True, I didn’t consider that. He’d still have to convince them though, which would be easier said than done if he wanted to entirely disregard the constitution

No. The ruling seems to have said that he can do anything he likes in his capacity as president, and he can’t be convicted of any criminal offence for it. It didn’t say that the people around him would have to go along with it, or that they’d be immune from prosecution.

It also left convenient wriggle room for the court to arbitrarily decide what constituted “official” actions, rather than him doing something privately, so they’ve effectively granted themselves a get out of jail free card to decide case-by-case in the future

While that sort of analysis probably isn’t impossible, it is computationally unrealistic to do in realtime on a language which wasn’t designed for it.

It’s the sort of thing which is simple in 99% of cases, but the last 1% might well be impossible. Sadly it’s the last 1% you need to worry about, because anyone trying to defeat your system is going to find them

There’s no need to leave earth, just lift it into a medium earth orbit. There are literally thousands of kilometres in between low earth orbit (where there are lots of communications, spy, navigation and weather satellites) and geosynchronous (where there are lots of communications satellites), and outside of those two there’s virtually nothing there

Oh, sure. It’s not likely to be a serious threat, but not for the reason people keep saying

People keep saying that, but it isn’t true that the leak being in the disposable part of the vehicle means it’s not a safety problem.

It’s the pressurisation system for the thrusters. If that fails, then they won’t be able to control the capsule until it hits the atmosphere. That could mean they get stuck on the ISS, in the most extreme case, or it could mean that they lose thrust mid-manouvre and they re-enter the atmosphere incorrectly. That could be anywhere from inconvenient (they miss their landing spot and someone has to come get them), to dangerous (they land so far away that they’re in danger of sinking or being eaten by bears before anyone reaches them) to outright fatal (they skip off the atmosphere, or tumble their way into reentry and burn up)

It’s a matter of perspective. To someone who’s job is to write the system which interprets ASM, ASM is high level

You declaring a debt isn’t meaningful because you don’t have legal authority to do so.

A licence statement is describing in what way you’re granting permission for something you do have the right to control, which makes it meaningful

Nah, we’re alright. I don’t think anyone has clearly defined the requirements of earth citizenship, we can assume it’s like Ireland who hand it out like candy

No it wouldn’t. Whoever touched it last is responsible for it, that’s entirely consistent with the metaphore

I’m pretty sure it means exactly what it says, but you lot are all misreading it.

I interpret it as “all rights, except the right to commit, are reserved” (which doesn’t mean you surrender the right to commit, but rather that it’s the only right you aren’t depriving everyone else of)

In principle they could have pulled out slightly, if there’s jostling and tiny movements in skull then you’d expect them to work loose over time if they’re not securely anchored

Well it’s definitely alive, that’s not a terribly high bar (plants and sponges qualify, after all).

The ethics question is whether it’s a person yet (or should be treated like one)

Just one padlock is enough, but you can use up to 6.

You need all the locks removed before it’ll open, so you don’t need to count on someone to carefully count everyone back in. You just make sure that each person uses their own lock

Also, it’s probably possible to fix the partition so that it’s as big as it used to be. It’s likely that some of your data is corrupted already, but the repartitioning won’t have erased the old data except here or there where it’s written things like new file tables in space it now considers unused

What they’re suggesting is to back up the whole disk, rather than any single partition. Anything you do to the partition to try and recover it has the potential to make a rescuable situation hopeless. If you have a copy of the exact state of every single bit on the drive, then you can try and fix it safe in the knowledge that you can always get back to exactly where you are now if you make it worse

It depends on what exactly gets cut or punctured, of course, but my understanding is that without proper surgical intervention it can be an exceptionally slow and painful way to die.

The organs in the gut are mostly intestines. You’re not going to die just because they’ve spilled out, but you’re going to be bleeding pretty badly and if whatever caused them to spill out is still around then you’re pretty screwed.

The bigger problem is that it’s unlikely they’ve just spilled out, they’re probably also sliced open. Now you’re in serious trouble, because there’s lots of blood in there so now you’re bleeding really badly. You’ve also got blood and the content of your digestives system mixing together, and that means some very nasty bacteria which are normally safely contained now have access to your blood.

I suspect the most likely dangerous situation is a stab wound. In that case you’ll probably experience internal bleeding. There are no shortage of places for blood to go inside your body around there, including into your digestive system. I don’t think there’s anything much to stop blood from flowing endlessly into there, and you could bleed to death even if the external wound doesn’t look like it’s bleeding all that badly.

In summary, getting stabbed in the gut will contaminate your blood and lead to potentially endless bleeding which can’t be treated with bandages because it’s inside. Even if you avoid bleeding to death, you’re probably going to die from a massive infection

They’re suggesting that businesses are so keen to invest in AI right now because they can be certain that AI won’t unionise, and they want to replace as many workers as possible so that they don’t have to worry about the unions any more

It might not make him wrong, but he also happens to be wrong.

You can’t compare AI art or literature to AI software, because the former are allowed to be vague or interpretive while the latter has to be precise and formally correct. AI can’t even reliably do art yet, it frequently requires several attempts or considerable support to get something which looks right, but in software “close” frequently isn’t useful at all. In fact, it can easily be close enough to look right at first glance while actually being catastopically wrong once you try to use it for real (see: every bug in any released piece of software ever)

Even when AI gets good enough to reliably produce what it’s asked for first time & every time (which is a long way away for quite a while yet), a sufficiently precise description of what you want is exactly what programmers spend their lives writing. Code is a description of a program which another program (such as a compiler) can convert into instructions for the computer. If someone comes up with a very clever program which can fill in the gaps by using AI to interpret what it’s been given, then what they’ve created is just a new kind of programming language for a new kind of compiler

Not exactly. There are some species which haven’t changed all that much for millions of years, and those have certainly managed excellent adaptability.

Others, though, might find themselves evolving to cope with the climate right now at the expense of being vulnerable to some future problem. Say the climate is very hot, but in a few tens of thousands of years there’ll be an ice age. An animal which is well adapted to the ice age will probably go extinct before it arrives, having all been eaten by an animal well adjusted to the heat which is here right now.

“In the end” isn’t useful if you get outcompeted in the meantime