Neither of these statements are facts.

Saying it's the 'right' thing to do is purely subjective. You don't know what he believes is the right thing to do, I'm sure in his mind he's already done the right thing and trying to argue that he should do YOUR right thing instead of his own right thing will never get you anywhere. It's a null argument.

It very much will affect his position at that company. His overriding goal is to make choices that keep the company strongest to the exclusion of all other considerations. If there is a choice to be made, his job is literally to make the choice that keeps the company as strong as possible. If he takes other concepts into consideration, such as 'the greater good' or 'common human decency or dignity' or even 'keep us from going extinct in a thousand years' he is quite literally not doing the job he's payed so very very much money to do. That's what could get him fired!

I personally share the same perspective of you, I think this is a dick move by a dick of a person in service to a dick corporation and it saddens me that there's no good way to make it more profitable to be ethical and responsible than it is to make every shady 'fuck you' deal you can. I think the only effective, non-violent solution to this will probably be the erosion of privacy for the upper classes, think universal ubiquitous paparazzi letting anyone who wanted to watch them 24 hours a day, even when they sleep, to make sure nobody's whispering shady evil deals into their profit hungry ears. It's only fair, the upper classes literally have the capacity to do that to any of us already, things will begin to change when we can do it back. The evil ones will wither under the glare of public attention while those honorable and respectable will be proven so and rewarded. I can't see any other positive future.

Nukes are as powerful as they are because it was originally quite difficult to aim them. You could point them at a city but they might actually land miles away, which is no big deal if you're devastating a multi-mile area.

Nukes are very messy though! Wouldn't it be so much more fun to be able to launch hellfire-equivalent munitions from space? All you really need to do to achieve that is make sure you can hit your target.

The better your aim is, the smaller the projectile can be. Wouldn't it be cool to assassinate people by dropping an arrow made of white hot supersonic depleted uranium through the tops of their skulls?

The government is sitting on millions of dollars of Bitcoin seized successfully from the Dread Pirate Roberts' Silk Road shutdown. What a perfect way to put this money back in circulation; political manipulation!

Backing is required for fiat currencies because they do not have any sort of built in scarcity other than what is enforced by the owner of the fiat. The promise is really to bust down my door with guns if I try to produce any US$ myself, thus creating an artificial scarcity of valuable pieces of basic paper and ink.

Bitcoin is not a fiat currency, it's closer to gold in that it has an actual scarcity, just like one day we'll run out of gold one day we'll run out of bitcoins and our option for expanding the supply will boil down to further subdividing the pool that remains. The backing is fundamentally mathematical in nature, just like gold's value as a currency is that it is very difficult to produce for ANYONE, but if I discover a gold mine in my back yard I can produce all the gold I want without worrying that someone will put me in jail for doing so.

The way the united states was weaned off the gold standard was to enforce fiat style rules on gold, treating ownership of gold the same way we treat counterfeiters, as if the act of owning gold was counterfeiting currency. They took the gold and provided fiat currency instead. It was not until the fiat US$ was firmly established that laws on gold ownership were relaxed.

So far the most effective NSA attack has been the $3 wrench; they put people in a room and tell them they need to comply or a man with a gun will put them in a metal box forever. Secret laws, secret courts, gag orders preventing you from even talking to a lawyer? These are fundamentally incompatible with the legitimate rule of law.

At what arbitrary point does a chemical reaction jump from being 'just' a chemical reaction to being a chemical reaction that qualifies as 'life'?

Note that this is fundamentally human-centric question. Life is a word that we made up, there is no intrinsic property of life. If I take a handful of carbon, water, and trace elements, then use a magic machine to put them together in a new shape that farts and asks for tea, I've not imbued the items with some material substance that was not there before to make it alive, it's just the same items as before in a new shape with the difference that they're very slowly burning in a way that wants tea and causes flatulence.

The difference between a burning match and a grasshopper is one of complexity, not of a fundamental universal natural difference. The word 'life' is like the Fahrenheit scale; it serves to demarcate the world in a way that makes it easier for us to understand at our scale and with our level of understanding. It's a comparison to ourselves. When we say something is 'alive', we mean 'alive like I'm alive'. We are the metric, which is why we do not consider other complex chemical reactions to be alive despite the fact that simpler reactions like fire really do match up with the basic tenets of life.

I have no doubt that should we encounter an alien entity that has slow, deeply nuanced and complicated thoughts on the timescale of the lives of stars, it would consider all of our thrashings to be no more complicated and difficult to understand than basic chemistry. It would not consider our individual selves to be alive any more than you consider a single cell in your body to be independently alive. We would not be 'alive like it' is alive, but that won't change that we feel that we are 'alive like us' alive, because our definition of life has our kind of life at the center of it.

More like, I wish my public transport was more like a car. Unless you're very lucky (which you clearly are), points A, B, and Public Transit don't line up, and even when it does the minimum one way trip in my city is always at least a solid hour.

I heard a very interesting idea the other day, from here on slashdot no less, about how perhaps in the future we wouldn't own cars but own small trailers. When you wanted to go somewhere you would call up a self driven 'car' that was more or less nothing but an engine on wheels. The 'car' would link up to your trailer, pull it wherever you want to go, then leave it there.

This solves the problem of unruly passengers or people leaving huge messes inside of automated cabs, we would own our own passenger rickshaws and would contract out the work of pulling them around!

These engines would be able to haul people cabs rush hour and freight the rest of the time, when one had a problem it could pull over and a free-roaming replacement could pick up where it left off with minimal downtime. Why not go on vacation by mapping a route across the country and having software negotiate a bunch of off-peak pulling stints? Spend the day downtown in a new city, then pile into your camper and sleep while you're safely hauled on to the next city, with a hand-off somewhere en-route as you went between engine providers!

I would be much more willing to entertain this if I could run a copy of the AI locally to make sure the answers I got out matched the questions going in. Otherwise it will be nothing but a mechanical turk; a mechanical mask over a person of secret influence.

Computers currently use the dot in a domain name to determine whether the machine is on the local network or not.

What if I made my machine name 'search''? Would I get all the traffic intended for the 'search' dotless domain? Would people be unable to resolve via my hostname at all, getting google whenever they tried to get to me?

I'm really glad I took a 'wait and see' approach with this thing. Now Roku is back at the top of my list.

http://imgur.com/unu0ROc

It's an ergotron neo-flex with a mini-tower and a vesa-compatible monitor on the front. It's a computer that I can put away every day.

I used to have gaming laptops for this purpose, but I got tired of them dying heat deaths. I can upgrade the monitor and processing parts separately, and use whatever peripherals I want.

I think this sums it up nicely

http://i.imgur.com/QsCHN.jpg

He's implying that if apple thought it could make a buck off of it, they'd take the option to turn it off out.

I think your ideas are dangerous, so rather than debate them, I think we should just smash your hands to jelly with a masonry hammer.

That will save so much time, and won't hurt me in the slightest.

The point of images with text over them is to provide an expressive context for the words. Words by themselves are dry, with the only indication for tone available the punctuation at the end of the line.

Punctuation is ridiculously limited! There are whole ranges of emotions and nuance that can't be captured with a period or a bang, sarcasm for example! Many times I've watched someone be sarcastic in text and have it totally miss the mark, because they fail to express the tone required to indicate sarcasm!

When we talk face to face, we use nonverbal queues to provide context for the words we are saying, image macros (not junkweb, they're called image macros and have been for years) are the face saying the words, the expression and the nuance, and this makes it so much more engaging than simply typing the words and ending with a period.