The Right To Life types will go absolutely berserk over this. The whole religious underpinning of the movement...the one they never like to talk about...will have to decide whether a human created by man should enjoy the same protection as a human created by their god.
Only if the resulting creation actually seems to exhibit a sufficient number of traits that are distinctly human-like. Does a synthetic person have a theory of mind once they get old enough? Can they question the universe around them and try to create an explanation for their observations based on not only the knowledge they have communicated so far, but also the ability to image. Can they learn to read, and in particular once they have apparently learned how to read, can they then use that skill to learn new skills from books that nobody else has taught them before?
If the answers to a sufficient number of these questions is yes, then I'd agree it that what you are saying will become an issue. If not, however, synthetic humans are unlikely to ever legally gain such rights as what ordinary humans enjoy.
No... 50 *UN*vaccinated children would be getting sick. The problem is that not all of those kids are represented by a parent who voluntarily chose their kids to not get vaccinated. The preal problem becomes clear when you look at the mathematics behind it.
Consider that only between 1 and 5% of children cannot actually be vaccinated for medical reasons. If nearly everyone around these kids is immune to a disease because everyone else around them has been vaccinated, then that unvaccinated person enjoys the benefits of a herd immunity. Even though they are technically vulnerable to a disease, the disease simply does not get a chance to really get near them because everyone else around them is immune. In this way, even the unvaccinated kids do not generally get sick, but that only works as long as sufficiently high percentage of people around them are already immune to the disease. As you add more unvaccinated people to the system, however, then the herd immunity breaks down, and the greater the chance that all or nearly all of the unvaccinated kids get sick, and not just the one or two vulnerable ones that may have been otherwise directly exposed to the illness outside of that group. Put another way, each unvaccinated kid represents an attack vector, and with each additional unvaccinated person that you add to a group, the number of attack vectors againsty any other unvaccinated person grows quadratically with the number of unvaccinated kids.
Compare these two scenarios, and you have your answer,
Which is worse, when one child gets sick when everything that was possible to do based on knowledge that they had at the time was done, or when 50 children get sick because of something that could have been done, but was not?
One child out of a hundred getting sick from a vaccine shot is better than 50 kids getting sick from a preventable illness because 45 didn't get a shot that they otherwise could have.
There are a subset of children who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. The percentage of people that this is true for is quite low, and they benefit from the immunity of the vast majority of people around them. Theoretically, even those who have medical reasons to not get vaccinated could pose the same risks as those who would voluntarily choose not to, but as I said, the percentage of those people is quite low, and herd immunity keeps them all healthy, If, however, you allow people to freely choose whether their children that go to public school are vaccinated or not, then the percentage of unvaccinated rises substantially... enough that those who would not have been able to get vaccinated for actual medical reasons can no longer take advantage of the herd immunity as a means of avoiding becoming sick.... the result is that a very large number of children can get sick (and sometimes even die) that otherwise would not have.
I would imagine that any risks would depend on encoding. If utf8 is used, for instance, then filtering out the invalid characters amounts to at most a half-dozen or so extra lines of C code beyond that of what you would find in a very naive decoder, any risks beyond that are non-existent, and the benefit gained is access to international character sets, as well as many symbols that cannot be adequately represented in ascii.
The only excuse to not implement it in this day and age now is laziness.
And hey, if that's the excuse, then at least be honest about it instead of trying to justify inaction by saying that unicode doesn't offer significant enough advantages (which is subjective) or making some claim that proper unicode handling is hard (which it isn't).
Yes, crime rate has been steadily decreasing, but the rate at which it decreases varies. In fact the very graphs that you link to illustrate the point. At each peak of unemployment, there is a rise (or at least a reduced rate of reduction) in the crime rate as well. The correlation between is quite hight between the two, probably nearly 80% on just the data points on those two graphs alone.
Now I'm aware that correlation is not necessarily indicative of causation, but the strength of the correlation is still impossible to statistically ignore.
THC levels might say nothing about impairment, but I think it would still say something about how *recent* the last time was. Regardless of impairment, zero tolerance means that no threshold is considered "safe" (even if one clinically otherwise might be), and that one who uses it should not drive for at least 8 to 12 hours.
Even working at a company you dislike is better than losing your home, or not being able to eat if your employment insurance runs out before you find other work.
"As job growth slows and the cost of living remains as high as it is, that's going to put many people in a difficult position"
"Expect the crime rate to go up."
The single most pronounced governing factor for crime rate is unemployment. As the weeks of unemployment drag into months, people get desperate, and do stuff they would never otherwise even dream of.
We have the "technology" to end hunger today. We just don't have the will.
Not exactly true. What we don't have is an infrastructure necessary to get food to places that need it the most via a means that is economically sustainable. This is, at least in part, owing to limitations in technology... but more related to how expensive those technologies are to sufficiently deploy in areas that are inadequately served by them than because the technologies do not exist at all. Theoretically, as technology advances, costs can come down, potentially making such deployment more economically feasible in the future.
Zero tolerance works adequately for alcohol and driving in some jurisdictions, or when a person has that restriction on their driving license. Why wouldn't it work for THC?
I am suggesting that after a sufficient period has elapsed, their THC levels would likely be sufficiently close to zero that it would not be practically measurable, particularly with field equipment that is generally going to be much cruder than what you would be able to use in a proper lab facility.
If they can't figure out an threshold that objectively represents a dangerous level of impairment, then just disallow it entirely when one is driving. There's not very much subjectivity about whether or not something is zero (or at least below measurable levels).
.... we can learn a lesson from WhatsApp. if you ever develop any mechanism that allows end users to encrypt data in ways that nobody other than the intended recipient can decrypt, you have to actively try to discourage it from ever becoming too popular, because if it ever should become a dominating player, then criminals will be using it as well, and then law enforcement will want to come after you.
Not meaning to sound like I'm trolling. I'm being entirely serious here when I say that I just don't take it as some sort of personal attack upon myself when a show that I might happen to be really getting into is suddenly interrupted by a TV commercial. It's just TV. It's just not THAT important to be something to get upset about.
Imagine if you were trying to read a book...and every 5 minutes some annoying person would come around and shout at you or do something random and stupid to distract you
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you haven't had kids:)
Okay, seriously.... I've watched stuff on streaming services many times. One of my grown-up sons has a Netflix subscription and the year before last, he had moved back in with us for a few months due to some unexpected circumstances at his own home. During that time, I did actually watch quite a few shows on Netflix, especially on the weekends, and enjoyed rewatching some of the older tv shows that I had a fond recollection for. However, the experience overall seemed no different to me than watching the same TV series on a DVD, however, which is similarly without commercials, and for myself it did not alter the experience of watching regular TV shows with commercials in any way.
I simply don't notice commercials enough to be bothered by them... I suppose I might if they lasted much longer than they currently do, but the duration seems to be short enough that it's not an issue, and generally speaking, television is not so important or urgent a priority to me that I would otherwise feel I can't afford to sit around waiting for a commercial to end.
There is nothing "powerful" that keeps you from saying "bring me a large salad with a lo-cal dressing" instead of "bring me ribs and mashed potatoes"
Nothing except the hunger that you have already conceded is virtually impossible to ignore once it happens.
But you should then accept the consequences and not blame "neuroscience" or "powerful forces" for your weight.
Neuroscience isn't the underlying cause of obesity, but it *IS* a huge factor in why people who, once they have become obese, are faced with an enormous difficulty in getting back down to normal levels. The habits that people indulged in which led to them becoming obese are of course their own fault and nobody else can be blamed for that, but to suggest that it somehow their own fault that they can't somehow relatively easily get back down to normal weight levels, or that it is still solely the fault of the person because of choices that they are allegedly still consciously making is completely ignoring the psychological factors involved.
True.... but the pause button is an active disengagement... you may pause in the middle of somebody saying something, for example, even without meaning to. Commercial breaks are, at least, usually actually *between* scenes... and give you the opportunity to disengage from the TV without having to concentrate over when to hit that pause button.
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Only if the resulting creation actually seems to exhibit a sufficient number of traits that are distinctly human-like. Does a synthetic person have a theory of mind once they get old enough? Can they question the universe around them and try to create an explanation for their observations based on not only the knowledge they have communicated so far, but also the ability to image. Can they learn to read, and in particular once they have apparently learned how to read, can they then use that skill to learn new skills from books that nobody else has taught them before?
If the answers to a sufficient number of these questions is yes, then I'd agree it that what you are saying will become an issue. If not, however, synthetic humans are unlikely to ever legally gain such rights as what ordinary humans enjoy.
No... 50 *UN*vaccinated children would be getting sick. The problem is that not all of those kids are represented by a parent who voluntarily chose their kids to not get vaccinated. The preal problem becomes clear when you look at the mathematics behind it.
Consider that only between 1 and 5% of children cannot actually be vaccinated for medical reasons. If nearly everyone around these kids is immune to a disease because everyone else around them has been vaccinated, then that unvaccinated person enjoys the benefits of a herd immunity. Even though they are technically vulnerable to a disease, the disease simply does not get a chance to really get near them because everyone else around them is immune. In this way, even the unvaccinated kids do not generally get sick, but that only works as long as sufficiently high percentage of people around them are already immune to the disease. As you add more unvaccinated people to the system, however, then the herd immunity breaks down, and the greater the chance that all or nearly all of the unvaccinated kids get sick, and not just the one or two vulnerable ones that may have been otherwise directly exposed to the illness outside of that group. Put another way, each unvaccinated kid represents an attack vector, and with each additional unvaccinated person that you add to a group, the number of attack vectors againsty any other unvaccinated person grows quadratically with the number of unvaccinated kids.
Compare these two scenarios, and you have your answer,
Which is worse, when one child gets sick when everything that was possible to do based on knowledge that they had at the time was done, or when 50 children get sick because of something that could have been done, but was not?
One child out of a hundred getting sick from a vaccine shot is better than 50 kids getting sick from a preventable illness because 45 didn't get a shot that they otherwise could have.
There are a subset of children who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. The percentage of people that this is true for is quite low, and they benefit from the immunity of the vast majority of people around them. Theoretically, even those who have medical reasons to not get vaccinated could pose the same risks as those who would voluntarily choose not to, but as I said, the percentage of those people is quite low, and herd immunity keeps them all healthy, If, however, you allow people to freely choose whether their children that go to public school are vaccinated or not, then the percentage of unvaccinated rises substantially... enough that those who would not have been able to get vaccinated for actual medical reasons can no longer take advantage of the herd immunity as a means of avoiding becoming sick.... the result is that a very large number of children can get sick (and sometimes even die) that otherwise would not have.
Or a lazy one.
Which to be truthful is probably most of them... but that doesn't make the excuse any better.
There's a saying about leading a horse to water....
I would imagine that any risks would depend on encoding. If utf8 is used, for instance, then filtering out the invalid characters amounts to at most a half-dozen or so extra lines of C code beyond that of what you would find in a very naive decoder, any risks beyond that are non-existent, and the benefit gained is access to international character sets, as well as many symbols that cannot be adequately represented in ascii.
The only excuse to not implement it in this day and age now is laziness.
And hey, if that's the excuse, then at least be honest about it instead of trying to justify inaction by saying that unicode doesn't offer significant enough advantages (which is subjective) or making some claim that proper unicode handling is hard (which it isn't).
From your comment, I believe that it may have escaped your attention that we are no longer living in the 20th century.
Yes, crime rate has been steadily decreasing, but the rate at which it decreases varies. In fact the very graphs that you link to illustrate the point. At each peak of unemployment, there is a rise (or at least a reduced rate of reduction) in the crime rate as well. The correlation between is quite hight between the two, probably nearly 80% on just the data points on those two graphs alone.
Now I'm aware that correlation is not necessarily indicative of causation, but the strength of the correlation is still impossible to statistically ignore.
THC levels might say nothing about impairment, but I think it would still say something about how *recent* the last time was. Regardless of impairment, zero tolerance means that no threshold is considered "safe" (even if one clinically otherwise might be), and that one who uses it should not drive for at least 8 to 12 hours.
... that some router manufacturers were going to do this?
Even working at a company you dislike is better than losing your home, or not being able to eat if your employment insurance runs out before you find other work.
"Expect the crime rate to go up."
The single most pronounced governing factor for crime rate is unemployment. As the weeks of unemployment drag into months, people get desperate, and do stuff they would never otherwise even dream of.
You assume that you are not, yourself, already being simulated... without you even knowing it.
Not exactly true. What we don't have is an infrastructure necessary to get food to places that need it the most via a means that is economically sustainable. This is, at least in part, owing to limitations in technology... but more related to how expensive those technologies are to sufficiently deploy in areas that are inadequately served by them than because the technologies do not exist at all. Theoretically, as technology advances, costs can come down, potentially making such deployment more economically feasible in the future.
Zero tolerance works adequately for alcohol and driving in some jurisdictions, or when a person has that restriction on their driving license. Why wouldn't it work for THC?
I am suggesting that after a sufficient period has elapsed, their THC levels would likely be sufficiently close to zero that it would not be practically measurable, particularly with field equipment that is generally going to be much cruder than what you would be able to use in a proper lab facility.
If they can't figure out an threshold that objectively represents a dangerous level of impairment, then just disallow it entirely when one is driving. There's not very much subjectivity about whether or not something is zero (or at least below measurable levels).
.... we can learn a lesson from WhatsApp. if you ever develop any mechanism that allows end users to encrypt data in ways that nobody other than the intended recipient can decrypt, you have to actively try to discourage it from ever becoming too popular, because if it ever should become a dominating player, then criminals will be using it as well, and then law enforcement will want to come after you.
Not meaning to sound like I'm trolling. I'm being entirely serious here when I say that I just don't take it as some sort of personal attack upon myself when a show that I might happen to be really getting into is suddenly interrupted by a TV commercial. It's just TV. It's just not THAT important to be something to get upset about.
I haven't watched a movie on tv for years.... If I want to watch a movie, I will plug in a DVD, or buy/rent a digital copy.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you haven't had kids :)
Okay, seriously.... I've watched stuff on streaming services many times. One of my grown-up sons has a Netflix subscription and the year before last, he had moved back in with us for a few months due to some unexpected circumstances at his own home. During that time, I did actually watch quite a few shows on Netflix, especially on the weekends, and enjoyed rewatching some of the older tv shows that I had a fond recollection for. However, the experience overall seemed no different to me than watching the same TV series on a DVD, however, which is similarly without commercials, and for myself it did not alter the experience of watching regular TV shows with commercials in any way.
I simply don't notice commercials enough to be bothered by them... I suppose I might if they lasted much longer than they currently do, but the duration seems to be short enough that it's not an issue, and generally speaking, television is not so important or urgent a priority to me that I would otherwise feel I can't afford to sit around waiting for a commercial to end.
Nothing except the hunger that you have already conceded is virtually impossible to ignore once it happens.
Neuroscience isn't the underlying cause of obesity, but it *IS* a huge factor in why people who, once they have become obese, are faced with an enormous difficulty in getting back down to normal levels. The habits that people indulged in which led to them becoming obese are of course their own fault and nobody else can be blamed for that, but to suggest that it somehow their own fault that they can't somehow relatively easily get back down to normal weight levels, or that it is still solely the fault of the person because of choices that they are allegedly still consciously making is completely ignoring the psychological factors involved.
True.... but the pause button is an active disengagement... you may pause in the middle of somebody saying something, for example, even without meaning to. Commercial breaks are, at least, usually actually *between* scenes... and give you the opportunity to disengage from the TV without having to concentrate over when to hit that pause button.