First of all the current 'intelligent' systems are on a level of an ant or bee. This does not make them less lethal to humans however. The problems are already there then and the biggest is - even systems that are meant to be friendly may become lethal because of oversight, bug, miscalculation, abuse or because they may 'think' that humans are danger to other humans (which is mostly potentially and in quite many cases actually true). What about systems that are meant to kill or at least disable humans? In old good times a gun shot by itself once a year but it did so only if somebody pulled the trigger. Now the autonomous systems may pull the trigger all by themselves and they may have to decide themselves as humans in control loop are too slow. I think in most cases making system robust and reliable may be a shot in the right direction. Alas in the real world scrum team may decide this feature is to be move to next sprint or demo it albeit it is not ready etc... In other words - is anybody ready to pay for robust systems that are less likely to kill by accident? Yea I did not think so. We solve problems that come out of ant like creatures that have enough power to kill many, move on to quality and robustness and then when AI is on horizon we can start thinking about 3 laws and some such things.

In most of the cases those commissions are not needed and are a waste of time but we just do not know in advance which plumber's fuckup can be really problematic, so we assume any can be.
Bureaucracy is not a good solution to the problem but it seems the only one that can prevent many accidents. It seems to me that this attitude made nuclear industry surprising safe. At least when one does not think too much about waste disposal.

This is probably one of the few intelligible posts on this thread. I too think that the question is badly formulated and problems are not what we think they are. It is not accidents but waste, it is not energy production but energy production and very important weapons production that stimulated development of fission plants, it is not either nuclear or coal but rather the question of how humanity affects its environment. So far the raise and fall of civilizations followed the path of: develope, shine, destroy environment beyond repair and if move to another place is possible - move and rearrange elsewhere. Problem with this is that we live now everywhere. That is typical of any living organism really - if conditions are good - develop and occupy as much as is possible. Overpopulation causes collapse usually. Sometimes renewal. I hope for the later although I know that usually the former happens.

People do not really hate Uber or rather most of us had unsettled view of the company and its methods till more and more stories about criminal or almost criminal activities came out. This is topped with all comments on these evil commies 'banning' Uber in say Berlin i.e. on requiring Uber to follow the law as all others do. Stop throwing verbal abuse at opponents and use arguments of reason instead, then maybe the 'hate' will become reasonable doubts about revealed business practices. But I guess that is too much to ask, is it not?

How is that relating to the subject of the discussion? Not at all which is to be expected from naive /.ers as well as from Uber shills.

improve on that and you probably have a better chance of increasing minorities participation in tech. I doubt however if parity with the population structure could ever be achieved and I do not think it makes sense.

After lawyers and finance industry sucked the civilization dry they evolved into a star sucking monsters described as 'massive balls of plasma' in TFA.

3strikes are for wankers and liberals - let them criminals make small stones from big stones for few years and then release them into free marketplace with a permanent criminal record. That will teach them.
If they are abroad drone them down - no need for a court order then.

So what is your point exactly - that iThings are inhackable or that they are hackable but they are not popular enough to make a difference or what exactly?
What I see a problem with is, that increasing the amount of devices having mostly crappy software inside does not stop. TV sets usually call home (i.e their makers) or else you cannot use some of their functions, the same will happen with the rest of appliances. The problem is not with all but with some of the users who will be abused - trough misuse of the processing power and storage capacity as well as of your connection etc. The increase of attack surface is inevitable. I am rather pessimistic about the remains of our privacy and wealth. IN wild west as well as in middle ages it was not whether you were robbed but whether you survived a robbery and whether you could recover from it. It seems we are getting or already are in a digital version of that. Having more digital shit at home is not going to help much.

Sorry to bring it to you but for this you would need an automated system to sip trough the information and ask you only in rare case of doubt for decision or else you are going to do what all other users of software do - press appropriate key to get rid of the warning or disable warning after the first time already. While such automated systems are possible to make by your self you will have to tweak it for each new appliance having slightly different set of APIs and then maintain the whole lot because the upgrades will surely introduce changes that your systems did not foresee etc. Automatic upgrades will require your attention etc. You can of course switch to bought in privacy and security protection suite from the market leader but uhum how is that going to save you if they are hacked by some criminals on request of NSA etc.
It is increasingly close to impossible to live a normal life and stay out of reach of digital criminals hunting for your data and money. It is like musical chairs but you participate as soon as your mobile and more often when that of your neighbour is on. The digital equivalent of missing a chair is when your data is stolen and misused by privet and state criminals.
1984 is already there only we do not notice because there is not one but a legion of different organisations, mostly private, that dig into your life every second.

I knew it. Something was a-miss this morning, some hidden urge or itch was there. I am sure you know this feeling, you know something is wrong but do not know exactly what. You took cover away and then the difficult to identify feeling becomes a full blown itch and burn - this big monster is called Putin sending his proles to do their dirty deeds.

But seriously - I know there are technical means to mitigate such attacks but they are still an annoyance and the only way to combat those is to go after the attackers. Pointing fingers in general direction of Putin, Russia or Zamunda is not going to do anything but raise tensions possibly, strengthening this overwhelming feeling that conflict is inevitable making the conflict in fact inevitable - if you are under pressure from all sides you may justifiably feel threatened , sort of self fulfilling prophecy.

Yet from another angle - all the BS that NSA and security military industrial complex did over years is making me uneasy about any request for more power. Clearly the police needs more powers to find perpetrators of such acts of IT violence but we also know that they are going to abuse that as soon as they get those new powers. Thus NSA is also a culprit then.

It is not only his but he got 2 insightful mods too. I guess this means lots of Aspies got mod points today.

Calling what a call center worker in India or Pakistan uses English means that English dialects are indeed wider apart than Nordic languages are. That is normal. The language norms have a lot to do with written forms and enforcing (even if not formal) authority. The same happens with English - many people speak it and they do it very differently. Some dialects deviate so much that they are or at least may be considered languages on their own. Whether it stays so is just a guess. With weapons of mass destruction* getting cheaper and cheaper it may be that we will not have that problem in 50 years.

(*) this will inevitably be not only chemical, biological and nuclear agents but also robotics and malware like agents and we shall not forget that biological agents powerful as they may have been so far will become cheaper.

I have to agree with this working in maintenance of closed source and also in QA - our own fault reports were often ignored because the product part reached end of its active development and there was nobody to pay for a fix. This even in a situation where a customer wrote a bug report on that too. So closed source is just as bad or as good. It all depends or in other words: source v. close source is a false dichotomy - there are good&bad products, development teams etc

I have worked in maintenance team few years of my life and if product left the active maintenance you will find out that even paying customers get told to sod off if they complain. Unless of course the problem reached customer-vendor relationship busting proportions and vendor thinks it is worthwhile. It all depends. free software often sucks so much that we went on to make our own or buy shit from 3rd party. Often times this 3rd party or our own in-house developer was even worse.