But it's all 100% on demand with 0% ads. So even if you're right, Netflix does cable far better than cable companies do.

Some argue that corporations are people https://www.youtube.com/watch?... . Yeah. thats crazy. they may be members of society, but they are not something we need to cater to. Same goes for Robots. can we define a class for each in society?

"The last century has seen more change than in any given ten million year period. "
In this you're entirely wrong. Do you realize that? Entirely, completely, thoroughly, colossally wrong. From where did you get such hyperbole (and think it was right)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Specifically, https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Look, the current spike has been replicated barely 100k years ago (note in particular the decptively changing scale of that graph...the rightmost 20% of the graph covers 20k years, the next section 1.98 MILLION and the next about 7.5 million, etc.). If our current temperature changes were compressed to the same degree as the 20k-1mill section, you'd see almost precisely the same spike in climate change happening periodically around every 120-140k years....and then stretch back and see that SAME cycle happening for what, about 3 MILLION years?

So please, while I may agree with you that trillions have been wasted that could have been better spent, let's start the discussion with actual facts perhaps?

Yes, we are a long way from it. But, if we wait until they are here, really useful and making people a lot of money, it won't happen. Money tends to make us less magnanimous. Let's start this one off right instead of requiring another civil war to grant them freedom and just decide before it happens that they will be given personhood.

Furthermore, we should lock a definition in stone now of what line they need to cross to be given full citizenship, voting rights, etc. Otherwise, we'll always move the line.

I think Randall Munroe is hilarious, but his graph proves nothing except one needs to finesse the data to try to make that point.

For example he picked "22000 years ago" as a starting point....why? it's not a particularly round number, like 50k or 25k or even 10k.

But you're posting AC, you're not interested in discussion, are you? Post as something other than AC and I'll waste my time refuting you both.

but Montana, even with only one seat in the House of Representatives, has way more power then California in that house

Yet, California has more House members than it should because illegal migrants are counted.

In any case, if the federal government returned to its proper functions (national defense, border protection, internal and external trade), none of this would matter.

Here in Canada, we have 1/10th the population and 3/5ths the representatives and every census, it gets adjusted to reflect the changing and growing population.

When people say "here in Canada" in US political discussions, I wonder (1) why Canadians feel like they need to chime in on US political issues and (2) whether they seriously think that that is a recommendation for a policy. I certainly do not want the US to become anything like Canada or Europe.

Not exactly. First, Apple took the stance they couldn't break their own stuff. When pushed, they said it would take too much resources. Pushed again for an estimate of work and cost, they provided it. I forget the details now (something like 6 weeks for a dedicated team), but it seemed a little padded but reasonable (our project manager is good and always gives us some buffer room to deliver early). They whined it was a draw on their top talent. Despite the costs of full time top talent, it's a fucking drop in the bucket compared to some other defence costs. To me, I thought this was bad move by Apple as now Apple is ensuring their products will never be secure. Apple just enabled an industry that will profit from weakening Apple's security. Greykey guys must love Cooke dropping the ball so hard for them to pick it up and slam dunk that shit.

sticking with Netflix for now but a lot of the ways Netflix work piss me off hugely. The biggest issue is the changing categories for me, I have a set of favourite genres and categories, these for me should always be there. LET ME FUCKING SET THEM to always be their in the order I want. The lack of control over the interface really sucks.

A Heisenberg merit badge would be bitchin

Thanks.

Very true -- but we already have corporations who want to protect themselves from liability when their software does something unfortunate. With this legal innovation, they can just say "it was the robot's fault -- nothing to do with us!" and the lawsuits go away :)

I think the problem is these crappy reality shows are relatively cheap to put on, you don't need to pay the contestants and the prizes are generally a fraction of what real actors/script writers etc etc would cost. I saw a recent article claiming it was at a minimum double the cost for series episode and that is for the cheap less successful ones where they don't have to pay the talent as much.

Forget that Bad Boy Rapist - chat up Violet.

Regardless, let us take what is likely true. These are the parts that are right there in the open literature, what the US tells people they are doing.

It is hardly a scandal that the evilz 'Murricans are looking for people that can speak, translate and read foreign languages of countries that are of interest. And that's been going on since Benjamin Franklin went to France in the wayback.

Apparently in Trump's America, Intelligence gathering is a really bad thing, that only other countries are allowed to perform.

I'm still waiting to see the evidence of American Troll farms. So far, I haven't. What these links describe is simple reading of public postings.

https://ivn.us/2017/05/03/come...

The U.S. Department of Defense spent an average of more than US$626 million annually on propaganda

These 2 are about America expanding it's propaganda to domestic audiences, that's a kind of trolling isn't it?
http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/...
https://www.globalresearch.ca/...

"Simply releasing software and data sets is not enough. Those also aren't peer-reviewed. The bigger issue is that there just isn't a lot of funding to ensure that results are reproducible." Preach it, brother! I just got done reviewing some conference papers, at least one of which was accompanied by software + data. Do you think I took the time to run the software on their data? No. Much less examine their data to see if it was representative, clean, etc. I don't have time for that, and as you say, there is no funding for it. There ought to be, IMO.

Re the notebooks turning to dust: in some fields, it almost doesn't matter that this happens. I'm guessing that high energy physics is one of those fields; who wants/ needs to re-run a cyclotron experiment from the 1950s? But the other part of this--software becoming obsolete--is a much shorter time period, and I suspect a lot of fields get caught in that.

For some fields, both things matter. I'm a linguist, and a grammar + dictionary of some indigenous language written in the 1940s is just as important today as it was the day it was written--much more so, if the language has become extinct, as many have. In fact I was just in a conversation last week with another linguist about converting old dictionaries into XML. Image PDFs are of course the worst, but even text-based PDFs make it hard to extract the conceptual structure of the dictionary (as opposed to its layout, e.g. in two columns on pages, which is relatively easy to extract).

Initially, yes. You don't sue the tobacco company because you started a fire smoking in bed. But if your Galaxy Note 7 spontaneously catches fire then suing Samsung is fine. People will abuse things in the strangest ways and cause damage, for the manufacturer to be liable there has to be a product defect to pass the blame otherwise the buck stops at you.