I have to say, as a worker in the analytical community, the attached presentation is one of the worst I've seen for a while. In addition to the fatuous (or a least completely unproven) assertions about the effects of "excessive" destruction in war, the presentaton is a good example of what I call the "tyranny of the present"; a worldview utterly focused on current operations and topical concerns as to render the "insights" worthless. But aside from the limited worldview, the 2x2 targetting taxonomy has no dimensional consistency, makes no sense, and is a good example of why "analysts" should be taught class theory before being let loose with powerpoint. A lesson in anecdotal sampling bias in the use of historical cases might also help.
Enough sniping; on to the meat of the article. And the most obvious flaw already pointed out is that nigh-all combat platforms are combination of weapon, man, and (often) motive vehicle. So, the robot could cheerfully waste a tank as a "thing", with the crew as acceptable collateral damage. As a legal manoeuvre, this might have some merit, but I don't think it satisfies as a philosophical sucessor to Asimov. [I leave aside the article asking us to believe that non-lethal weapons will persuade the enemy to abandon their fighting platforms so they can be clinically destroyed by the robot. Nice. I have to put up with a lot of silly techno-utopianism with the American way of war but this makes me wonder if the author has slept through every conflict since ALLIED FORCE.]
Amusingly though, on the most restrictive reading of the rules, the US robts will be sat on the battlefield waiting for other robots to be fielded by the enemy so that they can shoot them. I'm reminded of the Onion article where the US pledges $600m to the Taliban to build a C4I complex so that they can bomb it. In practise , of course, it matters not what rules the US and its allies adopt in the short term. The temptation for a challenger power to adopt a universal targetting ROE for _their_ robots would be immense. Faced with such a challenge, I suspect US robots would have to follow suit, at risk of ceding a massive advantage on the battlefield. [This is already the case with the argument for arming UAV's for air-to-air engagement. Fear of what enemy UAVs so prepared might potentially do is already influencing doctrine development; without one real theat in the sky].
As with warfare through the ages, technological possibility will shape strategy, with challengers being first adopters (the current RMA is a bit unusual in this). And after a while, I think people will find that the law follows too... there's this old chestnut about crossbows and knights...
Someone wrote about the difficulties inherent to investment banking. Though I may be going out on a limb here, but I'm guessing that it is a very unlucky or unskilled player who would not double his initial resources in 6 months of game-time, or perhaps a few weeks of real time. In real life, if most businesses could acheive those kind of growth rates, then the demand for money would push interest rates through the roof. I would hence have thought that investment banking was an extremely obvious and lucrative (legitimate) profession for EVE.
As regards collecting on loans, then security is one way to do it, or perhaps 3rd party sums held in escrow. But this is inefficient. However, a better method is available; the market already provides a method of punishing defaulters through placing a bounty on their heads. The infamous scene from the Mos Eisley Cantina can now be lovingly recreated by aspiring players all over the galaxy... Certainly, with interest rates in high double figures, genorous bounties could be offered against those foolish enough to consider reneging on their debts. Are there interesting implications for in-world bankruptcy, debtors prison, or perhaps indentured servitude arising from catastrophic business ventures?
One final point: Someone made a very good point that if this is (RW) fraud, then blowing up someone's ship must count as (RW) vandalism, because it deprives them of imaginary wealth through non-consensual means too. This is obviously absurd; the EULA, clearly holds ultimate ownership of all game assets back with the game provider (so no theft, as nothing changes ownership). The comparison with monopoly money or scrip is slightly misleading in this instance. The fraudster (or anyone else for tha matter) DO NOT OWN THE ISK they control in EVE and cannot legitimately sell title or use of them. The fact that it _happens_ is besides the point; such a contract would be unenforcable. It would be akin to selling you a car that I have only been leant for the afternoon.
And the "labour theory of value" excursion was marxist twaddle too, but other economists spotted that first.
...which leaves us only to calculate how many m^2 there is a sphere of radius equal to Earth's Orbit.
It's called a Dyson sphere. But personally, I favour exotic complete mass-anihiliation technology myself rather than relying on puny fusion as an intermediary.:o)
My oh my, it's like the Club of Rome never crashed and burned...
Despite his geology credentials, I would join with those who worry that the economics underlying the good professor's model are gravely inadequate*. The "Hubberts Curve" analysis of US 70's oil is badly misleading; US oil production in the 70's was not a closed system; cheap middle-eastern oil had rendered many US wells uneconomic to run. Underlying this problem seems to be a lack of clarity about our definitions.
Perhaps it would be useful to move the debate onto "known recoverable reserves at a given price" as opposed to "total global reserves" (itself a rather problematic concept as the geologists on this board have already pointed out). I can see that this is happening to some extent with posters looking to the end of "cheap oil". A more interesting notion, on several levels.
There are uncertainties in this future; rates of resource substituion/alternative sources, energy saving, price elasticity, and exploitation trechnologies, but they generally point to reasons for optimism that the "problem" will be contained without the end of the world, or even a serious islocation. Supporting this conclusion, the Oil Futures market is still resilient. At the least, doomsayers are not putting their money where their mouth is. Deffeyes may pronounce "by 2025 we will be back in the stone age", but I bet he's got a 20-year mortgage. Let's be honest; part of his alarmism is just to shift copy.
People who proclaim "Ah, but this time its differrent..." should take a close look at the "Ehrlich-Simons bet" to see how the Neo-Malthusians have ended up looking very silly many times before. Are their arguments really novel? How? And if they are true, so what? (A more level-headed projection of possible consequences would also be in order)
And will someone please define for me, in a way that makes sense and uses concrete and measurable criteria, what a "a fair share of the earth's resources" is, and how they calculated the "fair" bit.
- Al
*Incidentally, I haven't seen anyone comment that the current high price for consumer oil products is driven more by globally limited refinery capacity than a lack of crude...
I'd just like to make it clear that not everyone in the UK thinks that the license fee is such a marvellous idea.
Even if the programmes were value for money, it would still be a draconian and compulsory >tax< for a product I actively dislike and have not chosen to consume. How about a bit of slashdotter libertarian solidarity here?
I did a quick calcualtion, and the BBC costs me approximate 4x as many pounds per viewing hour as my subscription cable channels. It's a ridiculous throwback to the days of a national broadcaster; when one-size fit all. When you subtract kids programmes, daytime tv, light entertainement, bad comedy, religion, soap opera, cookery programmes (oh yeah, all the rage at the moment), bloody 18th century costume drama, home-makeoevers, crime drame, and "Suppernanny" shows, there's nothing left. Good grief, I'm an educated 30-something scientist with an IQ on the sunny side of 130, and there's entire days with nothing on.
Science? Literarture and books? Engineering and architecture? Art and philosophy? Documentaries that don't have you tearing your hair out? Informed comment and civil debate? Nawh, must be some other channel....
And don't get me started on the news and current affairs output; politically correct, superficial, full of factual error, and glibly patronising. I nearly went insane before discovering the blogosphere. It's like being FORCED to buy a newspaper whose opinions I hate.
Basically, you Americans only see the >good< exports. And did I mention chat shows?
Slashdot Mirror
Enough sniping; on to the meat of the article. And the most obvious flaw already pointed out is that nigh-all combat platforms are combination of weapon, man, and (often) motive vehicle. So, the robot could cheerfully waste a tank as a "thing", with the crew as acceptable collateral damage. As a legal manoeuvre, this might have some merit, but I don't think it satisfies as a philosophical sucessor to Asimov. [I leave aside the article asking us to believe that non-lethal weapons will persuade the enemy to abandon their fighting platforms so they can be clinically destroyed by the robot. Nice. I have to put up with a lot of silly techno-utopianism with the American way of war but this makes me wonder if the author has slept through every conflict since ALLIED FORCE.]
Amusingly though, on the most restrictive reading of the rules, the US robts will be sat on the battlefield waiting for other robots to be fielded by the enemy so that they can shoot them. I'm reminded of the Onion article where the US pledges $600m to the Taliban to build a C4I complex so that they can bomb it. In practise , of course, it matters not what rules the US and its allies adopt in the short term. The temptation for a challenger power to adopt a universal targetting ROE for _their_ robots would be immense. Faced with such a challenge, I suspect US robots would have to follow suit, at risk of ceding a massive advantage on the battlefield. [This is already the case with the argument for arming UAV's for air-to-air engagement. Fear of what enemy UAVs so prepared might potentially do is already influencing doctrine development; without one real theat in the sky].
As with warfare through the ages, technological possibility will shape strategy, with challengers being first adopters (the current RMA is a bit unusual in this). And after a while, I think people will find that the law follows too... there's this old chestnut about crossbows and knights...
Someone wrote about the difficulties inherent to investment banking. Though I may be going out on a limb here, but I'm guessing that it is a very unlucky or unskilled player who would not double his initial resources in 6 months of game-time, or perhaps a few weeks of real time. In real life, if most businesses could acheive those kind of growth rates, then the demand for money would push interest rates through the roof. I would hence have thought that investment banking was an extremely obvious and lucrative (legitimate) profession for EVE.
As regards collecting on loans, then security is one way to do it, or perhaps 3rd party sums held in escrow. But this is inefficient. However, a better method is available; the market already provides a method of punishing defaulters through placing a bounty on their heads. The infamous scene from the Mos Eisley Cantina can now be lovingly recreated by aspiring players all over the galaxy... Certainly, with interest rates in high double figures, genorous bounties could be offered against those foolish enough to consider reneging on their debts. Are there interesting implications for in-world bankruptcy, debtors prison, or perhaps indentured servitude arising from catastrophic business ventures?
One final point: Someone made a very good point that if this is (RW) fraud, then blowing up someone's ship must count as (RW) vandalism, because it deprives them of imaginary wealth through non-consensual means too. This is obviously absurd; the EULA, clearly holds ultimate ownership of all game assets back with the game provider (so no theft, as nothing changes ownership). The comparison with monopoly money or scrip is slightly misleading in this instance. The fraudster (or anyone else for tha matter) DO NOT OWN THE ISK they control in EVE and cannot legitimately sell title or use of them. The fact that it _happens_ is besides the point; such a contract would be unenforcable. It would be akin to selling you a car that I have only been leant for the afternoon.
And the "labour theory of value" excursion was marxist twaddle too, but other economists spotted that first.
My oh my, it's like the Club of Rome never crashed and burned...
Despite his geology credentials, I would join with those who worry that the economics underlying the good professor's model are gravely inadequate*. The "Hubberts Curve" analysis of US 70's oil is badly misleading; US oil production in the 70's was not a closed system; cheap middle-eastern oil had rendered many US wells uneconomic to run. Underlying this problem seems to be a lack of clarity about our definitions.
Perhaps it would be useful to move the debate onto "known recoverable reserves at a given price" as opposed to "total global reserves" (itself a rather problematic concept as the geologists on this board have already pointed out). I can see that this is happening to some extent with posters looking to the end of "cheap oil". A more interesting notion, on several levels.
There are uncertainties in this future; rates of resource substituion/alternative sources, energy saving, price elasticity, and exploitation trechnologies, but they generally point to reasons for optimism that the "problem" will be contained without the end of the world, or even a serious islocation. Supporting this conclusion, the Oil Futures market is still resilient. At the least, doomsayers are not putting their money where their mouth is. Deffeyes may pronounce "by 2025 we will be back in the stone age", but I bet he's got a 20-year mortgage. Let's be honest; part of his alarmism is just to shift copy.
People who proclaim "Ah, but this time its differrent..." should take a close look at the "Ehrlich-Simons bet" to see how the Neo-Malthusians have ended up looking very silly many times before. Are their arguments really novel? How? And if they are true, so what? (A more level-headed projection of possible consequences would also be in order)
And will someone please define for me, in a way that makes sense and uses concrete and measurable criteria, what a "a fair share of the earth's resources" is, and how they calculated the "fair" bit.
- Al
*Incidentally, I haven't seen anyone comment that the current high price for consumer oil products is driven more by globally limited refinery capacity than a lack of crude...
I'd just like to make it clear that not everyone in the UK thinks that the license fee is such a marvellous idea.
Even if the programmes were value for money, it would still be a draconian and compulsory >tax< for a product I actively dislike and have not chosen to consume. How about a bit of slashdotter libertarian solidarity here?
I did a quick calcualtion, and the BBC costs me approximate 4x as many pounds per viewing hour as my subscription cable channels. It's a ridiculous throwback to the days of a national broadcaster; when one-size fit all. When you subtract kids programmes, daytime tv, light entertainement, bad comedy, religion, soap opera, cookery programmes (oh yeah, all the rage at the moment), bloody 18th century costume drama, home-makeoevers, crime drame, and "Suppernanny" shows, there's nothing left. Good grief, I'm an educated 30-something scientist with an IQ on the sunny side of 130, and there's entire days with nothing on.
Science? Literarture and books? Engineering and architecture? Art and philosophy? Documentaries that don't have you tearing your hair out? Informed comment and civil debate? Nawh, must be some other channel....
And don't get me started on the news and current affairs output; politically correct, superficial, full of factual error, and glibly patronising. I nearly went insane before discovering the blogosphere. It's like being FORCED to buy a newspaper whose opinions I hate.
Basically, you Americans only see the >good< exports. And did I mention chat shows?
OK, rant over.