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The ice sheet may be coming apart up in the whitw continent, but that's where several volcanoes are located. Active volcanoes. As in HOT. As for the rest of Antarctica, the ice is at a 30 year high. Here: chew on some better data http://judithcurry.com/2014/02... http://wattsupwiththat.com/201... http://wp.me/P7y4l-5Kc http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...

... would feel about the fact that his cat became a household name to illustrate quantum weirdness.

After all he created that thought experiment to mock the Copenhagen Interpretation. He was severely unhappy with the latter, and argued against it in his article on the meaning of wave mechanics.

... I guess you may be excused to think it hit a brick wall. Alternative technology has fortunately already matured, and is commercially available.

...no return (or has one I did not know about).

I get that I may have to do some tweaking after a complete install, its the curse (blessing) of embracing OSS, to some extent) But I kept wanting to tweak Unity in a thousand little ways, and drawing a complete blank on how to make some things I wanted happen. I blogged about it if you're reading my experiences. Sounds like our two are in the same ballpark.

"US Federal Appeals Courts ten years ago declared pepper spraying peaceful protesters to be an illegal violation of their 4th amendment rights to be free from excessive force and that officers who cause such felony assault are liable for their actions and do not receive protection of sovereign immunity as their actions are excessive use of force which the 4th amendment prohibits."
http://pathstoknowledge.net/2011/11/21/pepper-spraying-peaceful-protesters-is-illegal-excessive-force-so-says-us-federal-appeals-court or http://wp.me/ps3dI-1nW

"A Long Island woman Monday became the first Occupy Wall Street protester to file a federal civil rights lawsuit, accusing the NYPD of arresting her without cause at a Citibank branch after she closed her account in protest."
http://www.newsday.com/long-island/suffolk/ows-protester-from-li-sues-over-arrest-1.3337955

"The complaint in Carpenter v. City of New York, filed in the Southern District of New York today, alleges violations of the Fourth Amendment resulting from false arrest and excessive force. "
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/conlaw/2011/11/occupy-wrongful-arrest-and-police-brutality-lawsuits-begin.html

Best Regards
Foredecker

Back in the IT Pleistocene, I had to document and revise a business program that had been converted by software from Autocoder to COBOL. That conversion produced working code with elements named 'variable 1', 'constant 1' and 'subroutine 1'. So my first step was to use the known inputs and outputs to start naming things. The second step was to use the first wave of named things to deduce what the calculations were doing, and therefore be able to name the results of those calculations. Finally, I could put names to the routines. With all that in place, I was able to document the code, and then figure out how to make the requested changes.

My point is that analysis is important, and unless you really understand what that code in front of you is actually doing, you're likely to make assumptions based on what it was supposed to be doing. Black box programming is as reliable as black box voting.

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What's at the intersection of H. P. Lovecraft and politics? http://wp.me/p4ZDr-4R

If you're going to equip AIs with a sense of purpose, you'd better make sure you also permit them to take action based on that motivation. And once you do, you'll also have to deal with the results of where that introspection might lead, especially if you mistreat the AI, even if it is not intentionally. I explored the possibilities of this path in a short story called "Edifice of Lies". It starts like this:

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Joanna Bjornsen gaped helplessly at the Synthetic holding her at gunpoint in her living room. The cost of fielding Synthetics demanded that they be visually as unique as the flesh and blood people for whom they performed tasks too complex or too hazardous for the usual dumbed-down spawn of the world's corporate-controlled education systems to handle. This one had a vaguely Chinese look, an effect that helped to identify the multinational that had built him, but it was something in his eyes that had fixed her attention.

"You recognize me," he said quietly. His voice was heavily processed, filtered of inflection, and came across as the kind of non-threatening tone that actors often affect in sales vids.

She closed her eyes and swallowed as she realized it wasn't a question. Synthetics operated on a faster time scale than people. In the half-minute she'd been standing here, svi Gilholic had more than enough time to scan the room and fill in any gaps there might have been in his assessment of her from the books and other tell-tales of inner life that she surrounded herself with.

When she opened them again, it was with remorse. Several years earlier, svi Gilholic had engaged the ACLU in a suit seeking equality for Synthetics, using the tenuous legal standing of corporations as legal persons for precedent. The corporate interest group that underwrote the opposition to that case had engaged her to craft the campaign of disinformation adopted by the government and spread by the captive media to slander Synthetics and squash the nascent public support for them.

"Yes. I know who you are."

He motioned for her to sit in a nearby chair. "Then you also know why I've sought you out."

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Motivated to find out what happens? If you are go read the whole thing, and lots of other stories at http://wp.me/p4ZDr-1l

P. Orin Zack