Don't be silly. It's not as if GlobalFoundries is putting AMD at the back of the line. They just haven't been able to keep up with TSMC technologically (GF couldn't promise to deliver 20nm or 16nm when TSMC could), and they probably wouldn't have been able to if they were still a part of AMD.
The only big difference is that it would have been a pretty hard sell to have your GPUs be produced by a third (technologically more advanced) party instead of in your own (struggling) fabs.
1. The concept 'goal' requires the concept of time (or: transitioning between states) and the concept of objective desirability, as it defines a set of reachable states that are more desirable than other states (more fully: an ordering of states). Both are, to me, not fundamental but emergent elements of the universe. 2. The target state(s) are necessarily goalless (or they wouldn't be the most desirable, that is, unless you allow the 'end' goal to change between states).
Let me put it like this: Suppose there is a big red button hidden in the desert somewhere and that pushing it is the end goal. Suppose we find it and push it. Then what?
Push it again? Game over, thanks for playing? Cop-out 'transcendence' to next level with new 'end' goal? Transcendence to next goalless level in which things just happen for no reason and all states are equally desirable?
Don't get me wrong: we can still have subjective temporary goals. Just no 'end' goal.
tablets are invading the land of laptops and will kill the men and fuck the women to produce a generation of tablet/laptop hybrids
Hehe, thanks for the chuckle:-)
In addition, tablet culture and sensibilities will displace laptop culture. While the future is hybrids, the tablet will have effectively "won" and laptops "lost".
I'm doubt that the takeover of 'tablet culture' will be that complete. It is very true that the capacitive touch screens have spurred a huge development in UI design when it comes to having big targets, little clutter and sensibly using gestures, but these principles aren't really new. They just became necessary elements because of the lack of input capabilities, precision and invested effort of the target market. At the same time we're also still seeing many, many suboptimal workarounds to deal with those properties (cursor positioning, slide-in panels, long press, double tap, triple-tap, auto-correction, Swype, etc.). Applications that are even slightly complex benefit greatly from having a pointer and a keyboard and I predict that these applications will exist side by side (or even as an integrated whole) on convertibles as consumers and application developers slowly rediscover the ease of having those input capabilities present. The apologism for the issues present in people's new tablet (and hopefully smartphone) toys will slowly wane when that happens.
I'm sure there is some analogy about men fucking women and men in there, but I'm not sure the imagery would clarify my points above;-)
compared to a macbook air 11", my ipad air 2 with clamcase shell is 2 inches shorter in width, 0.75 inches longer in depth, and 0.06 inches taller in height. it's also 3 oz lighter. the screen is 20% smaller in area, but because the aspect ratio is 4:3 instead of 16:9 it's much easier on the eye for most applications.
You do realize than none of those things are necessarily because of the tablet+case configuration you have chosen? Although I will admit that if you really want 4:3, there isn't all that much on offer in ultrabook/convertible-land.
Also ipad apps are designed from square 1 to minimize window chrome etc as much as possible, and the same cannot be said for netbook OS's
1. There are Android convertibles. 2. Windows 8. It gets a lot of hate, but it 'too much chrome' is not among the arguments. 3. The amount of actual productivity tools on offer for actual laptop OS is ridiculous.
Think hard about what you said:
I'm a big believer that tablets will replace laptops. [...] Rumor mill says Apple will be updating the MacBook air to be a tablet/laptop hybrid, possibly like the set up I described. That would be cool!
I agree with the latter, but not the former. A convertible with a proper keyboard and touchpad, combined with a hybrid touch/pointer-OS is infinitely more usable than a tablet with a keyboard slapped on to it.
* it is small and light, yet the ipad screen is way huge compared to netbook screens.
Your ClamCased tablet is never going to be smaller and lighter than a/an netbook/ultrabook with the keyboard permanently attached (or even than a convertible/hybrid).
* cell connection means you always have email the instant you open it, and any website is available any where. once you get used to this it is jarring to back to a laptop where you're scrounging for internet access (or have a Sting that glows when in the presence of unsecured wifi).
Tethering. Mobile Wifi hotspot. A secondary subscription just for your laptop/convertible/tablet is a PITA.
* instant wake from sleep. Another thing where once you get used to that it's hard to go back to the laptop.
Try one of the newer Win 8.1 configurations on solid state memory.
* it lasts all day. literally, 10 hrs +. better than my crappy work win7 that burns like a thousand suns.
This is where you have a point. Wintel is still catching up to ARM in this area.
* road warriors will identify with this one: the charger is small and light (not a brick)
Well, there's a tradeoff here. Bigger bricks generally charge the devices faster. Some convertible producers are switching back to (small) bricks from straight USB-chargers due to the limitations of charging via USB-ports.
This is why you don't connect to strange wi-fi networks
No, this is why you set up a VPN server in your home and use it to securely tunnel to the internet.
I will say that setting up the server and connecting to it on different devices should be easier, though. My current setup is OpenVPN (tun)-clients on Android and Win8.1 connecting to an OpenWRT OpenVPN server. I'm pretty sure that the average Joe wouldn't be able to get this setup up and running.
Seriously? You clicked on an article on statistics, yet haven't the faintest clue what 'correlation' means? Try going to Yahoo Answers instead of Slashdot. You'll do everybody a favor.
They tried that, but it didn't make a huge difference (the resulting network was still easily 'fooled' with similar images).
The big thing to realize here is that the algorithm that generates the fooling images specifically creates highly regular images ("images [that] look like modern, abstract art". The repeated patterns are very distracting to the human eye, whereas the DNN pretty much ignores them. See figure 10 in the paper (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.1897v1.pdf ). It is necessary to take into account that the training set almost exclusively contains images of entire objects, not of patterns on that object. Presented with the 'evolved' school bus image, a human would probably say 'bee' or 'wasp' before school bus if forced to make a guess. The DNN, however, has never seen a close-up of the backside of a bee. I'm 99% confident that if you'd add closeups of patterns found on the classes in the ImageNet database, the DNN would be far less easily fooled.
Also, when removing a number of the top and bottom repetitions in the school bus example, a human could very well guess 'school bus', given the following question: "Out of these 1000 object classes, which one does this image show?" 1000 different classes is ridiculously far away from the number of different visual concepts a human can distinguish.
You are what's wrong with the world. You're effectively saying that effective intra-governmental oversight is impossible and that any government is only after its own financial gain.
If you'd open your indoctrinated eyes, you'd see that there is a plethora of well-functioning intra-(semi-)governmental oversight relations. Probably even in the US. Stop throwing away the baby with the bath water. Government isn't necessarily and inherently evil.
Finally: the notion that corporations 'keep an eye on the government' is fucking ridiculous and implies that corporations have a responsibility they shouldn't, can't and fucking don't have. Unless by 'keeping an eye on' you mean 'lobbying and bribing the fuck out of ~'.
True, and windows 10 actually improves on this by also supporting top-bottom splits and corner-splits (the omission of which in Windows 7, if you think about it, is actually pretty idiotic - especially considering the post XP-removal of the CTRL+click on taskbar entries & Tile vertically/horizontally).
If you had read closely, you would have seen that I didn't make any statements on the absolute amount of morality and justice in the US. It was a relative statement, which only put a lower bound on the amount of morality and justice in the US. Considering the US is currently at 'killing and torturing people is fine', we are talking about a pretty low bar, however. (is a statement on the absolute amount of morality and justice in the US)
Now you may be right (in a very generous sense) that I'm looking at history through rose-colored glasses, but it isn't exactly hopeful to be under the impression that the US was always at the level it is now and probably always will be. I remain under the impression that whether it be in business or politics, the nature of modern society has increased the rate at which the good guys are either thrown out of the system or corrupted by it.
Nice ad hominem.. Dickwad. Starting off with a straw man doesn't make you look great either: I never said that free markets are killing us.
Anyway. The highly regulated private entities 'solution' is a Frankenstein monster born out of compromise. It's what you do when nationalization of certain sectors is called communist but you are also very aware that leaving it purely to the market would lead to a very shitty and untenable situation.
If a private entity operates in a natural monopoly, you will be writing veritable books of regulation to 'hold them accountable' and prevent all the ways in which they can and will cut corners to profit from their monopoly (hate the game, not the playa). Tell me, have you factored in the cost of the government entities necessary to regulate these profitable and 'efficient' government regulated private entities? What if, as a society, we add that cost to what we have to pay these private entities for their services, then weigh that against the quality of the service they are providing and consider whether a nationalized variant would really be worse?
Open your eyes, man. Don't throw away centralized government. Instead: Fix it. Make it awesome!
Why the hell is that unfortunate? Utilities should be nationalized. Their existence and proper functioning is essential to society and shouldn't be subject to the whims of shareholders and career tigers or 'operating at a profit'. Even though I believe nationalized industries do not necessarily have to be less 'efficient' than private ones (the efforts to make them efficient have been meager and successes underreported), I'd rather have inefficient organizations operating at a net loss than ones that will fuck me over left and right to extract every penny they can and don't give a flying fuck about the service they should be there to provide.
This 'socialism bad, free market good'-crap really needs to stop.
Morality and justice slowly fade away in the process, as everybody clambers over each other to get as far away from the bottom as they can. I think this process has occurred countless times in history and that the ones at the bottom, the ones who constantly get boots in their face, the ones who feel they have nothing to lose are the ones that effect change.
I don't want a cell phone on my computer so I use Win 7 which has 0 support after 100 dpi. Last I heard even Chrome had issues.
That is an exaggeration. There are definitely some issues in Win 7 (no independent dpi settings for different monitors), but after a bit of tweaking it is absolutely fine.
People yack about 4k being the second coming of Christ but you need a $1000 video card to play games with half the settings off and compatibility problems.
This is an exaggeration too. 1. You can always set the resolution to 1920x1080 or 2560x1440 (at the dpis common for 4k monitors, scaling artifacts are hardly noticeable) 2. AA is not really required at 4k on typical monitor sizes (which saves a lot of processing power) 3. Most games aren't that demanding, considering a lot of them are console ports or built to be in line with console quality.
I have 2 AMD 7950s, but for a lot of games I don't even bother turning Crossfire on, as it is unnecessary.
Finally: Forget gaming; 4k is the second coming for productivity tasks (if you have good eyes). The amount of information on the screen is obviously not going to be 4x as much as on a 1080p screen, but it is pretty damn close.
My apologies. Apparently I misread your 'I left the US as well' as 'I went to the US as well'. The 'as well' and the rest of the thread must have thrown me off.
The Chinese Room thought experiment causes so much lack of understanding it should be banned. Take your Chinese Room and ask it this: "How many fingers was I holding up ten seconds ago?" (your single-state basic lookup table is not going to work, baby)
Such questions require ever more hacks and additions to the original thought experiment to the point where the most apt analogy for the guy in the Chinese Room is that of a hand. Determining that hands don't "know" anything is hardly ground-breaking.
And don't get me started on the extremely vaguely defined notion of what it means to 'know' or to 'understand'. The fact that humans attribute those things with an almost mystical quality is a testament to the (quite effective) arrogance instilled in us by evolution. Is it really that hard to accept that we're not the deliberate, free-willed agents we think we are?
Although I agree with you, technically autonomously driving vehicles can take away some of the logistic issues in car sharing and car rental services. Being able to drive anywhere, then get out and have the car return to the place the renting agency needs it to be would greatly increase the attractiveness of occasionally renting a car.
Your question is like asking "So, is water bad?" The worst thing in dietary advice is trying to shove individual types of food into some ill-conceived set of two boxes labeled 'bad' and 'good'. It really destroys the discussion.
I think the whole obesity and diabetes epidemic stems from a sedentary lifestyle
1. Depends on what you mean with sedentary life style. IIRC, 30 minutes of daily mild exercise (walking) is enough to let almost all the increased risk of being (reasonably) overweight disappear (it is enough to move the caches of visceral fat to the more external fat storage locations). Link: http://news.aces.illinois.edu/...
2. Diabetes is a disruption of insulin response that is brought about by insulin spikes. Insulin spikes are generally caused by food with a high insulin index (generally proportional to the glycemic index, with dairy as a clear exception to the rule). Although this depends in part on whether your blood sugar is low before eating (and a number of other factors). See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
3. I believe the prevalence of engineered foods is higher in the US than in other developed countries, simply because people in other countries tend to be chauvinistic about (the purity of) their traditional food. Engineered foods are bound to elicit effects in the body that are driven by outdated but powerful mechanisms in our bodies ('engineered' means getting you to want more of it, either right then and there or the next time you're buying food). As it happens, sugar and carbs in general are one of the if not the most physically rewarding things to ingest. Just try to do a little bit of your own food engineering: it doesn't always work, but 9/10 times you can make pretty much anything self-prepared taste better by adding sugar. There's a reason pretty much every sauce in existence has a very high sugar content (20+% for ketchup and Sriracha).
I'm not sure medical science understands (well enough) the relationship between carbs/blood sugar/cholesterol and cardiovascular disease
Sadly, medical science has, for decades, had a better understanding than you seem to think. The problems arise from advisory organs (from the individual dietitian to the WHO) having to justify their existence by coming up with some kind of advice.
"In general, we're not really sure about a lot of things, but it is pretty obvious that nutrition raises your blood sugar levels, with the speed of the increase related to the glycemic index of the food and that both very high and very low blood sugar levels have negative effects on your body, so you should manage your nutritional intake based on your blood sugar levels. Oh yes, and don't forget the buffering effects of glycogen storage in your muscles and liver" makes for great but very unmarketable advice.
"Fat is bad, mmkay" and "High cholesterol will kill you" are a lot more palatable. Who cares about scientific accuracy nowadays? Most 'journalists' don't. Most politicians don't. The average Joe certainly doesn't (at this point he doesn't even trust those scientist fuckers, always 'saying' different things in the papers).
Take it from me: the science is out there and has been for a while. Believe nothing you read about the subject of dietary advice, unless it is actual research or the stating of hard facts: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... (note the years of publication)
Slashdot Mirror
You have no idea what the word 'merge' means, do you?
You just wanted to karma-whore by posting an irrelevant XKCD-link. Shame on you.
Don't be silly. It's not as if GlobalFoundries is putting AMD at the back of the line.
They just haven't been able to keep up with TSMC technologically (GF couldn't promise to deliver 20nm or 16nm when TSMC could), and they probably wouldn't have been able to if they were still a part of AMD.
The only big difference is that it would have been a pretty hard sell to have your GPUs be produced by a third (technologically more advanced) party instead of in your own (struggling) fabs.
How cunning.
What's next? 'Your mom'-retorts?
Oneliners can be very insightful or completely ridiculous.
There can be no end goal.
1. The concept 'goal' requires the concept of time (or: transitioning between states) and the concept of objective desirability, as it defines a set of reachable states that are more desirable than other states (more fully: an ordering of states). Both are, to me, not fundamental but emergent elements of the universe.
2. The target state(s) are necessarily goalless (or they wouldn't be the most desirable, that is, unless you allow the 'end' goal to change between states).
Let me put it like this:
Suppose there is a big red button hidden in the desert somewhere and that pushing it is the end goal. Suppose we find it and push it.
Then what?
Push it again? Game over, thanks for playing? Cop-out 'transcendence' to next level with new 'end' goal? Transcendence to next goalless level in which things just happen for no reason and all states are equally desirable?
Don't get me wrong: we can still have subjective temporary goals. Just no 'end' goal.
tablets are invading the land of laptops and will kill the men and fuck the women to produce a generation of tablet/laptop hybrids
Hehe, thanks for the chuckle :-)
In addition, tablet culture and sensibilities will displace laptop culture. While the future is hybrids, the tablet will have effectively "won" and laptops "lost".
I'm doubt that the takeover of 'tablet culture' will be that complete. It is very true that the capacitive touch screens have spurred a huge development in UI design when it comes to having big targets, little clutter and sensibly using gestures, but these principles aren't really new. They just became necessary elements because of the lack of input capabilities, precision and invested effort of the target market. At the same time we're also still seeing many, many suboptimal workarounds to deal with those properties (cursor positioning, slide-in panels, long press, double tap, triple-tap, auto-correction, Swype, etc.). Applications that are even slightly complex benefit greatly from having a pointer and a keyboard and I predict that these applications will exist side by side (or even as an integrated whole) on convertibles as consumers and application developers slowly rediscover the ease of having those input capabilities present. The apologism for the issues present in people's new tablet (and hopefully smartphone) toys will slowly wane when that happens.
I'm sure there is some analogy about men fucking women and men in there, but I'm not sure the imagery would clarify my points above ;-)
compared to a macbook air 11", my ipad air 2 with clamcase shell is 2 inches shorter in width, 0.75 inches longer in depth, and 0.06 inches taller in height. it's also 3 oz lighter. the screen is 20% smaller in area, but because the aspect ratio is 4:3 instead of 16:9 it's much easier on the eye for most applications.
You do realize than none of those things are necessarily because of the tablet+case configuration you have chosen? Although I will admit that if you really want 4:3, there isn't all that much on offer in ultrabook/convertible-land.
Also ipad apps are designed from square 1 to minimize window chrome etc as much as possible, and the same cannot be said for netbook OS's
1. There are Android convertibles.
2. Windows 8. It gets a lot of hate, but it 'too much chrome' is not among the arguments.
3. The amount of actual productivity tools on offer for actual laptop OS is ridiculous.
Think hard about what you said:
I'm a big believer that tablets will replace laptops. [...] Rumor mill says Apple will be updating the MacBook air to be a tablet/laptop hybrid, possibly like the set up I described. That would be cool!
I agree with the latter, but not the former. A convertible with a proper keyboard and touchpad, combined with a hybrid touch/pointer-OS is infinitely more usable than a tablet with a keyboard slapped on to it.
* it is small and light, yet the ipad screen is way huge compared to netbook screens.
Your ClamCased tablet is never going to be smaller and lighter than a/an netbook/ultrabook with the keyboard permanently attached (or even than a convertible/hybrid).
* cell connection means you always have email the instant you open it, and any website is available any where. once you get used to this it is jarring to back to a laptop where you're scrounging for internet access (or have a Sting that glows when in the presence of unsecured wifi).
Tethering. Mobile Wifi hotspot. A secondary subscription just for your laptop/convertible/tablet is a PITA.
* instant wake from sleep. Another thing where once you get used to that it's hard to go back to the laptop.
Try one of the newer Win 8.1 configurations on solid state memory.
* it lasts all day. literally, 10 hrs +. better than my crappy work win7 that burns like a thousand suns.
This is where you have a point. Wintel is still catching up to ARM in this area.
* road warriors will identify with this one: the charger is small and light (not a brick)
Well, there's a tradeoff here. Bigger bricks generally charge the devices faster. Some convertible producers are switching back to (small) bricks from straight USB-chargers due to the limitations of charging via USB-ports.
Blessed Be Her Holy Hooves!
This is why you don't connect to strange wi-fi networks
No, this is why you set up a VPN server in your home and use it to securely tunnel to the internet.
I will say that setting up the server and connecting to it on different devices should be easier, though. My current setup is OpenVPN (tun)-clients on Android and Win8.1 connecting to an OpenWRT OpenVPN server. I'm pretty sure that the average Joe wouldn't be able to get this setup up and running.
Seriously? You clicked on an article on statistics, yet haven't the faintest clue what 'correlation' means?
Try going to Yahoo Answers instead of Slashdot. You'll do everybody a favor.
They tried that, but it didn't make a huge difference (the resulting network was still easily 'fooled' with similar images).
The big thing to realize here is that the algorithm that generates the fooling images specifically creates highly regular images ("images [that] look like modern, abstract art". The repeated patterns are very distracting to the human eye, whereas the DNN pretty much ignores them. See figure 10 in the paper (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.1897v1.pdf ). It is necessary to take into account that the training set almost exclusively contains images of entire objects, not of patterns on that object. Presented with the 'evolved' school bus image, a human would probably say 'bee' or 'wasp' before school bus if forced to make a guess. The DNN, however, has never seen a close-up of the backside of a bee. I'm 99% confident that if you'd add closeups of patterns found on the classes in the ImageNet database, the DNN would be far less easily fooled.
Also, when removing a number of the top and bottom repetitions in the school bus example, a human could very well guess 'school bus', given the following question:
"Out of these 1000 object classes, which one does this image show?"
1000 different classes is ridiculously far away from the number of different visual concepts a human can distinguish.
You are what's wrong with the world. You're effectively saying that effective intra-governmental oversight is impossible and that any government is only after its own financial gain.
If you'd open your indoctrinated eyes, you'd see that there is a plethora of well-functioning intra-(semi-)governmental oversight relations. Probably even in the US. Stop throwing away the baby with the bath water. Government isn't necessarily and inherently evil.
Finally: the notion that corporations 'keep an eye on the government' is fucking ridiculous and implies that corporations have a responsibility they shouldn't, can't and fucking don't have. Unless by 'keeping an eye on' you mean 'lobbying and bribing the fuck out of ~'.
True, and windows 10 actually improves on this by also supporting top-bottom splits and corner-splits (the omission of which in Windows 7, if you think about it, is actually pretty idiotic - especially considering the post XP-removal of the CTRL+click on taskbar entries & Tile vertically/horizontally).
If you had read closely, you would have seen that I didn't make any statements on the absolute amount of morality and justice in the US. It was a relative statement, which only put a lower bound on the amount of morality and justice in the US. Considering the US is currently at 'killing and torturing people is fine', we are talking about a pretty low bar, however. (is a statement on the absolute amount of morality and justice in the US)
Now you may be right (in a very generous sense) that I'm looking at history through rose-colored glasses, but it isn't exactly hopeful to be under the impression that the US was always at the level it is now and probably always will be. I remain under the impression that whether it be in business or politics, the nature of modern society has increased the rate at which the good guys are either thrown out of the system or corrupted by it.
Nice ad hominem.. Dickwad.
Starting off with a straw man doesn't make you look great either: I never said that free markets are killing us.
Anyway.
The highly regulated private entities 'solution' is a Frankenstein monster born out of compromise. It's what you do when nationalization of certain sectors is called communist but you are also very aware that leaving it purely to the market would lead to a very shitty and untenable situation.
If a private entity operates in a natural monopoly, you will be writing veritable books of regulation to 'hold them accountable' and prevent all the ways in which they can and will cut corners to profit from their monopoly (hate the game, not the playa). Tell me, have you factored in the cost of the government entities necessary to regulate these profitable and 'efficient' government regulated private entities? What if, as a society, we add that cost to what we have to pay these private entities for their services, then weigh that against the quality of the service they are providing and consider whether a nationalized variant would really be worse?
Open your eyes, man. Don't throw away centralized government.
Instead: Fix it. Make it awesome!
Why the hell is that unfortunate? Utilities should be nationalized. Their existence and proper functioning is essential to society and shouldn't be subject to the whims of shareholders and career tigers or 'operating at a profit'. Even though I believe nationalized industries do not necessarily have to be less 'efficient' than private ones (the efforts to make them efficient have been meager and successes underreported), I'd rather have inefficient organizations operating at a net loss than ones that will fuck me over left and right to extract every penny they can and don't give a flying fuck about the service they should be there to provide.
This 'socialism bad, free market good'-crap really needs to stop.
The US has become a kleptocratic oligarchy.
Morality and justice slowly fade away in the process, as everybody clambers over each other to get as far away from the bottom as they can. I think this process has occurred countless times in history and that the ones at the bottom, the ones who constantly get boots in their face, the ones who feel they have nothing to lose are the ones that effect change.
Obligatory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I don't want a cell phone on my computer so I use Win 7 which has 0 support after 100 dpi. Last I heard even Chrome had issues.
That is an exaggeration. There are definitely some issues in Win 7 (no independent dpi settings for different monitors), but after a bit of tweaking it is absolutely fine.
People yack about 4k being the second coming of Christ but you need a $1000 video card to play games with half the settings off and compatibility problems.
This is an exaggeration too.
1. You can always set the resolution to 1920x1080 or 2560x1440 (at the dpis common for 4k monitors, scaling artifacts are hardly noticeable)
2. AA is not really required at 4k on typical monitor sizes (which saves a lot of processing power)
3. Most games aren't that demanding, considering a lot of them are console ports or built to be in line with console quality.
I have 2 AMD 7950s, but for a lot of games I don't even bother turning Crossfire on, as it is unnecessary.
Finally: Forget gaming; 4k is the second coming for productivity tasks (if you have good eyes). The amount of information on the screen is obviously not going to be 4x as much as on a 1080p screen, but it is pretty damn close.
My apologies. Apparently I misread your 'I left the US as well' as 'I went to the US as well'. The 'as well' and the rest of the thread must have thrown me off.
Fuck Searle and his Chinese Room. Seriously.
The Chinese Room thought experiment causes so much lack of understanding it should be banned. Take your Chinese Room and ask it this:
"How many fingers was I holding up ten seconds ago?" (your single-state basic lookup table is not going to work, baby)
Such questions require ever more hacks and additions to the original thought experiment to the point where the most apt analogy for the guy in the Chinese Room is that of a hand. Determining that hands don't "know" anything is hardly ground-breaking.
And don't get me started on the extremely vaguely defined notion of what it means to 'know' or to 'understand'. The fact that humans attribute those things with an almost mystical quality is a testament to the (quite effective) arrogance instilled in us by evolution. Is it really that hard to accept that we're not the deliberate, free-willed agents we think we are?
Although I agree with you, technically autonomously driving vehicles can take away some of the logistic issues in car sharing and car rental services. Being able to drive anywhere, then get out and have the car return to the place the renting agency needs it to be would greatly increase the attractiveness of occasionally renting a car.
So beans and rice is bad?
Maybe. Sometimes. It depends.
Your question is like asking "So, is water bad?"
The worst thing in dietary advice is trying to shove individual types of food into some ill-conceived set of two boxes labeled 'bad' and 'good'. It really destroys the discussion.
I think the whole obesity and diabetes epidemic stems from a sedentary lifestyle
1. Depends on what you mean with sedentary life style. IIRC, 30 minutes of daily mild exercise (walking) is enough to let almost all the increased risk of being (reasonably) overweight disappear (it is enough to move the caches of visceral fat to the more external fat storage locations). Link: http://news.aces.illinois.edu/...
2. Diabetes is a disruption of insulin response that is brought about by insulin spikes. Insulin spikes are generally caused by food with a high insulin index (generally proportional to the glycemic index, with dairy as a clear exception to the rule). Although this depends in part on whether your blood sugar is low before eating (and a number of other factors). See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
3. I believe the prevalence of engineered foods is higher in the US than in other developed countries, simply because people in other countries tend to be chauvinistic about (the purity of) their traditional food. Engineered foods are bound to elicit effects in the body that are driven by outdated but powerful mechanisms in our bodies ('engineered' means getting you to want more of it, either right then and there or the next time you're buying food). As it happens, sugar and carbs in general are one of the if not the most physically rewarding things to ingest. Just try to do a little bit of your own food engineering: it doesn't always work, but 9/10 times you can make pretty much anything self-prepared taste better by adding sugar. There's a reason pretty much every sauce in existence has a very high sugar content (20+% for ketchup and Sriracha).
I'm not sure medical science understands (well enough) the relationship between carbs/blood sugar/cholesterol and cardiovascular disease
Sadly, medical science has, for decades, had a better understanding than you seem to think. The problems arise from advisory organs (from the individual dietitian to the WHO) having to justify their existence by coming up with some kind of advice.
"In general, we're not really sure about a lot of things, but it is pretty obvious that nutrition raises your blood sugar levels, with the speed of the increase related to the glycemic index of the food and that both very high and very low blood sugar levels have negative effects on your body, so you should manage your nutritional intake based on your blood sugar levels. Oh yes, and don't forget the buffering effects of glycogen storage in your muscles and liver" makes for great but very unmarketable advice.
"Fat is bad, mmkay" and "High cholesterol will kill you" are a lot more palatable.
Who cares about scientific accuracy nowadays? Most 'journalists' don't. Most politicians don't. The average Joe certainly doesn't (at this point he doesn't even trust those scientist fuckers, always 'saying' different things in the papers).
Take it from me: the science is out there and has been for a while. Believe nothing you read about the subject of dietary advice, unless it is actual research or the stating of hard facts:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
(note the years of publication)