No shit?

Whut up, yo? Mostly moved to Twitter... You have an account... why don't I see you there much?

"I can write this in a slow, OO language using OPM (other people's modules) and it'll be quick to target, bug free, lightweight, and fast. Because, uh, faster hardware and, uh, derp" Also, "I don't need to learn C, I have (fill in the blank with the latest fad language that purports to save programmers from having to really learn to program)" and also "I can use the (fill in the blank with the latest agile / tricky / ultra-testable) technique to Make My Code Shine!"

Oh yeah, and this charmer: "I don't have to bugfix version-2 or older, it's perfectly reasonable to expect everyone to upgrade."

You're making up numbers. We've had billions of transistors on chips for some time now. The XBox One's main chip has five billion transistors. And that's just one chip. The Titan supercomputer has nearly 200 trillion transistors.

If the transistor doubling time remains about the same, you can equate any number of transistors you like to a neuron and Kurzweil's prediction still won't be off by much. Such is the nature of exponential curves. Sophisticated objections to his predictions don't involve transistor counts.

Nobody knows how much of a neuron you need to build a brain. If you actually have to simulate it, possibly at the quantum level, then no number of transistors may be sufficient. You can probably get around that problem by not using regular transistors though. Sufficient artificial neurons might actually be easier to build - noise and interference are probably not as harmful as they are in regular computing, and may actually be beneficial.

1300 times as massive.

Isn't there a city in your "midwest" (which is actually pretty far east, no?) that's called the windy city? Seems like wind power might be a reasonable thing in that region.

You know you can use electricity to produce heat, right?

You could go further with this idea. Maybe have an expert in the topic present to help people. You could even gather a bunch of meetups for different courses under one organization. Provide equipment, develop new courses, etc. You could call it I don't know a college maybe?

Then you just switch to internal navigation and let the drone go fully autonomous. A smuggler could launch the drone anywhere within the drone's flight range, from a moving vehicle, whatever.

This is a race that the guards aren't going to win. Of course, it's not like anyone's ever been able to stop contraband getting into a prison anyway.

-jcr

Lay off the boot licking, sunshine. The heavy metals aren't good for your central nervous system.

-jcr

I got four letters for you:J-U-R-Y

I got some letters for you, too: Voir dire. This is the process wherein lawyers weed out all your peers in favor of compliant idiots. That's not what it's supposed to do, of course, but that's how it's used. It's then almost always followed by admonishment by the judge to the effect that the jury has to apply the law as written, with nothing at all about the jury's actual duty to evaluate the law -- in fact, if that's brought up, likely you'll have a mistrial.

If you go to court in the US, you can pretty much look forward to success in ratio with the money you spend on your lawyer, and how well your lawyer manages to pass that largesse along to the judge. And too bad if the judge thinks public opinion means more than your money.

Every experiment contains randomness, regardless of quantum theory. Engineers call it noise. Statisticians call it unexplained variance. That's why statistics is the language of science. You can still repeat experiments, including quantum experiments, by collecting a large enough sample size and computing the relavent statistics.

I prefer "accepted." The accepted theory is the current state of the art in a field, meaning that it is the best description (in a practical makes-useful-predictions way) that we currently have. Accepted theories are constantly tested, and could be wrong in the details or even in broad strokes, but they're the best thing available, and work in a way that has been fairly well explored.

Of the theories listed in the summary, all are being actively tested and refined today. The only one that really isn't having it's details continually tweaked is Relativity, although that's mostly due to the lack of close up black holes to study.

Someone here doesn't keep up with philosophy.

A good deal of philosophy is mythology, trendy mythology, which is why I tend to ignore the signals coming from that direction. It's not even a soft science: it's not science at all. So yes, you're quite right, and thank you for noticing I'm not taking part in that mostly-bewildered sideshow.

There is nothing -- repeat, absolutely nothing -- to indicate, in any way, that there is anything going on in brains that isn't mundane physics. Further, not anywhere in the body, not anywhere in the world, not anywhere in the entire universe. The tendency of certain personality types to attribute the unknown to various imaginary basics without bothering with objective fact, measurable cause and effect, and the inconvenience of presenting a falsifiable proposal is what got us gods, elves, banshees, ghosts, chupacabras, and so forth.

Me, I'll wait to assert that force X is making something happen until someone demonstrates that there is a force X. In the interim, we already know the living brain is replete with electrical, chemical and physical activity (by which I mean the actual physical configuration is known to change over time... I'm not just talking about niceties like oxygen transport.) We don't know what it all does in any kind of holistic sense; that makes it far too early to be presuming the existence of further activity of another order. If, however, we look into all the known activities and find that they cannot account for the end result, that's the time to look further -- that, or if someone builds an X detector and demonstrates that X is, in fact, going on -- as it were. I must point out to you that no such thing has occurred.

In the interim, the way to bet is clearly that it's all mundane, in the sense that we already understand the underlying physics principles. Everything from Occam's Razor to basic statistics tells us the probable solution lies in the set of solutions we've determined describe everything else; for one, we know of nothing else, for another, there's no evidence whatsoever that points to something else. There's simply no path from here to Dualism. Chalmer's assertions are baseless at this point in time, as they were when made. There's simply no evidence for consciousness as "it's own thing"; it exists in the mundane world, odds are that it is of the mundane world -- just like everything else we've ever looked into.

If they'd actually read the Rand crap they'd be less confused. Instead they just spout what they've HEARD she said, which seems to usually be the opposite of what she actually said.

Not quite as wrong as the OP, but still wrong.

Theories are explanatory structures that attempt to describe some phenomenon. Laws are an old-timey name for short, succinct, important bits of theories. Theories are used to generate hypotheses, which are effectively predictions, which are then tested through experiment.

Einstein's theory of relativity was just as much a theory when the ink on his paper was still wet as it is now. All those theories about low energy supersymmetry are still theories, even though there is strong evidence that they are wrong.