They've been doing it for well over 10 years:

cite:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08...

Relevant quote:

Last month, The New York Times reported on the practice, which is called the Mail Isolation and Tracking system. The program was created by the Postal Service after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 killed five people, including two postal workers.

Lot's of people still actually hand-write addresses. It needs to get OCRed in order to be sorted.

In times past, sending porn through the mail *was* illegal, and the antiquated version of this program tracked porn mailers and receivers.

Well, it is for sorting purposes. (They've got massive machines running Linux doing OCR which replaced manual sorting, and that requires... taking pictures of the mail.)

Whether all the pictures are also retained is a completely different story. 10 years ago, I'd have said, "No; too expensive." But storage costs have plummeted, so nowadays, maybe so.

If I live in State A and own property in State B, I cannot vote in elections in both states. That is taxation without representation as well - assuming I pay taxes in both states (property or income). How is this any different? Plus they can still run for school board, go to district meetings open to the public, and participate in the PTA.

Is your school voucher program going to give me back the money I have paid in taxes for things like welfare, unemployment, medicaid, school districts, universities, medical research, and other programs I am not taking advantage of at the present moment? No? Oh, that's right, sometimes we pay taxes for things that don't benefit us directly because it makes society a better place.

On a tangent, the fact that we can't even control crime in prison says a great deal about the ineffectiveness of our approach to crime. Heck, I'm sure they can't even keep drugs out of prison.

Every single iOS developer at my company got one of these emails - except me. Apple asked us back in November to create an app for the Apple Watch, so maybe that has something to do with it. I'm also the only person who won the WWDC lottery at my company. So who knows?

How many Prius would you need to carry 7 people, plus 7 suitcases of stuff, plus tow an 8,000 lb trailer?

I own a Yukon XL, which is the GMC version of the Suburban.

I am not attempting to troll by asking this question, but I am curious: what percentage of the miles driven in that Yukon have just 1-3 people, and little luggage? What percentage of the miles are driven with 7 people, 7 suitcases, and an 8,000-lb trailer?

They're done that way to distill a matter down to the essence. The same issues apply to complicated situations, but they are far more convoluted.

Is it OK to force people to pay taxes so that others can have free health insurance? If they refuse to pay their taxes is it OK to imprison them, again so that others can have free health insurance? Is it ethical to pay $200k to extend the life of somebody on their deathbed by a week when that same sum could allow a homeless person to live in a half-decent home for a decade? Does it make a difference if the person who will live a week longer is happy and healthy for that week? Is the lottery ethical?

Every one of these issues is controversial, and ethical thought problems try to distill them down to elementary values problems, in the hope of shedding light on how to handle real-world ones where there are many more possible outcomes.

Well, the army and Robin Hood might take issue with your statements. :) Nobody actually follows those rules rigidly in practice.

It isn't really enough to just have a list of rules like "don't kill." You need some kind of underlying principle that unifies them. Any intelligent being has to make millions of decisions in a day, and almost none of them are going to be on the lookup table. For example, you probably chose to get out of bed in the morning. How did you decide that doing this wasn't likely to result in somebody getting killed that day, or did you not care? I didn't give it much thought, because if I worried about causal relationships that far out I'd never do anything. But, when should an AI worry about such matters?

We actually make moral decisions all the time, we just don't think about them. When we want to design an AI, suddenly we have to.

Well, the fact that not everybody would agree with everything you just said means that none of this has anything to do with the fact that you're human. You have a bunch of opinions on these topics, as do I and everybody else.

And that was really all my point was. When we can't all agree together on what is right and wrong, how do you create some kind of AI convention to ensure that AIs only act for the public benefit?

That would work if:

1. People could actually control what markets their money got invested in. Last time I checked I had no control over where my pension is invested. If my company's pension fund is wiped out, that is a problem for me.

2. Governments actually let people lose their money when they make bad choices. However, because of #1 they really can't do this. Plus so many people make bad choices they couldn't even really let it happen even if it were completely voluntary.

When markets are "too big to fail" then they need to be regulated so that they don't fail.

I'm definitely a fan of minimal intrusion. I'd have taken much more market-based solutions to most of the financial crisis problems, such as splitting up large banks (more competition, nobody is too big to fail on their own), or making bailouts much more powerful (government eminent domains company, reorganizes with only an interest to the national economy and no care of shareholders, and they do everything they can to find a basis for suing every previous executive of the company, then in the end the company is IPOed to get it out of the government's hands, the government recoups all its costs first, and then if anything is left over it goes to previous debtholders followed by shareholders). Because of collective idiocy I still think that markets are going to need to be regulated.

That was my whole point. We can't agree on a logical definition of morality. Thus, it is really hard to design an AI that everybody would agree is moral.

As far as whether we are Vulcans - we actually have no idea how our brains make moral decisions. Sure, we understand aspects of it, but what makes you look at a kid and think about helping them become a better adult and what makes a psychopath look at a kid and think about how much money they could get if they kidnapped him is a complete mystery.

I'd argue the opposite. I'd encourage one set of rules for markets to operate under, and make it illegal to trade securities in any other way. Flash crashes and such are a threat to the national economy (just look back at 2008). The markets certainly should be regulated in a way that helps to stabilize them. It would also make things like transaction taxation easy to implement, and eliminate a lot of forms of fraud and tax evasion. Any security would be traded in exactly one market, and you own however many shares of it the exchange says you own.