When you sell weapons to civilians you expect nothing of the sort. Civilians using weapons to do something normal people would consider evil is exceeding rare. In the US for instance there are millions of guns in civilian hands but civilians kill people with guns very very rarely. Gun death statistics for a year are well below automobile death statistics in a day and almost in almost all cases the shooter is an agent of government (usually police domestically).

They expected the digital rebel good guys to use them against the guys do the gathering, warranting, lobbying, etc the real bad guys. And spammers and malware people of course but that's just collateral damage.

That's not torture it's just good fun.

What on earth makes you think that Netragard and the same people's instant new exploit selling system to replace it after this announcement Intertrode aren't shell organizations for the western regimes?

Consider this, there would be no democracy in the world if the powers at be did not have to fear the mob which is why we have a 2nd amendment. Now that every nation in the world including ours has disarmed the people to the point the powers-at-be no longer have to fear the mob... what happens to democracy and do you honestly think it hasn't happened already?

They are probably actually working as a front for the western repressive regimes.

There are different flavors of troubling. Many of the hacking groups out there are effectively digital rebel warriors trying to fight oppressive regimes like Egypt and the US. Their actions may be criminal and in some cases immoral but they are fighting greater evils perpetrated by the powers we've failed to resist by conventional means. That is civil disobedience. Perhaps they considered that getting tools to these elements was worth the risk of simple profiteers getting some exploits but did not consider that the regimes themselves might be getting the exploits.

Yes but rebel exploit sellers want rebels to buy exploits to use against oppressive regimes like... essentially everyone who used Hacking Team. Pretty much everyone on their client list qualifies as an oppressive regime. Including the government in control of the servers I'm posting on.

"tens of times what, say, the President of the US earns"

That's probably still true but lets not pretend that government salary represents any notable portion of what the president, presidential appointees, or congress critters make. Not even when you only consider the bribes in the form of high salaries and benefits without actual duties that are paid on leaving office and offered while in office for favors.

The DoD is wasting hundreds of billions and $45m is the noteworthy issue?

Public transit runs on it's own slow schedule to locations that are neither where I am nor where I'm going. I live in a large city and it would still take me over an hour just to walk to a transit station and then I might have to wait 45min for the train I need. If I need more than one connection each might have up to 45min delay and at the end I still might have an hour walk to get to my destination. If you miss one, tack another 45min for it to come around again. Plus, I wouldn't be able to transport more than I can reasonably carry.

I had to use public transport for a time in Albuquerque which has a better public transit system than most. I'd never do it again voluntarily. At least not as a primary form of transportation. I do drive to the closest metro station sometimes when going to a large sporting event or concert downtown to avoid traffic and parking.

Malware disrupts your machine or does something negative. Just because it wasn't invited doesn't make it malware. From the sound of it everything this does is positive.

There is quite a bit that is legitimate in criticizing the new trend of 400 layers of abstraction each adding their overhead for the sake of rapid development. Those old development models produced more stable and dramatically more efficient software. Nobody really denies that, they just argue that developer time is more valuable than computer time and improvements in hardware make up the difference in most use cases.

But what happens when hardware stops getting dramatically faster? We'll have to go back to making things more efficient to see gains and suddenly you'll have a great deal of respect for dad who could make a word processor with 90% of the functionality of word that weighed in under 1mb and ran smoothly on as little ram with a processor your smart phone could emulate 200 times over. There is a reason where the browser makers, the home of high level abstraction and high level languages, are finally all actually in agreement and collaborating and the thing that brings them together is making c/c++ compile to a uniform standard that all browsers can execute at near native performance.

The circle comes around, it always comes around.

"And the methods used have nothing to do with true cognition."

That's a bold assumption. The methods used for voice and image recognition certainly have a great deal to do with true cognition. It's certainly feasible that Google is playing with a true learning system and trying to teach and grow it rather than just throwing together another chat bot with scripts and trickery. Which isn't to say they've succeeded but just because none of the engines built to date have attained adult human level intelligence doesn't mean none of them are built on simple algorithms which could ultimately manifest complex behavior and awareness just like our own brains.

Knowing exactly how our own cognition manifests isn't a prerequisite to true cognition, a digital system could be completely unique in how it works and achieve true cognition.

"A lot of people will buy a car on a 3-5 year loan /w some kind of warranty and trade it in as soon as they pay it off before it starts to go to hell."

Except batteries aren't like motors. They don't suddenly go to hell 5yrs down the line, they gradually lose capacity. So when you go to trade in that car 5 years down the line and the easily measurable battery capacity is only 20% the trade in value is going to be pretty minimal.