All those links, and not one published paper among them. Seems like you completely missed my point.

Your Forbes link illustrates precisely what I'm talking about. It is not a peer-reviewed analysis, it is not subject to any stringent scientific standards, it is merely one layman's opinion, and judging from the language it's a highly biased opinion at that. *Exactly* the sort of reporting that only muddies the waters. What makes you believe he didn't "form his theory before the data came in" - or that the scientists in question did?

And nobody is claiming the peer-review is perfect - but it is *far* better than no peer review at all! It can't guarantee perfection of course, but the review process weeds out the vast majority of mistakes, obvious and subtle, and expert review does this better than any layman could. Inevitably there are crap publications that merely pretend to review, just like there are equally useless blogs and editorials, but reputable publications are still looked to as reliable sources by all in the field. There is a reason why, in every scientific discipline, peer-reviewed papers continue to be our highest standard of information quality.

You make vague accusations of bias, yet no offer explanation why so many researchers around the world in this one specific field would be risking their all-important reputation by apparently submitting (and passing) sloppy, biased work - only your claim that all their politics are different to your own. Plus of course, you fail to say why your preferred, non-scientific source is any better, particularly as it hasn't even had the benefit of an expert review.

It seems unlikely that all the coral will go completely extinct, yes. Some small percentage will doubtless adapt and survive. But sudden drastic changes to the environment will certainly result in massive diebacks, of the coral and the ecosystems that depend on them.

It'd also suck for the local tourism & fishing trades, and the many livelihoods that depend on them, not to mention losing at least one of the natural wonders of the world, but hey, at least the coral won't be completely extinct.

That is completely untrue, nor would that sort of obvious crap ever get past peer review. There have been 6 or 7 papers on the consensus among climatologists that did pass peer review, and all arrived at similar numbers using different methodology; I suggest you read a few for yourself, and don't just accept other people's versions.

You're right that a lot of the reporting is highly charged one way or the other, and its difficult to get a clear picture of the facts. But published, peer-reviewed papers are still the most accurate and least biased source of information we have. All our best information in every field still comes through the peer review process; all else is speculation at best, and deliberately misleading at worst.

Don't trust *any* reporting on the matter unless it provides links to published sources, and be sure to *always* at least read the linked papers' abstracts and conclusions to get as close as a layman can to the original data. I've seen blogs link to papers that stated the exact opposite of the blog author's conclusions.

Well, considering the solar energy coming into the environment is a net 170,000 terawatts, the 0.0003% represented by a few hundred gigawatts isn't really all that significant. Even the geothermal flux of 47 terawatts dwarfs it.

Consider also that we're not removing energy from the environment (it's not destroyed), we're just redistributing it - the energy is re-radiated elsewhere, ending up as heat (which is what most solar radiation, wind energy etc ends up as also). There may of course be specific sites that are affected by this redistribution, but that's what environmental impact studies are designed to assess.

Emphasised that for you.

But yeah, there's little doubt that the value of slaves as assets and production & fears of economic catastrophe were a major factor in the Civil War, though the war itself was an even bigger economic disaster.

CO2 isn't a poison - but CO is, as are SO2, NOx, formaldehyde, benzene, mercury etc, all of which are produced by burning fossil fuels. Of course our economy isn't "based on" these poison gases, but it is based on the burning of fossil fuels, and the resulting toxic byproducts from fossil fuel electricity alone in the US is estimated at "$361.7–886.5 billion annually, representing 2.5–6.0% of the national GDP."

But he didn't register www.youtube.com/lush - he registered www.youtube.com/user/lush, and that hasn't changed.

The former is an automatic shortcut, which has now apparently changed without notice.

and it's still at the same URL it's always been at: http://www.youtube.com/user/lush. Lush Cosmetics' channel is still at the same URL it's always been at too: http://www.youtube.com/user/lushcosmetics.

What's changed here is only the shortened URL, http://www.youtube.com/lush. Neither party registered this URL, so neither has prior claim - it was simply a shortcut that an algorithm pointed at whatever related page met its criteria. Since it was never registered, neither party should be using this on their marketing materials.

That said, I wonder if YouTube ever made that clear to anyone - that shortcut URLs could change without notice, because that would seem to be a fairly crucial point. And I'm curious as to why the algorithm apparently deemed the Lush Cosmetics page more "worthy", despite having 1/10 the subscribers. Possibly due to them owning the lush.com domain, or having a higher pagerank?

Undoing my moderation to add - absolutely, this is the Free Labour Market at work, with the added benefit of giving the underprivileged 90% a chance at earning some of the money that the rich 10% (i.e. most Americans) have been keeping to themselves. Certainly sucks for the laid-off workers but I bet the H1B replacements are delighted. From a global perspective, it's all good, competition at work.

However, like any other form of import, there are options. If the foreign services are out-competing the local labour market (on wages at least) and harming US tech-worker self-sufficiency, then the Government can just do what it does for every other shaky local industry: impose a duty.

The Government can allow H1Bs in, but collect a duty on their wages, bringing the total cost of the worker inline with the local market. Result: US workers can more easily compete with imported labour, companies can still bring in truly skilled workers if they need them that much, and the Government gets a nice new revenue stream. All assuming that the companies involved allow the Government to do this, of course...

You're ignoring the decades of government-funded research that Tri-Alpha are building on. They didn't start from scratch.

Private enterprise is great at solving engineering problems, including some directed research if the payoff isn't too far off. But very few companies can sustain a $10-50 billion research effort for the really hard stuff. You need a government for that.

The other thing that governments are good for is big research & engineering jobs with little direct payoff but substantial indirect benefit to society - national infrastructure stuff. Private enterprise just doesn't see the value unless the profits go to them.

Selective much? You missed the sentance before:

and particularly the sentance immediately after:

So no, they can't do anything they like with your content. Worst they can do is use it in an ad for the Photos service, or use it in a training dataset.

Android File Transfer *is* an MTP implementation. OSX, at least older versions, did not support MTP naively.

Google's offering unlimited storage of 16MP images and smaller. For most consumers that's all they need, though professionals will still want to back up their larger & raw files themselves of course. 1080p video is now unlimited too.

The categorization that Google is doing uses image recognition that goes a fair ways beyond any photo management software you can run yourself, but again likely won't be flexible enough for pro users.

The "unlimited" part isn't actually new, BTW. Google have been storing unlimited photos and video for a while now, but the size limits were 2MP and 15 minute clips, previously. This is much more useful for the average person.

Can you pick which one has vastly more evidence for it?

Any AI that couldn't pursue a goal would be largely useless to us, so we would design one that could.

Whether it could conceive of its own goals is still an open question (like so much). But if it can't it's not going to vary from its design, and is therefore not worth worrying about; same as if strong AI turns out to be impossible at all.

So we discuss possibilities based on the assumption that a future AI will exist, and will be capable of forming its own goals.

In your strident efforts to impugn AI researchers' motivations as being tainted by the desire for money - has it ever occurred to you that successful development of strong AI threatens existing vested interests far more?

If researchers actually manage to create a superintelligent AI, it would likely put them out of a job - along with physicists like Hawking, managers like Gates, and engineers like Musk - by being far more able to access, process and reach insightful conclusions on pretty much any large dataset, including most research and management fields. Those who controlled (or partnered with) such an intelligence would have a brief but dramatic advantage over their competitors, until ubiquitous strong AIs took the lead to further their own goals instead (which would most probably be orthogonal to our own, having little overlap to compete over).