The prison system already has more mentally ill people than the healthcare facilities. In fact, a lot of people refer to the prison system as the nations largest system of mental heath facilities.
This is a false dichotomy. It implies that an experiment can only either support *the* theory or not. There can be several competing theories that can all be tested by the same set of experiments. There were many experiments performed at the LHC. Even the experiments specifically gathering evidence for the Higgs boson tested various hypotheses about what energy level ranges the Higgs boson could be found in.
Finding out the truth is never a setback in science. It is always an accomplishment. While it may sometimes feel like a setback to find out you were wrong, the real setback would have been heading down the wrong path longer than necessary. Think of the lost opportunity cost in potential discoveries that could have been made sooner with a more accurate picture of the world.
I don't disagree with you. But I would differ slightly on the point about "All but the most isolated should have affordable access."
I would prefer a system where every person pays rates in proportion to the costs of providing them service (i.e. rates can be cheaper in the city and more expensive in rural areas)
I think this is the best way to incentivize people to live in areas with more efficient infrastructure. There is no good reason we should be subsidizing service in rural areas while taxing those who live in urban areas, as it unnecessarily encourages people to live in those areas.
Even if we wanted to help poor people afford service(e.g. people who can't afford to live in urban areas), a better way to help those people would be to increase their income to be able to compensate for higher prices. This would provide the same benefit with minimal market distortion.
I wasn't trying to suggest Australia has good internet service. I think it is pretty clear that they don't. I was just showing one example to counter the claim that "internet access in the US is so slow compared with everywhere else....", with a recent example from personal experience. Australia is not a 3rd world country or a totalitarian theocracy. They are a relatively wealthy democratic country that happens to have slower internet than the US. I am not saying the internet in the US is fast. I am saying we are not the slowest, even among developed nations.
As far as density, I think this is a bit of a red herring, because you don't have to run internet to the outback. We should be comparing population density for only the regions that are currently receiving internet service. It may well be that Australia is still less dense under this metric, but I think it is a better metric in terms of judging the difficulty of providing services.
Secondly, sometimes density can be a bad thing. If a city is very old and dense, it may be prohibitively expensive to dig up all the crowded streets to lay down fiber lines. For modern cities that already built telecommunications into their infrastructure, replacing cables is easier, and for less populated cities, you can start digging with lower risk of damaging existing infrastructure like gas and water pipes.
If you look at the cities that Google is selecting to install ultra fast fiber service, they are not the most densely populated cities, but they are cities with newer infrastructure.
No, I'm not bad at reading. I'm just not cooperating with your attempts to control my argument or strawman me.
As to you being a libertarian, then why are you so in favor of putting the government in charge of everything?
Evidence of your lack of ability to read.
As to your allegation that I must be an anarchist, no... I said the the government is needed for laws, police, and courts. That automatically means I'm not an anarchist.
I specifically pointed out that you were not an anarchist for that same reason.
More evidence of your lack of ability to read.
You're not a libertarian... that's obviously a lie. You're sitting there arguing a statist position.
My voting history: 2000: Harry Browne, 2004: Harry Browne, 2008: Ron Paul, 2012: Gary Johnson.
It's retards like you that are giving a bad name to libertarianism. You take a very reasonable ideology and turn it into something completely irrational and closed-minded.
wow... so you're saying that if the city has to do a rebuild on the conduit once every 100 years that is a deal breaker for you?
You are even worse at reading comprehension than I am. At no point did I say or imply that. I think conduit needs to be replaced far more often than every 100 years, and even being changed every 100 years does not contradict my statement that it will eventually need to be changed.
As to arguing that government never works, I did not say that. I just said I don't want to be held hostage to their incompetence if and when they fuck up. Is that unreasonable? Or does everything have to be a too big to fail government clusterfuck?
I'm a libertarian...
Name anything the government does that the private sector does and we'll go through the cost figures. The government literally is always less efficient. Without exception.
This is something that an ideologue says.
Here is something the government does more efficiently than the private sector. Dealing with the problem of "tragedy of the commons". Markets solve a lot of problems efficiently. They don't solve *every* problem efficiently. If you really thought the government was *always* less efficient than the private sector, you would be an anarachist, and you would not even want them in charge of the conduit.
After the budget crunch, many cities ran out of money. Some cities privatized large portions of city services and without exception saved a lot of money by doing it. They privatized stuff like park maintenance, ambulances, fire departments, etc. And the cities in some cases saved so much money by doing that in the middle of a deficit that they were able to actually expand and improve services with the savings.
So instead of Of the city hiring people to do jobs, the city hired people to hire people to do jobs and it was better? What is that supposed to prove? That governments are really good at saving money when they need to?
Notice the cities did not actually transfer the jobs of governing (deciding what needs to be done) to the private sector. They didn't hire an outside consultant to be the mayor.
No, government is not more efficient. it is a necessary evil. It exists because you need someone to act as judge. You need someone to make laws. And you need someone to hire people to point guns at other people that break the laws.
You don't need someone to act as judge. You don't need someone to make laws. You don't need a justice system. Society is more efficient when we have those things. We can all concentrate on being productive when we don't need to spend all our time defending ourselves.
That is what you NEED government for. Everything beyond that tends to be a circle jerk.
We don't *need* government for roads, bridges, electricity, water, emergency services, etc. We can have private companies that make toll roads, and private fire departments that charge monthly subscriptions. In fact, many libertarians want exactly that.
Government works better for *some* things even some things we don't *need* government to do. I advocate using the government for the things it does better, no more no less.
The difference between me and you, is that you use a lot of "always"s and "never"s, and I use a lot of "some"s. I think my view of the world is more accurate, and my plan more practical because of that.
I do agree with your argument that 4 companies competing is better than 2, and certainly better than a monopoly. I was just pointing out that there is also a difference in the pricing model. I think there is more incentive for cellular companies to provide faster data rates apart from competition (i.e. they charge customers for the amount of data they use).
If internet companies charged per byte, there would be a strong incentive to increase capacity (even in a pseudo-monopoly), because it would increase their profit potential.
Also, if people were charged per byte, people would try to minimize their use of data, or maybe even time big downloads and uploads to happen at off-peak hours when they are cheaper. This would free up a lot of bandwidth when it is most needed.
Rather than having people pay less for slow internet, and more for faster internet, you could have an internet that was always blazing fast, and simply pay for the data used * the price of the data (based on demand pricing).
If the service is run more efficiently, it will seem faster given the same capacity. Or put another way, for the same quality of service, the ISP would be able to sustain more customers and make more money.
Again, the english are running cable in pipes that are over a hundred years old. So give me a break please.
So you think 100 years == forever?
Okay... last time. CABLES DETERMINE BANDWIDTH.
I never said they didn't. I don't know why you think I did.
As to you not invoking the notion that without the government running it there would be chaos. *facepalm* That is exactly your argument.
No it is not. And it is obviously not, because my plan involves private ISPs.
As to the only difference being who owns them, wrong. Because if they own them and no one can compete with them, what is to stop the government cables from just staying old and shitty forever?
I did not make the argument that government always works, but you seem to be making the argument that government never works...except for conduit.
This is not a profitable discussion. You've got no reason for wanting the city to have control. You just DO want them to have control. Either cite the reason for wanting the city to be in control of it without referring chaos or order because you said that wasn't your argument... or what exactly are you fighting this so hard for? Why?
The reason I want the city to own the cables is (like I already said) efficiency. It is efficient to have government controlled infrastructure. There is a reason we don;t have private water pipes and electricity lines. It is inefficient. Having 5 different lines from your house to 5 different ISPs just to satisfy your desire to have the option to use all 5 is inefficient.
You have plenty of reasons for wanting public conduit and multitudes of private cables, they have all just been dumb reasons so far.
1. As long as it always has enough space and never degrades it will never need to change (i.e. it will eventually need to be changed just like everything else).
As to the government not needing to do the innovation, they would need to approve things.
yeah that's what they do. It would be what they would be doing in your system too (approving individuals to rent space in the conduit)
Look, the government providing my internet access is a non-starter. You've seen all the privacy abuse stuff they've done already. If they actually own the cables it will be even worse. And that is just ONE reason amongst many. It is a bad idea.
I didn't say they would provide internet access. I said they would provide cables. And yes I have seen all the stuff they've done already, and the fact that a handful of companies own all the cables is actually a much worse situation than if city and state governments owned the cables. Even if each individual person owned their own cable, are you going to police your cable to make sure it's not being snooped by the NSA?
There is always this notion that anything but the government controlling it means chaos. Give me a break.
A notion which I have not invoked, so I don't see why it's relevant.
As to the government not running the internet but running the cable... the cable determines the bandwidth and much of the quality of service. So no.
And since the government isn't making the cables, but buying and installing the same cables that anyone else could put in, the only difference is who owns them.
The government can own and run the pipe the cable runs in... that's it. I'm not trusting them with anything beyond that.
wouldn't government owned conduit just give the NSA even easier access to personal data?/s
I feel like you have a very arbitrary set of standards regarding this matter.
I don't mind them providing the conduit. I do mind them providing the cable. the cable you must appreciate will change. there will be innovation.
1. I think the conduit probably does need to change from time to time although I wouldn't call those changes the same kind of innovation traditionally associated with technology.
2. The government doesn't have to be the one doing the innovating in order to provide the cables. They can just pay consultants to research which new technologies for cables should be used, and voters can decide if the government officials are doing a good job of hiring the right consultants. I am not saying this system is foolproof, but I think it's a better system than one which requires people to run their own cables.
Like I said. I am not saying I think the government will always do an amazing job running cables. I am saying that it will surely be better than the cluster fuck that will happen if you let each person run their own cables.
Part of the issue is that the government is very much a "too big to fail" system. Everything is combined. So if I don't like my internet service which you want the government to run, does that mean I vote for another mayor even though the only thing the current mayor is bad at is running the communication service? See the issue?
I didn't say the government would "run" the internet service. I said they would provide the conduit and cables. Presumably you could have competing ISPs at some central location and switch ISPs would be like switching circuits at an old telephone switch board or something.
I'm only saying that the government should own the infrastructure rather than telecoms and people, but use market competition when it is practical.
Sorry I misread your post, so my reply doesn't make any sense. I will amend my reply.
In your example, the government still owns the conduit. Rather than simply providing conduit, why not provide the conduit and the wires in the conduit as a public service? The government is in a unique position to do this *efficiently and fairly.
*I don't mean to imply that governments are always efficient and fair, but merely that they are capable of being efficient and fair in a way that for profit corporations can not be. The government has more resources in terms of creating infrastructure and it is accountable to voters rather than shareholders.
It's hard to count anything in the telecom industry "competition". There are only 4 cellular providers in the US and they use a public resource (i.e. radio frequencies), not to mention a bunch of cell towers all over the city. It's not like anyone can just become a cellular provider.
Furthermore, you can't just compare data rates. While cellular data speeds are pretty fast, they also typically come with caps. It's a lot easier to provide potentially fast service when all your customers are trying to conserve their data usage to save money, and the users of more data are required to pay for their extra usage.
Even in the setup you are describing, everyone is still connecting to a single city hub, which would count as a monopoly if it were private. Pretty much no matter what you do, you are going to run into the issue of eventually require use of some public property that we don't want in the hands of a for-profit company.
Why not just expand the public portion of the public internet service to include the cables as well? Then you don't need a disorganized and inefficient mess cables going to the central hub.
I don't know about other parts of either country, but Southern California (~50Mbps) has way faster internet than Melbourne Australia (~5Mbs). Anyone from Melbourne feel free to correct me, I'm just going by what I could get while there and what my relatives have told me.
Try switching nouns - consider this possibility. Given the limitless potential of humans, don't you think it is possible for a human to eventually create a bicycle capable of reaching the moon?
This is a semantic argument. That's because a bicycle has an implicit definition (i.e. lating for 2 circles). A bicycle is a vehicle, a car is a vehicle, and a saturn 5 rocket is a vehicle. Why do people talk about flying cars and not flying bicycles? Because a car doesn't imply wheels, but a bicycle does. It is certainly possible for a "car" to go to the moon. If we have a personal vehicle that can one day go to the moon, and it is similar in size and shape to a traditional car, I don't think anybody will have trouble calling it a "space car".
Some day we may create something that is as intelligent as humans. But it will be much more similar to a human than a computer is - to the point where calling it a computer would be like calling a rocket ship a bicycle.
I think you have a very narrow view of what "computation" is. If one day we have machines that are as intelligent as humans, and they are still made of the same stuff as they are now (i.e. transistors), but just in more advanced configurations, and you don't want to call them computers anymore, I can't stop you. I will say that everything from modern laptops, to calculators, to AIs, to biological brains fit pretty firmly in the realm of "computing machines" according to the experts in field of computer science.
If you win your semantic argument, and nobody (even computer scientists) in the future wants to call AIs computers, all it will mean is that the profound philosophical question "can computers be intelligent?" will be turned into a trivial question with a trivial answer of "No, because computers are defined to be non-intelligent"
Saying "Computers will never be intelligent, because I've defined computers as non-intelligent things", is a meaningless statement.
I'm not saying it's bad to know your snakes. The reason I came up with the example, is because I was just reading wikipedia articles about snakes at the time. My point is that the information is really easy to understand (i.e. even dumb people are capable of doing it). The fact that you know about snakes isn't a bad thing. It is probably a good thing. But it is not indicative of high intelligence (relative to other humans).
Some information is indicative of intelligence. (i.e. the information that dumb people can't just easily get/understand from google or wikipedia).
Slashdot Mirror
"never" is a very absolute kind of a word.
It was a rhetorical question.
They should hire you to work at the FBI since you know what everyone is capable of.
The prison system already has more mentally ill people than the healthcare facilities. In fact, a lot of people refer to the prison system as the nations largest system of mental heath facilities.
Anonymous cowards post lots of things...
...so anarchy?
If the FBI arrests 0 people, they are doing a bad job.
If the FBI arrests 150 people, they are doing a bad job.
How many people should the FBI have arrested to be doing a good job?
This is a false dichotomy. It implies that an experiment can only either support *the* theory or not. There can be several competing theories that can all be tested by the same set of experiments. There were many experiments performed at the LHC. Even the experiments specifically gathering evidence for the Higgs boson tested various hypotheses about what energy level ranges the Higgs boson could be found in.
Finding out the truth is never a setback in science. It is always an accomplishment. While it may sometimes feel like a setback to find out you were wrong, the real setback would have been heading down the wrong path longer than necessary. Think of the lost opportunity cost in potential discoveries that could have been made sooner with a more accurate picture of the world.
I don't disagree with you. But I would differ slightly on the point about "All but the most isolated should have affordable access."
I would prefer a system where every person pays rates in proportion to the costs of providing them service (i.e. rates can be cheaper in the city and more expensive in rural areas)
I think this is the best way to incentivize people to live in areas with more efficient infrastructure. There is no good reason we should be subsidizing service in rural areas while taxing those who live in urban areas, as it unnecessarily encourages people to live in those areas.
Even if we wanted to help poor people afford service(e.g. people who can't afford to live in urban areas), a better way to help those people would be to increase their income to be able to compensate for higher prices. This would provide the same benefit with minimal market distortion.
Correction: I voted for Michael Badnarik in 2004, and I even donated $200 to his campaign.
As far as density, I think this is a bit of a red herring, because you don't have to run internet to the outback. We should be comparing population density for only the regions that are currently receiving internet service. It may well be that Australia is still less dense under this metric, but I think it is a better metric in terms of judging the difficulty of providing services.
Secondly, sometimes density can be a bad thing. If a city is very old and dense, it may be prohibitively expensive to dig up all the crowded streets to lay down fiber lines. For modern cities that already built telecommunications into their infrastructure, replacing cables is easier, and for less populated cities, you can start digging with lower risk of damaging existing infrastructure like gas and water pipes.
If you look at the cities that Google is selecting to install ultra fast fiber service, they are not the most densely populated cities, but they are cities with newer infrastructure.
No, I'm not bad at reading. I'm just not cooperating with your attempts to control my argument or strawman me.
As to you being a libertarian, then why are you so in favor of putting the government in charge of everything?
Evidence of your lack of ability to read.
As to your allegation that I must be an anarchist, no... I said the the government is needed for laws, police, and courts. That automatically means I'm not an anarchist.
I specifically pointed out that you were not an anarchist for that same reason.
More evidence of your lack of ability to read.
You're not a libertarian... that's obviously a lie. You're sitting there arguing a statist position.
My voting history: 2000: Harry Browne, 2004: Harry Browne, 2008: Ron Paul, 2012: Gary Johnson.
It's retards like you that are giving a bad name to libertarianism. You take a very reasonable ideology and turn it into something completely irrational and closed-minded.
wow... so you're saying that if the city has to do a rebuild on the conduit once every 100 years that is a deal breaker for you?
You are even worse at reading comprehension than I am. At no point did I say or imply that. I think conduit needs to be replaced far more often than every 100 years, and even being changed every 100 years does not contradict my statement that it will eventually need to be changed.
As to arguing that government never works, I did not say that. I just said I don't want to be held hostage to their incompetence if and when they fuck up. Is that unreasonable? Or does everything have to be a too big to fail government clusterfuck?
I'm a libertarian...
Name anything the government does that the private sector does and we'll go through the cost figures. The government literally is always less efficient. Without exception.
This is something that an ideologue says.
Here is something the government does more efficiently than the private sector. Dealing with the problem of "tragedy of the commons". Markets solve a lot of problems efficiently. They don't solve *every* problem efficiently. If you really thought the government was *always* less efficient than the private sector, you would be an anarachist, and you would not even want them in charge of the conduit.
After the budget crunch, many cities ran out of money. Some cities privatized large portions of city services and without exception saved a lot of money by doing it. They privatized stuff like park maintenance, ambulances, fire departments, etc. And the cities in some cases saved so much money by doing that in the middle of a deficit that they were able to actually expand and improve services with the savings.
So instead of Of the city hiring people to do jobs, the city hired people to hire people to do jobs and it was better? What is that supposed to prove? That governments are really good at saving money when they need to?
Notice the cities did not actually transfer the jobs of governing (deciding what needs to be done) to the private sector. They didn't hire an outside consultant to be the mayor.
No, government is not more efficient. it is a necessary evil. It exists because you need someone to act as judge. You need someone to make laws. And you need someone to hire people to point guns at other people that break the laws.
You don't need someone to act as judge. You don't need someone to make laws. You don't need a justice system. Society is more efficient when we have those things. We can all concentrate on being productive when we don't need to spend all our time defending ourselves.
That is what you NEED government for. Everything beyond that tends to be a circle jerk.
We don't *need* government for roads, bridges, electricity, water, emergency services, etc. We can have private companies that make toll roads, and private fire departments that charge monthly subscriptions. In fact, many libertarians want exactly that.
Government works better for *some* things even some things we don't *need* government to do. I advocate using the government for the things it does better, no more no less.
The difference between me and you, is that you use a lot of "always"s and "never"s, and I use a lot of "some"s. I think my view of the world is more accurate, and my plan more practical because of that.
I do agree with your argument that 4 companies competing is better than 2, and certainly better than a monopoly. I was just pointing out that there is also a difference in the pricing model. I think there is more incentive for cellular companies to provide faster data rates apart from competition (i.e. they charge customers for the amount of data they use).
If internet companies charged per byte, there would be a strong incentive to increase capacity (even in a pseudo-monopoly), because it would increase their profit potential.
Also, if people were charged per byte, people would try to minimize their use of data, or maybe even time big downloads and uploads to happen at off-peak hours when they are cheaper. This would free up a lot of bandwidth when it is most needed.
Rather than having people pay less for slow internet, and more for faster internet, you could have an internet that was always blazing fast, and simply pay for the data used * the price of the data (based on demand pricing).
If the service is run more efficiently, it will seem faster given the same capacity. Or put another way, for the same quality of service, the ISP would be able to sustain more customers and make more money.
Again, the english are running cable in pipes that are over a hundred years old. So give me a break please.
So you think 100 years == forever?
Okay... last time. CABLES DETERMINE BANDWIDTH.
I never said they didn't. I don't know why you think I did.
As to you not invoking the notion that without the government running it there would be chaos. *facepalm* That is exactly your argument.
No it is not. And it is obviously not, because my plan involves private ISPs.
As to the only difference being who owns them, wrong. Because if they own them and no one can compete with them, what is to stop the government cables from just staying old and shitty forever?
I did not make the argument that government always works, but you seem to be making the argument that government never works...except for conduit.
This is not a profitable discussion. You've got no reason for wanting the city to have control. You just DO want them to have control. Either cite the reason for wanting the city to be in control of it without referring chaos or order because you said that wasn't your argument... or what exactly are you fighting this so hard for? Why?
The reason I want the city to own the cables is (like I already said) efficiency. It is efficient to have government controlled infrastructure. There is a reason we don;t have private water pipes and electricity lines. It is inefficient. Having 5 different lines from your house to 5 different ISPs just to satisfy your desire to have the option to use all 5 is inefficient.
You have plenty of reasons for wanting public conduit and multitudes of private cables, they have all just been dumb reasons so far.
1. As long as it always has enough space and never degrades it will never need to change (i.e. it will eventually need to be changed just like everything else).
As to the government not needing to do the innovation, they would need to approve things.
yeah that's what they do. It would be what they would be doing in your system too (approving individuals to rent space in the conduit)
Look, the government providing my internet access is a non-starter. You've seen all the privacy abuse stuff they've done already. If they actually own the cables it will be even worse. And that is just ONE reason amongst many. It is a bad idea.
I didn't say they would provide internet access. I said they would provide cables. And yes I have seen all the stuff they've done already, and the fact that a handful of companies own all the cables is actually a much worse situation than if city and state governments owned the cables. Even if each individual person owned their own cable, are you going to police your cable to make sure it's not being snooped by the NSA?
There is always this notion that anything but the government controlling it means chaos. Give me a break.
A notion which I have not invoked, so I don't see why it's relevant.
As to the government not running the internet but running the cable... the cable determines the bandwidth and much of the quality of service. So no.
And since the government isn't making the cables, but buying and installing the same cables that anyone else could put in, the only difference is who owns them.
The government can own and run the pipe the cable runs in... that's it. I'm not trusting them with anything beyond that.
wouldn't government owned conduit just give the NSA even easier access to personal data? /s
I feel like you have a very arbitrary set of standards regarding this matter.
I don't mind them providing the conduit. I do mind them providing the cable. the cable you must appreciate will change. there will be innovation.
1. I think the conduit probably does need to change from time to time although I wouldn't call those changes the same kind of innovation traditionally associated with technology.
2. The government doesn't have to be the one doing the innovating in order to provide the cables. They can just pay consultants to research which new technologies for cables should be used, and voters can decide if the government officials are doing a good job of hiring the right consultants. I am not saying this system is foolproof, but I think it's a better system than one which requires people to run their own cables.
Like I said. I am not saying I think the government will always do an amazing job running cables. I am saying that it will surely be better than the cluster fuck that will happen if you let each person run their own cables.
Part of the issue is that the government is very much a "too big to fail" system. Everything is combined. So if I don't like my internet service which you want the government to run, does that mean I vote for another mayor even though the only thing the current mayor is bad at is running the communication service? See the issue?
I didn't say the government would "run" the internet service. I said they would provide the conduit and cables. Presumably you could have competing ISPs at some central location and switch ISPs would be like switching circuits at an old telephone switch board or something.
I'm only saying that the government should own the infrastructure rather than telecoms and people, but use market competition when it is practical.
Sorry I misread your post, so my reply doesn't make any sense. I will amend my reply.
In your example, the government still owns the conduit. Rather than simply providing conduit, why not provide the conduit and the wires in the conduit as a public service? The government is in a unique position to do this *efficiently and fairly.
*I don't mean to imply that governments are always efficient and fair, but merely that they are capable of being efficient and fair in a way that for profit corporations can not be. The government has more resources in terms of creating infrastructure and it is accountable to voters rather than shareholders.
It's hard to count anything in the telecom industry "competition". There are only 4 cellular providers in the US and they use a public resource (i.e. radio frequencies), not to mention a bunch of cell towers all over the city. It's not like anyone can just become a cellular provider.
Furthermore, you can't just compare data rates. While cellular data speeds are pretty fast, they also typically come with caps. It's a lot easier to provide potentially fast service when all your customers are trying to conserve their data usage to save money, and the users of more data are required to pay for their extra usage.
Even in the setup you are describing, everyone is still connecting to a single city hub, which would count as a monopoly if it were private. Pretty much no matter what you do, you are going to run into the issue of eventually require use of some public property that we don't want in the hands of a for-profit company.
Why not just expand the public portion of the public internet service to include the cables as well? Then you don't need a disorganized and inefficient mess cables going to the central hub.
I don't know about other parts of either country, but Southern California (~50Mbps) has way faster internet than Melbourne Australia (~5Mbs). Anyone from Melbourne feel free to correct me, I'm just going by what I could get while there and what my relatives have told me.
No. People are limitless, but computers are not.
Do you have any evidence to support this?
Try switching nouns - consider this possibility. Given the limitless potential of humans, don't you think it is possible for a human to eventually create a bicycle capable of reaching the moon?
This is a semantic argument. That's because a bicycle has an implicit definition (i.e. lating for 2 circles). A bicycle is a vehicle, a car is a vehicle, and a saturn 5 rocket is a vehicle. Why do people talk about flying cars and not flying bicycles? Because a car doesn't imply wheels, but a bicycle does. It is certainly possible for a "car" to go to the moon. If we have a personal vehicle that can one day go to the moon, and it is similar in size and shape to a traditional car, I don't think anybody will have trouble calling it a "space car".
Some day we may create something that is as intelligent as humans. But it will be much more similar to a human than a computer is - to the point where calling it a computer would be like calling a rocket ship a bicycle.
I think you have a very narrow view of what "computation" is. If one day we have machines that are as intelligent as humans, and they are still made of the same stuff as they are now (i.e. transistors), but just in more advanced configurations, and you don't want to call them computers anymore, I can't stop you. I will say that everything from modern laptops, to calculators, to AIs, to biological brains fit pretty firmly in the realm of "computing machines" according to the experts in field of computer science.
If you win your semantic argument, and nobody (even computer scientists) in the future wants to call AIs computers, all it will mean is that the profound philosophical question "can computers be intelligent?" will be turned into a trivial question with a trivial answer of "No, because computers are defined to be non-intelligent"
Saying "Computers will never be intelligent, because I've defined computers as non-intelligent things", is a meaningless statement.
You have the humor of a really old and uninteresting person.
I'm not saying it's bad to know your snakes. The reason I came up with the example, is because I was just reading wikipedia articles about snakes at the time. My point is that the information is really easy to understand (i.e. even dumb people are capable of doing it). The fact that you know about snakes isn't a bad thing. It is probably a good thing. But it is not indicative of high intelligence (relative to other humans).
Some information is indicative of intelligence. (i.e. the information that dumb people can't just easily get/understand from google or wikipedia).