That aliens would be vulnerable to our viruses and diseases?
Maybe our viruses wouldn't be able to interact with them at all. Which way does it go?
The way we have most experience with, a population exposed to and being decimated by a disease from elsewere ?
What about the alternative, a disease not being able to lock on to a population that is too alien? Is that possible?

Two things:
- the US has accelerated the development of malware and lifted it to a new level.
- the US has lots of advanced technology that's vulnerable to malware.

So if there's a cyberwar between backward North Korea and the US , who you'll think will lose?

Sensible comment. There's a marketing story about how a toothpaste increased their sales by 15% just by increasing the size of the opening of the tube. Since then, they've all done that. And with they I don't mean toothpaste brands. Think about it the next time you squirt some detergent in the sink

But as small as the stakes might appear, highly specialized bots like this one, which can only do one thing (in this case, bring up to 10 pounds of stuff from the lobby to someone's door) are a better glimpse of our future than any talk of hyper-competent humanoids or similarly versatile machines.

Rule 34 has no minimal requirements for robot capabilities.

I agree. The moment everyone has a car with the autopilot option there will be pressure to enforce autopilot in some conditions. But that would be a later evolution. First everyone switches voluntarily to the option, then afterwards the use of the option becomes less voluntary.

It's easy to see that self driving cars will come if you look at it as a feature. Take a normal car with a self driving button that you can switch on and off at your own judgement. You don't have to use it, but slowly you start to detect situations where the self driving button comes in really handy, such as traffic jams. And then some slow city traffic. And as confidence grows you switch it on on a long highway journey.
So you end up with all the cars having the option but some never use it, others sometime, some as much as possible.

Clarkson has not announced new job yet.

Conceptually, I understand that everything is on the internet. It's nice to actually see it from time to time. Especially when it's not porn.

yeah, I wonder how parent post found the link. Probably browsing for something..

Yeah right. Now put it differently, suppose a number indicates your desiring to die at any given moment. The number fluctuates all the time. Then you can distinguish between a function with a few dangerous peaks and one with a dangerous level for the baseline. Making access harder for those who are just having a difficult period is bound to have results.
What you then get is a tradeoff. To what extent are you willing to restrict someone's freedom by just making some things harder, to build in delays here and there, just to get them past the dangerous period. I think compromises can be made there. The two groups i don't like here at both sides of the spectrum, those who never interfere and those who want to decide for you what's best for you and don't even realize they're compromizing other values.

No. We've been lucky. And yes, there have been successful attempts to get them better under control. The first 20 years were pretty reckless and afterwards there also have been unintended close calls.

Yeah, using nuclear bombs as an example of restraint isn't very enlightened. We made bombs for one purpose, and when that purpose went away we instantly found another use for them as soon as we had the first bombs ready, and then proceeded by furiously making as many of them as possible. The main reason we haven't blown up the planet a few times is luck.

Overripe Camembert Mortars? Munster grenades?

The list of chemical weapons uses in the last century is nice. I'll point out though where it suffers from 'mainstream' bias. That chemical gas usage in Iraq in 1920 is omitted is acceptable, the claim can be disputed with reason. A similar claim about use of chemical weapons by the Syrian is taken as fact because everyone says so, while it's very doubtful that the Syrian army has resorted to chemical weapons. The very significant fact that Iran always refused to even make chemical weapons let alone use them while Iraq used them abundantly is turned into them running a weapons program after some restraint. They never made the weapons. Sure, proponents did some research, but proposals for weaponization were met with an unequivocal no from Khomeini.

I wonder about the claim that chemical weapons killed millions of people . How many besides the german concentration camps? Often war casualties were not killed but maimed.

Intelligence is a plus if the species is opportunistic and social. Like for instance raptors. Standing on rear legs opens opportunities - indicating that it increases chances for opportunistic strategies to outweigh the extra braincost.

I think the genes responsible for 'bigger' and 'more' generally don't take up more space, much less than 'restructure to do the same in a brain half the size'. Probably we've taken a very wasteful approach to getting smarter in terms of er, brain real estate.