An AI won't in any meaningful way be programmed by humans, any more than you "chemically program" your children through DNA. Through emulating synapses making new connections or a reproduction-like system through fork/modify/simulate/replace it will eventually wire up its own thought processes and define its own problem-solving strategies. A few hours with National Geographic will teach it that killing your enemies is a possible strategy. After that, all you need is for someone to give it a task that would be easier if we weren't there in the first place. Like for example you make EcoAI and tell it to "protect the environment" and initially it comes up with green tech but eventually decides we're the root cause for the environment being fucked up in the first place. Our extinction might be just an unplanned side effect of an otherwise noble goal.

Copyright law begs to differ.

"Unable to survive" is just silly hyperbole. For example my grandmother was one of nine siblings, all growing up on a farm long before you had tractors, electricity or running water and all the modern comforts that go with it. They weren't rich but they survived, like most actually have for most of history. Now I'm not saying that I want to live like it's 1914 instead of 2014, just that a "non-extravagant" life style today is usually a fairly easy one. I expect you still want your running hot and cold water, shower, flush toilet, refrigerator, freezer, stove, microwave, washing machine, dishwasher, TV, computer, cell phone, car and enough money in your account to stroll down to the grocery store and buy a TV dinner, it's not really the slum hut standard you're asking for. That might be a lot harder because large parts of the working world population aren't there today.

About 200 years ago 90% of the population here in Norway worked in agriculture, today it's less than 2%. Granted there's a bit more to it than that but I wager that if we went just for basic survival less than 5% of the population could manage to keep the other 95% from starving, freezing or otherwise lacking basic utilities as long as you don't expect heart surgery or anything like that. That's not how it works though, the expected social standard keeps rising. That's actually the most common complaint I hear from less well off in this country, that they get "caught" at not affording expensive clothes or toys or hobbies for their kids or fancy activities or vacations. I can understand that it's embarrassing, but it still sounds like a first world problem if that's the worst of it.

No, it's the final "nuke it from orbit" step.

That's something of a misrepresentation, the elite never lacked the money and the rich have only gotten richer so it was more that they wouldn't than that they couldn't. Improved communication lowered the demand to send bigwigs between Europe and the US, I imagine the ~2*4 hours saved on a business trip was a key selling feature for the Concorde. That's fast but video conferencing is even faster. As for leisure travel I think the standard has gone up, travelling first class on a subsonic plane can be quite luxurious so the rich are not in that big a hurry to make the trip as short as possible.

I can't speak for the grandparent but generally in de facto non-profit monopolies - there's nobody else competing to be the US army for example - there's very little risk in not pushing boundaries. Projects might run over time and over budget but at the end of the day the politicians have to fund the army next year too and you don't get the fat bonuses like when your software makes money for the company. Obvious flops on the other hand might require scapegoats and if you make your superiors look bad, well they're likely to be a step or two up in seniority for the rest of your career in the same "company". That will permeate the entire environment making any kind of change hard, nobody wants to be the one signing off on anything without a drawn out change process.

Here in Norway the craziest example at the moment is the police. In 2005 our politicians made fairly big changes to the penal code, which would go into effect when the police systems were able to handle it. Well, now it's 2014 and it's still not in effect. But what can you do, not fund the police? No matter how much the schedules slip and it goes over budget we have to keep throwing money at them. If they were a commercial company they'd be out of business long ago. Sometimes I wonder if it would be cheaper if we awarded two companies the contract to write the same module with a bonus to the winner, just to get the competition.

Um, looking at the list of SpaceX customers there's MDA Corp, SES, Thaicom, Orbcomm, AsiaSat with several others planned in the future so there seems to be quite a bit of private satellite business. I guess it's less newsworthy than replacing the Shuttle as we've been launching satellites for decades, but it's there. There's not much else though as the costs are too high and outside LEO/GEO/polar satellite it's all just one-off missions so far.

What I'm hoping for is that SpaceX will eventually use their "reusable" tech into making a rocket-powered lander for Mars so they can offer a standard "Earth to Mars surface" delivery system. That could enable a lot of other cool ventures, private and public.

Or to put it another way, the most irrational thought is the evolutionary winner. If you think you're going to die, why fight the inevitable? If you rationally think you'll win, your spirit will be broken when you don't. But if you believe against any rational hope that you'll survive, you'll fight any odds because youl think you'll beat them. It doesn't matter that they're wrong most of the time, all the ones who survive think they were destined to survive.

You can do a lot tighter security with a three-level design unless you very deliberately design the sanity checking into the database logic. For example say you're designing a online bank client, it may in theory show every transaction of every account as every user may in theory be logged in at some point. But if you've logged in as user X and rooted the web server and can query any view or call any procedure that returns data from any other user than X then you have a huge security problem.

In theory I guess you can solve it through the login procedure giving you a session ID, that session ID is used as input to every procedure and everything is validated in SQL on the database server on every procedure before returning any data, but it sounds inconvenient. Not to mention you'd like a little more to happen than just not return data, you'd want some pretty big red lights to go off if user A starts querying on B's account numbers.

That and a lot more lockdown since you know exactly what requests the web server should be sending to the middleware server, you control both sides of the communication, you don't have to deal with all the formatting and navigation and whatnot and got a fairly limited core that you can do security review on. Sounds like good defense in depth to me.

And parts of the general overhead should also reasonably be allocated to that line, if you run a Surface ad that should probably be specific indirect cost but if you have a stand at a conference promoting all your products then a fraction of that cost should probably be considered Surface marketing costs. All companies do some form of internal cost assignment that is more detailed than what the official accounting practices gives you but since they're easy to manipulate they won't show them to investors as you could easily be sued over giving a false impression of the profitability of one particular product or service.

What's worse when it comes to investment decisions is that even if the costs are properly allocated - a very big topic in itself, particular for example what costs employee time, equipment time, equipment wear, storage or use of consumables instead of direct expenses - is that cutting one product line won't necessarily cut the allocated costs. A textbook example is a chicken farm where you sell chickens breasts, legs and wings. Even if you find out the wings aren't profitable through the cost allocation, it's pretty hard to make chickens with no wings so dropping the product wouldn't actually cut the costs, just force a re-allocation.

Another fun part of this is the impact dropping some products or services can have on others, for example say you run a grocery store and find that selling milk is really making you no money all, in fact you're losing a bit. But if you tried to cut milk from the store, you'd find a lot of customers start shopping elsewhere. It's amazing how many companies have fallen into this trap by cutting auxiliary non-profitable products only to find they were necessary to make the profitable sales. Or in other areas like public transportation, if they cut the off-hour lines people buy a car and use that instead of the bus altogether.

It's not all bean counting 101, like in tech there actually are complex interrelations in business too. Most of it isn't rocket science but if you use too simplistic models it might fall flat on its face in reality. The GAAP figures they publish for the stock market are not made for detail, they're made for being correct and comparable which highly limit their depth because they don't want to give companies the degrees of freedom to manipulate the numbers. Trying to accurately say how a small product is really doing in a big company's books is actually very, very hard.

As for a guesstimate from the headline/summary, I generally like "smart search", I'd love to see Google apply Watson-style technology to return relevant answers.

The universe repository is not supported by Ubuntu. There are four sections:

Main - Officially supported software.
Restricted - Supported software that is not available under a completely free license.
Universe - Community maintained software, i.e. not officially supported software.
Multiverse - Software that is not free.

So someone in the "community" once made an ownCloud package, got it in universe and isn't maintaining it. Ubuntu is saying "that's not ours, you fix it" while the developers are saying "that's not ours, you fix it" and they're both making valid arguments. Ubuntu is saying the quality of the universe packages is what the community makes of it, if it's broken or vulnerable it stays that way until the community provides a fixed version. Otherwise they'd get overrun by lazy packagers who get it into the release repository then orphan it and ditch the maintenance responsibility on Ubuntu. If the developers won't jump through the hoops to fix it then it can't be that important to them.

The developers of course see it differently, they never asked for their software to be put in this repository. They never broke it, why should they fix it? Clearly they're a victim here. Still, just because you're a victim there might still be a process. If you send an angry mail to YouTube saying "Hey you bastards, stop sharing my video kthxbye" they might redirect you to say here's the report copyright violation form, fill this out and we'll process it and you go "Nuh uh, too much work and I already told you stop so stop already." you won't get far. And Ubuntu is legally in the clear here, if they want to keep shipping that package they can. It's a request, not a demand.

Or Microsoft found out they must cede the battle to avoid losing the war. That doesn't mean Valve should get complacent, once you make a threat like that it'd better stay credible. If they back down too far Microsoft might try for a blitzkrieg shoving the Microsoft Store down users' throat before Valve has time to rekindle the SteamOS project. At the same time they don't want Steam to go mainstream to avoid making it a real enemy to Windows.

That's because you don't want to get between a land whale and his supersized Big Mac with extra cheese and bacon, double onion rings and bucket of Coke.

So what? Since there's no central authority to block transactions or seize funds they'll simply be passed around until any relation with the crime is meaningless with almost everybody in the transaction chain is blissfully unaware that somewhere they were stolen. Then what? If you find the person behind the wallet and seize the "stolen property", you introduce a massive transaction risk that totally undermines the cryptographic guarantee that the transaction is final and irreversible. Imagine the following scenario, you sell a car for bitcoins. The bitcoins come in, transaction is verified, you hand over the keys. Then you try to spend your bitcoins only to be told that they're stolen, we have the serial numbers and is returning them to their rightful owner. Now you have no bitcoins and no car and good luck recovering it.

Imagine if cash was that way, every time the grocery store tried to despoit money at the bank the bank would say "oh no, this and that bill came from a gas station robbery two years ago so we'll return it to the gas station and deduct it from your deposit. The system would crumble as cash couldn't be trusted to really have the cash value it says, even if it's a genuine bill. Everyone with money of questionable origin would pass it off to others who can't and won't verify their legitimity and let others pick up the tab. By all means, if the cops can uncover a whitewashing operation that's fine but once it's passed back into normal circulation again you can't suddenly take away that value.