This might say more about these judges than it does about the bot.

This is a good point. I'm guessing every single one of the entries into these Turing test competitions since 'Eliza' has been an attempt by the programmer to trick the judges. Turing's goal, however, was that the AI itself would be doing the tricking. If the programmer is spending time thinking of how to manufacture bogus spelling errors so that they bot looks human, then I'm guessing Turing's response would be that this is missing the point.

Just like we know OJ Simpson did it, but we don't have a written confession. Now we have a written confession from the NSA. Time to convict.

One thing you can do which they won't find out about in advance is invade Crimea.

Honestly, why do you think they would care about your data? Are you a journalist investigating the government or the banks? Are you running against Obama and want to make sure your campaign isn't spied on?

We knew this stuff was going on in the mid-90's.

No. We knew it was a possibility, but we didn't know what was actually going on and so the gov't and press could dismiss techies as paranoid. More importantly, no one was talking about it, which is the really good thing to come out of all this.

Late, I know, but read up:

The unredacted wikileaks were a security breach.

People with a conscience (sadly, not everyone has one) consider Bradley Manning's treatment to be torture. According to the article, the harsh conditions of his imprisonment were meant to persuade him into making statements to implicate wikileaks in organizing the leaks. The suicide threat shit is a result of them making it hard for Manning to live inside his own mind.

Torture is torture. If they're stripped naked and put into stress positions for hours, left without human contact for days, etc, then what difference does it make if they're in a military or civilian prison? Oh and they could have pushed for the death penalty, so for anything less, Manning should have been thanking them. If someone walks up and punches you in the face, you should thank them for not stabbing you. Also, Manning didn't leak anything to the public. As everyone else knows he gave them to wikileaks to sort through. They did redact information that could be damaging to individuals and refrained from leaking most of what they received. It was one of the few acts of 'journalism' we've seen in the media for years.

Please don't compare Manning to Snowden.

There's little in common between the two. Manning's subsequent torture and isolation, however, did not have intended consequence of deterring whistleblowing. Snowden, knowing now that he had no guarantee of personal safety for alerting Americans to the actions of their gov't, was forced to run into the arms of our 'enemies.' If we'd acted righteously and humanely in Manning's case, the Snowden leaks may have been handled more effectively.

I dunno why you think he has to spy on Americans to be a hypocrite. By doing propaganda for the Russians, he is affirming that sometimes you have to compromise your lesser values in order to protect greater ones.

Exactly. There's nothing hypocritical about that. It's a decision we all have to make from time to time.

If they *could* only use this to protect Americans, that'd be great. Unfortunately, there's nothing stopping them from spying on and manipulating journalists, other politicians, spying on elections, providing information to big business campaign donors to the disadvantage of competition, etc. It's important that citizens know the capabilities of their gov't so the right checks can be put into place.

As I said elsewhere, this argument makes no sense. We've shown Americans how we deal with leakers by our handling of Bradley/Chelsea Manning. Snowden had no choice but to go to our enemies for asylum. He's an American. For him to be a hypocrite, he'd have to spy on americans. If he has to do propaganda for the Russians to survive, then who cares? It's the Russians' problem, not ours.

Our country's policy on whistleblowing has forced him to go to our enemies for asylum. Our allies would've sent him right back. The U.S.'s treatment of Bradley Manning has in that effect damaged our national security.

When considering public opinion on such matters, note that the majority of the country once believed Saddam Hussein caused 9/11, that the Vietnam War was legitimate, that slavery was okay, etc. Leaker of the pentagon papers Daniel Ellsburg was also considered a traitor in the 70's and underwent the same treatment as Snowden by the military/intelligence bureaus, but as time went on and the government propaganda machine moved on to other matters, he largely became regarded as a hero. That said, I'd be curious to hear his angle on your 'legitimate espionage' point.

Funny people complain about too much regulatory powers when it comes to cows, but ignore the neglectful lact of regulation in banks, campaign finance, environmental pollution, even food and medicine, etc, when assessing the power of our beauracracy. If an oil company had asked for this land, they'd have gotten it in a heartbeat, but this guy wasn't donating to the right politicians. It has nothing to do with regulatory overreach.

Regulation aside, it gave the guy an unfair advantage over competitors, a concept that should strike dear to the hearts of libertarians. Not every rancher is positioned next to gov't land they can 'borrow.' Did he even offer to buy the land?

I doubt it. People who go to Elliot Bay probably aren't looking for the most popular books, as it's not the kind of place you'd find stacks of Twilight novels, and Amazon is not going to have a very large inventory in Seattle to acommodate every purchase. And we might be at the point now, where the people who go to bookstores are always going to go to bookstores, no matter how convenient online shopping gets.

I was recently at Powell's in Portland (which just had major renovations) and it was crowded on a weekday afternoon. In Seattle, Elliott Bay and the University Bookstore are often hard to browse due to all the people. It's not just Amazon employees, but a lot of people just enjoy browsing books. On the other hand, the cashier lines at any of these places are not as long as they'd been in days past.