I, for one, cannot wait for the day when I can set my car's logic system to different ethical settings, sorted by philosopher.

I just tried the Plato setting and now I'm stuck in a cave. Thanks Joe!

Except that sitting on the floor isn't an Eastern practice, it's a Japanese/Korean practice. Chinese sit in chairs like the rest of Asia/world.

Would a real-name policy even work at eliminating trolls? I mean, The Westborough Baptist folks are still out there trolling in the real world and everyone knows their real names.

at least in Berlin...

I was curious about what rules would be waived so actually read the article. This article says almost nothing. And the supposedly supporting link on 'waive the rules' doesn't go anywhere. About all I can tell is that they will let them do their Impact Assessment as they begin construction instead of ahead of time.

Seems like much ado about nothing unless anyone has some real info.

we demand that Samsung engineering department show us their diversity porfolio!

Signed,

NAACP, N.O.W., G.L.O.W.

Of course a program can do things that it is not explicitly programmed to do, at least in the sense you're implicitly using "explicitly programmed to do." Any learning algorithm, from simple regression on up, changes it's output based on the training data it's presented with.

If you want to use that phrase in the most general way possible, then your brain can't do anything it's not explicitly (by genetics) programmed to do either.

Nobody knows how to program "general intelligence." Virtually everybody has given up on the idea of doing so and has turned to the idea that you don't have to.

You'll have to wait a few years until they integrate radar and track the bullet's flight. The first one might miss, but the one behind that will hit exactly. By then they'll have dropped the pretense of a human pulling the trigger too.

I recognize your username I think I've been able to answer one of your questions before. They're interesting, and you've got a great way of asking for clarification if you don't like the answer you get. Reminds me of the nineties on Slashdot. ;)

how could these companies say with a straight face that they only want more H1B visa employees due to lack worker shortage and not because they're trying to find cheaper labor?

You're being pedantic (yes, in your other post too). NASA is a US government agency. Individual researchers in that agency are US government employees. As far as I can tell, this study was funded by internal NASA funds.

Somebody convinced someone in a responsible position within NASA, with the power to allocate funds and probably assign personnel, that this was something worth looking into. Normal people understand that when you say "NASA did this" or "IBM did this" or "Microsoft did this" that you don't mean that every individual associated with one of those entities was involved, but that someone was, and that there was some kind of institutional involvement. Funding certainly qualifies.

I imagine they'll get around to that, provided everything goes well, but they'd probably like to do some more ground testing before they invest millions putting up a satellite.

Your "major reason" is BS you made up. Have you heard of relativity?

If you're going to use P = F*v then the v has to come from the thruster, not from however you got the train up to mach 10 in the first place. Congrats though, you managed to dazzle the mods with some "math."

So you're arguing that NASA shouldn't test a potential new propulsion technique based on some shady logic founded on a description in a pop science magazine? Very rigorous of you.

Which NASA is working towards gathering. What's the problem?

Somebody convinced NASA that it was worth spending some money checking this out, so they build a small scale version and tested it. Results were positive, with some compromises in the experiment. The next step is to do a more rigorous experiment. If that's positive you invest a little more. Eventually, if everything goes well, you launch a test satellite. There's your extraordinary evidence.

Many crazy ideas are not worth testing. This one isn't nearly as crazy as the media likes to make it sound. The leading theoretical explanations don't involve any violations of conservation of momentum.