From the article you linked to:

Even if it were not so controversial, Searle's argument does even come close to proving the creation of sentient machines is impossible. We do not yet know if it is possible or not. The GP makes a good argument that it might be possible but certainly doesn't prove it. As many others have said before, the Chinese room argument is not pertinent to the discussion of what is possible with AI.

This was a lie when it was said about Chelsea Manning and it is a lie when it is said about Edward Snowden. Neither one of them did a "massive document dump" although they both had the opportunity. Instead, they did the responsible thing and disclosed what they found to news organizations to let the news organizations decide what was safe to publish and what wasn't.

If the only way you can support your world-view is with outright lies, perhaps you need to reconsider your world-view. Of course, those who most need to reconsider almost never do.

You could get statistics by scrapping this page list of British police officers killed in the line of duty. I think it is roughly 71/248 or about 30%. I would not be surprised if the GP was correct and the percentage of British police officers killed by guns is greater than the percentage of US police officers. This could be due to the fact that British police don't have guns.

But the percentages are terribly misleading if you don't look at the absolute numbers or per capita numbers. In the US, 500 people per year are killed by the police while in Britain only 30 people total have been killed by the police (up until 2005). Since Britain has 1/5th the population of the US, the total (over all years) per capita number of people killed in Britain by police is less than 1/3rd of the per capita killed in the US every year.

Over 100 US police officers are killed in the line of duty each year while according to the page linked to above, the number of British police officers killed in the line of duty is 2 per year (this century). So on a per capita basis ten times as many US police officers get killed on duty than British police officers. If, as the GP states, roughly 30% of US police deaths on duty are due to firearms then it is 10 times more likely for a person in the US to gun down a police officer than someone in Britain.

Whatever the exact numbers are, it is clear that the amount of police related gun violence in Britain is drastically lower than police related gun violence in the US on a per capita basis.

This is completely false. Oracle changed the rules around for what it means to be "compatible" so that only projects that Oracle likes will be deemed compatible. Apache is being forced into a Java Fork:

Apache: I know my rights. I want my compatibility certification!

Oracle: How can you get a certification if you can't take the test?

You are so far off base, you are on the wrong planet. The Koch bros are about screw the planet, screw everyone else, even screw themselves for a little short-sighted short-term monetary profit.

There are certain harsh economic realities that unfettered markets do not deal with correctly. Generating energy from coal has great negative externalities. IOW, the Koch bros are not paying for the cost of dealing with all the pollution their plants generate.

Another thing unfettered markets don't deal with correctly is limited resources. Those resources might be fossil fuels in the ground or the capacity of the atmosphere to hold carbon emissions without disastrous effects on the human race. If the wisest policy involves not using up these resources as fast as possible then unfettered markets don't do the right thing.

Even if we accept your unstated assumption that the subsidies of the fossil fuel industries do not dwarf those of renewables, it still makes sense to subsidize renewables. Partly due to the current subsidies, the cost of renewables is dropping. It is in the best interest of the human race to switch over to renewables before we run out of non-renewables and before the waste products of non-renewables make the planet uninhabitable.

Blind faith in the infallibility of markets is part and parcel of the greed is good mentality that continues to wreak havoc on our economy and on our social stability. These are the harsh economic realities the Koch bros are ignoring.

By your logic, a premium that went up by 1% from $100 to $101 would be a 101% increase.

Does it run Linux?

Well then maybe they should stop putting people like Putin in power. The current political system in Russia is the direct result of the disastrous neo-liberal economic policies imposed by the West after the collapse of the USSR.

Let's stop fucking up other parts of the world and then fucking them up further by using military intervention to clean up our previous fuck ups. How quickly we forget where this all goes.

Blame the messenger much? Her decision to stop working on Groklaw was triggered by an announcement by the owner of Lavabit:

The reason she stopped was the invasive and Unconstitutional spying by the NSA.

Next question.

FYI: The GNOME Foundation Is Running Out of Money

Exactly! The current patent system gives all the power to large corporations who own lots of expensive lawyers. Independent developers are screwed, blued, and tattooed.

Software patents are most dangerous to creative, independent developers. You could spend all of your time just researching patents that might cover what you are working on. And as Linus said, all you get for this effort is the threat of treble damages for willful infringement.

The current patent system is completely incapable of separating the obvious from the non-obvious in the realm of software. That is because the patent system is filled with non-practitioners. Nowadays even someone who is an expert in one field of software may not know enough about other areas to separate the obvious from the non. [This is not an endorsement for patents on non-obvious software but that is a separate issue].

If you are a creative and productive software designer then you are probably creating code that infringes software patents on a weekly or monthly basis. Not because you are stealing ideas but because you are developing them independently. Since the presumption of validity is given to the patent holder, even one totally bogus software patent can put you out of business.

Exactly! But instead of banning, it should just be taxed. They are basically imposing a tax on society that makes them filthy rich while providing no benefit to society. Yet these are the same people who scream bloody murder whenever someone proposes a bona fide tax on stock transactions. If they insist on acting like spoiled young brats then we need to treat them as such.

At its heart, this corruption is similar to the *IAA corruption. In both cases technological advances that should have made the middle-men obsolete are flipped around to provide a disservice to society while enriching the unscrupulous.

No, but there will be plenty of Ponzis.

According to the reference, the reason for the speed improvement had to do with the vastly different CPU architecture and specifically with getting more cache misses due to an increase in the size of the code base because of the unrolled loops.

It seems rather silly to imply that Duff's device is no longer elegant merely because it does not apply to current CPU architectures.