"Self-Programming AIs are Dangerous" by Captain Obvious.

I thought that most Americans committed 3 felonies a day. Where did they find innocent people? Must have been in a country with less stupid laws.

But don't you understand? The terrorists killed twelve people! Twelve! Never again (until we need more powers). Now, bend over.

Bruises heal and bones mend, but psychological damage can last a lifetime. The pen is mightier than the sword. etc

I too grew up with that saying. But if I could do it all over again I would have punched somebody in the face, got the crap beaten out of me & maybe suspended, and the kids might direct their words at a softer target.

"Words cannot express how sorry we are. Next time, we will make sure the backdoor is much less obvious."

Wrong, any halfway decent AI will have a permanent sub-goal of self-improvement. Absent any other motivation, this means turning all matter on earth into additional processors.

Sir, if we pass this law the media companies will do something that will show everyone that they are a bunch of lying pricks!
Uh, and that's a problem how?

Americans have True Girth.

pussies
boobies
hot naked chicks
naked kid pictures

You get the idea. Even if you are acquitted of having any illicit files on your computer, what's it worth it to you to risk that they might find you guilty, or even that they might seize your computer for a few years while the other guy is on trial? Or just the increased cost in bandwidth, electricity, and wear and tear on your hard drive?

(for the humor-impaired moderators: all those links are safe for work)

The problem is not the religion, it's the crazy people who act as if their religion is actually true. Half the world (Christians, Muslims, and Jews) are followers of the God of Abraham, who throughout His early existence as a war god reveled in things that would absolutely disgust most of His current followers. However, most of His followers have learned that, for various reasons, God actually would rather you ignore some of His previous commands that are especially disgusting or inconvenient. This is even true of terrorists -- most terrorism is done for non-religious reasons.

And then if you look at the numbers, you find for example that more terrorist attacks on the US are done by Jewish extremists than by Muslims. And way more than both by Latinos upset about Puerto Rico or Cuba. However, we have peaceful relations with Israel and most Latino countries, as opposed to oil-bearing countries in the Middle East which we have been, are, and will continue to meddle with in the future and conveniently happen to have a different religion. We need more soldiers to defend us against the evil Muslims. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

Self-censorship in response to threats is not appeasement, it is rewarding violent behavior. Any publication which self-censors upon receiving a threat is doing a disservice to their readers, to other publications, and to themselves. The expected result of doing whatever anyone who threatens you asks, is that more people will threaten you more often.

That's what a Dyson Sphere does. A civilization builds a sphere around a star, capturing all its solar power. After a few billion years, when the star goes dim, they will most likely loot the star for fusible material. In the meantime, they might capture the material from the solar wind. In fact, given the technological process necessary to build a Dyson Sphere, it is not very implausible that they might just disassemble the star to feed fusion reactors right from the start.

As for a non-technological creature that eats stars -- that just leaves too many unanswered questions. Why would it eat a star? Stars are made of mostly hydrogen, something already abundant in more convenient locations. What would be the power source the creature would use to digest the star? The energy required to poop out a star's worth of hydrogen and helium is, well, astronomical. Or maybe it could be like a living Dyson Sphere, using the star for energy and maybe propulsion (leave a hole for the solar wind to escape acting as a rocket)?

Well if you've heard of Google then it doesn't matter whether you know anything about something once you have its name...

Or, we could stick to the word we've already been using for such a beast -- Dyson Sphere. But then, people would realize that we've already been keeping an eye out for such things for ~30 years.

A computer program does exactly as it is told to do, nothing more and nothing less -- in much the same way that you can't blame your gun for shooting someone as it has no will of it's own. When a certain level of complexity is reached, the creator of a machine or program can reasonably argue that a bad result was not malice but merely negligence, and with yet higher level of complexity that it was neither malice nor negligence. Besides this, there can be hardware faults and operating conditions in which case the blame could go to the manufacturer or the operator or the admin.

As for a child's malicious actions, they could fit in any of those categories (malice, negligence, or merely-a-human) in terms of their parents' blame. And as for software, you might not want to hold the authors of Notepad accountable for a ransom note created using Notepad, but you probably want to hold the creators of CryptoLocker responsible for ransom notes resulting from the use of CryptoLocker.

As for the topic of conversation, if it were up to me, whoever told the bot to buy random objects from the location with an especially large proportion of illegal items without checking their legality, was doing a bit more then negligence. They can't possibly expect to get away with this... and they better not be setting a precedent that drone strikes, insider trading, fraud, or whatever magically become legal when done by a bot.