A couple of months ago, Bruce Shneier linked to an interview with a professional safe cracker. Relevant piece:

I think if Anaya was following the same rule, he'd be a free man today. Once the mechanisms failed to trip, he should have handed the gentlemen tools (drill, saws, etc..) told them where to drill and walked away.

If these services are totally hammered now when people are just browsing for an alternative, think of how piss-poor it will be when the service has actual users, and data and... .

*shudder*

Someone will eventually emerge with a usable, scalable service to take in the Reader Refugees. Until amateur hour is over, I'll just sit on the sidelines and wait for that service to emerge.

PS: Fuck you, Google.

Possibly as a segue into a history discussion?

This affects a large chunk of the planet's population and hasn't happened in 600 years.

This'll give the history nerds something to talk about. (There are other kinds of nerds than tech nerds.)

Agree about Cyanide & Happiness. Sick, perverted, and completely inappropriate. And always funny despite just being stick figures.

(The thinking man's version of xkcd.)

HALGHALGHLAGHLAGH

The stated goal is for shit. This has nothing to do with some video insulting the prophet Mohamed. That was simply the next excuse that came up when the Mohammedans shook the Magic 8-Ball of Islamic Gripes. The next will be Israel's existence, infidels in Afghanistan, pornographic magazines like "Time" and "National Geographic" with immodest women, or some other perceived insult that demands some kind of retribution.

Once the charities reach the size that the volume of mail they send raises the hackles of the post office, then they've already become part of the "conspiracy". The Iron Law is already in effect, regardless of their donation/overhead ratio. They just need to own up to it and formally join the cabal.

To the original article: a mailing list of 400,000 addresses isn't a community, it's a nation bigger than Iceland or Belize.

RMS would be the stuffy guy they'd hit with a cream pie in every episode.

I was more addressing the fact that the liability issues of building and "selling" a thinking machine have been considered before.

However, an Asimov robot can be manipulated into violating the Laws. For example the First Law could be voilated if a robot was convinced that a human really wasn't human (this worked on Solaria in "Robots and Empire" [?]) or by performing a seemingly innocuous action that led to to a human's injury ("The Naked Sun"). Also, Asimov robots were built with altered Laws to allow humans to perform potentially hazardous work ("Lost Little Robot") and child care (drawing a blank here, so that children could actively play and risk minor injury).

Asimov's early robot stories dealt frequently with corporate liability and it was often the source of the plot conflicts. If a proofreading robot made a mistake causing a slander ("Galley Slave") or an industrial accident resulted in injury, US Robotics was put into the position of having to prove that it was not the fault of the robot (which it never was).

This is why Asimov's US Robotics didn't sell you a robot, they leased it to you. The lease was iron-clad, could be revoked by either party at any time, had liability clauses, and had mandatory maintenance and upgrades to be performed by US Robotics technicians. If you refused the maintenance US Robotics would repossess, sue and claim theft if you withheld ("Bicentennial Man", though unsuccessfully; "Satisfaction Guaranteed").

A properly functioning robot would not disobey the three laws, and an improperly functioning robot was repaired or destroyed immediately ("Lost Little Robot"). Conflicts between types of harm were resolved using probability based on the best information available at the moment ("Runaround"), and usually resulted in the collapse of the positronic brain when it was safe to do so ("Robots and Empire", etc.).

Like IE or hate it, it still has the best Javascript profiler available today -- and it's built in. It beats the ever loving crap out of Firebug's pathetic profiler, and presents timing data in a proper tree with better function name resolution than Chrome's.

It's other development tools are marginal though. Debug your app in Firebug, and fire up IE to check it for compatibility and find the slow bits.

"Artificial Womb" sounds so awkward. How about axlotl tank?

Likely they were observers. My wife has worked the elections for the Clerk's office and as a poll observer (not at the same election). Really, there's not much they can do but sit and watch and stay out of the way.

Long, complicated ballot in Michigan this year with lots of asinine state constitutional amendments. This made for about a 45 minute wait in line to even get a ballot. I figured out my choices the weekend before and put the options on my phone to read in the booth; even then, filling the real ballot out correctly still took about 5 minutes.

I considered your argument for a moment, really, and then quickly dismissed it as you picked a poor example. These are skilled entertainers, and I think that muddies the waters completely. The highest paid NFL players make over $11M/year and the lowest paid are making under $.4M. That's a disparity of 27:1. (I daresay that the SAG ratios will be far, far worse.) But consider if the NFL didn't put names or numbers on the jersey's and player stats were virtually un-collectible by fans.

Would that 27:1 ratio still hold for long? Oh I doubt it. The owners certainly would have to play some players more than others, but since everyone is anonymous the threat to sign with another team is greatly diminished. Peyton Manning would have to stand in line at tryouts just like everyone else. The competition at the high end would die quickly. If your resume didn't say "Super Bowl Champ _(last year)_" you'd be worth jack squat.

Programmers work in the dark, mostly. We're on teams, sure, but rarely do our names and faces get put on the product. We're not marketable and hold no value to our employers in that way. Instead of SAG or NFLPA, we'd wind up more like the UAW or the Teamsters possibly with some merit on our pay scale but not much.