Actually... It is being rationalized on both sides of the debate, not one. Logic is being used, but only for one set of values, leading to a mistaken impression that one is right, as opposed to just having an opinion. Nobody is on any higher ground than "I have buddies here that agree with me". The reason for that is that this article was never about choosing which lives to save. The poster I replied to, in order to pose as a 'smarter than the rest of us' person, attempted to pervert it into that. But since he based it on a misunderstanding of why it came up in the first place, replying to my post about the actual value of the individual lives is fruitless. This scenario doesn't lend itself to this discussion.

None of what you said has any relevance to why the number of children and infants was brought up by the news outlet. If you want to have a hypothetical debate about the value of children, then let's talk about a scenario involving life boats.

It doesn't.

Yeah, you can tell how unknown he is by the fact a movie was just released about him.

I wish contrarianism didn't beocome so popular on this site. I mean, really, taking a shot at Hawking?

I heard your entire post in my head in Seven of Nine's voice.

Adults have lived some of their life. Kids have missed out on things most believe everbody should be able to do before they die, like their first kiss.

Everybody here actually understands this, I have no idea why you all picked now to suddenly act like you're Mr. Spock.

What's the value of an asshole that spends his evening judging the value of others he has never met?

I don't know which distro, I just know my friend griped about me sending him links to sites that use Flash because they frequently crashed Firefox. Heh

Yes, if you substitute one belief for another you greatly change the outcome of the extrapolation. "I beleive AI will never exist so that won't happen." Thanks for supporting my point that this sort of extrapolation is not science.

The artist workstations at Sony Imageworks are Linux.

<troll>Ah, Windows... the gift that keeps on giving.</troll>

Seriously, though... this is pretty ugly. It checks back every five minutes for each machine. You would think that Sony IT would notice that network traffic (or, say, the fact that all of their Windows desktops started listening on port 443). The moral of this story is run an IDS, scan your network, and pay attention to it all! :(

If you're going to commit to this exercise where you use extrapolation to arrive at a conclusion, then you're going to have to take things like 3d-printing into account and even just the general demand for machines that build machines that will lead to eventual technical advances.

Try to remember that when you cherry-pick what does and doesn't count when extrapolating stuff like this you're simply adding to the risk that earlier you implied was a bad thing.

If you apply that same extrapolation to what's happening here on Earth right now and you get right back to the super-robots being dominant. I'll give you a hint: robots are the dominant life-form on Mars right now.

And the scientific evidence of this conclusion is...? ;)

People keep repeating this line ad-nauseum, spouting 'language is dead', etcetera. They might have bona-fide complaints, but maybe they're an alias for a different annoyance, perhaps that they didn't pay enough attention in school circa 9th grade to maintain a simple conversation on a site known to attract tech-lovers. Ergo this problem will not be solved quickly.