In the game, you control a fleet of starships as you journey through the galaxy to complete missions, protect planets and their inhabitants, and build a planetary federation.

That seems to be targeting only a subset of consumers(*).

What if I want to build a totalitarian empire? Subjugate and control planets, turn their productive output towards my ever-growing fleet of interplanetary destroyers? Drive my enemies before me, hear the lamentation of their women, yada yada.

Sort of like Ronan from Guardians of the galaxy?

Not all of us want to have good, clean, wholesome fun, 'ya know...

(*) I'm reminded of the children's holodeck game from Star Trek, where the "correct solution" was to broker a truce between the tree person and the water person. Made me want to puke.

As much as I like what's happening recently, I'm really troubled by the *way* it's happening.

Eric holder just gutted civil forfeiture. That's a good move, should have been repealed 30 years ago, I'm all for it.

Has anyone noticed that a single man who was not elected gets to pick-and-choose which laws he will enforce? Here's a man in the executive branch who decided unilaterally to dump an entire law. The legislature can pass or repeal laws, that's their job. The supreme court can bless or condemn laws, that's their job.

But the executive branch?

Can they just unilaterally pick and choose which laws(*) they will prosecute?

Similarly, Obama told Holder awhile back not to pursue "Defense of marriage" cases. That's fine too, the law should never have been passed and should have been dumped long ago.

Has anyone noticed that this was done by the executive branch all on its own, with no oversight?

I'm troubled by this because everyone accepts the outcome because the results are so good. The ends justify the means in these cases, it's so good to get these laws off the books that we don't notice *how* they got repealed.

To be specific, in the future we will see the executive branch gutting laws more often, and if people complain they will point to these good results and say "it's OK for us to do this now because no one complained when we did it previously".

This is a troubling turn of events.

(*) I'm making a distinction between pick-and-choose laws, as opposed to pick-and-choose cases, the latter of which is within the discretion of the prosecutor. Yes, there's line, and yes it can be abused.

I've been following the trial with some interest.

The Free Keene group went down (from NH to NYC) to protest the trial and hand out Jury Nullification pamphlets, for which they were threatened by the judge.

The government is using threats to prevent jury nullification information from getting to potential jurors. Doesn't seem fair to me, but then the constitution is probably written in some strange dialect of English where the meaning is something different to a lawyer.

It occurs to me that this is one way we can have an effect on government in addition to the vote. By informing people about jury nullification, we can encourage juries to ignore unfair laws.

Thank you - well put and insightful.

Five! Five laws of robotics...

I'll come in again.

I'm an AI researcher working on strong AI.

I've wrestled with the morality of making a breakthrough that causes all sorts of mayhem - from changing the economics of getting paid to do work, to making humans superfluous, to starting a terminator-like utopian future. (Or was that distopian? I can never keep those words straight.)

I've asked on this very forum whether a researcher should forego publishing, with the example case of Leo Szilard, who might have put off development of the atomic bomb for decades (possibly indefinitely) by not publishing.

The results were a little surprising. "Yeah - go for it!" 'kinda sums up both the position and strength of the response.

So now I basically don't care about the morality - I mean, why should I when to all appearances no one else does? Will the military worry about the humanity of applying AI to weapons? Will the lawmakers worry about the humanity of applying AI to business? Will the nameless bureaucrats worry about humanity when making regulations about AI?

I'm working towards the downfall and subjugation of the human race, and loving it. Sort of like a James Bond villain, or at least working for one.

If you (meaning: the "royal you", or humanity) don't care enough about yourselves to practice morality, then why should I?

(If anyone has a counter to this position, I'd love to hear it. Note that "just stating your position" is not a counter argument.)

Yeah, and the Democratic president waited until *after* the Democrats lost power in the legislature before proposing it.

It almost seems - dare I say it - that both parties are against the needs of the people!

I was wondering if any malware writers would like to help.

Lots of malware will scan the infected computer for E-mail addresses so that it can send out spam.

Suppose someone wrote a virus which scans infected computers for E-mail addresses with common muslim first names, and sends a randomly selected offensive Mohammed cartoon to that person. One of 10 cartoons that comes bundled with the malware, for instance. (Google has many to choose from.)

This would have the simultaneous effect of trolling (getting others emotionally upset), swatting (getting others to do precipitous actions), ferreting out the extremists, and getting the Islamics more used to satire and criticism.

Of the proposals so far, I think this has the potential to really change the situation. It's like getting allergy injections to teach the body to tolerate irritation.

Any malware writers out there?

Check out this image.

That's for the US, but it echoes the situation in industrialized countries, which is that production of goods and services rises over time. The value of money is the amount in circulation divided by the amount of goods and services produced.

If the money pool were fixed (discounting replacements as bills wear out &c), fixed money supply divided by greater production would make your money more and more valuable over time - year over year the same amount of money is available to purchase ever-larger production.

Governments realize this and put more money into circulation by printing and then spending it. In fact, each year they put proportionally slightly more money into circulation to maintain a positive inflation rate - year over year the same amount of money will purchase slightly less of the same production goods.

Thus, governments have to tweak the amount they print in order to keep up with production and have a slightly positive inflation value. Letting things get too far out of hand would result in runaway [positive] inflation, or negative inflation [generally considered a bad thing].

If there's more money in the pool due to crypto-currency, government regulators would simply adjust their printing output to compensate.

Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you!

Great response!

The panel posted a quick summary of their results and findings.

Isn't global warming [from greenhouse gases] an exponential system? When the planet gets warmer, doesn't that release more greenhouse gases from clathrates under the ocean, causing more warming?

Isn't offsetting an exponential response by using another exponential curve difficult? I thought that was what made nuclear reactor regulation difficult.

Any control theorists in the audience who can shed light on this?

Jesus was not a murderer, a pedophile, a liar or a rapist(*). What's your point?

Also, where in the bible can you find all of those attributes in one individual?

(*) Neither was Joseph Smith, Buddha, or Zoroaster. Historical accounts generally use the terms "pious", "noble", and "compassionate" to describe religious leaders. Of those three words ("pious", "noble", and "compassionate"), which most accurately describes Mohammed?

How about a duty to intelligence?

Look to the future and consider two outcomes: where media self-censors based on threats of attack from extremists, or where media blatantly continues in the face of such threats.

The decisions made today will bring about one of these scenarios. It's a simple case of "payback horizon": how far ahead do you plan for.

If you self-censor right now, it will protect your people and your business near-term, but over time you will find yourself increasingly subject to threats and attacks, you will be self-censoring more and more.

One of the definitions of intelligence is the ability to put off short-term rewards for a larger long-term gain. Being frightened into submission has near-term benefits, but those policies will not end well.

See Bullying.

I see you've read the article, so can you explain something for me?

I'm told that photons gain energy when falling into a black hole. Suppose you have two entangled photons and one goes off and gets captured by a black hole.

Based on the article, would there be any noticeable effect on the other entangled photon?

We can't make any single measurement which contains 37 digits and have each of those digits accurate, that's true.

Just out of curiosity, how do radios work? I'm told that the measurement units for an antenna nanovolts per meter. Does the receiver make a 12-volt measurement to 8 digits of accuracy in order to recover the signal?

Or does the receiver amplify the signal so that it's large enough to be readily detected?

And is there no way to make multiple measurements so that the effect adds up? Can we do a million measurements added together to make the signal a million times stronger?