Most of us believe that most Animals aren't Conscious... they don't look out of their eyes the same way that you do. They don't truly "Perceive" or "Think."
A chicken is no more than a glorified chemical reaction, but humans... out Consciousness is something different and special. We can stop a chemical process with as little moral guilt as stomping out a fire... but to destroy a Sentience/consciousness/soul... well that we can't morally do.
That's quite a bit different. A sentient being has to recognize his own existence (or something along those lines).
How about a newborn baby? Is it sentient? If not, can we morally destroy it? When does it become Sentient?
So-called souls are some kind on metaphysical religious nonsense about you living forever in paradise if you kill the right kind of people, or honor certain gods, or donate all your money and live like a homeless person, or some other thing that only 0.05% of the world lives up to.
Enjoy your "afterlife" with the 0.05% of people who manage to score enough points with the one "real" god (Vishnu, maybe?). Although, it's unlikely you'll be one of those 0.05% so rather enjoy your eternal torment along with the other 99.5% of humanity.
I don't think that I have to point out that most of your post is a Strawman Argument. I never once mentioned God or Religion or Heaven or money.
I use the term "Soul" instead of the term "Sentience" because of my above question. Is a newborn baby _truly_ sentient? I don't think so. I doubt it can reason its way out of a paper bag. However, I believe that it has True Perception. I believe that it looks out of its eyes and sees the world the same way that I do, even if its understanding of that world is limited. I don't know what to call that... "Sentience" doesn't seem right, nor does "Perception." "Consciousness" and "Soul" are about the closest things that come to it. (Perhaps I should have used the word "Consciousness.")
For me, its not so appalling because "It won't have a soul!!!" but appalling because of the chance that it _will_.
Suppose Religion is real and you create some kind of sci-fi cartoonish Larson-esque Cow Person who actually _has_ a soul... and it spends its life, at best, ostracized by humanity, and at worse, spends its short life in experiments before being destroyed.
Religious people aren't against cloning because they think something won't have a soul... they're against it because some scientist is playing the role of creator, father, and executioner with something that _does_ have a soul.
Someone should write a video-sharing app for the current iPhone and also sell an iPhone Periscope attachment that lets the current camera look at the user.
After all, this really is one of those times where the iPhone devs must be hitting their heads and saying "Why didn't we think of that sooner?" It seems so obvious in retrospect. Other than the forward-facing camera, there is _nothing_ keeping the current generation of iPhones from having this capability. They've got the power, the robustness, the hardware, and the infrastructure.
Did the devs just have a brainfart when designing the iPhone or was it their intention all along to release such a great new feature that you couldn't upgrade to without upgrading the whole phone, thereby having to buy a new one?
It's articles like this that make me want to go out and start signing up for "Premium" accounts. I don't mind pulling my own weight if I use something often enough, and it would make me feel like I'm doing my part to thwart the encroaching apocalypse.
But now here's a question: where the hell is an average net user like me going to even use a "Premium" account? I can't even think of one that I'd use for free, much less want to pay for. Like most college students, I use forums and Facebook and Google and Wikipedia and Amazon. Like most gamers, I use Steam almost exclusively. None of my forums require or even offer paid membership, nor does Facebook. Steam's services are free, Slashdot is free, Wikipedia is free.
Just about the only thing I can think of is signing up for a Premium Fileplanet account... but I download so little content these days (and I'm not a pirate _at all_) that I -know- it wouldn't be worth it. I'd barely use it.
I guess I'm just going to shrug my shoulders and make a donation to Wikipedia.
You could easily have the waste heat from the PC run a Turbine... it just wouldn't be nearly enough to power the _entire_ PC. A few watts here and there would _help_, just not very much.
It is not the -same-, no, but it can be more dangerous and more destructive.
If we head down the path of "Stealing is only wrong when something physical is lost" then what about stealing blueprints or architecture plans or patent ideas?
If you go to BMW and photocopy the blueprints for their latest engine, you likely either believe that there's something wrong with that or that our entire society needs revamping into some kind of Anarcho-Communist hippie state.
Ideas can be worth more than the physical goods themselves. If you write a book, what's worse for you... me stealing one physical copy of that book or me claiming that you've got no rights to it, and distributing up a printing press and handing out copies on the street corner for 25c a pop?
I on the other hand, tend to like the winning team. When I was little, I remember playing a Checkers Video game where you were always red and the enemy was always black. Well... at the time, I sucked at Checkers and black always won. I thought they had some kind of advantage... that black was intrinsically better.
If every time you play America's Army, your enemies (terrorists) win... you might start wishing you could play as the Terrorists so that you might start winning more.
What they really need to do is see if people can learn things done -entirely- within Video Games.
Like what if in a Pepsi/Coke video game, Coke gives you Health and Pepsi hurts you... would these people start preferring Coke over Pepsi? Or maybe there would be some reverse psychology where since people -can't- have Pepsi in the game world, they will intrinsically want it more in the real world.
The mind is complicated, but I'm sure that, yes, connections are formed when playing video games just as they are anywhere else.
It's likely not economic for them to enforce, either. In a recent story on catching Internet Criminals, it was brought up that the UK Government has to pay something like $300 per request when requesting user data from ISPs. That -can't- be worth it, given the number of people and likely few convictions that this would actually result in.
Yeah, I agree it would be a good training exercise to land on them and maybe even work on mining techniques. But the article specifically states "tap their resources."
Maybe they foresee some future orbital spaceyard where its easier and cheaper to get metal from already orbiting NEOs than it is to send up materials from Earth?
Having NEOs in stable orbits around the Earth could be of benefit to mankind in the future as missions can be planned, possibly sending mining missions to these rocky visitors so we can tap their resources.
The Near-Earth-Objects in question are only 10m and 20m in diameter. How would it be of any benefit to us to mine resources from these? Surely it would cost far more in resources to -get- there.
Or do these NEOs have some kind of exotic resource that I am unaware of?
I think "specific mission briefings" and "personal information of soldiers" clearly falls in the category of "Things that the military should be allowed to keep secret."
Surely you don't think that every single offensive, attack, and maneuver should be announced ahead of time?
It would be really funny if some guy did just that and faked a bunch of mission briefings, put it on his secondhand mp3 player, then sold it to a pawn shop.
Next guy who buys it does the right thing and returns it, but the Army/CIA spend countless resources running in circles looking for the "leak."
I personally read it more as
"We're just trying something new here. We don't have all the bugs worked out... we don't have all the questions answered, now quit pestering me."
When they talk about Purity, they mean how pure it is in terms of P-240. The amount of P-240 is usually determined upon creation conditions, since it is -very- difficult to separate P-239 from P-240.
Now, P-239 decays into U-235, and it -is- easy to chemically separate them.
I'll say. And it's even more interesting if you do some research, too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239 shows that Plutonium-239 is really hard to make and come by... anything more pure than 94% is considered weapons grade and anything more pure than 97% is considered "super grade."
What's more is that after doing some calculations, it looks like you only need about 510cc of the stuff to reach critical mass and there's 400cc here. Could this have been dangerous in the wrong hands?
The article is full of its own questions. There's still a mystery as to how the safe was contaminated and why this sample wasn't used in a bomb sooner. The article treats these questions like ancient history, but aren't there people alive and around who can answer them? Weren't there records kept?
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Most of us believe that most Animals aren't Conscious... they don't look out of their eyes the same way that you do. They don't truly "Perceive" or "Think."
A chicken is no more than a glorified chemical reaction, but humans... out Consciousness is something different and special. We can stop a chemical process with as little moral guilt as stomping out a fire... but to destroy a Sentience/consciousness/soul... well that we can't morally do.
That's quite a bit different. A sentient being has to recognize his own existence (or something along those lines).
How about a newborn baby? Is it sentient? If not, can we morally destroy it? When does it become Sentient?
So-called souls are some kind on metaphysical religious nonsense about you living forever in paradise if you kill the right kind of people, or honor certain gods, or donate all your money and live like a homeless person, or some other thing that only 0.05% of the world lives up to.
Enjoy your "afterlife" with the 0.05% of people who manage to score enough points with the one "real" god (Vishnu, maybe?). Although, it's unlikely you'll be one of those 0.05% so rather enjoy your eternal torment along with the other 99.5% of humanity.
I don't think that I have to point out that most of your post is a Strawman Argument. I never once mentioned God or Religion or Heaven or money.
I use the term "Soul" instead of the term "Sentience" because of my above question. Is a newborn baby _truly_ sentient? I don't think so. I doubt it can reason its way out of a paper bag. However, I believe that it has True Perception. I believe that it looks out of its eyes and sees the world the same way that I do, even if its understanding of that world is limited. I don't know what to call that... "Sentience" doesn't seem right, nor does "Perception." "Consciousness" and "Soul" are about the closest things that come to it. (Perhaps I should have used the word "Consciousness.")
Alright.
Replace every use of the concept of Soul in my post with the concept of Sentience and go from there.
For me, its not so appalling because "It won't have a soul!!!" but appalling because of the chance that it _will_.
Suppose Religion is real and you create some kind of sci-fi cartoonish Larson-esque Cow Person who actually _has_ a soul... and it spends its life, at best, ostracized by humanity, and at worse, spends its short life in experiments before being destroyed.
Religious people aren't against cloning because they think something won't have a soul... they're against it because some scientist is playing the role of creator, father, and executioner with something that _does_ have a soul.
Someone should write a video-sharing app for the current iPhone and also sell an iPhone Periscope attachment that lets the current camera look at the user.
After all, this really is one of those times where the iPhone devs must be hitting their heads and saying "Why didn't we think of that sooner?" It seems so obvious in retrospect. Other than the forward-facing camera, there is _nothing_ keeping the current generation of iPhones from having this capability. They've got the power, the robustness, the hardware, and the infrastructure.
Did the devs just have a brainfart when designing the iPhone or was it their intention all along to release such a great new feature that you couldn't upgrade to without upgrading the whole phone, thereby having to buy a new one?
It's articles like this that make me want to go out and start signing up for "Premium" accounts. I don't mind pulling my own weight if I use something often enough, and it would make me feel like I'm doing my part to thwart the encroaching apocalypse.
But now here's a question: where the hell is an average net user like me going to even use a "Premium" account? I can't even think of one that I'd use for free, much less want to pay for. Like most college students, I use forums and Facebook and Google and Wikipedia and Amazon. Like most gamers, I use Steam almost exclusively. None of my forums require or even offer paid membership, nor does Facebook. Steam's services are free, Slashdot is free, Wikipedia is free.
Just about the only thing I can think of is signing up for a Premium Fileplanet account... but I download so little content these days (and I'm not a pirate _at all_) that I -know- it wouldn't be worth it. I'd barely use it.
I guess I'm just going to shrug my shoulders and make a donation to Wikipedia.
As a former nuclear engineer, I am well aware of the immense energy in nuclear material.
Hey guys, cut Oppenheimer some slack here. He feels guilty, after all.
You could easily have the waste heat from the PC run a Turbine... it just wouldn't be nearly enough to power the _entire_ PC. A few watts here and there would _help_, just not very much.
I have this picture in my head of a water-cooled PC that gets so hot that the water turns to steam, which runs a turbine, which helps power the PC.
Hugely inefficient, but sooooo cool to have a Steam-Powered PC.
It is not the -same-, no, but it can be more dangerous and more destructive.
If we head down the path of "Stealing is only wrong when something physical is lost" then what about stealing blueprints or architecture plans or patent ideas?
If you go to BMW and photocopy the blueprints for their latest engine, you likely either believe that there's something wrong with that or that our entire society needs revamping into some kind of Anarcho-Communist hippie state.
Ideas can be worth more than the physical goods themselves. If you write a book, what's worse for you... me stealing one physical copy of that book or me claiming that you've got no rights to it, and distributing up a printing press and handing out copies on the street corner for 25c a pop?
I on the other hand, tend to like the winning team. When I was little, I remember playing a Checkers Video game where you were always red and the enemy was always black. Well... at the time, I sucked at Checkers and black always won. I thought they had some kind of advantage... that black was intrinsically better.
If every time you play America's Army, your enemies (terrorists) win... you might start wishing you could play as the Terrorists so that you might start winning more.
What they really need to do is see if people can learn things done -entirely- within Video Games.
Like what if in a Pepsi/Coke video game, Coke gives you Health and Pepsi hurts you... would these people start preferring Coke over Pepsi? Or maybe there would be some reverse psychology where since people -can't- have Pepsi in the game world, they will intrinsically want it more in the real world.
The mind is complicated, but I'm sure that, yes, connections are formed when playing video games just as they are anywhere else.
It's a flawed metaphor anyway. If you take the soap, it's gone, whereas when you download an MP3, it's still there.
On the other hand, the packaging calls it "Complimentary Soap." The mp3s aren't called "Complimentary mp3s."
The soap is a consciously given gift, the mp3s are not.
It's likely not economic for them to enforce, either. In a recent story on catching Internet Criminals, it was brought up that the UK Government has to pay something like $300 per request when requesting user data from ISPs. That -can't- be worth it, given the number of people and likely few convictions that this would actually result in.
How about SupCom with 6 AIs with 1000 units each?
...with my lightning-fast 486!!!
Yeah, I agree it would be a good training exercise to land on them and maybe even work on mining techniques. But the article specifically states "tap their resources."
Maybe they foresee some future orbital spaceyard where its easier and cheaper to get metal from already orbiting NEOs than it is to send up materials from Earth?
Obviously we did already because there's a camera shot from the asteroid of Earth.
That's not a photograph, it's a crappy 3D render.
http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/earth_toutatis_big.gif
Having NEOs in stable orbits around the Earth could be of benefit to mankind in the future as missions can be planned, possibly sending mining missions to these rocky visitors so we can tap their resources.
The Near-Earth-Objects in question are only 10m and 20m in diameter. How would it be of any benefit to us to mine resources from these? Surely it would cost far more in resources to -get- there.
Or do these NEOs have some kind of exotic resource that I am unaware of?
I think "specific mission briefings" and "personal information of soldiers" clearly falls in the category of "Things that the military should be allowed to keep secret."
Surely you don't think that every single offensive, attack, and maneuver should be announced ahead of time?
It would be really funny if some guy did just that and faked a bunch of mission briefings, put it on his secondhand mp3 player, then sold it to a pawn shop.
Next guy who buys it does the right thing and returns it, but the Army/CIA spend countless resources running in circles looking for the "leak."
I really doubt that the US Army is going to try and punish an innocent New Zealander for trying to do the right thing.
Although I guess I'm not sure that announcing this to the news was "the right thing."
I personally read it more as
"We're just trying something new here. We don't have all the bugs worked out... we don't have all the questions answered, now quit pestering me."
When they talk about Purity, they mean how pure it is in terms of P-240. The amount of P-240 is usually determined upon creation conditions, since it is -very- difficult to separate P-239 from P-240.
Now, P-239 decays into U-235, and it -is- easy to chemically separate them.
All of this I learned in the last 10 minutes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239
I'll say. And it's even more interesting if you do some research, too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239 shows that Plutonium-239 is really hard to make and come by... anything more pure than 94% is considered weapons grade and anything more pure than 97% is considered "super grade."
What's more is that after doing some calculations, it looks like you only need about 510cc of the stuff to reach critical mass and there's 400cc here. Could this have been dangerous in the wrong hands?
The article is full of its own questions. There's still a mystery as to how the safe was contaminated and why this sample wasn't used in a bomb sooner. The article treats these questions like ancient history, but aren't there people alive and around who can answer them? Weren't there records kept?
Further investigation is warranted.