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Comment Re:A Reasonable Person (Score 2) 436

Neither Snoop Dog or Katie Couric. The guy choose a specific audience. He was posting these for his wife to see. He wasn't posting these in a rap forum. He wasn't on the today show. He was posting these to his ex-wife. (I think, it was also possible he was posting to his public facebook. If so then that is different.) The jury just had to decide what that meant.

Comment Re:In the news today (Score 2) 436

He isn't selling music. After his divorce the defendant started posting quotes of violent rap lyrics on Facebook. Lyrics that were about harming women. His ex-wife reported him the FBI. The FBI only stepped in when things were a little to on the nose as a threat. Basically this guy was trying to be clever and protect his threats by being vague. He was dancing on the line and the FBI stepped in when they perceived he crossed it.

Comment First 5 billion (Score 1) 307

Things are even bleaker in other galaxies, the researchers report. Compared with the Milky Way, most galaxies are small and low in metallicity. As a result, 90% of them should have too many long gamma ray bursts to sustain life, they argue. What’s more, for about 5 billion years after the big bang, all galaxies were like that, so long gamma ray bursts would have made life impossible anywhere.

Wouldn't that also imply that for the first 5 billion years planets in general would be low in metal? So you would have very few planets without iron cores and similer density as Earth. There would be a different chemical mix in most of the universe.

Comment Halting Problem (Score 2) 335

that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist

The article misunderstands the halting problem. You could replace robots with humans and murder with any descision involing other people and come to the same conclusion. AI does not try to create perfect solutions. Instead you try to create solutions that work most of the time. Approaches that can evolve with trail and error. Ethically you weigh the positive benifits of success against the negative consequences of your failures.

Comment Interesting (Score 5, Insightful) 120

Basically it works like this.
1) Amy has a contract to wash Bob's car for $100 month.
2) Carl sues Bob for murdering his dog.
3) The courts can not give Carl a contract with Amy. The courts can only award Carl with property and money taken from Bob.
Basically the courts can't force Amy to work with Carl. They can't force ICANN to work with the plantiffs.

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