In 1999, the EU had a GDP of 7.8 billion euros, the US of 8.7 billion euros. The US was only 12% better off than the EU. Once the new 10 prospective EU members are approved, the EU will be the biggest single market in the world, and will be a larger economic force than the US. Something to consider, neh?
Vastly superior economy? I wouldn't be so hasty, or confident, and nor would I class a 12% gain as "vastly superior". Certainly not when this was measured when the US was at it's peak, and certainly not when you consider that the economy of the EU, when expanded to 25 member states, will be easily larger than that of the US.
I wasn't proclaiming EU dominance over the US. Just that if a trade war started, the US couldn't sit comfortably back and be unaffected, whilst laughing at those poor EU citizens that depend so much on US goods. 12% ain't a lot, folks, and the EU and US exchange goods on an almost equal footing, as I pointed out before.
Huh? Have I missed something? I didn't mention a "multi-trillion dollar" deficit, nor did I imply it, apart from saying it was damn high. However, with a debt of nearly 400 billion dollar (or 0.4 trillion, if you prefer), the US does owe more money than any other country in the world.
That's 4% of the US's GDP, which is even more than France has racked up at the moment, and certainly much more than the EU as a whole has.
And where does this whole 3 years thing come from? Perhaps it would be best if you didn't mix political agendas, as you certainly haven't read my post through properly.
First off, let me express how impressed I might be that you can control a mouse with an extra prehensile appendage. The ladies must really dig that kind of dexterity.
The rewards are many.
And, not to throw poop at other AC's but I assumed you ment you'd joined a evolutionaryily stunted criminal organization that enjoyed public masturbation and occasional gay sex. Like the Portland Trail Blazers, or Dallas Cowboys.
Clearly, some simians give others a bad name. It's also a common misconception to think that monkeys are less evolved, somehow, than humans. Granted, the job market has been small, but recent technological advances have widened up our field of expertise.
The dot-com boom made it fashionable to have non-traditional office furnature. An investor no longer bats an eye to see a potted tree or tire-swing. Being a mobile species, laptop and wireless technology also helps, and corespondance through email and IM is the prefered method of communication.
For more information on this trend, this corperation does an excellent job of promoting the use of monkeys in the IT industry.
Unfortunately, from past research, I know that the numbers on these things are damn tricky to get. However...
This marks out US budget deficit as 4% of GDP. According to this, there are only three countries in the EU with debts currently exceeding 3% of GDP. France, with 3.9% (though a BBC article puts this now at the same level as the US), Germany at 3.8% and Portugal at 3.3%. Remember, these are the only countries out of all the members of the EU with deficits over 3%.
Unfortunately I couldn't find a source for the overall EU deficit. As I say, such things are nearly impossible to find on good. But we can conclude that the EU's overall budget deficit is probably quite close to 3%, considering the majority of member states are at or below that. And even though Germany and France are big economies in the EU, Britain's not bad for size either, and thus she and the other 11 member states I haven't mentioned yet, probably contribute a greater amount than the France/Germany pair.
Of course, a lot of this is speculation, due to inadequate statistics, but effectively US debt is quite a bit higher; anywhere from 40% to 20% more, when compared to relative GDPs.
I'm not saying it's much different, just that taken the fact that the EU and US trade on equal footing, and the EU has an economy with less debt, then it's not necessarily given that a trade war would be in the US's favour.
A trade war with the EU would probably damage US interests more than the EU. Of the US imports 16.1% came from the EU in 1999. Of the EU imports 16.9% came from the US in 1999. So the EU and US trade on, more or less, equal footing.
Of course, the EU doesn't have the huge national debt the Bush administration has given the US. In fact, EU economic policy keeps it's member states debt fairly controlled.
So the US actually has far more to lose than the EU at the moment. Whilst you may find it amusing to see the EU economies struggle, I hope you're not a US citizen, or else you'd most probably find your own economy doing quite a bit worse.
Does that mean we'll have to abstain from using "icons" as well?
Actually, the word Daemon, like many things in Christianity, has roots in paganism, though it also has connections to Ancient Greek as well. Only in Christianity does the word specifically refer to an evil entity.
What's the difference between Unix borrowing the word to mean Disk And Execution MONitor, and Christianity borrowing the word to mean a sort of evil, supernatural entity?
Here's a free whack with the clue-bat -- EVERYTHING is taxed heavily by most countries in Europe. Socialism and social engineering doesn't come for free, you know.
Not every European country has high tax rates, and not every product is taxed at the same rate. For instance, Petrol is taxed over 16 times more than, say, a computer or a watch or a football, is in the UK. Over three quarters of the price of petrol over here is tax. That's a markup of 300%.
So I fail to see your point. Petrol is expensive in the EU almost solely because of tax. Since I live in the EU, and there have been many debates on the subject, I think I can say I'm reasonably informed on the matter.
Regardless, I stand behind the argument that a domestic source for oil results in a lower cost.
In the EU, tax is the major issue. Not that I really mind. Tax is a good way of keeping the amount of vehicles on the road down, or at least getting the money needed to clean up after them.
So there you have it -- a diary of a typical suburban geek's travels. I've given you what you've asked for, now you tell me how I could make that work with a scooter or public transportation. Hint: You can't.
You're missing the point entirely. Again. Of course you can't use a scooter to shop or take a family out or any of those things. Would you consider buying a helicopter to take you down to the shops? Just because a scooter isn't designed for long distance, heavy loading, or whatever, doesn't mean it's not useful.
The post you originally replied to, basically said, "The US could do with using two-wheeled transport a little more." You seem to be taking it to mean: "The US should switch entirely to using two-wheeled transport." Whether this is intentional or not, it was obviously not the original poster's meaning, and shouldn't be taken as such.
Take Rome. That has much more two-wheeled forms of transport than cities in the US with a similar climate. This is probably due more to the US fascination with SUVs and the like, a trend that has largely passed over the EU. Personally, I'd be happy if the US concentrated more on making it's cars efficient than big. Around the rest of the world, fuel economy for the average vehicle is more efficient. In the US, it's actually decreased.
This is what irritates me. Sure, you could dig up more oil natively to get the price down. Or, the US could say, "Hey, wait a moment, if we improve our terrible efficiency of our vehicles to be nearer the standard the rest of the world, then we'll save much more money and help the environment."
I think it is. The above poster argues that a motorbike or scooter isn't practical because you can't fit a family on one. I don't think the person to whom he was replying had that quite in mind. The person advocating motorbikes and scooters obviously was not saying a family should sit on them. Instead of focusing on the real arguments against scooters and motorcycles, the poster goes off on a bizarre rant about families. Either he's deliberately missing the point, and thus this is a straw man, or he's an idiot.
It's not a very good argument at all. It's very straw man. Effectively, the parent to the above poster said: "Why not use scooters more." Then the above poster replies with: "If we completely replaced cars with scooters, we'd be screwed." Of course, the parent poster was not saying this at all.
It's frankly, a ridiculous argument. You might as well argue that planes are no good near the ocean because you can fit more people on boats. The original poster quite clearly meant that scooters and the like are useful to use in warm climates for transport of one or two people. If it works in Italy, why not in the US?
His other arguments are not altogether too good, either. Just because you have a car, doesn't mean you have to use it. Just because you have a scooter, doesn't mean you have to drive it out in the pouring rain or through snowstorms. Also, from my experience of mopeds, scooters, etc, you don't stink of fumes, either. Though perhaps that's due to the better fuel efficiency of European cars and the fewer of them on the road.
There are good arguments against two-wheeled forms of transport. The US being more spread out, and scooters being more dangerous, are two. But that's not to say they couldn't be used more in the US than they are now. Unfortunately, there seems to be a trend not only away from two-wheeled transport, but also toward the biggest, most inefficient SUVs imaginable. Elsewhere in the world, fuel efficiency is much, much higher than most US cars. And that general attitude, along with the Kyoto treaty that the US government messed up completely before throwing it out the window, is not something that's really too good.
Yes, and what makes us different from most of the rest of the world is that we have an advanced society and a DOMESTIC supply for approx. 50% of our oil demand. (Which is about 50% too low. IMO it's time to drill in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska and anywhere else we can find domestic supplies, then tell the Saudis and the rest of the mid-east to go F themselves.)
It isn't that the base cost of petrol is any higher in the EU. It isn't. But petrol is taxed heavily by most countries in Europe.
>>US is also one of the few countries where 2 wheeled vehicles like motorbikes/scooters are almost non existent.
Gosh, do you think that may be because they're not very PRACTICAL? "C'mon, kids, let's all hop on Dad's 38cc scooter and go visit Grandma. Junior, you sit on the front fender, sis can ride on your shoulders, Mom gets the basket on the back, and Fido can just follow along since we won't be doing more than 2 mph even with a tailwind."
If you're going to try for a straw man argument, at least make it less transparent than this.
You can choose to go live your life styled after the average scooter-riding borderline third-world peasant. I'll stick to my big air conditioned cars and house in the 'burbs, thankyouverymuch.
Ah, I see, a troll, no? Subtle, I suppose, but not so much as to avoid looking like an idiot.
Pretty obvious, and dare I say, sensible. There seems to be a lot of anglicisation of words in the US. Like aeroplane becoming airplane. Heh. Deja vu:)
IIRC, if you take three square mirrors and arrange them at 90 degrees to one another, like the corner of a cube, then a ray of light entering into this arrangement will reflect back in the exact direction it came from.
So, as far as I can see, if you have many of these mirror arrangements, and coat the outside of tanks with this geometric pattern of small mirrors, then not only will lasers bounce off, but they will also return right back from where they started. Boom!
Life is measured relative to the ecosystem in which we live in[1]. Can you suggest a mechanism by which an intelligent robot would be physically self-modifying within our ecosystem? No? Then we probably don't need to answer the question for another 20 years.
As someone else pointed out AI != Robot. There are plenty of self-modifying pieces of code around. Any AI worth it's salt nowadays is self-modifying. Hell, Core-Wars has self-modifying pieces of code:)
So? Can you figure out how an intelligent robot could in theory
Again, who said anything about a robot? If an AI wants to reproduce, which is given as making a near-exact copy of itself, I would suggest it look into the Unix "cp" command. Hell, one of the main problems with some pieces of code today is that they copy themselves around way too much. Outlook "What's Security?" Express certainly has provided the main breeding ground, but we can't give Microsoft all the credit for email viruses and worms.
I would counter that by saying that given time in the correct environment to grow and learn, this fetus will become as intelligent as adult human. The same cannot be said about any artificial intelligence we have today. So a human fetus is more human than an AI.
Given a self-modifying piece of software that uses genetic algorithms to improve itself, then in the correct environment to grow and learn (say, a 0.02 exaflop computer), this program may very well become as intelligent as an adult human. Even if we don't have the "correct environment" now, we can stuff it into a computer, and keep adding components and upgrading the system until 2020 or whenever.
Furthermore, until we know that a human is nothing more than it's physical brain and body, human life should be treated with more value than that.
That's a silly argument. You could make the same comparison between, say, those of direct african descent and those of european ancestry. Hell, can I prove that I'm just as good as a person with dark skin, or should I consider myself inferior until I can prove that I am not?
Parasite: an animal or plant that lives in or on a host (another animal or plant); the parasite obtains nourishment from the host without benefiting or killing the host.
Whilst one could argue that a foetus will benefit the mother in future, if we just take the foetus as-is, then it is, technically, a parasite. Only in the long term, if the foetus survives, is it not a parasite. Or if the mother actually wants the child, and gains psychological reassurance for it, I suppose. Then again, if the mother wants an abortion, then the foetus does not provide reassurance nor does it have a future to grow into something sentient.
That all said, I hope that many, many more foetuses continue to parasitically feed off their parents for many years to come:)
Murder? At the stage when a foetus is aborted it is not sentient, nor conscious. Technically it's just a parasite. It does, however, have the potential to become a human being, which is important.
But your example is plain idiocy. Lets say that you noticed this woman, and invited her around for tea a month or so before your example, and recommend that she not stress herself in the bedroom. She listens, there's no frolicing, and you have just MURDERED Ludwig Van Beethoven. That little sperm cell of genetic information quietly expires and your actions have exactly the same result as if you advised abortion.
In fact, how many people have you "murdered" in your lifetime? How many potential lives of geniuses or artists are snuffed out because the genetic data is lost forever. Hell, your existance is probably screwing up the far flung future in all kinds of ways.
You can't call abortion murder. The thing you've destroyed is not a sentient life. Abortion may be wrong, but it's not murder.
I feel a similar way. Maybe it's just nostalgia, but the level on science on TV seens to have decreased. Personally, I adored Local Heros, though I have to admit I haven't seen much of Science Shack, recently.
It would certainly be nice if there were more technical programmes on TV, rather than dumbing them down to the lowest common denominator.
Also, it seems, there has not been a single technical programme on software or computing made so far to date. At least, none that I have seen. Anyone know of anything being shown like this?
In the UK, the BBC has a lot of good science programs. BBC2 more really, because of the connections with the Open University, but there's also some other interesting things on. It's a long way from being a dedicated science channel, but it does a better job then any other channel I've seen, even the ones on Cable/Satellite.
Science Shack is good, with Adam Hart-Davis and his enthusiam for odd and fun experiments. Time Commanders is something I should mention, even if that's more military history, but only because I enjoy strategy games, and the idea of letting contestants take one side of an famous battles is good. If only they'd do a head-to-head version too:). The Human Mind and other documentary series like that are interesting, and deal with a lot of biology stuff. The Sky at Night is the longest running program in the world, and is interesting if you're into astronomy. Then there's also Rough Science, which is where a group of scientists have to complete tasks such as panning gold or building a generator whilst stuck out in the middle of nowhere with little resources. And Hollywood Science I like too.
Now if only they'd take all of these and all the rest and stick them on one channel for convenience:)
Five or six years ago, that would be entirely true. Perhaps in a few more years Blender will close the gap on Maya. Maybe not. Interesting to see though.
Slashdot Mirror
In 1999, the EU had a GDP of 7.8 billion euros, the US of 8.7 billion euros. The US was only 12% better off than the EU. Once the new 10 prospective EU members are approved, the EU will be the biggest single market in the world, and will be a larger economic force than the US. Something to consider, neh?
Vastly superior economy? I wouldn't be so hasty, or confident, and nor would I class a 12% gain as "vastly superior". Certainly not when this was measured when the US was at it's peak, and certainly not when you consider that the economy of the EU, when expanded to 25 member states, will be easily larger than that of the US.
I wasn't proclaiming EU dominance over the US. Just that if a trade war started, the US couldn't sit comfortably back and be unaffected, whilst laughing at those poor EU citizens that depend so much on US goods. 12% ain't a lot, folks, and the EU and US exchange goods on an almost equal footing, as I pointed out before.
Huh? Have I missed something? I didn't mention a "multi-trillion dollar" deficit, nor did I imply it, apart from saying it was damn high. However, with a debt of nearly 400 billion dollar (or 0.4 trillion, if you prefer), the US does owe more money than any other country in the world.
That's 4% of the US's GDP, which is even more than France has racked up at the moment, and certainly much more than the EU as a whole has.
And where does this whole 3 years thing come from? Perhaps it would be best if you didn't mix political agendas, as you certainly haven't read my post through properly.
First off, let me express how impressed I might be that you can control a mouse with an extra prehensile appendage. The ladies must really dig that kind of dexterity.
The rewards are many.
And, not to throw poop at other AC's but I assumed you ment you'd joined a evolutionaryily stunted criminal organization that enjoyed public masturbation and occasional gay sex. Like the Portland Trail Blazers, or Dallas Cowboys.
Clearly, some simians give others a bad name. It's also a common misconception to think that monkeys are less evolved, somehow, than humans. Granted, the job market has been small, but recent technological advances have widened up our field of expertise.
The dot-com boom made it fashionable to have non-traditional office furnature. An investor no longer bats an eye to see a potted tree or tire-swing. Being a mobile species, laptop and wireless technology also helps, and corespondance through email and IM is the prefered method of communication.
For more information on this trend, this corperation does an excellent job of promoting the use of monkeys in the IT industry.
What if I'm a monkey? Typing with 20 digits and having an extra appendage to control the mouse comes in very handy, let me tell you.
:)
That said, my sig doesn't necessarily imply my creation by simians. It's ambiguous
Unfortunately, from past research, I know that the numbers on these things are damn tricky to get. However...
This marks out US budget deficit as 4% of GDP. According to this, there are only three countries in the EU with debts currently exceeding 3% of GDP. France, with 3.9% (though a BBC article puts this now at the same level as the US), Germany at 3.8% and Portugal at 3.3%. Remember, these are the only countries out of all the members of the EU with deficits over 3%.
Unfortunately I couldn't find a source for the overall EU deficit. As I say, such things are nearly impossible to find on good. But we can conclude that the EU's overall budget deficit is probably quite close to 3%, considering the majority of member states are at or below that. And even though Germany and France are big economies in the EU, Britain's not bad for size either, and thus she and the other 11 member states I haven't mentioned yet, probably contribute a greater amount than the France/Germany pair.
Of course, a lot of this is speculation, due to inadequate statistics, but effectively US debt is quite a bit higher; anywhere from 40% to 20% more, when compared to relative GDPs.
I'm not saying it's much different, just that taken the fact that the EU and US trade on equal footing, and the EU has an economy with less debt, then it's not necessarily given that a trade war would be in the US's favour.
A trade war with the EU would probably damage US interests more than the EU. Of the US imports 16.1% came from the EU in 1999. Of the EU imports 16.9% came from the US in 1999. So the EU and US trade on, more or less, equal footing.
Of course, the EU doesn't have the huge national debt the Bush administration has given the US. In fact, EU economic policy keeps it's member states debt fairly controlled.
So the US actually has far more to lose than the EU at the moment. Whilst you may find it amusing to see the EU economies struggle, I hope you're not a US citizen, or else you'd most probably find your own economy doing quite a bit worse.
Gah! I wanted too ;)
Does that mean we'll have to abstain from using "icons" as well?
Actually, the word Daemon, like many things in Christianity, has roots in paganism, though it also has connections to Ancient Greek as well. Only in Christianity does the word specifically refer to an evil entity.
What's the difference between Unix borrowing the word to mean Disk And Execution MONitor, and Christianity borrowing the word to mean a sort of evil, supernatural entity?
Here's a free whack with the clue-bat -- EVERYTHING is taxed heavily by most countries in Europe. Socialism and social engineering doesn't come for free, you know.
Not every European country has high tax rates, and not every product is taxed at the same rate. For instance, Petrol is taxed over 16 times more than, say, a computer or a watch or a football, is in the UK. Over three quarters of the price of petrol over here is tax. That's a markup of 300%.
So I fail to see your point. Petrol is expensive in the EU almost solely because of tax. Since I live in the EU, and there have been many debates on the subject, I think I can say I'm reasonably informed on the matter.
Regardless, I stand behind the argument that a domestic source for oil results in a lower cost.
In the EU, tax is the major issue. Not that I really mind. Tax is a good way of keeping the amount of vehicles on the road down, or at least getting the money needed to clean up after them.
So there you have it -- a diary of a typical suburban geek's travels. I've given you what you've asked for, now you tell me how I could make that work with a scooter or public transportation. Hint: You can't.
You're missing the point entirely. Again. Of course you can't use a scooter to shop or take a family out or any of those things. Would you consider buying a helicopter to take you down to the shops? Just because a scooter isn't designed for long distance, heavy loading, or whatever, doesn't mean it's not useful.
The post you originally replied to, basically said, "The US could do with using two-wheeled transport a little more." You seem to be taking it to mean: "The US should switch entirely to using two-wheeled transport." Whether this is intentional or not, it was obviously not the original poster's meaning, and shouldn't be taken as such.
Take Rome. That has much more two-wheeled forms of transport than cities in the US with a similar climate. This is probably due more to the US fascination with SUVs and the like, a trend that has largely passed over the EU. Personally, I'd be happy if the US concentrated more on making it's cars efficient than big. Around the rest of the world, fuel economy for the average vehicle is more efficient. In the US, it's actually decreased.
This is what irritates me. Sure, you could dig up more oil natively to get the price down. Or, the US could say, "Hey, wait a moment, if we improve our terrible efficiency of our vehicles to be nearer the standard the rest of the world, then we'll save much more money and help the environment."
It isn't a strawman argument.
I think it is. The above poster argues that a motorbike or scooter isn't practical because you can't fit a family on one. I don't think the person to whom he was replying had that quite in mind. The person advocating motorbikes and scooters obviously was not saying a family should sit on them. Instead of focusing on the real arguments against scooters and motorcycles, the poster goes off on a bizarre rant about families. Either he's deliberately missing the point, and thus this is a straw man, or he's an idiot.
It's not a very good argument at all. It's very straw man. Effectively, the parent to the above poster said: "Why not use scooters more." Then the above poster replies with: "If we completely replaced cars with scooters, we'd be screwed." Of course, the parent poster was not saying this at all.
It's frankly, a ridiculous argument. You might as well argue that planes are no good near the ocean because you can fit more people on boats. The original poster quite clearly meant that scooters and the like are useful to use in warm climates for transport of one or two people. If it works in Italy, why not in the US?
His other arguments are not altogether too good, either. Just because you have a car, doesn't mean you have to use it. Just because you have a scooter, doesn't mean you have to drive it out in the pouring rain or through snowstorms. Also, from my experience of mopeds, scooters, etc, you don't stink of fumes, either. Though perhaps that's due to the better fuel efficiency of European cars and the fewer of them on the road.
There are good arguments against two-wheeled forms of transport. The US being more spread out, and scooters being more dangerous, are two. But that's not to say they couldn't be used more in the US than they are now. Unfortunately, there seems to be a trend not only away from two-wheeled transport, but also toward the biggest, most inefficient SUVs imaginable. Elsewhere in the world, fuel efficiency is much, much higher than most US cars. And that general attitude, along with the Kyoto treaty that the US government messed up completely before throwing it out the window, is not something that's really too good.
Yes, and what makes us different from most of the rest of the world is that we have an advanced society and a DOMESTIC supply for approx. 50% of our oil demand. (Which is about 50% too low. IMO it's time to drill in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska and anywhere else we can find domestic supplies, then tell the Saudis and the rest of the mid-east to go F themselves.)
It isn't that the base cost of petrol is any higher in the EU. It isn't. But petrol is taxed heavily by most countries in Europe.
>>US is also one of the few countries where 2 wheeled vehicles like motorbikes/scooters are almost non existent.
Gosh, do you think that may be because they're not very PRACTICAL? "C'mon, kids, let's all hop on Dad's 38cc scooter and go visit Grandma. Junior, you sit on the front fender, sis can ride on your shoulders, Mom gets the basket on the back, and Fido can just follow along since we won't be doing more than 2 mph even with a tailwind."
If you're going to try for a straw man argument, at least make it less transparent than this.
You can choose to go live your life styled after the average scooter-riding borderline third-world peasant. I'll stick to my big air conditioned cars and house in the 'burbs, thankyouverymuch.
Ah, I see, a troll, no? Subtle, I suppose, but not so much as to avoid looking like an idiot.
Pretty obvious, and dare I say, sensible. There seems to be a lot of anglicisation of words in the US. Like aeroplane becoming airplane. Heh. Deja vu :)
;)
Or is that Day Jar Voo?
How is "Cheque" spelt in USian then?
Maybe he meant "MC"?
Oh yep, that sounds familiar. You have to wonder what the fascination with lasers is. For military purposes, they're pretty useless.
IIRC, if you take three square mirrors and arrange them at 90 degrees to one another, like the corner of a cube, then a ray of light entering into this arrangement will reflect back in the exact direction it came from.
So, as far as I can see, if you have many of these mirror arrangements, and coat the outside of tanks with this geometric pattern of small mirrors, then not only will lasers bounce off, but they will also return right back from where they started. Boom!
Life is measured relative to the ecosystem in which we live in[1]. Can you suggest a mechanism by which an intelligent robot would be physically self-modifying within our ecosystem? No? Then we probably don't need to answer the question for another 20 years.
:)
As someone else pointed out AI != Robot. There are plenty of self-modifying pieces of code around. Any AI worth it's salt nowadays is self-modifying. Hell, Core-Wars has self-modifying pieces of code
So? Can you figure out how an intelligent robot could in theory
Again, who said anything about a robot? If an AI wants to reproduce, which is given as making a near-exact copy of itself, I would suggest it look into the Unix "cp" command. Hell, one of the main problems with some pieces of code today is that they copy themselves around way too much. Outlook "What's Security?" Express certainly has provided the main breeding ground, but we can't give Microsoft all the credit for email viruses and worms.
How do you define growth then? What do I do that is somehow different or superior to modification?
Out of interest, what does it do? Looking at it I'd say it takes random files and prints out some dots, though I'm not sure of the significance.
Yep. Tried it. Dots.
I would counter that by saying that given time in the correct environment to grow and learn, this fetus will become as intelligent as adult human. The same cannot be said about any artificial intelligence we have today. So a human fetus is more human than an AI.
Given a self-modifying piece of software that uses genetic algorithms to improve itself, then in the correct environment to grow and learn (say, a 0.02 exaflop computer), this program may very well become as intelligent as an adult human. Even if we don't have the "correct environment" now, we can stuff it into a computer, and keep adding components and upgrading the system until 2020 or whenever.
Furthermore, until we know that a human is nothing more than it's physical brain and body, human life should be treated with more value than that.
That's a silly argument. You could make the same comparison between, say, those of direct african descent and those of european ancestry. Hell, can I prove that I'm just as good as a person with dark skin, or should I consider myself inferior until I can prove that I am not?
Parasite: an animal or plant that lives in or on a host (another animal or plant); the parasite obtains nourishment from the host without benefiting or killing the host.
:)
Whilst one could argue that a foetus will benefit the mother in future, if we just take the foetus as-is, then it is, technically, a parasite. Only in the long term, if the foetus survives, is it not a parasite. Or if the mother actually wants the child, and gains psychological reassurance for it, I suppose. Then again, if the mother wants an abortion, then the foetus does not provide reassurance nor does it have a future to grow into something sentient.
That all said, I hope that many, many more foetuses continue to parasitically feed off their parents for many years to come
Murder? At the stage when a foetus is aborted it is not sentient, nor conscious. Technically it's just a parasite. It does, however, have the potential to become a human being, which is important.
But your example is plain idiocy. Lets say that you noticed this woman, and invited her around for tea a month or so before your example, and recommend that she not stress herself in the bedroom. She listens, there's no frolicing, and you have just MURDERED Ludwig Van Beethoven. That little sperm cell of genetic information quietly expires and your actions have exactly the same result as if you advised abortion.
In fact, how many people have you "murdered" in your lifetime? How many potential lives of geniuses or artists are snuffed out because the genetic data is lost forever. Hell, your existance is probably screwing up the far flung future in all kinds of ways.
You can't call abortion murder. The thing you've destroyed is not a sentient life. Abortion may be wrong, but it's not murder.
I feel a similar way. Maybe it's just nostalgia, but the level on science on TV seens to have decreased. Personally, I adored Local Heros, though I have to admit I haven't seen much of Science Shack, recently.
It would certainly be nice if there were more technical programmes on TV, rather than dumbing them down to the lowest common denominator.
Also, it seems, there has not been a single technical programme on software or computing made so far to date. At least, none that I have seen. Anyone know of anything being shown like this?
In the UK, the BBC has a lot of good science programs. BBC2 more really, because of the connections with the Open University, but there's also some other interesting things on. It's a long way from being a dedicated science channel, but it does a better job then any other channel I've seen, even the ones on Cable/Satellite.
:). The Human Mind and other documentary series like that are interesting, and deal with a lot of biology stuff. The Sky at Night is the longest running program in the world, and is interesting if you're into astronomy. Then there's also Rough Science, which is where a group of scientists have to complete tasks such as panning gold or building a generator whilst stuck out in the middle of nowhere with little resources. And Hollywood Science I like too.
:)
Science Shack is good, with Adam Hart-Davis and his enthusiam for odd and fun experiments. Time Commanders is something I should mention, even if that's more military history, but only because I enjoy strategy games, and the idea of letting contestants take one side of an famous battles is good. If only they'd do a head-to-head version too
Now if only they'd take all of these and all the rest and stick them on one channel for convenience
Five or six years ago, that would be entirely true. Perhaps in a few more years Blender will close the gap on Maya. Maybe not. Interesting to see though.