So this only works if you have /usr/bin/host installed?

And for those of you who DO auto-update blindly and destroy your app or your server when a bad version comes out, well, at least you can smugly assert that you were "secure".

If they spent all that money and time making a map which showed that there was LESS likelihood of earthquakes, people would scream boondogle. Now, because of douchebag grant-suckers, innocent people will suddenly have their insurance rates raised.

I'm pretty certain that any attempt to do precisely what you are asking for here is going to be a pretty potent driver for significant AI research, if nothing else. There are some chat-bots which do a pretty good job of simulating a lewd conversation. All you are asking is for that to be coupled with robotics like Disney's anamatronics for a Las Vegas theme park.

Maybe Westworld isn't so far away after all. One of the scenes in that film which I found sort of funny at the time was when the protagonist took a couple of whores in the Saloon up to a room and tried to bed them... only to discover they weren't completely anatomically correct.

We know so little about what self-awareness, intelligence, or sentience actually is that every attempt to simulate the concept is usually met with dead ends in terms of research. There is some usefulness that comes from legitimate AI research, but at this point it is parlor tricks and a few novel programming concepts that have some usefulness in a practical sense.

The only thing that is fairly certain is that somehow a raw physical process is involved with establishing consciousness. Some real effort has been done with trying to understand the physical process from which neural cells interact with each other, and it is fairly certain that the brain is a key component (not the only one though) of what establishes thoughts and reason. Still, there is a long way to go from being able to mathematically describe a neuron to being able to completely simulate, much less actually implement consciousness in the sense that we see with human children emerging after they are born.

You can say that ocean tides act with what apparently is some intelligent behavior, yet if you really study the phenomena it turns out that it isn't. Sometimes complex behavior comes from some very simple rules, sometimes it doesn't. Don't confuse those simple rules with actual intelligence, which is precisely what you are doing here. Even assuming that somehow we could almost completely duplicate the nervous system of a human in electronics, I seriously doubt it would be something you could simply flip on a switch and have working within minutes of starting up the computer.

Not entirely true. I think you are including childhood mortality. If you made it to age 20 (working age) in 1935, the year that the Social Security Act was enacted, you could expect to live to be about 66 years old if you were a man, or 68 if you were a woman. This isn't a "small portion of the population", it is, by definition of being the average life expectancy, at least half the population.

Life expectancy has gotten longer but it has been a very gradual process and the taxes have increased over the years. The reason that the program is in trouble is because the taxes have not quite kept up, and politicians have been playing financial games with the savings for decades.

In Russia, its all krokodil these days. These fuckers can't seem to kill themselves fast enough.

a) there's nothing special about Open Source
b) being excited about something is not tangible
c) self-esteem is not the point
d) being a career non-profit means that you never created value
e) Oregon is full of hipsters and douches

Melting permafrost.

That example isn't even close to being equivalent. We're talking about the possibility that which someone can, with relative ease, wirelessly and anonymously deprive me of the use of my property without leaving much of a trace. You seem to be describing the crime of physical breaking and entering, which I would argue is none of those things.

Don't put a kill switch in my car. Kill switches will be hacked and abused. Devices will be sold and marketed to kill a car, even if they are illegal. Just like the MIRT and all the related devices. Illegal as a $7 bill but assholes still buy them.

Nice try. If you want to continue the Soviet era propaganda that was trying to convince the west that they really were one big happy family and that the Soviet Union was just as friendly to each other as the European Union is right now, continue that daydream. It should be telling as soon as the opportunity to bolt out from under Russian control, that the former Soviet Republics all left. Heck, you even have admitted the "-stan" republics were quick to expel the Russians as soon as they could. This would have been unthinkable during the Soviet era.

Throughout the 1950's and 1960's, most western politicians and news media still referred to that part of the world in general as "Russia", at least in terms of the primary opponent of America during the Cold War. That started to change by the 1970's, but by then it really didn't matter.

Yes, there were some people of talent who were able to rise to power like Stalin who came to power in spite of their ethnic background. That doesn't stop it from being an exception rather than the typical situation. BTW, Nikita Khrushchev, while his ancestry certainly was Ukrainian, was born in Russia and considered himself to be Russian. It does get messy though so it isn't nearly so clear... but the Russian culture certainly pervaded everything that happened in the Soviet Union.

At least France is a western country.

Just wait until ICANN goes full international. The fun will really begin.

Thanks liberals!

We bought some Transmeta-based blades at $LARGE_US_BANK a while back, and they sucked. Hard. Like, don't bother running stuff on them hard. They went back to HP, or in the trash, I forget, and we got real hardware. It looks like HP is reviving the concept of shitty servers for people who don't do a lot with them. Instead of 1 beefy 4U machine, you have a 45-node Beowulf cluster of suck, and most problems ARENT trivially scalable. Or, if your app really is that scalable (or you've spent the time to make it so) then you're a big boy company and you need real iron.
Fail.

How many times has the President (any President) done exactly this? Since Jackson famously told the Supremes "now go and enforce it" the Executive has been able to give the Judicial the finger. How many times in recent memory has the Executive waived, changed, or broken existing laws regarding the new Health Care act?