I think maybe you read more into my post than was really there. For example, I never suggested we supply all drinks in pints, only milk and beer, because those are what most people are familiar with. Obviously we could sell, say, a half-litre of milk instead of a pint, but what benefit would that actually bring? Every child in the UK grows up knowing how much a pint of milk is, and every shop sells milk in pints, so changing units (and, realistically, slightly changing the familiar volumes as well) seems like a solution in search of a problem to me.

Those who fail to understand history are doomed to repeat it....even if they have to force it down our throats.

Holder doesn't fail to understand it - he and his ilk are back for Round 2. They will persist until the liberty is removed, however many rounds that takes. Then they will move on to the next liberty that still stands. If they can't win at the Federal level, they will get it done at the State level (e.g. California's back door requirements for cell phones).

That's how government works; I guess your point is well-supported by the history after all.

Except that in this country, almost literally everyone uses that system, and what the metricists are arguing for is the "standard" that almost literally no-one uses.

Losing the Mars mission was very unfortunate, but not nearly as unfortunate as seeing, say, an extra hundred people dying on the roads the year after speed limits changed.

I wonder, do you think we self-absorbed holdouts should drive on the right as well?

Are you arguing that because they crap all over the rest of the Bill of Rights, we should allow them to crap all over the second as well? Really?

Obviously, the correct solution is to required our government to obey all of the law -- and in the extreme (and unlikely, I think) event that we fail to achieve that via political processes, we'll have to make use of our arms to retake control (our arms and the unwillingness of the US military to fight fellow citizens; both are necessary). The "crapping all over all the rest of it" makes holding onto the second amendment vastly more important, not less.

Counterpoint: people who have the most to gain from racist propaganda and muckraking are black "leaders."

And the ones who have the most to lose are the racists.

It's gotten so bad that you can hardly use racial slurs for sports team names any more. Thanks a lot, Obama.

billionaire computer science major Judith Faulkner

What? Who says things like that? Is there even any semantic meaning in context of the issue? </aside>

My understanding, especially from friends still-on-the-inside (of clinical information systems), is that EPIC's main product is a SEP field.

I used to work on what was once hailed as a model clinical information system, but it was killed by beancounter CIO-types, angling for bonuses on unspent budgets, and eventually they were replaced by the clinicians who just wanted something where they felt they could get features and reliability (internal requests for such were almost always turned down by management because of perverse incentives).

Not being qualified to make technical decisions, [as I understand it] the clinicians went for big & popular, as it was felt that at least that stood a good chance of being decent. But more importantly, the internal bureaucrats were always angling for budgets and lawyers while the outside vendor is able to offer relief from all of that for merely a mountain of money. Clinical functionality is somewhere down the list in terms of required features.

I've been consistently ignoring such snide remarks and I'm going to continue doing so... but my willingness to be so patient with your snark is wearing thin. Cut it out or I'll simply stop responding.

As for whether or not I know "how this stuff is actually made", you might consider that I'm a professional software engineer with 25 years' experience, currently working for Google. I know quite a lot about how "this stuff is actually made", including familiarity with current machine learning techniques, since I'm a guy who makes it. I also personally know a couple of people who've worked on Watson (I worked for IBM for 15 years, including on Watson Labs research projects)... and they agree with my perspective on this question: AI is clearly possible; we don't yet know how to create it because we don't understand intelligence.

You can argue in exactly the same way that programmers in the 1950s understood how to implement knowledge graphs. Or computer vision. Or voice recognition. After all... they're "just code". Never mind that programmers of that era had no conception of the modern algorithms needed to actually make those things work. What they lacked wasn't just horsepower, but fundamental understanding of the problems and the solution. They couldn't build a computer system capable of driving a car that was infeasible only because it couldn't compute quickly enough, they couldn't build such a system at all.

Certainly it will be software running on hardware, all programmed by humans. Humans that understand what intelligence actually is and how it works... something that we don't yet know. To get a little more specific, it appears that human "intelligence" is actually a collection of several different components, with several emergent properties. It's long been thought that "self-awareness" is the key emergent property, but many animals have self-awareness and yet lack the crucial ability that makes humans distinct.

The current best thinking is that the distinction is a particular form of creativity. Specifically, the ability to create abstract explanations. We certainly know how to write computer programs that manipulate abstractions, but they're abstractions of the programmer's creation, not of the program's. We need to learn how to write software that is able to create and criticize its own conjectured solutions to problems. We do not yet know how to do that.

We know it's possible, because we possess computers that can do it. In our heads.

There are several misunderstandings implicit in this sentence.

First, I didn't ask for a link to prove humans have free will. You mentioned current legal definitions of free will. I asked for a cite to explain what such legal definitions are.

Second, you seem to think that civil rights are somehow related to free will. I don't see any such link. It's perfectly possible to have free will without having any civil rights, and it's equally possible to have civil rights without free will. I suppose you're trying to argue that we have established systems of human rights in order to protect the expression of free will... but that's clearly a second or third-order effect.

Third, you seem to think I'm questioning the existence of free will. I'm not. I don't think our perception of free will is in any way incompatible with the notion that our brains are deterministic machines... and I also don't think that they necessarily are. Quantum effects may well add a non-trivial amount of non-determinism to our thought processes. Such non-determinism may be a necessary component of what we perceive as free will, or it may not. We don't (yet) know. And it's possible that this non-determinism is both fundamental and is the mechanism by which a supernatural influence (e.g. our souls) play into the picture. Actually "supernatural" isn't quite the right word, because if there is such an effect it is also natural, just not part of the physics we understand.

Something like Metropolis?

Metropolis was all about the imagery. No matter how good this Tetris movie is or is not, it'll all be about the fifteen minutes before - filling the theatre seats is going to be great fun!

Can you provide citations for this?

Everybody knows that if you grow most of your own food on a 1/4 acre of yard, it's much worse for the environment than if you hire a company to maintain a pristine lawn there and drive down to the Whole Foods in your SUV to buy produce flown in from Chile.

nature is so much worth than farming.

So stop eating farmed food. Or stop being a hypocrite - either would be acceptable.

Obvious downside: fossil fuel use to get water where it is most useful may exacerbate the problem over time.

We know just fine how to build nuclear-powered ocean vessels. Maybe Congress can give the corporate welfare to the MIC to build iceberg haulers instead of battleships.

Since we're on the subject, does anybody know how to calculate the centripetal and gravity effects of a long-range tunnel bored through the earth's crust? I suspect there must be a maximum achievable tunnel length but also maybe the rotation of the Earth could be used for pumping energy, depending on direction.

It might just be easier, though, to warm to environment and have some of Antartica melt again, and re-humidify the atmosphere. People cannot seem to wrap their heads around the ice sheets, but if you told them there was a hole bigger than the United States filled with 500 feet of fresh water that was locked away from the atmosphere - that they could get. Even fewer can understand that the oceans have risen 120m in the past 20,000 years - geologists aren't welcome in the mainstream (pundits won't even accept those graphs in the IPCC reports).

All the water that used to be in the Aral Sea, had to go somewhere. Today it is in the oceans, raising global sea levels by several millimeters.

I can see not reading the article, it is Slashdot, but to jump to comment before even the second paragraph of the summary ... that just leads to embarrassment.

It's not 2067 yet.

It would have had to have been produced in 1922 or earlier.

Works published between 1923 and 1978 are protected for 95 years from date of publication. After 1978 it's 'Life of the longest surviving Author plus 70 years', which works out to 2049 at the earliest. Now consider for classical music that every musician in the symphony can be considered an 'author'. That can be hundreds of people, including a person in their teens. Hell, put a preschooler on the triangle or something. Still, consider that some are probably in their twenties and will survive into their 90s. That's 140 years.

Anyways, consulting the timeline of audio formats..., it looks like the 'best' recordings you'd have would be wire recordings, and the phonograph records/tubes could hold only about 4 minutes of sound.

So in order to exploit this you'd need to find an intact record produced before 1923(until next year), scan it and convert it to digital, as well as putting up with the fact that in many cases you'd be lucky to find a single song given the limitations.

It would almost be easier to pay a symphony to produce songs to be put into the public domain 'for the good of mankind'.

I agree, but I considered the 'and reshare' bit implied when I should have probably mentioned it. If it helps, read my post in the context of 'evidence in addition to the generic orders already known to 'download and share as much music as possible'.

Also, look at all the torrent stuff out there, you wouldn't ever get 90c per song - too many people would pay a buck for 1 song, if that, as an 'entry fee' and share amongst themselves.

But that's exactly the point: we are used to ordering a 1/4lb burger or an 8oz steak, so everyone knows what they're getting, so there is no problem. Rather like programming, using the same style as everyone else for what you're looking at right now is more practically useful than trying to enforce universal consistency for all plausibly related things everywhere.