That depends on where you live. The elected DA is only the one at the top of the DA's office. There are many attorney's under them that also receive the monitor "DA" whom are not elected; they do have to balance out cases against how the elected DA sets priorities, but they are more or less just regular attorney's working as prosecuters.

Again, it's all a matter of where you live. Not all areas even allow the top DA to be elected; while other areas have more of the chain in the election routine.

Well, you'd be wrong.

My mom once tested out how fast the car could go (when she was a teen) nearby a police station because she figured they wouldn't be looking there. Things have changed a little since, but most likely it's still the case that they tend to turn a blind eye around the station because of the (incorrect) bias that "no would be dumb enough to commit crimes near the station".

And the beauty of the Second Amendment of the U.S Constitution is that you do too.

You example is allowed for the safety of the officer and others (thus you are not allowed to refuse), and is already after probable cause having been established (on account of the grounds for arrest being present); however, in most cases you can refuse unless they have a warrant - even if the court would consider it a valid case of a valid warrantless search.

It may increase their ability, but the reality is that people are less likely too as it placates them unless someone tries to mess with one of the things that is placating them.

This is why Social Security and Medicare/Medicaide are such hot bed political topics and essentially considered a no-no to touch politically, despite the fact that they need drastic overhauls to be sustainable (assuming that is even possible; for Social Security it isn't as designed).

I'd say your drop of the rest of the sentence there was its own problem. The parent (quoted by me as well) was probably be facitious in their question.

Well, no it wouldn't be a 5th Amendment Issue, it'd be a 4th Amendment issue since the 4th Amendment requires a Search Warrant for the government, and the Search Warrant must have limits. A Search Warrant, btw, is only issued via the Judicial Branch not the Executive Branch.

So they could still stand up and say "no; provide us a Warrant first".

And that too would also be within the law as the law is superceded by the Constitution and any amendments therein; thus even though it may have been passed prior the Amendment, the Amendment still takes precedent and therefore limits the law and the government thereby still requiring a Warrant and changing to "the government must do what it can (within the law) to obtain the information". If they can't get a warrant than they have still satisfied the law in question.

No, you got that wrong. You give them Welfare, Social Security, and Health Care so that you can do whatever you want to do since you can then start finger pointing at the other guy to change the conversation by saying "but he wants to take away X" instead of talking about the actual issue at hand.

And prior to land animals and anything in the seas.

Most of those hacks are not really hacks - just things that were there for testing that users discovered; some things will always be possible if you put enough effort into it.

For instance, an easy way to negate the hack my friend did is to force the download of the content in upon the connection to the network; this however has two hacks: (i) doing something that prevents the download and thus forces it back into using whatever is cached on disk which can be manipulated, and (ii) adding some kind of MITM that lets you inject the content you like - this however may be at the cost of some latency which most players wouldn't like.

As you said, it's a bit of an "arms race", but the race is more people discovering what developers did than cracking into the software.

Given that many programmers take the "path of least resistence" and don't optimize programs much besides what the compiler does, I would certainly agree that we are not utilizing computers to their full potential. However, an AI would not be able to do so either without being trained how to organize itself better for the hardware it is using. It won't just magically come up with a more efficient algorithm to do what it is doing without being taught something about how to optimize and how the hardware it is using works.

True; though the examples for today - such as the genetic one you quote - are considered "specialist AIs" and in some respects are not much of an AI at all, much like IBM's Deep Blue or Watson computers are not really AI, just very fast depth search algorithms that can mimick an AI to some degree in a very specialized field.

Well, technically they're not being good stewards (per Christianity) in doing so, but legally they have probably jeopardized their "church" non-profit status as a result.

Funny thing is - the conservative right-wingers will typically take money if you make it available, but they don't typically want it made available as they'd rather not pay the higher taxes that cover it to start with. However, it's the liberal left-wingers that want the higher taxes and all the "free" money programs that everyone (especially the liberals) abuses. The right-wingers would prefer the "market" handle things instead; most will agree that some level of oversight is necessary when it comes to safety, etc but that it should still remain minimal; unlike the left-winger "you didn't build that" sentimentality.

Yep. One friend of mine had a hack that added large rings around each player that you could see nearly all the way across the board, which penetrated walls, etc b/c they were not suppose to be there - simple hack by just replacing the character profile information to include it.

Of course he claimed it was as much a hinderance as an advantage b/c even though the rings were blue/red (to tell you which team) he had a hard time telling which team so would often kill his own team mates too.

Needless to say, I'm surprised Valve hasn't done more to get rid of those kinds of "hacks".

Well, yes, but no. There's a major difference. The algae can self-replicate in every form required to spread. A computer AI cannot - it's limited to the hardware it was built on, and it would not be able to build new hardware to add to itself. Further, heterogenous processor environments (networks, switches, etc) would also limit it as it would have to be able to reach out across them and assimilate them into itself.

So no; it will be very unlikely that by the time an true AI of any sort at the lowest level of intelligence is created that it would be necessary to assume ubiquity or that a Skynet-like singularity moment will happen. To start, the AI would have to be far smarter than that to be able to move itself to another system. It won't just "magically" happen to be able to run itself on all types of computer infrastructure at the same time.

So there's another flaw in your logic. Yes, your laptop may seem to be able to connect to an "infinite" number of inter-connects, but reality is that it can't. For instance, each network connection requires a small chunk of memory to manage it, plus some more for the routing rules for the networking so it can get off the computer and out onto the larger network which then has to have the correct routing rules for it to be able to get to the Internet, assuming that the network is even connected in a way that it could reach the Internet (not every network is Internet connected). As a result Operating Systems impose a limit on the number of network connections; usually done through limit Open File Descriptors. For instance, Linux by default only allows about 4-5 thousand open file descriptors at a time for the entire system, not per application, due to the OS-level memory consumptions required to manage each - this includes all network connections.

Now, you'd say that the AI would "magically" overcome this by developing a new way to track it all, or just use a few at a time. However, that again limits it as it generally takes a lot more than 10-25 ms to establish network connections. Using TCP is a good example as it is the ultimate optimization of having a UDP-based protocol for tracking a connection state - that is, the typical work around is to use your own UDP protocol, but that only results in moving more memory into the application, not really overcoming the issue.

This again also does not overcome the issue that the AI would still be limited to the hardware available to it for learning - that is, the RAM and Processor and all the hardware in it; it would also be further limited to the environment (both OS and hardware) and knowledge it has about any given portion of hardware. It won't be able to magically rebuild itself for an ARMv8 processor when it was built on an ARMv7 as there are major differences between the two; or to go from a Power processor to an x86 processor. It won't be able to optimize itself to run at peak on the hardware without having been given knowledge of how a processor works.

All-in-all there are many many limitations that will prevent the spread of AI such that it will be well known that a true AI was created in some form long before the "singularity" moment occurs. And, if you really pay attention to most of the Sci-Fi stuff, the Sci-Fi stuff generally acknowledges that since it is the norm that a government or corporation or individual spent a long time developing the AIs, communicating with them, teaching them, in private before the "singularity" moment occurs - which is typically related to some preservation realization when someone wants to shut it down.