You don't want an expensive robot to go breaking itself just because you're a bit careless giving it orders.
Dude, you're viewing this from a completely wrong angle. The three laws are put in the robots by the company that makes them. And what does it mean that an expensive robot breaks itself because of bad input from the user ? That you can sell the user another expensive robot. Or expensive repairs to the expensive robot. Anyway, it's going to be expensive for the user, which means profit for the company.
No, Diablo 2 is not at all a good example, because every player can have their very own, private instance of the game world. In WoW, you share the lucrative farming grounds and quest mobs with all the other players on the server, and if someone's running a bot that can be online 24/7, he's depriving the honest players of their chance to grab some loot without having to compete with a bot.
What winter ? We've had a chilly late fall and a fairly cold early spring. No sign of winter. 25 years ago, winter meant that there was snow on the ground for a few contiguous weeks. Nowadays, you've got to be glad if it stays for more than two days.
The LD50 of CO2 for humans is 100,000 PPM (10%), so you'd probably be OK if you were a healthy human with ample oxygen content in the remaining 93%... wouldn't be fun, but tolerable.
My sources say it's closer to 8% and 30-60 minutes of exposure. I didn't want to kill the poor guy.
But 7% isn't going to be tolerable. It's going to be pretty fscking horrible (if you can actually stay conscious) - regardless of how much oxygen is in the air. CO2 isn't bound to hemoglobin and doesn't compete with oxygen for transport capacity. It only indirectly reduces oxygen transport capacity somewhat by acidifying the blood.
All life on Earth benefits from even very high levels of carbon dioxide. [...] Carbon dioxide is not a poison gas and needs to remain unregulated.
Great. Could you please spend twenty minutes in an atmosphere with about 7% CO2 in it (you can pick the other gases in the mixture yourself) ? You'd be doing humanity a great favor.
Do you know that there's something perfectly natural that eats up CO2? They are called p-l-a-n-t-s.
Yep. And where does most of this magic happen ? In Earth's oceans. Which we're about to make a lot less hospitable for life through acidification (ironically, mostly through CO2) and overfertilization.
It almost seems as if this earth were designed in such a way that we couldn't mess it up.
We can't mess it up for life in general, but we sure as heck can mess it up for us. And, believe it or not, there are some people who might want to see mankind live and prosper for another couple of ten thousand years, at least.
The planetary temperatures are either flat or cooling down. Since its been two weeks since the last sunspot, can anyone say "Little Ice Age"?
Erm... did you actually look at those values ? Or even plug them into Excel/Matlab/Octave/whatever and trend them (with a larger running average than 12 months) ? If not, then I suggest you do that.
There's just not that many hydrocarbon fuel molecules - even heavier fuels like kerosene are 12-15 carbon molecules - meaning their fuel just plain can't be all that different.
One of the biggest differences between "synthesized" fuels and ones that are made from crude is that the former don't contain all the crap (sulfur, heavy metals, etc) that crude contains. Synthesized diesel fuel, for example, will be virtually sulfur-free.
The byproduct is also quite honestly the one that we don't want.
Please tell me you're not serious. Any carbon-containing byproduct of hydrocarbon combustion that is not CO2 is even more problematic than CO2.
Ecologically, from a global warming POV, having diesel *not* emit useless soot is absolutely catastrophic, as the carbon has to go somewhere. It's either soot, or carbon dioxide.
I'm sorry, but that's a load of nonsense. Having soot in your exhaust means that the engine didn't extract the energy from that portion of the fuel - so in order to get the same amount of energy, the engine needs to burn more fuel. You'll end up with the same amount of CO2 in the end, plus a load of soot that causes its own problems, compared to a "clean" burn.
In short: You want a combustion engine to turn CxHx + O2 into H2O and CO2 only. All other byproducts will cause even more problems than the latter two, and mean that your engine is wasting fuel.
Getting the agricultural waste out of the food chain is exactly the opposite of sustainable.
And where in the article does it say that once the process is up and running, 100% of all agricultural waste must be used as feedstock ?
This means even more exhaustion of the soil, and even more chemicals to be pumped into the soil to compensate for the loss of nutrients.
Most of the "nutrients" (nitrogen compounds, minerals) in the agricultural waste will probably come out of the process as waste products, and can then be put back into the soil.
Is the bio-fuel from rice the same as the bio-fuel from cotton seed oil? Usually, it isn't. Different sources yield different products.
That mainly depends on what process you use. If you use first-generation biofuel processes (fermentation/biodiesel/etc), then you will get different products. If you go from biomass to syngas to hydrocarbons (second-generation biofuel process), it doesn't really matter what kind of biomass you use as it'll all get turned into H2 and CO at some point in the process. The only questions then are what you can actually use as feedstock for the process, and how efficient it is.
Was it an "entirely different species" or was it just an adaptation?
One of the defining characteristics of E.coli is the inability to metabolize citrate. If it metabolizes citrate, it's not E.coli anymore.
Could you cross breed this "new" version of citrate metabolizing E. Coli with the original strain?
Erm, you need to consult a biology textbook about how bacteria reproduce. Hint: They don't need partners to do so. That makes cross-breeding a bit difficult. Especially since a strain of E.coli was used that doesn't do the conjugation thing, either.
I know that this is going to be wildly unpopular, but the truth is, if the government tells a business to do something, and tells the business that they have legal authorization to do it, and in fact threaten the company if they don't comply, the business is going to be off the hook in court.
What terrible things can a government do to a company ? Companies aren't individuals that can be threatened with things like death, torture or imprisonment. The worst thing that a government could do to a company would probably be seizing it, which still only translates into a monetary loss that can be fought over in court. Sorry. Doing illegal stuff because declining would cost you money is no excuse. Doing illegal stuff because declining would get you killed would be one, but you've got to be a real person for that one.
For something new... although the Artemis Fowl series is as much or more fantasy than sci-fi, and it is dark, I still highly recommend it. It contains some amazing ideas on how the worlds of magic and science colide, and the path that Artemis takes from dark to light is very compelling.
I second that. And, while the books might be dark sometimes, they've also given me some of the best laughs _ever_. Sushi, deep fryer... 'nuff said.
English is 90% latin, the remaining 10 percent can be perceived as local dialects;-)
Err... no. The 90% thing might be true for Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and a couple of other Romanic languages, but English has two major roots (Germanic and Romanic) and a couple of minor ones (Scandinavian).
That's also the reason why English is the language with the largest vocabulary - it often has two words for the the same thing, one derived from its Romanic root and the other from the Germanic one.
I don't see why most universities don't require at least some foreign language as part of the curriculum.
I don't why at least one foreign language isn't a requirement for finishing high school. The later you start, the more effort you need to put into learning a language.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't want an expensive robot to go breaking itself just because you're a bit careless giving it orders.
Dude, you're viewing this from a completely wrong angle. The three laws are put in the robots by the company that makes them. And what does it mean that an expensive robot breaks itself because of bad input from the user ? That you can sell the user another expensive robot. Or expensive repairs to the expensive robot. Anyway, it's going to be expensive for the user, which means profit for the company.
Glider doesn't allow you to do anything in WoW that can't be done manually.
Ok. I'd like to see you farm for 120 hours without interruption. And that means no breaks for food, sleep, or other biological functions.
I'm not clear on how that harms other players.
You've clearly never had to compete with a bunch of bots for a good farming spots. Couple of thousand furbolgs in Felwood for the rep, anyone ?
A concrete example in Diablo 2
No, Diablo 2 is not at all a good example, because every player can have their very own, private instance of the game world. In WoW, you share the lucrative farming grounds and quest mobs with all the other players on the server, and if someone's running a bot that can be online 24/7, he's depriving the honest players of their chance to grab some loot without having to compete with a bot.
P.S. he didn't "find" the planets, they were already there.
How can you find something that's not already there ? If it isn't there, you can't find it !
I wonder how much of that was from all the particulates released during WWII. I assume that cities, planes and ships don't burn cleanly.
How is this different then getting a younger sibling, or trained monkey to do it for you while you go off and do other things with your life?
All of which would be prohibited, too.
If you enter a chess contest, and secretly get your moves from Deep Blue, then yeah, you're cheating.
What winter ? We've had a chilly late fall and a fairly cold early spring. No sign of winter. 25 years ago, winter meant that there was snow on the ground for a few contiguous weeks. Nowadays, you've got to be glad if it stays for more than two days.
The LD50 of CO2 for humans is 100,000 PPM (10%), so you'd probably be OK if you were a healthy human with ample oxygen content in the remaining 93% ... wouldn't be fun, but tolerable.
My sources say it's closer to 8% and 30-60 minutes of exposure. I didn't want to kill the poor guy.
But 7% isn't going to be tolerable. It's going to be pretty fscking horrible (if you can actually stay conscious) - regardless of how much oxygen is in the air. CO2 isn't bound to hemoglobin and doesn't compete with oxygen for transport capacity. It only indirectly reduces oxygen transport capacity somewhat by acidifying the blood.
Great. Could you please spend twenty minutes in an atmosphere with about 7% CO2 in it (you can pick the other gases in the mixture yourself) ? You'd be doing humanity a great favor.
Do you know that there's something perfectly natural that eats up CO2? They are called p-l-a-n-t-s.
Yep. And where does most of this magic happen ? In Earth's oceans. Which we're about to make a lot less hospitable for life through acidification (ironically, mostly through CO2) and overfertilization.
It almost seems as if this earth were designed in such a way that we couldn't mess it up.
We can't mess it up for life in general, but we sure as heck can mess it up for us. And, believe it or not, there are some people who might want to see mankind live and prosper for another couple of ten thousand years, at least.
The planetary temperatures are either flat or cooling down. Since its been two weeks since the last sunspot, can anyone say "Little Ice Age"?
Erm ... did you actually look at those values ? Or even plug them into Excel/Matlab/Octave/whatever and trend them (with a larger running average than 12 months) ? If not, then I suggest you do that.
One of the biggest differences between "synthesized" fuels and ones that are made from crude is that the former don't contain all the crap (sulfur, heavy metals, etc) that crude contains. Synthesized diesel fuel, for example, will be virtually sulfur-free.
That might be an idea for the future ... on Mars.
Please tell me you're not serious. Any carbon-containing byproduct of hydrocarbon combustion that is not CO2 is even more problematic than CO2.
Ecologically, from a global warming POV, having diesel *not* emit useless soot is absolutely catastrophic, as the carbon has to go somewhere. It's either soot, or carbon dioxide.
I'm sorry, but that's a load of nonsense. Having soot in your exhaust means that the engine didn't extract the energy from that portion of the fuel - so in order to get the same amount of energy, the engine needs to burn more fuel. You'll end up with the same amount of CO2 in the end, plus a load of soot that causes its own problems, compared to a "clean" burn.
In short: You want a combustion engine to turn CxHx + O2 into H2O and CO2 only. All other byproducts will cause even more problems than the latter two, and mean that your engine is wasting fuel.
Good. If you had realized it, you'd be wrong.
A reactor is a place where reactions occur. It doesn't specify whether those reactions are chemical or nuclear.
And where in the article does it say that once the process is up and running, 100% of all agricultural waste must be used as feedstock ?
This means even more exhaustion of the soil, and even more chemicals to be pumped into the soil to compensate for the loss of nutrients.
Most of the "nutrients" (nitrogen compounds, minerals) in the agricultural waste will probably come out of the process as waste products, and can then be put back into the soil.
Is the bio-fuel from rice the same as the bio-fuel from cotton seed oil? Usually, it isn't. Different sources yield different products.
That mainly depends on what process you use. If you use first-generation biofuel processes (fermentation/biodiesel/etc), then you will get different products. If you go from biomass to syngas to hydrocarbons (second-generation biofuel process), it doesn't really matter what kind of biomass you use as it'll all get turned into H2 and CO at some point in the process. The only questions then are what you can actually use as feedstock for the process, and how efficient it is.
Was it an "entirely different species" or was it just an adaptation?
One of the defining characteristics of E.coli is the inability to metabolize citrate. If it metabolizes citrate, it's not E.coli anymore.
Could you cross breed this "new" version of citrate metabolizing E. Coli with the original strain?
Erm, you need to consult a biology textbook about how bacteria reproduce. Hint: They don't need partners to do so. That makes cross-breeding a bit difficult. Especially since a strain of E.coli was used that doesn't do the conjugation thing, either.
I know that this is going to be wildly unpopular, but the truth is, if the government tells a business to do something, and tells the business that they have legal authorization to do it, and in fact threaten the company if they don't comply, the business is going to be off the hook in court.
What terrible things can a government do to a company ? Companies aren't individuals that can be threatened with things like death, torture or imprisonment. The worst thing that a government could do to a company would probably be seizing it, which still only translates into a monetary loss that can be fought over in court. Sorry. Doing illegal stuff because declining would cost you money is no excuse. Doing illegal stuff because declining would get you killed would be one, but you've got to be a real person for that one.
"You can judge a society's [productivity | output | (insert KPI here)] by the level of beareaucrcy it imposees on its citizens"
By that metric, Japan must be horribly un-productive.
Or the metric is just nonsense.
A single photon is infinitely more light than no photon.
For something new... although the Artemis Fowl series is as much or more fantasy than sci-fi, and it is dark, I still highly recommend it. It contains some amazing ideas on how the worlds of magic and science colide, and the path that Artemis takes from dark to light is very compelling.
I second that. And, while the books might be dark sometimes, they've also given me some of the best laughs _ever_. Sushi, deep fryer ... 'nuff said.
I remember they can detect one single photon, (although we wouldn't perceive it) going all the way up to super bright light.
The big news is that with the discovery, you can tell the difference between a single photon and two or three of them.
Detecting that there were any photons isn't the big challenge - determining the exact number of them is.
English is 90% latin, the remaining 10 percent can be perceived as local dialects ;-)
Err ... no. The 90% thing might be true for Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and a couple of other Romanic languages, but English has two major roots (Germanic and Romanic) and a couple of minor ones (Scandinavian).
That's also the reason why English is the language with the largest vocabulary - it often has two words for the the same thing, one derived from its Romanic root and the other from the Germanic one.
I don't why at least one foreign language isn't a requirement for finishing high school. The later you start, the more effort you need to put into learning a language.