I still have not forgiven them for the rootkit and other more recent sins. And no, employees are not innocent. You work for a corrupt company, you are complacent. Just like NSA employees, you don't get a free pass because you are following orders. If 60% of NSA employees quit, it would have forced change a lot faster then anything going on now.

Do you have some kind of problem with trouble?

If people didn't get into trouble, we wouldn't even be talking about robots, yet. We'd be posting on Slashdot, stuff like "sucks that I didn't find enough berries today, and the area is running out of meaty squirrels, so I'll probably be moving along soon." You think you want to be a factory or farm slave for the rest of your life, but you don't even get to do that, until after you've already figured out that you don't want it.

"As long as the opportunity to start your own business is equal"

There's only one sub-industry I can think of today where that is true, and I've yet to meet anybody who is making a living at it (though, in that sub industry, cell phone app authorship, there have been some big short-term winners, most of them produce fad and fashion, not trend).

It's been done.

Villa Girasole

There's also a film

There is no fundamental difference between creating a strong AI and having a child.

I disagree, though some of it depends on exactly how you create the AI. A child is a machine optimized for serving the "interests" of its genes (half of which it copied from you), and even in the near-future of say "Gattaca" you don't really have much say in how the child works. Even if AIs were grown in a biological analog, the initial inputs would be totally different than anything else in Earth history, much less arbitrary (from our idealist viewpoint) than what goes into making up a person. Even if you set them up to evolve in a biological manner, where the inputs eventually drifted, their "genes" certainly wouldn't be anything like oldschool life genes, much less human. Perhaps you'd get some interesting convergence, but that's not the same thing.

To see the potential of AI, you really need to think like a god, not a biologist. Or possibly somewhere in between the two. Imagine what life on Earth would be like if the creationists were right, and you'll get an analogy of how AIs might end up. (Better yet, think like HPL's elder things, and consider the shoggoth.) Whatever they have in common with previous life would be remarkable exceptions, and most of it would be new and alien-like. I think they're be more alien than "real" (biological) aliens.

Maybe think of AIs as (initially!) part of humanity's extended phenotype, like a spider's web is to a spider, or a dam is to a beaver. Could you convince a spider that a web is like its child, the new spiderdom of the future? I don't think a web that can "do things" would make your argument to the spider any stronger.

I'm not saying you should freak out, but They Will Not Be Humanity.

And most of what I'm saying is from taking a fairly extreme biological view. I wonder if that's kind of outdated, and AIs are going to be even less like life, than predicted in previous decades.

I can cover that. Ban drones because predator use them to tract kids and see when they are alone. Anyways it is a legit concern. Wait till you are on a flight that is downed due to a hobby drone

Taxi drivers need a app. The biggest problem with taxi's anywhere besides New York is it takes forever to get one anywhere besides that 3 block area near the bar. How about getting /to/ the bar. Or to work from home? You have to call or website and it takes forever to arrive and sometimes they never come after waiting 30 minutes because taxi drivers go where the fuck they want. If taxi drivers had some accountability and had a decent app already you never would have been able to let uber undercut you. Also why don't you get a real padded seat already instead of that plastic beach copcar seat? uber isn't just cheaper, it is also just better.

The problem with Karl Marx, as with most economists of any stripe, is they are incredibly short sighted, and cannot see beyond the present generation very easily.

Thus B replaced A (Aristocrats) by revolution and good business sense, just a generation or three before Karl lived. So he expected P would replace B eventually (because that's what progress means). He failed to take into account original sin, thus B & P really aren't that much better than A, the feudal lords they replaced.

Ron Wyden I see as giving in quite quickly. He ran on the idea of being a Hatfield type conservative, bucking the party that endorsed him, and then morphed into yet another party hack after he was elected, paying back those who pay for his campaigns.

Same with Rand Paul, he's just got a different set of donors than most Republicans, which can appear to be solid beliefs when they really aren't.

The flip side of corporate political campaigns, is that good businessmen don't spend money without a significant return on investment, for anything.

I concur. A development methodology ("open source") will not address any of the deficiencies (when viewed from the voter's perspective, the perspective that should matter most) of voting. No matter how much one trusts a voting program, there's no way to be sure that the computer used for voting is running only software one trusts. No electronic system can compete with the simplicity and recount-friendly approach of what is called for here: voter-verified paper ballots.

So address to the question in the /. summary: You never should have stopped using voter-verified paper ballots.

There are computers one can purchase that do as the parent post specified—the voter feeds in a blank ballot (one which they could have filled out manually if desired) and the computer (which has a scanner and printer attached) will scan the ballot, help the voter by showing the choices on a screen, reading the ballot aloud, or reading the ballot text to headphones, and then collect votes from the voter. Then the computer's printer will print the voter's votes on the paper ballot, and eject the printed paper ballot to let the user inspect that printed ballot. At this point the voter can choose to carry the voter-verified paper ballot to be counted or spoil that ballot and start again. The voter can also feed in a marked up ballot (marked by hand or by computer) and let the computer summarize the votes which that ballot specifies. These features let the blind and/or illiterate vote without losing their privacy by forcing them to find & bring in someone else to mark up their ballot for them. This is as close to computers used in voting as one should want to get.

except Natalie, of Natalie's Cakes N More bakery, is African American.

I notice that a bunch of rich white conservatives though got together to support her:
http://www.gofundme.com/NataliesCakesnMore

The only thing faster than the rioting, is this GoFundMe account, in which she's not only got back the $20,000 needed to rebuild her bakery, but a good year's salary in the bank besides.

by do a lot of damage, I mean completely collapse it. Most nuclear silos though are a hell of a lot deeper than 60 feet, and are built out of reinforced concrete, not packed earth.

I don't need to know so much who's supporting a candidate, because that only matters if I already know that they don't have solid beliefs themselves and are primarily just doing what their supporters want.
 
What politician has solid beliefs?