In general I applaud the EU ruling *if* it really gets implemented fairly. But there's all sorts of wiggles to mess around with.

We've been focusing on "that one guy" but look at this note way at the bottom of the article:

"It is only a few days since the ruling has been implemented - and Google tells me that since then it has received a staggering 50,000 requests for articles to be removed from European searches."

And that's 50K requests in a few days.

Google can afford to hire "the army of paralegals", but does the ruling extend to smaller services? You can delist-bomb a small site out of existence when someone manages a "DDOS Distributed De-List of Service" attack on every article in their entire catalog. Then you get games where people try to de-list each other's materials.

Not that I am a fan of Google, but I can bet a senior lawyer at Google is saying "well hell, besides the cost, if we have taken down seventeen million articles on all kinds of topics, there goes our ten year competitive advantage of useful searches."

All this is making me start to think of some kind of more clever "panic mode" encryption.

You'd have to make it really fast, such that it's reg proto-encrypted two ways, one normal, and the panic mode. So say something really fast like shift-control-alt-F11 instantly flips the "panic bit".

We as geeks could put all kinds of awesome stuff into it, smashed into a kind of digital Klein Bottle with milk for Schrodinger's cat.

"Do you know how to decrypt it?"
"No"
"Why not?"
"Because it's time-locked with a code that cannot be found until next September."
"Do you know what documents are on there?"
"The ones you are looking for are not there because they were broken into component parts that only the computer knows, tied to a code that September code. Meanwhile other documents you did not know were there, are there, because they were created by algorithms the moment I hit the Panic Button and not a moment before. And the base of the September key is an English phrase which may or may not admit a crime. You don't know."
"So what if the case is dismissed?"
"I can do other work until September. What's important is that it cannot be broken right now."

"Hey may have hit it best, but he was far from first. Poul Anderson's Brain Wave [wikipedia.org], for example, came out in 1953-54. I think there were a lot of even earlier examples, but I don't have them at my fingertips."

Okay, fair. I might have slipped up on my wording.

It's been decades since my old days as a young'un reading all the old Pre/Gold/Silver age stuff. I certainly know who Poul Anderson is, but that exact story is the kind of thing that used to be really tough to find. It's still a little tricky, maybe six web links in Amazon can do it, but back even in the 80's trying to find a then-thirty-year-old story was really tough and I wouldn't have known it even existed to hunt it down.

D. K. and Flowers showed up because it was aggressively highlighted in some school class's curriculum. To be sure, it was worth the exposure, but that's different from trying to make a quick post and hold it to "researcher standards". At 1958 it is reasonably close to the top of the chain and I bet the writers of my examples had at least a phone call advising them "You know you're re-making Flowers for Algernon, right?"

But then there's your note, and if you moved the theme just a little, you might even get some slightly different earlier but not unrelated takes on the theme.

Drifting off topic, but did the infamous Beta in fact get Unicode support?

I mean, look at this tortuous new Beta, did they even bother to put in the Unicode support that people have been screaming for for ten+ years?

Damn we need a mole at Dice. What do they even do at management meetings?

"Let's make a whole new design with 55 changes."
"What about Unicode Support?"
"That's a big word. That's too hard for me. Let's put more videos up instead."

"are mathematics (of which algorythms are a small part) discovered or created ? No one has a clear answer to that question."

I thought it was pretty clear that stuff is discovered. To me this kind of question reads like "Well, does it stop being right at any time once it is discovered?" and the answer is generally no. (A, you sometimes get stuff that was discovered and not properly reported, at which point the original discovery is not at fault and it is just a reporting problem, or B, you get stuff that was *insufficiently* discovered and *over-reported*, causing someone else to re-do parts of the work and end up with something else. But then it's still discovered, at whatever level that year's understanding entails.)

In a way it's a bit silly, you can't just "make up" (create) knowledge, so it has to be there. It can just be ferociously difficult to "correctly" discover, and we might end up with three or thirty versions of the knowledge as we discover it. But once something is really nailed, hard, I can't think of any cases where people said stuff like "Oh, sorry, that law stopped existing in 1932". Every time, when a mistake shows up, it's "Oh, sorry, we didn't discover it right."

See this is where the news gets varying degrees of surreal.

In 2014, you "recycled" a hard drive with important emails on it?! Really?!

So then we're faced with that famous Dr. Who trick of whether the Media is accurately reporting an astoundingly senseless event, or if the Media got it wrong.

Oh look, this time it's the IRS. What's with agencies magically losing data when it suits them? Snark aside and all that, why is it that only HIPAA medical records get taken remotely seriously at least with lip service? What possibly produces a result like "ho hum, let's recycle this person's hard drive and damn any data that happens to be there in the only copy with no backup?!"

I had a mini project looking for other variants of the same idea because Keyes got there first and hit an important theme.

Some other entries:

The Six Million Dollar Man - Burning Bright (1974) William Shatner ... Josh Lang
Phenomenon (1996) - George Malley - John Travolta

And a couple of newer movies that I am out of energy to track down.

This argument has a bit of a different feel to it though.

Up till now for a decade the agencies just invoke "we're scary and secretive, we don't need to follow your puny little laws because of National Security but we need a billion dollars in next year's budget to build more systems to hold data forever and ever".

And you can bet they cherry pick their data so that they have ten years worth of people's email and Slashdot posts, but suddenly when a lawsuit comes along, suddenly that data vanishes. But then it becomes vital to an investigation! "Oh look, we found it again!"

"...what a lot of people portray as "evil" is really just the absence of a moral code -- more accurately called "amoral". An AI system that has no moral code and no ethical code..."

I think this is the main line of the discussion. Hollywood profit calculations aside, this is what we're worried about. But we don't let people grow up without moral codes, so AI's shouldn't get a free ride.

Forgetting Snowden style confusion, when you commit a criminal act, you expect to get into trouble. So if anything it's a snap to program an AI with all the laws so that it at least knows the basics of what not to do even better than we do. Yes, cue the Grey Areas, but that's a topic we can handle. We're nervous about Skynet/Borg style complete takeovers which have discarded our laws completely.

"The problem with that argument is that we don;t have to design an AI that is self aware by that specific definition."

Without dragging me into Citation Needed stuff, I have read a few things that suggest that self awareness is a crucial part of true AI. (Suggested partial cite - Douglas Hofstadter's book "Strange Loop". )

Partially relevant from another genre is Ray Bradbury's story "The Bicentennial Man". In that story, it is about a robot that grows as an AI. But only near the end with an understanding of mortality do people grant it "true AI" status.

But even before that, just knowing flaws, is what we people have to deal with every day. That's why I have semi-joked that every AI needs an old Pentium 1 chip as part of its processor network, *and to be aware* that it can't fully trust every result it produces. (I know, it's slow, it needs better chips to do the hard stuff.) But to my knowledge that's the only famous chip with a true math error flaw that isn't just past tense "state of the art as it was then".

Asimov had a good start with the three laws of Robotics. We don't let people become random murderers, so why should AI's get a free ride? So we just have to program/teach them basic morality.

" by immaterial (1520413) Alter Relationship on 05:48 AM June 4th, 2014 (#47162803)
A 24 Horus deadline? Just six of those falcon-headed bastards strutting around all godlike and hassling me about missed TPS reports is bad enough, but 24... To be honest, at that point I might just throw myself into the Nile and let my ka move on to the realm of Osiris."

Dear Sir.

Please advise what Creative Commons license you wish for this comment. This is *the* most epic comment I have seen here in months and I would like to do something such as write a short story around it.

Send me an email when you like,

--Tao

So I'm a bit confused all this. How close is the following chain of events?

1. Netflix/___ others start trying to wrap their "tasty content" into wrappers that (try to) require baked in DRM.
2. Uneducated Firefox users suddenly discover that their browser won't play that tasty content anymore "because Mozilla didn't add that Dr. Thingy stuff" to make it work.
3. Said uneducated Firefox users then jump ship to that dulcet siren's call such as Chrome because yay the tasty content works again! "Everything is Awesome!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

So what about PaleMoon? Scuttle has it a bunch of people are headed over that way not least because of FF29 UI Shenanigans. So why not DRM? Their entire point was to unbake bloaty parts of reg FF. So why not if they unbake the DRM from their copy?

And what does Opera have to say about all this? How about Chromium and/or Komodo Dragon? (Non-Googly clones of Chrome.)

You're close and this would be really easy to make. You just need a bit of a clever UI that stops most prank calls but is "unforgettable" in real emergencies. The actual tech of this is a snap.

Nice angle Dan. I needed you to start the angle because I don't have the skills for that post but I can ride with it.

Working with that use case, my older iPhone croaks right about at the 6% mark (when it's not glitching.) So for ex if you are right at 7% battery because you spent all day doing stuff, and didn't recharge, you might be able to smash out one or two texts but don't have time for the full call. Similar thing, folks like me have "value plans" for phones and with 60 cents left on the plan there's no way I'd get a call out but I might be able to manage two texts.

Hallo Sir Avenger.

I'll go even further with a new avenue. Let's say that there is no attacker, that it's a "contained" emergency like a self inflicted wound or an auto hit or whatever. *Both* text *and* voice could save lives. If you have stuff like

"Geroald MacKenzei with the ei and watch the unusual spellings 1433 Maple Avenue #7F Woodside, NY next to 5th and 6th Ave hits M and R trains just past the cross junction of Broadway and Roosevelt. Remember you need to have someone get you in the building." ...all as a pre-recorded 911 text you just smash it out during your call and the operator should have the tech to power-blast it to all 17 agents. So you don't need to waste time with the Op on stupid junk repeating it because Texts Can't Be Forgotten. (done right)

Our traditional notions of 911 are somewhere stuck half in 1977 and half with modern tech that 1882 TV cop shows is possible but somehow the carriers are treating it like a big deal to get a text message and send a squad car.