But the difference is that central banks/governments cannot conjure gold out of thin air as they can with $. So you, as a user of gold, know that your 1 oz or whatever, is 1/N of the whole amount and will remain so for ever (modulo people digging more out of the ground, which is a slow process). It's the inability to create more that ensures it retains its value over time.

Sounds like my PhD in the 1990s in Canada, except for #4: I had no bike, I took the bus everywhere. Salary was around $15,000 Canadian, rent was $300/month split two ways (I had the bed in the living room, friend had the bed in the bedroom). Extra Foods was my my main shopping place, and the first question in any new cafe/bar was "Are the coffee refills free?"

But I had no idiot boss (that came later in industry), got to ask questions of really smart people at seminars, travel to conferences (admittedly only one/year), and be surrounded by the most diverse and interesting set of people I've known. And all in return for thinking about interesting problems and writing down my ideas. I wouldn't want to have done it with a family or dependants, but for a single person it's my idea of a dream life.

If I search for "gun" on DDG I can find lots of pictures of guns, but it won't make making one easier. Organic chemistry is pretty hard, especially at scale. You're more likely to kill yourself than anyone else.

The people who are capable of putting aside the profit motive for a greater good aren't the ones who own the economy that is polluting the earth with waste products. Until those of us who want something other than to make tons of money at the world's expense collaborate to make it painful for them to produce crappy, disposable goods, they'll continue to put profits first.

Start with Amazon: if you're using prime you're desolating the world for your convenience.

or like a company claiming to have invented a machine that creates energy for nothing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Steorn also got investors to fund their "work" before they went bust.

The English in 1066; invaded by the French who killed the soldiers, but did NOT kill 90% of the population, stole the land but we got it back. 800 years later, the USA killed 90% of the population, stole 99% of the land and STILL blames the survivors for their plight.

It's the scale that is shocking not the fact of one people attacking another.

No, FB is the problem: lazy, disengaged, gullible etc, etc, people "on their own" are not a problem, but put them in an FB group together and they become a problem. A bloke down the pub saying racist things is annoying to a few dozen people. get thousands of people like him and they become a political menace. Social media is an amplifier for hate because hate sells more than being nice.

I think the point is that even the people who can do the math don't understand it. I took graduate courses in advanced QM, solved all the problems, but still don't understand how a piece of quartz "knows" not to let a photon through when it's polarised the "wrong" way.

If you put two polarizers, i.e., pieces of quartz, at 90 degrees to each other, send some light through them, nothing comes out. Why? The first one only lets light through with, say, vertical polarization, and none of that gets through the next one because it's 90 degrees rotated. Conclusion: there's no light with horizontal polarization after the first polarizer.

But if you place a third polarizer at 45 degrees in between them, light comes out. Conclusion: there was some light with both vertical and horizontal polarization in the middle because 45 degrees is a superposition of vertical and horizontal.

Dodge that.

I would suggest that if the computer can "do nothing more than find the most optimal path" it is not intelligent as it is just finding an extremum. Computing gradient descent doesn't count as intelligent to me. A good test would be to change the problem domain and see if it can find the new optimal path. If it cannot recognise when it needs to change its algorithm, it is not intelligent.

I'm not familiar with the nuances of freedom of speech in the USA, so can you explain why uploading illegal content is an "unpopular or unapproved viewpoint"? It seems to be an action to me. And how does not being able to upload such content constitute being "locked out of society"?

Does freedom of speech include the right to harm people, and distribute documentary evidence of the harm for fun or profit?

Your argument of a slippery slope is a reductio ad absurdum; should I be worried about not being able to upload my preferred, er, proclivities to pornhub?

Er? According to my calculator 1.5**0.0001 = 1.000004, so X gets closer to 1 as the power goes to zero not closer to itself.

What you've shown is that any number to a power that is a positive integer is another integer (rule 1). That makes sense because multiplication is an operation you do an integer number of times. The last line that 6**0 = 1 is an extrapolation: multiplying a number an integer number of times is a clear process - but doing it zero times is not part of that process. You just defined it to be 1.

  Rule two says that zero multiplied by itself an integer number of times is still zero. This is another definition. But it leaves zero to the power zero undefined: Your two rules don't apply to this new situation. It an unjustified extrapolation.

I looked at the paper:

1) The simulate the galactic connectivity, it's not real data
2) They use proximity of neurons instead of their actual connectivity to define "connections"
3) They ignore long-range neuronal connections
4) It's published in Frontiers that will publish anything so long as you pay the OA fees

Millions of years ago, no human was "cold and calculating" for the simple reason that "reason" hadn't appeared by then. There was no structure in the brain to support ratiocination. We were governed, like all the other animals, by instinct. This picture that religion was "constructed" by slightly-cleverer "priest/rulers" to control the slightly-dimmer populace is a meme that has no basis in evolution or history. It makes a nice story, so some people believe it.

You could read some Jung to get a better description than I can give.

And regarding "religion is just a meme-virus" if by "meme virus" you mean any self-replicating structure that lives in our minds, then effectively ALL of our knowledge falls into this category. I'm a scientist, and I have not checked that Newton or Einstein were right in their work, I accept it because other people (my teachers) told me it was right. Indoctrination? It could also be called learning.

Religion and science express essentially the same attitude towards the world: explore and learn. Except that science explores reproducible phenomena while religion explores your life over its entirety including your death.

The difference comes in whether your experiments (daily life) agree with what your teachers told you: if they don't, and you trust your experiments, you question the teacher and maybe learn something new about the world. Rejecting the teacher is good too if it disagrees with your experiments.

Blindly accepting teachers in both religion and science is prejudice and wrong in both cases.

I agree, it's not going to happen. But I didn't say the military should hire these people: the government should and they should limit the ability of non-governmental actors to compete with them (in pay and hiring) in the interests of national security.

I don't see a difference between the government legally forbidding citizens from owning artillery pieces or nukes and the government legally limiting private companies/citizens from developing more powerful cyber weapons than the government has. It's much harder to implement because anyone can learn to code and build up a skill set that is potentially dangerous to a country. But if that person can make 5-10 times more working for the government than any private company, I think they probably would do so. Assuming they are a reasonable person, that is; ideologically deranged people obviously won't join the government. But I hope they are not the majority of high-level coders.