My point was just that "intelligence" can't be impossible to reproduce algorithmically, because physics is amenable to simulation and has given rise to intelligence.

If it can be produced by a mass of wet jelly sat between two ears, it can be produced by a computer running the right program. The challenge then is to unpick the puzzle of what that jelly is actually doing, and to do so sufficiently clearly to be able to specify that "right program".

Not saying it's easy; it's incredibly difficult. But possible in theory.

Current algorithms are not Artificial General Intelligence. What we have now are algorithms for domain-specific intelligences.

But in principle, physics can be simulated by an algorithm. Therefore a human brain can be modelled at the particle level and run in simulation. Therefore whatever a human brain is doing that produces intelligence (assuming for now that it does, in fact, produce intelligence) can, in principle, be reproduced by an algorithm, even if it has to treat the brain as a black-box to do so.

Consider that the brute-force approach to algorithmic intelligence. Obviously the real prize is to find the shortcut - abstract out only the necessary elements of what the brain does and express those as algorithms.

I may be wrong, but I feel like you missed the point of the post above you... the "$20 trillion dollar bank account", I took to be an analogy for the world's fossil fuel reserves. Which, if we want to avert climate change, we probably have to take a significant fraction of and leave it in the ground.

All the focus is on reducing demand by reducing usage, and that would theoretically force fuels to be sold cheaper until the point where it's not economically viable to extract them. But it seems like an indirect approach compared to convincing a government that controls a lot of fuel reserves to just stop drilling them out and leave them buried.

But of course it's not really 'realistic' to expect them to do that - they're sitting on a bottomless well of wealth just begging to be dug up. It would make them uncompetitive to stop, it would mean other nations continue to profit while they sit on their hands, it would weaken their position of power on the world stage... it would help save the ecoystem of the planet, but clearly that's of no particular importance compared to wealth and power.

If you spent most of your prison sentence unconscious, it would make any attempt at either punishment or rehabilitation impossible. Would still satisfy the "removing you from society" goal, and would still offer some deterrence (maybe not as much if prison was now closer to a null experience than an actively unpleasant one), but still... seems like defeating a large part of the point of imprisoning people

I'm not certain where it fits into your analogies, but I'm using Windows 8 with Classic Shell and the only time I ever even see Metro is the rare occasion when my touchpad driver forgets that I disabled the "Edge swipe" gesture and that goofy little "Charm bar" sidebar pops up.

It boots to the Desktop mode, I have all the default full-screen Metro apps replaced with my own programs, it has the familiar old start menu and control panel and everything. For all intents and purposes, I don't need to know it's Win8. The one thing that hasn't quite gone back to the way it used to be is the network connect/disconnect dialog - that still opens up a full-height sidebar with the names of nearby wireless networks. But I can live with that.

Right here. Especially when the EU is trying to legislate something like net neutrality and the useless gang of cunts we call a government decides to veto it.

There isn't one. I've never been 100% sure whether this is deliberate and intended to promote careful checking before pressing submit, or if it's just because something in the code has been broken since forever.

Or to borrow some actual slashdot headlines...

Formhault C has a huge bitcoin debris ring
Scientists print bitcoin
Police pull over more drivers for bitcoin tests
Apple pushes developers to bitcoin
NASA schedules space walks to fix bitcoin pumps
Bitcoin exchange value halves after... wait, I did this one wrong
Unreleased 1963 bitcoin on sale
Want to fight allergies? Get bitcoin

Dammit, it still works, I would read every single one of these.

Ownership is established by knowing the private key for the wallet/address. The FBI gained that key --whether by keylogger, wiretap, plea bargain or $5 wrench is unclear-- and transferred all the funds to an address under their exclusive control.

So from the point of view of the bitcoin protocol, the FBI were the proper owners (they knew the key) and therefore weren't obstructed from making that transfer. Likewise they wouldn't be obstructed from further use of the address they control unless a majority of miners collaborated to refuse to include their transactions in blocks *and* refuse to mine on top of any chain that included such a transaction in a block mined by somone else.

Which would, strictly speaking, be a breach of protocol - you're supposed to always mine on top of the longest chain. But nonetheless possible if they patched the mining software to selectively ignore particular addresses. But that would seem like a bad precedent to set and a bad capability to build into the network.

Well, Google reckons the population of the UK is about 63 million, so I would of course be happy to pay my fair share, which comes to... approximately 24 cents, so long as you're willing to pay the cost of posting it to you of course.

Probably heavier and bulkier for the same amount of contents, so the trucks transporting goods to the store will carry less stuff (so there will be more trucks) and burn more fuel. Same with using glass bottles instead of plastic. With food, you also run the risk of increasing damage done to anything fragile, like fruit, if they're not fairly snug in their package - so bundling them loose into bigger boxes means more waste from the squashed/bruised ones.

There may well be better options for packaging; the way the world works now is set up to incentivise minimising cost rather than environmental impact, but some costs also have environmental impacts attached or correlated (fuel especially). It's not as simple as just "get rid of plastic".

If your "match" has to be fuelled by your "fire", then it's still a bit of an issue.

What they have is a pellet of fuel absorbing energy from a bunch of lasers, then emitting energy by fusion, and having the energy out higher than the energy in. The problem is that the lasers used more energy than was absorbed by the fuel, and the energy out can't be 100% efficiently collected into electricity generated.

It's not just a question of paying some high ignition energy then reaping self-sustaining free energy thereafter - without solving the problems, it isn't self-sustaining; you can't power the lasers from the output of the generator, not even close. Well, not yet. It's a milestone, just not an endpoint.

There are consequences in GTA - if you kill enough cops they send you a free helicopter as a prize.

Why not use angular momentum?

It's a toolbar button that takes you to a semi-random web-page, picked based on other people clicking the buttons to say that they like it, and also to put it into a category. In practice it ends up like channel surfing for the internet - keep hitting the button until you see something that looks like it might be half interesting, then move on as quickly as you arrived. From what I've heard from site owners, it's a good way to direct a spike of traffic to a single page but a lousy way to actually increase your readership.

If they've now monetised it successfully, presumably they've stepped up how aggressive the paid-for insertions are since I last used it. They were already somewhat jarring - the quality level on the whole wasn't high but the ads were always a moment of "Who in the name of the blind idiot god submitted this bullshit? Oh, another ad, fuck that, moving on"