You *can* download the whole thing - there's just no reason to actually do so unless you want to either determine how much BTC is actually in a very old wallet, or to trace the flow of payments to find out who actually paid for those drugs/weapons/slaves/etc.

Which basically means miners and intelligence agencies. There's no need for a normal BTC user to ever look at the blockchain unless they've forgotten how much is in their wallet. Any more than there's a need for traditional banking customers to go through the complete financial records of their bank.

Extending this - there are still big concrete markers scattered around the US, left over from when they were used as "trail markers" for airplanes - telling you where you were and which way to go to get to where you were going.

A bit disingenuous a claim.

If you don't get paid for excess power generated, because you're generating too much, then you paid for solar panels whose power is either charging the car or going to waste - and the cost of those excess solar panels (plus any financing costs) is the price you're paying to charge your car.

Here's a better idea - ban *anyone* other than the person it's about from selling sensitive personal information of any kind. Ever. There is ZERO legitimate use for such invasive surveillance in a nominally free society.

Of course, that would mean cops and intelligence agencies would have to get warrants and do their job, instead of just buying the info they want from someone else, but honestly I'd consider that an added bonus.

Queue the wave of videos of actors appearing to say horrendously offensive things that someone goaded a game AI into saying, and then overdubbed onto an unrelated lip-syncable video in 3...2...1...

Honestly though that's nothing new, other than maybe the degree of hype. It's *always* been true that the public's expectation of ANY new science or cutting-edge technology they hear about should be, "Maybe something useful will come of this in 20+ years, if it ends up being real".

Science news follows the cutting edge of science. Which means that 90+% of the time it's later proved wrong - that's just the nature of science. The whole point of scientific publishing is to get other scientists interested in trying to prove you wrong - which they usually succeed at. Peer review can't happen until your peers know what you think you've accomplished. And that has little to do with the "peer review" (reputable) scientific journals do - which is basically lenient arm-chair quarterbacking by other people in the field, who are just looking for really glaringly obvious problems in your write-up or methodology.

And technology news isn't much better - since it's generally a mix of cutting edge science (like this one - we haven't gotten it working yet, but believe we can), and "we got this working in the lab, and believe we can scale it up to production levels", which usually proves far more challenging than anyone expected.

If a layman likes following science news, that's great - but they need to recognize that they're watching the sausage being made, and almost everything they hear will later be proven wrong. And of course, the popular science media doesn't like drawing attention to that, since why would their audience pay good money to hear about bad science? Which means you'll only hear about the "Cool new thing discovered!", and almost never the follow up years later that "Cool new thing proven to be nonsense."

You misspelled "the military"

Sounds like a problem of poor terminology to me.

A driverless car can't drive, at most it can roll until it hits something. It makes sense that it can't be ticketed for traffic violations, because it can't commit them.

However, what we're actually dealing with is a car with an robotic driver - a robot that's doing EXACTLY what it was told to by its manufacturer.

As such, the reasonable outcome would be to ticket the driver that is in full control of the car - a.k.a. the manufacturer.

Yeah, only far less bulky.

Loved that show, especially the early seasons.

Could always have a protective cover over them, like a projector screen. Picture a titanium tube "candybar phone", with only a minimal "eWatch" screen, if that. Then you pull a full-sized tablet out of the side.

I'm inclined to agree.

I can see *rollable* screens having some serious potential, but nobody seems interested, maybe it's just too expensive? Give me a dry erase marker sized "candybar" phone that lets me pull out a an ipad-sized screen, and then they'd have something.

No hinges. No sharp folds in the screen. No need for extremely tight fits that make dirt a problem. And you could have it all gently roll up inside a titanium tube that would let busses drive over it harmlessly.

Stiffening it could be an interesting challenge, I doubt it'd survive long flexing free. Maybe start by mounting it on something like a giant "slap strap" bracelet?

Gotta disagree. If your god interferes with reality, we *all* better sit up and take notice.

On the other hand, if *you* try to interfere with reality on your god's behalf... I see no reason why anyone else should care about a god so powerless it can't even speak for itself.

Just plow them under - we've got a long history of doing so here on Earth, whenever nobody is going to notice.

And so long as they're cremated I don't see any problem at all - we all eat, breathe, and shit peoples' cremated remains on a regular basis - it's not like the ash just vanishes when you scatter it on the wind.

Did they factor in the sudden drop in global cloud coverage over the oceans?

Banning high-sulfur fuels in cargo ships was a good move when it comes to reducing acid rain - but it became obvious very quickly that the ocean-spanning clouds seeded by the resulting sulfur dioxide had been causing a powerful global cooling effect, and removing them is nearly doubling the rate at which the planet is warming.

Personally, it seems to me like maybe we should roll back the new ban until we've got the warming under a bit more control. Is reducing acid rain for a few decades really worth cutting the time we have to avert catastrophic global warming in half?

Instead, the only proposals I've seen have been adding new, expensive additives to the fuel to get a similar effect. Which realistically seems VERY unlikely to happen, especially compared to the ease with which everyone would be happy to go back to the old cheap bunker fuel.

Maybe you'd prefer the word "being" to "entity"? Like I said, the words are squishy around consciousness, you kind of have to go with intent rather than technicalities, because we have no effing clue what the technicalities actually are.

A thermostat does NOT have subjective experiences. It undergoes objective changes, but subjectivity is inherently specific to the observer - a thermostat experiences nothing that an independent observer watching it does not.

Referring to AI references for uses of terms related to awareness is rather like referring to an automotive repair guide for terms related to biology. It may be full of familiar-seeming words, but they've all been repurposed to mean something that's at best vaguely analogous to their previously established meanings.

You're talking about a field that has been convinced that they are on the brink of understanding consciousness, and that true general-purpose conscious AI is just around the corner, for the better part of a century. And we still don't seem to be significantly closer to either goal, with the only large gains in the field having come from resorting to extremely crude emulation of biological processes we don't understand at all, and which has contributed nothing to our understanding of either.