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I guess we're talking past each other at this point. Do you understand that all humans are criminals, but littering isn't as bad as murder? If by "this" you mean they wax eloquent about the sanctity of marriage as they commit adultery, well, that is fairly exclusive to Republicans as most Democrats support gay rights.

And really quick, how many lives do those escapades have a negative impact on versus denying gays basic civil rights? Are you having trouble understanding why hypocrisy is meaningful in this case? You're comparing a politician getting expensive haircuts with denying gay partners all over the country hospital visits. It's apples and oranges, dude.

Well, they've been making it so easy for me lately... Two wrongs make a right! But to reiterate from my first post, John Edwards isn't out there trying to "protect" the "sanctity of marriage" from those lewd and unseemly gays. He's still adamant about this position despite being caught in an act of adultery: http://www.sanford2012.org/

Emotion plays a huge part in social interaction. Do you think it's just a coincidence that the same part of our brain which recognizes faces also couples emotions with memories? Socialization is how we acquire natural language as well as world knowledge. They also stimulate us to various forms of action. While I think it might be possible to create an entity with consciousness comparable to a human while remaining devoid of emotion, I really can't fathom how such a being would behave or interact.

I certainly don't mind licensing/background checks, however I do think there needs to be a way to expedite the process for the purposes of things like gun shows. There are many things that are designed to kill which are still fun to own. This knife was designed to inflict maximum damage on internal organs: http://www.spyderco.com/catalog/details.php?product=60 Should we therefore ban it? I'd kind of like to have one actually. I think a decorative mace (like the spiky ball kind) would be pretty cool as well

I think we're kind of seeing it in the form of Netbooks. Many people these days can do everything in a web browser and don't need any actual installed software. That said, Netbooks are still absurdly powerful compared to what computers used to be just a few years ago. They're not really "thin" in the traditional sense. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged That doesn't make sense. Why not do it in software?

Watch out, someone might taser you and stab you with a knife Or shoot you with a crossbow Or they could lob high explosives at you Perhaps they're an expert at knife throwing

The fact that the digital computer you're sitting at works at all is a pretty good testament to the validity of logic.

Has anyone ever informed you that cars are deadly weapons? Maybe we should ban cars

(LOL Faux Noise and D/R) So it seems the South Carolina governor who disappeared a few days ago on an apparent hiking trip has been found! Has been found... having an extramarital affair with some Argentinian woman. Yes, those Republicans, they sure know how to preserve the sanctity of marriage. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/sc-governor-quits-gop-post-in-wake-of-affair Oh, and he quit. Is it me or is "Republican hypocrisy" just completely redundant at this point?

I have a friend with a semi-auto AK. It's fun to shoot. I don't think it should be banned and can't really see someone actually picking it for the purposes of crime over a handgun (which is lighter, more easily concealed, and for the purposes of most crimes will be just as effective)

Systems programming is really hard and tedious because it's so difficult to debug.

These people have Crysis running over a remote display protocol: http://www.onlive.com/ The Sun Ray protocol (as well as RDP and many others) support 3D over remote display protocols.

I can, and it's devoid and meaningless...

Because it would seem terrorism is a term applied to other things which are already crimes in the event they are crimes intended to influence public policy. Therefore terrorism is something of a meta-crime and in that respect it is unique. Personally I don't think it should be considered a crime in and of itself, but if we are going to make it a crime, I'd prefer it be well-defined and enforced consistently, at least in America. Aren't "we" as a nation "at war" against the nebulous concept of terror? If "terror" is a national enemy, I hope the nation defines it the same way across the board. The definition of things like murder and larceny are relatively clear cut compared to terrorism. What exactly is terrorism? You clearly had one definition in mind, and thought it was in fact spelled out in the US PATRIOT act when it was not, but does that make your definition wrong? Civilian actions on military personnel seem like a pretty clear case of terrorism in my mind too, but that doesn't fall under any legal definition of terrorism I'm able to find. Terrorism is a nebulous enough concept to begin with, we don't need Texas or Alaska off creating their own definition of terrorism. Muhammud killed two people. Two people means terrorism? So terrorism is defined as "instilling terror"? In who? Certainly Roeder most likely brought several members of that church to a state of terror. Does that count? It would appear the colloquial definition of terrorism, at least as cited in Wikipedia, would be creating terror such that it brings about changes in public policy. As far as my personal opinion of how Roeder vs. Muhammud's actions go, perhaps I'm just a pessamist, but I see a rash of abortion doctor assassinations bringing about the end of abortion in America (no doctors willing to perform abortions due to fear of getting shot) a hell of a lot sooner than I can see the military pulling recruiters off the streets due to fear of terrorists or actual policy changes coming about due to the killings of Army recruiters. In all likelyhood, I think Roeder was much closer to bringing about the end of abortion than Muhammud was towards bringing the US military to a particular course of action that Muhammud would've found desirable.

I am a strong advocate of gun rights, both as a gun owner and as a civil libertarian

We could... I think the important thing to remember about the brain is that it's made up of a few large macrostructures which implement the majority of the function and tons of tons of microstructures (most inherited from the limbic system, a.k.a. the "reptillian brain") which provide tuning or specific functions which are essential to consciousness or the way the conscious parts of our brain interact with the world. While it's possible to build a brain without them, I think any attempts at AI are going to have to start with them in place until we can empirically determine which brain structures are "unnecessary" or could function in a different way. Emotion is pretty central to the way human consciousness works. I imagine a conscious entity without emotion would function much like an autistic, perhaps able to understand complex patterns in the world but unable to relate to other people. I hope the first conscious entity we create is able to communicate with other humans as if it were a human itself

Amygdalae appear to play a role in the formation of memory, and are very much influenced by emotion. Note that amygdalae are suspected as the cause of both autism and schizophrenia

In most remote display protocols, a virtual framebuffer (rather than the physical framebuffer) is transmitted to the remote host. Same idea, just done in software rather than hardware. Yes, in particular see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray Indeed, there's little point in thin clients when you can get a gigahertz netbook for around $250

I hate the idea of compulsory voting. The last thing we need is people casting a vote with dubious reasoning: "I voted for the guy who the polls said was ahead!" As for open source voting, it's the only way I'd cast an e-vote. That said I vote on paper.

You ask reasonable questions, unlike some people around here...

So you're basically saying we shouldn't expect charges of terrorism to apply consistently, only when the federal government wishes to intervene? I'd be fine with that. Terrorism is certainly something that should be defined at the federal level, not the state level, and should carry with it a federal charge. I don't want 50 different definitions of terrorism. Why? Why do you feel it will weaken the case against Roeder but not against Muhammud? Perhaps charges of terrorism aren't something we should leave up to individual prosecutors at a local/state level.

So it seems "terrorism" is a label you slap onto a crime when it's convenient to your prosecution? That's a nice definition. Well, questions like this are at the heart of the topic of this thread. Why does shooting a doctor qualify as terrorism? If terrorism is defined as violence for the purposes of "exerting pressure on decision making by state bodies" then I see little difference between shooting a doctor because he performs abortions and you want the government to ban abortions versus shooting military recruiters because you don't want the government at war in the middle east.

Rather than telling us "go fish", perhaps you'd care to point out the specific provisions in the PATRIOT act which make this an act of terror by definition. Reading the overview here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_PATRIOT_Act I'm not seeing specific provisions as to how targeting military personnel makes a particular act an act of terror.

Consciousness is built on what Hofstadter calls "strange loops", you could consider them to be feedbacks joined with some sort of mechanism that takes things up a level of abstraction. Physically these are manifested as cortico-thalamo-cortical loops, with the cortex providing additional levels of abstraction, or at least that's the theory I ascribe to. It's my belief that reproducing consciousness in a computer will involve reproducing and understanding the complex connections between: - the cortex: this has been implemented in software as part of the NuPIC software and the BlueBrain project - the thalamus: no known software implementations to date, and its structure/function still remains largely a mystery, afaik - the hippocampus: this is a comparatively easy-to-understand part of the brain whose function has now been modeled mathematically after slicing it up piece by piece Combine all these pieces together, potentially with some ancillary structures like the amygdala and the locus coeruleus, and you'll begin to have the underpinnings of human-like consciousness.