Slashdot Mirror

No. Sorry to be blunt, but you have misunderstood. You should read this paper, and re-read it, until you have understood the nature of the problem. It isn't that there are no classical variables - it's that hidden variables of any type are provably impossible according to the experimental results. This is why Einstein asked "is the moon there when we are not looking?" Experiment shows that the particles cannot have properties (and therefore cannot be part of reality in a classical sense) while they are in superposition. Since they share properties instantaneously at the moment of collapse, they must share information.

Some quotes:

According to the Laboratory Record Argument below, there are no things (elements of reality, properties,
“quantum events”, etc.) the relative frequencies of which could be equal to quantum probabilities.

As this simple example illustrates, no matter whether or not we are able to com-
municate with EPR equipment, the very fact that we observe correlations which
cannot be accommodated in the causal order of the world is still an embarrassing
metaphysical problem.

Causality itself is upended by quantum mechanics. There isn't a classical explanation, and there isn't a comfortable interpretation. Experiment shows that our reality is built on logical impossibilities. Every physicist that has understood this problem has been deeply disturbed by it (Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, Pauli, Schrodinger, Bell, Feynman) . It is fundamentally misrepresenting the science to pretend that there's a classical answer (or an easy answer) to quantum mechanical behavior.

A bit of pedantry that I think is very important: two entangled objects have no classical hidden variables. The wave equation is nothing if not hidden variables - they're just not linearly related to any classical observables.

No. Sorry to be blunt, but you have misunderstood. You should read this paper, and re-read it, until you have understood the nature of the problem. It isn't that there are no classical variables - it's that hidden variables of any type are provably impossible according to the experimental results. This is why Einstein asked "is the moon there when we are not looking?" Experiment shows that the particles cannot have properties (and therefore cannot be part of reality in a classical sense) while they are in superposition.

Some quotes:

According to the Laboratory Record Argument below, there are no things (elements of reality, properties,
“quantum events”, etc.) the relative frequencies of which could be equal to quantum probabilities.

As this simple example illustrates, no matter whether or not we are able to com-
municate with EPR equipment, the very fact that we observe correlations which
cannot be accommodated in the causal order of the world is still an embarrassing
metaphysical problem.

Causality itself is upended by quantum mechanics. There isn't a classical explanation, and there isn't a comfortable interpretation. Experiment shows that our reality is built on logical impossibilities. Every physicist that has understood this problem has been deeply disturbed by it (Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, Pauli, Schrodinger, Bell, Feynman) . It is fundamentally misrepresenting the science to pretend that there's a classical answer (or an easy answer) to quantum mechanical behavior.

The fundamental problem which is lost on virtually everyone outside of very limited liberal arts circles is that there is no agreed upon, rational basis for morality. Without that, 'change the world for the better' becomes 'change the word to suit my preferences with a specious veil of objectivity'.

Living in a postmodern, emotivist culture, everything becomes a moral imperative with justifications of baseless assertions.

Emotivism and Manipulative Social Relations

"At present there are few practical uses for this new large prime, prompting some to ask "why search for these large primes"? Those same doubts existed a few decades ago until important cryptography algorithms were developed based on prime numbers. For seven more good reasons to search for large prime numbers, see here.

Much of the left believes in Critical Theory and thinks it's (or tries to portray it as) critical thinking.

Ermm, no. The earth being not flat and geocentrism being wrong were NOT ever basic natural laws. If you don't know what such laws entail, see http://www.iep.utm.edu/lawofna... , if you want examples, see http://physics.about.com/od/ph...

You'll note that flat Earth and geocentrism is not among them.

As for your last sentence: I just gave you the equations in one of my former posts that prove NG is still valid *within its domain and a specific frame of reference*. The GR *incorporated* it as a special case, thus, but NG remains as correct, or incorrect, as it has before. Just as the GR itself is. If your stance is that because it's an approximation and thus 'incorrect', then all laws are incorrect, because all laws are approximations. Which makes any debate over what is broken and not meaningless. Since I don't engage in meaningless debates, what is meant when talking about something being a law, and it being valid: it pertains to being valid WITHIN itts own domain and within a frame of reference. That's why I explicitly mentioned it as such in my very first post in this thread, yet some people say I'm wrong and then give an argument which is *outside* the domain of that law. It's like saying 'that horse is the fastest living being on that horse-track' and then trying to counter it with 'But that car is much much faster on the road." that's inconsequential and irrelevant. No doubt an airplane flying in the air will still be faster, just like a GUT will still be 'more correct' in more domains than even GR.

What 'works' and what is 'broken' is merely dependent on what frame of reference you use, and if it has predictive power within that frame. And the NG has that. The GR has it more and better. But that is inconsequential and irrelevant to the question if NG still has predictive value in its own domain.

A hybrid approach is to say that at least regarding our faith and our acceptance of God we have free will even if everything else about us is deterministic.

The problem with philosophy, as Descartes seemed to also think, is that it's very difficult to arrive at definite and incontrovertible truths about metaphysical things. But then, Christianity doesn't really care about that sort of thing anyway. Christianity is concerned with God, us, and our relationship to Him and to each other. Our freedom of will is sort of a fine point that doesn't really illuminate anything for much the same reasons as Descartes' rejection of substantial forms.

A hybrid approach is to say that at least regarding our faith and our acceptance of God we have free will even if everything else about us is deterministic.

The problem with philosophy, as Descartes seemed to also think, is that it's very difficult to arrive at definite and incontrovertible truths about metaphysical things. But then, Christianity doesn't really care about that sort of thing anyway. Christianity is concerned with God, us, and our relationship to Him and to each other. Our freedom of will is sort of a fine point that doesn't really illuminate anything for much the same reasons as Descartes' rejection of substantial forms.

this is likely true as the number 1 is not a prime number. https://primes.utm.edu/notes/f...

Sorry, I let a reference to Bishop Berkeley, who made all of these arguments long ago back in the heyday of the materialism vs idealism wars. The idealism argument lost to everybody who wasn't religious a couple of centuries ago:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/berkele...

I just didn't have the patience to walk through the entire tired argumentation associated with Berkeley and his tree falling in the quad and god and David Hume's empiricism that ultimately won the argument and ended the era of bullshit philosophy. But I can, if you like.

Several posts in the thread do a perfectly fine job of it, though. Solipsism cannot be refuted, but neither is there any good reason to think it is true. The same is the case for Berkeley's arguments. Scientific materialism, OTOH, is supported empirically to the extent that nobody seriously doubts it compared to the alternatives simply because there is no evidence to oppose it and every minute of our existences constitutes experience that tends to support it.

rgb

Uber wants to be above the law, or at the very least, encourage their drivers to break the law. This is not an ethical way to do business.

I agree that if you break the local laws wherever you are, you will be subject to the prescribed penalties. I also agree that not all laws are good things. For different reasons I agree that there are instances of Uber acting unethically (fake hailing Lyft rides, for instance, or misusing customer information).

I disagree that disobeying one or more regulations is, by definition, an unethical way to do business. There are cities where Uber is not allowed to pick up at the airport. And yet, when Uber drivers nonetheless pick up at those airports, the only thing harmed is the taxi oligopoly (and perhaps public respect for the regulatory system, which people can see is not being used for the public good but to prop up entrenched interests).

Like jaywalking laws and signage size ordinances, port authority pickup regulations do not invoke deep questions of right and wrong behavior (i.e. ethics), beyond the metaethical questions of the origin of morality and whether following The Law is a moral good in and of itself.

Now, if you want to argue that a law such as causality has only limited validity, you should at bare minimum be able to show that one can build a consistent model of reality without it

http://www.iep.utm.edu/hume-cau/

Slashdot Fallacies 101

This is an example of the Complex Question fallacy (several times). Each of these questions has a legitimate, objective, answer, and each can be neutrally phrased, but each question is phrased to presuppose a controversial point of view.

You use this fallacy when you frame a question so that some controversial presupposition is made by the wording of the question.

He's given up one dogmatic authority in his life, and chosen another (in that case, the dictionary).

Eh? The poster is merely using the dictionary as evidence of the meaning of the word in common use, not (necessarily) as an authority. Furthermore, the poster asked a simple question, to which you're presumably invited to answer. You're free to add your own evidence or reasoning to the discussion, but you haven't. You've only made the bizarre claim that being convinced by evidence has nothing to do with believing, and that you'd be confused if someone asked you whether you "believe" the theory of evolution. "Oh my, whatever do they mean? I'm so confused by the question!"

Seriously? You should do some reading on the topic. This is a topic on which there is a substantial body of work going back centuries.

http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html

I'm just trying to weigh the energy consumption versus potential benefit. The GIMPS homepage does a terrible job of explaining why (I'm not suggesting that there is no reason to do this) and a linked FAQ is hardly better ( http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html ). Can anyone provide a better answer or instruct those running the GIMPS homepage to do so?

I thought you might have taken the time to look things up, but apparently not. Let's recap then; Euclid proved that there are infinitely many primes in approx. 300 BC. The proof is very straightforward and has been repeated many times. See here for a canonical example. But wait, there's more. Bored mathematicians have found other proofs, usually perverse ones for amusement value. See, for example Goldbach's proof, or Furstenberg's topological proof.

Perhaps your going to say that those are just a touch hand-wavy and not "derived directly from mathematical laws". That would be a mistake, but we can cover that too: here is a proof that is conveniently completely machine verifiable and traceable back to formal axioms -- specifically first order predicate calculus and Zermelo Frankel set theory (we don't even need the axiom of choice!).

There are infinitely many primes. But don't trust me -- work through the metamath proof in all the gory details if you really still don't believe.

I thought you might have taken the time to look things up, but apparently not. Let's recap then; Euclid proved that there are infinitely many primes in approx. 300 BC. The proof is very straightforward and has been repeated many times. See here for a canonical example. But wait, there's more. Bored mathematicians have found other proofs, usually perverse ones for amusement value. See, for example Goldbach's proof, or Furstenberg's topological proof.

Perhaps your going to say that those are just a touch hand-wavy and not "derived directly from mathematical laws". That would be a mistake, but we can cover that too: here is a proof that is conveniently completely machine verifiable and traceable back to formal axioms -- specifically first order predicate calculus and Zermelo Frankel set theory (we don't even need the axiom of choice!).

There are infinitely many primes. But don't trust me -- work through the metamath proof in all the gory details if you really still don't believe.

I thought you might have taken the time to look things up, but apparently not. Let's recap then; Euclid proved that there are infinitely many primes in approx. 300 BC. The proof is very straightforward and has been repeated many times. See here for a canonical example. But wait, there's more. Bored mathematicians have found other proofs, usually perverse ones for amusement value. See, for example Goldbach's proof, or Furstenberg's topological proof.

Perhaps your going to say that those are just a touch hand-wavy and not "derived directly from mathematical laws". That would be a mistake, but we can cover that too: here is a proof that is conveniently completely machine verifiable and traceable back to formal axioms -- specifically first order predicate calculus and Zermelo Frankel set theory (we don't even need the axiom of choice!).

There are infinitely many primes. But don't trust me -- work through the metamath proof in all the gory details if you really still don't believe.

From http://www.iep.utm.edu/moral-re/

Moral relativism is the view that moral judgments are true or false only relative to some particular standpoint (for instance, that of a culture or a historical period) and that no standpoint is uniquely privileged over all others. It has often been associated with other claims about morality: notably, the thesis that different cultures often exhibit radically different moral values; the denial that there are universal moral values shared by every human society; and the insistence that we should refrain from passing moral judgments on beliefs and practices characteristic of cultures other than our own.

This is what I am talking about.

Dammit, Slashdot you have some of the best commenters here but you're wasting our time making us get about 30 comments in before someone posts the correction to the flawed summaries.

From what I can see in a quick glance, the summary is at least partially wrong. The "regular" Goldbach conjecture seems to apply to every *even* integer greater than 2. So your odd number question disappears into another heading, which is apparently called variously the odd-number or three-primes version of the Goldbach.
http://primes.utm.edu/glossary/page.php?sort=goldbachconjecture
http://primes.utm.edu/glossary/xpage/OddGoldbachConjecture.html

(Rant)

So for a community that is expert on Forks, why can't we just Fork Slashdot? *We* are the "value". The only value they offer is the "summaries" and *every single one is wrong*. We lost our leader anyway, and we've all seen what the successors are up to, and Slashcode is sorta/mostly open source right? (Dunno if they bolted on something.)

So why can't we Fork Slashdot? Are we so exhausted and burnt out from the days when fighting IE6 and Vista mattered, that we just don't care anymore? Oh and by the way, every new user would start at the *bottom* of the thread so those new breeds of shills with names like SunriseVista and BoldBraveBalmer don't hijack the top real estate of the conversation. P.S. Sorry, AC's, the top 10 memes of 2003 Slashdot have to go to now. Basically no other forum on the entire net has the First Post thing, and while I get the low level "test against censorship thing", we need a *user option* to flip the entire first post thread and any matching titles to the *bottom* of the post set. Then the *second thread in* which tries to deal with the article can do some work.

(/Rant)

Dammit, Slashdot you have some of the best commenters here but you're wasting our time making us get about 30 comments in before someone posts the correction to the flawed summaries.

From what I can see in a quick glance, the summary is at least partially wrong. The "regular" Goldbach conjecture seems to apply to every *even* integer greater than 2. So your odd number question disappears into another heading, which is apparently called variously the odd-number or three-primes version of the Goldbach.
http://primes.utm.edu/glossary/page.php?sort=goldbachconjecture
http://primes.utm.edu/glossary/xpage/OddGoldbachConjecture.html

(Rant)

So for a community that is expert on Forks, why can't we just Fork Slashdot? *We* are the "value". The only value they offer is the "summaries" and *every single one is wrong*. We lost our leader anyway, and we've all seen what the successors are up to, and Slashcode is sorta/mostly open source right? (Dunno if they bolted on something.)

So why can't we Fork Slashdot? Are we so exhausted and burnt out from the days when fighting IE6 and Vista mattered, that we just don't care anymore? Oh and by the way, every new user would start at the *bottom* of the thread so those new breeds of shills with names like SunriseVista and BoldBraveBalmer don't hijack the top real estate of the conversation. P.S. Sorry, AC's, the top 10 memes of 2003 Slashdot have to go to now. Basically no other forum on the entire net has the First Post thing, and while I get the low level "test against censorship thing", we need a *user option* to flip the entire first post thread and any matching titles to the *bottom* of the post set. Then the *second thread in* which tries to deal with the article can do some work.

(/Rant)

I'm not saying there aren't any problems with Pascal's wager. I'm saying that it PROVES that you can think logically about religion.

If you are interested, all your other arguments are actually addressed by proponents of the wager too. There's an ecumenical interpretation of the wager (see here) where believing in any OTHER god is acceptable as long as it has the essential characteristics of Pascal's god, and the original argumentation of Pascal's wager still holds. (Specifically, your what-if about a jealous God does not actually disprove the wager, it is only dismissed as a non-genuine option. That is, if there IS a god who really punishes people for worshiping the competition, that god is not a meritorious god either, and therefore isn't Pascal's god.)

That said, even if you believe it's a glaringly gratuitous mechanism for self-justification, it's STILL a more valid justification than other "childish" self-justifications I've seen from some (not all) atheists, e.g., "if your (judeo-christian) god is merciful, why does he punish you and countless others for not believing?" And anyway, I started believing in it after going through an atheistic "science is the only valid philosophy" phase myself, so I'm not so sure it's valid to say it "only works for people who have already made up their minds".

"Anaximander is often regarded as a precursor of the modem theory of development. He deduces living beings, in a gradual development, from moisture under the influence of warmth, and suggests the view that men originated from animals of another sort, since if they had come into existence as human beings, needing fostering care for a long time, they would not have been able to maintain their existence. In Empedocles, as in Epicurus and Lucretius, who follow in Hs footsteps, there are rudimentary suggestions of the Darwinian theory in its broader sense; and here too, as with Darwin, the mechanical principle comes in; the process is adapted to a certain end by a sort of natural selection, without regarding nature as deliberately forming its results for these ends."

These would be guys writing over 2,500 years ago in Ancient Greece.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/evolutio/

Easy to understand, but not exactly... enthusiastic?

A similar site (and they're also promoting a book), prime curios, exudes enthusiasm imo, encourages user input, and I think promotes interest in math. I think the 'geomagical' site could use some editors (which prime curios probably utilizes).

In philosophy, the situation you describe is known as Pascal's wager. Find more here and here.

>>Please define "outside of time". To me that is a meaningless statement.

Yikes, there's no easy way to summarize that whole debate. Try this thought on for size: God is immanent in every moment at every place and views everything as an eternal present.

And if that doesn't make sense, I apologize. If you want to stretch your brain, try reading through this:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/god-time/

I also have some good physics books on space and time if you're interested.

The first time you encounter the concept of factoring (as per OP's question) is probably not the best time to introduce mathematics requiring groups and rings.

Granted.

And while the GNFS is indeed magnificently superior to naive searching, it is not sufficiently fast to make a significant difference to the cryptographic strength of a system based on the difficulty of finding large factors - hence, I judged it was not worth mentioning.

While the fact remains that you can make the number large enough for it to be impractical even with GNFS, I must disagree that it makes no significant difference. If the only thing we could do was trial division by primes, a 44 digit RSA composite would need at most ~200 quintillion divisions to find the factors. (see http://primes.utm.edu/howmany.shtml, there are ~200 quintillion primes below 10^22) More than sufficient for safe encryption. Even if you could do 1 billion per second, you'd need almost 6400 years to crack it.
But since there's GNFS, a 309 digit (1024 bit) number is currently the standard, and is being phased out.

In any case, you could've said something along the lines of "There are some more efficient ways, but they are still difficult for large numbers." instead of "There are some tricks you can use to speed it up, but that's essentially it."

It's true, it's the perfect example of hasty generalization:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/fallacy/#Hasty%20Generalization

Just because every big company ever accused of something had in fact done that horrible thing, doesn't mean it's true in this case.

http://primes.utm.edu/mersenne/

And philosophy comes in for the one-punch kill:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/b/brainvat.htm

Your life is regulated by "I believe" including that you believe you and physical reality exist, with zero evidence to that point.

Stop arrogantly oversimplifying complex arguments just so you can feel superior to someone who is religious. It's the intelligence of the person that determines the clarity of the religion, not how the masses interpret it.

The primality test for these Mersenne primes does not consist of sieving, that would be way too slow given the size of these numbers.

Instead, the Lucas-Lehmer test is used, a very simple iterative process which you can implement in a few lines of code in most programming languages. It's described here:

http://primes.utm.edu/mersenne/index.html#test

You mean especially since the bounty for a prime goes from $100K - $250K?

The answer is not in the summary, nor in the first page of the FA...

Buried somewhere in the linked site is this FAQ:

http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/why.html

However all the answers are a bit unsatisfactory, IMHO...

So, I ask the great Slashdot hive-mind... What are the practical applications of Mersenne Primes and why are people paying money to find them?

z = primex * primey;
suppose z = 377, how do you find the factors: 13 and 29?
Now, for encryption, z is thousands of digits instead of 3.

As all pries are known, or at least only known primes can be used, why not make a table with the answers? e.g. for the one digit ones
2 x 2 = 4
2 x 3 = 6
2 x 5 = 10
2 x 7 = 14
3 x 3 = 9
3 x 5 = 15
3 x 7 = 21
5 x 5 = 25
5 x 7 = 35
7 x 7 = 49

So suppose z = 35, you look it up in the table and see directly that it is 5x7.
Sure it will take some time to make that list, but once you have it, getting back should be very fast compared to figure it out in a mathematical way.

Here are the first 15.000.000 primes, so there are only 15.000.000^2 solutions to look at or 2.25e+14
I could imagine that by looking at the length of the result you can reduce the place where you are going to look. e.g. if the result is only one digit, you could only look in the one digit solutions, making stuff a lot faster.

Obviously these go to only 9 digits, so a bit more will exist till you get to m39 (or 2^(13.466.917)-1

Anybody willing to make such a database? :-D

Social Contract Theory, nearly as old as philosophy itself, is the view that persons' moral and/or political obligations are dependent upon a contract or agreement between them to form society. REF

Hobbes argues that we will do ANYTHING to avoid the State of Nature and will always, rationally, pick absolute authority.

I can not be told better, from the same article:

According to Locke, the State of Nature, the natural condition of mankind, is a state of perfect and complete liberty to conduct one's life as one best sees fit, free from the interference of others. This does not mean, however, that it is a state of license: one is not free to do anything at all one pleases, or even anything that one judges to be in oneâ(TM)s interest. The State of Nature, although a state wherein there is no civil authority or government to punish people for transgressions against laws, is not a state without morality. The State of Nature is pre-political, but it is not pre-moral. Persons are assumed to be equal to one another in such a state, and therefore equally capable of discovering and being bound by the Law of Nature. The Law of Nature, which is on Lockeâ(TM)s view the basis of all morality, and given to us by God, commands that we not harm others with regards to their "life, health, liberty, or possessions" (par. 6). Because we all belong equally to God, and because we cannot take away that which is rightfully His, we are prohibited from harming one another. So, the State of Nature is a state of liberty where persons are free to pursue their own interests and plans, free from interference, and, because of the Law of Nature and the restrictions that it imposes upon persons, it is relatively peaceful.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

Humans are essentially free, and were free in the State of Nature, but the âprogress' of civilization has substituted subservience to others for that freedom, through dependence, economic and social inequalities, and the extent to which we judge ourselves through comparisons with others. Since a return to the State of Nature is neither feasible nor desirable, the purpose of politics is to restore freedom to us, thereby reconciling who we truly and essentially are with how we live together. So, this is the fundamental philosophical problem that The Social Contract seeks to address: how can we be free and live together? Or, put another way, how can we live together without succumbing to the force and coercion of others? We can do so, Rousseau maintains, by submitting our individual, particular wills to the collective or general will, created through agreement with other free and equal persons. Like Hobbes and Locke before him, and in contrast to the ancient philosophers, all men are made by nature to be equals, therefore no one has a natural right to govern others, and therefore the only justified authority is the authority that is generated out of agreements or covenants.

Thomas Jefferson in a letter to James Madison on Shay's Rebellion (a violent opposition by ~1200 farmers regarding free trade agreements with Spain on the Mississippi River. Farmers feared the agreement would affirm sovereignty of Spanish traders):

I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. REF

In another letter criticizing the (not yet ratified) constitution:

I do not like... the omission of a bill of r

The millionth prime is 15,485,863. This means that he considered ~5.5 million more numbers that start with a 1 (10 million - 15.5 million) than numbers that start with any other digit.

1: 415441
2: 77025
3: 75290
4: 74114
5: 72951
6: 72257
7: 71564
8: 71038
9: 70320

Which puts the probabilities at:

1: 0.415441
2: 0.077025
3: 0.07529
4: 0.074114
5: 0.072951
6: 0.072257
7: 0.071564
8: 0.071038
9: 0.07032

My computer is currently crunching the first fifty million primes and I will post those as a reply to this post later today when it is done.

These ratios on numbers 2-9 seem far too close in range for this to be a true log scale. Hopefully with more data it will be more logarithmic.

Yeah, that's a pretty interesting point. Intelligence isn't well understood, so the gaping whole in all of it is "intelligence + 1 = ?".

We more or less agree about that being a gaping hole, but I don't think it's even as simple as "intelligence isn't well understood"; to me, it's more along the lines of "all the cognitivist talk about 'intelligence' as an objective property is obscurantist." There is no fact of the matter as to whether anything is intelligent in the first place; it all comes down to a set of complex cultural discourses about human values and relationships, that can never be pinned down.

His reasoning goes on to say that if you could simulate a human mind on a piece (many pieces) of silicon, then that human mind becomes subject to accelerating returns of hardware advancement. (This assumes hardware keeps advancing). So a mind that runs on my 2025 486 runs 32 times as fast on my 2035 PIV - and assuming there's advances in tech maybe it runs hundreds of times faster. Then you've got a brain that can cover a thousand years of thinking in one year.

The gap I find in his logic is that a) the mind doesn't go mad because its inputs are happening really slowly (having a conversation with the outside world is like talking, waiting a day, then getting a response), b) that one guy sitting around for a thousand years will build something better than itself.

I don't buy that argument either, as I said in another post which very much echoes what you say. I think I do go a bit further, in that I reject the assumption that such a "sped-up fake brain" would work at all in the first place.

More generally, I'm skeptical about AI/cognition talk that focuses excessively on the brain, to the exclusion of environment and culture; see, as a general source of criticisim of that kind of thinking, embodied cognition.

I don't find the concept of machine intelligence ridiculous, but I find that Kurzweil flounders a bit trying to make predictions about what a true machine intelligence will be like as we're still so far away from producing one.

I find the concept of machine intelligence as interesting as the concept of swimming machines. When you get down to it and strip away a lot of rationalizations, we don't say that people are "intelligent" because of any one objective fact about people; we call them "intelligent" because of the way that we relate to them. Folks may some day build machines that we relate to very much like we relate to people, and that would require impressive technical feats, but it would be more fundamentally a cultural change on how people relate to machines than a scientific advance.

Oh yay, argument ad absurditum.

Sadly it's a fallacious form of argument.

First of all, I refute the idea that reductio ad absurdum (which is what I assume you're referring to when you say "argument ad absurditum") is a fallacious form of argument. It is in fact a valid form of argument, as long as one is careful to not allow it to become a strawman argument.

While Wikipedia isn't an academically citeable source, its article on this topic starts off with what I found to be an excellent summary, and seems to match up fairly well with the peer-reviewed source cited above:

"Reductio ad absurdum (Latin for "reduction to the absurd")...is a type of logical argument where one assumes a claim for the sake of argument and derives an absurd or ridiculous outcome, and then concludes that the original claim must have been wrong as it led to an absurd result."

I am arguing that your original claim (Every city and county between new york and san francisco is filled to the ears with "adults" who never grew up. (that's not to say there aren't a fair share IN those cities, but the ratio is far higher in what is colloquially referred to as "middle america") is absurd, and am following your claim to its most extreme and ridiculous outcome to argue my viewpoint that your original claim is wrong.

Would it have helped if I'd ended my previous post with Q.E.A.?

Given the nature of the post you are replying to, ironically fallacious.

Are you now saying that you were joking, or being sarcastic? Am I guilty of feeding the troll?

"Advertising in general, or at least the way it is currently done, is something that I believe a more enlightened society would view as either a great evil or at least a corrupting influence."

More enlightened society does view it as a corrupting influence, 'evil' being a term that's generally avoided in said society. If you look at trends in comtemporary philosophy/cultural theory you'll find a number of critics of this, a part of what they label as 'the culture of capitalism' or 'late capitalism', from Theodor Adorno (stanford encyclopedia of philosophy entry) to Fredric Jameson.

Interestingly, society is neither enlightened nor interested in becoming enlightened (the criticism is there and instead of either reacting and modifying the system to fix the problems or replacing the system completely, whatever floats your boat, we are in denial about the existance of what's literally in our face every day), so this is what we're stuck with.

there isnt a database of all known prime numbers? like: http://primes.utm.edu/lists/, or something like that.... if you are going to crak something, i think you wll start from the bigger ones, just looping thru the prime list...

"No, they could also run it a zero profit (not needing any subsidies) or at a significantly lower profit margin than any company could accept. It's not nonsense and not a circle, sorry."

Only if they likewise increased taxes.

"They would have to raise taxes to keep the same revenue stream coming in."

Yes but they no longer have a fleet to maintain or drivers to pay. How can you suggest running at zero profit in the same post that you claim they would have to raise taxes if they no longer offered the services?

"and a network that makes a sieve look perfectly able to hold water."

According to what? If you would like to argue that competition doesn't reduce cost to the customer, feel free, but now you're just pulling excuses out of thin air.

"There's no right not to be taxed."

So are you saying that my income is not my property, or that I have no right to my property?


"Maybe you want to move to a country"

Why do these debates always lead to the other person saying "move to another country if you don't like it"? Has your logic simply hit a wall? You can't say your money is not being taken by force at gunpoint when the only choices given are to "move to another country" or be jailed.

"And I'd much rather have "government" spend my taxes on keeping the air I breather somewhat cleaner and the roads somewhat less congestest than on the gazillion of other things "government" usually blows money on."

And that's nice that you have ideas about what your money should be spent on. But you should not expect others to just fork over their money to support your ideas. But that is exactly what the government has become - a means to force people to fund projects that sometimes have good results, often are a bust, and always a violation of everyone's rights.

"And that's written down where ?"

Rand is just the most recent pop culture analysis of the fundamental right that's been discussed since ancient times and in more recent detail by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Blackstone, Hume, etc. In the U.S., the Bill of Rights prevents the government from depriving anyone of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. I'm not sure what rights are like in other countries, but property rights are probably common in the developed nations. For more info check out this article from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The US did no such thing, either in Bosnia or in Kosovo. The only thing NATO did was protect the peaceful self-determination of the majority populations of Bosnia and Kosovo.

Supporting democracy is just as unethical as quashing it?

Let me ask you: which country trains the most doctors, invents the most medicine, and so forth?

The Taliban were primarily interested in controlling Afghanistan. It's the people who the Taliban were harboring who were the problem. They aren't the threat the Soviets were, but they're still killers and we still have every right to slay them.

Alcohol causes brain damage, too. And in my experience, the marijuana culture is very much separate from the hard drug culture.

You still haven't figured out how the world works, if you think redistributing wealth is worthwhile.

Actually, you do. Free Will must be a conscious act for it to matter in all the senses that philosophy cares about -- if agency is to exist, it must exist in a conscious form. If some subconscious process is "making" your decisions prior to your "self" (where "self" is your conscious and self-conscious awareness), you don't really have Free Will, since conscious deliberation on possible actions has no effect on the resulting action you take.

If you haven't, I suggest looking into some Philosophy of Self and Philosophy of Mind books and essays, since I certainly don't have the time right now to get into it as deeply as a subject like this deserves.

Wrong, Spud. Try again.

Honestly, if you're going to get deeply offended by a word that appears on the internet, where you're willing to concede the original author may not have even realised the significance and/or potential offensiveness of said word to a small subset of the worlds population as a whole --I'm sorry to say the internet is not for you.

Which I suppose leaves us at "When in unknown company, say nothing", but that would make conversation a little dull.

Look, if you AGREE that there are people who hold such views, then it isn't a straw man argument---by your own admission!

Now, you may be right---it may not be charitable, it might not be an argument that takes on all the fairy tales that people have made, but holy crap, he is clearly responding to people who hold views that you yourself describe. This isn't a straw man, and your constantly asserting that it is shows that, alas, you have no clue what you're talking about. A straw man argument involves attributing easy to knock down views to people that DON'T hold them. Run along and read this before you go on asserting that you know what the fuck you're talking about:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/fallacy.htm#Straw%20Man

Maybe the poster doesn't address your views, but then he's not straw manning you. And since there are plenty of people who, by YOUR OWN GODDAMN ADMISSION, do damn well hold the position, then he isn't straw manning them.