i agree that the NSA's activities are unconstitutional, but what's the point in this context?

and, going on your ridiculous tangent, would you be perfectly fine with what the NSA were doing if the constitution were amended to allow it?

how is that "not as bad"? it's just differently bad. they want to intimidate (though not quite as overtly as the USSR did), while the US wants to secretly disappear people. it's not a diversion. it's reality, and neither 'side' is that great, even though i'd much, much rather be in the US.

anyway, China has always clamped down on unlicensed cartography, and it is theoretically possible to use data mining to squeeze some location information out of the iPhone data. this really seems like a non-story to me, or anyone else who's been paying attention.

the reason D-wave not performing as they (used to) claim is that they were hucksters and charlatans all along.

now they've admitted that they're doing adiabatic annealing (a huge step down from what they were coyly hinting at) and, guess what?, it's not really that great at that either. it's not the "talking to classical reality" part of their machine that sucks; it's just not doing very much inside either.

don't bother trying to discuss this here, you won't get anywhere. read Nielsen and Chuang's "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information" if you can handle it. suffice it to say, non-locality is an accepted part of quantum theory. i know it seems really exotic and impressive to lay-people, but it's just a part of quantum theory. part of what you need to keep in mind is that, roughly speaking, the entanglement is determined at read-time. you can't simultaneously write to a nearby and far-away qubit at the same time. they need to be together at some point, close enough to be entangled by the write.

would you be impressed by a CPU that was a mile across? well, maybe. but would it be a fundamentally different thing than a CPU than was an inch across? not really, though there would be some engineering impracticalities. it's the same with QC; non-locality is just a feature of the system. it's there, we've shown it's there. it doesn't, in principle, matter if the two qubits are an inch apart, or 17 miles apart.

non-locality is interesting, but for QC you just need to accept that it's there.

the d-wave quantum "computer" isn't nearly identical to modern CPUs. it is, in fact, far inferior.

diodes are quantum you fucking moron.

the concept of auteur was developed in the context of film, but the idea extends obviously to games if you have half a brain and aren't totally ignorant.

see, with books and plays, it's pretty obvious that the author or playwright is the person who deserves the credit. with music, it was the composer. and so on. films were different. by analogy with plays, maybe the screenwriter should deserve the credit; but the script doesn't really determine the movie, does it? the big name actor matters more than the screenwriter, for better or worse. so who deserves the credit? after a lot of to and fro, the French determined that the director is the person who matters. this is, pretentiously, called 'auteur theory'.

it's exactly analogous with games. if anything, the persons described in the summary are even more auteurs than directors are, since the division of labor is even less distinct. they are the movers and shakers; the ones with vision (or, perhaps in the case of Romero, the charlatans who have masqueraded as such).

in short, you're an overly literal fuckwit with no real insight.

uh, what's wrong with it?

Yeah, as opposed to all those functional anarchies in the world.

Go work on seasteading or the NH Free State Project; make it work and give us positive examples if you don't like Somalia.

snarky, but yes, basically. slavery has gotten a lot nicer over the years, and it isn't just insidious mind control (there's a bit of that too). life has actually gotten better.

anyway, the actual point you have missed was that the idea of returning to some pristine state of freedom is platonist nonsense. there never was such a thing.

Yes.

no, you have it all wrong. traditional education is just state power keeping progress down.

true capitalist geniuses like Linus would have done just as well, and even provably better because of free markets, if we abolished education completely. imagine how much better Linux would be today, if Linus were not shackled by the vestiges of religion.

that is so last year. old meme is old.

fuck, i meant to say, "wow. such old. much trolling."

it's worth being skeptical whenever someone's argument involves their not being able to comprehend the magnificence of their own creation (it's a form of argument from ignorance). i'm pretty sure that a serious assembly hacker could have completely traced out the reproduction mechanism within a few hours.

you see this with children too: "oh, my kid is so smart, he (did whatever) the other day and i'd never have been able to figure that out at his age."

and there are quite a few human pairs for which one would not be able to convince the other that they were speaking intelligibly, either.

it is irrelevant. it is only necessary for one computer (however that's defined) to pass this test. i don't see how it's really any better than Turing though. it's a nice idea, it seems even more vague than the Turing test.