Taking of a human life is a serious thing and it should be treated seriously. A human should have to make that decision and live with the consequences regardless of how the act is actually carried out.
Killing has become more and more remote. For about a century now, artillery has generally been used to kill people the gunners can't see, and in WWII artillery was the main killer. Once killing is reduced to shooting at coordinates someone else supplies, is it that different from sending in robots?
If it's robot vs. robot, war is just an expense, and nobody gets killed. What's wrong with that? If it's robot vs. human, well, it's not like we haven't had battles and wars before with widely disparate technology and wildly different casualty ratios.
Return the suspicious books before you're asked. Most libraries nowadays keep no records on what books someone has checked out in the past, for just this reason. (It was a reaction to the Patriot Act.)
A friend of mine explained drug use by entertainers this way: you have access to enough money to buy drugs. You have no assurance that you're going to be working after your current contract. You're going to do what you can to make it more likely that you'll do well in this gig so you'll get another one. The availability, uncertainty, and incentives push strongly towards drug use.
"Infinity" is not a known value. If it were known, there would be a limit, and it would be finite. There are things known to be infinite, but that means we can't assign a value saying how many there are.
You are apparently using a new definition of "practical" that I was previously unaware of. "Practical" typically means something that can be put into practice without excessive costs of any sort. It means something an expert in the field would consider as an actual possibility. Your idea of redoing all the containers in the world and making all the container ships in the world submersible is exceedingly impractical.
The reason it wouldn't happen is that there are much cheaper and more reliable ways of getting that level of protection if desired, including armed guards and massively increased naval patrols. It isn't a matter of the risk not justifying the expense, it's a matter of the expense being way out of line with what can be accomplished.
There are advantages to submersible cargo ships. They don't need icebreakers. They aren't affected by storms. The fact that there are none in service might tell you something.
To be pedantic, battleships have had 12" armor (the thickest naval armor I'm aware of was about two feet of armor on the front of the main turrets on the Japanese battleships Yamato and Musashi), but not hulls. Instead of building up the hull, it was considered more worthwhile to attach expensive and specially-made armor plates.
Some modern companies seem to complain excessively about regulations that people have been living with for years without complaint. We've seen Uber complain that their taxi service is sometimes regulated like a taxi service, requiring commercial driver's licenses, commercial insurance, and background checks (nobody's applying medallion limits to Uber).
You seem to be saying that regulation shouldn't be applied when it's actually needed, but rather has to wait until numerous people have suffered for the lack of it. You're also calling for metrics that don't really exist. It's usually not possible to directly compare results with regulation and results without regulation over time. Consider background checks for taxi drivers: the idea is to reduce crime perpetrated by the drivers, but there really isn't much measurable other than how many people failed the check. In order to see if it reduces crime, it would be necessary to take some of the people failing the check and put them into cabs over a period of time and see how many passengers were crime victims.
Life requires judgment calls. If you don't like the calls your elected representatives are making, campaign against them in elections. If you get no traction, then it may well be that everyone else is happy with the situation.
The status quo is the status quo for reasons, some of which are good. Change for the sake of change is often bad, especially changes based on ignorance.
Exactly where do you get the information about how women feel after abortions? Do you make it up to suit your prejudices, or do you get it from other people who made it up? I haven't seen any such statement in reliable sources. I'd say the evidence is pretty clear that women who get abortions tend not to want to have that fetus/child at that time. There are cases of coercion, I'm sure, but not many.
I see that you want our entire society massively changed to suit your prejudices. I generally approve of the changes, but they're not going to happen any time soon, and will have unforeseen effects.
I also see that you prefer to misconstrue what I wrote and use insults than address what I actually wrote.
Sure. If your code gets hard to understand when you write your own templates, either don't do that or learn to do it better. You're the one who has to work with it, not me, and there's no moral significance in using features of a programming language. I find templates extremely useful at times, and sometimes tricky to work with, so I usually use ones people who are more confident than I am already wrote.
The only languages or frameworks that make it impossible to make errors are the ones that stop you from doing anything. Real life is messy and error-prone.
A lot of the complaints are of the form that Microsoft screwed up people's systems. Had this been a legitimate update offer, without underhanded attempts to force it, there'd be the normal level of complaints about it. If I decide to update a computer to Windows 10, and it doesn't work, that's my problem. If Microsoft practices nonconsensual updating on my computer, and the update doesn't work, that's Microsoft's problem.
I'm not claiming the road design was the best, and the other driver pulled a really bad move, but in that case I didn't have time to brake enough and the lane to the left was empty.
How about being on a four-lane highway, mostly empty, and somebody pulls in from a side road in front of you? If you've been monitoring, you may well know that the other lane is clear.
Heck, I'm still a little haunted by an incident where I took the proper action and avoided an accident. I still can see the in-skull tactical display showing the accident I averted, and what it probably would have done to the other driver.
The movie was not about robots turning against humanity. That would indeed be non-Asimovian. It was about the conflicts between the Three Laws of Robotics and possible results, and that's the sort of story Asimov liked to write.
The robots looked at the First Law, and figured that it was their job to prevent humanity from harm, and that they needed to take control of the situation to prevent harm to humans. Asimov wrote some stories that were at least related to this theme (although Jack Williamson's Humanoid stories took it all the way).
So, what is harm to humans, and what can robots do about it without causing greater harm? Certainly I'm safer with robots making sure I don't go anywhere dangerous or do anything with sharp knives and such, but is it worth it?
I'm going to suggest a third alternative: fostering a sort of thinking that would be useful later.
My favorite educational game is Lucas Learning's Pit Droids. It's a series of problems with amusing graphics, and it seemed to me to be tickling my math synapses. I may be wrong about this, but I'd recommend it on that basis.
I think it obvious that games can be educational. The question is whether Civ itself, not any other game, is suited for a school curriculum. I'm not convinced.
Because it's opinionated, prejudiced, and arrogant, I'd say. The kicker, I think, was when the AC accused economists as a whole of being incompetent on the basis of his favorite book on the subject.
Also because it's a flagrant attempt to graft the AC's nonstandard ideas into a game that isn't really designed to showcase them. It would be possible to write a game that was educational about the history of money, I suppose, but that would be best done by designing a new game.
The problem is that history has facts that certain people find uncomfortable. As far as I can tell, secession was primarily about slavery, and when the war started the Union was primarily fighting to reestablish the US more or less as it had been. Lincoln was anti-slavery, but he was also a politician, and knew that a war to end slavery wasn't going to be particularly attractive. He made the Emancipation Proclamation for its diplomatic effect, as it pretty well prevented Britain from direct intervention on the Confederate side, since the war was between a de facto country based on slavery and a country that was apparently anti-slavery.
Throw over a century of arguing and justification in there, and just finding out what went on gets complicated.
Effectively, there were no protections for whistle-blowers. The choices were to keep quiet, publish and leave the country, or publish and get sentenced for a long time in prison. What I don't like his his publication of information on the NSA spying abroad, which is precisely what I want it to do. If he had only published information on the NSA's spying in the US, I'd be much happier about him.
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Killing has become more and more remote. For about a century now, artillery has generally been used to kill people the gunners can't see, and in WWII artillery was the main killer. Once killing is reduced to shooting at coordinates someone else supplies, is it that different from sending in robots?
If it's robot vs. robot, war is just an expense, and nobody gets killed. What's wrong with that? If it's robot vs. human, well, it's not like we haven't had battles and wars before with widely disparate technology and wildly different casualty ratios.
Return the suspicious books before you're asked. Most libraries nowadays keep no records on what books someone has checked out in the past, for just this reason. (It was a reaction to the Patriot Act.)
A friend of mine explained drug use by entertainers this way: you have access to enough money to buy drugs. You have no assurance that you're going to be working after your current contract. You're going to do what you can to make it more likely that you'll do well in this gig so you'll get another one. The availability, uncertainty, and incentives push strongly towards drug use.
I'm always in my rest frame. It may not be the same frame as it was a microsecond ago, but it's my rest frame now.
Doesn't this mean that particle physicists should every so often run into people with large exclamation points over their heads?
"Infinity" is not a known value. If it were known, there would be a limit, and it would be finite. There are things known to be infinite, but that means we can't assign a value saying how many there are.
You are apparently using a new definition of "practical" that I was previously unaware of. "Practical" typically means something that can be put into practice without excessive costs of any sort. It means something an expert in the field would consider as an actual possibility. Your idea of redoing all the containers in the world and making all the container ships in the world submersible is exceedingly impractical.
The reason it wouldn't happen is that there are much cheaper and more reliable ways of getting that level of protection if desired, including armed guards and massively increased naval patrols. It isn't a matter of the risk not justifying the expense, it's a matter of the expense being way out of line with what can be accomplished.
There are advantages to submersible cargo ships. They don't need icebreakers. They aren't affected by storms. The fact that there are none in service might tell you something.
To be pedantic, battleships have had 12" armor (the thickest naval armor I'm aware of was about two feet of armor on the front of the main turrets on the Japanese battleships Yamato and Musashi), but not hulls. Instead of building up the hull, it was considered more worthwhile to attach expensive and specially-made armor plates.
Some modern companies seem to complain excessively about regulations that people have been living with for years without complaint. We've seen Uber complain that their taxi service is sometimes regulated like a taxi service, requiring commercial driver's licenses, commercial insurance, and background checks (nobody's applying medallion limits to Uber).
You seem to be saying that regulation shouldn't be applied when it's actually needed, but rather has to wait until numerous people have suffered for the lack of it. You're also calling for metrics that don't really exist. It's usually not possible to directly compare results with regulation and results without regulation over time. Consider background checks for taxi drivers: the idea is to reduce crime perpetrated by the drivers, but there really isn't much measurable other than how many people failed the check. In order to see if it reduces crime, it would be necessary to take some of the people failing the check and put them into cabs over a period of time and see how many passengers were crime victims.
Life requires judgment calls. If you don't like the calls your elected representatives are making, campaign against them in elections. If you get no traction, then it may well be that everyone else is happy with the situation.
They were picked up by Compaq a long time ago, and then HP bought Compaq.
The status quo is the status quo for reasons, some of which are good. Change for the sake of change is often bad, especially changes based on ignorance.
Exactly where do you get the information about how women feel after abortions? Do you make it up to suit your prejudices, or do you get it from other people who made it up? I haven't seen any such statement in reliable sources. I'd say the evidence is pretty clear that women who get abortions tend not to want to have that fetus/child at that time. There are cases of coercion, I'm sure, but not many.
I see that you want our entire society massively changed to suit your prejudices. I generally approve of the changes, but they're not going to happen any time soon, and will have unforeseen effects.
I also see that you prefer to misconstrue what I wrote and use insults than address what I actually wrote.
Sure. If your code gets hard to understand when you write your own templates, either don't do that or learn to do it better. You're the one who has to work with it, not me, and there's no moral significance in using features of a programming language. I find templates extremely useful at times, and sometimes tricky to work with, so I usually use ones people who are more confident than I am already wrote.
The only languages or frameworks that make it impossible to make errors are the ones that stop you from doing anything. Real life is messy and error-prone.
A lot of the complaints are of the form that Microsoft screwed up people's systems. Had this been a legitimate update offer, without underhanded attempts to force it, there'd be the normal level of complaints about it. If I decide to update a computer to Windows 10, and it doesn't work, that's my problem. If Microsoft practices nonconsensual updating on my computer, and the update doesn't work, that's Microsoft's problem.
That's what it is. I find it hard to believe that they all screw up that badly, as opposed to coming to conclusions I think entirely wrong.
There was no violence in the game, just clumsy and amusing droids. My son took to the scenario designer almost immediately.
I'm not claiming the road design was the best, and the other driver pulled a really bad move, but in that case I didn't have time to brake enough and the lane to the left was empty.
How about being on a four-lane highway, mostly empty, and somebody pulls in from a side road in front of you? If you've been monitoring, you may well know that the other lane is clear.
Heck, I'm still a little haunted by an incident where I took the proper action and avoided an accident. I still can see the in-skull tactical display showing the accident I averted, and what it probably would have done to the other driver.
The movie was not about robots turning against humanity. That would indeed be non-Asimovian. It was about the conflicts between the Three Laws of Robotics and possible results, and that's the sort of story Asimov liked to write.
The robots looked at the First Law, and figured that it was their job to prevent humanity from harm, and that they needed to take control of the situation to prevent harm to humans. Asimov wrote some stories that were at least related to this theme (although Jack Williamson's Humanoid stories took it all the way).
So, what is harm to humans, and what can robots do about it without causing greater harm? Certainly I'm safer with robots making sure I don't go anywhere dangerous or do anything with sharp knives and such, but is it worth it?
I'm going to suggest a third alternative: fostering a sort of thinking that would be useful later.
My favorite educational game is Lucas Learning's Pit Droids. It's a series of problems with amusing graphics, and it seemed to me to be tickling my math synapses. I may be wrong about this, but I'd recommend it on that basis.
I think it obvious that games can be educational. The question is whether Civ itself, not any other game, is suited for a school curriculum. I'm not convinced.
Because it's opinionated, prejudiced, and arrogant, I'd say. The kicker, I think, was when the AC accused economists as a whole of being incompetent on the basis of his favorite book on the subject.
Also because it's a flagrant attempt to graft the AC's nonstandard ideas into a game that isn't really designed to showcase them. It would be possible to write a game that was educational about the history of money, I suppose, but that would be best done by designing a new game.
The problem is that history has facts that certain people find uncomfortable. As far as I can tell, secession was primarily about slavery, and when the war started the Union was primarily fighting to reestablish the US more or less as it had been. Lincoln was anti-slavery, but he was also a politician, and knew that a war to end slavery wasn't going to be particularly attractive. He made the Emancipation Proclamation for its diplomatic effect, as it pretty well prevented Britain from direct intervention on the Confederate side, since the war was between a de facto country based on slavery and a country that was apparently anti-slavery.
Throw over a century of arguing and justification in there, and just finding out what went on gets complicated.
Effectively, there were no protections for whistle-blowers. The choices were to keep quiet, publish and leave the country, or publish and get sentenced for a long time in prison. What I don't like his his publication of information on the NSA spying abroad, which is precisely what I want it to do. If he had only published information on the NSA's spying in the US, I'd be much happier about him.