Apparently, the NSA didn't figure the Utah State government for such a bunch of chiselers. They still have a lawsuit ahead of them, in which the plaintiff and the judges will be different branches of the Federal government. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see which way that will turn out. If they should lose, it would pave the way for all kinds (literally ALL kinds) of indirect taxes directed at the federal government by states, counties, cities and rural fire protection districts.

NSA builds coal-fired generator on site and arranges to have coal brought in by rail (the line is aleady there) from Colorado, where there's more than plenty coal. NSA tells Utah to fuck off. Problem solved.

Did they do better because of

• more computing power?
• more accurate models?
• dumb luck?

That depends on the reason they stopped working on efficiency. If they stopped because they're *tired*, they're going to get their asses handed to them by the less-complacent. If they stopped because it's no longer among the highest four nails on the reducible-cost Pareto, they're doing the right thing for now.

True. Those things are almost exact opposites. You will never waste money by cutting costs, if you are accounting correctly.

I was going to say people aren't addicted to guns but maybe that's not the case.

No it doesn't. Houston has more Hispanics. Chicago has more blacks.

And barriers to importation of guns into Chicago are nonexistent. It's a majority-minority city, which means you would expect its murder rate to be high for American cities because in the USA, murder rates are many times higher among blacks and hispanics than among whites and many times higher among poor people of all races than among middle-income and up people of all races. If you don't figure that in when thinking about violence, you will come to all kinds of conclusions that won't withstand the light of day.

We had this argument years ago when they were talking about putting encryption engines in everybody's phones, but they'd have back door keys and NOBODY WANTED ONE. They still won't. All this will do if passed is prevent anybody from buying a new phone until they have a method in hand to turn off or change the back-door codes so nobody can hack them.

So why not talk to them? This is my main point. You are at the bar for the social interaction.

But the robotic bartender is all wrong for this purpose. Instead, it should be telling you how drunk the OTHER people in the bar are, so you can hit on the chick that's three sheets to the wind and will be easy to talk the underwear off of. A bartender might give you hints about that, but then he might have a conscience. The robotic bartender won't. It can be programmed to sell creeps Coca Cola and that info instead of liquor all night.

Seriously, it's unreadable.

Suppose the experiment had the opposite result. Would you have considered it ethical then?

It's not clear to me that consciousness is well enough defined for anyone to say how it can be synthesized, evaluated or measured, whether animals have it, whether children have it and if so at what developmental stage and whether all adults have it.

No shit! Researchers don't understand how it works, we don't understand how it works, 60% of biomedical research results can't be repeated...

Is this published in the AIR (http://www.improbable.com/magazine/), by the way? It ought to be, because it sounds unethical and crazy on the face of it. Just the kind of thing they like.

But now that the information is out there, it can't just be ignored. Either there's something weird going on that's useful or there's something weird going on that's not useful. Maybe some day we'll all have little remotely controlled (or consciously controlled) electroshock devices implanted in our heads to improve various abilities on demand.

It would have to be negative.