The three laws of robotics is not very practical (as evidenced by Asimov himself; his fiction is essentially a long list of all the ways the laws fail). In fact, ethics classes themselves are complex enough that it's difficult to imagine any simple, cogent way to summarize ethical decision making into a sound bite. But do you believe it is possible at all to codify into the behavior of future complex systems? Personally, if we ever do get strong AI in my lifetime, I'm betting it'll be as screwed up and erratically ethical as we are.

Works for you as well, if you can hire an attorney to talk to a judge and convince the judge to grant a court order to... nevermind, your phrasing is shorter and means the same thing.

Google Cardboard, like the Oculus Rift, zooms in on the screen making some pixels very large. Perhaps this QHD resolution will look nicer than average when used as a Rift replacement? (note: I'm well aware that it will not actually be a good rift replacement, just that it's abnormally high pixel density could make a difference in extremely specific circumstances.)

I'd like to moderate the story as flamebait.

If small sellers have an alternative to the abysmal conflict resolution Paypal offers, this can only be a good thing. Amazon does Customer Service well... I think they can certainly improve upon Paypal in that respect. Competition may drive Paypal to improve.

This is not a compass. This measures the atoms passing through lines of magnetic flux. The magnetic flux lines are remarkably uniform when you are not within range of a competing magnet; I suspect that is just as true underwater. It's like measuring your distance from the center of a record by counting the track grooves you have scratched over. It does mean it's more accurate at east-west than it is at north-south.

But still pointless, useless, and self-destructive. The letter is bad enough that if he denied writing it, I would believe that it was a character assassination attempt. The guy didn't deserve prison, but he's still an idiot.

Cloud hosting removes the need to hire employees to cover certain duties. Backups Virtualization Database Admin etc Cloud makes sense for small companies who cannot afford enough expertise to adequately handle these issues. A cloud service (in theory) will have more (and more competent) people handling these areas than a small business can muster. But large companies? If you have over 1000 employees, you probably should not be cloud hosting your trade secrets, customer data, and core business value.

To be fair, cars are also held to higher and higher standards of safety every year. If they could legally build a 1960's car today, it could be sold for under $5000 new... but they can't. The car would fail hundreds of safety and emissions regulations.

Not saying that protected monopoly status doesn't contribute, but it's not the largest factor.

This is ancient, but at least you will read it: A lot of rich people in the world don't have half a billion dollars in fungible cash lying around. They have it in tracable, lockable, secured accounts with reversible transactions.

If someone gets access to Satoshi's bitcoin wallet, there will be no recourse to prevent them taking that entire amount. It's a lot harder to steal Warren's money because it's tied up in assets and traceable accounts.

They are developing software to get better orbital trajectories. We already HAVE software that manages traffic and orbital collision warnings, but the problem is that our orbital trajectory data is too inaccurate for it to be as helpful as it should be.

Over 22 years of experience writing columns, he ends on a 'best of' list. This stupid meme (using the more traditional definition of the word) is so frustrating to witness. I understand why writers do it (because it's easy), but it's depressing to see a good columnist in a respected publication end his career with one.

I can see the utility, but this seems like a security issue. Isn't one of the purposes of the SIM to provide a physical identity chip? Why does it need to be programmable? Shouldn't you just say 'this SIM now has access to this network'?

I probably just don't understand the function of a SIM card well enough to get the significance of this. Can someone clarify? I am not 5, FYI, and I can understand multi-syllabic words.

Reference: http://www.thetruckingattorneys.com/carriers/ups/ and http://www.thetruckingattorneys.com/carriers/fedex/