Seventy years ago today, Poland suffered invasion. Today, the United States shut down its Eastern European missile defense program. This act could mean one of two things:

1. A giant middle-finger to Poland and other nations like Czech Republic; to simply let them twist in the wind if or when Russia decides to roll on in.

2. A bargaining chip with Russia; Something we can diplomatically point to as “See? We lowered this defense because we trust you. Help us kick ass militarily/economically/etc against Iran/Korea/China.”

I don’t know if I can give our administration credit for the second scenario, but it certainly is easier to swallow even if it’s not entirely easy to digest. If the second situation holds, it has likely already been used for negotiation for under-the-table dealings with Russia. What would we have to gain from weakening our position on pure speculation? Maybe that’s why I don’t feel comfortable giving this administration credit: I can imagine it being so poor at diplomacy to try it to see if it worked.

Regarding the hard and fast DTV Transition today, /.user ObsessiveMathsFreak had this to say:

REPENT! Repent ye geeky sinners! For the end of days is upon ye!

Lo! As it is written, there shall befall a great and terrible calamity upon all the kin of the nerdy, and their most precious gadgets and devices shall be laid low by the machinations of the wicked! And they shall lament, and make agitated phone calls even in the early hours of the late morning!

And there shall be a great moaning as the geeky rise to diagnose the woes of their parents and uncles and aunts and cousins and neighbors and co-workers and friends and even children! Naught will your warnings save you as the wretched shall pay no need. And ye shall be swamped with piteous wails and whinges as the masses of humanity beat down thy doors and fill up they inboxes with useless protestations and opinions and heed not thy councils.

Thou shalt spend thy last days overseeing the procurement and installation of countless digital devices. Yea, in peoples very living rooms! And thou shalt be condemned to maintain and provide unpaid support for each and every one of these cheap and buggy imports till the end of thy unhappy life.

Repent geeky sinners! Give up thy sinful social ways and cast off thy connections to society, like the mathematicians and programmers of old! Give up thy internet and telephone connections and families and social life! Give up and repent, lest ye be danmed! REPENT!

Unapologetically stolen without permission from here in this discussion. Misspellings included!

This is a growing problem, this illegal immigration thing. Rather, it’s a problem that’s been big for quite some time, but the scale seems more apparent lately. There are some big questions out there, and some pretty creative solutions, but if you know me, I don’t think they’ll work, or if they do work, it sacrifices too much liberty.

The crux of the problem is there is only so much money to pay for a certain amount of people. If a budget is done properly, then every dollar has a place to go. Assuming an air-tight budget (and this is a massive assumption!), but with more people receiving services than there ought be, this causes some problems.

The first draft of my solution is a state-issued I.D. must be shown when receiving state services. This doesn’t really work, because all it does is show there are X number of people receiving Y services that should not. While valuable information, it’s simply information for its own sake.

I wanted to come up with a something that hits home rather than fear of The Man. Also important is I didn’t want to provide a recipe for a totalitarian presence setting up checkpoints and asking for my “papers.” It’d be comical in a sardonic way, and certainly not funny especially if it were to happen to you, yourself.

And then it hit me: Economics. Don’t give the state or federal government any more power (they have more than enough as it is), and have the states simply adjust what they already have authority over.  Increase the state sales tax by 20% and have retailers provide a 20% sales-tax discount if a state-issued I.D. can be shown. This means citizens can buy what they’ve always bought for the same exact prices they always have, but those without I.D. have to pay for the markup.

This one solution attacks on more than one front:

1. It provides the much-needed extra coin to the state treasury to pay for the services that illegal immigrants use.
2. If goods are too expensive to buy, those without I.D.s will simply leave and go somewhere else – preferably back to their country of origin or, less optimally, another state in which this is not place. 

Of course there no plan is perfect, but the flaws present are not inherent to the plan itself. The extra money raised will likely not be used properly by those in power. This is a corruption issue that I can’t begin to think about solving. Another question to ask is “how do the retailers prove the I.D. is legitimate?” Add another step to the checkout process and, in states with magnetic stripes on their drivers licenses, swipe the card in the credit card reader to qualify for the discount. Again, if corrupt people decide to keep recordsof these transactions and attach them to some profile, that’s not the plan’s fault unless naiveté is a flaw.

I know I’m a dirty hate-monger a lot of the time, but I’m being genuine here today. There are some concepts I feel I have to introduce first before I get to the meat though – don’t those people that say, “I told you that, so I could tell you this” grate on your nerves?

I’d like to first make a distinction between Artificial Intelligence and Synthetic Intelligence. On its face, ‘artificial’ implies something fake, something not quite what it’s supposed to be emulating. ‘Synthetic’ on the other hand certainly is what it purports to be, but is something crafted or made. A polyester shirt is certainly a shirt, just as a holographic projection of anything fake. SI is something real, that is why I prefer to use it over AI.

There is a test called the Turing Test which is designed to determine whether an intelligence is human. Imagine two humans chatting with each other over an instant messaging program, and one of those humans is a judge. If the test-subject is human enough, the test-subject passes as human. The same could be true for a Synthetic or Artificial Intelligence. If the judge determines the interaction to be human enough, the subject passes the Turing Test. An Artificial Intelligence that can fool a judge into passing is still artificial, but a Synthetic Intelligence implies it is advanced enough to be indistinguishable from an Organic Intelligence

The way the Turing Test is designed, a human should have no trouble passing the test, but what about those humans with mental retardation (MR)? Provided they have the intelligence to operate the computer, might a subject with MR pass or fail? I really don’t know, and I think the idea is politically incorrect enough to never be tested. It may even fall within the category of people not wanting to know because there are uncomfortable moral implications if humans with MR indeed do not pass the test, most directly “Are mentally retarded humans even human?”

Which finally brings me to my main point: If a Synthetic Intelligence turns out to be mentally retarded, can they pass a Turing Test? My gut says “yes” because for all intents and purposes, from an intellectual level, they are human. Thinking a bit further though, if the intelligence is truly what it is, rather than a facsimile, it may not pass the test at all, and the only way we could know answer is if we empirically gathered data on MR Organic Intelligences.

Another way to answer the unsettling question is to actually develop SI that passes the test and then modify it to have MR and test this new intelligence. This raises a question though: Is this no better than an Artificial Intelligence with a Synthetic as a model? I think it all depends on how the intelligence is created. If it is dialed back from an existing intelligence, then it is artificial. If it is crafted and “grown” to be MR, then it is synthetic.

You may be smiling or frowning now, but if an intelligence is grown, how is the intelligence not organic? Are we playing God and is what we created really alive? If we are created, are we alive? Implications, implications.

Go vote, you irradiated mole rat!