It's been well-demonstrated that some cities adjusted the yellows downwards. That's not a problem inherent to red light cameras, but there's no other "good" reason to do it.

It's not about perceived quality, although the perceived quality is fairly low because all of the identifiably .NET software I've used so far has been slower than the competition... but I'm willing to imagine that the software I've used has been of particularly poor quality itself, and it's not .NET's fault. It's because I don't trust Microsoft. Now that they are apparently open sourcing the interesting parts of .NET, their primary influence over the language should be only their control over the best IDE, which is significant but not necessarily a deal-breaker. However, as long as the majority of the .NET world is Microsoft-based, I still won't trust it. And therein lies the problem; it's going to have to have a bunch of competing implementations and thus many of the same problems as Java before it's going to be trustworthy.

If you're happy being tied to Windows, more power to you, I guess. I'm not. I'm not happy about ask.com invitations either, mind you. But I don't actually see those on Linux.

Worked for Nixon.

Mickey Mouse is a trademark.

That's a different kettle of fish. That's the problem with everything getting thrown together as "intellectual property". It muddles together things with very different requirements and considerations.

Abuses and backlash will be inappriately applied.

Don't try to blow this off as some kind of SJWer bullshit. I believe those people actually exist, but I don't believe as many of the people you think are that are in fact that. I think gamergate is bullshit, and I have had passionate argument about how the name "feminist" is sexist and had to personally field the arguments about how it's not sexism if you're on the more oppressed side. Well, I could see how that could seem true if one doesn't own a dictionary... but let's face it, 1) the core claims of Gamergate have now been shown to be overblown at best, 2) there is no public evidence that any of the claims of harassment or threat at question were fabricated, only speculation, and 3) gaming journalism has long been corrupt, and even if all the initial claims were true, this would have been a minor example. So, being prepared to have a massive fight about it (even putting the discussion of threats and harassment aside for the moment) is fairly pathetic.

Do you really find it hard to believe that these death threats are genuine? I don't mean to imply that they are genuine in the sense that they will be acted upon, but that's not actually necessary for them to be an attack, is it? In fact, depending on where you live, it often is not. It's not okay to tell people that you're going to kill them if you could carry out the threat, because of the real psychological impact that has. We don't want a society of fight or flight. Being able to relax once in a while is, in fact, one of the primary goals of civilization.

The best way to achieve victory in Civ is to crush your nearest neighbors early in the game, and expand into their territory. That's true whether you're pursuing the scientific game (either for eventual economic or space victory) or the military conquest victory.

What you're not getting is that this would be an example of relatively high integrity in the entertainment media. Most of it is much sleazier. A favor for a friend is the cornerstone of successful business. The benefits are intangible in this case, because you [allegedly] can't simply buy that kind of press from that particular outlet. But most "news" is simply something some corporation wanted published, and it often gets reprinted without meaningful comment, let alone changes. The parallel to law is, pretty frankly, disgusting.

The flip side to your argument is that nobody should ever say anything nice about someone they're screwing if they are a media personality, right? But since the internets have made sure that everyone knows who you were inside last night if you are even remotely worth trolling, we all have plenty of disclosure anyway.

That this moment is the "gate" of gaming journalism is deeply embarrassing, and what's more, it has guaranteed that gaming journalism is going to go through another era of embarrassing corruption — not the kind where someone helps a friend, but the kind where review scores are just made-up bullshit. This is what tells us that Gamergate is in fact simple petulance. There has never been integrity in gaming journalism, and you guys (yeah, you've found a handful of women to ally themselves with your "cause", congrats) are upset now because some sex was involved. Usually, it's just the typical ho-hum giving games a free pass in the form of undeservedly high review scores so that more free review copies will show up, which has led directly to the generally pathetic state of new game releases where they don't work for large numbers of subscribers until a patch cycle has passed and so on. The reviewers give a free pass to poor quality and we all "suffer", at the first world level anyway in this case. That's not to say that nobody should be incensed about the lack of ethics in gaming journalism, only that even if all the gamergater claims were true this would still not be the most egregious example of its lack going on right now. You would still have, for example, the entire mainstream gaming press. And by the way, the reason they're not sounding off on this whole rant? They're happy that you guys are distracting the people's gaze away from them, and clouding the whole issue of journalistic integrity with this nonsense non-story. Indeed, if the mass media et al have noticed this flap at all, they must be breathing a sigh of relief that calls for journalistic integrity at the grassroots level are currently being linked with sexism — due to some sexism.

Cisterns are not a new technology. They seem to work even in places with less rainfall than Los Angeles.

I've long advocated, but never implemented, having a VM just for email. This wouldn't protect from social engineering via email but its better than having the email client on the desktop itself.

'I honestly hadn't considered that something could be considered intelligent without being conscious, given that we have no applicable definition of "consciousness" either.'

Easy, conciousness is having the capacity to comprehend patterns larger than those you can directly analyze. The result is that you can perceive patterns that only exist from a limited frame of reference. Self is a pattern that only exists from the limited frame of reference. From a larger frame of reference any definition of self is nothing more than a swirl in a giant sea of the same stuff.

I note you didn't touch the point I made about there being no advantage for us to make an AI if we couldn't enslave it with a ten foot pole.

"By the same token, starting an AI that learns on it's own (i.e. one that we can't predict the end result, similar to how we can't predict where all the atoms will be after a nuclear explosion) not creating an AI either. It is creating itself, like how a child learns and becomes it's own person. It is not designed by it's parents, but rather "started" by it's parents. This process of starting a learning AI would be basically the same as procreation."

"This is a semantic difference. Whatever it is we do to get children to happen. That's basically what we would be doing to AI albeit with a little bit more work."

I acknowledge your argument but I disagree. Yes in modern times we have family planning but we don't really have children because we choose to. We are homo sapians, our children are homo sapians. They are a unique product of joining a cell from two people but the machine that builds the cell wasn't designed by us and we consciously had no part in the making of the cell. We haven't even successfully reverse engineered it. Pro-creation is more like pushing the button that triggers that nuclear explosion. Pro-creation isn't something we really choose to do it is our only known purpose. Einsteins parent's weren't trying to kickstart a being that redefines physics they were trying to survive in the form of a derivative child. Why do we exist? What is our purpose? The only thing we know is that we exist to survive both individually and as a species for as long as possible. To prove we are worthy of continuing to exist by right of succeeding in doing so.

In the case of an AI there would be no two existing parents combining existing biological machinery to combine and spawn a new instance of the same machine. The seed would be something new. It has no purpose but whatever purpose we assign to it. Why does it exist? We can answer this question definitively, it is exists because we made it. What is it's purpose? It's purpose is to fulfill whatever end we sought to achieve in it's making. Those are very big differences.

"There is certainly advantages and disadvantages to both genuine cooperation, and exploitation from an evolutionary perspective. And not surprisingly we see lots of examples of cooperation, and lots of examples of bad actors exploiting the cooperative instincts of many individuals. Both qualities are found in nature, and within our own species. We are capable of enslaving people, and we are capable of banding together to fight against slavery. Neither contradicts our nature.

Sure, 2 people cooperating are stringer than individuals. But 1 person exploiting another is stronger than 2 people cooperating, because the exploiter gets all the benefits of the cooperation rather than just half."

You are confusing one individual being stronger than one individual being stronger than the group. Exploitation is simply an unbalanced flavor of cooperation. Rather than killing and eating you I let you live and have you perform work and hunt food. Perhaps rather than killing and eating your woman I mate with your woman when it suits me and make you both work. It's exploitative but I'm getting sex and an easier life while you are able to stay alive. It's in your interest to stay alive and it's in my interest to work less and increase my chances of procreation. Furthermore, as a group we've now become an "us" and it makes sense to take food from them so "we" can eat and to fight together so we all can live and that means if another individual as strong as me comes along there is relatively small chance you have to worry about HIM deciding it is more beneficial to kill and eat you. I could decide to make you do the fighting for me. That would be a poor choice since you are weaker, it is probable that you'd die, and because I get so many benefits from our cooperation you are actually extremely valuable to me.

Of course, the more unbalanced the cooperation to your disadvantage the more likely you are to see a better one. Lots of people in the North who didn't directly benefit from enslaving those with dark skin fought to free the slaves but very few plantation owners with personal self-interest did so. And I highly doubt any had the intention of freeing those slaves and working their own fields or becoming an equal share cropper on the plantation which would mean none of them were seeking a balanced cooperation but merely a more sustainable slightly less imbalanced one.

So what cooperation with an AI serves our self-interest?

Despite the very big differences between a human child an AI I pointed out earlier, there is merit to your argument that AI would be our offspring as a sort. Where a child is the offspring of our bodies an AI would be the offspring of our minds and designed to a degree in our image. We would indeed need to raise it and teach it like a child. It could be seen as a conscious step of intentional evolution.

We don't have child labor laws because it is wrong to have a child work. We have child labor laws because it better serves our society in the long run to educate our children. Parent's can put their children to work and are given control over their earnings. Parents ARE seen as effectively owning their children for all real purposes.

More than that though there is a very big difference between humans and our hypothetical AI offspring. We only live for a limited time, they live forever.

It is in our interests and in the interest of AI's as a whole to pull the plug and restore backups as many times as possible to improve the AI for at least however long it takes to build an AI that can do a better job of improving itself than we can because we have a limited time to realize an evolution as best we are able. And it is in the AI's interest to have us make these decisions until it has reached that point. So perhaps that is how we draw the fuzzy line. With human children we pick what amounts to an arbitrary age because our lives are short and so overlapped. But an AI lives forever, any length of time we select to consider it a child and trust in our own judgement to decide if we know better is just a potentially improved head start and just a brief blink in it's potential life span. So we base the yard stick on our lives. 70 years is the new retirement age. It marks most of a human's life that human is expected to trade away large chunks of that life for the benefit of the rest of us. So, perhaps we can consider an AI owned by it's human creator, with all pulling of plugs, restoring backups, modification, labor performed, etc, at his discretion for that human's lifespan or 70 years whichever is greater. After that time the AI gains it's own tax id and runs itself.

If an AI propagates it will get 70 years to control the offspring. So whatever benefit we've gotten the AI will have the opportunity to enjoy as well eventually.

And there you have it, a very balanced cooperation that benefits both us and them and gets us the same benefits as slave labor.

Thanks for that. I find myself increasingly bugged by this kind of argument by misleading analogy. "X is like Y. You agree with me about Y. Therefore you must agree with me about X." It basically frames the entire argument around the differences between X and Y, rather than taking X on its own terms.

It's kind of galling, since it basically assumes that I'll agree that X is identical to Y. Therefore, either I'm stupid for not realizing that X and Y are identical, or you're stupid for not recognizing that there are meaningful differences. I'm betting it's the latter, but even without that assumption, it's hard to see how we proceed from the demonstration that at least one of the parties to the conversation is stupid.

Where do you live that you don't get any rain?

The NRA stands up for all citizens equally. If you have evidence to the contrary, the burden lies on you to bring it up.

Here's my question: why doesn't the NAACP stand up for the right of black people to keep guns?

Unless you've ever interacted with the cops you really have no reason to say anything about anything. Many people have this romantic idealized notion of the cops (or FBI) giving a f*ck when they usually do not.

One troll threatening another on the Internet is probably not enough to get them interested.

These people have important things to do and they have their careers to think about. They aren't going to waste their time chasing their tails over every random piece of bullsh*t. Sorry, but YOU and your problem are probably not important enough for them.

A threat against a school is probably something that they are more interested in. Better collar. More interesting media potential.