> But the government doesn't CONTROL the money you have under your mattress.

Sure it does: it controls its value by adjusting how much money it prints.

Are you really that dense? When the small-margin convenience store seller isn't allowed to raise the price for a credit card transaction in order to make up for the processing fee, he raises the overall price instead so that the cost is subsidized by cash transactions. If the payment option discussed in the article gathers critical mass, said seller can, instead of raising his prices, set a minimum purchase amount for those few remaining, like yourself, who are stubborn enough to insist on using their credit card instead of the new, transaction-fee-free payment method (or cash).

Uh, cash _is_ government money, since there's no private currency in any developed country. Without loss of generality by ignoring coins, paper cash = promissory notes issued by the central bank. Making it electronic, as long as it's anonymous (which it is, as addressed in posts made by others in this discussion), doesn't do shit as far as giving government any more control than it already has. Government control over money comes from the fact that you can only pay your taxes in the government/central bank-issued currency, and your transactions are subject to taxes even if they're pure barter, or based on bitcoin or gold or whateverthefuck else libertardians will latch onto next.

Unless, of course, the comparison is based on ratio (division) rather than subtraction, which is quite reasonable -- after all, we use logarithmic scales quite often, and human senses are generally logarithmic in terms of perception, which makes it all the more intuitional.

Unfortunately, in the long run, privacy is indeed mutually exclusive with protection. It's easy to see this by extrapolating technological trends. As technology has improved, it has become easier and easier for a smaller and smaller group of people to destroy/kill more and more. The logical conclusion of this is that, eventually, technological progress will enable any individual to kill almost everybody. It's unreasonable to suppose that protection measures other than pervasive, total surveillance, will be able to keep that in check, simply because destruction is always an easier action than creation/protection/any other practical action; thus, only absolute measure will suffice. Please note I'm not saying pervasive surveillance by our future AI or enhanced post-human overlords is a good thing, but I don't see any logical way out of it. The trick will be, as the by-now-cliche saying goes, who watches the watchers? Perhaps the only reasonable answer here is: everybody. Zero privacy from anyone might be what lies in our future, say a century from now.

> I don't have to care how "poor and undeveloped" someone's worldview is, although in practice, I do care.

Of course you don't have to care, but you do in practice. You don't have to do anything. That whole sentence is largely meaningless.

Well, I can cite the previous slashdot post (in another topic, I believe) where I lifted that line from ;)

An average nuclear reactor core (at least here in Canada) generates about 1000 MW.

Here's a question: how many OTEC plants would be needed to replace current world energy use? Or, how many wind power towers? How much area in solar panels?

Here's another question: without restraining progress, as developing countries become fully industrialized and their energy use per capita becomes 10-fold, how many OTEC plants and windmills and square meters of solar panels are we going to need?

So why bother? Especially when nuclear has the lowest number of deaths per terrawatt-hour generated: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

This is the thing about anecdotes -- they're useless for generalizing because for every one that supports one thesis, there's another one someone else will bring up from their own experience to counter it. All they're good for is a "cool story, bro".

My last ex is undecided (2nd yr) but mainly studying literature and philosophy. She's the most respectful and understanding person I've ever met, who always in a disagreement tried to find flaw in her own views first before challenging the other side, and even then only after asking for enough clarification as to be certain there wasn't a misunderstanding. My conclusion is that people will use the knowledge and training they have in ways that extend their core self. In your case, that person already had the sort of personality that made her liable to be a "snotty bitch", as you describe her. It's silly to think her degree made her that way; it only gave her ammunition.

My point is I really miss my ex. It doesn't help that she was really hot too, and was with me despite the fact that I was/(am?) a super skinny narcissistic geek with impaired empathy, 12 years her senior, who gave her suicide advice while she was depressed and then didn't apologize but made lame excuses that she had provoked me by acting too nice and forcing me to push her to try to find her breaking point.

> People who want to study useless $H!T like art and literature should do so on their own dime and make sure they have a plan to earn a basic income of their own.

I'm an electrical engineer and software developer, and I find your comment incredibly ignorant and offensive. Once a society gets above the level of mere subsistence, culture is pretty much the entire point of human existence. The extreme materialism and utilitarianism implied by your post shows how poor and undeveloped your worldview is.

Having worked with OpenAL, it became clear to me that it doesn't live up to its name, which implies a status comparison with OpenGL. Nowhere close, actually. It's not merely the fact that there is very limited development activity on OpenAL. The problem is that the simplifications taken in structuring positional audio are way too far from reasonable psychoacoustic models, and there's no way moving beyond them without fundamentally redesigning the API. We need something a lot more like http://www.carlschissler.com/gsound/index.php?page=home and there's no way to do this sort of more advanced psychoacoustic modeling in OpenAL; compare, instead, OpenGL, where the API supports much more flexibility.

Please tell me what devilish mixture of banned substances you injected in your veins before you set out to write these last two posts.

Mods, I dare you to read the parent post without your heads exploding.

The seemingly extraneous 'either' in my third sentence was there to support the missing clause that gives the alternative to simulation: emulation by (very advanced) robotics. But if something like the somatic marker hypothesis is even approximately correct--and there is evidence from neuroscience that it is--then the level of detail required in such emulation makes it completely impractical without very advanced nano- or biotechnology, unlikely to be seen this century.

The laws of physics are indeed universal, so intelligent artifacts are certainly possible. But practical matters must be stressed. You cannot separate the mind from the body: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition
From this and recent neurological research supporting it and extending it by showing just how deep the mind depends on low level integration with body biology (for example, see Damasio et al.), it is clear that to create a human-like AI, you need to either simulate a body and its environment for it to a low level enough that computational power won't be practical any time soon. If the AI, on the other hand, is not human-like, it certainly can still be very useful, but not for AI agents whose purpose it is to aid humans, as effective communication requires understanding of humans.

And of course, there's still the little bit about humans having 150 trillion synapses and each synapse having the processing complexity of a ~100 gate circuit. Despite how slow neurochemical signalling is within the brain, the enormity of these numbers more than make up for that. My prediction: no human-like AI this century. I knew Kurzweil had jumped the gun in his predictions the first time I started reading this prophesies in the 1990s.

That still won't work because of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition and recent developments in neurology that support and extend the issue of embodiment and how much the mind is shaped by deep integration with body biology (for example, see Damasio et al.). And if the AI you create is not human-like, then AI agents will not be able to understand humans sufficiently to allow for effective communication.