jpapon

> As far as SS goes, I'd be happy to see it fail

I wouldn't. If SS fails, there will be riots, if not armed uprisings in the streets.

>> Nobody can assess the entire game tree, so the fact that it is theoretically knowable isn't actually relevant in a game.

That's not the point though. The point is that you only need to consider current state when considering your next move in Go or Chess. This is not the case in an incomplete information game, since the sequence of moves that led to the current state contains a lot of information. That's not the case in Chess or Go. Basically, Chess and Go satisfy the Markov Property, while Poker does not.

It's not that there is unburnt fuel in your exhaust - unburnt fuel, while a pollutant, is not the problem.

The issue is that higher temperature combustion, while more efficient, produces much more NOx. So you get more energy per unit fuel at higher temperatures, but you also get more pollutants. Lower temperatures (less oxygen) result in "cleaner" combustion (essentially, more CO2 and N2, less NO and NO2), but produce much less energy per unit fuel.

Yes, and think how unfair it is to students at universities in other countries that they don't get .edu addresses. Why should the US have this monopoly?

It's kind of a tricky legal situation. If they're European citizens, can you really stop them from coming back from Syria? What if they claim they didn't do anything illegal there?

People don't lose their rights just because they travel to the Middle East...

Germany also has very generous vacation, 12 months of paternity/maternity leave, etc... and their economy is doing just fine.

I guarantee if you asked Americans if they would trade their 2.5% (or whatever) economic growth for Germany's 1% in exchange for 20 days guaranteed vacation per year, most would say "hell yes". The people who wouldn't take the trade are those rich enough to not need the vacation.

This is obviously not true for the majority of jobs. You can't work harder to make up for your vacation when the job requires your presence (eg waiter, policeman, etc...).

Even for people who could work harder to make up for lost time, I don't agree with the assumption that they would. Remember, everyone has that vacation time, and is required to take it. There's no need to work harder to make up for it.

That's just ridiculous. Inner city kids don't lack the proper incentives to succeed (they're poor, after all), they lack the resources needed to succeed.

> Since REM is the part of the cycle where your body rests the most, I feel that if I fall into the cycle sooner rather than later, I can safely shave a few hours off my sleeping time.

That's a pretty big leap to make. If the natural sleep cycle has several stages, it's likely that the other stages are also important.

If you accept that computation is universal, then yes, you could definitely achieve human-like understanding through means that are completely different from the actual human wet-ware.

It might not be very efficient... but it's certainly possible. If the universe is isomorphic to a Turing machine, then the human brain certainly is. If that is so, then it is possible in principle to create a human-like machine with any other Turing-complete machine. It just might take you a billion years to simulate one second of human brain activity.