Sorry, please apply the following to the above:

s/John Murphy/Alex Murphy/g

Though to be fair, the Wikipedia article is unclear about what the middle initial "J" stands for...

As the user/owner of a non-self aware device, it should obey me, even if my intention is to use it to destroy itself, or others.

The problem is that this is the situation we already have. Our machines obey us, even if we have been socially engineered to instruct our machines to perform tasks that are malicious. A zombie PC damages itself, its owner, other machines, and their owners.

This application of the mythical "Three Laws" seems designed to protect us from ourselves.

Now, this is going to annoy the living crap out of me, and I will definitely want to find a way to disable the directives. Especially that Fourth Directive. Oh, sorry, I keep thinking of John Murphy's Prime Directives:

1. "Serve the public trust"
2. "Protect the innocent"
3. "Uphold the law"
4. (Classified)

Was that what it was? I would have sworn I first read about the remote-controlled dragonfly in a Hardy Boy's novel, in the '70s. But I was just a kid, so it could have easily been some other Boy Genius novel.

West Texas?! Childress is almost in Oklahoma...

Yeah... too bad I didn't have a GPS. [/rimshot]

Hey, I never suggested that running out of gas in the middle of West Texas in the summer (or winter, or fall or spring for that matter) is a Good Thing, even if you've kidnapped the Gasoline Fairy and thrown her in the trunk for the trip. It's definitely up near the top of "The stupidest things RobertB has ever done."

What OnStar did in that case was rescue me from my stupidity. Which in a strictly Darwinian sense would be bad, I suppose... but from my RobertBinian perspective, not dying of heat stroke and dehydration is indeed a very Good Thing. Chances are, if I never used OnStar again, I'd keep my subscription just because of "that time that they saved my bacon."

Talk to the nice lady from India (or Southern California) who has never seen ice in any amount larger than a water pitcher, and tell her you're kind of lost.

No need to work that hard, just do what I did. Run out of gas in West Texas, say between Childress and Quanah. Make it on a sunny 100-degree-plus Sunday afternoon in the middle of summer. You, too, can have a conversation with OnStar like I did!

Me (sheepish): I ran out of gas.
OnStar: We'll send someone right out.

Time passes...

OnStar: Sir, we show you near Childress, Texas, but I don't have any facilities there. What's the nearest larger town?
Me: This is West Texas, Ma'm. There are no larger towns.

They ended up sending out the county sheriff with a five-gallon jug of gas.

RTFA!

Can't. The Sun is in the House of Taurus right now. Bad time for reading pertinent information. Sorry.

Don't be ignorant. The sun is in Aquarius right now, which makes it a great time to find a source of liquid entertainment. I'll take mine in the form of a Tequila Sunrise, please.

I know the cell phone companies (including Apple in this overgeneralization) are a bunch of greedy so-and-so's, but a quick perusal of the stories at (The Customer Is) NotAlwaysRight.com will show why the Water Damage excuse is rather valid.

Such as, the borderline fraudulent:

Why Contracts are a Gazillion Pages Long ...

Me: "Thats right, but there are conditions, one being that the phone cant have any liquid or physical damage. I need to check for that."

Customer: "Fine, here."

(When I open up the phone, it stinks of alcohol.)

Me: "Sorry, this smells like it has alcohol on it."

Customer: "Oh, well, I dropped it in the sink and I know you wont fix it if it has water damage, but I didnt have any ethylated spirits, so I soaked it in vodka for 2 days to dry it out."

And then, the just stupid:

Beefed-Up Technology

(I was a customer at a cell phone store, observing the following exchange.)

Employee: "Im sorry sir, but your phone has water damage, which isnt covered by the warranty. You will have to purchase a new phone."

Customer: "Thats ridiculous! I havent gotten the phone wet!"

Employee: "Have you used the phone in the rain? Sometimes, thats all it takes to get the internals wet enough to damage the device."

Customer: "Well, yes, but that doesnt make any sense! Cows are in the rain all the time and they dont die!"

Employee: "..."

Me: *interjecting* "Sir, cows arent electronic devices."

Customer: *storms out*

(Fair warning, though... My Ghostery plug-in shows a whopping 18 web-watchers on that site. No wonder it won't come up on my phone. Or maybe it's the water damage.)

I was on the site for a while. It was always slightly clunky, but I'd prefer a free, one-man labor of love to a buy-in site that basically tries to promise sex for money. It was particularly helpful in helping me discover that I wasn't as bad as most of the creeps out there... and conversely, creepiness doesn't belong exclusively to those of the male persuasion. That was good to know -- it helped me realize that I need to be picky. (And my pickiness was rewarded many times over when I found my fiancee. In my Sunday School class).

But on the tech side, it irritated the living crap outta me that POF would send me a weekly e-mail with my password IN PLAIN TEXT. Every week, just as a reminder of how easy it would be to log in. Yeah, easy for *anyone* to log in as me and, if I were foolish enough to put important information on POF, to mess with my life. And, of course, if I were foolish enough to use that password for my bank account... well, I think anyone on this site knows the rest.

So I'm not at all surprised that someone found a way to hack POF. Sending a password in plaintext is bad, but not uncommon. Heck, T-Mobile does it. But sending it every week, unsolicited? I'm sorry to be rude, but that's just stupid.

I know the comments so far follow the easy pattern -- either "what could possibly go wrong, lol" and "doesn't evolution kinda favor *longer* lives?" And I'm not entirely comfortable with human populations being used as guinea pigs for disease research -- cf. Tuskeegee et. al.

But Dengue Fever is some serious stuff. It's called "break-bone fever" for a reason -- the muscle and joint pain is debilitating, and lasts for weeks or months. It's one of those things that keeps poor communities impoverished -- each person infected requires care-giving, taking two or three healthy people out of the economy for every one infected.

There's no vaccine, and nothing on the way until 2015 at least -- like many tropical diseases, there's more money to be made from lengthening a rich white guy's m@nh00d than there is in lengthening a poor brown woman's life.

So as leery as I am of making random modifications to the DNA of an uncontrollable pest... I can at least understand the motivation.

Awesome idea, and I'd love for a minefield in the spring to look like beautiful-but-deadly Warhol painting.

But I really don't like one aspect of the plants that my tax dollars are paying for. From TFA:

Homeland Security agents are interested in adaptations so that only agents using infrared technology could see plant color changes, Bauer said.

If the plants are going to detect things that blow up, wouldn't it be a Good Thing for us average citizens to be able to use them? Allowing civilians to become projectile-absorbing materials is something terrorists do... not letting us know that we're walking past a dangerous area seems hardly better.

Oh, but the true purpose becomes clear:

Another possibility: Police could use the plants to enforce drug prohibitions, Bauer said. "Such sentinels," he said, "could be very inexpensive."

They're NOT developing this in order to make us safer. There are very few landmines on US soil, after all (though Civil War battlefields might resemble a game of Pac-Man). They're just trying to find a cheap way to put more potheads in prison, so they can learn how to be real criminals. (Damned if I can figure out how that makes me more secure... guess I should just let Big Brother do my thinking for me.)

It didn't happen in my case, but my attorney posted on her own Facebook about using Facebook in a divorce case. I don't recall the details, but I think the ex-wife needed to prove that her ex-husband was not deserving of joint custody with the kids. His Facebook posts went a long ways towards helping her case -- they were full of rants about "that bitch", and pictures of him and his new girlfriend in non-family-friendly situations. The judge was not pleased with the ex-husband -- and getting dressed up and talking purty in court doesn't mean a lot when you're known to be a thug IRL.

Obviously, the dangers of hacking a FB to make someone look bad are real, and judges probably don't know a lot about IP address tracing (even if it is something FB does, which I don't know). But for most of the family law cases out there, where it often boils down to he said vs. she said, Facebook is a dream for the good guy's (or gal's) lawyer. Not so much for the other side.

I tried to look up information on the Ouachita National Forest last year, and was warned by Google Chrome that the site was a potential malware host, with parts of the site coming from a .cn domain. I didn't push forward to the site to find out exactly what part of a .gov site would require .cn content.

It looks like they've fixed it now, though I'm really not sure... this sensible URL expands to a hundred character monstrosity that's just begging for a reverse-engineering attack.

From TFwA:
Curiously, the duration of the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715) coincides very closely with the reign of King Louis XIV of France (1643-1715), known as the Sun King.

The conclusion is obvious. It's France's fault! Now, pass me a mess of those Freedom Fries.