gort

> So you're entitled to that content for free?

The web browser sends a request to the server requesting something, and the server can either say "200 OK" and send you the document, or it can do something else, such as refuse.

If it does send you the document, this does not create any other obligations on your part; for example it doesn't create an obligation to issue further requests so as to download images referred to in <img> tags in the document. Even if you do so download them, there's no obligation to actually render them on any particular device.

If the server owner objects to this he needs to configure his server to do something other than reply "200 OK" to arbitrary requests.

> As for questions of religious proof, existence, and so on... I'll get to them when I'm done with more important issues, which is basically everything else.

But some of the prevailing religions of our time tell us that one's eternal fate depends on the answers to such questions. To say that such questions aren't important implies you've already decided such religions aren't true; because if any of them were true, that would be important.

> A species which naturally reduces fertility in response to crowding

If almost every member of a species is doing this, you need to explain what stops the rare mutant genes that don't give this behaviour from rapidly becoming more common.

Some combination of covert communications and/or trips to the toilet.

> Whenever someone tells me about the "right" to healthcare, I ask, "From whom? From me?" This question exposes this "right" for the robbery and slavery that it is.

> If too many doctors quit, the government might try to make them work.

Well, what a load of rubbish. Numerous free countries do indeed have some sort of right to healthcare in their laws: in practical terms it translates to a promise by the government that it will pay the market rate to ensure that there are adequate doctors working for it.

(One could, of course, make some generalised argument against taxes, but that doesn't seem to be what this is.)

I feel I'm given explicit authorisation to read the page when the server sends a "200 OK" response to my request to read it.

People can wake up from coma, I take it. But in cases where damage to the brain is so extensive that we can reasonably say all capacity for future thought has been lost, the primary worry really is just for the wishes of the family.

The medical establishment, at least where I live, tends to take the view that there's no intrinsic value in trying to prolong the life of such a body.

> For instance, could a person with Down's Syndrome be denied protection from murder?

Since nobody seems to have given a straight answer to this, I will. Someone with Down's Syndrome easily counts as an intelligent being, and is not even close to any borderline.

I suppose your question assumes that, since intelligence comes in degrees, any value based on it must also come in degrees. But instead, most people who see personhood this way believe in some sort of threshold above which everyone deserves equal protection.

Back of envelope calculation:

  A. Starting height = 39045 m
  B. Desired speed = 343 m/s
  C. Acceleration = 9.8 m/s/s

  D. Average speed while accelerating = 171 m/s (half of B)
  E. Time to reach desired speed = 35 s (B divided by C)
  F. Therefore distance travelled = 5985 m (D times E)

  G. Therefore altitude at Mach 1 = 33060 m, give or take the small amount of drag.

Edit: Meh, I see from the video that he didn't accelerate as fast as this, I guess the drag was significant after all. Even a small amount of gas will move you if it's coming at you at significant speeds...

> Mutation happens randomly, then natural selection will sometimes prune out bad mutations. That's all.

That is not all. Beneficial mutations sometimes occur; and because they provide a benefit they spread through the population [caveat below].

Bostrom's question is valid: if some change to the brain's chemistry could provide a boost to intelligence, why hasn't a mutation providing that change already swept through the population?

There's nothing wrong with the question, and it does have answers, e.g. constraints (no simple set of mutations can provide the specified change) or tradeoffs (the change would result in a net fitness loss; intelligence isn't everything) or just insufficiently large benefits (any rare gene, e.g. a new mutation, is likely to die out by chance simply because it's rare; providing a larger benefit helps its chances of survival. [1])

[1] http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1544/1195...

"point that was made in the essay, which is that there are no working Lamarckian mechanisms in biology"

Fair enough - Pinker seems a bit too firm about that.

I'm not sure how it's relevant to the issue of group selection and altruism; but anyway such inheritance still seems to be relatively rare, as far as I know.

It's interesting that you call it Lamarckian - the epigenetic inheritance system itself would have to evolve in a normal Darwinian way... e.g. if genes get methylated (turned off semi-permanently) and passed down to offspring in this state, one could call that Lamarckian, but the methylation system itself is in need of a Darwinian explanation.

The difference between worker bees and cells in a body is that the cells in a body (call them "somatic cells") are 100% genetically identical to the cells that actually do the animal's reproduction - i.e. the cells that produce sperm or eggs. There's an automatic alignment of interests.

Now, in bee colonies there is not this perfect alignment between worker and queen, since the workers are only the queen's daughters, related to her by 50%. There's the potential for various types of conflict, between worker and queen, or between worker and worker...

For example, in many species the workers can in fact reproduce, favouring their own interests, but there's conflict between the workers to disallow this. [1] Naturally this conflict does have costs for the colony as a whole.

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v342/n6251/abs/342796a0...

Hmm. If anything I'd expect them to have evolved a lot of interesting deep-sea adaptations that should render them rather unlike our 500 MYA ancestors... remember they've had just as long to evolve to their peculiar environment as we have.

Still, you've got me thinking about this question. I would think the present-day fish that most resembles our ancestor of that time ought to be something less exotic. Perhaps something like a hagfish.

Another argument is this:

The (wrong) graph has been drawn with 12 cycles, based on approximately 12 lunar months per year. But the result is obviously not to scale. If you try to draw it to scale, the truth jumps out at you; it can't have this form.

If I recall correctly (it's been a while), the normal Mandelbrot works by treating each pixel as a complex number and seeing if it escapes to infinity or not when iterated through some formula... the Buddhabrot however plots which values are landed on as numbers are iterated...

An interesting alternative I tried some years ago is to draw lines for each iteration instead, between where it started and where it ends, leading to the following result:

http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/583/pathsoftravel5.png

(I have some C code lying around if anyone's interested.)

I have to speculate since the article is short on molecular details, but I would guess the mosquitoes carry simple knockout mutations which prevent them from manufacturing some essential compound, maybe an amino acid.

Therefore, there's nothing of consequence to transfer to another species. You'd be transfering a gene that doesn't do anything.

Even if, in addition to transferring to another species, it somehow replaced the working gene in some individual, then the gene would simply die out due to the heavy selection pressure against it, leaving the rest of the population unharmed. (To counteract that with the mosquitoes, I take it fresh supplies of the engineered males are going to be repeatedly introduced?)

It's suggestive, it raises the possibility, but it's hardly proof as it stands.

This seems to be a freely available version: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/zoran/NSMBfoldit-2011.pdf

I thought the idea was that if this decision had gone the other way then Microsoft wouldn't have achieved its current position.

"Species" is a vague and slightly philosophical concept, but I think an actual population of people with 44 chromosomes would have to become established before the term was applied.

"A species" is typically defined as something like "a group of individuals that can breed with each other".

Out of curiousity, how confident are you about the general idea of humanity surviving and in a good state? I know your work focuses on the idea that AI, poorly implemented, will probably destroy everything of value; so how confident are you that it will be well implemented?

Odd. The filed legal paper says "iCloud Communications was formed in 2005".

That's true of overt ads; ads masquerading as reality have less need to worry about such things.

Perquisite, not prerequisite. Perquisite means something like "perk".

While many traits that help an individual also help its group, I take it that "group selection" refers to traits evolving that harm an individual for the benefit of the group.

It's really difficult to get this to work, since the selection pressure at the individual level tends to outweigh the pressure at the group level; every group will eventually produce mutants that don't have the trait; these then come to make up an increasing proportion of the group, since they have higher fitness.

Out discomfort with it is due to this.

The fundamental criticism seems to be that the authors take kin selection to be a fundamentally different sort of thing from "ordinary" natural selection.

That is indeed a very strange view since the two are really tightly connected logically.

"a way to count to 512"

1024 (or 1023), surely?

There must be shorter, easier Socratic dialogues one could read. Maybe Euthyphro, or something:

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/euthyfro.html

The paper is:

Jianni Liu, et al (2011) An armoured Cambrian lobopodian from China with arthropod-like appendages. Nature 470(7335): 526-530 (doi: 10.1038/nature09704)

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v470/n7335/full/nature0...