Just imagine a company like Equifax going on the offensive: I would estimate a 95% chance that they would be utterly ineffective, with a 5% chance of them screwing up something they have not already broken. The black hats would have a field day getting companies to attack one another, vital infrastructure, or - for bonus points - themselves.

The one thing companies need to do right now in this domain is to get serious about practicing good security, and if they do, the issue of retaliation will be moot.

Why go for the crap when the good ones are there for the taking?

Picking up a phone is already a minefield of unintended actions...

We were planning to go to Nebraska, and specifically to the road (state route 92) that runs through Tryon and hews closely to the centerline, but a deteriorating forecast for that area caused us to make the trek to Unity, Oregon. I am glad to see that the weather was fine in Nebraska (as it was where we were.)

Our reasons for picking both areas were: 1) statistically, a high probability of clear skies in the morning at this time of year; 2) a clear view of the sky (checked using Street View); 3) roads running along the centerline of totality, so we could hope to dodge clouds if we had to; 4) somewhere likely to have a low density of viewers, so that it would be possible to move, if necessary, without being caught in traffic. When switching to Oregon, we also considered wildfire locations and forecast wind direction (the forest service has frequently-updated fire location maps and reports.)

We printed maps showing roads and the path of totality, in case cellphone navigation failed us (which it did, but on account of the location's remoteness, not service overload.)

We were least certain about the density of viewers, but the roads were so empty as we approached our destination that I worried that I had made a huge navigation error!

While they do not, at first sight, seem similar, the computing and parenting groups may both contain a high proportion of insecure people, some of whom attempt to bolster their self-esteem by putting down others. It is straightforward social-animal dominance hierarchy behavior, where chi beats up psi after being beaten up by phi, complicated by many of the aggressive people on internet forums having low status in real life.
 

Dang! Posted in the wrong place!

You cannot change this by going in to an office.

6) Noise. It will still be a problem when the rest are solved.

Flying directly towards him, I suspect.

"And because Blockchain is effectively run by a network of unrelated computers, it produces a permanent ledger of transactions with which no one can tamper. Until now."

“The invention is not designed for ‘permissionless’ systems, like the cryptocurrency system supporting Bitcoin, which is open and decentralised and where the absence of a single governing authority makes absolutely permanent, or ‘immutable,’ recordkeeping vital."

The author of the article does not seem to understand that decentralized openness is an essential part of blockchain tamper-resistance (you can rewrite your copy of the Bitcoin blockchain, but you cannot get it accepted without controlling a significant part of all global Bitcoin mining.)

I wonder how many blockchain-based solutions will be sold on the grounds of tamper-resistance, when the way they use the blockchain actually negates that assumption?

His safety claims are made up from wishful and magical thinking, trying to justify the current technology by pretending it is what it is hoped to become.

Musk's somewhat more sophisticated attempt at the same thing has been exposed as bogus, e.g:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.technologyreview.c...

The name is not the problem - if it was, it could easily be fixed. The problem is human nature - even well–intentioned people find it difficult to pay attention when, most of the time, they do not have to. This is not driven by the name, it is driven by experience.

If it is just a software upgrade away, then there is no harm in waiting a bit and doing it properly, is there?

Except the 'upgrade' is not developed yet, and so certainly not tested yet. By this 'argument', superhuman generalized AI is 'just' an upgrade away.

Besides that, there are a number of good arguments that the current state of software needs additional hardware support in order to do the job properly.

The auto industry should look to the aerospace industry, which has learned the hard way how to do safety, and that industry was not killed off by it (quite the contrary, in fact.) One thing learned was that wishful thinking and vague hand-waving arguments don't count for much.

You cannot justify the irresponsible use of *current* technology by pretending it is now what it will become.

Keeping your hands on the wheel doesn't mean much. The manufacturers that require this may want us to think it is a proxy for paying attention, but it is not.

Self-driving cars would be a great improvement, but, as Tesla keeps saying, these are not self-driving cars.