Penrose's entire argument (in "The Emperor's New Mind") for why consciousness was quantum mechanical was that a computer could not be concious, because it could not answer the question "how do you feel?" - to which I respond "can I have my money back". Scientists like Penrose, Hawking and Dawkins should be locked up for their own good when they start mumbling about philosophy and God. They would be very quick to point fingers if the Dalai Lama or Amartya Sen started making statements about microbiology or quantum gravity based on their philosophical skill.

I think we are supposed to go "back to nature" - like the end of Battlestar Galactica, we give up our technology. After 95% of the population have starved to death, we could have a perfectly sustainable life "in harmony" with nature - i.e. up until the point something less conflicted evolves to kill us all. I think the enviro-crowd's anti-industrial ideas come from people like Rousseau and Marx, and just like Rousseau and Marx, they are totally reliant on the culture they criticize.

So to summarise your argument: the police force is corrupt, therefore anything that gives the police force information is bad, because they misuse whatever power they have. These people are armed with guns, they have great power to tamper with the criminal system, but you are particularly worried that they might be able to track a car that goes into a "gay district". Why don't you follow your argument to the logical conclusion, and dissolve the police force? We could all police ourselves, with our .44s.

Why should anyone be alarmed about Fukushima? Let's do some risk analysis. What do you think the severity of the problem is? I assume we can limit this to how many people do you think are going to die. What do you think the probability is? For me, I estimate the probability of more than 100 people dying is less than 1 in a million, even granted the one in a thousand events that overtook the reactor have happened. If the public reaction is reasonable, then it should be a reasonable reaction to these figures - which are something like the number of people that die on the roads in a day. If you are factoring an unreasonable public reaction into your analysis (i.e. germans banning all nuclear power), then we might as well stop arguing - they could ban nuclear power for any reason (and effectively, they already have banned nuclear power - there are very few new nuclear plants in the US or Europe, due to irrational public fear). We slashdotters understand rationality, and nuclear power, and pity the poor idiots who are trapped by their ignorance into a carbon burning future.

This argument doesn't work. If people gave press to preventable death, they would highlight obesity, gun ownership and safe driving. The reason people are scared of nuclear power is because they do not understand the issue. The reason people live in hurricane afflicted areas is probably because they do not think it will happen to them. If the same number of people died from artificial nuclear radiation in Florida as die from hurricanes, can you imagine the hysteria?

Well, lucky for you that the legal system requires your guilt to be proven beyond reasonable doubt. If you told someone you were going down that road, by your logic, you would be arrested. So effectively what you are saying is, the police are going to fit someone up for this crime. If they have more information, it is more likely to be me. I don't see how you can deduce that - and since in your world, law enforcement is random anyway, what does it even matter - it's not fair either with or without the cameras. I think the real point of this argument is this gives information and power to the state, and the police, something which slashdotters are against, since they have an instinctive distrust of authority. Slashdotters might be against authority, but that doesn't mean authority is wrong.

Sorry mate, but you sound insane. You're busy analysing the wording in a quote that has been paraphrased by the journalist. Would you care to analyse the line "Mr. Edwards’s head had been wrapped in plastic, and his throat appeared to have been slashed." Is that the kind of civil liberty you are so keen to protect?

If you don't like it, why? I like my life, where people who commit crimes are actually tracked down by the state and held. You might not believe it, but the police can actually gain access to your house if they can show evidence that you committed a crime. If you say something to your neighbour about how your wife won't be coming back again, ever, he can be sure of that, they can actually use his testimony in court - almost like they have recording devices everywhere. Police can ask you hard questions, try to trip you up, even lie to you to make you incriminate yourself. If any of these methods were invented today, would you allow them? Tech is cool and all, but somehow I don't think automatic reg plate recognition would have made things a great deal easier for Adolf.

seems like a fair point to me. List of 18 countries that it's banned in, 3 are non-dictatorships, which is supposed to make some kind of point, except one of those is actually ... a dictatorship.

This is not proof, just evidence.

I don't think financial engineering really comes into CDOs, except in that financial engineering was something the banks could do that the ratings agencies couldn't do very well. The ratings agencies were using monte-carlo models to work out the risk in the structures, which were not exactly state of the art. The best people at the ratings agencies were being hired by the banks to reverse engineer the ratings. Generally I also don't see the difference between "productive gambling" and "crime" under your definition - it seems CDOs were a crime, because you could lose too much. I don't see where to draw the line between this and short selling stocks (where your potential loss is unlimited) or fx trading (where you are always short one currency). The thing about banks is that they take these kind of risks all the time - that is what lending is all about. The problem here was that the ratings allowed them to say there was no risk, and the other problem is that we rely on these institutions to make payments, buy houses, and keep our savings safe. Financial engineering would not have justified any of the long CDO positions at major banks, without credit ratings.

The answer is, mostly, neither. Finance is a gambling game played by dreamers. I think Fred Schwed had it right when he said "We expect a child to grow up in time, and learn what is reality, as opposed to what are only his hopes. This however is too much for the romantic Wall Streeter - and they are all romantics, whether they be villains or philanthropists. Else they would never have chosen this business, which is a business of dreams. They continue to dream of conquests, coups and power, for themselves or for the people they advise." Aaron brown of AQR holds the same view. Essentially, people love to gamble, so people play the markets. Then afterwards when people need to explain why it's done, professors come up with reasons like "efficient allocation of capital" - to some extent, this is an effect of finance, and probably the reason it isn't as restricted as gambling is. But the reason people do it is to get rich quick - by gambling.

I spent some time studying the credit crunch too. I believe the effect of CDOs was to allow banks to avoid holding sufficient reserves. They could take their loan books, get an AAA rating on them by packaging them as CDOs, and then take up more debt. This then created an old-fashioned banking crisis like the ones in 1907 and the late 19th century, before reserving was enforced. The mathematical models were largely irrelevant detail - these deals were marked to the market price for correlation, which was supported by the AAA credit ratings. But it's worth bearing in mind that the banking collapse was really just a trigger, the bigger problem was the huge, unsustainable level of debt held by American consumers, and the bad investing decisions they made in housing. The banking collapse caused a tightening of credit, which made things hard for business, which caused redundancies for overstretched consumers, which caused Americans to suddenly start saving, which caused a reduction of demand, which made things harder for business. The problem is in a modern, free market democracy, individuals need to take some responsibility for their financial continence. Either that or we need a revival of strong moral leadership across corporate and political America - but I don't think the system is set up for this to happen.

No such thing as bad publicity - cf. Charlie Sheen.