It will get to the point where it could know to ask those questions, like a human would. Clearly these tools are not there yet, but I think the models are probably good enough for this already.
There are plenty of other programs with "planned" missions to the moon and mars. You can question whether or not they'll happen, but you can do that about SpaceX too.
If Gmail reads private emails to target ads [1], why would people think that Facebook isn't doing the same thing? Also many companies (including Facebook) have agreed to share hashes and cooperate to "remove extremist content from their websites" [2]. It would be naive to think that they are excluding private messages from their searches.
It doesn't appear so, no. The raw bytes seem to be dumped to temp files, local storage, or S3 [1][2] without mention of any sort of encryption step (or reading of a secret somewhere). As mentioned below, you could encrypt before uploading of course. Someone please correct me if I misread though.
I initially fell in love with programming by botting Runescape. If you want to look at some old (and very very poor quality) code to see what the botting scripts looked like, this was my most popular one: http://pastebin.com/WENWkWEW
There were some really interesting "innovations" in those scripts compared to the other free ones that were available at the time. For example, this script would allow the character to harvest and store wood from trees that would regrow / respawn. This script would time each hardcoded tree to count how long it had been de-spawned (dead) in order to move the bot user to wait by the tree that had been de-spawned the longest when all of the others were de-spawned. This was a good way to avoid being reported because most bots would just wait by the last tree to de-spawn and then instantly start moving to the first one that respawned.
Some other interesting tricks could be found in the "antiBan" method in a lot of scripts. Given a random input this script would move the mouse in some random ways, check some random stats, move the camera around, etc. One additional "antiBan" approach that I implemented for this script was to "take breaks". The idea was that a real player would probably not be watching their account and harvest the wood with perfect efficiency all of the time. Telling the bot to "take breaks" meant that it would turn itself off entirely for a short time (maybe a minute?) and just not react to any input, as if you were using the restroom or doing something else.
I could talk about this stuff for ages, it was great fun. :)
The biggest problem that I ran into with this approach however was checkpointing. I could never correctly reason about a way to prune the log of updates that you apply that still allows (100% correct, intent-preserving) merges from someone that might have been offline since the dawn of time. Does anyone know if this issue with this approach was ever solved?
Here is a paper [0] out of Berkeley that explains the chart you're asking about (the chart appears on page 8). For more information on each isolation level you might have to refer to the cited works or other sources.
A super easy way to keep yourself accountable when doing something like this is with the contribution graph on Github. My desire to not break my streak keeps me working on my projects every day.
Neat AI approach to play it. When this first blew up 5 or so days ago I threw together a simple javascript bookmarklet that played the game at: http://www.mrspeaker.net/dev/game/flappy/
It's really poorly formatted and has unused code in it but it was fun to automate and watch. http://pastebin.com/yTmdWgfC
To use it just install the bookmarklet, click on it and then start the game. Press space to make it die.
