"Not to mention the fact that he is funding MIRI. If you were giving millions of dollars to a research institute devoted to mitigating existential risk from AI, you would probably become pretty knowledgeable on the subject too."

Or you just demonstrated yourself to be gullible enough to give your money to a certain kind of snake-oil sellers after watching Terminator one time too many.

Remember that being outstanding in some fields doesn't preclude you to be stupid in others (specially when your previous success makes you think about yourself like some kind of infallible demi-god).

"This, of course, means we can use them in the same way you use a canary in a coal mine. If they all mysteriously end up dead at or around the same time, we know to be on the lookout for a murderous rogue AI bent on eliminating dissent."

Quite rite.

And, just for the record, I for one welcome our superior AI overlords.

"You know, if AI research suddenly gets heavily regulated or even banned, their jobs might fly away."

You know, if their jobs weren't heavily regulated they'd soon discover you (the repetitive Anonymous Coward going with the same boring arguments again and again in these comments) are nothing more than a trolling AI, and a lame attempt at it, and would return you to the dirty pits you belong.

Quick and dirty example: environmental damage. An AI could determine that humanity's growth and impact on the ecosystem and biosphere is no longer sustainable and therefore the majority of humanity must be culled. In effect it would be killing us to save us...

Millions of subscribers? You have trouble nowadays convincing people that we went to the moon in the first place. Even the worst television series has more views than any (real) space-related stuff.

But a Crown Victoria in the face usually does.

From the department of redundancy department, located right next to the atm machine. OK I could have written it better, but also I can hide behind what someone else said - technically you can post a selfie of someone else... but yeah, fair point and well caught.

I'd anticipate significatnt sublimation and thawing on even the backside if the solar sail does not reflect _away_ from the object.

Since at least some comets that cross Earth orbit (and are therefore a threat) have had insignificantly altered orbits for several thousand years and dozens of perihelia, then the lower limit of sublimation you're going to need to consider is under 1% per apparition. Even with a solar sail blasting the backside with essentially another Sun, you're still down in the 2% per apparition or lower range. (I'd guess lower). Comets on a sun-diving orbit are approximately half the threat of ones that don't sun-dive. The sun-divers don't get a second chance to hit the Earth.

But the idea provides far more available thrust and control than draping coverings directly on a tumbling asteroid or comet.

I agree on this point. But since the proposal is for a generic design to deal with any incoming impactor, be it comet, asteroid, or even generation ship, then a design that can handle any impactor without modification is needed. There won't be time to design a modification if it is actually needed.

The poster thinks that being knowledgeable about tech is knowing your memes and posting selfies of yourself regularly. I could ask my 20 year old millenial daughters how they think their phones/laptops work if you want an example of "clueless". Being a crack addict does not confer knowledge of plant alkaloids or even botany.

On the other hand people who aren't clueless about tech (and the disturbing direction it's headed in) will voluntarily use as little tech as possible...

"IBM's PC strategy from the mid '80s to mid '90s could be summed up as using their influence to prevent networking, multi-tasking and file permissions from happening on the same platform at the same time."

Of course yes.

That explains why in the mid '80s to mid 90's IBM was busy in a joint venture with Microsoft first and alone afterwards... to produce a PC system with networking, multi-tasking and file permissions and even 32 bits (OS/2).

Or maybe you are wrong.

"An ELE shows up about every 60 million years. If it kills 6 billion people, then that is on average 100 people per year, which is small, but still much larger than they imply."

It would directly kill those 6 billion but then, it would stop humanity from growing at least 25x that number (provided it takes 25 generations to rise back to 6 billions and that 6 billions is more or less the max capacity of the Earth). This would mean -as per your numbers, about 2500 people/year, and that is without taking into account the life standars for the survivors or if it doesn't manage to extinguish the species altogether.

"It's good to have a healthy fear of asterisks -- there's a big difference between "rm -rf *.tmp" and "rm -rf * .tmp"

But surely the space is the villain there."

No, no... it is the asterisk coming from the spaces.

Did the number of "users" drop because of the switch in tactics by the police, or did it drop along with the overall drop in crime? And did prostitution really drop at all, or did it just migrate from the street corner to escort services, craigslist and twitter? Not as black and white as you think.

While I only code as a hobby, I started with TRS-80's running BASIC (yeah I was the guy hogging the computers on demo at the Radio Shack near you!), did an official BASIC course at my high school before PC's went mainstream. Then I got into ASM, COBOL, Pascal and C, all self taught. After that I got a life.

But if you think about it languages are just different ways of doing exactly the same thing. If you know how what your code is doing to the machine, then you can program in any language - it's just a case of learning the new syntax. Unfortunately too many people think a language is like some arcane spell where the words have to be said just right or the Computer God gets angry.

That knowledge of Pascal will last you a lifetime son.