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I would love for the Republicans to get better as well. However the quote from Eric Cantor is just outright lies and hypocrisy. And it's not like he's Freshman Representative McDouchebag. He is a member of the Republican House leadership. To get better, I think the Republicans need to be a bit more vigilant about finding leaders who can make well-reasoned arguments and aren't, well, evil. Their current MO seems to be disseminate arguments full of "truthiness" and to have the whole party on point with them. If the Republicans want to get better, this needs to change. Well, I don't see them spouting outright lies about their opponents... I leave that as "guess we'll find out soon"

I think you missed my point completely. I guess I'll just leave it where I left it in my original post. I think the word "terrorist" has become diluted to the same level of offensiveness that was once afforded to "communist". I feel that among conservatives circles they leverage the same level of criticism against "liberals". These are not words that carry definitive meaning. These are words leveraged by a particular social group against a particular social outgroup. I see it as little more than neo-McCarthyism.

http://www.altmuslim.com/a/a/a/3110/ So here's an interesting story: within the span of two days, Dr. George Tiller was assassinated by Scott Roeder, and two US Army recruiters were assassinated by Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad. Muhammad was charged with terrorism. Roeder was not charged with terrorism. What exactly is the distinguishing factor in these two cases? According to Wikipedia (lol) terrorism is: I'm unclear on how the actions of Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad qualify as terrorism while the actions of Scott Roeder do not. I think either they're both terrorists, or neither of them are. I will refrain from suggesting that Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad is being considered a terrorist because he's a Muslim. Oh wait, I indirectly suggested it! Whoops! Yeah, honestly, I feel like this is neo-McCarthyism, with the Muslim world as our enemy instead of the USSR, and "terrorist" being the new "communist". What do you think?

And what kind of lies are those? Is he suggesting the Democrats have pushed through over $2 trillion dollars (i.e "trillions") in new spending? Honestly, why does CNN even print this stuff? The guy is stating things which are simply not true (not to mention he's a total hypocrite). This would be a good opportunity for CNN to use the good old quote-transition journalistic format to transition to someone who actually scrutinized the baldfaced lies coming out of this guy's mouth, but no, they just print it verbatim and move on.

Totally badass... Obama seems to do a great job of doing something that makes me love him shortly after doing something that pisses me off. I love the Republican reaction: It seems a tad disingenious of Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia to talk about the debt created by Obama when he voted for the Bush-sponsored bailout bill and thus participated in creating the highest budget deficit in history after years of record budget deficits. I'd say he's also quite a bit off on his maths. The YTD budget deficit is $697 billion. In 2008 over a TRILLION dollars was added to the US national debt, thanks to a bill this clown voted for. To add insult to injury, Obama is now trying to fix the problem. And this guy is... criticizing him for it? Am I supposed to interpret his statements as meaning he doesn't like PAYGO and is against trying to reduce the deficit? I'm curious, does anyone actually take Republicans seriously anymore, or are they some sad pathetic parody?

I suggest you read about the Church-Turing Thesis. What you're describing isn't computation. While I can see a future where the physical operation of a processor becomes more probabilistic and error prone, you are not going to get away from the notion of a computer being something which has a state it can deterministically act upon. Otherwise, what you have isn't a computer. I think distributed computing is the future, and that future will come in the form of communicating sequential processes. That's how all distributed computer systems work: they are merely networks of communicating Von Neumann machines. The idea of communicating sequential processes is also immensely effective in leveraging multicore computers. In fact, some of the key things limiting advancement of multicore computer designs are the fact that multicore CPUs aren't being designed around the communicating sequential process model. Most multicore CPUs are designed to run a single system image, which adds all sorts of arcane technical requirements to the design like cache coherency. I foresee the traditional relational database disappearing and getting replaced by simple key value stores, particularly ones based around ideas like distributed hash tables. It sounds like you want a dataflow language. I'm almost reluctant to link this because it's creator is a crackpot, but perhaps this is what you're thinking of: http://www.rebelscience.org/Cosas/quicksort.htm COSA is an idea for a "language" (presently unimplemented) where you program with a bunch of drag and drop components with little pins you can plug together. I do not think this is a very practical idea, particularly for developing complex applications. Math is not a programming language. You're comparing apples to oranges. That said, I've found there are people who think of programming language more like math (who are typically attracted to functional languages) and ones who like to think of languages as working more like natural language (who are typically attracted to imperative languages). I suppose I lean more towards the natural language side of things. I like my language to be flexible rather than rigid. I'd rather it have a large expressive grammar than a tiny minimalistic one. I like having procedures that do things because I tell them to, rather than functions which take only arguments as inputs and do nothing but return a value. Over time I have come to think more like a functional programmer, but to me I will never think about programming as if it were math.

Integrated circuits using mesh interconnect (e.g. NUMA) can form connections with other integrated circuits. The process is a logical one rather than the physical one you see with neurons, but the idea is the same. Integrated circuits do not "form algorithms", rather they execute algorithms as a byproduct of their operation.

The noises you are hearing are quadrature amplitude modulation, which is where modems derive their name from (they are modulator/demodulators)

Sorry to dodge your questions and go off on a tangent, but: The Turing Test provides a nice solution to the p-zombie problem, which suggests that there can exist things which appear to be conscious but aren't conscious. If conversation with an intelligent computer program is indistinguishable from conversation with a human, then what difference does it make if the computer program doesn't contain some magical mystical metaphysical undefinable quality of consciousness that philosophers like John Searle would argue something like the Chinese Room lacks?

I don't forsee a revolution so much as an evolution of existing concepts and making them more usable. Ummm... no, nothing of the sort. Those are extremely imperative concepts which fail in a concurrent environment. To address the issue of concurrent programs, I see a complete abandonment of "normal thread synchronisation techniques" and a tradition to an evolution of existing concepts, particularly: Software transactional memory Communicating sequential processes Process calculus / join calculus I think languages that handle concurrency well will combine two or more these within the same environment.

Well, there was this announced last month: http://www.physorg.com/news161456485.html

You can read lots of speculation on that subject here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity

A neuron is comparable to an integrated circuit (i.e. "computer chip") however an individual neuron is far less complicated than your average CPU. You can think of your brain as being a massively complex network of computer chips if you so desire.

Writing correct programs using "normal thread synchronisation techniques" is extremely difficult, hence the final sentence in my statement: You can substitute C for C++ there (although C++ actually provides some niceities for making mutex locking a little more automatic) It all goes back to the general issue that writing correct concurrent programs is hard. There are a number of languages trying to address concurrency, like Erlang , Haskell, and Clojure. All of these are functional languages with rather novel approaches to concurrency which don't rely on "normal thread synchronisation techniques". That said Erlang wouldn't work at all on something like the Cell since its additional cores aren't general purpose CPUs and the ring-based interconnect makes message passing-based concurrency perform poorly. That said Erlang works wonderfully on CPUs with large numbers of general purpose cores and a mesh interconnect like the Tile64. One of my favorite quotes about the difficulties of traditional approaches to threading comes from the book Java Concurrency in Practice:

The stated goal of the BlueBrain project specifically precludes trying to create strong AI. They're simply trying to do neocortical simulations. In the near term I think tools like NuPIC provide a much shorter path towards strong AI.

100% agree, and that's why Obama's plan for preventative detention is so frustrating.

We now return to your regularly scheduled thread...

This is correct Correction: the graph showed a decreasing negative forcing response beginning around 1980, which does correlate to the time when emission of sulfate pollutants began to decrease globally. At the very end (towards the late '80s/early '90s) it does show an increasing negative forcing response. I cannot explain that. In order to make that claim (observed "facts" plural) you would need to point out an additional fact the graph cannot be reconciled with. Just because the little purple line turns down at 1990 doesn't cause the whole house of cards to come crashing down. This is the case with climate modeling in general: while there are some inaccuracies, they are more than made up for by successes in other areas. If I could find an updated graph based on a more recent simulation I would, however I cannot. I suspect they don't get made very often for just this reason: plotting the modeled forcing responses over time will be error-prone. I believe that's why charts like the one iNow linked earlier showing the overall trends are what are commonly disseminated: But, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here... Because the argument it's being "trotted out" against is substantially poorer: That chart, despite its inaccuracies, is easy for laymen to read as compared to the one shown earlier in this post as part of IPCC AR4.

It isn't. For example, prokaryotic translation and eukaryotic translation differs. What do you mean "why is there only one kind of life"? There are many kinds of life. There are prokaryotes and eukaryotes who operate on a sort of quantity vs quality strategy. There are six kingdoms of life. Are you asking why all lifeforms use ribosomes to transcribe RNA into protein? The ostensible answer to that question is what Mokele described: "because any previous forms are extinct." Lifeforms based on ribosomes outcompeted all other forms for resources and all the other forms went extinct. The last universal common ancestor of all life on earth had ribosomes, and thus all descendant forms of life did as well. That said, it's not like the ribosomes found in all lifeforms are the same. There is dramatic variation in the ribosomes found in prokaryotes and eukaryotes, for example.

Even this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report Yes, there are natural climate forcings at play too, but... ...there are also anthropogenic greenhouse gases which are dramatically outpacing the natural forcings driving climate change. The evidence is extensively documented in IPCC AR4 WGI: The Physical Science Basis. This is an extremely large report, but fortunately, they've boiled it down to a single sentence summary: where "very likely" is footnoted as: I've noticed your post provides nothing in the way of things like evidence or well-reasoned argumentation in the form of peer-reviewed scientific literature. You might want to work on that.

Well, I hope you'd admit that your average mammal is a hell of a lot more conscious than your average "sea kitten" As a cat owner (something else PETA considers wrong, I guess) I think it's deplorable to consider peabrained fish to kittens. There's no doubt in my mind that cats are conscious. Your average fish most certainly is not. You might be able to make a case for sharks, but what about minnows? Salmon? Tuna?

I thought this was interesting: crazy Singularity futurist Ray Kurzweil has accepted a bet from some angel investor I've never heard of: http://www.longbets.org/1 The bet is simple: will a computer pass the Turing Test by 2029? What do you think? I think it's entirely possible, but when you start talking about near-term hard dates like 20 years in the future it seems like little more than a guess. If they changed the betting window 50 years (i.e. 2059), then my answer would be a definitive yes. Note that this is more than just a friendly wager. If the angel investor wins, Kurzweil will donate $20,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If Kurzweil wins, then $20,000 goes to the Kurzweil Foundation. I certainly wouldn't be willing to put money on a bet like this.

I think the bigger question is "why is the universe non-uniform" If I had to guess, it would be because I believe our universe is the result of cosmological natural selection

Erlang is reputed for its ugly syntax, which is a real shame because it has some beautiful semantics. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged I love programming for fun, however I typically program to accomplish a particular goal, not just for programming for programming's sake. With a language like Ruby I can come up with a nifty idea for a web site and have a working prototype finished in a matter of days. When I was younger I certainly loved trying to take an idea and map it directly to the Von Neumann machine model, and being able to do that was fun in and of itself. The straw that broke the camel's back for me was trying to implement a large, complex system in C. I spent 4 years trying to develop a program (unsuccessfully) and eventually came to the realization that C was a poor language for modeling complex problems.

See Max Tegmark's paper: Importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes I think it's also interesting to note that the only reputable physicist who chose to advocate quantum mind mumbo jumbo (Roger Penrose) chose to do so in the form of a book instead of publishing a peer-reviewed scientific paper on the subject.