On the subject of politicians playing music at campaign stops....

I came across this CNN article from 2012:
http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/16/politics/music-in-campaigns/

wherein Bruce Springsteen complained about Saint Reagan playing Born In The USA, apparently without the Reagan people realizing that it was a song that was anti-war and bemoaning the decline of the USA.

The article is quite interesting and names several other rock groups who have complained about misappropriating their music, including Tom Petty and Heart.

Here's the interesting bit: campaigns buy blanket music performance licenses so they theoretically can play just about anything that they want. But if you piss off The Boss, not a good thing.

Who is responsible when thinking machines break the law?

Excellent article by Bruce Schneier. "Last year, two Swiss artists programmed a Random Botnot Shopper, which every week would spend $100 in bitcoin to buy a random item from an anonymous Internet black market...all for an art project on display in Switzerland. It was a clever concept, except there was a problem. Most of the stuff the bot purchased was benign­ -- fake Diesel jeans, a baseball cap with a hidden camera, a stash can, a pair of Nike trainers -- but it also purchased ten ecstasy tablets and a fake Hungarian passport."

Artificial Intelligence has been getting a lot of press recently with Elon Musk and Bill Gates talking about the danger of AI running wild. They have some valid points, but I'm not too worried about it: how long does your Windows machine go without crashing? ;-) Anyway, there's no way to implement Asimov's Laws of Robotics, it's debatable if we'll ever have an AI along the likes seen in HAL or Terminator. But who knows.

But I have to wonder: what would a computer do with a fake Hungarian passport?

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/01/when_thinking_m.html