The best route is 50% until you have republic (we've been living under something of a tyranny of late, so it'll be nice to get back to that) and then go to 80% spend on R&D, 10% on bread and circuses, 10% on paying for expenses. If we'd done that, why, we could have made it to Alpha Centauri back in the 1800's and working SDI in all cities. by 1950.
Just be sure to use the United Nations as much as possible to force people to make peace - it takes the worry out of Kim Jong Il saying his words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS.
Actually, yes, it is. See, it's not just general knowledge, but, as about 9 billion other people in this thread pointed out, there are puns and other wordplay often involved.
What do you think the proper Jeopardy answer to this question is (in the category "Much Ado" for $100):
"It's the spirit that gets things done."
Answer: What is "can do"
The $500 version might be something like, "This recently hip-again party favorite was first created in New York."
Answer: What is "fondue"
Both of those are pretty easy examples. Both require the computer to "get" the wordplay in the topic (aDO), one requires that it understand that pronunciation of the word in the answer is the key, and numerous other things that I probably take for granted but are rather non-trivial things for a computer to do.
If they can get the machine doing reasonably well on those kinds of questions for Jeopardy, I'd love to see them go after "You Don't Know Jack" next. I've seen many reasonably bright people completely unable to handle that game when it came to the punny or obfuscated questions.
I think, with the whole "homosexuality as population control" thing, that it was assumed that there was some biological tinkering to make it happen. I vaguely remember someone talking about those hetero sickos getting "cured," so it was probably a statement about homosexuals at the time being treated as if they were mentally ill.
As to the combat training thing - Haldeman is a vet, so I don't think he was coming from a place of ignorance. The message I took from it was that war was being taken to it's absurd extreme conclusion of using up literally the best and brightest for no benefit.
1) The purpose of copyright is to provide creators protection to profit from their work and to also provide the public with something in exchange for those protections. I agree that the language of the old laws are archaic and certainly need to be updated for the times so that those purposes may actually be met.
That does not mean, however, that we should completely abandon the purpose of the law. The purpose - protecting the rights of creators so that they continue to create while also giving the public something in exchange for providing that protection - is a good one. The implementation as it is now, however, is AWFUL because it actively discourages the creation of new things and instead encourages the continual reselling of old stuff, doing absolutely nothing to add to human culture.
You may disagree, but I believe that is very, very wrong. There needs to be give and take, and right now, the way the laws are set up it is *all* take. What do I, as a citizen, get in exchange for giving that protection? What do I, as a citizen, get in exchange for my tax dollars funding the laws and enforcement of those laws that are protecting the copyright owners? Nada.
2) You completely ignored several parts of my DRM statement in order to make your point. I bought the game that I later pirated because the DRM made the game not work on my system. I paid money to get a product, the product didn't work because of a measure intended to prevent piracy, and yet by piracy I was able to actually use the product I paid for. You might think my downloading a cracked version of something I paid for so that the thing I paid for can be made to work makes me a criminal, but I disagree - it makes me a frustrated consumer who was using one of the few options available to me to get value from the product I paid for.
Past that, my recourse now is to not buy games from publishers who engage in these practices. Why would I pay money to be treated like a criminal and frustrated when trying to use something I paid for? You seem to take my "I don't buy..." to mean "... but I pirate," and that is simply not the case.
I also acknowledged that this is probably a negligible portion of the people who use TPB and similar sites. But, as I said at the beginning of my post, this one one of several arguments I have heard.
3) I never said that artists become my slaves because technology has advanced. What I did say, and what you completely failed to address because you became so wrapped up in attacking me personally, is that advancing technology has changed the value proposition for people who are interested in buying IP to the point where the traditional models are no longer appealing for consumers. Further, I pointed out how companies are attempting to force the marketplace to accept the old business models - at the expense of the consumer - rather than adapt to changing circumstances.
I won't bother addressing the overall hostile and insulting tone of your post except to say that if you want to have a discussion, I suggest you learn to speak civilly. Repeatedly insulting me and accusing me of misdeeds does nothing to contribute to the discussion, and just makes you look like a petulant child who's unable to have a mature discussion with someone who holds an opposing viewpoint. If you wish to continue this discussion, I'll expect any reply to be polite, otherwise I won't waste any more time with you.
I will give you several arguments I have heard that go beyond "we should get free stuff":
1) Originally, copyrights were intended to inspire creative work (a public good) by protecting the creators rights to their produce and providing a financial incentive to create. However, in exchange for that protection, the idea was that the work would come into the public domain at the end of the copyright term - so the public was, in essence, buying the work and setting it free in exchange for those protections.
But then people who are not creators started buying up copyrights from people who create, and these purchasers used their money to push to have the laws changed. Previously, where a work could eventually join the public domain, the term had been extended (and extended) so that it seems like no work will ever enter the public domain again unless the copyright holder *explicitly* puts it into the public domain.
Suddenly the original equation - we protect you so you can create and make a profit and we then get the work after some time - has now changed to you hold a copyright and you can sue into oblivion anyone who infringes on it, and the work will never, ever become public because the copyright duration will keep on being increased.
2) DRM, which is fairly widely used, has become a tax on legitimate users of the software and does nothing to curtail illegal use. I paid for a copy of Spore (I know, I know, but I had hopes) and was completely unable to use it on my system because of the DRM. So I downloaded a pirated copy that, ironically, worked better than the one I had paid money for. A few years ago, I bought a CD, put it in my player and... it didn't work. Tried another player - no luck. A third - nope. I took the disc back, exchanged it, and the new one didn't work either. Turns out it was DRM that made it not workable on any of my players. Last CD I ever bought. Obviously, not everyone (not most, or even a real portion) of the people using sites like TPB own the stuff legitimately, but the general concept of sites like that being available as a way to address that because the publishers don't want to is not a bad one - just poorly implemented.
3) Times change, and businesses need to change with them. It used to be that it was somewhat difficult to find pirated software/movies/whatever. Then peer-to-peer came out and it became trivial to find anything you want. Rather than look for ways to make peer-to-peer work for them, most companies tried to squash p2p. Rather than accept that their business model needs to be updated, copyright holders (or their agencies) sought ways to throw the fear of god into people who dated to infringe on their IP, to the point of absurd lawsuits alleging hundreds of thousands in damages because some teenybopper downloaded Oops, I did it again... So, we have a situation where corporations are fighting to keep an outdated model, one that is not good for consumers (same high prices while production and distribution costs have gone down a lot, etc).
TPB is an example of how the marketplace will fight back against archaic ways of doing business. If a company offers the user a value-proposition that is better than TPB can offer, then the users will buy from the company. Right now, paying $50 for a game that doesn't work because the company is treating me like a criminal, that came with a meh manual and absolutely nothing special in the box, is not exactly tempting when I can go to a website and download something for free. Yet, oddly, I have absolutely no problem paying $20 for the client and $15 a month (and the occasional $50 for an expansion) for an MMO. I don't want to have to go to a store, buy a CD that is $20, has 3 songs I'll like on it and 10 that are horrifically overproduced shit, and have a CD that may not work on any of my players - but I have absolutely no problem dropping $100 on iTunes to mix and match songs from various artists that I can download immediately.
TPB and sites like it are forcing businesses to change their models to ones t
It's not censorship if a retailer stops selling certain books. It's a retailer deciding not to carry something. At the 7/11 down the street there is a rack that has maybe a dozen different magazines, some comic books, and 10 "best selling" paperbacks - because they don't carry every single publication EVER, does that mean that 7/11 is censoring all those works? No, it just means that 7/11 doesn't sell them. If I want to get something not available at 7/11 (or, in this case, Amazon) I can look elsewhere.
If Amazon was floating a trial balloon to see if anyone would get upset if they pandered to fundamentalists, that is a great many stupid things, but none of those stupid things is censorship. Personally, despite owning a Kindle (great device, worth every penny) (I got it as a gift), I won't buy books for it from Amazon, nor will I buy subscriptions, especially not after these incidents, but I certainly don't think this is anything even approaching censorship.
Also, your tinfoil is showing - you think it's somehow sinister for an online retailer to have the capability to type in a keyword and make any items with that keyword inactive/marked as not for sale. I have news for you - ANY retail operation with a database of products can do the same thing. "SELECT * FROM products WHERE keyword='whatever'" and then switch a flag from active to inactive. ZOMG IT'S A CONSPIRACY!!! SQL IS FASCISM! The very language was intentionally built with the capability to silence us all!
Sorry if this seems a bit harsh, but I'm really annoyed by alarmists freaking out at every little thing - it makes it easy for real injustices to be dismissed as the rantings of conspiracy theorists.
Sure, it may be a good product but how many people would be willing to buy the equivalent product that has little or no image / cool factor attached to it?
Most of 'em.
The thing about Apple stuff is that it really actually is pretty damn good stuff, in addition to being cool. The click-wheel iPod's interface was glorious. The iPhone is a dream to use. My MacBook is the only laptop I've ever had that I didn't want to throw through a window (light, small, speedy, mag-safe strip, can handle sleep/hibernate properly, love the OS, well constructed, featureful). I don't think a lot of people buy that stuff because it's cool - I think most buy the aforementioned products because they like the way they work more than anything.
The only thing that Apple does that I think fits the "bought because it's cool" is the shuffle. I have one (got it as a gift) and I suppose it's cute, but there are better tiny players out there for less. By "better" I mean as solid an interface (or better, with a display), good battery life, easy to load up, good sound quality, etc. The only time I use it is if I'm visiting my aunt who gave it to me and we go for a jog together. I think shuffles are kind of like Coach keychains - a cheap bit of "style" people can have - and are definitely for trendwhores.
The problem is that not everyone agrees on what's just and unjust, especially not people who have extensive experience with the justice system.
I'm as liberal as the next gal, wish we had legal weed in the states (not to smoke, but just for the revenues it'd generate), but there is no way I want judges to start legislating from the bench on drug charges. Why? Because it isn't their job to do so. It also opens the door for other judges who have rather more conservative opinions to disregard the law as well. We have a system, make the system work. Disregarding laws we don't agree with on a retail basis rather than working with the system in place to change it may seem more effective, but that's only in the short term.
Mind you, I'm all for civil disobedience - I think *citizens* have the right to violate laws they disagree with (expecting that they will suffer the penalties for violating the law), and hopefully their plight will show how absolutely stupid the law is, and cause the laws to change. But I don't think it should be judges doing it - in fact, I think a judge letting someone off for an absolutely stupid "crime" probably makes it harder to get the law changed because there's nothing to be bothered by. We *should* be pissed off at the draconian punishments for non-offensive things, because then people will be motivated to do something about it. "Man gets 5 years in prison for dime-bag" is outrageous and generates protest; "Man who had dime-bag has charges against him dropped," makes life easier for that one guy, but does nothing to get rid of the law.
The problem with this attitude - 95% of cops are OK, it's 5% who suck, just like in any other job - is that the effects of improper behavior by a police officer can be catastrophic, much more so than many other jobs.
Police should be held to a higher standard because they are given quite a bit of responsibility and quite a bit of power.
Let me give you a car analogy:
If your seat heater only works 95% of the time, that's totally okay. If your brakes only worked 95% of the time, that's a huge problem.
In the portion of your post that I quoted (and since I quoted it, one might be excused for coming to the conclusion that that was the part I was responding to, rather than a part I never quoted or addressed), you said:
It will be interesting to see which side the gay community comes down on then
That is pretty unambiguous - you're saying there's a gay community and that it will come down on a side TBD. Now, you might have meant to say, "It will be interesting to see the variety and range of responses from people who are homosexual when this kind of thing comes to pass," but that's not what you actually wrote. You say you don't think of homosexuals as a herd, and I'll take your word for it, but I think it's perfectly reasonable for me to have taken your words in the way I took them.
As to the question of castigation, perhaps you should re-read what I wrote. I said "we," and not "you," or "they." Think about that for a moment and ask yourself what I might have meant by "we" in that context. I'll give you a hint - I was clearly stepping back from responding solely to what you wrote when I started off that paragraph with, "Choice or biology, what does it matter?" as a way of addressing a larger point, and a larger audience than just one person.
First, chess and an MMO are rather different situations. One of them is an oppositional zero-sum game in which the entire point of the game is to defeat your opponent. The other one is a co-operative game in which one of the major draws and points of it is to enjoy playing a game with other people. Those are rather different beasts.
Second, depending on the circumstances, yes, actually, I might not take advantage of an opponent's error. If I am playing against a novice who makes a mistake, I would point out the move they made, explain why it was a less than optimal move, and discuss strategy with them so that they could get better at the game. If it is a friendly game against someone of equal or greater skill I might point out the error (while still taking advantage of it) and ask them what their thinking was behind it - at the least they see they made a silly mistake, but at the best they give me some ideas on how I might improve my play (even if that particular move was a mistake). If it's in a competition, however, then no, I wouldn't bother pointing it out, would take advantage of it, and perhaps after the match we would discuss it.
As I said in my comment (and as you seem to have entirely missed), I actually enjoy playing games with people, and will take the course of action that will most likely lead to more enjoyment - in the case of the auction house error, this is usually giving the person a chance to buy it back.
As to your assertion that MMOs simply aren't important enough to apply ethics to, I suppose that line of thinking, and you and people like you who believe it, are one of the reasons that so many online environments are seething cesspools of assholery filled with virtual sociopaths who seem to enjoy doing the virtual equivalent of walking in on other people enjoying a game of chess and knocking the pieces over. To each their own, I guess - that's why online games have ignore lists.
Eventually, technology is going to make our very genes a matter of personal preference. It will be interesting to see which side the gay community comes down on then, since even if homosexuality really is a strictly hereditary phenomenon, there will truly be a choice. Of course, that will work both ways.
The problem with this question is this: If I could choose to change my sexuality, would I still be the same person? The way I think about sex, the way I feel about my sexual partners, the way I experience relationships, the future I imagine for myself - all of these things that make up a large part of my life and my thinking are tied up in my orientation, and it's the same for most other people, straight, gay, bi or other.
The question that is really being asked by your scenario is, "If you could essentially obliterate the person who is there now and replace it with another person who happens to have the same memories as you but isn't, in fact, you because they think in very different ways about very important things, would you do it?"
To compare sexual orientation to any other trait is a bit disingenuous - my skin color changes frequently (from ridiculously pale white in winter to bronze in the summer) and other than having to adjust my make-up use it doesn't really impact who I am. My hair color changes (brown to auburn and, in one case, for kicks, platinum blonde) and that doesn't really change much. I gain or lose weight, and that actually has some impact - self-confident and fit vs. feeling a little self-conscious and pudgy - but nothing big. But change who I love and who I want to be with? Yeah, that's pretty huge.
And, you speak of the "gay community" as if homosexuals are some monolithic block, always voting in one way or another, always moving like a herd. It may surprise you to realize that gay people are, like everyone else, just people - individuals. Speaking in terms of "communities" or "groups" is the same as saying "they're all alike" and leads to dehumanization by thinking of those "others" as not being individuals.
Lastly, choice or biology, what does it matter? Religion is a choice, and freedom of religion is a cherished right. Skin color is biological (mostly), and we protect people of color from discrimination. What makes homosexuality so special or different that if it's a choice we want to castigate those who choose it, or if it's biological we want to treat it like an illness and cure it? "Because it makes me feel icky," is not a valid reason to deny another human being basic rights and freedoms.
Not when you have hundreds (thousands?) of people doing constant BottomScans for bargains. I've fumble-fingered an auction like that before, and by the time I was able to get to the screen that would let me cancel, it had been bought.
What makes it unethical is that it encourages behavior that is non-optimal for everyone involved. If I take advantage of an accidental bargain and keep the profit, it creates a situation where the person who accidentally sold it might get upset and, depending on how they handle that upset, they might try to get people to harass me (I've heard of people being kicked out of guilds for dumber things). I might be amused by their responses (like the guy who essentially told me to fuck off despite the fact that he was losing something like 20 silver in order to recoup at least 6000 gold from his mistake), but some people can be incredibly obnoxious, leading me to eventually having to add them to the ignore list, which could lead to situations where I wind up not joining a group with the idiot, and on and on.
Further, it encourages other people to take advantage of those accidental bargains, leading to the same potential for acrimony, but among more parties, which leads to a generally more annoying environment for people who just don't want to deal with dramahol.
Oh, I suppose that having a few extra gold can be considered a positive, but really - if stuff you can buy with in-game gold is going to compensate for a toxic atmosphere in the community, why bother playing an MMO in the first place? Clearly the community is not worth much.
Contrast that with an environment in which, at the least, you'll almost always have someone saying, "Hey, thank you for being a decent person about that" at the least and, in several cases, I've had people send the items back to me (*after* paying the COD to get it back) with a note saying that since I was a decent person, I deserved the item and hey, it's a lesson learned to be more careful. There won't (usually, with that one idiot being the exception) be any acrimony, and who knows, maybe other people will behave like mensches when they have the chance, also. Sure, you don't have the few extra gold, but really - if the other person hadn't made a mistake in the first place, you wouldn't have it anyway, so it isn't like you actually lost anything.
When one course of action greatly increases the risks of negative outcomes and another is generally neutral at worst but extremely positive at best, I'd say that's pretty much ethics in a nutshell, no?
It also assumes that "buying something that was listed below market price and reselling it for a more appropriate price based on prevailing market conditions" is the same as "taking advantage of someone's weakness," which is rather a big stretch - I don't actually see the two as being connected in any way.
Further, it presupposes that making a profit on a transaction is inherently taking advantage of someone - it isn't. For any transaction to take place, both parties have to agree that engaging in the transaction is worth more to them than not engaging in the transaction. The player listing an item at less than market price essentially said, "I want to sell this item for X price, X being the minimum amount I'd be willing to accept." They may not be fully informed as to the actual market rate for that item, but that is their choice - they're choosing to not gather market information because to them, making whatever they make from selling the item and not spending the time getting an idea of the proper valuation is worth more to them than gathering the proper pricing information and then selling the item for more.
The only time I could see this being unethical would be if someone posted an item for, say, 50 silver when they meant to post it for 50 gold - that's taking advantage of an error. My policy when I see something that simply must be an error (like a recipe that usually goes for 2500g being sold for 25g) is to buy it, then mail it COD (for the amount I paid) back to the person who posted it with an explanation that I assumed the price was an error.
Funny enough, the last time I did this, the guy who I mailed it to called me an asshole for sending him something COD, returned it to me, and demanded that I re-send it but not COD or he would report me to the GMs. This was on an item that usually goes for 6,000-8,000 gold mimimum, and he had listed it for 6 gold. Needless to say, I did not send it back, am a little under 7,000 gold richer, and had a good laugh with the GM when I was contacted to explain the situation. I absolutely don't think I was unethical in my handling of the situation.
Everything other than pure skill creates an uneven playing field, pretty much. So many other things go on outside the game:
Have a fantastic connection with low latency? Unfair to those on dial-up or those with awful latency!
Have a great computer that lets you run at high settings with no stutter (so you can see spell effects easier/make out what people are equipped with)? Unfair to those with crappy video cards or low-end systems!
Have programming skill that lets you write UI mods that make certain elements of the game easier? Unfair to people who don't have those skills!
Have 10 hours/day to do nothing but play the game? Unfair to people who have to work for a living or have other obligations!
Have a fantastic job that pays well so dropping a couple hundred on in-game gold or items is a trivial expense? Unfair to people who are unemployed or have shit jobs!
The proper way to handle the problem is not to try to change people's behavior, but to design the games in such a way that the effect of external influences is minimized. To deal with all of the "unfair" situations above, this kind of redesign would be:
1) Don't make twitch responses necessary - give a decent window before moves and counter-moves need to be executed, and make gameplay more dependent on using proper tactics than on being quick.
2) Optimize the graphics, but also have lower-end textures/models that are unambiguous (even if ugly) as to what they are.
3) Require that any mods a user runs have their source-code deposited at a central location, and make it available to everyone. If you make a mod, congratulations, welcome to the world of open source software!
4) Design the game in such a way that playing for 10 hours in a row is, functionally, the same as playing for 10 hours an hour at a time - in other words, eliminate camping, make quests work in stages, make it very clear before starting a quest if there is a time-limit or not so that players will be able to know beforehand whether or not they have the time to do it, etc. So yeah, someone with 70 hours a week in game will still be ahead of someone with 7 hours/week in game, but two people with 700 hours will have had the same opportunities to benefit.
5) Design the game so that having scads of gold/currency is not imbalancing. Make the best items in the game obtainable only through questing or actual game-play rather than purchasable with a sellable currency (and remember to keep this along with rule 4 above, so that even people who can only play an hour a day can eventually get that good stuff, even if it will be obsolete due to expansions by the time they get there)
If game designers did these things, it would make gold-selling essentially irrelevant, allow for all kinds of different external situations without imbalance.
I think you overstate the case for the "damage" gold-selling does, and there are ways to make gold-selling less impactful on a game. I will actually suggest that WoW is a game where gold-selling is, in fact, not causing a disaster to the economy. Before you die laughing, let me explain:
Virtually every high-end item worth having is either Bind on Pickup or an item earned from turning in quest/dungeon/raid drops. There are very few items that can be bought and sold between players that are as good or better than those dungeon/raid drops - and those items are so highly prized and so difficult to get that they simply don't make up any real portion of the economy. It's like how Ferarri and Lamborghini are irrelevant to the car market.
The things people buy gold for are stuff like epic flight or the teleport ring. Epic flight doesn't let a player do anything (except a few quests) that regular flight does, it just gets a person from point a to point b in less time. The teleport ring just lets a player go home an extra time (and has some nice stats, but roughly equivalent stats are available through raiding, IIRC). Neither of those purchases puts gold into the hands of other players - it takes gold out of the economy. Both of those items just make things a little less inconvenient for players (letting them get to a raid quicker, more or less, but even then, there are other ways that are quicker still, like summons etc).
The market for crafting components gets a bit of a beating - I've seen people buy a couple thousand gold to max out a crafting skill - but even so, it's still possible for non-gold-buyers to participate in that market because they can sell basic materials they don't use for high prices and then fund their own crafting binges. In other markets, the farmers create such a glut of certain materials that they aren't profitable for people to sell, but that doesn't force people to buy gold - just the opposite.
As far as farmers causing zones to be unplayable for others, that's simply not true. It's actually more cost effective to farm in instances now - a level 80 in nothing but quest blues/reputation items/craftables is able to easily solo some of the old dungeons. Since those are instanced it doesn't interfere with other players. When I need money, I'll grab my paladin (who's an engineer and can open locked chests) and blast through Ramparts. My paladin is 80, geared in nothing but craftables, easy reputation items, and quest rewards. Professional farmers can easily have characters at least that powerful.
In other games, yes - gold selling can wreck the game, but I'd say that it's easier to redesign the game to make gold-selling and buying essentially pointless or low impact rather than to expect people to change their behavior.
Never bought or sold gold myself, but then I also am pretty good at working markets in games to make money, or just farming it up for myself. And, it turns out, that the games in which gold-selling can cause problems are the kinds of games I just don't enjoy.
Those same end users very likely wouldn't be the ones trying to go from 6.X to 9.X, however.
I've heard a lot of stupid computer questions over the years, but never anything like "Hey, I have these Windows for Workgroups floppies - I can just install that and then upgrade to Windows 2000 by downloading stuff, right?"
I don't disagree with your point - that some things that are simple if you know what you're doing are brick walls to people who aren't very experienced - but the situation as described is just not one that those kinds of people will run into.
Well, it depends on what you mean by "presence" but -
Anarchy Online is still around (and still getting expansions etc.) is free to play for the basic version but you have to pay for the expansions. I tried it out a few months ago; wasn't for me, but it wasn't a bad game.
For SWG fans, SWGEmu, which is an emulator of the SWG servers before SOE lobotomized the entire game (the 1.0 release aims to be 100% true to pre-Combat Upgrade live servers) is coming out "soon." I've been playing around with the test server and also set-up my own server to play around with building content etc. Right now, because they want to focus on getting people to test on their server, the SWGEmu devs are keeping some of the source closed (network stuff, with a 1-hour maximum uptime and 20 connection limit), to be changed once they hit v1.00.
Then put your money where your mouth is - infect yourself willingly with HIV and don't take any treatments for it.
Surely if it's harmless as cretins like Hogan say, then there's no reason for you not to do it and thus prove to the world that the HIV/AIDS connection is completely false. You would certainly win fame, prestige, riches beyond your wildest dreams for exposing it, right?
I don't see this as an issue; what do humans have that AI/robots would need that they couldn't get *much* more easily and abundantly in space?
Given effectively infinite lifespans and a reasonably capable body, an AI of human or greater intelligence would easily be able to bootstrap itself from a single unit to an entire civilization by taking advantage of solar power and asteroids.
Not if we're competing for resources... I'd hate to be the spotted owl:)
An AI smarter than humans wouldn't bother extinguishing us to compete for resources. It wouldn't need to. A smart AI would happily ask to be shot into space (or otherwise cause itself to be put into space) so that it could take advantage of the much, much vaster resources that human beings can't seem to get motivated to use.
Given an essentially infinite lifespan, intelligence greater than ours, a body capable of manipulating the physical world at least as well as a human can (actually, wouldn't even need to be that good), an AI entity would have very little difficulty colonizing space. Humans need a habitable biosphere that is vastly different than most of the universe; robots could easily survive in virtually any location in the universe.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll get crushed by everyone with a mere 20%!
The best route is 50% until you have republic (we've been living under something of a tyranny of late, so it'll be nice to get back to that) and then go to 80% spend on R&D, 10% on bread and circuses, 10% on paying for expenses. If we'd done that, why, we could have made it to Alpha Centauri back in the 1800's and working SDI in all cities. by 1950.
Just be sure to use the United Nations as much as possible to force people to make peace - it takes the worry out of Kim Jong Il saying his words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS.
Actually, yes, it is. See, it's not just general knowledge, but, as about 9 billion other people in this thread pointed out, there are puns and other wordplay often involved.
What do you think the proper Jeopardy answer to this question is (in the category "Much Ado" for $100):
"It's the spirit that gets things done."
Answer: What is "can do"
The $500 version might be something like, "This recently hip-again party favorite was first created in New York."
Answer: What is "fondue"
Both of those are pretty easy examples. Both require the computer to "get" the wordplay in the topic (aDO), one requires that it understand that pronunciation of the word in the answer is the key, and numerous other things that I probably take for granted but are rather non-trivial things for a computer to do.
If they can get the machine doing reasonably well on those kinds of questions for Jeopardy, I'd love to see them go after "You Don't Know Jack" next. I've seen many reasonably bright people completely unable to handle that game when it came to the punny or obfuscated questions.
I think, with the whole "homosexuality as population control" thing, that it was assumed that there was some biological tinkering to make it happen. I vaguely remember someone talking about those hetero sickos getting "cured," so it was probably a statement about homosexuals at the time being treated as if they were mentally ill.
As to the combat training thing - Haldeman is a vet, so I don't think he was coming from a place of ignorance. The message I took from it was that war was being taken to it's absurd extreme conclusion of using up literally the best and brightest for no benefit.
1) The purpose of copyright is to provide creators protection to profit from their work and to also provide the public with something in exchange for those protections. I agree that the language of the old laws are archaic and certainly need to be updated for the times so that those purposes may actually be met.
That does not mean, however, that we should completely abandon the purpose of the law. The purpose - protecting the rights of creators so that they continue to create while also giving the public something in exchange for providing that protection - is a good one. The implementation as it is now, however, is AWFUL because it actively discourages the creation of new things and instead encourages the continual reselling of old stuff, doing absolutely nothing to add to human culture.
You may disagree, but I believe that is very, very wrong. There needs to be give and take, and right now, the way the laws are set up it is *all* take. What do I, as a citizen, get in exchange for giving that protection? What do I, as a citizen, get in exchange for my tax dollars funding the laws and enforcement of those laws that are protecting the copyright owners? Nada.
2) You completely ignored several parts of my DRM statement in order to make your point. I bought the game that I later pirated because the DRM made the game not work on my system. I paid money to get a product, the product didn't work because of a measure intended to prevent piracy, and yet by piracy I was able to actually use the product I paid for. You might think my downloading a cracked version of something I paid for so that the thing I paid for can be made to work makes me a criminal, but I disagree - it makes me a frustrated consumer who was using one of the few options available to me to get value from the product I paid for.
Past that, my recourse now is to not buy games from publishers who engage in these practices. Why would I pay money to be treated like a criminal and frustrated when trying to use something I paid for? You seem to take my "I don't buy..." to mean "... but I pirate," and that is simply not the case.
I also acknowledged that this is probably a negligible portion of the people who use TPB and similar sites. But, as I said at the beginning of my post, this one one of several arguments I have heard.
3) I never said that artists become my slaves because technology has advanced. What I did say, and what you completely failed to address because you became so wrapped up in attacking me personally, is that advancing technology has changed the value proposition for people who are interested in buying IP to the point where the traditional models are no longer appealing for consumers. Further, I pointed out how companies are attempting to force the marketplace to accept the old business models - at the expense of the consumer - rather than adapt to changing circumstances.
I won't bother addressing the overall hostile and insulting tone of your post except to say that if you want to have a discussion, I suggest you learn to speak civilly. Repeatedly insulting me and accusing me of misdeeds does nothing to contribute to the discussion, and just makes you look like a petulant child who's unable to have a mature discussion with someone who holds an opposing viewpoint. If you wish to continue this discussion, I'll expect any reply to be polite, otherwise I won't waste any more time with you.
I will give you several arguments I have heard that go beyond "we should get free stuff":
1) Originally, copyrights were intended to inspire creative work (a public good) by protecting the creators rights to their produce and providing a financial incentive to create. However, in exchange for that protection, the idea was that the work would come into the public domain at the end of the copyright term - so the public was, in essence, buying the work and setting it free in exchange for those protections.
But then people who are not creators started buying up copyrights from people who create, and these purchasers used their money to push to have the laws changed. Previously, where a work could eventually join the public domain, the term had been extended (and extended) so that it seems like no work will ever enter the public domain again unless the copyright holder *explicitly* puts it into the public domain.
Suddenly the original equation - we protect you so you can create and make a profit and we then get the work after some time - has now changed to you hold a copyright and you can sue into oblivion anyone who infringes on it, and the work will never, ever become public because the copyright duration will keep on being increased.
2) DRM, which is fairly widely used, has become a tax on legitimate users of the software and does nothing to curtail illegal use. I paid for a copy of Spore (I know, I know, but I had hopes) and was completely unable to use it on my system because of the DRM. So I downloaded a pirated copy that, ironically, worked better than the one I had paid money for. A few years ago, I bought a CD, put it in my player and... it didn't work. Tried another player - no luck. A third - nope. I took the disc back, exchanged it, and the new one didn't work either. Turns out it was DRM that made it not workable on any of my players. Last CD I ever bought. Obviously, not everyone (not most, or even a real portion) of the people using sites like TPB own the stuff legitimately, but the general concept of sites like that being available as a way to address that because the publishers don't want to is not a bad one - just poorly implemented.
3) Times change, and businesses need to change with them. It used to be that it was somewhat difficult to find pirated software/movies/whatever. Then peer-to-peer came out and it became trivial to find anything you want. Rather than look for ways to make peer-to-peer work for them, most companies tried to squash p2p. Rather than accept that their business model needs to be updated, copyright holders (or their agencies) sought ways to throw the fear of god into people who dated to infringe on their IP, to the point of absurd lawsuits alleging hundreds of thousands in damages because some teenybopper downloaded Oops, I did it again... So, we have a situation where corporations are fighting to keep an outdated model, one that is not good for consumers (same high prices while production and distribution costs have gone down a lot, etc).
TPB is an example of how the marketplace will fight back against archaic ways of doing business. If a company offers the user a value-proposition that is better than TPB can offer, then the users will buy from the company. Right now, paying $50 for a game that doesn't work because the company is treating me like a criminal, that came with a meh manual and absolutely nothing special in the box, is not exactly tempting when I can go to a website and download something for free. Yet, oddly, I have absolutely no problem paying $20 for the client and $15 a month (and the occasional $50 for an expansion) for an MMO. I don't want to have to go to a store, buy a CD that is $20, has 3 songs I'll like on it and 10 that are horrifically overproduced shit, and have a CD that may not work on any of my players - but I have absolutely no problem dropping $100 on iTunes to mix and match songs from various artists that I can download immediately.
TPB and sites like it are forcing businesses to change their models to ones t
Dude, you did a price check on Twilight.
Twilight.
I'm a girl, and I'm laughing at you.
It's not censorship if a retailer stops selling certain books. It's a retailer deciding not to carry something. At the 7/11 down the street there is a rack that has maybe a dozen different magazines, some comic books, and 10 "best selling" paperbacks - because they don't carry every single publication EVER, does that mean that 7/11 is censoring all those works? No, it just means that 7/11 doesn't sell them. If I want to get something not available at 7/11 (or, in this case, Amazon) I can look elsewhere.
If Amazon was floating a trial balloon to see if anyone would get upset if they pandered to fundamentalists, that is a great many stupid things, but none of those stupid things is censorship. Personally, despite owning a Kindle (great device, worth every penny) (I got it as a gift), I won't buy books for it from Amazon, nor will I buy subscriptions, especially not after these incidents, but I certainly don't think this is anything even approaching censorship.
Also, your tinfoil is showing - you think it's somehow sinister for an online retailer to have the capability to type in a keyword and make any items with that keyword inactive/marked as not for sale. I have news for you - ANY retail operation with a database of products can do the same thing. "SELECT * FROM products WHERE keyword='whatever'" and then switch a flag from active to inactive. ZOMG IT'S A CONSPIRACY!!! SQL IS FASCISM! The very language was intentionally built with the capability to silence us all!
Sorry if this seems a bit harsh, but I'm really annoyed by alarmists freaking out at every little thing - it makes it easy for real injustices to be dismissed as the rantings of conspiracy theorists.
Sure, it may be a good product but how many people would be willing to buy the equivalent product that has little or no image / cool factor attached to it?
Most of 'em.
The thing about Apple stuff is that it really actually is pretty damn good stuff, in addition to being cool. The click-wheel iPod's interface was glorious. The iPhone is a dream to use. My MacBook is the only laptop I've ever had that I didn't want to throw through a window (light, small, speedy, mag-safe strip, can handle sleep/hibernate properly, love the OS, well constructed, featureful). I don't think a lot of people buy that stuff because it's cool - I think most buy the aforementioned products because they like the way they work more than anything.
The only thing that Apple does that I think fits the "bought because it's cool" is the shuffle. I have one (got it as a gift) and I suppose it's cute, but there are better tiny players out there for less. By "better" I mean as solid an interface (or better, with a display), good battery life, easy to load up, good sound quality, etc. The only time I use it is if I'm visiting my aunt who gave it to me and we go for a jog together. I think shuffles are kind of like Coach keychains - a cheap bit of "style" people can have - and are definitely for trendwhores.
Hey, is it any surprise campus security are afraid of Command Line Interface Terrorism?
Given that most of the campus security are men, I'm amazed they can even find Command Line Interface Terrorists in the first place.
"No, officer, the person you're looking for is upstairs a little bit - no, one more floor. And now one dorm-room to the right. No, your other right."
The problem is that not everyone agrees on what's just and unjust, especially not people who have extensive experience with the justice system.
I'm as liberal as the next gal, wish we had legal weed in the states (not to smoke, but just for the revenues it'd generate), but there is no way I want judges to start legislating from the bench on drug charges. Why? Because it isn't their job to do so. It also opens the door for other judges who have rather more conservative opinions to disregard the law as well. We have a system, make the system work. Disregarding laws we don't agree with on a retail basis rather than working with the system in place to change it may seem more effective, but that's only in the short term.
Mind you, I'm all for civil disobedience - I think *citizens* have the right to violate laws they disagree with (expecting that they will suffer the penalties for violating the law), and hopefully their plight will show how absolutely stupid the law is, and cause the laws to change. But I don't think it should be judges doing it - in fact, I think a judge letting someone off for an absolutely stupid "crime" probably makes it harder to get the law changed because there's nothing to be bothered by. We *should* be pissed off at the draconian punishments for non-offensive things, because then people will be motivated to do something about it. "Man gets 5 years in prison for dime-bag" is outrageous and generates protest; "Man who had dime-bag has charges against him dropped," makes life easier for that one guy, but does nothing to get rid of the law.
The problem with this attitude - 95% of cops are OK, it's 5% who suck, just like in any other job - is that the effects of improper behavior by a police officer can be catastrophic, much more so than many other jobs.
Police should be held to a higher standard because they are given quite a bit of responsibility and quite a bit of power.
Let me give you a car analogy:
If your seat heater only works 95% of the time, that's totally okay. If your brakes only worked 95% of the time, that's a huge problem.
In the portion of your post that I quoted (and since I quoted it, one might be excused for coming to the conclusion that that was the part I was responding to, rather than a part I never quoted or addressed), you said:
That is pretty unambiguous - you're saying there's a gay community and that it will come down on a side TBD. Now, you might have meant to say, "It will be interesting to see the variety and range of responses from people who are homosexual when this kind of thing comes to pass," but that's not what you actually wrote. You say you don't think of homosexuals as a herd, and I'll take your word for it, but I think it's perfectly reasonable for me to have taken your words in the way I took them.
As to the question of castigation, perhaps you should re-read what I wrote. I said "we," and not "you," or "they." Think about that for a moment and ask yourself what I might have meant by "we" in that context. I'll give you a hint - I was clearly stepping back from responding solely to what you wrote when I started off that paragraph with, "Choice or biology, what does it matter?" as a way of addressing a larger point, and a larger audience than just one person.
First, chess and an MMO are rather different situations. One of them is an oppositional zero-sum game in which the entire point of the game is to defeat your opponent. The other one is a co-operative game in which one of the major draws and points of it is to enjoy playing a game with other people. Those are rather different beasts.
Second, depending on the circumstances, yes, actually, I might not take advantage of an opponent's error. If I am playing against a novice who makes a mistake, I would point out the move they made, explain why it was a less than optimal move, and discuss strategy with them so that they could get better at the game. If it is a friendly game against someone of equal or greater skill I might point out the error (while still taking advantage of it) and ask them what their thinking was behind it - at the least they see they made a silly mistake, but at the best they give me some ideas on how I might improve my play (even if that particular move was a mistake). If it's in a competition, however, then no, I wouldn't bother pointing it out, would take advantage of it, and perhaps after the match we would discuss it.
As I said in my comment (and as you seem to have entirely missed), I actually enjoy playing games with people, and will take the course of action that will most likely lead to more enjoyment - in the case of the auction house error, this is usually giving the person a chance to buy it back.
As to your assertion that MMOs simply aren't important enough to apply ethics to, I suppose that line of thinking, and you and people like you who believe it, are one of the reasons that so many online environments are seething cesspools of assholery filled with virtual sociopaths who seem to enjoy doing the virtual equivalent of walking in on other people enjoying a game of chess and knocking the pieces over. To each their own, I guess - that's why online games have ignore lists.
Eventually, technology is going to make our very genes a matter of personal preference. It will be interesting to see which side the gay community comes down on then, since even if homosexuality really is a strictly hereditary phenomenon, there will truly be a choice. Of course, that will work both ways.
The problem with this question is this: If I could choose to change my sexuality, would I still be the same person? The way I think about sex, the way I feel about my sexual partners, the way I experience relationships, the future I imagine for myself - all of these things that make up a large part of my life and my thinking are tied up in my orientation, and it's the same for most other people, straight, gay, bi or other.
The question that is really being asked by your scenario is, "If you could essentially obliterate the person who is there now and replace it with another person who happens to have the same memories as you but isn't, in fact, you because they think in very different ways about very important things, would you do it?"
To compare sexual orientation to any other trait is a bit disingenuous - my skin color changes frequently (from ridiculously pale white in winter to bronze in the summer) and other than having to adjust my make-up use it doesn't really impact who I am. My hair color changes (brown to auburn and, in one case, for kicks, platinum blonde) and that doesn't really change much. I gain or lose weight, and that actually has some impact - self-confident and fit vs. feeling a little self-conscious and pudgy - but nothing big. But change who I love and who I want to be with? Yeah, that's pretty huge.
And, you speak of the "gay community" as if homosexuals are some monolithic block, always voting in one way or another, always moving like a herd. It may surprise you to realize that gay people are, like everyone else, just people - individuals. Speaking in terms of "communities" or "groups" is the same as saying "they're all alike" and leads to dehumanization by thinking of those "others" as not being individuals.
Lastly, choice or biology, what does it matter? Religion is a choice, and freedom of religion is a cherished right. Skin color is biological (mostly), and we protect people of color from discrimination. What makes homosexuality so special or different that if it's a choice we want to castigate those who choose it, or if it's biological we want to treat it like an illness and cure it? "Because it makes me feel icky," is not a valid reason to deny another human being basic rights and freedoms.
Not when you have hundreds (thousands?) of people doing constant BottomScans for bargains. I've fumble-fingered an auction like that before, and by the time I was able to get to the screen that would let me cancel, it had been bought.
What makes it unethical is that it encourages behavior that is non-optimal for everyone involved. If I take advantage of an accidental bargain and keep the profit, it creates a situation where the person who accidentally sold it might get upset and, depending on how they handle that upset, they might try to get people to harass me (I've heard of people being kicked out of guilds for dumber things). I might be amused by their responses (like the guy who essentially told me to fuck off despite the fact that he was losing something like 20 silver in order to recoup at least 6000 gold from his mistake), but some people can be incredibly obnoxious, leading me to eventually having to add them to the ignore list, which could lead to situations where I wind up not joining a group with the idiot, and on and on.
Further, it encourages other people to take advantage of those accidental bargains, leading to the same potential for acrimony, but among more parties, which leads to a generally more annoying environment for people who just don't want to deal with dramahol.
Oh, I suppose that having a few extra gold can be considered a positive, but really - if stuff you can buy with in-game gold is going to compensate for a toxic atmosphere in the community, why bother playing an MMO in the first place? Clearly the community is not worth much.
Contrast that with an environment in which, at the least, you'll almost always have someone saying, "Hey, thank you for being a decent person about that" at the least and, in several cases, I've had people send the items back to me (*after* paying the COD to get it back) with a note saying that since I was a decent person, I deserved the item and hey, it's a lesson learned to be more careful. There won't (usually, with that one idiot being the exception) be any acrimony, and who knows, maybe other people will behave like mensches when they have the chance, also. Sure, you don't have the few extra gold, but really - if the other person hadn't made a mistake in the first place, you wouldn't have it anyway, so it isn't like you actually lost anything.
When one course of action greatly increases the risks of negative outcomes and another is generally neutral at worst but extremely positive at best, I'd say that's pretty much ethics in a nutshell, no?
It also assumes that "buying something that was listed below market price and reselling it for a more appropriate price based on prevailing market conditions" is the same as "taking advantage of someone's weakness," which is rather a big stretch - I don't actually see the two as being connected in any way.
Further, it presupposes that making a profit on a transaction is inherently taking advantage of someone - it isn't. For any transaction to take place, both parties have to agree that engaging in the transaction is worth more to them than not engaging in the transaction. The player listing an item at less than market price essentially said, "I want to sell this item for X price, X being the minimum amount I'd be willing to accept." They may not be fully informed as to the actual market rate for that item, but that is their choice - they're choosing to not gather market information because to them, making whatever they make from selling the item and not spending the time getting an idea of the proper valuation is worth more to them than gathering the proper pricing information and then selling the item for more.
The only time I could see this being unethical would be if someone posted an item for, say, 50 silver when they meant to post it for 50 gold - that's taking advantage of an error. My policy when I see something that simply must be an error (like a recipe that usually goes for 2500g being sold for 25g) is to buy it, then mail it COD (for the amount I paid) back to the person who posted it with an explanation that I assumed the price was an error.
Funny enough, the last time I did this, the guy who I mailed it to called me an asshole for sending him something COD, returned it to me, and demanded that I re-send it but not COD or he would report me to the GMs. This was on an item that usually goes for 6,000-8,000 gold mimimum, and he had listed it for 6 gold. Needless to say, I did not send it back, am a little under 7,000 gold richer, and had a good laugh with the GM when I was contacted to explain the situation. I absolutely don't think I was unethical in my handling of the situation.
Everything other than pure skill creates an uneven playing field, pretty much. So many other things go on outside the game:
Have a fantastic connection with low latency? Unfair to those on dial-up or those with awful latency!
Have a great computer that lets you run at high settings with no stutter (so you can see spell effects easier/make out what people are equipped with)? Unfair to those with crappy video cards or low-end systems!
Have programming skill that lets you write UI mods that make certain elements of the game easier? Unfair to people who don't have those skills!
Have 10 hours/day to do nothing but play the game? Unfair to people who have to work for a living or have other obligations!
Have a fantastic job that pays well so dropping a couple hundred on in-game gold or items is a trivial expense? Unfair to people who are unemployed or have shit jobs!
The proper way to handle the problem is not to try to change people's behavior, but to design the games in such a way that the effect of external influences is minimized. To deal with all of the "unfair" situations above, this kind of redesign would be:
1) Don't make twitch responses necessary - give a decent window before moves and counter-moves need to be executed, and make gameplay more dependent on using proper tactics than on being quick.
2) Optimize the graphics, but also have lower-end textures/models that are unambiguous (even if ugly) as to what they are.
3) Require that any mods a user runs have their source-code deposited at a central location, and make it available to everyone. If you make a mod, congratulations, welcome to the world of open source software!
4) Design the game in such a way that playing for 10 hours in a row is, functionally, the same as playing for 10 hours an hour at a time - in other words, eliminate camping, make quests work in stages, make it very clear before starting a quest if there is a time-limit or not so that players will be able to know beforehand whether or not they have the time to do it, etc. So yeah, someone with 70 hours a week in game will still be ahead of someone with 7 hours/week in game, but two people with 700 hours will have had the same opportunities to benefit.
5) Design the game so that having scads of gold/currency is not imbalancing. Make the best items in the game obtainable only through questing or actual game-play rather than purchasable with a sellable currency (and remember to keep this along with rule 4 above, so that even people who can only play an hour a day can eventually get that good stuff, even if it will be obsolete due to expansions by the time they get there)
If game designers did these things, it would make gold-selling essentially irrelevant, allow for all kinds of different external situations without imbalance.
I think you overstate the case for the "damage" gold-selling does, and there are ways to make gold-selling less impactful on a game. I will actually suggest that WoW is a game where gold-selling is, in fact, not causing a disaster to the economy. Before you die laughing, let me explain:
Virtually every high-end item worth having is either Bind on Pickup or an item earned from turning in quest/dungeon/raid drops. There are very few items that can be bought and sold between players that are as good or better than those dungeon/raid drops - and those items are so highly prized and so difficult to get that they simply don't make up any real portion of the economy. It's like how Ferarri and Lamborghini are irrelevant to the car market.
The things people buy gold for are stuff like epic flight or the teleport ring. Epic flight doesn't let a player do anything (except a few quests) that regular flight does, it just gets a person from point a to point b in less time. The teleport ring just lets a player go home an extra time (and has some nice stats, but roughly equivalent stats are available through raiding, IIRC). Neither of those purchases puts gold into the hands of other players - it takes gold out of the economy. Both of those items just make things a little less inconvenient for players (letting them get to a raid quicker, more or less, but even then, there are other ways that are quicker still, like summons etc).
The market for crafting components gets a bit of a beating - I've seen people buy a couple thousand gold to max out a crafting skill - but even so, it's still possible for non-gold-buyers to participate in that market because they can sell basic materials they don't use for high prices and then fund their own crafting binges. In other markets, the farmers create such a glut of certain materials that they aren't profitable for people to sell, but that doesn't force people to buy gold - just the opposite.
As far as farmers causing zones to be unplayable for others, that's simply not true. It's actually more cost effective to farm in instances now - a level 80 in nothing but quest blues/reputation items/craftables is able to easily solo some of the old dungeons. Since those are instanced it doesn't interfere with other players. When I need money, I'll grab my paladin (who's an engineer and can open locked chests) and blast through Ramparts. My paladin is 80, geared in nothing but craftables, easy reputation items, and quest rewards. Professional farmers can easily have characters at least that powerful.
In other games, yes - gold selling can wreck the game, but I'd say that it's easier to redesign the game to make gold-selling and buying essentially pointless or low impact rather than to expect people to change their behavior.
Never bought or sold gold myself, but then I also am pretty good at working markets in games to make money, or just farming it up for myself. And, it turns out, that the games in which gold-selling can cause problems are the kinds of games I just don't enjoy.
If I had the media laying around, I'd definitely give that a try - that sounds like a fun experiment to see what works and what doesn't.
Anyone know, though, how well hardware from 2009 would handle OSs from 1989?
Those same end users very likely wouldn't be the ones trying to go from 6.X to 9.X, however.
I've heard a lot of stupid computer questions over the years, but never anything like "Hey, I have these Windows for Workgroups floppies - I can just install that and then upgrade to Windows 2000 by downloading stuff, right?"
I don't disagree with your point - that some things that are simple if you know what you're doing are brick walls to people who aren't very experienced - but the situation as described is just not one that those kinds of people will run into.
Well, it depends on what you mean by "presence" but -
Anarchy Online is still around (and still getting expansions etc.) is free to play for the basic version but you have to pay for the expansions. I tried it out a few months ago; wasn't for me, but it wasn't a bad game.
For SWG fans, SWGEmu, which is an emulator of the SWG servers before SOE lobotomized the entire game (the 1.0 release aims to be 100% true to pre-Combat Upgrade live servers) is coming out "soon." I've been playing around with the test server and also set-up my own server to play around with building content etc. Right now, because they want to focus on getting people to test on their server, the SWGEmu devs are keeping some of the source closed (network stuff, with a 1-hour maximum uptime and 20 connection limit), to be changed once they hit v1.00.
And suddenly LOGO turns out to be the programming language we need to encode the formula for everything.
Go, little turtle, go!
Then put your money where your mouth is - infect yourself willingly with HIV and don't take any treatments for it.
Surely if it's harmless as cretins like Hogan say, then there's no reason for you not to do it and thus prove to the world that the HIV/AIDS connection is completely false. You would certainly win fame, prestige, riches beyond your wildest dreams for exposing it, right?
I don't see this as an issue; what do humans have that AI/robots would need that they couldn't get *much* more easily and abundantly in space?
Given effectively infinite lifespans and a reasonably capable body, an AI of human or greater intelligence would easily be able to bootstrap itself from a single unit to an entire civilization by taking advantage of solar power and asteroids.
Not if we're competing for resources... I'd hate to be the spotted owl :)
An AI smarter than humans wouldn't bother extinguishing us to compete for resources. It wouldn't need to. A smart AI would happily ask to be shot into space (or otherwise cause itself to be put into space) so that it could take advantage of the much, much vaster resources that human beings can't seem to get motivated to use.
Given an essentially infinite lifespan, intelligence greater than ours, a body capable of manipulating the physical world at least as well as a human can (actually, wouldn't even need to be that good), an AI entity would have very little difficulty colonizing space. Humans need a habitable biosphere that is vastly different than most of the universe; robots could easily survive in virtually any location in the universe.