One possibility I have not seen discussed is whether the Intelligence Community is actually directing this whole Snowden-NSA revelation thing. Spying has much in common with effective magic: the art of directing attention elsewhere is crucial. What are we NOT paying attention to because of these revelations? Why do we believe the content of any particular Snowden release? As many have pointed out, why should believe anything the NSA says publicly? Easy answer, you shouldn't.

Is this why my dog howls when he drives my McClaren in the rain? I always thought he howled for the sheer fun of it!

A not-unrelated problem is the creation of individual entries for living "non-famous" people. Every time I turn around I find another puff bio on someone that looks like a rip-mix-burn from their LinkedIn page. Some of these are for people I know personally, and it leaves me shaking my head. I suppose I could edit the prose to bring supposed accomplishments down to size, etc., and that might be the right thing to do, but who wants to start a war?

The are many government agencies that fund basic and applied research. NSF is the flagship, but the others are no small potatoes either. I am precisely in the situation you describe, along with many colleagues. Even if they resolve everything tomorrow and play nicely together from now on, the impact on on-going research is huge. People don't realize the importance of federal support for scientific research.

Majority rule is a bedrock principle of democracy. Propose, discuss, debate, negotiate, and eventually vote. A democracy only "works" if people agree to abide by the will of the majority.

I feel the same way and I'm perilously close to a furlough situation myself. We are rapidly getting to a point where the actions of the RWNJ's and their oligarch sponsors will be tantamount to sedition. Some argue we've already passed that threshold. Many GOP members of Congress have vowed to "dismantle" the Federal government. They are the new Confederacy, and the actions they are taking with this GOP shutdown are entirely consistent with their words and previous deeds — in fact, they have no incentive to stop because it is what they have promised to do. They are gleeful to see the government fail, and don't care if that means our Democracy fails too. They certainly don't believe in majority rule, and that is a bedrock principle of democracy. I don't know how to stop them, or what legal methods are available to the President or other elected officials. I fear the worst. Good luck to you. I'll see you at the barricades.

My colleagues and I work at a non-profit research institute affiliated with the State of Florida university system. We just do research. No students, no classes. It's all soft money and the vast majority of our funding, maybe 90%, comes as contracts and grants from Federal agencies. There are two huge problems that are hurting us right now. First, if the government cannot make the incremental payments to us on existing grants or contracts, then we don't get paid. That is happening right now. Not only are we not hiring, people are taking salary cuts or going to half time or worse. The payments from the government come at different times throughout the year and are different depending on the grant and the agency, so it is not a issue of the lights suddenly getting turned off. But the impact, however incremental, is very real and it is NOW. I have enough cash on hand from my largest existing grant to keep myself and my group going through December maybe. That brings up the second problem, which is the whole proposal process. Continuity in our research projects requires that we are always in "proposal mode." Grants and contracts are for limited amounts for limited duration. It can take a long time and a lot of effort to get funded since the level of competition is very high. (Competition is ok - I welcome being pushed to do my best.) Right now I have proposals and white papers and discussions with program managers that are all in limbo - and the clock is ticking. Even if they are approved, it will take many months, maybe half a year, to receive the first increment of funding. What's more, the tendency of program managers when they are uncertain about the funds available to their program is to be VERY conservative about making new commitments, regardless of proposal quality. They are also really p.o. 'ed about being furloughed and this makes them surly. In such circumstances, it is difficult to talk about research continuity.

Constructing a deontological ethical model that works in all situations has proved extraordinarily difficult. Indeed, if Asimov's rules had worked very well then the stories would have been incredibly boring! You are probably right about AI in the near term, but that is uninteresting to me. I'd rather work on the problems coming down the road in 10 or 20 years and have some some answers when the question really comes up about how to assure ethical behavior in robots. That's not as far uptime as you may think.

Indeed. "Mental" modeling — maintaining and manipulating an abstract computational representation of beliefs — is at the heart of strong AI. Such models include, for example, beliefs about the world, beliefs about other agents (including what they believe about you), and beliefs about self. This is where computer scientists, linguists, cognitive psychologists and others all have some common ground and interdisciplinary research can be very productive. Learning is the ability to make systematic normative changes to mental models as a consequence of reasoning about experience; normative in the sense that such changes improve the ability to reason with and about the model in ways that maximize some value (e.g., ability to make accurate predictions). Experience involves reasoning about both the outside "real" world and the internal reasoning process itself. This is where your comment about "the next level" is germane. Those of us working on this topic call reasoning at multiple levels "meta-cognition", that is, thinking about thinking. There is no theoretical reason to limit meta-cognition to any specific number of levels. Current research on meta-cognition typically considers the level (or two) "above" (abstracted from) experiential belief modeling and action planning. This is also about the right level of abstraction for ethical reasoning ("would", "could", "should", "may" and their opposites). I've observed that most researchers assume a utilitarian ethics, which makes some sense if maximizing performance is the overall imperative. However, I count myself among those who believe that future AIs must be able to reason about moral imperatives if we expect them to behave themselves appropriately as we live and work alongside each other. Ronald Arkin at Ga.Tech is a leader in this area and he is a pioneer on the topic of computational methods to help ensure ethical behavior by potentially lethal robots.

This is correct. They can detain you during the conduct of an investigation. It is also useless to ask, if you are arrested, what the charge is. The copy has no obligation to tell you and may not know. All the police need is a reasonably suspicion that a crime has occurred/is occurring. The Prosecutor is the one that charges you.

Deputy Dan is your friend! (google it)

Agreed, MOD THIS UP. It is the only correct response that preserves your rights and gives you the best chance of coming out the other end of the ordeal intact.

Truth. I know this first hand and also from lawyer friends. First thing to remember is that the police are not obligated to tell the truth. In fact, they are trained in various methods of deception and manipulation to get you to talk. [p] Second thing to remember is this: cops are going to do what they're going to do. You can object to a search (and you should, always), and not say anything (never talk unless your attorney says it is ok), and the police will still search, they will still arrest you. That's their job, and the prosecutor and judge sort things out, if you are lucky. Asserting your rights won't intimidate the police, or probably stop them, but it may help you later. Oh, you can also sue them afterwards, but do you really have the $$, Time, and do you really want to become a "person of interest"? Good luck!

In November 2012, President Obama signed Presidential Policy Directive 20 which lays out the specific "rules of engagement" regarding cyber- defense and offense. http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/policy-and-strategy/267879-report-obama-authorizes-new-cyber-warfare-directive We in new territory here so it remains to be seen whether the policy, in practice, complies with binding international treaties on the "rules of war". If the question is whether the US government, or any government, has the right to respond to a cyber attack with deadly force, I think you have to refer to the treaties with specific cases in mind for the legal perspective. Having the "right" from a moral perspective is something completely different.

I have direct experience with submitting a number of my technical reports to the NASA Technical Report Archive, a requirement for reports of research sponsored by NASA. The submittal process included a third party assessment of the applicable technology export control laws. In my case, this was performed by our Office of General Counsel. However, I was also asked whether controlled information was included in the report or not under the assumption that it was my responsibility to know the rules. While I believe I was personally scrupulous, I will wager that many report authors saw the whole process as a poor use of their time and were not so careful. So I believe the archive probably does contain export controlled information. On the other hand, the really interesting work gets published in the relevant journals and professional society conferences, and there is no way to control that except through the classification process.