salthound

Kudos for looking into it, and offering a correction. If you don't trust Romero's account for some reason, you can find this corroborated by Carmack (his only answer on Quora [1]).

[1] https://www.quora.com/profile/John-Carmack

That is exactly what it was, a very interesting piece of foundational research in anthropology justified by allusions to the dangers of nuclear pollution.

I don't understand this. Work on making what illegal? Facial recognition? Or breach of duty? Or making mistakes?

It seems to me that we already have the proper way of dealing with this situation. Have the company pay punitive/exemplary damages.

The law provides remedies: someone has been wronged, and the legal system provides recourse. The law also regulates conduct: the punishment acts as a deterrent, to avoid similar violations in the future.

A negligible settlement won't act as a deterrent for an entity with deep pockets.

> it is inconceivable in Western Europe that homelessness would be tolerated near a national monument.

Name the country. I have lived in many cities and towns across Europe. I know that homelessness is tolerated one street down from Edinburgh castle, next to the parliament building in Budapest, in front of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, in the stations of Rome, and don't even get me started on Brussels.

Do bees produce "naturally" food for bears? Do hens produce "naturally" food for foxes?

I think the actual analogy was lost in translation: the point is that, unlike its older brother, Sgr A* is not going to "pose" when you point your camera at it.

> You also can't consent by going somewhere where for all practical purposes you are legally compelled to go.

There is no legal issue. E.g. this happens to people in the army (and conscription is legal under US law), who are not allowed to have unauthorized communications equipment with them.

But it should be pointed out that induction is essentially unrelated to Gödel's theorem.

For example, Robinson Arithmetic is a finitely axiomatized theory whose axioms contain only one existential quantifier, but just like full (Peano) arithmetic, it is subject to Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

No. What the article details is not an ordinary exit from the French market, but an overnight attempt to pressure France into a change of government, which would involve disabling critical infrastructure and not fulfilling contractual and legal obligations in an attempt to make the French state unable to perform its functions.

And yes, having a company with the power and will to "digitally coup" world powers would be an immediate threat to national security, no question about that.

I don't know where you got the nationalization part from: U.S. courts and law enforcement are perfectly capable of taking temporary control of companies' resources in an effort to stop or prevent criminal activity, and none of that involves nationalizing anything.

That's one silly power fantasy.

But what if they really tried to do it? Well, the most likely outcome would be the US government declaring Google a risk to national security, and taking direct control. After all if this could happen to France, it could happen to the US, and governments of sovereign states really really hate non-state competitors that could potentially meddle with the operation of the state.

After that, whatever remains of Google would probably be auctioned off to cover the costs of the backlash (and probable legal action) from Google's corporate clients.

In humans, the optic nerve routes in front of the retina, creating a 14 degrees wide blind spot in our vision. The nerves could equally well route behind the retina, eliminating the blind spots essentially for free. Given how important vision was in our evolutionary past, and given our numbers, presumably people without blind spots would already exist. If so, where are they?

"Evolutionary Occam's razor" arguments do not work, because evolution gets stuck in local optima all the time. There might simply be no short evolutionary route between "conscious" humans and equally fit "non-conscious" ones (whatever that means).