I once saw an interview with Dennis Quaid where he was asked about the idea of letting his kids become child actors. His response was something along the lines of "I think that would be tantamount to child abuse." I mean, can anyone look at the Britney Spears of the world and not see the dangers of pimping their children as some sort of sick commodities? Seriously, I've seen way more screwed-up parents in this world than pedophiles creeping around on the internet.
I think that the one universal "right" that god/the government has given "parents" is the right to mentally fuck up their kids almost however they deem. The few exceptions seem to be if sex is involved or forcing a kid outside of some magic changeable boundary. (Actually, the rule is if the kid looks/acts o.k. in public education or Walmart then you can do whatever else at home. You aren't messing them up too bad. If teachers or Walmart cashiers can notice something off about the kid, then you are likely abusing your kids in some way.) Can't think of it at the moment, but there was was the family that was arrested for child abuse because they had their kids run around the outside of their house nearly all weekend as a punishment for something. Reminds me of some of the strictness that some of those spelling B, chess, music, or actor kids go through. If you are rich and can buy rural property and pretty much raise your family their without leaving then you could in theory raise them however you think without anyone peeking in.
Has any government successfully taken all the kids from parents for the state/government to raise? I think something like that was in Brave New World, but I can't think of any "real world" examples. One of these days some one is going to find a method like that which works, and then they'd be able to change the taught morals in school each generation so each generation would believe certain truths or believe certain things were wrong.
I blame required public education. This stuff happened before required public education, but no one knew that it was supposed to be wrong. Now that we've got everyone going through required public education; everyone has or/is getting mostly the same morals stamped on them so now we know these things are supposed to be wrong. Talk about biting from the tree of knowledge and waking your view point up.
I don't trust people to do this job, so why the hell would I trust a computer?
Because a computer won't miss work, show up drunk or stoned, or just be inattentive while at this high stress job. Of course, it assumes that we can automate the task without buggy software. You always "trust" people. You trust those that built the roads that you drive on, you trust those that build your cars, you trust that food sold at stores is "safe", and you trust those that designed, built, and fly planes do their job well. You may have doubts about the perfection of the system, but its kinda implied that you "trust" the system if you are using it. You may have doubts about Linux or MS, but odds are you are using one of the two so you must trust them.
I don't "trust" humans to drive cars. There are thousands killed a year because of stupid human drivers. We've not been able to automate that task though we've been trying. How able are we to actually automate air travel controller's tasks? Honestly, this is a great idea, but making an immortality drug, curing diseases, or usable fusion are also a great ideas. We've been having problems with those as well.
Seriously, it's important that we realize that religion makes people nuts. Of course, there are degrees of nuttiness, and certainly marching around in front of Women's Health Clinics and screaming at young women going in to get a pap smear and throwing lamb's blood at them isn't quite as bad as strapping a bomb to yourself and blowing folks up, but crazy is crazy. I think we really have to try our best to encourage people to keep their religious insanity to themselves and to their own little groups. The early Christians had the right idea, meeting in secret in caves. If only we could get the contemporary ones to follow their lead.
They used to feed those christians to the lions because they were worshiping the wrong religion. Actually, we are lucky that abortion clinics aren't burned/razed to the ground or happen to be completely ignored in the news and by the police because they happen every other week. I'm morally against abortion because its wasteful. I think that only the state/government/community has the right to decide to terminate life.
A parent/mother doesn't/shouldn't have the right to decide to kill off their offspring. If they have that right to begin with, then they should hold that right all through their offspring's life. Do you think that your parents should have the "right" to choose to terminate you at any moment at their discretion? I don't think that you do. Then why would you support letting a teenage girl or rape victim kill off their offspring? I think the solution is for the government/community to raise the kids and for those that go to said clinics to be sterilized so it doesn't happen again. I'll agree that the government does a horrible job of raising kids, but it's more moral than having abortion clinics.
ridicule is the key. Somehow, it seems like all forms of political correctness have been beaten back except when it comes to religion.
Welcome to the planet Earth. I see that you are new here. This happens to be the US the land of political correctness. To stop groups from disliking us, we have to adopt these terms and avoid others. They've become so ingrained in parts of our society that some forget that its everywhere.
More importantly, who gives a shit what they think is "unacceptable"? In the Western World its unacceptable for religion to impose its restrictions on free speech. Nobody is forcing them to go look at these pictures.
What's next? Are they gonna complain about the pictures all over the net (and even Wikipedia) of exposed women? My right to say what I want, read what I want and look at what I want trumps your right not to be offended.
Um, no. You have it wrong. It's actually fine in the western world and the entire world for religion, or any moral code to impose its restrictions on "free speech." In the US, we've got a little document that says the government can't limit free speech. The government does limit "free speech" though. Any individual or group of individual other than government can try to restrict, monitor, or control "free speech" in the US or any where in the world. It all depends on how successful they are at it though. They don't have to go through the government; they can get places like AOL, Walmart, or TimeWarner not to carry content that their followers dislike. You can't buy porn in the magazine stand at Walmart. Time Warner and the entire politically correct crowd have been slowly censoring/changing shows/content that "enough" groups call in/write in to complain about.
It doesn't matter if you are atheist, christain, or muslim, or a jedi. You've got the same ability as any one else to try to control others. You start by finding anything you don't like. Find others that dislike it. Then find content creators that use said content. Complain to those that pay those content creators and they'll force the content creators to modify the works a bit so your group'll be abit happier. There are many ways for groups control/censor content that they dislike for various reasons.
Look at child porn. It doesn't matter if it is the worst crime imaginable. You've got content creators and purchasers that are happy with their product. Then you have another group that isn't them trying to control their content and the purchase of said content. Change "child porn" to gay marriage, sex education, or heck slashdot/blogs. The same tactic can be used to filter any content. You just have to convince enough others that your picked content that you dislike is the most immoral crime and they'll widen your crusade for you.
Frankly, I am appalled by the irreverent joke comparing Mohammed to Super Saiyans. This is exactly the type of disrespectful behavior that the article is complaining about, and you ought to be ashamed for making fun of other people's religions. Is it that hard to have a little respect and basic tolerance for other human beings? I find it disturbing that people are so ignorant and prejudiced as to mock our Prophet in this fashion. We faithful take our Prophet, the Super Saiyan known as Goku, very seriously.
We'd take either Jesus, Mohammed, or anyone seriously if they could destroy the moon or planet by themselves without a death star!
What planet is that guy from? We don't encrypt our music we compress it. Why would I download or install any codec that the RIAA supports? MP3 will rule for years into the future mainly because its a standard that RIAA can't kill as of yet.
I've never paid for any music in my life other than some music appreciation cds that I had to get in college. I've never felt the need to go out and buy any form of recorded music. Radio has been fine for me. This doesn't mean that I don't have many mp3s. I have tons. The RIAA would like to put a RIAA listened hearing aid in everyone's head and filter out any RIAA that you've not paid for from ever being heard.
I'm sick of the RIAA, but I'm not going through any additional effort to actually fight them. I don't buy any music, so I can't boycott selected music. I've been boycotting it most of my life. You know every video game or movie that I buy has background music in it. I hear music on the radio. I'd really like to have all RIAA actually filtered out of my life, but without RIAA methods. I can't buy a video game, TV DVDs, or movie that hasn't already paid into the RIAA or MPAA scheme of things.
You know this reminds me of why I'd like the IRS and think that all taxes of that nature removed and it all just go to some magic percentage sales tax. Because people/companies/assorted government offices can't cheat their way out of paying taxes then. You know if they really wanted to secure it they'd stop selling all music, movies, and TV DVDs and make the mediums all ad supported or where you have to show up a specific place and pay a cover charge before you can listen/watch the content.
Listen up folks of the RIAA/MPAA. We aren't in the 1500-1600s any more. The citizenry has gotten used to radio, TV, and now the internet. Face it, your content's price is dropping fast and if the government really was pushed by the citizenry it would go the whole bread and circus route which means we get the radio, TV, movies, and internet at the expense of content providers. That's why the RIAA/MPAA has been truly panicking about their business models.
The mechanisms to control society are firmly in place. If you are evil, this has to be attractive. There WILL be evil people trying to get into power. Now, or soon.
Now these evil people are not going to base their campaign on "hello, I'm evil, vote for me". They will SEEM to be perfect candidates. Just as Hitler did, just as Mussolini did, just as many other examples did.
That's what governments do. It doesn't matter if you were an Egyptian god king, Emperor of Rome, China, or Japan, or elected to the Roman senate or any "democratic/republic" senate. Once you are in there, you've got the tools to reorder society. You know; I want some one to run on the kinder gentler police state platform. They'd win in a landslide election. Face it people, most citizens like the things police states stand for. It's when those police states go from the warm fuzzy protecting "us from them" to "annoying the hell/scaring the hell out of us for their own benefit" that we have to change them. Here is a trick question for you. How many police states were changed from within to something we'd recognize as democratic or republican?
On a related note, we've been edging toward becoming a police state since the Red Scare and the cold war. Every effort to fight those evil communists put systems into place that could make it easier for a domestic party to take charge. Sooner or later we'd need someone to take charge to take care of something. Once that happens, the next guy might not even bother with an excuse for "taking charge."
How about silly things like real working public transportation? Passenger trains between cities, silly crap like that.
Um, did you glance at the head line top ten things or look at the pictures at the article at all? It seemed damn near all of it was fast/expensive single segment of long span train or tunnel for us with mass transit. This is almost the most worthless list I've ever read even for the humor factor. Mechs? I cared about them in junior high, but I don't really want giant robot weapons platforms walking around my major cities thank you very much.
Moon base and space hotel? Those are funny because the two things that are "stopping" the entire space thing is cost of transport. Transatlantic Tunnel? Why can you honestly say that the trade/tourism that a Transatlantic Tunnel would bring would ever come close to the cost of building it? No, it is much saner to stick with ships like we do now. Supersonic Transport actually makes some sense. The problem with Supersonic Transport is cheap to operate and quite Supersonic Transport though. If you can solve those to things then all long distance passenger planes will slow phase into those. If they cost as much to run as to build and are outrageous noise hazards of course no one will want them flying near their cities or suburbs. If you can't fly near where there are are lot of people, you can't make a lot of money.
New York-L.A. Maglev Express? I'm sorry; when I was 6 flying maglev trains seemed the best thing ever. Glancing at the article, Maglev trains can't compete with current trains for speed. Why was it that the guy writing the article picked that over just upgrading existing trains to go faster? Well, maglev is more scifi than normal trains. Rolls eyes. Just having mass transit in most cities or being able to trivially get onto the mass transit and cheaply commute/vacation to other places would be a useful waste of funds. Building a massive NY-LA highspeed train just so all those business travels can get from one major city to the other? Nah. unless it massively benefits every major city in between, it'll never fly. Speaking of which, hey we've got those handy plane things that fly from one major city to the other. Why would we spend billions on additional mass transit if we have existing mass transit that does the job fine?
A Floating City. This is the first really cool scifi one that they picked. Arcologies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology) are one of those things that I think will drastically change the world. China or India building a dozen of them to house a few million former rural farmers into new urban environments would have drastic long term global social effects. Heck, I think really 90% of the NY metro area could be compacted into a smaller form facter if we really went with arcologies.
Android Armies. Depends on what you refer as android. Those emplanced guns that mow down anything with a large IR sig coming from the other way could qualify. It could be cheap android army. It's easier to build your android wall to divide the populations rather than get the androids to move from point A to point B and weed out the people in point B that we don't like.
Blasters and Railguns. We could have large scale ones soon enough. Other than being scifish, what advantages do they have over guns.
Interstellar Exploration... Actually, the cost could be done for less than a few billion. It depends on speed though. What you don't want to wait 100K years for our probe to go 4 light years? Manned interstellar exploration is something else though. I think colonizing the entire solar system with trillions of people would come first before we figure out FTL or decide to go away from the rest of humanity for whatever reasons. What people that are focused on planets don't understand is we could fit tons of people in our own solar system. The only reason that we'd really need to leave the safety of our solar system is if the sun was going nova or burning out.
I live in continental Europe in a country where everyone is expected to be able to identify himself to the police at any time, in a country where there's a central voter register and if you move, you are expected to register yourself with the local town inside of 3 weeks. That sounds like the total police state, doesn't it?
You just explained why most of the US doesn't want ID cards of any type and how the system/government/police can screw you over if you don't get with their system. It doesn't take an extreme fascist, communist, or socialist government to do bad things with these ID cards. It could very well start out nicely and all above board for a generation or two, and then a change in government and well the general population is screwed. They are tagged and ready to jump through the hoops of whatever system you've setup.
I notice that you spent the most time explaining how much the police come down on anyone with invalid/forged ID. You didn't give any real good reasons why it would be in our interests to all have these universal ID cards.
Heck, I even think universal ID cards are usually a good ID, but from reading your post, I don't see that they'd be any benefit for us. Actually, I always laugh when people say that we have any form of ID in the country. Why? The only picture ID most people have is a DL. What do you need to get one of those? Usually a Birth Cert an SS card. How do you get a SS Card? Normally, your parents or the hospital where you were born mails in a copy of the birth cert. What ID'ing information is on that Birth Cert? Some baby foot prints, child's name, parents name, and what ever doctor/nurse/ random person that actually delivered the baby. No one actually checks to see Birth Certs match up with who the SS cards go with. What's an SS Card? It just has a name and 9 digit number. There isn't a picture, thumb print, or any vague description of who it goes to. So how the heck can you say a birth cert and a SS Card actually IDs the person that got a DL. Sure, now you've got their picture and in some states a thumb print.
If you really wanted to keep track of the population, the birth cert would have a lot more IDing info and the hospitals would be required to take that info at birth of the kids and from a parent and embed it into the document so it's never altered and the government's magic database has a copy. Every medical/school/government office would just ask for that birth cert and would pull up the same person and append to the file. No one is talking about anything that extreme, yet. But that's the only way for you to have real certainty in your IDing system. As it stands, we've no idea if the person that was born matches up with the person that gets IDed when 16 or so for a DL. Let's be truthful, the government wants to track everyone at all times. The DL, SS card, and Birth Cert are all baby steps in that process.
There are numerous way around these methods of identification:... Sure, it would identify the average US citizen, but it would be useless against organised crime and terrorism.
There are days I wonder what life would be like under real time census. It's my idea of the government collecting the long form census stats in real time for everyone in the US. I think that we could do it now. We could barcode/tag/ID all our money/products where the government and businesses could trivially track the paths of our entire money supply and those products that carry a next generation UPC. Think of a UPC that has a model number, serial, number, price, maker info, long description and other stats related to the product all embedded into the UPC and the entire thing is tracked by businesses and the the government. They'd reissue the money supply to make it trivial for point of sale cashiers to scan in the barcode/ID of the money and they'd know from which bank that money was issued, who it was issued to, and what it was used to purchase.
Trust me, it wouldn't be "useless" against either organized crime or terrorism, but not how folk traditionally think. You can't just make up or change your IDs if the system is actively tracking everything. Plus in some cases it wouldn't matter. If the government tracked the cash, it wouldn't matter if the guy that picked it up from the bank was hiding their ID. Sure there are some ways around it. The first that comes to mind is to grab a few honest folks and use them to take out your cash or for them to take out their cash and swap your hot money supply. It wouldn't help for long. The honest guy could spend his cash on the mortage, mcdonalds, and walmart and the government would know where the money came from. They aren't looking for the honest guy at first, but they'll find those honest people as soon as they use money that they the government was tracking that passed into illegal channels or as soon as money pops up from illegal channels and the last known holder of the cash was the honest guy.
When the secret service/FBI/or other government guys come knocking at the door, most honest people would tell them everything even without a warrant. If they were afraid of the illegal guys, the government types would pickup on that and keep a watch out if the illegal folks tried to use this guy anymore.
I think that it'd be much easier for the government/businesses to collect all that tracking information than for them to actually use it though. But they'd not throw any of it away and as long as they had a single purchase that they could track, they could find out who obtained the money from the bank and what they've spent their money on. Trust me, their would be a division of the government looking for those that try to outfox their system. They'll know how it is done, but it wouldn't matter as long as they've been tracking everyone else well enough. Problem is too much data. But you know they'd build a machine to query it in a useful amount of time.
If you've done nothing wrong,you have nothing to fear. Just so long as they don't redifine what's wrong, with retro-active effect.
If you are a modern peasant/corporate work and not a rich/modern noble with resources, of course you have something to fear. History teaches us to be fearful and paranoid because governments can radically change their minds within 2-3 generations. You aren't nearly as safe as you think you are.
And on the subject if it being crazy not to allow Ron Paul discussion in this, "me too!". He has just as much chance of winning the nomination as Huckabee (next to none, and yes I'm a RP supporter). I don't think Huckabee should be excluded either, they should both be allowed, if for no other reason that mathematically they all have a chance still, at least until after Super Tuesday. But also leaving him out will probably generate more discussion of him than including him. You know how we 'Paulbots' are,
I don't pay attention to any of the election stuff. Some one mentioned that it was an election year so I had a brief look at who was under each party. I can't tell you how shocked that Huckabee was on the list. I didn't know. I'm from Texarkana and actually went to the Baptist Church that Huckabee preached at for years before running for governor. At times like this, I'd like to say that I was paying attention to give the guy from the state a pat on the back and say vote for him. The only state programs that my family made use of was some state college scholarships, WIC (Women in Childern I think. Basically coupons to get pregnant and new mothers healthy food. Best state program ever.) and ArKids which is a low cost state health insurance.
I can't really tell you that I've noticed anything else that he has done. On a side note, most people around here actually liked Huckabee. I can't tell you a single person around here that thought Clinton would be good for the country or anything. I think that most folks from Arkansas supported Clinton for two reasons: He was from Arkansas, and it got his family out of the state. I thought the whole Huckabee running for president was a joke. After thinking about it though, I think that he actually has a fair shot at it. I think that he would make a better showing if he was some one's VP. Huckabee is moderate middle of the road kinda of preacher. Guys like him would be useful for the moderate Republicans and the middle of the road Christian crowd. His most useful things is that he can bend to get some things done, and that he can play that religion card against folks that are far more religious extremist than him.
O.k. those that hate anything doing with religion and would instantly vote against any church member, much less a preacher, will never like Huckabee. Those that understand how a preacher can bend and get most of his followers to at least give it a try for a while will see that Huckabee could be good for the general Republican party. I think Huckabee and Ron Paul both have that snowball's chance in hell of actually winning, but I thought Clinton had the same chances of winning and that Huckabee had that same chances of winning his bid for governor so what the heck do I know?
Seriously, they figured that people would be watching the superbowl, and that's UNACCEPTABLE! Why? BECAUSE THE ADS ARE FOR BEER. Can't have good christians watching advertisements with frogs saying "Bud", now can we? So they showed the superbowl up on the wall of the gathering area at the church with a projector, and during the commercials, they'd instead air mini-commercials about jesus that the youth group had put together.
Yeah. No joke. Wild.
That's why the guys generally try to get together without the little old ladies or that one woman that is offended by anything "male." Guys generally don't have much against women except when women try to corner into our niches and say that's now a woman's turf and you should be doing it this way. This basic logic works for a surprising amount of social groups. We exclude that one guy/girl/bitch/jerk/bastard that is offended by things most of us enjoy or atleast can enjoy while we invite others that actually like said event.
A couple of hundred people gathered in a church is a "public performance."
Especially since they're using it as an "outreach" to people who aren't regular church-goers. That makes it not only a public performance, but performance in return of expectation of a "good or valuable consideration".
The church is in the wrong here - like on so many other things.
I'm a bit different in my view point. I think that if it happens in a church it is a private performance unless they air it on TV or try to use an event to gain church-members.
That its happening in a church to me means that it's as private as its going on in your own home. Now using something like this to recruit really pisses off some branches of Christainty. My wife is church of christ and they think that church should only be supported by tithes and no other activities would go on in the building. This means no church bake-sales or football parties at the church. I'm a Baptist; heck we about could throw a State Fair in the church and call it a proper religious event.
Actually, I hate to say it, but the entire thing falls under freedom of religion. It might not be in the bible anywhere, but their right to have social activities in the church should as protected as any of their part of their right to worship. Just cause they are different, doesn't mean the NFL or the government could use a fine print law like this to limit activities in a Church. My wife's church friends may think a church that is mainly a social club as ungodly and irreligious and what not, but they still have a right to be a church and do their thing.
Seriously, this would have cost 10% of that back in the '90s when we ALREADY PAID FOR THIS as part of the Telecom Act of 1994. The telcos simply have not delivered what they promised for receiving deregulation and all those tax breaks.
There is a big part of me that would like the government to either give every company of that nature that got a tax break a bill from the IRS with major back tax fines for failure of doing what they said, or they could just seize the companies, but that's an even worse idea. I think just using the IRS as club to leach the money from said companies would be the only one that could get the government's money back. We can't expect them at this date to build what they said they would.
I don't mind a few companies making a mint off the government as long as I get something as part of it. Everyone in the nation should have LAN speed connections to the internet for $10-15 a month. We already paid for it. I normally don't care if you leech money and I get toys, but when you leech money and I don't get toys, I get upset; you don't want lots of people upset so you better give back the money or give me toys!
Can't they respect their own traditions without imposing technologically enforced access controls? What do they do when someone uses hard-copy information, or, to take an example from the article, a man viewing woman's rituals?
What is the point of building an access control system like this?
As I understood it, its not about keeping members of their culture from viewing what they shouldn't. It's about allowing you the random slashdotter from viewing their sacred rituals. On the internet, they don't know if you are male or female. It may not matter to some, but sex type matters here. Think of you getting a word doc or mpg from this and it having their DRM that makes sure you are the correct gender before you are allowed to view the file. Members of the culture already know and generally respect the rules. It would be better not to allow any of the content to be recorded than allow the potential for the wrong parties from viewing it.
I actually can think of some interesting uses for this. The main use would be wills. You could genetically lock your will where only your male relatives see some parts and the your female relatives see another, and close friends see something else, and then your lawyer only see what he legally needs to see. I guess you could use the same thing with mailing out your holiday cards. Instead of sending out one picture to every, you'd send one file, and it would have different viewable content depending on who you are and how you are related. In the modern US, it may not be legal to use in government, but other places in the world may love this tech.
I've always thought the whole we aren't going to discriminate against sex, race, religion bit was a bit silly. Why? Because if I was the person incharge, of course I'd discriminate in my family's and my friends' favor. If this tech was actually a part of the documents instead of an external content management system, then you could setup your family business where you have to be an actual genetic member of the family to view/edit certain records. If you were family through marriage then you may not have access to some lines of credit and some fall back plans will be hidden from you on purpose. If you aren't in the family and don't have plans to marry into it, I'd arrange it to be very difficult for you to read enough documents to move into any positions of power in the family business. I'd have family retainers that have their own special rules and credit lines. Actually, the more that I think about, the more I'm surprised that we aren't moving in that direction faster. It'll be awhile before we can make our documents have that kinda of DRM, but I'd bet in the next 20-30 years some cultural on the globe would develop it. It would mainly be outside of US and Europe that this was developed, but we'd adopt it in a heart beat once some one figures it out.
It's all becoming clear now. A lot of Islamic terrorists are engineers. That explains why they have no infrastructure over there... The engineers are too busy killing themselves to build a society. Boy I'm glad my engineering degree will be put to better use than suicide.
Think frustrated engineers. Engineers that have been western educated and know how to build modern stuff. Now you take that engineer out of those western schools and put them back into the middle east. Sure, this guys could build a better country, but no one wants to. They all want to fight each other or build weapons. I bet these guys really just want to shoot who ever told them that they had to come back to the middle east.
"Non-solar fusion won't produce that much energy any time soon." I was going to mention Ivy Mike and friends, but now that I think about it, I dearly hope you prove correct.
Well, I kinda was implying non-solar fusion to power precision death toys. Not using just a plain Jane large fusion bomb. There is a part of me that thinks that we'd have anti-matter bombs before we have useful controlled fusion. For the given app of powering rail guns, I'd want useful controlled fusion in a small carrying container. O.k. I guess the Navy could build a ship large enough that makes it worthwhile to use a large fusion power plant, but smaller is better. Why should the Navy get all the toys? How about those rail guys on tanks? We are no where near using fusion to power anything at the moment. O.k. yes we could use it to wipe out an entire island, but would we really do that in an entire war? I doubt it. We don't go into the mass slaughter any more. We want that precision targeting and take out. If you could vaporize just a single building with a fusion bomb, then it would be useful, killing off an entire city costs too much in PR over the long haul.
The REAL reason Fusion power will be perfected...so the Generals can fire their fancy guns more than a few times an hour.
Non-solar fusion won't produce that much energy any time soon. What we need is serious solar energy collection; I'm talking about solar powered orbital microwave death rays. That's how to properly power your death dealing toys. With a proper number of death rays, you should be able to fry any acre of land on the globe fairly easily. It's assumed that frying the land will kill off all enemy soldiers, peasants, and nature lovers that may be hiding there.
Besides, I still fail to see why a country which is likely to lose in the robotic war would accept these rules, when it makes a lot more sense to attack the other country's civil population - which in turn might reconsider the whole thing.
Fighting from the sofa is one thing, having bombs exploding nearby is quite different.
Um, cause they may be terrified that the robots would switch from ethical mode to genocide on populations found to be training terrorists or recently conquered populations found to be terrorists need to have extreme measures taken on them. If you are dealing with an enemy that has vast hordes of seemingly ethical robots, make sure you play by their rules otherwise they can define your entire population as unethical terrorists that need to be removed/eliminated.
You seal off the borders, kill off the entire population including all reporters, send in the cleaning robots to tidy up the place, and then you send in the real estate robots to sell all these new homes to your citizens at low prices. If the housing is subpar, you may have to knock it all down, have robot builders come in and build new homes and then start the re population process. It may seem evil and unethical to your enemies, but your citizens would like/love the government that was providing all these cheap new resources.
If you've got battlebots, why not have one against another to resolve international conflicts, rather than destroy infrastructure and the like?
It'd probably take a mountain of treaties and the like, and of course any organization used to judge the battlebot contest would be rife for corruption and whatnot, but it couldn't be that much worse than what happens around the World Cup and the Olympics...
Um, we'd use the existing way. That would mean that we'd go to war and find out, which side has the better/best bots. It could also show if it's better to build a million cheap bots rather than 10,000 expensive ones. It may be cheaper over the long run for your government to always have a few hidden stock piles of a couple million cheap bots just in case a war ever breaks out that you'd have some front line cannon fodder before the new guys show up.
You know one aspect that you completely forgot to think about was an entire new sport: Battle Bots the real time action game where you login and help your country take over some one else's country/defend against those nameless evil foreigners.
Besides, if your enemy expects your robots to defeat their army, what would be the point of fighting them in the first place? Attacking civilians seems a more logical step (I don't think it's reasonable to demand any country at war not to attack only military targets where there's none that can't be replaced easily).
Well, given that you have the tech to make solider death bots, let's also add in the tech to make police bots. You may not be able to properly man customs and police stations with moral upright individuals, but you can build/buy a million or two police/solider bots that can take over and then police most lands for you. You are assuming that just because they send robots off to war that they don't all have personal robot police bots at home/work. If terrorists are found active, add another order of police bots.
Sure I can pay my bills and book a vacation online at the same time, but programming in parallel is a big no no. Our brains were not designed as and are not SMP computers, they aren't even very good preemptive multitasking machines (a single processor computer). A decent CPU can probably context switch in.1ms, but even for trivial tasks (like I'm cooking spaghetti sauce in this pan, *INTERRUPT--The water is boiling* CONTEXT SWITCH, put noodles in water, lower heat, *INTERRUPT--Sauce simmering too vigorously* CONTEXT SWITCH, stir sauce) Even something simple like that the context switches will take 1-5 seconds, many thousands of times slower than a CPU, and those context switches have next to zero data overhead associated with them. Context switching is not cheap in silicon, and it is a lot less cheap in my experience in carbon.
Yeah, but we need that massive processing of ours to walk around, breath, lift our arms, find kitchen tools in a cluttered drawer. Show me any computer/robot that can do those takes as an fast and as well as an average human cook. Once you find the robot, randomly pick 4-5 recipe books and 2-4 recipes out of each. Can your robot know that something is out of stock and has to run to the store before starting a given recipe? Or even better yet, can your robot make 3-4 various mods on given recipe and several mods coming out as an success to the normal human tasters? Comparing humans and computer/robots just isn't the same thing. I'd actually think that our ability to context switch will exceed a robots ability to do that task for a few decades.
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I once saw an interview with Dennis Quaid where he was asked about the idea of letting his kids become child actors. His response was something along the lines of "I think that would be tantamount to child abuse." I mean, can anyone look at the Britney Spears of the world and not see the dangers of pimping their children as some sort of sick commodities? Seriously, I've seen way more screwed-up parents in this world than pedophiles creeping around on the internet.
I think that the one universal "right" that god/the government has given "parents" is the right to mentally fuck up their kids almost however they deem. The few exceptions seem to be if sex is involved or forcing a kid outside of some magic changeable boundary. (Actually, the rule is if the kid looks/acts o.k. in public education or Walmart then you can do whatever else at home. You aren't messing them up too bad. If teachers or Walmart cashiers can notice something off about the kid, then you are likely abusing your kids in some way.) Can't think of it at the moment, but there was was the family that was arrested for child abuse because they had their kids run around the outside of their house nearly all weekend as a punishment for something. Reminds me of some of the strictness that some of those spelling B, chess, music, or actor kids go through. If you are rich and can buy rural property and pretty much raise your family their without leaving then you could in theory raise them however you think without anyone peeking in.
Has any government successfully taken all the kids from parents for the state/government to raise? I think something like that was in Brave New World, but I can't think of any "real world" examples. One of these days some one is going to find a method like that which works, and then they'd be able to change the taught morals in school each generation so each generation would believe certain truths or believe certain things were wrong.
I blame required public education. This stuff happened before required public education, but no one knew that it was supposed to be wrong. Now that we've got everyone going through required public education; everyone has or/is getting mostly the same morals stamped on them so now we know these things are supposed to be wrong. Talk about biting from the tree of knowledge and waking your view point up.
I don't trust people to do this job, so why the hell would I trust a computer?
Because a computer won't miss work, show up drunk or stoned, or just be inattentive while at this high stress job. Of course, it assumes that we can automate the task without buggy software. You always "trust" people. You trust those that built the roads that you drive on, you trust those that build your cars, you trust that food sold at stores is "safe", and you trust those that designed, built, and fly planes do their job well. You may have doubts about the perfection of the system, but its kinda implied that you "trust" the system if you are using it. You may have doubts about Linux or MS, but odds are you are using one of the two so you must trust them.
I don't "trust" humans to drive cars. There are thousands killed a year because of stupid human drivers. We've not been able to automate that task though we've been trying.
How able are we to actually automate air travel controller's tasks? Honestly, this is a great idea, but making an immortality drug, curing diseases, or usable fusion are also a great ideas. We've been having problems with those as well.
You seem to be confused. Obama is not a Muslim. Did you mean Osama Bin Laden?
I kinda feel sorry for that Obama guy because he won't get elected because his name is too similar to Osama Bin Laden.
Seriously, it's important that we realize that religion makes people nuts. Of course, there are degrees of nuttiness, and certainly marching around in front of Women's Health Clinics and screaming at young women going in to get a pap smear and throwing lamb's blood at them isn't quite as bad as strapping a bomb to yourself and blowing folks up, but crazy is crazy. I think we really have to try our best to encourage people to keep their religious insanity to themselves and to their own little groups. The early Christians had the right idea, meeting in secret in caves. If only we could get the contemporary ones to follow their lead.
They used to feed those christians to the lions because they were worshiping the wrong religion. Actually, we are lucky that abortion clinics aren't burned/razed to the ground or happen to be completely ignored in the news and by the police because they happen every other week. I'm morally against abortion because its wasteful. I think that only the state/government/community has the right to decide to terminate life.
A parent/mother doesn't/shouldn't have the right to decide to kill off their offspring. If they have that right to begin with, then they should hold that right all through their offspring's life. Do you think that your parents should have the "right" to choose to terminate you at any moment at their discretion? I don't think that you do. Then why would you support letting a teenage girl or rape victim kill off their offspring? I think the solution is for the government/community to raise the kids and for those that go to said clinics to be sterilized so it doesn't happen again. I'll agree that the government does a horrible job of raising kids, but it's more moral than having abortion clinics.
ridicule is the key. Somehow, it seems like all forms of political correctness have been beaten back except when it comes to religion.
Welcome to the planet Earth. I see that you are new here. This happens to be the US the land of political correctness. To stop groups from disliking us, we have to adopt these terms and avoid others. They've become so ingrained in parts of our society that some forget that its everywhere.
More importantly, who gives a shit what they think is "unacceptable"? In the Western World its unacceptable for religion to impose its restrictions on free speech. Nobody is forcing them to go look at these pictures.
What's next? Are they gonna complain about the pictures all over the net (and even Wikipedia) of exposed women? My right to say what I want, read what I want and look at what I want trumps your right not to be offended.
Um, no. You have it wrong. It's actually fine in the western world and the entire world for religion, or any moral code to impose its restrictions on "free speech." In the US, we've got a little document that says the government can't limit free speech. The government does limit "free speech" though. Any individual or group of individual other than government can try to restrict, monitor, or control "free speech" in the US or any where in the world. It all depends on how successful they are at it though. They don't have to go through the government; they can get places like AOL, Walmart, or TimeWarner not to carry content that their followers dislike. You can't buy porn in the magazine stand at Walmart. Time Warner and the entire politically correct crowd have been slowly censoring/changing shows/content that "enough" groups call in/write in to complain about.
It doesn't matter if you are atheist, christain, or muslim, or a jedi. You've got the same ability as any one else to try to control others. You start by finding anything you don't like. Find others that dislike it. Then find content creators that use said content. Complain to those that pay those content creators and they'll force the content creators to modify the works a bit so your group'll be abit happier. There are many ways for groups control/censor content that they dislike for various reasons.
Look at child porn. It doesn't matter if it is the worst crime imaginable. You've got content creators and purchasers that are happy with their product. Then you have another group that isn't them trying to control their content and the purchase of said content. Change "child porn" to gay marriage, sex education, or heck slashdot/blogs. The same tactic can be used to filter any content. You just have to convince enough others that your picked content that you dislike is the most immoral crime and they'll widen your crusade for you.
It's a very human thing to do.
Frankly, I am appalled by the irreverent joke comparing Mohammed to Super Saiyans. This is exactly the type of disrespectful behavior that the article is complaining about, and you ought to be ashamed for making fun of other people's religions. Is it that hard to have a little respect and basic tolerance for other human beings? I find it disturbing that people are so ignorant and prejudiced as to mock our Prophet in this fashion. We faithful take our Prophet, the Super Saiyan known as Goku, very seriously.
We'd take either Jesus, Mohammed, or anyone seriously if they could destroy the moon or planet by themselves without a death star!
What planet is that guy from? We don't encrypt our music we compress it. Why would I download or install any codec that the RIAA supports? MP3 will rule for years into the future mainly because its a standard that RIAA can't kill as of yet.
I've never paid for any music in my life other than some music appreciation cds that I had to get in college. I've never felt the need to go out and buy any form of recorded music. Radio has been fine for me. This doesn't mean that I don't have many mp3s. I have tons. The RIAA would like to put a RIAA listened hearing aid in everyone's head and filter out any RIAA that you've not paid for from ever being heard.
I'm sick of the RIAA, but I'm not going through any additional effort to actually fight them. I don't buy any music, so I can't boycott selected music. I've been boycotting it most of my life. You know every video game or movie that I buy has background music in it. I hear music on the radio. I'd really like to have all RIAA actually filtered out of my life, but without RIAA methods. I can't buy a video game, TV DVDs, or movie that hasn't already paid into the RIAA or MPAA scheme of things.
You know this reminds me of why I'd like the IRS and think that all taxes of that nature removed and it all just go to some magic percentage sales tax. Because people/companies/assorted government offices can't cheat their way out of paying taxes then. You know if they really wanted to secure it they'd stop selling all music, movies, and TV DVDs and make the mediums all ad supported or where you have to show up a specific place and pay a cover charge before you can listen/watch the content.
Listen up folks of the RIAA/MPAA. We aren't in the 1500-1600s any more. The citizenry has gotten used to radio, TV, and now the internet. Face it, your content's price is dropping fast and if the government really was pushed by the citizenry it would go the whole bread and circus route which means we get the radio, TV, movies, and internet at the expense of content providers. That's why the RIAA/MPAA has been truly panicking about their business models.
The mechanisms to control society are firmly in place. If you are evil, this has to be attractive. There WILL be evil people trying to get into power. Now, or soon.
Now these evil people are not going to base their campaign on "hello, I'm evil, vote for me". They will SEEM to be perfect candidates. Just as Hitler did, just as Mussolini did, just as many other examples did.
That's what governments do. It doesn't matter if you were an Egyptian god king, Emperor of Rome, China, or Japan, or elected to the Roman senate or any "democratic/republic" senate. Once you are in there, you've got the tools to reorder society. You know; I want some one to run on the kinder gentler police state platform. They'd win in a landslide election. Face it people, most citizens like the things police states stand for. It's when those police states go from the warm fuzzy protecting "us from them" to "annoying the hell/scaring the hell out of us for their own benefit" that we have to change them. Here is a trick question for you. How many police states were changed from within to something we'd recognize as democratic or republican?
On a related note, we've been edging toward becoming a police state since the Red Scare and the cold war. Every effort to fight those evil communists put systems into place that could make it easier for a domestic party to take charge. Sooner or later we'd need someone to take charge to take care of something. Once that happens, the next guy might not even bother with an excuse for "taking charge."
I just went to http://www.megagames.com/ for the no cd patch. Oh this is the official no-cd patch. Well, that's a bit better. Kinda late though.
How about silly things like real working public transportation?
Passenger trains between cities, silly crap like that.
Um, did you glance at the head line top ten things or look at the pictures at the article at all? It seemed damn near all of it was fast/expensive single segment of long span train or tunnel for us with mass transit. This is almost the most worthless list I've ever read even for the humor factor. Mechs? I cared about them in junior high, but I don't really want giant robot weapons platforms walking around my major cities thank you very much.
Moon base and space hotel? Those are funny because the two things that are "stopping" the entire space thing is cost of transport. Transatlantic Tunnel? Why can you honestly say that the trade/tourism that a Transatlantic Tunnel would bring would ever come close to the cost of building it? No, it is much saner to stick with ships like we do now. Supersonic Transport actually makes some sense. The problem with Supersonic Transport is cheap to operate and quite Supersonic Transport though. If you can solve those to things then all long distance passenger planes will slow phase into those. If they cost as much to run as to build and are outrageous noise hazards of course no one will want them flying near their cities or suburbs. If you can't fly near where there are are lot of people, you can't make a lot of money.
New York-L.A. Maglev Express? I'm sorry; when I was 6 flying maglev trains seemed the best thing ever. Glancing at the article, Maglev trains can't compete with current trains for speed. Why was it that the guy writing the article picked that over just upgrading existing trains to go faster? Well, maglev is more scifi than normal trains. Rolls eyes. Just having mass transit in most cities or being able to trivially get onto the mass transit and cheaply commute/vacation to other places would be a useful waste of funds. Building a massive NY-LA highspeed train just so all those business travels can get from one major city to the other? Nah. unless it massively benefits every major city in between, it'll never fly. Speaking of which, hey we've got those handy plane things that fly from one major city to the other. Why would we spend billions on additional mass transit if we have existing mass transit that does the job fine?
A Floating City. This is the first really cool scifi one that they picked. Arcologies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology) are one of those things that I think will drastically change the world. China or India building a dozen of them to house a few million former rural farmers into new urban environments would have drastic long term global social effects. Heck, I think really 90% of the NY metro area could be compacted into a smaller form facter if we really went with arcologies.
Android Armies. Depends on what you refer as android. Those emplanced guns that mow down anything with a large IR sig coming from the other way could qualify. It could be cheap android army. It's easier to build your android wall to divide the populations rather than get the androids to move from point A to point B and weed out the people in point B that we don't like.
Blasters and Railguns. We could have large scale ones soon enough. Other than being scifish, what advantages do they have over guns.
Interstellar Exploration... Actually, the cost could be done for less than a few billion. It depends on speed though. What you don't want to wait 100K years for our probe to go 4 light years? Manned interstellar exploration is something else though. I think colonizing the entire solar system with trillions of people would come first before we figure out FTL or decide to go away from the rest of humanity for whatever reasons. What people that are focused on planets don't understand is we could fit tons of people in our own solar system. The only reason that we'd really need to leave the safety of our solar system is if the sun was going nova or burning out.
You know the things that we should spend a few
I live in continental Europe in a country where everyone is expected to be able to identify himself to the police at any time, in a country where there's a central voter register and if you move, you are expected to register yourself with the local town inside of 3 weeks. That sounds like the total police state, doesn't it?
You just explained why most of the US doesn't want ID cards of any type and how the system/government/police can screw you over if you don't get with their system. It doesn't take an extreme fascist, communist, or socialist government to do bad things with these ID cards. It could very well start out nicely and all above board for a generation or two, and then a change in government and well the general population is screwed. They are tagged and ready to jump through the hoops of whatever system you've setup.
I notice that you spent the most time explaining how much the police come down on anyone with invalid/forged ID. You didn't give any real good reasons why it would be in our interests to all have these universal ID cards.
Heck, I even think universal ID cards are usually a good ID, but from reading your post, I don't see that they'd be any benefit for us. Actually, I always laugh when people say that we have any form of ID in the country. Why? The only picture ID most people have is a DL. What do you need to get one of those? Usually a Birth Cert an SS card. How do you get a SS Card? Normally, your parents or the hospital where you were born mails in a copy of the birth cert. What ID'ing information is on that Birth Cert? Some baby foot prints, child's name, parents name, and what ever doctor/nurse/ random person that actually delivered the baby. No one actually checks to see Birth Certs match up with who the SS cards go with. What's an SS Card? It just has a name and 9 digit number. There isn't a picture, thumb print, or any vague description of who it goes to. So how the heck can you say a birth cert and a SS Card actually IDs the person that got a DL. Sure, now you've got their picture and in some states a thumb print.
If you really wanted to keep track of the population, the birth cert would have a lot more IDing info and the hospitals would be required to take that info at birth of the kids and from a parent and embed it into the document so it's never altered and the government's magic database has a copy. Every medical/school/government office would just ask for that birth cert and would pull up the same person and append to the file. No one is talking about anything that extreme, yet. But that's the only way for you to have real certainty in your IDing system. As it stands, we've no idea if the person that was born matches up with the person that gets IDed when 16 or so for a DL. Let's be truthful, the government wants to track everyone at all times. The DL, SS card, and Birth Cert are all baby steps in that process.
There are numerous way around these methods of identification: ...
Sure, it would identify the average US citizen, but it would be useless against organised crime and terrorism.
There are days I wonder what life would be like under real time census. It's my idea of the government collecting the long form census stats in real time for everyone in the US. I think that we could do it now. We could barcode/tag/ID all our money/products where the government and businesses could trivially track the paths of our entire money supply and those products that carry a next generation UPC. Think of a UPC that has a model number, serial, number, price, maker info, long description and other stats related to the product all embedded into the UPC and the entire thing is tracked by businesses and the the government. They'd reissue the money supply to make it trivial for point of sale cashiers to scan in the barcode/ID of the money and they'd know from which bank that money was issued, who it was issued to, and what it was used to purchase.
Trust me, it wouldn't be "useless" against either organized crime or terrorism, but not how folk traditionally think. You can't just make up or change your IDs if the system is actively tracking everything. Plus in some cases it wouldn't matter. If the government tracked the cash, it wouldn't matter if the guy that picked it up from the bank was hiding their ID. Sure there are some ways around it. The first that comes to mind is to grab a few honest folks and use them to take out your cash or for them to take out their cash and swap your hot money supply. It wouldn't help for long. The honest guy could spend his cash on the mortage, mcdonalds, and walmart and the government would know where the money came from. They aren't looking for the honest guy at first, but they'll find those honest people as soon as they use money that they the government was tracking that passed into illegal channels or as soon as money pops up from illegal channels and the last known holder of the cash was the honest guy.
When the secret service/FBI/or other government guys come knocking at the door, most honest people would tell them everything even without a warrant. If they were afraid of the illegal guys, the government types would pickup on that and keep a watch out if the illegal folks tried to use this guy anymore.
I think that it'd be much easier for the government/businesses to collect all that tracking information than for them to actually use it though. But they'd not throw any of it away and as long as they had a single purchase that they could track, they could find out who obtained the money from the bank and what they've spent their money on. Trust me, their would be a division of the government looking for those that try to outfox their system. They'll know how it is done, but it wouldn't matter as long as they've been tracking everyone else well enough. Problem is too much data. But you know they'd build a machine to query it in a useful amount of time.
If you've done nothing wrong ,you have nothing to fear. Just so long as they don't redifine what's wrong, with retro-active effect.
If you are a modern peasant/corporate work and not a rich/modern noble with resources, of course you have something to fear. History teaches us to be fearful and paranoid because governments can radically change their minds within 2-3 generations. You aren't nearly as safe as you think you are.
And on the subject if it being crazy not to allow Ron Paul discussion in this, "me too!". He has just as much chance of winning the nomination as Huckabee (next to none, and yes I'm a RP supporter). I don't think Huckabee should be excluded either, they should both be allowed, if for no other reason that mathematically they all have a chance still, at least until after Super Tuesday. But also leaving him out will probably generate more discussion of him than including him. You know how we 'Paulbots' are,
I don't pay attention to any of the election stuff. Some one mentioned that it was an election year so I had a brief look at who was under each party. I can't tell you how shocked that Huckabee was on the list. I didn't know. I'm from Texarkana and actually went to the Baptist Church that Huckabee preached at for years before running for governor. At times like this, I'd like to say that I was paying attention to give the guy from the state a pat on the back and say vote for him. The only state programs that my family made use of was some state college scholarships, WIC (Women in Childern I think. Basically coupons to get pregnant and new mothers healthy food. Best state program ever.) and ArKids which is a low cost state health insurance.
I can't really tell you that I've noticed anything else that he has done. On a side note, most people around here actually liked Huckabee. I can't tell you a single person around here that thought Clinton would be good for the country or anything. I think that most folks from Arkansas supported Clinton for two reasons: He was from Arkansas, and it got his family out of the state. I thought the whole Huckabee running for president was a joke. After thinking about it though, I think that he actually has a fair shot at it. I think that he would make a better showing if he was some one's VP. Huckabee is moderate middle of the road kinda of preacher. Guys like him would be useful for the moderate Republicans and the middle of the road Christian crowd. His most useful things is that he can bend to get some things done, and that he can play that religion card against folks that are far more religious extremist than him.
O.k. those that hate anything doing with religion and would instantly vote against any church member, much less a preacher, will never like Huckabee. Those that understand how a preacher can bend and get most of his followers to at least give it a try for a while will see that Huckabee could be good for the general Republican party. I think Huckabee and Ron Paul both have that snowball's chance in hell of actually winning, but I thought Clinton had the same chances of winning and that Huckabee had that same chances of winning his bid for governor so what the heck do I know?
Seriously, they figured that people would be watching the superbowl, and that's UNACCEPTABLE! Why? BECAUSE THE ADS ARE FOR BEER. Can't have good christians watching advertisements with frogs saying "Bud", now can we? So they showed the superbowl up on the wall of the gathering area at the church with a projector, and during the commercials, they'd instead air mini-commercials about jesus that the youth group had put together.
Yeah. No joke. Wild.
That's why the guys generally try to get together without the little old ladies or that one woman that is offended by anything "male." Guys generally don't have much against women except when women try to corner into our niches and say that's now a woman's turf and you should be doing it this way. This basic logic works for a surprising amount of social groups. We exclude that one guy/girl/bitch/jerk/bastard that is offended by things most of us enjoy or atleast can enjoy while we invite others that actually like said event.
A couple of hundred people gathered in a church is a "public performance."
Especially since they're using it as an "outreach" to people who aren't regular church-goers. That makes it not only a public performance, but performance in return of expectation of a "good or valuable consideration".
The church is in the wrong here - like on so many other things.
I'm a bit different in my view point. I think that if it happens in a church it is a private performance unless they air it on TV or try to use an event to gain church-members.
That its happening in a church to me means that it's as private as its going on in your own home. Now using something like this to recruit really pisses off some branches of Christainty. My wife is church of christ and they think that church should only be supported by tithes and no other activities would go on in the building. This means no church bake-sales or football parties at the church. I'm a Baptist; heck we about could throw a State Fair in the church and call it a proper religious event.
Actually, I hate to say it, but the entire thing falls under freedom of religion. It might not be in the bible anywhere, but their right to have social activities in the church should as protected as any of their part of their right to worship. Just cause they are different, doesn't mean the NFL or the government could use a fine print law like this to limit activities in a Church. My wife's church friends may think a church that is mainly a social club as ungodly and irreligious and what not, but they still have a right to be a church and do their thing.
Seriously, this would have cost 10% of that back in the '90s when we ALREADY PAID FOR THIS as part of the Telecom Act of 1994. The telcos simply have not delivered what they promised for receiving deregulation and all those tax breaks.
There is a big part of me that would like the government to either give every company of that nature that got a tax break a bill from the IRS with major back tax fines for failure of doing what they said, or they could just seize the companies, but that's an even worse idea. I think just using the IRS as club to leach the money from said companies would be the only one that could get the government's money back. We can't expect them at this date to build what they said they would.
I don't mind a few companies making a mint off the government as long as I get something as part of it. Everyone in the nation should have LAN speed connections to the internet for $10-15 a month. We already paid for it. I normally don't care if you leech money and I get toys, but when you leech money and I don't get toys, I get upset; you don't want lots of people upset so you better give back the money or give me toys!
Given your comment, I'm wondering...
Can't they respect their own traditions without imposing technologically enforced access controls? What do they do when someone uses hard-copy information, or, to take an example from the article, a man viewing woman's rituals?
What is the point of building an access control system like this?
As I understood it, its not about keeping members of their culture from viewing what they shouldn't. It's about allowing you the random slashdotter from viewing their sacred rituals. On the internet, they don't know if you are male or female. It may not matter to some, but sex type matters here. Think of you getting a word doc or mpg from this and it having their DRM that makes sure you are the correct gender before you are allowed to view the file. Members of the culture already know and generally respect the rules. It would be better not to allow any of the content to be recorded than allow the potential for the wrong parties from viewing it.
I actually can think of some interesting uses for this. The main use would be wills. You could genetically lock your will where only your male relatives see some parts and the your female relatives see another, and close friends see something else, and then your lawyer only see what he legally needs to see. I guess you could use the same thing with mailing out your holiday cards. Instead of sending out one picture to every, you'd send one file, and it would have different viewable content depending on who you are and how you are related. In the modern US, it may not be legal to use in government, but other places in the world may love this tech.
I've always thought the whole we aren't going to discriminate against sex, race, religion bit was a bit silly. Why? Because if I was the person incharge, of course I'd discriminate in my family's and my friends' favor. If this tech was actually a part of the documents instead of an external content management system, then you could setup your family business where you have to be an actual genetic member of the family to view/edit certain records. If you were family through marriage then you may not have access to some lines of credit and some fall back plans will be hidden from you on purpose. If you aren't in the family and don't have plans to marry into it, I'd arrange it to be very difficult for you to read enough documents to move into any positions of power in the family business. I'd have family retainers that have their own special rules and credit lines. Actually, the more that I think about, the more I'm surprised that we aren't moving in that direction faster. It'll be awhile before we can make our documents have that kinda of DRM, but I'd bet in the next 20-30 years some cultural on the globe would develop it. It would mainly be outside of US and Europe that this was developed, but we'd adopt it in a heart beat once some one figures it out.
It's all becoming clear now. A lot of Islamic terrorists are engineers. That explains why they have no infrastructure over there... The engineers are too busy killing themselves to build a society. Boy I'm glad my engineering degree will be put to better use than suicide.
Think frustrated engineers. Engineers that have been western educated and know how to build modern stuff. Now you take that engineer out of those western schools and put them back into the middle east. Sure, this guys could build a better country, but no one wants to. They all want to fight each other or build weapons. I bet these guys really just want to shoot who ever told them that they had to come back to the middle east.
"Non-solar fusion won't produce that much energy any time soon."
I was going to mention Ivy Mike and friends, but now that I think about it, I dearly hope you prove correct.
Well, I kinda was implying non-solar fusion to power precision death toys. Not using just a plain Jane large fusion bomb. There is a part of me that thinks that we'd have anti-matter bombs before we have useful controlled fusion. For the given app of powering rail guns, I'd want useful controlled fusion in a small carrying container. O.k. I guess the Navy could build a ship large enough that makes it worthwhile to use a large fusion power plant, but smaller is better. Why should the Navy get all the toys? How about those rail guys on tanks? We are no where near using fusion to power anything at the moment. O.k. yes we could use it to wipe out an entire island, but would we really do that in an entire war? I doubt it. We don't go into the mass slaughter any more. We want that precision targeting and take out. If you could vaporize just a single building with a fusion bomb, then it would be useful, killing off an entire city costs too much in PR over the long haul.
The REAL reason Fusion power will be perfected...so the Generals can fire their fancy guns more than a few times an hour.
Non-solar fusion won't produce that much energy any time soon. What we need is serious solar energy collection; I'm talking about solar powered orbital microwave death rays. That's how to properly power your death dealing toys. With a proper number of death rays, you should be able to fry any acre of land on the globe fairly easily. It's assumed that frying the land will kill off all enemy soldiers, peasants, and nature lovers that may be hiding there.
Besides, I still fail to see why a country which is likely to lose in the robotic war would accept these rules, when it makes a lot more sense to attack the other country's civil population - which in turn might reconsider the whole thing.
Fighting from the sofa is one thing, having bombs exploding nearby is quite different.
Um, cause they may be terrified that the robots would switch from ethical mode to genocide on populations found to be training terrorists or recently conquered populations found to be terrorists need to have extreme measures taken on them. If you are dealing with an enemy that has vast hordes of seemingly ethical robots, make sure you play by their rules otherwise they can define your entire population as unethical terrorists that need to be removed/eliminated.
You seal off the borders, kill off the entire population including all reporters, send in the cleaning robots to tidy up the place, and then you send in the real estate robots to sell all these new homes to your citizens at low prices. If the housing is subpar, you may have to knock it all down, have robot builders come in and build new homes and then start the re population process. It may seem evil and unethical to your enemies, but your citizens would like/love the government that was providing all these cheap new resources.
If you've got battlebots, why not have one against another to resolve international conflicts, rather than destroy infrastructure and the like?
It'd probably take a mountain of treaties and the like, and of course any organization used to judge the battlebot contest would be rife for corruption and whatnot, but it couldn't be that much worse than what happens around the World Cup and the Olympics...
Um, we'd use the existing way. That would mean that we'd go to war and find out, which side has the better/best bots. It could also show if it's better to build a million cheap bots rather than 10,000 expensive ones. It may be cheaper over the long run for your government to always have a few hidden stock piles of a couple million cheap bots just in case a war ever breaks out that you'd have some front line cannon fodder before the new guys show up.
You know one aspect that you completely forgot to think about was an entire new sport: Battle Bots the real time action game where you login and help your country take over some one else's country/defend against those nameless evil foreigners.
Besides, if your enemy expects your robots to defeat their army, what would be the point of fighting them in the first place? Attacking civilians seems a more logical step (I don't think it's reasonable to demand any country at war not to attack only military targets where there's none that can't be replaced easily).
Well, given that you have the tech to make solider death bots, let's also add in the tech to make police bots. You may not be able to properly man customs and police stations with moral upright individuals, but you can build/buy a million or two police/solider bots that can take over and then police most lands for you. You are assuming that just because they send robots off to war that they don't all have personal robot police bots at home/work. If terrorists are found active, add another order of police bots.
Sure I can pay my bills and book a vacation online at the same time, but programming in parallel is a big no no. Our brains were not designed as and are not SMP computers, they aren't even very good preemptive multitasking machines (a single processor computer). A decent CPU can probably context switch in .1ms, but even for trivial tasks (like I'm cooking spaghetti sauce in this pan, *INTERRUPT--The water is boiling* CONTEXT SWITCH, put noodles in water, lower heat, *INTERRUPT--Sauce simmering too vigorously* CONTEXT SWITCH, stir sauce) Even something simple like that the context switches will take 1-5 seconds, many thousands of times slower than a CPU, and those context switches have next to zero data overhead associated with them. Context switching is not cheap in silicon, and it is a lot less cheap in my experience in carbon.
Yeah, but we need that massive processing of ours to walk around, breath, lift our arms, find kitchen tools in a cluttered drawer. Show me any computer/robot that can do those takes as an fast and as well as an average human cook. Once you find the robot, randomly pick 4-5 recipe books and 2-4 recipes out of each. Can your robot know that something is out of stock and has to run to the store before starting a given recipe? Or even better yet, can your robot make 3-4 various mods on given recipe and several mods coming out as an success to the normal human tasters? Comparing humans and computer/robots just isn't the same thing. I'd actually think that our ability to context switch will exceed a robots ability to do that task for a few decades.