People still use eBay? Is this the same eBay that became a scammer's paradise where no matter what you do, you're screwed? As a buyer you can be screwed easily enough, but as a seller I wouldn't waste my time. The risks so far outweigh the benefits that it's more like legalized gambling with the loser being the highest bidder.

(Yes, yes, I know some people do indeed make a decent living on eBay, but it's swimming against the tide to be sure.)

I think caring about them collectively would be a good starting point. What, exactly, would be so heinous about that?

I tried it once, and to put it succinctly, I'd rather have back-to-back root canals than go through that shite again.

So the soldier who no longer needs to go into battle is better off.

What about the civilians in the country you just invaded because politicians are no longer worried about getting blamed for dead soldiers?

The US already has a big problem with wars, almost all the costs are externalized.

From the Iraq war slightly less than 10,000 non-Iraqi coalition forces died.

But over 100,000 Iraqis died, perhaps over 500,000 or even 1,000,000 and their country is shattered.

These are costs that are barely registered in the US other than the fact that they create entities such as ISIS, and even they barely warrant notice except when they're threatening Americans.

If you're going to start a war you need some skin in the game, soldiers dying is a horrible tragedy but it that restrains the US from perpetrating far grander tragedies on a whim.

In the alternative universe where you have effective killbots they're now roaming the landscape over Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. But they're also probably in Libya, Lebanon, Iran, and Gaza (Israel gets them too). It probably saves a few Americans (minor a handful from escalated terrorist attacks), but at the cost of many times that.

Yeah, now I can afford to buy 0.0000002% of a communications satellite instead of 0.0000001%. Yippee!

...anytime they say it's going to be "great news for American workers", you know it's going to be the exact opposite. More like, "great news for multinational conglomerates who couldn't care less about individual workers".

On the other hand a single nuke is very powerful and easy to conceal, which is why nuclear proliferation treaties are very tough to enforce.

But no one really cares if you have a dozen autonomous weaponized drones, that's not going to give you a decisive military edge and any more than that you won't be able to conceal.

Make it against international law, people will occasionally violate the law but they'll be only small instances. The real cause for concern is a large scale deployment and arms race which a law can stop.

As much as I dislike Chief Keef and his musical stylings *cough*, I have to side with him on this one. Should an arrest warrant also restrict a person's free speech, or justify police intervention? I have to think it should not, regardless of how I feel about the person.

If we don't protect the speech we don't like, then it's not "free speech" as I understand it. The fact is that we must protect the kind of speech we personally detest if it's to mean anything at all.

I know, it's like they're teasing us.

500 new solar panels AND a pony. No, TWO ponies. And a yacht. And a lifetime supply of whiskey. And Sofía Vergara as my personal sex slave.

I mean, as long as we're dreaming....

> The problem was that Steam wasn't actually checking the codes sent via email.

Really, Steam? Really? You really, truly didn't even bother to check the code you sent as "confirmation"? The code that is the raison d'être for sending the code in the first place?

This is the kind of mistake I'd expect from a newbie who's still getting the hang of "Hello, World!", not from a multi-million dollar team of professional developers.

....stop complaining about these hidden features and start thanking the developers for making it so easy for $random_hacker to ruin years of work.

It's funny, though, because resetting the password on a STEAM account the way you're supposed to can be a total clusterfuck that will leave you cursing for days, if not weeks. Ask me how I know.

We know one thing for sure, and that is that if they're all recommending we don't do it, then it will be done. The very arguments against it will "prove" the usefulness and "need" for autonomous weapons.

I'm guessing the vast majority of ad benefits come from impressions rather than clicks.

I don't think I've ever clicked on a movie ad, but I'm sure a lot of my movie choices come from movie ads.

Same thing for other products, the ads annoy you, but when you go to buy something the one you've seen the ad for suddenly looks a whole lot more credible and familiar.

I think you've got it backwards.

In Canada the parties are far stronger than they are in the US and the individual MPs are almost irrelevant as they're simply expected to vote with their party, yet we seem to have a lot less of this kind of corruption and I don't think it's a coincidence.

Look at the emails, the guy was so compliant partly because he was relying on the MPAA for fund-raising, he's a state level politician dealing with the representative of the US media industry, of course he was playing ball. Just like if he was some individual legislator with a big group threatening to flood his district with money for his opponent, it's really easy for powerful interests to manipulate the government by picking off individual legislators.

If you make the parties stronger then the interests have to deal with the party instead of the legislator, and the parties are strong enough (and often incentivized) to tell the powerful interests to screw off.