AI risk is a reasonable topic, but there are other existential threats, and people aren't as excited about them. To paraphrase, a machine powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take away everything you have. ...but, we're pretty far off. If we had self directing artificial sapients and someone was talking about adding sentience to them, then I think that AI risk would be a much more pertinent topic.

If the Democrats wanted this to pass, they would have brought the bill to floor when they had a chance of it actually passing. Far too many in the Democratic party are in the pockets of those that won't let this pass, but by bringing it up now, it can look like the Republicans are the bad guys.

Which, they are. Both parties are opposed to net neutrality. But this bill is just there for grandstanding. The Democrats could have made net neutrality happen MANY times in the last few years, so this is just to try to smear team red, even though team blue agrees with them totally on this issue.

In fairness, that was pretty much everywhere Genghis had been :P

The "hardcore history" podcast does a "Wrath of the Khans" set of eps, they are pretty great.

ITT AC decides that it's ok if changing a lightbulb takes the same time that changing the brakes should.

Safety standards is not why you can't change a goddamned lightbulb, period.

That isn't Woz. That's some Geoff guy with the same last name.

It's silly how mandatory it feels to jailbreak. Even with jailbreaks, it's a lot of work to restore ios to even its previous GRAPHIC level. You know a company is hostile towards its users when it utterly deletes a successful theme with zero user choice.

The real standout is the strange little gray shading that appeared on all my backgrounds. A picture of a sunny day became overcast. A portrait became ludicrous. What went wrong with backgrounds betwixt 6 and 7? Not only did we lose the ability to set a background without a strange gradient appearing (sometimes, it is internally based on the brightness of your background), which is entirely without purpose (some hypothesize it would be there to make the clock easier to read, but not only is it present when you are on your home screen, it is present even if that background is NEVER set to appear when the clock is visible, so, it assuredly has zero purpose except customer griefing), but we ALSO lost the ability to even pinch and zoom the background properly.

The workaround is a set of wallpaper editing apps that duplicate the pinch and zoom work that was free in ios 6 and part of the interface, combined with a jailbreak, then winterboard, then a mod for winterboard that removes the gradient (alternatively, you can jailbreak, then go into the files and delete the gradient .PNG files that ruin all your shit).

And that's just raw presentation. Functionality appears to appear and disappear at random. Each upgrade takes hours of research about whether to press the "go" button, and it just feels so temporary, like I'm renting the functionality.

The following fundamental security features are missing:

IDE/SATA/SAS/USB: Write protection, physical.
IDE/SATA/SAS/USB: Write light (NOT read/write light, access light, or "I have power" light) with minimum duration of half a second per write
USB: Physical switch to force mode (media only, keyboard/mouse only, etc. on a given physical USB switch)

And I should clarify that by "infected" I don't mean just software, like a boot sector virus. I don't think a commercially purchased USB stick can act like a keyboard via viral infection (though the fact that this is even theoretically considerable is a flaw too), but a custom hardware piece can absolutely do this.

This gets trotted out, but it isn't the reason. Small and stores lots of data is GOOD.

Here's the problems with thumb drives. This is why they can't be trusted:

1)- NO READ-ONLY MODE
Unlike CDs, which are read only without giant hoops to jump through, there's no write-protect switch for thumb drives, or ability to trivially make them read-only.

2)- USB drive, or viral keyboard?
Nothing inside a USB drive can make sure it's actually a damned USB drive. An infected CD won't run without autorun, but an infected USB stick could reasonably and actually become a keyboard and launch a binary itself by TYPING IN ITS OWN COMMANDS (this can really happen, easily). Since the U in USB is universal, and there's no reasonable way to force it to behave as a passive drive in a physically inspectable manner, it can't be trusted.

3)- Terrible OS design (mostly gone)
For whatever reason, most OSes properly treat removable media as removable, but often have a soft spot in their hearts for USB sticks. This is mostly fixed by now, but was absolutely an issue for years and until the older conception is gone, who knows.

tl;dr: Thumb drives being small and holding a lot isn't the issue, the idea of them secretly being generic USB devices (aka, absolutely anything) that are generally auto-trusted and can reasonably press OK to their own confirmation dialogs is, as is their entire lack of hardware accountability. Unlike a floppy or a CD, a USB stick can always be written to and can actually be any goddamned thing at all.

Computer Science is still a newbie discipline. Much more relevantly, the problems introduced by the sudden social change of what a network is are a pretty big deal.

Here's how you know it's crazy: look at the hacker hysteria, and how it has barely gotten any better. The vast majority of "hackers" who cracked stuff back in the day were treated entirely ludicrously, like some kind of wizard. Everyone here probably remembers indefinite detention and ludicrous punishments such as "can't use a computer", which would be absolutely unthinkable for even a bank robber who had served his time.

If you piped your water supply through every enemy state in the world, you would probably want to inspect it before handing it out as drinkable. But, if you did not do that inspection, would you complain about the pipe manufacturers, for not making a pipe no one could interact with? Like, "why isn't this pipe adamantium"? And would you ignore all the enemy nations and go throw in jail the guy who put green food coloring in to show that an actual bad guy could have done something much worse?

The other big thing is how fast expectations change. Every few years someone has rigged up a specialized framework that solves some set of "needed for profit" set of network issues, and then the advantages of that force migration towards it. While in theory each of these individual solutions could be highly secure, the fact that they are new features hurts that a whole lot.

As people decide on a feature set that they actually need for certain purposes, and finally discard the idea that something is bad because it is old, we will start to see really solid code that is trusted. In MANY places, we already HAVE this.

More importantly, in disciplines whose lengths of existence rounds to millenia instead of decades (network security) or a century (computer science), you have things that "everyone knows", and those things have been true for generations. Meanwhile, in computer science, you see holy wars wrapped in holy wars, and a lot of it is due to communication issues.

"Care to point to the source"

Haha is this wikipedia? I'm telling you things you can google, not applying for a job as your bitch.

You know that statement about extraordinary claims needing extraordinary proof?
Well, ordinary claims just need you to use a search engine, or even just start on wikipedia. You don't get to play skeptic with life, assuming that before you change your precious worldview something has to be tied up and cited. You have the power to google it your goddamned self.

But, fuck it. I'm on vacation.

You can find a TON of first hand accounts of crazy fucking bullshit in North Korea. Here's some who talk on social media after having been there as a tourist:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...

Here's one on social media who mentions having taught there, and brings up the "repelled incursions" I referred to, in addition to crazier shit involving netting on cars:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...

Also you can find firsthand accounts all over, not only from social media:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c... ..but from other media as well
http://www.cracked.com/article...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.dailylife.com.au/li...

Essentially ALL of these mention that the internet is pretty well shut down and only the North Korean fake version is available- in Pyongyang. You know, their BIG CITY.

Here's a wikipedia link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Some quotes:
"As of late 2014 there are 1,024 IP addresses in the country."
"Despite the incident, many citizens of North Korea may be oblivious to the existence of the internet."

http://qz.com/315969/in-north-...
http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/2...

"Nearly all of the country's Internet traffic is routed through China. Firms that monitor that traffic say it is comparable to only about 1,000 high-speed homes in the United States."

I'd like to repeat my earlier point, however:
You don't need to source a claim to be correct. The world isn't wikipedia.

He acts as if the common North Korean citizen is permitted knowledge of the internet, instead of just advanced CS students who have proven themselves indoctrinated sufficiently.

It's so easy to underestimate what such a government can do with such an ancient moral code and modern access to propaganda. The North Korean people aren't like "put yourself in their position". They have been systematically denied knowledge and education that would permit them to ask "Why don't we have the freedom to access the internet". They don't understand "freedom", they don't know that there is an "internet", and in many cases their definition of "we" will be substantially alien as well. Education is huge, and they have plenty over there- just of the wrong kind.

Protip: The North Korean media reports on US troops attacking North Korean soil and being repelled. The overwhelming majority of North Koreans believe that not only is the US at war with North Korea, but that North Korea is winning a defensive war lasting decades. That's the literal truth. That's how successful the Juche zealots have been. Internet access? Goodness, lol.

Seriously, holy shit. I mean, lets science.

Facts: Suddenly, everyone is fat.
Conclusion: Everyone must be a lazy pussy suddenly.

How on earth do otherwise reasonable people do this?

Is that what you think is going on? Everyone just wants to "scarf junk food with no consequences"?

You think the obesity epidemic is a fucking character flaw?