Of course, that's an easy answer in itself and therefore wrong:^).
The more complete answer would be that easy and simple answers are abstractions. "All politicians are liars" is a rule of thumb; there are exceptions, but if you can't or won't invest the time and effort to examine the issue in more depth, going by that simple soundbite is going to make you right more often than wrong. Even more importantly, it's going to make you right when it matters; you won't fall a victim to propaganda as easily if you remember it can't be trusted.
Bah. I had True AI for years... I just haven't got a computer powerful enough to run it.
Well, by my calculations, to simulate a human brain in real-time would take 4.1 petabytes of memory and enough computation capacity to loop through it all from 200 to 1000 times per second. At that point you could model each neuron, their connections to each other, and their firing rate accurately.
It might be possible to optimize a little, but still, a true AI would very likely require a modern data center to run.
Let me explain this in terms you can (hopefully) understand: "stealing" is the act of depriving someone of the economic value of a thing.
So, if I were to open a shop near another shop, I'd be stealing? Because competition certainly lowers the profits - and thus the economic value - of the shop that were there first.
Too much abstraction leads to absurd conclusions. A level abstraction that allows calling copyright infringement stealing is going to make thieves of shopkeepers. The reason for that is that intellectual property law doesn't exist to safeguard natural rights, it exists to provide incentive to invest efforts to produce said intellectual property - which is not real property, merely "intellectual" property. And - IMHO - current absurdly strict copyright law with its draconian penalties fails miserably at this nowadays.
. I can't see how big problems like global overpopulation can be solved while we are trying to keep everyone happy -- in the end, some people will have to make sacrifices for the greater good. Obviously going about this in a Stalin like manner isn't the solution, but some changes are going to need to take place. Say what you will about China, but you can't deny that they are one of the very few countries with their population size under control.
Actually, all Western democracies have very small - and many of them negative - population growth rate. In fact, according to Wikipedia, the only continent with significant growth is Africa.
In other words, the problem seems to be solving itself, without the need for human sacrifice.
some of us realize that individuals effectively have no say in democracy.
Modern societies are composed of millions - sometimes hundreds of millions - of people; a single individual shouldn't be able to influence them significantly, because such exercise of power would happen at everyone else's expense. The whole point of democracy is to disperse power amongst the populace rather than concentrate it on an individual.
If democracy can't fix it and climate change is that big of a problem, it follows that we have to dispense with democracy (perhaps only in certain respects) until the problem is fixed.
Who's this "we" you're talking about? I am not going to share my power. And if you happen to get in power instead of me, I'll concentrate on sabotaging all your plans so you'll look like a fool and are easy to replace.
Seriously, how the heck can you first note that democracy results in more efficient cooperation than dictatorship, and then suggest that democracy should be "suspended" when cooperation is required?
Crying like a bitch because you don't like the situation isn't solving anything.
Fine: if you try to "suspend democracy", I will personally hang you with your own entrails from the flagpole of whatever building you chose as your imperial palace or, if that's unavailable for any reason, from the nearest suitable structure. Happy now?
What's unreasonable is saying that you personally can live with the effects of climate change. I'm sure that the millions of people who would suffer terribly because of climate change would have a problem with your "choice".
Well, since democracy has been suspended, and thus they don't have a voice, so what?
If rich countries think that they can ignore climate change and not suffer Al Qaeda x 100, then they are sadly mistaken. The world's poor aren't going to go quietly just so you can have "democracy".
Al Qaeda was founded by a rich asshole. Whether the poor go quietly or not doesn't really matter, because if I'm not listening to my fellow countrymen - which is what "suspending democracy" means - I'm certainly not going to listen to foreigners either.
Or to slow down the change? Sure, but again - to what extent? If you're merely slowing change down, what are you doing, buying time to figure something else out?
Slower change makes it easier for both people, infrastructure and nature to adapt to the new conditions, and as an added bonus should make the extreme weather effects caused by changing heat flows less extreme and frequent.
The thing is, if climate warms then weather patterns change, possibly drying now-fertile farmland and increasing rainfall elsewhere. The society needs time to transfer food production to the new location. Also, if the change is slow enough, you can replace old infrastructure with one better suited to the new conditions as a part of normal maintenance cycle, and don't have to spend billions doing it as a rush job everywhere at once.
In short, dealing with a fast change is far more expensive than with slow change - maybe too expensive that we could do it at all.
It gets back to the old adage that if you want a job done right, do it yourself. If all of Gaia's little envirominions can't take care of her, then I say it's well past time for her to take matters into her own hands.
The Gaia hypothesis basically asserts that the whole biosphere of this world is a giant organism, with what we call living things acting as cell-equivalents. Given this, it follows that we would also be part of Gaia, in the same way your brain and white blood cells are part of you. And, of course, it also follows that your hands are Gaia's hands.
So, does this mean that our current environmental troubles are because Gaia's hit her teens and is addicted to oil and coal?
It's naive in the extreme, nevertheless we have a man intelligent enough to earn a PhD, yet dumb enough to think that power won't be abused despite evidence to the contrary in the news each and every day.
Or we have a Slashdot poster dumb enough to not realize that the man with the PhD knows but doesn't care, as long as he gets his wish. Or that the PhD man is trying to set up an extreme position to locate the "reasonable compromise" where he wants.
In other words, it has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with the ability to imagine possible outcomes of the situation and their probabilities.
Did they test problem-solving ability immediately afterwards? If that's also impaired, that would be further evidence that it's imagination that's impaired here.
A lot of activities and mental states which do not harm people are considered morally wrong. For example, homosexuality, coveting and envy, pride, "thoughtcrime" in the novel, 1984, etc.
So basically, you are arguing that applying strong magnetic fields to the head improve sanity and make one more ethical by removing all kinds of crap reasons for hating one's neighbour.
Never mind hypocrisy, this is cultural imperialism.
Some cultural values are better than others, and should dominate over them. For example, free access to information is better than censorship, and should dominate over it. This can be easily demonstrated by thinking whether you would want some entity preventing you from accessing information that entity has deemed contrary to its goals.
But hey, keep on lying to yourself that all cultures are equal, and specifically that ours isn't superior to any other; ours gives you that right. Plenty of others wouldn't.
Nobody will notice that it is completely ineffective, or that it entrenches use of secure P2P channels by pedophiles so that it becomes infinitely harder to track them down.
Is that a bad thing, thought? A pedophile downloads child porn to jack off to; you track him down. Why? What, exactly speaking, does that accomplish, apart from making life even harder for someone who's already dealt a shitty hand?
I understand people want to see someone suffer - that's what the gladiator games of Rome were all about, feeding OMG criminals to the lions - but can't you satisfy that urge with a violent action movie or something? That's what ethical people do, when they experience immoral urges. Or perhaps you're the type that would molest children, were that your fancy?
Ah, so you think that the EU has the right to dictate Canadian law?
Well, Canada is a subject state to British crown, and Britain is a member of the EU...
More seriously, no, of course EU doesn't have the right to dictate to non-members. On the other hand, EU certainly does have the right to tax or outright ban imports from outside the union. Should Eu try to influence Canadian law by threatening to tax Canadian imports; now that is the question.
Except that politicians - especially EU comission members - can simply bill the state on "expenses". It's the average person who's shit out of luck, as always.
Not that I'm the least bit bitter. Just because our representatives give 40,000+ euro/month pensions to their buddies while the average person gets a few hundred at most is no reason to be bitter. Neither is our glorious leaders rising their own wages each year while the rest of us have our jobs outsourced to Chinese slave labour. Nor is having to pay 50%+ taxes for a new car while our Prime Minister gets one for free from the state (and has the gall to demand a bigger one, because the old one didn't "accomodate his family comfortably" - for the record, my car is 14 years old). No sir, I'm not bitter!
I do, however, think there's a 10th level of Hell reserved for politicians, because even the Devil doesn't deserve to tolerate them forever.
Poker is also a game where your hand depends on luck, yet other people manage to consistently win more than they lose, while others are those who supply those wins.
No championship should be decided by a single game. Even if chance plays no part in the game itself, even the most skilled people sometimes make dumb mistakes; "Know you not that even the very doughtiest of the doughty may run afoul of a day most bad?"
In other words, simply have an even and greater than one number of rounds, and the one who wins most of them wins the match. That should even out the effects of luck, and favour those who are better at taking advantage of it.
This is the problem. We all wanted an RPG FPS like Deus Ex, but no company wanted to put the time or effort into making the RPG element meaningful. Now we have a ton of crummy games with watered down RPG junk in them, like Borderlands. Even Fallout 3 was a major let down in that arena.
Fallout 3's problems have nothing to do with the leveling system, which in turn is not inherent to RPG games. Fallout 3's problem is simply that the computer is unable to simulate social dynamics or a personality, so every action of every character - indeed, everything that can happen in the game - must be scripted by hand. The larger the game, the more superficial everything becomes; the developers simply don't have time to give characters lots of complicated interactions, and the more they try, the more buggy said interactions tend to get - and everyone else will become nothing but a faceless crowd.
The next big thing after "physics simulation" - which in itself is still far from really good, you can't for example destroy the surroundings in most games - is artificial intelligence, both for individual characters and the communities they form. The Sims is already a pretty decent experiment there, but needs more depth and the ability to generate natural language.
In short, computer RPGs need an artificially intelligent Dungeon Master to respond to all the myriad unexpected things people might do. Physics simulation is a step in that direction, since it allows at least parts of gameworld to react in a "natural", unscripted way; the next step would be integrating something like SimCity and/or Civilization into the game, so that The Kingdom can seize the opportunity once you've killed the leader of the Orc Hordes of Doom, rather than just sit there twiddling its thumbs (or alternatively beat a hasty retreat before the advancing orcs if you failed), and a city can grow or shrink in a natural way depending on the goings-on in the gameworld.
In short, get rid of scripted worlds, since they can't help but be static, and embrace ones runnign on simulation engines instead, allowing the player to write his own plot rather than just follow the predetermined one.
But most users don't care how much theoretical space a "32-bit filesystem" has. They have 1TB drives and want to know practically how many hours of high-def videos they can store on it, how many Bluray movies they can rip. Try doing your computations with a "1TB" drive mixed with power of 2. prefixes.
Okay, so maybe Ubuntu should hide all these confusing bytes and bits altogether and report disk space in Bluray-hours?
The issue is having humanity become unable to survive a collapse of the medical infrastructure.
Why is it that every monster always thinks his hideous deeds are justified by saying it's "for greater good"? And why is it that they always have such a flimsy grip on whatever branch of science, philosophy or theology they're abusing to justify their evil?
If you want to improve humanity's gene pool, remove yourself from it. It's your kind of sick fuck who casually says "let's sterilize someone" who's going to be our doom, not a guy who dies of cancer at 40.
For your information, humans only need to live around 16 to breed. It's a very rare person who needs life-or-death medical operations before that.
Then you'll have people screaming that the government ruined their childhood.
Yes, but the question wasn't "how to make everyone happy", which is impossible anyway; it was "how to prevent abuse, as in someone - parents, government, or anyone or thing else in a position of power in relation to his potential victims - reprogramming others to abide by his values".
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, that's an easy answer in itself and therefore wrong :^).
The more complete answer would be that easy and simple answers are abstractions. "All politicians are liars" is a rule of thumb; there are exceptions, but if you can't or won't invest the time and effort to examine the issue in more depth, going by that simple soundbite is going to make you right more often than wrong. Even more importantly, it's going to make you right when it matters; you won't fall a victim to propaganda as easily if you remember it can't be trusted.
Yeah. If only those damn scientists would address the many issues evolution skeptics rise, we could finally get rid of this darwinist conspiracy.
Ups, wrong "skeptics". But please forgive me, for it's hard to tell them apart sometimes.
Well, by my calculations, to simulate a human brain in real-time would take 4.1 petabytes of memory and enough computation capacity to loop through it all from 200 to 1000 times per second. At that point you could model each neuron, their connections to each other, and their firing rate accurately.
It might be possible to optimize a little, but still, a true AI would very likely require a modern data center to run.
So, if I were to open a shop near another shop, I'd be stealing? Because competition certainly lowers the profits - and thus the economic value - of the shop that were there first.
Too much abstraction leads to absurd conclusions. A level abstraction that allows calling copyright infringement stealing is going to make thieves of shopkeepers. The reason for that is that intellectual property law doesn't exist to safeguard natural rights, it exists to provide incentive to invest efforts to produce said intellectual property - which is not real property, merely "intellectual" property. And - IMHO - current absurdly strict copyright law with its draconian penalties fails miserably at this nowadays.
Hey, feel free to submit to my rule anytime.
Actually, all Western democracies have very small - and many of them negative - population growth rate. In fact, according to Wikipedia, the only continent with significant growth is Africa.
In other words, the problem seems to be solving itself, without the need for human sacrifice.
Modern societies are composed of millions - sometimes hundreds of millions - of people; a single individual shouldn't be able to influence them significantly, because such exercise of power would happen at everyone else's expense. The whole point of democracy is to disperse power amongst the populace rather than concentrate it on an individual.
Who's this "we" you're talking about? I am not going to share my power. And if you happen to get in power instead of me, I'll concentrate on sabotaging all your plans so you'll look like a fool and are easy to replace.
Seriously, how the heck can you first note that democracy results in more efficient cooperation than dictatorship, and then suggest that democracy should be "suspended" when cooperation is required?
Fine: if you try to "suspend democracy", I will personally hang you with your own entrails from the flagpole of whatever building you chose as your imperial palace or, if that's unavailable for any reason, from the nearest suitable structure. Happy now?
Well, since democracy has been suspended, and thus they don't have a voice, so what?
Al Qaeda was founded by a rich asshole. Whether the poor go quietly or not doesn't really matter, because if I'm not listening to my fellow countrymen - which is what "suspending democracy" means - I'm certainly not going to listen to foreigners either.
Slower change makes it easier for both people, infrastructure and nature to adapt to the new conditions, and as an added bonus should make the extreme weather effects caused by changing heat flows less extreme and frequent.
The thing is, if climate warms then weather patterns change, possibly drying now-fertile farmland and increasing rainfall elsewhere. The society needs time to transfer food production to the new location. Also, if the change is slow enough, you can replace old infrastructure with one better suited to the new conditions as a part of normal maintenance cycle, and don't have to spend billions doing it as a rush job everywhere at once.
In short, dealing with a fast change is far more expensive than with slow change - maybe too expensive that we could do it at all.
The Gaia hypothesis basically asserts that the whole biosphere of this world is a giant organism, with what we call living things acting as cell-equivalents. Given this, it follows that we would also be part of Gaia, in the same way your brain and white blood cells are part of you. And, of course, it also follows that your hands are Gaia's hands.
So, does this mean that our current environmental troubles are because Gaia's hit her teens and is addicted to oil and coal?
Or we have a Slashdot poster dumb enough to not realize that the man with the PhD knows but doesn't care, as long as he gets his wish. Or that the PhD man is trying to set up an extreme position to locate the "reasonable compromise" where he wants.
How strange. All I get is a good, relaxed feeling and a buzz.
Are you sure it's the beer and not you?
In other words, it has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with the ability to imagine possible outcomes of the situation and their probabilities.
Did they test problem-solving ability immediately afterwards? If that's also impaired, that would be further evidence that it's imagination that's impaired here.
So basically, you are arguing that applying strong magnetic fields to the head improve sanity and make one more ethical by removing all kinds of crap reasons for hating one's neighbour.
Some cultural values are better than others, and should dominate over them. For example, free access to information is better than censorship, and should dominate over it. This can be easily demonstrated by thinking whether you would want some entity preventing you from accessing information that entity has deemed contrary to its goals.
But hey, keep on lying to yourself that all cultures are equal, and specifically that ours isn't superior to any other; ours gives you that right. Plenty of others wouldn't.
Is that a bad thing, thought? A pedophile downloads child porn to jack off to; you track him down. Why? What, exactly speaking, does that accomplish, apart from making life even harder for someone who's already dealt a shitty hand?
I understand people want to see someone suffer - that's what the gladiator games of Rome were all about, feeding OMG criminals to the lions - but can't you satisfy that urge with a violent action movie or something? That's what ethical people do, when they experience immoral urges. Or perhaps you're the type that would molest children, were that your fancy?
Well, Canada is a subject state to British crown, and Britain is a member of the EU...
More seriously, no, of course EU doesn't have the right to dictate to non-members. On the other hand, EU certainly does have the right to tax or outright ban imports from outside the union. Should Eu try to influence Canadian law by threatening to tax Canadian imports; now that is the question.
Except that politicians - especially EU comission members - can simply bill the state on "expenses". It's the average person who's shit out of luck, as always.
Not that I'm the least bit bitter. Just because our representatives give 40,000+ euro/month pensions to their buddies while the average person gets a few hundred at most is no reason to be bitter. Neither is our glorious leaders rising their own wages each year while the rest of us have our jobs outsourced to Chinese slave labour. Nor is having to pay 50%+ taxes for a new car while our Prime Minister gets one for free from the state (and has the gall to demand a bigger one, because the old one didn't "accomodate his family comfortably" - for the record, my car is 14 years old). No sir, I'm not bitter!
I do, however, think there's a 10th level of Hell reserved for politicians, because even the Devil doesn't deserve to tolerate them forever.
Poker is also a game where your hand depends on luck, yet other people manage to consistently win more than they lose, while others are those who supply those wins.
No championship should be decided by a single game. Even if chance plays no part in the game itself, even the most skilled people sometimes make dumb mistakes; "Know you not that even the very doughtiest of the doughty may run afoul of a day most bad?"
In other words, simply have an even and greater than one number of rounds, and the one who wins most of them wins the match. That should even out the effects of luck, and favour those who are better at taking advantage of it.
Fallout 3's problems have nothing to do with the leveling system, which in turn is not inherent to RPG games. Fallout 3's problem is simply that the computer is unable to simulate social dynamics or a personality, so every action of every character - indeed, everything that can happen in the game - must be scripted by hand. The larger the game, the more superficial everything becomes; the developers simply don't have time to give characters lots of complicated interactions, and the more they try, the more buggy said interactions tend to get - and everyone else will become nothing but a faceless crowd.
The next big thing after "physics simulation" - which in itself is still far from really good, you can't for example destroy the surroundings in most games - is artificial intelligence, both for individual characters and the communities they form. The Sims is already a pretty decent experiment there, but needs more depth and the ability to generate natural language.
In short, computer RPGs need an artificially intelligent Dungeon Master to respond to all the myriad unexpected things people might do. Physics simulation is a step in that direction, since it allows at least parts of gameworld to react in a "natural", unscripted way; the next step would be integrating something like SimCity and/or Civilization into the game, so that The Kingdom can seize the opportunity once you've killed the leader of the Orc Hordes of Doom, rather than just sit there twiddling its thumbs (or alternatively beat a hasty retreat before the advancing orcs if you failed), and a city can grow or shrink in a natural way depending on the goings-on in the gameworld.
In short, get rid of scripted worlds, since they can't help but be static, and embrace ones runnign on simulation engines instead, allowing the player to write his own plot rather than just follow the predetermined one.
That's true of every field nowadays, not just IT.
They have the recourse of waiting until they're legally adult and having it changed.
Okay, so maybe Ubuntu should hide all these confusing bytes and bits altogether and report disk space in Bluray-hours?
Why is it that every monster always thinks his hideous deeds are justified by saying it's "for greater good"? And why is it that they always have such a flimsy grip on whatever branch of science, philosophy or theology they're abusing to justify their evil?
If you want to improve humanity's gene pool, remove yourself from it. It's your kind of sick fuck who casually says "let's sterilize someone" who's going to be our doom, not a guy who dies of cancer at 40.
For your information, humans only need to live around 16 to breed. It's a very rare person who needs life-or-death medical operations before that.
Yes, but the question wasn't "how to make everyone happy", which is impossible anyway; it was "how to prevent abuse, as in someone - parents, government, or anyone or thing else in a position of power in relation to his potential victims - reprogramming others to abide by his values".