The article's title is "Irreversible Damage Seen ..." and the very first line is "Humans risk causing irreversible and widespread damage ...". Well, which is it?

You can still wear glasses. You'll just be doing it ironically.

Because the pilot union doesn't want that data to be available for anyone to look at outside of an accident situation. Consider if your car had a black box, which it should. But in addition to collecting the data was transmitting that information continuously to the government for them to peruse any time they wanted. One already gets speeding tickets automatically when your fast lane toll pass records you traveling between toll plazas faster than you should be. Imagine if that was all the time.

Either way, I reckon they should be quick about it before the Alliance shows up.

It was actually solved back in 1983 by RFC 882.

I think the point is that if AI is involved then the machine is stringless. It doesn't sound like Hawking is saying don't do it. He says understand the risks beforehand. i.e. instead of after it is a problem. That sounds prudent, not fear mongering.

In addition, I don't see what transcendence has to do with AI. A human consciousness in a computer is still a human consciousness. It seems that we are mostly worried about AI because it lacks humanity. So in transcendence we are just dealing with more sophisticated humans against less sophisticated. This is a problem humanity has faced since the invention of tools. People being dominated by other people.

... any competent Unix admin could write a device driver. Now a days they barely know the grep.

Except when it is connected to a black hole.

The guy with the screwdriver who managed to open his un-openable window.

That would violate the first rule of robotics.

It could be kerberized telnet.

Most influential maybe in terms of politics, but technology? What was the technology he pioneered or employed? Copy? Not very influential in my opinion.

Again, we are talking about currency here. The three seashells were a method for ... well let's not get into that.

I completely agree. As a pilot I have to convert from local time to UTC to do any kind of planning. As an IT admin in a global corporation I have servers in lots of different time zones making scheduling jobs non-trivial. When choosing a datatype for my db columns do I choose a regular datetime or a datetime with timezone. Timezones, let alone DST, make things overly complicated. I am ready to get rid of them.

This article is tagged fracking. I do not think it means what you think it means. You know, this being slashdot and all.