The real problem with Asimov's Laws is that for them to be followed, they must be understood, and we are so far from being able to build any system capable of genuinely understanding anything that it is not realistic to believe we can impute laws with social nuance to an algorithm anytime in the immediate predictable future. Mounting guns on robots that run computer vision algorithms to detect and kill humans, however, is last decade's technology. (Disclaimer: I am an AI and NLP researcher at Google.)

That's why when we don't like code, we should start reimplementing it from scratch immediately.

Since there are only about three people in the world that could actually tell you whether one set of elliptic curve constants are inherently more secure than another set, I'd say they deserve the $10M, probably a lot more. (Whether or not what they did is ethical is a totally different issue. It clearly was not ethical to betray the whole world's trust like that, especially for a company where half their core business is verifying trust.)

It was the attitude, not the money.

PS granted, Steve is a very good hacker and a generally all-around good guy, the only thing I'm pointing out is that, at least at that point, he wasn't about the Utopian ideal of sharing around the wealth with the commoners that work in the fields. But maybe not being a communist is a good thing, or he may not have landed the most recent round of funding.

They get nada. I implemented one of the features that caused CM to explode in popularity very early on, and cyanogen did very well out of donations from it, but I never saw a cent of it. I gently raised the issue one day, and he made it pretty clear that he had no intention of divvying up the wealth. Granted, he has put a heckofalot more time total into hacking on CM than I have, but actually, I would have spent a lot more time hacking on it if it weren't for that experience. That was the last code I wrote for CM.

Wait, use chemical reactions on the scale of femtometers to avoid using electronics on the scale of nanometers? Got it.

In other countries (such as New Zealand, where I grew up), passive voice is the preferred grammatical construction, because speaking passively is considered less confrontational. We were taught to write in passive voice in school. We weren't even taught it explicitly; the *teachers* all used it too. Nobody thought it was bad form. Having said that, now that I live in the US, and now that my passive voice constructions have been corrected enough times by self-knighted grammarians, I actually far prefer active voice, and I do see a problem with passive voice. I have no idea if that is just a learned response, or if there's something inherently inferior about passive voice.

I can't wait to see this system having a conversation with itself.

If Google had that much say over what Mozilla does, Firefox would have switched from NPAPI to PPAPI (Pepper) and would have started supporting Native Client a long time ago.

Oh sure, a "practice" mission.

Because they now have a better back door that needs to become the default.

In other news, archaeologists discover we were one year off in our estimates of the end of the next Long Count cycle on the Mayan Calendar.

Wouldn't asteroids hit the moon a lot harder if they glanced past the earth, due to gravitational slingshot? Seems like a good reason for a bigger crater.

Remind me again what Tesla would be doing wrong by offering better technology, and selling that technology on its own relative merits in a competitive market to consumers who have the freedom to make their own choice about what to spend their money on?