Do you really know the purpose of life? I don't (though I suspect there is no such thing as a purpose to life). But I do believe in acting morally, and if I thought that my sacrifice would prevent a war on an unimaginable scale, then yes, I would think that my self-sacrifice would be obligatory. Hopefully I'd have the courage to do it, because it would be the right thing to do.
I'm wondering what concept here you're having trouble with. Maybe you don't think hard enough about ethics.
Yeah, this is the sort of thing I was thinking. I don't suspect that we are living in a zoo, but I'm taking the puzzle of the Fermi paradox very seriously.
But as another post pointed out, maybe it's not right to want to outrun the sterilizers headed this way, if there are any. That would only set up the unthinkable galactic conflict down the line. If we discover that there is a rival or a superior colonizing technology in the galaxy, we should either exterminate ourselves while we are still few, or at least limit ourselves to not spread exponentially (self check-in zoo).
But since there is some chance that we might be in the lead, we should pursue this, and do our best to bring about the Pax Homo in the galaxy. Maybe eventually we will have enough power to come up with something more subtle than sterilization in response to emerging alien technology; maybe we'll figure out a way to design escape-proof zoos for other species in which we interfere with them minimally, and perhaps eventually even integrate them in our galactic empire. But while the galaxy is still unclaimed territory and escape-proof zoos are far beyond our capacity, sterilization seems like the best policy to pursue.
As far as our present space program policy, I don't think that sending people up to into orbit or to the moon will have any impact on the relevant technology to what needs to be done. The sort of research we really need can actually be done on Earth. Most important, we need to take steps towards robotic self-assembly, autonomous robotic mining, and that sort of stuff. There is no point in sending people to the moon until there's a good place there for them to live, and that place will be built from lunar resources by robots. I expect that the result will look much like Biosphere 2, a project that has a lot more to do with valuable space travel than anything we're doing in the ISS. As far as interstellar colonization goes, I think the most accessible path would be this: We send frozen genetic material in a very compact and heavily shielded ship. (The layers of the shielding could be inscribed with all the information of our civilization.) Once the probe enters the orbit of an alien planet, an AI wakes up, unfreezes the genetic material, and gestation machines bring it to life. Human infants would be "raised" by an advanced anthropomorphic AI, while robotic probes would be using the native resources of the planet to make a self-sustaining biosphere for them to move into. I think we will be able to launch a mission like this within a few hundred years, possibly using an Orion-style thermonuclear propulsion to reach about 3% of the speed of light. Hurrying along with this will be critical, because if we only take 300 years between our first EM noise and colonization capacity, that might not give sterilizers enough time to notice and respond.
I do think that it follows from my logic that if there is a comparable or greater power than us in the galaxy, the moral thing for us to do is to destroy ourselves before we can start colonizing interstellar space. If we don't, the expansion wave of our descendants will cross with that of our rivals, and that is the most repugnant future possible.
Your post makes some very silly assumptions about civilizations who chat with each other and have reputations or whatever. From what we know of physics, it will just not work that way. Information too can only travel at the speed of light, and colonization waves will quite likely travel at an appreciable fraction of this.
Messages may take a thousands of years to travel through interstellar space, and you'd be insane to do this and wait for a reply, hoping that in the meanwhile, the lifeforms you contacted aren't already beginning their runaway colonization.
But maybe there is a model for "galaxy police" that works like this: You send the sterilization probe with an advanced AI, and the give the native lifeforms a chance to survive if they verifiably give up all attempts to launch a vehicle outside of their planet's orbit, as well as any technology which might threaten the sterilization probes.
This seems like playing with fire, though. Just how good would this AI have to be to not be outfoxed by some resourceful aliens? Unless this AI is brutal and willing to maintain this brutality over millennia, the containment system will fail. And morally preferable to this extended brutality (plus the risk of catastrophe) is the "nip it in the bud" strategy of one-time, total sterilization. Well, probably.
That's all fine. But what is the analogous option in the case of extraterrestrial intelligence? How do we apply our influence on an alien civilization so that they safely stay in "art school" and don't start spreading across the galaxy?
If there was a reliable way to do this, of course I would prefer it to sterilization. I'm not some sort of monster - my suggestion is indeed to minimize the monstrosities of conflict. If there was some way to do this with even less cost, of course I would prefer it. But I really just can't imagine it.
I think I heard about this, but I haven't read it. It sounds interesting and definitely makes sense. I think it's in these terms that we should think about extraterrestrial life.
Yeah, this is an interesting point. I'm not quite sure how to respond. I'm tempted to say that once advanced enough (hard enough to wipe out) we could sue for peace by agreeing with the more advanced powers to curtail our expansion (accept being "zoo'd"). But if that doesn't pan out, you're probably right. Maybe we really do have a duty to graciously lie down and let doom hit us. I don't think that's as crazy as it initially sounds.
I come to the same conclusion as Hawking - that we should try to be a quiet civilization - but not for the same reasons.
The fact that we haven't detected advanced life in all of our SETI searching, and the fact that our solar system has not been visited by an alien probe (see Fermi Paradox) is some evidence that our galaxy has a "sterilizer civilization" - which is a pretty straightforward concept.
If two civilizations begin interstellar colonization in our galaxy, their spheres of expansion are bound to intersect in the future. As they will largely be competing for the same resources (sources of energy differential), some sort of conflict is inevitable. But a conflict at this scale would be so horrible that any reasonable civilization would want to avoid it at all costs. This reasoning makes me think that any suitably advanced, reasonable civilization will be a sterilizer civilization: For the moral purpose of preventing great suffering, they will sterilize any technological civilization before they begin their interstellar colonization. Being rational, they will do this in the most efficient way possible: They will send a robotic probe which will duplicate itself in our solar system, and this autonomous army will wipe out all technological life and monitor our system to make sure that none re-emerges. Since sending even a small payload at great interstellar distances requires great energy, the rational sterilizer civilization will choose a speed for the probe that will bring it to its target safely before their interstellar colonization phase begins, but not much earlier. It is quite possible that such a probe is on its way to us right now, but won't arrive for another thousand years.
On the very unlikely scenario that we are somehow the first technological civilization in our galaxy, I think that we have an ethical obligation to become a sterilizer civilization ourselves. Everyone now wishes that somebody killed Hitler when he was a baby. It would have prevented great suffering. Like Hawking, I think it's inevitable that if contact is allowed to occur between two colonizing civilizations, the result will be catastrophic on a scale that will make the casualty count of a nuclear war seem like a rounding error. So of course there are ethical downsides of sterilizing a budding, intelligent civilization, just like there are downsides to killing the still-innocent baby Hitler. But I think the refusal to do this would be far more monstrous. The costs could be mitigated by meticulously recording all information about the culture and biology of the extinguished life, or perhaps even saving some specimens who will be safely contained in some sort of a galactic zoo.
So how should we react if there is a sterilizing probe on its way to get us? We have to begin our interstellar colonization before the probe gets here. I don't think it makes much sense to try to raise up a defense, because we can't even guess at the mechanism of such a probe. One thing it might do is to create a tiny black hole and drop it into the sun. (Or perhaps the probe just is a small black hole set to collide with the sun in a thousand years or so.) At this point, we are still a very vulnerable civilization, and will remain so until we have covered a substantial part of the galaxy. Also, we should be working hard on the technology for an effective sterilizer probe, just in case SETI does eventually reveal an alien civilization. I know it's "no fun" to kill aliens before we ever meet them, but I think the ethical costs of not doing so are unacceptable.
First of all, Flash isn't a video codec, and second - it actually does matter that we keep our bandwidth under control and the crappy artifacts you see in low-efficiency codecs basically means that you have to crank up the bandwidth before it looks good.
Another thing we want is for videos to be viewable on everything that browses the web, including smartphones. Maybe somebody will write a hardware decoder of VP8 so that even phones can play it smoothly, but right now there's nothing like that. So while this is a really good thing, I'd still rather solve the licensing issues that plague h.264, because of its technical merits and near-universal support.
Only the last item would really involve any real need for fragile humans to be in space, and it's also by far the most far-fetched item. No matter how much we fuck up the earth, it will always be cheaper and use fewer resources to support someone on it than off it. Forever. Even if you had to move people under the sea into some Octopus's garden, it would be far cheaper than keeping them alive in space.
I've seen the DOE flush tens of millions down the drain that a private company would've spent *much* more efficiently.
What have you actually seen that the DOE made which wasn't made by a private company under contract? Do they actually make stuff in house? You might mean that they make dumb and wasteful contracts with companies that are proven liars but never get punished - and no private company would consider making contracts like that. And you'd be right. Still, the problem is the inefficiency of these private companies. That the DOE forgives them is a separate problem.
I don't think you understood this right. Obama is opening the position of taxi service to the ISS to the open market, but by this he doesn't mean the private sector. He means that the national government would pay for this service with tax money. They're declaring unambiguously that there will be a demand, and inviting private companies to satisfy it at market rates. But those two companies have much more lucrative things to work on, like SDI - where they get billions for making powerpoint presentations.
Exactly. Those two companies are used to getting sweetheart military contracts where they charge $80 for each screw they use. When they see an even playing field with a real competitor, they're thinking: Fuck that! I think this shows better than anything the sense of entitlement of our defense contractors. They think that our tax money belongs to them no matter how shitty and uncompetitive their products would be on the open market. They're the last people screaming "Why we should get your money! Why? Cause we're Ameeeerican, that's why"...and people still listen.
This is a really well-made point. I thought about it the same way, though I didn't have the experience you had. But I did once fantasize about being a paid video game tester until I realized how much I'd hate to take something so wonderful as video games and make them a grind. Imagine being paid to level up some lazy American's WoW character. Would you go want to play Warcraft after your work hours were done? So I'm really troubled by the idea of paying people to read books, because you will stop paying them at some point and their relationship to books will be fucked up. So I don't think it's simply sentimentalism to hope that kids do valuable things out of intrinsic motivation, not out of bribes.
You know, that's actually not true. The reason why I do hard things and insist on being paid is that it takes a long time to do the hard things that I want to do, and I don't want to starve while I do them. So an employer plays the role of a benefactor to give me the opportunity to do the hard thing I want to do. Children already have such benefactors - they are called "parents" - so they can pursue any project they want without existential worries.
I think about it this way: Sometimes I see a bunch of ugly trash on the side of a road, and want to just clean it all up. What stops me is the realization that people get paid to do this sort of thing, so they should be the people to do it. But if there were no such payments, maybe I and people like me would just do this cleaning ourselves, out of intrinsic motivation. I'm not saying that paying for this service is bad, but a community that does this on their own really does seem a bit more decent than ours. But now consider a young adult who thinks: "Why the fuck would I read a book when nobody is paying me for it?" It's parallel to the cleanup situation, but in this case, such an end would be very sad.
It seems to me that earning the title of being NP-hard is very easy for games. As someone said before, even sudoku is NP-hard, but intuition-less computers are still much faster at it than humans with all their intuition. So where is the list of the "boring" games that aren't NP-hard? If there aren't any such games, then this story is pretty trivial.
I thought Moffat's episode "Blink" was one of the best scifi episodes ever. This crap was even clumsier and weaker than Russell Davies. I'll probably give it one more hour before giving up.
Interestingly, the nations with the largest data service revenues were: the US, Japan, China, the UK, Italy, Germany, France, Australia, Spain and Korea, respectively.
I don't find this all that interesting, since this pretty much a list of the world's largest economies in descending order. I'd be much more interested in per subscriber data.
I think you're exactly right. Painfully obvious domain names just don't have much value anymore. I mean, someone who has been in a coma for the last 15 years really might type "sex.com" into the URL bar when they're looking for sex, and "search.com" when they're looking for a search engine, and "books.com" when they're looking for books. But it's crazy to think that a website will become a big player in a well-established field just because they have the most banal and obvious domain name. Google and Amazon have nothing to fear from "search.com" and "books.com" respectively, and neither do the thousands of established porn websites have anything to fear from "sex.com".
Wake up. Kids kill themselves sometimes because they're bullied. They don't (generally) begin "extremely disturbed"; being victimized by bullies is what leads them to completely lose perspective. This is well researched, and if you want to cast aspersions at the victims, spend a year under my heel and see how you feel then, little piggy! Anyone can be broken. You can pretend the victims are some sort of freaks, but this could just as well happen to you.
Also, learn to read and correctly quote people. It's just straight up dishonest to remove the beginning of my sentence when you quote me, and then pretend I'm saying something completely different.
Bullied kids are sometimes literally made irrational (or "disturbed" if you prefer that expression), and this makes them incredibly vulnerable. And I expressed a worry that inscentivising their suicide when they're in this state is might have tragic consequences. I explicitly said that bullies should be punished (in the start of the sentence whose second part you quoted), but the punishment should be based on the nature of the bullying, not on the reaction it generated.
Exactly - that was my first thought as well. The last thing we should be doing is incentivizing suicide for teenagers. We should punish bullies for their actions, but not punish them extra when their actions cause a suicide. If we did, we're just giving kids a (very powerful) reason to kill themselves - to get revenge against the people who are making them feel so horribly.
I find it pretty chilling that we are actually rewarding a teenager for suicide. This is a scary precedent. I mean, there are many teens who are bullied, and feel like they have no way to get back at the people who are making them miserable. But now, we seem to be giving them a means: All they have to do is kill themselves. That way their strongest desire is granted: They ruin the lives of the bullies they hate.
I can easily imagine some poor, miserable kid threatening to write a long litany about the abuses of the bullies and then killing herself in some horrible way - just to get the bullies to stop. But if they don't, some kid who thinks her life is worthless might just decide that she'll have the last laugh, comforted by the thought that her harassers sit in jail.
I'm not saying that bullying shouldn't be punished. I'm saying that there shouldn't be an extra punishment when the bullying leads to a suicide. If there is, then our legal policy gives the victims a reason to kill themselves, which is sick.
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No, the point of the sterilizing would be to produce casualties on a comparably minuscule scale. I think you didn't understand my post.
Do you really know the purpose of life? I don't (though I suspect there is no such thing as a purpose to life). But I do believe in acting morally, and if I thought that my sacrifice would prevent a war on an unimaginable scale, then yes, I would think that my self-sacrifice would be obligatory. Hopefully I'd have the courage to do it, because it would be the right thing to do.
I'm wondering what concept here you're having trouble with. Maybe you don't think hard enough about ethics.
Yeah, this is the sort of thing I was thinking. I don't suspect that we are living in a zoo, but I'm taking the puzzle of the Fermi paradox very seriously.
But as another post pointed out, maybe it's not right to want to outrun the sterilizers headed this way, if there are any. That would only set up the unthinkable galactic conflict down the line. If we discover that there is a rival or a superior colonizing technology in the galaxy, we should either exterminate ourselves while we are still few, or at least limit ourselves to not spread exponentially (self check-in zoo).
But since there is some chance that we might be in the lead, we should pursue this, and do our best to bring about the Pax Homo in the galaxy. Maybe eventually we will have enough power to come up with something more subtle than sterilization in response to emerging alien technology; maybe we'll figure out a way to design escape-proof zoos for other species in which we interfere with them minimally, and perhaps eventually even integrate them in our galactic empire. But while the galaxy is still unclaimed territory and escape-proof zoos are far beyond our capacity, sterilization seems like the best policy to pursue.
As far as our present space program policy, I don't think that sending people up to into orbit or to the moon will have any impact on the relevant technology to what needs to be done. The sort of research we really need can actually be done on Earth. Most important, we need to take steps towards robotic self-assembly, autonomous robotic mining, and that sort of stuff. There is no point in sending people to the moon until there's a good place there for them to live, and that place will be built from lunar resources by robots. I expect that the result will look much like Biosphere 2, a project that has a lot more to do with valuable space travel than anything we're doing in the ISS. As far as interstellar colonization goes, I think the most accessible path would be this: We send frozen genetic material in a very compact and heavily shielded ship. (The layers of the shielding could be inscribed with all the information of our civilization.) Once the probe enters the orbit of an alien planet, an AI wakes up, unfreezes the genetic material, and gestation machines bring it to life. Human infants would be "raised" by an advanced anthropomorphic AI, while robotic probes would be using the native resources of the planet to make a self-sustaining biosphere for them to move into. I think we will be able to launch a mission like this within a few hundred years, possibly using an Orion-style thermonuclear propulsion to reach about 3% of the speed of light. Hurrying along with this will be critical, because if we only take 300 years between our first EM noise and colonization capacity, that might not give sterilizers enough time to notice and respond.
I do think that it follows from my logic that if there is a comparable or greater power than us in the galaxy, the moral thing for us to do is to destroy ourselves before we can start colonizing interstellar space. If we don't, the expansion wave of our descendants will cross with that of our rivals, and that is the most repugnant future possible.
Your post makes some very silly assumptions about civilizations who chat with each other and have reputations or whatever. From what we know of physics, it will just not work that way. Information too can only travel at the speed of light, and colonization waves will quite likely travel at an appreciable fraction of this.
Messages may take a thousands of years to travel through interstellar space, and you'd be insane to do this and wait for a reply, hoping that in the meanwhile, the lifeforms you contacted aren't already beginning their runaway colonization.
But maybe there is a model for "galaxy police" that works like this: You send the sterilization probe with an advanced AI, and the give the native lifeforms a chance to survive if they verifiably give up all attempts to launch a vehicle outside of their planet's orbit, as well as any technology which might threaten the sterilization probes.
This seems like playing with fire, though. Just how good would this AI have to be to not be outfoxed by some resourceful aliens? Unless this AI is brutal and willing to maintain this brutality over millennia, the containment system will fail. And morally preferable to this extended brutality (plus the risk of catastrophe) is the "nip it in the bud" strategy of one-time, total sterilization. Well, probably.
That's all fine. But what is the analogous option in the case of extraterrestrial intelligence? How do we apply our influence on an alien civilization so that they safely stay in "art school" and don't start spreading across the galaxy?
If there was a reliable way to do this, of course I would prefer it to sterilization. I'm not some sort of monster - my suggestion is indeed to minimize the monstrosities of conflict. If there was some way to do this with even less cost, of course I would prefer it. But I really just can't imagine it.
I think I heard about this, but I haven't read it. It sounds interesting and definitely makes sense. I think it's in these terms that we should think about extraterrestrial life.
Yeah, this is an interesting point. I'm not quite sure how to respond. I'm tempted to say that once advanced enough (hard enough to wipe out) we could sue for peace by agreeing with the more advanced powers to curtail our expansion (accept being "zoo'd"). But if that doesn't pan out, you're probably right. Maybe we really do have a duty to graciously lie down and let doom hit us. I don't think that's as crazy as it initially sounds.
I come to the same conclusion as Hawking - that we should try to be a quiet civilization - but not for the same reasons.
The fact that we haven't detected advanced life in all of our SETI searching, and the fact that our solar system has not been visited by an alien probe (see Fermi Paradox) is some evidence that our galaxy has a "sterilizer civilization" - which is a pretty straightforward concept.
If two civilizations begin interstellar colonization in our galaxy, their spheres of expansion are bound to intersect in the future. As they will largely be competing for the same resources (sources of energy differential), some sort of conflict is inevitable. But a conflict at this scale would be so horrible that any reasonable civilization would want to avoid it at all costs. This reasoning makes me think that any suitably advanced, reasonable civilization will be a sterilizer civilization: For the moral purpose of preventing great suffering, they will sterilize any technological civilization before they begin their interstellar colonization. Being rational, they will do this in the most efficient way possible: They will send a robotic probe which will duplicate itself in our solar system, and this autonomous army will wipe out all technological life and monitor our system to make sure that none re-emerges. Since sending even a small payload at great interstellar distances requires great energy, the rational sterilizer civilization will choose a speed for the probe that will bring it to its target safely before their interstellar colonization phase begins, but not much earlier. It is quite possible that such a probe is on its way to us right now, but won't arrive for another thousand years.
On the very unlikely scenario that we are somehow the first technological civilization in our galaxy, I think that we have an ethical obligation to become a sterilizer civilization ourselves. Everyone now wishes that somebody killed Hitler when he was a baby. It would have prevented great suffering. Like Hawking, I think it's inevitable that if contact is allowed to occur between two colonizing civilizations, the result will be catastrophic on a scale that will make the casualty count of a nuclear war seem like a rounding error. So of course there are ethical downsides of sterilizing a budding, intelligent civilization, just like there are downsides to killing the still-innocent baby Hitler. But I think the refusal to do this would be far more monstrous. The costs could be mitigated by meticulously recording all information about the culture and biology of the extinguished life, or perhaps even saving some specimens who will be safely contained in some sort of a galactic zoo.
So how should we react if there is a sterilizing probe on its way to get us? We have to begin our interstellar colonization before the probe gets here. I don't think it makes much sense to try to raise up a defense, because we can't even guess at the mechanism of such a probe. One thing it might do is to create a tiny black hole and drop it into the sun. (Or perhaps the probe just is a small black hole set to collide with the sun in a thousand years or so.) At this point, we are still a very vulnerable civilization, and will remain so until we have covered a substantial part of the galaxy. Also, we should be working hard on the technology for an effective sterilizer probe, just in case SETI does eventually reveal an alien civilization. I know it's "no fun" to kill aliens before we ever meet them, but I think the ethical costs of not doing so are unacceptable.
First of all, Flash isn't a video codec, and second - it actually does matter that we keep our bandwidth under control and the crappy artifacts you see in low-efficiency codecs basically means that you have to crank up the bandwidth before it looks good.
Another thing we want is for videos to be viewable on everything that browses the web, including smartphones. Maybe somebody will write a hardware decoder of VP8 so that even phones can play it smoothly, but right now there's nothing like that. So while this is a really good thing, I'd still rather solve the licensing issues that plague h.264, because of its technical merits and near-universal support.
Only the last item would really involve any real need for fragile humans to be in space, and it's also by far the most far-fetched item. No matter how much we fuck up the earth, it will always be cheaper and use fewer resources to support someone on it than off it. Forever. Even if you had to move people under the sea into some Octopus's garden, it would be far cheaper than keeping them alive in space.
What have you actually seen that the DOE made which wasn't made by a private company under contract? Do they actually make stuff in house? You might mean that they make dumb and wasteful contracts with companies that are proven liars but never get punished - and no private company would consider making contracts like that. And you'd be right. Still, the problem is the inefficiency of these private companies. That the DOE forgives them is a separate problem.
I don't think you understood this right. Obama is opening the position of taxi service to the ISS to the open market, but by this he doesn't mean the private sector. He means that the national government would pay for this service with tax money. They're declaring unambiguously that there will be a demand, and inviting private companies to satisfy it at market rates. But those two companies have much more lucrative things to work on, like SDI - where they get billions for making powerpoint presentations.
Exactly. Those two companies are used to getting sweetheart military contracts where they charge $80 for each screw they use. When they see an even playing field with a real competitor, they're thinking: Fuck that! I think this shows better than anything the sense of entitlement of our defense contractors. They think that our tax money belongs to them no matter how shitty and uncompetitive their products would be on the open market. They're the last people screaming "Why we should get your money! Why? Cause we're Ameeeerican, that's why" ...and people still listen.
This is a really well-made point. I thought about it the same way, though I didn't have the experience you had. But I did once fantasize about being a paid video game tester until I realized how much I'd hate to take something so wonderful as video games and make them a grind. Imagine being paid to level up some lazy American's WoW character. Would you go want to play Warcraft after your work hours were done? So I'm really troubled by the idea of paying people to read books, because you will stop paying them at some point and their relationship to books will be fucked up. So I don't think it's simply sentimentalism to hope that kids do valuable things out of intrinsic motivation, not out of bribes.
You know, that's actually not true. The reason why I do hard things and insist on being paid is that it takes a long time to do the hard things that I want to do, and I don't want to starve while I do them. So an employer plays the role of a benefactor to give me the opportunity to do the hard thing I want to do. Children already have such benefactors - they are called "parents" - so they can pursue any project they want without existential worries.
I think about it this way: Sometimes I see a bunch of ugly trash on the side of a road, and want to just clean it all up. What stops me is the realization that people get paid to do this sort of thing, so they should be the people to do it. But if there were no such payments, maybe I and people like me would just do this cleaning ourselves, out of intrinsic motivation. I'm not saying that paying for this service is bad, but a community that does this on their own really does seem a bit more decent than ours. But now consider a young adult who thinks: "Why the fuck would I read a book when nobody is paying me for it?" It's parallel to the cleanup situation, but in this case, such an end would be very sad.
It seems to me that earning the title of being NP-hard is very easy for games. As someone said before, even sudoku is NP-hard, but intuition-less computers are still much faster at it than humans with all their intuition. So where is the list of the "boring" games that aren't NP-hard? If there aren't any such games, then this story is pretty trivial.
Yeah, and tell me that the scene you refer to was
1. Well written.
2. Well acted.
3. Relevant to something.
4. At least based on a good/interesting idea.
5. Anything but pure crap.
Sadly, it wasn't any of these things. Like much of the rest of the episode, it was an orgy of overacting - even by Doctor Who standards.
I thought Moffat's episode "Blink" was one of the best scifi episodes ever. This crap was even clumsier and weaker than Russell Davies. I'll probably give it one more hour before giving up.
I don't find this all that interesting, since this pretty much a list of the world's largest economies in descending order. I'd be much more interested in per subscriber data.
Never have I seen such a wretched hive of filth and villainy.
I think you're exactly right. Painfully obvious domain names just don't have much value anymore. I mean, someone who has been in a coma for the last 15 years really might type "sex.com" into the URL bar when they're looking for sex, and "search.com" when they're looking for a search engine, and "books.com" when they're looking for books. But it's crazy to think that a website will become a big player in a well-established field just because they have the most banal and obvious domain name. Google and Amazon have nothing to fear from "search.com" and "books.com" respectively, and neither do the thousands of established porn websites have anything to fear from "sex.com".
Wake up. Kids kill themselves sometimes because they're bullied. They don't (generally) begin "extremely disturbed"; being victimized by bullies is what leads them to completely lose perspective. This is well researched, and if you want to cast aspersions at the victims, spend a year under my heel and see how you feel then, little piggy! Anyone can be broken. You can pretend the victims are some sort of freaks, but this could just as well happen to you.
Also, learn to read and correctly quote people. It's just straight up dishonest to remove the beginning of my sentence when you quote me, and then pretend I'm saying something completely different.
Bullied kids are sometimes literally made irrational (or "disturbed" if you prefer that expression), and this makes them incredibly vulnerable. And I expressed a worry that inscentivising their suicide when they're in this state is might have tragic consequences. I explicitly said that bullies should be punished (in the start of the sentence whose second part you quoted), but the punishment should be based on the nature of the bullying, not on the reaction it generated.
Exactly - that was my first thought as well. The last thing we should be doing is incentivizing suicide for teenagers. We should punish bullies for their actions, but not punish them extra when their actions cause a suicide. If we did, we're just giving kids a (very powerful) reason to kill themselves - to get revenge against the people who are making them feel so horribly.
I find it pretty chilling that we are actually rewarding a teenager for suicide. This is a scary precedent. I mean, there are many teens who are bullied, and feel like they have no way to get back at the people who are making them miserable. But now, we seem to be giving them a means: All they have to do is kill themselves. That way their strongest desire is granted: They ruin the lives of the bullies they hate.
I can easily imagine some poor, miserable kid threatening to write a long litany about the abuses of the bullies and then killing herself in some horrible way - just to get the bullies to stop. But if they don't, some kid who thinks her life is worthless might just decide that she'll have the last laugh, comforted by the thought that her harassers sit in jail.
I'm not saying that bullying shouldn't be punished. I'm saying that there shouldn't be an extra punishment when the bullying leads to a suicide. If there is, then our legal policy gives the victims a reason to kill themselves, which is sick.