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While none of this is exactly new to people who've studied moral philosophy, Sam Harris can present this very well in his 23 minute TED talk "Science can answer moral questions". What he is saying is that most (he simplifies to "all" but anyways) schools of thought in ethics can be traced back to human happiness and flourishing (even if you believe in god and think that the happiness occurs in afterlife). Questions of human happiness are factual questions that we have studied for a long time (psychology, sociology, etc.). While we might not be able to agree on what are the peaks of happiness or how to get there, we certainly can say that some states of being are not the right answer... So we should not pretend that all cultures should be respected equally in that regard.

Using my google de-encryption method, the MBE Acronym appears to stand for the "Multi State Bar Exam" - a degree for Yankee lawyers practicing across state lines. Why on earth did they give that to this poor gentleman?

Welcome to the search filter bubble.

"The student in this case didn't exactly make the best of decisions: With tensions high, it would probably be better to not be drawing guns or give any potential "danger indicators" to school officials, etc."

For adults, your point might make sense. but kids may process information like the tragedy in CT by role-playing through it. That is described in a book called "The War Play Dilemma" by by Diane E. Levin and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, which I review here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
"The "dilemma" is about a fundamental conflict parents face when dealing with war play. On the one hand, most parents want children to grow and develop by working through developmental issues (like learning to deal with conflict, learning self-control, and learning respect for themselves and others through play, including play involving conflicts as hands-on-learning). On the other hand, most parents want to convey social values related to their beliefs about violence and war as ways to solve social conflicts. The authors clearly do not say all war play is bad, and they also point out that even a cracker can be turned into a gun with one bite. The authors say there are no easy general answers to this dilemma in all situations, but provide a range of options. ..."

People who draw may often draw what is on their mind. With 24X7 news coverage of the tragedy, how could guns not be on the minds of a lot of kids?

Beyond all the other insightful comments people have made here, this NJ situation shows the fundamental lack of understanding that is so prevalent in so many schools about how children really learn and grow.

Better information on how kids learn:
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0fg73WnLWQ
http://www.holtgws.com/howchildrenlearn.html
http://www.alfiekohn.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm

I did find this talk some time ago: http://www.ted.com/talks/marc_goodman_a_vision_of_crimes_in_the_future.html. It's interesting in noticing that security is almost impossible as damaging is much easier than preventing damage. The problem with terrorist is that little can actually be done to stop it. As it was recently proved, a single person with a gun can shock the world. Do that 10 times in random locations and see what happens... hell, I can think of many ways to create terror myself, without trying much.

I read somewhere that one of Bin Laden's objectives was to make the US spend 1 millon for each dolar that they spent. It is guerrilla warfare, it's all they've got, and they have been extremely successful at it. The values and way of life the US people were so proud about are gone. The millions were spent and continue to be. Sadly, the root of the issue it that, bared some reasonable efforts, the only way to fight terror is by enduring it and not being scared. Luckily, very few people are actually determined to do real damage and cause pain.

No I don't follow.

Take bounce back. Clearly Samsung implemented bounce back, clearly the jury found the Samsung mechanism was closely enough to Apple's to violate the patents. How does this not get upheld?

Look and feel issues like home button, rounded corners, tapered edges... that is making a product that appears to similar to another competing product. That sort of thing gets enforced all the time. Fake watches, fake coats, fake purses, There is nothing unusual there.

etc...

No. You are free to copy the *exact* design for a coat except for a trademarked logo. If you want to compare fashion to this case, it would mean that Samsung would be allowed to copy everything about the i* design except the Apple Logo. Watch this video for details on how the fashion industry has no copyright protection at all: http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

What, has scientific evidence of their moral wrongness been unearthed?

Maybe. You seem to think (with no uncertainty) that it's a foregone conclusion that such evidence is impossible. It isn't.
Mathematical proofs are for math. Science is about weight of evidence, not proof.

You seem to think the only two logical possibilities are moral nihilism or morality from religion. They aren't.

No, of course not. They know no such thing.

Again, so arrogant, and yet so ignorant.

This stuff has been debated for thousands of years, right up to the present day, in philosophy and science (yes, science.) But never mind that -- AC on Slashdot has it all figured out.

Educate yourself, or STFU. Here's a good place to start:

Science of Morality
Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions?

Everything is a remix.

I really like this guy's idea: link

There is a really good tech talk that touches on this. While McAfee seems to thinks this is a good thing, I believe it will most likely be a painful journey.

http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_mcafee_are_droids_taking_our_jobs.html

A recent TED talk showed me how far patents can go. Patenting obvious things which give convenience is bad. But patenting something which saves lives is... I don't know apropriate word for this. But this is reality. And we must be changing that.

This worries me because, contrary to popular believe, economic and social equality are the best guarantee for economic growth; the healthiest (but not necessarily the biggest) economies are characterized by notably high equality amongst their participants. (Also see http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html [ted.com])

This seems to be the core point of your post.

I will watch the movie later when I have time, but I doubt it will be very convincing, because it is easy to think of counter-examples. Some of the former Soviet states being obvious examples.

I think it is very simple to replace service jobs with robots. And this is happening a quite a fast pace.

In my country (Netherlands), nearly all banks have gone entirely online. They are not just "focusing more on the Internet", no, they have just closed nearly all their offices. Paying taxes has been completely automated for the vast majority. Offline retail is having more and more trouble keeping up with online retail (which, in many cases, is handled almost entirely by robots!). It has been ages since I've been in a real shop! Train personnel is being replaced by access gates and security cameras at a rapid pace, even the checkout employees at supermarket are mostly a thing of the past; customers just scan their groceries themselves. In the medium term, we can also expect all transport personnel (taxis, truck drivers) to be replaced and then it's just a matter of not too much time before the entire process from growing food on the land to it ending up in your fridge is handled by robots.

In fact (again, in my country) in the medium and long term, it does not really look like we're transitioning to a service economy at all. We already did that in the 50s to 80s and are now transitioning into the next phase. This can be seen very clearly during the past 30 years: employment in nearly all professions is declining, except for IT, recycling, sales, care, medical care and recreation (those are the main categories used by our national numbers-agency). In other words: apart from some jobs that are on the rise because they're just new, we're quite quickly moving to those jobs that cannot be replaced by robots.

I think this means the service economy will very soon be a thing of the past. Instead, we're moving towards a "care&joy economy", in which most jobs are about the one thing robots cannot do (very well): being humans.

Note that in the long run, employment rates have been pretty constant. I - like you - am not worried that robots will cause major unemployment; no other type of automation has done so in the past. What I am worried about, is that robots will enable further concentration of wealth on a level and at a speed never seen before. This old-fashioned problem, once popularized by one Karl Marx in the time of steam-engines is even now already gaining major traction. Economic and social inequality are increasing rapidly and will continue to do so.

This worries me because, contrary to popular believe, economic and social equality are the best guarantee for economic growth; the healthiest (but not necessarily the biggest) economies are characterized by notably high equality amongst their participants. (Also see http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html)

Robots won't take our jobs. However, their owners will increasingly not (be able to) spend their (ever growing stack of) money in ways that keep the economy up to speed. If we don't solve this problem before it occurs, it will be the end of western society as we know it.

Novel attack... demoed at TEDxAustin back in February and posted online for everyone to see ;-) http://www.ted.com/talks/todd_humphreys_how_to_fool_a_gps.html

I'd say we all know far too little to judge one slashdotters life situation with any real certainty.

But back on topic, EST/ECT does still work for a lot of people, and considerable work has been done to make the process less barbaric. This sounds like a very benign version of that.

Here's an interesting TED talk on severe depression and electroshock, from someone that was fortunate enough to benefit from it...

http://www.ted.com/talks/sherwin_nuland_on_electroshock_therapy.html

More Multi-Touch Prior art

http://blog.ted.com/2009/08/25/wireless_electr/

>2009

--
BMO

And, he got it in one. And it's not really all that niche an idea; even TED has presented talks on the subject. And it's not just the US any more; Foxconn is getting in on the action and replacing workers with a million robots. (Incidentally, this may cause the American lead in precision manufacturing to narrow, or vanish entirely)

But what happens when everyone who is manufacturing anything automates the entire process? Our agricultural system is already hugely centralized and automated. White collar "knowledge work" is on the chopping block next. Why? IBM wants it to happen, and has the ability to make it happen.

We're also making more and more people; nobody really wants to stop screwing. So we've got more people and less work - how do we allocate enough purchasing power so they can pay for food, medicine, and housing? Two ideas spring to mind: A command economy, which is a terrible idea, and make-work, which is merely bad. Bad because it could either be terrible, or if we get really ambitious, we could make work space exploration, asteroid mining, building orbital elevators and ending our dependence on fossil fuels. So, not necessarily terrible. Except some significant portion of that work is going to be automated.

I don't know the answer, but at least I can direct your attention to the problem.

You could, you know, watch the video before passing judgement. He isn't political, he just presents facts. That it is a liability isn't a political issue, unless you believe it is okay for an employer not to pay it's workers what it has promised to.

With regards to a bigger issue, scratching sources of information "off your list" is not very keen. It leads to the filter bubbles that lead to, you know, believing that the majority of the USA supports your opinions and you'll win elections easily, for example.

If hiding information from your eyes is the only way to maintain your worldview, said worldview might have issues.

The idea of molten salt batteries sounds quite intriguing to me, especially for bulk utility level energy storage. In this TED talk, MIT professor Donald Sadoway details his designs and describes the models he has already built. In short, the idea is to have two liquid metals, one less dense and one more dense. In the middle is a layer of molten salt. The less dense molten metal floats on the top. In the middle is the molten salt, and at the bottom is the more dense molten metal. The molten salt acts as the electrolyte in the cell, and the two different metals pass electrons around due to their different electron affinities.

When building these cells, they would use common cheap materials, so that the cost of this type of battery would be trivial compared with the amount of energy it can store. The fact that the cell is molten is actually an advantage. We spend huge effort in our current electrochemical cells trying to keep them cool. This type of cell would thrive on heat...indeed the energy used in charging and discharging it would help keep the metals and the salt molten.

Clearly this type of cell would not be used to power your laptop or cellphone directly, but it could be used to store energy from solar panels on your rooftop, or to store energy from large solar power plants for use in the night. As always, I am sure there are bugs to work out, but really, this sounds incredibly promising.

Perhaps you should take to to hear what she actually has to say.

Peeking Behind the curtain at anonymous.

A long way from sweeping generalisations common here.

> Copyright is the working model for digital media that allows creators to get paid for their work.

Want to tell that to the Fashion Industry?
http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

Regardless of which side of the death penalty argument you fall on there is something that we can all agree on... If you haven't already watched this David R. Dow: Lessons from death row inmates do yourself a 20 minute favour.

Combine it with one of these?

No issues whatsoever :-) Incidentally, you might also find this interesting: Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture | Video on TED.com. I have more sources if you are interested.

In the US the entertainment industry attributes losses of more 40 million to a single file-sharer.

And that's just for a corpse or a network printer. A single file-sharer with a pulse could cost the industry 8 billion dollars!

same person, but posting limits. due to socialist ideology of /.

It's easy actually, look up fashion industry.

Care needs to be taken when using global database searches to match DNA, otherwise even if you have only a slight chance of a false positive the chance finding someone who is a match is quite high, because your population is quite high.

see http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_donnelly_shows_how_stats_fool_juries.html (from 10 min) not specifically about DNA but the same principle. also
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/henryporter/2009/may/25/dna-database-false-positive

Reminds me of a TED talk...

http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_donnelly_shows_how_stats_fool_juries.html

Although not directly related to coffee, there is a very interesting TED talk from Jojanna Blakley that touches this exact point. She compares the fashion industry, in which there are pratically no copyright law or intellectual property, to the entertainment industry where this is heavily overblown. Link: http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

Why bother making fetuses when we can just make the parts? Unless you want all the other stuff you can't transplant to sell at a fast food restaurant, I can think of no good reason for it.

Seriously, we can already just make the parts.

A good TED talk in itself, but around 2:55 the speaker shows a video of a crow creating a tool: Joshua Klein: The intelligence of crows. I like his conclusion: instead of killing crows (and other non-human species which have adapted to live in cities), we should think how we can use their adaptive skills to train them to do some work for us, i.e. to try to cooperate with them.

Science has already largely shown though that your rate of pay does not really correlate to an increase in productivity. By and large all that paying people more does is make them willing to do something they would never have otherwise wanted to do...like menial labor.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

If the rate of pay really isn't an effective motivator why do we insist on meritocratic pay? Shouldn't incentives like this actually do something.

Yes you could. You could verify your vote counted and who you voted for however it couldn't be traced back to you without the receipt.

David Bismark E Voting Without Fraud

Bad idea.
http://www.ted.com/talks/todd_humphreys_how_to_fool_a_gps.html

This is also how Iran took down a drone.

Blueprints for Civilization This TED video is worth 4 minutes of your time.
Jakubowski articulates his vision very clearly.
I remember hearing of this a few years ago; I am glad to see they're making some headway.

> He is encouraging others to reject religion and other supernatural beliefs that are made without good reasons

Oh please. Dawkins continues to shit on other people's belief. When he is able to respect a person _irrespective_ of their beliefs then maybe the rest of the world will pay attention to him.

First, right now he comes across as a pompous ass unable to acknowledge that *everyone* has faith. i.e. If you didn't faith in your beliefs you wouldn't have them!

Second, as a Mystic the problem is BOTH Atheism and Theism are based on ignorance. They have beliefs (or lack of them) yet they BOTH LACK KNOWLEDGE. While Dawkins is able to see the wisdom of Atheism and the ignorance of Theism, he is _also_ unable to see the weaknesses of Atheism and unable to see the wisdom of Theism. This is not his fault. All the major religions for the most part have crappy teachers not understanding the difference between religion and spirituality. i.e. "How terrible it will be for you experts in religious law! For you hide the key to knowledge from the people. You don't enter the Kingdom yourselves, and you prevent others from entering " Unless a priest, rabbi, minister, etc, is able to explain what the Key of Knowledge is, sadly, they don't know jack about God, or the purpose of the Universe: HINT: It is ALL about relationships.

Third, Dawkins is ignorant of God because he keeps using another man's definition of "god" instead of his own. He is an arm chair theologian. You wouldn't go ask a non musician how to be the a great drummer; you would go find someone who IS a drummer to SHOW you.

Fourth, He is unable to reconcile the *paradox* "There is only one path; there are infinite paths." He doesn't understand that BOTH Atheism AND Theism are valid paths. They are NOT mutually exclusive.

Fifth, Dawkins continues to ignore the evidence that Death is merely a shift in consciousness as the NDE proves.

* http://abcnews.go.com/Health/neuroscientist-sees-proof-heaven-week-long-coma/story?id=17555207#.UI0gU41lQf4
* http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

Unless he is able to see BOTH the WISDOM _and_ IGNORANCE of Atheism he is deluded.

Good talk on this.

http://www.ted.com/talks/matthieu_ricard_on_the_habits_of_happiness.html

> Copyright exists because people cannot be trusted to respect the wishes of artists and/or financially support them
False. It was invented by _publishers_ to maintain control by preventing other publishers from making a profit !

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law [wikipedia.org]
"The history of copyright law starts with early privileges and monopolies granted to printers of books. The British Statute of Anne 1710, full title "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned", was the first copyright statute. Initially copyright law only applied to the copying of books."

"Pope Alexander VI issued a bull in 1501 against the unlicensed printing of books and in 1559 the Index Expurgatorius, or List of Prohibited Books, was issued for the first time."

"The first copyright privilege in England bears date 1518 and was issued to Richard Pynson, King's Printer, the successor to William Caxton. The privilege gives a monopoly for the term of two years. The date is 15 years later than that of the first privilege issued in France. Early copyright privileges were called "monopolies," ...

"In England the printers, known as stationers, formed a collective organisation, known as the Stationers' Company. In the 16th century the Stationers' Company was given the power to require all lawfully printed books to be entered into its register. Only members of the Stationers' Company could enter books into the register. This meant that the Stationers' Company achieved a dominant position over publishing in 17th century England"

Second, "The easiest form of parochialism to fall into is to assume that we are smarter than the past generations, that our thinking is necessarily more sophisticated. This may be true in science and technology, but not necessarily so in wisdom."
"Macaulay on Copyright"
* http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/25/1345/03329

Lastly, good luck with that spiel to the Fashion Industry:
"Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture"
* http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

It's war, not a courtroom. The burden of proof is a little different and combatants don't get trials.

There are two questions here, though. Most here would probably say we shouldn't be there at all. But the other question is about the use of drones specifically as a weapon of the military and CIA in the context of fighting wars.

The GP makes a very valid point. I think we can agree we're not talking about the indiscriminate carpet bombing of Dresden, or dropping an A-bomb. So would everyone be better off if we were using cruise missiles, aerial bombardment by manned aircraft, and marines on the ground? I don't think so, but it's a good question.

We've spent trillions of dollars trying to take the death out of war, in small increments. And we're better at it than anyone has been since we were fighting with rocks and sticks. Unfortunately, it's something we'll never master and we have to keep asking ourselves if new tech is better or worse within the context of war. That is to say, "always bad".

And much of it will always have to do with who is pulling the trigger, and why.

Relevant talk by Malcolm Gladwell on the Norden bombsight (and drone use):
http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell.html

It really does cover this issue better than anything we're going to say here.

Well, to a certain extent there is this idea that doctors should bat 1,000.

Brian Goldman has an excellent TED talk about this

You should check it out - it's very informative and it tries to put this problem into context as well as explain why the culture behind it is broken.

is the latest phase in Microsoft's search for the one true interface.

maybe they should learn something from Malcolm Gladwell when he talks about spaghetti sauce.

http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html

I could not see the images (seems slashdotted), but recently I saw this very interesting slow motion video of light itself:
here

TED: The missing link to renewable energy

Jack Horner: Building a dinosaur from a chicken | Video on TED.com - Renowned paleontologist Jack Horner has spent his career trying to reconstruct a dinosaur. He's found fossils with extraordinarily well-preserved blood vessels and soft tissues, but never intact DNA. So, in a new approach, he's taking living descendants of the dinosaur (chickens) and genetically engineering them to reactivate ancestral traits — including teeth, tails, and even hands — to make a "Chickenosaurus".

I thought we already determined that humans were as stupid as Monkeys when it came to economics and assessment of economic risk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/laurie_santos.html

The stupidz. Itz in ur geenz.

In relation to this ted talk from Clay Shirky http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government.html

Do you think it likely that one day you will be more famous for git (or a derivative of git) than for Linux ?

Whoever's behind this law needs to learn statistics. The fewer smokers that we have, the more innocent people will lose their jobs as a result of false-positive test results.

I don't know anything about Dyson, but based on our "civilization" we don't "believe" in infinite growth... we just grow to point where our growth is no longer sustainable.

I'm not sure that's true. If you look at the statistics available, the number of children per woman drops over time as the child survivability increases.

This means that barring something that really fucks up child mortality, we'll likely reach a something very close to a population steady state by about 2050.

Sadly I'm not adept enough at using Gapminder.org to pull up a reference - it's simply what I recall from one of Hans Rosling's many TED talks.

There are many cool technologies such as this http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html
But, only Google almost patented glasses allowing to watch P0RN with 24x7 reliability.

Journals don't only publish papers reporting "positive results," whatever that may be

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAhahahaha... ha... oh, oh I'm sorry, but that's funny.

Yes. Journals have a very long history of not publishing 'negative results'. (id est: "We tested to see if X happened under situation Y, but no it doesn't.") Mostly because it's not 'interesting'.

If you want a good example of this, check out the medical field, where the studies which don't pan out aren't published, the ones which do are, leading to severely misleading clinical data, and it leads to problematic results.