The Chinese Room only makes sense so far as there's a guy manipulating the input and output, who has office hours and goes home to his wife and kids after a long day's work of processing unintelligible Chinese. When there isn't a guy manipulating said input and output - when it's a machine within a larger machine, capable of its own sustenance when provided an input of energy as any other living being, the argument falls apart. I do feel we're a bit premature to start discussing the topic of AI rights and what's the difference between term and murder, but any machine that can demonstrate intelligence and agency, and can be reasoned and communicated with, has to be considered perhaps not exactly "human," but a person of some sort in the sense of the law, entitled to rights and protections as any other.

Regardless if it's the familiar doped silicon buried in a unimpressive beige box, or the machine we all too often forget is no more 'magical' than a CPU; a pile of boring wet matter with a smattering of weird chemistry, the brain. The Chinese room is at best misdirection, because it replaces an internal organ in which the mind of a being resides with an office like any other - cable bills, taxes, or Chinese, it's irrelevant. Unless, of course, you wish to imply that humans too don't display intelligence or the ability to experience because the individual neurons don't.

(Besides, corporations are people too, so wouldn't offices also be, in America?)

I hope you never drove on public roads, went to public schools, visited public parks, flushed your toilet into a public sewer, or filled said toilet with water from the public water supply. And if you want public health, safety standards, transportation, sanitation, or anything resembling civilization, that's something you should pay for with your own bank account! There's zero authorization to make me a slave to your common, collective good that benefits everyone, because... because...

He's used to make my comment sound like maniacal rambling? Why, it already does! (Muphry's law strikes again...)

I'll admit I was kind of fuming after reading the petition, especially because that dumbass tried to pull a CSI with over-zoomed images that can be anything. So yeah. Totally cocked the grammar up, but eh. Would be nice if Slashdot had an edit feature, and if retroactively changing posts for argument's sake is a concern, just leave "this post was edited on Feb. 31st, 20XX" or whatever on the bottom and add a Wiki-style history feature to see what the previous form/s were.

If this idiotic shitstain spent more than five hard seconds looking at the processed press release images, forgetting to take his meds, and crying conspiracy, he would've discovered that the Mars Exploration Rover site on JPL actually releases every single raw image the second it gets downlinked from Mars, including photos that deny claims of not taking micrographs, and also ignorant of basic traits of the MERs (well, MER now - RIP Spirit), such as the relatively low resolution of its sensors compared to modern standards, the microscopic imager just having a resolution of 1024x1024 and a working area of 3.1cm square at operating distance, and because it doesn't have an light on it like MSL/Curiosity's MAHLI, isn't as good at taking photos of things on the ground, like a little rock on the surface of mars.

In fact, there's even hazcam images of the arm being swung into place, denying that the rover never got close, and that it's actually just the really small rock it is.
Before arm placement, and after.

Anyways - oh look, close up, in focus images of a mushroom. Not. I hope this fuck gets laughed out and never returns.

Wrong. It's actually very common if you don't live in the right place.

God, I hate it when people bring this up. A bacteriophage does NOT infect eukaryotic cells, and more importantly their route of infection is tailored to exploiting bacteria. One of the most common model bacteriophages, T4, is in fact reliant on gram-negative anatomy by searching for lipopolysaccharides and porins to bind to.

So how to regulate it? Well, how to even regulate humans creating tailored cats to catch rodents on their trading vessels, that would then evolve is tricky...
Then again, considering cats are the new overlords of the internet, that's a bad example.

Do you really not get the irony of mentioning the civil rights movement while speaking about "patience, compromise, and steady change?" Do you know why there was this relatively sudden burst of demonstrations, protests, marches, and so on and so forth? Because for the past fifty years since the Atlanta compromise, gradualism was mainly used by the government as an excuse to do nothing about existing issues with no real plans on the agenda for integration. From 1895 until the 1950s, "patience, compromise, and steady change" did jack shit and only served to retard progress. That's why there even was a civil rights movement. People didn't feel like spending generations as second class citizens, waiting patiently for their great-grandkids to have a future they won't be around for and can't say for certain will even come around. There is no way to have slow, steady change on an order less than many generations, because thoughts and cultural memes get entrenched and passed from parent to child, and the only thing that'll force them out is conflict.

What you're talking about are all symptoms of a dysfunctional society and a refusal of the new social strata, and your examples are riddled with holes and victim blaming, especially because Bradley Manning couldn't've released his information piecemeal because between the volume of data and the constant threat of feds busting down your door, and regardless of what the law says there's nothing right about fifty years in jail for a few minutes in a closet unless you're taking someone's life, and then constant legal issues to the point where you kill yourself just to escape. While you're saying to stop vilifying opponents who well earned their reputations and stop glorifying leaks, what's really being said, be it your intent or not, is to just shut up, bend over, and hope it'll be over quicker this time. Change doesn't come from people lining up and merely wishing things were different, and attitudes like those don't make it happen at all. Stop blaming the victims and look who's really making people into martyrs.

Looks like someone never tried an iOS upgrade on an older iDevice...

You'd've been S.O.L. if I was your kid - even when I was real little, I'd find myself staying up late into the night and consistently waking up past 10AM.

Except that a nuclear bomb and a nuclear reactor are only the same in that they have the same Joe Sixpack/media stigma attached to both of them. Here, let me use an analogy.

Not building a nuclear reactor in Japan because of the previous use of the atomic bomb due to concerns of insensitivity is roughly the same as the United States of America not building the Saturn V because the use of rocket propelled grenades against troops in Vietnam. Completely different devices for completely different ends.

But, I thought in this modern era of human resources, employees were the assets seized!

Congratulations!
 
You seemed to forget the entire point of XKCD's what-if series is, in fact, taking childish daydreams and running with it. It's a bit odd, anyways, that a person who (begin rant) thinks a COTS laptop, in a shielded cabin in a magnetosphere-shielded environment using a tiny node size is every bit as radiation-hardened as a RAD750 with a 150nm node size to reduce susceptibility to smaller particles, with latchup-proof logic, parity-checked memory, etc etc. (end rant) is behaving as a physics expert to begin with.

Actually, a power tool is precisely the model to go after, really.

I insert the safety key and press the on button. The motor turns on and it just works. Dangerous? Mildly to extremely depending on the tool. But it Just Works and that's what matters whether it's some skilled artisan who has turned more bowls on his 25,000 dollar lathe and hand-sharpened every tool he's forged himself or something absurd like that or an underpaid illegal immigrant sticking screws into a wall frame with a handheld drill/screw gun. It just works - pull trigger switch, motor turns, screw goes in. Obtuse things like spitting out errors that are purely a number just doesn't make sense in this era of 64-bit monster rigs that can churn out well-encoded, efficiently compressed video at or above the native framerate - can't we spare a couple bytes to stick a descriptive error string after looking up the error in a stored table? It isn't like we're dealing with featherweight embedded computers with barely enough space to stick a primitive FORTH in. Maybe I just need to turn in my geek card in, or something. I don't know.