Apple isn't Alice, the owner of the phone is.

The system most certainly is self regulating. So is my living room. If I light my sofa on fire, my air conditioning will kick in. I don't think it'll do much to prevent my house from burning to the ground though.

There is no "supposed to be." Supposed to be according to whom?

Maybe what you mean is "what is the temperature compared to what it would have been without humans?" If so, the answer is clear if not precise: warmer.

I don't (and wouldn't) have a JVM installed so that probably explains why I don't notice it on my desktop. It used to be useful on the server side, but every month that goes by it falls further behind. Java 8 is not going to be significant enough to change that. At this point, the only reason to use Java is because that's what you've always used.

You're doing it wrong. The biometric data is not like a password -- it's like a username. Do you change your username whenever you change your password? Of course not. You don't want it to be changeable or revocable. The password is separate from the biometric id. That's what you change. And obviously permissions associated with the id are modifyable/revocable. If the biometric id is compromised, you change the password, and perhaps flag the account to notify security if it is used (and the swat team if it's used with the old "revoked" password.)

That's not a flaw, it's a feature. And it's not a key, it's an ID.

That's the whole reason that people get so worked up about belief -- it affects your actions. What would be the point of belief otherwise?

In that sense, everything "actively uses" quantum mechanics. Perhaps he meant something else?

I've heard that kind of argument before, and I don't find it convincing. First of all, We don't really know all that much about embryonic development, compared to what we know we don't know about it yet. We know even less about consciousness. We certainly do know something, and we're learning more about it all the time. I just think we have a long way to go before we can do anything like emulating consciousness in a computer. And I think there are good reasons to be skeptical that it can be done in a digital computer at all. But assuming that it is possible, we will have much more than enough computing power laying around long before we know enough to use it effectively to that end. Creating something that can create something to do it for us is not going to make it that much easier, in my opinion. If we knew how to do that, we'd be most of the way toward just finishing it ourselves.

I agree that it is strangely likely that we will "invent" AI without really understanding how it works. There are a few ways that that could happen. But if it happens that way we can't really claim to have "figured it out." Maybe we could ask it how it works :)

By the way, I didn't mean to sound so critical of Dennett's book -- I loved it. Anyone interested in the subject should read it. Come to think of it, I'd recommend just about anything he's written.

Well that's just it. Nobody knows. Or else they spend 511 pages claiming that experience doesn't exist.

Every form of life we have ever encountered uses DNA. Are we to conclude that life without DNA is impossible?

I think you missed the point of the question. The question is not about how to scale experience up/out. Scaling is fairly well understood. The question is how do you get a computer to experience anything in the first place.

Learning without forgetting is possible if, for example, you reconstruct the network, preserving the old one (and this can be optimized so the entire network doesn't have to be duplicated.)

But I'm curious why you think a mind is necessarily a neural network. Are you saying there is no other possible way to construct a mind? As far as I can tell, there are lots of other designs, many of them far superior to neural networks, especially for such basic things as representing knowledge.

They look on the surface like .Net based solutions, but the .net components are thin wrappers around COM. If anything, Microsoft is moving back toward native and away from .net (although they seem admittedly schizophrenic about it.) But that doesn't matter, because one thing we can be sure of is that backward compatibility with COM is not going away. Actually .NET is just the new COM anyway (In fact it started out being called COM 3.0... then they dropped the name).

As for adding ActiveX support to Webkit, well, your idea of trivial is different from mine. But lets say they did it. As someone pointed out elsewhere in this thread, there are hundreds of interfaces involved. Implementing them in a way that was backward compatible with existing COM would just tie their fork of Webkit to Windows, for what exactly?

Both false.

Internet explorer does many things in the Windows/Office universe that no other browser does. Those things make Microsoft money by driving sales of Windows and Office and many other pieces of the Microsoft ecosystem (e.g. Sharepoint, SQL Server, etc.).

If all your desktops are Windows with Office and IE, you can develop intranet applications that use Office and can make direct calls to Win32. Yes this totally ties your application to Windows and Office, but many businesses are fine with that, even like it that way.

Active-X may be a security disaster on the internet, but in a locked down corporate intranet environment, you can easily do powerful things, like have a web page that embeds a live excel spreadsheet (the real excel, not a bloated, slow, feature-deprived javascript 'spreadsheet') displaying editable data from a database or web service. Click a link to open in excel, still editable, still connected to the server. You can do that kind of thing with very very little code, but only if you can assume you have Windows and Office on the client, and it only works in IE.

That is one of the competitive purposes of IE, and one of the ways they make money from it.