Either ways, the solution should be to fix the security system and reward the whistleblower. In a few years, we are going to have millions of teenagers with the competence and ability to pull of what Hamed did. What then?

Obviously those youngsters are all criminals that ought to be put to jail. We shall implement a zero-tolerance policy, just like the copyright industry did. </sarcasm>

Nevertheless, I'm afraid they might do just that.

I'm sure this is common knowledge. But this is his "troll" organization - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Nigger_Association_of_Ameri...

I have "pain is temporary" tattooed on my inner thigh to serve exactly this purpose. Unfortunately, when you're depressed the tattoo seems stupid.

PS: This might be because it's a stupid tattoo to begin with.

It is not:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_too_shall_pass

I never found comfort in "all this pain is an illusion" but Pearl Jam's "Present Tense" lyrics have something simplistic, true and healing about them that honestly make me wonder how they could have written it. Especially the part leading to "you're the only one who can't forgive yourself".

And Tool "Reflection", especially "And as I pull my head out I am without one doubt, Don't want to be down here feeding my narcissism, I must crucify the ego before it's far too late" which is of course a bit long to have it tattoo'ed but the idea, how narcissistic it actually is what you are doing... and how you must crucify this ego, this part of you, to find your true self and find peace.

People that describe themselves as trolls are generally bigoted idiots and I feel no sympathy. I'm sorry if that's a stereotype but I can't help myself, the internet hasn't been nice to me.

Whether they're bigoted or idiotic shouldn't affect how the law affects them, though. If the person committing this crime was a nice, inoffensive guy, would the law remain justified?

The law should treat both of them exactly the same. But if he was nice and unoffensive, I would go out of my way to help him.

This response has nothing to do with anything. The singularity as Kurzweil is describing it is marked by tangible events like the development of a true AI or atleast a machine learning algorithm capable of discovering and proving its own concepts. I have no idea how this relates to your very abstract singularity (a trick of perspective?).

Kurzeil attempts to privilege certain technological milestones as substantively "different" from other technological milestones (e.g. "true" AI)--and thus claim their consequences for human culture are uniquely unpredictable.

My point is that this is just an assertion, not a prediction. Every future development to some extent obscures our ability to predict the future of human culture. Look far enough into the future along any line of inquiry (legal, artistic, religious, energy, biology, etc.) and there is a singularity beyond which we cannot predict. It's just a function of trying to predict the future in general, not some special property of AI.

We may not be able to predict future developments in musical composition, but we can predict that song writers will probably not convert the entire mass of the solar system into musical instruments over a two week period.

The same cannot be said of self-improving AIs. Kurzweil's Singularity is not about the difficulty of long term predictions, it is that the progress function may become so steep that even short term predictions become impossible.

Self-aware music might do that-- and beyond the musical singularity, a concept like "self-aware music" has to be treated as plausible.

Which I think is the point.

Why can't the same be said of self-improving AIs? This seems to me like the sort of awesome-sounding but unsupported assertion that leads people to roll their eyes at the Singularity crowd.

A copy is never good enough. I think the best approach would be to enhance the brain by attaching devices to it directly. This maintains continuity and doesn't raise as many philosophical questions. This also raises other interesting questions like how long can the brain live in a suspended solution and where would all these consciousnesses live...

Slowly replace organics with mechanics until you only have a machine left. If you keep it gradual, you never know when you stop being a cyborg and start being a full fledged android.

There is a way to feed the energy you make using renewable sources into the grid so you can use them when they are around. Since you're still connected to the grid, conventional energy sources or better yet, renewable energy being generated elsewhere, can take over when the renewables aren't available.

Which is what I said.

The problem is still severe. In a country the size of the US it is still possible for there to be days of very little wind across the whole country. And, of course, once the Sun goes down on the West coast there won't be any power coming from solar for many hours. Which means that in a worst case scenario you need to rely on nuclear, coal, or hydrocarbon based power generation. And it means that you can't avoid having to build out conventional power generation capacity to match peak loads (which can occur when solar and wind power production is effectively zero).