Re:Driving force for bloodless surgery
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I do not accept that one person can 'own' another person, nor do I accept that a relation of ownership that supposedly holds between two people defines the existence or nonexistence of the person 'owned'. Whether a person exists or not is not affected by whether or not they are 'owned', let alone whether the wishes of their 'owner' happen to be satisfied. You are in effect arguing that if the owner of a slave does not want the slave to eat Chinese food, and I feed the slave Chinese food, I have then killed the slave. That is nonsense.
Re:Driving force for bloodless surgery
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Where do these 'rights of man' of yours come from? This includes the so called 'property right'. Has it ever been discovered by a scientist? Can you point to it? No, it does not exist; rights are an invention. More specifically, they are a convention; we use them to express our shared agreements to behave in a certain way because it makes us all better off.
If everything you create is automatically your property, then the results of that are ridiculous. For example, if you step in some mud, the footprint becomes your property. If you breathe on a window, the condensation is your property (I suppose I would be violating your rights by wiping the window). Moreover, every 'creation' of yours presupposes countless 'creations' by others. For example, say you are working on an assembly line making chairs and you are the last person on the line. You put the finishing touch on the chairs, and without what you do, the chairs would not be the product they are. But this is also true of the other people on the line. Nevertheless, we can say that you are the one who really 'brought the chair into existence' because you are the one who actually completed it. So I guess it's your property then? This example extends to everything. Just because you happened to be the last in the line to put the finishing touches on something (including your sperm) does not mean it automatically becomes your 'property'. In the case of your children, the other things that go into creating them include food produced by others, water cleaned by others, hospitals built by others, etc.
Moreover, if we follow your logic, you should be able to murder your children even when they are at the age of 50. For they are still your creation, and therefore still your property. Would you argue that anyone should be able to kill their children at any time even after they are fully grown adults? After all, if creation = property, I don't see how it can be otherwise.
Why care for your children if they are not your property? To ask such a question you must be a sociopath. People, like all other animals, care for their children out of love, empathy, and so on, very often incurring massive sacrifices in the process. They do not do it because their children are their 'property' and somehow they must take care of them in the same way they must take care of their garden.
You are effectively arguing that there should be no laws against parents murdering their children--after all, withholding life saving medical care is tantamount to murder, and you also claim that parents have a right to murder their children outright. So children should have no protection from their parents. Effectively this amounts to the claim that they should have no rights at all that even might have any chance of conflicting with the rights of the parents. But if children have no rights, why should anyone have any rights? Why should anyone ever be protected from anyone else? It seems you are arguing for some kind of bizarre Hobbesian universe in which everyone kills, rapes, etc everyone else. Have fun in the lunatic asylum. I hope they catch you before you cause anyone any harm.
Re:Driving force for bloodless surgery
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I don't need an explanation for the bible, because I'm not a historian. If I was interested in an explanation of the bible, I would ask a specialist on ancient civilisations, because as far as I am concerned it is nothing more than a relic of a now-dead civilisation that has been preserved and fetishised by another civilisation.
What I need an explanation for is why I should choose to believe the bible, as opposed to other religious texts. Or for that matter, comic books.
Re:Driving force for bloodless surgery
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Actually archaeologists, like most scientists, make lots of educated guesses, most of which turn out to be wrong, and they grope their way along by getting confirmation and disconfirmation from empirical evidence. There is no doubt that this process involves intuition, belief in oneself, sometimes stubbornness or arrogance. But it involves a lot more. No matter how stubborn a scientist is, his work must meet the criteria of the scientific community, especially empirical adequacy, otherwise it is doomed.
As for your 'faith', you are playing with a double meaning of the word. On the one hand it means confidence, belief that something will succeed, not necessarily a belief that could be entirely justified to others, for example belief in yourself. On the other hand it means a belief that can never be verified, and that one must willfully commit to because it is not even possible in principle to verify it. The first meaning is obviously involved in science. The second is not.
The second meaning, however, is what you say is necessary to believe in the bible. I agree with that. It is also necessary to believe in the Quran, in the Bhagavad Gita, and in the thousands of legends and masses of folklore that make up the world's many ancient religions. But when you say that what we lack is 'faith', what you are saying is that in order for us to believe in the bible, we must first choose to believe in the bible. You are not giving us a reason. You are not giving us any motivation or an explanation. You are simply thumping your hand on the table and giving us an exhortation. This is patently absurd.
Re:Driving force for bloodless surgery
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In what sense is a child the 'property' of their parents? In what sense can any person be the property of another? If you mean legal property, you are incorrect. There are very few countries left where legal slavery still exists. If you mean some kind of moral property, where do you get this from? Do you pull it out of the sky?
And of course, yes, you can murder another person, regardless of whether you have any 'right' to. But what is your point? The fact that you can do it does not mean you have a right to.
Re:Driving force for bloodless surgery
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OH! You need faith to believe in the bible! I'm so glad someone finally explained this to me! All this time I read this book and thought, 'Wow, this is great for the archaeological record, along with other random scripts which tell us about the bizarre beliefs of ancient societies'. But now that you've explained the mystery that all I need is faith, I can start believing this stuff and go get baptised!! Hallelujah!!
Re:Driving force for bloodless surgery
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If the child is too young to consent, the basic human rights of the child must trump anything that the parents say. For example, say there is a 3 year old child that gets into an accident and is in hospital, and will die without surgery, but the parents do not consent to surgery. The child's right to live unquestionably trumps the parents' so-called 'right' to impose their religion on their own child. The doctors are not forcing a religion on the child, the parents are.
Re:Driving force for bloodless surgery
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Actually the idea is that no one is the property of anyone else. If you have a child, you take responsibility for their care. Humanity has recognised that we are all entitled to that care from our parents, as enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Children. Similarly in the UK (and in particular in the European Convention on Human Rights) certain basic human rights have been recognised; one of these is the right to life.
You do not 'own' another human being, and you are not allowed to take actions that will result in their death. That went out with slavery.
It seems you are arguing effectively that all punishments for breaking the law should be infinitely harsh because the harsher they are, the more terrified people will be of breaking them and therefore the less likely they are to commit a crime. There are a couple of problems with that however.
One is that it is not at all convincing that harsher punishments will deter people. Generally people commit crimes when they think they are not going to be caught. After all in some US states the minimum sentence for possession of marijuana is 20 years, which is sufficiently harsh to scare most people, but they do it anyway when they think there is no real chance of getting caught. Increasing this to 60 years or death would probably not change much, as long as it does not alter a person's subjective probability of getting caught.
A second problem is that if you give all crimes extremely harsh punishments there will be nothing to stop someone who has committed one from committing another. The classic example of this is rape and murder. If you make the punishment for rape as bad as the punishment for murder, or even sufficiently bad that it seems nothing can be worse, then a rapist has no incentive not to murder their victim. By using a graduated punishment scheme, effective deterrent may be possible. But it is not enough that it is graduated; punishments must also not be so severe that the graduation is irrelevant--if, for example, the punishment for rape was having your eyes gouged out, then making the punishment for murder having your legs cut off may create no meaningful difference.
A third problem is that people often accidentally break the law, and some people are accidentally convicted. Using massive punishments against these people is more likely to create a sense of injustice than using proportional punishments. If you don't care about these people, then perhaps there's no problem--but even if you don't care about them, I think it would have deleterious social effects like a sense of constant unease if, for example, going 1 mile over the speed limit were to result in punishment by having your fingernails ripped out.
A fourth problem is that the view of punishment as a deterrent to crime is too limited; punishment has other purposes as well. One purpose is the effects it has on the person who committed the crime and specifically their future behaviour. While it may be the case that a sufficiently terrible punishment will traumatise a person enough to scare them away from ever committing a crime again, it is also most probably the case that beyond a certain level of harshness, punishment results in perverse effects like the creation of psychopaths. Or in the more common case, people who are given very long prison sentences become psychologically dependent on the prison environment so re-offend in order to be re-convicted.
A fifth problem has to do with another role of punishment: it helps to make explicit a society's norms about the weight of certain crimes. This is not just within the spectrum of law, but forms a continuum with social sanctions imposed outside of law. For example spitting profusely in public is not illegal in most places, but people don't do it partly because they know others would be bothered by it and would react adversely to it; it can be made illegal and moved into the realm of law with a minor, symbolic punishment to reinforce the social sanction. But if punishments were all extreme because the sole deterrend was taken to be fear of the nature of the punishment, rather than also the social significance of being labelled a criminal, then less acts could be moved into the realm of law because people would not want them to be sanctioned with such massive punishments. In other words, the system becomes much less fine-grained.
I think these are all arguments for punishment proportional to crime. I think you will find people in Singapore subscribe to the same kinds of arguments, although they probably feel caning is within the realm of reasonable punishments. It is overly simplistic to see punishment as being purely about deterrent through threat of the nature of the punishment, and it is overly simplistic to see humans as being purely motivated by fear of physical harm.
I hope you realise that your standing on the sidelines knowing absolutely nothing substantial about the case and wishing this man be raped, beaten, tortured and whatever else, in retribution for computer crime, is essentially the same thing as mediaeval mobs cheering a lynching or torturing of someone who has committed a crime. While you are completely ignorant about this man, what he has done, and his situation, you feel qualified to condemn him, and not just to some kind of ordinary punishment, but actually something extremely cruel, inhumane and vicious. You obviously take pleasure in the thought of this being inflicted on him, and I suspect the only thing stopping you from wanting to do it to him yourself is that it would not be socially acceptable. Better to sit back and watch it on reality TV. You are the kind of person who makes others ashamed to be human beings.
So you've never broken a speed limit, lied to get out of jury duty, consumed alcohol before the age of 21, had sex before the age of 18, smoked a joint, or witnessed anyone else doing any of these things and not reported it (thereby aiding and abetting)? I congratulate you! You will be the last American left alive after all the others are brutally tortured to death for their crimes.
By the way, in addition to the common law tradition that punishment should be proportional to the crime, the men who wrote the US constitution probably thought it was worth emphasising because each and every one of them were criminals--terrorists, in fact. Insurgents against their own British government. But obviously you don't think the protection should have been extended to them--so I guess maybe the constitution shouldn't have been written in the first place?
We learn our reactions through our culture and our personal experiences, and then we react without thinking or choosing when we perceive stimuli to which we have learned to react. We might even be unable, upon trying to choose to react otherwise, to change our reactions because they are so deeply entrenched.
For example, if I take out a knife and walk toward you menacingly, you are going to react by being frightened. Even if I say, 'I am only joking' you are still going to be frightened. Why? You are just choosing to react that way right? Wrong. People are not little atomic, liberal, choosing machines. We are made by our environment as much as we make it. We do not choose the reactions we have learned, that is why it is a 'reaction' rather than a 'choice'.
Similarly, we learn stereotypes. We learn racial stereotypes, gender stereotypes, this is why it is so difficult for many people to overcome them. People who have deeply entrenched racial stereotypes are like people who have developed strange phobias, they may come to realise that they are irrational but they cannot just 'choose' to suddenly rewire their brain, although they may be able to do it painstakingly over the course of a long period of time.
We learn cultural meanings. And a suit has a cultural meaning; a clean shave versus a beard has a cultural meaning; scraggly hair versus neatness has a cultural meaning. Everything has a cultural meaning. The way that society has to work, for purely logistical reasons if nothing else, is that most of the time, people have to conform to each others' expectations rather than every one of us having to constantly change our expectations for the exceptions. This is why for example we don't see nudists coming in to work naked. People can scrape by dressing like shit, but they still don't break the rule of wearing clothes.
Nevertheless, what they wear has a cultural meaning, and people do not react to it as a 'choice', they react to it through a learned reaction, they same way they react to everything else through a learned reaction. To go in to work dressed like shit and say 'Why don't you overcome your prejudice, man?' is absurd individualistic tripe. Get over yourself.
That's right! When the bomb comes, the troops do what Bert the turtle would do, they duck... and cover! Good thing the troops know how to defend themselves from the bomb.
107599 * 4096 = 440725504 bytes, or approximately 440 megabytes.
If this is 69% of the size of your hard drive, I'm impressed that you can read Slashdot on your computer. Considering these days most hard drives shipping are at the very least 40GB or so, does 440MB (versus the 110MB it would be if they were all 512 byte files instead) really make much of a difference?
If you haven't noticed, the UN is not a government, it is an international organisation based on the consensus membership of independent, sovereign countries in its foundational treaties and operating bodies. It is no more a government than the OAS, SAARC, ASEAN, the International Postal Union, or any other international organisation (there are dozens).
Maybe this is off topic but I don't really understand how you can say there is 'one world government coming into power'.
You did not include cost estimates of all these other costs in your original calculation, and as I don't feel like coming up with numbers for them, I can't account for them.
But as for $100/year being too much for billions of people, of course this is true. I was not suggesting that everyone on the planet contribute $100/year, only putting the number in perspective in per capita terms. World GDP according to the CIA world factbook was approximately $59.38 trillion last year, so 600 billion per year is a fairly small fraction of this. Of course, most of it would come from the first world, but if we're talking about powering the whole world, we have to look at it in terms of the economic cost to the whole world, and 600 billion out of 59.38 trillion is not as massive as you make it sound.
As for peaceful worldwide decade long multi-trillion dollar projects, well probably I couldn't point to any that are multi-trillion dollar, that's true. But there have been prolonged worldwide projects at somewhat lower budgets that have been unprecedented and highly successful, like the eradication of smallpox, as well as some that have not yet succeeded but that have produced a great deal of knowledge, like the ITER project.
More importantly, powering the whole world with nuclear power is not likely to be one giant international project, it's likely to happen in a decentralised way. All I was trying to establish is that given the numbers that you gave, the costs are not all that great as a percentage of world GDP.
3000 nuclear powerplants...Keep in mind a nuke plant costs a billion to build, takes 5 years
Assuming your numbers are correct, this is not a very big undertaking at all. We're talking about a total cost of 3 trillion dollars spread over 5 years, which is 600 billion dollars per year, given that the Earth's population is 6 billion this represents a total cost of $100 per person per year for 5 years.
I agree with your post but would change one thing. We do not 'know that the brain operates on a neural network'. Neural networks are models, usually constructed by comp sci students, that bear little direct resemblance to actual functioning of neurons. Basically at best they are intended to be a plausible reconstruction of how clusters of neurons *might* work--but it is not the case that they have been conclusively shown to be an accurate representation of how clusters of neurons actually *do* work.
Now, we can surmise from basic observation of brain structure and activity that it does operate as some kind of network. But this is a far cry from the kinds of 'neural nets' that people construct on computers. Don't be fooled by the occasional over-eager slashdot posting cogsci/compsci student who claims that the brain actually functions this way. The fact is it could function totally differently, and in fact it is likely to given that it is infinitely more complex than the most complex of 'neural networks' constructed by anyone so far.
In twenty years, maybe even ten, it will be considered quaint and old-fashioned to make a distinction between the two.
So in ten to twenty years, computers will be able to directly interface with the human nervous system and stimulate smell, taste, touch, vision, and hearing, as well as detect and respond to motion etc? The only way it could ever be 'quaint' to make a distinction between reality and computer simulation is if computers can do this. Otherwise, you will always be missing something, and reality will always very different.
And what's more, the other distinction between the two is that in 'virtual reality', you cannot make the things you need to survive, because what you are doing has no effects on the real world. Whether or not you like it, we humans are animals, we need food, water, shelter, clothing, medicine, etc. Those things can only be made in the real world. That is why we spend our time in this 'real world' rather than spending all our time fantasising about fantasy worlds, that is why people don't spend all their time playing MUDs or glorified MUDs (i.e. MMORPGs), NOT because they aren't technically sophisticated enough, but because they aren't REAL, and we ARE.
While your post makes a good premise for a dystopian comic book, it bears little relevance to reality.
The reason it is bizarre is not that it is technically inferior, but that it is globally non-standard. The result of this is that an American with a CDMA phone cannot roam to 95% of countries on the planet (there are a couple that have small CDMA networks, but not many). It also means that there are large areas of the US covered by CDMA but not by GSM, so that people from the rest of the world have a harder time roaming in those parts of the USA.
One of the main advantages of GSM is that I can get on a plane here in the UK, land nearly anywhere in the world, turn my phone on and be instantly roaming with my UK number. This works because GSM has become the de facto global standard. To use a non-GSM standard breaks this. What is the point?
There is a unified text messaging system, it's standardised across all GSM networks. Yes some countries do have different text message lengths to others, which can get annoying if you send international texts and have them truncated. And there are a couple of countries that refuse to standardise on anything, like the USA, so use bizarre non-GSM systems. But for the vast majority of the world, which is on some variant of GSM, text messages are standardised and more or less seamless.
And IM is different to SMS. SMS is about sending messages one at a time from one phone to another. It only works on phone networks, and the messages are not connected together in e.g. threads. If your phone is off, they queue up until you turn it on; the person sending you a text can't see if you're 'online' at the moment. IM is at least in principle network-neutral; you should be able to send IMs back and forth between your phone and an Internet-based IM service, for example. People can see that you're online, and messages are threaded. The two are very different.
One other interpretation of probability is that it represents real propensities in the world, I think this is particularly relevant in the case of quantum physics. This rests on the idea that causality includes stochastic determination, so that when you say there is a 10% chance of rain tomorrow, you are actually talking about some real propensity of the world.
I also don't think your example is a good way of debunking frequentist interpretations. A frequentist would argue that the weather forecast should be interpreted in the following way: Out of every day that has occurred in the past of which the conditions of the antecedent day are similar to the conditions of today (i.e. out of the relevant sample), 10% have been rainy, so if there is some distribution that days are converging on, then there is a 10% chance tomorrow will be one of the rainy days, i.e. will fall into that part of the distribution. This does not require reference to possible worlds theory (which is something I find personally repugnant).
Anyway I think it's a bit overly strong to say that frequentist interpretations of probability are discredited, and I also think it's overly strong to suggest that subjectivist interpretations have completely won out.
As far as I am aware, North Korea doesn't actually have ICBMs, so it wouldn't be relevant for them anyway. I was under the impression they only had medium to long range surface-to-surface missiles, so their main deterrent has always been the threat of attacking South Korea or Japan. Correct me if I'm wrong but I didn't think anyone was anywhere near having a land-based anti-missile system for surface-to-surface missiles.
state of the art phones are really comparable with the home computers of 80s
The Nokia N80 due out this May has 40MB of internal memory expandable to 2GB flash, if it's like comparable Nokia phones it has a 32-bit ARM-9 RISC CPU running at 220MHz, it has a 3 megapixel camera, wifi, bluetooth, infrared, can run Java, a web browser, PDF viewer, and a lot of other demanding applications that wouldn't have a prayer on a home computer of the 80s.
Very low-end phones today are comparable to the home computers of the 80s, maybe. But I don't think you'll find a single home computer from the 80s that comes anywhere near a spec like today's state of the art phones.
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I do not accept that one person can 'own' another person, nor do I accept that a relation of ownership that supposedly holds between two people defines the existence or nonexistence of the person 'owned'. Whether a person exists or not is not affected by whether or not they are 'owned', let alone whether the wishes of their 'owner' happen to be satisfied. You are in effect arguing that if the owner of a slave does not want the slave to eat Chinese food, and I feed the slave Chinese food, I have then killed the slave. That is nonsense.
Where do these 'rights of man' of yours come from? This includes the so called 'property right'. Has it ever been discovered by a scientist? Can you point to it? No, it does not exist; rights are an invention. More specifically, they are a convention; we use them to express our shared agreements to behave in a certain way because it makes us all better off.
If everything you create is automatically your property, then the results of that are ridiculous. For example, if you step in some mud, the footprint becomes your property. If you breathe on a window, the condensation is your property (I suppose I would be violating your rights by wiping the window). Moreover, every 'creation' of yours presupposes countless 'creations' by others. For example, say you are working on an assembly line making chairs and you are the last person on the line. You put the finishing touch on the chairs, and without what you do, the chairs would not be the product they are. But this is also true of the other people on the line. Nevertheless, we can say that you are the one who really 'brought the chair into existence' because you are the one who actually completed it. So I guess it's your property then? This example extends to everything. Just because you happened to be the last in the line to put the finishing touches on something (including your sperm) does not mean it automatically becomes your 'property'. In the case of your children, the other things that go into creating them include food produced by others, water cleaned by others, hospitals built by others, etc.
Moreover, if we follow your logic, you should be able to murder your children even when they are at the age of 50. For they are still your creation, and therefore still your property. Would you argue that anyone should be able to kill their children at any time even after they are fully grown adults? After all, if creation = property, I don't see how it can be otherwise.
Why care for your children if they are not your property? To ask such a question you must be a sociopath. People, like all other animals, care for their children out of love, empathy, and so on, very often incurring massive sacrifices in the process. They do not do it because their children are their 'property' and somehow they must take care of them in the same way they must take care of their garden.
You are effectively arguing that there should be no laws against parents murdering their children--after all, withholding life saving medical care is tantamount to murder, and you also claim that parents have a right to murder their children outright. So children should have no protection from their parents. Effectively this amounts to the claim that they should have no rights at all that even might have any chance of conflicting with the rights of the parents. But if children have no rights, why should anyone have any rights? Why should anyone ever be protected from anyone else? It seems you are arguing for some kind of bizarre Hobbesian universe in which everyone kills, rapes, etc everyone else. Have fun in the lunatic asylum. I hope they catch you before you cause anyone any harm.
I don't need an explanation for the bible, because I'm not a historian. If I was interested in an explanation of the bible, I would ask a specialist on ancient civilisations, because as far as I am concerned it is nothing more than a relic of a now-dead civilisation that has been preserved and fetishised by another civilisation.
What I need an explanation for is why I should choose to believe the bible, as opposed to other religious texts. Or for that matter, comic books.
Actually archaeologists, like most scientists, make lots of educated guesses, most of which turn out to be wrong, and they grope their way along by getting confirmation and disconfirmation from empirical evidence. There is no doubt that this process involves intuition, belief in oneself, sometimes stubbornness or arrogance. But it involves a lot more. No matter how stubborn a scientist is, his work must meet the criteria of the scientific community, especially empirical adequacy, otherwise it is doomed.
As for your 'faith', you are playing with a double meaning of the word. On the one hand it means confidence, belief that something will succeed, not necessarily a belief that could be entirely justified to others, for example belief in yourself. On the other hand it means a belief that can never be verified, and that one must willfully commit to because it is not even possible in principle to verify it. The first meaning is obviously involved in science. The second is not.
The second meaning, however, is what you say is necessary to believe in the bible. I agree with that. It is also necessary to believe in the Quran, in the Bhagavad Gita, and in the thousands of legends and masses of folklore that make up the world's many ancient religions. But when you say that what we lack is 'faith', what you are saying is that in order for us to believe in the bible, we must first choose to believe in the bible. You are not giving us a reason. You are not giving us any motivation or an explanation. You are simply thumping your hand on the table and giving us an exhortation. This is patently absurd.
In what sense is a child the 'property' of their parents? In what sense can any person be the property of another? If you mean legal property, you are incorrect. There are very few countries left where legal slavery still exists. If you mean some kind of moral property, where do you get this from? Do you pull it out of the sky?
And of course, yes, you can murder another person, regardless of whether you have any 'right' to. But what is your point? The fact that you can do it does not mean you have a right to.
OH! You need faith to believe in the bible! I'm so glad someone finally explained this to me! All this time I read this book and thought, 'Wow, this is great for the archaeological record, along with other random scripts which tell us about the bizarre beliefs of ancient societies'. But now that you've explained the mystery that all I need is faith, I can start believing this stuff and go get baptised!! Hallelujah!!
If the child is too young to consent, the basic human rights of the child must trump anything that the parents say. For example, say there is a 3 year old child that gets into an accident and is in hospital, and will die without surgery, but the parents do not consent to surgery. The child's right to live unquestionably trumps the parents' so-called 'right' to impose their religion on their own child. The doctors are not forcing a religion on the child, the parents are.
Actually the idea is that no one is the property of anyone else. If you have a child, you take responsibility for their care. Humanity has recognised that we are all entitled to that care from our parents, as enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Children. Similarly in the UK (and in particular in the European Convention on Human Rights) certain basic human rights have been recognised; one of these is the right to life.
You do not 'own' another human being, and you are not allowed to take actions that will result in their death. That went out with slavery.
It seems you are arguing effectively that all punishments for breaking the law should be infinitely harsh because the harsher they are, the more terrified people will be of breaking them and therefore the less likely they are to commit a crime. There are a couple of problems with that however.
One is that it is not at all convincing that harsher punishments will deter people. Generally people commit crimes when they think they are not going to be caught. After all in some US states the minimum sentence for possession of marijuana is 20 years, which is sufficiently harsh to scare most people, but they do it anyway when they think there is no real chance of getting caught. Increasing this to 60 years or death would probably not change much, as long as it does not alter a person's subjective probability of getting caught.
A second problem is that if you give all crimes extremely harsh punishments there will be nothing to stop someone who has committed one from committing another. The classic example of this is rape and murder. If you make the punishment for rape as bad as the punishment for murder, or even sufficiently bad that it seems nothing can be worse, then a rapist has no incentive not to murder their victim. By using a graduated punishment scheme, effective deterrent may be possible. But it is not enough that it is graduated; punishments must also not be so severe that the graduation is irrelevant--if, for example, the punishment for rape was having your eyes gouged out, then making the punishment for murder having your legs cut off may create no meaningful difference.
A third problem is that people often accidentally break the law, and some people are accidentally convicted. Using massive punishments against these people is more likely to create a sense of injustice than using proportional punishments. If you don't care about these people, then perhaps there's no problem--but even if you don't care about them, I think it would have deleterious social effects like a sense of constant unease if, for example, going 1 mile over the speed limit were to result in punishment by having your fingernails ripped out.
A fourth problem is that the view of punishment as a deterrent to crime is too limited; punishment has other purposes as well. One purpose is the effects it has on the person who committed the crime and specifically their future behaviour. While it may be the case that a sufficiently terrible punishment will traumatise a person enough to scare them away from ever committing a crime again, it is also most probably the case that beyond a certain level of harshness, punishment results in perverse effects like the creation of psychopaths. Or in the more common case, people who are given very long prison sentences become psychologically dependent on the prison environment so re-offend in order to be re-convicted.
A fifth problem has to do with another role of punishment: it helps to make explicit a society's norms about the weight of certain crimes. This is not just within the spectrum of law, but forms a continuum with social sanctions imposed outside of law. For example spitting profusely in public is not illegal in most places, but people don't do it partly because they know others would be bothered by it and would react adversely to it; it can be made illegal and moved into the realm of law with a minor, symbolic punishment to reinforce the social sanction. But if punishments were all extreme because the sole deterrend was taken to be fear of the nature of the punishment, rather than also the social significance of being labelled a criminal, then less acts could be moved into the realm of law because people would not want them to be sanctioned with such massive punishments. In other words, the system becomes much less fine-grained.
I think these are all arguments for punishment proportional to crime. I think you will find people in Singapore subscribe to the same kinds of arguments, although they probably feel caning is within the realm of reasonable punishments. It is overly simplistic to see punishment as being purely about deterrent through threat of the nature of the punishment, and it is overly simplistic to see humans as being purely motivated by fear of physical harm.
I hope you realise that your standing on the sidelines knowing absolutely nothing substantial about the case and wishing this man be raped, beaten, tortured and whatever else, in retribution for computer crime, is essentially the same thing as mediaeval mobs cheering a lynching or torturing of someone who has committed a crime. While you are completely ignorant about this man, what he has done, and his situation, you feel qualified to condemn him, and not just to some kind of ordinary punishment, but actually something extremely cruel, inhumane and vicious. You obviously take pleasure in the thought of this being inflicted on him, and I suspect the only thing stopping you from wanting to do it to him yourself is that it would not be socially acceptable. Better to sit back and watch it on reality TV. You are the kind of person who makes others ashamed to be human beings.
So you've never broken a speed limit, lied to get out of jury duty, consumed alcohol before the age of 21, had sex before the age of 18, smoked a joint, or witnessed anyone else doing any of these things and not reported it (thereby aiding and abetting)? I congratulate you! You will be the last American left alive after all the others are brutally tortured to death for their crimes.
By the way, in addition to the common law tradition that punishment should be proportional to the crime, the men who wrote the US constitution probably thought it was worth emphasising because each and every one of them were criminals--terrorists, in fact. Insurgents against their own British government. But obviously you don't think the protection should have been extended to them--so I guess maybe the constitution shouldn't have been written in the first place?
You found Natalie Portman naked ... now where are the hot grits?
We learn our reactions through our culture and our personal experiences, and then we react without thinking or choosing when we perceive stimuli to which we have learned to react. We might even be unable, upon trying to choose to react otherwise, to change our reactions because they are so deeply entrenched.
For example, if I take out a knife and walk toward you menacingly, you are going to react by being frightened. Even if I say, 'I am only joking' you are still going to be frightened. Why? You are just choosing to react that way right? Wrong. People are not little atomic, liberal, choosing machines. We are made by our environment as much as we make it. We do not choose the reactions we have learned, that is why it is a 'reaction' rather than a 'choice'.
Similarly, we learn stereotypes. We learn racial stereotypes, gender stereotypes, this is why it is so difficult for many people to overcome them. People who have deeply entrenched racial stereotypes are like people who have developed strange phobias, they may come to realise that they are irrational but they cannot just 'choose' to suddenly rewire their brain, although they may be able to do it painstakingly over the course of a long period of time.
We learn cultural meanings. And a suit has a cultural meaning; a clean shave versus a beard has a cultural meaning; scraggly hair versus neatness has a cultural meaning. Everything has a cultural meaning. The way that society has to work, for purely logistical reasons if nothing else, is that most of the time, people have to conform to each others' expectations rather than every one of us having to constantly change our expectations for the exceptions. This is why for example we don't see nudists coming in to work naked. People can scrape by dressing like shit, but they still don't break the rule of wearing clothes.
Nevertheless, what they wear has a cultural meaning, and people do not react to it as a 'choice', they react to it through a learned reaction, they same way they react to everything else through a learned reaction. To go in to work dressed like shit and say 'Why don't you overcome your prejudice, man?' is absurd individualistic tripe. Get over yourself.
That's right! When the bomb comes, the troops do what Bert the turtle would do, they duck ... and cover! Good thing the troops know how to defend themselves from the bomb.
107599 * 4096 = 440725504 bytes, or approximately 440 megabytes.
If this is 69% of the size of your hard drive, I'm impressed that you can read Slashdot on your computer. Considering these days most hard drives shipping are at the very least 40GB or so, does 440MB (versus the 110MB it would be if they were all 512 byte files instead) really make much of a difference?
One world government? What are you talking about?
If you haven't noticed, the UN is not a government, it is an international organisation based on the consensus membership of independent, sovereign countries in its foundational treaties and operating bodies. It is no more a government than the OAS, SAARC, ASEAN, the International Postal Union, or any other international organisation (there are dozens).
Maybe this is off topic but I don't really understand how you can say there is 'one world government coming into power'.
You did not include cost estimates of all these other costs in your original calculation, and as I don't feel like coming up with numbers for them, I can't account for them.
But as for $100/year being too much for billions of people, of course this is true. I was not suggesting that everyone on the planet contribute $100/year, only putting the number in perspective in per capita terms. World GDP according to the CIA world factbook was approximately $59.38 trillion last year, so 600 billion per year is a fairly small fraction of this. Of course, most of it would come from the first world, but if we're talking about powering the whole world, we have to look at it in terms of the economic cost to the whole world, and 600 billion out of 59.38 trillion is not as massive as you make it sound.
As for peaceful worldwide decade long multi-trillion dollar projects, well probably I couldn't point to any that are multi-trillion dollar, that's true. But there have been prolonged worldwide projects at somewhat lower budgets that have been unprecedented and highly successful, like the eradication of smallpox, as well as some that have not yet succeeded but that have produced a great deal of knowledge, like the ITER project.
More importantly, powering the whole world with nuclear power is not likely to be one giant international project, it's likely to happen in a decentralised way. All I was trying to establish is that given the numbers that you gave, the costs are not all that great as a percentage of world GDP.
3000 nuclear powerplants...Keep in mind a nuke plant costs a billion to build, takes 5 years
Assuming your numbers are correct, this is not a very big undertaking at all. We're talking about a total cost of 3 trillion dollars spread over 5 years, which is 600 billion dollars per year, given that the Earth's population is 6 billion this represents a total cost of $100 per person per year for 5 years.
In other words, it seems doable.
I agree with your post but would change one thing. We do not 'know that the brain operates on a neural network'. Neural networks are models, usually constructed by comp sci students, that bear little direct resemblance to actual functioning of neurons. Basically at best they are intended to be a plausible reconstruction of how clusters of neurons *might* work--but it is not the case that they have been conclusively shown to be an accurate representation of how clusters of neurons actually *do* work.
Now, we can surmise from basic observation of brain structure and activity that it does operate as some kind of network. But this is a far cry from the kinds of 'neural nets' that people construct on computers. Don't be fooled by the occasional over-eager slashdot posting cogsci/compsci student who claims that the brain actually functions this way. The fact is it could function totally differently, and in fact it is likely to given that it is infinitely more complex than the most complex of 'neural networks' constructed by anyone so far.
In twenty years, maybe even ten, it will be considered quaint and old-fashioned to make a distinction between the two.
So in ten to twenty years, computers will be able to directly interface with the human nervous system and stimulate smell, taste, touch, vision, and hearing, as well as detect and respond to motion etc? The only way it could ever be 'quaint' to make a distinction between reality and computer simulation is if computers can do this. Otherwise, you will always be missing something, and reality will always very different.
And what's more, the other distinction between the two is that in 'virtual reality', you cannot make the things you need to survive, because what you are doing has no effects on the real world. Whether or not you like it, we humans are animals, we need food, water, shelter, clothing, medicine, etc. Those things can only be made in the real world. That is why we spend our time in this 'real world' rather than spending all our time fantasising about fantasy worlds, that is why people don't spend all their time playing MUDs or glorified MUDs (i.e. MMORPGs), NOT because they aren't technically sophisticated enough, but because they aren't REAL, and we ARE.
While your post makes a good premise for a dystopian comic book, it bears little relevance to reality.
The reason it is bizarre is not that it is technically inferior, but that it is globally non-standard. The result of this is that an American with a CDMA phone cannot roam to 95% of countries on the planet (there are a couple that have small CDMA networks, but not many). It also means that there are large areas of the US covered by CDMA but not by GSM, so that people from the rest of the world have a harder time roaming in those parts of the USA.
One of the main advantages of GSM is that I can get on a plane here in the UK, land nearly anywhere in the world, turn my phone on and be instantly roaming with my UK number. This works because GSM has become the de facto global standard. To use a non-GSM standard breaks this. What is the point?
There is a unified text messaging system, it's standardised across all GSM networks. Yes some countries do have different text message lengths to others, which can get annoying if you send international texts and have them truncated. And there are a couple of countries that refuse to standardise on anything, like the USA, so use bizarre non-GSM systems. But for the vast majority of the world, which is on some variant of GSM, text messages are standardised and more or less seamless.
And IM is different to SMS. SMS is about sending messages one at a time from one phone to another. It only works on phone networks, and the messages are not connected together in e.g. threads. If your phone is off, they queue up until you turn it on; the person sending you a text can't see if you're 'online' at the moment. IM is at least in principle network-neutral; you should be able to send IMs back and forth between your phone and an Internet-based IM service, for example. People can see that you're online, and messages are threaded. The two are very different.
One other interpretation of probability is that it represents real propensities in the world, I think this is particularly relevant in the case of quantum physics. This rests on the idea that causality includes stochastic determination, so that when you say there is a 10% chance of rain tomorrow, you are actually talking about some real propensity of the world.
I also don't think your example is a good way of debunking frequentist interpretations. A frequentist would argue that the weather forecast should be interpreted in the following way: Out of every day that has occurred in the past of which the conditions of the antecedent day are similar to the conditions of today (i.e. out of the relevant sample), 10% have been rainy, so if there is some distribution that days are converging on, then there is a 10% chance tomorrow will be one of the rainy days, i.e. will fall into that part of the distribution. This does not require reference to possible worlds theory (which is something I find personally repugnant).
Anyway I think it's a bit overly strong to say that frequentist interpretations of probability are discredited, and I also think it's overly strong to suggest that subjectivist interpretations have completely won out.
As far as I am aware, North Korea doesn't actually have ICBMs, so it wouldn't be relevant for them anyway. I was under the impression they only had medium to long range surface-to-surface missiles, so their main deterrent has always been the threat of attacking South Korea or Japan. Correct me if I'm wrong but I didn't think anyone was anywhere near having a land-based anti-missile system for surface-to-surface missiles.
state of the art phones are really comparable with the home computers of 80s
The Nokia N80 due out this May has 40MB of internal memory expandable to 2GB flash, if it's like comparable Nokia phones it has a 32-bit ARM-9 RISC CPU running at 220MHz, it has a 3 megapixel camera, wifi, bluetooth, infrared, can run Java, a web browser, PDF viewer, and a lot of other demanding applications that wouldn't have a prayer on a home computer of the 80s.
Very low-end phones today are comparable to the home computers of the 80s, maybe. But I don't think you'll find a single home computer from the 80s that comes anywhere near a spec like today's state of the art phones.