1) The robot must do what will preserve human life.
And what about the situation that gets trotted out in every ethics class, which illustrates one of the difficulties of utilitarianism: the robot can preserve total human life best by destroying some human life?--in a time of hunger and mass starvation, it decides that humans would best be served if it and its brethren killed 10% of the population to feed the rest. Easier to imagine, it decides that human life would best be preserved if all rednecks and christian fundamentalists were wiped off the face of the earch -- the U.S. at least. You can say that the 2nd law could be invoked, but it clearly conflicts with the 1st law in both of these -- and millions of other -- cases, and the 1st would take precedence.
These 3 rules are incredibly simplistic. If ethics were this simple, there would be no discipline of ethics within philosophy, and our courts would never have to deal with questions of ethics, only with those who break the ethics enshrined in laws.
FYI: mensa != genius. In fact, being in mensa is actually quite easy: 2 out of every 100 people, on average, have an IQ high enough to qualify for Mensa. Which is to say, it's nothing special. I think of those bumper stickers that say "My child is an honors student at Some Elementary" when I hear that people are in Mensa -- okay, but who cares? It's silly to attribute anything meaningful to that fact, and if it is a prominent part of your self-identity that you're an honors student or in mensa, then you're probably compensating for some other inadequacy. Really intelligent people don't have anything to prove -- well, that's not true, egoism is always a powerful force, perhaps most so with the intelligent.
What I'm saying, though, is that even if we grant the extremely contentious point that IQ measures intelligence, it is a fact that history is rife with moderately high-iq (say +145) people whose intelligence led them astray. Some of the most close-minded people I've known have been among the most brilliant, and I have one friend with an iq somewhere above 160 who is one of the least rational people I've ever known! In short, don't attribute any meaning to somebody's IQ or the fact that they are a member of mensa -- unless we're talking +160 range, in which case, all bets are off, but such people are as far above the menschites as the menschites are above forrest gump! Statistically, there is a greater chance that a menschite will have an intelligent and worthwhile perspective, but what is.4 versus.2 when you're dealing with an individual case? Pay attention to content and depth of thought of the person and not to the letters or memberships they've collected like trophies.
Not according to the Trademark Dilution Act (in the U.S.). The article states that "the Trademark Dilution Act adopted by Congress in 1995 is specifically intended to protect the famous brands of major U.S. corporations. The law seeks to safeguard well-established brands from upstarts even in unrelated industries."
Today i installed a critical update hotfix. After restarting, whenever I shut down or restart, I get the BSOD during the shutdown process, everytime.
I had to uninstall the hotfixes, which really sucks, because you have to uninstall each one individually and then reboot--there's no way to do them all at once. So it takes me 6 reboots to uninstall this POS. That's win2k for you.
Name one teacher who was teaching at the time that they made the discovery that earned them a Nobel Prize. They teach afterwards but not before.
George A. Akerlof, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. This took me 1 minute to find. And I could find another 10 in 10 minutes. But it is easier for you to just make things up than to actually do a bit of research first.
SO, teachers, by the nature of passing on information that is already known CAN NOT be cutting edge.
Are you really that ignorant about university research that you are unaware of the hundreds of nobel laureates that are professors. It is the research that they pursue in addition to their minor teaching responsibilites that is cutting edge nobel material, and if you are in a good graduate program, you will be studying cutting-edge research--the only places in the corporate world that can compare are places like Xerox PARC, and they are anomolies. Truthfully, there are a lot of bad teachers, but as you go higher, the quality changes radically. University professors in a good program are just about as intelligent as they come--which is not to say that they can teach, 'cause they often can't and don't care.
If you only mean to say that teachers through community cutting edge are not cutting edge, then no shit. Who would argue otherwise? How many of the millions of programmers of the world actually do anything cutting edge? less than.01% I would estimate. If the commercial world is so cutting edge, why are commercial OSs so far behind research OSs. Compare any extant commercial operating system of today to the Mach OS of ten years ago.
I think that probably you are trolling, so I won't respond any more. But look at a list of physics nobel laureates and see how many of them were professors when they did the work that led to the nobel.
I meant specifically that there is room for more than one to excel. You said there is only room for one company to excel. The intranet/search engine licensing market is huge. Inktomi may have really dropped the ball and given up their earlier pre-eminent position, but they are fundamentally an information retrieval company. I'm not saying that they are excelling, but there there is plenty of room for others to excel. Google can't be all things for all companies, so there are certainly niche needs for others to fill. Google's advantage on the web is now huge, but in the area of corporate intranets, the bar is not as high for another company to excel.
you just throw them around like a little boy in search of something to hate / stand up against because by god your way of life shall not be challenged by this fscking yellow peril.
By the way, I said nothing about the yellow peril. If you're curious how I came to my feelings about the PRC and it's policies and treatment of human beings, it is by knowing many, many people in Tibet who have been tortured in prison for many years, women who have been raped for years in prison. Your position is essentially that there is no right or wrong, and if they don't like it they should revolt. It is unbelievably cowardly to say everybody has their own beliefs about ethics, and if people don't like such treatment is up to them to revolt--as if violence (the problem) is the ultimate arbiter for every question of right and wrong.
You probably believe the Chinese propaganda that there is no concept of human rights in asia and that we have no right to try to impose western ideas on china. This is complete bullshit though. Speaking from personal experience among tibetans and chinese, I can tell you that they certainly have very deeply held notions about inalienable human rights, whether they know the western ways of describing these notions or not. The chinese government keeps its more brutal policies from the public precisely because the people intuitively recognize that people are being violated in some universal way when they are tortured in a prison for 28 years because they organized demonstrations when they were 18 years old. Or when people are shot in front of their families (for similar politically motivated reasons) and their families are forced to pay for the bullets.
No it doesn't. Hitler had an overt policy of extermination of people based on racial prejudice and massively expansionist goals far past the limits of even the former greater German Empire...
Hitler's policies are irrelevant to the topic under discussion. It was an example of something that you can't say is wrong and can't be justified in taking action against if you assume a subjectivist point of view--only one example among many.
Regarding your comment about my "statistic": you should learn to read, because you didn't get any statistic from reading my words. It was a thought experiment. I in no way said or even implied that it was supposed to represent reality in any way, and I don't know how you could so misconstrue my point.
Let me spell it out for you even more clearly:
To the extent that 'anything goes', life becomes a might makes right affair, without the right.
If there is nothing more than subjectivist ethics (which is something of an oxymoron; aesthetics is probably are better term), then you cannot say that Hitler did anything wrong. All you can say is that you don't like Hitler's or Mao's policies, etc. But they are just as right or wrong as you, me, or Gandhi, since 'right' and 'wrong' have become utterly vacuous.
In the end, all you can say in the way of justification for any action is "I did what I did because I wanted to". It isn't a solid foundation upon which to build or sustain civilizations.
From a very high level, I do believe that there is no such thing as right and wrong, apart from conventions as to what is right and wrong. But there are some fundamental axioms and principles of reasoning that we probably all agree on (which will of necessity be a restricted subset of the axioms and principles of any actual culture or worldview). This can constitute a "functionally objective" ethics that all can agree to, and all the stuff that falls outside that space bounded by the agreed upon axioms, principles of reasoning, and everything derivable from them, is cultural and "functionally conventional".
It is all conventional, ultimately, but that doesn't mean that we don't all agree on some conventions and that this common ground can function as an objective basis for ethics.
I would submit that there is no culture on the planet in which the average person (or the government officially) condones organ harvesting (of prisoners, many of whose 'crimes' are trivial, even by people of that culture). And I would argue that you cannot find a culture whose conventional ethics is so different that organ harvesting is okay--certainly not the Chinese.
Having sexual relations with your mother is and has been considered wrong in all known cultures. It is culturally invariant. Why it is so does not matter. That it is so is sufficient for us to regard it as "functionally objective", loosely speaking, objective wrong.
I know I am going to be modded down for this, but I can't resist.
Exodus 21:7 sanctions slavery.
Lev. 25:44 states that one may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations.
Exodus 35:2 clearly states that one who works on the Sabbath should be put to death.
Lev.15:19-24 states that one is allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanness.
Gee I love your moronic fucking religion. This is the bullshit that you would die and kill to defend, and that your like- and feeble-minded brothers have butchered untold numbers to promote.
Who are you to impose a global ethical standard on anyone? Ethics is a totally subjective ideal and there is no act that can alone be considered wrong or right, even in the post S11 environment of today.
Your position is untenable. Do you really want to cling to ethics as subjective? It means that it is okay if a country decides to raise 98% of its people so that they can be slaves to the remaining two percent (literally slaves), perhaps they even get killed and eaten at age 35, when they have outlived their usefulness but still taste pretty good and serve as a good food resource for the 2%?
Your bullshit argument basically amounts to saying that we weren't justified in doing anything about Hitler, because ethics is a subjective thing, and we can't impose our subjective values on somebody else or interfere with their own culturally valid ways of life. And should governments not impose laws that regulate conduct, since everybody has their own subjective interpretation of ethics?
The U.S. Patent Office just issued a patent for intelligent machines. I can't believe they granted this. It is ridiculously broad and general in scope. I would have rejected it on the basis that it is poorly written and isn't at all rigorous in the arguments that the author is trying to make.
Re:Books, VS.NET, .NET FreeBSD
on
What is .NET?
·
· Score: 1
You are wrong, or, at the very least, disingenuous. See the following article, "Microsoft Hotmail still runs on U**x, dated 12/12/2001--yes, 2 months < 2 years.
Here is a brief excerpt: "... a Microsoft spokesperson told Reuters yesterday that Hotmail is the only Microsoft system that runs on U**x, and that the migration is still in progress. A check with Netcraft shows that Hotmail's front edge servers do indeed run Windows 2000, so Microsoft can faithfully claim that the "web site runs Windows", as it did yesterday. But the infrastructure is still stored on BSD kit."
I just put all my addresses on their exclude list. The thing I don't like though, apart from it not being permanent, is that this should be opt-in rather than opt-out, i.e., they should have an include list of people that they are *allowed* to spam and not spam anybody else.
The biggest spam problems I have come from China or elsewhere in Asia, and this exclude list will probably have no effect on that spam. Anything the DMA does is only going to be followed by semi-legitimate companies, but the most egregious offenders couldn't care less what the DMA says. They will continue to spam until it is no longer profitable.
Wow, what a well-written article. Detailed and informative while still very readable. I wish more articles like this were posted to/.
Is it just me, or does anybody else think that gravastar is one of the silliest sounding names they've ever heard? What success will a theory of gravastars have in the popular press when we have things like wormholes, quasars, pulsars, brown dwarfs, and super-massive black holes? Gravastar sounds like something out of one of the poorer Buck Rogers. Yeah, I know we're talking science and not popular science, but still, there is a long tradition of coming up with interesting names for interesting phenomena (like quark).
China does not have a population of 3 billion yet. The 2000 census number was 1.29533 billion.
Re:a resounding yes--people r stupid & inconsi
on
Quoting in Emails?
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· Score: 1
yes, you are so right. I think the problem is that most people just don't think about their actions beforehand. They act out of instinct or habit and aren't aware of the impact of their actions on others or even on themselves, and when they do, on occasion, think about the consequences, they're selfish enough that they don't really care about the impact on others and they value their comfort above all else. It is a problem with much more important things than email and mailing lists though, so I guess email quoting habits are a minor annoyance.
Sometimes I wonder what will become of us bald apes. It seems to me, from observation, that most of us are almost hardwired to be selfish and to cling to our ignorance and parochialism as if they were virtues.
Yes, Hilbert's questions were mathematical questions, as the user, adn, clearly stated. I was just correcting the number--10, or 23, not 11. True, there were, are, and always will be more than 23 unanswered questions, but those particular questions "were designed to serve as examples for the kinds of problems whose solutions would lead to the furthering of disciplines in mathematics," as it states on the linked page. They weren't meant to be exhaustive.
David Hilbert originally proposed 10 questions, not 11. The final list included 23 questions. See here for more details and the specific questions.
a resounding yes--people r stupid & inconsider
on
Quoting in Emails?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I routinely get emails from people who should know better that are 98% words that I wrote to them. Is it really so hard to snip the original message? The person probably remembers what they wrote. I am personally at a loss to understand how people think it is acceptable to send back the whole message when you don't need to quote it or show context.
The worst has to be when you send a long email to somebody, and it makes it way back to you with the original message and "YES!!!!!!!!" at the top, but let's not talk about top-posting in email.
I believe that this only occurs if you 'fast save' enabled, in which case it saves the changes each time after the first. It still wouldn't be 50x the size, but it would be larger than it should be.
I read an article a while ago, could have been on/., about the privacy implications of this microsoft 'feature', given that things that have been deleted could be recovered with the use of your favorite simple text editor. For example, a word document with confidential financial information that was 'deleted' would still be in the document in ASCII someplace after you sift through all the binary garbage. Something to think about if you use MS Word.
Could you talk about how Sun's various open source endeavors (OpenOffice, JXTA, etc.) fit into Sun's business model? I know that most of Sun's revenue is from hardware, but are there plans to generate more from software in the future, and from open source projects in particular? If so, how exactly does Sun intend to do that, and how will the business model reflect this in, say, 10 years?
Slashdot Mirror
And this took me about 30 seconds to find.
And what about the situation that gets trotted out in every ethics class, which illustrates one of the difficulties of utilitarianism: the robot can preserve total human life best by destroying some human life?--in a time of hunger and mass starvation, it decides that humans would best be served if it and its brethren killed 10% of the population to feed the rest. Easier to imagine, it decides that human life would best be preserved if all rednecks and christian fundamentalists were wiped off the face of the earch -- the U.S. at least. You can say that the 2nd law could be invoked, but it clearly conflicts with the 1st law in both of these -- and millions of other -- cases, and the 1st would take precedence.
These 3 rules are incredibly simplistic. If ethics were this simple, there would be no discipline of ethics within philosophy, and our courts would never have to deal with questions of ethics, only with those who break the ethics enshrined in laws.
What I'm saying, though, is that even if we grant the extremely contentious point that IQ measures intelligence, it is a fact that history is rife with moderately high-iq (say +145) people whose intelligence led them astray. Some of the most close-minded people I've known have been among the most brilliant, and I have one friend with an iq somewhere above 160 who is one of the least rational people I've ever known! In short, don't attribute any meaning to somebody's IQ or the fact that they are a member of mensa -- unless we're talking +160 range, in which case, all bets are off, but such people are as far above the menschites as the menschites are above forrest gump! Statistically, there is a greater chance that a menschite will have an intelligent and worthwhile perspective, but what is .4 versus .2 when you're dealing with an individual case? Pay attention to content and depth of thought of the person and not to the letters or memberships they've collected like trophies.
Not according to the Trademark Dilution Act (in the U.S.). The article states that "the Trademark Dilution Act adopted by Congress in 1995 is specifically intended to protect the famous brands of major U.S. corporations. The law seeks to safeguard well-established brands from upstarts even in unrelated industries."
I had to uninstall the hotfixes, which really sucks, because you have to uninstall each one individually and then reboot--there's no way to do them all at once. So it takes me 6 reboots to uninstall this POS. That's win2k for you.
Yes, I also strongly recommend SecureFX. It has download resume, drag-and-drop, and tons more.
... is the corporate death penalty.
George A. Akerlof, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. This took me 1 minute to find. And I could find another 10 in 10 minutes. But it is easier for you to just make things up than to actually do a bit of research first.
SO, teachers, by the nature of passing on information that is already known CAN NOT be cutting edge.
Are you really that ignorant about university research that you are unaware of the hundreds of nobel laureates that are professors. It is the research that they pursue in addition to their minor teaching responsibilites that is cutting edge nobel material, and if you are in a good graduate program, you will be studying cutting-edge research--the only places in the corporate world that can compare are places like Xerox PARC, and they are anomolies. Truthfully, there are a lot of bad teachers, but as you go higher, the quality changes radically. University professors in a good program are just about as intelligent as they come--which is not to say that they can teach, 'cause they often can't and don't care.
If you only mean to say that teachers through community cutting edge are not cutting edge, then no shit. Who would argue otherwise? How many of the millions of programmers of the world actually do anything cutting edge? less than .01% I would estimate. If the commercial world is so cutting edge, why are commercial OSs so far behind research OSs. Compare any extant commercial operating system of today to the Mach OS of ten years ago.
I think that probably you are trolling, so I won't respond any more. But look at a list of physics nobel laureates and see how many of them were professors when they did the work that led to the nobel.
I meant specifically that there is room for more than one to excel. You said there is only room for one company to excel. The intranet/search engine licensing market is huge. Inktomi may have really dropped the ball and given up their earlier pre-eminent position, but they are fundamentally an information retrieval company. I'm not saying that they are excelling, but there there is plenty of room for others to excel. Google can't be all things for all companies, so there are certainly niche needs for others to fill. Google's advantage on the web is now huge, but in the area of corporate intranets, the bar is not as high for another company to excel.
Inktomi would disagree.
By the way, I said nothing about the yellow peril. If you're curious how I came to my feelings about the PRC and it's policies and treatment of human beings, it is by knowing many, many people in Tibet who have been tortured in prison for many years, women who have been raped for years in prison. Your position is essentially that there is no right or wrong, and if they don't like it they should revolt. It is unbelievably cowardly to say everybody has their own beliefs about ethics, and if people don't like such treatment is up to them to revolt--as if violence (the problem) is the ultimate arbiter for every question of right and wrong.
You probably believe the Chinese propaganda that there is no concept of human rights in asia and that we have no right to try to impose western ideas on china. This is complete bullshit though. Speaking from personal experience among tibetans and chinese, I can tell you that they certainly have very deeply held notions about inalienable human rights, whether they know the western ways of describing these notions or not. The chinese government keeps its more brutal policies from the public precisely because the people intuitively recognize that people are being violated in some universal way when they are tortured in a prison for 28 years because they organized demonstrations when they were 18 years old. Or when people are shot in front of their families (for similar politically motivated reasons) and their families are forced to pay for the bullets.
Hitler's policies are irrelevant to the topic under discussion. It was an example of something that you can't say is wrong and can't be justified in taking action against if you assume a subjectivist point of view--only one example among many.
Regarding your comment about my "statistic": you should learn to read, because you didn't get any statistic from reading my words. It was a thought experiment. I in no way said or even implied that it was supposed to represent reality in any way, and I don't know how you could so misconstrue my point.
Let me spell it out for you even more clearly:
From a very high level, I do believe that there is no such thing as right and wrong, apart from conventions as to what is right and wrong. But there are some fundamental axioms and principles of reasoning that we probably all agree on (which will of necessity be a restricted subset of the axioms and principles of any actual culture or worldview). This can constitute a "functionally objective" ethics that all can agree to, and all the stuff that falls outside that space bounded by the agreed upon axioms, principles of reasoning, and everything derivable from them, is cultural and "functionally conventional".
It is all conventional, ultimately, but that doesn't mean that we don't all agree on some conventions and that this common ground can function as an objective basis for ethics.
I would submit that there is no culture on the planet in which the average person (or the government officially) condones organ harvesting (of prisoners, many of whose 'crimes' are trivial, even by people of that culture). And I would argue that you cannot find a culture whose conventional ethics is so different that organ harvesting is okay--certainly not the Chinese.
Having sexual relations with your mother is and has been considered wrong in all known cultures. It is culturally invariant. Why it is so does not matter. That it is so is sufficient for us to regard it as "functionally objective", loosely speaking, objective wrong.
Exodus 21:7 sanctions slavery.
Lev. 25:44 states that one may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations.
Exodus 35:2 clearly states that one who works on the Sabbath should be put to death.
Lev.15:19-24 states that one is allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanness.
Gee I love your moronic fucking religion. This is the bullshit that you would die and kill to defend, and that your like- and feeble-minded brothers have butchered untold numbers to promote.
Fuck you!
Who are you to impose a global ethical standard on anyone? Ethics is a totally subjective ideal and there is no act that can alone be considered wrong or right, even in the post S11 environment of today.
Your position is untenable. Do you really want to cling to ethics as subjective? It means that it is okay if a country decides to raise 98% of its people so that they can be slaves to the remaining two percent (literally slaves), perhaps they even get killed and eaten at age 35, when they have outlived their usefulness but still taste pretty good and serve as a good food resource for the 2%?Your bullshit argument basically amounts to saying that we weren't justified in doing anything about Hitler, because ethics is a subjective thing, and we can't impose our subjective values on somebody else or interfere with their own culturally valid ways of life. And should governments not impose laws that regulate conduct, since everybody has their own subjective interpretation of ethics?
The U.S. Patent Office just issued a patent for intelligent machines. I can't believe they granted this. It is ridiculously broad and general in scope. I would have rejected it on the basis that it is poorly written and isn't at all rigorous in the arguments that the author is trying to make.
Here is a brief excerpt: "... a Microsoft spokesperson told Reuters yesterday that Hotmail is the only Microsoft system that runs on U**x, and that the migration is still in progress. A check with Netcraft shows that Hotmail's front edge servers do indeed run Windows 2000, so Microsoft can faithfully claim that the "web site runs Windows", as it did yesterday. But the infrastructure is still stored on BSD kit."
The biggest spam problems I have come from China or elsewhere in Asia, and this exclude list will probably have no effect on that spam. Anything the DMA does is only going to be followed by semi-legitimate companies, but the most egregious offenders couldn't care less what the DMA says. They will continue to spam until it is no longer profitable.
Is it just me, or does anybody else think that gravastar is one of the silliest sounding names they've ever heard? What success will a theory of gravastars have in the popular press when we have things like wormholes, quasars, pulsars, brown dwarfs, and super-massive black holes? Gravastar sounds like something out of one of the poorer Buck Rogers. Yeah, I know we're talking science and not popular science, but still, there is a long tradition of coming up with interesting names for interesting phenomena (like quark).
China does not have a population of 3 billion yet. The 2000 census number was 1.29533 billion.
Sometimes I wonder what will become of us bald apes. It seems to me, from observation, that most of us are almost hardwired to be selfish and to cling to our ignorance and parochialism as if they were virtues.
Yes, Hilbert's questions were mathematical questions, as the user, adn, clearly stated. I was just correcting the number--10, or 23, not 11. True, there were, are, and always will be more than 23 unanswered questions, but those particular questions "were designed to serve as examples for the kinds of problems whose solutions would lead to the furthering of disciplines in mathematics," as it states on the linked page. They weren't meant to be exhaustive.
David Hilbert originally proposed 10 questions, not 11. The final list included 23 questions. See here for more details and the specific questions.
The worst has to be when you send a long email to somebody, and it makes it way back to you with the original message and "YES!!!!!!!!" at the top, but let's not talk about top-posting in email.
I read an article a while ago, could have been on /., about the privacy implications of this microsoft 'feature', given that things that have been deleted could be recovered with the use of your favorite simple text editor. For example, a word document with confidential financial information that was 'deleted' would still be in the document in ASCII someplace after you sift through all the binary garbage. Something to think about if you use MS Word.
Could you talk about how Sun's various open source endeavors (OpenOffice, JXTA, etc.) fit into Sun's business model? I know that most of Sun's revenue is from hardware, but are there plans to generate more from software in the future, and from open source projects in particular? If so, how exactly does Sun intend to do that, and how will the business model reflect this in, say, 10 years?