As I note in my doom and gloom YouTube, it's a 50-year-old analogy in the quest for AI that artificial flight did not require duplicating a bird. Artificial intelligence may look very different, and in fact in my video, I avoid defining intelligence and merely point out that "a computer that can program itself" is all that is required for the singularity.

Have you ever talked to a little girl? Saying that having to Frozen characters involved might interest more little girls is not sexism, it's the most common of sense.

People like you say you want more women in coding but don't want to do anything real to make it happen, at the level it needs to happen - early education.

Sorry to disappoint you, but everybody knows that Slashdot has exactly 8 actual users, 3,564,372 sockpuppet accounts, and an AI at the U of Illinois Champaign/Urbana that makes all of the AC posts as a way to blow off steam after dealing with grad students all day.

Why limit it to nations? Major corporations are as capable as most countries, and only a little bit more endangered if caught.

Despite the "only security through obscurity" meme, you need to understand it, not just say it.

There are only two types of security:
1) security through obscurity,
and,
2) security through inaccessibility.
They can, however, be intelligently combined.

Please note that private key encryption is security through obscurity. Cutting the phone line is security through inaccessibility. Saying that "it's secure because they can't get the prime factors of that key" is security through obscurity.

Despite the meme, security through obscurity is widely and properly used. What's wrong if false obscurity, which is common. If you don't properly assess just how obscure your secret is, then you have a security failure.

So having a monoculture is reduced security, because that means that there are a much larger number of entities seeking to discover the secret...and any breach in security cannot be easily contained. If you don't have a monoculture, then a single breach cannot be as widely damaging, and is thus also less valuable to find. This is a sort of network effect.

OTOH, a diverse community means that more effort needs to be devoted to security, because each branch is a separate thing to be maintained. So it's not all benefit or all loss, it's a mixture.

FWIW, I choose not to have flash installed on my system, despite the fact that it would have some utility, because I consider that the weakness that it presents is not worth the benefit. The ability of refuse to have such a service installed allows increased security...at a cost. For some people the cost is higher than they are willing to pay. This reduction of the attack surface is a form of security through obscurity mixed with security through inaccessibility, i.e., I have become inaccessible to some forms of attact, and I have reduced my visibility to many attackers.

In private powered transport, cars aren't the most expesive element anymore. Unjamed roads and especially parking space are. In Europe at least.

So, yes, if we'd all take a step back and turn on our brain, no one would want to own a car, they'd rather own the right to use a reservationable parking space. Cars would be used on-demand.As they are in the car-sharing offerings poping up all over Europe - even in Germany! German automotive manufacturers actually are scratching their heads, because there is a whole generation growing up in Germany just now that simply isn't interested in buying cars.

Our cities are absolutely packed with them. ... Germans spend 4.7 Billion man-hours per year in traffic jams.
So, yes, there are tons of insentives to move the burden of ownership somewhere else, away from the private owner.

There's probably some truth to that.
Three possible explainations:

1) I could imagine that overall presence of higher education is more dense in Europe than in the US.

2) Right now, life in general probalby sucks more in the US than in central/western Europe, hence the need for more distraction.

3) The US is used to quick sensations in media due to their TV history. In Europe the viewing habits are more ... 'sophisticated' ... although they have degenerated massively since the 80ies. Even prime news today is unbearably stupid and dumbed-down compared to two decades ago.

...they'll all be owned by Uber.

There's a network effect for shared vehicles. Availablility is best if you have one big pool of cars rather than lots of little ones. So there will be a single winner in that space for each city.

Imagine Uber having the power of GM and Google combined. Run by the current team of assholes.

It would be easier to get everyone to agree to switch to nuclear energy than to agree to meaningful limits on CO2 emissions

Even though going nuclear is the only practical solution, I don't think it's any easier - you have decades of people devoted to scaring people about anything nuclear, and those groups are still around piping that tune - even to the clear detriment of the earth and environment. They just are too afraid to do anything else.

even in countries that actually want to do something about CO2 (like Germany) are switching away from nuclear, so that tells you how hard the problem is.

Exactly my point, if even GERMANS can't be rational about this there is no hope for anyone.

Since I live in a city with decent mass transit, I don't own a car in the present, nor do I especially want or need to.

I also note that some cities, such as Copenhagen, have had self-driving subway trains for years.

this is really really important: anyone wishing to make a difference in the world really REALLY needs to read the book written by Professor Yunus, the joint winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Price, "Creating a World Without Poverty".

in his book, Professor Yunus describes how he naively studied Economics because he believed that he would be able to change his country's financial situation through studying first world economies. after graduation he set out just after one of the worst natural disasters his country had experienced and realised how completely pointless his studies had been. however he did not give up, and set out to work out what the problem actually was.

he learned that the poor are first and foremost incredibly resourceful... mostly because they have to. he also learned that many of them are, because there are no enforceable usury laws, permanently kept in debt to money-lenders. this shocked him so badly that once he freed an entire village from debt just from the small change in his wallet: something like $USD 15 was all it took to pay off a decade of usury.

what he discovered is that the gratitude of these people when freed from their former situation is immeasurable. the Grameen Bank doesn't have lawyers or debt collectors. the people that they lend money to are so GRATEFUL that they work non-stop to turn their lives around and pay off their loan. in fact, the repayment success rate is around NINETY EIGHT percent. it's so high that the *GRAMEEN BANK* considers it to be THEIR FAULT if one of their customers is ever in default. by contrast in the western world the default rate is 88%. i'll repeat that again in case it's not clear: only TWELVE PERCENT of creditors in the western world pay their debts on time, every time, and in full.

but the main reason why anyone wishing to help the emerging markets and the third world should read his book is because he patiently, with all the knowledge from his economics background, outlines why NGOs, Charity and the "Corporate Social Responsibility" clauses of standard profit-maximising Capitalist Corporations are all worse than doomed but are guaranteed to be ineffective at best and invariably seriously damaging and counter-productive.

right at the start of his book he outlines a surprising offer by Danone to work with him (follow his advice) to actually be effective. it was Professor Yunus's first experience of having been "under the microscope" of people with both big resources and heart. in other words the team at Danone were huge fans of what Yunus was trying to achieve: when he explained to them the financial structure that was needed, they listened, and they did it. they did not go in with a charity, or with donations: they set up a "non-loss, non-dividend" business, selling *locally-produced* yoghurt that happened to have the nutritients that the local population happened (by a not-coincidence) to be chronically deficient in.

the yohurt was sold not at a loss but at an affordable financially sustainable price because the focus was on remaining *stable*, not on exploitation through maximisation of profits: the focus was on allowing people to feel proud of what they achieved, and to take responsibility for their own wealth. they were EMPOWERED through the enormous generous resources of Danone's, but it was a successful venture because they LISTENED to what Professor Yunus had to say.

See? The dangers from ACs trying to spread pernicious truths such as these is exactly why we need everyone's communications tapped at all times!

I know, the stingray is essentially a hacking tool. That makes you think though, why on earth is there a large wireless network carrying sensitive data without TLS (transport layer security), or encryption between the modem on the phone, and the carrier? Either the contents are not sensitive, or the carriers / cell phone manufactures are complicit or worse.. incompetent.

GSM dates to 1987. When it was created, the previous mobile telephony standard was analogue - you could listen in on calls just with a regular radio. There was a very small amount of digital signalling to the network, but the field of commercial crypto hardly existed back then and subscriber cloning/piracy was rampant. GSM introduced call encryption and authentication of the handset using (for the time) strong cryptographic techniques. It was very advanced. But it didn't involve authentication of the cell tower to the handset, partly for cost and complexity reasons and partly because a GSM base station involved enormous piles of very expensive, complex equipment that had to be sited and configured by trained engineers. The idea of a local police department owning a portable, unlicensed tower emulator was unthinkable, as the technology to do it didn't exist, and besides .... trust in institutions has fallen over time. Back then it probably didn't seem very likely police would do this because they could always just get a warrant or court order to turn over data instead.

When 3G was standardised, this flaw in the protocol was fixed. UMTS+ all require the tower to prove to the handset that it's actually owned by the network. Little is publicly known about how exactly Stingray devices work but it seems likely that it involves jamming 3G frequencies in the area to force handsets to fall back to GSM, which allows tower emulation.

The latest rumours are that the company that makes Stingrays has somehow found a way to build a version that works on 3G+ networks too called "Hailstorm", but it's dramatically more expensive and as mobile networks phase out GSM in the coming years police departments are having to pay large sums of money to upgrade. The whole thing is covered in enormous secrecy of course so it's unknown how Hailstorm devices are able to beat the tower authentication protocol. Presumably the device is either exploiting baseband bugs, or is using stolen/hacked/court-order extracted network keys, or it was built in cooperation with the mobile networks, or there are cryptographic weaknesses in the protocols themselves.

That would be just peachy if votes for particular candidates/parties actually counted for something.

It really amazes me that someone who appears to be as intelligent as you do cannot see the state-within-a-state that has grown up in the US since the Second World War. Just as Eisenhower warned it would.

No, they just invade and annex big chunks of their neighbours.