Awesome, we give the US the property rights to the atmoshpere above the US. We'll fine the US for any effects that it spreads around it's any area it doesn't control. I think three trillion dollars per ppm CO2 would be nice thank you.

I'm absolutely convinced that AWG is true, but I am severly skeptical about the measures proposed in your message to have the desired effect. Unfortunately, the discussion about AWG completely dwarfs the discussion about what we can do to mitigate the effects. That is really what pisses me off. The AWG deniers are absolutely preventing a sane solution to even be discussed. It's infuriating.

Okay, so you are denying a fact because you don't like the way some people want to mitigate the effects of that fact. That's pretty mature, in line with putting fingers in your ears and screaming lalalalalalalala.

There's no 100% proof, sorry. There's 90% proof, there's 99% proof, there's 99.9% proof, there's 99.99% proof, etc. However, there's are no certainties, no 100% proof. Sorry. Try living in this world.

On another note, how much proof of of NOT crashing in the next plane do you accept as tolerable for taking said plane? You seem to argue for 0%: we need to be absolutely sure that we are crashing this plane before we refuse to take it.If we survive 1 in a 100 flights, we shouldn't complain. We need to be absolutely sure that we crash this plane before we try to do something about it.

Awesome. As long as I can kill everyone and their progeny if despite our efforts, temperatures rise by 3 degrees, I'm game.

You are looking at a large construct where each and every part has been scrutinized. The parts are put in a consistent whole to create an overall indication of the state of the climate, and you are claiming it isn't fair that they didn't put in an obvious weak spot that could invalidate the whole? Are you asking the same of engineers when they construct a bridge? "Please, please, put a single point of failure in so I can destroy the bridge without too much effort? How else am I going to prove that the bridge will crumble under the load! It ain't fair!"

So yes, I'm sorry. The state of this part of science is such that all obvious issues have been addressed. Although far from perfect, the picture emerging is consistent with a climate that is quickly heating due to forcing by CO2. This CO2 is man-made by burning CO2 previously captured. To invalidate this whole, you will have to find non-obvious sources of error. This will require a lot of work, and, might not even be possible because you know, the overall picture might actually be roughly correct.

And honestly, what's wrong with this? Complex modules such as database engines or GUI frameworks should be black boxes, with no need to look inside. What we're failing to do as a profession is to be able to clearly state what these black boxes are providing. So yes, I want to know that if I query this database on a field that hasn't got an index that it is O(n), instead of O(log(n)) if it has one. I truly don't care how they achieve that, and if they don't achieve what they claim, I would want to be able to sue and get another library.

What you're advocating is the status-quo. We don't really engineer our solutions so we need to have knowledge of each part of the solution. If you contrast this with real engineering: there every layer provides some form of guarantees. If you build a bridge, you know the forces steel products can withstand, and you pick your supplier of steel based on these guarantees. We don't do anything of the sort. We just pick at random and hope for the best. No engineering.

As the Boston bombing shows, the NSA is really not reading facebook. They're storing all this shit. but it's not used for any actual intelligence work. I can only speculate what it is used for, but chances are that's it's about money. So feel free to post on facebook, that's the last place they'll look.

e^{\pi i} + 1 = 0 is written simpler as e^{\pi i} = -1. So yes, Euler's formula is doing something redundant. And how come '0' is fundamental? It is just 1-1.

e^{\tau i} = 1.

This is impressive. Unfortunately, you're off by a factor 2.

The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
-- Dijkstra (1984) The threats to computing science

As a corollary -- we did not need to actually understand much about how biological organisms swim to be able to build a submarine.

The perceptron as used in the sixties had particular limits, namely that they could not do anything more when layered than when they were not. This was because the perceptrons in use were linear. Minsky pointed out this simple fact as a response to a number of outrageous claims from the NN community about the capabilities of those linear perceptrons. NN was done in by selling snake-oil. They did it again in the 90s, and they're again having a go at it now.

I think you've got a fair point. In this view, I would say that many accounting reports of the last few decades should be considered creative in nature and therefore copyrightable. It seems the banks agree.

Who cares? You're just shooting the messenger. The media is simply trying to cover up the fact that they seized to be ... the media. Now we depend on the likes of Assange to question the actions of the powerful. And you complain about Assange?

Actually, the million monkeys typing a million years is a point against things getting funky with time. Say Hamlet is 100,000 characters long, say the typewriters only consist of 52 characters (lower and uppercase, let's forget about punctuation). This means that a monkey typing a random 100,000 characters has a probability of 1 over 52 to the power of 100,000 to produce Hamlet. The monkey can bang away for a million years (10^6), he can invite a billion friends (10^9*10^6=10^15), they can bang away for a few trillion years (10^12*10^6), he can turn all atoms in the universe (10^85) into monkeys (with built in typewriters). They all can bang away for a trillion universe lifetimes (roughly a googol), and still the probability that they will produce anything like Hamlet is zilch. They wouldn't even produce the first page. Things absolutely don't get funky in that way.

In short, you either need an infinite amount of monkeys, or an infinite amount of time to produce Hamlet.