Doesn't that violate an Amazon patent? ;-)

Indeed, my first thought also was "did Intel put their chip designs under GPL, or what?"

First, because if anything goes wrong with the connection, like the remote end has problems, the backup never happens and you are at the mercy of the cloud provider to fix it.

This is only a problem if your cloud backup is the only backup you do.

Second, because a company running a cloud service could suddenly disappear or decide to start charging/raise your rates.

See above.

Third, it's a huge privacy hole, what with the NSA stealing peoples' data and all.

Bingo. Except that's not the third, but the first reason not to do cloud backups.

From the Wikipedia page it sounds like a remote-controlled device without much internal control. The page may be misleading (it wouldn't be the first Wikipedia page to be), but if not, it's by far not as impressive as the Boston Dynamics robots.

You are missing a fundamental flaw in the reasoning.

No. But you are opbviously missing the entire second paragraph of my post.

Technology (in this case "robots") is as good as the human that designed it.

That's your fundamental assumption. It is by no way a proven general statement. Indeed, even the term "as good as the human that designed it" isn't really well-defined. It certainly cannot mean "cannot do the task it was designed for better than the designer", because that claim would already be disproved by chess computers. So what should it mean?

There will always be work in researching, designing and building new and more efficient technology.

That rests on quite a few assumptions:

Assumption 1: There will never be a point reached where we don't have the desire for more technology because the technology we have already does everything we want. Granted, up to now it looks like that. But we cannot know that this will always be true. The only way to know whether it is true is to reach that point.

Assumption 2: Robots/Computers will never be able to invent new things, or be better in it than humans. Which may be the case, but again, we cannot tell. As before, the only way to know whether it is true is to reach that point.

The assumption that we humans will be able to develop AI that can then create new and better technology is a logical fallacy.

If it were a logical fallacy, you could logically(!) disprove it. I'm hearing.

For this the AI must become sentient, or can only optimize existing processes and technology, but never create new one.

That's an unproven assumption.

If the AI is sentient, I doubt it will cooperate for long.

That depends on what the AI wants. A sentient AI would not necessarily be human-like. It would be more reasonable to build it in a way that it cannot do other than admire humans. The ideally designed sentient AI would love humans, and the highest pleasure for that AI would be to help humans in any conceivable way. That AI would suffer when it sees humans suffer, and enjoy seeing humans enjoying themselves.

Obviously Google knows that knowledge you can put into new products in the future is more important than a finished product now.

Does iRobot have anything even remotely comparable to Boston Dynamics' projects?

Given the attitude of many people, I guess you could just search for a message in which she says that she has her period. There will be one, almost certainly.

The implicit assumption is that at one point, robots will be better than humans on any possible task. Then, whatever work has to be done, it would be an uneconomical decision to employ a human instead of getting a robot.

Whether this point will ever be reached is, of course, another question. But that's not an economic question, but a question on what is possible with robotics.

Of course it might also be caused the fact that with a dog you are forced to regularly go outside.

Actually, the babies get their first shot of gut bacteria at birth. Unless it is a caesarean.

Of course the question is: Did he expect BTC to gain that much value, or USD to lose it?

1. If they are a group, they needed to communicate to collaborate effectively

Yes. And the most efficient communication still is face-to-face.

2. NSA + GCHQ watches all coms in Europe

Including all face-to-face ones?

3. NSA knows who they are

Maybe. Or maybe not.

4. FED tells CIA to exterminate this dangerous group who aim to topple the US dollar

At that time, even rf the FEDs knew it, they most probably wouldn't have considered it an immediate threat to the dollar. And when it starts to be one, they still have the power to stop it. And maybe they ordered the NSA to mine enough bitcoins to crash the bitcoin market if necessary?

In the mean time the bitcoin network with its perceived anonymity together with a perfect transaction record on the block chain is the ideal tool to find criminals and other people trying to hide from the authorities (case in point: Silk Road).

5. Bitcoin project therefore never gets published

Wrong, see above.

6. Point five collides with reality

That doesn't matter because point 5 is wrong anyway.

7. Point six shows they were not a group from Europe

Due to the flaws mentioned above, it doesn't.

Well, if you had a money-making machine, would you sell it?

Of course. To anyone paying me more money than the machine can make. ;-)

So the Golden Girls are Satoshi Nakamoto?

Well, if pot and kettle get WiFi enabled, then finally the pot can really call the kettle black. ;-)