They're effective, efficient (per dollar), and badly needed. I spent some time looking for something I could be comfortable donating to monthly, and this is the one I concentrated all my charitable donations to (aside from my own volunteering in an unrelated area). http://www.msf.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Please mod parent up. The examination he cites has the potential to save countless developers from getting burned by this toxic crap "database".

Mod parent up. A cursory look at that reference is proof beyond a doubt that Mongo is the sheerest garbage (to borrow the infamous quote from the history of QCD).

Good thing, too. Your comment prompts me to remind readers the fact that China's repressive and amoral government is almost completely dominated by scientists and engineers: http://singularityhub.com/2011...

As W.F. Buckley quipped, "I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University."

Mod parent down for misrepresenting what GP wrote by dishonestly converting "just as reasonable" to "equal estimated probability". There is no reasonable argument for assigning probability either way because extrapolating backwards beyond a singularity at creation is not possible. Any assertion to the contrary is falling for the Bayesian bullshit epistemology that Popper and then other critical rationalists discredited time and again throughout the 2nd half of the 20th century. Selecting one option is no more or less reasonable than choosing another and, in the cases of those showing a preference, just reveals their biases.

While GP would have preferably written that it's just as (un)reasonable to say any one thing created the universe vs. any other thing whatsoever, rather than just mention the two ideas that he did, it's quite clear he did not intend to imply it's a dichotomy.

Both parent and GP failed to note that a creation event isn't necessary, because there is no contradiction to or evidence against a model without an initial singularity that posits an eternal pre-inflatinonary universe: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... (note that in this case, the Big Bang is not a discontinuity as in, say multiverse models where a quantum fluctuation may spawn another universe).

Yes, and unions don't abuse their power *rolleyes*. I live in what one of your few remaining old-school conservatives, Patrick Buchanan, with only slight hyperbole described as Soviet Canuckistan, and I beg to differ. The unions in Ontario and BC have caused tremendous economic damage. Their achievements are perfectly exemplified by virtually every group of road workers you pass by: one guy working, three-four people watching. I never saw such inefficiency in the several years I lived in the US (outside of government bureaucracy). Canada ranks very low in terms of productivity per capita, and it's clear why.

I'm with you if (1) you increase the threshold age to around 24, because, while cannabis' safety record is pretty good in adults, it does have significant negative developmental effects — and the prefrontal cortex of humans doesn't complete development until around the early 20s (for the same reason, I believe the voting age ought to be raised); and, (2) you likewise legalize psychedelic drugs (psylocybin/mushrooms, mescaline, DMT, LSD) as, unlike most other psychoactive drugs, they're non-addictive and have no dangerous side-effects in healthy individuals.

Whoops, I mixed up the order of the links. [1] is just Bandyopadhyay's commentary that links his experimental results to those theories of consciousness.

And this is the trick: continuity is a core aspect of the experience of consciousness; otherwise, this scenario is identical to killing the original and "activating" the cloned mind.

One thing that could throw a kink into the scenario, however, is the possibility (albeit, IMHO, less than even) that some core aspects of consciousness are encoded as quantum information, in which case it cannot be cloned (by the no-cloning theorem). Some hints that this may be the case are to be found in recent experimental research: the most important result is http://www.researchgate.net/pu... but also see http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... and http://iopscience.iop.org/1742... as well as, for an overview of this area, http://journals.sfu.ca/jnonloc...

No, you can't.

The $10,000 threshold was set in 1970, when it really was a large amount (over $60,000 in today's dollars). Now, not so much, and over the years, the number of people becoming ensnared due to transactions that are not in support of any crime has increased. What do you say to that, you statist scum? Do you seriously suppose that the threshold was not linked to inflation but left to have its real value fall continuously and indefinitely because of oversight? Because if so, you're either a bald-faced liar, or, well, I have a bridge to sell you.

Wrong, the horizon is not eternally expanding! As you asymptotically approach de Sitter space, the horizon becomes purely a function of the cosmological constant (because it's a function of the curvature, which is determined by the cosmological constant in de Sitter space). You can see the equation, and some even tighter bounds in http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/00...

Proton decay is a really minor point, because it doesn't affect any of the more fundamental barriers (tunneling, quantum fluctuations, the Bekenstein bound). If all baryons decayed, and that was the only problem, life could potentially still exist in some other form, until larger timescales when the other problems take over.

By the way, even if protons don't decay in the usual manner, there are alternate ways in which protons might eventually be destroyed, involving virtual black holes and other processes. A number of these are noted in section "IV.F. Higher order proton decay" in http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/...

Wow, a post that actually deserves to be moderated Funny.

I was so disturbed by having ended up rummaging through yet another medium.com slashvertisement thread that I wondered about the provenance of these lyrics and searched for them, without noticing the title of your post until just now, after I've been listening to the album online for the past ten minutes.