Absolutely. Remember Back Orifice? A roommate's hosebeast of a girlfriend would come over and sit on the spare computer in the living room muttering under her breath and making random sounds while chatting on ICQ (Yeah, that long ago...). I installed BO on it and then would use my laptop to send deletes, backspaces and when I got really bored, send program closes to it until she would get fed up and leave to go smoke on the deck and complain to her bf about the "possessed" computer.

And by him, you mean practically everyone who sits in front of a computer, or controls a machine or a huuuge chunk of the workforce. When AI can do telephone customer service jobs, programming, systems admin work, troubleshooting, IT work, heavy equipment operation, driving, piloting, warfare and a million other tasks there is going to be an enormous number of people without gainful employment.

THAT is the biggest problem with AI outside of the Skynet scenario. We will need a Federation-style post scarcity economy to come into being, but based on the knee-jerk reaction to anything that looks like Socialism in the US, I doubt that will happen before an awful lot of suffering.

Then I demand equal time for my group that insists the world outside of our perceptive dimensions is actually a disc and floats through space on the back of an etherial turtle. Furthermore, I demand policy changes to carbon emissions as the CO in the atmosphere that is dropping off the edge of the disc may be poisoning our great Turtle.

Tolerance of ignorance? This is no different than the anti-vaxxer crowd. These people if given a chance would have their fairy tales shape government policy, so no, no tolerance of their backwards ignorance.

> But wouldn't that have been harmful to South Korea? You seem to be valuing the interests of Denmark over the interests of South Korea. Do you have a rational basis for doing so?

Are you trying to be deliberately disingenuous? You're asking a Danish national why a Danish company shoudn't source work in Denmark if it means less money for a country 1/3 of the way around the globe?

Have you ever given a family member money? If so, why? That would seem to be valuing the interests of your family over the neighbors you've never met. Do you have a rational basis for doing so?

"my Mac can kick your PC's ass in most ways"

Except upgrades. Try updating your video card after a year and let me know how that works out for you. One of the strengths of my PC is that I replace a couple hundred dollars worth of parts couple of years and remain modern. The Apple upgrade cycle is a tad more costly. Step 1. Time machine everything. Step 2. Take paycheck(s) to Apple vendor. Step 3. Restore backup from Time Machine to new Apple machine. Step 4. Craigslist/Ebay old machine after wiping to recoup a percentage of your outlay on new Mac.

You bought a Dell laptop. Might as well have just taken that money out in ones and lit them on fire in your back yard. Would have been entertaining in a horrific way and at least you wouldn't have had any expectations crushed afterward. Dell makes OK servers and workstations, but their laptops are hit or miss to the point that we haven't bought them in years.

Buy a decent Lenovo or Asus laptop and you'll be far more satisfied.

"popular" is a relative term. If 0.001% of all Android devices out there had Cyanogen running on them at this moment I would be floored.

>Right now if they ground up the waste and vented it into the atmosphere it would be less damaging than that caused by coal mining, megawatt for megawatt.

The Fukushima and Chernobyl exclusion zones would show that to be extreme hyperbole. Grab a tent and go live for a month a mile from a coal burning plant in a field, and then try the same thing a mile from Pripyat and let me know how that goes for you.

Reality has a well known liberal bias. That's why Fox News is out to destroy it.

I know, it's terrible. Something like 88% of the US buys the wrong car. I fully believe that all tests to get licensed should be conducted in manual transmission vehicles unless the subject has a medical exemption and has to drive an automatic.

Manuals have several advantages including better fuel efficiency, greater control over the vehicle, and reduced costs. And in rare safety incidents like the rare cases of "throttle stick" manuals are much safer. Newer automatics at highway speed will not let you shift into neutral if the throttle is sticking, but with a manual you just press the clutch pedal and move to the shoulder, then turn off the engine. Disaster averted.

I can still see a safety issue with the ignition being shut down arbitrarily. Imagine the car is a stick shift and the driver sucks at stick shifting. So they go to take off after the light turns green and manage to stall it instead, rolling it 40-50 feet into the intersection. Then the interlock stops the car from being started again . And the intersection happens to have train tracks. And here comes a freight train a couple of miles away...

If the behavior of the shutdown circuit could include logic like "don't activate unless the car has been off for at least 90 seconds" or something then that would be a lot safer.

This isn't 25 years ago. I just got rid of my 12 year old car that had a blue book value of ~$1000. It wasn't the prettiest thing, the trunk latch needed a bit of fiddling to get to open as the spring in the external latch handle was worn out, it leaked oil (slowly, about a liter per month) and it had a few other minor issues with it, and someone had backed into the driver's side door in a parking lot, leaving a dent about the size of a dinner plate. I traded it in, but if I sold it privately I realistically would have gotten about $700-$800 for it on the open market based on comparables for sale in the paper and on Craigslist at the time.

The reason I got rid of it wasn't that it was unsafe or it wouldn't start or run, it was that to bring it back to 100% would cost a couple of thousand dollars that I figured would be better spent getting something newer and fancier that I can afford to do. It was still mechanically sound aside from the small oil leak and pretty much the most dependable car I've ever owned. If selling it privately wasn't such a hassle, I would have been happy to see it go to some college student or other person who needed good basic transportation for not too much money.

There are lots of cars in the $1000-$2000 range these days that are sound and dependable, their only sins are that they are old and cosmetically challenged.

You're talking about targeted research within their existing product line. Bell Labs, Xerox PARC and others existed to do research on things that weren't even close to core business. The simple fact is there are almost no publicly traded companies today who can dump even a small fraction of their money into researching something that is not directly related to their product line without a shareholder revolt. What exactly do you think Microsoft's shareholders would do if MS announced they were getting into gigabit fiber buildouts like Google is doing?

Yup. They have a special mindset. Reminds me of a podcast of This American Life I heard a few months back:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/293/a-little-bit-of-knowledge

If you listen to Act Three, you hear this in full effect. Bob Berenz the electrician is CONVINCED he has found a problem with the understanding of physics and anyone who tries to prove otherwise is not paying attention to what he says, "doesn't get it" or is in on maintaining the "big science" status quo. The reality is he's made several basic errors in his own version and is unwilling to accept any explanation of them.