You are promoting the idea that there is safety in a situation for which you have no data.

Only a fool would follow you there.

Because it sets some bars that are useful in illustrating a point that is actually real, but that is impossible to convey without creating an artificial situation that exemplifies it. The set-up is legitimate: when I worked at Wendy's, it was clear we wouldn't sell more burgers by staffing more people; but we were profiting, and we had exactly enough people that we could make the burgers and fries as fast as they were ordered at any given time, and we would still be profiting with a few pennies increase in wages, and still be cheaper than buying and maintaining machines at the time. This is a thing that is actually real.

It's not a blending though. It's this behavior, and there is a lot of ground to cover on both sides to hit that cross-over point.

It's possible with the amount of money we currently spend on direct welfare. Our current welfare system discourages work. By creating a more efficient welfare system using the same financial resources, we increase value by moving power into the hands of workers and allowing for a free-market solution to wages and employment.

The current solution is "if you don't work, you will die." That's an artificial market solution with a dictatorial nobility oligarchy. We try to counter that by minimum wage; it has problems, but they're smaller than the problem of supplying work to desperate workers. My solution eliminates minimum wage, its problems, the problems of qualified welfare, and the problem of desperation, without eliminating the demand for employment; demand for employment increases, compared to our current welfare system, because getting a job when you're on our current welfare system tends to leave you with less money.

Because an AI that does what you need an AI to do is not actually an intelligent, free-willed machine.

You do realize that every single cell in your body can be considered to be millions of years old, right?

Each cell divided from your original ovum/sperm combination. Those came from their parents, which came from their parents, etc. etc.

Cells have been proven to be able to divide into new ones FOREVER, given minimal changes. Telomeres and the other forms of aging are all just anti-cancer techniques.

You do however have a good point when you mention the brain.

But that is also not insurmountable. It's called gradual replacement. Kill about 1% of the brain every year and grow new cells.

Yes there will be some partial memory loss. So what? By that age, you already have memory issues. Personality and the 'soul' (if it exists) will remain the same. You ameliorate the memory issues by leaving personal recordings of important things - video, etc. Basically, you look at your own Facebook page [ ughh, I found a real use for Facebook :( ]

You are correct we will never win against entropy.

But you are wrong when you think the constraints are freer for artificial intelligence. They simply are not there. The 'weaknesses' of organic life are actually strengths that people do not understand. Things like blinking - it is an automatic health maintenance procedure, not a weakness in human vision.

While it is true they have zero evidence, this is slashdot, not a scientific paper. As such, if we ignore anyone with zero evidence, then Myspace will have more content than we do.

I totally agree with this. I think the reason our SETI program is like Native Americans looking for Europeans by trying to find Smoke signals. ET must likely does not use radio waves, they are too primitive.

The basic argument is that they can be: 1) Effectively Immortal 2) Upgradeable. 3) Information transfer.

My counterargument is simple: a) Genetic engineering and b) information transfer is a weakness

The main obstacle to medicine preventing aging is cancer. Aging started out as a simple way to prevent unlimited cell reproduction, i.e. cancer. Give us another 200-500 years and we will stop aging and cancer. We won't really be immortal, as humans will still die from accidents - but so will artificial life forms.

What few upgrades that are good ideas (for GENERALISTS, not specialists - don't give people tools that not all of us of need), we will be able to slowly work into the genome using the same genetic engineering.

Finally, high speed, unfiltered information transfer is NOT a good idea for life forms. It lets you be hacked. Any creature that has a simple way to upload a ton of data is susceptible to having a virus inserted into that data, which means they get stuck in low level jobs, not high level ones.

There's been a trend of treating science like speculative fiction. A few dissenters have tried to explain to us that AI is a set of computer algorithms that make intelligent decisions, not necessarily by human-like thought process, but with human-like outcome; but people are fixated on the idea of AI being a warlike species with infinite reach, immediately taking hostile control of all network systems, rewriting firmware to turn anything capable of generating or measuring electromagnetic noise into a transceiver, and turning every piece of electronic machinery into a drone node specializing in the killing of biologicals.

Yeah I see nothing in the Constitution allowing the Federal government to actually criminalize the possession or use of substances like marijuana. The Supreme Court could decide the DEA is unconstitutional, and decapitate it. That could be ... chaotic.

Yes, that's called anecdote. It's cool that your $30k loan could go down in 3 years; it's also cool that the 5 colleges around me have students coming out with $192,000 of tuition over 4 years, plus books, plus lab fees, plus registration fees, and none of these kids have jobs. In the IT field, I had coworkers who were on their 12th year of student loans, with over $100k of balance.

It has been estimated (as of April, 2014) that 75% of college graduates will be paying their student loans in their 50s. In America, many student have over $200k of debt; some have over $400k; and we have a 10-year deferral where interest accrues, which is massively expensive. One of the big cons of loans is the concept of loss of balance: by the time you've half paid a mortgage or a student loan, you've paid way more than the original borrowed sum. The Federal government is putting new regulations in place to cancel student debt after 30 years (England already does this); this isn't a loss because, 30 years in, you'll have paid well more than you borrowed anyway. You haven't paid your contracted obligation, but you've paid the bank the amount borrowed, plus inflation, plus a profit on top.

Welcome to the real world, where we have $1 trillion in student debt in America.

You said we should advocate education in all its forms. There is no justification for such a statement; it leaves open every possible situation, every possible expense, every possible idea. We could advocate education by providing state-funded tuition and housing so that people don't have to work or pay for food and housing while being educated; we could combine this with re-education, in case the market is flooded in your career and so you need to go back to college. In that situation, you could just spend your entire life in college, being paid by the government, and just take 400 degree programs until you die. It would not be productive; it would be state welfare.

You may not be aware of this, but you see education as a thing we give individuals. You don't see college education as a hand-out to businesses, but as a service to the student. Because of this, any suggestion that we should take away state support for college education feels, to you, as if we're advocating taking things away from people. When things are taken away, they must go somewhere; presumably, they go to other people who are not the poor and the middle class. Your immediate reflex is to see this as taking things away from the poor and giving them to the rich.

Think about that for a minute. Then think about what I said about cheap labor. State-supported universal college education is a hand-out to the rich at the expense of the poor.

Even a startup that only survives 5 years has a business plan. Often that plan doesn't pan out; but the business won't survive such a massive shift in direction that it needs to fire an entire class of employees and hire a different class. In short: your business isn't going to have to fire half its programmers and hire nurses; your business isn't even going to have to fire half its 3D designers and hire Web designers. Your business operates in a certain market sector with a certain type of operation needing certain styles of operation; growth is lower risk, diversification is higher risk, and complete changes of market are nearly impossible.

I predict that I will need water, light clothes, food, and a compass to cross the desert. If I get into the desert and find an oasis, I may realize I need more water, and stock up. If I haven't predicted that the desert is so vast and so hot, I may simply die out there. I won't suddenly need to dump all my water, throw out my food, and build a boat; that won't work. (This works the other way, too: your ship may sink; you can't simply charter a camel if you realize your ship wasn't properly equipped for the ocean voyage, or it was but you went out and encountered a tropical storm.)

I assume you're not a business executive, project manager, PHR, or risk management professional. This is simply outside your professional field of understanding.

Yes, because they're available. Remember what I said about not having the state provide a mechanism for the individual to actually get those skills already? Re-assess that in a world where people don't already have the skills: you can't just hire someone because there are one million programmers and fifty million programmer jobs, and nobody can afford college on their own. What do you do? What would a business do? What strategy would give a business a competitive edge over its skilled-labor-starved competitors who cannot find the professionals they need?

Unless you can sit back, smoke your cigar, massage your bag of gold coins, and just wait for these poor schmucks to make themselves into useful tools for you to hire, you're going to have to toss some of your gold coins their way and send them off to the big trade school factory that makes them into trained professionals. With universal college education, you don't have to put your own coins in the pot to get these people trained; without universal college education, if you want a tool, you're going to have to pay assloads for one of the very few available, or make one yourself. Guess which way businesses want it?

That's bullshit. Among other things, people would sue the theaters, not Sony. They could have released it to HBO, etc. Not releaseing it all is a huge mistake. Not just in lost revenue, not just in lost money spent creating and advertising for the movie, but a huge hit for their reputation. The money alone is probably far worse that any unreasonable jury award for situations like that. That is, if you were right (which I think is laughable), that a terrorist attack would end having Sony being sued and they had to pay out money, the amount paid out would be far less than what they are throwing away today.

Every single patriotic American is saying "what a bunch of pussies." Everyone is talking about how Sony caved to the terrorists. How N. Korea made Sony their b!tch.

Performers, directors, vendors, etc. are all thinking "Why should I work with Sony again when I can go work for someone that will actually PUT OUT the movie that will bring my carreer to the next level. If I waste my time with Sony - evenn if they pay me (not certain), it could be career suicide.

The damage for an attack based on the movie would be MINISCULE compared to the damage they have done to themselves.

I am puzzled.

Step 1) Someone asks what they should get on their smart watch that they are considering buying.

Step 2) I list several features they should get.

Step 3) You point out that all the features I list 'already do that'.

But you seem to think that a list of features that alread exist is not appropriate response for someone looking for features on their smart watcH? Why?

I meant that violent people enjoy violent video games.

That is, you don't become violent because you play a lot of violent video games. Instead you play a lot of violent video games because you have an aggressive personality.

Smart watches should not simply be small smartphones on your wrist. They should take advantage of their place on your wrist. To my mind that means any reasonable smart watch should do the following:

Sports applications - specifically it should measure the movement of your arm at the very least, if not the full exercise monitoring/recording of the fitbit and the similar items.

Medical application - specifically at least measure your pulse, if not full blood sugar, etc.

In addition it should have a good voice recognition and bluetooth capacity to make up for the small screen size.

Let's say those businesses can make a profit hiring 100 guys at $10/hr, and will make less of a profit hiring 90 guys at $10/hr, and less of a profit hiring 60 guys at $10/hr. Let's say, as well, that demand sharply drops off after the production capacity possible with 100 guys: they make less of a profit hiring 110 guys at $5/hr than they make hiring 100 guys at $5/hr. If they can negotiate $5/hr, they will hire 100 guys; if they are forced to a minimum wage of $10/hr, they will hire 100 guys; and, if minimum wage is $15/hr, the demand slowly tapering off (S-curve) will cause them to only hire 70 guys at $15/hr.

People need some 2000kcal of food intake per day to live. Paying people enough for 1500kcal of food intake per day will lead to malnutrition over time, as they can't get enough food. If they aren't paid at all, they simply starve immediately.

Providing everyone for the means to live will not destroy the desire to work.

Our current implementation of welfare creates a situation in which you should *not* seek employment, because you may permanently lose welfare. Bouncing into and then back out of employment can disqualify you from receiving welfare you could have kept receiving. Further, the welfare may be more than or only slightly less than the wages; why would you work for a quarter an hour?

An unconditional guaranteed supply of the basic needs of life would avoid this welfare trap. Employment always increases income; however, employment also reduces quality-of-life, and so compensation must be equal to the exertion of employment plus the time. This exchange provides a null impact on a person's life; wealth is increased by using the wages to afford things which increase the quality-of-life during time spent outside work. Because of this, minimum wage is no longer an imperative: we have ensured a minimum standard of living, and placed negotiation power in the hands of the laborer.

I ask you: if you had the money to afford a bedroom big enough for a twin bed (roughly the size of a small bathroom), a sitting room slightly larger, a small kitchen, and a bathroom that includes a shower stall (with sink basin in the shower) and a toilet crammed in the corner, would you be happy? Would you spend every dime you have on rent, on meager and tasteless food, on shoddy clothes, and find yourself hardly able to afford a Frisbee to play with? Or would you seek to live in something that isn't slightly larger than a Singapore apartment, something more than half the size of a studio in New York, with enough money to not financially ruin yourself by eating at Burger King four times in one month?

I am rather certain this doesn't undermine and destroy civilization, as you could have essentially the same standard of living if you convinced someone to let you sleep in his tool shed and take a shower and some bread each day in exchange for sucking his dick before and after work. In my system, I've eliminated the dick sucking part.