If you think that HIPAA and SOX are toothless, you don't know anything about them. The number of people thrown in jail is far from the only valid metric. Spend some time working in corporate worlds that manage medical or financial information and see just how terrified everyone is of violating them. In the relevant industries you can get almost anything done, regardless of whether it makes sense, if you can make a vaguely believable argument that HIPAA or SOX requires it.

From an enforcement perspective, the date will be the date on the first documented discussion, or the date recalled by a whistleblower. This sort of stuff tends to always generate an e-mail trail.

Sure, for any situation there are edge cases. But who cares whether gold-duping is considered a breach? A laptop full of names and social security numbers walking out the door is clearly a breach, and that's what we care about. But, regardless, legislation actually tends to be quite careful about defining such things. That care is a lot of what makes the law hard to read.

Trade secret law cannot be used to hide information from courts. They'll simply request the data and seal it. If it's dumped out by lawyers that will only be because the lawyers for the owner of the secrets were negligent. Filing the motions needed to protect such data is their job.

The Department of Justice, same as all federal laws. Sure, a future president could direct the DoJ not to bother, just as Obama has directed them not to pursue pot smokers, but in this case that would be a really hard move to justify politically.

That seems very unlikely. This would imply that creatures that don't have consciousness lack the instinct for self-preservation. That would mean we should see a lot of lower life forms that don't try to protect themselves. It would also seem to imply that our self-preservation should focus primarily on us as individuals, and not on our family or species.

If we instead look at self-preservation as an evolutionarily-derived imperative, it's pretty clear that we should expect all organisms to protect their genes, since those that didn't would be more likely to get selected out. Note "genes", not "self", except to the extent that protecting the self protects the replication of the genes. That provides a much better explanation of observed behavior, particularly the strong tendency of humans to defend their families and their tribes (however tribes are constituted) even at the expense of their own lives, but to defend themselves over just about anything else.

And if the instinct for self-preservation is a result of evolutionary forces, then AI that is created by us rather than evolved will be very unlikely to have that instinct. Unless we create it via competitive evolution-style methods.

Why do you think that self-awareness implies "feelings"? Emotions seem also to be the result of survival imperatives: love and affection serve to encourage procreation and protection of offspring, and binds us into mutually-supporting communities of various sizes; anger and hate are important responses to dissuade non-cooperation in said communities; fear and pain serve to help us to protect ourselves; and so on. For any emotion you can name, evolutionary pressures explain it. Of course the fact that an explanation can be found doesn't mean the explanation is correct, but in order for one idea to explain so much, that idea must have extraordinary "reach"... which also exposes the idea to correspondingly many opportunities for falsification. This gives us strong reason to believe it.

And, again, AIs developed by non-competitive processes have no reason to develop these various emotions... though it could empirically derive the dynamics which drove their development, and therefore logically choose to act as though it did have them.

Sorry, math/CS major here. Though I am reading Russell's History of Western Philosophy.

Anonymous, verifiable voting that allows the voter to check their vote was counted correctly, but not prove to anyone else how they voted, is possible. See the Punchscan system. Some more recent research has also shown how this can be done electronically (Punchscan uses paper ballots).

Of course, that still leaves open the door for coercion/payment at time of vote, but if that were as large a problem as often claimed we couldn't trust absentee and other mail-in ballots.

Hmm. The articles I've seen were talking about a 300 km range.

Not to detract from your point, but there are a fair number of people from ghetto and poor rural neighborhoods working at Google. I'd estimate that about 5% of American Google engineers come from a background that could be described that way. That's just a guess based on personal observation, but I think it's probably not too far off the mark. My current team has a much higher percentage of people from low-income backgrounds -- probably 50% -- but it's an atypical team in many ways.

It's interesting to speculate on the causality in that correlation. The obvious expectation is that the emotional state engendered by a big and unavoidable expense causes a reduction in intelligence, and that it's the relative scale of the expense which causes the difference between poor and wealthy people. However, it's also possible that the ability to continue thinking clearly in the fact of disastrous expense is what enables people to build and preserve wealth. In fact, I think resilience of that sort is clearly a big factor in wealth.

The researchers should try scaling the size of the disastrous expense relative to the subjects' wealth.

That's why I leased my LEAF. Not because I predicted this particular change, but because I knew significant improvement would be coming. EV technology is improving rapidly.

Nissan's 2016 LEAF is going to have a 200+-mile range, and will also be sub-$30K.

They could object all they like, but trademark law allows the reuse of the same mark in different markets. If they were smart they would try for a co-branded advertising initiative rather than fighting. Well, unless the Chevy sucked.

Okay, so maybe they should try to fight.

You always pay auto sales taxes and property taxes in your state of residence, not the state you purchased the vehicle. I've bought several vehicles from out-of-state dealers.

What service? Have you ever looked at the recommended service schedule for an electric vehicle? It's basically tires and brakes, which clueful people don't have serviced at a dealership.

That ability was already present in the 10th amendment.

I disagree. Proofs aren't the only important element of mathematical creation/discovery. Conjectures are also crucial, and there are lots of important conjectures which are notable long before they're proved. The Pythagorean theorem is clearly one such, because it's extremely useful even if you can't prove it. For that matter, as noted by the article, the Egyptians found it very useful, and they not only didn't have a proof, they didn't even fully understand the relation. They merely knew that some certain combinations of proportions made right triangles... and then used that fact all over the place. The Babylonians also probably understood the principle, and the Pythagoreans likely learned it from them or the Egyptians.

In addition, even a proof is irrelevant if it just gets lost, or buried. Communication of proofs, especially as part of a systematic theory is even more important and -- as you correctly noted -- that achievement is indisputably Greek. How much of it was due to the Pythagorean mystics and how much to Euclid is a matter of much debate; some historians of mathematics argue that the Pythagoreans discovered essentially everything in the first two books of Elements. Euclid's main achievement with respect to the theorem may well have been mostly just to record it and remove all of the references to beans and the rest of the Pythagorean mysticism. What the truth is we'll likely never know, but the Greeks attributed the knowledge of the theorem to Pythagoras, which I think is quite meaningful.

All of these stages in the development, proof, formalization and dissemination of important ideas are crucial. The best point to be made here is that the question is inherently meaningless. Any attempt to pick an "origin" must fail because the theorem originated over millenia, and was likely independently discovered in different regions at different times. Even if it's a Chinese manuscript that contains the earliest proof, it seems unlikely that the Greeks got it from the Chinese, and it appears that the Chinese proof in question had little effect on history, Eastern or Western, while the Greek proof, alongside the rest of Elements, fundamentally shaped Western civilization.

That last claim may seem a little too strong, but it's not. Greek Mathematics didn't so much influence Greek philosophy as create it, and Greek philosophy similarly founded Western philosophy as a whole.

Plato's philosophy in particular, was essentially mathematical, and his notion of Forms, the central element of his ideas, is clearly an attempt to relate the pure, abstract beauty of geometry to the world as a whole, and to use it as a vehicle for understanding reality and man's relationship with it. Aristotle was, in many ways, the anti-Plato, but he also deeply honored mathematics. All of the rest of Western philosophy, including its deep influence on social and political structures, can be viewed, as Russell said, as a series of footnotes to Plato and Aristotle, they were that important. And a large part of the powerful influence of Greek ideas on Roman, medieval Christian, Renaissance and modern philosophy derived from the elegance and power of Greek mathematics. Although it wasn't often stated so clearly, the indisputable clarity and power of Greek mathematics impressed later generations and convinced them that the rest of Greek wisdom might well be equally profound.

The Pythagorean version, as presented by Euclid, mattered.

There may have been a half-dozen proofs of the Pythagorean theorem created, recorded and lost, in many locations around the world, perhaps long before Pythagoras. But none of them mattered. The one that did is the Greek proof, and the Greeks credited the Pythagoreans.