No fair! I moved back to MT from the SoCal desert a couple years ago, and I got reminded about the weather real quick :) I've got two older Ford pickups myself. They have keys. And the lights and wiper on the dash and the dimmer switch on the floor, where the gods intended. ;)

BTW re your sig, the local EMTs set up in front of Costco a while back and trained folks all day long. Takes about 30 seconds to become proficient.

I will can the peaches tonight. What's the problem?

Probably would be if it wasn't a write only language.

We already have weapons that make the decisions you suggest - the European StormShadow cruise missile for example, or the British ALARM anti-radar missile (launch it in standoff mode, it climbs to a given height and then deploys a parachute and waits until it can see a ground based radar, at which point it releases the parachute and kills the radar).

What they are trying to address is the decision to release the weapon - whether that decision is made by a human or non-human. After that point, automated guidance is a non-issue, its been around for 60 years and thus does not pose an ethical question (a 2000lb laser guided bomb taking out a bridge is better than 100 B-17s dropping 50 tonnes of bombs to drop the same bridge - the automated guidance aspect of the LGB means much less collateral damage than with area bombing).

At the moment the point to which we have progressed is having the non-human decide when to release the weapon, but not whether to release the weapon - that decision is always made by a human (yes, there is a huge difference between the two).

Uh.

What?

I remember I used to have these horrible connectivity problems with it, which turned out to be a result of a "feature" wherein it couldn't be used with a wifi network with a non-broadcast SSID, because it would scan for broadcast SSIDs, not see the one it was trying to be connected to, and turn the connection off. I spent a month or so trying to get it to use a WPA2 VPN and eventually gave up and went to wicd.

I have never previously heard anyone describe NetworkMangler in any positive terms whatsoever, let alone suggest that it was in some way "friendly".

I just read your post and was going to reply but I forgot what point you were making. I kept thinking about it too long. What really pissed me off though is that you had the nerve to insult my mother or my religion or something. Just know for the rest of my life, I'll be keeping an eye on you, and you'd better be looking over your shoulder.

People who say stupid things piss me off. Yeah, it doesn't compute, I know.

Excellent idea! And then they can say the words disappeared as they were read, just like the publisher intended. ;)

Will it notice the loaded 18 wheeler two cars behind it, that can't stop in nearly the same distance??

And what if just as your car swings off the road and passes that point of no return, the oncoming car brakes or swerves and gets out of what would have been your path had your smartcar not jumped over the edge. Now you've died for no gain at all.

See, you can't predict that sort of thing, unless all vehicles are obeying the same set of logic gates.

It occurs to me that this could also generate a new form of 'chicken', where the challenger is sure to win.

I'd say rather that Russian culture is not very different from the norm for large cultural groups throughout history, and that our 'enlightened' cultures in the West are a historical anomaly.

That reminds me of the question I had. If they're letting you mark up the book but still want it back.... obviously the only reason is to take it out of circulation, since they can't resell it as new. Not at all like a leased car, where if you trash the interior, you'll pay damages when it's returned to the leasing company.

Marking up a book is 'damage' not intrinsically different from unbinding it. So ... unbind it, copy it, and lose a random selection of the original pages, THEN send it back.

If it were hard goods or a bad check, the penalty would typically be three times the value of the goods or check, plus court costs. This seems reasonable to me. But in light of the insane "statutory damages" for 'intellectual property', I suggest that the same scale of damages be applied in the case of a false accusation. ;)