I'm a George Carlin fan too, but the point of that isn't to point we don't need to care, it's to point out our environmental marketing sucks. It's not about saving the Earth, it's about saving the humans. And the Earth doing its thing, with lifeforms other than our descendants, isn't a good thing. I don't know about you, but I want humans thriving on Earth, on Mars, humans thriving everywhere we can manage to get to. I'd like to make sure we survive, and to do that, we have to ensure our environment continues to favor us.

Bullshit. Newspaper headlines LOVE to talk about dangerous hackers. In fact, it's much more likely that if a Tesla car gets into an autopilot accident for a reason completely unrelated to the modification, that they're going to emphasize, "autopilot accident involved HACKED car!"

That's actually a massively complicated fix. The real answer, and the reason the problem exists in the first place, is that you have to go through the apple app store. You don't need Apple's permission to install a program on your mac, you don't need Microsoft's or HP, or ASUS's permission to install an application on the computer you buy from them. You should be able to install software on your phone from whatever source you choose, and it shouldn't be legal for Apple to restrict that. You've bought the hardware, it's yours now, not theirs.

Then Apple can have whatever rules they want for their app store for anyone who chooses to distribute their app through it. If anyone doesn't like those rules, they can distribute their app through alternate means.

And yet, patent trolls do it all the time. Your time in court against them will be easier if you can point to your own patents.

There's also the situation where a competing company that is not a patent troll sues you for something they have a patent in. At that point they're likely going to be violating some of your own, which puts you in a better position.

Defensive patent portfolios are a fact of life.

Hawking radiation for an object of 2.6 solar masses is so tiny, it actually can't lose mass at the current stage of the universe. At that mass, the black hole temperature is around 2.4x10^-8 K, which is far below the temperature of the CMB at 2.7 K. Basically, the black hole is gaining mass from the CMB, and will continue to do so until the universe expansion cools down the CMB temperature by many orders of magnitude.

Not magic, no. In fact, it would be magic to argue otherwise: your brain is following an algorithm: individual neurons fire when very specific conditions are met. To imply that the physical processes in your brain are not sufficient to create your mind requires that there's some added magic to it. Clearly, if you could reproduce the exact same process that happens in your mind, you would reproduce your mind, because there's nothing else unless you invoke the supernatural.

What I'm implying is that there's information in the process itself. When the man in the room is following the algorithm to create the response every action he takes is one piece of the thinking process. By the end of it, the reply he pushes back was the result of a process that resulted in understanding. He's not aware of it anymore than a neuron in your brain is cognizant of the effect it will have on your decision to become a philosophy major or a computer science major, but just because that neuron doesn't have any awareness is no proof that you didn't. The combination of the interactions, in that particular connectivity, in that particular state created your understanding. You can't take a piece of it and argue that because that piece doesn't have the property of the whole, then the whole doesn't exist.

The problem with the "Chinese Room" argument is that it separates mind from process by design, and uses that separation to argue that the mind can't arise from the process.

In that thought-experiment, you have a person inside a room. That person gets Chinese characters that they cannot understand from slips of papers, they follow an algorithm designed to produce perfect responses, then they pass the result back out. The person on the outside then imagines there is a person who understands Chinese inside. The argument is that there is not, because the person following the algorithm doesn't understand what they've done.

In reality, there must be an actual consciousness inside that does understand and properly respond the language. A mind is created, but it's not in the mind of the person manipulating the algorithm. It's akin to asking whether the individual neurons understand why they're firing, or whether your visual cortex understands the image it processes. The mind arises as an emergent response of the whole, it doesn't arise in parts that are part of the process. The person inside the box following the algorithm isn't thinking, but it's part of a mechanism that created a thinking being. If the responses of the algorithm show an equal ability to respond to questions as another human, than it must be equally as capable of understanding. The mind is an emergent property of the algorithm plus the person inside performing the actions, the mind of the person inside is just a cog in the process.

I feel like a better solution to that issue is to spray them with water while firmly saying, "stop it," when you see that happening. You know, like a cat clawing furniture.

I didn't really think I'd be the "get off my lawn" type of old man, but the trend for everyone to keep replacing native applications with web applications consistently astounds me. It's not that I'm against the benefits of connectivity and information in the cloud. I love that I can write a document in Word, then when I walk into a meeting and someone references, I can open Word on my phone and look at the same document. It's also not that I'm against having more complex websites that pack functionality into them...I like the fact that if I use a computer that doesn't have an office suite installed, I can use the web version of one. It's that, holy shit, the experience of using the web version is necessarily much worse **because** it's an application inside an application. It's fine as a backup, but why wouldn't you use the nicer, faster, more efficient, native tool that works offline and can sync you go back online?

The anti-capitalists like the one in this post are indeed idiots, but the "you didn't build that" comment from Obama is consistently taken out of context. In that speech, Obama wasn't saying they didn't build the businesses, he was saying they didn't build the public infrastructure that the business depends upon. They didn't build the roads their employees use to get to work, or that the trucks use to deliver their products, etc.

Basically, it wasn't an attack on private business, it was a comment that they need to pay their fair share in taxes to support the services they benefit from. Which is a fair point. Here's the context:

It creates an incentive for people to get loans, and for banks to give them (Fed also promised to buy $700 billion in bonds to inject liquidity, and cut the required reserve by banks to 0). The previous cuts resulted in a mortgage rate low last week, which resulted in a huge increase in cash-out refinancing (that's refinancing where the borrower not only refinances existing debt, but takes out part of the home equity values as a new loan). They're going to use that extra money they took out.

In a way, yes. I voted in the primaries in my state, and was pleasantly surprised they had upgraded to voting machines that just printed out a human-readable paper + barcode. Then you took that to the ballot box, which had a scanner on top. You deposited the paper, it scanned the barcode, kept the human readable ballot, in case a recount is needed.

Hopefully this is a trend. My state had insecure no paper-receipt voting machines for 20 years.

I'm going to examine that next, but first let's go bigger: there are 2200 billionaires in the united states. Their combined wealth is about $9 trillion

. So, forget about taxing their income, if you actually took everything they own, and left them with nothing, and could do that without decreasing the value of their wealth in the sell-off, it would still not pay for that $16 trillion.

Now, let's address your other point. $109 billion + $122 billion + $86 billion = $317 billion. The bottom 50% of US households have $1.67 trillion. Not even close.

A quick Google search tells me you're quoting a particular study done by the Institute of Policy Studies. Since that didn't mesh **at all** with the Wikipedia values, I decided to go read their report, here. They actually roughly agree with the household wealth numbers from the Wikipedia page, but gives us the answer in their methodology:

Fantastic. Yeah, you take all their wealth, subtract the value of everything they bought with that wealth, and there you go. Their argument is that those things are not easy to sell, and therefore not good storage of wealth, which is indeed right. But that doesn't make it worthless. First of all, once somebody chooses to buy these things, they had an opportunity cost and they could have chosen to buy something else. So why would someone buy a car and household appliances? Because they have value. If you don't have a car, it's harder for you to get to work. If you don't have a fridge, you can't store food for long periods. Not having these things cost money. They generate wealth. Their wealth needs to be counted.

I'm sure they also went ahead and applied the same methodology to the wealthy right? Did the subtract televisions, appliances, cars, private jets, and yachts, because those things hemorrhage money from the wealthy too?