Ah, a true free market fundie. Property rights as both the necessary and sufficient condition for a free market to come into existence. Necessary, probably, sufficient, no freaking way. A single private individual owning all property would be a 'free market'. A number of individuals that own sufficient amount of resources to create barriers to entry are another 'free market'. As the 19th century has shown, this is where this type of 'laissez-faire' free market will converge to.

What is needed (as a sufficient condition), is the ability to compete. Without competition, no free market. However, property rights are not sufficient for competition. If I own the widget market, and have a gaziilion bucks, I can stop competition. How I will do that? Well, when you with your meagre million start to create and sell widgets, I will undercut you. I will sell at a loss. I will give it away for free. I will give it away for free until you are broke. I've got a gazillion bucks, I can give it away for free for a very long time. Then I (or my offspring) will raise prices again, and will get the rest of my gazillion dollars back. If you also have a gazillion dollars, we will meet and agree not to harass each other. We will also agree to help each other to keep everyone else out. We both have a gazillion, and if we do this, we will each have 2 gazillion, instead of each having only having 1 gazillion due to us competing. Because it is just us two, or maybe a handful, we can do this, using promises we give in person. Promises we will keep because it will make each of us richer. We will still dictate price to a level that optimizes our income.

So, who can make sure that I do not give away my produce for free to kill all competition? Who can make sure that I'm not determining price with my competitors? The free market? You've got to be kidding. There's only one entity that can do this: the law, i.e., government. It is a job for government to keep the free market competitive and to limit the negative effects of excess capital. Read that again: negative effects of excess capital. The government needs to keep the market competitive for it to remain free. If you don't believe me, please explain how the scenario's I sketched above are countered by property rights alone. We need a right to compete for it to work.

He obviously decided that his particular view of religion needs hyphens. Who are you to criticize this completely arbitrary belief system? It's as valid as the next.

Correction: *every* system in the Western world but one survives fine without plea bargain. Plea bargaining occurs outside the US, but is the exception, not the rule. It's an American thing, even to the bad economy of putting people in jail to save money on courts. The US has 7 times the number of people in jail than European countries.

Dude, I'm just responding to people that argue that the only reason the Nazis could have taken over the country was by restricting gun ownership. This is demonstrably false: the Nazis didn't need to restrict gun ownership, the majority of the population put them into power and supported them all the way. Furthermore, they did really did something about gun ownership. It's a delusion to argue that the Nazis show that the second amendment keeps the government honest.

BTW, the page you link to shows a change in gun permit law enacted in 1938 (superseding the non-Nazi law of 1928) makes rifles and ammunition for rifles unregulated, lowers the age of the handgun permit from 20 to 18, makes this permit last for 3 years instead of 1, and ... makes gun ownership illegal for Jews. So, except for the Jew thing, (but don't forget about the muslims) this looks more like an action from the NRA than from anyone else.

So the Nazis took what they wanted, including guns. Your point is, what exactly? Once the government has become evil and starts to take what they want, hand all over, except your guns? Or, when the government comes in to take what they want start shooting? How would your granddad have fared in 1939?

And the point is that most of the arguments surrounding artificial intelligence are just that: semantic tricks. And that includes both sides. Or, as Dykstra put it: the question whether machines think or not is just as interesting as arguing about submarines being capable of swimming.

Of course. They were not considered citizens, right?

1) Can machines fly? Yes, planes can fly
2) Can machines swim? No, submarines don't swim.

If you can satisfactory explain the discrepancy between the answers for those two statements, you might be able to contribute. -

I think a recursive data-structure known as a. tree is pretty optimal for representing and navigating hierarchies. Why would I need a spiking neural net, and if I need such a thing, where can I get an SDK that gives me spiking nets for hierarchical organization of information for my little file-explorer?

Yeah sure. "Guns don't kill people, gun owners do". And that makes gun owners non-dangerous how exactly?

Unlike popular myth, Nazi Germany, as well as Saddam's Iraq, actively promoted gun ownership by their citizens.

If you want to be pedantic, please use correct terminology. First, the median is an average, the arithmetic mean another, the mode another, the geometric mean yet another. You probably equate average with arithmetic mean, but that's not strictly true. Second, the central limit theorem proves that for any random variable that has finite (stable) variance the mean and the median are equal. Not sure if 'driver ability' has finite variance, but if it is anything like IQ, length or weight, then yes, the (arithmetic) mean divides the top 50% from the bottom 50%.

Science advances one funeral at a time -- Max Planck

The Arctic ice is not a problem for rising sea-levels. Melting ice from Greenland is.

Gerrymandering.