I'm astonished at the number of people who don't get this. It isn't the first thing he asks casually, it's the first thing he asks once they're hooked to the polygraph. Not exactly brilliant humor, but it was worth a chuckle and certainly beats "First Post!"

The code is encrypted and rotates every week. It can only be used by contracted partners of Verizon, and the contract contains a "no-advertising" clause. The EFF should spend money on something actually important.

Actually, this may not be so bad. If they're not government agencies, then they're not immune to lawsuits and when they bust in the wrong house, that person can sue the hell out of them, right?

Come as a surprise? If they WEREN'T doing this, then the people running the company would be incompetent and should be tossed out the door.

This "Anti-PAC" is just a PAC supporting the two largest Democrat campaign finance bills which are more properly termed the "Silence Dissent Acts" or "Incumbent Protection Act" then any kind of real campaign finance reform.

So, all they are is another Democrat PAC masquerading under a fake name. Oh, they claim to support three other bills with bi-partisan support, which are bills sponsored by four back-benchers (Tom Petrie anyone? 30+ years in Congress and I don't think he's successfully sponsored one bill.) that will never make it out of sub-committee.

So, two hyper-left (Barbara Boxer, Henry Waxman, Dianne Feinstein type) proposals, and three non-events.

Anti-PAC, it's another way of saying "Democrat".

Makes you wonder why they feel they have to lie about their intentions.

The irony is that he's 180 degrees off from the main problem with his story, which is that he thinks robots are magic too. The reason robots will not be making ethical decisions is that they can't, not only because getting them to reason ethically would require us to agree on a system of ethics for them to follow, but because even if they had such a system, they don't have enough data to act on it with the degree of accuracy that would be required for the premise of the article to make sense. The author essentially assumes that these car-driving robots will be omniscient, or that they will be able to trust the omniscience of the robots in other cars with which they are communicating. The first supposition is nonsensical; the second is unlikely to be true, for the same reason that video game cheats are a problem.

He does no such thing. He assumes that the programmers who write the algorithms that control the robots will consider various possible responses to an emergency situation and will use ethical decisions in deciding how to code their algorithms. There may indeed be circumstances where the robot does not all of the data available that would be needed to make a valid ethical decision. Robots will certainly not be omniscient. Their sensors will not be infallible, nor will they be able to accurately discern all of the factors in all of the cases. But that doesn't mean there are no cases in which ethics will play a factor. A robot would almost certainly be able to tell the difference between a bus and a small passenger car, and it's reasonable to assume that the bus carries more passengers than the car, even if there are some cases where that would not be true. If a bus turns left in front of you when you have the right-of-way and the robot calculates that it is unable to avoid a collision altogether, should it hit the bus or swerve into the next lane, hitting the passenger car there? That's a scenario where some variant will almost certainly happen if self-driving cars become common, and it's one the algorithm should take into account. It doesn't at all mean the robot-cars are capable of thinking, of calculating ethics, or are omniscient. The question is how the programmer's writing the algorithms should code the decision making tree.

True, they did not, but I would put that at the level of mistake rather then being unreasonable.

I'm reasonably certain that the OpenSSL team did not do this on purpose. It likely wasn't a sabotage by a malicious developer. I seriously doubt someone paid the team to intentionally install the bug. You're almost certainly right that it was a mistake. But arrogance, ignorance and other weaknesses lead to mistakes which should not be made, and when they do, it's jake to point the finger. Just because it was a mistake doesn't mean it was out of their control.

In case no one has noticed, California is a desert (or nearly one) for most of its area. Before the farm subsidy act of the 1950's, no one grew food crops in California, and no one raised cattle. Then, after subsidies were based on your distance from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where they get 30-40" of rain a year, suddenly California became *the* address for raising food. When you can raise dairy cattle at a loss, milk them at a loss, and produce a gallon of milk for $6, and still sell it for $2 wholesale -- and the government ensures you're making a profit by handing you a $5 a gallon subsidy, of course you're going to raise cattle and farm in California.

California has to drain the Colorado river, and the showsheds of something like 1,000,000 hectares of mountains to even get close to their water needs on a good year. In the meantime, farms in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, and the rest of the heartland are all collapsing into bankruptcy, unable to compete with the ever-increasing subsidies bought by the legislatures of California with its 50+ congressmen and electoral votes.

Yes, but what if one of the snipers breaks a law? Hmmm? Who snipes the snipers?

And by the time you live in a tyranny or police state, something bad has happened.

Another former subscriber here, and I just can't tolerate the obvious bias that has crept into the once-great publication. I subscribed for years, then let it lapse, picked it up again out of nostalgia, let it lapse, and now completely ignore it.

Assuming, of course, the Captain Planet model of industry, where the moment the Federal Regulator steps away, the CEO pulls the lever to dump the toxic waste into the nearby river.

Or, maybe the guys running the plant (and likely living nearby) don't want to die in a nuclear waste spill either.

I'd think that one regulator on-site, one shift a day, would be more than enough to catch any worrisome behaviors. Maybe with a surprise inspection once a week on an off-shift time if you really think "Mr. Slimeholio" runs the plant.

The article says 90% of employees is 3600 furloughed. Which would say the remaining 10% would be 400 workers.

To monitor 100 plants.

That would mean you could have one regulator on-site 24 hours a day, seven days a week (That's 21 eight-hour shifts for the math challenged) or 5 shifts per person, with one overtime shift.

At every plant. 24/7 surveillance, with 10% of the workforce. What the hell were they doing before that? 10 regulators per plant, 24/7?!?!?!

The visitor's center view of the launch facility is now blocked by a stand of trees that has grown considerably over the years. One recommended viewing area is on the causeway between Chincoteague and Assoteague Islands.

http://www.chincoteague-va.gov/pdf/LADEE%20Rocket%20Launch-Viewing%20Areas.pdf

Another possible site was a location I scouted out last weekend where Arbuckle Neck road dead-ends into Oyster Bay. That gave me this view of the launchpad area. The rocket pad itself is the last tall building to the right of the water tower.

Al Gore also claimed the temperature of the core of the Earth is "millions of degrees" on Conan O'Brien. Unfortunately, that one went out on national television, so no one on his staff can make the claim that he'd been misquoted.