As the article correctly notes, the criminal case was dropped. Also, the law parts of the case was based on was practically forgotten for a few decades now and will be removed soon.
This particular article of the german penal code is a relic of the German Empire (1871). Last December, the government decided to get it removed from the penal code.
Not that I take the whole Bostrom superintelligence argument too seriously, but this is an incredibly weak argument (or more accurately, bundle of barely-related arguments thrown at a wall in the hope that some stick) against it. Feel free to skip the long digression about how nerds who think technology can make meaningful changes in a relatively short amount of time are presumptuous megalomaniacs whose ideas can safely be dismissed without consideration, it's nothing that hasn't been said before.
I'd prefer links to stories about new ventures, their strategic impact, etc, but given that anything worth discussing usually produces multiple stories it's better that all the discussion occur on a single thread with a link to the announcement.
This is lampshaded pretty hard in Consider Phlebas, I think, where Horza basically hates the Culture for that reason (among others). I also consider Star Trek's Federation boring as well, but worse: at least The Culture meddles in the affairs of other groups (for better or worse!).
There's an SF fan theory which tends to show up around the late-night bars in conventions that the Star Trek Federation and the Blake's Seven Federation are, in fact, the same Federation --- it's just we're seeing the propaganda films released by both sides.
Naturally, the anti- side doesn't have nearly as much money as the pro- side, which is why the special effects in Blake's Seven are so bad.
The things I miss out on by not going to sf conventions.
It makes a lot of sense, too. I mean, TNG started out with political commissars, even - take a look at Troi's character in Season One, especially e.g. Conspiracy, and tell me that's not exactly the role she's playing.
The Federation has the problem of being completely undefined; it has a president but no elections, politics, news? Does it have money or not? If not how does that work? We haven't really seen how normal people live inside the Federation.
The Culture is a benevolent Matrix where machines make decisions taking the desires and opinions of humans into account to whatever extent they choose to. The amorphous nature of the society is actually part of its explicit nature (whether a ship or population is part of The Culture is kind of up for debate and reassessment at any given time)
The difference between the Federation and the Culture is that Banks actually considered the societal impacts of matter compilers, godlike AI, etc. and tried to describe the results as he imagined them. THe Federation is "kind of like the modern US" with a bunch of tech that would make the modern US make no sense at all.
I'm confident that heavily armed hicks trying to found some sort of confederacy 2.0 could offer at least as much resistance as the Taliban. The US government doesn't exactly have a great track record of successfully suppressing insurgencies, even without having to do it on American soil, which would increase the public relations hit for collateral damage (I imagine CNN would care more if predator drones started bombing American weddings, for example).
Thanks for putting this together! As someone interested in cognitive biases, I wonder: how many of these effects have survived the recent replication crisis intact?
