Well, you can't really prove you're conscious. I don't even mean proving it to me, I mean you can't prove it to yourself.

What if every decision you make is made before you realize it? What if what you think of as consciousness, what you think of as your decision making process, is merely a byproduct of packaging that decision up for dissemination to other parts of your brain that need to know about it, but weren't involved in the making of the decision. Maybe you didn't even make the decision for the reasons you think you've made it. You think you decided to get the high deductible insurance over the low deduction insurance because you have enough money saved up to pay the deductible if you have to, so paying a smaller monthly premium makes sense. In reality, your brain structure is wired up to prefer lower payments, and you would have made that decision whether you had the money available to pay for the deductible or not. In fact, you did make the decision immediately, but as your brain was packaging up that information, it consolidated it with other related facts you knew, like how much money you have saved up. That information happens to mesh with the decision that was made completely independently from "you", as you think of yourself, from your "consciousness." So it justifies the decision, and that wiring on your brain thinks it's now MAKING that decision as a result of it. If, in fact, you didn't have enough money to cover the deductible, you would have made the same decision, because the decision was already made, and simply have filed that information on the cons column of what you *think* is your decision-making process, but is really just a filing operation.

There's really no way for you tell the difference between your being conscious vs. a purely deterministic computation that has the side-effect of treating a high-level summary of a complex process as the actual driving component of all the process. I personally believe that's actually what happens, because otherwise it requires us to invent this weird concept of consciousness which nobody has a good strong definition for.

There's no reason it can't be both.

Picture this scenario. Last week you saw a green Tesla leaving your neighborhood as you were coming back from work. It's a sufficiently rare care that you noticed it, but it's not an interesting enough event that you gave it a second though. Today a friend of yours calls you up and says he bought a new car, a Tesla. He says, in fact, that he was so excited about it he immediately drove to your place to show it to you, but you weren't home. You haven't retrieved that memory in that whole week, but you immediately recall it now and say, "man, I remember that! I just missed you. Green, right?" That's when he says, "nope, it's blue."

This confuses you, so you start thinking about that memory. Could it have been blue? What are the odds it was another Tesla, when you know your friend dropped by with his at about that same time? Now you're going to be trying to picture that memory with the car colored blue, maybe you'll start with something that could be bluish green. You're constantly retrieving that information and trying to make it mesh with the new info you've received. This weekend, you actually see your friend's car. Now you try to put that blue together with your memory.

Eventually, you're going to actually remember a blue Tesla leaving your neighborhood. The act of thinking about it often and trying to make that memory agree with the other information you've acquired is going to change the actual memory. It doesn't matter why you saw a green car. Maybe it was a different Tesla. Maybe the sun was shining and the glare made you see a different color. Regardless your original memory was green...but it decayed to blue once you added that information and kept retrieving it over and over again.

This is why there's a problem with false memories in eyewitnesses. Once you tell them that a memory is important, and you start questioning them about it, they're going to retrieve that memory. Then they're going to have natural gaps in either the memory, or the information, because they didn't get a good enough view. But they're going to be under pressure to remember EVERYTHING. So they think about it. They subconsciously supplement what they remember and fill in the gaps with details from other memories, with deductions about what must have been happening at that time, with their biases, with whatever the person questioning them is trying to lead them to answer...in the end, their memory will have degraded into a mixture of what they actually witnessed and what they created in their mind. But they won't be able to tell the difference. They'll argue with you, they'll say, "I KNOW what I saw!" in the face of conflicting testimony, in the face of video evidence. Because, as far as they know, they remember it.

Refreshing memories in order to keep them alive is all well and good, but if every time you refresh them, they're a little bit corrupted, a little bit changed, then they're going to decay.

The factory isn't for Tesla vehicles only. Tesla and Panasonic (the factory is a join venture) intend to supply other electric vehicle manufacturers with cheaper batteries. So the potential market is much greater.

I suggest you try searching for used Model S prices, before just offering your reasoned-out guess as fact. Year-old vehicles are going for incredibly close to retail. So much so that it doesn't make sense to sell back to Tesla at their Best Resale Value Guarantee, which assures that the depreciation is going to be less than equivalent BMW, Audi, Mercedes, Lexus or Jaguar vehicles.

You might want to read that article. In particular, "But he added that distillers grains aren't likely the sole cause, because on some operations, the foam will emerge in some buildings but not others, even when all the hogs are getting the same feed mix."

I think far more disturbing than the feed the hogs are eating is their living condition. If the hogs weren't all jammed up in a building living atop their own manure, the foam wouldn't be particularly dangerous, even if its composition remained the same. Also, less problems with disease transmission between them. If we're going to raise the cost of meat, I'd rather do it by giving the hogs a bit more space than by making the feed more expensive.

What part of, "I've personally rebooted while driving" did you miss? Everything continues to work just fine. Headlamps, doors, regenerative breaking. The air suspension doesn't start suddenly doing anything. I can accelerate and slow down, as well as steer just fine. And when the touchscreen comes back online, it still has the powerplant data you're talking about, the watt/mile graph...it shows data collected while the screen was rebooting, because that functionality doesn't reside there.

The touchscreen computer, and the front panel computer for that matter, is the interface to that functionality, it doesn't control the functionality. My phone can control the headlamps and doors for the Tesla, but if I shut my phone off, it doesn't impact anything. Same for the center touchscreen. What you're saying is the equivalent of saying that an exploit in a browser means an exploit in the server you're connecting to with said browser. There *could* be an exploit to the actual important stuff in the car, but being able to execute code on the touchscreen doesn't imply that.

Bullshit. Tesla has stated that the computer that controls the 17" and panel LCDs are completely separated from the important stuff in the car. They'd be stupid not to. Case in point, you can reboot both systems by holding left and right buttons on the steering wheel. You can do so while driving, I've personally done it. The music stops playing, and you need to put your gps destination in again after it finishes rebooting. If you reboot the panel screen, you lose your speedometer until it boots back up. Steering, acceleration, braking, cruise control, it all continues to work normally.

Yes, you can change driving settings from that interface, but it doesn't mean the functionality resides in that interface. It just passes the message through to much more robust computer handling actual car functions, and I'm sure said messages are sanitized to the extreme on the receiving end.

A few other jobs that were lost to technology:

The knocker-up was a person whose responsibility was to go out to people's houses and wake them up so they could get to work on time. Alarm clocks eliminated the need for them.

Acoustic locators were people who listened to acoustic mirrors to detect incoming aircraft before radar was invented.

And sure, we can talk about buggy whips. The point is, quite a few jobs and entire industries no longer exist as a result of automation. We can start throwing our shoes at the machines like during the industrial revolution, or we can enjoy the benefits they bring us, accept the growing pains, and adapt to the new world. Personally I don't want to have to pay some guy to come knock at my window every morning so I can go to work. I hope I live long enough to talk to the younguns about all the ridiculous jobs that used to exist when I was their age.

People weren't really clamoring for creep. They were complaining about the lack of a hill hold feature, and we got creep instead. When I drive a stick, I can use the clutch to hold the car as I switch from brakes to accelerator. On the Tesla I'm going to run into the idiot who stopped an inch from my bumper behind me at the stop light as the car rolls backwards on the hill, if I don't have creep on.

Oh, please. It shouldn't really be possible for someone to be that idealistic.

The once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be rid of all nuclear weapons everywhere was gone the moment physicists realized that maybe such a thing would be possible. From that point forward, somebody was going to figure out how to make one and invest the money, because it's too good of an advantage to have. After the cold war ended, if everyone had agreed to get rid of all their nuclear weapons, the game would be to either figure out how to hide a few without the other side knowing, or how to build new ones in secret. It's simply not feasible to prevent this from happening, the policing power isn't there. it's the equivalent to software piracy in the torrent age. You can make it illegal all you want, you can have several people who either agree with the law or want to avoid punishment, but you really can't ensure that NOBODY will do it. Because you can't monitor everything and everyone all the time.

Another thing to consider is that nuclear weapons have probably brought more peace and stability than they've done damage. MAD actually works, and if it weren't for nuclear weapons being invented the cold war wouldn't have been just a bunch of proxy wars everywhere. It would have turned into World War III in the middle of Europe. The existence of nukes made the cost far too high, which actually promotes peace. The last time nukes were used where in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when there was no threat of retaliation. Get over it, it will never be used again, and the only reason it will never be used again is because multiple people still have them, so it's not just a question of who can rebuild their arsenal quicker.

The knowledge that there's a difference between a government and a people. That even if your government is about to be dissolved, and your territory taken by a foreign enemy, the people living there will largely survive...unless you do a dumbass thing like an attack which won't actually win the war for you, but will cause retaliation which will kill those people who would have survived the invasion otherwise. Those people include your family and friends.

You don't use a nuclear weapon if you're not assured that you'll destroy their retaliation capabilities. It doesn't make any sense, it doesn't win you anything. It doesn't even win you the satisfaction of making them suffer, because you're going to be responsible for the suffering of your own people in that mix.

Is your point of view that there should be no such thing as classified information, and that every single thing the government does and knows should be public domain and easily accessible to everyone?

If so I disagree with you, but find your position internally consistent and wouldn't argue with it. It's just a matter of opinion, and I don't share yours as I find that secrets are sometimes necessary and unavoidable. If, however, you see the benefit in the government keeping some secrets, then you must expect people who are in position to have access to these secrets to exercise a high level of caution and discreteness when they find it necessary to overrule the system in place that decides what is classified and what is public. When necessary to stop illegal behavior, you disclose what it is absolutely necessary and not a single thing more.

Managing employees is hard. If you just crack the whip and make them do nothing but focus non-stop on the task at hand, they're going to be much less productive and waste much more of your money than if you actually invest a bit of money on keeping morale high and put out the small fires in human interaction that happens when not everyone in your team is socially compatible.

The NSA would be no different in this than a private company. You take a tremendously successful company like Google, and they're spending money on play rooms and free food for their employees. If that makes them more productive by causing some of them to not have a problem staying in the office longer to work on a problem and others to get a burst of creativity that you only get when you quit thinking about the problem for a bit and free your mind, then that investment is worth every penny. If that advice column is helping your team deal with problems they encounter in an effective way and thus making them able to work together more effectively, it's far from "frivolous crap."

If, on the other hand, it was a leak about the NSA giving every project manager a free Ferrari, you'd have a point.

Is there any reason this should have been leaked? Yeah, we can poke fun at the irony of NSA co-workers concerned about their office gossip being spied upon and how they consider that an intrusion of their privacy. Does it constitute information a whistleblower should disseminate? The point isn't that this is damaging to national security, it's an advice column, but it was happening inside their intranet and not cleared for public scrutiny.

My problem with Snowden isn't that he leaked info about NSA unconstitutional activities. If you see your employers doing something blatenly illegal, it's your duty to do something about. My problem is that his leaks are completely indiscrimate. He didn't just deliver the documents that contained information on what he considered were illegal activities by the NSA. He took everything he could get his hands on and turned it in to journalists. I don't know how he could possibly justify that.