This this this! I felt the movie was less shallow than you did, however. The relentless, pro-military, irrational exuberance seemed to more perfectly capture, what felt like to me, Heinlein's critique of such cultures in the book than any attempts at copying the technology would have been. Heinlein's technology never seemed as important as his commentary on people. The jumpsuits weren't the most important part of the book, it was the militarism, at time taken to extremes. The movie does it so well that its "laughable" and yet in some ways a little believable. True to form, Heinlein was also exploring positive aspects of militarism.

Regarding this showing Heinlein as a fascist, I wonder how people would take Stranger in a Strange Land after reading the book. Woo free love between everybody and what looks a little like communist ideas! Having read so much of Heinlein, I feel like I understand his thought process far more than his politics, and it seems like it would be a poor critic who would think any one book expressed Heinlein's ultimate beliefs.

Even in well designed projects with excellent coders, there are plenty of bugs. And, its quite possible people will pay more for new features. There are still tremendous forces suggesting that you don't add bugs willy nilly to a project, like much loser user adoption rates.

I am a developer working on an open source project and I would accept less money if I knew the bug was something I wanted to fix or a feature I wanted to implement. But to tackle something I truly don't want to do for personal joy or itch, I would have to have something on the order of $60-100 dollars per hour of my time to do it. And, there would be bugs and features all along this continuum. Also, I want higher adoption rights so the more "money" there is the more I want to do it for that reason. Also, if there are only a few bounties, I'd probably be willing to go for those more.

However, when money becomes a part of the motivation, if its not guaranteed, then I will start to look at expected probable outcomes (value of bug * chance I'll get the money = EPO). There has to be a reasonable assumption that you will get the money as a developer. Ways to increase the chance I'll get the money would be to take user's credit cards, but then you run into the problem of authing the card months after the bug has been fixed. You could implement a reputation system such that money that has been paid out in the past makes the current offer look stronger. You could also hold the money in escrow. Every solution on this front requires overhead, so how much would be taken off the top? Transparency in the accounting and structure would be highly important to maintain a perception of integrity in the bribing system.

Developers also can cheat the system by not really fixing the bug or adding the feature. They could implement the feature in ways that make more sense to them but cause the user to feel that they aren't getting value for money. A bug could be fixed in one way then pop up again causing the developer to look like he cheated a user, when in reality its the same buggy behavior for a different reason.

People are often terrible about getting information to the developer so that the bug fix is "easier". In that way, lines of communication would have to be kept open so the developer could ask for more information. Also, the developer could indicate that they find it low priority and suggest that they would consider it higher priority for a little more? Features are often poorly described by users so the developer could also communicate on that account as well.

What about bounty pooling? Like, two people put in a feature that is the similar but not quite the same. The developer and the users together may want to arrive at a compromise that benefits everyone.

People aren't paid in just money, social capital via social networks is also significant. Allowing the user to broadcast on plus and fb that he financed an open source project (and which one) also gets advertising for the project which benefits the developer, and kudos and respect for the user. Integration with social networks could be powerful. I, probably like many developers, don't like to use social networks personally, but users using them is great and I see the benefit.

I think the theory of the idea is sound, but it would require a lot of careful consideration, a lot of implementation, and some sound business consideration.

Also, in some way, this might undercut the amount of donating people already do. Now, to get the money I have to do more work, instead of generally getting rewarded for work I've already done. I can see that maybe it would lead to more money overall, but I wonder if it would?

Technically neither are AI running on computers. Cosmic radiation may flip a bit, the system, although rare, will be affected by externalities, and if we're talking speed of the result and the timeframe from when the input is started to when you get an answer, we're really talking about analog measures as temperature affects all the conditions.

I don't think a digital universe is required for us to have determinism. When you say a human can't be copied and the input exactly recreated this is also true of the AI, but the real problem is that you're blurring what 'can' means. Can by whom? Future humans? It might be quite possible, who can say? Can because we're limited? Theoretically unable to? I assert we would be able to 'theoretically' copy the state and inputs to the same degree we do the computer program and you've not said anything I find persuasive to suggest otherwise.

To put it in other terms, what you mean by copying the program and putting in the same inputs... you and I can do this. But, not a tribesman born and living in the amazon whose never encountered a computer before. The notin of replicating the pogram and its inputs are just as opaque as replicating a human being is to you and I. You cannot know its not possible.

Whats more, the alternative, that we don't have determinism, is incredibly more complex than if we do have determinism. With "free will" we have a process which is not affected by the universe and yet affects the universe and its going off in six billion or so humans and however many animals you choose to give this property. Uncaused causes on a massive scale. What is more, it is obvious that this free will property IS affected by the "physical universe" because people do not make choices that are available to them if they do not know they are available to them but which they would surely make if they knew. Even that notion that we can generally predict people will make choice x or y suggests feedback from the physical universe. The very notion of making choices first assumes that you have choices you're perceiving are there to make, so we have something even more complex, something that is affected by the physical universe but only indeterministically. Thats so sufficiently complex to me as to be unlikely in the extreme faced with the idea that our perceptions and our vanity, things more tangible and predictable to me, lead us to believe we have some mysterious power.

Why is it easier to 'justify'? That is kind of lame. If it is true, then morality is a compulsion. You could just as easily argue that recognizing you have this compulsion allows you to serve it better, and thus become more moral. In my mind, I've never seen a determinist be heinously immoral. If we're talking about experiential wisdom, it is precisely the crowd that believes in free will, as I see it, that is most prone to hurting other people. So, I dispute your quote, its fallacious and and smacks of precisely the same 'moral superiority' which has so turned me off about the "free willers."

I've never seen anyone define free will in a way that isn't either circular or intended to be taken axiomatically. Frankly, this strikes me as a knock against it since it's described effects are so complex as to suggest it is non-obvious. In determining if other people have this enigmatic free will, come up with a better definition than, it is hard to predict their ultimate choices.

Then you were compelled, by your lack of free will, to not believe it. Sort of like forcing a computer program to state its not a computer program.

It fits my definition of exceptional.

Apparently, gone are the days when fox-news-esque comments like yours wouldn't be modded down past most decent people's filters. You've said nothing of persuasion and apparently barely even understood the summary. They're talking about a bias in the technology so that you do not get an accurate color spectrum. Following up by ascribing such a base motive to the poster of the article itself without any real evidence is another way to play to prejudices and score that elusive +5 informative without actually saying anything of merit.

hmm, wordiness is irritating, I'll grant you, as is boilerplate. But, it just stops being irritating the moment that your IDE starts taking care of all of that for you. Writing Java from the command line is an exercise in extreme torture, but Eclipse makes it just fine. Liberal use of ctrl-1, ctrl-space, and the refactor functions on context menus and the actual menu make most of these annoyances trivial. Also, I have yet to see something that can refactor javascript as well as eclipse refactors java.

Also, cool I define by how powerful, flexible, and quick a language is to accomplish tasks. Boilerplate in the age of modern IDE's seems to have almost a negligable impact on those metrics. Boilerplate and language redundancy also often helps with human parsing of the language, imo, so it might even have a bit of a positive effect.

Lastly, I almost never agree that 'terse' is elegant. Elegance should only be clever in what it is actually doing, not in how it is being expressed in the language.