Agreed. The authors set up a nearly impossibly complex ethical dilemma that would freeze even a human brain into probable inaction, let alone a computer one, and then claims "See? Because a computer can't guarantee the correct outcome, we can therefore never let a computer make that decision." It seems to be almost the very definition of a straw man to me.

The entire exercise seems to be a deliberate attempt to reach this conclusion, which they helpfully spell out in case anyone missed the not-so-subtle lead: "Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans."

I'm in no hurry to turn loose an army of armed robots either, but saying that you can "prove" that an algorithm can't make a fuzzy decision 100% of the time? Well, yeah, no shit. A human sure as hell can't either. But what if the computer can do it far more accurately in 99% of the cases, because it doesn't have all those pesky "I'm fearing for my life and hopped up on adrenaline so I'm going to shoot now and think later" reflexes of a human?

I'm not sure I'd describe a "judgement call" as being non-deterministic. It's really better described as fuzzy logic, and computers do it all the time, such as in spam filters. The difference is that humans have a lifetime of learning and context for them to help make those judgments, where most computer algorithms don't have that extended context to draw from.

I don't see how true randomness has anything to do with these sorts of decision-making processes or with quantum mechanics in general.

I don't think anyone is disputing that hosted online services are both useful and, in some cases, absolutely essential, especially for smaller businesses. Well, maybe some people are, but they're pretty much Luddites, so we can ignore them. It's just that in the rush to push everything to the cloud since that's seen as some sort of panacea, people tend to forget that there are serious consequences to outages, and the more you push services to the cloud, the greater the impact of those outages will be. It's essentially putting all your technological eggs in one basket.

As much as people complain about proprietary file formats, those really don't hold a candle to proprietary services as far as vendor lock-in. If the service you chose, for instance, starts to go south on a regular basis, and you've built your entire ecosystem inside a specific vendor's cloud, you could be in a world of hurt.

That being said, my feeling is that these sorts of system-wide outages are simple part of these services growing pains. Even now, keep in mind that these sorts of large-scale failures are rare enough that they make international headlines. In another five to ten years, it's going to be even rarer still. Otherwise, fewer large players will trust them for critical infrastructure over the long haul. For smallish businesses, even with occasional outages, it's still probably a net win.

I'm afraid I don't have any specific suggestions, but if you want them to get interested in programming, it needs to be an environment that let's them build things that they're already interested in. Generally speaking, that probably means it should be relatively simple to create videogames in the environment you choose. I learned how to program in AppleBASIC on an Apple II+ as a kid, and the very first thing I tried once I reached a basic level of competence was to create a videogame. I've seen this pattern over and over. Even college students seemed to be a lot more enthusiastic about final projects if they had the option of creating games - nearly all of them opted to do so.

Modding existing games is a great place to start, because they're already starting out with something they like, and they can see results very quickly. The downside, of course, is that setting up a modding environment is often rather tricky (depends on the game, of course). Other good candidates are things which affect devices in the real world, such as controlling robotics. Lego Mindstorm comes to mind. Seeing real-world reactions from something you programmed is incredibly addictive.

I've long wished there was a quality multi-media / game development engine (2D would be fine) all in one development environment that contained a lot of sample art assets and an integrated language that's simple, robust, and safe. Many modern development environments are often too difficult to set up, unfortunately, and those "all-in-one game development" packages I've seen have been severely lacking in quality. Granted, maybe there are some good ones out there I haven't seen.

The simple answer would be "to learn", of course. Humans are insatiably curious - gathering knowledge even if it's unlikely to benefit us directly.

Besides, I don't mean they wouldn't aim to bring back the species... I meant that I don't believe that scientists would simply dump it back into the wild without fully understanding what the impact would be.

After doing a bit of research, I actually found that they have a home waiting for them, should the species actually be brought back. It's an enclosed nature reserve in Siberia designed as something of a large-scale laboratory, with the intent of recreating the northern subarctic steppe grassland ecosystem during the last ice age. I'd wager that this place or similar parks would be the likely home of any initial populations, and would remain so until their effects on existing ecosystems could be studied in great detail.

Rabbits, weeds, insects, and velociraptors can easily get out of hand. Giant, slow-breeding mammals are easily culled if needed. We've nearly wiped out entire species of large mammals before because of over-hunting. The dangers of them over-populating are probably about the same as the danger of modern elephants over-populating. That is, extremely low.

Besides which, we've learned plenty of painful lessons about the dangers of releasing new animals into new territories. I don't think anyone (well, anyone in a position to actually do so) is foolish to enough suggest we just fling open the Canadian ranges or Siberian wilderness to herds of wooly mammoths.

Was anyone seriously considering releasing them into the wild, though? That's not at all what I had in mind certainly. We well understand the danger of transplanting species at this point - I learned about feral pigs destroying Hawaii's rainforests many years ago. My parents live on a small lake, and the homeowners there have to battle foreign weeds annually that threaten to swallow up everything else. Yeah, many people, especially scientists, now well understand the dangers of throwing new species into a region, because they've seen the damages caused by that first-hand.

So, no, I doubt anyone's foolish enough to do something as reckless as that. If they do start creating these animals, of course, they'd better have a plan for what to do with them. I don't think it would be impossible to create a closed-off reserve for them, in which we can make a long term study about how they might interact with the surrounding environment. I still think that would be fascinating.

The Cryptlocker guys, unfortunately, did a near perfect job implementing their ransom-ware and command/control net. Both the US Justice Dept and Interpol did go after them, and ultimately took down the Zeus botnet controlling the malware, even getting back all the keys for the encrypted files. Don't think for a second that the Justice Dept wouldn't have loved to catch those guys and splash it all over the front page if they could have, though.

I don't buy the conspiracy theories. You can bet the feds are still trying to track Cryptolocker guys with considerable zeal, given how much damage that software caused. I think they just hid their tracks better than the Silk Road operators.

I'm curious about why one would consider this unethical? That nature had her shot and declared these animals unfit for habitation on the earth, perhaps? That this could open the door to more widespread tampering with genetics? We interfere with the "natural order" all the time, most especially when it comes to our own comfort and survival. I'm sort of curious why people would suddenly start worrying about bringing extinct animals back to life. I'll admit I haven't given this a lot of thought yet, but my initial reaction is that it seems like a fascinating opportunity if we can pull it off.

Maybe someone that opposes this on ethical grounds could enlighten me.

The exact boundary line is subjective, but it's not exactly difficult to just play it safe, especially when you're talking to the press or meeting with the public. Professional adults don't intentionally push against those sorts of boundaries unless they're trying to call attention to themselves, because it can do nothing but distract from what they're actually trying to convey. And that's exactly what happened here.

I feel a little bad for this guy, because he probably has never been to a business meeting in his life where such attire would be equally inappropriate, and probably got blindsided by this. Someone should have really given him some advice that what he was wearing wasn't appropriate, and to throw on a jacket or something.

I saw nothing in those links that indicates the military prefers this sort of communication to normal fiber for their US landlocked bases. I'd guess the military probably values that technology for places in which laying down permanent fiber isn't an option. For instance, when a war breaks out, there's a need to set up all sorts of bases and command headquarters in completely unpredictable or currently inaccessible places. Moreover, a laser beam can't as easily be disrupted by enemy ground forces or by bombardment. I'd bet this also has applications for ship-to-ship communications, or maybe ground to air drone as well.

I loved that episode, and I also loved the Enemy Mine movie. It's been a long time since I watched either of those - I have no idea how well they'd stand up today. I think I won't chance it, since my memories are great... probably much better than the reality.

The reboot ended up worse than the original, at least for me. The human characters were so unlikeable I started rooting for the cylons. And the moment the show started getting seriously pseudo-mystical/quasi-religious was the moment I dropped it. The original show would have been fantastic if it had just taken itself just a bit more seriously and dropped most of the cheese. The reboot seemed to take itself too seriously. Or at least, tried to be "deeper" than it really needed to be.

Don't get me wrong, the actors did a fantastic job, the cinematography was brilliant, and some of the early episodes were amazing... I just disliked the overall direction of the series. No skin off my nose if others liked it though.

I broke myself of the habit of running many of my desktop applications fullscreen, especially web viewing, since it's pointless. It's frustrating, but it's really web developers fault for insisting on presenting information in a narrow column format. Fixed or maximum width pages drive me bonkers. To this day, most (all?) standard WordPress layouts, for instance, have a maximum width far short of a standard monitor width Why, for heaven's sake? HTML is infinitely malleable in it's native form.

The move to widescreen is certainly a nod to entertainment software, since it's much more suited to playing movies / TV shows and playing videogames in that wide view. It's also really useful in the rarer types of software that edit data in horizontal tracks, such as music sequencers or video editors.

Unfortunately, it's far less useful to those working primarily with text or other largely vertically oriented documents (like programmers). I suspect that's actually *most* computer users, especially business users. However, I also suspect that since resolutions have largely reached a "good enough" state, not a lot of people complain too much about wasted horizontal space in most of their day-to-day tasks. Instead, like me, they probably just use the space to shuffle other windows around.

If you do nothing but write code or work on other vertical documents, then of course you can always tilt that widescreen 90 degrees and get a massive amount of vertical space. Most people don't do this because they still on occasion make use of that widescreen aspect, playing the occasional video or videogame which sort of demands a horizontal aspect ratio.

Yes, we technically don't need to pay off our debt. That doesn't mean there isn't a practical limit to how much we can actually be indebted without destroying our economy. Nor does it mean it's actually healthy to stay in perpetual debt to the extent we are now. We're currently largely staying afloat only thanks to China buying up massive numbers of US bonds. Consider the ramifications of that very carefully.

We do have to pay off bonds when they come due, and we pay those bonds off with new bonds. Or printing money, which, yes, shrinks the debt, but it also shrinks the purchasing power of every other dollar out in circulation. And when you say "inflation shrinks the debt", what you are actually saying is that inflation reduces the return for people who invested in US Bonds, not to mention every other US-based investment. The reason it helps your mortgage is because you're actually paying the thing off. But the US is financing it's debt with new debt, so it gets hurt by higher inflation since that pushes up interest rates, the same as if you were refinancing your house every five years.

It's not the debt that's the root of the problem, although that's bad enough. It's the near-perpetual deficit spending. To stop doing that, we need to either raise taxes, cut spending, or both. None of our politicians have the political will do it, because everyone understands it's going to cause a lot of short term pain when we do, and no one wants to take the political hit for that.

Speaking of AAA... we lost our AAA credit rating in 2011, and it's been downgraded at least once since then, if I recall. We're still the largest economy (measuring GDP) by a good margin, but we really need to manage our debt better, or it may not stay that way. People seem to think we have some special magic that allows us to ignore the laws of economics that seem to apply to everyone else.