"Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."

if you can’t explain how to simulate your theory on a computer, chances are excellent that the reason is that your theory makes no sense!

-- Scott Aaronson

So what I argued was that thoughts are by nature commensurable: it's just in the nature of thoughts that any thinking system can think any thought from any other thinking system. There are exceptions to this, but these exceptions are always on the basis of limited resources, like limited memory.

So, an application of this view is that there are no incommensurable scientific schemes: we can in principle take any claim from any scientific paradigm and understand or test it in any other.

Cryonics?

It would surprise me, since no one could ever give me an example. I'm not sure what kind of evidence could give me good reason to think that there are thoughts that I cannot think.

I was under the impression that AA applied to college admissions, and that college graduation is still entirely contingent on one's performance. (Though I've heard tell that legacy students both get an AA-sized bump to admissions and tend to be graded on a much less harsh scale.)

A quick google search isn't giving me an actual percentage, but I believe that students who're admitted to and attend college, but do not graduate, are still significantly in the minority. Even those who barely made it in mostly graduate, if not necessarily with good GPAs.

On specificity and sneaking on connotations; useful for the liberal-minded among us:

I think, with racism and sexism and 'isms' generally, there's a sort of confusion of terminology.

A "Racist1" is someone, who, like a majority of people in this society, has subconsciously internalized some negative attitudes about minority racial groups. If a Racist1 takes the Implicit Association Test, her score shows she's biased against black people, like the majority of people (of all races) who took the test. Chances are, whether you know it or not, you're a Racist1.

A "Racist2" is someone who's kind of an insensitive jerk about race. The kind of guy who calls Obama the "Food Stamp President." Someone you wouldn't want your sister dating.

A "Racist3" is a neo-Nazi. You can never be quite sure that one day he won't snap and kill someone. He's clearly a social deviant.

People use the word "Racist" for all three things, and I think that's the source of a lot of arguments. When people get accused of being racists, they evade responsibility by saying, "Hey, I'm not a Racist3!" when in fact you were only saying they were Racist1 or Racist2. But some of the responsibility is on the accusers too -- if you say "That Republican's a racist" with the implication of "a jerk" and then backtrack and change the meaning to "vulnerable to unconscious bias", then you're arguing in bad faith. Never mind that some laws and rules which were meant to protect people from Racist3's are in fact deployed against Racist2's.

-celandine13

The biggest is solar flares and coronal ejections. Not your normal day to day solar winds and stuff, but honking great gouts of energy and/or coronal mass that are flung out.

Another is comms. How many people would use each server? Really? What's the bandwidth divided by users? From the ground going up you either need a well aimed dish or a honking lot of power (or a shitload of antenna topside)

Third is Putting lots of these up isn't a wonderful idea as they will obsolete quickly and need to be replaced. You then have the choice to de-orbit them (wasteful) or leave them up there (danger to navigation).

Fourth, fifth and sixth are security, security and security. How do you apply a security patch to something Up There. Yes, it can be done, but what happens if you Brick It. Back to more engineering and more redundancy and etc. Up goes the cost, up goes the size, down goes the payback. How do you prevent eavesdropping on your communications with it? And with it's communication with you? Encryption? that's either more CPU cost, or more payload to use special processors. How do you protect it from deliberate interference from various organisations that wish to compromise it. etc. etc.

While the lure of "free" energy (or more accurately low cost, reliable energy) is compelling, there's a LOT of ways to get many of those benefits terrestrially. The notion of something like this "reducing poverty" is silly. While there is a lot that processing power can do to reduce poverty, access to raw computing resources ISN'T one of them. You'd be better off deploying something like wifi to GSM connections and building effective mesh network protocols. A for various kinds of research there's plenty of unused power here on this planet. See this: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/energy/energy_archive/energy_flow_2010/LLNLUSEnergy2010.png If you really want to solve a useful problem in this area turning that "rejected energy" into CPU cycles. You've got about 26 Quads of waisted energy JUST from electrical distribution.

That's a metric buttload of entropy that could be put to work solving problems if we could figure out how to get to it. CPU cycles that are close, easily upgradeable, easily defendable, easily recoverable when they die or get obsolesced.

(I have this pet notion that landfills are GOOD places to put stuff we can't use right now, because some day some smart bloke is going to figure out how to use nanotech of some kind to (diamond age style) sort the component bits right out and we'll KNOW where all the high density sources are because we'll have been dumping our old crud in there for a hundred years. Now if we can just keep the crap out of our ground water....)

Overall it can be done, and if you want to deliver compute resources to station owners or Aboriginal Communities in the outback, or nomadic tribes in the desert regions of the world it might be cost effective. But those folks would need a local computer and network to access it, so why not just give them a slightly beefier lapdog and use some sort of distributed compute engine?

I have a tendancy to agree with Mr. Gerard and Mr. Cunningham on this though--while it's an interesting technical exercise and I (clearly) don't mind talking about it, it's not the sort of thing I come here for.

The classic is Andrew Tobias, "The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need." You can trust it because he's not selling anything and teaches common-sense, conservative advice: no risky speculation or anything.

You somewhat misquote the FDA fatalities estimate. It is not that the FDA prevents 5000 fatalities; it's that the extra delay by FDA, compared to european regulators (EMA), prevents at most 5000 fatalities per decade.

Total absence of regulation would result in a drug industry that is only concerned with soundbites, drug colouring, and trademarks. Through most of our history, the medicine worked just like this.