A clearly illiterate death threat might be more likely to be sincere and acted upon, but I wouldn't expect the perpetrator to be particularly competent. I might try to pay a bit more attention for a while, but ultimately I'd expect to be able to outwit the would-be assailant. That goes double if you're a public figure, like a celebrity or a major elected official.

On the whole, most people who are going to make an even vaguely competent attempt to kill you aren't going to warn you about it first. I don't mean to suggest that the secret service or whoever shouldn't take such threats seriously. That's part of their job. I'm just saying, a badly-written, horribly-misspelled death threat is unlikely to have been written by someone who can successfully evade their efforts and manage to actually complete an assassination. They're overwhelmingly more likely to fail and get caught.

The assassins you really have to worry about are the ones who don't make any threats.

Ve haf a plan. In order to eliminate ze President, ve are goink to build a giant laser... in space. Zen ve vill rule ze entire vorld! Mwahahahahahahaha. And ven ve rule ze vorld, ve vill make lawsuits illegal, and zen ve vill round up all ze lawyers and launch zem into ze sun. Also, ve vill make molasses cookies ze official world food, vich vill be served as ze main course at all formal state dinners. And ve vill make it a misdemeanor to carry a cellphone into a public building vithout turning it off first, and everyone who does it vill owe ze government a fine equal to one month's phone bill per offense. And ve vill use ze fine money for ze cookies. Ve vill also outlaw ze posting lolcats, or any other meme that started on ze 4chan, to anyplace except 4chan -- but instead of a fine ze penalty for zat vill be only one entire day vithout access to ze internet, for each offense.

Ve are lookink for investors. Ve vill need to raise substantial capital to pay for buildink ze giant laser, in space. If you invest now, ve promise to at least read any proposals you write us for laws zat you sink ve should pass once we rule ze entire vorld. Zis is chance you do not vant to miss, yes?

> These days we no longer believe that Silverlight is a
> suitable platform for write-once-run-anywhere technology

It took you HOW long to figure this out? It wasn't extremely obvious to you, for example, when you saw the original Silverlight announcement from Microsoft?

Better late than never I guess. At this rate it'll be 2105 before they finally realize there's absolutely no point in emulating .NET either.

> 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.

Intellectual property law is a very specialized subfield. Most lawyers don't know much about it. It is entirely believable to me that a lawyer (who is NOT an intellectual property lawyer) might think a non-profit organization could legitimately claim fair use for this sort of thing. She'd be wrong, but you know, sometimes people are wrong.

With that said, she's got serious credibility problems, for other reasons.

Throwing around threats of legal action like she did, in public, containing words like "defamation" and "libel", is extremely irrational and would do material harm to her case, if she had one. No competent lawyer would ever behave in this fashion, especially if they believed for one minute that they had anything resembling a valid case. Real lawyers handle 100% of their communication about legal matters using properly formal legal verbiage, no exceptions. They do not write email messages and blog posts containing informal trash talk like "You make me vomit. I'm going to sue you for libel and defamation." They send you certified mail containing extremely formal legal trash talk, much more along the lines of "Be it known that insofar as the first party, one Jay Lee, residing at [address] and being responsible for the content hosted on the website accessible via [URL], hereinafter 'THE DEFENDANT', has knowingly undertaken or been party to undertaking the following specific actions..." et cetera ad infinitum ad nauseam. A real lawyer would no doubt be able to point out flaws in the preceding attempt at legal verbiage, but it is MUCH more similar to authentic legalese than anything this Shwagger wrote.

Consequently, I have considerable difficulty believing that she is an actual lawyer.

GoDaddy's policies, like those of any ISP, are between them and their customers.

Normal, reasonable ISPs, on receipt of a takedown notice for a single file, first fire off some form of communication to the party responsible for the site content, and then if they don't hear back promptly they take down the file.

But hey, if this lawyer lady wants to use an ISP that handles it differently, that is kind of up to her.

To me, the real story here is "GoDaddy handles DMCA notifications in an extremely heavy-handed manner." If I'd been previously considering using them as a hosting provider, I probably wouldn't be considering it any more.

But, you know, maybe that's just me.

> akin to demanding an aircraft maker constructs
> a plane that is indistinguishable from a bird

On the contrary, a plane that's indistinguishable from a bird may be beyond today's technology, but if so it's only beyond our current technology in definable ways. Engineers who were working on such a problem would be able to break it down into subgoals and immediately start making measurable progress.

The Turing Test is more like demanding that aircraft makers design a plane that is larger on the inside than on the outside and can travel faster than the speed of light without using any fuel or reaction mass. *If* it's even theoretically possible, we would have to revise our current fundamental understanding of how things work rather substantially in order to even begin to have any idea at all how to get started working on the problem.

Why has the quest for real strong AI fallen by the wayside? Because we've learned a lot more about computers and what they can easily be made to do. We no longer think of a computer as a "giant electronic brain" that might somehow magically become self-aware if we just give it a database of words and program it to use subject-verb-object word order or some similar ridiculously simplistic approach. We've seen what happens when you send a paragraph of text through an online translation engine from English to Japanese and back to English, and we've come to understand that computers are not, in fact, anywhere near as smart as people.

Computers are great at memorizing and searching and sorting, but they absolutely suck at understanding what any of it means, and the top AI researchers in the world do not have ANY practical ideas about how to change that. If strong AI is possible at all, it requires a scientific breakthrough that will make general relativity look like small potatoes.

While I'm not discounting the security concerns, we should also recognize that this is self-serving to IBM because it sells IT security consulting services.

Google should charge US$0.99 per take down for "administrative cost recovery" or some other similar reason. It's a price high enough to stop "frivolous" take downs. It's low enough that people who are actually loosing money because of a link should have no qualms about paying.

The 2000 election was where Bush received 50,456,002 votes and Gore received 50,999,897 votes [source Wikipedia]. Bush was able to win because he was able to carry enough states by sufficient margins to achieve 271 electoral college votes which is enough to win. In 2004, Bush won both the popular vote and electoral college vote. Every state has the power to choose its electors as it wishes [US Constitution Article 2, Section 1.] Most (if not all) states choose electors in a winner-take-all fashion based upon popular vote within that state and many states have laws that compel electors to vote for the person they've pledged to vote for.