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Comment Re:Bad idea with current laws (Score 2) 232

You are not required to incriminate yourself.
This however does not mean you cannot be compelled to give physical items,or access to physical items (including fingerprints).
The cops have no right to demand you produce your passphrase.
They have a right to demand the bit of paper they know you wrote the passphrase on.

Comment Re:"AI" vs Strong AI (Score 4, Insightful) 227

Software runs on hardware - yes.
Software cannot increase the capabilities of hardware - well - not quite.
The most literal meaning of this - apart from limited things like overclocking is of course broadly true but may be hugely misleading.
If you've got a really advanced program on each of a network of computers, doing a given task - there are many ways in which it can seem to increase its capabilities, without really doing so.

Giving up the designated task and freeing resources.
Co-opting other systems into adding to its resource.
Optimising the way it performs the task so that it at least does it reasonably well, but much cheaper.
Sharing computations over multiple devices which were expected to be done on one.

There are many systems where 'dumb' algorithms are tens, or thousands of times less efficient than optimum ones.
Optimum algorithms are in many cases intractable for humans to find.

Optimising computational efficiency over time as machine learning is a really valuable thing to do.
Looked at from another angle, this can come quite close to 'evolution'.

Comment Re:Pets (Score 1) 182

The above comment is especially fun - because it varies.
Some animals you keep you have no liability over their actions, and some you do.
(in the UK)
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/...

For example - you are liable for the damage livestock causes to others property.
But this is only "cattle, horses, asses, mules, hinnies, sheep, pigs, goats and poultry, and also deer not in the wild state and, in sections 3 and 9, also, while in captivity, pheasants, partridges and grouse; poultry” means the domestic varieties of the following, that is to say, fowls, turkeys, geese, ducks, guinea-fowls, pigeons, peacocks and quails"

Ostriches, camels, llamas, kangaroos, cats, dogs, parrots, peacocks are not listed, so you aren't.

Unless your dog damages other peoples livestock.
If it savages a Kangaroo - no liability.
Or if your cat kills chickens.

in short - the exact legislation matters.

Submission + - A Bot Committed a Crime - Who's Responsible?

HughPickens.com writes: Daniel Rivero writes that as part of an art show in Zurich an automated online shopping bot with a budget of $100 a week in Bitcoin, is programmed to go to one particular marketplace on the Deep Web and make one random purchase a week with the provided allowance. The art show, titled "The Darknet: From Memes to Onionland" is an attempt "to grasp this extremely controversial phenomenon of hacking the Deep Web with artistic contributions." There's only one problem — the bot committed a crime. The programmers came home one day to find a shipment of 10 ecstasy pills, followed by an apparently very legit falsified Hungarian passport– developments which have left some observers of the bot’s blog a little uneasy.

If this bot was shipping to the US who would be legally responsible for purchasing the goodies? The coders? Or the bot itself? Are these artists liable for what the bot bought? The answer is "maybe." In the United States, at least, criminal law is predominantly statutory. "We would have to look to the precise wording of the federal or local law and then apply it to the facts at hand," says Ryan Calo. "If, for instance, the law says a person may not knowingly purchase pirated merchandise or drugs, there is an argument that the artists did not violate the law. Whereas if the law says the person may not engage in this behavior recklessly, then the artists may well be found guilty, since they released the bot into an environment where they could be substantially certain some unlawful outcome would occur." For their part, coders Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo say that they are assuming full responsibility for the bot’s actions and for the illegal contraband, even though the gallery is ironically located next door to a police station. “We are the legal owner of the drugs – we are responsible for everything the bot does, as we executed the code,” says Smoljo. “But our lawyer and the Swiss constitution says art in the public interest is allowed to be free.”

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