So why not just steal $4.99 worth of stuff, 500 times?

So...the programmer that wrote the code, or the QA guy who signed off on it, or the software engineer who designed it, or the platform guy who deployed it, or the product manager who owned it, or the CEO who ordered it, or the hardware engineer who designed the drone, or the factory worker who assembled it, or...all of them? Criminal liability in an autonomous system is not as clear-cut as you make it seem. Now, this isn't new - some percentage of cars fail catastrophically and kill people (not because of driver error) and some of those may be because of errors of people at $car_company - but that isn't to say that we have it totally under control.

Hopefully both end up losing somehow. It couldn't happen to two shittier companies.

I'm curious if she had a non-compete clause in her contract, and how it will all work out if she does. Any Google employees who know the details on their typical contracts?

And this is different from conventional war...how?

That happens to few enough people that it's not worth the hundreds of billions of dollars extra to include DNA.

What does it matter if it's intuitive? English (and any other language, though possibly not language in the abstract) is learned, and it works just fine.

This is pretty much patently false for Apple in-app purchases. Unless you have any examples of apps that don't explicitly say "$0.99 for 30 coins" or whatever, because I have *never* seen such a thing.

One solution to this problem is to let the police wiretap without warrants. The better solution is to have a system where a judge can be woken up in the middle of the night with a warrant to sign - if it's truly urgent enough and valid, he can sign it. If it isn't, he can give the cops an earful and tell them to stuff it.

This is terrible thinking. You're right, the cashier doesn't have to know anything about arithmetic to give out change - unless they accidentally hit the wrong button the register. Which they do. Because fingers are fat and slow, and registers are dumb machines. So when the cashier hits $10.00 instead of $20.00 for the bill I gave him, I want him to know enough math to give me an extra $10 in change - since that's what he owes me. If you think this is a trivial example, manage some cashiers sometime. A quarter will correctly adjust (correctly) instantly, a quarter will simply not notice and give a person too little (or too much) change, and half will realize they hit the wrong button, stop, panic, and call someone for help to sort it out.

Nah, you're not being nearly creative enough. Ellison has no income, you see, so he can't pay back his loan, so the bank collects on the collateral, cancels the loan, and now Ellison has $1 billion and the bank has $ 1.05 billion in stock (or whatever). Easy peasy.

That's a wealth tax, and that's fine if you want a wealth tax. However, if you were to count the increase of your home's value as income, and then be taxed on that at the same rate as the rest of your income, you might quickly find you can't afford to have your house increase in value. Do you see why that might not be ideal?

Is it difficult to be as consistently awesome as you are? Is it ever a burden?

No, it isn't. Software engineering is programming. CS is the study of algorithms, time complexity, theoretical computation, etc. etc. etc. While a CS worker may do some light programming in his job, the average software developer is not a computer scientist, and does not have the skill set to be one. Slightly tongue in cheek, but I hope you get the idea - we're in a field that's very very murky.

...to make this matter at all? Really? It's simple: get your speed up on calculators/numpads, and be slow as heck when manually dialing the phone. It'll work out better in the end.