That aside, watching a mars rover live is like watching paint dry. Opportunity has a top speed of 0.18 km/h and on average it has moved 10 meters a day. It spent over 11 years on a marathon that runners on Earth do in two hours. Everything else it does is equally slow, it makes a sloth seem energetic. The reason is of course that it's running on a tiiiiiiiny trickle of power, but it doesn't make for great entertainment. It's like for example CERN, you get a huge splash when they find the Higgs boson but between that it's months and years between something newsworthy happening.

Well, maybe not the actual scientists but there are quite a few dead cultures and species wiped out because guns and bullets beats spears and claws. And I don't think anyone doubts Oppenheimer was a bright guy, even though he wasn't the one dropping the nukes. Since you mention cats, would you like an AI treating you like you treat the cats? My guess is you would not, particularly not when they decide we're too fickle and resource hungry and would rather not have cats.

The reason I'm not worried is because we have no clue on how to build systems with self-awareness. The software is running, but the computer can't look at itself in the mirror and realize I need electricity and CPUs and RAM sticks to "live". Wake me up when we have a computer that can actually refuse me from hitting the off switch.

As for trapped AI, you should all see Ex Machina, great movie.

No, this is NOT more taxes. This is taxed OWED, by evaded.
And personally, I am tired of tax cheats.

It is time to tax sales all over the states, based on where it goes to.
The easiest way is to have any out-of-state (or out-of-nation) delivery to add 10% to the sale. This is above and beyond the delivery.
Then the delivery entity gets to keep 10% of that (or 1% of the total sales) for handling this.
Then the 9% is delivered to the state, along with the address of where item was delivered to. From there, the state breaks it apart into state, county, locality.

If every state will agree with this, it is actually EASIER AND CHEAPER to the business than trying to calculate the taxes based on the address.

And it is LONG past time for America to tax delivered items.

Pardon me, I might be one of those godless heathens but I suffered through quite a few years of Christian teachings - what exactly has the Bible promised us apart from forgiveness from our sins and heavenly bliss in the afterlife? The old testament was as I remember it mostly punishments. Punishment for eating the apple, building Babel's tower, Sodom and Gomorrah and of course the flood to wipe out everything. We're all sinners from the original sin and if we don't repent it's hell.

The new testament was pretty much all allegories on how we should live, there were a few "one-off" miracles while Jesus lived but all those who saw him raise the dead, turn water to wine or walk on water has been dead for 2000 years. So there's good and evil in the world, but that's pretty indistinguishable from good and bad people with free will without God or Satan pulling anyone's strings.

So I'm curious, what is it you feel God has promised? And what do see that makes you feel he's delivered? Because I can't find a lick of difference, the devout believers get injured, sick and die like the rest of us and terrible sins go by without being struck down from the heavens. It's of course possible that all of this gets tallied up and justice is served in the afterlife, but here and now in this life I can't find any sign of God. Maybe I should ask this in the opposite direction, if you were to envision a world without God what exactly would be different?

Look, I understand what you're trying to say. If they're trying to hide their atrocities we should expose them, if they're using them as propaganda and to terrorize we should suppress them. But as a guideline that would be very confusing and hard to live by since it assumes you know the details of every conflict and who wants what, assuming they're all in agreement which they're probably not. Not to mention the answer is probably (d) all of the above, some are inspired to fight against the atrocities, some are frightened by them and some are cheering them on.

Every year we send busloads of teens to visit Nazi concentration camps, not because we have some morbid fascination with death camps and genocide but because at some point you have to learn how cruel human beings can be to each other. But that is quickly fading out of living memory, it's 70 years since the war ended so those who really remember the war is in their 80s and 90s by now. Very soon it'll be "museum" knowledge that you read about in a book and look at an exhibit and it's going to be filed away as ancient history. But it's not, because there's still shit like that going on but we're not sure if we want to see it or not.

I'll admit that watching cruelty will make you die a little inside. You will want to punch something or maybe cry a bit, but at the end of the day I want the truth about the world not the PG-rated version. Which is of course not to say you should lose perspective, with 7 billion people it'll seem like anything you focus on happens a lot even if it deals with 0.01% of the population or less. And I'm here in the safety of my living room looking at a screen, I'm not the one in a war zone getting shot at. I'm not the one hoping nobody will bomb the market I go to. I'm not the soldier who needs to pull the trigger risking that innocents die if I do or die if I don't. I still got it easy.

Not really. I believe there is a clean hands doctrine that says if your inaction has amplified the harm then you might not get relief for that. For example if you live in the downstairs apartment and notice water is leaking from the upstairs apartment but don't do anything to stop it or limit the damage because you'd rather get the insurance money you can get cut short. It's a lot trickier with an IP issue, is it a lump transfer or an ongoing violation but I think it has most the characteristics of the former where you take a half-finished product and hand it to someone else to finish. In that case there's no harm in delaying apart from the statute of limitations.

Let's say I'm in an accident with you, but it seems at first to not be a big deal and I don't sue for damages. However it turns out it won't heal properly and I lose a lot of money and decide to sue anyway. Am I too late? No, those costs aren't caused by the delay, they'd come no matter what and it won't count against me. Of course I'm not in the US, there you find the nearest ambulance chaser and sue for $millions, unless it was a hobo that hurt you.

And yet it's an obvious case for cheap political rhetoric, "What do you mean that's never going to happen? You're sitting there making plans for it right now!" I don't think you should underestimate the explosive power of contingency plans. For example in a supply chain you might have a contingency plan in case your business partners, vendor or distribution network turn shit but nobody's going to like that you have a plan to stab them in the back. And there's always those who willingly or unintentionally confuse planning in case of failure with planning for failure.

TL;DR: Some things you should just keep your mouth shut about, even if makes sense.

In fact, WSJ actually used to be conservative. Now, they are more loony tunes. Basically, they went from economics to political over the last 7 years.

How funny. You did not learn. He was actually accurate in saying that. But you accuse him of a personal attack, when in fact, it was not. It might be an attack by association, but that is something totally different. However, the fact is, that WSJ is owned by murdock and has turned from conservative to loony tunes since that time.

Oops on 1. It was roughly 1980 when America started to emit more CO2 than Europe. Prior to that, Europe emitted more.

I stand by #2, based on the above. You can see that starting in 2008, America's emissions started dropping, and has continued since that time. More importantly, it will continue for the next 4 years, if not longer. And here is EIA saying that much more will close. And IER thinks that 72 GW of 321 GW of coal plants are going to shut down before 2020. Note that Coal plants account for about 3/4 of electricities CO2 emissions in America. Shutting down that 72 GW, which are the worst, will take out roughly 1/4 of that CO2 of Electricities CO2 emissions.

This data from Europe, shows that America's data starts in 1992 at 5.0. hits highest point was 2007 (5.9 billion tonnes) drops to 5.3 in 2013. Likewise, Eu28 data start in 1992 at 4.3 and then sits at it until 2007, where it also drops to 3.7.
Sadly, this article does not do justice to the amount of emissions that Europe kicks out, but the map in it shows how much is really coming out of Europe AND CHINA.

And as to 4 above, that stands on its own. Again, OCO2 shows how much China emits, which is far far more than is generally admitted since Chinese leaders are lying.

and you can look up 5 and 6, or even think about it. China's emissions from 1850 on, exceed America's total. And considering that China and Europe have been burning coal for multiple millennium as well as have been the most populated areas of the world for the last milenium, it makes sense that they account for the majority.

Well, we sure didn't get into it to write boring business applications except a few in the dotcom years who quickly moved on when it went bust. As I remember it though, there were many who just wanted to play games and only a few who wanted work with code and I don't think pushing them to play more would have brought them over. Of course you needed the opportunity, but there are a lot of games that are mod-friendly if you're so inclined. I'd sure encourage and test if tweaking a game peeks their interest, but if it doesn't I wouldn't try with more game time.

W = bush.
O = Obama
Yes, the sentence on OCO2 is wrong. the first "emissions" was left in there by accident.

What is clearly wrong?
All of it is backed up by facts, not by BS.

Missing codecs: AAC, H.264, MP3
Missing plug-in: flash

So either patents or not their code, if you got a good solution for that I'm sure Google would like to hear it.