Yeah, 236K isn't the temperature of any room I'd like to be in for more than a few seconds, but seeing as the current record is around 135K, I'd overlook a bit of hyperbole if the claims hold up.

As a couple of other people pointed out, the three laws are an "executive summary" of billions of lines of mathematics that define and control its behaviour. Some characters complain that they take up too much storage and processing power. They'd like to build more sophisticated robots, but there isn't enough room in the brain for the additional code. And the laws limit the robot's ability to do useful work, because it's constantly checking itself to ensure that it's in compliance with them.

In Asimov's early stories, robots weren't allowed on Earth, because too many people were afraid of them, or thought they'd take all the jobs. They were confined to spaceships and mining outposts on asteroids, so the number of humans they encountered was quite small. The harm they were concerned with preventing was mostly immediate and physical, like entering an airlock without a spacesuit. They didn't have the knowledge or the mental capacity to know that eating lots of doughnuts or smoking heavily might give you a heart attack or lung cancer in 20 years.

Most of Asimov's robots are smart enough to be able to evaluate levels of risk and weigh degrees of harm against one another. If one of them tried to prevent you from consuming alcohol, you could tell it that you enjoyed doing that, and that being prevented from doing something you enjoy causes you harm. It would weigh the stated high risk of immediate harm against the lower risk of harm in the distant future, and conclude that it had better let you have the drink.

Some of Asimov's later books are set in a society with the kind of problems you describe, where the robots have been programmed to prevent every conceivable kind of harm, and the people gradually realise they've built a hell for themselves. Rather than get rid of all the robots, a couple of characters try to build a new type of robot that works as an ally rather than a slave.

I did read the paper (shocking, I know ;-) ). I agree it's well worth a read. I like the way that an evolutionary algorithm can expose requirements and domain knowledge that a human expert would consider too obvious to need to be stated. For instance, the one that was looking for novel ways to arrange carbon atoms into buckyballs that wanted to put all the atoms in the same place. Or the one that was trying to evolve a sorting algorithm and settled on a function that always output an empty list, because nobody had thought to tell it that the output should be the same length as the input.

That reminds me of an anecdote that one of my university lecturers told, about one of the first computers with programmable microcode. Someone ran a profiler on it and noticed that it was spending a lot of time executing a particular sequence of four machine language instructions. They decided to create a new instruction that would do the same thing as this sequence, but would be faster and need less memory.

So they did this, and modified the compiler so that it knew about the new instruction, and recompiled all the software that ran on the machine... and it was no faster than before.

That four-instruction sequence? It was the operating system's idle loop.

I wonder if the bot had learned to exploit integer overflow? On many CPUs, if you subtract one from the most negative integer that the machine can store (the one furthest from zero), you get the most positive integer (the one furthest from zero in the other direction). If the bot ran away from the centre of the maze, its score would decrease rapidly, but then would flip from a big negative number to a big positive one.

Considering that the aim of the scam is to convince the victim to hand over money... how many people could come up with $2,800 by tomorrow if they thought their life depended on it? Now add a zero or two and ask the question again. (Also, how many people could even tell you the going rate for a contract killing?)

Gold standard != holding gold reserves. Having your currency on a gold standard means that for every paper dollar or pound or yen or whatever that the government issues, the government holds an equivalent amount of gold in a vault somewhere. I'm not aware that any government does this nowadays. Having gold reserves just means you have some gold in a vault, and you treat it like any other long-term investment.

But in a two-party system, that would usually give you a president and vice-president from opposite parties, who would be opposed to one another on most or all of the issues that the election was fought over.

How about - each candidate picks one pledge or promise from their campaign or their party's manifesto. The voter then has to match the pledges or promises to the candidates or parties before they're allowed to vote, thus demonstrating some knowledge of the important issues in the election. (Or at least, the issues that the candidates think are important.)

(If there are only two or three candidates, maybe let them pick more than one pledge, so that the chances of a voter guessing the right answers are acceptably low.)

That sort of thing is present in the license agreement for just about every piece of commercial software, at least as far back as Windows 3.1 (the earliest one I read).

Actually, every open source and free-as-in-speech license has something like the second provision, and most if not all copyleft licenses have something like the first provision (the automatic termination part, not necessarily the "destroy all copies" part.)

I don't recall whether it was explained in any more detail. I think you were meant to be impressed that the aliens could do it at all :-) Perhaps, as you say, the mass of the circuitry is small in comparison with the mass of the proton. Or perhaps mass or gravity doesn't exist or doesn't count in the extra dimensions. I wondered if the proton already contained a lot of structure, so that the unfolded shell wasn't simply a uniform surface. That is, maybe the aliens could've made the circuitry by rearranging what was already there.

There was some handwaving about how space has more than three dimensions, but the extra ones are very small. (See string theory.) For the purposes of the story, subatomic particles exist mostly in the extra dimensions. The aliens took a proton and unfolded it out of the extra dimensions to make a spherical shell. (It was bigger than their planet...) They then inscribed circuitry on the shell to make an incredibly powerful computer, folded the shell back into a proton and sent it off to Earth. Quite why the circuitry didn't add to the proton's mass wasn't clear to me.

The cases would have to be investigated by the Afghan police and prosecuted in the Afghan courts, as no one else has jurisdiction. In countries where the customs officials are corrupt (and get away with it), it's quite likely that the police and judges are corrupt as well. So even if the police and judges could be bothered to take on a case against a corrupt customs official, they could probably be easily persuaded (i.e. bribed) to drop it.

In other words, corruption exists (and continues to exist) because the systems that ought to stop it are themselves corrupt.

It works more or less like that in the UK too. If the company grants the employee share options rather than actual shares, the employee doesn't owe any tax when he receives them.

The article says Amazon is giving their employees shares, not share options, but then says the employees can't benefit from the shares for one to three years. That suggests they're really getting share options, but the reporter doesn't understand the difference, or doesn't feel like trying to explain it. (I've been given share options a few times, and have always struggled to explain them to anyone who hasn't worked for a company that gave them.)

Usually the stock would be taxed when the employee receives it, because the company is giving the employee something that's worth money, but there's an exemption that Amazon are (presumably) making use of here. If the shares are worth less than £X and it's been more than Y years since the employee last benefited from this exemption, no tax is due when the employee receives the shares. (I'm too lazy to look up the values of X and Y, but they're not huge.) The aim is to encourage the spread of share ownership and give companies another way to motivate employees.