I wouldn't call it a metaphor, nor would I say that Asimov's point is that you can't codify morality. His point is more subtle: a code of morality, even a simple one, doesn't necessarily imply what we think it does. It's a very rabbinical kind of point.

I nominated "dingleberry".

Spin, sure, but it's a waay bigger minority than I expected. I'd even say even shockingly large.

The genius of Asimov's three laws is that he started by laying out rules that on the face of it rule out the old "robot run amok" stories. He then would write, if not a "run amok" story, one where the implications aren't what you'd expect. I think the implications of an AI that surpasses natural human intelligence are beyond human intelligence to predict, even if we attempt to build strict rules into that AI.

One thing I do believe is that such a development would fundamentally alter human society, provided that the AI was comparably versatile to human intelligence. It's no big deal if an AI is smarter than people at chess; if it's smarter than people at everyday things, plus engineering, business, art and literature, then people will have to reassess the value of human life. Or maybe ask the AI what would give their lives meaning.

Look again at a piano keyboard. Notice there are 7 white keys and 5 black keys for each octave? There are seven letters in the western scale, so people get confused by that.

But it's even more confusing, as the western scale divides the octave into 12 notes, and then does LSD while smoking crack before inventing the notation for those 12 notes and related "keys". If we ditched the oddball half-step from E to F, we'd have 6 letters with sharps and flats giving 12 notes/octave, and it would all make much more sense when compared to the 7 notes/octave of the Thai scale.

You can divide up the octave many ways and still find pleasing harmonies - interference patterns between nearby notes being themselves notes which must fit with the chord. You can use a traditional scale, or do your own oddball thing (as Rush did on later albums, where the scale is offset a bit from where we expect, making it sound like a tape played at 80% speed).

Dear moderators: "Troll" is not a synonym for "I disagree with this".

That said, I disagree with this.

We've known since the investigation of 9/11 that suicide bombers are not necessarily dead-enders except in the literal sense. Economic powerlessness might play a role in the political phenomenon of extremist violence, but it is not a necessary element of the profile of a professional extremist. These people often come from privileged backgrounds and display average to above average job aptitude.

Mohammed Atta's life story makes interesting reading. He was born to privileged parents; at the insistence of his emotionally distant father he wasn't allowed to socialize with other kids his age, and had a lifelong difficulty with relating to his peers. At university he did OK but below the high expectations of his parents. He went to graduate school in urban planning where his thesis was on how impersonal modern high rise buildings ruined the historic old neighborhoods of the Muslim world.

That much is factual; as to why he became an extremist while countless others like him did not, we can only speculate. I imagine that once he decided modernity was the source of his personal dissatisfactions Al Qaeda would be attractive to him. Al Qaeda training provided structure which made interacting with his new "peers" easier than ever before. And martyrdom promised relief from the dissatisfactions of a life spent conscious of his own mediocrity. Altogether he was a miserable and twisted man -- but not economically miserable.

Anonymous coward( 'Bull Fucking Shit', below) is far too strident; but it is the case that there's a curious sort of 'bifurcation' in the 'terrorist' labor market(a confusion we probably contribute to by conflating the various local tribal militias, warlords, strongmen, etc. who cause us trouble during our ground campaigns with the 'terrorists' who are much more international in scope).

On the one hand, as you say, the terrorist grunt supply is heavily drawn from frustrated young men(inconveniently, lots of prime recruiting grounds have demographics that skew fairly young, so there are lots of them), with limited economic prospects, often compounded by a culture where you probably aren't getting laid unless you've achieved enough economic stability to get married. The miscellaneous 'insurgents' who raise hell when you attempt to occupy their home sand trap; but lack international ambitions and/or capabilities are mostly these guys. Some of the lower-skill terrorists proper are as well(particularly for the Israelis, since Gaza's festering-prison-slum atmosphere provides an endless supply of the angry and hopeless; and you don't even need to buy them plane tickets to have them go do a 'martyrdom operation'.

On the other hand, a lot of terrorist leadership, and high-skill recruits(if you want to blow stuff up, it sure helps to have some real engineers and chemists around), are not driven by economic desperation. Bin Laden himself was basically a trust-fund fundamentalist, and a lot of the more influential and logistically important figures are people with decent university degrees, often in marketable subjects, who are financially stable; but alienated by some aspect of the injustice of the world, or disaffected by secularism or the wrong sort of religious practice, exactly which one varying by person.

They come in both flavors.

Stop treating everyone as children. Adults are moral entities with agency, and can damn well decide on their own whether to wear a seatbelt or not.

Exactly: we seem t have a collective fetish for forcing others to make the same choices that we would, instead of respecting one another as people just like us, each with the right to find his own distinct path to happiness.

If anything, Al-Qaeda isn't actually in the mass-murder business.

They are a nasty bunch, treat civilian casualties as a feature not a bug, etc.; but they don't have nearly the resources or the direct combat assets; much less specialized infrastructure that must either be carefully hidden or sited in an area where you are the de-facto government, to do 'mass murder'.

They do terrorism: that tends to include a good deal of violence; but calibrated with an eye to maximum psychological impact, attacks on culturally salient targets, that sort of thing. In terms of straight body count, they rank well below more-or-less-strictly-business drug cartels, and even a fair percentage of the 21st century bush wars in countries that aren't interesting enough to even attract a few foreign correspondents; much less the sort of stuff that made the 20th century so notorious.

The numbers get a bit fuzzy because of the various more-and-less-actually-connected 'franchise' operators, some of which were actually collaborators to some reasonably close degree, some of which were little more than unrelated thugs with a taste for trademark infringement; but Al-Qaeda's body count just isn't that big. It's well weighted for psychological punch, lots of Americans in important buildings, fewer peasant conscripts in ethniclashistan; but in absolute numbers? Chickenshit. ISIS and Boko Haram are almost certainly well ahead; and let's not even talk about how quickly the professionals working for established nation states can stack up bodies...

Shamefully, I actually read TFA. It has a lot of great background on the problem, and is a fine read for someone who hasn't ever looked into cosmology before, but it actually has less information than the Wikipedia article on using the 21cm "hydrogen line" to observe the "dark age" of the universe. Prettier pictures than Wikipedia, though.

"What's the other half, Joe?"

"Killing those Cobra motherfuckers!"

And that point is encapsulated in a single adverb: still. "Still" is what makes this news; it wouldn't have been news twenty or thirty years ago.

I am old enough to remember when genital equipment was considered employment destiny. When my wife went to oceanography graduate school the sysadmins of the school minicomputers were all female. The all-male faculty called them -- I kid you not -- "Data Dollies". Data dolly was considered a good job for a technically inclined woman because it paid well for an entry level job, involved computers, and was an easy job to hand off when you quit to marry the professor you'd snagged. Plus they'd have a hard time getting work in industry. Clearly that was a transitional moment because there were a substantial minority of women graduate students in the program, but *no* female professors, much less senior administrators.

But given the strong cohort of women in that class, it is surprising the thirty years later there is still a lingering perception in this country that science isn't for women. But maybe it shouldn't be surprising. Change doesn't happen instantaneously, nor does it necessarily ever become complete. When I was in college the notion that women had to become full time homemakers was still predominant -- not among students, but of people over thirty or so, practically everyone in positions of hiring and authority. That attitude seems weird and foreign to a young person today; I expect it's hard for a young person to grasp how pervasive and indeed how genuinely oppressive that belief was. It's a bit like the difference between the way I experience watching Mad Men and the way my kids do. I actually *recognize* that world where smoking was everywhere, big shots drank during office hours, and "womanizing" was a word people actually used without irony. It was fading fast, but still there. To my kids it's like an alien civilization in Doctor Who. So yes, the news that many Americans see science as a profession that somehow belongs to men is a bit like discovering a Silurian in the closet.

The women of my generation fought hard to establish a beachhead in male dominated professions, and if they're sometimes a bit snippy about it, well they earned the right. It wasn't easy to be an oddball among your peers and freak to your parents, teachers and and people in authority generally. And this was at a time when there was no such thing as geek chic to offset the disadvantages being an oddball. Being a geek was bad, period.

Now that cadre of pioneering women is at or approaching the apex of their careers. They're still a minority in their age cohort, but they left a wide open hole in their wake for the next generation. It's taken awhile for that hole to fill up because when opportunities open for a group they go for more high-profile professions (47% of medical students are women, as are 48% of law students). But in another generation I am sure the view that science belongs to one sex or another will be a truly fringe belief.

Its hard to convince Americans in general to wear seat belts.

Can you actually find torrents for academic journals? That would be quite a public service by whoever's taking the time to scan them.

Only if the competition can avoid the taxes. If all of the players in the market get hit with the same taxes, then all of them absolutely can and will raise prices, and there will be no consequences.

This is a standard financial calculation, and a trivial one. The tax is 10%, so the increase is 10%, but there's 10% tax on that, so 1%, meaning the increase needs to be 11%, continue ad infinitum (literally). In other words, the new price needs to be 11.1111...% higher than the old one to keep profit margins unchanged. More generally, the increase needs to be the sum of the infinite series with terms r^n. This series is convergent if r < 1, and converges to 1/(1-r). So for a 25% tax, the company needs to increase prices by 1-1/(1-.25) = 33.333...% to keep profit margins unchanged after accounting for the new tax.

Of course, it doesn't quite happen like that. In practice, companies don't instantly raise prices. They do take the hit for a while, where it gets absorbed by the investors, not the customers. Then they allocate a portion of the losses to employees, in the form of reduced raises, or benefits. Then they raise prices. But eventually they get back to a steady state of roughly the same return on assets that they had before the tax hike.

Specifically, all corporate taxes paid come from three categories of individuals: consumers, who pay higher prices for items to cover the taxes; employees, who make lower wages to cover the taxes; and shareholders, who earn lower returns (and note that the two former categories are often also shareholders, via their pension plans). Suppliers can also lose, but they're generally corporations as well, with their own employees and investors who actually eat the loss. In the long run, though, the investors don't lose because capital flows away from lower returns and towards higher ones. So companies must find ways to keep their returns up to somewhere near the mean rate of return.

Once you understand that no taxes are paid by corporations, ever, then you should also recognize that corporate taxes are not only ultimately paid by individuals, but the individuals almost never realize they're paying it. How many people know their prices would be lower, wages higher, or pension more secure, if it weren't for corporate taxes? And, therefore, how many voters have any interest in opposing corporate taxation? To politicians and voters, corporate taxes look almost like free money. Ratchet up the corporate taxes and no people get hurt, just those nasty corporations. (Actually, politicians sometimes get even more value out of threatening corporate taxes than enacting them, since it tends to encourage said corporations to buy off, er, donate to their re-election funds.)

I assert that while taxes are necessary, the electorate should see and understand exactly what they're paying, so they can evaluate the value they're receiving for the money they're paying. Hidden taxes are evil, and therefore corporate taxes are evil, and should be abolished, not raised.