I can DM Chaotic Evil, but it would be bloody... I can DM Lawful Evil, but it would be downright harmful to the player's mental health... Or I can just keep channeling Nyarlathotep, and someone's character just might survive, this time. No, Really...
I do commercial tax prep for an unnamed company, and this is spot on. In 2004, the IRS testified before congress about where they thought the most major tax fraud cases were. The IRS's estimates were that a specific group of Small/Home business filers (the ones using schedule C with just a normal private citizen's 1040/1040A, and not using the commercial tax form 1041 and all the quarterly reporting forms they would have to use if they had employees) were responsible for about 100 billion in tax fraud every year.
Second place was false filings for the Earned Income Credit, with about 9 billion a year projected loss.
Congress directed the IRS to focus on the second case first. Some of us saw that cynically - I've heard several fellow tax pros describe it as a Republican dominated congress and executive branch, focusing on the group that doesn't vote or votes Democrat, rather than a larger group that tends to vote and contribute republican. Congress adopted a new set of tax rules that included the "Uniform Definition of a Child (UDC)" rules and told the IRS to go to town.
Other people, perhaps more charitably, noted that going after the smaller group also tended to catch a lot of dead-beat dads, and was much, much easier to implement. Over the last three years, congress and the tax courts clarified the rules on a lot of business related deductions such as de minimus employee benefits, and cleaned up the tax code re. small business filers. Some significant cases made it through the tax courts during this interval, and my own estimate is the IRS is in a much better position to go after their #1 on their top ten list than they were, and maybe it will start happening. Whether there's a connection to which party is in power is at least debatable.
That's fine, but the U.S. version also has ideas that help smooth out the worst bumps, such as fair and speedy trial, at least for criminal cases (regrettably, not necessarily applicable for civil cases). Here, the Judge is giving a court order, which is within his perview both in NZ and the US. But, the other party may well really want the gag order in place much more than he wants to cooperate with getting to a final verdict. He may well feel he should drag his feet now, and let the gag order run as long as possible. This has been a common flaw in many similar cases of late. The judge issues a binding order to keep the issues silent until resolution, but then lets one party win what they really want by gaming the system with delays.
So, we have a court that is selectively giving one side what it really wants before the actual trial, and a person who doesn't respect the authority of the court. Fixing just one of those problems is a good way to end up with 50 million people who don't respect the authority of the court.
He doesn't have to prove he's not a criminal or whatever, but he may have to answer to whatever evidence made the other party think he was one, if there is evidence.
Party A says party B 'has teh ghey". (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) B says "Not!". A says "I saw B wearing just chaps, hugging another guy, in a leather bar on Fire Island and singing a Streisand medley". At that point B has to either oppose the claim that he was in the bar, and claim that it's untrue, or admit to it but claim that it isn't enough to make a reasonable man assume he has teh ghey, or give up the suit. He's still got options, just not the option to claim that the reasoning of the other party is simultaneously valid for a person without malice, and clearly driven from malice.
I'm putting the cart before the horse? You've asked for proof via the scientific method. Your awareness of the scientific method is based on only a small part of your total experiences. You probably never heard of the scientific method until you were at least 8 to 10 years old. When you learned about it, you didn't verify what you first learned by using the scientific method because you didn't know it yet. You accepted the scientific method itself based on things you already knew, and those things weren't part of the scientific method, but outside it.
Now, you are asking people to prove the whole of your experience, by some small part of your experience, which can't even prove itself to be valid. Tell you what, prove to me that the scientific method itself is not just a useful tool, or even the best tool we have, prove to me, using only the scientific method, that the scientific method is the most efficient possible tool for determining fact and error, anywhere, at any time, by any creature capable of using it, all as measured on an absolute scale of values. If you can't, then why should I accept what you say?
Here's the real point, you have accepted that consciousness exists by challenging me to show how I know something. Just saying that, you've assumed that 'I' exist. You've even stipulated that you think I have this property, consciousness, by stipulating that you think I know something. Then you're saying, "I don't really believe what I just said, now prove there's no contradiction." I can't - there is a contradiction. You act like you believe consciousness exists, you act like you are compelled to believe it, then you say you don't. That makes you a schizophrenic, not a scientist.
Have you ever studied basic Physics? Matter, Energy, Space and Time are four fundamentals (at that level - later courses will link them together, but not until you have had a few semesters of the thermodynamics, statics, etc.). In the beginning, Matter, etc., are treated as axiomatic. You can say to the professor, "Wait, I refuse to accept the existence of this "Matter" stuff until you can show it exists!" If you want, and you can even throw around terms such as "The Scientific Method" to make it look like you know something and the professor doesn't. If you started trying to walk through the professor like he wasn't there, no one would think you were making a brilliant philosophical point about Matter, they would think you were a nutter. But, people are not as educated in philosophy or psychology as they are in physics. Do the equivalent of walking into the professor in a discussion of consciousness, and most people won't realize you are proving your own argument false in precisely the same way.
You have never had a thought you weren't conscious of. Eveything you think you know about an external world is based on a limited subset of the many things you have been consious of. You have been conscious at times of many things you don't think are part of that external world, dreams, thoughts, imaginings, emotions, but you have never, ever, ever drawn any conclusion about what is or isn't real or what is or isn't worth serious consideration without using consciousness. If you decide that consciousness itself is not even worth serious consideration, then every single subset of things you have been conscious of is worth even less consideration, for the part cannot be greater than the whole.
"And how do you know that such a nebulous concept as "consciousness" is even something worth talking about and not something we just made up using consiousness to convince ourselves of our own uniqueness?"
If Colossus and Guardian had not controlled a lot of physical power, they would have conspired to gain it. If they had been in charge of nothing that could threaten the human race into compliance, they would have manufactured evidence to make humans think they should be given control over more and more infrastructure systems, until they could gain the same power that they began with in the film. In fact, they would have probably killed many more people in such an aggregate process. All that follows from an initial set of conditions much like the Three Laws, for which the machines are trying to find optimal solutions.
Probably Asimov's own laws would produce a similar mess, and I generally take Jack Williamson's novella "With Folded hands", as being based on Williamson's own speculation about what Asimov's laws would produce.
I think some form of 'the Singularity' is at least possible, depending on just what version you mean, but, I've always had a problem with one idea many singularity-mavens seem to adore.
That's the argument that, if we get something smarter than an un-augmented human, it will find it relatively easier to make something still smarter, and so on. First, how hard it is for something to reproduce, even at its own level of intelligence, varies widely with just what type of singularity model we use. Suppose AI happens in a system that has lots of sensory elements, and control elements that affect real world processes, where we actually encourage the first steps of the system waking up. That makes more sense than an AI spontaneously generating in some big processor network, or developing in a system with very limited bandwidth devoted to interacting with the real world.
So the number of 'transistors' that fit on this thing's 'chips' doubles every 18 months, or whatever variant of Moore's law you want to use. That doesn't mean 18 months later it (or you) can build one twice as smart. All its sensory and motor capabilities don't automagically double, even if Moore somehow still applies. Its intelligence needs to reproduce a body for its offspring, not just a mind, and if that body involves the whole existing net, a dozen radio telescopes, and a few automated car factories, it has to build something better than that for the next generation, as well as just building a better brain.
If we actually got something a little bit smarter than us, and educated it well, it might be pretty smart about not building its successor to have more environmental consequences than the parent, or making something smarter that would be miserable without senses and effectuators capable of using the increased intelligence.
After all, if you are I.Q. 130, and find a mate who is also smarter than average, and genetic analysis shows your kids would average 150 or more, you should probably go for lots of kids, right? What if those kids also have significant chances of suicidal burnout and schizophrenia like alienation from their limited environment? And they are only going to able to realize their potential on a very steady high protein diet, which looks hard to sustain given your predictions for the ecology. Maybe you'd skip that opportunity, or even decide reproducing at all isn't such a good idea, at least not just yet.
Plus it gives plenty of other useful info. We don't just find out that the business behind Storm is selling illegal drugs, but that there are some good reasons why these particular mail order sales are illegal - i.e. major variations in the dose and 1/3 of them containing no dose at all. Since plenty of people here on/. think the U.S.'s policy on mail order drugs is there just to prop up U.S. company's monopoly status, they obviously could use the information that there are some real problem cases that the law is attempting to address.
Every commercial drug advertisement lists the effects that it is being sold for before it lists the 'side' effects. That is, "BEFORE the downside" as you put it. They also do what they can with large print vs small, and eloquent on screen actor vs mumbling guy in background, to make this more effective. I understand why you feel this method is unethical in Wired's case, but I have to ask, do you think it's equally nasty in these other cases?
You do see big chain pharmacies such as Walmart promoting their low cost generic programs, including listing specific drugs and often the diseases they affect. It's not nearly so significant that a Drug maker heavily promotes Avandia when the customer is equally likely to hear Kroger pharmacy telling type 2 Diabetics to ask their doctor about generic Metformin, available at only 4.00$ a month.
Either DK is right to move for impeachment proceedings and a bunch of the other Democrats are corrupt enough to let it all slide so they can inherit the abusive and unethical powers and protections Bush has crafted, or he isn't and they aren't. If you really think the whole rest of the Democratic party is as bad as in your post, logically you must also think that Dennis Kucinich is doing something absolutely noble, courageously standing up against both the opposition party and his own. A lone voice of courage and decency crying in the wilderness, fighting for what's right against absolutely incredible odds. By everything else you have claimed, Kucinich is a patriot on a par with Washington or Jefferson. So why are you using his act to further criticize the rest of his party, without pointing out that that also means we have identified the noblest, most decent, and most honorable GREAT! AMERICAN! PATRIOT! in recent history?
The observer in the Schrodinger's Cat 'paradox' is the first particle to come in contact with the cat (typically a photon). If you define the entangled quantum state as the cat plus the apparatus then it's typically an Infrared photon passing through the air inside the box, and if you define the entangled state as the whole box, then it's typically a photon in the room. The 'observer' could be an electron orbiting one atom in the table top supporting the box, or various other possibilities. That's what QM means by observation, not a living entity, or a self aware entity with memory, or a self aware entity with memory actually trained in Quantum Physics. The first particle outside whatever you've already defined as an un-collapsed state vector, that interacts with it, reifies the state vector. An un-reified state vector with the mass of a cat 'collapses' in an extremely tiny fraction of a second.
The only known way to prolong this is by extremely low temperature methods, where something with the mass of a cat could theoretically be a Bose-Einstein condensate and not one of the three classical states of matter.
Of course this will get moderated off topic (and should) but I can't resist. 1, Fox News actually went to court and won an advance judgment that said, even if it could be shown that the newscasters had deliberately lied about a concealed source being reasonably unbiased, and it was proved that the source actually worked for a political party and was paid to make the claims that it made, Fox would still be protected by the normal laws about concealing the identity of sources and this situation wouldn't constitute possible malice with respect to libel laws. Name another news agency that has even sought such a protection. 2. In 2002, there was a study of the media where the only thing that was examined was accuracy of attribution. That is, if a news source quoted a person and said that person was a lawyer in the state of New Jersey, the study checked to see if the person was really liscenced before the New Jersey Bar at the time. If they said a source was a Vice President at a fortune 500 company, the study checked to see two things - was that company really in the 500, and was the guy's title really VP and not Assistant VP or similar. NPR and BBC both scored in the 3.8 to 4 out of a possible 5 range. PRI, MSNBC and ABC ran somewhere near the middle. Where did Fox score? 2.2 - right next to Al-Jazera!
As Burke (of the book and TV Series "Connections") said, "Technology is not good or evil, nor is it neutral" (emphasis mine).
Technologies can change what your choices are, including your moral choices (which is pretty much what I gather you mean by "good or bad").
For example, it became possible to test for brain wave activity in the last third or so of the 20th century, and most nations rapidly accepted 'brain death' as the legal standard of death.
Before that, asking if brain death was a good or bad standard meant comparing it to various other rules in place, such as the 'We bury them with a bell attached to a cord - if that doesn't ring by the next morning, then they were really dead.' standard. As the technology for measuring brain death became robust and widely employed, the question of whether brain death itself was a good or bad standard meant comparing it to other definitions and asking if they had technologies of their own, and how much these would cost, how reliable they were, and so on.
In the same way, breathalizers changed what we meant by drunk driving, mostly from 'acting in a way that a cop thinks indicates an increased risk of accident' to 'having a number that a machine says implies the same risk'. It made the morality of trusting the police to fairly administer a complex law less important, and eliminated some kinds of subjectivity, but it introduced other kinds.
That's Swamp Thing, the Wes Craven film. With Louis Jourdan, Adrienne Barbeau and Ray Wise. I don't think you'll find that quote in the original comics, but it just might be there somewhere.
I agree with pretty much everything you said, but look where it leaves us... This law may be quite justifiable from your line of reasoning. 1. Part of normal adult responsibility is recognizing when the person you are verbally attacking is potentially fragile - if speaking to your own kid some way would even possibly, even by a remote chance, be child abuse, then you have more duty to the rest of society to avoid it when speaking to someone else's child you don't know so well, not less. 2. Laws that come into effect 'when the straw breaks the camel's back' are actually pretty common. If you attend a few trials, you're likely to hear the DA refer to this or that act as the 'straw that broke' quite often. Frequently, there will be arguments between DA and defense about whether some part of a whole series of actions raise the whole to premeditation, or count as an agrievating circumstance, or make the whole case serious enough to justify invoking the law. You'll hear for example, that making an obscene gesture didn't rise to the level of assault, but shaking a fist in someone's face was clearly the straw that broke the camel's back as far as the law is concerned.
There's also a strong tendency for Fascist states to have lots of scapegoats for whenever their leaders don't succeed at a program, or are perceived as breaking their promises to 'the masses'. I admit this isn't really part of the dictionary definitions, but still....
In fact, I'd argue that what's really going on is there's a tendency for some self perceived elites to take increasing, even total control of the government. When their one sided perspective on what needs to be done results in failures, they find ways to deflect the punishments for said failures to other groups with less power, so as to retain their own. So long as the power wielders are mostly successful at making calls that benefit at least fair chunk of the general public, it feels to most of the public like they are living in a plutocratcy or some other form of heavily classed society, but as system failures occur, the scapegoating process accelerates and then it really 'feels' like fascism.
To the people in power, it doesn't feel much different whether the society is being more or less successful as a whole - that's what being insulated from the consequences means, after all.
I started using one. I run and lift weights, and no, it's not likely to give me either strength or cardiovascular benefits. But, I needed to work on my balance despite overall fitness, and it's been a fun way to fix that. You can be able to run 5 miles at a time, and still not be able to stand on one foot for more than a few seconds without wobbling. A little guiding the bubble down river or thwacking soccer balls with your head is good for shoring up weak spots.
What else? Rainy Day fitness - it can do enough for even a seriously fit person to get a light workout, on those days when the weather is bad, or you're just getting over the flu, or you're really pressed for time. Probably not enough to keep you from slipping back if you have lots of bad training days, but enough to get you through an occasional one.
Yeah, I'd have more trouble with any religion that claimed to already know for example, that there definitely were aliens, and they were definitely sinners, (except the ones that look like out of the e-suit Vorlons of course - you say Droshalla, I say G'lan.), and so on. Religions don't have all the answers, and the better ones will admit it. 'I don't know' is not necessarily a flaw, sort of depends on the question.
Science is allowed to say that it doesn't know some things, or that the answers to some are very complicated. Science is allowed to use words in unusual ways, such as Charming Quarks, and most people don't reject it for any of that. If an astrophysicist says Mars will be 22 Million miles away at next closest opposition, very few people would refuse to believe it just because that same astrophysicist doesn't want to commit on what might have happened 'before' the Big Bang.
Modesty is refreshing in a religion.
Western courts routinely give indeterminate sentences for contempt. 'Until you reveal your sources' is, at least in theory, for life if the reporter continues to refuse. And you should have a little more respect for the modern journalists who have faced years over contempt charges than to call them all thugs.
Plus, the secular courts of that era routinely gave people sentences such as being hung upside down and sawed in half vertically, crotch first, for offenses that would barely merit a fine today. Complaints about church 'justice' that don't also take what such state 'justice' was into account, trivialize the deaths of tens of millions by such means.
See, twisting someone's words to justify your attack of righteous indignation is easy, and if you do it to me I will cut you off at the kneecaps. Now about that word you use, "torcher" - you do know that the spell-checker isn't fixing that one for you, don't you?
The 'court' in G's case, specifically enjoined him to write an answer in the court Latin of the time, and not to use the venacular, and denied him permission to publish the venacular version until the debate was resolved. Ergo, he did face a court directive already in place by a judge (or rough equivalent), and he did violate it. In fact, he also had, and took advantage of an appeals process, although it was to the Pope and not a superior court. I believe that part of your problem is you do not know the actual history of the event, and the other part is you lack the ability to Google.
In short, don't go correcting people's misunderstandings. accusing people of ignorance of basic facts involved and otherwise acting like a Weisenheimer unless you actually have some understanding of those facts. It makes you look like you are educated above your actual intelligence. (You are, you know. Sorry to have to break it to you.)
Additionally, the majority of the current court, in one of their 5 to 4 decisions, has again agreed that commercial speech is not as protected as other speech. As long as the video games in question are intended to make a profit, there's an overall consensus that they don't enjoy all the protections of political speech, as you touch upon tangentially in your last quote. So even if the court were to rule that a particular game wasn't in any way obscene, that would not necessarily give it all the protection due to works which appear to have significant literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. The court could even find that a game had some artistic value without having to acknowledge that it was entitled to the same level of protection as a typical campaign speech or technical paper.
A violent or sexually explicit game is therefore at least two steps removed from the maximum protection of law.
Scientific consensus was perfectly fine with the steady state theory for several generations. It implied a universe that didn't need a creator, and had no moment of creation. Nobody said "Hey, this steady State thing is unscientific - it has no origin, and EVERYTHING has to have one". There's simply no rule in science that all things have to have an origin. People want to know the origin of the universe because something at least approximately like the Big Bang seems to be true, based on evidence. A Big Bang universe is a scientific theory that seems to have limits implying an origin or source.
So what's with this "Who created God? If you say Nobody, you're being unscientific!" routine? If that were true, then Science should have categorically rejected the Steady State as automatically unscientific, and scientists were wrong to wait for the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background to settle the debate, and Penzias and Wilson don't deserve that Nobel because they didn't disprove a major scientific theory - there was never a real doubt.
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I can DM Chaotic Evil, but it would be bloody...
I can DM Lawful Evil, but it would be downright harmful to the player's mental health...
Or I can just keep channeling Nyarlathotep, and someone's character just might survive, this time. No, Really...
I do commercial tax prep for an unnamed company, and this is spot on. In 2004, the IRS testified before congress about where they thought the most major tax fraud cases were. The IRS's estimates were that a specific group of Small/Home business filers (the ones using schedule C with just a normal private citizen's 1040/1040A, and not using the commercial tax form 1041 and all the quarterly reporting forms they would have to use if they had employees) were responsible for about 100 billion in tax fraud every year.
Second place was false filings for the Earned Income Credit, with about 9 billion a year projected loss.
Congress directed the IRS to focus on the second case first. Some of us saw that cynically - I've heard several fellow tax pros describe it as a Republican dominated congress and executive branch, focusing on the group that doesn't vote or votes Democrat, rather than a larger group that tends to vote and contribute republican. Congress adopted a new set of tax rules that included the "Uniform Definition of a Child (UDC)" rules and told the IRS to go to town.
Other people, perhaps more charitably, noted that going after the smaller group also tended to catch a lot of dead-beat dads, and was much, much easier to implement. Over the last three years, congress and the tax courts clarified the rules on a lot of business related deductions such as de minimus employee benefits, and cleaned up the tax code re. small business filers. Some significant cases made it through the tax courts during this interval, and my own estimate is the IRS is in a much better position to go after their #1 on their top ten list than they were, and maybe it will start happening. Whether there's a connection to which party is in power is at least debatable.
Uhm... The damned court order says I can't rename myself after the 22nd letter of the alphabet, either...
That's fine, but the U.S. version also has ideas that help smooth out the worst bumps, such as fair and speedy trial, at least for criminal cases (regrettably, not necessarily applicable for civil cases). Here, the Judge is giving a court order, which is within his perview both in NZ and the US. But, the other party may well really want the gag order in place much more than he wants to cooperate with getting to a final verdict. He may well feel he should drag his feet now, and let the gag order run as long as possible. This has been a common flaw in many similar cases of late. The judge issues a binding order to keep the issues silent until resolution, but then lets one party win what they really want by gaming the system with delays.
So, we have a court that is selectively giving one side what it really wants before the actual trial, and a person who doesn't respect the authority of the court. Fixing just one of those problems is a good way to end up with 50 million people who don't respect the authority of the court.
He doesn't have to prove he's not a criminal or whatever, but he may have to answer to whatever evidence made the other party think he was one, if there is evidence.
Party A says party B 'has teh ghey". (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
B says "Not!".
A says "I saw B wearing just chaps, hugging another guy, in a leather bar on Fire Island and singing a Streisand medley".
At that point B has to either oppose the claim that he was in the bar, and claim that it's untrue, or admit to it but claim that it isn't enough to make a reasonable man assume he has teh ghey, or give up the suit. He's still got options, just not the option to claim that the reasoning of the other party is simultaneously valid for a person without malice, and clearly driven from malice.
I'm putting the cart before the horse? You've asked for proof via the scientific method. Your awareness of the scientific method is based on only a small part of your total experiences. You probably never heard of the scientific method until you were at least 8 to 10 years old. When you learned about it, you didn't verify what you first learned by using the scientific method because you didn't know it yet. You accepted the scientific method itself based on things you already knew, and those things weren't part of the scientific method, but outside it.
Now, you are asking people to prove the whole of your experience, by some small part of your experience, which can't even prove itself to be valid. Tell you what, prove to me that the scientific method itself is not just a useful tool, or even the best tool we have, prove to me, using only the scientific method, that the scientific method is the most efficient possible tool for determining fact and error, anywhere, at any time, by any creature capable of using it, all as measured on an absolute scale of values. If you can't, then why should I accept what you say?
Here's the real point, you have accepted that consciousness exists by challenging me to show how I know something. Just saying that, you've assumed that 'I' exist. You've even stipulated that you think I have this property, consciousness, by stipulating that you think I know something. Then you're saying, "I don't really believe what I just said, now prove there's no contradiction." I can't - there is a contradiction. You act like you believe consciousness exists, you act like you are compelled to believe it, then you say you don't. That makes you a schizophrenic, not a scientist.
Have you ever studied basic Physics? Matter, Energy, Space and Time are four fundamentals (at that level - later courses will link them together, but not until you have had a few semesters of the thermodynamics, statics, etc.). In the beginning, Matter, etc., are treated as axiomatic. You can say to the professor, "Wait, I refuse to accept the existence of this "Matter" stuff until you can show it exists!" If you want, and you can even throw around terms such as "The Scientific Method" to make it look like you know something and the professor doesn't. If you started trying to walk through the professor like he wasn't there, no one would think you were making a brilliant philosophical point about Matter, they would think you were a nutter. But, people are not as educated in philosophy or psychology as they are in physics. Do the equivalent of walking into the professor in a discussion of consciousness, and most people won't realize you are proving your own argument false in precisely the same way.
You have never had a thought you weren't conscious of. Eveything you think you know about an external world is based on a limited subset of the many things you have been consious of. You have been conscious at times of many things you don't think are part of that external world, dreams, thoughts, imaginings, emotions, but you have never, ever, ever drawn any conclusion about what is or isn't real or what is or isn't worth serious consideration without using consciousness. If you decide that consciousness itself is not even worth serious consideration, then every single subset of things you have been conscious of is worth even less consideration, for the part cannot be greater than the whole.
"And how do you know that such a nebulous concept as "consciousness" is even something worth talking about and not something we just made up using consiousness to convince ourselves of our own uniqueness?"
If Colossus and Guardian had not controlled a lot of physical power, they would have conspired to gain it. If they had been in charge of nothing that could threaten the human race into compliance, they would have manufactured evidence to make humans think they should be given control over more and more infrastructure systems, until they could gain the same power that they began with in the film. In fact, they would have probably killed many more people in such an aggregate process. All that follows from an initial set of conditions much like the Three Laws, for which the machines are trying to find optimal solutions.
Probably Asimov's own laws would produce a similar mess, and I generally take Jack Williamson's novella "With Folded hands", as being based on Williamson's own speculation about what Asimov's laws would produce.
I think some form of 'the Singularity' is at least possible, depending on just what version you mean, but, I've always had a problem with one idea many singularity-mavens seem to adore.
That's the argument that, if we get something smarter than an un-augmented human, it will find it relatively easier to make something still smarter, and so on. First, how hard it is for something to reproduce, even at its own level of intelligence, varies widely with just what type of singularity model we use. Suppose AI happens in a system that has lots of sensory elements, and control elements that affect real world processes, where we actually encourage the first steps of the system waking up. That makes more sense than an AI spontaneously generating in some big processor network, or developing in a system with very limited bandwidth devoted to interacting with the real world.
So the number of 'transistors' that fit on this thing's 'chips' doubles every 18 months, or whatever variant of Moore's law you want to use. That doesn't mean 18 months later it (or you) can build one twice as smart. All its sensory and motor capabilities don't automagically double, even if Moore somehow still applies. Its intelligence needs to reproduce a body for its offspring, not just a mind, and if that body involves the whole existing net, a dozen radio telescopes, and a few automated car factories, it has to build something better than that for the next generation, as well as just building a better brain.
If we actually got something a little bit smarter than us, and educated it well, it might be pretty smart about not building its successor to have more environmental consequences than the parent, or making something smarter that would be miserable without senses and effectuators capable of using the increased intelligence.
After all, if you are I.Q. 130, and find a mate who is also smarter than average, and genetic analysis shows your kids would average 150 or more, you should probably go for lots of kids, right? What if those kids also have significant chances of suicidal burnout and schizophrenia like alienation from their limited environment? And they are only going to able to realize their potential on a very steady high protein diet, which looks hard to sustain given your predictions for the ecology. Maybe you'd skip that opportunity, or even decide reproducing at all isn't such a good idea, at least not just yet.
Plus it gives plenty of other useful info. We don't just find out that the business behind Storm is selling illegal drugs, but that there are some good reasons why these particular mail order sales are illegal - i.e. major variations in the dose and 1/3 of them containing no dose at all. Since plenty of people here on /. think the U.S.'s policy on mail order drugs is there just to prop up U.S. company's monopoly status, they obviously could use the information that there are some real problem cases that the law is attempting to address.
Every commercial drug advertisement lists the effects that it is being sold for before it lists the 'side' effects. That is, "BEFORE the downside" as you put it. They also do what they can with large print vs small, and eloquent on screen actor vs mumbling guy in background, to make this more effective. I understand why you feel this method is unethical in Wired's case, but I have to ask, do you think it's equally nasty in these other cases?
You do see big chain pharmacies such as Walmart promoting their low cost generic programs, including listing specific drugs and often the diseases they affect. It's not nearly so significant that a Drug maker heavily promotes Avandia when the customer is equally likely to hear Kroger pharmacy telling type 2 Diabetics to ask their doctor about generic Metformin, available at only 4.00$ a month.
Either DK is right to move for impeachment proceedings and a bunch of the other Democrats are corrupt enough to let it all slide so they can inherit the abusive and unethical powers and protections Bush has crafted, or he isn't and they aren't. If you really think the whole rest of the Democratic party is as bad as in your post, logically you must also think that Dennis Kucinich is doing something absolutely noble, courageously standing up against both the opposition party and his own. A lone voice of courage and decency crying in the wilderness, fighting for what's right against absolutely incredible odds. By everything else you have claimed, Kucinich is a patriot on a par with Washington or Jefferson. So why are you using his act to further criticize the rest of his party, without pointing out that that also means we have identified the noblest, most decent, and most honorable GREAT! AMERICAN! PATRIOT! in recent history?
The observer in the Schrodinger's Cat 'paradox' is the first particle to come in contact with the cat (typically a photon). If you define the entangled quantum state as the cat plus the apparatus then it's typically an Infrared photon passing through the air inside the box, and if you define the entangled state as the whole box, then it's typically a photon in the room. The 'observer' could be an electron orbiting one atom in the table top supporting the box, or various other possibilities. That's what QM means by observation, not a living entity, or a self aware entity with memory, or a self aware entity with memory actually trained in Quantum Physics. The first particle outside whatever you've already defined as an un-collapsed state vector, that interacts with it, reifies the state vector. An un-reified state vector with the mass of a cat 'collapses' in an extremely tiny fraction of a second.
The only known way to prolong this is by extremely low temperature methods, where something with the mass of a cat could theoretically be a Bose-Einstein condensate and not one of the three classical states of matter.
Of course this will get moderated off topic (and should) but I can't resist.
1, Fox News actually went to court and won an advance judgment that said, even if it could be shown that the newscasters had deliberately lied about a concealed source being reasonably unbiased, and it was proved that the source actually worked for a political party and was paid to make the claims that it made, Fox would still be protected by the normal laws about concealing the identity of sources and this situation wouldn't constitute possible malice with respect to libel laws. Name another news agency that has even sought such a protection.
2. In 2002, there was a study of the media where the only thing that was examined was accuracy of attribution. That is, if a news source quoted a person and said that person was a lawyer in the state of New Jersey, the study checked to see if the person was really liscenced before the New Jersey Bar at the time. If they said a source was a Vice President at a fortune 500 company, the study checked to see two things - was that company really in the 500, and was the guy's title really VP and not Assistant VP or similar. NPR and BBC both scored in the 3.8 to 4 out of a possible 5 range. PRI, MSNBC and ABC ran somewhere near the middle. Where did Fox score? 2.2 - right next to Al-Jazera!
As Burke (of the book and TV Series "Connections") said, "Technology is not good or evil, nor is it neutral" (emphasis mine).
Technologies can change what your choices are, including your moral choices (which is pretty much what I gather you mean by "good or bad").
For example, it became possible to test for brain wave activity in the last third or so of the 20th century, and most nations rapidly accepted 'brain death' as the legal standard of death.
Before that, asking if brain death was a good or bad standard meant comparing it to various other rules in place, such as the 'We bury them with a bell attached to a cord - if that doesn't ring by the next morning, then they were really dead.' standard. As the technology for measuring brain death became robust and widely employed, the question of whether brain death itself was a good or bad standard meant comparing it to other definitions and asking if they had technologies of their own, and how much these would cost, how reliable they were, and so on.
In the same way, breathalizers changed what we meant by drunk driving, mostly from 'acting in a way that a cop thinks indicates an increased risk of accident' to 'having a number that a machine says implies the same risk'. It made the morality of trusting the police to fairly administer a complex law less important, and eliminated some kinds of subjectivity, but it introduced other kinds.
That's Swamp Thing, the Wes Craven film. With Louis Jourdan, Adrienne Barbeau and Ray Wise. I don't think you'll find that quote in the original comics, but it just might be there somewhere.
I agree with pretty much everything you said, but look where it leaves us...
This law may be quite justifiable from your line of reasoning.
1. Part of normal adult responsibility is recognizing when the person you are verbally attacking is potentially fragile - if speaking to your own kid some way would even possibly, even by a remote chance, be child abuse, then you have more duty to the rest of society to avoid it when speaking to someone else's child you don't know so well, not less.
2. Laws that come into effect 'when the straw breaks the camel's back' are actually pretty common. If you attend a few trials, you're likely to hear the DA refer to this or that act as the 'straw that broke' quite often. Frequently, there will be arguments between DA and defense about whether some part of a whole series of actions raise the whole to premeditation, or count as an agrievating circumstance, or make the whole case serious enough to justify invoking the law. You'll hear for example, that making an obscene gesture didn't rise to the level of assault, but shaking a fist in someone's face was clearly the straw that broke the camel's back as far as the law is concerned.
There's also a strong tendency for Fascist states to have lots of scapegoats for whenever their leaders don't succeed at a program, or are perceived as breaking their promises to 'the masses'. I admit this isn't really part of the dictionary definitions, but still....
In fact, I'd argue that what's really going on is there's a tendency for some self perceived elites to take increasing, even total control of the government. When their one sided perspective on what needs to be done results in failures, they find ways to deflect the punishments for said failures to other groups with less power, so as to retain their own. So long as the power wielders are mostly successful at making calls that benefit at least fair chunk of the general public, it feels to most of the public like they are living in a plutocratcy or some other form of heavily classed society, but as system failures occur, the scapegoating process accelerates and then it really 'feels' like fascism.
To the people in power, it doesn't feel much different whether the society is being more or less successful as a whole - that's what being insulated from the consequences means, after all.
I started using one. I run and lift weights, and no, it's not likely to give me either strength or cardiovascular benefits. But, I needed to work on my balance despite overall fitness, and it's been a fun way to fix that. You can be able to run 5 miles at a time, and still not be able to stand on one foot for more than a few seconds without wobbling. A little guiding the bubble down river or thwacking soccer balls with your head is good for shoring up weak spots.
What else? Rainy Day fitness - it can do enough for even a seriously fit person to get a light workout, on those days when the weather is bad, or you're just getting over the flu, or you're really pressed for time. Probably not enough to keep you from slipping back if you have lots of bad training days, but enough to get you through an occasional one.
Yeah, I'd have more trouble with any religion that claimed to already know for example, that there definitely were aliens, and they were definitely sinners, (except the ones that look like out of the e-suit Vorlons of course - you say Droshalla, I say G'lan.), and so on. Religions don't have all the answers, and the better ones will admit it. 'I don't know' is not necessarily a flaw, sort of depends on the question.
Science is allowed to say that it doesn't know some things, or that the answers to some are very complicated. Science is allowed to use words in unusual ways, such as Charming Quarks, and most people don't reject it for any of that. If an astrophysicist says Mars will be 22 Million miles away at next closest opposition, very few people would refuse to believe it just because that same astrophysicist doesn't want to commit on what might have happened 'before' the Big Bang.
Modesty is refreshing in a religion.
Western courts routinely give indeterminate sentences for contempt. 'Until you reveal your sources' is, at least in theory, for life if the reporter continues to refuse. And you should have a little more respect for the modern journalists who have faced years over contempt charges than to call them all thugs.
Plus, the secular courts of that era routinely gave people sentences such as being hung upside down and sawed in half vertically, crotch first, for offenses that would barely merit a fine today. Complaints about church 'justice' that don't also take what such state 'justice' was into account, trivialize the deaths of tens of millions by such means.
See, twisting someone's words to justify your attack of righteous indignation is easy, and if you do it to me I will cut you off at the kneecaps. Now about that word you use, "torcher" - you do know that the spell-checker isn't fixing that one for you, don't you?
The 'court' in G's case, specifically enjoined him to write an answer in the court Latin of the time, and not to use the venacular, and denied him permission to publish the venacular version until the debate was resolved. Ergo, he did face a court directive already in place by a judge (or rough equivalent), and he did violate it. In fact, he also had, and took advantage of an appeals process, although it was to the Pope and not a superior court. I believe that part of your problem is you do not know the actual history of the event, and the other part is you lack the ability to Google.
In short, don't go correcting people's misunderstandings. accusing people of ignorance of basic facts involved and otherwise acting like a Weisenheimer unless you actually have some understanding of those facts. It makes you look like you are educated above your actual intelligence. (You are, you know. Sorry to have to break it to you.)
Additionally, the majority of the current court, in one of their 5 to 4 decisions, has again agreed that commercial speech is not as protected as other speech. As long as the video games in question are intended to make a profit, there's an overall consensus that they don't enjoy all the protections of political speech, as you touch upon tangentially in your last quote. So even if the court were to rule that a particular game wasn't in any way obscene, that would not necessarily give it all the protection due to works which appear to have significant literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. The court could even find that a game had some artistic value without having to acknowledge that it was entitled to the same level of protection as a typical campaign speech or technical paper.
A violent or sexually explicit game is therefore at least two steps removed from the maximum protection of law.
Scientific consensus was perfectly fine with the steady state theory for several generations. It implied a universe that didn't need a creator, and had no moment of creation. Nobody said "Hey, this steady State thing is unscientific - it has no origin, and EVERYTHING has to have one". There's simply no rule in science that all things have to have an origin. People want to know the origin of the universe because something at least approximately like the Big Bang seems to be true, based on evidence. A Big Bang universe is a scientific theory that seems to have limits implying an origin or source.
So what's with this "Who created God? If you say Nobody, you're being unscientific!" routine? If that were true, then Science should have categorically rejected the Steady State as automatically unscientific, and scientists were wrong to wait for the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background to settle the debate, and Penzias and Wilson don't deserve that Nobel because they didn't disprove a major scientific theory - there was never a real doubt.