Morgauxo,

The important point is that nobody has made even the most rudimentary artificial intelligence, let alone one with feelings and emotions. The Softbanc blatherer is just using the latest trick to get noticed: spew dire warnings about the risks of AI. AI, which doesn't exist and isn't even remotely on the horizon, even after lots of naturally intelligent people have devoted their lives to achieving.

Personally, I think it's demons from the pit of hell we'd better watch out for. We have more evidence for them than we do for AI.

So it's clear, then: the new fast route to instant fame is for ignorant pundits to make lofty proclamations of caution regarding artificial intelligence. You can't be faulted, because it's better to be safe than sorry, right?

I call bogus on the whole AI skyfaller tactic. The only part of AI that is real is the A. To date, absolutely no intelligence of any kind has been artificially produced. And to beat the duped to the punch: No, self-driving cars are not AI. Neither are baseball umpiring systems, chess computers, drone flock controllers, or medical diagnostic aids named Watson. Not even machines passing the so-called "Turing Test" are AI. (Easy disproof: If a computer that can convince a human that the computer is a human means the computer is as intelligent as a human, then is a computer that can convince a dog that the computer is a dog as smart as a dog?)

I'd be more justified holding forth on the importance of designing freeways to support hovercar traffic. That's actually a technology on the measurable horizon. AI is, well, a fantasy. We are no closer to AI today than we were when the field of AI research was founded at a conference on the campus of Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956. In fact, after some fifty years of no progress achieving the original definition of AI, the AI research community decided it had better reframe its terms. So it renamed actual artificial intelligence (which nobody has achieved) "strong AI" and everything accomplished to date "weak AI".

So fear not. The sky isn't falling. There is no AI.

It's Turings. All the way down. :)

You can't fly over people when below 1000' (and can't fly above 400'). . FAA RC statuary regulation and FAA FAR part 91. https://www.faa.gov/uas/media/...

This instance was illegal. I'm an RC modeler, a licensed helicopter pilot, and a drone builder. This drone was flying illegally by all existing laws.

Jazzharper,

But he wasn't shooting at a person, hence not using deadly force. He was protecting his family from n imminent threat, which a drone most certainly is. Drone blades have killed people. No different than pushing a falling tree out of the way. I think the charges will be dropped.

But you have an expectation of safety. A lawnmower flying over your head deserves to be taken down, as it definitely constitutes a serious, and illegal, safety hazard. I predict, barring some kind of ordinance against firing weapons within some particular boundary, that this homeowner prevails -- against the city and the droning harasser.

You only think it's trivial because you haven't gotten into it yet. You are also assuming that somebody isn't trying to prevent webscraping. You run into problems such as cookie counter overflows, dropped sessions, rate limiting, and bogus redirects. I don't know if these things are deliberate, but you run into them if you just try manually scraping the web pages too.

People say that screenscraping is easy, and they even attempt to do it, but screen scraping is not as simple as it looks. It's definitely not trivial. Try it.

But, more importantly, why should the citizenry put up with this nonsense? The law belongs to the people, and the government should not put up barriers blocking full public access equal to that of any attorney.

If you're conducting research for an actual case, being restricted to a search tool like this is like knitting a sweater through a keyhole. The state knows this. That's why they sell (and only sell) access to the full set of current law text. They know lawyers (who can afford it) will spring for the $615 year after year. But mere citizens are kept in outer darkness.

Still, as far as I can tell, there is no way to get a PDF of the current law. Only a year old. That's not helpful for case research. Even if the law were updated daily (which it is not), it would be simple to generate a time stamped PDF that represents the current law.

Alas, not even close. The current law page still only displays a tiny fragment at a time -- virtually useless for researching the law for an actual case. And the search is only by citation number (!), not natural language, or even keyword. You have to know the exact citation of any particular passage in order to display it by search.

I would flunk any freshman computer science student delivering an interface this broken. It's clear that no competent programmer would build such a restricted access interface unless that was the specification provided by the government.

The historical PDFs are useless for current cases, as they can't legally be cited in any proceeding, and you'd be crazy to depend on them given the arbitrary routine changes that occur. But they do serve to prove that the State of Oregon is fully capable of delivering the current law as PDFs. They simply choose not to. I think it's obvious that the reason for that choice is a too-cozy relationship with the seller of the $614 "complete" current edition.

Jesse,

This is fantastic! Thanks for taking the time to build the code. I'll add a module that retrieves links online and writes them to local files in the same directory.

That's why I said your simple wget wouldn't work. :)

You at least need a prefix step to click the "I agree" copyright notice blocking page or you will get megabytes of just that notice.

Another poster (Jesse) has a working bash+wget script that requires extending to follow annotation links. He may be posting it to this slashdot story.

Jesse,

Alas, that quick fix doesn't work. Part of the problem is that the HTML links all have file:// URL prefixes, and they need to be http://. But another problem is that even with http://web.lixisnexis.com hardcoded into the link, you get redirected to a sign-in page. There must be some state the server is expecting to be set first.

However, you've built an excellent proof of concept. I'm happy to do the next round of revisions. In the interest of openness, would you be willing to post the bash script in this slashdot thread?

It's great, of course, that citizens can get around the government's attempts to lock down the law. But the real fix is to delete the bureaucracy that is blocking citizen access in the first place! So I am supporting public.research.org's fight against Georgia's lawsuit.