But the point is, and this is why I have such little respect for feminists and other who harp on the "you're just blaming the victim" trope: bad things happen, sometimes to good people. Why would someone put themselves in such a situation in the first place, knowing that you live in a dangerous world?

Sure a woman should be able to walk-around naked and have only wanted attention, but in this world, she's going to have some unwanted, possibly physical, attention as well.

Similarly with this guy's cousin: sure he should be able to wear all the gold he wants, but with the understanding that you might get mugged.

Ordering a hit on someone is still illegal, high-stakes or not.

He's facing life in pound-me-in-the-ass prison, and the "Government" caught him red-handed, so to speak. Any leverage he might have would be as an informant, which, if he's sane he'll agree to. But at least he might get out in 10 years.

I think that applies to men more-so than women. Even plain-looking women get a lot of messages on the internet, whereas the man has to be an underwear model to get the same kind of attention.

" If a woman is suitably impressed by a man's answers, she can make herself visible to him. "

It seems pretty unworkable to me. I suppose these women must be a mix of Angelina Jolie/Kate Upton and Jennifer Lawrence, to insist on being anonymous.

What I don't understand is why would a desirable man put up with all of these games just to view a woman's picture? If a man is attractive enough to get replies and messages from women on online dating sites in general (most men can easily send out hundreds of messages to get only a handful of replies), presumably he's attractive enough to go on other sites that don't make the man jump through these hoops, just to view the woman's picture, let alone go out on a date.
Which means that the men who are willing to put up with these kinds of hoops wouldn't be attractive to these women in the first place.

Madisonian Democracy is like that by design. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

It was doing what it was programmed to do! What do you think a human being would be to a robot anyway, if not other moving objects it has to keep out of a hole?

I never understood why any one would believe a "robot" would be beholden to any laws at all. I mean, the first application of truly autonomous machines would be in the military or private sectors (shipping, manufacturing, etc.). Of course military robots are going to kill people, and industrial robots are only going to keep people from dying in so far as its good for the bottom line. Do you really think the main concern of a manufacturer of a self-driving delivery truck will be keeping it from running -over some pedestrian?

The whole 3-laws thing is really just more of this geeky infatuation with technological Utopianism that finds no analogue in the real world, and which dismisses the inherit and counter-intuitive complexity involved in technological development.

Except if there's ever an accidental release, it's going to matter very little what their intentions were in creating the strain.

Until one day the Level 1 vial ends up in the incinerator, and the Level 4 vial ends up in the trash can, because, you know, shit happens; end result, millions dead.

What about scalable cloud instances that students pay for out of their tuition fees? That way if they want to use 32GB of ram and 12 cores for their hello world.c program, they can do so without affecting other users, but they have to pay?

IDK, a smartphone is the perfect spying machine.

Not only do people keep their whole lives on their phone, email, pictures, documents, passwords, social media accounts, but the same device is fully portable, has a GPS receiver, picks up and connects to open wifi APs, has a microphone, and accelerometer.

So you can find out what your target is up to, what he's planning, who he's talking to, where he is, and how fast he's moving, and by extension you get acces to his digital life.

Let's say a hypothetical security service, such as the Norway Safety Alliance (NoSaal), wanted to collect intelligence by putting in a backdoor, secret registers, or something in a CPU manufactured by another hypothetical entity called Ingal, how would they do it?

What intelligence gathering capability could you include in a CPU that would 1) not interfere in the normal functionality of the PC, or otherwise be detectable by the end-user?

I've read that an entity like nosaal could read the electrical hum of the CPU from a distance to determine what it's doing, or maybe grab crypto keys that way.

But could Ingal actually put code or some other way dope their CPUs without anyone knowing?

And more importantly if that's the case, what could we do about?

No, I think you're logic is fallacious. You're not looking at the functional power wielded by either party. Since the US is a democracy which holds private property, including the assets of a corporation, as the highest form of freedom, the government can't take that property without due process.

This process is handled through the court systems, which works with lawyers and Judges, and juries. The only lawyers that work for the government are criminal prosecutors, and they make less than corporate lawyers. So government lawyers would only be involved in a criminal case against a private corporation.

Therefore, in civil suites, corporations get get the best private attorneys money can buy. This includes lobbying the government to pass certain laws in their favor. And the corporations that pay for the right lawyers, can get away with anything they want and $$$.

So, in reality, in the American capitalist system of government, it's the government that's beholden to private interests, since they make more money.

If you can't see this, you've been watching too much Fox News.

Yeah, it starts to look really, really expensive, and thus less and less likely. Face it: colonizing space is the dream of the future, and it always will be.