If you believe that there is computation being done by nature/physics that is strictly more powerful than what a Turing machine is capable of, then consciousness might be beyond the reach of a silicon computer.

I personally believe that the UCTT is very likely to be true, not least because we have not yet proposed an oracle that is physically feasible and yet is beyond the capabilities of a Turing Machine.

That said, in the space of feasibility there are open questions -- even if P != NP, a non-deterministic Turing machine can be simulated by a deterministic one, just potentially with an exponential increase in computation time or space.

The reality is that if you are using ad blocking, you are free-riding off of users who are not using them. It's an illusion to believe that "ad blocking" can actually work. If "ad blockers" were universal, then sites would just work around it -- instead of serving from third-party domains they would use plugins to serve on the first-party page. This will make everything slower and more heavyweight. Right now it's just not worth doing it.

As for finding a technical solution, jury is still out but I am unconvinced that it is possible to have a solution that a) prevents children from using an online service, b) allows adults to use the service, and c) does not identify the specific adult who is using the service. You proposed solution is no exception.

Why the silly conspiracy theory? Can't something just be stupid and bad but well-intentioned? You really think lawmakers are involved in some secret cabal that wants to track everyone's activities online? If anything, jurisdictions have shown that they are very interested in preventing the tracking of people's activity online, they just don't know how to do it!

Why go to the silly conspiracy theory place? Up until then I was in violent agreement, but things don't need to be a conspiracy to be bad. The rules are well-intentioned but poorly thought through, which is devastatingly common for government action in digital spaces; witness the fucking cookie popups (no illuminati involved in that one, just stupidity).

People and lawmakers are just not thinking through the privacy implications for the people who are exempt from these limitations, and the persistent nature of digital paper trails.

What is the limit on the scaling then? If we can scale up tokamaks, why aren't we right now building 10GW plants? 100GW plants?

The scaling constraints on other forms of power generation are well understood but the scaling is limited by safety/regulation and by logistics.

So maybe the economics are shifting -- I certainly hope so. I don't know if there's a big market for a premium eReader (like the Oasis) or whether there's a push to improve the UX to the point where it's usable, but I would very much like both of those things to happen.

That said, Amazon is definitely making a streaming push and the UX for their "Fire Stick" is on par with the UX for an actual "Dumpster Fire" so maybe they're just really bad at it.

I pretty much only buy ebooks now and the prices have been stable, but apparently print prices have been shooting up so the situation has now been corrected.

* improved in the ratio of ebook price to physical book price; ebook prices are still too high but that's just me complaining about how a quarter used to buy a loaf of bread or whatever.

We are not in a place where we expect fusion power to be incrementally achieved by the current systems. We need major breakthroughs that are both impossible to predict and may not even exist outside of stars or thermonuclear devices.

The idea that we'll get massive improvements in Qsci, while maintaining the same basic structure as existing fusion systems, is in the end a bit silly. What would we estimate our confidence to be that when someone invents the Fromboculator, that the Fromboculator will even have a heating system or "vacuum vessel" or a plasma system.

In the end, this looks like it's a steam engine simulator more than anything else, but with some fancy words thrown in.

Have things improved since the last time I checked in? I really hate so much about the kindle and its ecosystem but it seems to be the best out there.

In past eras they used holograms and watermarks and special papers in an attempt to prevent forgery but these methods keep getting challenged by an ever more sophisticated criminal element. Moving into cryptographically secure methods is the last barrier here.

They could also rely on the state to match identities to tickets, but this approach does not scale and is frankly undesirable for the majority of people anyway.

Even if we could make them truly unforgeable, people generally want electronically transferrable tickets. How do you propose to do this?

Having a non-exfiltratable bearer token is really really hard. In order to present a zero-knowledge proof of the possession of a token you need to have some sort of challenge-response protocol. The simplest one, and the one in most common use (such as this) is a time-based method, where the shared knowledge of the current time represents the challenge.

The other method is to use civil identity as the challenge, and use government-issued IDs as the bearer token that the ticket is tied to. This doesn't scale well to larger events, and presents real challenges involved centralization of ticket exchange.

You can argue whether or not forgery is a significant enough problem to be worth this trouble, but that's a business decision, and as live events like this get more expensive forgery and resale become more and more of a problem, which end up locking out people like this who have legally and legitimately bought tickets but can't gain access to events because someone has stolen and resold their ticket.

EDIT: I know complaining about downvotes is a downvotable offense itself, but I'm genuinely curious as to what is objectionable about this comment.