This week in Time: "Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines Still Valid?"

Not in the novel. Spielberg changed the ending of the movie to allow for a sequel.

1990's - "But the real question is, is climate change really occurring?"

2000's - "But the real question is, is climate change caused by humans?"

2010's - "But the real question is, is climate change a good thing or a bad thing?"

2020's - "But the real question is, how will we deal with this famine?"

The only climate change deniers for a long time now are people who are either too lazy to change or have a stake in not changing. Looking at you, auto and oil industries.

Phone books also do this, since the list of phone numbers is not eligible for copyright.

If another party publishes a list of numbers containing the mistakes, that proves they didn't compile their list independently.

Actually, it's my understanding that patent terms in Hell are quite reasonable- life of the creator plus 7 years.

Well, to be fair to Scotland, my research indicates that the Tennessee Parthenon is made of concrete, while the Scottish one is made of stone.

Obviously, no true Scotsman fashions a temple out of concrete. ;)

This is the much better Bradbury collection. I have both, and the one you linked to omits some classics, in favor of his more recent work.

Also, I was just researching Ray the other day, spurred by thoughts of his story of being compelled to "LIVE FOREVER!" at a carnival... I found this picture, which makes me laugh a little. You can almost see the thought balloons:

Ray: "Why yes, it IS an honor to have your picture taken with me.
Laura: "I thought this award was for CHRISTIAN authors..."
George: "First man on Mars, hell of a guy!"

Also, a full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee.

I tried Chromium. There is a problem: I've become addicted to tree-style tabs, courtesy of the Firefox extension.

Chromium/Chrome had this feature natively for a long time, until the developers disabled it in a sneaky-Pete maneuver that pissed off a bunch of people.

The obvious response, to write a Chromium extension for Tree-Style Tabs, is not an option. The Chromium plugin API does not expose the functionality necessary to do so.

Webkit (Chromium/Chrome's layout engine) seems to be a little faster than Gecko (Firefox's equivalent), but I would prefer to use a browser that gives the user (ME!) control over it, even at the cost of some rendering speed.

The time I would gain in rendering efficiency would probably be lost trying to scan this, as opposed to this.

For shame. I assumed you were talking about Leia.

'"'That would be #2 "Ignore the premise that the CR supports and pick on the illustration'"

Those who use analogies should be prepared to defend them. I admire the craft displayed in the creation of the Chinese Room scenario. It seems on the surface to be a well-intended thought experiment for the purpose of shedding light on whether Artificial Intelligence is possible. Upon closer examination, the conclusion forced by it is foregone, and it serves primarily to insult the author's opposition.

A better thought experiment would be to replace the human with a black box that behaves exactly the same. For some reason, the presence of a human in the room incites an emotional response. Stripped of the author's semantic legerdemain, it is no longer so certain that the room does not "understand Chinese".

In any case, I target the premise directly. The premise, as I understand it, is that the "Chinese Room" does not understand Chinese, and that's it's absurd to suggest that a room could do so.

However, that fails to take into account that, in the Chinese Room scenario, the human occupant is part of the room, and by all accounts understands Chinese. Ignoring this is like removing the hardware from a workstation enclosure before benchmarking it.

Ultimately, the measure of "understanding Chinese" is being able to carry on a meaningful conversation in Chinese. The alternative is to define thinking as "something humans do". If that's your perspective, I'll grant nothing but a human will ever be able to perform actions that by definition can be performed only by a human. (I suspect that even if our intellect is surpassed by machinery, homo sapiens will remain unsurpassed in its tautological vanity.)

Would you say that a Chinaman's brain does not understand Chinese, since there's no Chinaman inside his skull to understand Chinese for him?

Wikipedia lists five categories of replies to the Chinese Room scenario. You only listed 4. The omission is left as an exercise for any interested parties.

Doug Hofstadter refutes it by pointing out that no human could ever perform the actions attributed to the human in the Chinese Room. I believe he also (it's been a while since I read "Le Ton beau de Marot") goes on to mention that the analogy is dishonest, by virtue of an inclusion of a human in the room.

If the instructions in the book suffice to understand and reply to the room's input, then there is no need for a human to occupy the room. The legerdemain is offloading the capability of reading the book and arranging the characters to this human occupant.

If, after a long, meaningful conversation via written Chinese, the door to the Chinese Room were broken down to reveal no one inside, it would be hard to refute the idea that the room "understands Chinese".

The point of the Turing test is that whether or not the machine is "really" intelligent does not matter- it is debatable whether humans are, in fact- but rather, that "the proof is in the pudding", or, as I prefer, "stupid is as stupid does."

There has never been a Jainist theocracy, so I'll consider your rebuttal mere conjecture. I'm sure that if a Jainist government ever committed genocide, the true Scotsman would make an appearance anyway.

To my knowledge, every religion that has had power has abused it.

For what it's worth, cursory googling reveals that Jainism is historically a religion of the upper castes, and that Jainism perpetuates a caste system.

I find it instructive to reframe discussions regarding belief in god as discussions regarding belief in unicorns.

"Not believing in Unicorn/unicorn(s) is not the the same as believing there is/are no Unicorn/unicorn(s)." is thus easily revealed as the semantic niggling that it is. Either there's unicorns or there ain't; if there are, you believe in them.

Also, Christianity in the U.S. only seems benevolent to the extent that it does because Christianity's become a toothless tiger after 200+ years of secular legislation forcing Christians to treat other human beings like human beings. Christianity, or any other religion, unchecked would be indistinguishable from radical Islam given free rein. The pretense of infallibility leaves no room for civil liberties.

In keeping with the article's theme, let's all laugh at historical Islamic hubris: 12th century Muslim sultan tries to demolish the Great Pyramids; fails.