I'm not stopping anybody from re-examining the various acts.

And your statement of the reason behind the DB act is only an opinion. Further, even if an act was created with questionable intentions, it may sometimes be kept or used for other purposes beyond the original. Thus, original intent alone is not a reason to keep or discard an act.

Robot treatment shouldn't be our baseline for human treatment. If it's pretty obvious that robots will get incrementally better, then it is as somebody else described it: competing directly with robots (and 3rd world labor) will become a "race to the bottom". That's competing with automation, not leveraging it to make our life better.

Sounds like a reasonable explanation. Thanks.

if North Korea was capable of this sort of hack they've got more tempting targets to use that capability on.

Such as? A commercial company is probably a far easier target than a military institution. And maybe some of the military breaches we've heard about were from them. Many breaches are not even made public.

When I ask conservatives what Federal laws to cut, most of them don't have a clue. The few that bother to research often recommend cutting rules that create health, safety, or pollution risk for workers or customers.

Becoming a 3rd world country to compete with the 3rd world doesn't sound like a good plan to me.

I'm giving you the opportunity to give substantive suggestions here again...

He was an integral part of Calculus education.

I'm so happy about this news, I'm gonna shove a cat through 2 slits to see what happens.

Why does the sky appear to so quickly transition from black to blue around the 6 minute mark?

They were made out of meat

If our main goal is to reproduce and spread among the galaxy, then a brain inside a dick will be the quickest route: cut out the middle-men organs. In fact, skip the brain.

> First, there is no reason to believe that we can built robots that can reproduce themselves.

What? This is exactly the technology humans are trying to reach! We're already a significant way down this path!!

> Second, there is no evidence that we or anyone else can build intelligent machines, as the original story seems to presuppose.

Nature did it. We can do it.

> Third, biological organisms are so many orders of magnitude more efficient and flexible than machines that it barely makes sense to put them into the same qualitative category "form of life".

This whole conversation is about extrapolating on the cosmic scale. If you look at the path robotics has taken in the last century it does, as pointed out, actually support the premise of this article.

> Hint: A human consumes only about 2.9 kilowatt hours per day, the equivalent of 1-2 light bulbs ...

Not relevant. Once machines are replicating and repairing themselves they'll do exactly what we do and find other sources of energy.

Frankly I agree with you that it's hard to picture Transformers inhabiting the universe, but OP did make a really good point that extrapolation isn't even in the ballpark of refuting this clown. Honestly I'm shocked he didn't come back with that XKCD cartoon.

Isn't it discriminatory to give an employee a pink-slip for being obese?

"the ability to steal gossipy emails from a not-so-great protected computer network [at Sony] is not the same thing as being able to carry out physical, 9/11-style attacks in 18,000 locations simultaneously.

So compromising a not-so-great protected computer network is not the same as compromising a not-so-great protected computer network?

Now all we need is for Anonymous to hack Sony again, replace Sony.com with The Pirate Bay, and put up a torrent of the movie. Then the lulz will be complete.

Nah, that's no good -- we can't have Sony actually do something good; it'd be too out of character.

No, what really needs to happen is that Anonymous should hack Sony a second time, replace the Sony.com website with a copy of The Pirate Bay, and release a torrent of the movie there.

But to not show it because some third-world dictator pitched a fit is a different thing. That truly offends me. We should be showing it precisely because it pisses him off.

Exactly. But since the theaters dun goofed and Sony compounded their incompetence with a double-helping of cowardice, we need to compensate. Clearly, what needs to happen now is for Anonymous to hack Sony again and release the movie to Bittorrent.