In most countries, you are a citizen of that country, and that's that.

That the UK/ Great Britain/ England/ whatever has a crazy patchwork of overlapping national identities, allegiances, and historical intricacies is your fucking problem, not the world's.

Don't expect us to know about your petty nationalistic bullshit, keep track of it, or fucking care.

1. a scarier version of stuxnet
2. a Facebook smarphone
3. secret backdoors on military chips
4. workplace havoc because of OS fake holidays

I was going to accuse Slashdot of fearmongering, until I doublechecked and found out that, yes, Facebook really is trying to build a smartphone.

The Apocalypse is near.

> Unless you believe that the human brain has magical
> properties, it must be possible to simulate its operation

My point was that nobody has any idea how to even get started. Nobody even knows what research to do to find out how to get started.

To clarify: it is not my position that creating artificial intelligence is *ultimately* impossible as such. I'm only saying that nobody has any idea how to do it or what would be involved, so asking an engineer to design it is ridiculous, not to mention grossly unfair to the engineer.

It has also not been shown that the mind is necessarily entirely contained within the brain, but that's really a separate issue. For the purposes of this discussion I am willing to proceed on the premise that the mind may be purely a function of the physical brain and various inputs. (The inputs are known to be rather complicated; for example the endocrine system is not entirely straightforward to simulate; nonetheless, this does not make simulation theoretically impossible, just very difficult.) I am willing to grant this, because it doesn't have any significant impact on my point. I will explain further...

If the mind is a function of purely physical phenomena, primarily the brain, that does NOT imply that we know how to simulate it, because, straightforwardly, we have absolutely no idea how those physical phenomena work, particularly the brain. If we did have such information, we could easily cure Alzheimer's and any number of other conditions and probably could start to work on the mortality problem itself (by transferring the consciousness from the original brain to some other physical housing; after all, if you really understand how a design works, you can build your own). But we don't even know how many more decades -- or perhaps even centuries, or even millennia -- of research and study we will need in order to get to that point. We don't know *if* we'll ever figure that stuff out, let alone when. So far, every time some brilliant biologist thinks he has an idea how the brain might work, it turns out to be wrong, or at least entirely inadequate to explain observed phenomena. If you don't count ruling out wrong ideas as progress, we've made basically no progress at all. Okay, sure, we now understand some of the minutia, such as how neurotransmitters convey signals from one neuron to another, but we have absolutely no idea how any of that relates to the whole function of the brain as an organ.

So the problem, "design an artificial intelligence that's smart in the same way as a human mind", is currently an impossible problem for engineers, even if it's not categorically theoretically possible in the absolute sense.

Engineers design based on their understanding of how things work. That's the basic starting point they work from. Otherwise, nothing gets designed -- or, at least, nothing that works as intended. Without this understanding, you're asking the engineers, metaphorically, to make bricks not only without straw but also without mud or clay. It's completely impossible, in every way that matters.

6 ring carbon is too constrained to link within each other, so pick some other ring structures:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterocyclic_compound

or better yet, a different ring structure for each color (yellow would be cyclo-octasulfur, pyridine for green, etc.)

then build them interlocking

to actually formulate this would win the team a nobel prize, so complex would it be

oh... a nobel, not an olympics gold

As I understand it, countries that have hosted the Olympic Games have to treat the rings and other IOC symbols as hardcoded famous trademarks, with sui generis restrictions that parallel the dilution restrictions on famous trademarks.

After having read your comment, I realized that I can't know for sure what my general case is. It involves speculating at the future of an economy, which can never be 100.0 percent reliable because we never know for sure that there isn't going to be some sort of disaster that ends the developed world as we know it. But what I do know is that locked-down devices rule out certain computer-mediated hobbies. They make it hard for people to transition from the role of a "consumer" to the role of a participant in culture, someone who both "consumes" and creates. And if tablets become so prevalent that it's hard for an individual who wants a laptop to get one, this mobility will become even more difficult.

Go Daddy's entry-level paid plan, about $4.50 per month.

Which hosting company would you recommend for a small site run as a hobby, especially in this IP shortage?

He's being a good slashdot commenter who's offering stuff that matters to the small contingent of us who have advanced maths degrees?

That's begging the question... What evidence do you have that these patents are "useless"? Consider, if they successfully "harass new entries to the market" then they're clearly useful, even if you don't like it.

On the contrary. If there are new entries to the market, that indicates that the patented invention isn't so difficult to develop, therefore the patent was incorrectly approved in the first place. The only effect of patenting an idea that anybody can easily come up with is to prevent innovation.

No, he described the current *means* of implementing patents, not the *intent* of their existence.