Well he said "or" not "xor" so that's okay.

Actually that conclusion doesn't follow even if you accept the premise. Most severe crimes are committed by repeat offenders who commit them many times - over and over.

So even if you accept the premise that prison has no deterent effect (a premise not entirely without merit I guess) it still doesn't follow that without a justice system crime rates would be unchanged - simply because it doesn't account for the crimes not committed while serving your sentence.

Yep, guys like him should really try lying under oath in a court and then claiming "Freedom of speech" as a defence against the resulting perjury charges...

But that still leaves the most important question unanswered.

Is it legal to shout "Theater" in a crowded firehouse ?

He's been repeatedly asked for an executable we can have a bash at, and he's refused (apparently it's too much work). I've seen this on usenet waaaay too many times in the 90's. Some new aspiring unsung-encrypting-genius will pop up on comp.programming (or similar) and boast about their encryption algorithm without giving any details about it. Suffice to say someone usually managed to decode their ciphertext within a few hours.

This appears to be more of the same - at least the usenet newbies had the grace to provide something that we could attempt to crack; this poster, as sincere as he sounds, doesn't even want the free crack-testing that we are offering, so yes, he probably *does* think that he's come up with a DRM solution that is better than anything that came before.

This troll is finally not totally off-topic :-)

You make a good point - BTC is only useful if you have no other options. That being said, there is not a single spot on earth where you have no options other than BTC, which makes BTC slightly less desirable than a chocolate teapot.

That's news to me - when did *anyone* seriously consider bitcoin other than as a commodity?

Now you've got me curious - which currencies are *not* backed by force?

Have you ever had a LEGO brick turn squishy on you? Because that's what they're made of, ABS plastic.

It's a plenty tough enough material that I used it to manufacture parts for a geodesic dome for outdoor use as a greenhouse, and it held up fine. I also manufactured gears for a friends high end RC car after the manufacturer had gone out of business. Those gears see a lot of stress, and they held up fine.

ABS is a great material, and so is PLA.

Funny all the trained CNC machinists with 3D printers are all anonymous. The non-anonymous ones readily admit that if a thing you want is all of cheap, fragile and made of cheap plastic then a home 3D printer would suit you just fine, otherwise get a cheapie mill or lathe, or pay 10-20 times that amount for a decent 3D printer.

Using these goalposts even real intelligence, nevermind AI, would never meet the standard - if it has been directly programmed to learn new responses, ilke humans for example, then you would still fail it as intelligence using this criteria.

How about if what you directly programmed it to do was to write code to handle unexpected situations/inputs/etc? Perhaps in an iterative fashion, using previously gathered data? Using code fragments that are reassembled in new combinations, testing each mutation for success against the inputs? Because AIUI this is what the majority of chatbots *currently* do - use previously acquired data to refine their outputs.

The consequences, in this particular case, is that the someone will forever be shunned by institutions. The only good thing to come out of this is that they will never work again. Their name is forever tainted due to the large amount of non-science that they did. The other party of this little drama will continue being a well-respected nobel prize-winner working on cancer research, with offers of employment and requests for assistance pouring in.

The witch-hunter in this round fully got what she deserved. When your publicly available CV does not match up to publicly available information *AND* that particular fact is the first hit on google you may as well kill yourself - no one else is ever going to believe a word you say about your competence again.