Essentially it is NP complete to optimize the sequence of operations, and it is exponential in a really bad way. Most people couldn't write code that optimizes a sequence of more than four instructions without taking over a month to compile the program. Using state of the art techniques it is possible to optimize blocks of up to 9 or 10 instructions, which is still much below the actual numbers needed.

From reality. The median square footage of urban houses sold in the US is 2203. This means 50% of all houses sold are larger than that.

Yeah we bitch about it, and I hate it too, but 40 hours really isn't difficult.

Which is why I said: "A similar move needs to happen now, but with increase in vacation time to about a total of two months a year."

Today if we slack off, we end up no better than some random crummy place

We'll end up about average. I claim average is about OECD level, you think is about one of the poorest countries in the world, like Phillipines.

You are making the same argument that Luddites were making in England 200 hundred years ago. What happened in between is that the work week went down from 76 hours a week to 40 hrs a week. A similar move needs to happen now, but with increase in vacation time to about a total of two months a year.

Problem is that this would mean a modest drop in wages so you wouldn't be able to afford your McMansion and second SUV in the garage but we as a society just don't seem ready to give that up.

There's no way that the parent post is a Troll. He might be wrong, but he's stating a valid opinion.

Then the reply which has "wrong" to everything and is quite comparable to the OP is modded insightful.

Finally the counterpoint from dorpus which of the three posts is the only one with actual references sits at 1.

This is why the /. moderation system sucks so much.

the general public don't follow the detail of arguments.

So far we agree.

If people are debating they just think it's something for which there isn't a correct answer, only opinions.

The message needs to be given that the there is no doubt that AGW is happening.

Consider the reverse scenario, if you walk away from the fight too early it gives the laymen the impression that you do not have strong arguments. They will never follow the arguments in detail, they neither have the time nor the expertise, but as you said, they make deductions from the overall tone of the discussion.

Certainly in the 1970s when I was a kid, we knew smoking caused cancer.

Were you a bicoastal middle class relatively educated kid or were you a NASCAR watching fan from middle America? You would be surprised at the things each of these groups takes for granted that are completely the reverse in the other.

Let me explain. I'm not criticizing that the early figures AIDS were pessimistic. Where the scientific fraud lies is that when the revised data from the field started streaming in, projections were barely adjusted.

The CDC kept predicting a million HIV Americans every year, in spite of the failed prediction of previous year, and more importantly, the clear models showing that such figure was not likely to be reached. Eventually it might** have been reached, not because of the consequence of an increase in the infection rate as the CDC was claiming, but because of a decrease in the mortality rates at the other end.

** I say might, since the number of diagnosed HIV positive in America is, today, about 680K.

The rest are just predicted future innovations that turned out to be harder to achieve and less useful than predicted.

Much of the GW debate is still in the prediction phase, so there is still a lot of room for big mispredictions. Let me be clear, GW is here and it is real, I'm talking debate about the shape of the growth curve only.

Moreover in the cases of the exaggerated benefits of Artificial Intelligence scientists were making statements as if this things would come to pass automatically, not possible, potential maybe-baby benefits in the future.

I'm not saying GW is a hoax, I'm just saying scientific fraud has happened, and if you believe that it takes "magic mushrooms" to see one (like the OP by gtall claimed) you are far, far too naive.

In my opinion we are still about ten years away from educating the general public, and the only way to educate the average joe is to drive the point home over and over with facts and even further evidence just like we did with tobacco carcinogens. The science was clearly in the 60s, the average populace came around only in the 80s.

Kiddo you are much to young. Neural networks first saw the light of day as perceptrons by Rosenblatt in 1958 when it was argued they were actual models of the brain and about to lead to sentient machines. This view pretty much held until the Minsky and Papert tempered their claims in 1969. The term neural networks became the prefered name only in 1975 after Werbos introduced backpropagation.

do you have something solid outside of the "flying cars" articles?

This is no secret kiddo. There in fact even a wikipedia article on it.

I read about it in the original articles. The claims were made by the AI founders, not "flying car" popular writers. Here's an example.

First off, I think that you've kinda proven my point

You didn't even read what I said. Yes, it was doctors and physicists and paleontologists who decades after the respective theories were proposed (and initially opposed) eventually verified them.

It's always people from within the discipline that overturn consensus, not outsiders

Incorrect, the meteorite theory was proposed by Walter Alvarez who is a geologist and Luis Alvarez, a physicist. They got a lot of push back from paleontologists for the first ten years or so before the paleontologists started turning around. You will still find plenty of skeptics among the old timers by the way.

When did it begin to be widely accepted by climate scientists? The late 1950s!

In what parallel universe did that happen? GW was up in the air until sometime in the 90s. Before we didn't even have enough data to make a proper determination.