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.

the internet is a series of tubes after all. And data packets are gumballs.

I think it has to do with the fact that the plastic trash melts either by campfires or lava and can't be carried by the wind or water, so it gets buried, thus no sunlight. This buried melted plastic gets fused with sand and coral to form a stone.

This doesn't make sense to me. On the one hand, a big reason for automation is that you can easily replace a broken component with another one. If an army of technicians were required to fix a robot, who would buy it? On the other, a large part of creative destruction in the modern era is that 1 new job replaces many old ones, unlike the example of the car replacing the horse an buggy. Innovation no longer replaces specialized craft-labor (required for building a buggy) with huge factories full of workers (required to assemble a car), it replaces that factory with very few specialized knowledge workers an loads of automation.

"With the current state of robots, you're talking about taking away the most dull, dangerous, and dirty jobs out there"

But we're not talking about the current state of robots, like robotic arms painting a car, with a highly specific set of pre-programmed instructions
The future of robotics alluded to here ranges from automated package delivery, robotic supermarket clerks and checkout counters, to automated fast food service.
There's no technical reason at the moment why something like an automated drive-through burger place couldn't exist

But really though, future advances in AI could even put most lawyers out of work, what with autonomous systems which fill out contracts, deeds, divorce papers, etc, jobs that are already being outsourced.

So it's pretty naive to think that only dangerous blue-collar work would be subject to robotics and automation. And it's not unreasonable to surmise that unemployment in 50 years might be 20%, a society where the wealthy build and own robots and their labor, while everyone else picks-up the scraps.

It can just be a metal tube. Aluminum would be terrible for instance, and it would have to be rifled, to give the bullet spin so it doesn't tumble through the air.

"McCain picked Palin who is probably smarter than Biden"

What evidence are basing this on? It took Palin 5 years and 3 different colleges to earn a BA (in communications). The totality of Palin's government experience before she became governor was 10 years as city councilor and mayor of a town of 5,000 in Alaska. Biden, in addition to a law degree, was a well-respected U.S. Senator for 40 years. He served on the Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees.
Moreover, since losing, Palin has made some pretty questionable decisions regarding her public persona. Nobody takes her seriously as a political contender any more.

"the right policies that could help put Computer Science — which is undeniably the most important 21st Century skill..."

Isn't this a bit like saying: in the 1950's undeniably the most important skill was operating and repairing TVs and video transmission equipment.

Just because a technology's new, doesn't make it the most important. If anything skills making pharmaceuticals and treatments for human diseases is a much more important skill, let alone robotics and engineering.

There's only so much you can do with a compiler, OS, or a database after all.