There is no ARGH. Burning your retina is painless, that's why it's so dangerous to look at the Sun. You can go outside on a sunny day and stare directly at the Sun. It doesn't matter how long you do it, there is no pain, just like cutting your brain with a knife. There was simply no evolutionary reason for nature to make these experiences painful, because until we humans got intelligence no animal was smart enough to harm itself in such an ingeniuos way.:)
The cop has to protect the citizens, not himself. He chose the job, he is paid to risk his life, so unless he can be reasonably sure he is in real danger, shooting anyone who shinesa laser pointer at him is unjustified murder.
We don't give cops guns to make cops safer. We give them guns to make us safer. If they abuse our trust killing innocent children, they should be jailed for 10+ years.
I just read three replies you made in this thread and I don't see anything about formatting, except something about missing the nuclear part, so I don't know what you are talking about.
And I noticed that your formatting is poor, but why don't you "check, double check, triple check, and god dammit check it again" if you know it's so? Are you above the rules?
Anyway, I insulted you not because your post was poorly written, but because it was stupid. Not doing something is not avoiding the risks, it's just taking different ones. If we don't try to capture, destroy and divert asteroids, we may not have a chance to learn it quickly if we find out a comet is going to hit us in 3 months. Your comment was stupid, because it ignored that. So I suggested that the cause might have been your stupidity.
First, we can have a law against piracy, but tolerate it when it does more good than harm. Second, piracy often does more good than harm. It can be demonstrated really easily by anyone with a good grasp of economics (I wrote an article about this, but it's in Russian). We already have many laws which affect different people (companies) differently. Why shouldn't we have another one, especially when that law benefits the economy significantly?
BTW, when you say most software is developed by small companies, do you have data to back this up? Because the data I saw says the opposite.
Nonsense. Before the stone age of arcade games there weren't electronic games at all. You had to kick a can and imagine you are bing a part of a big space battle. Or may be ride on a stick and pretend you were King of Gondor. Do you imply that anything which requires us using imagination less is bad? May be we should burn all books, because imagining the stories without reading what an author wrote is so much better?
Don't be silly, the more realistic the games are, the better.
Why do I have this ominous feeling of dread May be because you are stupid? You comment about diverting Earth instead of divering an asteroid certainly suggests that...
Wrong. You can't have evolution in a darwinian sense unless you have heredity. Heredity means that there must be traits passing from parent to offspring. In Conway's Life you don't have heredity - the offspring is often completely different from the parent and adding or removing one cell can drastically change the nature of the pattern. You don't have evolution there, you basically have random changes that may result in stable patters simply by accident. The same is probably true for those quantum things. If there is no heredity, there is no evolution, it just happens that stable patterns emerge, but they do not evolve.
So this is indeed an abuse of the term "darwinism". And a case of publicity whorism.
Well, it's called "idea darwinism" or memetics. Concepts that are more fit survive. And one of the useful traits for memes is taking a popular term and appending it to yourself.
Like if you had something to do with gardening you could take the word "Xtreme" and attach it to yourself. Now that you are called "Xtreme Gardening" you are suddenly more popular, more books are written about you, people want to buy products based on you. You prosper and reproduce.:)
Now imagine that you were an idea about quantum mechanics...
Re:God of the Gaps: Glass half-full or half-empty?
on
Subatomic Darwinism
·
· Score: 1
Yes, smarter. Smarter and less likely. Like an alcoholic, who tries to persuade himself he'll become a great writer. First he has a blog and drinks once a week. He hopes to write and publish a collection of short stories. Then he abandons the blog, but trolls at Slashdot instead. He drinks 3 times a week and believes he will write a novel. After some time he is disconnected from the Internet. He writes angry letters to his local paper and drinks every day, except Sundays. He tells everyone he already has written a novel and is looking for a publisher. Some more time passes. They guy doesn't get dry anymore, his writing is limited to unsuccessful attempts to solve a crossword in a local paper. If he could find anyone willing to listen, he would tell stories about how J. K. Rowling asks him for advice writing her Harry Potter books.
The bigger problem is that the "governments" everywhere are completely incapable of acting according to the future needs, even when these needs are obvious to intelligent and knowledgable people (scientists) and to everyone in hindsight.
Consider the MN4 asteroid. Now, especially if the probability goes up a bit more, we can expect some actions by the "governments" to prevent the disaster in 2029. But we knew that comets and asteroids can be deadly for decades now. The first ideas about protection appeared a long time ago, but nothing was done because people in charge are morons. They simple can't be proactive, they can only do their current duties and even that very poorly.
The same is with future technological developments (nanotechnologies, AI, biotech, etc.). Most governments today either do very little or nothing at all, simply because they have no imagination and don't listen to those who have.
I agree with you that the case of your company is different from I described. When a company in a niche market goes out of business, everyone suffers and the economy suffers too.
But if we consider simplier products which do not require upgrades made for for larger markets (photoshop, word processors, etc.), which probably constitute most of the piracy, the situation is different.
So should be our attitude to piracy. We should condemn it when it harms both the producers and the customers, but we should tolerate it when the negative effect on developers is bearable and the positive effect for all the freeloaders is significant.
The Humane Society are a bunch of publicity whores
on
Re-Pet a Reality
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· Score: 1
The Humane Society and other pet advocacy groups have criticized pet cloning as wasteful, noting that 6 million to 8 million cats and dogs enter shelters each year nationwide, where 3 million to 4 million are put to death.
Yeah, so let's oppose the cloning. I mean, if cloning of pets would be illegal, may be these 6 people would adopt all the 0.000075% of those animals who enter shelters each year. Yes, that makes perfect sense to me. BTW, I hope noone opposes people paying $2000+ for an expensive dog or cat, because it's clearly nothing like cloning and these people shouldn't have adopted a homeless pet instead. No, it's the evil scientists who clone pets that are to blame! Stop the cloning! Oppose the evil plot.
No, really, I am so sick of those morons, who pretend to be ethical and are able to get the media attention all the time. If I could, I would have killed every member of that Human Society (in the most humane way, of course)... for wasting oxygen that our cats and dogs need so much.
Chess. Computer games. Simple exercise for health benefits. A sport doesn't need to be risky to be fun. I am not saying one should not tandem jump, just that there are better and MUCH safer ways to enjoy life.
That's all great, but in about 20 years we will probably be able to experience everything you enjoy today in virtual reality. So why risk your life today for real when you need only wait a few decades (meanwhile you can enjoy progressively better surrogates) and then risk your life safely as much as you want?
Another future option is, of course, doing this in reality, but with better tech, which could be much safer. I mean, I certainly understand why you enjoy your sport, but you would look awfully silly dead or paralyzed because of your careless "LIVING".
I wonder if you have ever considered even for a fraction of a second the positive effect to the economy? If 1000 companies use software which costs 500$, they get 500000$ of value and then some on top of that by actually using the software. It can work out to a few millions dollars of added value for the companies, for shareholders and for the economy overall. Meanwhile, your company loses 300000$ investment that you made. But there is more - since the software is now essentially free, 4000 more companies who would not have paid for it while it costed 500$ are going to use it. That's about 2 million (may be more, may be less) dollars more in value.
Of course, it's not as simple in real life - there is no support available, the source code is lost, since the authors haven't released it, and the company doesn't invest in the next product. But there are clearly positive effects which in many cases compensate for the potential losses of the developers.
Have you thought about it? Have all those people who lament 200000$ of losses thought about it? While piracy generates potential losses for the developers, it also generates very real and tangible net economic gains for the society overall.
I just don't understand why is it useful, and why everybody else should care about it.
Nobody has to care about it, it's just a simple explanation of why I am justified in saying "Those 2000 people lived in shitty houses, so it's likely their deaths is no big deal on the planetary scale".
You can play with the logic all day long, but in the end I don't think a significant number of Terrans would say "It'd better we had this earthquake in the North Sea instead so that an equivalent number of Swedes, Brittons and Dutch died".
This assumption is just the first step. People hold wrong beliefs about the world. One such common belief is that you can't say that one person is better (more valuable, more worthy) than another. This is wrong, but to demonstrate that it is necessary to use this simplier model.
I don't think that a list of good software is very useful. Given that most freeware/shareware applications are free of "nasties", a list of known spyware and adware makes more sense.
Rule No 1: They won't cause you any trouble if they don't get caught.
Give them a good lesson in anonymity and privacy. Give them all necessary software (VPN, encrypted messengers, PGP plugins for e-mail, software for anonymous remailers, disk encryption software, PGP-phone, FreeNet, PeerGuardian, firewalls, some steganography tools, etc., etc.). Explain that THEY are watching. Suggest caution.
Rule No 2: If there is no evidence, noone can cause you any troubles.
Either give users optional dynamic IPs or install an anonymizer proxy. Don't keep logs or delete them after a few hours automatically.
Rule No 3: Honesty is the best policy.
Be upfront with your customers. Explain that when MPAA comes with a court order, you would need to cooperate. Explain that when FBI comes (even without a court order), you would need to cooperate. State in your terms of use very clearly that you are not monitoring the use of the connection and are in no way responsible for it, it's the sole responsibility of the user.
I was not objecting to those, who consider this an important event, I was objecting to those (posters in this thread), who claim that the loss of life is somehow horrible and to those, who moderated such posts to 4-5, despite these posts having no useful content.
You are of course, completely correct about several important implications of the cataclysm. Congratulations for being rational in the face of disaster. Are you an engineer yourself? That would explain a lot.
I know these are emotional blocks, because I can clearly see that the reaction to my arguments is irrational and coincides with an excited emotional state. People don't take what I say clamly, but instead offer completely irrational rebuttals such as "Hitler would surely agree" and stuff.:) I'm not saying your metion of the Nazis means you are incapable of rational thought, just that it's (a) typical (b) badly thought argument.
I wanted you to agree first that it's possible to judge the worthiness (value) of people, who only differ in one particular respect. That's the necessary step. For example, that I would be less valuable/less worthy if I didn't have a Ph.D. and you did, all else being equal.
Assuming you agreed with that, we could proceed to the next step - arguing that it's often possible to confidently judge who is more valuable out of two people, who are different in several respects. Here is the gist of the argument: a) we can't always make a perfectly correct decision, but we can often be reasonably sure, although there are cases where we can't decide b) we can't take into account every minute of their lives, but this doesn't make our judgements completely worthless c) the list of relevant qualities and their weights are determined using expert estimates, where any intelligent, rational and ethical person is an expert d) even though seveal "experts" would likely provide two different lists and different weights for qualities, there are many cases (see (a)) where all of them will make the same decision e) it's not necessary in practice to provide quantitative metrics of people's qualities in order to judge them. You can say that Claudia Schiffer is more beautiful than some dirty crackwhore from the gutter without using a "beautymeter". Even though you can't easily compare her with, say, Halle Berry
A good illustration is valuing the material objects. Can you say "Painting A is better than painting B" (or "computer A is better than computer B")? Yes, there are painting that you can't compare, but there are some that you can.
With humans we can start with Hitler (why not?) and Ghandi. Can you say one is more valuable (worthy) than another? Of course, you can be stubborn and insist that you can't say that, but I think you, just like any reasonable person, would agree that we can compare those two. Then we should move to more interesting real-life pairs and conclude that there actually is a possibility of comparing two people's values. We probably can't judge controversial people (Feynman's involvement in the Manhattan project was, IMO, sufficiently small to make him "not evil enough" to be controversial), but most of people aren't really very controversial.
The third step is to understand that even when we can't compare individual people because we lack the necessary information, we can still make probabilistical estimates of who would be more valuable. That is the same as comparing a number of people from one sample with a number of people from another sample.
After that we are all set. The lemmas "proven" (or at least agreed upon) above are sufficient to make the final statement - that those who died in this disaster are probably less valuable on average than (for example) the same number of people who live in Holland.
It's worth noting that while there may be many human classification schemes that are wrong, that does not preclude the possibility of there being some good schemes. Of course, if you develop a good scheme, for obvious reasons it won't be applicable to every pair of humans. But it should still probably work well enough for many pairs.
I am also not suggesting in any way that humans can all be plotted on one axis. What I am saying is that for every combination of a pair humans and a valid classification scheme there exists a value between 0 and 1, which is a probability of a given scheme saying that person A is more valuable than person B. And for certain pairs of people a sufficiently large number of valid classification schemes have corresponding values close enough to 1 (or a sufficiently large number have values close to 0). Hope this isn't too complicated for you. Assuming you have a Ph.D. in physics it shouldn't be.
Assuming all else is equal, yes. My life (since I don't have a Ph.D. yet) would be worth less.
It's possible to argue for this using a number of rather simple thought experiments, first persuading you that it is possible for two lifes to have different values, second persuading you that generally the better the person is (in any accepted regard), the more valuable his life is to rational people, and third, using this principle in a particular example.
I know from experience that many people have a number of emotional blocks that prevent them from easily accepting this argument. I don't know how simple or difficult would that be for you, though.
Of course, there are lot of side tasks as well, such as defining what "valuable" means, deciding who is qualified to make such decisions, etc.
A function of what? You meant continuous function? A function of our emotional reactions.:) There is a large set of possible reactions, from completely ignoring that story to jumping out of the window (it's not 1-dimensional, to be honest, so it can't be easily monotonic, but I conviniently ignore that). For each possible reaction there is a value of idiocy. My point is that there are more than two possible values. And, generally, the more intensive the reaction to a story, which is not particularly important in a grand scheme of things and which has no relevance to your personal life is, the more idiotic it is.
What is exactly the difference between caring and believing that you care ? Acting. Caring implies certain real actions. If you care about the victims, you do something, the most obvious actions being to send them blankets, food, money, etc. If you don't do anything, you don't actually care.
Simple emotional reaction is natural. But just because I gross out seeing a dog hit by a truck doesn't mean that I care. If I took it home or buried it near the road (assuming it's dead, of course), that would be a sign that I cared. If I just stand there, stare, say "poor doggie" and then go away, I don't care, I just pretend I do or believe I do.
Many people pretend they care, but they don't do anything. And as they apparently seem to care about every major story pushed by TV (they care about Yushchenko as much as about quake victims), I suspect that don't care about any story, but are just conditioned to express certain reactions when seeing something on TV.
Slashdot Mirror
To humans it would look deep violet or dark red.
There is no ARGH. Burning your retina is painless, that's why it's so dangerous to look at the Sun. You can go outside on a sunny day and stare directly at the Sun. It doesn't matter how long you do it, there is no pain, just like cutting your brain with a knife. There was simply no evolutionary reason for nature to make these experiences painful, because until we humans got intelligence no animal was smart enough to harm itself in such an ingeniuos way. :)
The cop has to protect the citizens, not himself. He chose the job, he is paid to risk his life, so unless he can be reasonably sure he is in real danger, shooting anyone who shinesa laser pointer at him is unjustified murder.
We don't give cops guns to make cops safer. We give them guns to make us safer. If they abuse our trust killing innocent children, they should be jailed for 10+ years.
I just read three replies you made in this thread and I don't see anything about formatting, except something about missing the nuclear part, so I don't know what you are talking about.
And I noticed that your formatting is poor, but why don't you "check, double check, triple check, and god dammit check it again" if you know it's so? Are you above the rules?
Anyway, I insulted you not because your post was poorly written, but because it was stupid. Not doing something is not avoiding the risks, it's just taking different ones. If we don't try to capture, destroy and divert asteroids, we may not have a chance to learn it quickly if we find out a comet is going to hit us in 3 months. Your comment was stupid, because it ignored that. So I suggested that the cause might have been your stupidity.
First, we can have a law against piracy, but tolerate it when it does more good than harm. Second, piracy often does more good than harm. It can be demonstrated really easily by anyone with a good grasp of economics (I wrote an article about this, but it's in Russian). We already have many laws which affect different people (companies) differently. Why shouldn't we have another one, especially when that law benefits the economy significantly?
BTW, when you say most software is developed by small companies, do you have data to back this up? Because the data I saw says the opposite.
Nonsense. Before the stone age of arcade games there weren't electronic games at all. You had to kick a can and imagine you are bing a part of a big space battle. Or may be ride on a stick and pretend you were King of Gondor. Do you imply that anything which requires us using imagination less is bad? May be we should burn all books, because imagining the stories without reading what an author wrote is so much better?
Don't be silly, the more realistic the games are, the better.
Why do I have this ominous feeling of dread
May be because you are stupid? You comment about diverting Earth instead of divering an asteroid certainly suggests that...
Wrong. You can't have evolution in a darwinian sense unless you have heredity. Heredity means that there must be traits passing from parent to offspring. In Conway's Life you don't have heredity - the offspring is often completely different from the parent and adding or removing one cell can drastically change the nature of the pattern. You don't have evolution there, you basically have random changes that may result in stable patters simply by accident. The same is probably true for those quantum things. If there is no heredity, there is no evolution, it just happens that stable patterns emerge, but they do not evolve.
So this is indeed an abuse of the term "darwinism". And a case of publicity whorism.
Well, it's called "idea darwinism" or memetics. Concepts that are more fit survive. And one of the useful traits for memes is taking a popular term and appending it to yourself.
:)
Like if you had something to do with gardening you could take the word "Xtreme" and attach it to yourself. Now that you are called "Xtreme Gardening" you are suddenly more popular, more books are written about you, people want to buy products based on you. You prosper and reproduce.
Now imagine that you were an idea about quantum mechanics...
Yes, smarter. Smarter and less likely. Like an alcoholic, who tries to persuade himself he'll become a great writer. First he has a blog and drinks once a week. He hopes to write and publish a collection of short stories.
Then he abandons the blog, but trolls at Slashdot instead. He drinks 3 times a week and believes he will write a novel.
After some time he is disconnected from the Internet. He writes angry letters to his local paper and drinks every day, except Sundays. He tells everyone he already has written a novel and is looking for a publisher.
Some more time passes. They guy doesn't get dry anymore, his writing is limited to unsuccessful attempts to solve a crossword in a local paper. If he could find anyone willing to listen, he would tell stories about how J. K. Rowling asks him for advice writing her Harry Potter books.
It's called delusional desperation.
The bigger problem is that the "governments" everywhere are completely incapable of acting according to the future needs, even when these needs are obvious to intelligent and knowledgable people (scientists) and to everyone in hindsight.
Consider the MN4 asteroid. Now, especially if the probability goes up a bit more, we can expect some actions by the "governments" to prevent the disaster in 2029. But we knew that comets and asteroids can be deadly for decades now. The first ideas about protection appeared a long time ago, but nothing was done because people in charge are morons. They simple can't be proactive, they can only do their current duties and even that very poorly.
The same is with future technological developments (nanotechnologies, AI, biotech, etc.). Most governments today either do very little or nothing at all, simply because they have no imagination and don't listen to those who have.
I agree with you that the case of your company is different from I described. When a company in a niche market goes out of business, everyone suffers and the economy suffers too.
But if we consider simplier products which do not require upgrades made for for larger markets (photoshop, word processors, etc.), which probably constitute most of the piracy, the situation is different.
So should be our attitude to piracy. We should condemn it when it harms both the producers and the customers, but we should tolerate it when the negative effect on developers is bearable and the positive effect for all the freeloaders is significant.
The Humane Society and other pet advocacy groups have criticized pet cloning as wasteful, noting that 6 million to 8 million cats and dogs enter shelters each year nationwide, where 3 million to 4 million are put to death.
Yeah, so let's oppose the cloning. I mean, if cloning of pets would be illegal, may be these 6 people would adopt all the 0.000075% of those animals who enter shelters each year. Yes, that makes perfect sense to me. BTW, I hope noone opposes people paying $2000+ for an expensive dog or cat, because it's clearly nothing like cloning and these people shouldn't have adopted a homeless pet instead. No, it's the evil scientists who clone pets that are to blame! Stop the cloning! Oppose the evil plot.
No, really, I am so sick of those morons, who pretend to be ethical and are able to get the media attention all the time. If I could, I would have killed every member of that Human Society (in the most humane way, of course)... for wasting oxygen that our cats and dogs need so much.
What extremely fun sports to you participate in?
Chess. Computer games. Simple exercise for health benefits. A sport doesn't need to be risky to be fun. I am not saying one should not tandem jump, just that there are better and MUCH safer ways to enjoy life.
That's all great, but in about 20 years we will probably be able to experience everything you enjoy today in virtual reality. So why risk your life today for real when you need only wait a few decades (meanwhile you can enjoy progressively better surrogates) and then risk your life safely as much as you want?
Another future option is, of course, doing this in reality, but with better tech, which could be much safer. I mean, I certainly understand why you enjoy your sport, but you would look awfully silly dead or paralyzed because of your careless "LIVING".
I wonder if you have ever considered even for a fraction of a second the positive effect to the economy? If 1000 companies use software which costs 500$, they get 500000$ of value and then some on top of that by actually using the software. It can work out to a few millions dollars of added value for the companies, for shareholders and for the economy overall. Meanwhile, your company loses 300000$ investment that you made. But there is more - since the software is now essentially free, 4000 more companies who would not have paid for it while it costed 500$ are going to use it. That's about 2 million (may be more, may be less) dollars more in value.
Of course, it's not as simple in real life - there is no support available, the source code is lost, since the authors haven't released it, and the company doesn't invest in the next product. But there are clearly positive effects which in many cases compensate for the potential losses of the developers.
Have you thought about it? Have all those people who lament 200000$ of losses thought about it? While piracy generates potential losses for the developers, it also generates very real and tangible net economic gains for the society overall.
I just don't understand why is it useful, and why everybody else should care about it.
Nobody has to care about it, it's just a simple explanation of why I am justified in saying "Those 2000 people lived in shitty houses, so it's likely their deaths is no big deal on the planetary scale".
You can play with the logic all day long, but in the end I don't think a significant number of Terrans would say "It'd better we had this earthquake in the North Sea instead so that an equivalent number of Swedes, Brittons and Dutch died".
This assumption is just the first step. People hold wrong beliefs about the world. One such common belief is that you can't say that one person is better (more valuable, more worthy) than another. This is wrong, but to demonstrate that it is necessary to use this simplier model.
MSN Toolbar Beta is not spyware. And it's quite good, actually. Not as customizable as I would have liked it to be, but good enough for a beta.
I don't think that a list of good software is very useful. Given that most freeware/shareware applications are free of "nasties", a list of known spyware and adware makes more sense.
Rule No 1: They won't cause you any trouble if they don't get caught.
Give them a good lesson in anonymity and privacy. Give them all necessary software (VPN, encrypted messengers, PGP plugins for e-mail, software for anonymous remailers, disk encryption software, PGP-phone, FreeNet, PeerGuardian, firewalls, some steganography tools, etc., etc.). Explain that THEY are watching. Suggest caution.
Rule No 2: If there is no evidence, noone can cause you any troubles.
Either give users optional dynamic IPs or install an anonymizer proxy. Don't keep logs or delete them after a few hours automatically.
Rule No 3: Honesty is the best policy.
Be upfront with your customers. Explain that when MPAA comes with a court order, you would need to cooperate. Explain that when FBI comes (even without a court order), you would need to cooperate. State in your terms of use very clearly that you are not monitoring the use of the connection and are in no way responsible for it, it's the sole responsibility of the user.
Hope this helps.
I was not objecting to those, who consider this an important event, I was objecting to those (posters in this thread), who claim that the loss of life is somehow horrible and to those, who moderated such posts to 4-5, despite these posts having no useful content.
You are of course, completely correct about several important implications of the cataclysm. Congratulations for being rational in the face of disaster. Are you an engineer yourself? That would explain a lot.
I know these are emotional blocks, because I can clearly see that the reaction to my arguments is irrational and coincides with an excited emotional state. People don't take what I say clamly, but instead offer completely irrational rebuttals such as "Hitler would surely agree" and stuff. :) I'm not saying your metion of the Nazis means you are incapable of rational thought, just that it's (a) typical (b) badly thought argument.
I wanted you to agree first that it's possible to judge the worthiness (value) of people, who only differ in one particular respect. That's the necessary step. For example, that I would be less valuable/less worthy if I didn't have a Ph.D. and you did, all else being equal.
Assuming you agreed with that, we could proceed to the next step - arguing that it's often possible to confidently judge who is more valuable out of two people, who are different in several respects. Here is the gist of the argument:
a) we can't always make a perfectly correct decision, but we can often be reasonably sure, although there are cases where we can't decide
b) we can't take into account every minute of their lives, but this doesn't make our judgements completely worthless
c) the list of relevant qualities and their weights are determined using expert estimates, where any intelligent, rational and ethical person is an expert
d) even though seveal "experts" would likely provide two different lists and different weights for qualities, there are many cases (see (a)) where all of them will make the same decision
e) it's not necessary in practice to provide quantitative metrics of people's qualities in order to judge them. You can say that Claudia Schiffer is more beautiful than some dirty crackwhore from the gutter without using a "beautymeter". Even though you can't easily compare her with, say, Halle Berry
A good illustration is valuing the material objects. Can you say "Painting A is better than painting B" (or "computer A is better than computer B")? Yes, there are painting that you can't compare, but there are some that you can.
With humans we can start with Hitler (why not?) and Ghandi. Can you say one is more valuable (worthy) than another? Of course, you can be stubborn and insist that you can't say that, but I think you, just like any reasonable person, would agree that we can compare those two. Then we should move to more interesting real-life pairs and conclude that there actually is a possibility of comparing two people's values. We probably can't judge controversial people (Feynman's involvement in the Manhattan project was, IMO, sufficiently small to make him "not evil enough" to be controversial), but most of people aren't really very controversial.
The third step is to understand that even when we can't compare individual people because we lack the necessary information, we can still make probabilistical estimates of who would be more valuable. That is the same as comparing a number of people from one sample with a number of people from another sample.
After that we are all set. The lemmas "proven" (or at least agreed upon) above are sufficient to make the final statement - that those who died in this disaster are probably less valuable on average than (for example) the same number of people who live in Holland.
It's worth noting that while there may be many human classification schemes that are wrong, that does not preclude the possibility of there being some good schemes. Of course, if you develop a good scheme, for obvious reasons it won't be applicable to every pair of humans. But it should still probably work well enough for many pairs.
I am also not suggesting in any way that humans can all be plotted on one axis. What I am saying is that for every combination of a pair humans and a valid classification scheme there exists a value between 0 and 1, which is a probability of a given scheme saying that person A is more valuable than person B. And for certain pairs of people a sufficiently large number of valid classification schemes have corresponding values close enough to 1 (or a sufficiently large number have values close to 0). Hope this isn't too complicated for you. Assuming you have a Ph.D. in physics it shouldn't be.
Assuming all else is equal, yes. My life (since I don't have a Ph.D. yet) would be worth less.
It's possible to argue for this using a number of rather simple thought experiments, first persuading you that it is possible for two lifes to have different values, second persuading you that generally the better the person is (in any accepted regard), the more valuable his life is to rational people, and third, using this principle in a particular example.
I know from experience that many people have a number of emotional blocks that prevent them from easily accepting this argument. I don't know how simple or difficult would that be for you, though.
Of course, there are lot of side tasks as well, such as defining what "valuable" means, deciding who is qualified to make such decisions, etc.
A function of what? :) There is a large set of possible reactions, from completely ignoring that story to jumping out of the window (it's not 1-dimensional, to be honest, so it can't be easily monotonic, but I conviniently ignore that). For each possible reaction there is a value of idiocy. My point is that there are more than two possible values. And, generally, the more intensive the reaction to a story, which is not particularly important in a grand scheme of things and which has no relevance to your personal life is, the more idiotic it is.
You meant continuous function?
A function of our emotional reactions.
What is exactly the difference between caring and believing that you care ?
Acting. Caring implies certain real actions. If you care about the victims, you do something, the most obvious actions being to send them blankets, food, money, etc. If you don't do anything, you don't actually care.
Simple emotional reaction is natural. But just because I gross out seeing a dog hit by a truck doesn't mean that I care. If I took it home or buried it near the road (assuming it's dead, of course), that would be a sign that I cared. If I just stand there, stare, say "poor doggie" and then go away, I don't care, I just pretend I do or believe I do.
Many people pretend they care, but they don't do anything. And as they apparently seem to care about every major story pushed by TV (they care about Yushchenko as much as about quake victims), I suspect that don't care about any story, but are just conditioned to express certain reactions when seeing something on TV.