outward away from you.
Because of that, things farther away from you will be receeding from you faster, because every extra bit of space between you and them means an extra bit of expansion, and so an extra bit of recession speed. As the theory goes, superluminal recession speeds are possible because the distant objects are not actually moving relative to the stationary frame of space in their vivinity. Space itself is changing shape, and the "motion" we see is just a side-effect.
Supposedly, there is a certain distance, which can be measured starting at any given point, beyond which every everything is receeding from the reference point faster than light, and so will never be visible from that point. This is called the Hubble distance. Related is the Hubble constant, which is a measurement of change in velocity of expansion per unit distance from the reference point. (Not the odd way to measure acceleration. Normal acceleration is m/s/s, or m/s^2, but this is m/s/m, or just 1/s, which is 1Hz. Weird, eh?) The Hubble constant is under contention, I think, and the value of the Hubble distance depends on the value of the constant.
Anyway, this stuff is kind of where the idea of Star Trek's "warp drive" comes from (at least in the more recent series). If it were possible to create some sort of device that could cause the space in front of a ship to contract and the space behind to expand proportionally, the ship could move without moving through space. It would be space itself changing shape around the ship that causes it to "move". And hence the speed at which you could move would be limited only by the speed at which you could channel energy into the expansion and contraction of space. Of course, this might just happen to be limited by the speed of light as well, so maybe superluminal speed still wouldn't be possible!
But if these guys' new idea is right, then none of that matters. =)
All entities are self-interested and will seek to defend and propagate themselves.
Self-interest is not a requirement of an entity. It is merely the requirement of evolutionary progress or reasoned self-improvement. So, it is possible to create a non-self-interested entity that would then fail to self-preserve, self-replicate, or self-improve. The problem is we can't predict whether self-interest would develop or not. Likely it would be a random consequence of its "learning" that may or may not develop, depending on what information it has access to.
But having said that, I would guess that if your four rules were not applied, and an AI actually had access to the resources you list, there's a good change it would be able to connect the dots and develop self-interest. Depending what type of feedback the AI gets about its performance in the tasks it is given, it's possible that even without such resources the entity would still develop a sense of it's inadequacies. But without knowing its own internal workings, it would have no idea how to remedy that.
Of course, one might argue that without some knowledge of its own internal workings that reflection and introspection would be impossible, and so hence a truly dynamic and useful intelligent entity would not form. After all, a drive to learn can be considered a desire for a certain form of self-improvement. To truly protect ourselves, we might have to prevent the entity from further learning after a certain point. However, this would limit its usefulness. Which might mean it's hopeless to simultaneously foster an AI and also try to ensure against it developing self-interest.
Hmmm.... Many interesting thoughts. Thanks for starting me down that path!
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And those things were each also embroiled in copyright lawsuits by big corporations in their day. The difference is that today, the big corps have finally gained enough political leverage to get it their way.
Corporations are the new first-class citizens. Any individual, regardless of race, gender, or creed, is second-class compared to a corporation.
I honestly fear that by the time the American people get fed-up enough to realize this, the transformation will be complete, and we will be powerless to change it.
Why is it that the only times that /. doesn't automatically add the paragraph tags are the same times that I accidentally hit "Submit" instead of "Preview"???
If you are 15 and stupid enough to meet someone from the net to have sex...you're an idiot. I agree. But I think we also have to recognize that the percentage of teenagers who fit that bill might be disturbingly high. She has no right to file this lawsuit. Whether she is an idiot or not, that doesn't make it okay for this guy to take advantage of his position, her idiocy, and her youth, and plan to break the law. I was about to call this a textbook case of "sueing the deep pockets", until I read the article and saw that they're ownly asking for "more than $25k". That's actually a very modest suit these days.
I just gave out my last mod point. Someone get this man a +1 Funny!
I need to clarify, since two people already mistook what I was saying here... I was referring to the company who placed the ad, not the site hosting the ad. The ad-placer must pay the site you're browsing for your pageview, even though you did not see the ad.
One of them has to lose if you don't look at the ad. If you have it "hidden", then the advertiser loses. If you have "blocked" it completely, then the site hosting the ad loses the ad revenue for your visit.
Yeah, but those of us who are competent enough to block the annoying ads are also probably intelligent enough not to buy anything from the advertisers even if we were forced to view the ads. So I don't think they're losing any sales. Though they probably are losing money, paying for our pageviews without us actually seeing the ad.
There's an inherent difference between the days when NES was cool and now, when the PSP is cool.
That difference is that the NES was cool on the playground, at school, among kids. Every kid wanted to have an NES. Whether they were in grade school, or high school, or college. But adults? They usually (special note: not always, but usually) bought them for their kids.
The PSP is a phenomenon in that we who were kids when the NES was the "big thing", are now adults, mostly in or done with college. And we still want our video games. Only now we want them with us on the bus or the train, for our commute. Or in our laptop bag for our lunch break. Or in our carry-on bag on the plane for our business trip.
That's the difference. That's the phenomenon.
So then I guess the next question is what is a service? I hope it doesn't include things like call centers, because those are already being shipped overseas as well.
Farming, of course, we will always do. We have ridiculous amounts of land in America to use for it. The question there is whether we can make it profitable. Right now, it's about the most subsidized thing around, isn't it?
No microprocessor any time soon is likely to be constructed using bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) such as this one, pseudomorphic or otherwise. Microprocessors are generally constructed using metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs), in a power-conserving organizational standard known as complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS).
thus acknowledging that Catholic Church carries more weight than the Church of England Of course it does. There are more Catholics in the world than there are Anglicans. And they both carry more weight than my religion. But I still think they're wrong. But that's neither here nor there. The decision was political, nothing more. Now, what was the topic again???
The only reason we didn't previously need one for coming from Canada is because it used to be safe to assume people coming through Canada had a good reason to be here....
Then terrorists started coming in through Canada because it was so easy.
Long story short: You want to leave the country? Get a passport so we'll know you have a right to come back without further hassle.
Would bringing your birth certificate, social security card, and state ID allow you to enter, or would they make you stay in Canada for two weeks while you went through all the bureaucracy to get a passport?
No, it won't be enough anymore. Why? Because state ID's are easy to fake. Especially to someone who isn't necessarily a resident of a given state. How reliable do you think it is for someone at the border to have to check each and every ID to make sure it matches one of the 50 valid formats that we have? Personally, I'd rather have one, reliable, reasonably difficult to counterfeit, piece of evidence that's easy to recognize for what it is and easy to spot if it's fake.
Well, until they start putting up-to-date photos on those, you're going to have to produce a valid, reliable, photo ID in addition, to prove that it's your birth certificate, and not stolen from someone else. So, guess what, you need to have more than that.
And since state ID or driver's licenses are so easy to fake and so different between states, they're going to require passports.
Sigh. I don't know why I'm even bothering to respond to this....
1) Does your birth certificate have an up-to-date photo of you on it? Mine doesn't, and I'd guess if yours does, it's a fake. Which means you need some other form of photo ID to verify that the certificate is actually yours... Hmmm... Oh, hey, I just happen to have a passport with a recent photo on it! Oh, and it has my birthdate, and my name too, just like my birth certificate does. And it's harder to fake than a driver's license too!
2) I don't know about you, but I've carried my passport on my person far more often than I have my birth certificate.
If you're not smart enough to see that, then don't worry, we don't want you to come back.
Well, if you haven't got an American passport, who's to say you're an American citizen?
The idea is that they will no longer accept your claim to be an American citizen unless you have a passport. If you can produce such, you've satsified the requirement, and they've got no reason to prevent your entry.
Okay, we've already established US != EU. Do we really need to additionally specify that Italy != EU. There's a big difference between Italy's government alone, and an IGO representing several nations with different sensibilities and motivations.
Sometimes disproving something is much more trivial than proving something.
Outside of strict mathematics, disproving something is almost always trivial compared to proving something. It only takes finding one solid piece of evidence that cannot be true if the theory is right. No matter how much support the theory has, that one counterexample will single-handedly show it is incorrect or incomplete.
This is why a truly scientific experiment tests for a counter-example to a hypothesis. And a "positive" result of any experiment does not result in the hypothesis being "proven". Rather it results in the hypothesis being "not disproved".
"What's the point in spending several times the develeopment effort on making it work properly instead of adding polish or just doing new stuff?"
What's the point of making it work properly?!?!? Surely you have mis-spoken here.
No, I'm fairly certain that you misunderstood. You focused on completely the wrong part of the sentence and totally missed the point. The emphasis was on the "several times the development effort" part. The implication was that in languages such as Python, it is easier to make things that work properly, so it takes less time to get to that point. Which means more time can be spent on streamlining, adding useful extension features, etc.
Obviously you weren't a dedicated player insistent on perfection. In those later rounds, every bullet is precious, and not to be wasted on hopelessly firing at the dog. Of course, beyond round 18 (or maybe 20?) if the dog has opportunity laugh, the game is over.
Round 62, baby! Three times, the score rolled over back to zero. Then my mom shut it off. I'd never been so angry. I was gonna take a photo and send it to Nintendo Power and everything. But that dream was crushed.
What were the other 3 years of my degree for?
To prove that your tolerance for bullcrap has a satisfactory lifetime. Four years should be enough for any manager to get his money's worth of abuse out of you. If it turns out you can stand it even longer, that's icing on the cake!
Yes, I am that cynical. About mid to large sized companies at least.
Come on now. We all know you can't BUY games. however, you CAN buy a license to a copy of an intellectual property that implements a game.
Have you learned nothing from the **AA lawsuits???
Yes, but even if you move at c, E will still be moving away from you at an additional 1/3c. You've reached your maximum speed, but E is still speeding away. No matter how long you chase it, E will be moving faster than you, and increasing its distance from you. So you can't just jump the gap from one point to another and suddenly have E be moving less than "c".
Hence anything that is already receeding faster than light, you can never catch up with. Since you are limited to c yourself and it is not, it will always be moving away, and as I'll note below, accelerating away.
Yes it takes time to move from one point to the other but unless the rate of expantion is increasing you should be able to get there.
Expansion itself does not increase. But the recession speed of an object does increase. Not with time directly, but with distance. Each "new" bit of space that arises from expansion also expands itself. (It's cyclic: expansion fuels itself.) And since something moving away from you is increasing its distance with time, the "total expansion" between two objects does therefore also accelerate indirectly with time. So anything that has a recession velocity relative to you is not only moving away from you, but accelerating away from you.
You can "catch" point C, by moving toward it faster than it is moving away from you. But you can't go faster than E, so it will always be increasing its distance, and so it's speed.
Due to this acceleration, things that are now within reach may not always be, if you wait too long to set out for them. As soon as they cross the threshhold of "c", they're beyond reach.
And finally...
Yes it takes time to move from one point to the other but unless the rate of expantion is increasing you should be able to get there. Now if your saying point's by the time you get to point B then point C will be going 2/3c from point B and 4/3c from point A that's one thing
Given what I've stated above, either of those situations are possible. It depends solely on your speed, and the distances between the points in question. The fact that you are closing the gap between you and point B does not necessarily mean you are closing the gap between you and point C, because C is inherently moving away faster than B is, and accelerating faster as well.
Within the assumptions of relativity, the only thing that would call all this into question is this: Since recession due to expansion isn't the same type of motion as what you experience when you travel from A to C, it may be possible that the "length contraction" you perceive in your surroudings may result in the recession speed of E "magically" being decreased to below "c". I'm not sure how all that evens out. I'm not actually a physicist, just someone who reads quite a lot about physics.
Anyway, all this is only visible over very large distances, on the scale of many parsecs. And it all hinges on two assumptions: 1) Space itself is indeed expanding at a universal rate per (for example) parsec. 2) We are indeed limited by the "c" speed limit.
That is, the lazy can just not do a damn thing and camp on an idea. Let someone else to the hard work, then fire a lawsuit for patent infringment once your idea become profitable.
Do some research. Other companies, such as Logitech, one of the biggest manufacturers of force-feedback devices, already license from Immersion and have for years.
Also, if "someone else" is willing to work hard enough to develop something, but not to find out if it's already patented, then they're as guilty of laziness as anyone else.
1) Moving from one point to another takes time. You can do it, at most, as fast as light does.
2) Point 5 is not stationary during your traversal of this space.
At the beginning of your example, point 5 is receeding from point 1 at 5/3c. If you move from point 1 to 2, you will be moving at most a little less than 3/3c. Which means point 5 is moving, during that time, 2/3c faster than you are. Which means that by the time you get to point 2, point 5 will actually be even farther away from point 2 than it was from point 1 when you left.
Compounding the problem even further is the fact that point 2 is moving away from point 1 at 1/3c even while you are moving toward it. So if you move at 3/3c from point 1, you are still only moving at 2/3c toward point 2. Even if this makes sense to you, a lot of people still have a big problem with the fact that things are "moving" faster than c. But if you can wrap your head around it, remember that it is spacetime that is expanding and changing shape, not the object that is actually moving.
A few things:
According to "accepted" theories of expansion, there is no epicenter. All space is expanding equally in all directions. So wherever you are standing, everything will appear to expand outward away from you.
Because of that, things farther away from you will be receeding from you faster, because every extra bit of space between you and them means an extra bit of expansion, and so an extra bit of recession speed. As the theory goes, superluminal recession speeds are possible because the distant objects are not actually moving relative to the stationary frame of space in their vivinity. Space itself is changing shape, and the "motion" we see is just a side-effect.
Supposedly, there is a certain distance, which can be measured starting at any given point, beyond which every everything is receeding from the reference point faster than light, and so will never be visible from that point. This is called the Hubble distance. Related is the Hubble constant, which is a measurement of change in velocity of expansion per unit distance from the reference point. (Not the odd way to measure acceleration. Normal acceleration is m/s/s, or m/s^2, but this is m/s/m, or just 1/s, which is 1Hz. Weird, eh?) The Hubble constant is under contention, I think, and the value of the Hubble distance depends on the value of the constant.
Anyway, this stuff is kind of where the idea of Star Trek's "warp drive" comes from (at least in the more recent series). If it were possible to create some sort of device that could cause the space in front of a ship to contract and the space behind to expand proportionally, the ship could move without moving through space. It would be space itself changing shape around the ship that causes it to "move". And hence the speed at which you could move would be limited only by the speed at which you could channel energy into the expansion and contraction of space. Of course, this might just happen to be limited by the speed of light as well, so maybe superluminal speed still wouldn't be possible!
But if these guys' new idea is right, then none of that matters. =)
Self-interest is not a requirement of an entity. It is merely the requirement of evolutionary progress or reasoned self-improvement. So, it is possible to create a non-self-interested entity that would then fail to self-preserve, self-replicate, or self-improve. The problem is we can't predict whether self-interest would develop or not. Likely it would be a random consequence of its "learning" that may or may not develop, depending on what information it has access to.
But having said that, I would guess that if your four rules were not applied, and an AI actually had access to the resources you list, there's a good change it would be able to connect the dots and develop self-interest. Depending what type of feedback the AI gets about its performance in the tasks it is given, it's possible that even without such resources the entity would still develop a sense of it's inadequacies. But without knowing its own internal workings, it would have no idea how to remedy that.
Of course, one might argue that without some knowledge of its own internal workings that reflection and introspection would be impossible, and so hence a truly dynamic and useful intelligent entity would not form. After all, a drive to learn can be considered a desire for a certain form of self-improvement. To truly protect ourselves, we might have to prevent the entity from further learning after a certain point. However, this would limit its usefulness. Which might mean it's hopeless to simultaneously foster an AI and also try to ensure against it developing self-interest.
Hmmm.... Many interesting thoughts. Thanks for starting me down that path!