They already cooperate. Their physical locations in the various countries mentioned in the EFF article require that they comply with legal takedown requests. They are not doing any new censoring.

That's exactly what they're doing. Instead of removing the blocked content for everyone, they block it only for those in the country where it was removed. The content still exists and is visible where the censorship does not apply. They are actually doing less censoring.

Ha. Says the anonymous coward.

To meet that requirement, Twitter would have to host their servers on a barge in the middle of the ocean.

Correct. The EFF article points out that Twitter's locations are “United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan, and soon Germany”, in addition to the United States (the “various countries” I was referring to). They are only obligated to act on legal requests inside those countries. This policy allows Twitter to expand its physical presence, without having to then deal with a convoluted mess of free speech laws that are different in each of those countries. And it's not limited to government requests. The bulk of what Twitter takes down has been DMCA-based.

It seems as though nobody who is reacting to what Twitter has stated actually read or thought about the new policy, instead parading headlines like “Social Suicide”. It's easily the most subversive and transparent approach to censorship to date. They are already obliged by law to remove content in various countries, and have done so. The alternative is complete blocking of the service by the country. Until now, complying required removing content globally. What Twitter has done is made it possible to only remove content in the country that requested the block (reactively, like DMCA takedowns), while still leaving it visible to the rest of the world.

Now countries with screwball notions of free speech cannot affect beyond their borders. Also, those *inside* the country will be notified that they are seeing blocked content, instead of just an absence, and the censoring will be documented on Chilling Effects. Before, if content were censored, it would be impossible to see it no matter where you are, or where you pretended to be. Now, people's voices can still get out, the oppression of their voices will be more apparent, and it's still possible to get around the censorship if necessary.

See the point 3, SLAM on: http://blogs.forbes.com/briancaulfield/2010/10/09/four-reasons-google-cars-drive-better-than-you-do/

Same thing humans do, watch out for them and react. Except, unlike humans, autonomous cars aren't so distractible and can react much more quickly. Also, if networked, the cars can be warned of hazards by another car well before actually encountering it.

They are just giant butterflies, after all.

"Laser chopsticks" sounds way cooler than "optical tweezer" from TFAbstract. They should've gone with that in the paper.

...that's a tablet. Seriously, do they think cargo pockets are the predominant pocket variety?

They're one step ahead of you.

FTA: "So assuming the mission continues well, in 2014 the Rosetta Probe will land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it will measure the comet's molecular composition. Then it will remain at rest as the comet orbits the sun for hundreds of millions of years. So somewhere in the solar system, where it is safe but hard to reach, a backup sample of human languages is stored, in case we need one."

Now that's some serious off-site backup. Good luck doing a restore in case of corruption. Even just incremental backups are going to be a bitch.

Here at Cornell we pretty much idolize quite a few of the folks that made the Mars Rovers possible, including Profs. Jim Bell and Steve Squyres.