Joshu's Wu, a standard koan. The trick here is that "wu" is both the Chinese onomatopoetic sound of a dog bark, and a word meaning, approx., "Don't ask that question" (or so I am told).
So the claim that dogs have souls is considered ill-defined by rather ancient Buddhist monks. This particular one dates back to considerably before Buddhism crossed from China to Japan, though not as far back as before it crossed from India to China. So it's definitely sometime AD, and thus considerably after Plato. But from this vantage point they are all smeared together into "ancient history". If someone who was living in Eurasia then has any modern descendants, then we are ALL their descendants. (That's a statement based on probability theory and genetics, so it's not certain, but has a quite high likelihood. [ref. Dawkins: The Ancestors Tale. I'm leaving out isolated island populations and Africa, so I'm moving the date forwards a bit.])
I'm also assuming that Joshu's definition of "Buddha nature" matches your definition of "soul". This is also a bit uncertain. I've met people who didn't believe that other people who didn't speak their language had souls. (I didn't bother to get clarity on what they meant by soul.)
Given many definitions that are used, I have a hard time believing that people have souls, either. Given other common definitions, there's no way to tell. Given other definitions...yes.
And why, given whatever definition you use, do you believe that *you* have a soul? Can you prove it? Can you prove it to someone besides yourself? Is the proof logically valid? Empirically testable?
I generally avoid the word soul, because it has so many meanings, so few of which are distinguishable without *close* examination. And there's a strong tendency to slip from one meaning to another without noticing it.
That's a choice that would be reasonable, but it's not the one that would be best for HP.
The best choice for HP would be to do an Apple, only start with an existing distro, say Debian or Ubuntu. Then customize it for their own hardware, including in a separate repository any necessary proprietary drivers (which are included in the purchase price). Then add another repository which is the HP store, where they sell additional software. Possibly that could be broken into two sections, one of which is supported by HP, and the other of which isn't.
Note that what we're doing here is essentially separating the repositories by license. The base repository would be GPL. The other repositories would be commercial in one way or another. Possibly included in the price of the system and possibly not. Differs by repository. They could also have the equivalents of Ubuntu's Universe and Multi-verse repositories.
But this is assuming that they are still the engineering company that they used to be. That's not the way I read the rumors that I've been hearing. It's certainly not what the last couple of HP products I bought indicate. Based on that I'm not even sure that they *HAVE* a quality control arm anymore.
HP would need to put a bit of muscle behind it, and buy some proprietary drivers (until it managed to coerce the driver mfg. to make decent support for Linux), but I really think that HP *could* turn out a product that would be desirable to end users and not just to techies.
I might not need to point this out, but I expect that this would offend purists mightily. What HP would probably need to do would be to maintain it's own repositories ala Debian or Ubuntu, and ONLY support software from those repositories. One of them could be for commercial partners, where companies could sell GPL incompatible products. So there would be a base system which would be pure GPL, and there would be the extras repositories. Including the HP Store where you could buy software.
This is something they *could* do, and do profitably. Will they? Probably not. It would require becoming a systems house rather than a hardware vendor, and they seem to be moving away from that direction (which they used to use with HP UX). It's adopting an approach more like that of Apple, but with low end (i.e., largely free) components. If HP still had the engineers in charge I think they could run with this and make dynamite systems that everyone would want at below the cost of the MS-based competition. I don't know if the current company could do anything. The (second or third hand) reports that I've been getting aren't very favorable.
But this is an approach that ANY good engineering company with good name recognition could easily succeed at. Especially one with a heavy background in Unix/Linux.
OTOH, it may well be that in the current market nothing would succeed. Sigh. A good product and good marketing combined won't succeed when the customers are hunkering down and cutting their budgets. Then the only things that can work are things that don't cost money, even in the short run.
You raise a good point...though lamentably you misunderstand it.
This is math, not science. This is a particular interpretation of mathematics which, when adopted, is consistent with many things known about the universe, and not known to be inconsistent with anything. But it's still math. Science has to be experimentally testable, math only has to be self-consistent.
That said, there's a lot of overlap between science and math, and before one dismisses it as irrelevant because it's just math, one should look at how much of what we do know about the universe it explains. It turns out that the answer is "LOTS".
And actually I mis-stated the case. The foundation is math. The interpretation is what is being called science. It's not, because it doesn't predict anything testable that hasn't be observed. But it still deserves to be taken very seriously because it's consistent with an extremely large number of facts that we have tested.
The thing is, every interpretation of the math that we use to explain what we know has implicit in it extensions that seem wildly unreasonable, and which aren't testable. And sometimes the math is not necessary to explain what we've observed, but appears to be implicitly required by elegance. This is tricky. Mathematicians have long used elegance as a guide, and found it unreasonably effective. But it's a subjective evaluation.
Also note that some people find the idea of the multiverse less peculiar than intrinsically disconnected sections of a singular universe, and I've seen at least one analysis that considered them identical. (I've got suspicions as to what THEY considered the multiverse, but I didn't analyze their analysis.) The point is that different people find different choices unbelievable. (Just consider all the trouble Einstein had with Quantum Theory.)
The thing is, while an "Intelligent Creator" is emotionally satisfying...at least if you presume that it cares anything about people, it's not in the running as a plausible scenario.
It's too complicated.
The only way I've been able to make it seem at all sensible is logically equivalent to saying that we are all life forms who are NPCs in a really fancy game. Not exactly the kind of scenario that fills one with joy.
Others have managed to put more emotional pull behind the notion by saying that we are simulations of the ancestors of the people who are running the simulation, and that they are interested in us because we represent their ancestors. OK. I find this rather implausible.
And note that BOTH of these "explanations" leave untouched the question of "Where did these model builders come from?" But so does every explanation I've encountered that invokes some intelligent creator.
Note that just because the explanation seems unreasonable doesn't prove that it's wrong. But it does mean that if you want it to be believed, then you should have some good evidence. I've yet to encounter any.
That depends on how the color gets implemented. If it's done as separate pixels of R G B, then it would be an additive display. If it were a white background with R, G, & B filters imposed above it, then the color would be subtractive. And note that there wouldn't be different intensities of colors. Everything would be on or off. So one spot of color (4 pixels if R G B W/B, one pixel if White + filters) could only supply R, RG, RGB, RB, B, BG, G, White, and Black... That's nine colors because I'm counting RGB as being different from both black and white, otherwise it would be 8. The Apple ][ did better than that. Possibly if the filters were electrically settable... but then it might require more power (or might not, as it might only require power to change a filter's setting).
This is hugely speculative, but don't think of this as being either like a monitor or like mixing paints. Both give you the wrong image of current possibilities. Ideally there would be an electrically adjustable filter for each color for each pixel which when set would retain it's value without additional power. This would mean that you would need more light in order to be able to read the screen, but recent flashlights give promise that this may be doable for only quite moderate power requirements. But the illumination would need to be from above, or it would look very different when lit by the screen light and when lit by external light. If all this were accomplished, then you would have a subtractive color screen, which probably means that the color filters you should stack would be CMYK. But note that ALL of this is a long way from the lab, much less the shipping department.
Programming is mainly thinking, not reading. You only read enough to refresh your mind over what you've just written...or to check a small piece of code for errors.
That's immensely different from large blocks of text. OTOH, I usually find that I can read text without much strain if I increase the font size enough. (How much is enough depends both on the screen and on the font.) But it's never pleasant.
Convenience is one of the factors that decisively tip the scales *away* from Kindle, or any of the electronic media I've seen so far. Electronic media are fine for listening to, and adequate for videos. They are appalling for extended reading.
Also, I tend to read several different books at once, often with place markers in several different places. I rarely write in the books, but I frequently write on the markers. This is secondary, however.
And, of course, another factor is that books are permanent. (Well, relatively so.) I still have many books from 20 years ago. I don't reference them often, but when I do there's frequently no other source for the particular thing that I'm after. (No, the web doesn't suffice. It's got lots of things, but there are still large areas where it's coverage is quite sparse. Especially in materials that were published before the web was ubiquitous.)
I can't cite the law either, but I remember the occasion. I couldn't have told you whether it was a law or a judicial decision. I think the other country involved was Norway, but I'm not even certain of that.
Still, I remember the event, if not the specifics. I can't remember whether it was about copyrights, patents, or something else. I don't remember whether the US actually invaded, or just threatened to. I do remember being quite upset about it.
The DMCA is an evil law. It may have not evil applications, but they appear to be in the vast minority. That it would be such a law was predicted before it was passed.
I've seen the way the US implements treaties. The US only implements treaties to the extent that the government wants to. The DMCA goes far beyond what the treaty requires, and is probably, in a logical system, unconstitutional. (Granted the constitution is too vague to form a complete specification as a logical basis. Many terms are undefined, and much is presumed as common knowledge...including much that is no longer common knowledge. Still, this seems to clearly be a law regulating speech or the press.)
Nanites would probably use techniques descended from the atomic force microscope. These could potentially be far more efficient than the techniques plants, and also far more efficient than "chemical vapor deposition". (Actually I don't believe that chemical vapor deposition is all that energy efficient. It's a process that we use because it's inefficient for us to control each individual reaction at the atomic scale. But our reasons for it being inefficient wouldn't apply to a nanite.)
OTOH, grey goo is a very sophisticated nanite. I don't think that we need to worry about it during the next decade or so. It's basically a nano-scale assembler, albeit one that's rather specialized.
The point is that it's clearly impossible to cling "to what we are now". We are using up resources faster than they can be replaced. SOME change is inevitable.
The interesting question is "How can we shape a future that will be either most desirable or least undesirable?" The the entities asking the question are us, here and now.
It's rather clear that trying to stay as we are will inevitably lead to extinction in one of several different ways. Trying to predict the details is both pointless and depressing. So look for a path forwards that doesn't lead to that end. I can think of several, some of which are moderately desirable. Trying to convince people, though, requires convincing those with the power to make decisions to look more than two elections ahead. This is unlikely to be successful, though of course it should be attempted, and there are those who are attempting it.
What is possible to slashdot readers is to attempt to construct a moral AI. I.e., an AI that has a morality that will allow people to coexist with it. This is also a low probability effort, but EVERY SINGLE PATH INTO THE FUTURE TAKES OFF FROM A LOW PROBABILITY EVENT. And if you don't try, you definitely won't cause it to happen.
The highest probability paths all lead inevitably to the extinction of humanity within a century or two. Some only slightly lower probability paths lead to the collapse of civilization, massive die off, and then survivors picking among the ruins. Probably considerably less than one person out of a million would survive. The carrying capacity of the earth with primitive farming methods averages around 50 people per square fertile mile. And cities have been built on top of the most fertile ground. That won't be available again until the cement is hauled away...using muscle power. (O, yes. Do you expect any horses to survive? Donkeys? Some donkeys will probably survive in remote areas, but horses are likely to all be eaten during the collapse. When you're starving a horse that would be immensely valuable in a few years is worth more now as food.) I expect that some deer would survive, some bears, some mountain lions, etc. Not many of anything large enough to eat. There wouldn't be many people, and people would be the most numerous large animal.
Lets try to avoid that, even though it isn't exactly an existential risk. I doubt that civilization would ever again rise to the level of working with electricity. Nothing written on plastic would survive, and probably nothing that wasn't written on archival quality paper. Even that would only be preserved through rare chance. (Does it ever get cold where you live? How do you get warm?)
Sorry, when I try to think realistically about this I get rather gloomy. Once I though space habitats could serve as a refuge, but we've wasted that chance. I don't think there's time anymore. AI there might be time for. MIGHT. But it has to be an AI that people can live with.
Perhaps that just makes things worse. I thought they had a good reason for not having a staff person read it. (Probably the factoid started out as "over 20,000 words...", which is bad enough, but still possible. Or possibly I have it confused with UCITA2b, which didn't pass any state in unaltered form.)
No only do the citizens not have a meaningful opportunity to criticize legislation before it is approved, it is also not uncommon that the legislators don't read the bills before they vote on them, and it's not unknown for there not to be any time for anyone on their staff to read them. How many legislators do you think read the DMCA before it was voted on? The answer is NONE! It was written by special interests, the damn thing is over 2000 pages long (that may be hyperbole...I haven't seen a written copy), and they voted it through within a week after it was presented to them. I believe the process is called "railroading".
Also, in many significant votes it's impossible to determine how your Representative or Senator voted. I'll grant that this isn't always true, but it's true when they want to pass something that they feel the people back home wouldn't approve of. In fact I believe that most votes AREN'T roll-call votes. (Admittedly I haven't kept current.)
What's been being asserted is that China is a country with a Socialist, or Communist, religion, but not practice. Do you have any *evidence* that is otherwise? Several people have cited personal knowledge. You don't list the grounds for your statement.
My tendency is to believe that you are just quoting someone else, who may well be quoting someone else (etc.). There is clear evidence that your assertions would have been reasonable while Mao was in charge (though I tend to think of him more as an Emperor than a Dictator), but during the subsequent period I find the picture a lot more confused...and I suspect that it's because it's actually confused, with different groups acting in different directions.
If that's what you mean by capitalism, there isn't a capitalist country on the face of the earth, and hasn't been for a very long time. I can't swear that there wasn't one in the 17-1800's, but if so they weren't in the histories I read. Perhaps Luxembourg?
Adam Smith made an abstract of certain feature of the existing system, and ignored lots of other features. He didn't describe a complete system. Nobody has yet been able to do that, so why expect it of him?
Given that, modern China is at least as Capitalist as 16th century Britain. Both have lots of other features, that if you were so minded you could consider more important. (Most people in 16th century Britain thought religion was more important than Capitalism.)
1) That's a pretty strained interpretation of the Constitution. (Standard decision, and it wouldn't surprise me, but still pretty strained.)
2) The US Constitution doesn't apply directly to subordinate governments, like State, much less to cities and townships. The limitations that the Constitution provides are generally only directly applicable to the Federal government (without tortuous argument).
3) If you're going to argue like that, then I'm going to argue that e-mail is a form of mail. It's silly, but so is your comment.
Sorry. They don't count ballots marked invalid, and they don't count votes for write-in candidates that haven't registered. Doing either of those is the same as not voting.
You may want to say it shouldn't be, and I'll agree with you. But should isn't is.
No. The solution is to cause the data collected to become public. No other solution other than refusal to build the system is acceptable.
It would also be helpful if the code used to collect the information were made public, so that it could be determined if there were ways for the knowledgeable to avoid being noticed. This would probably just mean that those means were removed, but that would be an acceptable response.
So have the existing cameras on the streets reduced crime that much?
The way I heard it, they haven't even reduced crime in their immediate vicinity.
The system that you are proposing can work only with an overwhelming police presence. Then, indeed, it could turn the country into a maximum security prison...but not just for the terrorists, for everyone.
There actually *IS* a difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, but it seems to be basically only that the Democrats want people to like them, while the Republicans want selected rich people to like them. This means that the Democrats use more camouflage, and proceed less abusively (unless they can come up with an acceptable excuse)...but they never seem to roll back the abuses that have been previously begun.
It's really too bad that revolutions never seem to improve things either.
Slashdot Mirror
"Does a dog have a Buddha nature?"
"Wu!"
Joshu's Wu, a standard koan.
The trick here is that "wu" is both the Chinese onomatopoetic sound of a dog bark, and a word meaning, approx., "Don't ask that question" (or so I am told).
So the claim that dogs have souls is considered ill-defined by rather ancient Buddhist monks. This particular one dates back to considerably before Buddhism crossed from China to Japan, though not as far back as before it crossed from India to China. So it's definitely sometime AD, and thus considerably after Plato. But from this vantage point they are all smeared together into "ancient history". If someone who was living in Eurasia then has any modern descendants, then we are ALL their descendants. (That's a statement based on probability theory and genetics, so it's not certain, but has a quite high likelihood. [ref. Dawkins: The Ancestors Tale. I'm leaving out isolated island populations and Africa, so I'm moving the date forwards a bit.])
I'm also assuming that Joshu's definition of "Buddha nature" matches your definition of "soul". This is also a bit uncertain. I've met people who didn't believe that other people who didn't speak their language had souls. (I didn't bother to get clarity on what they meant by soul.)
Yes. That's the point.
Given many definitions that are used, I have a hard time believing that people have souls, either. Given other common definitions, there's no way to tell. Given other definitions...yes.
And why, given whatever definition you use, do you believe that *you* have a soul? Can you prove it? Can you prove it to someone besides yourself? Is the proof logically valid? Empirically testable?
I generally avoid the word soul, because it has so many meanings, so few of which are distinguishable without *close* examination. And there's a strong tendency to slip from one meaning to another without noticing it.
That's a choice that would be reasonable, but it's not the one that would be best for HP.
The best choice for HP would be to do an Apple, only start with an existing distro, say Debian or Ubuntu. Then customize it for their own hardware, including in a separate repository any necessary proprietary drivers (which are included in the purchase price).
Then add another repository which is the HP store, where they sell additional software. Possibly that could be broken into two sections, one of which is supported by HP, and the other of which isn't.
Note that what we're doing here is essentially separating the repositories by license. The base repository would be GPL. The other repositories would be commercial in one way or another. Possibly included in the price of the system and possibly not. Differs by repository. They could also have the equivalents of Ubuntu's Universe and Multi-verse repositories.
But this is assuming that they are still the engineering company that they used to be. That's not the way I read the rumors that I've been hearing. It's certainly not what the last couple of HP products I bought indicate. Based on that I'm not even sure that they *HAVE* a quality control arm anymore.
I'm not so sure.
HP would need to put a bit of muscle behind it, and buy some proprietary drivers (until it managed to coerce the driver mfg. to make decent support for Linux), but I really think that HP *could* turn out a product that would be desirable to end users and not just to techies.
I might not need to point this out, but I expect that this would offend purists mightily. What HP would probably need to do would be to maintain it's own repositories ala Debian or Ubuntu, and ONLY support software from those repositories. One of them could be for commercial partners, where companies could sell GPL incompatible products. So there would be a base system which would be pure GPL, and there would be the extras repositories. Including the HP Store where you could buy software.
This is something they *could* do, and do profitably. Will they? Probably not. It would require becoming a systems house rather than a hardware vendor, and they seem to be moving away from that direction (which they used to use with HP UX). It's adopting an approach more like that of Apple, but with low end (i.e., largely free) components. If HP still had the engineers in charge I think they could run with this and make dynamite systems that everyone would want at below the cost of the MS-based competition. I don't know if the current company could do anything. The (second or third hand) reports that I've been getting aren't very favorable.
But this is an approach that ANY good engineering company with good name recognition could easily succeed at. Especially one with a heavy background in Unix/Linux.
OTOH, it may well be that in the current market nothing would succeed. Sigh. A good product and good marketing combined won't succeed when the customers are hunkering down and cutting their budgets. Then the only things that can work are things that don't cost money, even in the short run.
You raise a good point...though lamentably you misunderstand it.
This is math, not science. This is a particular interpretation of mathematics which, when adopted, is consistent with many things known about the universe, and not known to be inconsistent with anything. But it's still math. Science has to be experimentally testable, math only has to be self-consistent.
That said, there's a lot of overlap between science and math, and before one dismisses it as irrelevant because it's just math, one should look at how much of what we do know about the universe it explains. It turns out that the answer is "LOTS".
And actually I mis-stated the case. The foundation is math. The interpretation is what is being called science. It's not, because it doesn't predict anything testable that hasn't be observed. But it still deserves to be taken very seriously because it's consistent with an extremely large number of facts that we have tested.
The thing is, every interpretation of the math that we use to explain what we know has implicit in it extensions that seem wildly unreasonable, and which aren't testable. And sometimes the math is not necessary to explain what we've observed, but appears to be implicitly required by elegance. This is tricky. Mathematicians have long used elegance as a guide, and found it unreasonably effective. But it's a subjective evaluation.
Also note that some people find the idea of the multiverse less peculiar than intrinsically disconnected sections of a singular universe, and I've seen at least one analysis that considered them identical. (I've got suspicions as to what THEY considered the multiverse, but I didn't analyze their analysis.) The point is that different people find different choices unbelievable. (Just consider all the trouble Einstein had with Quantum Theory.)
The thing is, while an "Intelligent Creator" is emotionally satisfying...at least if you presume that it cares anything about people, it's not in the running as a plausible scenario.
It's too complicated.
The only way I've been able to make it seem at all sensible is logically equivalent to saying that we are all life forms who are NPCs in a really fancy game. Not exactly the kind of scenario that fills one with joy.
Others have managed to put more emotional pull behind the notion by saying that we are simulations of the ancestors of the people who are running the simulation, and that they are interested in us because we represent their ancestors. OK. I find this rather implausible.
And note that BOTH of these "explanations" leave untouched the question of "Where did these model builders come from?" But so does every explanation I've encountered that invokes some intelligent creator.
Note that just because the explanation seems unreasonable doesn't prove that it's wrong. But it does mean that if you want it to be believed, then you should have some good evidence. I've yet to encounter any.
That depends on how the color gets implemented. If it's done as separate pixels of R G B, then it would be an additive display. If it were a white background with R, G, & B filters imposed above it, then the color would be subtractive. And note that there wouldn't be different intensities of colors. Everything would be on or off. So one spot of color (4 pixels if R G B W/B, one pixel if White + filters) could only supply R, RG, RGB, RB, B, BG, G, White, and Black ... That's nine colors because I'm counting RGB as being different from both black and white, otherwise it would be 8. The Apple ][ did better than that. Possibly if the filters were electrically settable ... but then it might require more power (or might not, as it might only require power to change a filter's setting).
This is hugely speculative, but don't think of this as being either like a monitor or like mixing paints. Both give you the wrong image of current possibilities. Ideally there would be an electrically adjustable filter for each color for each pixel which when set would retain it's value
without additional power. This would mean that you would need more light in order to be able to read the screen, but recent flashlights give promise that this may be doable for only quite moderate power requirements. But the illumination would need to be from above, or it would look very different when lit by the screen light and when lit by external light. If all this were accomplished, then you would have a subtractive color screen, which probably means that the color filters you should stack would be CMYK. But note that ALL of this is a long way from the lab, much less the shipping department.
Programming is mainly thinking, not reading. You only read enough to refresh your mind over what you've just written...or to check a small piece of code for errors.
That's immensely different from large blocks of text. OTOH, I usually find that I can read text without much strain if I increase the font size enough. (How much is enough depends both on the screen and on the font.) But it's never pleasant.
Convenience is one of the factors that decisively tip the scales *away* from Kindle, or any of the electronic media I've seen so far. Electronic media are fine for listening to, and adequate for videos. They are appalling for extended reading.
Also, I tend to read several different books at once, often with place markers in several different places. I rarely write in the books, but I frequently write on the markers. This is secondary, however.
And, of course, another factor is that books are permanent. (Well, relatively so.) I still have many books from 20 years ago. I don't reference them often, but when I do there's frequently no other source for the particular thing that I'm after. (No, the web doesn't suffice. It's got lots of things, but there are still large areas where it's coverage is quite sparse. Especially in materials that were published before the web was ubiquitous.)
I can't cite the law either, but I remember the occasion. I couldn't have told you whether it was a law or a judicial decision. I think the other country involved was Norway, but I'm not even certain of that.
Still, I remember the event, if not the specifics. I can't remember whether it was about copyrights, patents, or something else. I don't remember whether the US actually invaded, or just threatened to. I do remember being quite upset about it.
The DMCA is an evil law. It may have not evil applications, but they appear to be in the vast minority. That it would be such a law was predicted before it was passed.
I've seen the way the US implements treaties. The US only implements treaties to the extent that the government wants to. The DMCA goes far beyond what the treaty requires, and is probably, in a logical system, unconstitutional. (Granted the constitution is too vague to form a complete specification as a logical basis. Many terms are undefined, and much is presumed as common knowledge...including much that is no longer common knowledge. Still, this seems to clearly be a law regulating speech or the press.)
Nanites would probably use techniques descended from the atomic force microscope. These could potentially be far more efficient than the techniques plants, and also far more efficient than "chemical vapor deposition". (Actually I don't believe that chemical vapor deposition is all that energy efficient. It's a process that we use because it's inefficient for us to control each individual reaction at the atomic scale. But our reasons for it being inefficient wouldn't apply to a nanite.)
OTOH, grey goo is a very sophisticated nanite. I don't think that we need to worry about it during the next decade or so. It's basically a nano-scale assembler, albeit one that's rather specialized.
The point is that it's clearly impossible to cling "to what we are now". We are using up resources faster than they can be replaced. SOME change is inevitable.
The interesting question is "How can we shape a future that will be either most desirable or least undesirable?" The the entities asking the question are us, here and now.
It's rather clear that trying to stay as we are will inevitably lead to extinction in one of several different ways. Trying to predict the details is both pointless and depressing. So look for a path forwards that doesn't lead to that end. I can think of several, some of which are moderately desirable. Trying to convince people, though, requires convincing those with the power to make decisions to look more than two elections ahead. This is unlikely to be successful, though of course it should be attempted, and there are those who are attempting it.
What is possible to slashdot readers is to attempt to construct a moral AI. I.e., an AI that has a morality that will allow people to coexist with it. This is also a low probability effort, but EVERY SINGLE PATH INTO THE FUTURE TAKES OFF FROM A LOW PROBABILITY EVENT. And if you don't try, you definitely won't cause it to happen.
The highest probability paths all lead inevitably to the extinction of humanity within a century or two. Some only slightly lower probability paths lead to the collapse of civilization, massive die off, and then survivors picking among the ruins. Probably considerably less than one person out of a million would survive. The carrying capacity of the earth with primitive farming methods averages around 50 people per square fertile mile. And cities have been built on top of the most fertile ground. That won't be available again until the cement is hauled away...using muscle power. (O, yes. Do you expect any horses to survive? Donkeys? Some donkeys will probably survive in remote areas, but horses are likely to all be eaten during the collapse. When you're starving a horse that would be immensely valuable in a few years is worth more now as food.) I expect that some deer would survive, some bears, some mountain lions, etc. Not many of anything large enough to eat. There wouldn't be many people, and people would be the most numerous large animal.
Lets try to avoid that, even though it isn't exactly an existential risk. I doubt that civilization would ever again rise to the level of working with electricity. Nothing written on plastic would survive, and probably nothing that wasn't written on archival quality paper. Even that would only be preserved through rare chance. (Does it ever get cold where you live? How do you get warm?)
Sorry, when I try to think realistically about this I get rather gloomy. Once I though space habitats could serve as a refuge, but we've wasted that chance. I don't think there's time anymore. AI there might be time for. MIGHT. But it has to be an AI that people can live with.
Perhaps that just makes things worse. I thought they had a good reason for not having a staff person read it. (Probably the factoid started out as "over 20,000 words...", which is bad enough, but still possible. Or possibly I have it confused with UCITA2b, which didn't pass any state in unaltered form.)
My apologies.
No only do the citizens not have a meaningful opportunity to criticize legislation before it is approved, it is also not uncommon that the legislators don't read the bills before they vote on them, and it's not unknown for there not to be any time for anyone on their staff to read them. How many legislators do you think read the DMCA before it was voted on? The answer is NONE! It was written by special interests, the damn thing is over 2000 pages long (that may be hyperbole...I haven't seen a written copy), and they voted it through within a week after it was presented to them. I believe the process is called "railroading".
Also, in many significant votes it's impossible to determine how your Representative or Senator voted. I'll grant that this isn't always true, but it's true when they want to pass something that they feel the people back home wouldn't approve of. In fact I believe that most votes AREN'T roll-call votes. (Admittedly I haven't kept current.)
That's a possibility, but MS has denied that the NSA KEY had anything to do with the NSA, and you've got to trust them.
(You really don't have any choice, if you use their software. Not that trusting them is sane, but if you use their software you have no choice.)
For some meaning of the word "fixed".
I don't hold out much hope for Obama making things better, but he might slow the rate at which they are getting worse.
What's been being asserted is that China is a country with a Socialist, or Communist, religion, but not practice. Do you have any *evidence* that is otherwise? Several people have cited personal knowledge. You don't list the grounds for your statement.
My tendency is to believe that you are just quoting someone else, who may well be quoting someone else (etc.). There is clear evidence that your assertions would have been reasonable while Mao was in charge (though I tend to think of him more as an Emperor than a Dictator), but during the subsequent period I find the picture a lot more confused...and I suspect that it's because it's actually confused, with different groups acting in different directions.
If that's what you mean by capitalism, there isn't a capitalist country on the face of the earth, and hasn't been for a very long time. I can't swear that there wasn't one in the 17-1800's, but if so they weren't in the histories I read. Perhaps Luxembourg?
Adam Smith made an abstract of certain feature of the existing system, and ignored lots of other features. He didn't describe a complete system. Nobody has yet been able to do that, so why expect it of him?
Given that, modern China is at least as Capitalist as 16th century Britain. Both have lots of other features, that if you were so minded you could consider more important. (Most people in 16th century Britain thought religion was more important than Capitalism.)
Read the 10th amendment again.
1) That's a pretty strained interpretation of the Constitution. (Standard decision, and it wouldn't surprise me, but still pretty strained.)
2) The US Constitution doesn't apply directly to subordinate governments, like State, much less to cities and townships. The limitations that the Constitution provides are generally only directly applicable to the Federal government (without tortuous argument).
3) If you're going to argue like that, then I'm going to argue that e-mail is a form of mail. It's silly, but so is your comment.
Sorry. They don't count ballots marked invalid, and they don't count votes for write-in candidates that haven't registered. Doing either of those is the same as not voting.
You may want to say it shouldn't be, and I'll agree with you. But should isn't is.
No. The solution is to cause the data collected to become public. No other solution other than refusal to build the system is acceptable.
It would also be helpful if the code used to collect the information were made public, so that it could be determined if there were ways for the knowledgeable to avoid being noticed. This would probably just mean that those means were removed, but that would be an acceptable response.
So have the existing cameras on the streets reduced crime that much?
The way I heard it, they haven't even reduced crime in their immediate vicinity.
The system that you are proposing can work only with an overwhelming police presence. Then, indeed, it could turn the country into a maximum security prison...but not just for the terrorists, for everyone.
So now it's clear what system you are defending.
There actually *IS* a difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, but it seems to be basically only that the Democrats want people to like them, while the Republicans want selected rich people to like them. This means that the Democrats use more camouflage, and proceed less abusively (unless they can come up with an acceptable excuse)...but they never seem to roll back the abuses that have been previously begun.
It's really too bad that revolutions never seem to improve things either.