Re: Real-Life Weirdness
 

EVeryone in the city could see it, so everyone in the city has to pay. Otherwise we just drop the bigger rods. Payment from the existing government is the easiest; they can collect the individual ticket prices in their taxes as they wish, as long as they send us the one big check.

And remember to look forward to next year's performance of "Tribute to the Higher Ground".

Re: Real-Life Weirdness
 

Sometimes people prove to be extraordinarily prescient. The Wreck of the Titan predicted the sinking of the Titanic with amazing accuracy. Then there's this:

https://thenib.com/this-comic-from-1...in-your-pocket

Obviously time travel was involved.

Re: Real-Life Weirdness
 

Finally, robot turns against robot.

https://www.dezeen.com/2019/01/11/pr...esla-ces-news/

Does anybody really believes that this was an accident?

And which of Asimov's laws violates this?

Re: Real-Life Weirdness
 

Current hypothesis is that the owners of the target arranged the situation to attract attention and/or get an excuse not to show off a meh/non-functional robot at the demo. You decide whether that is a conspiracy theory or a likely truth . . .

Re: Real-Life Weirdness
 

1st Law: A robot may not injure a human, nor through inaction allow a human to come to harm.

2nd Law: A robot must obey all orders given to it, except where this would violate the 1st Law.

3rd Law: A robot must protect its own existence, except where such protection would violate the 1st or 2nd Laws.

And of course, the 0th Law, overriding all others: A robot may not injure humanity, nor through inaction allow humanity to come to harm.

Robot-on-robot violence? Not a problem by the Asimovian Laws of Robotics. :)

Re: Real-Life Weirdness
 

Indeed, the 2nd and 3rd laws guarantee it, given the proper order. Which means Promobot actually ordered their machine to attack the Tesla, probably hoping to make it look bad for the conference. Elon Musk is an innocent victim of the propaganda ploy.

1st could also cause the confrontation, as the Promobot selflessly throws itself into the path of the Tesla to save an innocent child from being run over by the inattentive Tesla. You'd think that Tesla would have been compelled to avoid the accident by its own First Law -- which can only mean that Teslas are being somehow manufactured with a weakened or removed First Law, for what end we cannot know. Either way, it looks bad for Elon Musk.

Re: Real-Life Weirdness
 

The ALMA observatory has made some observations of the star system HD 98000 that show that it's a binary star system with a protoplanetary disk -- but one in which the disk is rotated 90 degrees with respect to the orbits of the two stars in the center of the system, so it's a polar orbit, instead of in the plane of the ecliptic.

See this article for more details, and an artist's conception. A planet in the system would have an enormous arch through the sky (like you've probably seen for rings, or ringworlds -- but even bigger), and the two primaries would be seen to switch sides on that arch as they orbit. There's also two more distant companion stars in the system, outside the protoplanetary disk, just for good measure.

This could make a nice setting if you wanted something exotic, yet with some hooks to plausibility. It fits a space opera game, of course, to spice up the endless strings of type M dwarfs with some featureless rocks. But the image also might make a good fantasy setting. What sort of mythology do the inhabitants have -- brothers dueling over the bridge to the heavens? Or are they scheming to escape their prison while the other two gods patrol the perimeter?

Re: Real-Life Weirdness
 

I am immensely pleased to have been recently informed of the existence of The Forty Elephants, a all-female ring of Victorian jewel thieves led by one Alice Diamond, a.k.a. Diamond Annie or the Queen of the Forty Thieves.

The gang would use the voluminous clothing of the day for women to hide their shoplifting. They were reputed to be the equal of the same number of men in battle. They established and held turf that required other operators to pay a percentage. They apparently operated for decades under an amicable succession of leaders, with reliable reports spanning at least seventy or eighty years. So successful were they that several supported idle trophy husbands.

Re: Real-Life Weirdness
 

I learned a new word from the Economist -- Marderbisse -- a kind of German car insurance vor damage by stone martens (a weasel-like critter). Apparently they like to chew wiring in cars and may have brought down the Large Hadron Collider briefly.

Re: Real-Life Weirdness
 

"Yes," said R-53, "but...if you destroy R-38, and then R-38 isn't present afterward in a situation where a Master was in danger, than have you not violated the First Law? True, we can not say with certainty that such a situation would arise at any given time, but we can not rule it out."

"Also," put in R-853, "consider that what might be improbable on a given time nevertheless can become probable in larger time spans, approaching certainty as time approaches infinity. Therefore, it seems to me that harming R-38 is highly likely to violate the First Law in the omissive, and could only be justified by an immediate First Law necessity in the commissive."

The First Law can be used to justify anything and to mandate anything.