The X factor of sheer chance/chaos is significant. If I posit a mediocre, obnoxious riddle to a group of 1,000 people, those who solve it may exhibit a pattern of slightly higher "interest" or higher "intellect" or whatever, but repeated trials will show it's also largely a roll of the dice. I suppose in your frame it'd equate to some line about "opportunity meets effort".

Nothing contrary here, just highlighting a thought not mentioned yet. To me (local district's IT dept) the takeaway is that whatever the tastes or capabilities of 1,000 students, it's only a matter of time 'till someone finds a workaround. And because knowledge is a contagion (looking at you, thoughtpurchases) everyone is quickly infected and everyone knows. If the workaround is slow, difficult, tedious, harmless, ignore it. Otherwise, tick one more point on your Whackamole card and do a fix.

Dibs! I'll get a screenplay out of the clusterfuck below that occurred to me while discussing Grooveshark's mystery figurehead over at Ars:

Remember the Satoshi Nakamoto story? It felt straight out of fiction, almost trope: A well-tuned, global, controversial technology is developed by an unknown genius, a reclusive hermit. All we need is some kid to stumble upon a series of events that start revealing The Hidden Secret of Nakamoto's creation.

The Truth of BTC would probably involve supercomputer architecture built on human brain mapping. Or it's powered by brain jars. I dunno. There will be a girl in a box (see trope) at some point. Or possibly a bio-pod-cylinder-tank thing. The villain's Order will also be following the same trail (his banking companies are dying as the UN or whatever start switching to BTC). There will be guns and tacticool black OPs armor and at some point a lab will explode. The hero's parents are dead - no wait, missing for reasons unknown! - and s/he lives with an unc- no, an aunt. Passive, uninteresting aunt with little story pertinence. Allows exposition to warm up at Anyschool High in sleepy Anytown, which has That Weird Science-Building Complex owned by Undisclosed Person on the edge of town.

Samantha's internet and phone logs suggest she's a pedophile and is also exploiting a local addiction to cheese sticks. Financial analysis links her activity to drug lords and the Disney store. Satellite imagery shows she's either privatized a military force or likes to jump-rope.

Samantha has three-hop ties to KNOWN TERRORIST GROUPS. Certain liberties must be compromised in order for us to protect you from the Samanthas out there.

I doubt "having a go" is very free.

Actually, isn't the area full of waiters and dishwashers having a go?

That sounds like a much better way to spend his life.

"What does metabolism have to do with anything? Have Earth's humans changed in the future??"

Lots of semantic discussion at this tier. Subtiers. Some of the posts address AI as some linear strength metric that qualifies after some arbitrary point. That's a stupid definition. Better would be to pin it to some tipping point; not the singularity, but self-writing or something. AI isn't deterministic. Chess is deterministic. "Natural" voice navigation will be deterministic.

AI isn't even deductive. AI means it builds new decision trees, adaptive to conditions. Most life forms do it. In this context, humans boil down to execution of instinct code, all the way up to "love (and the expression of) is chemicals in the brain".

Now, we already have code that does this, at a crude level. At the time, Black & White set some niche records for the amount of behavioral code your Creature pet would build for itself. We have programs that don't know how to play chess, but can write a chess-playing decision tree that optimizes over iterations. It will reach a shitty roof well below current, human-written layouts. Programs that "learn" to play Space Invaders (or anything) play like shit.

So, seeing as you read this far, I'll concede that we hit a familiar snag - either we already have AI (of this definition) or we're pegging AI to some arbitrary strength of original, generated thought. But the code equivalent to the instincts of even simple life forms would be a mess, so it'll be a while before self-preserving, self-sustaining, "self-aware" (enjoy ur semaniks.) AI.

This is imaginary thoughtcrime again. Good luck prosecuting (sorry, "holding responsible") someone who's been long dead.

The culprit obtained, kept, and operated the tool, device, machination, etc. that's pertinent. MAYBE the operator caused the events unknowingly, in cases where they were unaware of a strange or faulty capacity (the latter is pre-t-t-y hard to predict the first time), but that affects the measure of intent, which some areas of law are rational enough to outright forgive.

What it doesn't affect is blame shifting up some abstract chain of causation leading from the inventor's guilty parents to the guilty Big Bang.

"You'll be harassed for it." is a bad symptom.

"If we can't use justice, we'll just use bullshit. We don't need to be 'right'." kind of demands to be contested on sheer principle. No, not everyone can afford to do so, but we can be aware.

I'm actually amused by the idea of my refrigerator being the majestic warhorse of destruction against some prolife/choice* website (depends which Anonymous you get - remember, it's a banner before it's a group).

It'd be quietly chilling in the corner and suddenly (the pump?) would start humming with the strain, the effort of my valiant fridge clashing horns across the cyberspace! Rawrrrrrrgh! Taste this, heathens!

*gun control, samesex whatever, health insurance, $hot_button, etc

- I thought lots of municipalities already did this stuff. For ages. Bunch of physical, chemical, mechanical filters/treatments. We simply avoid thinking about it, like with many things we do/ingest. Including the affluents. "Everyone poops."

- Poop ain't shit. It's an infectious slurry at first, but the components under that aren't particularly important. Bunch of carbon. Fibers, fats. Carbon, hydrogen. Organic material - as in, what you eat. The point (as seen above repeatedly) is we should be far more concerned about chemicals that get dumped (flushed) into the water. And I even reckon one guy flushing a pill or two will be diluted to homeopathic (lol) tier - it's an office or factory dumping a bottle of something every week, all year round, that I'd be nervous about.

> beaten back by entitled, squeamish whiners who denounced
- FTFY. See above point. Sell them bottled water at gouge rates. We've already observed that (1) people don't know or care about what it actually is so long as it has a picture of mountains or fields or glaciers on the tin (must not have a bear next to a river); and (2) they can't judge which contents matter anyway.

I think I'm on this page, maybe with less hyperbole. For an article this is pretty narrow and speculative for something still relatively distant. It'll be an inconsequential concern someday, sure, but the bridge will pretty much cross itself, so to speak.

If we /must/ indulge, I expect even larger (bus) vehicles will have at least one window. For all our "perfecting" airplanes allow fly-by-wire failsafe, only some IoTard would let a derped machine (not just can't-phone-home, full failure, maybe EMP) become so full-retard that the passenger can't even open the electronic hatch to get out.

FTA, > Being surrounded by noisy co-workers and office machinery probably doesn't help either
How about the demands? Interruptions, "hey can you do this too", "we need you for [meeting/explanation/event]" and all the constant "This is now also on your plate, deal with it.", which appending "whenever" doesn't make much better re: attention span.

It's not even the most painful of iterations among the increasing expectations of workers.

> once they try to give their idea away it is illegal
Be careful, this edges across the line into thoughtcrime. There's nothing illegal about me describing shiv-building steps to you in a Starbucks. It CAN be illegal if it's a substep of conspiracy for me/you to operate said shiv (in an illegal manner). If they're trying to own/sell the design as imaginary property, SALES of the design, now a commercial item, may mean openings for intervention.

If it's free, they still might find an illegality ("Fire!" in a theater endangers humans) in there somewhere that allows for intervention, but the 1stA makes it hard to prevent a mere recitation of knowledge in a vacuum.

Printing one is a physical process that's easier to draw fences around, though messy to enforce. Sales are a physical process, and more conducive to enforcement. Laws on those two will probably vary by state.

Oh relax ya sissies, I'm sure the roof has waist-height guards, right?

*loads up VR Mirror's Edge and/or Assassin's Creed*

In older movies and cartoons, inheritance of haunted estates was often held pending On One Condition as a plot device to get people inside spooky mansions for ghostly shenanigans (ie the second-in-line trying to scare protagonists away and claim the inheritance). You may have seen it parodied more recently in, say, Futurama/Simpsons.

Or maybe your post was just a roundabout crack at the linguistic ties my handle will exhibit in various languages. Believe it or not, I had no idea it did when I picked it for an SNES RPG. But it amuses me now, if not as much as actually seeing someone make a penis in minecraft blocks, custom decals, spray tags, guild logos, spaceships, Spore creatures, etc etc etc