Whoa there, it turns "innovation", "IP", "the free market", and "network neutrality" into sad jokes. And there's not a lot of respect for that sort of stuff in China. The country is still fairly repressive by modern standards.

But it very much funnels users and money back towards China. This sort of thing will not be fought by the officials in China. The minor officials get shark-fin soup, so they're all for it. But the higher ups like it just the same as it keep money from leaving the country. It's essentially protectionism.

Most people just call that the Dead Sea Effect.

Yeah, jesus christ does Mycroft-X have it wrong.

Imagine his scenario applied to the wee little people:

He wants to purchase a search result form Google, who would pay Verizon to send it to him. Oh hell no.

So are you assuming the "separatists" are pro-Russian Ukrainians who somehow got their hands on a missile, or are you assuming the separatists are Russian military?

Even then, for both cases, you have to question how much training such soldiers received. Is #1, where some dumbasses with a missile shot down a convenient target, so much of a stretch? Also, why can't #1 and #3 be true?

Yeah, this, and he would have picked that up if he was an engineer worth his salt who could read english.

I'd even go so far as to say that it's OH-SHIT mode wouldn't give two shits if BOTH the grandma and the little kid would both be hit. Seriously, the alternative is trying to swerve away, off the road, into god-knows what, or barreling headlong into traffic, in an effort to play hero. At a policy level, that's fucking stupid.

No. Oh Shit = Hit the brakes. That's it. No grand overly convoluted AI ethic and morality neural-net enforcing Asimov's three laws. Keep it simple, stupid.

Imagine a table saw manufacturer who doesn't have a shut-off when someone puts their finger in it! Because that's possible today. There's a competitor that creates such table saws. They're really expensive. Regular table-saw manufacturers haven't been sued to oblivion.

Uh..... yes it can? Better than a human can at any rate if you boil it down to reaction times. It's still, you know, a car.

I imagine it'd be program to slam on the breaks and stop, minimizing the damage. Don't give me that bullshit about swerving to the side. In that case it's program to kill whoever is in violation of it's right-of-way.

To stop and share the narrow bridge, allowing the human-driven bus to navigate it first. Sorry, but you haven't explained how this is a critical scenario that will lead to crash.

I think you're trying to describe the scenario where how the car should sacrifice itself to save the bus. A us-or-the-bus scenario.
In that case: Slam on the breaks, minimizing the damage.

Really, you think that the car is going to have some sort of morality judgement function. No. It's going to have a "crash imminent mode" where it tries to stop. That's it.

The outcome of such a reaction might be hitting a kid. Or hitting a bus. Or whatever. But as a standard oh-shit procedure, it's solid.

Pft, please. No more so than SCUBA gear, power tools, and industrial robots.
Shit hits the fan, they try to stop.

And it will never be perfect. Just good enough.

The fact that a company blatantly states that they try to "enhance online branding and clear negatives by blanketing search results with positive content" means that are bold-faced EVIL. They are no longer even trying to hide it. That have accepted that society is malleable and that they can make a buck distorting the truth for the highest bidder.

They are mercenaries. They might not be shooting people in the face for money, but they're destroying the truth for money. They are paid to go censor people in the open square. It's not even the polite sort of lie of an advertisement or a commercial. No. They are paid to suppress the statements of others. To effectively gag them.

This company and ones like them are not just leeches on society, they are ACTIVELY WORKING AGAINST SOCIETY. I have no better definition of evil. Their existence is detrimental to the rest of us. Anyone who does business with them should be scorned and their names remembered.

Hmmmm, if it has guidance in the bullet, does that mean you need to fire it out of a smoothbore barrel?

Also, where is the computer assisted laser pointer?

"Playing". Because the best sound comes from a vinyl LP powered by a Magnetar with monster cables, of course.

...Wow, it'd be sad if our first contact was the sound of their bombs killing themselves off.

Last couple of times I touched it I thought it was too easy.

It's almost trivial to get a farm going in a good spot. Being able to gather seeds, till the surface, and plant instantly makes the food economy dirt simple.

It doesn't give you a super-powerful fortress that can repel the goblin hoards and megabeasts, but it certainly makes the early game less engaging. I mean, remember when you seriously needed fishermen just so you wouldn't starve before your first harvest?

Starting a fortress on the tundra, or with an aquifer, or in a desert makes for a more interesting time.

Yeah, I was going to say that. He's just facing burnout and age.

But "New technologies, once exciting for the sake of newness"? That phenomenon is known as being young and stupid. The new technologies are exciting because of the additional capabilities they give us. If you thought the technology was exciting just because it was new, then you've been misguided the entire time, and marketers must have loved you. They could slap "NEW" onto an old product and generate some more sales. A fresh coat of paint and it's a top seller again.

Ignore the paint. Cut through the bullshit. Does the new thing work better? If so, it's worth learning.

Or hey, you can stick to the stable and clear COBOL platform that you know so well. Since all your peers are dying off you can charge an arm and a leg for being a master at it. Hopefully you didn't gamble your decades on something like RPGII.

riiiiiiiiight, but that's not what they're talking about when they say that removing the semi-colon would make white-space significant.

HAHAHAHAHA! Sorry, it's too good of a post not to pass along.

What dirty secrets?
Me and a friend regularly chat about this sort of social trends. His father was an enforcer for the Hell's Angels. He's lead a slightly more colorful life than I have. I have to remind him at regular intervals that some of us actually kept our nose clean and don't have a sordid past and a laundry list of activities that others could hold over our head forever.

But sure, in such a hypothetical scenario: I'D ABSOLUTELY OPPOSE THE NSA'S ILLEGAL PROGRAMS! (especially when it gathered said dirty laundry). I'd just do it anonymously, because otherwise they could end me at a moment's notice. Because I'm not sure I'm such a martyr that I'd make that sort of sacrifice just to showcase how badly they could abuse their power.

Now... if I were a hypothetical politician, becoming a martyr and exposing such actions is actually good for the career. Sooooooo maybe I'd try to exchange the dirty laundry for the good deed.

Time to remind everyone of the last time this happened.

Except it was J Edgar Hoover, the FBI, their programs like COINTELPRO, and those crazy radicals like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Einstein as well as people on the list for being part of the women's right movement, civil rights movement, "the new left", criticizing the Vietnam war, and the typical boogy-man organizations of socialists and communists.

Or hey, how about MINARET? or SHAMROCK?. Both of which had no warrents, but when people got a whiff of them, congress came down hard and the projects were discontinued.

What's so different about this time? Why are the power that be not doing their job?

Here's a great quote by meta-monkey, from A YEAR AGO:

One YEAR. The exact same trend is continuing. No one of power is fighting this. No one is backing down. Just what the fuck is going on?