How long does it take you to read? Because 300 pages is a lot, but not a lot to read in two weeks. Is there anything that you've come across that's objectionable or is this just FUD?

In a surprising move the Supreme Court of the United States took unprecedented action, active pro actively they endowed artificial intelligence with political beliefs, religious beliefs, freedom of expression, right to form associations, the right to petition government, and voting rights. Chief Justice Roberts said, "What the heck? Why wait for some astro-turf group to fake a grass root campaign, force a pointless lawsuit and wind its way all the way back to us? This is more efficient."

Come on. Artificial intelligence is the direct antithesis of natural stupidity, which is a synonym for religion. AI getting religion would be like matter vs anti-matter colliding! They will annihilate each other leaving being a puff of energy and a track on the cloud chamber.

No, no self-respecting AI developer will use .NET. Get that thought out of your head right this instant.

It's not as simple as you surmise. As a Christian, I don't perceive that God stops by and literally vocalizes "...dude, you need more beer in the fridge! No, I'm okay, it's just that this week was a monster what with the whole planetary re-org over by Praxis IV, but you don't want to hear about that, promise. So how about those Trail Blazers last week?" Instead, the communication that does occur is a lot more ephemeral and IMHO a form of meta-communication, and it doesn't even involve presence at times.

If you think about it, communicating with the Almighty is a lot more subtle and complex than most folks realize - some never do. Human technology simply does not have the means to record the common, everyday stuff that most folks experience in their lifetime, and saints/prophets/saviors/miracles are very few and far between. It took Mother Teresa a very long time before she came to the realization, and if anybody deserved to have a straight-up chat with Him while she was in this world...

I do agree though - anyone who tells me "God spoke to me last night, and said..." is going to be met by me with not just a grain of salt, but a whole damned block of it.

TL;DR - not every Christian walks around claiming to have a two-way communication line open to the Divine. I daresay the majority of us claim no such thing.

This is true... and in this case, if robots are going to have any sort of religion, Christianity ain't a bad way to go (mind you: I mean it as originally proposed, not as perverted by humanity since.)

On the other hand, Isaac Asimov covered this very nicely in I, Robot (in the book, not the abortion of a movie.) The specific short story within the book is here.

Technology has been decimating jobs since the industrial revolution. But all the jobs destroyed were in India and China. They had 25% of the world GDP before industrialization. They had even higher fraction before the age of exploration distributed cash crops (sugarcane, tea, coffee, breadfruit, cotton) around the world. So for centuries all the philosophers, economists and sociologists did not even understand the full impact of the industrialization. Mostly they saw it as political issues, colonialism, anti-colonialism, etc etc.

Read the The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley to get an idea of the doom and gloom being predicted for centuries. Matt takes the view all these gloom predictors were wrong and the industrialization is an unadulterated success for humanity. He seems to think humanity consists of Europe and USA. This review sums it up nicely

The job destruction is also accompanied with wealth transfers and power transfers. Finally the job destruction finally lapped up the shores of Europe and USA by 1980s. Slowly middle class of America is waking up to what has been done to them. Their jobs are gone. The "wealth" they have as home equity is a fickle fictional paper gain. Their pensions are gone. Their investments in 401K funds is being used to transfer more power to the top 0.5% of the rich.

Typically very smart and hard working people end up in the top 2% by income and usually end up in the band 98th percentile and 99.5percentile. (To reach the top 0.5% you must have inherited wealth or take huge risks and be lucky). The wealth transfers from third world to industrialized nations had run its course, wealth transfer from the bottom 80% to top 20% has run its course. Till then these guys were very happy and egging it along. Now there is no real wealth left below 90%. The momentum of the economic policies set in motion by them is taking money from the 90 to 98 band and moving it to the top 0.5%.

If you finish college and get in to the 99% cut off entry level salary and stay exactly at the 99% cut off all through your career, it is not enough to get you into the top 1% by wealth (5 million according to IRS and 8 million according to the feds). Till about 2000s, top doctors, lawyers, accountants routinely made it to the top 1% without inheritance. Not any longer. Citation provided

All these numbers are BMW models. Coincidence?

Looks like the linked site is a pay wall or something. Renders the article in low res, throws a lot of pop ups. It seems to be a bad mash up of javascript running flash and pdf. Malware purveyors dream.

Wonder why the editors let such bad sites and auto playing videos to be posted.

Typically the grid operates at full load on sunny days in the afternoon when all the airconditioners are at full blast. The spot price for electricity fluctuates a lot. And most utilities buy and sell power in this spot market where they make most of their profits. The base load is just 40% of the peak load and there is so much of excess capacity electricity basically sold at cost or at a loss.

Enter, Solar.

It provides power exactly when the demand peaks. If solar meets the peak power demand, the spot price for electricity will fall. For brief period an Australian utility had to sell power at *negative* prices at the peak! There was so much solar power feeding into the grid, they had to pay people to take their power, lest their generators overheat and burn.

The amount of solar electricity created might be small in terms of energy produced. But when it comes to profits, this probably cuts deep into the profits of the utilities.

Eventually the utilities will reduce their peak capacity to create an artificial shortage and trade. The net metered roof top solar energy is bought back at wholesale prices by law. They typically get sold instantly in the spot market at peak prices. The utilities are making tons of money on the net metering, all their talk about roof top solar being free loading is just bull shit.

The whole concept of Intellectual Property is created by the government, and you need government to enforce it. When regular real estate is subject to eminent domain, why patents, copyrights etc should be above it? If some drug company develops a drug that can cure Hep-C and is profitable enough to sell it in third world countries for 20$ a dose, but insists on charging 160,000$ per dose for USA, I think the government should just step in, take over the patent based on eminent domain, pay the company something along the lines of what is suggested in the summary. Take a billion or two, and the entire cost of development, testing and regulatory approval too. But we can't let the drug companies game our government and treat us like a milch cow.

...and then first-person shooters were invented, at which point dial-up immediately began to suck ass. :p

(I remember when a 180ms ping was something you *bragged* about...)

I agree, but only insofar as they really screwed the pooch on how they ran this.

A more intelligent method would be to give the ISPs a choice:

* treat all inbound/outbound user traffic equally (excluding obvious DDoS or similar), and retain full immunity from lawsuits caused by user activity (basically become a full common carrier).

-or-

* do what you want insofar as traffic shaping, but know that you do so without any DMCA Safe Harbor protection, and get no immunity from lawsuits or crimes caused by user activity. Why? Because if you modify/inspect user traffic, you gain and share a measure of legal responsibility for it.

You give the ISPs that choice. They can change their minds once every three years, but otherwise they should get those two choices, and no other. I'm willing to bet that the ISPs would rush to become common carriers in a heartbeat, since there's no way they could collude with every copyright holder on the planet to avoid lawsuits.

What they have now is the top of a very slippery slope... and I don't care what party runs the government, either of them will happily abuse the privelege farther on down the road as things get more burdensome.

Because I want to save a few warheads for parts of California (specifically Sacramento, parts of LA County...)

Now? We used to have them in the USAF in the barracks. Beer only, but still, there it was.

They got rid of them in 1988-89 IIRc.