For those of us who may be in a slightly good mood... You prompted me to go find this:

http://www.hobbyfarms.com/hobb...

Yes, it is an "interactive" See And Say. It didn't even make me lower my security or prompt me for anything. Nice...

This person is wise in the way of the US Just Us System. Your legal-fu is worthy - I can tell by how you carry yourself.

Okay, I maybe smoked a little weed tonight. Maybe... It is mostly legal here but I can't be arsed to get the prescription. I can afford the fine. Call it my weed tax. You can not, realistically, go to jail for it here either. You can have pounds of the stuff and you get a $1000 fine. $350 for most amounts. You really gotta piss 'em off to get in trouble with it - I mean you need a gun, a bunch of cash, and to be forcing newborn babies to smoke it at the hospital itself. Even then it is probably a suspended sentence and payment arrangements for the fine if you have no money.

Which is why you are probably not a lawyer. Never, ever, assume good faith or commonsense. Never. I have dealt with the court system in so many different cases that, frankly, I am 100% certain that everyone involved (or those exposed long enough) are sociopaths. I feel bad for the liars that end up in the system - the ones that actually had altruism in mind. No, they become tainted.

Ask a lawyer (liar) what is the first word that comes to mind when you say, "Orange." Then ask them, "Explain your thought process as to how you reached that point?" For bonus points ask them if they could argue "orange" in court as a concept and how they would do so. However, there is that abyss and all that jazz so be careful about doing so.

No, you will get lost. Go RIGHT out of my driveway. The other way takes you to Eustis. Yes, I have to label my mittens - and keep them on a string.

There was a manual phone directory service in a small town that held on to it for cultural reasons. They ceased functioning about ten years ago, if I recall correctly. They were in the state I now call home, I did not live here then, and I think they were Byron Pond or something along those lines? Basically go left out of my driveway, head down 16, get on 17, and go down to Coburn Gore (spelling?). Take that left up (it takes you way back to Weld and to Farmington if you want to head that far and do not mind a rough road. Anyhow, before taking the right to go to Weld stay to the small trek to the left. There is a small town with just a few houses and a bunch of camps. They had the old fashioned phones where you literally spoke to an operator to get connected. They were also on a party line so anyone could listen in on your calls. There was a Bed and Breakfast there (I do not recall the name) and I stayed there on a work-cation but my stay was limited to just a few days that I could spare to be away from Rumford.

You know... I probably should be less lazy and use my mouse. I could have just searched for the town. I am sure Google knows. Google knows everything. *tab* *enter*

My ISP has all sorts of content. They have pages to bill me, pages to sell me stuff, pages to log in and play with my router (I just put my own routers in - screw that), and all sorts of stuff. You can not really say that ISPs do not generate content. They facilitate content but, I imagine, they all generate some content even if it is just a billing interface. You could even say that they craft packets... But, I am already being pedantic enough.

I have nothing to add really but Helvetica is a good movie. As for copyright, I could argue, if they are still making money from it then how do you suppose we have an obligation to strip them of that asset? However, I prefer to be illogical and really want copyright reform because, frankly, I think works in the public good would be beneficial though I do not think this applies to Mickey Mouse.

I take it you have not created any wealth... No, you can do quite a bit of exchanging without the bank being involved. Rather than get into details, please accept that I have a safe in my home with plenty of money in it. I just recently ordered a BMW and paid that with cash. Now, obviously, there is a bank (and some credit unions and some investment houses) if I want a large sum of money. I have filled out the form (I forget the name, they make me sign one if I take out x-amount of dollars and I have been told it is best to take out big amounts and be honest, enough, about the reasons) and put down "cash on hand." (Actually I just put COH on it.) I call a week before taking out very large amounts or I go on Thursday evenings to get smaller amounts. This is not a great onus. I have put down property and stuff like that but usually I just get a bank note for things that large but the paperwork is the same. Hell, I even travel with cash. Just declare the shit and you are all set.

3) Go to the drug store and buy a deck of cards...

Next time you go to fix Grandma's email, bring along a deck of cards and ask her to show you some solitaire games. In fact bring four decks -- some of the old games required more than one.

When faced with a tricky question, one think you have to ask yourself is 'Does this question actually make any sense?' For example you could ask "Can anything get colder than absolute zero?" and the simplistic answer is "no"; but it might be better to say the question itself makes no sense, like asking "What is north of the North Pole"?

I think when we're talking about "superintelligence" it's a linguistic construct that sounds to us like it makes sense, but I don't think we have any precise idea of what we're talking about. What *exactly* do we mean when we say "superintelligent computer" -- if computers today are not already there? After all, they already work on bigger problems than we can. But as Geist notes there are diminishing returns on many problems which are inherently intractable; so there is no physical possibility of "God-like intelligence" as a result of simply making computers merely bigger and faster. In any case it's hard to conjure an existential threat out of computers that can, say, determine that two very large regular expressions match exactly the same input.

Someone who has an IQ of 150 is not 1.5x times as smart as an average person with an IQ of 100. General intelligence doesn't work that way. In fact I think IQ is a pretty unreliable way to rank people by "smartness" when you're well away from the mean -- say over 160 (i.e. four standard deviations) or so. Yes you can rank people in that range by *score*, but that ranking is meaningless. And without a meaningful way to rank two set members by some property, it makes no sense to talk about "increasing" that property.

We can imagine building an AI which is intelligent in the same way people are. Let's say it has an IQ of 100. We fiddle with it and the IQ goes up to 160. That's a clear success, so we fiddle with it some more and the IQ score goes up to 200. That's a more dubious result. Beyond that we make changes, but since we're talking about a machine built to handle questions that are beyond our grasp, we don't know whether we're making actually the machine smarter or just messing it up. This is still true if we leave the changes up to the computer itself.

So the whole issue is just "begging the question"; it's badly framed because we don't know what "God-like" or "super-" intelligence *is*. Here's I think a better framing: will we become dependent upon systems whose complexity has grown to the point where we can neither understand nor control them in any meaningful way? I think this describes the concerns about "superintelligent" computers without recourse to words we don't know the meaning of. And I think it's a real concern. In a sense we've been here before as a species. Empires need information processing to function, so before computers humanity developed bureaucracies, which are a kind of human operated information processing machine. And eventually the administration of a large empire have always lost coherence, leading to the empire falling apart. The only difference is that a complex AI system could continue to run well after human society collapsed.

Not off topic! It used to be cows and still has cows or it did the last time I was there. I admit that was ages ago.

Keep an octane booster in your trunk - a few bottles is good. It is great for when you get crappy gas or when premium is unavailable. Beemers can be a bit finicky about regular.

Higher octane does not necessarily mean higher output. It just means that the fuel requires more energy for combustion.

This is the second time you have stated this falsehood in as many days. Why lie? Wikipedia is available with a handy history section. The phrase was in use long before the 60s. Dishonesty does nothing but discount everything you say as utter trash.

Oh, I could not care less that you ride a bicycle. I thought the smiley face made that eminently clear. Perhaps I should have used the "/s" indicator instead.