Why study a human brain?

The more ways we attack a given problem, the more chances of success. We have different communities working on different approaches to AI: Statistic, symbolic and biologically inspired. All three have produced interesting results already, meaning they have solved some practical problems.

Also, most human brains can show "intelligent behavior" in certain ways that our latest algorithms can't, e.g. navigating an arbitrary kitchen and finding a beer in the fridge :-)

Well, right now there is an economic war where the middle class all around the world is being obliterated. The likely end result will be a few very powerful and very wealthy entities/individuals owning most of the resources and technology, and competing between them in ways that we won't understand except when they use us.

They have been able to run around democracy and democratic institutions already. Unemployment is growing all around the word, as is social inequalities, the financial / industrial elites openly call the shots now. Manipulating people is extremely easy with the current mass media and people short attention spans.

The natural equilibrium state for this is just one entity calling the shots, the new superpower, and our only hope is that it is benign. The previous superpowers (USA, the British empire before that, the Spanish empire before them) didn't have the means to control all that is important, but with a globalized, homogeneous world and the current understanding of social science and politics and with the current technological means, it will be possible.

The only way around this would be to colonize the moon, or Mars, or somewhere that would allow for a situation where a new power center could have a chance of grow and survive, due to the physical distance.

What do you think will come first, immortality through repair technology like SENS, or immortality through mind uploading?

They were taken to court, lost, and slapped in the hand.

There, fixed it for you.

They are also the creators of the term "Freetard" used to reference anyone questioning the current "Intellectual Property" regime.

This gives you an idea of how they drifted. They used to be "bitting the hand that feeds IT", but no more. They used to get information from IT contacts inside companies. Now they are becoming standard journalist that are too dependent on the goodwill of PR departments.

This may have unintended consequences for MS. They are giving a high profile to the fact that their youtube app isn't up to snuff, compared to IOS or Android. Not very smart unless they are really sure they can get some action going in the antitrust front.

If I were looking for a phone and I would come across this information, this would be another negative. If you add this to all of the other shortcomings of Windows phone, I would avoid it.

If you only tax spending, hoarders will get rich. They will invest their savings and at some point they will own everything. We should tax production means as well. That means taxing corporations. I am not against taxing spending, but you can't stop taxing corporations.

In fact, my point is that we should stop taxing labor. If a Robot produces some good, the corporation owning the robot pays corporation tax and sales tax. If a person produces the same good, the corporation pays corporation tax, sales tax, social security tax and the person pays income tax. That situation is easy to change. You remove income tax from labor rents and social security. Removing taxes is better than throwing subventions around. Instead of getting money to go through the government with all of the inefficiencies and associated waste, you leave money in the hands of workers. You incentive work.

Then you need to raise taxes in the other areas. What is left? corporation earnings, financial transactions and sales .

Most people will never make it to higher education. It is never mentioned but the educational system works by setting up a threshold on people, not on knowledge. The 20% (or whatever) with the best mathematical skills get to be engineers or scientists. Exams are designed to filter that 20%.

In the US, people with some college is 56.86% of the population, as per wikipedia. The rest of the people are doing jobs that are being automated now or will be automated during the next decade. For example, drivers (self driving cars), factory people (robots), call center (the web and call center speech recognition), and many more. At some point robots will be flipping burgers, it is not that difficult.

We don't have time to educate all this people and create paid jobs for them before the next wave of technology comes around in another ten years. When it comes, it will take away even more jobs.

So we have two choices. We own the robots collectively as a society, or a few rich people owns them. The way things are going, it seems to be the former. This could bring a dystopia if we don't find a way out.

So here is my proposal.

Right now governments get most of their money from labor taxes, but soon this money will dry out. We should stop taxing human labor completely. We are penalizing it. Instead we should tax corporate earnings and financial transactions. That is where all the tax money need to come from. That would keep worthy humans productive even if their marginal value compared to robots is small.

We need to come to terms with the fact that a big and growing proportion of people will not be employed. They should not be considered guilty. In any case they should be considered owners of the automated workforce the same as the rest of people is. So they should be given a cut of the taxes so they can live meaningful lives.

Is it finally ready for prime time? any one with experiences/horror stories?

There is a problem with this. You don't want to wait 20 years if the technology is available now and you really need it (as in quadriplegic). So you will have to settle with two or three years in animal tests and with tissue samples showing no measurable damage to the brain tissue.

Worst of cases, if you are quadriplegic and using this technology, probably the independence gained with it would be worth one operation every five years.

The French government obviously has it backwards. Instead of making new law and all that shit, they should get google to stop dodging taxes with the double dutch.
There is plenty of money that can be had that way. Then they can share it with newspapers or whatever.

From your comment and his comment I suspect that his test involved getting huge documents from different MS office versions and loading them. Then deciding that OO can't handle big documents in general. This is a very skewed test. For people moving completely to OO that's a non issue.

I hoped it is clear I was kidding.

Yes, and China is leading the way in this area too, exporting civilization to the west for thousands of years.

You could introduce a "bug" into a processor that given a specific input (e.g. some GUID) will jump to a memory location and execute it. I guess that would be pretty difficult to find unless it is actually exploited.