The robot didn't 'pledge' anything - it mindlessly followed a script. A pledge requires self-awareness and will, neither of which this device has.

It would be much less expensive to put some mice in a rotating orbital habitat to see what low g does to a mammal than to send humans on long term missions to the Moon or Mars, but other than one limited Japanese experiment nobody seems interested in doing so.

That tells me that nobody is yet serious about such missions.

Where I live, the rules are generally the same for e-bikes as regular bikes. Wear a helmet, stay off the sidewalks.

The additional rules are "max assist speed 32 km/h" and "counts as a motorized vehicle if your dumbass has been prohibited from driving by a judge"

If licensing rules come here, I want a speed increase.

One of the things I like about Linux is that it's common to follow a philosophy of "start with nothing then add what you need" rather than "throw in everything and good luck trying to remove anything problematic".

Make it an optional component suggested during the installation procedure and it's fine. Force it on everyone and you're undermining good security and I have to suspect you're doing it for reasons I wouldn't like.

In Sony's eyes, you have no rights. This is a company that deliberately installed malware on customer computers.

If you do business with Sony, you get what you deserve. It's not like they've made a secret of their utter contempt for you.

It's an impressive accomplishment - nobody liked Iran, though it had allies. This unnecessary war is pissing everyone off enough they're more or less siding with Iran over the US.

That's the 'respect' Trump has brought to America.

I seem to recall the Mythbusters did a reasonably well designed practical experiment and found this just wasn't likely - if you think a place is haunted, it's because you're susceptible to that kind of thinking, not because of infrasound.

I think it is reasonable to allow the accumulation of enough wealth to sustain your lifestyle throughout retirement. Furthermore, I think at least a lower middle class existence is a reasonable goal - you're going to need a couple of million for that.

Additionally, there's nothing wrong with letting the numbers creep up a bit higher to harness human greed. I think maybe $20m is reasonable. It's not the end of the world in terms of wealth concentration, and it's enough of a differential to keep the motivation there.

Billionaires shouldn't exist, they're a runaway condition in our economic system that should be corrected.

The tax should be ongoing, and slightly higher than inflation, scaling with distance from an agreed-upon 'reasonable wealth'.

I suspect I'll be able to sleep tonight. Somehow.

It'll be a struggle knowing some guy was told he couldn't have a Pokemon award because he couldn't stop banging a table, but I'll manage.

I promise this old man diatribe has a point...

There were no smart phones when I was a kid. They were about a decade away from being mainstream consumer devices when I graduated high school. If you wanted to know something, you went to the library and looked it up (which almost nobody did!). If it wasn't taught in school, shown on TV, or told to you by your parents, it didn't exist.

We still managed to be distracted and bored in class, we just didn't have as many options for dealing with it and ended up paying marginally more attention as a result.

A connected smartphone is an awesome brain augmentation device if used correctly - to look up things in the moment you want to know them. Kids will be kids, though, and they use them for games and social media to alleviate boredom and to prey on each other like the socially inept little bastards they can be.

Don't block mobile phones. Block mobile data and provide school WiFi that only permits approved websites.

It's all about a communal decision about how much you invest in protecting your fellow citizens from themselves. At some point there's an absolute limit because your society collapses from the productivity loss, at the other end you're just an amoral monster.

Most people are somewhere in between, and my line is obviously not the same as the one suggested by the article. I don't want an LLM refusing to respond to a prompt 'for my safety'. I'm an adult. Until I'm hurting someone else, let me choose what risks I take.

I am sorry if you're mentally ill and driving your own downward spiral with the assistance of an LLM, but I don't see a net good from handicapping general use tools to protect you at the expense of their utility to everyone else.

I'd rather effort go into detection and treatment of people well before they're asking a chatbot to polish their thesis on time cubes.

Theoretically possible, but both memristor and magnon technology needs to advance a lot.

I remain surprised we haven't seen memristors outside the lab yet - invented in 1971, the first working ones created around 2008. You'd think we'd have at least transistor replacements by now (small clusters of memristors can be combined to make smaller, more efficient transistors).

Magnonics, though... they're decades more recent and the basics are still being worked out.

That's actually a pretty good concept, if the engineers agree. A battery built for fast charge that is good enough for a regular commute and a battery built for max energy density.

Of course, if you're heading off on a 2000 km trip you're probably not going to like having to stop every 100 km after the first half of the trip.