Hitachi, Sharp raided on DS screen price fixing suspicions

Filed under: Displays, Gaming
Price fixing isn’t ever fun — unless you’re the company doing it and expect to get away with it, and then it’s like a total blast, dude. But hopefully that isn’t actually the case with Sharp and Hitachi, whose offices were apparently raided by the Japanese Fair Trade Commission on suspicion of fixing display prices for the DS; Nintendo’s throw its hands up in the air exclaiming that it was unaware of the supposed screen cartel, and something else about just when they think were out, they got pulled back in.
 
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Original post by Ryan Block

Professor decries robotic killing machines, clearly prefers to do killing himself

Filed under: Robots

So the military is continuing down the totally inevitable path of computer-controlled autonomous robo-warriors capable of fighting deadly human battles on our behalf — and out come the naysayers like U of Sheffield prof Noel Sharkey, who, at The Ethics of Autonomous Military Systems conference in London, decried the bots’ self-determined killing abilities as “a threat to humanity” — especially if they’re captured and re-purposed by terrorists to do their evil bidding. Sharkey exclaimed that he’s “worked in artificial intelligence for decades, and the idea of a robot making decisions about human termination terrifies [him],” but — and we’re just gonna throw this out there — what if being oppressed by a race of automatons run amok were actually an improvement over our corrupt governments of men? Isn’t that a possibility, too? We’re certainly going to keep telling ourselves it is, thankful we’ve somehow managed to not be [...]

Original post by Ryan Block