Well, if we compare the life of some third-world farmer which we have never seen, then there might be some discussion, but I'll definitely say that if I was living in a malaria-prone area, the life of me and my family would be much, much more important than all the threatened species in the world. At least to me.
Malaria kills more than 1.000.000 people each year, most of them young children in Sub-Saharan africa. That does mean that at least a million families which have lost their children, and would be quite willing to shove a pound of DDT in every single endangered bird's mouth, and I can very well understand their opinion, since I would do the same in their place.
Any classification system where one of possible results is 'illegal to sell at all' is a censorship system - a system that decides how and which titles get allowed, and which get censored.
The fact that you can get around the system just means that the system is imperfect, but it does not change the fact that it (as currently implemented) is a censorship system.
Fermi's paradox does not rely on any possibility for FTL travel. Given the rough assumptions used, there 'should' be multiple alien civilizations active for long time - not long in our terms, like years, but long in astronomical terms.
Our galaxy is what, ~3000 ly in diameter? In a million years a civilization with 0.1 lightspeed capability can drive all troughout the galaxy many times, colonise whatever they want, and send a robotic probe to every interesting place.
What's the *marginal* cost for producing another copy of your song to a single additional customer, after you have made the "gold copy" of the song and given it to your first customer already?
The numbers I have seen are below $0.50 for physical copies on CD and below $0.01 for purely digital copies.
Exactly, and that's why consumer protection agencies should work to ensure that products sold in USA stores are not allowed to contain EULA's with misinformation about consumer rights.
I would treat the fact that "PHP has been successfully used by 3 of the top 10 websites" as evidence that PHP is fairly suitable for a single, narrow industry (website development) - one of many niches of IT development that is rather irrelevant for majority of large scale development projects.
Public web projects tend to be very visible, and get a lot of coverage and mindshare - but they are just a small part of all projects, and web-development needs and requirements tend to be very different from most other areas of development.
Very good work will be seen as inferior to good work+good politics every single day - you will both be seen as doing 'good work', as making that extra effort and getting added benefit to the company than the average joe. In practice, work quality is compared only on the scale 'bad'-'ok, good enough'-'good', but if two well-working employees are compared, the one having better political skills will get all the advantages he wants over his even harder working colleague.
Even the people who do not migrate often visit different medical facilities. It does not matter if the ER where you are taken with a heart attack is in a building right next to your GP - they don't get your records in time now. It does not matter if your knee surgery gets performed in a hospital three blocks away from your previous GP visit - the paperwork to get medical history is mindboggling.
The whole point here is to centralise information to allow access between various medical institutions. Currently they cooperate poorly, and it looks like they won't get things done if left to their own business.
Well, population crash is one (though unpleasant) way of solving the overpopulation problem. If people are too fussy to consider population control now, then after a generation or two of starvation and resource wars all the currently politically unacceptable population control methods will seem quite ok.
Yeah, they might be more dangerous, but they are much more rare. The purpose of this test is not to catch a devious psycho who has planned to murder the store's managers wife for the last 3 years and wants to get a job here as a part of his plan. The purpose is to filter out at least a large part of dumb care-for-nothing people who don't plan even to tie their shoelaces, but might take a DVD player from the store shelf to watch a movie at a friends party.
Enquiry that says 'select email from customers where status = ok' or 'select name, adress, zipcode from customers' would return most rows and would be a fairly common occurrance for a lowest-level employee sending out notifications or mass marketing. Admins would just put any such notifications in the recycle bin, since they would occur commonly.
Well, but there is a sea of difference between 'general maths' and a single (though complex) specialized type of calculation. Pretty much any single such calculation (like, say, the estimations needed to hit a quickly moving fly with a snap of the tongue, like some reptiles do) can be implemented in relatively simple ways with adaptable neural networks - i.e., a rather small bunch of nerve cells.
This does not require the general intelligence that a human needs to perform the same task - it's just some very specialized, and comparably very simple 'hardware' that does it.
Well, I feel that enchanting is quite intentional that way. You can do just fine with +50 spelldamage instead of the +60 spelldamage enchant that is ten times more expensive - but if you really want, you can go that extra mile and get a bit more dps.
Significant numbers of humans (say, 99%) dying would just bring us to the same global population level as during Roman Empire. Horrible, but not even close to extinction.
Depends on the genre possibly, but I see the completely contrary viewpoint, where the focus in previews of the next installments is in checking out the gameplay tweaks and small feature additions, and the story twists are mostly disregarded, with a vague paragraph about the new bad-guys-of-the-month.
I need a PC at home for business needs, and there is a big bonus at not needing to maintain, buy and worry about another electronic device. It does everything I need, including games as well, so a consle would offer no value to me - getting some games (like GTA) a few months earlier would be a small advantage, but it's not worth enough even to spend the effort to investigate and decide which of the current consoles to choose.
If USA loses the ability to buy cheap chinese crap, then the USA voters with guns will be on the streets rioting - they cannot handle a sudden doubling of consumer good prices if the cheap chinese imports are unavailable, and there are no replacements for this industry. And realistically, there will be no reasonable replacements for this industry in the first few years.
Meanwhile, China will be selling their stuff to Japan, India and Europe, and trust me, they will handle their starving peasants much more easier than USA will be able to handle their upset consumers.
It also depends on the bank. For example, my bank has set that if the POS terminal is chip&pin capable, then all swipe&sign transactions will be declined as if there was no money on account.
But testing over a wider temperature range and getting it build to this spec would be expensive as hell.
On the other hand, 'expensive as hell' is not that much when compared to the cost of getting a pound of stuff from Earth to Mars - so if it allows us to use the rover twice as long, then it may be cheap enough to do, as sending a ten times more expensive rover would be much cheaper than sending two current rovers, just due to the high cost of transport.
Well, the original point was exactly that it does not relate to the evil deed that is done, but to the sinful intent of one's mind.
The perception or the loss or fixing of the deed is irrelevant, if you have thought evil and acted evil, then the question is not about fixing the consequences, but about fixing and saving yourself, your soul.
The example you give - "He saw the girl by the tree." is more or less classic examples of sematic disambiguation - i.e., after the computer builds the possible meaning-relation models of the sentence - in this case, two slightly different models, the process of deciding which of the various meaning models is the 'true' one. Another popular example is properly understanding "I shot an elephant in my pajamas".
But this is generally considered at least partly solved - the ones where the computer really cannot tell the difference are the same ones that normal people often get wrong as well.
Well, regarding your argument "Wait till we as a civilization have grown up" - I see that building either AI, or computer-enhanced humans, or genetically improved humans is the only feasible way for our civilization to "grow up" in the sense of becoming better in social function and behaviour than the current civilization, which is in moral/social sense no better than the ancient roman/greek civilization or even stone age hunter-gatherer civilization.
AI's won't be children for us to raise. Within a short time after the first strong AI is created (singularity-proponents think that within a few says, but in general, definitely less than single human generation), AI's will be the ones creating and shaping the society as they know best, raising us as children and improving us. Or eliminating us:)
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Well, if we compare the life of some third-world farmer which we have never seen, then there might be some discussion, but I'll definitely say that if I was living in a malaria-prone area, the life of me and my family would be much, much more important than all the threatened species in the world. At least to me.
Malaria kills more than 1.000.000 people each year, most of them young children in Sub-Saharan africa.
That does mean that at least a million families which have lost their children, and would be quite willing to shove a pound of DDT in every single endangered bird's mouth, and I can very well understand their opinion, since I would do the same in their place.
Any classification system where one of possible results is 'illegal to sell at all' is a censorship system - a system that decides how and which titles get allowed, and which get censored.
The fact that you can get around the system just means that the system is imperfect, but it does not change the fact that it (as currently implemented) is a censorship system.
Fermi's paradox does not rely on any possibility for FTL travel.
Given the rough assumptions used, there 'should' be multiple alien civilizations active for long time - not long in our terms, like years, but long in astronomical terms.
Our galaxy is what, ~3000 ly in diameter? In a million years a civilization with 0.1 lightspeed capability can drive all troughout the galaxy many times, colonise whatever they want, and send a robotic probe to every interesting place.
What's the *marginal* cost for producing another copy of your song to a single additional customer, after you have made the "gold copy" of the song and given it to your first customer already?
The numbers I have seen are below $0.50 for physical copies on CD and below $0.01 for purely digital copies.
Exactly, and that's why consumer protection agencies should work to ensure that products sold in USA stores are not allowed to contain EULA's with misinformation about consumer rights.
I would treat the fact that "PHP has been successfully used by 3 of the top 10 websites" as evidence that PHP is fairly suitable for a single, narrow industry (website development) - one of many niches of IT development that is rather irrelevant for majority of large scale development projects.
Public web projects tend to be very visible, and get a lot of coverage and mindshare - but they are just a small part of all projects, and web-development needs and requirements tend to be very different from most other areas of development.
Yeah, and this information WILL be kept essentially forever, and (unlike google) they will just laugh laudly at a request to remove this data.
Good work is neccessary, but not enough.
Very good work will be seen as inferior to good work+good politics every single day - you will both be seen as doing 'good work', as making that extra effort and getting added benefit to the company than the average joe. In practice, work quality is compared only on the scale 'bad'-'ok, good enough'-'good', but if two well-working employees are compared, the one having better political skills will get all the advantages he wants over his even harder working colleague.
Even the people who do not migrate often visit different medical facilities. It does not matter if the ER where you are taken with a heart attack is in a building right next to your GP - they don't get your records in time now.
It does not matter if your knee surgery gets performed in a hospital three blocks away from your previous GP visit - the paperwork to get medical history is mindboggling.
The whole point here is to centralise information to allow access between various medical institutions. Currently they cooperate poorly, and it looks like they won't get things done if left to their own business.
Well, population crash is one (though unpleasant) way of solving the overpopulation problem. If people are too fussy to consider population control now, then after a generation or two of starvation and resource wars all the currently politically unacceptable population control methods will seem quite ok.
Yeah, they might be more dangerous, but they are much more rare.
The purpose of this test is not to catch a devious psycho who has planned to murder the store's managers wife for the last 3 years and wants to get a job here as a part of his plan. The purpose is to filter out at least a large part of dumb care-for-nothing people who don't plan even to tie their shoelaces, but might take a DVD player from the store shelf to watch a movie at a friends party.
Try playing EVE, then you will see :)
Enquiry that says 'select email from customers where status = ok' or 'select name, adress, zipcode from customers' would return most rows and would be a fairly common occurrance for a lowest-level employee sending out notifications or mass marketing.
Admins would just put any such notifications in the recycle bin, since they would occur commonly.
Well, but there is a sea of difference between 'general maths' and a single (though complex) specialized type of calculation. Pretty much any single such calculation (like, say, the estimations needed to hit a quickly moving fly with a snap of the tongue, like some reptiles do) can be implemented in relatively simple ways with adaptable neural networks - i.e., a rather small bunch of nerve cells.
This does not require the general intelligence that a human needs to perform the same task - it's just some very specialized, and comparably very simple 'hardware' that does it.
Hmm, DK tanks are quite ok... We're raiding naxx-25, and maintanking is on DK or warrior, depending on which is more suited for each boss.
Well, I feel that enchanting is quite intentional that way.
You can do just fine with +50 spelldamage instead of the +60 spelldamage enchant that is ten times more expensive - but if you really want, you can go that extra mile and get a bit more dps.
Significant numbers of humans (say, 99%) dying would just bring us to the same global population level as during Roman Empire. Horrible, but not even close to extinction.
Depends on the genre possibly, but I see the completely contrary viewpoint, where the focus in previews of the next installments is in checking out the gameplay tweaks and small feature additions, and the story twists are mostly disregarded, with a vague paragraph about the new bad-guys-of-the-month.
I need a PC at home for business needs, and there is a big bonus at not needing to maintain, buy and worry about another electronic device. It does everything I need, including games as well, so a consle would offer no value to me - getting some games (like GTA) a few months earlier would be a small advantage, but it's not worth enough even to spend the effort to investigate and decide which of the current consoles to choose.
If USA loses the ability to buy cheap chinese crap, then the USA voters with guns will be on the streets rioting - they cannot handle a sudden doubling of consumer good prices if the cheap chinese imports are unavailable, and there are no replacements for this industry. And realistically, there will be no reasonable replacements for this industry in the first few years.
Meanwhile, China will be selling their stuff to Japan, India and Europe, and trust me, they will handle their starving peasants much more easier than USA will be able to handle their upset consumers.
It also depends on the bank. For example, my bank has set that if the POS terminal is chip&pin capable, then all swipe&sign transactions will be declined as if there was no money on account.
But testing over a wider temperature range and getting it build to this spec would be expensive as hell.
On the other hand, 'expensive as hell' is not that much when compared to the cost of getting a pound of stuff from Earth to Mars - so if it allows us to use the rover twice as long, then it may be cheap enough to do, as sending a ten times more expensive rover would be much cheaper than sending two current rovers, just due to the high cost of transport.
Well, the original point was exactly that it does not relate to the evil deed that is done, but to the sinful intent of one's mind.
The perception or the loss or fixing of the deed is irrelevant, if you have thought evil and acted evil, then the question is not about fixing the consequences, but about fixing and saving yourself, your soul.
The example you give - "He saw the girl by the tree." is more or less classic examples of sematic disambiguation - i.e., after the computer builds the possible meaning-relation models of the sentence - in this case, two slightly different models, the process of deciding which of the various meaning models is the 'true' one. Another popular example is properly understanding "I shot an elephant in my pajamas".
But this is generally considered at least partly solved - the ones where the computer really cannot tell the difference are the same ones that normal people often get wrong as well.
Well, regarding your argument "Wait till we as a civilization have grown up" - I see that building either AI, or computer-enhanced humans, or genetically improved humans is the only feasible way for our civilization to "grow up" in the sense of becoming better in social function and behaviour than the current civilization, which is in moral/social sense no better than the ancient roman/greek civilization or even stone age hunter-gatherer civilization.
AI's won't be children for us to raise. Within a short time after the first strong AI is created (singularity-proponents think that within a few says, but in general, definitely less than single human generation), AI's will be the ones creating and shaping the society as they know best, raising us as children and improving us. Or eliminating us :)