The organized religions of the world called. They want their conservatism back.

I can and will assume that a random someone replying on slashdot in a way that disparages scientific research is a lotnless intelligent than someone doing actual research and engineering, winning a prize in a real competition. Presumptuous? Perhaps but quite easy to check if the GP tells slashot of the scientific advances they made in their lifetime.

Yet it is often someone "naive", who isn't held back by preconceived notions that are no longer applicable in a changed world, that make discoveries or inventions. Besides, since this person is obviously a lot smarter than you, the old adage comes into play: those who say it cannot be done should never interrupt the one doing it.

There's an inherent information disparity between businesses and employees that makes your position untenable. And since anarcho capitalists like you abhor unions, you are advertising for the exploitation of workers to fund the coffers of the "happy few".

My sentiment, too. However there are some tweaks and extensions to make to your proposal:
- Legalise all 'recreational drugs' but tax them according to the cost to society (this must include nicotine, alcohol and even NOx, too.) The tax levied should compensate for medical costs (such as for OD treatment), damages, cost of policing/monitoring the chains of production, quality control, education, other prevention measures etc.
- Make production of drugs something you have to get a license for. Preferably, the pharmaceutical industry is offered the chance to produce recreational drugs but only if they produce enough new types of medical drugs each year or risk losing their 'right to produce'. In the startup phase, make hunting drug shipments a priority with bonusses for police/border patrol that intercept drugs and then refine the drugs and sell them as government. Competing with drug cartels using their own drugs will quickly dissuade them from trying to smuggling drugs in.
- If you commit a crime or cause an accident while under the influence of anything that impairs cognition, reaction time etc., you are treated as fully culpable with aggravated punishment.
- If you want to buy drugs, you have to pass a test on the effects and risks of the drug. This will give you a right to buy (for instance using a creditcard like pass with your fingerprint) a limited amount of that drug per time period (to limit redistribution and use, yes this will cause an issue for heavy drinkers and use in social settings such as bars. That is fine with me.)

All in all, the bizarre part of all of this is (and has been for as long as drugs have been illegal) is that conservatives want /less/ control by the government but want to deny a large part of the population their right to make decisions about their own life. Yearly, lots of people die doing 'recreational things' like driving motor cycles, jumping parachute, climbing (or even just walking in the) mountains, skiing, diving, etc. etc. etc. and a proposal to get those banned or heavily regulated wouldn't even pass the first discussion. So why are 'drugs' different? There is no real reason. It is, as you say, mostly driven by ulterior motives that don't relate to the substances themselves at all. Oh well, a person can dream.

Indeed, let's wait and see. For now, even though the mechanism underneath may be unclear, I don't see proof of a more complex mechanism at work. Many complex human cognitive skills (Chess, Go, visual recognition, language recognition, etc.) have been replicated with machines to a varying degree and I dare wager that all of them will be at some point in time with nothing more than 'neural networks'. If some quantum effect or other esotheric mechanism is indeed involved in memory storage, I doubt it will change the working of these cognitive parts of the equation. On the other hand, I don't expect such networks to become 'aware' so yes, I think there is more to human minds than just neural network capacity :).

Humans make the same mistake when the visual differences are confusing or contradictory and we avoid them usually because our way of judging is based on the way we learn in the first place: large features first, only considering finer details if further classification is needed or if the larger features give too little information. Visual tricks that play into this can confuse humans even where they may not confuse AI.

Examples: sometimes it is hard to see if someone is male or female. We then call that person androgyn but factually it is a failure of our classification system. Some forms of optical illusions are the same: they deliberately take advantage of the way people (fail to) discern between 'objects'.

I think it is time to admit that our brains aren't too special. They really are nothing more than weighted networks that take inputs filter them and classify them. Ideas may be nothing more than a way for the brain to code and store the results. If that is true, then the 'human advantage' may be in that specific area: the greater ability to store and use these results as further input.

The difference between alpha and beta testing:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Diff...

Enough said.

My thoughts exactly.

(I explicitly browsed through all comments to see if this remark was made, yet :)

In reality, there is of course only a percentual difference between having everything be nothing or 'nearly' nothing if you look at atoms as being mostly empty anyway.

My 'Whoa. Déjà vu" was actually a smart ass reference to The Matrix because if everything is essentially non-existant, then what is the difference between our reality and a virtual reality simulation.

Cool stuff!

I wasn't aware that this is an implication of finding the Higgs. If that is true... Whoa. Déjà vu.

I'd mod you to +6, if only I could. So we'll just leave it at heart felt: if only Timothy would be running on Debian (the person, not his computer.)

I had the exact same association with GEM, but the link you provided really made me relive moments from over 25 odd years ago in college where I first saw that beast called GEM. Seeing your #id, I guess our lawns are in the same street.

negating failed mod

... is pretty cheap (5$ is for a family account). But as BB itself says, you can only upload 2 to 4 GB per day.

They should be making a mint on that service! They use home-brew storage pods and are very open about it, too!
http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/

Anyway, be careful to read all the gotchas:
http://www.backblaze.com/remote-backup-everything.html (hint: 'everything' for a certain definition of everything. No virtual machines, ISO's and NAS storage by default.)
http://www.backblaze.com/internet-backup.html (hint: not all OSes are treated equally.)

(Full disclosure: I work for a storage manufacturer that sells de-duping storage so I think I understand their cost model a bit better than most.)