I think you're missing the point. Evolved behaviors aren't morality. We've evolved behaviors that are sometimes moral by our artificial standards, sometimes not. And we have no reference points, so we cannot determine morality as mere mortals. A lot of your post has various misunderstandings about evolution, such as genetic memory and other things.
Actually I'm saying that we as earthlings cannot determine if an action is moral or immoral. This is because we do not have the knowledge that would be needed. In the past, we THOUGHT there was such a thing as morality, but we didn't know about evolution or how the neural hardware makes decisions or anything else. Turns out, we were wrong.
However, we can come up with a practical system for dealing with actions that are destructive to other individuals or to society. Such a system needs to be based upon research as to what actually reaches the local minima for crime versus the cost of fighting crime. (that is, we have to determine the cost of fighting crime versus the cost of the crime, and find the point on the graph that costs society the least). Criminal punishment should not be intended for 'revenge' : punishment should only be used if it is determined through research to actually reduce crime.
Agencies that attempt to punish people for their bad actions don't need to consider these things, though. It really doesn't matter where the failing is in a criminal that causes him to commit a crime, merely that he did it and this means we have to consider preventing this criminal from committing any more crimes for a period of time. Ultimately, I think we're going to discover that nearly all crime originates either in a bug in the hardware or a FEATURE of the hardware. (males commit way more crime because many of the crimes they commit increase their chances of reproduction)
Obviously, if humans have souls, then a cosmic authority would need to consider all influences, like you suggest, to determine accurate moral judgments.
Yes, this would work. The RNA that would be the target sequence for this treatment could be PART of an RNA string on HIV. We would then target the RNA molecules to bind to the receptors for helper T cells, which are the ones that HIV causes the most problems in. The CD4 receptor is one such target. This would definitely slow down the virus (although since current treatments can ALMOST eradicate HIV in a patient, it's hard to say if the treatment would be worth it)
Yes but the beauty of this treatment is that it's two stage. Once the RNA gets into a cell, it can be targeted to ONLY harm cells with the RNAs of cancer floating around in their cytoplasms.
It costs about $50k-$100k to have a person's brain cryogenically frozen. For those of us who believe in the laws of physics, the chances of eventually reviving a dead mind or at least recovering all of the memories and personality information is excellent. This would be a much better alternative than a year or two of excruciating suffering ending in a permanent death, and would be cheaper as well. I'm hoping reversible cryogenic freezing can be developed in my lifetime, so that we can definitely show that cryo patients are not actually dead, and make this procedure available to all. ("reversible" freezing would be a method using enough cryo-protectants that you could theoretically thaw out the brain and it would work. You wouldn't actually plan to do this for a century or two, but you could convince the general public that these patients were still alive)
One idea I've thought of to improve the method : how about blasting the frozen heads into space, and putting them into an orbit that keeps a planet between the space capsule and the sun? Then you wouldn't need to keep refilling the liquid nitrogen, or worry about something happening to the patients. Each frozen head would weigh about 5 kilograms : at today's $10,000/kilogram launch prices, that would be about $50,000 a patient.
I think the idea behind it is this. The more opiates you give a person, the higher the probability that they will become addicted to opiates. So you try to give them as much pain relief via acetaminophen as possible, with a few milligrams of opiates added for pain too severe for the acetaminophen to counter it. When I was hospitalized for a severe injury, I was given on demand morphine in the hospital for about a week. In the last few days of my hospital stay, they took me off morphine and put me on Vicodin. Ironically, I found the Vicodin was a lot more effective than the straight morphine was.
Once I went home, I had a big prescription of vicodin. I took it for about a day, and switched to straight tylenol because I didn't like how the opiates would cloud my head and cause me to sleep.
A "post scarcity" economy is a physical impossibility. The universe doesn't have unlimited resources.
HOWEVER, it's at least plausible that an economy could exist whereby the essentials to support billions of human lives in decent conditions could be generated with almost no input of human labor. All living humans could get all of their needs, and most of their wants taken care of with little effort on their part. With virtual reality, those humans who wanted things the economy couldn't provide (their own private planet, faster than light travel, sex with 50 clones of Pamela Anderson, etc) could get a close substitute.
Except that the difference between signing a form when you're ill and need prompt medical attention or you might die and signing a form when you buy a car is that you can turn down the latter obligation. In general, agreements and contracts made by individuals are only valid if the individual has some bargaining power or choice. Contracts made under duress or when there's no other options have to be regulated by law so that individuals don't get screwed over.
And precisely how much bargaining power do you have when you come to this "agreement"? Do you suppose that you could get the hospital to agree to charge you what the best insurance company would pay? Or instead do you think the hospital would dun you over and over and sic a collections agency on your ass if you don't pay 3x what the true price for the service is?
Let me get this straight : I hear that OLED is the "perfect" display tech.
+ Low energy consumption since all the light from the phosphers shines through + ultra high refresh rates possible + flicker free + full 180 degree viewing angle + perfect black levels with absolutely no light emmitting from pixels that are off + no ghosting at all + cheaper to manufacture than LCDs + flexible + ultra thin
Basically, a perfect display with no drawbacks other than the fact it isn't 3d like the holodeck.
Oh, and the blue pigments fade fast, so the display dims over time and the color balance gets messed up.
Oh, and it isn't being made in large enough quantities to be affordable.
So what's the deal? Why is Sony throwing in the towel now?
Best means one thing. A good athlete wins often in whatever sport he or she plays. The best athlete has the highest chance of winning out of any other athlete in the world. It doesn't matter how they got this chance. An ethical, non-drug using athlete can never be the best athlete, because an athlete with similar training and genetic potential who is using drugs will always have an advantage.
Erm, actually...the best athletes in the world are that way because of their tremendous hard work, genetic endowment, AND because they take steroids...The BEST athletes use everything.
Indeed, and the only way to challenge their claim is that you need lawyers. Good, expensive lawyers able to counter the army of lawyers the IOC undoubtedly has on retainer. Also, you need time...5-10 years for the courts to come to a final, uncontestable decision.
Nearly all individuals don't have the money or lifespan to do this. That's why big institutions hold all the cards when you deal with them. Only if the institution does something truly egregious do you have a chance of getting compensation.
Tell me more about helical 3d displays. I tried googling for it, and ironically this very slashdot post was the second hit. A lot of links to CT scanner stuff, but nothing about how an display actually works.
The interesting part is that the de-mining process starts with the assumption that all of these mines will still detonate. Wonder what kind of explosive is that reliable.
Hopefully, the actual fusing and ship detecting 'sensors' on the mine (not sure what else to call the big mechanical and magnetic switches mines of this vintage use) no longer work.
Childishly easy? There is equipment that can protect against directed sound weapons...a huge, bulky, helmet like apparatus that uses several things to block sound.
There's equipment that can stop tasers...basically a faraday cage around your body.
Heck, there's equipment that usually stops the low powered bullets used by cops. Just wrap your body in kevlar vests and kevlar pants and handgun bullets won't be able to touch you.
Now, as you waddle down the street swathed in protective gear, it'll be trivial for the ground cops to surround you and beat you to the ground with billy clubs. It'll also be a lot harder for you to get away after you commit a crime by trying to disable a drone.
Every weapon has a defense. As you may notice, the defense against lethal weapons is different from the one against the currently available nonlethal ones. So if the cops have all these weapons available, it'll be a lot harder for you to avoid them all.
That's why you launch from an unpopulated area, and you have the launch crew inside a bunker. We've been launching rockets this way since the beginning of rocketry. Even SpaceX does it this way.
Anyone have data on how these compare to x86 and Intel's latest creations? Presumably, one could write an efficient algorithm for a variety of common computing tasks and port it to the different chips to get a cross-architecture performance estimate.
Couldn't you access some kind of index file that would allow you to find everything else? Or are those files too low level for it to be accessed this way?
There's an enormous difference between The Pirates Bay and newsbinz.
Newzbin just automatically trawls all the binary newsgroups and automatically creates and index of what it finds. It's a common carrier, just like google. The fact that the binary newgroups have an enormous amount of pirated content is no more the fault of newzbin than the fact that the internet is choc full of disturbing porn is the fault of google.
The Pirates Bay, OTOH, is a site where the admins deliberately remove pirated content that was mislabeled from the site. This, as well as the site name, makes their database deliberately biased to help with piracy. Maybe that is illegal and maybe it isn't, but the point is, what TPB does is different than what newzbin does.
1. We're not "sacrificing" people, we're allowing people who are willing to tolerate a small risk (under 5%) of death in order for the glory of going to space. *I* would take that risk, even if 1/20 launches ended up blowing up or otherwise failing. You can go sit at home watching TV if you want, until old age puts you in a nursing home where you have to wear a diaper and someday something fails and you're dead. LIFE is ultimately going to result in death...you might as well get what you can out of it. If someone volunteers for a risky anything, we should generally allow them to take that risk.
2. Your reasoning is why medical science advances as such a glacial pace. In the old days, scientists could take experimental drugs right out of the lab and test them. Yes, there were some mishaps, but most of the drugs we use today were discovered this way. Institutionalized CYA and mountains of paperwork often cost more lives than it saves.
3. If a corporation has a big disaster, they'll go under...leaving the surviving private firms in the industry, who will scarf up the facilities and people left behind by the failed company. That's the very purpose of a corporation : to insulate the people owning it from the risk.
Plan : increase the budget to NASA, and ask for them to purchase rides to space from newly formed private companies.
The article says that NASA has "50 years of institutional experience" in doing spaceflight, and that this would be a bad idea.
The "institutional" part of that statement is the problem. NASA stinks for spaceflight. The problem isn't in their engineering, it's in the fact that they have many, many masters all trying to stir the pot. Their budget depends upon the whim of Congressmen, not performing to a contract.
Privatization has many failures. There's a lot of goods and services that it doesn't make sense to privatize. But I think the high tech industry of space travel is one that will benefit enormously from privatization.
The only downside? Private firms can probably get a LOT more manned launches done per year for the same cost, but they'll be a little riskier. More astronauts will be killed. I don't see this as a problem : there's 6 billion people on the planet, and I for one if faced between possibly dying during a trip to space or dying from old age would choose the former.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're missing the point. Evolved behaviors aren't morality. We've evolved behaviors that are sometimes moral by our artificial standards, sometimes not. And we have no reference points, so we cannot determine morality as mere mortals. A lot of your post has various misunderstandings about evolution, such as genetic memory and other things.
Actually I'm saying that we as earthlings cannot determine if an action is moral or immoral. This is because we do not have the knowledge that would be needed. In the past, we THOUGHT there was such a thing as morality, but we didn't know about evolution or how the neural hardware makes decisions or anything else. Turns out, we were wrong.
However, we can come up with a practical system for dealing with actions that are destructive to other individuals or to society. Such a system needs to be based upon research as to what actually reaches the local minima for crime versus the cost of fighting crime. (that is, we have to determine the cost of fighting crime versus the cost of the crime, and find the point on the graph that costs society the least). Criminal punishment should not be intended for 'revenge' : punishment should only be used if it is determined through research to actually reduce crime.
Agencies that attempt to punish people for their bad actions don't need to consider these things, though. It really doesn't matter where the failing is in a criminal that causes him to commit a crime, merely that he did it and this means we have to consider preventing this criminal from committing any more crimes for a period of time. Ultimately, I think we're going to discover that nearly all crime originates either in a bug in the hardware or a FEATURE of the hardware. (males commit way more crime because many of the crimes they commit increase their chances of reproduction)
Obviously, if humans have souls, then a cosmic authority would need to consider all influences, like you suggest, to determine accurate moral judgments.
Yes, this would work. The RNA that would be the target sequence for this treatment could be PART of an RNA string on HIV. We would then target the RNA molecules to bind to the receptors for helper T cells, which are the ones that HIV causes the most problems in. The CD4 receptor is one such target. This would definitely slow down the virus (although since current treatments can ALMOST eradicate HIV in a patient, it's hard to say if the treatment would be worth it)
Yes but the beauty of this treatment is that it's two stage. Once the RNA gets into a cell, it can be targeted to ONLY harm cells with the RNAs of cancer floating around in their cytoplasms.
It costs about $50k-$100k to have a person's brain cryogenically frozen. For those of us who believe in the laws of physics, the chances of eventually reviving a dead mind or at least recovering all of the memories and personality information is excellent. This would be a much better alternative than a year or two of excruciating suffering ending in a permanent death, and would be cheaper as well. I'm hoping reversible cryogenic freezing can be developed in my lifetime, so that we can definitely show that cryo patients are not actually dead, and make this procedure available to all. ("reversible" freezing would be a method using enough cryo-protectants that you could theoretically thaw out the brain and it would work. You wouldn't actually plan to do this for a century or two, but you could convince the general public that these patients were still alive)
One idea I've thought of to improve the method : how about blasting the frozen heads into space, and putting them into an orbit that keeps a planet between the space capsule and the sun? Then you wouldn't need to keep refilling the liquid nitrogen, or worry about something happening to the patients. Each frozen head would weigh about 5 kilograms : at today's $10,000/kilogram launch prices, that would be about $50,000 a patient.
I think the idea behind it is this. The more opiates you give a person, the higher the probability that they will become addicted to opiates. So you try to give them as much pain relief via acetaminophen as possible, with a few milligrams of opiates added for pain too severe for the acetaminophen to counter it. When I was hospitalized for a severe injury, I was given on demand morphine in the hospital for about a week. In the last few days of my hospital stay, they took me off morphine and put me on Vicodin. Ironically, I found the Vicodin was a lot more effective than the straight morphine was.
Once I went home, I had a big prescription of vicodin. I took it for about a day, and switched to straight tylenol because I didn't like how the opiates would cloud my head and cause me to sleep.
100 million lines of code? Where are they getting this number? The entire Microsoft ecosystem is about that many lines of code.
Maybe they mean assembly code? I'd imagine that the microcontrollers that a car uses are probably programmed with lots of bare metal assembly coding.
A "post scarcity" economy is a physical impossibility. The universe doesn't have unlimited resources.
HOWEVER, it's at least plausible that an economy could exist whereby the essentials to support billions of human lives in decent conditions could be generated with almost no input of human labor. All living humans could get all of their needs, and most of their wants taken care of with little effort on their part. With virtual reality, those humans who wanted things the economy couldn't provide (their own private planet, faster than light travel, sex with 50 clones of Pamela Anderson, etc) could get a close substitute.
Except that the difference between signing a form when you're ill and need prompt medical attention or you might die and signing a form when you buy a car is that you can turn down the latter obligation. In general, agreements and contracts made by individuals are only valid if the individual has some bargaining power or choice. Contracts made under duress or when there's no other options have to be regulated by law so that individuals don't get screwed over.
And precisely how much bargaining power do you have when you come to this "agreement"? Do you suppose that you could get the hospital to agree to charge you what the best insurance company would pay? Or instead do you think the hospital would dun you over and over and sic a collections agency on your ass if you don't pay 3x what the true price for the service is?
Let me get this straight : I hear that OLED is the "perfect" display tech.
+ Low energy consumption since all the light from the phosphers shines through
+ ultra high refresh rates possible
+ flicker free
+ full 180 degree viewing angle
+ perfect black levels with absolutely no light emmitting from pixels that are off
+ no ghosting at all
+ cheaper to manufacture than LCDs
+ flexible
+ ultra thin
Basically, a perfect display with no drawbacks other than the fact it isn't 3d like the holodeck.
Oh, and the blue pigments fade fast, so the display dims over time and the color balance gets messed up.
Oh, and it isn't being made in large enough quantities to be affordable.
So what's the deal? Why is Sony throwing in the towel now?
Best means one thing. A good athlete wins often in whatever sport he or she plays. The best athlete has the highest chance of winning out of any other athlete in the world. It doesn't matter how they got this chance. An ethical, non-drug using athlete can never be the best athlete, because an athlete with similar training and genetic potential who is using drugs will always have an advantage.
Erm, actually...the best athletes in the world are that way because of their tremendous hard work, genetic endowment, AND because they take steroids...The BEST athletes use everything.
Indeed, and the only way to challenge their claim is that you need lawyers. Good, expensive lawyers able to counter the army of lawyers the IOC undoubtedly has on retainer. Also, you need time...5-10 years for the courts to come to a final, uncontestable decision.
Nearly all individuals don't have the money or lifespan to do this. That's why big institutions hold all the cards when you deal with them. Only if the institution does something truly egregious do you have a chance of getting compensation.
Tell me more about helical 3d displays. I tried googling for it, and ironically this very slashdot post was the second hit. A lot of links to CT scanner stuff, but nothing about how an display actually works.
The interesting part is that the de-mining process starts with the assumption that all of these mines will still detonate. Wonder what kind of explosive is that reliable.
Hopefully, the actual fusing and ship detecting 'sensors' on the mine (not sure what else to call the big mechanical and magnetic switches mines of this vintage use) no longer work.
Childishly easy? There is equipment that can protect against directed sound weapons...a huge, bulky, helmet like apparatus that uses several things to block sound.
There's equipment that can stop tasers...basically a faraday cage around your body.
Heck, there's equipment that usually stops the low powered bullets used by cops. Just wrap your body in kevlar vests and kevlar pants and handgun bullets won't be able to touch you.
Now, as you waddle down the street swathed in protective gear, it'll be trivial for the ground cops to surround you and beat you to the ground with billy clubs. It'll also be a lot harder for you to get away after you commit a crime by trying to disable a drone.
Every weapon has a defense. As you may notice, the defense against lethal weapons is different from the one against the currently available nonlethal ones. So if the cops have all these weapons available, it'll be a lot harder for you to avoid them all.
That's why you launch from an unpopulated area, and you have the launch crew inside a bunker. We've been launching rockets this way since the beginning of rocketry. Even SpaceX does it this way.
Anyone have data on how these compare to x86 and Intel's latest creations? Presumably, one could write an efficient algorithm for a variety of common computing tasks and port it to the different chips to get a cross-architecture performance estimate.
Couldn't you access some kind of index file that would allow you to find everything else? Or are those files too low level for it to be accessed this way?
It would require much more complex firmware on the hard drive.
There's an enormous difference between The Pirates Bay and newsbinz.
Newzbin just automatically trawls all the binary newsgroups and automatically creates and index of what it finds. It's a common carrier, just like google. The fact that the binary newgroups have an enormous amount of pirated content is no more the fault of newzbin than the fact that the internet is choc full of disturbing porn is the fault of google.
The Pirates Bay, OTOH, is a site where the admins deliberately remove pirated content that was mislabeled from the site. This, as well as the site name, makes their database deliberately biased to help with piracy. Maybe that is illegal and maybe it isn't, but the point is, what TPB does is different than what newzbin does.
I disagree vehemently with your approach.
1. We're not "sacrificing" people, we're allowing people who are willing to tolerate a small risk (under 5%) of death in order for the glory of going to space. *I* would take that risk, even if 1/20 launches ended up blowing up or otherwise failing. You can go sit at home watching TV if you want, until old age puts you in a nursing home where you have to wear a diaper and someday something fails and you're dead. LIFE is ultimately going to result in death...you might as well get what you can out of it. If someone volunteers for a risky anything, we should generally allow them to take that risk.
2. Your reasoning is why medical science advances as such a glacial pace. In the old days, scientists could take experimental drugs right out of the lab and test them. Yes, there were some mishaps, but most of the drugs we use today were discovered this way. Institutionalized CYA and mountains of paperwork often cost more lives than it saves.
3. If a corporation has a big disaster, they'll go under...leaving the surviving private firms in the industry, who will scarf up the facilities and people left behind by the failed company. That's the very purpose of a corporation : to insulate the people owning it from the risk.
Plan : increase the budget to NASA, and ask for them to purchase rides to space from newly formed private companies.
The article says that NASA has "50 years of institutional experience" in doing spaceflight, and that this would be a bad idea.
The "institutional" part of that statement is the problem. NASA stinks for spaceflight. The problem isn't in their engineering, it's in the fact that they have many, many masters all trying to stir the pot. Their budget depends upon the whim of Congressmen, not performing to a contract.
Privatization has many failures. There's a lot of goods and services that it doesn't make sense to privatize. But I think the high tech industry of space travel is one that will benefit enormously from privatization.
The only downside? Private firms can probably get a LOT more manned launches done per year for the same cost, but they'll be a little riskier. More astronauts will be killed. I don't see this as a problem : there's 6 billion people on the planet, and I for one if faced between possibly dying during a trip to space or dying from old age would choose the former.