Oh and understanding what needs to be simulated and the initial state of the human brain. How is consciousness born? We've wondered that for centuries, we don't have the answer yet. Will we eventually know all of this and have the capability to duplicate human intelligence? I don't doubt it one bit! Will we be there in 30 years, at least down the path you suggest? Extremely unlikely.

A cascade of AI's capabilities in a short period of time seems likely, but we haven't made much progress yet. And even with a 100 fold increase in processing power we haven't managed to take our simple learning models and make them 100 times more powerful. There is a real scalability problem right now. So it feels a bit like putting the cart before the horse to worry about these what ifs.

Your cell phone is less capable of learning than a jellyfish. Although your cell phone can sometimes simulate very simple learning under extremely rigid frameworks for learning.

a human competitive AI in 30 years? seems unlikely given the almost zero progress on the subject in the last 30 years. But maybe we'll hit some point where it all cascades very quickly. Like if we could do a dog level intelligence it is not a far leap to do human level and super human level. But we have trouble with cockroach levels of intelligence, or even defining what intelligence is or how to measure it.

AI research for the last several decades have taught us how little we know about the fundamental nature of ourselves.

We can hope that eventually a judge is going to be annoyed and start treating the conscious action that businesses take when issuing a DMCA takedown notice as sufficient for being "knowingly false".

"Websites don't come with a nationality,"

Mine has an America flag in the website logo.

Yup we didn't need print magazines in the 80's. Because downloading images at 2400 baud and displaying them on your 8 color computer was vastly superior to full color printing and inexpensive monthly delivery.

I used to print out source to do code reviews, because I was too impatient to wait for VGA projectors to be invented.

I like it when my brakes stop me before I slide into something.
(I ride a motorcycle, I find riding in the rain to be unpleasant for a variety of reasons)

So, what, all Windows patents are invalidated?

If they actually provide a service that people need, then why are they so afraid of direct sales? It seems to me that, like home realtors, car dealerships ought to be perfectly capable of functioning in a mixed market.

I'm accepting gov seized coins at 50% value.
If someone wants to accept at a higher percentage, then I guess the free market will decide how much they are worth.

No, I think GP is referring to the $1.2 billion settlement for concealing safety defects.

It depends. If he was a licensed PE he had a professional and legal obligation to intervene with the switch, regardless of how he felt about it. If he wasn't a PE, then whomever the PE was that was managing him and approving his designs is to blame.

it uses it therefor it traps. but I assume you meant the word "use" in some other way...

we are pulling hydrocarbons from deep underground and if we continue to either burn it or allow it to decompose, it will become CO2 and contribute to the greenhouse effect. Anything that could sequester carbon long term is better than the nothing we are doing today.

the eventual goal would be to stop pulling material out of the ground, and reverse the trend and put carbon back faster than we take it out. We're so far away from doing that that I don't believe there are any viable plans written up to accomplish it.

So instead of releasing the carbon into the atmosphere we're pissed off because now we have ugly rocks that are made of trapped carbon?

If this plastiglomerate can remain in the environment for eons, then I'm thinking we should make more of it, a lot more of it.

Note: Patch for FileZilla is already available. Update to 3.8.1 which uses GnuTLS 3.2.15.