I agree with the rest of your post about reasonable suspicion, but encryption won't get you anything. In the US they can keep you in jail for life for failing to divulge an encryption key, even if you were only charged with a crime that carried a six month sentence.

How do you get bitcoins into the new address? You either have to mine it, buy it, or transfer it from another address. Most likely you transfer it, and what account you transferred it from is public record. So, all your accounts are effectively linked, even if you use a new one for every transaction.

Sure, you can have multiple completely-independent accounts, but you can't move money between them unless you pass it out through cash, or you mine it. The ability to pass it out through cash is limited due to the developments in TFA - banks are asking for ID. So, unless you mine ALL the cash you use in discrete unrelated bundles, you're traceable. Mining is pretty expensive and a hassle, though it can be done (though over time it will become less and less practical).

Such a contract would likely be unenforceable as a matter of law, or at least it should be. By their very nature the terms of contracts cannot be modified except by mutual consent. Contracts can include variable rates, but usually they need to be very well-defined. A contract that says you'll pay whatever expenses we happen to incur without any choice in the matter wouldn't qualify.

That's relativity, but the nice thing about this is that you can't actually observe it happening. If you put two golf balls in a room and then expanded the space between them so that they move a light year apart in a second, you'd never see either golf ball moving faster than the speed of light away from you, whether you are viewing from the perspective of either ball, or an observer in the room. You'd just see them move apart at a speed very close to the speed of light.

Objects further away than the cosmic horizon are in theory moving away from us faster than the speed of light. However, if we look at them all we see is a background of objects close to the horizon that are so red-shifted that they're barely detectable at all moving away at almost the speed of light. We can't see beyond the horizon (hence the name), and we can only see the horizon itself as a wash of particles coming from every direction (otherwise known as the cosmic microwave background).

I'm sure he was talking about an orbit with a low inclination in general, not one that was exactly zero. In any case, it does tend to launch to the east. If you wanted to launch from the east coast into a polar orbit it would probably be cheaper to do it at a more northern facility like Wallops Island.

This really only makes sense if the bank had incorporated some of its up-front costs into the interest rate, instead of the closing costs. If the bank is covering all of its transactional costs via the up-front fees then you could open and pay-off a mortgage three times a day and they'd only profit from it.

As long as the market continues to offer a broad range of terms I don't really have a problem with this practice. Choices generally are good. I'd consider a ban on the practice if everybody started shifting towards only offering these kinds of loans, because they tend to create lock-in which isn't good for the market.

Each outcome cannot be equally likely. An atom of uranium at any moment has to be more likely to decay than an atom of carbon, since the former decays and the latter does not.

Sure, radioactive decay certainly seems random on short terms. However, it is entirely possible that some day we'll come up with a way of describing its behavior and it will turn out not to be random.

How do you KNOW that it is random in the short term? The fact that you cannot currently predict its behavior does NOT necessarily mean that it is random. If it were truly random, then why is there a long-term predictable behavior?

I'm not sure that this really helps clarify whether this is actually a quantum computer.

The question is whether the D-Wave is a quantum computer, not whether it is faster than a classical computer. A quantum computer that is slower than a desktop calculator is still useful for research purposes.

Agreed. If anything antibiotics and vaccines have completely opposite mechanisms of action.

An antibiotic taken as a medication kills bacteria directly, assisting the immune system and making its job easier. In the case of bleaching every surface in your house, it means that the immune system never sees the bacteria in the first place. The same is true of other external use of antibiotics (killing of bacteria before it gets into your body).

A vaccine provokes your immune response against a pathogen without exposing you to the risk of developing the disease (or a greatly reduced risk). Your immune system does all the work, and as a result it is able to do the job entirely on its own much more effectively at a later time.

Comparing the approaches, the disinfectant approach is like bleaching your house 3x/day, and the vaccine approach is like rolling around in the mud and not washing before dinner. I'd be very hesitant to associate the problems of the one with the other.

I would object to both.

Somebody convicted of a crime is either a danger to society or they aren't. If they are dangerous to be allowed in public, then they shouldn't be allowed in public - full stop. If they aren't, then quite badgering about it for the rest of their life. Frankly our criminal justice system needs to be a lot less punitive and a lot more rehabilitative. I'm fine with deterring crime, but clearly that on its own doesn't work. If a criminal can't be rehabilitated then they should get a life sentence, even if all they did was beat somebody up. If they can be rehabilitated, then they should be released once they're able to function normally in society, even if they killed 35 people. As a citizen my concern is not whether the guy across the street was appropriately punished like a 12 year old, but rather whether they're capable of not acting like a 12 year old now.

Sure, the system will always be imperfect, but I don't really see much value in permanent sanctions. By all means use parole (and by that I mean an invasive probation where you actually help the parolee re-integrate over years with heavy contact), but once they're just an ordinary citizen, let them be an ordinary citizen (heaven forbid that criminals that rehabilitate have something to look forward to).

When you turn people into second-class citizens they'll start acting like second-class citizens.

Banning gun ownership by felons is also doubly silly. If you think they're not dangerous then why ban gun ownership? If you do think they have no regard for the law, then why do you think outlawing gun ownership will stop them when whatever law they previously broke failed to do so?

Imagine you step into a teleporter, in an atomic instant you disappear and an exact replica of you appears on the other side. In this hypothetical example the position and composition of every particle that composes you is perfectly replicated, momentum and all (no messy Uncertainty Principle issues).

In this highly idealized scenario, you could debate whether your consciousness really does teleport, or whether the guy who steps out the other side merely thinks that it does.

Of course, you could probably make the same argument with motion in general. When you move every particle in your body moves along, and at one point in time they are at one place, and at the next moment they are at another. I'm not sure how teleportation is any different beyond the distance being larger.

Of course, to the degree that teleportation is imperfect, then the matter is compounded.

I think another huge challenge is just going to be wiring them up correctly initially.

I used to think a brain was just a box full of neurons that had inputs on one side and outputs on the other and they were trained like any other simple neural network, but with far many nodes. As I've read up on things (and lived with somebody with anomic aphasia that has improved over time) I realized that nothing could be further from the truth.

There is very clearly some kind of basic architecture to the brain that involves incredibly intricate connections that are basically pre-wired but which evolve over time. There are specialized regions of the brain, and most operations involve many regions of the brain working together in various ways. There are both short- and long-distance connections all over the place.

My personal theory is that there are many building-blocks of functionality that are suited to particular purposes, and that as brains evolved these got stitched together in ways that led to all kinds of emergent properties. You have areas like the cerebellum which seem (to my poorly educated brain) to be a bit like the simplistic neural network model, and I suspect the rest of the brain uses it like a programmer might use a computer to automate certain types of operations (like feedback loops for balance and who knows what else). I suspect that different regions of the brain "use" each other in similar ways, almost symbiotically.

If I had the time to really study this stuff I'd probably start by trying to understand fundamental building blocks of neural networks. I figure that developmentally this stuff has to form in some kind of almost fractal pattern since embryonic cells really only can keep track of their immediate surroundings and cell division counts. What kinds of patterns lead to what kinds of processing abilities?

Really fascinating stuff - it will be truly amazing if we ever figure it out.

Yup. To the point where quantum effects impact a brain, it might be impossible to replicate a human mind. You could probably make a decent facsimile, but it could differ in subtle ways.

When you decide where to eat lunch, for all we know the decision was influenced by a cosmic ray that originated in a supernova halfway across the universe.

How do you know? You could only tell that you had respawned if your memories passed intact to your new self. Of course, if your memories don't pass intact then is it really your self? Oh, and if you go ahead and pass along your memories without you actually dying, which you is you?

And for that matter, when you step into a transporter, is the guy who comes out on the other side really you?