dodo53

There's also various disorders that produce dwarfism and giantism and other forms that might have looked like mythical creatures before medical science knew about these things.

Also, I like the mythical cyclops could have been from dwarf elephant skulls theory: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/cyclops02.htm

How about combine this with book-in-advance? So say you get $20 of pizza for $10, coupon website actually runs the payment system - takes payment of $10 in advance, and then you show up to get your deal. Then limited-capacity places could do realtime deals available to limited number of people to reach but not exceed their capacity, and bargain-hunters would be sure they'd get their deal and not show up somewhere that just became full.

it pushes a lot of work on consumers - you need a lot of information/research to know who you can buy from (and if you're being strict you'd have to follow their supplier chain also for your opinion to affect all the B2B companies).

I feel like that already with sweatshops/child labour already - you hear a couple big companies when it hits mass media, but it's no doubt widely spread, so boycotting scandalised company of the day might not be effective (and just incentivise better PR/press control).

That requires people who are (temporarily) able-bodied to be sufficiently foresighted and activist-y - I'm not sure consumer boycotts frequently work (either due to lack of information or coordination or it being too much effort).

I agree I'd like the market to sort it out instead of law, but I don't think it's realistic. Consider access ramps/elevator requirements for example - if a fairly significant chunk of key businesses (say supermarket, banks, workplaces, transport) in an area don't all have them, the area becomes practically uninhabitable by people in wheelchairs.

I always think Alex the grey parrot is impressive too http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6KvPN_Wt8I

>According to the lawsuit, the ADA requires that all “places of entertainment” provide “full and equal enjoyment” for people with disabilities.

I'm sure it's lost in translation from legalese, but that seems like a really broad requirement. How can you claim full and equal enjoyment of deaf people at a nightclub say? Googled the act and tried to read it (http://www.ada.gov/statute.html) but I can't parse it.

Edit: removed the bit where I said surely captions aren't hard - article links to netflix saying it is (http://gigaom.com/video/why-netflix-doesnt-offer-subtitles-o...)

It's a bit of a silly way to respond though - they could either be whitehats themselves and charge a more reasonable amount; or charge the same amount and donate whatever they think is reasonable to education campaigns or whatever.

I think the greenhouse effect is totally uncontroversial. To what extent the climate will change due to that is slighlty more scientifically controversial, but as uninformed lay person I'd say is fairly broad consensus.

Which green energy choices are economically feasible is much more controversial - there's counterintuitive things like - is it better to subsidize solar/wind while not really feasible to subsidize technology development or build natural gas plants (which are proven to be economically feasible and cleaner than oil I believe - but obviously still a fossil fuel).

Edit: tried googling for gas-is-cleaner-than-oil citation, and found - http://www.propublica.org/article/more-reasons-to-question-w... saying earlier studies may be wrong and it's actually dirtier than coal.

The problem is that climate change and green energy are so complicated and political, it's hard to tell what is propaganda (and there's strong incentives in many different directions for the results to come out in a given direction). Ethanol used to sound like a good idea; now it sounds like it's mostly a corn/sugar-lobby way of getting money and not practical (although I'm sure it's not that straightforward).

For 'wind looks cleaner' - the Register argues that mostly it'll end up making energy more expensive without being much cleaner (in this one case in the UK), due to perverse incentives: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/national_grid_2020/

I think 'gut feeling' is exactly what we don't need. Things are not always intuitively obvious.

>As a general rule, one should expect no-one to care about anything new you happen to be working on. Consider: if people cared, it would be done already

I think that's a bit of a jump! There's plenty of things that people care about but don't personally think they could achieve. If you do a startup to end world hunger, people would be interested as soon as you proved your credibility in actually achieving it.

Also - Interesting side-project! What's your background (are you a software dev? biotech scientist?)

Or presumably you could go one further and solve for the fundamental matrix which gives total probabilities (given unlimited steps) of ending at either end of the plank ('absorbing' states which you don't come back from). see: http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/archive/m20x06/public_html/Lec...

That is such a cool scheme. I'm glad somebody is actively seeking to invalidate bogus patents. I'm not sure how they're getting money - is they idea that people that join up donate to the cash pool they use to reward people who find prior art on existing patents?

Also it doesn't go quite as far as I'd like - it reduces the incentive to lodge bogus patents (as hopefully they'll stand for less time), but I'd still like their to some level of penalty to the originator when bogus patents are overturned (but that's a law change - somebody pointed out on a previous thread apparently Texas now has a law penalizing people that bring frivolous suits - not quite the same as filing for frivolous patents, but I still like it).

Edit: ah, followed links to http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/11/startup-crow... Apparently they take research requests from clients, presumably for money. Not quite as cool as I hoped - cost might still be out of realm of startup defence. Also - Article One Partners applied for a patent for their system of crowdsourcing patent invalidation :o)

I think this is a good idea. I'd even go further and say some startups catering to specific geographic areas could franchise - you take some of the risk, put in some of your own money maybe, they get cut of profits and give you their tech / secret sauce.

I think steep learning curves are used in two contexts -

1. for example at your job - steep learning curve is good, it means learning / time is high.

2. for example programming languages - steep learning curve is (possibly) bad, it means learning or aptitude /effort is high - lots of effort to gain aptitude. Somewhat confused by the fact that the reason it's hard is possibly because the final achievement is more useful (but not necessarily - you can have hard-to-learn interfaces/processes, that are just badly designed, so you've only learned to jump silly hoops).

I'm always a bit sad that sci-fi books/ideas that are cutting-edge and shocking at the time are either diluted or delayed so much by the time they hit film that they're no longer particularly surprising when the hit the vast majority of people who'd watch a sci-fi film but not read the book form. The awe of newness often gets replaced with action/horror.

My take: I worked for a startup as one of their two devs/IT guys at the time (2 business partners who definitely I'd say saw everyone else as employees, three-four customer service types). None of us knew a great deal about dev at the time (no version control, no ticket system, live changes in prod etc..), so we hacked by, but it was only once I worked for a much larger company that I learned a lot of important dev stuff (in my case, I wasn't coming from a CS degree; perhaps more appropriately educated types wouldn't have gained so much). Not all startups are equally tech focused / good at that aspect of things (this one was online retail).

But having said that, the learning payoff tails off really quickly - you gain much more in 3 months on role than the next 3 years etc..

I'd say main thing is to try and switch jobs/roles before you're too comfortable.

Also - focus on what you're gaining right from the start. The thrill of actually having money coming into your account sometimes means you can overlook when you're stagnating. You have to lead your own learning at companies - and if you push for it, you can gain a lot. But generally managers have other things to worry about and if you don't, they'll assume you're happy.

Suppose there is a tech/social web bubble, is there anything anyone would advise for starting your own startups? E.g: stick with the day job; bootstrap rather than take money; postpone and launch in 2 years; get in fast while the hype is still there?

Any startup survivors from the last one wish they'd done things differently?

That sounds really interesting, thanks for link.

I guess the goal would be to choose work where you don't rely on people at slower clock speeds (say working on deep algorithm stuff - you can get low latency connection to a library and research stuff 100x faster). Or you could change your clock speed / put your consciousness on hold until slower-time triggers mean you can do something productive, and then ramp up so that your end of things happens very quickly.

Ha, that's funny, that model was the one UCL referenced in their kinda 'This is possible' motivation. I find it all very interesting, but gave up after a year as I felt like a lot of the models were going to be a bit flaky for the next decade and that was a bit of a culture shock (I was a physics student before).

Yes, I think my current thinking is: this should be considered. But I'm also cynical that lawmakers could get it right, or that the laws would be followed. Strong AI would presumably have military applications too, or could allow rogue nations to outcompete economically if they had 'friendly' strong AI.

As, as long as most of the population / electable people are religious, probably the idea cannot be debated (as many religious would say consciousness cannot be simulated).

I agree you could just go on to a full body simulation - I guess you have to somehow decide what level of accuracy is needed for the key features. You're not going to be able to do chemistry-level simulations of your whole body, so you'll have to make higher level simulations of different parts (like here's a function that describes insulin reaction as a response to blood sugar function)

Also - if you're interested in background on systems biology - there's a broad overview of UCLs biological modelling research group here (http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10844/1/10844.pdf [pdf]) - they've got a project modelling the liver / blood-sugar-system.

Apparently the canonical example that has worked pretty well is a computer model of the heart but I think it's a simpler organ in that it's mostly electro-mechanical, without such a complicated chemical system (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/295/5560/1678.abstract - behind Science paywall)

Or even without maliciousness - someone could screw up a simulation such that the simulated mind is in pain for a subjective eternity

One thing I always think about brain emulation/mind uploading/strong AI research is we need an legal/ethical framework in place before we get there.

I still think it's far off, but not everyone does. If you believe consciousness is a property of running a brain or sufficiently advanced brain model, at what point are you allowed to stop running your model and it's not murder of a sentient? At one point can a model claim rights?

Especially as their goal is to use it for drug tests.

Also, can you simulate a brain without a body or is say hormones/blood sugar/nervous system not easily separable?

Cool. I guess I should sign up before suggesting stuff :o)

What I'm waiting from (purely from an uninformed coolness factor) is automated cooperating agent style construction - a la ant colony or termite mound.

The completionist in me would have gone back and tried the "No" route also :P

yeah, the company won an innovation award for it in 2006: http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/concrete-tent-gets-mixed-... I guess it takes a while to productionize.

From my experience of facebook - I'd say aggregating or having the choice of aggregating all the email would be really nice. So instead of a So-and-so is doing X, would you like to join them? You could have - Your friends are planning the following things this week/later this month. Reply with subject X to join in.