FWIW, the only time I restart systemd is to update the kernel, or I guess systemd itself (though the kernel changes more often and thus I can usually lump the latter in with the former). If you do live-patch your kernel, then you can do the same with systemd - it has a command to re-exec itself while preserving state.

I'm sure it isn't perfect, but it is as robust as anything else I've used on Linux. There are fairly few daemons that I've never seen need a restart sometime in the last 10 years.

Of course the retirement funds weren't bailed out. They didn't have to be, because the companies they invested in were bailed out instead. If the various investment banks were allowed to fail then they'd probably all crash and so would everything all those retirement funds were invested in. THAT is why those companies were too big to fail in the first place.

If investments were just a toy for the wealthy then we could let them play their games and take their haircuts. The problem is that the investment sector affects everybody, so we have no choice but to intervene when things go wrong. That gives us the right to prevent things from going wrong in the first place, even if it means the rich can't play their games any longer...

While I agree with many of your points, often these records become important after the fact.

Suppose I have a record of every letter sent from anywhere to anywhere. Then somebody blows up a building or whatever and are now known as a terrorist. The database allows you to obtain a list of every letter that had his address somewhere on it. Or any letter sent to a suspicious address which originated in his vicinity even if it didn't have a return address (such as if it were dropped in a mailbox). That kind of information can be useful to expand a network of suspects.

It is like having a record of every phone call for the last 30 years. It is hard to look at call patterns and tell who is a threat. However, if somebody blows up a building you can figure out who their college roommate was, or who they dated in middle school. All kinds of relationships that would not be obvious if you just talked to somebody's neighbors or looked at their recent credit card / phone history become apparent. Maybe their former girlfriend works for the TSA and was on duty when a terrorist slipped past security, but there weren't any phone calls between them in the last 10 years. That is a lead that might become apparent with long-term record retention that would be missed without it. Of course, such techniques inevitably involve looking into the cases of people who are almost certainly innocent. If the girlfriend wasn't involved, pursuing her might mean neglecting other leads that are real threats.

Data is just data. However, there is a lot you can do with a targeted search once you know what you're looking for.

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.

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.

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.

Just require that anything traded in the market be traded there exclusively. For additional effect, require by law that all trades within the country use a market that operates under these rules.

I do agree with some of these concerns. This model does require trusting the market administrators, and they would be in a position to give tremendous advantage to any party with inside connections.

I have mixed feelings on whether it should be secret. If it weren't, then those particular issues go away but there are others that then come up. However, I don't have a problem with anybody voluntarily sharing information. They just shouldn't be required to do so. I'd also allow anybody to directly place trades - it shouldn't cost anything to directly submit orders to the exchange other than perhaps having a deposit or bond.

The solution to this kind of problem is to have trades executed hourly or even daily, but at a random time which is not disclosed in advance. There might be only general guarantees such as it being at least 6 hours after the last trade. So, sometime on Tuesday every trade will be executed, and it will be between midnight and midnight. The computer will freeze the book at a random moment, and then run through and execute every trade it can. The book is secret until this time, and published after this time. I could see an argument for allowing changes or not, so I'm not sure which is better, though obviously all sales are final.

Define "significantly."

Do we really need nanosecond resolution on stick price changes?

Do fluctuations at those levels REALLY reflect changes in the actual value of a company? At 4:01.000000001 PM is GM really worth 14.01, but at 4:01.0000000012 something changed and it is now worth 14.02? And what is the cost of having this "extra resolution?"

Either is actually a potential moral monster in the making. The one might allow you to all die in a fire because it cannot predict with certainty what would happen if it walked on weakened floor boards, which might cause it to accidentally cause the taking of a life. Indeed, a robot truly programmed to never take any action which could possibly lead to the loss of life would probably never be able to take any action at all. I can't predict what the long-reaching consequences of my taking a shower in the morning might be. Maybe if I didn't create the additional demand for water the water company wouldn't hire a new employee, which means they'd be stuck at home unemployed instead of getting in the car and driving to work and getting into a fatal accident.

Sure, it is a ridiculous example. My point is just that we all make millions of unconscious risk evaluations every day and any AI would have to do the same. It requires some kind of set of principles beyond hard-coded rules like "don't kill somebody." AIs are all about emergent behavior, just as is the case with people. You can't approach programming them the way you'd design a spreadsheet.