Since the idea is that this universe is a simulation, who says it is a simulation of reality? Maybe we are some kids crazy fantasy world in which the container has to be larger then its contents! FREAKY!

The trick to thinking outside the box, is to stop thinking the box is real.

IF this is a simulated world, there is no reason to assume the rules in the simulation are the same as the ones of the world in which the simulation is running.

Are you fucking kidding me? This is so plainly in the "if it's not illegal, it ought to be" category that it's really difficult to think of a more clear example.

It's a direct attack on a competitors system, intended to deprive them of their ability to deliver their service. In IT security terms we'd call it a DOS.

If this rumoured playbook exists, someone ought to go to jail for it. To me it's bright as daylight and even asking the question seems stupid.

Vote me down, I can't do math... 600 MHz-900 MHz/6 MHz bands is 100-150 channels, not 1000-1500 so 4-6 Gbit total for the loop...

No. At least not one that makes sense for storing one or two copies of a consumer hard drive. And you're stuck with a huge investment in one generation of tapes, unlike HDDs where you can gradually buy bigger and better drives. I'd rather see hard drives get cheaper and tape not than nothing getting cheaper at all. What's the real practical downsides to HDDs for the average person anyway? They're standard and can be hooked up to any computer (real fun if your tape drive dies on you or is lost/stolen). They're random access. Without a tape robot it's not more convenient. Without a environmental controlled tape vault I wouldn't trust their longevity claims.

Personally I think the ideal consumer backup solution is three hard drives, one offline next to your computer and one online hooked up via high speed Internet. Anything that nukes your files can't get to your offline copy even if the online copy is hacked or accidentally sync'd, anything that destroys all local copies like theft or a fire can't get to your online copy. One drive goes bad and you should still have two good copies though RAID1 on your main computer would be nice, just to avoid the downtime.

And for what it's worth, most consumer data isn't really worth backing up as they're just a cache to the Internet. I just checked and my total personal stuff (photos, videos, documents, source code, whatever) is 370GB, while I got 10TB+ of other things. And a lot of that which goes under personal is actually "backed up" in that friends or family got copies too, so strictly speaking I could do with even less. I actually see they have 512GB thumb drives now (at insane prices), actually my whole backup could fit in that now.

Well, from the looks of it a coax cable can carry anywhere from 1000-1500 6MHz channels @ 42.88 Mbit/s so 42-63 Gbit/s, subtract TV channels (200 @ 10 Mbit? = 2 Gbit/s), divide by number of subscribers sharing the rest. It shouldn't take that much money to cut a loop in half though, just pick a midpoint and run two coax cables straight to the central office. Considering how rapidly things progress with competition I really doubt there's any technical difficulty in delivering more.

Works for the US military, with more tanks you can acquire more oil...

Sure, I assume that all cars will have something like that. Heck, since the car will be doing navigation it will likely have found a gas/charging station and pulled over long before it even got to that. But regardless they will never be perfect. What if it sprung a leak and couldn't pull over in time because it judged that there was no suitable shoulder (mountain road, narrow bridge), and this info wasn't in it's database to enable it to plan ahead?

We have been mass producing cars for over 100 years, and by all reasonable measures they have never been as reliable as they are today. Yet they still break down on occasion. Self driving cars will have all the same mechanical and electrical problems that we have today, with software problem on top of that. You can mitigate some of these hardware problems with additional sensors, and fault-tolerant design of the driving computer, but only to the point where the sensors and software are significantly more reliable than the hardware they are monitoring, and only for the situations that are programed for.

There always will be situations where things break down in unexpected ways that the car isn't capable of handling on it's own. And based on the historical rate of reliability improvement, those situations won't be uncommon for quite some time.

May the computer totally fail to realize that the bridge is about to give out or the building about to collapse or an avalanche about to hit or a dam about to burst or you're driving right into a rioting mob or some other disastrous event? Even if I assume that the car will never, ever throw the controls to me and expect me to take over doesn't exclude the possibility that I want to take immediate physical control to avoid some kind of danger that goes above and beyond a computer's understanding of traffic rules.

They may never be removed. Everyone is focused on the split-second decision scenario when talking about this issue, and on that I agree that humans will cause more problems than they solve. But there are many more situations where manual override is needed and beneficial. What happens when the car runs out of gas/charge and you need to push it to the side of the road out of traffic. Or the computer is malfunctioning somehow (software bug, squirrel chewed halfway through a wire, dead battery/alternator). Or when I need to move the car somewhere off-road that the AI refuses to recognize as a valid driving path. There are plenty of not so time critical scenarios where some sort of manual override is needed and those aren't going to go away even when we trust the software to do all the driving. Once we admit that they don't have to be intuitive for split-second reactions, then they don't have to retain the traditional layout, nor be designed for comfortable everyday use, but some sort of steering, brake control, and neutral gear select will always be needed.

Those people come to their predetermined conclusions with or without the the raw data, but removing restrictions on distribution of data does help real researchers.

Again those presenters would be manipulating opinion with or without openly available data.The fact that the statistics are openly available is the only chance people have to prove them wrong.

So neither of the examples of negative aspects are actually negative. At best the open information gives other groups the opportunity to debunk the lies and correct public knowledge, at worst people will ignore the facts for the opinions they prefer which is no worse than before the facts were available.

Really? They now put severed heads back on?

It may be your favorite charity, but frankly speaking, if you are looking for organisations that are opposing ISIS, the Iranian Army is a closer call than the Red Cross.

Like Windows, OS X, iOS, Android and.... who exactly has a network transparent protocol? The X protocol was designed when X was essentially drawing boxes and text to a frame buffer. Today the GPU is by far the second most powerful - and in some ways, the most powerful computing device in a computer. The absolutely biggest, fastest link is between your CPU and GPU with a 16x PCIe 3.0 link (15.75 GB/s) and companies are working hard to create heterogeneous computing where they even access the same memory pool so you don't even have the bus overhead. Putting a network in the middle is like replacing a mainline water pipe with a plastic straw.

The lie is that you can do network transparency without compromise. Just because the protocol is transparent it's still a straw and applications don't know they only get a sip and not a fire hose of bandwidth. Those who assume they will fail miserably and are practically unusable over a network since there's no way for the protocol to scale down the traffic. If you've got a fast network, do RDP/VNC. If you have a bit of bandwidth, do a web interface. If you have very little bandwdth, do text mode SSH. X forwarding? If I absolutely need to have an X app running (no command line, no web interface) and I'm bandwidth constraint, but it's the least bad solution to a bad situation in the first place.

You do realize that if they actually did that /. would be howling about 1984 and Idiocracy and how it's NSA propaganda to "trust the system" and stop thinking for themselves with pages full quoting Franklin about security and liberty. After all it had to be about humanity willingly handing over control, we already had the story were they assume control by force and that's a villain story (I, robot). Meanwhile regular people like to identify with their heroes, the villains may be monsters or aliens or robots but the heroes are 99.99% human(oid). Nobody cares that you can't identify with Sauron or Smaug or King Kong or the Borg, but for a hero AI that's going to be tough.

You have it in the Swedish series "Äkta människor" where humanoid robots = hubots are blurring the lines, but it's more of a rebellion/independence story where they're breaking out of servitude and they're certainly not humanity's heroes. As an AI story it's more along the lines of Her, with humans and robots getting emotionally involved in each other which is probably not the kind of movie you were looking for. The superior intelligence kind of robot wouldn't fit in there, if you can't care about the hero I suppose you could care about the victims of whatever conflict that is drawn up. But those poor, helpless humans who can't fix their own situation but need outside help? That's a bit dreary.

Besides, I think that's a bit too similar to actual problems in the world today, movies like to show empowerment. People sympathize with those who are powerless victims, but they don't want to identify with them. And if the AI is smart enough to control bad guys, wouldn't it also be smart enough to control the good guys? I think it would be very hard to avoid it ending up as a giant puppeteer who's now pulling all the strings. And that's again more of a creepy story where you're being manipulated without you even knowing it, like the Matrix before you take the blue pill. There is the War Games computer who learns that the only way to win is not to play but I'm really struggling to come up with another computer "hero" story.

You want to pull a "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists." on the fricking Red Cross? I didn't know Bush was trolling /. but hey if you''ve got another George running for President could you please get Iraq right the third time?

I think you vastly underestimate the difference between knowing that "people" in the abstract, far away sense are tortured and killed compared to people you can put a name and face on. If you had to see a third world slum kid over webcam for 10 seconds each day, look him in the eyes and tell him you're not donating anything today I think most would crumble very, very rapidly even if we were relatively short on cash themselves. Yes, their goal is to spread fear and terror. The flip side of that is also to spread righteous anger and determination that such evil must be scourged from the world. If you could gather the IS warriors all in one place and aim a nuke at them, I'd push the button. And if you knew me, that's way out of character. Shit like this is what drives me to such extremes, if I didn't see it (not that I've actually watched this particular beheading) I wouldn't have felt so strongly about it.