Hmmm. I'm not calling you a hypocrite (at least, not yet) but you'd be up in fucking arms if somebody violated the GPL, right? But not Apple's ToS -- that doesn't apply to criminals. It's just words on a page that a criminal has to scroll past to get to the "I Accept" button so that he can start cracking the device that he just agreed not to crack. You make some (weak) rationalizations for why it's ok for criminals to break the ToS, but you just highlight the real problem. Here's a clue: You can't maintain one ethical standard for hackers and a different standard for everybody else, dude. Not if you want to be taken seriously, anyway.

Simple rules that produce fascinatingly complex behaviors, to me, is more geeky than complex rules that produce fascinatingly complex behaviors. YMMV.

Boston Dynamics *is* a defense contractor, so by extension Google is one too, now. I am going to try to remain optimistic about the positive effects that Google can have on human advancement. Science and engineering seem to leap forward much farther and much, much faster when they are deployed in the service of armed conflict. Companies like Planetary Resources, Armadillo Aerospace, and SpaceX are going to have to be able to defend their extra-terrestial ventures, and NASA has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that robotic missions in space are far more cost-effective in terms of results than manned missions. The minute Planetary Resources starts exploiting the asteroid belt, they are likely going to need a way to defend against claim jumpers, and I'm hoping that by hoovering up all these robotic companies,Google is positioning itself to defend these companies in their (hopefully) peaceful occupation and exploitation of the solar system.

Vaidman, is that you?

This. So what if some company certifies the code as non-toxic? For every legit code certifying company that goes online, there will be a hundred phishing sites popping up over-night to take advantage of it. The problem is not toxic code --- the problem is the toxic levels of foolishness and naivete of the vast majority of users on the net.

Hmmm. Excellent post. But I'm having trouble reconciling these two assertions.

From the point of view of a warlord, superior military force confers the right to murder and rape. Indeed, it confers any right the warlord chooses to assert. Ditto your hungry lion -- his right to eat me stops at the muzzle of my rifle.

It would seem to me that you need something more than just the other party recognizing that you have rights. You have to be able to successfully assert those rights. In French, it is "preter main forte" or "show the strong hand." In English, it would be "might makes right."

And I always cringe when somebody makes an assertion that is counter to my experience and to my intuition. I think about death fairly often, dude, and so do *a lot* of other people. I like to participate in activities -- skydiving, motorcycle racing, and stunt flying, just to enumerate what I did this weekend -- which could reasonably be expected to be fatal if not done correctly or well. I like to think that my parachute is going to open *every time* I exit the aircraft, that there is no debris that found its way onto the track at the apex of a blind turn that is going to cause me to high-side at a buck fifty, or that I'm not going to pull so many negative g's that I red-out and auger in, so that my death remains firmly in the hypothetical. I want "if" and not "when" to remain the correct way for me to phrase thoughts about dying for many, many, decades to come. I will happily concede your point that dying is inevitable, but for some of us, getting close to death is pleasurable, and we would like to dance with it for as long as humanly possible. Yeah, we are probably not going to die of "natural causes" but we will be part of the tiny fraction of humanity that gets to at least have some say in the time and manner of our demise. Unlike Scott Adams' father, whose time and manner of death was dictated by the fiscal self-interest of the medical facility that was prolonging his life for financial gain.

"No heroic methods." That is the magic incantation that let's you die with dignity. At least in jurisdictions that allow advance healthcare directives, anyway. Run, do not walk, to your nearest legal professional and execute an advance healthcare directive, if you want to be able to die with dignity. If you don't live in a jurisdiction that allows advance healthcare directives, move to one that does. Period. BTW, morphine takes the edge off -- if you specifically allow the use of palliative measures in your directive, you can die with dignity and do it painlessly as well.

Hmmm. Bad medical decisions that *you* make stop when your heart stops. The alternative is for some other person to make medical decisions on your behalf. This other person is immune to the consequences of a badly grokked medical decision, which leaves him free to continue dispensing bad advice. How is this not a bad thing, as well? Is there a middle course between these two choices?

Don't be naive. Do you really think that some clever sociopath is *not* going to figure out how to exploit his/her augmented ability to "communicate and/or navigate" to enhance their ability to fuck with people? C'mon. By your line of reasoning, a gun just augments our ability to throw things. Why is there no downside to throwing things harder and with more accuracy? I suppose you live in a (fantasy) land where armed robberies never happen?

Well, okay. Changing my words to enable a (feeble) reductio ad absurdum, and then asserting I represent some "corner" of your carefully arranged delusion regarding Apple pretty much puts you firmly in fanboi status. For the record, I was bashing people who buy Apple products, not Apple products. Steve Jobs is lauded as a marketing genius -- he figured out how to sell smart machines to well-heeled idiots. A high school buddy of mine, Steve Goldberg, was the product line VP of the only real failure Apple ever launched, the Lisa. His analysis: Apple tried to push a system on its specs and the people who were supposed to buy them said, "Huh?" and immediately lost interest. Looking at the demographics of Apple's target markets, it's pretty easy to deduce Jobs' genius -- market the computer as if it was part of some desirable life style, like it was just another status symbol like a high-end car, or a high-end watch, or a high-end girlfriend, and you will have people lining up for days to buy them. People buy Apple products because Jobs managed to create the illusion that owning one is actually desirable and (like an expensive watch or high-maintenance girlfriend) difficult to replace. Dell, HP, Digital, Compaq -- they could only dream of the lock-in achieved by Jobs, but their target demographic was very much different. That demographic pretty much cared about things like performance per dollar, ROI, and scalability, and not so much about how pretty it was or how dumbed-down the interface was. A much tougher demographic to please than Apple's. There's genius in finding the barrel with all the fish in it to shoot, and that's exactly what Jobs did.

A morality play, indeed, and a book-long meditation on duty. RAH wrote ST largely because he was paranoid about communism. He felt betrayed by Eisenhower's parting shot at the military-industrial complex that, from RAH's POV, was our last bulwark against the Sovs. (Which is probably why he threw his support to Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 -- like Goldwater, he felt a nuclear war with the USSR was winnable and we might as well get it over with while we still had a slight advantage in nukes.) Check out his speech at the 1960 WorldCon, where ST won the Hugo, if you are in any measure unsure on this point. As far as the movie goes, Heinlein was *never* interested in presenting a balanced view of anything -- there is absolutely nothing thematically ambiguous in any of his corpus. I think this is why Verhoeven chose ST -- he was looking for a vehicle for an anti-fascist satire, and the crypto-fascist utopian society depicted in ST was *perfect*. And for what it is worth, ST was aimed at teenagers, not adults -- which is probably why so many adults are confused by it. Interestingly enough, Putnam actually refused to market it as a juvenile.

What is amusing is that the Nexus 5 costs half what the iPhone does. Apple's target demographic has always been people with more money than brains. Thwok....ball's in your court.

Actually, a pair of undergraduate classes in abstract and linear algebra thirty years ago is all that I'm going on, and it seems adequate to get the gist of the Wikipedia article. Admittedly, I had to look up Bergmann-Komarr (I'm not a physicist; the dynamical evolution of Einstein's differential equations describing GR have only a limited, abstract appeal to me!) , but abstract groups in general, along with commutations, diffeomorphisms, and Hamiltonians were covered at the freshman level. So months, not years. :)

What about cases where the patient is under a doctor's care as the result of publicly visible, *voluntary* behaviors? I can't really feel solidarity with some overweight person who smokes complaining that her medical information is being disclosed to some third party. Unhealthy behavior should be discouraged, and a good way to do that is to punish these people in the pocket book by maintaining a database of people with unhealthy behaviors so that insurance companies can shift the risk of those unhealthy behaviors unto the shoulders of those that deserve it. Those of us who try to stay healthy should not have to bear the financial burden when some chain-smoking junk food junkie's coronary arteries eventually seize up and her lungs shut down. My insurance company created a tiered system where they charge smokers much higher premiums than they charge for non-smokers. Ditto for BMI. People who refuse to maintain reasonable height-weight proportionality should have to pay more for health insurance than the rest of us. I have to get swabbed and weighed once a month to prove I'm not smoking anymore and am maintaining a healthy weight, but it saves me over $2000 per year in premiums.

More to the point, I think I have the absolute right to determine *for myself* that the people I put trust in (teachers, bus drivers, cops, firemen, bankers, janitors, housekeepers) are not abusing the medications that have been prescribed to them -- a publicly accessible medical database would go a long way in making that possible.