Fighting against your own government/leaders who are enemies of your country, is not the same as fighting against your country. It's still fighting for your country.

To me it is more patriotic than killing people in some other country.

If more people around the world did that sort of thing there would be much less need to kill people of other countries.

That said I'm not a big fan of patriotism. Seems to cause more harm than good.

To those who say they have no free will: "If you have no free will then you are a machine. Beware, it is easier to justify discarding/destroying/retask a machine that no longer 'meets the specifications'".

As for the question we don't even have proof that the physicist's definition of free will is correct, much less the OPs. The physicist is assuming free will = not knowing the final decision. But that's ridiculous! He hasn't even explained Consciousness - which is the "knowing" phenomena of how "we know we know". If there's no "you" observing yourself, there's no "you" deciding what happens next, thus there's no free will - since there's no Entity to _will_ anything in the first place whether free or not!

If he can figure out how the "knowing"/Consciousness phenomena works than he is in a better position to decide whether something has free will or not. Otherwise he's being silly and talking about stuff that he should do more thinking about first.

We think we have free will because we are self aware. Not because we don't know what we will ultimately decide to do. Sometimes we know exactly what we will decide to do next and yet our sense of "free will" does not go away. If I put you in a cage, you still believe you have free will, you just don't have the freedom to exercise your free will. That cage could be physical or metaphorical (e.g. limited choices).

The author addresses many of the same issues I addressed:

• "Moreover, the number of relatively short programs that can run for arbitrarily long times before halting is in some sense small. Indeed, Aaronson argues, proofs of uncomputability on its own are often less relevant to real-world behavior than issues of computational complexity" - This is part of why formal undecidability is a minor problem in the real world.
• "The uncomputability of the decision making process doesn't mean that all decisions are unpredictable, but some must always be." That's a property of many algorithms - there's are pathological cases that reach undecidability, but they may not come up that often. This is related to the class of algorithms that are NP-hard for the worst case or the absolutely optimal solution, but only P-hard for most cases or a near-optimal solution. The traveling salesman problem is such a problem. So is linear programming.
• "There is a subtlety here in that computational universality requires that you be able to add new memory to the computer or smart phone when it needs more -- for the moment let's assume that additional memory is at hand." -- This is the escape hatch for the finite state problem. With infinite memory, you can get undecidability from a deterministic system. Without infinite memory, you can't.
• "That is, any general technique for deciding what deciders decide has to sometimes take longer than the deciders themselves." That's his big result, on page 9. All it shows is that the worst case takes longer. It's like the proof that, for all lossless compression algorithms, there must exist some input for which the compressed version is longer than the uncompressed version.

It's quite possible to get into a philosophical tangle in this area, but it's not productive to do so.

Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to our selves. That we have first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see. -- Bishop Berkeley

In the US, the regulations on "experimental" aircraft are quite lenient. The main limitation is that you can't operate an experimental aircraft in a densely populated area or major airway without special permission. Permission is usually granted after successful flight tests.

The main place for testing unusual civilian aircraft and rockets in the US is Mojave Air and Space Port. They're authorized as both a launch site and an airport. SpaceShip One, the Voyager, and the EZ-Rocket first flew there. There's plenty of room over the desert in case things go wrong.

"You want to test a rocket engine? This is a place where you can do that." - Mojave Air and Space Port Board of Directors

Again, someone ran into the halting problem and thought they could say something profound about it. Worse, they got tangled up with "free will", which is theology, not physics or compute science.

A deterministic machine with finite memory must either repeat a state or halt. The halting problem applies only to infinite-memory machines. A halting problem for a finite program can be made very hard, even arbitrarily hard, but not infinitely hard.

As a practical matter, there's a widely used program that tries to solve the halting problem by formal means - the Microsoft Static Driver Verifier. Every signed driver for Windows 7 and later has been through that verifier, which attempts to formally prove that the driver will not infinitely loop, break the system memory model with a bad pointer, or incorrectly call a driver-level API. In other words, it is trying to prove that the driver won't screw up the rest of the OS kernel. This is a real proof of correctness system in widespread use.

The verifier reports Pass, Fail, or Inconclusive. Inconclusive is reported if the verifier runs out of time or memory space. That's usually an indication that the driver's logic is a mess. If you're getting close to undecidability in a device driver, it's not a good thing.

Yes, but that same agreement stated I sign away rights to your daughter as well ;}
In both cases, I can't sign away rights to things I personally do not own. That covers both my SSN as well as your daughter.

SSN's belong solely to the social security administration, and do not belong to the person the number is issued for. It says as much on the back of my SSN card.

If I do somehow have the right to sign away things I don't own, then under the same argument, why is it not legal to sign away your daughter to my friend?

My SSN card is from 1978 and pretty much says the same thing.
(BTW Mcgrew, I thought you were old! Now I feel aged)

"For tax purposes only. Improper use of this card and/or number by the number holder or any other person is punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both. This card is the property of the Social Security Administration"

I've never once had others do anything but laugh that message away and try to justify how it doesn't apply to their case.

There is another person in my city with the same name but a good 30 years older than me, who apparently got and used my SSN at some point in the past. Apparently I owe $30k in past debts I made when I was 5 years old.

I don't have a bank account to this day due to this, and have had to pay cash for every car I've ever owned. I'm renting a house and don't see how I will ever get around a home owners loan.

I attempted to get things cleared up through the courts, but that lasted all of 2-3 months before the debts got sold off to other collection agencies and apparently count again.

It was even suggested that I file for bankruptcy and pay the debts off just so it gets removed from my records... Which is pretty bullshit to begin with. But at the same time, why should I believe that would fix the problem? The credit agencies have already proven they are happy to list anything, no matter how obviously fake, or no matter how court ordered not to. I have no doubt if I procured $30k out of my ass to pay them, they would still somehow get listed again.

Experian and all the others can go fuck themselves in a fire for all I care.

No the norms do not have to evolve at all, until most humans can themselves evolve to be good multitaskers e.g. able to have more than one conversation at the same time, or similar.

It is rude. As you can see from the responses from those who think it's OK - they're so full of "I'm more important than you hence you'll have to do with what I have leftover" or similar[1].

If you are having a conversation with someone, it is rude to not pay attention. Maybe if you are a virtuoso multi-tasker you can do it successfully and the other person won't notice, but most people can't do that - they will miss stuff and either get the wrong message or the other person will have to repeat himself/herself.

So it's not cultural bias until humans themselves can multitask way better than they can now.

[1] Yes we all know there are people who are more important than others. But you can be more important without being an asshole. You could be President of the World and you're polite if you actually have a real conversation (without reading your email) or if you just tell people "sorry, I'm too busy to talk to you", or "Sorry can you send me an email instead?". You're rude if you attempt a conversation and then do other things at the same time. Because you'll be wasting other people's time while treating them as if they are wasting your time.

p.s. Too often I'm guilty of being this rude. It still is rude though.

The Microsoft KB says that all they changed was the user-agent string, taking out the "MSIE". Changing it back supposedly makes Google work. This implies Google has special-case code for Internet Explorer. I thought that went out with IE 6.

Right. Look at Bitcoin. Most of the standard financial scams have been replicated in the Bitcoin world. Ponzi schemes, fake stocks, fake stock markets, brokers who took the money and ran, crooked escrow services, "online wallet" services that stole customer funds - that's Bitcoin. In the US banking crisis, depositors didn't lose their money. Even Madoff's customers are slowly getting about half their money back, as the liquidator sues everybody who made a big profit.

Scamming is such a big part of the Bitcoin economy that almost nobody is using it for anything legitimate. The latest thing seems to be a big run-up caused by the use of Bitcoin to get around China's tight exchange controls. That will probably be shut down by the People's Bank of China, so there seems to be a rush to turn yuan into dollars and euros.

Not seeing any concrete plans here. Some of the ideas are silly, such as Blueseed, the scheme to have a ship just outside of US waters full of programmers. That's just a tax shelter. Of course, they want the U.S. Coast Guard to help them if they get in trouble, as their prospectus says. And they want a large ferry dock and a freighter doc in San Mateo County's Pillar Point small-boat harbor. And they want ICE to make that small-boat harbor a US entry point, so people don't have to go up to San Francisco on a boat to visit the US. They also wanted to set up a microwave link at the USAF radar station at Pillar Point. But they don't want to pay for any of this.

Then there was CITE, a small city to be built in New Mexico. No people - it was supposed to be just for testing "new technologies". The company behind it turns out to be basically one guy without much money and a lot of clip art. Got a lot of press, and even some political support, then the vaporware project went away. The business model made no sense.

Further back, there was the high-tech Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, which Walt Disney was going to build. Disney World has EPCOT today, but it's a theme park; nobody lives there. Disney did eventually build Celebration, FL, which is a retro-looking subdivision.

Some very top-down countries have done things like this: Tsukuba Science City, Guangzhou Science City, King Khalid Military City, and Brasilia. Those are all Government projects. The US private sector has a long history of "company towns", most of it not too good.

It gets even worse:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-returns-rates-7.html
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/893-7/ssd.html

There are other reports from this guy before and after those times and it's ugly numbers for OCZ till maybe this far back: http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html
But that might have been early stages for the SSDs so the stuff hadn't started failing yet, or they hadn't got them to their usual "quality".
Go look at OCZ's track record for RAM back then compared to the rest: http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-4/components-returns-rates.html

Maybe OCZ stands for Often Crap, Zero quality... ;)

I don't see the point of keeping the brand.

If OCZ making crap was not their fault but them getting backstabbed by their suppliers they better start gathering proof and taking appropriate action.

I doubt it though.

So I take 6 days to setup and configure a many billions year old Universe simulation and only start it at the end of the 6th day.

If there really is a Creator of this universe it'll be silly to assume what he can or cannot do.

Imagine an IT guy from the future trying to explain 100% what he does for work to some shepherds 6000 years ago[1]. Configure and tune virtual machines to run mailing and software asset management systems?

Will what he says to them be 100% accurate? Unlikely. Is it a lie? Not really.

So automatically assuming it's all a lie may be even sillier.

[1] Bronze age? I bet they haven't even got iron yet.