Dark matter is one of the few remaining possibilities for the imbalance - if dark matter somehow interacts with anti-matter somewhat less weakly, for some reason. Black holes don't work, since there don't seem to have been any in the early universe, and there's no reason to think they'd prefer anti-matter.
This news is exiting to me, since one way or another it suggests new physics is needed to understand the imbalance.
You do realize that you're supposed to be driving such that you can stop
That has never been a reasonable expectation, and certainly isn't the law where I live. Where do people come up with that shit? No matter how slow a car is going, it's possible to jump out in front of it with little enough visibility that there's nothing the driver can do.
Also, where I live, pedestrians only have the right of way in a marked crosswalk (and, in a controlled crosswalk, only when they have the light), not just anywhere they wander into traffic.
More drunk pedestrians are killed by sober drivers (by far) than sober pedestrians killed by drunk drivers. (At one point it was something like 40% of pedestrians killed in crosswalks were drunk.) I'd expect texting to be the same.
The laws of physics don't care who has the right of way. It's small comfort to you next of kin that the driver was in the wrong. Just look before you step off the curb - very low effort.
If you don't look up from your phone, how do you know if you have the light?
I've had people walk blithely out in front of me when I was exiting a parking garage, meaning (1) I had no way to see them, (2) there were warning lights flashing, and (3) there was a very loud annunciator warning that a car was coming. Some people just ignore their environment entirely, between headphones and eyes on screen.
I guess that depends on whether you want to make an arbitrary system that is as complex/powerful as a brain, or to copy a brain. I find the interesting thing about the human brain to be the "software", which doesn't come across in a scan. If what you want is a "newborn brain", then I can see your point - that might be interesting in its own way.
In order to disprove - falsify - something, you need some sort of system of logic under which statements can be proven or disproven. The statement "deduction doesn't work" can never be proven, as you need deduction to do so.
In fact, we know deduction doesn't work (to a more narrow extent: it sometimes doesn't work) thanks to Godel.
An example of induction completely failing us is the discovery of dark matter - 80 or so years after hard problems like general relativity and quantum mechanics. Physic was quite mature before someone noticed that we has just missed 80% of matter. Oops. But that's the fundamental limitation of induction.
Someone did give Hitler a good slap. It helped propel him to his political career, so he'd be the one doing the slapping.
But it's interesting to see you embrace the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive attack. As long as you're sure your attacking a Bad Person, it's OK to be the side initiating violence? I think that's what you're saying. Think about what happens when the other side starts doing the same.
The state develops naturally from the structure, it starts at zero.
An interesting theory. It's not clear that it's true, though. Epigenetics is new and poorly understood, and RNA-based memory storage certainly seems possible. It's really hard to test though - even something simple like "are we innately afraid of snakes, or is it just really easy to condition that fear (relative to fear of other things)" is unclear.
In any case, there's a bunch of state already by the time you're born, and certainly by the time your brain is being scanned. Heck, even the basic interaction between neurons is affected by the chemical soup bathing the brain - the same person will act very differently (or not be able to act/think at all) just based on the prevalence of the various neurotransmitters and neuromodulators.
Finally, the brain has less than half your neurons, so that probably matters.
The most sensible interpretation of "eternal" in theology is "existing in a time separate from our own". An eternal god creating both time and space would be analogous to starting a simulation - time in the simulation is just unrelated to you wall-clock time.
Science is never great at "why" questions (Feynman as a fun rant about that). Saying "God did it" may have no practical predictive value, but many find it emotionally satisfying.
BTW, science also rests on a set of unprovable assumptions such as "deduction works", "induction works", and "sense data is somewhat reliable". The most you can say is that it seems like the minimal set of unprovable assumptions.
I'd say the primary weakness of religion is that whatever is believed in is by definition untangible/undetectable/unprovable/etc,
I think you've mistaken the point of religion. The belief that it's better to wait to have kinds until after you're married is certainly measurable and testable, as are beliefs like "delaying gratification will get you ahead in the long run" and "it's good to keep a month's supply of necessities hidden away".
Looking to religion for scientific statements is as silly as looking to science for a moral code, and certainly isn't the reason religions persisted for millennia. You have to be a certain kind of nuts to think that e.g. it matters to the point of the story of Cain and Able whether two brothers with those names actually existed.
No, not even close. That's like saying if you know the structure of a memory chip you know the software running it it. The state is the hard part, and every neuron carries state.
We know in very broad ways what parts of the brain are responsible for what sorts of thinking (and that is mostly from study of brain damage), but there's nothing functional known neuron-by-neuron except for the simplest structures.
I initial the change, I am a signatory to the contract. For them to accept the terms as is, they sign on the dotted line and it becomes binding. I keep a copy and so do they.
Have you talked to you lawyer about that idea? I don't think that's how it works anywhere, but IANAL. Law is not code. COntracts are not code. Engineers make that mistake too often. A contact is a meeting of the minds, and the written document is just a record of the agreement, not the agreement itself. Plenty of people have, e.g., tried that trick with employment agreements, only to find out it was meaningless in court. Similarly, you can't hide stuff in "boilerplate contracts" like lease agreements, which is why some leases have you initial every paragraph.
A story-based single-player RPG would be hard to shove a cash shop with loot crates into, and that all EA or Ubisoft wants these days. An MMO, though, easy for a cash shop (SWTOR already has one of course).
So with one stroke of the pen, whilst I read the contract, it is gone and the onus is on them to agree
That's not how contract law works. Unless they initial the change, the presumption will be that they didn't read your alteration, and therefore it isn't binding. Remember, they'll have real lawyers.
That being said, they may well agree to the change, especially if you word it such that you'll be using open source code in places, and such code including changes will remain public. Some very big contractors use exactly this approach (and then don't share their changes with the larger community, but that's a different issue).
The sort of problems solved by AI are narrow in scope. AI is not machine intelligence, which is to say, no AI has ever demonstrated the least bit of general intelligence (though it's getting better at faking it by figuring out what part of Wikipedia has an answer to some question). The IQ of AI remains 0. The field of AI isn't even about that: it's about solving practical problems that cannot be solved in a more straightforward procedural way.
It's not clear that any amount of skill at solving specific problems, with any amount of computing power, can lead to general intelligence. Certainly humans don't work that way: you can't raise your IQ by training at specific tasks (and a lot of money has been spent trying). What might lead to general intelligence is a single AI system being trained to solve a large number of specific tasks, all with the same code, and specifically with the need to model hypothetical actions from as many kinds of risks as possible before taking them. But no one is working on that today.
There's no reason to think machine intelligence is impossible. In fact, it seems to me quite likely to result if enough research was done as described above. It's just that no one is doing that sort of research.
Man was dumped naked into the wilderness some time ago. This is what we have now as a result. Everything we as a species have, we as a species earned, and are thus entitled to. Simple enough.
Not every detail of every topic can be summarized for the GED-equivalent layperson.
Obviously a summary doesn't include every exact detail, by definition - not sure what you're saying there. But every topic can be described qualitatively such that the GED-equivalent layperson (assuming algebra here) can follow it. It may take a very smart expert in the subject to do so, as Feynman did with much of particle physics back in the day, but it's possible.
I've also been frustrated by the Electroweak Interaction page: frankly, it's garbage. However, the Weak Interaction page is reasonable. Missing from the electroweak page is any sort of summary of the weak force, even just a paragraph directing readers to the weak interaction page for background. There's a link to the weak page, but no suggestion that it's easier to read or more layman-oriented.
The problem with the analogy is Goldman-Sachs - where parasites like that are involved it's more like slots than poker. Fortunately, that's not every market.
If you want to be sensitive about it, we would recognize that there was a network of tribes every bit as diverse and rich as in Europe, and refer to each by name.
That systematically slaughtered each other over land and power. Or are we glossing over that fact now?
What part of "every bit as diverse and rich as in Europe" was confusing?
Often. I've been able to buy cables that clearly came from the same factory as Monster cables for 10-20% with the price, just without the logo. What you want to avoid is the cheapest cable.
Slashdot Mirror
Dark matter is one of the few remaining possibilities for the imbalance - if dark matter somehow interacts with anti-matter somewhat less weakly, for some reason. Black holes don't work, since there don't seem to have been any in the early universe, and there's no reason to think they'd prefer anti-matter.
This news is exiting to me, since one way or another it suggests new physics is needed to understand the imbalance.
You do realize that you're supposed to be driving such that you can stop
That has never been a reasonable expectation, and certainly isn't the law where I live. Where do people come up with that shit? No matter how slow a car is going, it's possible to jump out in front of it with little enough visibility that there's nothing the driver can do.
Also, where I live, pedestrians only have the right of way in a marked crosswalk (and, in a controlled crosswalk, only when they have the light), not just anywhere they wander into traffic.
More drunk pedestrians are killed by sober drivers (by far) than sober pedestrians killed by drunk drivers. (At one point it was something like 40% of pedestrians killed in crosswalks were drunk.) I'd expect texting to be the same.
The laws of physics don't care who has the right of way. It's small comfort to you next of kin that the driver was in the wrong. Just look before you step off the curb - very low effort.
If you don't look up from your phone, how do you know if you have the light?
I've had people walk blithely out in front of me when I was exiting a parking garage, meaning (1) I had no way to see them, (2) there were warning lights flashing, and (3) there was a very loud annunciator warning that a car was coming. Some people just ignore their environment entirely, between headphones and eyes on screen.
I guess that depends on whether you want to make an arbitrary system that is as complex/powerful as a brain, or to copy a brain. I find the interesting thing about the human brain to be the "software", which doesn't come across in a scan. If what you want is a "newborn brain", then I can see your point - that might be interesting in its own way.
In order to disprove - falsify - something, you need some sort of system of logic under which statements can be proven or disproven. The statement "deduction doesn't work" can never be proven, as you need deduction to do so.
In fact, we know deduction doesn't work (to a more narrow extent: it sometimes doesn't work) thanks to Godel.
An example of induction completely failing us is the discovery of dark matter - 80 or so years after hard problems like general relativity and quantum mechanics. Physic was quite mature before someone noticed that we has just missed 80% of matter. Oops. But that's the fundamental limitation of induction.
Someone did give Hitler a good slap. It helped propel him to his political career, so he'd be the one doing the slapping.
But it's interesting to see you embrace the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive attack. As long as you're sure your attacking a Bad Person, it's OK to be the side initiating violence? I think that's what you're saying. Think about what happens when the other side starts doing the same.
The state develops naturally from the structure, it starts at zero.
An interesting theory. It's not clear that it's true, though. Epigenetics is new and poorly understood, and RNA-based memory storage certainly seems possible. It's really hard to test though - even something simple like "are we innately afraid of snakes, or is it just really easy to condition that fear (relative to fear of other things)" is unclear.
In any case, there's a bunch of state already by the time you're born, and certainly by the time your brain is being scanned. Heck, even the basic interaction between neurons is affected by the chemical soup bathing the brain - the same person will act very differently (or not be able to act/think at all) just based on the prevalence of the various neurotransmitters and neuromodulators.
Finally, the brain has less than half your neurons, so that probably matters.
however at least they're not unfalsifiable
Think about that some more.
You cannot falsify the statement "deduction works". Do you see why? Induction may be less obvious, but it's in the same boat.
deduction works, which I deduct from the countless cases in which deduction clearly worked
Ah, because memory works?
The most sensible interpretation of "eternal" in theology is "existing in a time separate from our own". An eternal god creating both time and space would be analogous to starting a simulation - time in the simulation is just unrelated to you wall-clock time.
Science is never great at "why" questions (Feynman as a fun rant about that). Saying "God did it" may have no practical predictive value, but many find it emotionally satisfying.
BTW, science also rests on a set of unprovable assumptions such as "deduction works", "induction works", and "sense data is somewhat reliable". The most you can say is that it seems like the minimal set of unprovable assumptions.
I'd say the primary weakness of religion is that whatever is believed in is by definition untangible/undetectable/unprovable/etc,
I think you've mistaken the point of religion. The belief that it's better to wait to have kinds until after you're married is certainly measurable and testable, as are beliefs like "delaying gratification will get you ahead in the long run" and "it's good to keep a month's supply of necessities hidden away".
Looking to religion for scientific statements is as silly as looking to science for a moral code, and certainly isn't the reason religions persisted for millennia. You have to be a certain kind of nuts to think that e.g. it matters to the point of the story of Cain and Able whether two brothers with those names actually existed.
No, not even close. That's like saying if you know the structure of a memory chip you know the software running it it. The state is the hard part, and every neuron carries state.
We know in very broad ways what parts of the brain are responsible for what sorts of thinking (and that is mostly from study of brain damage), but there's nothing functional known neuron-by-neuron except for the simplest structures.
I initial the change, I am a signatory to the contract. For them to accept the terms as is, they sign on the dotted line and it becomes binding. I keep a copy and so do they.
Have you talked to you lawyer about that idea? I don't think that's how it works anywhere, but IANAL. Law is not code. COntracts are not code. Engineers make that mistake too often. A contact is a meeting of the minds, and the written document is just a record of the agreement, not the agreement itself. Plenty of people have, e.g., tried that trick with employment agreements, only to find out it was meaningless in court. Similarly, you can't hide stuff in "boilerplate contracts" like lease agreements, which is why some leases have you initial every paragraph.
A story-based single-player RPG would be hard to shove a cash shop with loot crates into, and that all EA or Ubisoft wants these days. An MMO, though, easy for a cash shop (SWTOR already has one of course).
The fact that it's also a hardware partitioning strategy is still important, though, for the lack of security it implies between containers.
So with one stroke of the pen, whilst I read the contract, it is gone and the onus is on them to agree
That's not how contract law works. Unless they initial the change, the presumption will be that they didn't read your alteration, and therefore it isn't binding. Remember, they'll have real lawyers.
That being said, they may well agree to the change, especially if you word it such that you'll be using open source code in places, and such code including changes will remain public. Some very big contractors use exactly this approach (and then don't share their changes with the larger community, but that's a different issue).
Scientists have already simulated 1 second of brain activity from a Human brain scan
What do you believe that accomplished? Do you actually believe a "brain scan" captured what goes on electrochemically in the human brain?
Compute power is not the limiting factor here.
The sort of problems solved by AI are narrow in scope. AI is not machine intelligence, which is to say, no AI has ever demonstrated the least bit of general intelligence (though it's getting better at faking it by figuring out what part of Wikipedia has an answer to some question). The IQ of AI remains 0. The field of AI isn't even about that: it's about solving practical problems that cannot be solved in a more straightforward procedural way.
It's not clear that any amount of skill at solving specific problems, with any amount of computing power, can lead to general intelligence. Certainly humans don't work that way: you can't raise your IQ by training at specific tasks (and a lot of money has been spent trying). What might lead to general intelligence is a single AI system being trained to solve a large number of specific tasks, all with the same code, and specifically with the need to model hypothetical actions from as many kinds of risks as possible before taking them. But no one is working on that today.
There's no reason to think machine intelligence is impossible. In fact, it seems to me quite likely to result if enough research was done as described above. It's just that no one is doing that sort of research.
Man was dumped naked into the wilderness some time ago. This is what we have now as a result. Everything we as a species have, we as a species earned, and are thus entitled to. Simple enough.
Not every detail of every topic can be summarized for the GED-equivalent layperson.
Obviously a summary doesn't include every exact detail, by definition - not sure what you're saying there. But every topic can be described qualitatively such that the GED-equivalent layperson (assuming algebra here) can follow it. It may take a very smart expert in the subject to do so, as Feynman did with much of particle physics back in the day, but it's possible.
I've also been frustrated by the Electroweak Interaction page: frankly, it's garbage. However, the Weak Interaction page is reasonable. Missing from the electroweak page is any sort of summary of the weak force, even just a paragraph directing readers to the weak interaction page for background. There's a link to the weak page, but no suggestion that it's easier to read or more layman-oriented.
The problem with the analogy is Goldman-Sachs - where parasites like that are involved it's more like slots than poker. Fortunately, that's not every market.
If you want to be sensitive about it, we would recognize that there was a network of tribes every bit as diverse and rich as in Europe, and refer to each by name.
That systematically slaughtered each other over land and power. Or are we glossing over that fact now?
What part of "every bit as diverse and rich as in Europe" was confusing?
Often. I've been able to buy cables that clearly came from the same factory as Monster cables for 10-20% with the price, just without the logo. What you want to avoid is the cheapest cable.
steadily rolling back population growth
You first, bucko.
Human lives are good and valuable. Humans are not a problem needing a final solution.