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WHOA! http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/14/bush.iraq/index.html?section=cnn_topstories

Well, they kind of did the same thing to Saddam's nuclear enrichment program in the '80s, you know... Also... http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/world/3517059.html

Iran scares the shit out of me. I mean, when my best hope is that Israelis fly in American-made planes over American-controlled Iraqi airspace to go bomb Iran and hope THAT doesn't cause a political clusterf*ck, the situation is bad...

Parasites feed off a living host. Predators feed off of dead ones (which they hunt, kill, and devour) Isn't it just that cut and dry?

People get freaked out when they walk into my room and see books strewn about everywhere with various cards, bookmarks, page folds, or other assorted objects acting as placeholders. At any given time I'm actively reading 2-3 books and what books I'm presently reading tend to change quite frequently, with some of those various books strewn about the room swapping into the rotation at various times. All of the books I'm reading are presently nonfiction, usually "dumbed down" approaches to complex topics (i.e. not horribly permeated throughout with specialist jargon or any higher level ideas) Given this approach, it usually takes me about a month or two to finish a book (~500 pgs usually) that I'm really interested. Others I have been working on, chapters or even smaller sections at a time, for years. Anyway, the first thing people ask me when they see the mess of books in my room and I describe the way I read is "How can you stand to do that?!" I guess it's just what naturally happens from my lifelong interaction with computers and constantly starting/stopping projects, multitasking, and mode switching. I'd like to think computers have trained me to be more flexible But consequently, I tend to read "slowly" So, your turn!

Instiki! Although a cooler toy to play with right now is Semantic MediaWiki

Sounds like you're describing autism there. I consider myself to have a healthy social life... I throw parties, go to parties, go to bars, clubs, hang out with my friends on a near daily basis, etc. But Jethro Tull said it best... I try to socialize but I can't seem to find what I was lookin' for... got somethin' on my mind...

Ick, using deceptive, pathological memes for marketing. Sinking to the level of the Blair Witch Project, now that's low...

Not that I want to derail the thread, but that statement ignores the fact that it'd be happening if humans never existed.

I think it's certainly possible that there is life on other planets which uses mechanisms fundamentally the same as our own cells: DNA, RNA, and protein, encapsulated in a cellular container with complex, multicellular lifeforms built out of these cells. Of course, I doubt the machinery of these cells would look anything like the eukaryotic cell...

Are you trying to tell me that an inmate given life without parole imprisoned in a Supermax Prison poses a risk to anyone? Maybe in the movies...

I said there's no absolute metric of guilt, and also stated my opinion if there was. Yet we still execute the innocent. Holy specious reasoning batman! Let's deconstruct this argument really quick and point out how flawed this kind of reasoning is... 1) Not everyone who commits murder is put on death row 2) People on death row can still be released In order for the death penalty to be effective in preventing these kinds of deaths the above would have to be reversed: those convicted of murder must instantly be put to death. And last I checked: 1) People on death row can still escape 2) People on death row can still murder guards or other inmates So again, the only way the death penalty can be effective in preventing these situations is if the penalty is carried out immediately after the trial. This would dramatically increase the number of innocents executed, and consequently the only way these murders could've been prevented by capital punishment is to increase the number of innocents executed. But apparently you don't find the state executing innocent people to be more morally reprehensible than a deranged individual murdering innocent people. I hope you can hold the state to a higher standard than a murderer.

DING DING! We have a winner!

With absolute certainty? No. We use a "reasonable doubt" metric which has a margin of error. Russ Feingold cited the following statistics in his argument against capital punishment: http://www.senate.gov/~feingold/speeches/senfloor/moratoriuminroduction.html Actual guilt and what the system establishes are two different things. I prefer a scientific approach: that every guilty verdict is potentially falsifiable given enough evidence. I do not think we can say with absolute certainty that anyone is a murderer. If someone is found guilty of a murder and given a life sentence, and new evidence comes to light to exhonorate them, you can always let them out of prison. If someone is found guilty of a murder and given the death penalty, and new evidence comes to light to exhonorate them, then the state has made a horrible, unforgivable mistake. There is no excuse for executing innocent people. Even if there were some magical absolute metric by which we could ascertain that someone was a murderer, I would not support the death penalty. I consider it blatent hypocrisy to solve the problem of a murderer with state-condoned murder.

Even if you had evidence to present that the death penalty proves a more effective deterrent than life imprisonment, how can you use this to justify the inevitable execution of the innocent?

You're using a deterministic algorithm to produce these numbers, therefore there is a pattern to them, therefore they are not random.

Yes, last I checked the US emits 25% of the world's CO2. However the largest concentration of NO2 sits above Beijing and northeast China. According to the 2005 National Research Council report, nitrogen deposition would appear to be a first order climate forcing. This biogeochemical forcing results in significant alterations in the physical components of the climate system such as the surface albedo, and the partioning of atmospheric turbulence into sensible and latent heat components, which subsequently affects all other aspects of the climate system. The modeling of the influence on long-term weather due to nitrogen deposition is in its early infancy. However, even now it needs to be recognized that this non-radiative biogeochemical climate forcing must be accounted for in any assessment of the relative and absolute role of the diversity of different human climate forcings.

I am adamantly opposed to the death penalty. Especially in this case: this was a reformed man whose efforts almost earned him a Nobel Peace Prize. It all gets back to "Why do we kill people who kill people to prove that killing is wrong?"

This is the closest thing I've ever seen to this concept. People keep telling me to be more skeptical about them but, well, I haven't seen any particularly good arguments leveled against their methodology: http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

The Singularity describes when the course of sociotechnological evolution ceases to be guided by humans as they exist now and becomes guided by either transhumans (with technologically augmented intelligence) or strong AI A DNI would allow everyone to think with the sum of human knowledge as their working memory...

It's as big an issue as there is in the entire universe, but it's totally irrelevant to the computability of consciousness...

Why do we have to prove the logical consistency of consciousness in order to implement it as a computer program? What computer program is logically consistent? This is a non-issue...

It's because all life on Earth is really just one enormous chemical chain reaction, so we all share heredity with the progenotes, which likely started as entirely RNA based ("RNA world") then later adapted to incorporate DNA and proteins. No other variants on this model managed to have descendants which survived to this day (to our knowledge) As to the feasibility of non-DNA/RNA/protein based life, I'm not a chemist so I don't even want to venture a guess.