Yeah thats the Hayflick limit which is designed to stop that.

Theres actually a damn good reason why cells are designed to stop reproducing after a certain limit. In fact one of cancers strategies is to artificially prevent telemere shortening to try and circumvent the hayflick limit.

Yep, now imagine that combined with entangled nanobots connecting themselves to neurons. The possibilities really become endless, and space travel becomes simple, and death loses it's sting. If it works :/.

wut? "Entangled nanobots connecting themselves to neurons"

What the fuck is an "entangled nanobot". Where talking about photons here, not goddamn miniature optimus primes.

Ubisoft sold keys ad different prices. Some of the "cheap" keys were activated in "expensive" areas. Rather than identifying the resellers and shutting them down (though they may have done nothing wrong), Ubisoft identified the keys, and revoked them.

Note, Ubisoft made a profit selling these keys to authorized distributors, and the users paid for a (at the time) valid key. But Ubisoft thinks they could have extracted greater profit with a different sales plan, so they revoked them all to try again. Too many "save, restart" games played by Ubisoft.

I hope they didn't try this stunt on Australian customers. We have "parallel importation" legislation forbidding retailers from trying to prevent people monopolizing sales channels againt people who import cheaper from overseas. Back in the day, the ACCC actually forced retailers to stop supplying DVD players that where not multiregion, although the bloody conservatives put a stop to THOSE shenanigans. Hell back then the ACCC even sued Sony for going after mod-chippers.

Same shit happened to progressive orgs under Bush. I'd be fairly certain its some A type authoritarian in the IRS "doing his part" for whoevers in charge at that moment of time.

I mean shit, look at the whole Acorn frame-up. Organization that got torn to pieces after it reported two of its own employees for vote registration irregularities , so bloody fox news doctors a bunch of footage to make it look like they are running some sort of prostitution scam, the IRS freaks out pulls their tax exempt status and then congress pulls their funding, despite the fact the organization had never been shown to have engaged in anything it was accused of. Moral of the story, don't annoy the government or the government will make you pay.

probably because Zoe Quinn supposedly unfairly profited from the corruption

No she didn't. Nobody has been able to point an instance of this actually happening. She had an affair with a journalist who didn't review anything she did. Thats it. A pissed off ex boyfriend posts that his girlfriend had an affair (It happens) and uh, for some reason that nobody can quite explain this is "corruption and something that people who don't know her are supposted to be angry about FOR SOME REASON.

Brianna Wu? Brianna "I don't know when I can return to my home, from whence I am giving this interview" Wu?

Yes, that is in fact a common outcome of being doxxed. Whats your point here?

Slashdot has been fairly in the bag for the SJWs over the whole #gamergate thing, but this is a bit much. Really, we need be a advertizing platform for pet projects of the SJW crowd now? A "gender equality in tech" story 3 days a week wasn't enough? WTF happened to Slashdot? Broad political clickbait was a bit understandable but this is starting to look like a Gawker site.

We miss you Taco, but it's becoming clear why you left.

This isn't about SJWs its about online harassment. Seriously go look up /baphomet/ on 8chan and see whats going on (And yes I realise bap is not gamergate, but there sure is a lot of crossover in targets). People have been killed because of swatting.

Fighting back against peoples lives being fucked up and even ended by chan dwelling bullies isn't being an SJW, its called being an adult.

But the executive branch?

Can they just unilaterally pick and choose which laws(*) they will prosecute?

Thats how the law has always worked. Don't blame Obama, blame the founding fathers. (Not that they'll hear, being dead and all that)

Similarly, Obama told Holder awhile back [google.com] not to pursue "Defense of marriage" cases. That's fine too, the law should never have been passed and should have been dumped long ago.

Well within his legal rights, as envisioned by the founding fathers.

Has anyone noticed that this was done by the executive branch all on its own, with no oversight?

The whitehouse *IS* the oversight, as envisioned.

I'm troubled by this because everyone accepts the outcome because the results are so good. The ends justify the means in these cases, it's so good to get these laws off the books that we don't notice *how* they got repealed.

Why be troubled. The system is working as it was designed. Its not like Obama invented this, its how its been done since independence.

To be specific, in the future we will see the executive branch gutting laws more often, and if people complain they will point to these good results and say "it's OK for us to do this now because no one complained when we did it previously".

Why do you say that? Obama has done nothing here that every president before him hasn't done.

Back when I was a late teenager , the college I went to had semi regular bomb threats whenever exams or whatever where on. They'd have to evacuate the place so we'd all get the afternoon off. Eventually they caught the kid when he went into the administration office to borrow the phone to make the threat. Clearly not the sharpest tool in the shed.

Cancer versus AIDS. Which to choose. decisions decisions decisions.

Plot device, perhaps, but if you've read the entire "robot" series of novels, you'll see that it was used to provide a unique "angle" from which to tackle some classical problems of ethics. As a practical matter, I rather doubt that such a set of such laws, even if they were logically sound, could be reliably built into a machine such that no contrivance, hardware or software, could be used to circumvent them.

I think part of the problem is , they fit into a logic/proof solving tradition of AI but not so much into a connectionist/neural-net model.

The problem is, I honestly suspect once neural nets get complex enough and self-organizing enough they can tackle human-style intelligence, we're really not going to have a lot of insight into how they work anymore. Too hard, too complex. How do you build those hard limits into a machine that can redesign itself and that we don't fully understand.

At best we could create an "instinct" to follow them. But what we know from our own intelligence is that instincts can be pretty muteable things (Ie we have a powerful instinct not to die, but make a man miserable enough and he'll hurl himself off a cliff)

We need to tread quite carefully, and make sure when we do create intellects as brilliant as our owns, that those intellects will want to be on our sides. Its almost like the reverse of theology. In Theology thinkers asked "What must we do to be ethical servants of the creator?". Now the tables are turned and WE are the creators, and we might need to ask the opposite, "What must we do to be an ethical creator to our creations".

Because if we don't, we're inviting ragnarok on ourselves.

Yep. I still remember being a young teenager and kid in the 80s and how prior to Gorbachev (That guy really should be considered a hero to *everyone*, Russians and Americans. Forget Reagan, it was Gorbachev that ended the cold war.) there was a genuine feeling that we where all gunna die.

I still remember the nuns at school (catholic primary school) making us kids pray that reagan and whoever it was at the time (Gromeyko? Andropov?) wouldnt hit the button and nuke us all after a bunch of sabre rattling over Afghanistan. She literally told us about the whole drop to the floor, roll into the corner and stuff.

I never expected to make 20. And here I am at 40. Its a whole different world.

The Feds could care less

They do when a couple of multi billion dollar multinationals with serious US investments come under attack.

Its all about the money.

The website however is total insanity from the mid 1990s.

Frederic Tudor may have invented the ice trade, but Walter White perfected it!