http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP

(I want to also mention that he debunks quite convincingly the theory that the decrease in crime had anything to do with legalizing abortion.)

To do that they would have to bet a lot of money that the tariff will make the country better (by an objective metric which is decided upon by the voters), and if that turned out wrong, they would lose a lot of money.

Why? Is it not a fair question to ask whether the guy who is the single source of all the revelations might not be playing with a full deck? The guy who said "they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent" about Red China? Wouldn't it even be the most Occam-compliant assumption, unless your anti-American prior is so strong you automatically grant credibility to anyone who speaks against the US government?

"Snowden will be called a defector. Also propaganda."

Isn't that technically what he did?

defect 2 |diˈfekt| verb [ no obj. ] abandon one's country or cause in favor of an opposing one

(Biases on the table: I'm biased against people who defect from the US to communist countries.)

If we were having this debate in the XVIII-th century, you could equally as well assert that any machine capable of playing chess should be considered a person. The motivation is exactly the same as with the Turing test: so far only humans can play chess, humans are sentient, QED.

Say someone said, "But what if a machine used a minimax algorithm." To which you could respond, armed with your knowledge of XVIIIth century technology, "Such thing cannot exist therefore it's an irrelevant question."

As for the creation of such a table, not that I consider that question particularly relevant, but here it is: Say a crazy scientist in the future created a program that actually simulated a human brain, then ran it (on future super-fast hardware) on every possible input (once again, the size of the input is bounded by the maximum length of a conversation a human can have), and stored the results on future super-large hard drives. Then he deleted the human brain simulation program, and gave you just the lookup table. The act of deleting the original program we may very well consider murder. But what about the generated lookup table?

The article acknowledges that a lookup table could pass the Turing test--the author even uses this argument for his own ends. At the same time, clearly he doesn't think we should presume the lookup table sentient. The only passage which might be interpreted as an "objective distinction" is this one:

Personally, I find this response to Searle extremely interesting—since if correct, it suggests that the distinction between polynomial and exponential complexity has metaphysical significance. According to this response, an exponential-sized lookup table that passed the Turing Test would not be sentient (or conscious, intelligent, self-aware, etc.), but a polynomially-bounded program with exactly the same input/output behavior would be sentient. Furthermore, the latter program would be sentient because it was polynomially-bounded.

And yet in the next paragraph the author says he's reluctant to stand behind such thesis.

Do you, unlike Scott Aaronson, want to adopt this amended postulate--i.e., do you believe all computer programs which can pass the Turing test should be granted personhood as long as they scale polynomially with the length of the conversation?

Now ask yourself: how on Earth did the author consider the information about Turing's persecution relevant to the subject at hand?

People say they can't stand Wolfram's lack of humility. Just get over it for your own benefit. People have flaws, that's life. If you get so enraged over his style that you can't listen to what he says, then you won't hear what he has to say which happens to be a lot of interesting things.

Really? But Wikipedia tells me that After 1970 the desirability of assimilation and the melting pot model was challenged by proponents of multiculturalism,[4][5] who assert that cultural differences within society are valuable and should be preserved, proposing the alternative metaphor of the mosaic, salad bowl or "American Kaleidoscope" – different cultures mix, but remain distinct.[6][7]

There's a lot of web hosting companies which use Linux on their servers?. Are you saying they're all doing it wrong? Or by "an unprivileged process" do you mean "not specifically sandboxed process"?

If we lived in a world where nuclear energy was still just a theoretical possibility, and you had a company D-Uranium trying to build the first reactor ever, and someone like Scott Aaronson kept saying for years and years "You guys suck you haven't even demonstraded there are any atoms split inside your device, for all we know it's all heat from chemical reactions", and then, eventually in the face of evidence he was forced to admit that atoms indeed were being split in D-Uranium's pile, so he retreated to saying "But your reactor generates less heat than a coal burning power station so you guys still suck!"--what would that make you think?

I'd argue that perl gets it right--as the default behavior, this behavior would gravely violate the principle of least surprise, but for the 0.01% of people who want \d to match ੧, there's no harm to making it available as an option you need to specifically request.