That's actually a valid point. s/child molesters/child murders/g;

When someone turns out to be murderer, it's profoundly unlucky.
They didn't pick their parents, or their genes. Nor do they pick the circumstances of their childhood or the disposition of their personality that culminates in them being a murderer.
If someone gets a brain tumor in just the right spot and it causes them to become a murderer we treat them as a victim as well.
Couldn't it just be argued that being a murderer is a form of mental illness?

Note: this argument has been made by Sam Harris, credit to him, not me.

While I'm all for squishing child molesters feet first using a steam roller in the lowest gear the issue is this...

It's confirmed that we've executed innocent people. Wrong place, wrong time, bad lawyers, biased juries. It's happened. People on death row have been exonerated by DNA evidence so often that a couple years ago the Governor of Illinois mass commuted everybody on death row to life without parole.

While it's bad if a guilty man goes free, it's far worse if an innocent man is killed.

I didn't get out of that article that he'd given away his login credentials, it sounded more like box.com just plain did the wrong thing.

The scary thing that I got out of that article was that with some simple social engineering seriously private documents (such as paycheck) information could be easily stolen from Dan.

There are things for which storing them in a shared storage system makes perfect sense, such as media. I've got piles of crap such as pictures I've taken on hikes out on my public dropbox folder.

However, if I were ever to get in the habit of storing information out on a shared storage system that could compromise my privacy, it would encrypted in a manner in which I'm the only holder of the keys and obfuscated such as being put into a drive crypt container/etc. Great, so you've just stolen a big pile of random bits... have fun with that.

Finally there is stuff that the only sensible place for it to be is in a safety deposit box. Some intersection of that would end up in my encrypted store, this is stuff like my children's original birth certificates, my marriage license, deeds to property, etc.

The big question you have to ask is, what are you guarding against? Having everything stored centrally makes great sense but now you've merely put your eggs in someone else unseen basket with the idea that they've got competent people working for them.

All of our core switches are running real time linux and have so for many years. Linux became a network OS back in 2008, if not much earlier. Basically the only place it's not running is on edge switches and even there you can find switches that running it.

Except this guy isn't making an exact copy of the game. He's taking the game to a place that it didn't or couldn't exist when SMB came out in 1985. At best you can argue he's making a derivative work.

The bigger questions here are what are reasonable lengths for a copyright? The game is 28 years old. Quite likely this kid was a baby when this game came out.

It also begs the bigger question... What's in the best interest of Nintendo? I suppose their legal department would argue that they need to pursue all infringements as aggressively as possible.

Is it in the best interest of Nintendo to stifle a college student who obviously has some talent writing video games? That's cutting your nose off to spite your face.

That guy over there whose ripping all the content from Wii disks and pirating the games... go after his ass, he's actually cutting into Nintendo's profits.

Their terms of service specifically say that. You may only interact with their software in ways approved by them. As far as they're concerned, the only way you should be talking to a WoW server, is with a WoW client and that client should only be taking input in ways approved by Blizzard.

What someone should really do is work on building a robot that can sit in front of a computer and actually play wow, by the rules. Watch the screen with cameras, actually do processing and press keys.

That would be cool.

Firstly, the *most* driver less miles have been put on cars driving at highway speeds around the bay area by Google. They're out testing this in real world conditions. When the car doesn't know what to do, it squaks at the driver and the person takes over. Understandably that has it's own issues. However, the more they drive these cars the better they can make these systems. It's a feedback loop.

Secondly, the hypothetical situation you describe is exceedingly rare and I suspect human drivers would nominally fair equally bad at avoiding the situation.
No matter how good your automomous car is, if you're driving along and a 1000lb piece of cast iron pipe tumbles off the back of a flatbed, you're fucked. Possibly having a car with reaction times that exceed a human might save your life. Your autonomous car is going to be not tailgating the semi to begin with and will be going the speed limit or lower depending on the traffic conditions.

Thirdly, I can only imagine that these cars will be recording all the telemetry and video they possibly can. To complete my scenario, when a piece of cast iron pipe falls off the truck and lands in the road and the lidar system doesn't properly identify it and the car runs into it, the insurance company is going to analyze the telemetry and the dashboard video and they'll sue the truck driver for not properly securing their load. They possibly would go after the car maker for a faulty system, but more likely the car companies just going to want the telemetry so they can improve the system.

As for knowing the difference between a shadow and a piece of black metal, these systems are currently using lidar... so I don't see this as much of an issue.

Also your scenario of what happens when someone runs out in front of the car... Mercedes already has an automatic breaking system.

Obviously the high end guys (BMW, Audi, Mercedes) will likely do it first. They're already incorporating lots of assistive technology into their cars now. This is giving them lots of real world experience with stuff like adaptive cruise control and semi automatic breaking. Lexus has had automatic parallel parking for a while. Combine this with really good GPS and stuff like google's chauffeur (this is the name of their autonomous driving software) plus a slim stylish lidar sensor (or something equivalent) on the roof and bingo you're there. Now how people will accept this technology is another question. Honestly I have an hour commute each way, if I could sit in my car and read a book instead of driving (as much as I love driving) or write code, that's two more hours of 'me' time.

When will I be able to go out and buy a Honda Civic EX with this technology? That'll be a much harder market to get into and the technology needs to be that much more robust, commodity and modular.

It also depends where you put the turbines. Much like hydro it's all about location. If you put them on the coast where there's a large temperature gradient wind works awesome. Where I live (Massachusetts) we've got a number of wind turbines on the coast that run 24/7 without stopping.

I was just thinking the same thing... If you're running linux with KVM as your hypervisor... Why is this better than Red Hat's Open Shift? That way you get your cake and you get to eat it too.

I'm a huge Timothy Zahn fan. He's a GREAT sci-fi writer. I hope he pulls this off!

I have to say, I read lots of sci-fi but have an equal amount of enjoyment playing sci-fi themed board games as well... being able to drive the narrative instead of being merely a passenger can be cool. Though it does require the right mix of people.

I feel terrible for his father who witnessed his son get killed in front of him, that's unimaginably terrible. However, the tippe makes a valid point.

I've attended several R/C fly in's with jet powered planes and helicopters. I've never seen a plane fly over the heads of spectators, ever. When a R/C plane zips by the runway at 200mph (322kph) it's in a direction that when it crashes it doesn't impale / decapitate or otherwise injure spectators.

Sadly this will end up being mentioned as a cautionary Darwinian tale.

You get so much mail so furiously that you can't suffer a 15 second delay? I presume you're talking about a personal mail server... if you're hosting mail for a 1000 people then yeah that's a problem.

My car was recently in the shop for two days. This forced me to use public transportation. I read an entire book during those two days. Unfortunately my commute is not amenable to my using the commuter rail (it takes me 3 hours instead of 45 minutes to get from door to door)

While I'd like the option to drive my car, the option to let the computer take the wheel sounds pretty great as well.

I'm a voracious reader and I don't have nearly enough time in the day... Gaining back the time I sit in traffic to read would be great.
Before you ask, my hands on IT job prevents me from working from home. No matter how hard you try you can't rack a server from your house...