The first rule of honest internet deal sites should be that no discount of less than 20% should ever be publicized. 10% is ridiculous, rare or no, and the commerce staff should be ashamed.

The first rule of honest internet deal sites should be that no discount of less than 20% should ever be publicized.…

100% of Republican policy these days is hostage-taking. Bail out the banks or we destroy the economy! Accept our budget cuts or we default on the debt! Gut the ACA or we will sabotage it from within! Subsidize coal/health insurers/bond holders/equifax/etc or they will ruin everyone who depends on them. Let…

Clone or not, Beth realized that as long as she has Morty’s love, Rick can’t make a move if she is a clone. So we’re back to square one — at least, until Jerry’s inherent odiousness makes Beth’s strategy untenable.

Between this, Westworld, Rick and Morty, and the season 3 premier of Broad City, we seem to be in something of a moment.

How far back do we have to push things — how close to the earth’s origins — before we have to conclude that life first came from elsewhere? The idea that the entire process from self-reinforcing metabolic cycles to the RNA world to membrane-enclosed prokaryotes with organelles happened in a few hundred million years…

That final speech by Rick is really not going to help with the rabid fan problem.

Rick is always right, and when he isn’t, he still comes out on top, probably with a catchphrase and an episode-ending laugh line. He also fucks space babes and smokes pot with monsters. To those fans, the fact that Rick is awesome offers justification for his—and their—self-absorption.... Harmon’s pledge to keep…

With a prevalence of around 0.2%, Lynch syndrome is actually one of the most common heritable cancer syndromes, about as common as breast–ovarian cancer syndrome (BRCA). If you know more than three hundred people or so, chances are you know someone with it.

It sounds like Sad Puppies In Space.

The wondrous thing about the American system is that even if she does have a solid fair-use argument and would eventually win, it would cost her so much to defend that it would be irrational to try. There’s no reason for rich people or corporations not to sue anyone they want, knowing that 95% of defendants can’t…

The problem is, the self-replicating robot scenario only requires a single capable individual in a single civilization to happen. So even if 99% of civilizations are octopi with no interest in space, that 1% can fill up the galaxy in an eye-blink. Given that we ourselves are almost sure to do it in 100 years if we…

The most acute version of the Fermi paradox, I think, concerns von Neumann machines. It won’t be very long before our civilization can build self-replicating robot spaceships, which slowly fly to neighboring stars, build replicas of themselves, and continue the process. Most reasonable estimates suggest that even…

Basically, they should just make the entirety of The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul canon and be done with it.

I used to have the standard strong-Turning skepticism of the Chinese Room, that the room/algorithm/system was sentient even if the parts (like our neurons) are not. But watching developments in AI over the last few years, I’ve actually become more sympathetic to the Chinese room.

Yet these [navigation] problems could potentially be resolved in future software updates, which the Dyson 360 Eye receives via Wi-Fi.

He shot allegedly at negotiators, but after that the negotiators stayed back, so he wasn’t an imminent threat to them. And the bomb claim was uncertain, and similarly wasn’t an imminent threat (or indeed, any threat at all as it turned out). But to be honest, this aspect doesn’t have much to do with robots. Even a…

Yep, I want the government to have all the guns — not because I trust it, but because it’s better than the alternative: giving them to people like you. It’s called civilization. If you don’t like it, go live in a cave in south Sudan.

“Imminent danger” is not the sole criterion for any deadly force. For instance, you can’t use sarin gas, or a biological weapon, or mines, or (so far) a drone-delivered missile. There are many limits to what civilian police forces can, and should, use on civilian domestic populations. Whether a robot-delivered bomb…

You have no right to own firearms except due to one vote (Kennedy) in DC vs Heller in 2008, a right which can just as easily be overturned as soon as there are 5 Democrats on the Court.

Do you all measure the sound when the compressor turns on and off? We bought a “quiet” Sharp AC a few years ago that was quite quiet while running, but the compressor turned on and off with a loud CLICK that made it impossible for sleeping. I’ve since gone through lots of other window units, and for sleep, the sound…