I for one have grave doubts whether a definition of personhood based on cognitive abilities could include all humans but completely exclude the great apes.
Here's one relatively simple way to define personhood: if the average intelligence of a species exceeds a certain threshold, then all members of that species are persons.
If you pick the right threshold, this definition makes none of the apes persons, while all humans are persons, including the few severely handicapped humans who are less intelligent than exceptionally smart apes.
I think virtually nobody think these critters count as "15%" of a person.
No, but at some point these creations will become sufficiently human-like that it would be wrong not to begin to grant them human rights. And that's going to be a very ugly, subjective debate. One possible outcome of that debate is that it will be determined that not even humans deserve human rights.
Yes, the path to self-sufficiency would be a long one. Mars Colony 1.0 will be able to make its own H2, O2, H2O, CH4, and crude cement, and that's about it.
After another 10 years maybe they'd be able to make parts and structural members out of cast iron and glass. (The energy to do this, of course, still coming from fission reactors shipped from good ol' Earth.)
As for things at the end of the dependency chains (sophisitcated medicines and microprocessors), these would continue to be imported luxuries for a good 100 years. Fortunately, they don't weigh much. The bulk commodities are easier to produce in-situ.
We have a pretty good historical record of how dependency chains developed here on Earth. With this hindsight, the Mars colonists will have the opportunity to "do it better" -- avoiding the mistakes and dead ends (I'll bet that thalidomide will never be manufactured on Mars), and putting more resources into accelerating certain branches of the chain now known to be strategically important.
Just because it will take them a few generations to reach self-sufficiency, does that mean we shouldn't begin the process now? No. If we don't get a move on, there will never be a self-sufficient colony. Inaction is a greater obstacle than dependency chains.
it costs tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram to land payload there
A space elevator sure would be an enabling breakthrough here.
If you're a light cell phone user like me, this is probably the way to go: Virgin Mobile prepaid service allows you to buy a $20 "top up" as infrequently as once every 90 days.
If you agree to have your credit card automatically charged once every 90 days, the rate drops to $15. Voila, $5 per month cell phone service.
In the second half of the article they get down to brass tacks. "A vehicle that used this approach would operate around 25 percent more efficiently than a vehicle with a conventional engine."
That sounds a lot less dramatic than "a design that could triple the power of a test engine."
Inasmuch as Bill is calling for admitting more skilled immigrants and fewer unskilled immigrants, it's a step in the right direction.
Let's make an analogy between Harvard U. and the United States.
Harvard is extremely selective about who is admitted. As a result it has a stellar reputation. Imagine how quickly Harvard would go downhill if it started admitting high-school dropouts.
Similarly, because so many people want to emigrate to the U.S., it could be extremely selective about who it admits. For example, it could require immigrants to have a master's degree.
Instead, the U.S. isn't picky at all about who it lets in. Anyone with a pair of legs can walk across the border. The U.S. imports poverty, when it could instead import success and wealth. As a result, the social safety net has been strained beyond the breaking point in some places: more than 70 California emergency rooms have closed. And the number of Americans killed by illegal immigrants is far higher than the number of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Imagine how much schools, hospitals, and crime statistics would improve, and property values go up, if the U.S. were selective about immigrants.
In fact, wind farms do take energy out of the wind. All things being equal, if you build a second wind farm immediately downwind from an existing wind farm, the second one will not generate as much electricity as the first.
Likewise, wave farms take energy out of waves. Shoreside of a wave farm, wave amplitude will be smaller; the wave farm "stills the waters" to some extent.
These things do indeed have environmental impact. To name an example that the original poster didn't: the reduced-amplitude waves will cause less erosion than would naturally take place.
Original post should be modded Interesting, not Funny.
Thanks to the current practices of the timber industry, there are more trees in North America now than there were in pre-Columbian times. They plant several for each one they cut down. It is in their interest to do so, so they'll have something to harvest 30 years from now.
The Lorax gave an incorrect impression to a whole generation of kids.
Did you notice the Google ads on this page? "Sympathy gifts," "Living wills," "Estate planning." I looked aroung the page to figure out why Google picked these ads. It must be because of the word "deathbed" in the article!
From the article: By angling a little bit to the right early on, the rover avoided the obstacle without needing to back up or make any sharp turns.
Everyone worries that the skies will become a deathtrap when flying cars, driven by people without pilots' licenses, hit the market. But the collision-avoidance solution is simple if they're all flying autonomously.
In 2007, it's trivial for inexpensive consumer devices to communicate with each other wirelessly. Similarly, flying cars need to broadcast their positions and velocities to all other aircraft within a few km radius. It then doesn't take much computing power to compute the slight course adjustments to avoid collisions, or even to avoid intersecting another aircraft's wake vortices.
This will also eliminate "air lanes," and the fear of them becoming saturated with traffic. All aircraft will simply fly the shortest point-to-point great circle route, except when the computer tells it to deviate to avoid another aircraft, its wake vortices, or an ADIZ. Because three-dimensional airspace is so vast, it will be able to accomodate expoentially more traffic than the current "air lanes" concept.
You're right that the cloners took marketshare away from Apple.
If Apple had charged enough for Mac OS licenses, that wouldn't have mattered to Apple's bottom line.
Apple should have set the Mac OS license price such that it didn't matter whether a customer bought an Apple or a clone; Apple would have made the same amount of profit either way. Increasing the customer base for Mac OS (while protecting its revenue stream) should have been Apple's goal in the cloning era, not propping up the size of its hardware division.
When a person accepts a job offer from Wal-Mart, that person does so for only one reason: no other employer (Target, K-Mart, IBM, etc.) has given them a better job offer. (Unless you want to argue that the person is self-loathing and consciously chooses to accept an inferior job offer -- and you can hardly blame Wal-Mart for that.)
Therefore, Wal-Mart has, by definition, elevated that person's state of affairs. To lash out against Wal-Mart is to reduce Wal-Mart's ability to provide jobs that people want. When a group of activists is successful in preventing a Wal-Mart store from being built, it forces hundres of people to settle for jobs with what would have become their second-choice employer, had the Wal-Mart opened.
It may be hard for some Slashdot readers to grok, but Wal-Mart doesn't hold guns to employees' heads to get them to stay. If there were other employers out there offering better deals to people with the skillset of the typical Wal-Mart employee, Wal-Mart would soon face a labor crisis.
Yes, in Jurassic Park they used frog DNA. I never did figure out why.
Dinosaurs (Greek for "monstrous lizards") were reptiles. Frogs are amphibians. Isn't a modern reptile, like an alligator, more closely related to dinosaurs, and thus its DNA is better suited for filling the gaps, than a frog's DNA?
Yes, futures trading has driven up the price in anticipation of future shortages, but that's a good thing. High prices are the only effective incentive to develop alternatives to crude oil, and to conserve.
Without futures trading, the price would tend to stay artificially low, encouraging overconsumption and discouraging the development of alternatives, right up until the moment we run out. Boy oh boy would we be screwed then.
An even better way to spend that money
on
The Hybrid Scooter
·
· Score: 1
I'm going to make a wild guess and state that, in all likelihood, nuclear power has killed or seriously or otherwise harmed far less people than fossil fuel per megawatt produced
You're more correct than you know. In 2004, the worldwide death toll among coal miners was a whopping 21,500!! (Most of the accidents happened in China.) That's as many deaths, every single year, as seven World Trade Centers stacked atop each other.
Contrast the coal industry with the nuclear power industry; in its entire history, there's been only one incident with fatalities. (Chernobyl, a reactor that was orders of magnitude less safe than modern designs, killed 31 people. Divide that by the 50-year existance of the nuke power industry, and you get an annual death toll of 0.62 persons.)
If all coal-fired power plants were converted to nuclear, we'd immediately surpass the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. Environmentalists spend a lot more time criticizing nuclear power than coal; the facts show they are barking up the wrong tree. Even when they criticize coal, they do so for the wrong reasons - like acid rain, which pales in comparison to the massive death toll among miners.
Yes, as a fifth grader, I was telling people the chicken egg came first -- because all chickens hatched from chicken eggs, but the first chicken egg was not laid by a chicken.
I can't believe professors are getting paid to answer questions already definitively answered by a child.
The recent loss off 12 coal miners in West Virginia was tragic, but what the media doesn't tell us is that in 2004, the worldwide death toll among coal miners was a whopping 21,500!! (Most of the accidents happened in China.) That's as many deaths, every single year, as seven World Trade Centers stacked atop each other.
Contrast the coal industry with the nuclear power industry; in its entire history, there's been only one incident with fatalities. (Chernobyl, a reactor that was orders of magnitude less safe than modern designs, killed 31 people. Divide that by the 50-year existance of the nuke power industry, and you get an annual death toll of 0.62 persons.)
If all coal-fired power plants were converted to nuclear, we'd immediately surpass the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. Environmentalists spend a lot more time criticizing nuclear power than coal; the facts show they are barking up the wrong tree. Even when they criticize coal, they do so for the wrong reasons - like acid rain, which pales in comparison to the massive death toll among miners.
Hussein was a bloody butcher of his own people. I remember the news reports of what his sons had been doing.
Check out these news reports:
* Qusay was the more deferential son, always showing Saddam great respect in public. He often oversaw the arbitrary killings of prisoners who were murdered to alleviate overcrowding in jails.
* AMMAN, Jordan, 3/21/2003 (UPI) -- A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."
The animations /.avi files on that site (like this one: http://www.thesurfaceofthesun.com/images/T171_0008 28.avi) are strangely convincing. Beneath the turbulently moving filaments of a coronal mass ejection, you can see a layer that has features that remain quite fixed in location relative to each other -- implying a solid surface.
In one of the TalkBack posts, James Kim (the author) wrote,
It's true that an apples-to-apples comparison (ie WMA vs. WMA DRM) would have been more telling... We will continue to test players and soon do a true and more complete comparison of WMA vs WMA DRM, AAC vs Fairplay AAC, and so on.
The recent loss off 12 coal miners in West Virginia was tragic, but what the media doesn't tell us is that in 2004, the worldwide death toll among coal miners was a whopping 21,500!! (Most of the accidents happened in China.) That's as many deaths, every single year, as seven World Trade Centers stacked atop each other.
Contrast the coal industry with the nuclear power industry; in its entire history, there's been only one incident with fatalities. (Chernobyl, a reactor that was orders of magnitude less safe than modern designs, killed 31 people. Divide that by the 50-year existance of the nuke power industry, and you get an annual death toll of 0.72 persons.)
Regardless of what TFA says, nuclear power could solve global warming; if all coal-fired power plants were converted to nuclear, we'd immediately surpass the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. Environmentalists spend a lot more time criticizing nuclear power than coal; the facts show they are barking up the wrong tree. Even when they criticize coal, they do so for the wrong reasons - like acid rain, which pales in comparison to the massive death toll among miners.
Slashdot Mirror
I for one have grave doubts whether a definition of personhood based on cognitive abilities could include all humans but completely exclude the great apes.
Here's one relatively simple way to define personhood: if the average intelligence of a species exceeds a certain threshold, then all members of that species are persons.
If you pick the right threshold, this definition makes none of the apes persons, while all humans are persons, including the few severely handicapped humans who are less intelligent than exceptionally smart apes.
I think virtually nobody think these critters count as "15%" of a person.
No, but at some point these creations will become sufficiently human-like that it would be wrong not to begin to grant them human rights. And that's going to be a very ugly, subjective debate. One possible outcome of that debate is that it will be determined that not even humans deserve human rights.
Yes, the path to self-sufficiency would be a long one. Mars Colony 1.0 will be able to make its own H2, O2, H2O, CH4, and crude cement, and that's about it.
After another 10 years maybe they'd be able to make parts and structural members out of cast iron and glass. (The energy to do this, of course, still coming from fission reactors shipped from good ol' Earth.)
As for things at the end of the dependency chains (sophisitcated medicines and microprocessors), these would continue to be imported luxuries for a good 100 years. Fortunately, they don't weigh much. The bulk commodities are easier to produce in-situ.
We have a pretty good historical record of how dependency chains developed here on Earth. With this hindsight, the Mars colonists will have the opportunity to "do it better" -- avoiding the mistakes and dead ends (I'll bet that thalidomide will never be manufactured on Mars), and putting more resources into accelerating certain branches of the chain now known to be strategically important.
Just because it will take them a few generations to reach self-sufficiency, does that mean we shouldn't begin the process now? No. If we don't get a move on, there will never be a self-sufficient colony. Inaction is a greater obstacle than dependency chains.
it costs tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram to land payload there
A space elevator sure would be an enabling breakthrough here.
If you're a light cell phone user like me, this is probably the way to go: Virgin Mobile prepaid service allows you to buy a $20 "top up" as infrequently as once every 90 days.
If you agree to have your credit card automatically charged once every 90 days, the rate drops to $15. Voila, $5 per month cell phone service.
In the second half of the article they get down to brass tacks. "A vehicle that used this approach would operate around 25 percent more efficiently than a vehicle with a conventional engine."
That sounds a lot less dramatic than "a design that could triple the power of a test engine."
Inasmuch as Bill is calling for admitting more skilled immigrants and fewer unskilled immigrants, it's a step in the right direction.
Let's make an analogy between Harvard U. and the United States.
Harvard is extremely selective about who is admitted. As a result it has a stellar reputation. Imagine how quickly Harvard would go downhill if it started admitting high-school dropouts.
Similarly, because so many people want to emigrate to the U.S., it could be extremely selective about who it admits. For example, it could require immigrants to have a master's degree.
Instead, the U.S. isn't picky at all about who it lets in. Anyone with a pair of legs can walk across the border. The U.S. imports poverty, when it could instead import success and wealth. As a result, the social safety net has been strained beyond the breaking point in some places: more than 70 California emergency rooms have closed. And the number of Americans killed by illegal immigrants is far higher than the number of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Imagine how much schools, hospitals, and crime statistics would improve, and property values go up, if the U.S. were selective about immigrants.
In fact, wind farms do take energy out of the wind. All things being equal, if you build a second wind farm immediately downwind from an existing wind farm, the second one will not generate as much electricity as the first.
Likewise, wave farms take energy out of waves. Shoreside of a wave farm, wave amplitude will be smaller; the wave farm "stills the waters" to some extent.
These things do indeed have environmental impact. To name an example that the original poster didn't: the reduced-amplitude waves will cause less erosion than would naturally take place.
Original post should be modded Interesting, not Funny.
Thanks to the current practices of the timber industry, there are more trees in North America now than there were in pre-Columbian times. They plant several for each one they cut down. It is in their interest to do so, so they'll have something to harvest 30 years from now.
The Lorax gave an incorrect impression to a whole generation of kids.
OK, I've been waiting to try out this joke... what do you think?
"In Soviet India, you're gonna get Instant Korma."
It works on so many levels : )
Did you notice the Google ads on this page? "Sympathy gifts," "Living wills," "Estate planning." I looked aroung the page to figure out why Google picked these ads. It must be because of the word "deathbed" in the article!
From the article: By angling a little bit to the right early on, the rover avoided the obstacle without needing to back up or make any sharp turns. Everyone worries that the skies will become a deathtrap when flying cars, driven by people without pilots' licenses, hit the market. But the collision-avoidance solution is simple if they're all flying autonomously. In 2007, it's trivial for inexpensive consumer devices to communicate with each other wirelessly. Similarly, flying cars need to broadcast their positions and velocities to all other aircraft within a few km radius. It then doesn't take much computing power to compute the slight course adjustments to avoid collisions, or even to avoid intersecting another aircraft's wake vortices. This will also eliminate "air lanes," and the fear of them becoming saturated with traffic. All aircraft will simply fly the shortest point-to-point great circle route, except when the computer tells it to deviate to avoid another aircraft, its wake vortices, or an ADIZ. Because three-dimensional airspace is so vast, it will be able to accomodate expoentially more traffic than the current "air lanes" concept.
You're right that the cloners took marketshare away from Apple.
If Apple had charged enough for Mac OS licenses, that wouldn't have mattered to Apple's bottom line.
Apple should have set the Mac OS license price such that it didn't matter whether a customer bought an Apple or a clone; Apple would have made the same amount of profit either way. Increasing the customer base for Mac OS (while protecting its revenue stream) should have been Apple's goal in the cloning era, not propping up the size of its hardware division.
When a person accepts a job offer from Wal-Mart, that person does so for only one reason: no other employer (Target, K-Mart, IBM, etc.) has given them a better job offer. (Unless you want to argue that the person is self-loathing and consciously chooses to accept an inferior job offer -- and you can hardly blame Wal-Mart for that.)
Therefore, Wal-Mart has, by definition, elevated that person's state of affairs. To lash out against Wal-Mart is to reduce Wal-Mart's ability to provide jobs that people want. When a group of activists is successful in preventing a Wal-Mart store from being built, it forces hundres of people to settle for jobs with what would have become their second-choice employer, had the Wal-Mart opened.
It may be hard for some Slashdot readers to grok, but Wal-Mart doesn't hold guns to employees' heads to get them to stay. If there were other employers out there offering better deals to people with the skillset of the typical Wal-Mart employee, Wal-Mart would soon face a labor crisis.
Couldn't the system simply have a filter that removes the wave signature of what it is outputting before processing input as a command?
Yes, it could. That's real similar to what a $20 pair of noise-cancelling headphones does.
That's the right idea.
Yes, in Jurassic Park they used frog DNA. I never did figure out why.
Dinosaurs (Greek for "monstrous lizards") were reptiles. Frogs are amphibians. Isn't a modern reptile, like an alligator, more closely related to dinosaurs, and thus its DNA is better suited for filling the gaps, than a frog's DNA?
Yes, futures trading has driven up the price in anticipation of future shortages, but that's a good thing. High prices are the only effective incentive to develop alternatives to crude oil, and to conserve.
Without futures trading, the price would tend to stay artificially low, encouraging overconsumption and discouraging the development of alternatives, right up until the moment we run out. Boy oh boy would we be screwed then.
Build a lunar-solar power generation system for $50 billion.
I'm going to make a wild guess and state that, in all likelihood, nuclear power has killed or seriously or otherwise harmed far less people than fossil fuel per megawatt produced
You're more correct than you know. In 2004, the worldwide death toll among coal miners was a whopping 21,500!! (Most of the accidents happened in China.) That's as many deaths, every single year, as seven World Trade Centers stacked atop each other.
Contrast the coal industry with the nuclear power industry; in its entire history, there's been only one incident with fatalities. (Chernobyl, a reactor that was orders of magnitude less safe than modern designs, killed 31 people. Divide that by the 50-year existance of the nuke power industry, and you get an annual death toll of 0.62 persons.)
If all coal-fired power plants were converted to nuclear, we'd immediately surpass the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. Environmentalists spend a lot more time criticizing nuclear power than coal; the facts show they are barking up the wrong tree. Even when they criticize coal, they do so for the wrong reasons - like acid rain, which pales in comparison to the massive death toll among miners.
"Able Danger" identified Atta and three of the other hijackers pre-9/11.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Danger
Instead of the government trying to cover up the success of Able Danger, it should be initiating twenty or so Able Danger-like data mining programs.
Yes, as a fifth grader, I was telling people the chicken egg came first -- because all chickens hatched from chicken eggs, but the first chicken egg was not laid by a chicken.
I can't believe professors are getting paid to answer questions already definitively answered by a child.
The recent loss off 12 coal miners in West Virginia was tragic, but what the media doesn't tell us is that in 2004, the worldwide death toll among coal miners was a whopping 21,500!! (Most of the accidents happened in China.) That's as many deaths, every single year, as seven World Trade Centers stacked atop each other.
Contrast the coal industry with the nuclear power industry; in its entire history, there's been only one incident with fatalities. (Chernobyl, a reactor that was orders of magnitude less safe than modern designs, killed 31 people. Divide that by the 50-year existance of the nuke power industry, and you get an annual death toll of 0.62 persons.)
If all coal-fired power plants were converted to nuclear, we'd immediately surpass the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. Environmentalists spend a lot more time criticizing nuclear power than coal; the facts show they are barking up the wrong tree. Even when they criticize coal, they do so for the wrong reasons - like acid rain, which pales in comparison to the massive death toll among miners.
Hussein was a bloody butcher of his own people. I remember the news reports of what his sons had been doing.
Check out these news reports:
* Qusay was the more deferential son, always showing Saddam great respect in public. He often oversaw the arbitrary killings of prisoners who were murdered to alleviate overcrowding in jails.
* AMMAN, Jordan, 3/21/2003 (UPI) -- A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."
http://www.thesurfaceofthesun.com/ claims that the sun has a solid "rocky, calcium ferrite surface layer" beneath a plasma photosphere.
.avi files on that site (like this one: http://www.thesurfaceofthesun.com/images/T171_0008 28.avi) are strangely convincing. Beneath the turbulently moving filaments of a coronal mass ejection, you can see a layer that has features that remain quite fixed in location relative to each other -- implying a solid surface.
The animations /
In one of the TalkBack posts, James Kim (the author) wrote,
It's true that an apples-to-apples comparison (ie WMA vs. WMA DRM) would have been more telling... We will continue to test players and soon do a true and more complete comparison of WMA vs WMA DRM, AAC vs Fairplay AAC, and so on.
The recent loss off 12 coal miners in West Virginia was tragic, but what the media doesn't tell us is that in 2004, the worldwide death toll among coal miners was a whopping 21,500!! (Most of the accidents happened in China.) That's as many deaths, every single year, as seven World Trade Centers stacked atop each other.
Contrast the coal industry with the nuclear power industry; in its entire history, there's been only one incident with fatalities. (Chernobyl, a reactor that was orders of magnitude less safe than modern designs, killed 31 people. Divide that by the 50-year existance of the nuke power industry, and you get an annual death toll of 0.72 persons.)
Regardless of what TFA says, nuclear power could solve global warming; if all coal-fired power plants were converted to nuclear, we'd immediately surpass the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. Environmentalists spend a lot more time criticizing nuclear power than coal; the facts show they are barking up the wrong tree. Even when they criticize coal, they do so for the wrong reasons - like acid rain, which pales in comparison to the massive death toll among miners.