Except for features of a car that are designed to function without a human. The entire point of moving to self-driving / self-parking cars is so you don't have to do it.

Now, we're not at that point yet, and I agree that in this instance it's the driver's responsibility. However, it's not defensible or ethical for Volvo to sell the pedestrian-detection feature separately from the self-parking feature anymore than it would be for them to sell seat-belts as an option. They know idiot drivers exist, they know the feature could save lives. If you don't offer a self-parking system with that capability, that's fine. However, if you have done the R&D to develop it, you better include it as a selling point of your improved self-parking system over other manufacturers, not as a separate feature. Doing otherwise is simply not ethical.

Yes. Nobody who worked in the Manhattan Project had any reservations whatsoever about building the atomic bomb, right?

Experts work in fields they're not 100% comfortable with all the time. The actual physicists that worked on the bomb understood exactly what the dangers were. The people looking at it from the outside are the ones coming up with the bogus dangers. You hear things like, "the scientists in the Manhattan project were so irresponsible they thought the first bomb test could ignite the atmosphere, but went ahead with it anyway." No, the scientists working on it thought of that possibility, performed calculations the definitely proved it wasn't anywhere near a possibility and then moved on with it. People outside the field are the ones that go, "The LHC could create a black hole that will destroy us all!" The scientists working on know the Earth is struck with more powerful cosmic rays than the LHC can produce regularly, so there's no danger.

Which is a 100% true statement. They're very smart people, but they don't know what they're talking about in regards to AI research, and are coming up with bogus threats that most AI experts agree aren't actually a possibility.

The aol.com address most certainly is irrelevant to everything else you said. You haven't needed to have AOL as your ISP in order to have an aol.com e-mail address for over a decade. You're the guy that points to every German he meets screaming, "Nazi! Nazi!" World War II is over, and so are the days that you used to spend an usenet dreading that aol.com post that signaled a member of the masses just got access to the net. The masses are now the majority of the net, and they use gmail too.

I don't really give a shit. I don't personally use Facebook, but I'm the weird one, not them. I recognize that I make people's lives more difficult when they ask me to get in touch with them via Facebook, because it really is the default these days, and I apologize while asking for a secondary contact option.

I consider judging people based on irrelevant categories to be far more damning.

Shortly after gmail came out, every other free webmail provider upped their storage amount in order to compete, including aol. Gmail at the time didn't provide imap access. You could access your mail via the web interface or pop. Aol, on the other hand, did provide imap, along with a ton of storage space, which allowed me to check my personal e-mail via my PDA's email client (remember those?), instead of its horrible browser.

I had a perfectly technical reason to switch to an aol address while everybody was switching to gmail.

Well, that's my point. That is the case. Anything else in unfairly promoting specific religions, which is constitutionally prohibited.

So, either prevent all religions from having tax exempt status, or accept that anything can be a religion and grant any organization (as long as it is a non-profit organization), tax-exempt status. I don't care which one you pick, but I think only those two options can be fair.

Which is the same amount of credibility any religion has, considering what makes something a religion is the taking of certain axiomatic principles on faith rather than evidence.

Which I don't have any problem whatsoever with, mind you. I just don't like people using age of a religion as a way to discriminate against others. "My religion says the reason humans die is because they allowed themselves to be fooled by a talking snake" sounds exactly as weird to me as, "My religion says we were brought here from intergalactic worlds on DC-10's and were trapped in volcanoes where they set off atomic bombs." You want to believe either of those, I'm going to defend your right to do it.

Now, I know Scientology has done some pretty illegal stuff, and I'm fine with us going after them for that. I don't like that anyone would want to define what gets to be an acceptable religion and what doesn't though. I'm sure plenty of people really and truly believe in the Scientology stuff, and as far as I'm concerned they have the right to do so. I will, in fact, defend their right to do so, even though I don't believe any of it. Same as I would defend the right of anyone to be a Christian even though I'm not one.

The problem is that most phone applications are typically 95%+ UI code. If you do that, you're not exactly going to save much time and effort.

Actually, they've been pushing Cordova. Xamarin is an option, but the free starter edition that will work with the Community Edition of visual studio still looks far too limited for seriously development, while the business edition is unreasonably expensive.

The visual studio 2015 preview includes cordova projects targeting android, though.

Except that modern manufacturing process can beat a skilled craftman any day. People buy expensive watches because they're expensive. It's a status symbol. They have something that other people can't afford.

For that reason, the $10k edition of the apple watch will sell plenty. Like the old "I Am Rich" app

No, personally I always thought that the BlackBerry sucked so much that any alternative at all that would let people have mobile e-mail would instantly replace it, no matter how much it sucked. BlackBerry was the phone you went, "goddamnit, I need to replace my nokia or motoralla with this shit, because of my need to send and receive e-mail anywhere!"

That one I'll cop to. In fact, I still don't understand it. The ipod is the worst music player I've ever seen. Back when it came out, I had a Windows PDA, and I thought that worked better.

Actually, no. Satire can use humor, but it's not a requirement. It can use any other tools available, as long it is used to criticize a topic:

In a reddit AMA, Khan explained what he wanted to show was the nature of how society finds violence acceptable in a kids show versus what they consider adult themed. He said the major difference between his short and the original power rangers cartoon was that when characters get shot, red liquid spurts out. Plus he showed titties. Other than that, it's the same type of fighting, with people hurting or killing others. But one is a kid's show and the other is "gritty".

It absolutely fits as satire and valid commentary.

You don't know much about Isaac Asimov. He has stated in several occasions and at the foreword of many of his books that he created the three laws as a response to all the evil robots of science fiction. That it is insane to assume they would turn against us, that we'd have safeguards which would keep us safe, and that we should absolutely build artificially intelligence once we had the technology to do so. Here's one quote on the subject: "One of the stock plots of science fiction was that of the invention of a robot--usually pictured as a creature of metal without soul or emotion. Under the influence of the well-known deeds and ultimate fate of Frankenstein and Rossum, there seemed only one change to be rung on this plot.--Robots were created and destroyed their creator; robots were created and destroyed their creator: robots were created and destroyed their creator-- In the 1930's I became a science-fiction reader and I quickly grew tired of this dull hundred-times-told tale. As a person interested in science, I resented the purely faustian interpretation of science."

The three laws were written with ambiguity not because he wanted to show rules didn't work and our ego of thinking that we could create such rules would be our downfall (the Faustian interpretation he decried above), but because he wanted to make sure there would be some sort of conflict for his stories. However, the rules worked. Most of the time the conflict was a result of the imperfection of humanity: the robots were doing the right things, but we wanted to do something stupid/selfish/prejudiced.

At no point were robots meant to be feared. When their three laws appeared to fail, the moral of the story was always that they hadn't and were working perfectly well. That there was method behind the apparent madness. When a robot appear to lie, despite being ordered to tell the truth (thus apparently disobeying the second law), it lied because it determined the truth would be emotionally harmful to you, and it couldn't disobey the first law.