blah blah blah....This whole line of thinking that you and Elon are engaging in is silly and pointless. You might as well worry about what kind of aliens we might encounter when we first travel to another galaxy. We are so far from solving intergalactic travel problems (or creating sentient AI) that any fretting and scaremongering is just pointless jibber-jabber. In the meantime, ignorant people (*cough*) who read this article might be unjustifiably worried about nothing, and start to develop a resistance to research in a field that promised to yield many very helpful and practical applications other than violent homicidal killbots.

rebutted.

Elon Musk is AI's Jenny McCarthy. Jenny is know as a celebrity who shoots off her mouth about the evils of vaccination, when she has no real intellectual or scientific authority to back her beliefs. Essentially she is an uniformed person using her tangential fame to spread her views.

What Elon Musk is doing here is virtually identical. I don't know of any real qualifications that he has that makes him in *any* way qualified to speak on the topic. (CS degree with work in AI? Philosophy degree with a focus on ethics?) Now this is a free country, where any rich asshole can (and will) talk at length about their opinions, but using your celebrity to espouse unfounded opinions is irresponsible.

Case in point: He cites a common trope in fiction, of an uncontrollable evil unleashed on the world which while it may be a parable, but it has no basis in reality. I could just as easily write a short story about summoning a devil, and ushering in a golden age of humanity using its supernatural abilities and cite that as a counter example.

This sort of bullshit opinion piece isn't going to help the real funding and research in the AI field which is still quite young. So, shut the fuck up Elon, and go back to building your RC cars.

Your observations are accurate, but your conclusion is completely wrong. All the elements you called out are things that would keep women from staying in a CS position for a long duration. Very little of what you listed would be something that a freshman entering CS would be exposed to or have any knowledge of. If your conclusion is correct, we should see a lot more of female CS grads that drop out of the talent pool in the first five years, and what we are actually seeing is they aren't even entering CS programs.

The problem starts much earlier. Girls start losing interest in STEM topics at a much younger age. There are no positive female role models to show young girls that they can excel at programming and there are plenty of females presented in the media as being interested in 'girl' stuff. Children are highly impressionable, and if they don't see an archetype they probably aren't going to gravitate towards it.

But why then would anybody with deep pockets ever invest in creating such an open infrastructure, if at any point their user base could declare them 'evil' and defect to a competitor? Nobody ever will trail blaze product development with the idea of creating a product that someone else can essentially appropriate.

The wealthy are already heavily taxed,

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAAAA.......Now get back on the troll bus, you tea party suck-up. The top 1% are paying perhaps 33% in taxes if they are stupid, and 10% if they are tax dodgers like Mitt Romney. Moreover, 33% of say, a million dollars a year still leaves enough to buy a whole fleet of Ferraris each year. If you are part of the dissolving middle class and making 40k, you are left with 32 thousand after the 20% taxes you pay, which isn't much to get by on. Thirty percent isn't heavily taxed by any yardstick.

and much of that tax money goes to the poor to remove the poor's incentive to work.

Drinking the much cool-aid, Tea bagger? I am just waiting for the requisite racist comment about lazy immigrant minorities are coming here to steal all our free benefits.

This is a typically leftist and obviously wrong viewpoint,

Lets play a game, which logical fallacies did you just commit? I am deliberately replying using an incendiary tone, because actual logic and reason doesn't seem to get through to 'your kind'.

production is made by human effort, and to the extent that you take a man's production or the money that results from his production, you are treating him as a slave.

Ah yes, the tired old taxes == slavery bullshit that is parroted by every self centered asshole who feels that their life would be so much better if they could just keep every one of their precious hard earned dollars, because they owe nothing to the society as a whole. Wake up and smell the bullshit, humans aren't very good at being solitary creatures, and we work really well together. As we build a society, the group as a whole benefits from building shared resources and infrastructure, and taxes is how it is accomplished. Tea baggers are a model of self reliant individualism, who only need a few thousand years of the collective work of society to prop up their selfish fantasies.

I really wish there was a small corner of the country we could put you idiots in so you could have your little tax free state and see what a horrible economic disaster that would turn out to be. Your brand of stupid deserves to see how 'free' you are in really are in a non-regulated, non-taxed Utopian pipe dream.

You are pointing out the lack of repeatable instructions, which is a good objection to cold fusion. I always had problems with the basic physics of could fusion that nobody has been able to explain away.

Pressure is equivalent to temperature, one begets the other. Since all cases of observable fusion requires high pressure, explain to me how you are going to get the pressure without the temperature? Are you going to crazy glue the atoms together?

I find the it curious that the extravagantly wealthy are so resistant to even modest social reform to improve the life of the poor. Where I a billionaire, I would take a page from history and consider that when there a lot of people with nothing to lose, I become a target. I would push for social reform for the simple reason that I am selfish, and I want to be surrounded by a large population that is well educated and wealthy.

In the end economic systems are just ways of distributing resources, and any system allows a small minority to aggregate everything is by definition a failure to distribute.

This is news that nerds might be interested in. If you have no use for it, clearly you aren't a nerd. Go elsewhere for your news. I am tired of people bitching about stories that don't pertain to them. If you don't find them useful, then don't read them.

This is important news. If China is stepping up it's state sponsored spying and digital theft, I want to know about it. It might be useful background info to know so that when the president decides to park a cruse missile on a building in China, you know some of the history that lead to this decision.

It is actually quite simple, about 200 TVs, all in one room, playing a differing episode. The marathon last the duration of the longest episode. BAM!

This campaign seems to me to pointless and idiotic. I saw the propaganda video that Greenpeace produced, with is heavy handed at best, and I am at a total loss over what they hoped to achieve. Ok, so they bullied a toy company into dropping a partnership with an oil company, but to what end? Now Lego models will never have oil company logos in the sticker sheets?

Greenpeace, you have truly won a landmark victory here....

This is a great idea, it makes the whole engine room smell *DELICIOUS*.

I like VB and VB.NET. When I see a coder willingly using it over another option, I instantly know they are an inept tool. Without it, I would have to speak with them possibly for several minutes in order to make this determination.

Well said. You also want to know if your vaccine causes a recipient to contract rapid onset brain cancer, or some other side effect that might be just as bad as the thing that you are trying to prevent/cure in the first place before you administer it to everyone. The Hippocratic oath contains a line about 'Do no harm'.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" But not on other peoples property, like, say, servers not on your property.

but while it isn't your server it is someone's server, and the same rule applies to their effects. An interesting law that might be passed is that "any party that is holding property or data on behalf of another, must require that a Warrant be served before yielding control of said property or data", forcing cable providers to stop piping every damn packet under the sun directly to the NSA.

Make the punishment death of the highest ranking company member to get them to really fear it.

I got a wife, does that count as a toy? In order to expand my toy collection, I'd have to become a Mormon....