Maybe the press reports on the people who are more famous (who tend not to be AI researchers). But Stuart Russell, UC Berkeley AI researcher and co-author of the best selling AI textbook of the last two decades, has concerns about the matter, too.

In any case, when you're close to the project you can tend to lose sight of the big picture. Probably few scientists at Los Alamos thought of the long-term consequences of the weapons they were designing.

Another thing to keep in mind is that hardly anyone believes that we're close to creating human-level artificial intelligence, particularly AI researchers.

There aren't four billion public IP addresses in use. The problem is that in the early days they handed out class A subnets like they were candy, wasting millions of IP addresses with every one. Most computers don't have their own public IP address -- they have a private IP address and access the Internet via NAT.

Not for me. I just finished downloading GCC 5.1 and Visual Studio 2014!

But New Horizons was trying to avoid collisions, not create them!

They did name Charon, Doofus.

So once she tried to break a satellite and she fixed it by mistake? Oops!

I've written Python for years and have never used any special editor. The one problem I've had is when commenting out several lines of Python code -- you need to add a # character to the beginning of each line. It's a minor inconvenience. But Python could use a good multiline comment mechanism. I had the same problem in Perl, which uses curly braces, so it isn't really an indentation issue at all.

Uh... they're the same thing.

Even at the speed of light we can expand our territory at most proportional to the cube of the amount of time we have to spread. If the birth rate exceeds the death rate, the population growth will be exponential. No matter what technology we have, we won't be able to accommodate a geometrically growing population within a volume that grows no faster than a cubic formula. Here come the death panels. Thanks, Obama!

We wouldn't have the confusion over octatonic if music started counting at zero. If you play a note and the next note up (on a heptatonic scale such as C major), it's counted as two (a second interval), because we started counting at one with the original note. By the time we get to the same note but at a higher pitch (do re mi fa so la ti do), we've counted to eight even though it's seven notes away. I avoided this mistake by counting A, B, C, D, E, F, G, seven notes, heptatonic. I suppose most people who can play an instrument didn't think it through before answering.

Well most music these days is heptatonic. Do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti is seven notes. This includes the traditional major and minor scales. I suppose the vast majority of Slashdotters (or at least the ones voting here) don't play music. Time for some Doobie Brothers!

The US swamped (whatever that means) with infections in two weeks and "the majority of humanity being wiped out... taking out huge chunks of our population" are two entirely different events!

Huh. I don't remember seeing those. Maybe those comments were modded down, as they should have been.

Not "when", "how much". They are melting now and have been for decades. Yes, Antarctica also.

You're seriously underestimating the connectedness and security of cars. They're already networked and hackable remotely.