Personally I give people a lot of camera slack. Where I live we often have a chance to photograph wildlife, and some of those things might only give you 7, maybe 9 seconds to react. There are some animals I've seen fairly often but have yet to get a reat pic of. It sounds a lot easier than it really is .

The definition of consciousness you're using mostly describes the attributes that consciousness displays, but doesn't actually define it. Consciousness is the emergent quality of direct perception. Instead of asking "Are you conscious?" You should change the question to be "What are you conscious of?" The difference is more than semantics. I am in a room, and I feel the temperature. I do not need to be told whether or not I'm hot, cold or comfortable. I also know that you are somewhere in a room but I am not conscious of the temperature there I'm only aware that the room your in has a temperature. An AI can never be conscious because you have to tell it what the temperature is and how to react. You are conscious because you do not have to be told those things. Yes, animals are conscious of the things they perceive, and so are plants. Dogs are conscious of a world of scents you cannot perceive. Plants are conscious of the direction sunlight is coming from and move to intercept it. The last point I want to make is that there is no such a thing as general consciousness you are merely conscious of something things and not others.

Granted that Obama and Biden were foolishly soft on Iran, Trump has not done a very good job of stopping Iran from developing nukes. Almost all of the serious damage to the Iranian nuclear program has been done by Israel, not the US.

In one version of the story there's an additional factor, namely that Microsoft wanted to pay a fixed, one-time, fee for the license whereas Kildall wanted to follow his usual practice of getting a royalty on each copy.

I used ZIP drives extensively in the 90s. I still have a drive and some disks. As far as I know they still work though I haven't tried them in quite a while. They were a huge improvement for people like me who had relatively large files (speech data).

There you go, using facts. We don't let facts get in the way of a good narrative.

Completely agree with your setup, but even on slashdot perhaps 10-20% of the readers could implement. In the real world, vanishingly small.

That said, the Walmart house brand Onn has been a delightful surprise.

This is interesting but it is only half-true that the use of consumable chemicals has been the barrier to the creation of scent emitters. The other problem is that no orthogonal basis for olfaction is known. In the case of color, for example, we know that you can combine red, blue, and green to form any desired color. There is nothing comparable for scent. We don't know that you can use, say, rose, bitter almond, and sandalwood to create any desired scent.

The article mentions the state's tax revenue as if it would lose it if liquor sales were privatized. Really? States manage to collect taxes on all sorts of privately sold products. As far as I can see, privatizing liquor sales need not mean giving up any tax revenue.

That's already the case. The so-called National Security Law is used against any kind of political dissent.

Agreed. This sounds like a useful feature for me.

It won't need the user anymore. Makes me think of the Dean Koontz novel Demon Seed.

Of course it will. Google will pimp you out to a scammer--they have no morals

Not sure of the specifics, but it is possible to measure the senses of non-human animals, measure various aspects of cognition and memory, and to detect anxiety etc.

Fuck you and that Ribbon.

I'm sorry. This is a topic that makes me nerd-rage.

LK