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Well, starting with the first sentence of my statement: I would like these people removed from the political discourse. Right now these sort of types hold tremendous sway over more moderate Republicans. I forsee a number of party line votes in the future where people who do not match the above description are influenced by those who do.

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, to get anything done in this country we have to get the seal of approval of a bunch of science-hating bible thumping homophobes who think any government they aren't in firm control of is hell bent on destroying America, while they in fact are doing exactly that (so long as they have the power to do so). I mean, look at the country, it's a freaking mess, and it's the Republicans' fault, period. But more to the point, it's not just Republicans, but crazy Republicans, the PNAC types who have been administering the country for the past 8 years. They've been dead wrong about practically everything and have left the country in an absolutely deplorable state. I'd like a moderate party who isn't so crazy and consistently wrong about everything. Then maybe the Democrats can capitulate with them, as opposed to bending over backwards to give them what they want only to be snubbed. All the right-wing nutjobs can go off and form their own party, endorsing Palin as their presidential candidate! Woohoo! Maybe that'd undo the horrible logjam that is the US Congress. I can see the present-day Republican party splitting into something like that... perhaps all the crazy neocons can go off and form their own party, leaving a saner body of moderate paleocons to actually get things done.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aDYQRfop9MWc&refer=us Yeah, what can I say. This sucks. This is the one criminal act Bush perpetrated which I really can't see anyone defending. Bush knew what the law was, and so did the people involved. The people involved sought a presidential signature to cover their asses. And not just one signature, instead Bush signed off on the program dozens of times. Our precious personal info was diverted into the NSA without warrant. Telcos, featuring potential litigation, pressured Bush and Congress to cover their asses, because they had done something illegal. A federal judge ruled it was illegal. Yet here we are... people try to investigate and Obama shuts them down. Obama. Ugh. The founding fathers called. They want the forurth amendment back.

Why? The scenario relies on one of two assumptions coming true: 1) We create strong AI. Putting aside some rather silly arguments there is little reason today to doubt this will eventually happen. Brains are physical systems which to the best of our knowledge exhibit classical mechanical behaviors. If we build one in a computer, we will have strong AI. 2) We create brain/computer interfaces which augment the abilities of those who have them to the point they have superhuman intelligence. Again, there's little reason to doubt this will eventually happen. We've already begun interfacing with the brain using both invasive and non-invasive methods and this technology will only continue to grow and mature. Why? Are you assuming a postsingularity alien civilization will immediately be able to communicate or travel faster than the speed of light? Many galaxies are millions if not billions of light years away. Hominids have been around for a mere six million years. It's entirely possible that thousands or millions of alien races have gone singularity, but they are causally disconnected from us given the great expanses of space light must travel across before we can even possibly know about it. Or, it's simply possible that creating a self-sustaining chemical reaction which evolves into something like Earth's LUCA is an extremely rare event. Perhaps millions of universes must come into existence before one even sees life. You are assuming far, far too much. Huh??? That also assumes there will be only one artificially intelligent computer program. Thing is: once you create one, anybody can copy it. It only takes one. After we have the one we'll see a massive proliferation, and only one copy need decide to become recursively self-improving. Once again... huh? Are you saying the singularity could be bad? Sure, it certainly could! There are many, many science fiction works depicting this. Fredrick Brown's Answer, Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, Colossus: The Forbin Project, the Terminator movies, and the Matrix, just to name a few. For the third time, huh? This all assumes the singularity will take place, which you're claiming it won't, afaict...

I think step one would be firing the guy who gave them too much money in the first place and still insists we gave them the right amount

I believe 3 is the most common among democratic societies, but maybe that's just a rumor I'm shamelessly repeating. Short answer: no

Brute force is already an untenable solution. One of my favorite quotes from Bruce Schneier in Applied Cryptography talked about how there are more potential 1024-bit pubkeys than there are atoms in the universe (someone correct me here if there are more than 10^1023 atoms in the universe). You're always going to need to reduce the size of your search space, and that's going to be a largely algorithm-specific procedure. Shor's algorithm isn't going to help you out cracking Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Cryptography is an arms race. On the one hand the algorithms need to be fast enough to be used practically on modern hardware, but also secure enough that they can't be cracked by modern hardware. And thanks to Moore's Law, the speed of modern hardware increases exponentially. Unless we find a solution for the P=NP problem I think we will have no trouble continuing to design more advanced algorithms which operate on larger and larger keys.

I like Kucinich even though his chances of getting elected president are pretty much nil

I think it's pretty sad when we have to chide Congress for putting too much trust in the executive branch. That said, we are talking about $700,000,000,000 and I wish it came with more strings attached. Oddly enough, we didn't see any Congressional Republicans with large posters illustrating how if you took 700 billion $1 bills and put them end to end that they'd circle the earth 10 times. Funny how that works.

I feel like no party represents me. I'm a liberaltarian and feel the Green Party is too authoritarian while the Libertarian party is too conservative. People of my political disposition seem to be pragmatists who would rather just side with the Democrats than try to form a party of their own. That and there don't seem to be too many of us...

Again, metonymy. If I say "The White House implored Congress..." I don't mean that the White House suddenly grew a mouth, sprouted legs, ripped itself up off its foundations, walked over to the Capitol building and started yelling at Congress. Clearly I'm talking about the administration inside the White House. In this case "Bush" implies "The Bush Administration" On the personal order of his Treasury Secretary and the head of the "Office of Financial Stability" In other words, his duly appointed underlings. Congress approved a bill written by Bush's treasury secretary which gives authority over spending to... Bush's treasury secretary, after Bush implored them to pass it. Congress is certainly culpable, but they're just patsies. They placed their trust in the president and his administration in a time of emergency, and once again that trust was abused by the administration. Are you arguing that a President isn't culpable for the actions of his administration?

In the case of a president this is certainly an area I expect them to delegate... I'm just curious why Obama continues to delegate authority to this guy given this enormous lapse of confidence. Firing him would be a first step in moving towards a new policy.

Okay, I'll wait for your followup. I'm afraid a 400 page PDF and "go fish!" isn't going to help me find the answers I'm looking for. Seriously though, do you believe abolishing our country's central banking system in the middle of a financial crisis is a good idea? What about Kucinich?

That zany Ron Paul is at it again, introducing yet another in a series of acts intended to abolish the Federal Reserve: http://www.house.gov/apps/list/speech/tx14_paul/AbolishtheFed.shtml Some choice quotes from Dr. Paul and my responses to them: Seems like a bit of a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Dr. Paul's statement implies we did not see a boom-and-bust monetary policy prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve. I wonder what Ron Paul makes of this list, namely: The Panic of 1797, the Depression of 1807, the Panic of 1819, the Panic of 1837, the Panic of 1857, the Panic of 1873, the Long Depression, the Panic of 1893, Panic of 1907. If we were to partition the list of recessions which occurred in the 100 year spans before and after the creation of the Federal Reserve, we find there were the same number in the same period (unless we see ANOTHER recession between now and 2013) Would an apologist for Dr. Paul care to interpret this statement for me so it makes sense? I'm quite curious what Dr. Paul is implying here. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this statement, but Dr. Paul seems to be implying that if we got rid of the Federal Reserve, we wouldn't have economic downturns. After all, he's saying Federal Reserve Policy is the cause of all economic downturns, is he not? My question is: why were there economic downturns before the Federal Reserve? A followup question: How did the Federal Reserve cause the 1973 Oil Crisis? -- I could go on, but for those of you who think that we should abolish the Federal Reserve: do you feel there's a need for a lender of last resort? Do you feel the problems that caused the Panic of 1907 are still applicable today, and if so, how would you address those problems without a central banking system? I think Dr. Paul is myopic in that he does not seem to be considering the problems the Federal Reserve was created to address, problems which only seem to me to be exacerbated by the present day economy versus the economy of 100 years ago. I don't think Americans are capable of dealing with both a fiat currency and a commodity currency, and I don't think any commodity can address the volume of currency needed by the American economy. I think eliminating the Federal Reserve will cause at least as many problems as it solves. Bottom line, I don't think Dr. Paul's suggestions are practical whatsoever.

No, I'm talking about the "Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008" I think it's really disingenuous to say this legislation isn't a product of Bush because Paulson wrote it when Paulson was Bush's treasury secretary and the legislation was vocally supported by Bush.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090206/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/bailout_oversight Not sure how I missed this one (ten days old at this point) but a Congressional oversight panel's study shows that Paulson overvalued the stocks of ailing financial companies by tens of billions. Paulson is gone, but Neel Kashkari, a holdover from the Bush Administration, remains in charge of the program, and has defended the Treasury Department's valuation of the stocks. Neel Kashkari heads the "Office of Financial Stability." I wonder why this guy still has his job. Shouldn't Obama fire him for such a gross oversight?

Are you unfamiliar with metonymy? When I say "The White House supports the stimulus bill", I don't literally mean the building supports the stimulus bill, but rather the people inside it, namely the President and his cabinet. Similarly, I don't see a problem with calling the 2008 Bush Bailout Bill the 2008 Bush Bailout Bill because it was authored by a member of Bush's cabinet and vocally supported by Bush. Zuh? If Obama's ideas work the country will already be the loser? I hate to break it to you but the country is already a loser, and it's not Obama's fault, it's Bush's. Welcome to the Bush recession. We're just in damage control mode at this point.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/singularity-uni.html Scientists at NASA and Google have come together to create Singularity University, a nine-week seminar on technological singularity, i.e. a fancy word for when robots take over the world, or something. Personally I'm all for this!

In the light of the stimulus bill, what are your thoughts in regard to Obama and the Democratic Party's attempts at bipartisanship? I've left this poll publicly viewable, but if you're too lazy to see what I voted and am curious what I think, I think Obama has given the Republicans a fair shake and they are simply being stubborn and hypocritical. What do you think? (Note: This poll pertains primarily to the stimulus as it's the most significant piece of legislation since Obama took office)

It may be the same song, but it's not the same album

When you make an AAC/MP3 file you're running it through Fourier transforms, filter banks, building a Huffman tree out of it, etc. You end up with a compressed version of the original work which sounds similar to human listeners but will contain a number of dissimilarities.

I could understand it if people were distributing hacked versions of the iPhone software (IPSW). However, that's not how it works. A legitimate iPhone purchaser downloads the new IPSW through iTunes, runs a tool on it, then flashes their phone with the modified image. How is that not fair use? Is it illegal to make mix CDs for personal use? I think it is completely within fair use rights to create "unauthorized derivative versions" of copyrighted works entirely for personal use. They're asserting that their software is in some sort of final form and any modifications by the end user are illegal. What the crap? All that said I have a hacked iPhone and care little what Apple thinks of the legality of jailbreaking it. As far as I'm concerned I'm completely within my fair use rights. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedSomething ironic I just realized: Apple is claiming it is not fair use to produce derivative versions of copyrighted works for personal use. However, that's exactly what iTunes does: it makes AAC/MP3 files out of your copyrighted CDs. It also lets you build playlists of these copyrighted songs and burn them onto mix CDs.

Solution: Avoid pointers, and when you absolutely must use them, use smart pointers, or at the very least auto_ptr Also: C++ hurts my head

Use a service like http://gist.github.com, http://pastie.org, http://pastebin.com, etc. Then post a link here.

I pursue neuroscience for the same direction as Hawkins: I want to know how brains work so I can build them inside of computers. Hawkins theories are quite convenient from my perspective, but as I understand it they're built on theories in neuroscience (namely about the role of the neocortical column) which are still disputed. Here's a video of Jeff Hawkins presenting Hierarchical Temporal Memory to a combined panel of neuroscientists and computer scientists. Skip to 40 minutes in or so to see some realtime peer review: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2500845581503718756&ei=-WyTSYKsLae4qAPziJHXDA Yes, if nothing else a Turing machine is sequential whereas a brain is massively concurrent and asynchronous.