That doesn't go far enough, I believe that the July 7th bombers may well have used maps such as these - http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tube/maps/ which I might add are openly available to the public in pamphlets, the back of diaries, they are even posted on the walls of the city!
They were also known to have been communicating with a lexicon derived from dictionaries available everywhere! We must stop the terrorist networking -remove the dangerous dictionaries!
anybody who's more than 30 ly away won't be able to have a meaningful conversation with us over the course of a single researcher's lifetime
Are you joking? Do you not think it would be meaningful just to receive the message "hello"? this would be one of the most important moments in the history of humankind (not to mention alienkind). A long conversation isn't needed for this to be meaningful. Heck, no conversation is required -we just want to find someone else out there.
...the system in Minority Report is considered one of the worst UIs in movie history because moving your arms is "very tiring". Maybe having to move your arms is a good thing. Maybe you should have to run on the spot to scroll.
There was an episode of Outer Limits (I think it was Outer Limits) where a race had become so dependent on their technology that their bodies had withered to non-functionality. It was an interesting forecast for ourselves, but it is more likely we will be disabled by obesity rather than withering.
Obviously I'm not actually suggesting something like this will occur, but my God people -is it really that hard to move your arms?
let's face it -your information is out there somewhere. Instead of being afraid of getting involved in some online community, let's think of better measures of protection against identity theft.
Don't you hate that time of day when the sun is shining right into your apartment/living room, and putting glare on your monitor/tv? Isn't this going to be a problem for those apartments facing the sun (and turning along with it)?
What you are is unqualified to engage in moral discussions. Assertion of your participation in a particular group is not justification for your actions. Would you grant moral equivalency to someone proclaiming themselves to be a devout follower of Mein Kampf?
Do you really believe that something is moral because it is written in your magical rules booklet (scripture, as you call it)?
Are you a vegan? And if so, what steps are you taking to make sure that a particular sub-species of earthworm that lives only in a little valley where thin, pale-looking organic farmers use ox-drawn iron-age plows to greenly raise the plants from which your Thanksgiving tofurkey was molded are all cut to ribbons in the process? You could be partly responsible for wormicide.
This is painfully spurious reasoning. By the same logic, I could argue that it is not a valid moral action to donate 100 dollars to a charity, since it would have been possible to donate 120.
Um, just to clarify a few things, please lay out your moral framework, as it relates to which living creatures it's OK to kill, and by what means. If it's a moral issue, that should be very simple for you to describe, since surely you're not basing that notion on any mixed premises or anything.
Generally speaking, it is immoral to kill conscious beings. You are correct if you are to say that science has not yet provided a means by which to compare and contrast the consciousness of various species, but this is not a justification for refusing to include them in our moral considerations, not the least because the same limitation of science applies to humans as well -we are also incapable of evaluating the consciousness of one human against another human. If your reasoning is correct, then there is nothing to stop us from excluding some class of humans from the rest. So, just because we can't determine one beings level of consciousness with respect to anothers (yet) doesn't mean we should exclude them from our moral considerations. What sort of moral considerations am I talking about, and how should we make them? Well, it is quite intuitive that consciousness is directly proportional to cognitive complexity. While not yet proven, this is a good starting point for deciding whether it is okay for us to kill some given animal.
Uh, not that I agree or disagree with the grandparent, but the holocaust was a targeted, conscious effort to kill, which it could be argued that extinctions due to pollution or destruction of habitat is not a concerted effort, just a "natural" byproduct.
you make a good point. I would like to respond in two ways. First, my post was intended to show that just because something is part of the process of natural selection does not mean that it is jsutified. You seem to agree with me insofar as you invoke motivations as a necessary consideration for the morality of an action. And so, if I understand you correctly, we both agree that the poster I was responding to was incorrect.
Secondly, you argue that the holocaust should not be considered natural selection because it was not a natural by-product but rather a targetted and conscious effort to kill, whereas with the dolphins they died as a natural by-product. I would have to disagree with you, for multiple reasons. First, as per the intent of the poster I was responsding to, we are considering all actions that humans do as part of nature. Hence, genocide is natural -whether or not it is targetted and conscious-, by the definitions we are proceeding on. Second, if conscious and targetted effort to kill is a requirement of natural behavior, then does it not follow that hunting behavior, such as in a lion, is not natural? I suppose you might argue that in a lion it is different, because its urge to kill is driven by its need for sustainance. However, the nazi's urge to kill was not in itself driven by a desire to kill, but was rather a by-product (a "solution") to their goal of getting rid of Jews.
I would like to return to my central point: natural selection is not the arbiter of morality. This is what I took issue with in the post I was responding to. You seem to agree with me. I hope the discussion of nazism didn't take us too far off point, but the fact that your response invoked motivations idnicates that you seem to agree with me. Unfortunately, you might want to argue that if you don't intend to kill, then you are justified. We can then change our example from the holocaust to say, AIDS, malaria, hurricane Katrina, or homeless dying of cold. I don't think you can stand on firm moral ground while claiming that we are morally justified in letting all of these people die, simply because no one specifically is trying to kill them. This is tantamount to saying that you are morally justified in letting a blind man walk off a cliff, because hey, you didn't try to kill him. Clearly the moral thing to do is to warn him. To extend this to other cases, we are morally obligated to take action against the many groups in nature -and in human society- which are, so to speak, walking towards the edge (or more accurately, being pushed towards the edge as a "by-product" of our collective greed.)
Yes, let's stick to science when we're talking about scientific matters. As for this issue, let's stick to morality, since this is a moral issue. The science of natural selection pulls no weight here, regardless of whether the death of this species can be understood as a type of natural selection. BTW I should point out that if we accept your argument about natural selection (wherein everything humans do is considered natural since we are part of nature,) then the holocaust would be justified as a type of natural selection.
So is forcing the blind to adhere to some higher code of ethics than sighted people. Look, a blind person doesn't have to adhere to your idea of how the blind SHOULD be any more than a sighted person has to give a rats ass about what you think of hunting. You see, patronization and nanny-state thinking is more wrong to me than shooting a deer. A deer is a deer. There are millions, and we've displaced their natural predators. I don't hunt but jeez, your attitude on this is ridiculously patronizing. Who says blind people would not want to experience the "joy of killing an animal" if sighted people sometimes do just that? Or do the blind live in some fantastic world where they go where you tell them to and do what you say is morally ok? If so, can we have your email so we can "check" before we run all willy nilly without benefit of your guidance?
Not to put to fine a point on it, but you lack the intelligence sufficient to engage in meaningful discussion. Oh by the way, thanks for reminding me that "a deer is a deer" -I forgot. I also forgot how it follows form this that it is morally acceptable to kill it because you think doing so will give you pleasure. Since you are clearly mentally deficient, let me make it very clear that my post was not intended to say that only blind people should be barred from killing animals, just that it should be unacceptable to kill animals simply to derive some kind of sick pleasure from the fact that you are the one killing it. Did you know there are such things as animal cruelty laws? Animals, as conscious beings, are deserving of protection. When someone declares that they want to fire projectiles through the body of an animal for fun, you would think they should have to justify that -and they do. They provide a reason for why they should be allowed to painfully kill animals for their own perverted self interest. Whether or not it is a good reason (it's not a good reason for the record), is this: it's a sport, and hence it is okay. Now, tell me, how exactly does it qualify as a sport when someone else is aiming the gun for you? It is clearly, at least in the case of these people, just a matter of wanting to kill things. Hence, they should not be allowed to, because that is not an acceptable reason (by almost any decent persons standards). I am not suggesting that this is the case with all hunters, in fact it is probably not the case with many of them. However, in the case of those who are having someone else aim for them but want to still have the "joy of pulling the trigger", they are clearly lying if they say they are in it for the "sport".
PS do you mind if I hunt you down and kill you in the forest for sport? Hunting a human might actually be a challenge. I'll even let you have a stick.
"This allows their companion behind them to peer over their shoulder and help them sight it, but the blind person can pull the trigger."
Great! Now they too can experience the joy of killing an animal! So who is still arguing that this is about sport? It seems to me quite clear to be about some primal urge to want to kill things. This is morally indefensible.
You proceed from a bad presupposition. High earners do not "receive" wealth from the economy. High earners CREATE wealth in the economy. It is therefore unethical for anyone but them to determine what becomes of that wealth, constrained by the fact that all must be taxed to pay for the necessities of government.
Listen, when I said that the economy distributes wealth, I wasn't implying that workers don't produce things of value to society -they obviously do and this much is obvious. What I mean when I say the economy distributes wealth -and you should be able to understand this if you think about it before shooting off a post- is that where money goes is dictated by a complicated system of pushes and pulls, supply and demand, and so on, which together we can simply call "the economy". What I am questioning is whether the operation of this system should be the ultimate arbiter of ethical truth. Frankly, I think that's a downright retarded view when stated as plainly as that, but that is the essence of what I am arguing against.
I could be wrong, but I think you shot yourself in the foot in with your opening sentance.
yea, you're wrong.
Free market economies do not "just happen" to distribute wealth. It goes to those who work, in proportion to how hard they work and how skilled they are.
There are way too many things wrong with this sentence to possibly address all of them. Maybe I will provide a few examples that will fly in the face of the assertions you have made:
Money doesn't always go to those who work (consider inheritance)
money isn't proportional to how hard you work, in fact the opposite is often the case -your typical factory worker busts his ass day after day and does overtime to hang onto the lower rungs of the economic ladder, and your typical overseas labourer works even harder for even less pay
Your pay is not always proportional to your skill -how many celebrities including actors and singers are paid based on their appearance? -exactly what skill are Paris Hilton and Nichole Ritchie exercising?
another question -why should your skill set (which is basically determined by chance) dictate your right to life, liberty, and happiness (since these are all affected to some extent by your income they are in effect determined by chance)?
another question -how does the sociological fact that the greatest predictor of your income is the income of your parents play into your view?
Now, I'm not saying these are all valid counterexamples, but they certainly demote the status of your claims from undisputed fact to contentious issue, and probably when taken together discredit your claims entirely. Please understand that the examples given above are far from a complete list.
As such, it IS an ethical issue for person A to take money from person B and just spend it; person B deserves that money, by the sweat of their brow.
Of course it's an ethical issue, you just don't realize you're arguing for the wrong side. Also note that person A is more likely to be sweating than person B, and furthermore, even if person B does happen to be sweating more (sorry to abuse this analogy so much) I don't see why it should follow that, ethically speaking, B has a right to own a third big screen tv and A deserves to die.
Do they use more than 18% of the expenditure of State?
If not, on what ethical basis do we justify taking from them what they or their parents have earned and spending it on ourselves?
You're conflating an ethical issue with an economical issue. Just because a capitalist economy has happened to distribute wealth in such and such a manner does not imply that those who received the wealth that they did are somehow ethically justified in spending that wealth. For example, it may well be the case that the economy dictates that your average celebrity or pro-athlete earns 1000 times as much as they need to survive. This is a far cry from saying that these people are somehow morally entitled to spend all of this money in any way they so please, when people are dying every day because the economy gave them a smaller piece of the pie (in a typical Ottawa winter one homeless person dies of the cold per day, for example.) To sum up, just because money is distributed in a particular way does not mean you are ethically entitled to spending it. Ethical questions are an entirely different matter from the particular circumstances that arise from our economy.
Let me note that I can't really fault you for believing this, because it is incredibly commonplace to hear that kind of sentiment. But I am interested in knowing why it is that so many people believe that economic circumstances should dictate what is morally correct. In any other domain it is absurdly obvious that what is ethical is determined by considering the pain and pleasure of the people involved, or by considering other aspects of the human condition, or by adhering to certain ethical maxims. And yet, when the domain of discourse is money, people suddenly forget this -they implicitly introduce the premise that what is ethical is entirely governed by the economy. This sort of assertion would be laughable if made out loud, and yet it is the implicit foundation the very sentiment you expressed in your post.
I had a question that I would like to see the Slashdot community have a go at. What exactly is wrong with the following electronic voting system (I assume something is wrong becasue it seems so simple):
You go to a voting booth. You are assigned a random and unique number. Your vote is tied to that unique number and made available online. Anonymity is maintained, while anyone can verify that their vote was cast accurately, and anyone who wants to can tally the votes. No central tabulator is required, and no moving of hardware containing votes is required. These have been major security concerns for Diebolds system.
Plus, of COURSE there should be a paper printout -one for the voter, and one for storage. Honestly, to not create the paper trail is either moronic or diabolic (the security errors in Diebolds system are almost too big to have been the result of incompetence.)
Pleo is a fake, or at least not nearly as impressive as they proclaim it to be.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=mgiB90lJNSY
The video demonstrates, at the very least, extreme dishonesty on the part of Pleo's manufacturers, in that they pass off their act as a demonstration of Pleo's adaptive ability.
What's going on here? Not a single comment blaming this on the Iraq war? Nobody trying to tell us that the US is a much worse police state? Wow. Must be an off-day for the slashdot trolls.
How about... giving more money to all teachers and attracting better talent? It is obvious and uncontroversial that offering more money gets you more skilled people. However, for some reason, when it comes to education people ignore this fact. If you want to provide incentives to get better teaching, raise salaries! Offering a prize for performance is just an underhanded way of trying to save money on your incentives -you are giving all the teachers a lottery ticket instead of cash. Worse than that, it clearly encourages cheating.
That's not what they mean when they say "intelligence emerges through interaction with the environment." You are thinking of learning through interacton with the environment, while they are suggesting that intelligence literally is comprised of some sort of interaction with the environment.
Think of an ant crawling along, forming an incredibly complex path along the sand. As complex as this path is, we know that the complexity arises not through the ants mind, (which is astoundingly simplistic) but rather, it arises because of the complexity of the environment -tiny pebbles and inconsistencies in its environment cause it to form a complex and intricate path. Similarly, the complexity of certain intelligent behavior (ours included) might be the result of an interaction with the environment.
We can take a very simple algorithm, place it in a robot body and drop it into a real environment, and see intelligent and intricate behaviors emerge via the robots interaction with its environment.
The article was fairly scant in terms of what algorithm they are using to combine the data derived by using these flags. It said simply "MythTV looks for all three of these identifiers to locate commercials". But how does it combine the indicators? this seems to me the most important part of the process, and its explanation is missing. Each test/indicator provides a piece of presumably meaningful data, but we need some way of combining that data to make a decision. They could simply count flags, they could grow a decision tree, train a neural net, use a clustering algorithm, use a naive bayesian learning system, use a kNN system, use a 1R learner.... Which is it? Anyone know?
Also, another test they should implement: They should look for text in the scenes. On screen text is rare in program content (unless subtitles) but is common in commercials. Several consecutive 30 second scenes, each of which (or most of which) contain on screen text would be a good indicator of a commercial block. If there is lots of text in the entire file, you are probably watching a show with subtitles, so ignore this test. (this test is very computationally expensive because of all the computer vision involved, but there are probably good optimizations and workarounds available, and it would probably be worth it to implement -I suspect it is a dependable test)
First of all, let me say that this is an impressive robot, and created a compelling illusions of high level intelligence. Now I say 'illusion' because the techniques employed to make the robot appear intelligent were no doubt just clever applications of simple pattern matching technology (I will explain shortly). What I found most impressive (probably not what most people will) was the ability of Quasi to pick out words spoken to him amidst all that background noise.
On the design of the robot itself, I liked the way it looked, appeared, and the personality they gave it. The personality is important in making it seem intelligent and making us bond with it. However, for those interested in whether this guy could appear in household toy form any time soon, the answer is "not without some serious design changes". Notice that none of the robots sensors are actually on the robot himself. He receives his data (and I believe all of his processing is done) external to the robot himself -his webcams, motions sensors, and microphones are all situated in the environment, and his components consist just of his servos and snazzy plastic body parts.
On the design of the robots mind, it doesn't appear to be anything too complex, but please correct me if I am mistaken. First of all, the very fact that his speech program made use of pre-recorded speeches (from TFA) should make us all very skeptical of its ability to be creative, or to be a worthwhile conversation partner for more than 3 minutes. Notice also that of all the questions that Quasi answered, any of the responses that they gave could be reasonably triggered by the recognition of one or two words in the same sentence, and playing the appropriate response. Some examples:
Person:......... tired........ Quasi: It's been a loooooong day! I've been here since 8:30!
Person:......your name....... Quasi: My names Quasi. Quasi the robot!
Person:......cute........ Quasi: awwwwwww, I bet you say that to all the robots!
and so on. There are not that many things that the typical person is going to say to a robot in a two minute encounter. Some smart alecky people will probably say something like "you don't really have feelings, you're just a robot!" which no doubt has a preprogrammed answer as well, because the CMU guys are going to have fun putting that response in there. Notice also what happened when the guy said to Quasi "do you remember my name?" The impressive thing here was that it recognized the guys voice, or made an assumption about conversation flow (perhaps it holds a list of peoples names for a few minutes). While Quasi certainly did remember the guys name, he couldn't say it, and thus the response "It starts with a C right?" because you can't pre-record quasi saying every persons name. You can bet your ass that if someone named Xavier asked Quasi if he remembers his name, the answer will be "no I'm sorry! Tell me again and I'll try harder to remember!" or something along those lines -they don't want to prerecord a message for every letter of the alphabet either.
Overall I give this robot an A+ without a doubt. It did very well what it was supposed to do. But please don't go jumping to the conclusion that Quasi is displaying intelligence -he's not. Quasi is doing a performance (quite well I might add) using simple pattern matching techniques and pre-recorded answers. For most people, the illusion would probably hold up, because most people don't know about the techniques used to solve these sorts of problems, and thus they don't know what sort of questions to ask to trip up a robot, demonstrating its real lack of intelligence. For example, ask it (textbook example) "The other day I ordered a hamburger, and it arrived blackened to a crisp. I stormed out immediately. Did I eat the hamburger?" or the variation "The other day I ordered a hamburger, and I left avery big tip. Did I eat the hamburger?" answering the first question no and the second yes would demonstrate an intelligent understanding of hamburgers, restaurants, and what people tend to do in them. This is a good question to ask for a start (by no means proof positive of intelligence), but Quasi would fail.
I hate cheaters. When other people cheat, it devalues my degree. Furthermore, it is a slap in the face to anyone who puts in the time and effort to legitimately receive the marks. I believe there are many other students who feel the same way. I was wondering -would it be possible to set up a system whereby students police each others work? Say, after the final due date has passed, the assignments all become accessible online (arbitrarily coded so we don't know which assignment came from which person) and students can flag passages or portions of the assignment that appear to be violations. Overseers then, presumably the prof, can look over the most oft flagged sections (if not all of them). I would have no problem participating in such a program. Cheating pisses me off to no end, and the childish notion that "snitching" is wrong does not affect me -these people are breaking the rules and adversely affecting both the system itself and me personally- I would be happy to see them caught in droves.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't go far enough, I believe that the July 7th bombers may well have used maps such as these - http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tube/maps/ which I might add are openly available to the public in pamphlets, the back of diaries, they are even posted on the walls of the city!
They were also known to have been communicating with a lexicon derived from dictionaries available everywhere! We must stop the terrorist networking -remove the dangerous dictionaries!
anybody who's more than 30 ly away won't be able to have a meaningful conversation with us over the course of a single researcher's lifetime
Are you joking? Do you not think it would be meaningful just to receive the message "hello"? this would be one of the most important moments in the history of humankind (not to mention alienkind). A long conversation isn't needed for this to be meaningful. Heck, no conversation is required -we just want to find someone else out there.
...the system in Minority Report is considered one of the worst UIs in movie history because moving your arms is "very tiring". Maybe having to move your arms is a good thing. Maybe you should have to run on the spot to scroll.
There was an episode of Outer Limits (I think it was Outer Limits) where a race had become so dependent on their technology that their bodies had withered to non-functionality. It was an interesting forecast for ourselves, but it is more likely we will be disabled by obesity rather than withering.
Obviously I'm not actually suggesting something like this will occur, but my God people -is it really that hard to move your arms?
let's face it -your information is out there somewhere. Instead of being afraid of getting involved in some online community, let's think of better measures of protection against identity theft.
I guess I read it wrong. That's a much better system.
Don't you hate that time of day when the sun is shining right into your apartment/living room, and putting glare on your monitor/tv? Isn't this going to be a problem for those apartments facing the sun (and turning along with it)?
What you are is unqualified to engage in moral discussions. Assertion of your participation in a particular group is not justification for your actions. Would you grant moral equivalency to someone proclaiming themselves to be a devout follower of Mein Kampf?
Do you really believe that something is moral because it is written in your magical rules booklet (scripture, as you call it)?
Are you a vegan? And if so, what steps are you taking to make sure that a particular sub-species of earthworm that lives only in a little valley where thin, pale-looking organic farmers use ox-drawn iron-age plows to greenly raise the plants from which your Thanksgiving tofurkey was molded are all cut to ribbons in the process? You could be partly responsible for wormicide.
This is painfully spurious reasoning. By the same logic, I could argue that it is not a valid moral action to donate 100 dollars to a charity, since it would have been possible to donate 120.
Um, just to clarify a few things, please lay out your moral framework, as it relates to which living creatures it's OK to kill, and by what means. If it's a moral issue, that should be very simple for you to describe, since surely you're not basing that notion on any mixed premises or anything.
Generally speaking, it is immoral to kill conscious beings. You are correct if you are to say that science has not yet provided a means by which to compare and contrast the consciousness of various species, but this is not a justification for refusing to include them in our moral considerations, not the least because the same limitation of science applies to humans as well -we are also incapable of evaluating the consciousness of one human against another human. If your reasoning is correct, then there is nothing to stop us from excluding some class of humans from the rest. So, just because we can't determine one beings level of consciousness with respect to anothers (yet) doesn't mean we should exclude them from our moral considerations. What sort of moral considerations am I talking about, and how should we make them? Well, it is quite intuitive that consciousness is directly proportional to cognitive complexity. While not yet proven, this is a good starting point for deciding whether it is okay for us to kill some given animal.
I don't think you are on the same page as the previous poster -from my reading it seemed as though he agreed with you. Correct me if I'm mistaken.
Uh, not that I agree or disagree with the grandparent, but the holocaust was a targeted, conscious effort to kill, which it could be argued that extinctions due to pollution or destruction of habitat is not a concerted effort, just a "natural" byproduct.
you make a good point. I would like to respond in two ways. First, my post was intended to show that just because something is part of the process of natural selection does not mean that it is jsutified. You seem to agree with me insofar as you invoke motivations as a necessary consideration for the morality of an action. And so, if I understand you correctly, we both agree that the poster I was responding to was incorrect.
Secondly, you argue that the holocaust should not be considered natural selection because it was not a natural by-product but rather a targetted and conscious effort to kill, whereas with the dolphins they died as a natural by-product. I would have to disagree with you, for multiple reasons. First, as per the intent of the poster I was responsding to, we are considering all actions that humans do as part of nature. Hence, genocide is natural -whether or not it is targetted and conscious-, by the definitions we are proceeding on. Second, if conscious and targetted effort to kill is a requirement of natural behavior, then does it not follow that hunting behavior, such as in a lion, is not natural? I suppose you might argue that in a lion it is different, because its urge to kill is driven by its need for sustainance. However, the nazi's urge to kill was not in itself driven by a desire to kill, but was rather a by-product (a "solution") to their goal of getting rid of Jews.
I would like to return to my central point: natural selection is not the arbiter of morality. This is what I took issue with in the post I was responding to. You seem to agree with me. I hope the discussion of nazism didn't take us too far off point, but the fact that your response invoked motivations idnicates that you seem to agree with me. Unfortunately, you might want to argue that if you don't intend to kill, then you are justified. We can then change our example from the holocaust to say, AIDS, malaria, hurricane Katrina, or homeless dying of cold. I don't think you can stand on firm moral ground while claiming that we are morally justified in letting all of these people die, simply because no one specifically is trying to kill them. This is tantamount to saying that you are morally justified in letting a blind man walk off a cliff, because hey, you didn't try to kill him. Clearly the moral thing to do is to warn him. To extend this to other cases, we are morally obligated to take action against the many groups in nature -and in human society- which are, so to speak, walking towards the edge (or more accurately, being pushed towards the edge as a "by-product" of our collective greed.)
Yes, let's stick to science when we're talking about scientific matters. As for this issue, let's stick to morality, since this is a moral issue. The science of natural selection pulls no weight here, regardless of whether the death of this species can be understood as a type of natural selection. BTW I should point out that if we accept your argument about natural selection (wherein everything humans do is considered natural since we are part of nature,) then the holocaust would be justified as a type of natural selection.
oh yea, and what's natural is good right? Like rape and murder? Thanks dr.Morality, you have staightened me right out!
So is forcing the blind to adhere to some higher code of ethics than sighted people. Look, a blind person doesn't have to adhere to your idea of how the blind SHOULD be any more than a sighted person has to give a rats ass about what you think of hunting. You see, patronization and nanny-state thinking is more wrong to me than shooting a deer. A deer is a deer. There are millions, and we've displaced their natural predators. I don't hunt but jeez, your attitude on this is ridiculously patronizing. Who says blind people would not want to experience the "joy of killing an animal" if sighted people sometimes do just that? Or do the blind live in some fantastic world where they go where you tell them to and do what you say is morally ok? If so, can we have your email so we can "check" before we run all willy nilly without benefit of your guidance?
Not to put to fine a point on it, but you lack the intelligence sufficient to engage in meaningful discussion. Oh by the way, thanks for reminding me that "a deer is a deer" -I forgot. I also forgot how it follows form this that it is morally acceptable to kill it because you think doing so will give you pleasure. Since you are clearly mentally deficient, let me make it very clear that my post was not intended to say that only blind people should be barred from killing animals, just that it should be unacceptable to kill animals simply to derive some kind of sick pleasure from the fact that you are the one killing it. Did you know there are such things as animal cruelty laws? Animals, as conscious beings, are deserving of protection. When someone declares that they want to fire projectiles through the body of an animal for fun, you would think they should have to justify that -and they do. They provide a reason for why they should be allowed to painfully kill animals for their own perverted self interest. Whether or not it is a good reason (it's not a good reason for the record), is this: it's a sport, and hence it is okay. Now, tell me, how exactly does it qualify as a sport when someone else is aiming the gun for you? It is clearly, at least in the case of these people, just a matter of wanting to kill things. Hence, they should not be allowed to, because that is not an acceptable reason (by almost any decent persons standards). I am not suggesting that this is the case with all hunters, in fact it is probably not the case with many of them. However, in the case of those who are having someone else aim for them but want to still have the "joy of pulling the trigger", they are clearly lying if they say they are in it for the "sport".
PS do you mind if I hunt you down and kill you in the forest for sport? Hunting a human might actually be a challenge. I'll even let you have a stick.
"This allows their companion behind them to peer over their shoulder and help them sight it, but the blind person can pull the trigger."
Great! Now they too can experience the joy of killing an animal! So who is still arguing that this is about sport? It seems to me quite clear to be about some primal urge to want to kill things. This is morally indefensible.
You proceed from a bad presupposition. High earners do not "receive" wealth from the economy. High earners CREATE wealth in the economy. It is therefore unethical for anyone but them to determine what becomes of that wealth, constrained by the fact that all must be taxed to pay for the necessities of government.
Listen, when I said that the economy distributes wealth, I wasn't implying that workers don't produce things of value to society -they obviously do and this much is obvious. What I mean when I say the economy distributes wealth -and you should be able to understand this if you think about it before shooting off a post- is that where money goes is dictated by a complicated system of pushes and pulls, supply and demand, and so on, which together we can simply call "the economy". What I am questioning is whether the operation of this system should be the ultimate arbiter of ethical truth. Frankly, I think that's a downright retarded view when stated as plainly as that, but that is the essence of what I am arguing against.
yea, you're wrong.
Free market economies do not "just happen" to distribute wealth. It goes to those who work, in proportion to how hard they work and how skilled they are.
There are way too many things wrong with this sentence to possibly address all of them. Maybe I will provide a few examples that will fly in the face of the assertions you have made:
- Money doesn't always go to those who work (consider inheritance)
- money isn't proportional to how hard you work, in fact the opposite is often the case -your typical factory worker busts his ass day after day and does overtime to hang onto the lower rungs of the economic ladder, and your typical overseas labourer works even harder for even less pay
- Your pay is not always proportional to your skill -how many celebrities including actors and singers are paid based on their appearance? -exactly what skill are Paris Hilton and Nichole Ritchie exercising?
- another question -why should your skill set (which is basically determined by chance) dictate your right to life, liberty, and happiness (since these are all affected to some extent by your income they are in effect determined by chance)?
- another question -how does the sociological fact that the greatest predictor of your income is the income of your parents play into your view?
Now, I'm not saying these are all valid counterexamples, but they certainly demote the status of your claims from undisputed fact to contentious issue, and probably when taken together discredit your claims entirely. Please understand that the examples given above are far from a complete list.As such, it IS an ethical issue for person A to take money from person B and just spend it; person B deserves that money, by the sweat of their brow.
Of course it's an ethical issue, you just don't realize you're arguing for the wrong side. Also note that person A is more likely to be sweating than person B, and furthermore, even if person B does happen to be sweating more (sorry to abuse this analogy so much) I don't see why it should follow that, ethically speaking, B has a right to own a third big screen tv and A deserves to die.
Do they use more than 18% of the expenditure of State?
If not, on what ethical basis do we justify taking from them what they or their parents have earned and spending it on ourselves?
You're conflating an ethical issue with an economical issue. Just because a capitalist economy has happened to distribute wealth in such and such a manner does not imply that those who received the wealth that they did are somehow ethically justified in spending that wealth. For example, it may well be the case that the economy dictates that your average celebrity or pro-athlete earns 1000 times as much as they need to survive. This is a far cry from saying that these people are somehow morally entitled to spend all of this money in any way they so please, when people are dying every day because the economy gave them a smaller piece of the pie (in a typical Ottawa winter one homeless person dies of the cold per day, for example.) To sum up, just because money is distributed in a particular way does not mean you are ethically entitled to spending it. Ethical questions are an entirely different matter from the particular circumstances that arise from our economy.
Let me note that I can't really fault you for believing this, because it is incredibly commonplace to hear that kind of sentiment. But I am interested in knowing why it is that so many people believe that economic circumstances should dictate what is morally correct. In any other domain it is absurdly obvious that what is ethical is determined by considering the pain and pleasure of the people involved, or by considering other aspects of the human condition, or by adhering to certain ethical maxims. And yet, when the domain of discourse is money, people suddenly forget this -they implicitly introduce the premise that what is ethical is entirely governed by the economy. This sort of assertion would be laughable if made out loud, and yet it is the implicit foundation the very sentiment you expressed in your post.
I had a question that I would like to see the Slashdot community have a go at. What exactly is wrong with the following electronic voting system (I assume something is wrong becasue it seems so simple):
You go to a voting booth. You are assigned a random and unique number. Your vote is tied to that unique number and made available online. Anonymity is maintained, while anyone can verify that their vote was cast accurately, and anyone who wants to can tally the votes. No central tabulator is required, and no moving of hardware containing votes is required. These have been major security concerns for Diebolds system.
Plus, of COURSE there should be a paper printout -one for the voter, and one for storage. Honestly, to not create the paper trail is either moronic or diabolic (the security errors in Diebolds system are almost too big to have been the result of incompetence.)
Pleo is a fake, or at least not nearly as impressive as they proclaim it to be. http://youtube.com/watch?v=mgiB90lJNSY The video demonstrates, at the very least, extreme dishonesty on the part of Pleo's manufacturers, in that they pass off their act as a demonstration of Pleo's adaptive ability.
What's going on here? Not a single comment blaming this on the Iraq war? Nobody trying to tell us that the US is a much worse police state? Wow. Must be an off-day for the slashdot trolls.
apparently not.
How about... giving more money to all teachers and attracting better talent? It is obvious and uncontroversial that offering more money gets you more skilled people. However, for some reason, when it comes to education people ignore this fact. If you want to provide incentives to get better teaching, raise salaries! Offering a prize for performance is just an underhanded way of trying to save money on your incentives -you are giving all the teachers a lottery ticket instead of cash. Worse than that, it clearly encourages cheating.
That's not what they mean when they say "intelligence emerges through interaction with the environment." You are thinking of learning through interacton with the environment, while they are suggesting that intelligence literally is comprised of some sort of interaction with the environment.
Think of an ant crawling along, forming an incredibly complex path along the sand. As complex as this path is, we know that the complexity arises not through the ants mind, (which is astoundingly simplistic) but rather, it arises because of the complexity of the environment -tiny pebbles and inconsistencies in its environment cause it to form a complex and intricate path. Similarly, the complexity of certain intelligent behavior (ours included) might be the result of an interaction with the environment.
We can take a very simple algorithm, place it in a robot body and drop it into a real environment, and see intelligent and intricate behaviors emerge via the robots interaction with its environment.
The article was fairly scant in terms of what algorithm they are using to combine the data derived by using these flags. It said simply "MythTV looks for all three of these identifiers to locate commercials". But how does it combine the indicators? this seems to me the most important part of the process, and its explanation is missing. Each test/indicator provides a piece of presumably meaningful data, but we need some way of combining that data to make a decision. They could simply count flags, they could grow a decision tree, train a neural net, use a clustering algorithm, use a naive bayesian learning system, use a kNN system, use a 1R learner.... Which is it? Anyone know?
Also, another test they should implement: They should look for text in the scenes. On screen text is rare in program content (unless subtitles) but is common in commercials. Several consecutive 30 second scenes, each of which (or most of which) contain on screen text would be a good indicator of a commercial block. If there is lots of text in the entire file, you are probably watching a show with subtitles, so ignore this test. (this test is very computationally expensive because of all the computer vision involved, but there are probably good optimizations and workarounds available, and it would probably be worth it to implement -I suspect it is a dependable test)
First of all, let me say that this is an impressive robot, and created a compelling illusions of high level intelligence. Now I say 'illusion' because the techniques employed to make the robot appear intelligent were no doubt just clever applications of simple pattern matching technology (I will explain shortly). What I found most impressive (probably not what most people will) was the ability of Quasi to pick out words spoken to him amidst all that background noise.
......... tired........
......your name.......
......cute........
On the design of the robot itself, I liked the way it looked, appeared, and the personality they gave it. The personality is important in making it seem intelligent and making us bond with it. However, for those interested in whether this guy could appear in household toy form any time soon, the answer is "not without some serious design changes". Notice that none of the robots sensors are actually on the robot himself. He receives his data (and I believe all of his processing is done) external to the robot himself -his webcams, motions sensors, and microphones are all situated in the environment, and his components consist just of his servos and snazzy plastic body parts.
On the design of the robots mind, it doesn't appear to be anything too complex, but please correct me if I am mistaken. First of all, the very fact that his speech program made use of pre-recorded speeches (from TFA) should make us all very skeptical of its ability to be creative, or to be a worthwhile conversation partner for more than 3 minutes. Notice also that of all the questions that Quasi answered, any of the responses that they gave could be reasonably triggered by the recognition of one or two words in the same sentence, and playing the appropriate response. Some examples:
Person:
Quasi: It's been a loooooong day! I've been here since 8:30!
Person:
Quasi: My names Quasi. Quasi the robot!
Person:
Quasi: awwwwwww, I bet you say that to all the robots!
and so on. There are not that many things that the typical person is going to say to a robot in a two minute encounter. Some smart alecky people will probably say something like "you don't really have feelings, you're just a robot!" which no doubt has a preprogrammed answer as well, because the CMU guys are going to have fun putting that response in there. Notice also what happened when the guy said to Quasi "do you remember my name?" The impressive thing here was that it recognized the guys voice, or made an assumption about conversation flow (perhaps it holds a list of peoples names for a few minutes). While Quasi certainly did remember the guys name, he couldn't say it, and thus the response "It starts with a C right?" because you can't pre-record quasi saying every persons name. You can bet your ass that if someone named Xavier asked Quasi if he remembers his name, the answer will be "no I'm sorry! Tell me again and I'll try harder to remember!" or something along those lines -they don't want to prerecord a message for every letter of the alphabet either.
Overall I give this robot an A+ without a doubt. It did very well what it was supposed to do. But please don't go jumping to the conclusion that Quasi is displaying intelligence -he's not. Quasi is doing a performance (quite well I might add) using simple pattern matching techniques and pre-recorded answers. For most people, the illusion would probably hold up, because most people don't know about the techniques used to solve these sorts of problems, and thus they don't know what sort of questions to ask to trip up a robot, demonstrating its real lack of intelligence. For example, ask it (textbook example) "The other day I ordered a hamburger, and it arrived blackened to a crisp. I stormed out immediately. Did I eat the hamburger?" or the variation "The other day I ordered a hamburger, and I left avery big tip. Did I eat the hamburger?" answering the first question no and the second yes would demonstrate an intelligent understanding of hamburgers, restaurants, and what people tend to do in them. This is a good question to ask for a start (by no means proof positive of intelligence), but Quasi would fail.
I hate cheaters. When other people cheat, it devalues my degree. Furthermore, it is a slap in the face to anyone who puts in the time and effort to legitimately receive the marks. I believe there are many other students who feel the same way. I was wondering -would it be possible to set up a system whereby students police each others work? Say, after the final due date has passed, the assignments all become accessible online (arbitrarily coded so we don't know which assignment came from which person) and students can flag passages or portions of the assignment that appear to be violations. Overseers then, presumably the prof, can look over the most oft flagged sections (if not all of them). I would have no problem participating in such a program. Cheating pisses me off to no end, and the childish notion that "snitching" is wrong does not affect me -these people are breaking the rules and adversely affecting both the system itself and me personally- I would be happy to see them caught in droves.