And I don't mean the Fortran version, but the original MDL code (aka, Muddle) which is a much weirder variant of Lisp than ZIL.

ZIL is basically a subset of MDL, so most of the weirdness you've seen in MDL is also there in ZIL. Check out the "maze" files in Bureaucracy, for example - the game reads a text file at compile time and generates pages of gibberish that have to be combined in the right order to solve a puzzle.

The MDL version is included in the same source dump: https://github.com/historicals...

Infocom's compiler hasn't resurfaced, but ZILF works well enough to hack on these games: http://zilf.io/

It's true that slavery has been all but universal at least since the rise of agriculture; however, there have been very few states where a large enough proportion of the total population to be economically significant were slaves, Pretty much the only historical examples are ancient Rome and Greece, and the plantation economies of the Americas. American experience is not altogether unique, but it is certainly very far from the norm. The last people born as slaves in the American South died in my lifetime.

Yeah, that and the companies who don't want to do "military applications" can just do pure research. Pure, ivory-tower research... which the DoD can just pay someone else to integrate into an actual weapon system. It's not like a machine learning algorithm knows or cares to what use it's put, once it is out there.

Dumb posturing; I also wonder if these people have considered what a world dominated by Chinese and Russian military AI will look like, and what effect it would have... I am not sure it would be the best of all possible worlds, exactly.

The linked article does say illegal sales have gone down, and gets into some reasons why they haven't gone away completely:

Business has fallen since the law passed, but enough people think they can score a bargain, or simply donâ(TM)t trust the shiny new stores, to keep things moving.

These are temporary problems, and they don't translate well to other industries. For example, high quality, low tax medical marijuana resold on the black market can easily undercut legal recreational sales. But a black-market brothel can't undercut the legitimate ones as easily, or offer the same level of service -- lower prices tend to mean lower quality, and operating in the open gives the legal ones extra advantages (marketing, health inspection, integration with other businesses).

I doubt this has been lost on the DefCon organizers. Presumably they think that they'd lose more attendance by moving to Europe than by having people who can't safely travel to the US just not come, or attend/present via videoconference or something. And I suspect that's probably true -- very few people (in my experience) go to DefCon or similar conferences on their own dime; you go on your employer's money. And getting your employer to comp you a few hundred bucks for a flight to Vegas and a shitty hotel room (Vegas hotel rooms are notoriously cheap) is a heck of a lot easier than getting a company to cough up for a transatlantic ticket, hotel in Europe, etc. As long as the majority of the attendees are in the US, this is where the conferences are going to be.

But coming here if you're involved in cybercrime is probably, uh, not a very smart idea. That Hutchins came at all suggests to me that he didn't know that the FBI was onto his alleged previous (pre-Wannacry) activities; the alternative is that he's dumb, and he doesn't seem dumb. (Though a fair number of very smart people are also arrogant and don't give other people credit for being able to figure things out, so that's also an option, I suppose.)

There is a legitimate question as to whether there should be some sort of cyber amnesty program, though, given the number of mostly-legitimate "security researchers" who have shady backgrounds but seem to have moved on from them. I've got some mixed feelings on that. On one hand, getting blackhats and their knowledge out into the open so vulns can be remediated and the network in general made more robust is a Good Thing. But I don't know if it outweighs the message it would send, which is that you can basically play Computer Mafioso when you're young and then retire to a nice, secure, respectable position as "security researcher" without the threat of your prior activities coming back to bite you. That's not really how things work in the non-IT world; if you spend your 20s working for the Mob, and then retire to a respectable profession, that respectability is unlikely to protect you from getting a knock on your door sometime later, depending on the statue of limitations, for stuff you did earlier. Might make a judge or jury go easier on you, but it's not an ironclad defense.

I think it's more like "one good deed today doesn't get you off the hook for the bad deed you did last week".

In other words, if you're a blackhat who happens to take down another blackhat, that doesn't buy you a get-out-of-jail-free card that you can play when other things you may have done in the past surface.

Or at least, not to an extent that stops you from getting indicted. It might play pretty well in court if the whole thing actually goes to trial, I'd imagine. Can't hurt anyway.

That doesn't make any sense and has no basis in fact.

There are enough legitimate issues with the FBI / CIA and their handling of cybersecurity issues that creating conspiracy-theory narratives is both unnecessary and counterproductive. Frankly it just muddies the waters on the real issues.

I have to wonder whether asking this on /. counts as a sort of metatroll ...

Exactly so. Calling it a "robot" is a marketing ploy.

From TFA: "one in which a virus, used in gene therapy to halt the effects of retinal degeneration, was planted on the retina itself, a procedure only made possible by R2D2’s unprecedented precision."
Also bollocks. Retinal gene therapy (which so far has really got no further than proof-of-concept) has been going of for a while. There was (among several examples) a very brief gene therapy study in Moorfields Eye Hospital in London for Leber's Amaurosis a few years back, It basically showed you can get the gene into the retina, but so far nobody has significantly benefited in real life.

"First operation inside the human eye" my arse. *Every* modern cataract operation is an operation inside the eye. The membrane-peeling described in the link is a standard vitrectomy operation. I have two colleagues who between them do several a week and have done for years. So far (not very) as this is anything new at all, it is automated assistance to a human surgeon.

This is basically regurgitated publicity handout crap.

The UK government ignored a petition about the Brexit vote which had four million signatures.

Very happy with the touch-screen XPS 13 and Ubuntu. Basically no trouble that I didn't create myself.

Specifically, I immediately tried to upgrade to 16.04 from the (working-fine) out-of-the-box 14.04, which failed, and then discovered that there was bug in the Ubuntu installer so it couldn't cope with the SSD.
But all work-roundable with pretty minimal googling. I might have been more worried if I wasn't used to setting up linuxes on laptops (first time I did it, I needed a framebuffer for the video. Tell that to 'the young people of today, they don't believe you.) But surely the same is true for pretty such anyone who would actually *want* linux on a laptop?

The only other real problem I had was video (working, but tearing), which all got better with xorg-edgers. Again, not difficult to solve with a bit of searching.
Since then, it All. Just. Works. So to speak. And it's very nice hardware.