This argument has a bit of a different feel to it though.

Up till now for a decade the agencies just invoke "we're scary and secretive, we don't need to follow your puny little laws because of National Security but we need a billion dollars in next year's budget to build more systems to hold data forever and ever".

And you can bet they cherry pick their data so that they have ten years worth of people's email and Slashdot posts, but suddenly when a lawsuit comes along, suddenly that data vanishes. But then it becomes vital to an investigation! "Oh look, we found it again!"

"...what a lot of people portray as "evil" is really just the absence of a moral code -- more accurately called "amoral". An AI system that has no moral code and no ethical code..."

I think this is the main line of the discussion. Hollywood profit calculations aside, this is what we're worried about. But we don't let people grow up without moral codes, so AI's shouldn't get a free ride.

Forgetting Snowden style confusion, when you commit a criminal act, you expect to get into trouble. So if anything it's a snap to program an AI with all the laws so that it at least knows the basics of what not to do even better than we do. Yes, cue the Grey Areas, but that's a topic we can handle. We're nervous about Skynet/Borg style complete takeovers which have discarded our laws completely.

"The problem with that argument is that we don;t have to design an AI that is self aware by that specific definition."

Without dragging me into Citation Needed stuff, I have read a few things that suggest that self awareness is a crucial part of true AI. (Suggested partial cite - Douglas Hofstadter's book "Strange Loop". )

Partially relevant from another genre is Ray Bradbury's story "The Bicentennial Man". In that story, it is about a robot that grows as an AI. But only near the end with an understanding of mortality do people grant it "true AI" status.

But even before that, just knowing flaws, is what we people have to deal with every day. That's why I have semi-joked that every AI needs an old Pentium 1 chip as part of its processor network, *and to be aware* that it can't fully trust every result it produces. (I know, it's slow, it needs better chips to do the hard stuff.) But to my knowledge that's the only famous chip with a true math error flaw that isn't just past tense "state of the art as it was then".

Asimov had a good start with the three laws of Robotics. We don't let people become random murderers, so why should AI's get a free ride? So we just have to program/teach them basic morality.

" by immaterial (1520413) Alter Relationship on 05:48 AM June 4th, 2014 (#47162803)
A 24 Horus deadline? Just six of those falcon-headed bastards strutting around all godlike and hassling me about missed TPS reports is bad enough, but 24... To be honest, at that point I might just throw myself into the Nile and let my ka move on to the realm of Osiris."

Dear Sir.

Please advise what Creative Commons license you wish for this comment. This is *the* most epic comment I have seen here in months and I would like to do something such as write a short story around it.

Send me an email when you like,

--Tao

So I'm a bit confused all this. How close is the following chain of events?

1. Netflix/___ others start trying to wrap their "tasty content" into wrappers that (try to) require baked in DRM.
2. Uneducated Firefox users suddenly discover that their browser won't play that tasty content anymore "because Mozilla didn't add that Dr. Thingy stuff" to make it work.
3. Said uneducated Firefox users then jump ship to that dulcet siren's call such as Chrome because yay the tasty content works again! "Everything is Awesome!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

So what about PaleMoon? Scuttle has it a bunch of people are headed over that way not least because of FF29 UI Shenanigans. So why not DRM? Their entire point was to unbake bloaty parts of reg FF. So why not if they unbake the DRM from their copy?

And what does Opera have to say about all this? How about Chromium and/or Komodo Dragon? (Non-Googly clones of Chrome.)

You're close and this would be really easy to make. You just need a bit of a clever UI that stops most prank calls but is "unforgettable" in real emergencies. The actual tech of this is a snap.

Nice angle Dan. I needed you to start the angle because I don't have the skills for that post but I can ride with it.

Working with that use case, my older iPhone croaks right about at the 6% mark (when it's not glitching.) So for ex if you are right at 7% battery because you spent all day doing stuff, and didn't recharge, you might be able to smash out one or two texts but don't have time for the full call. Similar thing, folks like me have "value plans" for phones and with 60 cents left on the plan there's no way I'd get a call out but I might be able to manage two texts.

Hallo Sir Avenger.

I'll go even further with a new avenue. Let's say that there is no attacker, that it's a "contained" emergency like a self inflicted wound or an auto hit or whatever. *Both* text *and* voice could save lives. If you have stuff like

"Geroald MacKenzei with the ei and watch the unusual spellings 1433 Maple Avenue #7F Woodside, NY next to 5th and 6th Ave hits M and R trains just past the cross junction of Broadway and Roosevelt. Remember you need to have someone get you in the building." ...all as a pre-recorded 911 text you just smash it out during your call and the operator should have the tech to power-blast it to all 17 agents. So you don't need to waste time with the Op on stupid junk repeating it because Texts Can't Be Forgotten. (done right)

Our traditional notions of 911 are somewhere stuck half in 1977 and half with modern tech that 1882 TV cop shows is possible but somehow the carriers are treating it like a big deal to get a text message and send a squad car.

Okay, this is kinda an important topic and too many junk post are threatening to bury it so I will keep raising a couple of new avenues to discuss.

It's a weird collection of states. Pasted:
Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Montana, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Virginia

Linear:
Colorado
Georgia
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Maine
Maryland
Montana
New York
North Carolina
Ohio
Pennsylvania
South Carolina
Texas
Vermont
Virginia

I think you make a good point. These services tend not to flesh out as fast as they need to. But for example any of the dating apps are free (with ads) via Wifi (in your home) So if they really wanted to drill this out (see my note above, emergency codes help) you could for example text 911 on a dating site for free.

It comes down to how much they want to actually help people vs the political capital. It's not hard to monitor "911" on any of thirty dating apps if they spread the word to solve exactly the problem you mentioned.

See my note above.

For example let's forget tinfoil hats and assume that for once the cops are on your side. You go visit them on a nice safe day and get a series of codes.

Then you folks work together to make a few pre-recorded 911 texts with those codes and stuff they will need as mentioned in the article. Responders are at work, it's not like chatting, they don't mind a Wall of Text. So with some sort of few keystroke system if you can send any of nine 911 text messages in 12 seconds, that's gotta be plenty for them to get started with. Yes on the rare case you send that as a joke you get a fine, but the life saving side will way outweigh it;

Maybe I've seen too many TV shows but if you have a pre-recorded text for 911, something like seven key strokes can send it silently whereas the standard voice call risks the attacker hearing you.

I wasn't impressed with the article. At a higher level there has to be some coding you can send that says "can't speak, puts my life in danger". I don'tr know what that would be, but it rises above the article's cheap promotion of voice calls.

This is a topic highly prone to what AC was meant for in the best sense.

It's rather narrowly presented - all on the officer side. Pretty soon the members of the public will have their own running cameras if for no other reason than just in "today's social media / blogging culture". So then suddenly the defendant has a video but the cop doing something "forgot" to turn his on?!

That's gotta be good for a defense lawyer!

So the next level is both sides have theirs on, and everyone is tracking everyone else, and we become a giant game of Pac-Man. Go Atari.

Well gee, the top half of this story threads are wrecked, so I'll reply to you.

According to the (non-optimized) version I learned, you're not wrong. The Bottom Middle Non-Corners were the bear of the solution. You had both rotation and orientation to worry about. The Rotation was 18 moves long and the Orientation was 18 moves long.

So one fun prank was to take display cubes and throw them off by the 18 move orientation move, and know that "it looks so close" but no one could fix it, then they have the minor guilt of leaving a "almost solved" cube in shambles! : )

But the various modern tricks make sure you have an easier time when you get there, but like someone else said elsewhere, my horribly clunky method was enough, so I never felt the interest to super-optimize it.

Reversing the "what could possibly go wrong" sentiment, this particular article is noticeably short of the backing science paper for the detail hounds to pore over. The meager analysis presented is too simple - "so if this species dies, another one will just step up the food chain", like maybe that Asian Tiger Mosquito. So then just rinse and repeat a second time. "Kill all the mosquitoes and we win."

Unlike things like the Africanized Killer Bee, which as I understand it was greed gone wrong, there's a life and death upside to winning this attempt, so I'm being careful with my words. So straight up, what *could* possibly go wrong? My best guess is something like knocking a hole in the ecology chain and getting unlucky that we did three rounds, celebrated a couple years of victory, and then discovering that mosquito eating bats are in trouble and then damaging the balance of ecology with whatever eats those or something.

But the snark question is also a fast shorthand for containability risk. Unlike a problem say with a temporary dominance of destructive wolves, making a mistake with insects could be really hard to fix.